Wild Wild Death

by Casey Daniels

  It wasn’t a question. She nodded anyway. “That is what love is all about, isn’t it?”

  It took dying to convince Quinn. And he still wouldn’t talk about it.

  So unlike Jesse, who’d taken the news of my former Gift not so much in stride as he did like it was some kind of honor. Go figure.

  I snapped out of that thought to find Caridad watching me carefully. She nodded and said, “You do know what I mean, Ms. Martin. I can tell this from the look in your eyes. You know about being in love and how love gives you the ability to trust. And to believe.”

  “Maybe.” It was as much of a commitment as I was ready to make in front of an almost total stranger. “I can tell you love and trust Dan and that’s great. Unfortunately, cops are a whole lot less understanding. Things aren’t looking good for him, Caridad.”

  “It is all a terrible mistake. It must be!” Though it was soft, her voice rang with certainty. “The police think Dan had something to do with the illegal permits for the excavation. They think he knows this Brian and that they are somehow involved in…” A helpless lift of her shoulders said it all.

  That wasn’t all the cops thought about Dan and Brian. For one thing, they knew for sure that Brian and Dan knew each other. For another… well, for now, I was keeping the news of Brian’s murder to myself. Caridad was already on the verge of hyperventilating. If I hoped to get any information out of her, I couldn’t afford to upset her even more than she already was.

  “I suppose they have their reasons.” It seemed a nice, middle-of-the-road way to avoid dropping the news of the murder on her like a ton of bricks. “Could they be right?”

  “There is no way Dan is guilty.”

  We were on the same page. When I left Norma’s, hightailed it back to the motel to change clothes and get my car, and called Caridad here at the inn, where Jesse had told me she was staying, I’d hoped we would be. In addition to being gratified, I found myself warming up to Wife No. 2. Which is saying a lot since Wife No. 1 tried to make me disappear forever into nothingness and Husband No. One and Only could have found a better way to let me know about his recent nuptials.

  But that was sour grapes for another time.

  “We…” Caridad leaned forward, every bone showing when she latched her fingers together on the table in front of her. “I believe we are the only ones who can help him. To prove he is innocent. It is what you are thinking, isn’t it?”

  “That, yes. And I’m thinking we need to find him. But to do that, we’re going to have to try and figure out what’s really going on. So first things first. If Dan didn’t forge those excavation permits, who do you think did?”

  Her shoulders were so slender, when she shrugged, I hardly noticed.

  “Don’t get pissed, but I’ve got to ask—do you think it could have been Dan?”

  Another shrug.

  Yeah, I was surprised. I tried really hard not to show it. I didn’t need her to get all defensive. “So you think it could have been him?”

  “You know he is not that kind of man.”

  “I do. But if it wasn’t Dan—”

  “The others on the excavation, they’re all graduate students. None of them would have had the knowledge or the nerve.”

  “Which brings us back to Dan.”

  “Or me.”

  Don’t think this wasn’t something I hadn’t thought of. I sipped my drink and studied her over the sparkle of salt on the rim of my glass. Pretty, professional, obviously very smart. Dan wouldn’t have fallen in love with her otherwise. But sparkle or no sparkle, it was time to get down to brass tacks. I set down my drink and leaned forward. “Did you?”

  She rearranged the orange slices on her plate. “I am an anthropologist. I study people and their cultures, and my specialty, it is Pueblo Indians. Most people believe this makes me a very dull individual. Yet here I am…” She held out her arms and looked around, taking in Taos and all of the surrounding countryside. “Here I am in the middle of this mystery. When I came here to New Mexico with Dan, my goal was only to assist him in his studies and to attend the San Felix de Gerona festival day later this week. This is the special feast day of the Taopi Pueblo and I was eager to study the people and their traditions and their celebration. Now…” She shook her head sadly. “I cannot show my face at the pueblo. Not after what has happened. Not after the place that is sacred to the Taopi has been desecrated, and I have been a part of it.”

