Ghost Medicine

by Aimée

  “Yeah, but at least we should be able to identify the caliber and the manufacturer.” Ella handed it back. “Get whatever you can from around the area the bullet impacted, but hold back on checking the door panel until we’re done with the interior.”

  “Okay.”

  Ella and Benny processed the cab slowly and methodically. The stench had dissipated some now that the body had been removed, but much of it continued to cling to the upholstery and the interior of the truck.

  Forcing themselves to ignore distractions, they went over every square inch. By the time they were done, Ella’s patience had been stretched to the limit. The flies were an ever-present nuisance and even mentholatum in her nose hadn’t been able to successfully mask the odor of decaying flesh.

  Ella stood well back for a moment, swallowing hard. She’d lost a friend, and though sorrow—and anger at the way he’d died—filled her in equal measure, there was no time to grieve. She had a job to do and Harry deserved nothing less than 100 percent from her.

  “I can process the exterior myself, if you’d like,” Benny said.

  “Yeah, go ahead. That smudge on the driver’s side was supposedly made by one of the thieves when he reached in to pop the hood.”

  Ella walked over to meet Joe Neskahi, who was coming down the hill, camera in hand. “Any luck up there?” she asked.

  “I found a depressed area in the sand where the shooter lay in a prone position, but there wasn’t much else to go on. The rain pretty much obliterated everything except the gross outline. From the angle, I’d say he had an easy shot, especially if the vehicle was stationary. Is that your theory?”

  “Yeah, that’s the way it looks. The engine was off, the brake set, and the transmission in park, judging from the blood splatter pattern. Besides, if he’d been moving, the pickup would have rolled downhill and off the road,” Ella said. “Did you find any shell casings?”

  “No, but Ralph’s going up there in a few minutes with the metal detector. I was about to check this side of the road cut in case it had rolled off the edge,” he said. “I did find one thing you need to know about right away. Tracks were deliberately left up there to mess with our minds.”

  “What do you mean, Joe?” Ella asked.

  “First of all, they weren’t made until after the rain. I figure they were left there yesterday or last night, and they go backwards from the shooting site.”

  “Backwards?”

  “Yeah. The shooter—who else would know where he’d been the day before—walked backwards from a section of hard ground to the spot where he took the shot. Then he carefully walked back in those same tracks. It gives the impression that he beamed down from above, took the shot, then walked off. Weird, huh? Something a Navajo witch would do?” he added, his voice lower now.

  “You took photos?” Ella asked.

  “From every angle,” he said.

  “Good work,” Ella said. “Another thing, Joe. You volunteered to help Dr. Roanhorse before being asked. Thanks for stepping up like that.”

  “Glad to help. I know this one’s not easy for you,” he said, “and the doc’s always hard-pressed to find an extra pair of hands.”

  It was the slight gentling in his voice when he spoke of Carolyn that let Ella know what she’d somehow missed. Joe was interested in her longtime friend.

  “Are you two getting together later?” she asked, curious.

  “I wish. We’ve had coffee a few times, but she’s more into medicine, science, and tribal politics than baseball, rodeo, and cars,” he said, and shrugged.

  “So what are you saying, that she’s dating a politician?”

  “No, more like a lawyer.” Joe shifted uneasily. “I’d better go look for that shell casing.” He nodded toward the slope in the road cut.

  “Wait a sec. You know something. What’s going on?” she pressed.

  “Don’t kill the messenger, okay?” He looked at the ground for a second or two, then spoke slowly. “Carolyn’s dating a guy pretty close to home these days—your home.”

  Ella stared at him in confusion. All she could think of was Herman, her mom’s husband, who was pushing eighty. Then it hit her. “You mean like a lawyer—close to home?”

  Joe nodded. “Yeah. She’s been seeing Kevin Tolino.”

  The news left her speechless. Although she and Kevin hadn’t been intimate in years, and had never lived together either, he was her daughter’s father and played a large role in their lives. Getting used to this was going to take time.

