Shooting Chant

by Aimée

  “I know you didn’t shoot him—I did that when he tried to kill me and another officer. But I need to know everything you know about him.”

  He hesitated.

  “Don’t even think of lying to me,” she said, her voice firm.

  “All I can tell you is that his name is Tom something. I can’t remember his last name. I met him one time at the mine. He was talking to Jesse about a truck or something like that. Ask Jesse. Then I ran into him a few times in the Palomino Lounge, you know, the one at the Sagebrush Motel. It’s the closest place a guy can get a cold beer around here without going into Farmington.”

  “And?”

  “He’s a stranger to me, for all intents and purposes. We barely talked. He noticed my Chiefs’ cap and bought me a beer once.”

  “Were he and Jesse good friends?” she pressed.

  “Ask Jesse. You know better than to ask me that. One Navajo doesn’t speak for another,” he said.

  She looked at his cap, then gave him a wry smile. “That’s a convenient excuse. Since when did you become a traditionalist?”

  “I’m not, but I do believe in our ways, and I think the old customs should be treated with respect.” He gave her a long, hard look. “Sometimes you still sound like L.A. Woman.”

  She forced herself not to cringe. That had been the nickname many had used for her when she’d first returned to the Rez from southern California. After being back home for several years, and after everything that had happened to her since, she’d thought everyone had forgotten about it. Hearing it mentioned so easily now stung, but she was determined not to show it.

  “What was this guy like?” she pressed. “I’d like your impression of him.”

  Billy considered it. “He seemed lonely, like a fish out of water here, and trying too hard to make friends. I asked him what he was doing on the Rez, and all he said was ‘research.’ I thought he was some kind of college graduate studying Indians, since we get so many of those who come by.”

  “I’ll check it out. But you said Jesse knows him?”

  “I saw them together once at the mine. That’s all I can really tell you.”

  Ella gave him a long, thoughtful look. “You and I used to be friends once, Billy. Why can’t we trust each other anymore?”

  Billy shook his head sadly. “We both changed. There’s a lot happening on the Rez right now, but I believe we can’t restore harmony using the Anglo system of law. To defeat our enemies, we have to hold fast to our own traditions.”

  “It’s how we define ‘enemies’ that really separates us,” Ella said. “As I see it, anyone who undermines the stability and order of our tribe—a lawbreaker—is an enemy, whether or not he sees it that way.”

  Billy began walking toward the front door of his house. “It’s time to say good-night. I’ve told you all I know.”

  “Or just all you’re going to tell me?”

  He shrugged, unlocked his door, then turned. “Do what you have to, Ella. I’ll do the same.”

  As she got back into her police unit, Ella felt a vague sense of disquiet. It really bothered her to think that some of her own people saw cops as enemies of the tribe. All the cops she knew were highly dedicated men and women who put their lives on the line to serve The People. This was their home, too—a place where they lived, loved, and raised their children. Without them, there would be no harmony or beauty, only chaos, despite all the arguments that attempted to twist the truth.

  Ella put her unit in gear and drove away from Billy Pete’s home. It was time to get back to work. She had a job to do.

  Ella reached for the mike to request Jesse Woody’s address, when she heard her call sign over the radio. She answered, identifying herself, and waited for the dispatcher to tell her the nature of the call.

  “We’ve got an Officer Needs Help call near you. He’s asking for you specifically. I’m going to patch you through to him now.” The dispatcher had her switch frequencies, and in moments Sergeant Neskahi’s voice came over the air.

  “If you can respond, I can use the assist,” Neskahi said. “John Brownhat’s wife is dead, and it looks like she fell off her mare. Her husband found the body when he came home from work, and he insists her death was no accident.”

  “What does the scene tell you?” Ella probed.

  “It’s inconclusive. The horse seems gentle enough, but you know how they can spook one minute and be okay the next. John is understandably very upset, and wants someone to come and investigate. He’s certain that the horse would never have thrown his wife and that there’s no way she just fell off.

  “What do you think?” Ella asked.

  “Admittedly, she’s a good horsewoman, but accidents do happen. She might have had a heart attack or something. There’s no way I can tell,” Neskahi said. “But John wants answers, not guesses. He’s on the phone with the chief now. He’s not going to let this go.”

  “I’m on my way,” she said.

  Moments later, as she neared the fork in the highway at the center of Shiprock, she was called on the radio again. This time, Big Ed came on.

  “Shorty, I need you to assess the scene over at John Brown-hat’s and then report back to me. If there’s a chance it’s homicide, I want you on the case.”

  “I’m already on the way, Big Ed,” Ella affirmed. “Sergeant Neskahi called me for assistance.”

  “I’ve also sent Carolyn Roanhorse out to take a look,” he added. “She may even get there before you. John Brownhat is a close friend of the tribal president and I’ve got enough pressure on me right now.”

  “10–4.”

  Ella picked what she thought would be a shortcut to the Brownhats, but, as it turned out, the gravel road had been partially washed out in the last rain, and it wasn’t much of a timesaver. By the time she arrived at the solitary home that stood a few miles north of Ship Rock, the geological formation for which the town was named, she saw Carolyn had already arrived.

