by Joseph Flynn
Makilah rolled her eyes. “I didn’t get any call. The department is switching over from AT&T to a system Google Voice is putting in for us. At least, that’s what I think I was told.” Standing, she added, “The bugs are still gumming up the works. They say they’re working to fix emergency calls first.”
“Makes sense.”
“Of course, if I didn’t live so deeply in my own little world, I might’ve heard your approach.” She extended her hand. “You know who I am. So who’re you?”
Shaking her hand, he said, “John Tall Wolf, Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
“Really? A special agent?”
“Co-director.”
“My, my. Well, please have a seat, sir. Would you like something to drink?”
“I’m good, thanks.” John sat in Makilah’s guest chair.
She returned to her seat. “You sure you’re in the right place, Mr. Co-director? I handle investigations of possible procedural violations by SFPD officers.”
“Please call me John, and I have some information that might be of help to you in the matter of the death of a man named Merritt Kinney.”
Makilah sat back in her chair and stared at her visitor. “Okay, John, I’m happy to have any help you care to offer, only I’m stumped how a bigwig from the BIA knows about Merritt Kinney or how you found your way to me.”
John said, “A confidential informant pointed me your way. He told me Kinney worked for one of your town’s tech moguls, Edward Danner.”
Makilah remembered Sergeant Fab Gallo telling her he’d met the high and mighty Danner.
She wanted to hear more of what this mysterious Native American fed knew.
But not right there in her office where anybody passing by might see them.
If she faced the possibility of going up against a billionaire who’d gone rogue, she wanted to be very careful. She was still a year out from her pension being vested. No way was she going to lose that.
“How about I buy you breakfast somewhere nice, John?” she asked.
John countered with: “How about you take me to the late Mr. Kinney’s apartment for a look-see, Captain?”
Chapter 23
Southwest, U.S.
Alan White River met with a half-dozen of his fellow tribal leaders in the plush celebrity car the Super Chief locomotive had been towing. They sat around a polished teak table in ergonomic leather chairs. The old men’s flannel shirts, blue jeans and boots were at odds with the furniture and other designer flourishes surrounding them. It was clear none of them was completely at ease.
But Bodaway, the firemaker, was.
He looked completely at home. He was doing his best, in fact, not to seem like he was enjoying his surroundings too much. With each glance around the car, though, he was making mental notes of furnishings he’d someday own.
“I’ve never even been in a casino this nice,” Donald Leaning Elk told his peers.
Henry Bald Eagle smiled and nodded. “This is the first time in years I’m wondering if I’ve got cow flop on my boots.”
Three of the other chiefs laughed and made similar jokes.
White River let the others go on for a moment. He knew they were all nervous. Sitting there among the white man’s luxuries made plain the wealth of the powers they’d dared to confront, the seriousness of what they’d done. If they were called to account for their theft in a federal court, they wouldn’t be the only ones to suffer. The people who had trusted them with positions of leadership would also be tainted.
Then again, each chief had joined in the conspiracy with the assent of the elders of their tribes. Native American politics could be as divisive as any others, but on this issue there was complete agreement. The plan Alan White River had set in motion would be the redress of a longstanding and agonizing grievance: the harm the railroads had done to their people.
At an opportune pause in the nervous good humor, White River said to his great-grandson, “Bodaway, what news do you have?”
The others fell silent and turned to look at the young man.
“Wicker and Brent, the trainmen, were alive when the ambulances arrived to take them to the hospital.”
“Not the same hospital,” Andrew Hardwood said.
He’d been one of the leaders not to join in the uneasy joking. Hardwood took matters every bit as seriously as White River. He was Apache and in his native tongue his name was Cochise.
“No,” Bodaway told him. “Not the same hospital nor even the same state. Still, by releasing these men rather than treating them ourselves, we’ve narrowed the area where the FBI will search for us.”
The lines of concern deepened in the faces of all the older men.
Bodaway had suggested they keep both Wicker and Brent, have them treated by the tribe’s doctors, but the only physicians they’d been able to contact were general practitioners and both of them had said Wicker needed a heart surgeon and Brent probably needed a nephrologist. Bodaway had thought if the two men died, so be it. They’d become only the latest casualties of a conflict that had begun centuries ago.
The elders, however, had overruled him. They’d intended to spill no blood. They didn’t want any angry spirits haunting their dreams. That made Bodaway laugh, but only to himself. The chiefs had their own purposes in stealing the Super Chief, but they weren’t his.
He’d only wanted to show that it could be done. He had already taken a trophy from the passenger car. That would be payment enough for what he’d done.
Still, he loved his great-grandfather, and had done his best to buy him and the other old men all the time they would need to achieve their goals. Wicker and Brent had been stripped of all identification. Both men had been unconscious when they were loaded into their respective ambulances. Assuming they had both gone into surgery, it would be some time before either of them was in full possession of his faculties.
As for the third non-complicit member of the train crew, Bob Clarey, it was decided he should be released, too. But Bodaway had offered an idea to which the elders had agreed. Clarey was dosed with Rohypnol, put on a private airplane and flown to Louisiana. He’d been deposited in a dive bar in Baton Rouge, left at a table with a bottle of cheap bourbon and a glass.
