by Aimée
“Fair enough,” she said. “And, Dan, thanks.”
“Just watch your back,” he said. “You’re becoming a magnet for trouble.”
“Hey, at least I’m not a boring date.”
He laughed. “Boring? That’s not an adjective I’d ever use to describe you.”
“How would you describe me?”
He looked at her and shook his head. “Ask me when I’m not on duty.”
As he walked away, Ella studied his long-legged stride and tight buns. Work always managed to get in the way. She sighed. Unfortunately, that also summed up her entire history with men, even with Eugene, her late husband. He’d been a soldier, deployed for half their brief time together.
Dan stopped by his truck, then glanced back and smiled. “Window shopping?”
Ella laughed. Maybe this time things would turn out differently. “You can’t blame a girl for admiring the scenery.”
Ella drove back toward Shiprock and the Navajo Nation feeling wide awake and a little wired after everything that had happened. No way she’d be able to fall asleep anytime soon.
Not ready to go home, she considered paying Teeny a visit. He was a night owl and very seldom went to bed before midnight. She dialed his cell, knowing that if he’d already sacked out, she’d get his voice mail.
Teeny answered after the second ring. “Hey, Ella.”
“If you’re not turning in early, how about letting me come over? I need to chat with someone.”
“Sure. Night’s still young.”
“See you in twenty.”
When Ella drove into Teeny’s fenced-in compound, she spotted Jayne Goodluck’s truck and cringed. Justine’s sister and she had never managed to get along, but things grew decidedly worse after Jayne started dating Teeny.
Ella’s friendship with Teeny went all the way back to high school. They were close, but there’d never been any romantic involvement between them. Despite that, Jayne had always been jealous of that relationship. No amount of reasoning, or reality, could dissuade her.
Teeny met Ella at the door. As she stepped inside, Jayne came out of the back bedroom wearing one of Teeny’s T-shirts, which draped over her like a tent.
“Ella,” she said, “kinda late for you to be roaming around, isn’t it?” Not waiting for an answer, she ducked back out of sight into the bedroom.
“You should have mentioned you had company,” Ella said, biting off the words.
“Jayne came looking for a fight tonight and I’m not in the mood for battles. Step into the kitchen with me and ignore her,” he said. With a wave of his hand he invited Ella to take a seat, then offered her a Mexican Coke, the kind that used sugar, not syrup. “Are you any closer to catching the killer?”
“No, which is why I wanted to talk to you.”
“I’ve told you all that I can, Ella. I’m still waiting to hear from my client.”
“Okay,” Ella said. “So how about this? Can you tell me which county offices have reported missing items?” Seeing him hesitate, she added, “Help me. I really need a lead.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that much, but that’ll be it,” he said. “The county commissioner’s office and the sheriff’s department.”
“So I assume your client is pretty high on the food chain?”
“Don’t push it, Ella, and stop trying to narrow down the list. I’ve given you all I can,” he said.
“You’re being stubborn,” she said, taking a sip of Coke.
“I’m respecting my client’s right to privacy. Like it is in police work, there are lines in the private sector that no one should cross.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll drop it for now.”
He grinned. “You’re a real pain in the ass, but my company could really use someone like you—skilled, smart, and stubborn. Just name your terms.”
“I’m still thinking about that,” she said. “I’m tempted, too. I just don’t like what’s happening at the PD. If it all falls apart and I get transferred to Window Rock, I might just quit.”
“My door’s always open.”
Jayne came up the hallway, fully dressed now, her boots clicking on the tile floor. “I’m leaving. You’re obviously going to be busy,” she said, then shot Ella a dirty look.
“No, listen, I’m just—,” Ella started, but Teeny uncharacteristically interrupted her.
“Nothing’s stopping you, Jayne. Go,” he said.
From the way Jayne slammed the door on her way out, it wasn’t hard to tell that she was furious.
“I really didn’t have to stick around,” Ella said.
“I wanted her gone—seriously. I’m not happy with the way things are working out. What’s worse, I don’t see them getting any better.”
“I understand.” Ella gave him a sympathetic smile. “Your track record with relationships is a lot like mine. Nothing works for long.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “I’m set in my ways, but your problem is that your heart and loyalty are already given to your family and the tribe.”
“Yeah, maybe so,” she said.
“That’s one of the reasons you should come work for me. You’ll determine your own schedule, and in the majority of cases, you would still be working in behalf of the Diné, just from the private sector.”
“I’m really considering it, Teeny. Police work doesn’t give me the same satisfaction it did once, and I’m not cut out to be a paper pusher, if it comes to that.”
“I’m willing to bet that you’re really going to like the freedom of working for a private company, Ella, and if there’s a problem, we’ll work it out. You and I think alike in a lot of ways.”
“We’re both reasonable people,” she said, nodding. “You’d think we’d have better luck with relationships.”
“It’s hard to find someone who understands that we choose to give the work we do everything we’ve got, and that there’ll be times everything else will have to take second place.” Teeny leaned back, making himself more comfortable. “Take Jayne. She loves meeting people for dinner, but I work most evenings. My company handles a lot of cases and that’s the way I like it, but she wants me to change my life to suit her. So the fights start, and that gets old in a hurry. When I cash it in for the day, I don’t want to argue. I just want to relax.”