  This was a roundabout answer to my question. Maybe. Or maybe it was a dodge. Either way, it wasn’t helping, so I asked again, “Did you forge those papers, Caridad?”

  With one finger, she traced an invisible pattern on the table. “I have thought of telling the police I did. Just to convince them that Dan did not, that he isn’t hiding from them, and that they should go out and try to find him. But really…” She bunched the tissue into one hand and held on for dear life. “I believe they would ask me how I accomplished this forgery and I would not know what to tell them. Instantly, they would know I was lying.” She picked up an orange slice, set it back down. “Would you do such a thing?” she asked. “Would you lie to protect the man you love?”

  I’m not exactly the philosophical sort so, rather than think about it, I played with the little plastic straw in my drink. “That’s a tough one,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be. Not if you loved someone as much as I love Dan.”

  “So what you’re saying is that you have been lying to the police. To protect Dan.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Look…” I rested my elbows on the table. “We’re dealing with an awful lot of dead people here, Norma and Arnie and…” I decided to throw caution to the wind. “Brian is dead, too,” I told her, and watched what little color there was in her cheeks fade away. “I found his body this afternoon. Dan’s cell phone number was written on a piece of paper in Brian’s pocket.”

  She went as still as stone.

  “You’re not surprised.”

  When Caridad pulled in a breath, it was so sharp, I swear even my lungs hurt. A fresh cascade of tears started, and this time, she didn’t even try to dab them away.

  “Caridad, if you know Brian and Dan were working together, you have to tell the police. They’re going to find out anyway, and—”

  Her spine went poker straight. “Then they do not need to find out from me.”

  “If you keep secrets, it’s only going to look worse for Dan. And if you run…” I caught the little movement when she braced her hands against the arms of her chair to push it away from the table. “That’s not going to look good, either, and they’re going to find you. The only thing that’s going to help Dan now is you coming clean and telling the cops everything you know. Then they can find Dan and we can get this whole mess cleared up.”

  “You are working with them.”

  “The police?” I was chewing a mouthful of nachos when I said this, and it came out sounding like… well, like someone trying to talk while chewing a mouthful of nachos. I swallowed. “The police? No, not officially. But if you tell me something, Caridad—”

  “You cannot tell them! Swear to me, swear to me you will not.”

  “But if it’s important to the investigation—”

  “You must swear!”

  I struggled with the ethics of the situation. For maybe three seconds. Then I pulled my hands onto my lap, crossed every finger I could, and gave her the earnest look of a truth-teller. Who says years of dating had never prepared me to be a detective? “I swear.”

  She took my vow at face value. Thank goodness. “A few weeks ago…” Antsy, Caridad rubbed her right hand up her left arm and along her shoulder. “We were at the excavation. I was actually down in the kiva. It is…” For a second, her expression was transformed. The worries of the last days disappeared, her eyes cleared, and a smile touched her lips. “It is an amazing place. Even I, who do not believe as Dan does in the world of spirits… even I could feel a presence there in the darkness of the kiva. I
was down there alone. Only, I was not alone.” She snapped out of the memory and shot me a look.

  “I am sorry. To you, this is an everyday thing. Dan says you see and feel and talk to the spirits all the time. To you, my musings must sound sophomoric.”

  Since I didn’t even know about my Gift in high school, I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Since I didn’t have it anymore, anyway, it hardly seemed to matter.

  “So you were down in that kiva thing.” In spite of the late afternoon warmth, a shiver crawled over my shoulders. “Isn’t it creepy?”

  “I imagine I find such cultural treasures as fascinating as you find the mausoleums and gravestones in the cemetery where Dan tells me you work.”

  I imagined not.

  I shook away the thought. “So you were down there in that kiva…”

  “And when I came again out of it, I saw Dan near our tent. He was talking to a man.”

  I didn’t need a road map to see where this story was leading. The only way to counteract the sudden sourness in my stomach was a nice, long sip of margarita. “Brian,” I said when I was finished.