When he regained his senses, he’d have no idea of where he was or how he got there. He also had no ID on him, and if he claimed he’d been kidnapped on a train in Los Angeles … well, it’d be sometime before the cops would believe him. More time would be required to confirm the claim, but even if everything happened with unexpected speed it would still create a geographical diversion the FBI would be obliged to investigate.
Bodaway felt comfortable everything would work out for the best.
The Native Americans were the good guys in this Western.
They’d come out on top this time.
Only White River brought up a concern Bodaway hadn’t foreseen.
“I was told Marlene Flower Moon tried to call me this morning. She was informed I was away on business, but not where I was. She left a message saying she might be nominated to be Secretary of the Interior. She wants my support.”
He left it to the others to take the next step.
Hardwood got there first. “She must have called all of us. That woman leaves nothing to chance.”
“Not being able to find any of us at home will make her very suspicious,” White River said. “She must be searching for us right now. Trying to find out what we are doing.”
Bodaway saw that prospect frightened the elders far more than any worry about the FBI.
He said, “This woman is just a bureaucrat, a would-be politician, isn’t she? Why worry about her?”
White River knew his great-grandson would laugh at the idea Marlene Flower Moon was really Coyote. The young man’s heart put him inseparably with his people, but his mind was indivisible from his education in the white world. Bodaway wanted to beat them at their own game.
The old man chose his words carefully.
“She is a force to be reckoned
with, a woman none of us has ever known to fail.”
Bodaway saw all the old men nod. Even Hardwood agreed.
“All right,” Bodaway said, “she’s smart and she’s powerful. So what? Why would she have any reason to oppose what we’re doing?”
“She may not,” Hardwood conceded.
The others nodded hopefully, except for White River.
“There is no way to know what is in that woman’s mind,” he said. “All we can be certain of is she will find us before the white men do. And there is one other thing.”
“What?” Bald Eagle asked.
White River began to tell the others what he knew of John Tall Wolf.
Bodaway leaned forward and listened intently.
Chapter 24
San Francisco
“Here we are,” Makilah Walsh told John as they arrived at Merritt Kinney’s apartment.
Before leaving police headquarters, Makilah had shown John the video recording Sergeant Fab Gallo’s team had made of their attempt to arrest Kinney. She plainly expected him to make some comment on what he’d seen. John told her he’d reserve judgment for the moment.
Kinney’s place was so small a nickel tour would have been price gouging. The living room, dining area and kitchen were contiguous. A man John’s size might have sat at the card table with his dinner, used one hand to change the TV channel without a remote and grabbed a drink from the fridge with the other. The bedroom was over-furnished by nothing more than a twin bed and a tiny dresser. The bathroom was a claustrophobic’s nightmare.
“Barely room to turn around” John said of the lavatory. “Trying to towel off in here must bruise your elbows just about every time.”
“It’s got a window and a bathtub,” Makilah told him. “With the rents in this town, this apartment isn’t half-bad.”
John said, “The window’s open.”
“You look at what’s on the floor around the toilet, that’s a good thing.”
Dried splotches of feces circled the bowl like a vile necklace.
“Yeah,” John said. “But who opened the window, Kinney or SFPD?”
Makilah said, “I don’t know. I’ll find out.”
“If it was Kinney, that would explain how he heard or saw your cops coming. If his underwear shows signs of a hasty retreat, that should clear up the window being open.”
With a thin smile, Makilah nodded. “I imagine it would.”
John lowered himself to a squat and looked at the book he saw in the bathtub. His movement nudged Makilahh to the threshold of the room. Looking over John’s shoulder, she said, “The man must’ve been reading while he was taking care of his business.”
“Mmm-hmm.” John took a notebook and pen out of a coat pocket. Both he and Makilah were wearing nitrile gloves to preserve the crime scene, but he didn’t touch the book. Only wrote down the title and the author’s name. A big shot like him, he should be able to charge a copy of the book to his official credit card.
Makilah asked, “You think that book has something to do with all this?”
John stood up and gently urged the police captain backward so he might exit the room.
“You’ve been very patient,” he said. “Let’s step outside and I’ll tell you what I know. Well, some of what I know, anyway.”
Makilah took John to Union Square, bought him an iced green tea with mint, instead of the breakfast she’d offered earlier, and had a Snapple Kiwi Strawberry for herself. They sat on the plaza at a table for two under a green umbrella. Looking like the couple of cops they were, passersby gave them a wide berth. They kept their voices down, but didn’t have to whisper.
John told her about Edward Danner flying the coop on him.
“Maybe he just had to be somewhere in a hurry,” Makilah said.
“Is that what you’d think if you went to see someone and he jumped in his helicopter?”
“You put it that way, no.”
“So I went to see Brian Kirby at his house.”
The SFPD captain gave John a look. “You just drop in on a billionaire and he opens his door for you?”
“I had reason to believe he was expecting a visit from someone with a badge.”
