Jojola and his men generally dealt with misdemeanors and traffic violations—most of their cases consisted of domestic violence incidents and drunk drivers. But he knew in his heart this was no wife-beating or DUI. Trying to sound official, the young officer said, “They found a body over by the gorge. It might be one of ours.”
Jojola knew that Small Hands was talking about the missing boys. But which one?
The first to disappear had been an eleven-year-old whose alcoholic parents hadn’t even bothered to report him missing back in March. When a schoolteacher finally called the police department to say that the boy hadn’t attended school for several days, Jojola went to the parents’ run-down trailer to look in on him. “Li’l shit took off ’gain,” the father said. Even through the screen door, Jojola could smell alcohol on the man’s breath. “Goo’ riddance, goo’ fer nuthin’ li’l shit.”
Jojola had insisted on looking around the trailer, but the boy was gone. Still, he wasn’t unduly alarmed. He knew the boys’ parents; both of them were rarely sober, and when they weren’t hitting each other, they were hitting their kids. He didn’t blame the child for running away and was determined that when he was found this time, he’d make sure the boy was placed in a foster care home with one of the tribe’s stable families.
Most such runaways turned up in Albuquerque, the biggest city in New Mexico about 135 miles to the south, where a large population of street kids lived off handouts and petty crimes. He called the Albuquerque police and faxed them a photograph of the missing boy. He assumed that sooner or later the APD or Department of Social Services would come in contact with the boy and bring him home, as they had the first time he ran away.
When the boy still hadn’t turned up after two weeks, Jojola drove down to the city. He cruised the places where the homeless kids gathered to skateboard, socialize, and smoke marijuana; one park in particular had a reputation as a hunting ground for pedophiles, who’d offer the kids money and/or drugs for sex. But there was no sign of the boy.
A month later in April, a second boy disappeared from the reservation. This time the red flag went up and stayed there. This child was only nine years old and came from a good home. Both of his parents were successful artisans—their paintings sold for thousands of dollars at the highbrow galleries in Santa Fe—and the child was active in his school and the Catholic church youth group. He also belonged to the young Taos dancers who were being trained to carry on the traditions. Now he was just gone.
It was now May and a third child had been missing for a week. A twelve-year-old altar boy had disappeared as he walked home after Sunday morning Mass. There’d been several possible sightings of him that afternoon, but nothing substantiated. The most promising had been that of a passing motorist who thought he saw a boy matching his description talking to “a really big, older guy” near the main reservation entrance. The pueblo kids sometimes gathered there because of the convenience store located just outside the boundary. “I haven’t seen him before, but he just seemed to be asking for directions, ’cause the boy was pointing down the road. I figured the big guy for a priest, so I didn’t think anything of it.”
“A priest?” Jojola asked. “How did you know that?”
The witness looked at him like he was an idiot. But Jojola didn’t think there was any such thing as a stupid question, unless it was the question that didn’t get asked and turned out to be important later. “He had on the black shirt and pants, and I’m pretty sure I saw the collar,” the witness said. Then he laughed and added, “Either that or he was Johnny Cash.”
Desperate for any connection, Jojola had gone to see Father Eduardo, the priest who ministered to the Taos Pueblo. The Franciscan was a tiny, wizened old man of indeterminate age who seemed to have adapted to his desert surroundings by blending in. His face was as gray and rough as the mesas, his arthritic hands gnarled like the roots of the juniper trees, but he was the perfect man for the job of blending the Church of Rome with pueblo customs.