  Ella parked her unit, then walked toward the others. It was twilight now, and the ground was obscured by the grayness of the hour. A saddled pinto mare stood by, grazing on a patch of tall grass, oblivious to everything but her appetite.

  Sergeant Neskahi left the ME and came up to Ella as she approached the scene. In a low voice, he filled her in. “The victim died of a broken neck, according to Dr. Roanhorse’s preliminary examination, but that’s what you might expect from a fall from a horse.”

  Ella studied the mare, which no longer had its bridle on, though it remained saddled. “That’s the horse?”

  “Yeah. I took the bridle off so she could feed freely, and maybe not wander away in the dark. That mare looks as if a three-year-old could ride her, but you know as well as I do that horses are unpredictable. Just when you take your mind off what you’re doing and relax, something goes wrong. A hamburger wrapper drifting in the breeze could turn a nice ride into rodeo time. But then again, Elisa Brownhat raised and trained horses, so she would have known how to handle almost anything. She was one of the best horse people around.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “It does seem as if there’s a piece of the puzzle missing.”

  “That’s exactly the way I feel,” John Brownhat said, approaching Ella from behind.

  Ella turned her head, startled by the silence of his approach. She’d never even had an inkling that he was there. She knew his reputation as a hunter and a tracker. Even when game had been scarce, the Brownhats had never gone hungry. But she’d never seen Brownhat’s skill until just now. He had walked from his house across an area filled with grass, brush, and rocks without making a single sound.

  “My wife did not fall off that mare. You should know that in the seven years we’ve been married, I never once saw or heard of her falling off a horse, even when she was training them. She sometimes bailed—got off fast—if the horse was giving her too much trouble. But she never took a fall.”

  Ella met his eyes. In the twilight, they burned with anger and sorrow. “I’m very
sorry about what happened, Sir. I’m looking into this myself, and if there’s something not right about this, I’ll find it.”

  Brownhat nodded. “You have certain talents, I know,” he said.

  There it was. The legacy followed her as if it were solid, incontrovertible fact instead of a legend. “Right now what I need you to do is go inside and let us work. I’ll come and talk to you again before we leave.”

  “Some of the tracks have been brushed away,” John told her. “Look carefully. Some other person was here when my wife died.”

  “You’ve checked the area?”

  “I know what you’re thinking, but I haven’t disturbed anything. You can easily recognize my tracks, and they haven’t confused any of the other signs.” Having said that, Brownhat turned and went to the house.

  Neskahi expelled his breath in a hiss. “He’s really a skilled hunter. He found the tracks by the road. I probably wouldn’t have looked that far from the body.”

  “We owe it to him and to the victim to check everything out. If there’s something more to what’s happened here than a riding accident, we need to find evidence to support it.”

  Ella unhooked her handheld radio from her belt, and requested her crime scene team. A moment later, the dispatcher told her that Big Ed had already done that for her. Tache, Ute, and Justine were in transit.

  Seeing Carolyn kneeling by the body, talking into her tape recorder, Ella approached quietly, not wanting to interrupt her.

  After a minute, Carolyn glanced up at her. “I can’t tell you much from the body, not until I’ve had a closer look,” she said, preempting Ella’s questions.

  “Any signs of violence?”

  “It appears that she has a broken neck, and there are bruises on her jaw, and probably elsewhere, but you’d expect to see some of that after a fall from a horse.”

  “But on her jaw?”

  “I know,” Carolyn answered. “That one can go either way. It could be evidence of a homicide or not.” Carolyn struggled to get off her knees. “I should go on a diet, but I just like eating dessert too much.”

  Ella smiled and gave her a hand. Carolyn was a large woman by anyone’s standards, but in the past few months she’d added another ten pounds at least. “You just need to do more exercise,” Ella suggested quietly.

  “I dislike any activity that makes me sweat,” Carolyn said curtly. “Besides, life is unpredictable and I’d hate for anything to happen to me, like a heart attack, while I was doing something highly unpleasant. If I have to die, I’m going to do it licking cookie crumbs off my lips.” She signalled Neskahi to help her put the body into the sack.

  Ella saw Neskahi cringe, then quickly cover his reaction up. “You very seldom ask me to help you with the bodies,” Ella said. “Why’s that?”

  Carolyn grinned. “I like to force the macho cops to do something that makes them weak at the knees. It’s my version of fun, so back off.”

  Ella bit her lip to keep from smiling. It would have been too cruel to poor Sergeant Neskahi, who was approaching so slowly it was as if his feet had suddenly turned to lead.

  Hearing vehicles approaching, Ella saw her crime scene team driving up. “I better go fill my people in.”

  “Good luck. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “Count on it,” Ella answered.

  Ella watched Justine leave her unit and come toward her. Her assistant never complained about the long hours. Like Ella herself, Justine seemed to thrive on police work. It was free time that they had difficulty handling.

  Ella filled her team in, and then watched as they brought out floodlights and began working the area. Neskahi assisted, as he often had in the past. Ella examined the blanket and the saddle, looking for cockleburs or something that might have upset the animal earlier. Finding nothing, she led the horse away, staying on the harder ground and traveling in a straight line, making sure that she didn’t obliterate any clues or tracks in the process.