“Yeah, guy—me, too,” she said, moving toward the door. “And with that thought in mind…”
“You gotta get home,” he said.
She nodded. “Some Friday night, huh?”
“Par for the course.”
* * *
Ella was passing through Shiprock when her cell phone rang. Considering the time, she picked it up quickly, and glanced at the caller ID. It was a blocked call.
Thinking it was one of her team, she answered immediately.
“Listen carefully,” came a fast whisper. “There’s a body out by Rattlesnake, near where you found the last one. The skinwalkers are playing with you.”
Before she could ask the caller for a name, the man hung up.
Ella picked up the radio and requested that any officer in the area of Rattlesnake provide backup. Big Ed was the first to respond, but he used her cell phone to contact her instead of going through dispatch.
“What’s the deal, Shorty?” he asked.
She was surprised that he was still at his desk, but then again, even the chief had reason to be looking over his shoulder these days.
Ella reached the intersection of 491 and 64, turned west on 64, then gave him a quick situation report as she raced past Shiprock High.
“With the weekend here, most of our officers are answering calls or working the DWI checkpoints north and south of town. I’ll try to free up a patrolman, but if I can’t, I’ll back you up myself.”
Ella returned her cell phone to her pocket. She knew why Big Ed had chosen to use the phone instead of the radio. Even the word “skinwalker” was enough to start a media circus. News stations and some former officers often monitored police radio calls. S
ince their department was already under the microscope, using the phone had become part of the CYA approach to law enforcement, another unfortunate sign of the times.
Ella switched on her siren. Though traffic wasn’t particularly heavy, there was always the risk of encountering a drunk walking down the center line or livestock that had found a gap in the fence.
It wasn’t a long drive, a little under twenty minutes, which by Rez standards qualified as just down the street. As she topped the hill where they’d found Harry’s body, the badger fetish she wore around her neck began to feel warm against her skin. Although she’d never been able to figure out if it was simply the result of her own rising body temperature during moments of stress, the inescapable fact was that it always signaled trouble.
Ella remained inside her pickup, but with the windows down, it didn’t take long for the scent to reach her. Death—there was no mistaking that odor. Using her headlights to cut into the darkness and hoping her backup would come soon, she proceeded slowly.
Ella drove along the fence line, then slammed on the brakes as her headlights revealed a skinwalker’s calling card. A human body had been strung up like a scarecrow on the fence. She took shallow breaths, hating the stench and the fact that she’d have to go in even closer.
Ella reported her position to dispatch, then used the phone to call Big Ed.
“I’m not far behind you now, Shorty. I’ll be there in less than three minutes.”
Grabbing her flashlight, she got out of her truck and approached the corpse slowly, making sure that she didn’t obliterate any tracks as she walked. Bitsy Willie, Dawn’s friend, lived just down the road and this was a sight she didn’t want her daughter’s friend, or anyone outside of law enforcement, to see.
The corpse was wearing a suit, and on closer inspection, she could see it wasn’t a fresh kill. It had to have been dug up from a cemetery somewhere. From the sallow skin that still clung to the facial bones, she had a strong suspicion that the body didn’t belong to a Navajo. The bone structure indicated Anglo or Hispanic. The body had been mutilated, however, with missing fingertips, as with Harry. But there was more.…
Hearing another vehicle approaching, she rested her hand on the butt of her pistol, but seeing the emergency lights on the SUV, she relaxed. It was Big Ed. Not wanting to draw attention to the incident, he’d turned off his siren after leaving the highway.
Big Ed aimed his spotlight at the figure on the fence, then got out of his SUV. “Do you know who that is?”
“No, do you?”
“Yeah, there’s enough of him left. He’s one of the Anglos who’d opposed the casinos. He spent the last few years working against the tribe, trying to cut any federal funding we received. He claimed that we were doing the Devil’s work, and until that stopped, he wanted to make sure the good people’s tax money wasn’t used to help the tribe in any way. He died several weeks ago,” Big Ed said, stepping a little closer and illuminating the body with his own flashlight.
He whistled low. “Somebody really did a number on his body. At least he was dead at the time.”
“How’d he die, anyway?” Ella asked.
“If I recall, he had a heart attack. He made a lot of noise when he was alive, and now in death he’s still going to make headlines—if this gets out.” Big Ed stepped over a low spot on the fence and moved closer to the dead man.
“Then our people will be blamed, and that’ll generate even more ill will,” Ella said. “It won’t stop there, either. Inside the Rez, this kind of news will create a panic. This is a skinwalker’s MO. Skin whorls are prize catches, and so are the bones at the back of the head.”
“Which explains why the back of his skull is missing,” Big Ed said, examining the body from a different angle. “At least they didn’t do that to Harry,” he added, stepping back and checking the ground for footprints.
“We’ll need the ME to tell us what else is missing from the body,” Ella said. “Skinwalkers particularly like dried skin, so we need to know how much was stripped off the body.”
“You’re thinking for use as corpse poison?” he asked, retracing his steps and coming back across the fence.