When the Spanish first settled in the area, they’d forced the Indians to work as slaves and to accept the Catholic faith while prohibiting the natives from practicing their religion on pain of death. In 1619, the conquerors built an adobe chapel dedicated to San Geronimo, or Saint Jerome, that became a symbol of their domination. But the Indians revolted in 1680, chased off the Spanish, and destroyed the church. The pueblos remained free of Spanish rule for twelve years and accepted their return only when the overlords promised to end forced labor, recognize the Indians’ right to their ancestral lands, and to stop interfering in their internal affairs, especially their religion. The San Geronimo Chapel was rebuilt and from that point on, the priests looked the other way when the faithful also continued with their traditional practices. Father Eduardo even went one step further, blessing such “pagan” events as the Mudhead Kachina Dance, used to encourage rainfall, “as just another of the wonderful ways man has of relating to God and the world he created.” He was much loved in the community.
Despite his age, the priest’s grip was still strong when he greeted Jojola. The police chief knew that the old man was no simple rural priest, either, but a well-read man whose mind had lost none of its quickness or his hazel eyes their youth. He loved the children of the pueblo most of all and had personally badgered every businessman in Taos, and many in Santa Fe, to raise money for a youth center on the reservation. Those who did not contribute to renovate an old farmhouse were hit up for the money to buy Ping-Pong and pool tables, as well as subsidize a snack bar.
The disappearance of the boys distressed the old man considerably, but he shrugged helplessly at the description of the big priest. “Doesn’t sound like anybody I know; you might check at the St. Ignatius Retreat,” he suggested. “It’s run by the New York archdiocese, but they have little to do with us here or even the archdiocese in Santa Fe. I don’t know any of them well, plus most are apparently there on vacation and come and go.”
Jojola was aware of St. Ignatius, located in the foothills just north of the reservation, but he had never been there himself. So he was surprised when he arrived because the retreat looked more like a prison to him than a vacation spot for priests. The buildings that constituted the main compound were surrounded by a twelve-foot-high wall, and he was stopped at the gated entrance by a guard, who made him wait while he went back inside his gatehouse to summon someone with the authority to meet with him.
A few minutes later, a thin, balding man in running sweats came out of one of the buildings and jogged over to the gate. He extended a hand—Jojola couldn’t help but notice how limp and wet it was compared to Father Eduardo’s. “Excuse the attire, Chief…”
“Jojola.”
“Chief Jojola. I’m Dr. Tobias, the administrator for St. Ignatius. What can I do for you?”
“You’re not a priest then?” Jojola asked.
Tobias chuckled—rather forced, Jojola thought—then answered. “Oh, I’m a priest all right, Brotherhood of Jesus,” he said. “A Jesuit, but I’m also a psychiatrist.”
“A psychiatrist?”
Tobias nodded. “Well, yes. Our object here is to provide a place where priests from the New York diocese can come to relax and unwind from the trials and tribulations of their service to man and God. For some that simply means time away to do nothing more than pray and, perhaps, read a good book.
“But others of our guests have deeper issues, including alcoholism and even drug abuse, so we offer professional counseling and rehabilitation to help them overcome these afflictions. Lay people often don’t realize, but the awesome responsibility of being good shepherds can be a very stressful occupation. Priests, after all, are just men and subject to many of the same vices that trouble the rest of the modern world.”
Dr. Tobias did not invite him into the compound so Jojola had to ask about the large priest while standing at the gatehouse. “He’s not in any trouble,” he said…yet…“but he may know something about a boy missing from the Taos Pueblo.” As someo
ne trained since childhood to note the minute behavior of animals he tracked, he thought he detected a reaction from the administrator—almost a flinch.
But Tobias shook his head. “No, doesn’t sound like anyone here,” he said. “We require our guests to remain on the property. They are, after all, here to get away from the outside world, especially those in rehab. I’m sure you understand.”
Not really, Jojola thought, but said, “Sure. Makes sense to avoid outside temptations.” Again, he thought he noticed some fleeting troubled expression pass over Tobias’s face and wondered, but the psychiatrist then smiled.
“Well, sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” he said. “Perhaps the man you seek is not a priest at all but someone in a black shirt and maybe a white undershirt that looked like a collar. Happens all the time. Black seems to be ‘in’ nowadays.”
