Buffalo Bill's Dead Now (A Wind River Mystery)

by Margaret Coel

  “I know that,” Father John said. The counselor’s tone again: he was on Jason’s side; he and Vicky were here to help him. “I think you trusted somebody who betrayed you. I think you called them after Vicky left the office this afternoon. Was it a couple of white men? Strangers asking around the rez about artifacts?”

  Jason stepped back and tilted his face toward the sky a moment.

  “How much did they pay you?” Father John pushed on.

  “Pay me?” The astonishment in Jason’s voice was so palpable, Father John felt as if he could reach out and grab hold of it. “What are you talking about?”

  “At least one other Arapaho took money in exchange for information,” Vicky said. “The Riverton police and fed are tracking all of it. We can’t help you unless you trust us. Who told you to call Petey? Who did you call today?”

  “Oh, God.” Jason dropped his face into his hands. Deep sounds of grief and fright rumbled in his chest. He started sobbing, and moisture leaked around his fingers.

  Father John placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “What is it you know?” he said.

  “She asked me to tell Petey his shift was changed,” he managed, his voice shaking. “It was no big deal. Some guys she knew were gonna help themselves to one of the artifacts. There were a lot, she said, so nobody would notice one was missing.”

  “She?” Vicky said.

  “I loved her more than anything,” Jason said. He peeled his hands from his face and stared down at the concrete. “She was my whole life. When she found some other guy and broke up with me, I came close to driving my car off a cliff. I didn’t want to live. Then she called and said she missed me. Missed me! God, I was over the moon. We should get back together, she said. But we’d take it slow this time. I’d keep staying at my mom’s; no moving in right away like last time. She needed a favor. I’d do anything, I told her. Just ask.”

  Father John had to step away. He looked out across the dark street toward the row of buildings swallowed in the shadows, and the lights of Riverton twinkling beyond. A haze of stars glowed overhead. God, he should have seen it. Everything was starting to come into focus. The young woman at the center of it all. Plans to donate Arapaho artifacts to the museum. Plans to hijack them from the warehouse. Plans to sell them on the illegal market. He wondered how Trevor Pratt had drawn her in. What had he promised? How much money from the artifacts would be hers? What happened when she found herself involved in murder? She had seemed so innocent, ambitious, eager to learn the museum business. And yet, even after Trevor’s murder, she had stayed involved with his partners. Even today she had warned them about Vicky.

  “Sandra Dorris,” he said, turning to face the red-rimmed eyes of the Indian.

  “She didn’t do anything,” Jason said. He looked as if he might start sobbing again. “You gotta keep her out of this.”

  “Keep her out?” Vicky shouted. “She’s in this up to her eyebrows. She’s working with two men that killed Trevor and tried to kill me.”

  Father John cut in. “Eldon White Elk might still be alive.” He took a moment and said another silent prayer. “They won’t hesitate to kill him when he isn’t any use to them. Sandra may know where they’re holding him. You’ve got to tell us, Jason. Where’s Sandra now?”

  THE TRACE OF light around the window curtains suggested someone was inside. Father John parked near the front stoop and slammed the door against the quiet that gripped the night. From far away came the faintest sounds of a barking dog, the noise of an engine gearing down out on the road. A steady wind swept over the fields around the house. Jason had balked at saying anything more about Sandra, except that he loved her and they were back together. Sandra couldn’t have anything to do with theft or murder or kidnapping. He had swiped his hands at the air, as though he could erase the words written on a chalk board. If Father John or Vicky said anything to the law, he would deny he had ever talked to them.

  Father John had taken Vicky’s arm and guided her back to the pickup. She had resisted at first. She would have stayed outside in front of Security Systems cross-examining a man who was like a mule that couldn’t be led any farther, even if he stood in the path of a tornado. Father John had seen that kind of bulwark rise up in counseling sessions. There was no point in continuing. The man needed time to regain his balance and begin the slow, painful move away from denial. Finally Vicky had seemed to realize the same thing, because she had matched her step to his.