  Justine, who’d apparently been standing behind her, cleared her throat and stepped forward. “I’m done, boss. We need to send an officer to our friend’s residence to preserve any evidence there, but the system doesn’t have a current address for him. I figured that since he worked for Bruce Little, maybe you could get the address?”

  “Yeah, but I want to tell him what’s happened in person. Have Benny check area cell phone carriers and see if he can get our friend’s address through them—just in case. Also have him tell everyone on our team that the skinwalker angle has to stay under wraps at least for now. Something like this can create a panic.”

  “Okay. Afterwards, do you want to start questioning area residents?” Justine pointed to a lone house perhaps a mile in the distance.

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” Ella said, glad to be able to focus on police procedures again. “Our friend’s death is connected to whatever business he had here and to skinwalkers. The sooner we figure out what that link is, the faster we’ll be able to put his murderer behind bars.”

  Justine spoke to Benny, then met Ella back at their tribal SUV. Ella got into the passenger’s seat while Justine took the wheel.

  “Does it bother you, about Kevin and Carolyn, I mean,” Justine asked her as they got under way.

  “It just feels … strange,” Ella said.

  “It’s going to be interesting, though probably not in a good way, once your family finds out. How do you think Rose will react, knowing Kevin is spending time with Carolyn and also with Dawn?”

  Ella stared at Justine and sucked in her breath. “Oh, wow. I hadn’t considered that. I think my brain’s about to explode.”

  THREE

  Twenty minutes later, Ella and Justine had finished conducting their first interview and were walking back to the SUV. “Well, that got us nowhere,” Justine said, opening her door as Ella climbed in the other side.

  “Harris Largo’s in his nineties and very hard of hearing, so it wasn’t a surprise that he never heard the gunshot,” Ella said.

  “It also makes sense that he seldom goes past the area where our friend died. From his residence, Rattlesnake Road, to the east, is the best and quickest route to the highway.”

  “At least we got some intel on the other area residents, like who might have been at home during the day,” Ella said. “Let’s go back by the crime scene so I can leave that list with our people. Once they finish processing the area and the pickup is hauled to impound, Ralph can drive the van back to the station. That’ll free up Benny and Joe, and they can interview the other locals. You and I are going to drop by Teeny’s. I need to give him the news and find out what our friend was working on at the time of his death.”

  “Teeny probably already knows what happened. He monitors police calls, or at least he used to,” Justine said, pulling back onto the graveled road.

  “No, I really don’t think he’s found out yet,” Ella said. “He would have called me by now if he did. Remember that we got the initial call over the cell phone, not the radio.”

  “Our friend had an ex-wife and a daughter. They’ll also need to be notified,” Justine said.

  “We never met—that was after his time here—but last I heard, they were living in the Albuquerque area. I’ll arrange to have an officer go by their home and give them the news as soon as Teeny gives me their address.”

  Ten minutes later, they passed through the small community of Rattlesnake and Ella was finally able to use her cell ph
one. She got Teeny on the second ring.

  “Hey, Ella, good to hear your voice,” Teeny said, his tone mellow and upbeat. “Howsit? I’ve picked up some carefully worded department transmissions this afternoon and news that the crime scene unit was deployed. You have a hush-hush case you want to talk about?”

  Justine, who could hear the penetrating voice of the mostly gentle giant, turned, eyebrows raised. “He’s good,” she whispered.

  “Naw, great. Hi, Justine,” Teeny said distinctively.

  “Hi, Bruce,” she mumbled, then turned back to focus on her driving.

  “We need to talk, Teeny. See you in—say, a half hour?”

  “Of course,” he answered, suddenly serious. “Can you tell me more?”

  “Not over the phone. See you in a bit.” Ella ended the call. Teeny and she had shared a special connection all the way back to high school. He could pick up even the most subtle changes in her voice. If she’d kept talking, he would have put things together, and that wasn’t the way she wanted him to get the news.

