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That concern died away as she saw the Lawton sky-glow refract through the light-bar atop the car as it neared her. It slowed as if to come to a stop beside her.
Even before it did, Annja recognized, illuminated by the multicolored lights of the onboard computer and dashboard, the indefatigably cheerful face of Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears.
“Little cold out to be hitchhiking, ain’t it, Ms. Creed?” Ten Bears asked.
“Yes,” she said, hugging herself tightly against the biting cold. She wasn’t really in the mood for a lot of ironic repartee.
“Hop on in and get warm, why don’tcha?” he asked.
She could think of any number of reasons why she wouldn’t, actually. None of them was as compelling as either getting out of the cold or putting the symbolic bulk of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol between her and the bikers and midnight ambushers. She wasn’t naive enough to believe a lone trooper in a cruiser would necessarily deter them. But along with his .41 Smith & Wesson, Ten Bears had a radio.
She settled into the passenger’s seat. Beaming between his uniform collar and his peaked cap, Ten Bears put the cruiser back in gear and drove off along the county road at a just-over-walking pace.
She regarded him through narrowed, suspicious eyes. “Small world, huh?”
“Small world,” he agreed. “Welcome to Indian country, Ms. Creed. Not much goes on here that folks don’t see. What they see, they like to talk about. Especially when you’re a white-eyes from outside. And most especially a real nice-looking lady white-eyes, if you get my drift.”
Annja knew full well that the coming of any stranger would spark gossip in a tight-knit community. While Annja didn’t think of herself as particularly beautiful, she knew that her tall, lean-muscled, leggy form tended to attract added attention that, say, a dumpy fifty-year-old bearded archaeologist would not.
“I heard some things got me kind of concerned,” the lieutenant said. “I checked your motel but you weren’t there. Them Comanche County deputies told me you’d left the dig site right around sundown. So I wondered if you hadn’t broken down along the way. Or something.”
Or something, she thought. But carefully did not say.
“The breakdown scenario. My rental car died on me. I just managed to ditch it in the parking lot of the Bad Medicine Bar.”
“Hoo,” Ten Bears said. “Tell me you didn’t go inside?”
“No cell-phone coverage out there,” she said. “I didn’t think I had much choice.” She shrugged. “The reception I got didn’t exactly make me feel welcome. So I left.”
He laughed at that. “Them boys rowdy you up some?” he asked.
“Let’s say I got out of there before things got really out of hand,” she said with a grin.
“You’re a big TV star and all. Anything happened to you, it’d reflect poorly on the department and the Comanche Nation. Also you seem like a nice lady, if a bit idealistic,” he said.
“Thanks. I think.”
“See, there’s something going on in Indian country. Mostly western Oklahoma and northern Texas. Something not so good. We got some people here, young people, who are kind of on the radical side.”
He glanced at her. “You met some of them tonight. Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club.”
“I see.” She tried to keep her tone neutral.
“They got a rival bunch,” he said, “call themselves the Dog Society. Both sets want to live in the good old days, you know? Ride around whooping and hollering and shooting buffalo. They don’t much like the government. Okay, nobody does. They are also not too fond of the white-eyes.”
He drove a moment in silence. To their right the land began to pitch up into rough granite hills. Ten Bears didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. That he was heading away from Lawton didn’t particularly alarm Annja. She had fairly well-honed survival instincts. She didn’t sense anything sketchy from Ten Bears, just concern.
She knew he wasn’t telling her everything. Police never told outsiders everything about a live investigation. It didn’t mean much.
“Most of all they don’t like each other,” he continued. “There’s trouble between ’em. Regular trouble. Lots of bad blood. And it’s getting worse.”
“I don’t ever see anything about this on the news,” Annja said.
“I hope you don’t, Ms. Creed.” He looked at her. “I hope you won’t be going public with it.”
“Not much danger of that,” she said with a little smile. “I’m an archaeologist, not a reporter.”
“Nation’s trying to keep it all quiet. So’s the state. The Comanche Nation’s got this new casino opening up in a few days, you know. Your young bloods, the radical-traditional types, aren’t happy about that. It’s Indian business and white-eyes don’t much care. Anyway, if word of the problem does get out, what with the whole continuing terror hysteria and all, it’s just going to bring more grief to Indians without calming the passions that are causing the problems.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Most people here are good folks. Indians, whites, blacks, Asians, whatever. But there are strong under-currents of racism and anger. And plenty of areas where white-eyes aren’t in the majority. And not real popular. You know?”