“Yeah, could be,” Jojola replied. At the same time, his mind was jumping ahead. All he’d told Tobias was that he was looking for a tall, heavyset priest. He’d not said anything about what the man was or wasn’t wearing, especially not a collar, which was becoming more rare. Father Eduardo was usually in a T-shirt and jeans except when he was actually performing church services. Slow down, Jojola, he thought, he might have just assumed it. Still, there was something about Tobias and the whole walled “retreat” that troubled him.
With a third child having disappeared, the tribe was in an uproar. Except for the possible sighting of the last child, there’d been no other sign or word of the boys. Jojola was feeling the pressure from his people, but he wasn’t getting much help from the outside. The FBI agent in charge of the Santa Fe office said he’d look into it, but there’d been nothing from him since. Neither had the Taos County sheriff done much other than offer a bored deputy who took the missing-persons reports. “But otherwise, Sheriff Asher told me to tell you that there’s no evidence that a crime occurred off reservation property. He says you need to talk to the feds.”
Ever since the disappearance of the second child, Jojola had made almost daily calls to the Albuquerque police, who were more cooperative but had no better answers. He then began driving down on weekend nights, when the street kids tended to be more active. He’d stopped at the city morgue, but the only decedent of the approximate right age was a white youth who, high on methamphetamine, had stepped in front of a long-haul truck on its way to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
“We have no idea who he is, and probably never will,” the deputy coroner said. “He was pretty messed up by the collision. We couldn’t even get a good likeness from your artist to send out to police agencies around the country.” The man shook his head sadly. “He’ll be buried in the county cemetery. No headstone, no services. His parents will never know what happened to him. The sad thing is there are thousands like him every year around the country who disappear and no one knows whether they were murdered or died accidentally…or are living the good life beneath some bridge.”
Jojola left for home more troubled than ever. He wondered if one of the missing boys was lying on some cold steel table in another city with a John Doe toe tag, or was already buried in a pauper’s grave. His people believed that the souls of the Taos Pueblo’s dead could only rest if buried in the land of their ancestors. He needed to find the children and bring them back home, one way or the other.
As Jojola awakened to the news that one of the boys might have been found, he also felt a tinge of desperation. He’d noticed one constant about this mystery: each boy had disappeared on the day of a full moon. There was something particularly chilling about that—especially because in a little more than two weeks, the moon would be full again.
• • •
If Officer Small Hands got it right—he’d overheard a sketchy radio dispatch on the county sheriff’s frequency—a grave had been discovered out in the desert west of the reservation. He hopped in his police truck and, leaving the reservation, ten minutes later reached Highway 64 and headed west as questions raced through his mind.
If the child was buried, that meant he’d been murdered. But what manner of man, or monster, could walk among the people, kidnap three boys, and not be noticed? And did all three boys suffer the same fate, or was there still hope?
He believed he knew the answer to the last question, although he did not want to accept it yet as fact. The ugliness of these thoughts contrasted with the beauty around him. It was a diverse land. The mountains were covered with pine forests and aspen trees. Lively streams raced down from the heights. Where the mountains stopped, the land grew flat, much of it irrigated for farms and ranches. Coarse old cottonwood trees stood shoulder to shoulder along the streambeds, and the blossoming wild plum trees colored the roadsides with purples and pinks.
However, just a few miles west of the pueblo, the land turned into high desert. In the far distant past, it had been subject to repeated coatings of molten lava from the volcanic peaks and rifts in the earth’s surface. Ten thousand years after the last eruption, the land appeared flat to an observer on the ground, but from the air a viewer would see that it was crisscrossed with deep ravines, etched into the hard ground by flash floods. The terrain wasn’t what most people pictured when they thought of a desert. There were no great expanses of sand. Hard scrabble was the best description—a land of rock and arid soil to which tough survivor plants like the silver-green sagebrush, stunted junipers, prickly pear cactus, and hardy grasses clung desperately.