  “Yes.” Caridad shook her head. “Dan, he introduced me. The man’s name was Brian, Brian Reynolds.”

  “And did Dan explain what Brian was doing there?”

  “Dan told me they had business together.”

  “The bones.”

  “We do not know this. Not for certain.”

  “But if we’re going to get anywhere in our investigation—”

  “You promised. You swore you would not tell the police what I have revealed.”

  “Yes, I did.” Notice how I did not add anything like and I’m not going to. “That’s not what I was going to say.” This much was the truth. “I was going to say that if we’re going to get anywhere in this investigation and find Dan, then let’s just play with some ideas. Let’s say Dan is the one who wanted Brian to get the bones. I mean, just for argument’s sake.”

  She nodded. The movement sharp and quick. “For argument’s sake.”

  “According to the legend, if there’s a ceremony at the kiva, and if the ceremony somehow uses the bones of one of the people entrusted with the location of some magical, mystical something…”

  “A bowl, yes. A silver bowl.” She filled in the blanks of my memory. “The bones, the sacred ceremony… these are what call the spirits. And these spirits, they will reveal where the silver bowl has been hidden for more than one hundred years.”

  “So I get why Dan would be interested. It’s the whole woo-woo thing. He’d want to perform the ceremony and call the spirits. But why would he care about this silver bowl?”

  “This I do not know.” I could tell from the way she shook her head sadly that she wished she did. “Maybe it is because this bowl, it is old and valuable.”

  “We both know money doesn’t mean that much to Dan.”

  “Then maybe it is just to prove that the spirits are real.” She warmed to the idea, and sat up a little straighter. “If Dan, he says he performed the sacred ceremony and the spirits showed themselves, then everyone, they will just shake their heads and say yes, yes, that is Dan, believing too much in the paranormal. But if Dan, he can say that those spirits showed him where to find the bowl…”

  “Then that would prove he had information he couldn’t have gotten in any other way. I like it. It works.”

  Except it worked in all the wrong ways. But before I even had a chance to cringe and kick our argument in a direction that wasn’t Dan’s guilt, a flash of movement out on the sidewalk caught my eye.

  Buckskin dress.

  Feathered headband.

  Long, dark braids.

  While I was still processing the details and wondering why they looked so familiar, Caridad was tisking. “Obviously she knows very little,” she said. “The woman is dressed all wrong for a Pueblo Indian. This is the costume of a Plains Indian. If you ask me, she isn’t even a Native American. She is playing at it. No doubt if we gave her a chance, she would start talking about corn ceremonies, as if she were some expert.”

  Corn ceremony!

  The pieces clicked into place, and just as they did, I took off and raced out of the bar. It didn’t take me long to get out onto the sidewalk, but by then, Morning Dove—the woman who’d been at the Indians game back in Cleveland and wanted me to arrange for her to get into the cemetery to remove Goodshot’s curse—was already gone.

  I never did find out who San Felix de Gerona was exactly, except that he was the patron of the Taopi people, and that every year at the end of June, they had a huge to-do in his honor. That, and that he apparently didn’t have any pull when it came to determining the weather for his big day.

  The morning of the feast dawned cloudy and cool. From what I heard from the crowds of people who milled around me when I arrived at the pueblo, this was unusual. Thank you, San Felix. So much for showing off the cute little lemon-colored, square-necked tank I was wearing with an adorable A-line batik skirt in blues and greens and accents of the same fresh yellow. When I got out of the Mustang, I grabbed Quinn’s blue windbreaker from the backseat. Not that I had any intention of wearing it. I just figured if I carried it along, maybe the weather gods would get the message, the clouds would part, and I’d get to bask in a little Southwestern sunshine.

  The pueblo was packed with tourists, vendors, and Taopi, who, I found out later, always returned for the celebration, even if they’d moved to faraway places. I sidestepped my way through the plaza over to where I saw a yummy-looking guy in a uniform watching the crowds from behind his sunglasses.