“I got the impression.”
He chuckled softly.
“So why don’t I give you a ride back to the motel,” Ten Bears said amiably. “I’ll talk to the car rental company. You can call them in the morning to retrieve your broke-down ride and get a new one. Better still, why not just fly on back to New York City, get yourself some nice arugula?”
“I’m not a big arugula fan, Lieutenant. I’m more the unabashed carnivore. I promise I won’t interfere with your investigation. I’ll do my best to keep from turning up on the news for any reason whatever. But I lost a good friend today. I’m not ready to pack it in and head home.”
She turned away from him and wiped moisture from her cheek. The ghostly fun-house-mirror image of her face looked back at her with exaggerated eyes. Snowflakes beat against the windows like suicidal moths bent on flame.
Ten Bears sighed theatrically. “I figured you’d take that line. Well, it was worth a try. Listen. The whole skinwalker angle is tough for a cop to approach. Even a native cop—we’re supposed to be close to the spirits and the earth and all that. But us Indians don’t like to give our brother officers too many excuses to roll their eyes when they think we’re not looking, you know? You want to give me a real leg up catching the party or parties who murdered your friend, I’d certainly be willing to look at any evidence you might turn up on that aspect of the case.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“Don’t thank me. I should probably lock you up or something. But if I could make a small suggestion, you might want to take a closer look at the earlier attacks. As in, firsthand. They took place in what would seem more like skinwalker country, anyway.”
“Conveniently distancing myself from Comanche territory?”
“Exactly! I knew you were a smart lady.”
I’m not too unhappy about making myself scarce for a while, either, come to think of it, she thought.
“If you want to pick up on some of the cultural backdrop, both on South Plains Indians and the Navajo,” he said, “there’s somebody I know you might want to talk to, since you’ll be down Albuquerque way, anyway….”
THAT NIGHT THERE was no mention at all, on TV or online, about anything at all happening at a lonely bar in the sticks of western Oklahoma. Nor was there any the next morning.
In between Annja slept like one dead.
6
To Annja’s complete surprise, the car rental agency not only failed to give her a molecule of grief when she called them the next morning to report her mishap, but they insisted she have a replacement without her even asking. They’d come pick her up.
She suspected the jovial and heavy hand of one Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears, OHP. She could imagine him calling the agency to talk over what she had told him and in that self-effacing, aw-shucks, good-old-boy way of his, making it quite clear, in case they didn’t get it up front, what it would mean to them if they were difficult with her.
So almost before she knew it, Annja found herself driving north up I-44 behind the wheel of a shiny new rental car. Then she turned west on Interstate 40 and headed to New Mexico.
The land flattened out as Annja drove through the Texas panhandle. As she entered New Mexico, the terrain gradually became vast wide swoops of tawny land. The occasional lone peak, most likely a volcanic extrusion, showed in the distance. The vegetation ran mostly to short grass, dotted with scrub.
Once, she saw a herd of pronghorn antelope grazing away off to her right.
As she neared her destination the land rose and grew more broken, mounting to what Annja, with all respect to the Wichita Range, considered something closer to real mountains, with ridges and slopes densely furred with straight-boled pines. These, she knew, were the Sandias.
The mountains rose left and right of the highway, then fell steeply in sheer granite walls to foothills that became high desert, sloping gently down to a line of trees that marked the course of the Rio Grande. Before her and to each side stretched the gray and chrome encrustation of an urban concentration—Albuquerque. She stopped there for lunch before continuing west into the desert.
Past the Acoma Reservation and the triangular bulk of Mount Taylor lay the small town of Grants. Following her GPS, confirmed by reference to a Google Earth map she’d summoned in her motel room in Lawton the previous night, a few miles west of Grants Annja turned left down a none-too-obvious dirt road. It wound quickly upward between steep, scrub-covered hills into the Zuni Mountains with their forests of ponderosa pine, along the Continental Divide.