  Teeny and Harry had been friends for years. They’d both started out as tribal officers working out of the Shiprock station. That was one of the reasons Teeny had been so quick to hire him when Harry returned to the Rez.

  Delivering the news of Harry’s death would be difficult, but she owed it to Harry and Teeny, too.

  * * *

  They arrived at Teeny’s compound, a combination home and business located in a small warehouse several miles east of Shiprock. Stopping in front of the camera lens by the electronic gate, Justine pushed the intercom button.

  A moment later they heard Teeny’s deep voice. “Come on in, Officers.”

  The gate opened, and within a few minutes they were met at the front door of the metal building by a nearly seven-foot, three-hundred-pound Navajo man with dark, intelligent eyes.

  “It’s good to see you two,” Bruce said, motioning to the interior, a big room filled with tables and cabinets containing electronic gear of all kinds.

  Teeny had been a tribal cop and the department’s IT expert until budget cuts took away his job several years ago. Yet it hadn’t taken Teeny long to turn loss into opportunity. These days, Bruce Little—only Ella could call him Teeny—was a highly paid consultant and the sole owner of a well-known and successful private investigations agency. Though he still worked with the department on special cases, his services were much more expensive now that he was in business for himself.

  “Is this about Harry?” Teeny asked abruptly, leading them to a central patio with a view of the blue skies overhead. “I tried to reach him, but couldn’t even get an e-mail to his cell phone. The GPS on his cell phone is no longer broadcasting, too. What’s going on?”

  The tile floor was cool, shaded by the rows of weather-treated beams that broke up the skyline, leaving a sun-shadow pattern. Ella came up behind one of the four chairs that surrounded the round mosaic-tiled table, but remained standing.

  There was no good way to break news like this.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we found Harry’s body a few hours ago,” Ella said. “He was shot in the head with a high-powered rifle while sitting in his pickup.”

  “Where was he at the time?” Teeny asked, his voice taut.

  “Parked on an isolated road southwest of Rattlesnake. According to the ME, the time of death was approximately forty-eight hours ago.”

  Teeny looked down at his feet, uttered something that sounded like an oath, then pulled back a chair and took a seat. Ella nodded to Justine, and they both sat as well.

  “There’s more,” Ella said, then told him about the signs they’d found of skinwalker involvement.

  He stared at the wall for a minute or two, then finally spoke. “Dammit. He was a good man and my friend. He was also a top-notch investigator, though he had an independent streak a mile long.” Teeny ran a hand through his close-cropped hair. “I should have insisted that he file more updates and keep me in the loop. Then I would have had a clearer idea of what went wrong.”

  “His pockets had been emptied, Bruce,” Justine said. “His wallet, cell phone, weapon, almost everything was taken. We caught a couple of men ripping off his truck’s battery, too, but that was maybe a day after the shooting. We have no reason to believe that those men had anything to do with the homicide.”

  “He was parked beside a road that had been cut through a ridge, which meant he was pretty much hidden from view. It was the perfect position to watch the road to the north, toward the highway. It’s possible he was waiting to meet someone,” Ella said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on the table. “His killer left our friend’s truck behind, though the keys were still in the ignition, but took everything else. That’s what makes me think the murder was job related. I need you to tell me what Harry was working on and if there’s any connection between that and skinwalkers.”

  “Don’t use his name,” Teeny said, his jaw clenched.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” Ella said.

  “It normally wouldn’t bother me, but he died hard and he worked here. I’m not worried about the chindi. I just want to…” He paused, searching for the right words. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  “I think I understand,” Ella said. They were both Modernists who didn’t believe in ghosts or evil spirits, but they were also Navajo. That part of them never stopped whispering urgent warnings, assuring them that there was more to life than what was easily seen.