  “Hey, Officer!” I made sure my smile was as sunny as my tank top. “How’s it going?”

  I didn’t have to see Jesse’s eyes to know he slid me a look. I could feel the heat everywhere his gaze touched. It slipped from my tank top, to the skirt that ended three inches above my knees, to the open-toed, high-heeled sandals I was wearing with it. And all the way back up again.

  “Nice,” he purred.

  “I hope you’re not talking about the weather.”

  He twitched his broad shoulders. “Not much I can do about that. But at least everything else is going well.” Another officer walked by and Jesse signaled for him to keep an eye on things and led me down a short street alongside the buildings that faced the plaza. He took off his sunglasses. “I’m sorry I’m not going to be able to spend much time with you today,” he said. “We’ll have thousands of visitors coming and going all day long.”

  “Not a problem.” It really wasn’t since I wasn’t planning on hanging around long. “I’ll take a look around and then I’ll get back to work. Still no word on Dan?”

  A shake of his head was all the answer I needed.

  Just what I was afraid of. Which was why I had a plan. “I’m going to go back into Taos and see Caridad again. I got her talking once, maybe she’ll open up some more.”

  “Oh, no.” As if he thought I was going to take off right then and there, Jesse put a hand on my arm. “Today is the feast, and you’re not working. Besides, my parents want to meet you.”

  I took a moment to process the information. Processing done, I found myself feeling a little off-kilter—and completely terrified.

  “Dinner,” Jesse said, before I could come up with an excuse that would satisfy him. And his parents. One that was good enough to keep me from being thrown into a situation that made me woozy just thinking about it. “Feast day dinners are very important. And my family still owns one of the pueblos in the old village so that’s where we’ll be eating. It’s an honor to be invited.”

  “I’m sure it is, but—”

  “I told them all about you.”

  I hoped he wasn’t being literal because if all really was all, then it would include all we’d been doing together the last couple weeks. And I didn’t want to go into a first meeting with the parents with that on my mind. Then, of course, there were the ghosts. Or at least there used to be the ghosts. If Jesse’s parents thought li
ke him and actually believed that talking to the dead was some kind of privilege, and they expected me to have some kind of wacky Gift, they might be disappointed to learn the truth. Or they might think I was crazy. Or…

  I swallowed hard. “You told them all about me, huh? Is that good news or bad news?”

  One corner of his mouth pulled in a wry smile. “You’ve got nothing to be nervous about.”

  “I’m not nervous.” I folded my arms over my chest, and when that didn’t do anything to kill the chill that made my knees knock together, I took drastic measures: I slipped on Quinn’s windbreaker and hugged it tight around me. “I’m just thinking… you know… that we don’t have any time to waste. You know, when it comes to the case. And finding Dan. And the murderer. Somebody needs to talk to Caridad again. Right now.”

  “Brian’s murder is a problem for the sheriff up in Antonito. He’s a good man, and he’s on top of things. Trust me.”

  “I do.” Through my flash-frozen terror, I somehow managed a smile. “It’s just that—”

  “My parents and my two brothers and my sister… they’re all going to love you.” The quick kiss he gave me told me he had to get back to work. “Just like I do.”

  Yeah, that’s how he left it. He turned right around and walked away with those words still hanging in the air.

  Just like I do.

  What’s a girl supposed to think?

  I wasn’t sure, but I did know that, after that, I wasn’t quite as chilly anymore.

  There’s a lot that goes on at a pueblo feast day celebration, and a whole lot of it has to do with centuries-old traditions and ceremonies. Which means most of what happens isn’t exactly secret—because visitors are welcome to respectfully watch—but there are no cameras allowed, no cell phones, no recording devices, no talking during sacred dances or clapping after. I can’t say for sure, but my guess is the Taopi don’t mind if visitors head home and tell their friends and neighbors what they saw at the feast, they just don’t want the whole thing treated like some kind of stage performance.

  To the Taopi, this is sacred stuff.