The first attack had taken place at a dig in the Cíbola National Forest, working what was believed to be the remnants of an encampment of Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache led by the great guerrilla master Victorio during his war with the U.S. during the 1870s. The excavation had been protested by Native American groups even though the Mescalero tribe—which incorporated most of the survivors of the various Chiricahua groups except the Mexican Chiricahua, who were still in Mexico—offered no objection. It lay in a steep-sided draw. It had been discovered by a USDA team checking the results of reseeding by air after the area was burned over in a 2004 fire.
The attack had occurred the previous autumn. No signs remained of the dig or the murders. The excavation had been canceled after the incident. Wind and weather had smoothed out the disturbed earth.
Annja found no great mystery as to how the attacker could have struck from ambush there, either. The site lay along one side of a dry streambed, with the tree line beginning barely twenty yards away on one side and a rock outcropping looming twelve feet right above where, from the files, she knew the actual excavation had taken place. It would have taken a very athletic man to have dropped that distance without injuring himself. Then again it also took a very athletic man to kill three able-bodied adults—two men and one woman—and fatally wound a third man.
The sun was falling behind the divide as Annja drove back east. Although she still felt mostly numb about Paul’s death, in between wracking bouts of grief, she’d had a stressful couple of days. Not to denigrate the sheer physical toll long travel and combat took. She pulled off the highway just east of the river and spent the night in the Hotel Albuquerque on Rio Grande Boulevard, just north of Old Town.
AFTER EATING BREAKFAST the next morning at Little Anita’s near the hotel, she walked a few blocks south to the Old Town Plaza. It was a pleasant morning, still crisply cool, although warmer than out on the Plains near Lawton, with the sun just beginning to sting where it touched exposed skin. She sat on a cast-iron bench across from the old cathedral, beneath elm branches starting to turn green, while she used her computer to check her e-mail and confirm some information for her day’s quest. Then she made a few calls on her cell phone and hiked back to the hotel for her car.
The second attack had taken place in early March on land owned by San Ildefonso Pueblo between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The pueblo itself had invited a state team in to excavate what was believed to have been a temporary settlement by Pueblo Indians sometime predating the great Pueblo Uprising that threw the Spanish out in 1680. Despite that fact, and the fact that both State of New Mexico archaeologists and pueblo experts had confirmed the absence of human remains, the site had once again drawn protestors. There had been an ugly confrontation when pueblo police removed them for trespassing, although there was no record of injuries, nor charges filed.
Apparently there was some sentiment, in the Southwest at least, that any kind of archaeological excavation of potential Indian sites was profane.
Although this massacre was just a few weeks old Annja didn’t learn anything new there, either. As in the other two cases a cautious approach could easily have gotten the killer in range for a final rush without being seen. Especially since nobody would really have been looking.
She got back to Albuquerque about two o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon as she waited for her next appointment going through local and national news accounts of the murders online at a coffee shop on a fairly rustic-looking section of Rio Grande Boulevard a few miles north of her hotel.
The common threads among the murders, aside from the obvious gross similarities, were that they took place on dig sites that were protested by obscure groups. These had no apparent connection between themselves, other than professed radical pro-Native American sympathies. It wasn’t even clear how many of the protestors were actually Indians themselves.
She sat on the outdoor patio beneath a cottonwood beginning to leaf, drinking tea and pondering a few questions. Was the fact that all three attack sites had been protested significant or purely coincidental? If significant, what was the connection? Even the FBI, notoriously eager to discover terrorist conspiracies even where they weren’t, had either actively cleared the protestors of involvement or at least failed to list them as persons of interest.
Plus, frankly, people who’d go out and picket an archaeological dig struck Annja, who’d encountered a few in her time, as precisely the sort who would not be inclined to carry out impossibly violent blitz attacks ending in multiple murders. Nor, for the most, capable.
The light took on a late-afternoon yellowness. The sun had gotten tangled in the branches of the massive old cottonwoods across the boulevard. Time to go, she told herself, and folded her computer shut.
7
The western sky blazed in orange like burning forests when the silver Prius pulled up to the curb by the park and stopped. A tall woman got out of the driver’s side. A skinny young girl in jeans, T-shirt and a yellow Windbreaker, with her black hair in pigtails, got out of the passenger’s side. A big floppy yellow Lab pup, an adolescent probably, spilled out after her.