  After putting the animal in a corral adjacent to the house, she returned to join her team. Harry moved with his usual unerring intuition finding clues where no one else would have thought to look. She saw him sketching the pattern of hoof marks on the ground, then measuring the strides and entering them onto his drawing. He knew, as she did, that a spooked horse would change its stride, and maybe even rear and come down hard, making deeper impressions on the ground. They might also duck their heads to unseat a rider, and that would leave a distinctive pattern as well.

  Ella stood beside him. “What do the tracks tell you?”

  “There’s no sign here that the horse did much except walk at an even rate. There are also no drag marks from a rider with a foot caught in the stirrup. If we are to believe she fell, then the way it happened was that the horse was walking, stopped, and the woman flew off, landing about five feet away face down. Considering Elisa’s skill as a horsewoman, that just doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Make sure you say all that in your report. And keep up the good work,” Ella added. The tribe would be hard-pressed to find someone with Harry’s eye for detail and his love of the job. She felt a twinge of frustration, knowing that only he could decide whether to stay or go, and there was nothing she could do to sway him one way or another.

  Justine walked the cordoned-off perimeter alongside Officer Tache. Together, in a spiraling pattern, they searched the ground methodically.

  Ella approached them, staying in their tracks. “Anything?”

  “I’m sure that the area around where the victim was laying was swept clean of tracks—though it was skillfully done. Someone used a branch to eradicate the trail then dusted the ground with sand. We used to do that as kids when we were playing. I recognize the technique,” Tache said. “Someone’s playing us and the evidence here.”

  “I made plaster casts of some boot-prints we found up by the road,” Justine said. “I’m working from memory, so I may be wrong, but they look like a match in size and type to the ones we found where the sniper ambushed you. They don’t match the ones the victim’s husband is wearing either. I checked. Brown-hat’s feet are smaller.”

  “So, what the evidence is telling us is that someone was here with the victim, and that whoever it was wanted to hide that fact,” Ella said. “Also, this person knows how to obscure his trail.”

  “Unless she was murdered, it isn’t likely anyone would go through all that trouble,” Justine said.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Ella said. “It’s also possible that there was an accident, and whoever was with her didn’t want to get blamed or didn’t want it known that he was here with her. It could have been someone with something entirely different to hide.”

  “Like what?”

  “An affair, maybe, or any of a dozen other possibilities.”

  “So, you don’t think it was murder?” Justine pressed.

  “It probably was, but I think we have to keep our minds open,” Ella said. “Don’t overlook any possibility until we know something for sure.”

  “There’s something else you should know right now that could figure into this. I got a fax from the clinic, and Myrna Manus gave me a list of all the patients whose files had been stolen. She also said that the pregnancy tests results had already been placed in the file folders, though not every patient with a stolen file had a pregnancy test run. So, whoever took the files in the break-in kept just the pregnancy test results.” Justine kept her voice low.

  “Let me guess. Mrs. Brownhat’s file was one of those that was taken.” Ella wondered if Myrna had mentioned her own test as well. “Did Mrs. Brownhat have a pregnancy test run?” She asked.

  “Myrna wouldn’t say. She told me that any other information would remain confidential unless you got a court order or every patient’s permission.” Justine shrugged. “I just thought it was too coincidental not to mention.”

  “You did the right thing. Let’s wait and see what information I can get from the husband first.”

  Ella went inside the
house, leaving her team to finish processing the area. They’d be returning tomorrow in the light of day to make sure they hadn’t overlooked something.

  The problem right now was what to tell John Brownhat. He would demand answers, but she couldn’t give him much without compromising the investigation. She also didn’t know if she should mention the pregnancy tests, especially when she didn’t know if his wife had even had one done.

  As she approached the house, John came out to the porch and waved at her to come inside.

  Ella followed him into the living room, then sat down on an old, wood-framed couch.

  John’s expression was unguarded and sorrow was naked on his face. “Someone murdered her while I was at work,” he said, still in shock.

  “I think you may be right,” Ella said, “but we need to get more evidence together before I can tell you anything for sure.”

  He nodded “I want to know who did this,” he said in a whisper. “Find him.”

  Ella nodded. “Can you think of anyone who may have wanted to do her harm?”

  John took a deep breath. “My wife had her own way of doing things, and she wasn’t good at holding her tongue, even when the situation begged for it.”

  Ella said nothing as he lapsed into silence. Eventually, he continued.

  “Last week we were at a Chapter House meeting. She spoke against what she called the ‘stranglehold’ our traditionalists had on The People. As you can imagine, since those meetings are filled mostly with traditionalists, her views got some people really angry.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “Billy Pete was there, and they got into a shouting match after the meeting. My wife called him a brainless sheep, following the one with the bell, and he wasn’t too happy with that.”

  “Do you think Billy could have killed her, or made her fall somehow?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But, if he did, I want him to go to jail until he’s too old to walk.”

  “He will—if he’s guilty,” Ella assured him.

  “Is there anyone else she may have met—planned to go horseback riding with, for example?”