The road had turned downward, and the lake was coming closer. The white truck shimmied in the rearview mirror, and she forced herself to look away. She tried to remember what Ruth had said about Robert’s treasure map. Ruth said Robert had gotten his map from his grandfather, but people who had purchased maps claimed they’d gotten them from some ancestor who had known Butch Cassidy. And what had become of Robert’s map? Ruth hadn’t said, as if the map didn’t matter. An excuse to go treasure hunting. The map was probably in Robert’s truck, and the fed hadn’t yet released it.
Vicky tapped on the brake and turned into the two-track that ran parallel to the lake. Had she kept going, she realized, she could have driven straight into the lake. She had to concentrate. The Ford skittered over the troughs dug by other vehicles. The white truck had stopped at the turnoff and was making a U-turn. She felt the muscles in her stomach begin to relax. The truck had bothered her more than she realized. Listen to your instincts, Grandmother always said. Your instincts know the truth. She watched the truck complete the turn and start back. Why had the driver come all this way, if he didn’t intend to go to the lake?
She drove toward the strip of land that jutted out into the lake, where Robert had parked his truck. Water lapped at the rocks on the thin strip of swampy, wind-stroked beach. She stopped about thirty feet from the strip and got out. The yellow tape that had been here yesterday was gone. Case closed, she thought. Accidental drowning.
She passed the strip and kept walking toward the campsite she had discovered. She wondered if she could find it again with the wind bending the grass and clumps of sagebrush. Easy for things to disappear in this landscape. So many stories of the Old Time that Grandfather had told about the people scattering across landscape like this, hiding in the dirt and brush, scarcely breathing, not letting out a sound. The soldiers had ridden past, their white eyes unaccustomed to the play of sunshine and shadow, the wind moving everything about.
She stopped to get her bearings. How far from the strip had she walked? Half a mile? She saw the slight depression then. She pulled over and started walking across the grass. Footprints were still visible, hers and Ruth’s. She wondered if there had been footprints here when Gianelli and a forensics team were crawling over the area, and if they had made casts. In the Old Time, no footprints would have been left behind. Those who went last would sweep and brush the trail behind them. The people could cross the plains without leaving a sign.
The campsite looked the same as yesterday, and she wondered what she had hoped to discover. Something she and Ruth, as well as the investigators, might have missed? Something that might identify an anonymous caller? But there was no proof he had been here. He could have been farther along the lake, up above, looking down. Hiding in the grass where no one could see him. Except that someone had been at this campsite recently, and whoever it was had a full view of the strip of land.
She found a stick and started prodding the ashes. The forensics team would have done the same, scattering them about as they prodded. If anything had been left behind, they would have found it. A few feet from the fire pit was a flat-topped boulder. She sat down, thinking that the caller could have sat here and looked out at the lake. And did nothing! If Robert was murdered, the caller had done nothing to help him. Now she had a better sense of the man: scared to death for his own life; unable or unwilling to help someone else.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the white truck coming around a curve above. She could feel the knot tightening in her stomach as she watched the truck pull to the side and stop. The driver wore a cowboy hat, wide brimmed and tan-colored, that shaded his face. It was a man, she was sure. Powerful shoulders, a red plaid shirt.
She was certain it was the caller, as certain as if he had walked down the slope and announced himself. He must have been waiting near the coffee shop and had followed her, expecting her to go to the fed. Wasn’t that his instruction? But she had come here hoping to find something—she had no idea what it might be—to take to Gianelli, other than the claim of an anonymous caller.
She fought back the impulse to jump up and start running. Take the diagonal route through the grass, run all out for the Ford. She glanced over her shoulder. The Ford was a long ways away. It would take a few minutes to get there. And then what? Drive back along the road, around the curve where the white truck would be waiting? She got to her feet, feeling slightly shaky and disoriented. She was alone here. Annie and Roger were the only ones who knew where she was, and they were in Lander.
Now she was pushing the stick through the ashes, as if this were the most ordinary thing to do, the white truck a blur in her peripheral vision. She would not let the man in the cowboy hat see her fear. She dug past the ashes and into the burned ground, forking up chunks of dirt. An exercise in futility that proved nothing. Forensics would have swept the campsite clean, taken anything they found.
She tossed the stick aside and started for the Ford. It struck her that the white truck could turn downhill, barrel through the brush and grass and spindly stalks of trees, and cut her off. She willed her legs to stretch out, go faster, as if the Ford were an oasis where she could hide, a dirt cave from the Old Time where she could make herself small and invisible.
She saw the small, white flash under a sagebrush, scooped up the torn, half-burned piece of paper, and kept going. Not until she had gotten into the Ford, locked the doors, and maneuvered through a U-turn back to the junction of the two-track and the dirt road, did she open her palm and examine the piece of paper. A faint scribbling of boxes and X’s and lines with arrow signs. It looked like part of a tourist map, but different. The paper dingy with age; the scribbling almost formal, deliberate. The piece had been torn off from what looked like the right corner of a larger piece. The torn edge charred and burned.