“You must be Dr. Watson,” Annja said, rising from the picnic table a short way down a grassy slope from the street as the woman walked toward her. She was handsome if a bit heavy in face and hip, and the hair hanging unbound around the shoulders of her mauve cable-knit sweater was black with silver threads. She wore a long dark-blue denim skirt over dark purple suede boots with silver medallions on them.
“Yes,” the woman said. “And you’re Annja Creed?”
Annja agreed she was. “And I’m Sallie,” the girl announced. “It’s short for Salamander!”
“No, it isn’t, Alessandra,” her mother said. “Don’t be untruthful.”
Annja laughed. Something about the girl’s appearance tweaked her subconscious. She couldn’t pin down exactly what.
The dog sniffed Annja’s legs. She hunkered down to stroke its head. “What’s his name?” she asked Sallie.
“It’s a she,” Sallie said. “Her name’s Eowyn. She’s kind of silly.”
“Young Labrador retrievers act that way,” her mother said. “Why don’t you and she go play?”
The girl was looking intently at Annja. “You’re on TV, aren’t you?” she said.
Her mother looked stern. Annja said, “Yes.”
“Oh. I like your show.”
“Thanks,” Annja said.
Sallie reached in a pocket of her jacket and produced a pale-green tennis ball, which she launched down the hill. The dog bounded in pursuit. Sallie ran after her, romping through the shadows of big elm trees lengthening across the hills of Roosevelt Park, which was located roughly halfway between the University of New Mexico campus, where Watson worked, and downtown.
“Thanks for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Watson,” Annja said.
“Susan, please. I’m certainly willing to do anything I can to get to the bottom of these terrible crimes. And I thank you for being willing to meet with me under such unusual circumstances. I don’t really have any time free at school this week, and I don’t want to leave Sallie at day care longer than necessary.”
She leaned forward and fixed Annja with a disconcertingly probing look. Even without the low boot heels she had to stand six feet clear. Annja did not envy any student of Dr. Watson’s who failed to measure up to her expectations.
“So, is your interest in skinwalkers personal or professional?” Watson asked.
If she wanted to keep things up front Annja could match that. “Both,” she said. “I lost a close personal friend in the last attack.” She felt a nasty twinge as she said it.
“Also the authorities in Oklahoma have asked me unofficially to consult on certain anthropological aspects of the case.”
“You’re an archaeologist by training, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Of course, my training included extensive education in social and physical anthropology, as well as subjects like geology.”
“Oh, yes.” Watson herself was a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the study of Southwestern native cultures. “So what can I do for you?”
“My specialty’s the European Renaissance. It’s a little far afield from the South Plains and the Rio Grande Valley. And to be perfectly honest, while we studied Native American history and cultures, my memory isn’t as sharp as it could be.”
“I understand,” Watson said with a grin. “I forgot all my geology pretty much the instant I turned in my last exam.”
“So if you could fill me in a bit on the cultural background of the Southwest and Plains cultures, and any hint you can provide me as to why something out of Navajo folk belief would be operating in the Comanche country of western Oklahoma would definitely be appreciated.”
“Well, to start with, the Indian cultures of North America didn’t live in vacuums, much less isolation from one another,” Watson said.
Annja was only mildly surprised at a tenured professor using such a politically incorrect term as Indian; very few Native Americans she’d ever met showed anything but the most strident contempt for the phrase Native American. Tom Ten Bears hadn’t had much use for it, either.
“Even before the Europeans’ arrival, my own people, the Kiowas, were especially famed for their roles as raiders and traders. Rather as the Vikings were in Europe and even the Mediterranean. So were the Comanches, especially after the two nations allied in the late eighteenth century. Comanche relics have turned up in the Cahokia Mounds. Kiowa tradition recalls trading voyages to the country of the Maya—who were themselves noted for the long journeys of their own traders, who also served as proselytizers for their religion.”
“Really?”
Watson nodded. “So the South Plains people were common visitors to New Mexico. What’s now northeastern New Mexico was part of their customary range. In fact, the Kiowa-Comanche alliance got its start in the 1790s on what’s now the site of Las Vegas, New Mexico—you did know there was one, didn’t you?”