  “I take it you know where she lives,” she said when they had gotten into the pickup.

  Father John shook his head. “I know where to start looking.”

  Now Vicky knocked on the door as he came up the three concrete steps. Whoever was inside would have heard the pickup arrive. Sandra? Her mother? Neither would want to talk to them. He looked around at the brush and grass moving like gray ghosts in the wind. Another moment passed before the door creaked open. Peering around the edge, Barbara Dorris took them in with a frightened, lingering look. Then the door sprung open and she beckoned them inside.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” The woman backed into a chair and dropped onto the seat. “You come to tell me my girl’s been in an accident or got shot or something.”

  Father John walked over and set his hand on the woman’s shoulder. “We thought she’d be here. We came to talk to her.”

  The woman stared at him out of big, uncomprehending eyes. “You mean Sandra’s okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Father John said. “What would make you think she’s dead.”

  “She’s gotten herself into trouble, hasn’t she? That’s why you brought a lawyer.” She nodded at Vicky.

  “She’s going to need help,” Vicky said.

  “I knew it.” The woman flattened the palm of her hand against her mouth. “I knew something was going on by the way she moped around here, watching TV, acting real calm. But she was nervous as a cat every time the phone rang or somebody come to the door. She wouldn’t tell me anything. Kept saying everything was fine. Those outsiders she started hanging around with, they’re the ones got her into trouble.”

  “What outsiders?” Father John said.

  “Couple white guys. One of ’em might be Mexican. I don’t know their names. They come around looking for her once. I didn’t like the looks of them, didn’t trust them. They looked creepy, like they crawled out of a ditch. I told them to go away, leave my daughter alone.”

  “What makes you think Sandra was hanging with them?” Vicky said.

  “I knew, oh, I knew,” she said. “Sandra came home after those artifacts got stolen. She was real shook up.” She stopped, as if she had stumbled onto a bed of glass shards. “I’m not saying she had anything to do with that. She had been working on the exhibit, so naturally she was upset the Arapaho stuff got stolen. But I could tell she was scared, like maybe she knew something about it. Those men—they took the artifacts, you ask me—then they took the museum director. I think she suspected them. She laid low here the last couple days ’cause she was scared.”

  “What about Jason Gains?” Father John said. He wondered how much Jason had left out in his eagerness to protect Sandra. “Did he come around?”

  “Jason?” The woman shrugged. “That’s been over for a while.”

  “Jason says they’re back together,” Vicky said.

  “What? She never told me that. Oh, God…” Barbara sank back against the chair and wiped at her eyes. “I don’t know what Sandra’s been up to.”

  “Listen to me,” Father John said, then he stopped. He was about to tell the girl’s mother that her daughter could be involved in serious crimes. There was no point; the woman was worried enough. “We have to talk to Sandra,” he said. “When do you expect her home?”

  The woman looked up at him and shook her head. “She went back to that basement apartment in an old house in town. She calls that home now.”

  31

  “I’LL TAKE YOU home first,” Father John said.

  “I’m g
oing with you.” Vicky rubbed at her neck in a futile attempt to rub out the kinks that gripped her muscles. She should have taken the prescription, she was thinking. She probably wouldn’t get much sleep tonight. The headlights searched the road ahead and illuminated a coyote that darted across and disappeared into the darkness. “Sandra’s at the center of this,” she said. “She must have gotten involved with Trevor. There’s no other explanation, although it’s hard to imagine she would go for an older man. But he had money.”

  John O’Malley didn’t say anything. From the set of his jaw, she understood he was still trying to reconcile the Trevor Pratt he had known with everything they knew now.

  “Ambitious, smart, successful.” Vicky tried for a little laugh. “Hard combination for an ambitious girl to resist.”

  “He may have paid her.”

