From the wooded gullies to their right he heard the skreeking of scrub-jays, and the rich warble of a vireo. The crystal brightness of the afternoon had softened, beginning to turn gold. Blue rims of shadows edged the hills.
‘But why now?’ persisted Hannibal. ‘Why not wait until Taggart got over his pet and let his men get back to their proper work – so that attention wouldn’t focus so particularly on the household.’
‘Why indeed?’ January agreed quietly. ‘What changed? What’s different?’
‘Is that a way of telling me we’ll have to search the house? Serves Francis jolly well right,’ the fiddler added, ‘if the Comanche do ride down and lift half the horses on the place, while he’s keeping the men all standing guard. Surely the silly boy doesn’t actually believe he can keep the law off the place while he hunts for his lost silver mine?’
‘So your money’s on Francis?’
‘Who else could it be? I can’t see Aunt Alicia plugging her nephew and galloping ten miles out to the back of beyond just to prove to Valentina that all Catholics deserve to come to a bad end.’
‘Can’t you?’ asked January quietly. ‘We know nothing about Aunt Alicia except that she spends her time fogbound on laudanum and wanders around the house in the middle of the night – and dotes to idolatry on Francis. We know nothing about Creed, for that matter.’ He nodded ahead of them to the lanky cowhand, with two rifles in his saddle scabbards and a wheel-gun at his belt. ‘We know nothing about Jalisco, or Enoch, or TA the cook – or any of the cowhands who come and go around the house. When it comes to murder – even a complicated and well-thought-out murder – why is the silliest question you can ask.’
He rubbed thumb and fingers together, like a man counting out coin. ‘And sometimes,’ he went on, ‘you don’t even need that. Though personally, I find it hard to believe that Francis would trust a confederate –’ he nodded up ahead of them at Creed – ‘to saddle a horse for him. Whoa!’ he added, as his horse flung up its head with a startled snort.
Every man of the party – who had been watching all corners of the compass like cats in a kennel-yard – swung his attention to what had clearly spooked the animal. A coyote plunged through the long grass at the head of a gully, with a huge gray-black buzzard diving down on him, snatching with his claws. The coyote dodged, doubled, then apparently gave up and dropped whatever piece of carrion it bore in its mouth. The buzzard settled on it, the little gray wolflet trotted away. Jalisco nudged his horse at the bird and the bird, in its turn, flapped aloft again, hissing.
January saw the vaquero draw rein, looking down for a moment, and then cross himself.
Creed called out, ‘Whatcha got there, compadre?’
It was a man’s hand.
THIRTEEN
‘White man.’ A ruffianly Norte named Maddox dropped out of his saddle as the rest of the party drew near.
Creed said, ‘Shit. I’d’a swore there been no Comanche closer than Elbow Creek since last year.’
January, too, dismounted. Behind him, and for the benefit of their bodyguards, Hannibal called out authoritatively, ‘Did Dr Kerr train you to identify – er – disjecta membra like that, Ben?’
‘Yes, sir.’
With a white man’s blessing, the cowhands were prepared to let January investigate. He wrapped a bandana around his fingers, picked the horrid thing up. The wrist had been chopped through with an ax or a heavy knife, and by the look of the flesh, had remained half-attached to the arm until the coyote had torn it loose. Even this early in the year, the maggots and larvae in the wound looked healthy and plump. Little bastards grow up fast. Pupae, too: pale, glistening little ovals in the sour meat. The fingers flopped limp.
No calluses, no sunburn, no hair. Ink-stains on the index and middle fingers, and the edge of the hand. Clean nails, unbroken and tended. No scars, no wounds on the palm or heel, such as a man might get if he defended himself in desperation against edged steel.
He carried it to Creed first. (No harm laying it on with a trowel.) ‘Does this look like the hand of anyone you know, sir?’
The cowhand drew back with a noise of disgust, then thought about it a moment and asked, ‘You mean like scars or marks?’