She drove up the incline to where the road started bending around the mountain, the white truck out of sight, but still there, she was certain. Except that when she came around the curve that overlooked the strip of land and the campsite, the truck was gone. She could make out the tire tracks at the edge of the road where it had parked. The in and out of her breathing sounded loud and shallow around her. He could still be ahead, waiting. She slowed down, peering around each curve as she drove, half expecting to see the white truck stopped in the middle of the road, where she would have to brake hard. Every possibility of flying off the road.
She kept going until she emerged onto the flat road that sloped gently down into Lander. Still no sign of the white truck. She tried to shake away the unpleasant sense of having been shadowed by a cowboy she didn’t know, a cowboy who knew her. A few cars and pickups on the road now, the usual traffic between the houses in the foothills and town. Even if the white truck were nowhere in sight, she had the feeling she was still being watched.
* * *
TED GIANELLI WAS a big man with a thick neck inside the open collar of a denim shirt. He had black hair streaked with gray and gray eyes that gazed at her with curiosity. He had kept her waiting a few minutes in the entrance to the FBI office building, staring at wanted posters on concrete walls. Finally the metal door had swung open and the fed had beckoned her inside. Down the wide corridor past a warren of offices, the sound of his boots bouncing off the walls, and into a roomy office with paper and file folders stashed around the open laptop computer on his desk. Opera music played in the background; she recognized “Caro nome” from Rigoletto. John O’Malley had been playing the aria once when she had visited his office, and for a long time afterward the melody had stayed in her mind. She smiled. Two opera lovers, John and the fed, in the middle of Wyoming.
“What brings you here, counselor?” Gianelli motioned her to a side chair and sat down behind the computer. “Which one of your clients did I arrest in the last day or so? What kind of deal are you hoping to make?”
Vicky stopped herself from laughing out loud. Gianelli had never been willing to make a deal. He was a
s hard-nosed as they came. He tapped a ballpoint against a folder in rhythm to the aria while she told him she had come about Robert Walking Bear’s death.
“It might not have been an accident.” That caught his attention, and he stopped tapping, his gaze locked on her. She told him about the anonymous caller and the message he had delivered. Then she told him that she had driven up to Bull Lake and that she was sure the caller had followed her in a white truck. “I found this near the site where Robert died,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out the piece of paper. Tiny flakes of blackened ash rose in the air. She slid the paper across the desk. “It’s part of a map. Ruth said Robert had a map with him when he died.”
Vicky waited while Gianelli placed the piece of paper inside a clear plastic bag and sealed the top. Then she went on, explaining before he could ask why she had removed evidence from a possible crime scene. “It was under sagebrush close to a campsite,” she said. “It would have blown away.”
“We combed the area. Nothing to suggest the fire pit had been used at the time of Robert’s death.”
“The ashes looked recent.”
“You know that how?”
She wanted to say: from years of sitting around campfires when she was a kid, listening to old stories. “Ashes remain in place for days,” she said. “They could have been warm when Robert’s body was found.”
A fixed, concentrated look came over the man’s face. “Even if the campsite was used recently, there is no way to know exactly when. Campers could have been there days before Robert Walking Bear’s death.” He drew in a big breath and tapped the ballpoint several times, staring across the room. Finally he looked at her. “This investigation is ongoing. If someone claims he witnessed a murder, I’m going to take that seriously.”
“If I hear from the caller again”—and she would, she was thinking; the scared, desperate cowboy would call again—“I can try to convince him to come forward.”
“Good luck with that,” he said.
* * *
THE HEAT OF the day settled over the parking lot and sucked at the asphalt. Vicky could feel it grabbing the soles of her shoes as she raised the tailgate on the Ford and lifted out the sack of groceries she had bought on the way home. Salad for dinner, bread, a carton of milk that squished against the bread. She closed the tailgate and headed down the sidewalk toward the glass entryway to her apartment building. From the distance came the faint hum of going-home traffic, hardly rush hour traffic yet, but heavier than during the day. A faint, intermittent breeze carried odors of exhaust and hot asphalt.
“Hello!”
She flinched, almost dropping the sack of groceries. Where had he come from? She hadn’t seen anyone in the parking lot, no one near the building. She could hear her heart thumping against her ribs. She looked around, wondering how she could not have seen a white truck. But there was no white truck among the parked vehicles. It was a moment before she recognized the man coming toward her.
“Cutter,” he said. He was smiling, a big, lazy grin. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” He leaned toward her, reaching for the bag. “Let me help you.”
“I’m fine.” She swung the bag out of his grasp.
“Tried to call you this afternoon. Annie said you were out of the office. Anything I can help you with? You’re not sick, are you?”
“No. No. Nothing like that.”
“It’s just that, well, you look a little tired, and I was wondering . . .”
“It’s been a long day.” She started to step past him. “So if you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Hold on.” She could feel the strength in his fingers as he gripped her arm. “I’ve been waiting for you. I was hoping we could have dinner.”
“I don’t think so.” She felt herself beginning to relax. The white truck had put her on edge, that was all. Here was someone from the past, returning to his own people. “Not this evening. As I said, it has been a long day.”