  “She fell for him, John. Jason said she broke up with him because she had met someone else. When Trevor found out her ex-boyfriend worked at Security Systems, he must have convinced her to let Jason think she wanted to get back with him. She used that poor guy.” Vicky turned sideways a little and watched the profile of the man behind the steering wheel, shadowed in the lights of the dashboard. He glanced over and caught her eye, then went back to staring at the road. “Even after those white men killed Trevor, she kept working with them. She’s looking for the big payoff.”

  Seventeen-Mile Road butted into Highway 749, and Father John turned left toward Riverton. The headlights of cars in the oncoming lane threw new patterns of shadow and light over his face. She would go anywhere with this man, she thought, and forced herself to look away. The scrub brush and grasses passed outside in dark smudges; the black expanses of land stretched away from the highway.

  In Riverton, the streetlights drifted over vehicles moving past the quiet, nighttime shuttered buildings. Father John stayed on Federal for several blocks, then made a couple of left turns into a neighborhood of bungalows, lights glowing in the windows and cars parked in the driveways. Sandra’s mother had given them the address, and Vicky had written it in a small notepad. The notepad was in her bag. She had memorized the address. “Should be up ahead,” she said, trying to catch the numbers over the front porches.

  He slowed toward a small rectangle of a house. No lights glowing in the windows, no cars around, no sign of life. The dark hulk of a shed stood at the end of the driveway on one side. An overhang roof jutted toward the driveway. Beneath the overhang, Vicky could make out a partly submerged door to the basement. Headlights flashed across the window in the door as John pulled into the graveled driveway.

  The pickup was still rolling to a stop when Vicky swung open the door and got out. Pushing through the stiffness and soreness, she headed around the pickup to the top of the concrete steps. In the shadows below was a landing covered with leaves. The pickup door slammed behind her and John O’Malley’s footsteps scraped the gravel. She started down the steps and was about to knock when his arm brushed past her. He rapped hard on the door.

  No answer. The entire house was as still as a vault.

  John knocked again, and she stared through the window into what might have been a dark cave. “Nobody’s here,” she said.

  Then he moved around her and reached for the doorknob. There was a tiny squeal, like that of a mouse, as the door inched open. “Sandra?” he called into the dark interior. “It’s Father John and Vicky Holden. Anybody here?”

  Vicky realized she was holding her breath, half expecting someone to jump out of the darkness. The two white men had killed before. They would kill again. She grabbed hold of John O’Malley’s shirt as he stepped inside, an instinctive move, she realized, as if she could pull him back from danger. He must have found a wall switch, because a dim light flickered into life over a small living room, littered with things that had been left behind. Remnants of clothing—sweatshirt, crumpled blue jeans, tee shirts, newspapers, cardboard pizza boxes, and Styrofoam containers crusted with old food. The black futon sofa against the left wall listed to one side. A sleeping bag lay crumpled on top. Scattered about the debris were two metal chairs and a wooden stool. Another sleeping bag had been tossed into a corner.

  “Sandra?” Father John called again.

  Across the room was an alcove that served as a kitchen: sink, cooktop above a miniature refrigerator. A closed door on the left probably led to the bedroom and bath. “So this is where the men were hiding.” Vicky sliced a hand toward the sleeping bag on the futon and the other bag in the corner. “Perfect. Nobody would look for them in a basement apartment in Riverton. They must have kept the sedan in the shed in back. God, John. Sandra had no idea the type of people she’d gotten mixed up with. What have they done with her?”

  He was already crossing the room. He flung open the door, and Vicky followed him into a short hallway. She waited as his hand swept along the wall. The click of a switch, but nothing changed. Then he pushed open a door and reached inside. A ceiling light came on, and a rectangle of light spilled out. “Sandra?” he said, his voice soft.

  Clothes, towels, papers, and what looked like textbooks, tossed about the floor. The bed, a tangle of sheets and blankets. At the headboard were two pillows, worn and thin looking and crushed in the middle with head prints. “Jason wanted us to think he wasn’t staying here with Sandra,” Vicky said, nodding toward the pillows. “What a cozy love nest. A couple of killers in the living room.”

