They stood on the lonely stretch of Interstate 5 outside Rogue River, Oregon, where Timothy Little had met his death, dusk just beginning her first warnings, the western sky enormous, entertaining no clouds, stern and grim and going on forever. This particular stretch of highway was all loneliness and silence, alloyed with the vague and trivial life of insects. The roadbed here rose ahead of them on a slant that took a sharp curve and a hill ahead. In the median there were trees, a thick copse of jack pine and fir wherein black holes peeped out at them. Anyone or anything could be hidden in the dense woods around the scene of the murder.
If it were a setup, there could be no better isolated spot to attack long-awaited prey. Other than the black tire marks of the single vehicle, there was no indication a chase took place, no second set of squealing tires.
“If we're here, looking at where the car came to rest,”
Lucas said to Harold Lempel, “then whereabouts did you decide Little first lost control of the car?”
“Back up yonder,” Harold pointed.
'Take us back there, please.”
There was nothing save a police marker to indicate what horror had taken place here two nights before. Harold backed the squad car along the shoulder. Passing motorists, seeing his flashing lights, slowed, but not by much, children in back seats waving naively and wildly at them.
In a moment, they came to the spot where Little's tire marks indicated he was first in trouble. Lucas and Meredyth climbed from the squad car to have a cursory look at the black tire marks snaking all over the road.
Meredyth asked Deputy Lempel, “Your office has gotten no calls from witnesses; absolutely no one saw anything?”
“Not squat, Doctor. People must've seen something, flashing lights twirling with the car, something, but no… nobody wants to get involved.”
Lucas looked up and down the roadbed, his attention again going to the median across from them. Once more a stand of trees provided a dark cave in the crook of a bend just before the motorist would reach the bridge up ahead. Lucas walked across the asphalt to the median, stepped past road kill, and walked toward the trees, while the others stared after him. He pointed toward the trees ahead and shouted across the roadway, saying, “I'm going down there to have a look.”
Two cars sped by, making it impossible to hear him. He went toward the grassy tree oasis some hundred or so yards off to the left.
“What's your friend doing?” Harold asked Meredyth.
“He's part Indian,” she said with a shrug, which seemed to say it all.
“A tracker, you mean?”
She had read somewhere in Stonecoat's file that he listed among his abilities hunting and trapping and tracking, all lessons learned from his days on the reservation near Huntsville, Texas, where he had grown up.
“We scoured the whole area. He ain't going to find anything in the median anyway.”
Both the deputy and Meredyth put their dark glasses on. It had been a brilliant morning in which white struggled against the blue sky of an Oregon afternoon, one of those days when the wind tells you you're lucky to be alive so you can breathe it in, and now the sun in the west blinded them with golden plumes, making it difficult to see just what Stonecoat was up to. In fact, it was as if the Indian had walked into a time warp. He had essentially disappeared. Meredyth could just barely pick out his form. He was camouflaged by the stand of trees he now knelt among.
She studied Lucas, thinking how changed he seemed since that day she had followed him into the bar where he was drinking on duty, the same day he had taken on two would-be robbers at a gas station. He was a crazy man.
Kneeling at a spot just in front of the trees at a crook in the road, just ahead of the bridge overpass where cars sent jeweled reflections back at her, the Indian seemed to be praying. Lucas was staring hard at the ground, almost sniffing it the way a hunting dog might.
“He's found something. Come on,” she told Harold.
When they caught up to Stonecoat, he was sitting cross-legged in the grass, a faint smile on his smug face, his hands extended to cover his find. 'Tire marks, clean and untouched. The killers fired from this position, no doubt about it. And if you search the woods over there, you might even find a third arrow shaft, one that missed the car completely.”
“Hell,” complained Harold, “anybody might've pulled in here for a rest or a camp. How can you know what you're saying is even half true?”
“Not just anybody carries these.” he countered, lifting a steel arrow shaft between two fingers at the feathers.
“God Almighty…”
“They left tracks this time.” said Meredyth.
Lucas quietly agreed. “Many more tracks here than at the butchering sight.” He pointed out three separate, distinct shoe prints. “It's a bit more soggy here from the rains. When did it last rain hereabouts. Deputy?”
Harold looked at the evidence of at least three sets of footprints here, all male, all adult. He shrugged off the question about rain.
“Now it looks like the work of at least three men,” said Lucas.
Harold scratched the back of his head, staring at the shoe prints in the mud here. “Damn, maybe Sheriff's right… maybe it was our local union boys.”
“Drunks aren't going to hit that target down there,” said Lucas, pointing back to the deputy's windshield. Meredyth had to agree. “Whoever did this was stone sober and very, very good…”
“Very good with a high-powered, scoped crossbow with infrared targeting equipment, top of the line.” Lucas stood up, grimacing with a sudden stab of pain, hiding it by averting his face. He then asked Harold, “At least two hundred fifty, maybe three hundred pounds on the bows. That kind of power means high-tech equipment. Do you know anybody around here with that kind of hunting equipment?”
