Fortunes of the Dead

by Lynn Hightower

  The new rodeo sweetheart lost her rhinestone cowboy hat but not her seat. It was a close thing, with the horse an inch or two from falling over backward and crushing the slim young woman, but the rodeo queen proved the committee’s choice true by not jerking her horse’s head up, keeping loose hold of the reins, and hanging on like a tick.

  The palomino pony directly behind Laura and Dandy executed a rather neat little sideways crow hop, and his rider, already cranky at being a mere third runner-up, had his head turned to one side in no time, and kept him in a tight circle so no matter where he wanted to run, he couldn’t get much of anywhere. And when he got the hops out of his system and made it clear, hell yes, he was listening to whatever it was she said, she took him through fifteen minutes of maddening figure eights to remind him that spooking on this girl was always going to be more trouble than it was worth.

  One could speculate forever about which young woman was the best rider in the bunch, but there was no question that Laura Bass was certainly in the running. Dandy had pulled this maneuver on her before—that maddening and contentious wheel and bolt, where he whirled in a sudden one-eighty turn and took off for all he was worth. And at sixteen hands and eighteen hundred pounds of muscle and speed, Dandy was worth quite a lot.

  To a champion barrel racer like Laura, keeping her seat during such a piece of equine misbehavior was nothing compared to the hair-raising turns they executed during competitions, where Laura had a little crowd-pleasing trick of grabbing a handful of dirt—keeping her seat in a split-second whirl was more a matter of instinct than anything else. Her thighs would grip and her pelvis and hips would rock forward with the motion of the horse, and she’d ride the bolt out far beyond the point where Dandy wanted to keep going, till he was covered in sweat and sorry, so very sorry, he had started the whole thing in the first place.

  But Laura had been on the road for a year, traveling and performing rodeo queen duties, and Dandy had spent a frustrating amount of time bored in a paddock, or frustrated in his stall. He tolerated Laura’s mother, flattened his ears at anyone else, and generally stayed in a funky bad humor. He did not understand that Laura had rodeo queen duties, and by the end of the year, neither one of them were at the top of their form.

  Another complication came in the presence of Hal Mercado, riding his quarter horse gelding, Storm. Hal was an up-and-comer on the team roping circuit, and he made a point of showing up wherever Laura might happen to be. Laura was just starting to notice the way he always seemed to be around, and they were just at the stage of exchanging that certain kind of smile. While another cowboy would have already been taking her flowers and asking her out, Hal was patient, and liked to play the line like the fisherman he was. Hal was used to women coming to him.

  Clearly this sort of lazy behavior was not going to catch the attention of Miss Laura Bass, and Hal had decided to turn his courtship up a notch. To do so he came up with the novel notion of riding sideways behind the line of watchers, grinning at Laura and making it clear he had her in his sights.

  Still, Laura might have pulled things out of the fire if her left rein hadn’t broken.

  One minute she was trotting along looking at that good-looking cowboy Hal Mercado, and the next she was off balance, with no reins, and her right foot already out of the stirrup. In a split second Laura knew she could go one of two ways. Kick that left leg free of the stirrup and take a fall, or keep her seat and get that horse back in line. For a girl like Laura it was hardly a tough call, and she leaned back and grabbed a handful of Dandy’s mane, and was just getting settled down deep in her seat, when the horse slipped, and Laura went sideways over the left side, hitting the asphalt hard. With her left foot caught in the stirrup, Laura landed with her back arched, cracking a not so critical vertebra directly under her bra. If she hadn’t arched her back, the odds were high that she’d have spent the rest of her life as a paraplegic.

  Still, being dragged by a runaway horse was even worse, and the odds of being killed were pretty steep.

  Miraculously, Laura survived, with a crisply broken leg, one cracked vertebra, two shattered ribs, and multiple head trauma. And her injuries would have been worse if one, Hal Mercado had not forced his agile little bay to cross right in Dandy’s pathway, ensuing in a collision that broke Mercado’s ankle and permanently lamed his favorite horse, and two, if Laura’s mother had not made it down from the stands in near record time, grabbed Dandy’s bridle, and stilled the frantic horse. All in all it was a pretty close call, witnessed, in living color, by the ATF forensic committee, courtesy of a videotape loaned by Laura’s mother and made possible by a talented cameraman who had at the time been a virtual new hire at Channel 5.

  Wilson listened to Marian Windsor in something like a daze. If the other members of the committee noticed that he turned his pictures of Laura Bass facedown on the table, they made no comment. Marian Windsor drew a large cartoon head on a piece of notepaper. The nose and the half smile made it clear that this illustration was a side-angle view. She didn’t bother with ears. Wilson found her drawing something of a relief from the usual power-point presentation. Maybe because she was so unself-conscious about her medium.

  “There,” she said, holding the paper up. She had labeled the brain functions according to location. Personality and thought were located behind the forehead, and she had circled them and put an exclamation point beneath.

  “I’ve had Laura’s medical records, the ones from the accident, and eight months after, when she disappeared. Your average ER doctor has just started realizing in the last few years that the worst thing about head trauma, depending of course on the initial injury, is the secondary injury.

