Tommy Lee signed for both of us while the receptionist picked up the phone and spoke to someone.
“He’ll be out in a moment,” she announced. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
Making ourselves comfortable meant sitting in the two battleship-gray steel chairs pushed against the far wall of the cramped space. Neither Tommy Lee nor I took advantage of such luxury.
We couldn’t have waited more than a minute before the inner door opened only to be filled by a man of roughly the same size and proportions. Jet black hair topped a square head. His chest was long and broad, adding more to his height than his legs, which were each as thick as my waist. If a black bear were ever transformed into a human, the end result stood in front of us.
Bright white teeth flashed in the wide bronze face. “Well, if it isn’t Rooster Cogburn and his one-man posse.”
My mind jumped to the original film, True Grit, and John Wayne playing the cantankerous one-eyed U.S. marshal. The comparison held a degree of truth.
“That’s why I feel so at home in Indian country,” Tommy Lee said. He stepped forward and shook the Cherokee’s hand. Both men turned to me. “This is my deputy and lead investigator, Barry Clayton. Barry, meet Hector Romero, the modern edition of Sequoyah.”
Romero laughed as his hand swallowed mine. “He’s kissing up to me, which means the poor Indian is gonna get screwed again.”
“Save it,” Tommy Lee said. “You know the whole reason for my being here is to make you look good.”
“Rooster, with a face like yours, you make everybody look good.” He slapped Tommy Lee on the back. “Come to my office and we’ll sort things out.”
We followed him down a narrow hallway with doors on either side. This wasn’t a bullpen layout like our department, but a warren of small offices. Several policemen passed in the opposite direction and Hector had to turn sideways before they could walk by.
At the far end, he entered a room not much bigger than a barn stall. The decor of battleship-gray was carried out by a steel desk, a swivel chair, and two mates to the ones we’d been offered in the waiting area. Tommy Lee and I sat without an invitation.
Hector closed the door and squeezed past us to drop his bulk behind his desk. “So, how did Jimmy Panther manage to get himself shot in your county?”
“Probably by managing to be abducted from the reservation,” Tommy Lee said.
The Cherokee rocked forward in his chair. “What? This isn’t confined to white man’s land?”
White man’s land? Indian country? Maybe I was in a John Wayne movie after all.
“We don’t know for certain,” Tommy Lee said. “Preliminary indications at the scene suggest Panther was bound with Plasti-Cuffs, but they had been removed from his body. His truck was there. If he were caught and cuffed on site, why bother to cut him free either before or after shooting him?”
“To make it look like he drove there,” Romero said.
Tommy Lee gave an appreciative nod. “That’s what I think.”
Romero smacked his palm on his desk. “Damn. And here I thought you were making a courtesy call to give me information I could share with the family.”
“Did you talk to them this morning?” Tommy Lee asked.
“Yep. Soon as we got the word.” He looked at me. “Well, if the homicide occurred in the cemetery, then you’re still the lead investigator.”
“Yes,” I said. “The evidence is definitive. Panther died on Eurleen’s grave.”
Romero’s dark eyebrows merged together. “Who?”
“The woman whose burial Panther disrupted.”
“Better give me the whole story.”
I briefed him on everything that transpired from the unearthing of the Cherokee remains to the discovery of Panther’s body. I stopped short of telling him about my interview with Luther Cransford or that his son was no longer employed where Luther said he was.
“What about suspects?” Romero asked, pushing into the area I’d avoided.
Tommy Lee jumped in. “We’re investigating those angered by the demonstration. But I’m bothered by where Panther was shot. If he was in the cemetery already, then did someone lure him there?”
Romero rubbed his square jaw while he thought a moment. “Maybe he was and then bound until someone else arrived. Someone who wanted to witness the execution or even pull the trigger.”
The Cherokee raised an interesting possibility that undercut our abduction premise.