“Yeah, that’s part of their bag of tricks. That, along with powdered bone fragments, are used to make special ammo,” she said. “But there’s other stuff that doesn’t fit in. Why bother telling me ahead of time that it’s here? If one of the area residents had found this, fear would have spread faster than the flu, and played right into their hands.”
Ella called the ME and heard the electronic pause before Carolyn answered.
“We have a body,” Ella said, filling Carolyn in, then added, “I heard the pause, so I know you’ve got your phone forwarded. How soon can you get here?”
“Half hour to forty-five minutes. I’ll need to stop by the hospital and pick up the van.”
Irritated, Ella shoved the phone back in her shirt pocket. Kevin’s home was about twenty minutes from the hospital, and the ride from there would take another twenty minutes or so. It didn’t take a genius to know where Carolyn had been.
For some reason she really didn’t understand, the thought of Carolyn and Kevin dating each other bugged her. Logically, it made no sense. She wasn’t particularly close to Kevin and hadn’t been for years, but they did see each other more or less regularly when he came by to pick up Dawn for the weekend, or just to visit his daughter.
Carolyn, on the other hand, was one of her closest friends, and if anyone deserved a good life, it was her. She’d sacrificed everything for the tribe, and there just weren’t many Navajo men who could accept the work she did. Yet it still felt like a betrayal—but of whom and by whom?
Unwilling to think about it anymore, she called Justine and the rest of her team. As she did, Big Ed walked up the road, checking the area with his flashlight and staying on hard ground, not wanting to obliterate any tracks.
Once finished, Ella joined Big Ed, who was now standing beside his vehicle. “They’ll be here in about thirty minutes,” she said.
“While we’re waiting, why don’t we begin the search by working outward from the body in a spiral pattern? No sense in wasting time.”
Flashlights aimed at the ground, they were busy working when they both heard a hair-raising, mournful howl in the distance, somewhere off to the west.
“That wasn’t an animal,” Big Ed whispered. “Stay sharp.”
A second howl rose from among the waist-high brush and stunted junipers about two hundred yards away. Ella peered into the shadows, focusing on any sign of movement. The person was coming closer. Feeling a burning sensation at her neck, she reached up with her free hand and touched the badger fetish. It was scalding hot. Danger had found them.
TEN
“We’re being stalked,” Ella said in a harsh whisper. She moved the flashlight away from her body to keep from becoming a target, and reached for her pistol with the other hand.
Big Ed, his weapon out, crouched down and stabbed the night with his flashlight, looking for the howler. Seconds went by and they could hear movement but couldn’t pinpoint its location.
Without warning, an explosion of light and sound erupted from behind a waist-high boulder less than twenty yards away. The spotlight on Big Ed’s vehicle shattered, instantly throwing the area around them into darkness.
They dived to the ground. Ella dropped her flashlight, and as she reached for it, the ground beneath it exploded, shattering the light into shards of metal and plastic. Something stung her hand, and she knew she’d been hit by flying debris.
As she rolled to one side, she heard running footsteps moving from right to left. Ella fired two low shots, then crawled farther to her left. Big Ed fired once, then moved off somewhere to her right. His flashlight was off now.
They both remained still, listening for movement. All she could hear, beyond the faint ringing in her ears, was the sound of Big Ed’s car engine.
“Where’d he go?” he whispered.
“To
my left. Cover me while I head up the side road.” Ella inched along the ground, pistol extended, trying to advance and keep from being flanked at the same time.
After crawling for several feet, she stopped to listen.
Nothing. The guy was patient, but she was a better sniper. She’d wait him out.
Several minutes went by; then she heard a faint footstep to her right. Her night vision was back now, and spotting movement against the dark mountain background, she squeezed off a shot, then rolled to her left.
Within seconds, two shotgun blasts came at her in response, buckshot whistling overhead.
Big Ed fired three quick rounds at the muzzle flashes; then everything became silent again.
Another minute went by. “You hit?” Big Ed called out to her.
“Yeah, Bob … my leg.” By using the wrong name, she was letting Big Ed know she was fine, and at the same time hopefully drawing the shooter in.
She inched back several feet, then waited, scarcely breathing, searching for her target.
Seeing a flash of light to her right and hearing the sound of vehicles approaching, Ella knew backup had arrived. Unfortunately, that was also bound to drive the gunman away.
“Cover me,” she whispered, then ran forward, darting left and right. After fifty feet she stopped, crouched low, and listened.
Moonlight made an object on the ground glimmer and it caught her attention. It was the brass base of a shotgun shell, but the shooter was long gone.
Somewhere behind her she could hear Big Ed issuing instructions, positioning their backup.
Holding her ground, she waited.
One of the vehicles soon raced past them, then headed up the side road to her left. Far to the right, she could see a spotlight probing the slopes of the hillside beyond.
“Cover me,” Big Ed called out.
She watched and listened, looking for any sign of movement ahead.
Big Ed moved quietly for a big man, and a minute later he crouched down beside her. He aimed his flashlight at the area where the shotgun shell lay, and as he swept the beam of light from side to side, found another.