“All the more reason to have a nice, relaxing dinner. It’s been years since I’ve had a steak in Hudson. How about it? What’s in that bag? A container of salad? You can do better in Hudson.”
It was foolish, she knew, even as she started nodding, smiling at this man who was smiling at her. She had no memory of Jimmy Walking Bear, called Cutter now. And yet he had been in her past, a fellow student at the mission school. And here he was, handsome and thoughtful, wanting to take her to dinner.
“I’ll meet you at the restaurant,” she told him.
“I can wait for you upstairs.” He threw a glance at the top floor of her building, and she wondered for a moment if he knew her apartment number. “I’ll drive.”
“I’ll meet you at the restaurant in thirty minutes.” She shouldered her way past him.
11
THE RESTAURANT WAS crowded. An undercurrent of voices mixed with the clank of dishes and the noise of the kitchen door swishing on its hinges. A hostess with blond hair and freckled face led Vicky through the dining room past the tables with families and couples bent over baked potatoes, salads, and steaks that overlapped the edges of the plates. Cutter shifted out of a booth along the wall, his face set in a wide smile. “Thank you,” Vicky said to the hostess, but the woman was nodding at Cutter, as if she expected a pat on the back for having delivered the right woman.
“You look good,” he said, his eyes on Vicky. He gave an absentminded wave to the hostess, who turned and started back. “I’m glad you changed your mind.”
“I should be home catching up on work.” She was thinking of the reports on Luke Wolf that social services had sent over this afternoon. A lot of reading to get through.
“Work will always be there.” Cutter took a long look around the restaurant. “This place brings back memories. Whenever Dad sold a beef, he’d bring us here for dinner. Only happened once a year. Times were tough on the rez. How about you?”
“We hardly ever ate out.” Grandmother’s house, the closest they came to going “out.” Buffalo stew and hot fry bread, a campfire, stories around the campfire. It was better than any restaurant. Memories kept rearing up in front of her, those old days, and she realized how much she missed them. The man across from her had been on the rez at the same time, a brown-faced boy, probably experiencing the same things.
A waitress who looked like a younger version of the hostess—blond hair and freckles, a slash of red lipstick— took their order. Vicky waited until the woman had walked away before she asked Cutter what it was like to leave the rez as a kid.
He was quiet a moment, staring off into the restaurant as if he were trying to pull memories out of the tables and booths, the red wallpaper. “I never liked Oklahoma,” he said. “We had family there, but it wasn’t the same. I had cousins here, and grandparents. I always felt the relatives in Oklahoma wished we would go home. I left soon as I was old enough. Went to Texas and got jobs in the oil fields. Finally wised up and enrolled at Texas Tech. Took six years, but I came out a petroleum engineer. Went right back to a job in the oil fields in management for a lot more money.”
He smiled at her, expecting her to pick up her own story, she guessed. She looked away. Cutter Walking Bear was a handsome man, long black hair flecked with gray, and black deep-set eyes that she could feel boring into her. She would have to keep her balance. It was too soon after Adam to become involved in a relationship. She caught sight of the red-haired man at the table across the dining room and, for a disconcerting instant, thought he was John O’Malley. With a wife and two little kids. She shook away the notion. It was absurd the way she thought she saw him—on Seventeen-Mile Road, at a powwow—when he was nowhere in her life.
She realized Cutter was reciting her own life to her: divorced from Ben Holden, seven years in Denver earning a law degree, another couple of years at a big law firm there, and finally—home. He left out the rest of it: Susan and Lucas growing up on the rez with her pare
nts, the snatched weekends with her children getting so tall, growing away from her, the sadness inside her that she had missed the best part of her life.
“What is it?” Cutter said. “Did I get it wrong?”
“You got it right.” She forced a smile and waited while the waitress delivered the steak dinners.
“I regret I didn’t come back sooner.” Cutter sliced off a piece of steak and began to eat. He studied the table, examining something she couldn’t see. “Robert was sure he was going to find a lot of money. I went along a few times. Chance to get to know my cousin, and now he’s dead. I had a job interview that day with Fowler Oil in Casper. I keep thinking if I had been with him, I could have helped him . . .”
“How could you have helped him?”
“Talked him out of going up there by himself.”
“Ruth said he’s been going treasure hunting by himself for years.” Vicky took a bite of steak. Tender and delicious. There was no mistaking fresh meat, Grandfather always said.
“Ruth didn’t know he brought me along.”
“I’m surprised he wanted someone else around when he found Butch Cassidy’s treasure.”
“Butch Cassidy’s treasure! Who really believes that? Robert just liked getting away.”
“From Ruth?” Vicky waited before she took another bite. Ruth had never given any hint that she and Robert were having trouble.
“From everything. Haven’t you ever wanted to get away? It’s peaceful in the mountains.” Cutter dipped his fork into the baked potato and the rivulets of butter and sour cream. After a moment, he said, “Ruth told me you took her up there yesterday. I refused to take her when she asked me. ‘What’s the point?’ I told her. What good would it do? I had no intention of going back there. It’s a sad place, a place of death.”
The Man Who Fell from the Sky Page 8