Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  Kajika nodded. "Maybe so."

  "You make this kind of money selling rattlesnake skins?" Wolfe asked, already knowing the answer.

  "That's just for show. I don't really sell that many myself. I help the kids on the Rez catch and skin their own, and help sell them. They get some cash, their parents get some cash, and it helps foster good will."

  "Why would you need good will?" Carver asked.

  "I left the Rez as a teenager and didn't come back until my dad died in a car accident and my mom got sick. That's just one of those things you don't do. You don't turn your back on your people. But I did." His eyes clouded. "First chance to leave, I ran as fast as I could. College. Grad school. Even started my own company a world away from here. I tried so hard to prove I was better than the Rez that I guess I forget it was the Rez that made me what I was. It took coming home again to realize it. So now I do what I can to help make this place what I always wished it had been growing up: a place of opportunity versus oppression."

  "So where did the money come from?" Wolfe asked. "If you don't mind me asking."

  "I sold my business."

  Carver strolled around the room. The paintings were framed under glass, originals as evidenced by the texture of the brushstrokes. There was something incongruous about the scenario: a man of obvious wealth on an impoverished reservation finding a body in the middle of the desert while hunting rattlesnakes for the sake of pretense. His opinion mirrored Wolfe's. His first impression of Kajika was favorable, but there was something wrong with the situation.

  "What kind of company did you own?" Carver asked, turning again to Kajika in time to see the man's eyes light up.

  "Let me show you."

  Kajika ducked out of the great room into the kitchen. The sound of a door opening and closing came from beyond.

  "Something stinks," Wolfe said.

  "You think he's involved?"

  "Nah, but my gut still tells me something around here isn't Kosher."

  The bang of the door off the kitchen silenced them. Kajika returned holding both hands cupped in front of his chest, what looked like a white string hanging from their union. Something squeaked inside. He squeezed the contents into one hand so he could pull a keychain from the front pocket of his jeans. The whiskered head of a mouse poked out of his fist. It squealed and tried to nip at his skin. He walked over to the custom aquarium, unlocked the latch, and opened the lid just far enough to drop the mouse through.

  "Watch this," he said, beaming.

  The diamondback's tongue flicked faster and it raised its head to peer down at the sand where the mouse scampered nervously against the cage wall, trying to scratch its way out.

  "I don't understand how this has anything to do with--"

  Kajika shushed him. "Just watch."

  The rattler slithered down the rocks and resumed its coiled posture on the sand. Its rattle vibrated, a faint anticipatory buzz.

  The mouse became frantic, racing and scratching faster and faster.

  Slowly, the snake raised its head, drawing up its body into the shape of a swan's neck from the coils. It wavered, still tasting the mouse on its forked tongue.

  Its neck flattened and expanded into a hood like a cobra.

  "Dear God," Carver whispered.

  A lightning strike and the mouse was on its side, legs twitching uselessly, crimson splotches spreading on its fur.

  VI

  Flagstaff, Arizona

  Emil tossed his keys on the Spanish-tiled eating bar and produced a bottle of single-malt from the cupboard beneath. He poured two fingers and threw it back, swallowing the first slug and savoring the second. Shaking his head, he sighed and set the tumbler by the bottle, certain it would take more to chase away his stupidity. He had forsaken the sure thing in hopes of rectifying a past mistake. Stacey and Josie had both been disappointed when he had dropped them off at their cars where he had met them at the Park n' Ride. He'd seen it on their faces. They were both voracious in their own ways, and perhaps with the added element of danger brought on by the arrival of the FBI and the fact that their dig was instead the site of a mass murderer's burial, he could have bedded them together. What was he thinking? He supposed it was the fact that he'd never been with Elliot and the anticipation of her arrival had been building for days. She looked even better than he remembered, even after all these years. It had been a good idea to call her, even if it hadn't been his. At least now he was off the hook.

  Or so he hoped.

  He filled the glass halfway and walked into the living room. Maybe it wasn't too late to make a phone call. Or two.

  Something was wrong. He noticed it immediately. Since his now ex-wife Leila had left, the house had taken on a more lived-in appearance. Some might call it cluttered, but he subscribed to the theory of a place for everything and everything in its place, whether that meant in a drawer, on the floor, or strewn across any available surface. The papers on his desk had been moved aside to reveal the oak grain and the keyboard hung out from beneath on its trolley.

  He glanced around the room. The front door was still locked, the coat tree undisturbed. The staircase leading upstairs was deserted and what he could see of the hallway at the top was empty. The cushions on the suede couches were untouched, the coffee table a mess of trade journals.

  The black leather chair at the computer hutch had been pulled back, the wheels no longer resting in the grooves in the carpet.

  "Is someone in here?" His voice was small and meek in the vaulted room.

  Leaning over the desk, he powered on the monitor and gasped.

  There was a picture of him with a former student in a tenure-compromising position. His new screensaver faded to another image. A different student, her chin raised to expose her neck to his mouth, the sweat of their passion glistening on their faces.

  They swore these pictures would be destroyed if he did what they asked. They promised!