But, as soon as he voiced it, he waved his hand in dismissal. “As much as I’d like to think otherwise, the abduction fits better.”
“How?” Tommy Lee asked.
“Jimmy’s family was surprised he would go into the cemetery at night. Any cemetery where there had been recent burials.”
“Was he superstitious?” I asked.
“Inasmuch as one person’s spiritual beliefs might be viewed as superstitions by another. His grandmother said Jimmy had become more than a preserver of a bygone culture. She said he’d adopted the old ways, and that one of them was the belief that souls might linger for a time. Night held too much of the unseen, both in this world and the world of the spirits.”
“So, he especially wouldn’t have gone to the grave of a woman who had died within the past week,” Tommy Lee said.
“That’s the way I see it,” Romero agreed. “If you’re pursuing this abduction possibility, have you brought in the FBI and state police?”
“Not officially,” Tommy Lee said. “I wanted to speak to you first.”
“Not officially? How do you do something unofficially with the FBI?”
Tommy Lee laughed. “My niece heads the office in Asheville. Lindsay Boyce.”
“Get out of here. Lindsay’s your niece? Finally someone with brains in your bloodline.”
“I know. Hard to believe. She said she’ll come into the case when she’s needed.”
“And in the meantime?” Romero asked.
Tommy Lee looked to me. The case was my case.
“I’d like to retrace Panther’s movements yesterday,” I said. “He might have gone to the cemetery before dark.”
“Sure,” Romero said. “But he ate supper with his grandmother and sister and didn’t leave for home till nearly nine. It would have been after dark even if he drove straight to the cemetery.”
“Then his grandmother and sister might have been the last to see him alive. Do you think they’re up to speaking with me?”
“They will be, if I go with you.” Hector Romero rose from his chair and grabbed his duty belt from a hook on the wall behind him. “The family will probably have kinfolk and friends around. I’ll go in first and tell them we need to speak in private. People will understand. They want us to find out what happened. But we’ll take my car. No sense broadcasting your presence.”
“Would they be resentful?” I asked.
“No. But you have to understand we Cherokee are a big family, and we can be tight-lipped when it comes to outsiders. Jimmy’s grandmother and sister might suggest others we should talk to, and I don’t want them clamming up if they think you’re poking into their business without my blessing.”
“You know what we need to know,” Tommy Lee said. “We’ll play it however you think best.”
“Good. I’m not saying they won’t be cooperative, but we could be peeling an onion and uncovering layers of this story we don’t even know exist.”
I stood. “You mean Jimmy Panther had enemies other than those he might have made at the burial protest?”
Hector Romero’s face tightened. “Jimmy was an extremist who saw the Cherokee culture as being under attack from within and without. He came down hard against development and any perceived violation of Cherokee heritage. In other words, Jimmy was an obstacle and an obstruction to the powerful. He and a growing number of followers stood on one sid
e. Money, and lots of it, stood on the other. You tell me. Do you know a better way to make enemies?”
Chapter Seven
Detective Sergeant Hector Romero drove his patrol car down a narrow gravel road bordering a bold stream. We were heading into one of the coves of the Great Smoky Mountains so sheltered that it only emerged from shadows a few hours a day when the sun climbed high enough to clear the ridges.
I’d grown up in the Appalachians, but the Smokies were a range unto themselves. The mountains were squeezed together like deep wrinkles on a prune. Botanists claimed the diversity of plants was unequaled by any other site of temperate climate in the world. With elevations ranging from under a thousand feet to over six thousand six hundred, the latitude equivalent was like driving from Georgia to Canada.
The Great Smokies are among the oldest mountains in the world, and during the Ice Age became the refuge of wildlife escaping the glaciers. They are a zoologist’s dream.
They also separate humans into enclaves of hollers and coves—isolated from one another. The farther we followed the road, the fewer the mailboxes along the shoulder.
“Does Panther’s grandmother live in the national park?” I asked. We had to be getting close to the edge of the Cherokee Qualla Boundary.
