Mourning Dove

by Aimée

  “I think I’ve already gotten everything he’s going to say, but knock yourself out.”

  Ella went inside and sat down across the table from Ben Richardson. There was an empty foam cup. “You want a refill? Coffee, or water?”

  The question surprised him. “CID through with me?”

  “For now, I think.”

  His shoulders sagged as the tension washed out of his body. “When’s chow served in this joint?” he asked with a thin smile.

  “You’ll be getting something to eat after they take you back to your holding cell. When we’re done, Ben.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “So now what?” he asked, his gaze never wavering from hers.

  “That’s pretty much up in the air. You’ve been with us overnight, failed to show up for work at your police department job, so your pals are probably wondering where you are. If they manage to find out you’re here, they’re going to assume you cooperated—maybe even sought us out. I really wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, Ben,” Ella said simply, meaning it.

  Maybe it was because her tone of voice had made it clear that she was simply stating a fact, not passing judgment, that the seriousness of the situation hit him hard. She could see it on his face.

  “I’m going to need police protection,” he said, leaning forward. “If you turn me over to the Army, the guys I worked with will know about it, and they’ll find a way to kill me. Believe it.”

  “Protective custody for more than a day or two is the domain of the FBI, not the tribal police,” Ella said slowly. “And, just so you know, they’ll need more than what you’ve given them so far to make it worth their while. If you don’t have any actual names to trade, or pertinent information that’ll lead to a conviction, you’ve got zip, as far as they’re concerned. We’ll let you go, and you’ll be on your own.”

  Richardson thought about it a moment, then swallowed hard. “I have something to trade.”

  “Like what?” Ella said skeptically.

  He hesitated. After about ten seconds, Ella stood up as if getting ready to leave.

  “Just listen to me for a minute, okay?” he asked. “I’m thinking.”

  She sat back down and waited a full minute. “Okay. What have you got?”

  “I knew from the beginning that I’d have to watch my own back. So I did a little extra bookkeeping—insurance, kind of. I kept a record of all the weapons I handled, cleaned, assembled. I took photos—or if you prefer—visual souvenirs.”

  “Where are they?” Ella asked, trying to sound unimpressed.

  “Do we have a deal?” Richardson pressed.

  “I’ll talk to the Feds for you. Let me see what I can do,” she said, then stood and knocked on the door.

  Carson let her out, but didn’t speak until the door was closed again. “Smooth. But who’ll handle protective custody? This guy can’t just disappear, you know. If he does, the others will scramble to get rid of the evidence like he was doing, or more likely, head for Mexico.”

  “We need to put someone in place with him at his home. He can call in sick and we’ll stick to him like white on rice. But I don’t expect any problems. He knows that if he tips someone else off, he’ll have to take all the heat himself, including the murder of Jimmy Blacksheep. But just to stay on the safe side and make sure he plays nice, we’ll monitor his e-mails, his phone calls, any deliveries. The works.”

  “That sounds like my responsibility. I’ll do the babysitting,” Carson announced.

  “I was thinking you’d like the job. If a cop goes bad, other cops like to come in and clean up the mess. Same with the Army, right?”

  Carson nodded. “But let him stew for a while before we answer him. Like we’re wondering if we can get a better deal from someone else in his unit.”

  “My thoughts exactly. So, why don’t you come with me to my office? There’s something you need to see,” Ella said, leading the way. Once there, she waved him to a chair. “I received this from Private Blacksheep after his death,” she said, showing him a copy of Jimmy’s story. “We backtracked. He mailed it the day before he headed home from El Paso, and apparently, sent another package to his brother on the Farmington police force at the same time. The brother, Samuel, denies getting any mail from his brother. So either he never got it, or Samuel’s lying.”

  Carson read it over quickly. “Looks incomplete—and cryptic in a mishmash folklore way. Why wasn’t I shown this before?”

  “Would it have done any good?” Ella countered.

  He shook his head. “Only thing I can assume is that it’s some kind of user-generated coded message. Why else send it to you?”