‘Yes, sir.’ He kept his voice carefully diffident. You’re so wise and important, I’m asking you first. ‘I know it’s not something a man usually notices—’
‘No, no, you’re right, Ben.’ He bent – carefully keeping his distance – and studied more closely the intricate miracle of engineering and flesh. How can something that practical, that well-designed – powerful and delicate, capable of wielding a pen or guiding a horse, of constructing the intricate machinery of a gun or a watch – or of comforting a child with a touch on her cheek – just grow, like bananas on a tree?
The sandy-haired man shook his head. ‘Don’t look like it belongs to anybody I seen.’
‘Did you see where the coyote came from, sir?’ January had already spotted the area, but knew better than to lead the way, and again Creed looked gratified at being consulted.
‘There.’ Jalisco rose in his stirrups and pointed. ‘He first came out by that oak. Witch Cave Canyon – there’s caves, all the way back along the stream.’
January wrapped the hand in his bandana, and tucked it into his saddlebag. Hannibal said, ‘Best if we spread out,’ and, though January knew he wanted nothing but to return to the hacienda and sleep, dismounted. They both knew that none of the Nortes would stand to let a black man take the lead in the investigation.
‘Lope – Maddox,’ Jalisco added, ‘best you keep an eye around us, though it looks to me that hand is a few days dead.’
Past the oak tree, Witch Cave Canyon was a thickly wooded cleft winding back between the hills. ‘They’s near a score of caves, big an’ small,’ Creed informed Hannibal, pointing to the uneven silvery rim of the limestone escarpment. All his wary resentment at being outjockeyed by Jalisco seemed to have vanished, in his interest in the puzzle. ‘Come sundown, you’ll get bats pourin’ outta the ground like the smoke of Hell.’
‘We lost two cows last summer, back where the canyon ends,’ put in the youth Ajo. ‘There’s a pool before Witch Cave, and more within it.’
‘There.’ Jalisco pointed to a shallow lozenge of blackness six or eight feet up the canyon wall. ‘And there, see? Another, further along …’
‘Coyotes allá,’ put in Lope, and indeed there was a flicker in the brush of the canyon. Outside the mouth of one small cave, clear against the bright blue of the air, January saw the glitter of flies.
A lot of flies. And, the next moment, the familiar whiff of decaying flesh.
‘Keep back a little, if you would,’ said Hannibal, as January put a hand under his elbow to help him up the slithery slope of talus below the dark cave-mouth. ‘Tracks may tell us something.’
‘Maddox, Brawny.’ Creed waved to his two Norte companions. ‘You keep an eye down the canyon by the old road.’ He broke a limb from one of the mesquite trees that grew so thick where spring floodwaters periodically nourished them, stripped it of twigs and leaves, then wrapped the end in his bandana. ‘Lemme have your kerchiefs, boys …’
Jalisco, who had dismounted also, added his bandana to the end of the torch, along with handfuls of dried bark, bound on with the other cloth.
With Hannibal – supported by January – supposedly in the lead, the four men scrambled up the seven feet or so of slope, to the mouth of the cave.
There was scratching within. January saw the glow of coyote eyes, deeper in the cleft, where the scavengers had taken refuge from the humans.
The stink was worse, here.
Creed said, ‘Shit,’ in pity and disgust. The naked torso staked to the sandy floor of the cave had been slashed, across and across, and the vermin of the hills had feasted – messily – on the organs. ‘Fucken Comanche.’ The body lay spread-eagled, and the bones of all four limbs had been hacked with an ax. The man was missing a foot, as well as the hand the coyot
e had taken. Whether the man’s eyes and ears had been removed by his killers or by the local foxes and coyote, January couldn’t tell, but weirdly, he didn’t need them – or the rest of what remained of the face – to know who this was.
He said softly, emphasizing the servile tone of his English, ‘That there look like the bald feller we saw on the boat, doesn’t it, sir?’ Hannibal had shut his eyes and looked away, struggling not to be sick. Not, reflected January, the persona of a masterful investigator that they needed to project. ‘Comin’ up from Galveston?’
