Cain shrugged. “Navajo. Zuñi. Apache. Moki. Any kind that sells is fine with him.”
“Five letters from Sherberne.”
“Read them aloud. Can’t be any worse than Jay’s, right?”
Christy organized the postmarks and went to work, opening the most recent first. As she unfolded the sheet, a slip of paper fell out. She picked it up, glanced casually at it, and then stared.
“What is it?” he asked.
“The voucher half of a cashier’s check.”
He looked at her oddly. “So?”
Wordlessly she held out the paper.
He took one look and whistled softly through his teeth. The check had been made out to Jay Norton and paid by the Sherberne Gallery. The amount was $537,840.
“What’s the date?” Cain asked.
“Last week. The day before Jo-Jo started leaving messages for me in New York.”
“You better read those letters, Red. We need to know what Hutton’s jet jockey had to sell that was worth half a million bucks, wholesale.”
“I could make a wild guess,” she said unhappily, thinking of the alcove.
“So could I. We both could be wrong. Dead wrong. Read the letters.”
Chapter 38
For a few moments Christy fiddled with the letters, rearranging them without opening them. She really didn’t like reading her sister’s mail.
“Aloud, please,” Cain said innocently.
“Bite me.”
He gave her a slanting sideways look and a smile that was very white against the black of his beard. “I love it when someone talks dirty to me.”
“Then turn up the scanner.”
He laughed.
She flipped through the stack of mail again. This time she chose the oldest letter instead of the more recent ones. When she finished reading it, she put the letter back in its envelope, pulled out a new letter, and began reading again. She worked her way through five letters before he became impatient.
“Anything?” he asked.
“A postgraduate education in slang and ways to screw your employer’s ‘hot little whisker biscuit.’”
Cain smiled crookedly and said not one word.
She folded up the letter she’d been reading, put it in its envelope, and pulled out the next letter.
“You know,” she said after a minute, “I think Jay really cares for Jo-Jo. His vocabulary is just a bit limited.”
Cain gave her a look that said he thought she had lost her tiny little mind.
“He’s about as subtle as a baseball bat,” she agreed, “and has a one-track mind, but—” She shrugged.
“But what?” Cain asked after a moment.
“There’s a sort of primitive energy in what he writes, as well as real affection. Coarse, but real. He worships the ground Jo-Jo walks on.”
“More like the ground she sits on.”
Christy ignored Cain. “Jay wants her obsessively, and Jo-Jo needs to be wanted that way. I think…I think she’s always needed it, the way some people need heroin.”
A disgusted sound was Cain’s only answer.
“Reading between the lines,” she continued, “Jo-Jo’s longtime affair with Hutton was pretty well finished eight months ago. Jay caught her on the rebound.”
“Or she caught him.”
“It’s a good match.”
“As long as the equipment doesn’t wear out.”
“Oh, they’ve got more than sex going for them,” she said.
“Yeah? What?”
“Some kind of hauling business.”
“Ashes?” he suggested dryly.
“What?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Just more slang. What’s their business?”
“Packing, transportation, and delivery. Using Hutton’s airplane, of course. Wonder what he thought about that.”
“You’re assuming that he knew. What were they shipping?”
“Something fragile and valuable. They don’t mention what.”
She went back to reading.
For a time there was silence except for the hum of tires on pavement and the occasional muttering of the scanner when it connected with a law enforcement radio transmission.
“It’s the alcove,” Christy said, looking up from a letter. “Jay mentions the Sisters.”
“Yeah, I’ll just bet he does.”
She opened another letter. Pieces of paper fluttered out. “More check stubs.”
“How much?”
Silence, then, “Almost half a million in this lot. A million, total.”
Cain whistled.
“Was the alcove that good?” she asked.
“It was by far the most promising site I’ve ever seen.”
“Why?”
“Protected. Hidden. And then there’s Kokopelli.” Yearning and anger combined in Cain’s voice. An extraordinary site had been raped and ruined before it could be understood. “I’ve never heard of a kiva decorated with his symbol. That site was very special to the Anasazi. There would be very special artifacts in the kivas.”
“But a million dollars in artifacts? Even at ten or twenty thousand a pot, that’s a lot of pots.”
“Not these days. The Japanese collect anything the Western world collects. And the Germans are absolutely nuts about Anasazi artifacts. They pay hundreds of dollars for a handful of sherds.”
“Still, a million bucks—”
“Wholesale.”
“—is a lot of money.”
“Some foreign currencies have been strong against the dollar for a while,” he said. “What we think is an outrageous price is a bargain to them, relatively speaking.”
She shook her head doubtfully.
“Then there’s the collector mentality,” he added. “You get some rich, aggressive collectors bidding, and the outcome is big bucks for you and to hell with rational prices.”
“That I can believe.”
The scanner kicked in with a warning that a dead cow was a road hazard two miles inside the reservation’s northern boundary, northbound side of the road.
When it was silent again, Christy let out a long breath. Each time the scanner came to life she was afraid she would hear about a man fleeing a murder charge in a white truck with a redhead by his side.