  “Our thoughts as well,” she answered, giving him more details of what they suspected, a brief explanation of why she believed that part of the message was missing, and their attempts to break the code. “Until recently, I wasn’t sure who to trust or how far-reaching this arms smuggling operation was. So it wasn’t just a matter of letting you in on what was going on. I was worried about the chain of command you have to follow. If senior officers in the unit are involved, and other units as well, we might have tipped them off.”

  “But now that you’ve reduced the list of suspects to local members of the company, things are clearer,” he concluded.

  “Exactly. But we need more than this to bring charges, and what the tribe wants is the killer or killers.”

  “I understand. Let me know if Reverend Tome, or anyone else breaks the code. Insider intel would come in handy trying to bust this gang—lead us to the physical evidence.”

  “Give me a half hour to round up my team. Together we’ll see if we can break this code once and for all.”

  After Carson left, Justine came into her office and Ella briefed her. “Blalock will focus—pardon the pun—on the photographer, Martin Zamora. In the meantime, I’d like the rest of our team here ASAP. I want to brainstorm and see if any of them might have some ideas.”

  As Justine left, Ella called Ford. “Can you come over as soon as possible? Bring anything you’ve got, ideas, doubts, solutions, guesses. I need to bring you up to speed on what we’ve learned. That might give you some new insights on Jimmy’s story.”

  She’d just hung up when Carson knocked lightly on her door frame. “I was out in the hall and happened to hear you talking. I know you trust your team, but you’re relying on this Reverend Tome a great deal. What have you got to convince me he’s as trustworthy as you think?”

  “Not a whole lot. Mostly my instincts,” Ella said, just as Justine came in.

  “Let me do a more thorough check on Tome—first name Bilford, correct?” Carson asked.

  “If you’re running him down, you’re going to encounter some firewalls,” Justine warned.

  “Humm. Sounds like a challenge,” he said, and walked down the hall and outside.

  “He’s going to his car. You think he’s got a wireless laptop?” Justine asked, envy dripping from each syllable.

  It was no secret that she’d wanted one for a long time, but the department’s budget was strained and there was no way her request would be honored anytime soon. “It’s probably one of those five-thousand-dollar Department of Defense jobs,” Ella said. “His budget comes from the Pentagon, not Window Rock.”

  The meeting was switched to Big Ed’s office—at his request. Ella was walking in that direction when Carson caught up to her. “Reverend Tome has more clearance left over from his old career than you and I put together.”

  A dozen or so questions popped instantly in her mind, but there was no time for her to comment as they walked into Big Ed’s office. Blalock was there, looking physically tired but still mentally alert. Carson, of course, looked as if staying up all night was just another drill. Justine, Tache, and Neskahi were also there, eager and ready.

  Big Ed nodded to Ella. “Take it.”

  Everybody had met everyone else, so Ella got started without preamble. “I wanted everyone in on this because we’re running out of time. We need t
o solve this investigation before most of our suspects leave the country.”

  Ella introduced Ford to the others, most who’d met him casually already or knew he was a local preacher, and explained what Reverend Tome had been doing. “What I’m hoping is that by letting all of you in on this, we can work together to decode what Jimmy was trying to tell us.”

  Ford knew all about presence—an effective tool for any preacher. He glanced around the room, meeting everyone’s gaze, then glanced down at his notes. His voice didn’t exactly boom, but his speaking cadence commanded and his audience listened to every word. “The real problem with this . . . unfinished story is that it’s a code within a code—or actually several codes. At first I thought it was more akin to a parable, but that’s not it. Mourning Dove, a character in Navajo creation stories, is the narrator—a creature said to carry messages, and Jimmy is really writing about events he saw or heard about while in Iraq. We read about the Dark Ones—Trickster, Gopher, Gray Wolf, and Stripes—bartering for umbrellas—an absurdity for animals in the desert—from non-Navajo, apparently humans, called Walpole, Mountbatten, and others. Mourning Dove says these Dark Ones also buy gumdrops, shoes, and finally, nails.”

  Ella nodded. She had her own idea about the items bought, and recent events had only served to support that notion. But maybe Ford had more.