The tone of his speech seemed to remind the fiddler of who and what they were supposed to be. He managed to open his eyes, though without being obvious about it – fortunately they were far enough into the cave that his effort not to vomit or faint didn’t show – he didn’t actually look at the body. ‘You’re right,’ he said faintly. And then, more steadily, ‘Gerry Hookwire.’
Without turning, he went on, in a voice perfectly steady, ‘Mr Creed, could I get you to have your men make a litter or a travois of some kind, so we can take this man back to the hacienda? The least we can give him is a decent burial.’
‘Fucken goddam Comanche,’ repeated Creed, as Hannibal relieved him of the torch.
‘Jalisco, go with him.’
The minute the two cowhands were silhouetted in departure against the light, Hannibal passed the torch to January, and sank down onto the nearest boulder like a man who’d been shot. January knelt beside the body, held the torch close. Skin color, bloating, maggots but no beetles yet. Rigor mortis mostly gone. Ants, despite the chill of the spring weather.
He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Hannibal hadn’t passed out entirely, then turned back and examined the wounds. Quickly, because he didn’t know how long the cowhands would be … then examined them again. Then, with another glance at the cave-mouth – he could hear the men’s voices below, as they cut saplings, argued about whose horse and saddle-blanket were to be pressed into service – he moved further back into the cave, studying the mix of sand and fine gravel of the floor. The ceiling sloped down sharply as he moved deeper. Again he caught the glint of canine eyes.
He knelt by the body once more, and removed the rawhide thongs that bound wrists and ankles to the short stakes that held him. Checked the dirt beneath the body, around the stakes.
Twilight stained the air beyond the cave mouth. Creed, Jalisco, Brawny and Lope came scrambling up the slope, carrying a saddle-blanket for use as an improvised litter. Hannibal got to his feet and tried to look as if he, and not January, had been perusing the gruesome remains. As they carried the corpse of Gervase Hookwire down to the horses, the men told Hannibal a dozen anecdotes about Comanche outrages on women and children, on priests and traders, and speculated on how long it would take the president to send in the militia again and wipe the Comanche from the face of the earth.
While they were tying the body to an improvised travois of cottonwood saplings, January touched Hannibal’s arm to draw him aside, murmured, ‘That’s all very well, but it wasn’t the Comanche that killed him. Tace,’ he added – Latin, for with the men so close he didn’t dare touch his lips for silence, at the fiddler’s startled look.
The torch was quenched in the stream. Ajo – who had evidently lost the card-cut or finger-count or however the matter had been decided – led his horse, which drew the sorry burden. January and Hannibal mounted, but followed the rest of the party slowly through the long grass of the prairie clearings at a little distance, their voices reduced to a whisper.
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘His throat was cut,’ said January. ‘So far as I can tell, every other wound was inflicted after death. You’ve heard the mountain men talk about what the Blackfeet do to prisoners, as well as the stories about the Comanche here. But whoever mutilated that body left the genitals alone. That’s what a man will do who isn’t used to torture – a man who doesn’t do it either as his job, or his way of displaying vengefulness, or to deliberately frighten other men into submission. The body was cut up, and chopped with an ax, to make it look like the Comanche did this, but the killing itself was done elsewhere.’
‘Why?’
January shook his head. ‘Beats hell out of me. But there wasn’t enough blood under the body to have come from the cut throat. Very little blood at all, in fact. And no sign that the man had fouled himself, in terror, or pain, or death. Those stakes hadn’t been driven into the ground nearly deep enough to hold against a man in real agony. The dirt around them hadn’t even been disturbed. Nor the dirt under his heels.’
He turned in the saddle, glanced back along the canyon at the darkness gathering among the rabbitbush and oaks. The moon would rise in an hour or so, waning now but still bright. Nevertheless, he shivered, knowing he’d have to come back here. ‘But by the blood pooled under the skin of his back he was brought here – and cut up – within an hour or so of his death.’
Looking a little greenish in the twilight, Hannibal opened his lips to speak, then closed them again. Overhead, as Creed had promised, bats were pouring from the caves behind them in the gully, like the smoke from Hell.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked at last.
‘I don’t know,’ said January. ‘But I’ll take oath he hasn’t been dead more than four days.’