  “Laura suffered blunt trauma here, on the back of her head—see here, where the vision functions are. Because she took the initial impact on her back, before her head hit, she’d have had something of a concussion, and gotten her bell rung, but likely the complications would have been minor. The worst of her injuries occurred not on impact, but when she was dragged across the asphalt road. You saw the way she got flipped when the horse veered in the other direction. That’s when she really got hurt. Her leg snapped, a pretty clean break, by the way, and according to the X rays, it healed up great. But she hit her head hard, right here on the forehead, and then she actually bounced because the horse was still moving, and hit it in the same location, again and again.

  “There was a great deal of swelling to the prefrontal cortex, here. This area of the brain governs the higher order executive functions—social awareness, moral conscience. Personality. One of the things we’re finding is that subjects with severe antisocial personality disorders have a certain amount of damage to this area of the brain. Laura suffered an intercerebral hematoma that shut off the blood supply to this part of her brain.

  “Her care was pretty competent. The hematoma was surgically drained, she was watched, tested, and the cell death was kept to a minimum, considering the severity of the trauma, but a lot of brain cells were compromised. Another complication in an injury like this is the way the trauma sets certain biochemical events in motion. You get the formation of free radicals that target the fatty acids of the cell membrane, the result being cell death. Nobody really understood that at the time Laura suffered this injury. They figured that the cell damage she suffered from the hematoma was it. It wasn’t, of course.

  “When the mural circuit is damaged, the prefrontal cortex can no longer interpret feedback from the limbic system—which means that the signals from her brain that govern the free expression of emotion aren’t interpreted and filtered by her social awareness and moral conscience, and the end result can be intensely violent, aggressive behavior. There is no guilt, and no thought for the future, no consideration of consequences.

  “Laura’s mother said that after the accident Laura became absolutely fearless. She used to be afraid of heights—that was no longer the case. Rattlesnakes—Laura wouldn’t hesitate to pick one up. No fear whatsoever on horseback. And Wil
son, you said that one thing all the people who knew her as Janis Winters and worked with her at the rodeo commented on was how she had no nerves and no fear when she was out in the ring, drawing the attention of a bull or whatever kind of raging animal is involved in a rodeo show.”

  Wilson saw Christian hide a grin. He could see the humor; Marian Windsor had areas of complete mastery, but rodeos weren’t one of them.

  Marion pushed hair out of her eyes. “My suspicion, when I heard the details of the case, and looked at the statements from Laura’s mother concerning the personality changes that started after the accident, was that there was significant and increasing damage to the amygdala. And when I took a look at Laura’s brain during the autopsy, I found that—see, right here?” She held up the drawing, but she had made so many circles and exclamation points that Wilson could make no sense of which brain cell did what. On the other hand, he was willing to take the woman’s word for it.

  “This pair of almond-shaped structures,” and here Marian added ovals to the drawing, “see, situated here between the cerebral cortex and the limbic or emotional center of the brain. Significant damage there—which explains why Laura lost all fear. This area of the brain controls survival and fear.” She looked up and smiled at all of them. “Make sense?”

  Everyone nodded while Wilson wondered what all of this really meant. Because he was afraid that it meant that he had executed the Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

  Christian was watching Wilson, and Wilson scribbled on his pad like he was making notes. He had the ridiculous suspicion that Christian could read his mind, which made him feel acutely uncomfortable. Paranoia, he thought, wondering where the paranoia brain cells might be.

  “Here’s what happened when Laura went home.” Christian flipped through his notes, squinted at his own handwriting, then looked back up. “At first, Laura is brave and good-natured, but privately tells her mother that she is afraid to ever get back on a horse. Her mother says don’t worry, we’ll work it through like we always did before. Then Laura gets better. Physically, she’s young and tough and has an incredible constitution and ability to bounce back.

  “Her mother notices that she stops hanging out with her friends. She talks to Laura, and some of the kids she knows pretty well, and thinks that Laura is having memory problems, which make her feel alienated and off balance. And she’s having attacks of jealousy, about everything, her friends paying more attention to one girl than another, her boyfriend talking to anybody else. Finally, either Laura drops out of the group, or they drop her. She starts having temper tantrums, and there’s never any clue as to when and why they hit.

  “And her mother is devastated when she realizes how deep Laura’s memory loss goes. She keeps thinking that the memories will start coming back, but what really happens is that it gets worse, and Laura compensates by making things up to fill in the gaps.

  “The last month Laura was home she got it into her head that someone had taken her horse, Dandy, and substituted another horse, and that was what had caused the accident. Her mother went out to the barn with Laura time and time again, showing her how the horse really was Dandy, but Laura would say, OK, sure, but never really believed her.

  “And one day Laura’s mother got up in the morning, and realized Laura was gone. Nobody, the family, and our own investigators, have been able to find out where she was the following five years. The family hired private detectives and ran ads, and looked everywhere a girl who loved horses might wind up, but nothing ever came up.