  “I can’t tell you the exact nature of the case H was working on, not without permission from my client. I also can’t tell you why he was at that location, but that’s because I don’t know the answer to that myself. You knew H. He was an old pro. I gave him a long leash.”

  “Come on, Teeny. Give me something,” Ella pressed. “Anything to set us on the right track.”

  “I can tell you this much. He was investigating a series of thefts my client had discovered, but H hadn’t nailed down a suspect yet,” he said, then after a beat continued. “The curious thing is that the killer took our friend’s notebook. That makes me think he’d finally come up with some names, but having that suspect turn out to be a skinwalker”—he shook his head—“that makes no sense to me. As far as I know, H’s investigation centered on Anglo suspects.”

  “But he was on the Rez,” Ella said. “Watching or waiting for someone.”

  “I got that, but I can’t give you a reason why. Maybe his murder is unrelated to his work here.”

  “The reason he was there might be on his computer in a daily log or report he’d yet to file,” Justine said. “We’d like to take a look.”

  “He usually left his laptop at his apartment. Have you checked out his place?” Teeny asked.

  Ella shook her head. “Do you have his current address? The killer has his apartment keys and a two-day lead. We may already be too late, but I need to check it out.”

  “Let’s go,” Teeny said, picking up his keys as he gave them the address. “His apartment is off the main highway between Farmington and Bloomfield. Follow me and I’ll save you some time trying to find it.”

  A few minutes later, they were racing east, following Teeny in his dark gray pickup. It was at least a half hour drive, so Ella phoned the sheriff’s department, asking that a deputy be sent to secure the scene. They’d be well off the Navajo Nation, and she needed someone with jurisdiction on hand.

  Next, she called Special Agent Dwayne Blalock, their local FBI liaison. “I’m going to need a warrant to search for computers, memory devices, notebooks, and papers that might contain information on Harry’s investigations.”

  “I’ll phone in a request to the district judge. You should have it shortly, since the need to put a rush on it is there. I’m just leaving Albuquerque. As soon as I’m back in the area, I’ll let you know.”

  Ten minutes later, as Justine pulled up in front of an apartment complex west of Bloomfield, Ella reached for the copy of the search warrant. It had ju
st been relayed electronically to her mobile data terminal’s printer, and she’d been given the go-ahead to serve it on behalf of Blalock.

  A SJC deputy walked over to meet them seconds after Justine parked next to Teeny’s pickup. The deputy, his name tag read WALKER, waited as Ella and Justine stepped out of the cruiser.

  “Investigator Clah?” Seeing Ella nod, he continued. “The apartment’s locked, and there are no signs of any break-in. There’s also no one hanging around, except for a few kids on skateboards.”

  Ella noted that Teeny had remained in his pickup. Knowing he had no jurisdiction at all, he hadn’t wanted to complicate matters.

  “The perp has a key. Did you try the knob?” Ella asked Walker.

  “No, ma’am, but I tried knocking and there was no answer. I also listened and it was quiet inside.”

  “Thanks,” Ella said, walking over to the first-floor apartment door and taking a look around for herself. The curtains were drawn across the front room and bedroom windows and the lights were out, making it impossible for her to see inside.

  “Would you like me to get a key from the manager?” Justine asked.

  Ella nodded and handed her the warrant in response. As Justine left, Ella waved to Teeny. It was time to introduce him to Deputy Walker, who’d kept looking at him, clearly uneasy.

  Five minutes later, Justine returned with a man in his late forties. He looked ex-military, judging from his bearing, stride, and short-cropped hair. Ella identified herself, took the key he offered, and unlocked the door.

  She held up a hand, signaling the others, Teeny included, to wait. She stepped inside, hand on her Glock .40-caliber handgun, and took a look around the small, simply furnished apartment.

  After several moments, Ella gave them the all-clear. Justine, Teeny, and the county deputy were still at the door, though Teeny was taking up twice the space.

  Justine began to search in the bedroom, and Teeny went to Harry’s desk, looking inside the drawers for the laptop.