‘Sunday, or maybe Monday.’ The fiddler did a little mental arithmetic. ‘But it was over a week ago that Taggart ordered his men to turn away anyone from riding across his land.’
January said, ‘Yes.’
‘So there’s a good chance we’re going to spend tonight within a few hundred feet of whoever did this. Gloria in excelcis. Unless of course he’s out riding picket-guard by the road.’
‘No,’ said January mildly. ‘Actually, we’re not.’
‘I was afraid you were going to say that, amicus meus. What are we going to be doing instead?’
‘Searching the other caves along that canyon. The killer knew that the Comanche strip their victims. He also knew that burying the man’s clothes and effects – even hiding them in a hollow tree – would be too risky. I looked to see if there were tracks leading farther back into the cave and there weren’t, but given the thickness of the foliage in that gully, I don’t expect he carried him far. I’m hoping it won’t take us too long.’
‘And I’m hoping,’ said Hannibal gloomily, ‘that we won’t be seen sneaking horses out – either by whoever did this, or by whoever might be in his pay.’
But as Petronius had once observed, there is little point in expecting much of one’s projects, when Fate has projects of her own.
It was well and truly dark by the time Gervase Hookwire’s makeshift cortege reached Perdition. Because they were traveling at walking pace from the rolling limestone hills, Lope had been sent riding ahead with the news that they’d found a dead white man, tortured by the Comanche, and that the danger from that tribe was in fact greater than everyone supposed. When they reached the hacienda, they were met by Francis, limping on his ebony cane. He took one hasty look at the half-covered corpse, blanched in the light of the cressets in the courtyard, and detailed Noah, Malojo, and January to dig a grave and get him buried at once.
‘We’ll send for the Reverend Willet …’ He stopped himself, calculating – January could almost hear him ticking off pros and cons in his mind – whether whatever plan he had for the production of his brother’s ‘will’ would be derailed by the arrival of a minister on the morrow. ‘We’ll send for the Reverend Mr Willet tomorrow,’ he finished, in a tone that told January, at least, that he had no such intention and didn’t much care whether this stranger’s soul went to Hell or not.
January could almost hear him thinking, The man’s dead already, why bother?
Hannibal looked as if he would have protested, but January caught his eye, shook his head slightly. ‘It makes no never-mind to me, sir,’ said January, in the most cheerful-nigger voice he could muster. ‘If it’s all right with you, seems to me right, tha
t the poor gentleman should have a decent grave.’
The fiddler, who like January had had several hard days in the saddle and no sleep last night, looked deeply grateful. ‘You just wake me betimes in the morning, then, Ben.’
January nodded. ‘Primo levis equitare, like your old granddad used to say,’ and Hannibal chuckled, as if the Latin had been an actual classical tag instead of, We’ll ride out at first light.
January had, in fact, been wondering how to get a more detailed account during the servants’ dinner, of who had been where at what times on Monday morning. According to the list that Valentina had slipped to Hannibal, Madre Taggart’s maid, Melanie, carried tales to her mistress of everything that was said and done in the house. But though he winced at the thought of spending until after midnight digging a grave – and probably until almost dawn shoveling dirt back into that same hole – he knew there was no better way of unlocking a slave’s lips than sharing with him a disagreeable task.
And in any case, he reflected uneasily, Hannibal looked like he would indeed be better for a night’s sleep.
As would he himself.
Provided, of course, that Hannibal hadn’t been right about spending the night within a few hundred feet of the man who’d slit Gervase Hookwire’s throat, carried him to the cave in Witch Cave Canyon, and carved up his body.
Am I looking at one crime, or two?
Vin Taggart had land to leave, a family who detested and distrusted his young wife, and a powerful rancher reasonably near-by whose brother he’d called a coward and a pup ten days previously in front of witnesses. In Texas (or in New Orleans, for that matter) that alone constituted grounds for retribution up to and including homicide.
But why kill Hookwire, who had only arrived in Texas two weeks before?
And, re-phrasing the question: what, if anything, was there about Hookwire that someone considered worthy of murder?
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