“No,” Romero said. “But her farm’s adjacent to it.”
“Farm?” I looked at the steep ridges. “She must plow using a mule with short legs on one side.”
Romero laughed. “She’s on in-between land. A bowl that’s neither reservation nor national park. Land she actually owns and isn’t part of the Cherokee’s federal trust.”
As he spoke, the stream on our right branched away and the narrow wedge of flat land between the ridges widened into a small valley. The scruffy vegetation became green pasture and, behind barbed wire, several cows stared at us as they chewed their cud.
“What’s the grandmother’s name?” I asked.
“Emma Byrd,” Romero said. “That’s Byrd with a y. She’s Jimmy’s maternal grandmother. Jimmy’s mother died about ten years ago of breast cancer. His father deserted the family shortly after Jimmy’s sister Skye was born, a good twenty years ago. Emma’s pretty much raised both of them.”
The farmhouse sat on a shelf of land above the flood zone of the mountain stream. The gentlest slope of the surrounding ridge was behind the weathered structure, providing protection against excessive runoff during a torrential downpour.
The gravel road stopped at the base, leaving the final approach as a rutted dirt lane that rose to the front yard. There was no garage or discernible driveway. Several vehicles were parked haphazardly near the sagging porch.
Romero swung his patrol car around the right side where a rusted heating oil tank hugged a paint-chipped wall. He rolled down the windows before killing the engine. “Wait here,” he said.
The Cherokee left us, Tommy Lee in the front passenger seat and me behind the partition separating prisoners and officers. Instead of heading toward the porch, Romero lumbered to the rear and climbed makeshift cinder block steps to the back door.
“Why’s he doing that?” I asked.
“Because he’s smart. Friends are bringing in food so one or two people will be coming in and out of the kitchen. Hector will ask someone to let the grandmother know he’s there without having to make a grand entrance. Then, together, they can decide how and where to answer our questions.”
I turned in the backseat for a better view of the vehicles in the yard. I expected Romero might ask visitors to leave, but after five minutes, no one had emerged from the house.
Tommy Lee opened his door. “There he is. Let’s go.”
Through the front windshield, I saw Romero help an elderly woman down the cinder block steps from the back door. She was thin as a cat-o-nine-tails reed with flowing white hair that reached her waist. Her brown shapeless dress stopped a few inches above her tan moccasins. Romero summoned us with a wave of his broad hand.
“How do you want to play this?” I asked Tommy Lee.
“Let Hector set it up. Then just ask your questions and go with the flow. She’s lost her grandson, and you’ve talked to more grieving families than Hector and me combined.
As we neared, the Cherokee woman cocked her head and her dark eyes scrutinized us.
Romero cleared his throat. “Emma, this is Sheriff Wadkins and his investigating officer, Deputy Barry Clayton. They’re doing everything they can to find who killed Jimmy.”
“We’re very sorry, Miss Byrd,” Tommy Lee said. “And we appreciate any help you can give us.”
“Let’s walk.” Her words came out as a whisper on a single breath. Without waiting for us to follow, she started up the slope away from the farmhouse.
Romero looked at us and shrugged. He fell in step behind her.
We entered the woods on a well-worn path that arced to the right in a gradual ascent above the stream. We hiked in silence, like one of Tommy Lee’s Vietnam patrols, with the war veteran bringing up the rear. After a quarter mile or so, the trail leveled onto a natural terrace created by the underlying rock formation. Two dwellings perched near the edge. One was a single-story rectangle with bark-covered walls and a thatched roof that extended about six feet beyond the front to form a porch. The second was a conical structure of clay that looked more like a beehive than a house.
Emma Byrd stopped in front of them.
“Jimmy lived here?” Romero asked.
“Yes,” the old woman replied. She pointed with a slender hand to the more traditional building. “Here when it’s warm.” She gestured to the circular one. “And in the asi when it’s cold.”