  The snapshot faded, and in the brief moment of darkness on the screen before the next shot materialized, he saw the reflection of a shadow behind him.

  Emil whirled to face the shadow, silhouetted by the fluorescents from the kitchen beyond.

  "You? What are you doing in my house?"

  The shadow took a step forward and Emil staggered backwards, banging into the desk.

  The phone rang from the kitchen.

  "There's no way you could have beaten me here."

  Something glinted in the shadow's hand.

  "I did what you asked!" Emil screamed, scooting along the hutch until he met with the wall, cornering himself. "She's here, isn't she? I called her just like you asked. You saw so yourself. Just leave me--!"

  A flash of steel silenced his protests.

  An arc of scarlet patterned the monitor. Thin rivulets of blood drained over the image of the professor's face like tears onto the much younger woman beneath him.

  The phone continued to ring.

  VII

  Verde River Reservation

  Arizona

  Kajika explained how he had found the body over iced tea at the table in the kitchen. Thinking he had stumbled upon a Sinagua burial, he had called the university instead of the police, and had followed with a call to the Diné Division of Natural Resources. There was nothing extraordinary about the story, but Carver couldn't shake the feeling that Kajika himself was of greater importance than the fact that he had made the discovery.

  "My undergraduate degree was in Biochemistry at UCLA," Kajika said. He led them out the back door from the kitchen and along a fitted-stone pathway toward the weather-beaten aluminum outbuilding. "Two doctorates in Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Human Genetics from Stanford. After that I spent a couple years working as a genetic counselor for the Center for Perinatal Studies at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle to save up some money. I lucked into a couple fat research grants, which I used to buy my equipment, then turned around and used the equipment as collateral against an even fatter business loan."

  H
e paused at the locked door to fish out his keys.

  Solid concrete walls showed through the rusted seams of the corrugated aluminum sheets.

  Kajika opened the door and guided them into a small tiled room. Machinery whirred all around them and there was the hum of forced air.

  "You're a man of many secrets," Wolfe said.

  Kajika toggled a series of switches and the overhead lights snapped on, revealing that the entire back half of the building was shielded from them by a thick wall of Plexiglas. Beyond was a laboratory reminiscent of the one at the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, though on a much more intimate scale. Everything shone of stainless steel from the workstations to the tables and storage racks to the hoods on the ceiling, which drew the air from the room.

  "You made that snake here?" Carver asked.

  "I call it a Quetzalcoatl, which means plumed serpent, after the Aztec snake-god of intelligence."

  "Is that what your company did?"

  "Kind of." Kajika shrugged. "Though nothing quite so exotic. This is just for fun now."

  "Why did you go out of business?"

  "We didn't fold. I sold the place. Made a killing. Besides, the time was right. Not only did I have personal issues that demanded my attention here, I think I reached the burnout point as well. Man, the money was great and everything, but I was spending all my time on the administrative and financial portions of the job and not enough time working under the hood. That's the whole reason I went into genetics in the first place. I wanted to stare God in the eye, open Pandora's box and share all her dirty little secrets. Now we have all these regulations and legislations. You can't engineer a train without protests from PETA and Greenpeace. I mean, we developed a variant of the Chinook salmon that matured faster and averaged nearly fifty pounds at two years, which effectively cut the impact of commercial fishing on the wild population by half. We even--"

  "Salmon?" Carver blurted. His heart felt like it had stopped beating. "What was your company's name?"

  "HydroGen. I thought it was pretty clever. Hydro... water. Gen...genetics. Hydrogen. Get it?"

  Carver had to brace himself against the wall to slow the spinning of the room.

  "Are you all right?" Kajika asked.

  Carver looked at Wolfe, whose face registered the same expression of surprise.

  "You knew Tobin Schwartz," he finally said.

  "Knew?"

  "What do you know about him?"

  "Tobin and I go back to grad school. Did something happen to him?"

  The link between the two cases had been intangible before, based on supposition and intuition, but now there was no denying it. Could Schwartz have killed the victims they were only now digging out of the sand so many years ago? It wasn't like a serial killer to change his modus operandi. The girls in Colorado and Wyoming had been butchered with complete lack of regard for their physical vessels, while the killer down here had gone to insane lengths to preserve them in precise, ritualistic fashion. His gut said the killers couldn't be the same person. Or could they? Schwartz had been schizophrenic. Was it so unreasonable to think that his damaged psyche could have split into two distinct personalities capable of mass murder? That theory just didn't ring true. One method was an expression of passion, rage, the other the almost clinical approach of an organized mind. Somehow Kajika tied what he believed to be two killers together. That, and the other undeniable connection.

  The blood.

  All of the victims had been exsanguinated, and they had yet to find the blood. Was there something of importance hidden within? Was the true goal of the killing to collect the blood for some purpose or to prevent some element of it from being found? There was definitely something there...something to either directly identify the culprits or explain their motivations.

  If there was something valuable in the blood, then there had to be a link between all of the deceased they had yet to explore. He needed to find it.

  "Is Tobin okay?" Kajika persisted. There was genuine concern on his face.

  "Why would someone need the blood from his victims?" Carver asked. "What would he do with it?"