  “Six weeks after Waco, Janis Winters surfaces, and gets hired from one rodeo circuit to the next as a clown. Her instincts are good, she is absolutely fearless, and she continues to be the only reason some cowboy makes it out of the ring in one piece. So her little oddities get overlooked. She lives in a trailer, and mainly keeps to herself.

  “And she’s changed so much—physically and personality-wise—that nobody really recognizes her as the Laura Bass who used to be a pretty good barrel rider on the local circuit near Higman, Texas.

  “The interesting thing is she has acquired a sister, Emma, and a secret sorrow that she confides to anyone who gets close to her, that Emma was involved with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and died at Waco. And her trailer is full of every last word that’s ever been written on the subject, including the rantings and ravings of splinter survivalist groups she runs across on the Internet.

  “Why the fascination with Waco? The dates are pretty interesting. She disappears, then resurfaces three years before the whole Waco incident starts up. And she tells people that her sister went away and got tangled up in a cult, and that the authorities refused to help her, and that she’s going to get her sister out herself. And she is obsessed with cults, and spends her time researching them.

  “While there was no Emma, some of the cult survivors we talked to do remember a Laura, who was pretty much picked up off the streets. Laura was pregnant when she was taken in, had her baby there at Mount Carmel, and stayed about eighteen months after the baby was born. She started fighting with Koresh, because she wanted to leave, but he wouldn’t let her take her child. No one we talked to has information about exactly what happened, just that one morning everyone woke up and she was gone.

  “We do, however, have reports of a Laura Bass talking to the Texas state police and the Waco sheriff about a baby she said was kidnapped by the cult. She told them she’d been to the FBI, the ATF, and the Texas Rangers. We’re still looking for something in our records, but we don’t have any reports filed. Because she could not come up with a birth certificate, or anyone who’d actually seen her with a baby, she was written off as a nutcase. But the autopsy confirms that Janis Winters did give birth to a child.”

  Christian gave a nod to Marian Windsor. “We went back through the records of unidentified Waco victims—as you know, many of them were children. We ran a comparison with Laura’s DNA and got a hit. We’ve confirmed that a male victim, age approximately five years, died of asphyxiation at Waco.”

  Wilson wanted very much to leave. He knew the others were studying him. Because his prefrontal cortex was in pretty good shape, and there was no interference with the feedback from his limbic system, he stayed put. He tried to think of Rugger, which he managed for a while, but it was not an image he was fond of, and he finally focused on Sel, and the way she looked that first day he saw her working the surf at Zuma Beach.

  Wilson kept Sel in mind. She was the target. He just needed to get home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Joel had no idea that I was sitting in the Cracker Barrel in I Corbin, Kentucky waiting for Wilson McCoy, who had agreed to buy me a late breakfast. As usual, I was late, but Wilson was later, so I sat in the nonsmoking section at a table for four in front of the window. A vigorous stream of sunlight lit the room. I sipped my coffee and watched the parking lot. The waitress brought me a basket of biscuits, in case I got hungry waiting for Wilson, and I opened one up and ate the soft bread from the middle, plain, without jam or butter. It was very peaceful, arriving first and having a few moments to myself. I wondered if I had been missing out by arriving late everywhere I go. Maybe the reason some people were habitually early had more to do with peace and quiet than punctuality.

  A spiffy new F-150 truck painted hot-rod red pulled into a prime parking space right in front of the restaurant—you couldn’t get closer unless you had a handicapped sticker. I did a double take when I saw Wilson climb out of the truck—he looked so local, in blue jeans and a blue Kentucky Wildcats ball cap. And driving a pickup truck on purpose? But it had to be Wilson, because of the limp.

  The waitress led him straight to my table, her cheeks newly flushed, and I could not hear what Wilson said to her, but she tossed a look at him over her shoulder, and I saw him grin. There was no hiding Wilson’s West Coast flair—evident in the fit of the jeans, Ralph Lauren; the black sweater, a blend of silk and wool. He sat across from me, leaned across the table, and kissed my cheek.

  “He
llo, Lena.”

  “Is that really you in the ball cap?”

  He took the hat off for a moment to show me the dyed blond hair and dark roots, twirled it on one finger, and put it back on his head. “See my truck?”

  “I did. With utter amazement. You better get back to Los Angeles, dude, or before you know it you’ll be spending your retirement money on a tractor and forty acres. As it stands, you could almost pass for a native.”

  “Sticks and stones, Lena.”

  The waitress arrived with coffee for Wilson, and a warm-up for me. I ordered my usual breakfast, sourdough toast, hash brown casserole, and today, bacon, and fresh squeezed orange juice.

  “How about you?” the waitress asked Wilson.

  He closed his menu and looked at her. “You pick it put for me. You know what’s good here, don’t you?”

  She chewed the end of her pen. “You hungry?”

  He nodded.

  “Stand by,” she said, and headed off.

  Wilson took a gulp of coffee, black of course. I was glad he’d had the wisdom not to ask for espresso. “I was disappointed you wouldn’t meet me back at the mountain. I wanted to see where you guys found Cheryl Dunkirk.”

  “I will never set foot on that mountain again. And stop complaining. I drove an hour and a half to meet you here.”