“The large kiva artifacts could easily have been worth a half million by themselves,” Cain said after a moment. “If you throw in the grave goods from the second kiva, you’ve got quite a haul, even at wholesale prices.”
“And they hauled every bit of it,” she said unhappily.
“That must have been the richest find in the last thirty years.” His voice was rough with anger for all that had been lost. “Was there any kind of inventory?”
Quickly she scanned the pieces of paper that had fallen from various letters. “They refer to ‘your shipment’ and ‘the pieces’ but never to anything specific. That’s…odd.”
“Damned odd. In legitimate deals, newly dug artifacts are photographed in situ and described millimeter by millimeter. The documentation becomes part of the value.”
“Would this many dealers be involved in something illegal?”
“Most dealers don’t give a damn about anything but a quick resale. The dealers paid in cashier’s checks, right?” he asked.
“So far.”
“That means they knew they could turn the artifacts around immediately and quietly. They didn’t have to worry about getting caught with dubious goods.”
“Jay went to just one dealer, at first,” she said. “Sherberne. He offered to take everything off their hands, but Jay didn’t like the price.”
Cain grunted.
“So Jay went to some other dealers and solicited bids,” she said.
The scanner crackled to life, muttering about a car upside down in a ditch two miles inside the reservation’s northern boundary, southbound side of the road.
“They should try fencing their livestock,” Christy said.
“The cow is worth mor
e as roadkill than it was alive. Cash is hard to come by on the reservation.”
“Was that why Johnny was looting his own history?”
“Johnny didn’t think much about history, including his own.”
Christy skimmed the page of angular printing that was becoming familiar. She flipped the page over and kept going to the bottom before she spoke again. “They ended up parceling out fifty-seven pots and twelve consignments of other goods.”
“What goods?” he asked instantly.
She shook her head. “Jay doesn’t say.”
“Damn.” Cain’s hands flexed on the steering wheel. “I keep hoping for some kind of inventory, some way of knowing what was found. And lost.”
“All I can say is that everybody paid by cashier’s check and everybody would have bought five times as much if they could have.”
His fist struck the wheel, a blow so sharp it made the tough plastic vibrate like a tuning fork.
“I wish I could have seen it, photographed it, catalogued it,” he said savagely. “There must have been an entire village preserved behind that stone curtain. And so far north—it would have turned the Moki world upside down. So damned much lost. Christ.”
“When we catch up with Jo-Jo, maybe we can recover—”
The look on his face made Christy swallow the rest of her words. His slicing sideways glance reminded her just how cold his amber eyes could be.
“I’ll catch up with Jo-Jo, all right,” he said, “but the artifacts are long gone. They’re in Germany and Japan, New York and Los Angeles, locked up in private collections, hidden beyond anybody’s reach.”
Christy began reading again, grateful for the excuse not to confront his icy anger. After a few minutes she went back to a previous letter, pulled it out, and began glancing back and forth. She set both of them aside, opened a new letter, and read only partway through before she set it aside and opened another letter and yet another.
The quiet frenzy of reading and comparing letters drew Cain out of his angry thoughts. He reached for one of the pages.
“No,” she said instantly. “Don’t mix them up. I’m trying to check something.”
“Give me some hints. Maybe I can help.”
“When did you tell Jo-Jo about the Sisters?”
“The first time?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Maybe a year ago,” he said.
“Don’t you remember?”
“Contrary to what you believe, Jo-Jo wasn’t a big blip on my scope. When Hutton got too rough for her, she’d call up and talk to me, that’s all.”
Something in Cain’s voice made Christy uneasy. “What did she want you to do?”
“Kill him, probably.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? She knew my past before she ever met me. Ex-con. Murderer.”
“That’s crazy. You’re no more a murderer than I am.”
He glanced quickly at her. “Red, you just saw me kill a man.”
“Self-defense isn’t murder.”
There was a strained silence. Then Cain let out his breath.
“Besides,” she added, “Hutton was Jo-Jo’s meal ticket.”
“Hutton was into bondage games. Real ones,” Cain said, “not the satin whip kind of romp Jay probably talks about in those letters.”
“I can’t see Jo-Jo going in for that.”
“You can’t see Jo-Jo, period. You keep seeing the past. That little blond angel child is no more.”
“She wasn’t an angel,” Christy said. “But she was…fragile, I guess. I always felt I had to protect her.”
“Yeah, Jo-Jo’s good at that game. She used it on all the local men. Get two men hot, complain to one that the other was hitting on her, and watch them fight.”
“Don’t give her all the blame. The men—”
“Have to be stupid enough to play her game,” Cain interrupted curtly. “I know. I was, once.”
“You were only eighteen.”
“The other guy was only twenty. He never got any older.”
Chapter 39
Christy took a long look at Cain’s closed expression and gave up arguing. Silence filled the truck while she went back to reading her sister’s mail.
“It looks as though Jo-Jo was planning to loot the alcove for at least eight months,” Christy said finally. “Maybe more.”
“Ever since I told her about the Sisters, I imagine.”