Makilah smiled. “Someone’s been whispering in your ear.”
“I’m easy to talk to, get along with people well. Anyway, what Mr. Kirby told me is that Mr. Kinney called him asking if he’d like to have Mr. Danner’s personal journal. Kinney also told Mr. Kirby that Mr. Danner used the journal to explain his part in a number of crimes. In his own handwriting, as it were.”
“Sonofabitch. No, wait just a minute. Why would Danner do that? Screw himself.”
“Take a guess,” John told her.
Makilah took a hit of Snapple to aid her imagination. “He must want people to know what he did, just not right away.”
“Posthumous publication is what I’m thinking,” John said. “That also makes me wonder if he has any children to consider.”
Like any good cop, Makilah had at least a passing knowledge of the high and mighty in her jurisdiction, who they were when they let their hair down, what kind of mischief they might get up to when they thought no one was looking.
“Word is Mr. Danner is gay, when he finds the time for anything but his work. He has no children I’ve ever heard about.”
“That’s one fewer constraint on how he’d like to be remembered.”
Makilah nodded. She drew another conclusion from what John had told her.
She said, “Brian Kirby must not have bought Danner’s journal or he wouldn’t have said anything to you. He had to know he’d be guilty of receiving stolen goods.”
“Kinney didn’t offer the journal for sale; he wanted to give it away, but Kirby understood taking possession would still place him in jeopardy.”
“So if he doesn’t have it, who does?”
“Kirby said he suggested that Kinney ‘do the right thing’ with it.”
Makilah’s smile was sardonic. “Well, wasn’t that civic minded of him? But I still get the feeling you might have a better idea of what the right thing is than I do, John.”
“I probably do,” he admitted, “but I can’t say for the moment.”
“Not even a hint? I mean, I did buy you a green tea with mint.”
“Well, the thing that strikes me about what happened when your officers went to arrest Kinney was that he overreacted fatally. He was panicked when the most he should have been worried about was finding a good lawyer. He found a small team of SFPD cops who acted professionally to be menacing. Why was that?”
“And your answer is?”
John said, “I’m not sure, but I’m going to read a copy of the book that wound up in Kinney’s bathtub. Who knows if something in it didn’t contribute to his being overwrought?”
“Maybe I should read it, too,” Makilah said.
“One thing I can tell you,” John said, “if you have any uncertainties about any of the cops who went to arrest Kinney, you should pass the word that Danner might be involved in a very big federal investigation. Nobody will be getting off easy. If they have any knowledge about Danner that could substantiate Kinney’s claim that the man is a criminal they ought to come forward fast. Before judges start handing down sentences, and they can still get some consideration for, you know, doing the right thing.”
Makilah laughed. “I’ll do just that. And I’ll stay in touch if you will.”
“Deal,” John said.
Chapter 25
San Francisco
Cullum Walker, CEO of The Museum of American Railroading in Chicago, told Arthur Halston, chief counsel of Edward Danner’s Positron, Inc., “I promise you, sir, any stolen property found aboard the Super Chief or its passenger coach will be returned to its owner immediately. If, as you say, that includes any personal documents, the confidential nature of their contents will be respected completely.”
Yeah, sure, Halston thought. That sounded good, but it was human nature for people to take a peek at t
hings they weren’t supposed to see. Be they stock tips or a comely neighbor. And if Walker or someone in the museum’s mail room didn’t leave a greasy thumb print on a page of Edward Danner’s personal journal, how would Halston know if the pledge of privacy had been honored?
Well, there was one way. If the cops or feds descended upon Danner in large numbers, that would be a pretty good clue someone had read whatever the hell Danner had been loopy enough to commit to writing. Genius, Halston thought, was not a seamless gift. In many cases, it was shot through with moments of jaw-dropping idiocy.
Just look at what Danner had done last night. Absconded from an interview with an official of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Jumped into his helicopter, dragged his lawyer with him and fled into the night sky. All he had to do was greet the man with a bit of courtesy and say on the advice of his attorney he would not be answering any questions.
That would have been that. No fuss, no muss. If the fed had gotten pushy, Halston would have come out swinging. Figuratively, of course. But he would have quickly erected a wall of legal protections that the man from BIA … that still bothered Halston. If the federal government had a bone to pick with Danner, why not send the FBI?
Wouldn’t that have been a more intimidating move? Would Edward have dared to duck them? You dodged the BIA, you could plead, reasonably, that you were simply avoiding an annoyance. Even if a judge didn’t agree with that notion, it was likely a juror or two would, and that was all any good defense lawyer needed.
So why … an unwelcome thought occurred to Halston.
The BIA showing up at the same time Edward Danner’s personal journal was smuggled onto a train called the Super Chief? Now, there was an element of symmetry. But only if …
“Mr. Walker,” Halston said, “is there any reason why the federal government should be looking into the train headed to your museum?”
The man’s eagerness to please vanished. “I can’t talk about that.”
“But you do know about it.” A declarative statement not an interrogatory one.
“I can’t talk about that either. If we find anything belonging to your client, it will be returned expeditiously.”