The afternoon sky was blue as turquoise, empty except for a few fluffy clouds that wandered across the great expanse like lost sheep. As he looked west, Jojola noted a sort of shadow running north to south, hovering above the land and dividing the desert in two. The Rio Grande Gorge.
Ten miles west of the pueblo, Jojola reached the Taos Gorge Bridge, the longest and perhaps most beautiful single-span steel bridge in the world. As always, when he began to cross, he got the impression that the earth had opened its mouth and was about to swallow him.
Unlike most canyons in the American West—such as the Grand Canyon, which had been carved by the Colorado River—the Rio Grande Gorge had not been created primarily by the forces of water. A river, the Rio Grande, ran through it and certainly contributed to the continued erosion, but the geological anomaly of the gorge was that it was technically a rift, or tear, in the earth’s surface. It was as though giant hands had grabbed the planet’s fabric and pulled it a quarter-mile apart along a nearly straight line that ran from the Colorado border for several hundred miles through New Mexico. The giant had plunged his fingers in deep, too; the sheer red and gray cliffs plunged nearly eight hundred feet to the green river below.
Some of the Taos reservation land bordered the gorge on its eastern side, but Jojola was headed to the west end, where he was out of his jurisdiction and into that of the county sheriff, with whom there was no love lost. But if Small Hands had heard correctly, the body belonged to one of his community’s children and he felt he had a moral right to be present when it was removed from its clandestine grave.
Reaching the western side of the bridge, he turned right on the first dirt road he reached and headed north and parallel to the gorge. About two miles up the rutted and seldom-used road, he saw a collection of vehicles and two groups of people. The largest group seemed to mostly be made up of members of the press, including newspaper reporters with their notepads, and the television crews with their cameras, boom mikes. Three TV satellite trucks were parked nearby—one from Santa Fe and two from Albuquerque, which irritated him as it was more than a two-hour drive and no one had bothered to contact his office in all that time.
Of course, it was no surprise that Sheriff Douglas James Asher, known to his few friends as DJ, of Taos County, had thought to contact the media first. He was constantly courting the press and running for an office he’d held for more than twenty years. Nor was it a surprise that he wasn’t particularly worried about garnering the Indian vote. The Anglo and conservative Hispanic electorate had swept him into office every f
our years on his law and order ticket.
Jojola was just as glad to see that Asher was doing what he did best as a lawman and that was appear before television cameras looking concerned and diligent, neither of which described him well. But the distraction allowed Jojola to slip unnoticed over toward the second group of people some thirty yards away.
Stepping over yellow crime-scene tape laid on the ground, Jojola brightened to see the woman who was obviously in charge of whatever was going on at the site. Her name was Charlotte Gates, a forensic anthropologist from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
Anthropologists as a whole were not always the most popular scientists with American Indians. For more than a hundred years, they’d unearthed and collected the remains of native peoples for the purpose of studying the bones of the earliest inhabitants of the continent. These scientists did not seem to understand that to the descendants of the dead, this was no different from a French anthropologist coming to New York and exhuming the remains from a cemetery there. What would they have thought of their grandmother Edna’s skull and pelvis ending up on display in a Paris museum?
Laws had been passed in recent years requiring that the remains of American Indians be repatriated with their descendants for reburial. Unfortunately, by accident or otherwise, many of the remains stolen over the years had simply ended up in boxes or display shelves with no identification or even an indication of their origin.
Char Gates was different. Her area of anthropology had to do with forensics, or the use of anthropology as it applied to the law. He knew she was considered to be one of the best in the country, a frequent lecturer at the finest state of the art crime labs including the FBI facility at Quantico, Virginia. Most of her work in the field revolved around locating and excavating human remains for the purpose of identifying their owner and assisting law enforcement in determining if the cause of death was accidental or suspicious.
As she had once explained to Jojola, she read bones the way other people read books. “They tell me stories,” she said. “By reading the bones I can tell if that person had lived a good life or a poor one, was well fed or was plagued by disease and malnourished.
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