  Reverend Tome continued. “The people they obtain these objects from have a combination of familiar and unfamiliar names, such as Walpole, Weigel, Mountbatten, and Chopra.”

  “The last two are well-known names, but Walpole and Weigel certainly don’t ring a bell,” Blalock said.

  Ford nodded. “On page four Mourning Dove gathers his courage. Hearing the song of his soul he decides to follow his own lead. This entails even greater danger to him but, ultimately, Mourning Dove hopes it’ll free him. They all get ready to go home, with umbrellas, gumdrops, shoes, and nails . . . but the story ends. . . .”

  “That certainly doesn’t tell us much,” Carson said.

  “I’d thought about the items bought, wondering if they represented something else, like guns,” Ella said. “But you’d have to know what kind of guns the nails represented—or maybe the nails were just ammunition? And what about the gumdrops? Grenades? If that’s what Jimmy had in mind, it certainly isn’t obvious or conclusive. Or am I trying too hard to make a Codetalker kind of connection out of this?”

  Reverend Tome smiled. “Many old, simple codes substitute letters or words for something else entirely, or just use ordinary words and have a system where you pick out one predetermined letter in a string of words and that forms the intended message. Anyone ever write notes in school, and have the message concealed in, say, the third letter of each word?”

  “Anagrams . . .” Ella muttered thoughtfully and looked down at what she’d written in her notes. “Wow. I never thought it would be this simple. Umbrellas, gumdrops, shoes, and nails. If you rearrange those so that gumdrops come first, then take the first letter of each, you get the word ‘guns’. That was what the characters were buying, right?”

  SEVENTEEN

  But we’ve already reached that conclusion, haven’t we?” Justine said. “And how do we know that was the intended message?”

  “Sung, gnus, nusg? It has to be guns. Very simple code, once we think about it, and have the knowledge of subsequent events,” Blalock said. “Do you suppose he picked gumdrops, so we’d know to put it first? It’s the only food item in the items bought, so it’s different from the others.”

  “Okay,” Ella said. “Now what about the famous and not-so-famous names?”

  “This is where it gets interesting,” Ford added. “Lord Mount-batten was a famous British war leader, and the best known Chopra is the self-help guru. Walpole and Weigel drew a blank so I tried a Google search on Walpole, and one of the first hits I got revealed that someone named Walpole was the victim of a highwayman. Recalling that Lord Mountbatten was killed by an IRA terrorist bomb, I had a possible connection. Both had been crime victims. When I searched the other names, adding a crime variable, I learned that Chopra had been the victim of a blackmail plot, and Weigel is the name of a person who’d been kidnapped. And Google’s also where I found out who Bula and Konik were. These are nicknames for men who were casualties of a Polish Mafia hit.”

  “Okay, that links with the two men from the Guard unit who died overseas. So what Jimmy was giving us here are descriptions of the methods the Dark Ones used to obtain guns,” Ella said. “With that in mind, I believe more than ever that characters like Trickster, Gray Wolf, and the others link directly to the suspects, men in Jimmy’s unit. But I still can’t figure out how Jimmy expects us to make an ID—not unless, like Jimmy, you happen to know what the soldiers did overseas and can link that to their namesakes in the story. I was hoping that we could brainstorm and compare the qualities of each animal in the story to specific suspects, and see if we can make a tentative ID that way.”

  “Trickster might be the imbedded photographer, Zamora,” Justine said. “From what we already know this doesn’t seem too far a stretch. By naming him ‘Trickster,’ Mourning Dove may have been alluding to the fact that he presented himself as one thing—a photographer—and, in reality, was nothing more than a thief.”

  “Zamora was sent home after the MPs searched his luggage on his way back to his imbedded unit in Iraq and found that he had thousands of dollars in cash,” Carson said. “He came up with a lot of explanations, but none of them rang true.”

  “I’ve got an update on Zamora,” Blalock said. “He died in a one-car accident on a mountain road in southern Colorado the same day Jimmy did. The local sheriff said that it looked like he’d been drinking, but a blood alcohol test showed that he was well within the limit.”