“Couple of folks, maybe. 'Course, Billings's old hunt club store carries some pretty high-tech items. We could start there.”
The quick trip around town to the people who might know something about high-tech crossbows proved a monumental waste of time. They were all Disney characters, as if they'd stepped out of another time period, their smiling, ingratiating ways making them either Step ford Wives or simply pure and honest village folk. Everywhere the Houston authorities went, they heard the same lament about Timothy Little. “Just awful, and him such a fine man who done so much for our area…”
To save time and taxpayers' money, they decided to fly back late the same night, allowing the locals to run their string of arrests out on their own. Harold's boss, Sheriff Lowell Barnette, only surfaced at the airport to see them off. He remained convinced that the killers were a pack of local boys who had it in for Little.
Barnette was a huge man, intimidating, with leather for skin. He looked genetically suited to the hardships of the outdoors. Robust and powerful, his forehead massive, creating a hanging cliff over his dark, brooding eyes, the man merely shook his head over Stonecoat and Meredyth, apologizing brusquely for not having had time to monkey-cart them around all day. as he put it, punctuating with the phrase “damn that, damn that,” and finishing with. “But, by God, I have a hell of a situation on my hands here, folks, and I'm specting the FBI in any time, and there's some confessions to get before then. But I know what I can do for you…”
“What's that. Sheriff?”
“I can give you a crack at these boys we got locked up.”
“Is that right? Well, we'd like to, but we got folks waiting for us in Houston,” countered Stonecoat. 'Thanks all the same.”
“You got some pure Injun blood in you, don't you, boy?”
Meredyth watched Lucas's reaction to this with interest. He showed no sign of displeasure.
“Some of the best,” replied Lucas.
“What're you, then? Coming from Texas, does that make you Coushatta,” he massacred the name, “Apache, a li'l of both?”
“Cherokee, but I break bread from time to time with the Coushatta and the Apache-what's left of them.”
“Damn that, what our race done to yours, son. I'm truly sorry for history. Damn that, for sure.” Nice way to view it, as history, Lucas thought-the white man's history was the red man's demise. “It's ancient history, and certainly not for you to worry about, Sheriff. Sounds like you got your hands full with those white devils in your cell.”
The sheriff stared for a moment, uneasy at the remark, then decided it was meant in jest, so he let out with a western whoop and a laugh. “Sorry I didn't have more time with you and the doctor, here,” he finally said before they began boarding. “Have a safe trip back now, you hear?”
Once on the plane, Meredyth summed Barnette up as the most purely Neanderthal individual she had ever met outside of a museum showcase. “He really didn't want us involved in his big show, did he?”
“Probably an election coming up.” Lucas grinned, then added in response to her remark, “He does look like a meat eater.”
Lucas quickly stowed his bag. “I sure do pity those local boys he's got in lockup.”
“You sure we shouldn't have talked to those boys?”
“Waste of time.”
“You sure are… sure of yourself. I'll give you that, Lucas Stonecoat.”
“This was a professional hit.”
“Professional. Like hired mob types?”
“Well-trained commando types; it was set up so neatly the whole thing was done in a matter of five to ten minutes, including the butchering.”
“God.”
“It looked very familiar, wouldn't you agree?”
“You mean like Mootry?”
“Precisely.”
“Then I was right? All along, I was right?”
“Yes, yes, yes, you were.”
She could hardly contain herself, so Lucas sat her down and locked her seat belt around her. “I knew it! I just knew it!” She beamed up at him. “What's our next step?”
“We go see Covey.”
“Covey? Jack Covey?”
“He was working the Palmer case, remember? Early in the investigation.”
“The cop pedophile serving time for abduction and child molestation?”
“He was working the Palmer case when he was put away on the charge. He's likely mellowed out some by now. In any case, we need to know what he knows.”
“What do you hope to learn from him? “Why he was caught.” She glowered at him. “What kind of game are you playing, Stonecoat?
“ One as old as time. I have twenty questions for Mr. Covey.”
“Beginning with?”
Lucas strapped himself into his seat. “Who was behind his capture and arrest?”
“But what does that have to do with… with this?”
“Maybe nothing… maybe everything.”
“Damn it, I hate it when you revert to Indian glibness and cryptograms. Will you please tell me what you hope to gain from this filthy individual whose arrest brought down the image of every cop in Houston with it?”
“He may be dirty, he may crawl on the earth as a snake, but why was the snake beheaded just as he was about to uncover evidence in the Whitaker case?”
“What evidence? I saw no evidence of evidence coming out of Covey's involvement. Where'd you get that?”