Asi. I wasn’t familiar with the term and made a mental note to remember it.
“Come. We can sit in the shade.” Emma Byrd walked to a split-log bench that ran along the front wall to the right of the door. Two plastic chairs faced it. She and Romero sat on the bench. Tommy Lee and I took the chairs.
“This is good,” she said. “Better to talk about Jimmy here than in my house.”
“I agree,” Romero said. “May my friends ask you some questions?”
Her thin lips formed a wry smile. “Isn’t that why we climbed here?”
Romero nodded, and then turned to me.
I leaned forward, striving to show sincerity without escalating the encounter into an interrogation. “We’re trying to retrace Jimmy’s activities yesterday. See if there was anything unusual that might explain what brought him to the cemetery.”
“Nothing would have brought him to that cemetery.” Emma Byrd looked at Romero. “Not at night.”
“Did you see him yesterday?” I asked.
“Twice. Breakfast and dinner.” She bit her lower lip in an attempt to stave off her rising grief. She gazed down the trail. “Jimmy could smell my cooking no matter which way the wind blew.”
“Did he seem particularly troubled at either meal?”
“Troubled? You mean was Jimmy upset?”
“Yes. Or behaving differently.”
The old woman stared up at the porch’s roof. Her fingers drummed against the bench. Romero, Tommy Lee, and I sat waiting, listening to the arrhythmic tapping. Two minutes passed.
“He was happy.” She whispered the words to the air above me.
“Happy?”
Her dark eyes focused on me. “Yes. At breakfast and supper.”
“And normally he was unhappy?”
She shook her head and the long white hair rippled like a windblown cape. “Happy in the sense of contented. Unhappy in the sense of agitated, obsessed with his fight against termination.”
“Preservation, not termination,” I said.
Emma Byrd glanced at Romero. “Did he hear that from you?”
The policeman shook his head.
“Jimmy spoke the words to me,” Tommy Lee said. “At the site of the r
emains we unearthed in Laurel County.”
“And when he blocked Eurleen Cransford’s funeral procession,” I added. “What’s it mean?”
Emma’s lips tightened as if holding back a flood of words. Then, in a even cadence, she said, “Kill the Indian and save the man.” She looked at Romero and tears trickled along the crevices of her cheeks. “But they killed the Indian and the man.”
Romero put his arm around the old woman and took a deep breath. “It’s OK, Miss Emma. I’ll explain it.” He turned to Tommy Lee and me. “Most in the white world don’t know termination was the code word for the government’s policy of driving out all vestiges of Indian heritage. The goal was forced assimilation and the abolishment of reservations. In short, civilize the native people that white society viewed as savages.
“Schools were built where Indian children were forbidden to speak their native tongue or practice traditional customs. In a generation or two, the Indian within would be eradicated, and what was left would be an individual swallowed up in mainstream culture.”
“Kill the Indian and save the man,” I repeated. “I thought that was from the late 1800s.”
“It was,” Romero said. “But the policy officially flourished from the 1940s through the 1960s when the government dissolved recognition of numerous tribes and gave states the responsibility to govern the former reservation lands.”
“Were the Cherokee terminated?” I asked.
“No. Terminations were done on a tribe-by-tribe basis and had to move through Congress and court challenges. A backlash built, the American Indian Movement coalesced around the common interests, and the documented effects of termination on education and health care proved devastating, the exact opposite of what was promised.”
“The termination policy was terminated,” I said.
Romero pulled his arm away from Emma, and she wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“Yes,” Romero said. “Thanks to Richard Nixon.”
“Tricky Dick?” Tommy Lee scowled. “What was in it for him?”
Romero shrugged. “I guess he had enough Vietnam War protesters on his hands without adding Indians to the list. And the states didn’t want responsibility for the tribes, especially with no federal funds. So, Nixon changed the policy from termination to self-determination.”
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