  “Maybe more pinpoint evidence, like whether Zamora is Trickster, is on the half of the story that disappeared—the part we believe originally went to Samuel Blacksheep,” Ella suggested.

  “I might be able to look over the unit records and see if any of the crimes Jimmy alluded to, like the blackmail or the kidnapping, turned up on any form within their platoon’s day-to-day operations,” Carson said. “Certainly a Mountbatten kind of action, a terrorist bombing of an authority figure, would be listed. If we can link a suspect to an incident like that maybe we can start identifying the other players, too.”

  “We need to identify the leader of the operation. Who would you all say is the focal point of the story?” Neskahi asked.

  “Trickster went his own way, so my guess is that it has to be Gray Wolf, Stripes, or Gopher,” Ella said.

  “Gopher seems too passive to be a leader, and Stripes, who is that? A skunk?” Justine asked.

  “Gray Wolf would be my guess,” Ralph Tache suggested.

  “Stripes could be a sergeant. You know, stripes on his sleeve,” Ella said, thinking out loud.

  “But a captain and a lieutenant wear bars which could be referred to as stripes by a non-career soldier or a civilian,” Carson pointed out.

  “There’s still no hint of a resolution in the story—it was as if the writer was telling us that the battle was an ongoing one and Mourning Dove didn’t know how it would end,” Big Ed said. He’d been silent until now, taking notes, not wanting to intrude his authority into the discussion. “I suppose the resolution could be in the second part, but judging from the overall tone, I doubt it.”

  “But we’re all in agreement that guns were stolen overseas to be resold here at home for a handsome profit,” Justine said. “The motive is clear as well—Jimmy was killed because he knew too much and was on his way home to reveal the story, hopefully with a lot more details of the events alluded to in here.”

  “If we’ve got a dirty cop involved, who’s to say that the operation stops with weapons from Iraq? Maybe weapons confiscated in a raid—those that normally get taken off-site and blown up as a way of destroying them—aren’t being destroyed after all,” Big Ed suggested. “Or maybe evidence that should be locked up
is turning up missing, jeopardizing future cases.”

  “There’re a lot of possibilities,” Ella said. “But the heart of our investigation is Jimmy’s murder.”

  Big Ed looked around the room. “We’ve got a long list of suspects but, as I see it, the key player—if he’s clean—is Samuel Blacksheep. He knew Jimmy better than anyone else. He might be able to break the code—or may even have the remaining part of the story and has been keeping it from us.” He looked at Blalock. “Can you check his bank accounts, and things of that nature?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Blalock said.

  “Samuel’s investigating on his own, Chief. And though he may have that last part of his brother’s story, I don’t think he knows about the part sent to me,” Ella said.

  “We need more evidence to tie the guilty to the crimes,” Big Ed said flatly. “Let me see what I can do through the Farmington PD’s back door. What about the body we found in the rental?”

  “I questioned his known associates and they claim that the victim had started a new business. He was playing with the big boys and that got him dead,” Tache said.

  “No other prints except Blacksheep’s were found on the vehicle, inside or out. The deceased was dumped onto the backseat, then shot with the assault weapon as he lay there, judging from the damage to the seat, which corresponds to several wounds on his torso,” Justine added. “He wasn’t killed by Jimmy Blacksheep, that’s pretty certain, though Jimmy probably shot him at least once. There was one nine-millimeter slug recovered from his thigh which happens to have been fired from the same gun that put the round in the sign where Jimmy’s body was found. From the angle, that round had to have come from the sedan,” Justine concluded.

  After they left Big Ed’s office, a heavy silence fell over the group. Somehow, they had to narrow down the field and sort out the innocent from the guilty.

  As Carson left to make the necessary arrangements regarding Richardson, Justine caught up with Ella in her office. “We just got a call from one of the Many Devils. He didn’t identify himself, but I took the call and think it was Tony. He says that he suspects that the carjackers are going to be on the watch for targets on the stretch of highway south of sixty-four between Farmington and Kirtland.”