“I read between the lines in the file. Covey was one of the two investigators on the case. One, Pete Felipe, a Spanish cop, was killed in what was described as a random act of violence outside a liquor store the night before his partner, Covey, was picked up on charges he abducted, molested, and filmed sexual acts with a number of minors.”
“All true, and a court of law put the man away.”
“Precisely.”
“Precisely what?”
“The judge who put Covey away?”
She stared hard into Lucas's eyes. “No. Charles Mootry?”
“One and the same.”
“Damn that! As Sheriff Barnette would say.”
“Something big and dark like an ugly cougar is roamin' about, and it has large claws and bigger fangs, Doctor, and if we continue to scratch at it, it's going to turn on us. Maybe now's a good time to ask yourself just how far you're willing to take this thing.”
“What're you talking about? Quitting now? That's non-sense!”
“When white men tell lies, they are often lies within lies, and I've heard it said that a cautious man is careful for what he wishes. Can you face the truth in the end if the truth may reach out and kill you or harm those in your family, Meredyth?”
She thought about this warning well. She said nothing, leaning back in her seat instead. They'd left the ground. “We've unearthed irrefutable evidence that some sort of hit men or hit squad is operating across state lines. We could turn what we have over to the FBI, pass the standard, make it someone else's nightmare. We could let it silently sink back into the quiet cemetery of the Cold Room from where it all came. But that wouldn't avenge Alisha Reynolds, now, would it?”
“Think long on it,” he said.
She shook her head. “I don't have to think long on it. I'll go with you to see Covey. We'll find out what he knows, or what he thought he knew when Mootry and the system put him away.”
“It may be he knows nothing.”
“I'm aware of that.”
'Then again, it may be that he was set up.”
“And his partner murdered? How did his partner die, exactly?”
“Stabbed repeatedly through the heart by what was described as a trio of street toughs.”
“Anyone charged with the stabbing?”
“They were never caught, never identified. One eyewitness said they were dressed entirely in black to blend in with the night, and apparently, they did.”
“Where did you learn of all this?”
“Insomnia gives a man time. I saw that Covey and Felipe were suddenly no longer on the case.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I noticed that, too, but I didn't pay much attention. I just figured administrative shuffle since they were getting nowhere on the case.”
'That's the difference between us. Doctor.”
“What's that?”
“I see conspiracies everywhere; you're too trusting.”
“Well, maybe… perhaps… but…”
“Covey and Felipe were probably warned in one fashion or another to let up on the case, to lighten up; it was probably suggested to them that it wasn't worth pursuing, but they continued to pursue, and look where it got them.”
She swallowed hard. “Are you suggesting… that we're Covey and Felipe now?”
“I'm suggesting that we're in danger.”
“Now that's carrying things a bit far, Lucas. The next thing you'll be suggesting is that Phil Lawrence is somehow involved, and that's why he's stood in my way all this time.”
“Just watch your back, Meredyth.”
She tried a joke. “I thought you'd do that for me.”
“You need somebody to do it for you. Obviously, you're no good at it,” he tried joking back, but then his tone hardened. “In all sincerity, we may be dealing with people who view life, your life and mine and anyone else's who stands to unmask them, as having very little worth, and frankly-
“You mean like the mob, the Mafia?”
“-and frankly, at the moment, I don't know anyone we can trust.”
The plane banked a bit. She stared once more into his deep-set, sure brown eyes, the centers filled with dread. She found her mouth dry and her palms sweating, her heart rate having jumped. “I'll see this thing through with or without you, you know.”
He frowned and dropped his gaze and shook his head. “Perhaps that is the one thing of which I have been certain all along.”
The plane continued to bank, smoothed out, played tiddledy winks with the air and their stomachs, the purr of the engine continuous and loud.
“You were good back there,” she told him.
“Just good? I thought I was a regular Columbo.”
“All you needed was the raincoat.”
He shook his head in amazement. “You know what I can't fathom?”
“What's that?”
“I can't believe those fools in Oregon overlooked so much.”
She shrugged. “Not everyone's got the gift. Hell, it was weird the way you did that. It was as if you knew the exact spot to go, the exact angle the killers used against Little.”
He realized she was looking at him with those blue-green eyes in a strange new light. “Hey, when I said we can't know who to trust, I meant people other than the two of us, Meredyth. You can trust me, and I can trust you, right?”
She hesitated only slightly, but enough that he noticed, she feared. “Sure… sure, I know I can trust you.”
“And I'm going to trust you.”
She managed a smile. “Big step in a… relationship.”
“Yeah, don't I know it. And don't forget, when this is over, you promised to get me out of the Cold Room permanently, right?”
“Yeah… sure, I'll do everything in my power.”
Why didn't it sound like enough? he wondered.