  "Are you suggesting Tobin was involved? I know he has issues, but he certainly isn't capable of killing anyone."

  "Issues?" Wolfe said.

  "Chemical imbalance. But he was religious about staying proactive. Shrinks. Pills. All that jazz. I mean, he got really nervous and edgy when I told him my plans to sell the business, but we practically started the business together. It wasn't like I was going to screw him over. The offer was for more than I could ever spend, so I cashed him out. Last I knew though, he'd stayed on and was happy enough working for the new corporation."

  "They fired him six months ago," Carver said.

  "Six months? That can't be right. I think I last talked to him maybe two months ago and he said everything was going great. He would have told me if--"

  "The blood," Carver said. "What could he do with the blood of his--?"

  He was interrupted by his ringing phone.

  Snatching it from his pocket, he saw the incoming call was from Marshall at the lab.

  "Hello?"

  "I'm downloading your facial reconstruction now."

  Wolfe shot Carver a look, but he held up a finger to signify it would be just a moment.

  "I'm right in the middle of something, Marshall."

  "I'm sorry, your eminence. Am I disturbing you?"

  "I'll call you back in a bit."

  "How about 'Thanks for dropping everything to do me a huge favor, Marshall' or maybe 'I owe you big time, buddy'?"

  "We both know I owe," Carver said. "I'm buying for the foreseeable future."

  "That's all I wanted to hear," Marshall said. "I'm sending the image through now. I'll run it through the missing persons database when I hang up. You'll be the first to know if I get a hit."

  Marshall ended the call and Carver opened the photo file.

  "Jesus," he gasped, nearly dropping the phone. He turned to Wolfe. "We have to go."

  "We aren't done here yet."

  "Then just give me the keys!"

  "I said--"

  Carver grabbed Wolfe by the jacket and shoved him against the wall.

  "Give me the goddamn keys!"

  The impact jarred Wolfe's glasses from his face. Carver stared into nearly clear blue eyes so light they appeared incapable of sight, like those of a Siberian husky or those of a...wolf.

  Wolfe knocked Carver's arms away and straightened his jacket. He calmly knelt, picked up his glasses, and replaced them over his eyes.

  "Thank you for your time, Mr. Dodge," Wolfe said. "Would you mind if we returned later to ask some more questions?"

  Kajika could only nod.

  Wolfe produced the car keys from his pocket. "Shall we, Special Agent Carver?"

  Carver was barely out the door when Wolfe grabbed him by the upper arm and turned him, their faces scant inches apart.

  Wolfe bared his teeth.

  "Don't ever touch me again."

  VIII

  Sinagua Ruins

  36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona

  "He still has no idea," the man said. He was nothing more than a shadow behind the tinted glass in the passenger seat of the black sedan parked along the side of the dirt road between its twin and the ERT van.

  He held the cell phone to his ear and watched the commotion off in the desert to the east.

  "I don't share your optimism," he said. "He has yet to demonstrate any appreciable--"

  The voice on the other end cut him off. A faint trace of anger pinched his lips, but quickly vanished.

  To his left, the driver tapped a tuneless melody on the steering wheel. He was a beast of a man, the backs of his hands hairy to the first knuckles, his face bristled with stubble despite his morning shave.

  "How long have we been trying to track him? And you think this guy's just going to swoop in and--"

  The caller interrupted him again, but this time h
e made no effort to hide his irritation. He reached across the console and grabbed the driver's right hand to stop the incessant drumming.

  "Yes, sir," he said, relaxing his fierce grip. The driver didn't attempt to resume. "Yes, sir. He left a calling card." He paused for the response. "Obsidian figurines. A bat and a tapir."

  He tilted the rear view mirror so he could see himself, and adjusted his sunglasses. They only hid his eyebrow, not the four parallel scars marring his forehead to the hairline.

  "Yes, sir. It definitely confirms our suspicions, but I don't believe for a second that's where he is. He's still close. I can feel him. He's just taunting us now."

  The driver began to tap the wheel unconsciously again, but Hawthorne silenced him with a look. Though the driver continued to stare straight ahead, the bulging muscles in his angular jaw betrayed his annoyance. His nostrils flared and there was a screech of grinding teeth, yet he said nothing. He brushed his bangs out of his eyes under his shades and shifted in his seat, his sinewy form creating the impression of uncoiling.

  "Yes, sir," Hawthorne said. "I'll see what I can do to expedite matters."

  He removed the phone from his ear and tucked it back into the inner breast pocket of his jacket, the back of his hand grazing his shoulder holster.

  "Did you give mom my love?" the driver said, his voice giving lie to his appearance. He was thin, yet muscular, his voice a scratchy baritone. He tried to hide his smirk as he killed the idling engine and climbed out the door, but Hawthorne had seen it all the same.

  Hawthorne opened his own door and climbed out of the air-conditioned car into the scorching desert heat. His patience had already worn thin. He had a solid team already in place. The last thing he needed right now was new blood mucking up the works, especially now that he was so close. He didn't share his superior's faith, but he had his orders. If Carver didn't perform as promised, then he would intercede and do what needed to be done. As he always had in the past.