  John didn’t say anything. He backed into the corridor, and she heard another door open. Vicky went after him and peered past his arm into a bathroom so small she wondered how anyone could turn around inside with the door closed. A few raglike towels thrown into the corner shower stall. On the glass shelf above the sink sat a can of shaving cream and an electric shaver, still plugged into the wall socket.

  “We’re too late,” Father John said. “They’ve taken off.”

  “What about Jason?”

  “I think he loved Sandra, so he helped her. Probably called her tonight.”

  Vicky went back into the living room and glanced about—looking for what? A master plan? A map with directions to where they were going? “They could be halfway to the state line,” she said as Father John walked over to the front door. She turned in a half circle, still surveying the room. “Where did they keep the artifacts? In a corner? Out in the shed? And what about Eldon White Elk? Where was he held? He must have been constrained, or he would have found a way to escape.” She pulled in her lower lip, not wanting to utter the words. Eldon could be dead.

  John had pulled his cell out of the case on his belt and was punching the keys. Then, staring at the monitor, he said, “Ted, it’s John O’Malley. Vicky and I are at Sandra Dorris’s apartment in Riverton.” He rattled off the address and said the apartment was in the basement. “It looks like the two white men might have been hiding here. We talked to Jason Gains,” he said, then he told the fed that Sandra had asked Jason to call off the security guard Monday night. “Looks like they’ve abandoned the apartment,” he said. “They must have the artifacts, and I hope…” He hesitated. “Vicky and I are hoping they have Eldon and he’s still alive.” He pressed another key and slipped the cell back into place.

  “I’ll take you home,” he said.

  “IT’S HARD TO imagine Sandra didn’t know what she was getting into,” Vicky said. They had retraced the route across town and were on Seventeen-Mile Road. The billboard next to the mission entrance loomed against the star-speckled sky, like a dark, giant sentry. “St. Francis Mission,” painted in white, shone through the darkness as they passed. He had asked her if she liked Puccini and turned on the CD player in the middle of the seat. A haunting, lilting melody filled the cab. Girl of the Golden West, he’d told her.

  “I think you called it right,” John said. “She was an ambitious girl.”

  “But the murder of a man she’d gotten involved with? That should have scared her silly. The abduction of her boss? What did she think when those two men brought Eldon to her apartment?�
�

  “They may not have kept him there.”

  “Still she knew who was responsible for the abduction.” Vicky was quiet a moment. “It’s hard to imagine what greed can make people do.”

  “You’re a lawyer, Vicky. You’ve seen this before.”

  Vicky looked sideways at the man behind the wheel. “I keep forgetting,” she said. “I always want to forget.”

  “Gianelli will put out an alert, and every law enforcement organization in Wyoming will be looking for a dark sedan with two white men, an Indian girl, and an Indian man.”

  Which sounded hopeful, Vicky was thinking, yet she couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that had come over her in the apartment, as if everything was too pat, too logical. Sandra and the killers had realized things were starting to close in and fled the area. But they could have left yesterday, or the day before. They could have left after they killed Trevor. They had stayed, even though the longer they remained, the greater the chance they would be discovered. They must have been having difficulty selling the artifacts, and Eldon White Elk was their best hope. An expert on Indian artifacts, connected to museums and legitimate dealers but also—certainly—aware of a shadowy underworld.

  Another piece of the logic snapped into place. For a while, it had been safer to stay than to flee with a hostage and a million dollars worth of artifacts in a sedan every cop and deputy in the state was looking for.

  “They’ll be picked up before morning,” John was saying, and in the strained reach for hope in his voice, she heard the echoes of the uneasiness nipping at her. “How are you feeling?”

  “Stiff and sore.” Vicky tried to shift her thoughts away from the men in the sedan. It seemed natural to be here, driving down Rendezvous Road now, past Arapahoe, lights twinkling in the windows of the box-shaped houses, around the curve where the white men had run her off the road. No sign of the accident. Even skid marks were lost under the faint layer of dust. The Jeep had been towed. “My motto for a while,” she said, massaging her fingers into her neck. She tried for a smile.