“I don’t know when she and Jay became an item—”
“Probably about the time she needed transportation out of Colorado for the artifacts.”
“—but about seven months ago Jo-Jo talked Hutton into hiring Johnny Ten Hats to search the area around the Sisters for ruins.”
“Using my information,” Cain said.
“And the bowl Jo-Jo took from your cabin.”
“How long did it take them to strike pay dirt?”
Christy sorted through various letters, reading quickly, her mouth a flat line of unhappiness.
“A few weeks, I guess,” she said. “They took most of the good pieces before Hutton ever saw them. Lord, what they must have taken…The artifacts I saw in Hutton’s house were incredible.”
“Did Hutton even know about the alcove?”
“Oh, he knew. He didn’t get those artifacts he showed me out of a Christmas stocking.”
Cain waited, but she didn’t say any more.
“What?” he asked.
“I read the Horizon file on Hutton pretty fast. I could be wrong.”
“About what?” Cain asked impatiently.
“I think Hutton was in trouble financially as well as artistically. He’d started a new line of perfume and cosmetics. Those things require a huge amount of cash to get going.”
“How are the new lines doing?”
“Too soon to tell,” she said absently, looking at another letter. “The costs are all up front. The payoff is a few years down the line. If it comes at all.”
She frowned and reread a section.
Cain waited.
“Listen to this,” she said, and began reading aloud. “‘He’ll go for it. Hutton is so desperate for cash, you’re lucky he’s not selling your platinum ass on street corners.’”
“Maybe Hutton was selling artifacts and forgetting to give Uncle Sam his cut,” Cain said.
“It would fit. In any case, Jo-Jo planned to double-cross Hutton from the very beginning.”
“Why? He was her meal ticket.”
“She found out he’d been secretly interviewing models.”
Cain’s black eyebrows shot up.
“The spring line of clothes was going to be her last work for Hutton,” Christy said.
“Any reason?”
“He told Jo-Jo she was too old.”
Cain whistled through his teeth. “I’d like to have been there.”
“So she came up with a scheme to steal artifacts from the alcove.”
“Revenge?”
“Partly. Mostly she was broke.”
“Broke! She was billed as the Million Dollar Body.”
“Jo-Jo spends money as fast as she makes it. The future has never been real to her.” Christy turned another page over. “Besides, Jay has expensive plans. This sounds like he’s already bought one airplane. He wants several to start his own charter service.”
“Any man who stays that long in the sack with Jo-Jo has earned it.”
Christy ignored him and kept reading. “Somehow Hutton found out that Jo-Jo and Jay were skimming artifacts from the alcove. He threatened them both.”
“When?”
She looked at the postmark on the envelope. Smudged. She tilted the paper several ways, trying different angles for the light. “Two weeks, max.”
“What happened then?”
She read quickly and summarized. “He—Jay—thinks the threat is funny. Says Hutton is in it with them up to his ass and can’t burn them without burning himself.”
“How did t
hey know which gallery owners to approach?”
“Johnny. He knew the private collectors too.”
“Figures,” Cain said, disgusted. “Jo-Jo had a real twist on Johnny.”
“What was it?”
“His cock.”
“What makes you think she was sleeping with him? There was Jay, remember?”
“Honey, Jay wasn’t around all the time. Jo-Jo went bar-crawling in Montrose and took her trophies back to Xanadu for Hutton to enjoy. Ah, love. Ain’t it grand?”
Christy winced.
“But then, maybe Jay was like Hutton,” Cain said coolly. “Maybe he liked watching Jo-Jo do what she did best.”
“Jay doesn’t say anything about watching her model.”
“I wasn’t talking about modeling. Hutton liked to watch Jo-Jo in the sack with the local cowboys. It was the talk of the county.”
Christy’s head snapped up and she stared at Cain. “What did you say?”
“Don’t look so shocked, honey. Jo-Jo liked strutting her stuff. Hutton liked watching.” Cain shrugged. “It happens.”
A shudder of distaste went through Christy. She set her jaw and went back to the letters. “I don’t believe it.”
“Long way from the High Plains of Wyoming, huh?”
She looked up. His expression was a mixture of sympathy and impatience. “A long way from anywhere I want to be,” she said evenly. “Ever.”
Without another word, she went back to the letters. A few minutes later she finished the last one, folded it, put it away, and leaned her head against the window.
“Anything new?” he asked.
“No.”
The strain in her voice made him want to hold her, but all that would accomplish was to make him want her even more.
There was a long silence, broken only by the scanner’s occasional mutterings.
Cain drove through a settlement that consisted of five wind-scoured houses, a one-pump gas station, and a store. The buildings were huddled at the base of the mesa. They looked old, beaten, gray without end.
Christy felt the same way.
Slowly, after many miles, the clean immensity of the land seeped past the darkness of her thoughts. The air was so clear she felt like she could see all the way to tomorrow.
She let out a long sigh and leaned back, allowing the spare beauty of the landscape to ease the aching deep within her, the pain that grew whenever she thought of the past, the present, and the sister she’d always loved and would never understand.
The Secret Sister Page 24