Wild Wild Death

by Casey Daniels

  Yeah, exactly what I was thinking.

  “And now,” I said, “he can perform that magic ceremony and call the spirits out of the kiva.”

  “Calling the spirits, huh?” Jesse put on his Stetson. “Sounds exactly like something Dan would do.”

  He just wasn’t going to let it go.

  I forgave Jesse. But that was only because we were already racing out of the office and there wasn’t time to bicker.

  For the second time, we made the trip out to the ancient pueblo. The route was just as dusty, just as rocky, and bumpier than ever thanks to the fact that Jesse drove it at as much of a breakneck speed as he was able. No doubt he felt the same sense of urgency that was pounding through me. And the same gnawing frustration. What with the crowds at the feast and the fact that another sacred dance had started just a few minutes before we set out to gather everyone Jesse wanted to bring along, it had taken more than an hour to locate the elders and Strong Eagle, the shaman.

  What that meant, of course, was that the person who attacked me and took Goodshot’s hand had the jump on us.

  By the time we arrived at the entrance to the steep, winding path through the two cliffs, the clouds had parted. Just what I’d been waiting for, except that the sun was already sinking over the horizon, and it was chillier than ever. Not that I missed the blue windbreaker or anything, but I was grateful when Pete reached into the back of the SUV and tossed me a Taopi police officer’s jacket. It was too big, but at least it was warm. Good thing I’d stowed my cowboy boots in the Mustang before I left the motel and had time to retrieve them while Jesse was gathering his troops. No way I ever would have made it up the trail in my high-heeled sandals. Then again, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, anyway. Jesse set a punishing pace and I stumbled along behind him, watching the bobbing beam of his flashlight as he led the way.

  By the time we stepped out onto the mesa, the sky above us was the color of grape juice and dotted with a million stars. Directly above us was the smudge of the Milky Way. Too bad I didn’t have time to be awestruck. At least not by the Milky Way.

  But then, I was pretty busy being awestruck by what was happening over on the flat-top roof of the kiva. One of the excavation worktables had been set there and turned into a makeshift altar with chunky candles burning on either end of it. The flames flickered in the breeze, tossing flapping shadows on what was laid out on the table—a human skeleton.

  Goodshot.

  There was a bowl of sage next to the bones. The tips of the branches were smoldering, and the smoke from them swirled around the altar like restless banshees.

  Maybe it was the smoke that got into my brain and made me see things. Maybe that’s why I was suddenly feeling even more winded than I had on the mountain path, and a lot like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

  Maybe that explained why I saw Dan Callahan standing at the altar.

  Big points for Jesse. When he turned around to give me a look, he didn’t say, “I told you so.” In fact, the only emotion I saw in his brown eyes was concern. “Are you going to be all right with this?” he asked me.

  “All right?” It wasn’t my raw throat that caused me to sputter over the words, it was the lump of emotion that blocked my breathing. A lump that dissolved in a flash thanks to what felt like a wallop to my midsection.

  Oh yeah, there’s a lot to be said for anger. It’s a great alternative to the pain of betrayal.

  I was headed over to the kiva before anyone could stop me.

  “You son of a bitch!” I guess my throat wasn’t hurt so badly after all, because I managed to bark the words at Dan and I watched him flinch and spin to face me. “That whole baloney about you being kidnapped… that whole thing about how I had to dig up Goodshot’s bones and bring them here to save you… and what happaned to Norma and Arnie and Brian…” I was nice and close now and I took advantage of the fact that Dan was still so surprised to see me, he hadn’t moved. I punched him right in the nose. “You son of a—”

  No way Jesse was going to let things dissolve into a ruckus. I would have given Dan another well-deserved smack if Jesse didn’t come up behind me and grabbed hold of my arm. “You’re Dan Callahan,” he said. He was just being official, I think, since the fact that I’d thwacked Dan probably told Jesse all he really needed to know.

  Dan had snapped out of his daze the moment my knuckles met his nose, and from behind his now bent wire-rimmed glasses, he blinked like a stunned owl at us and the Taopi who gathered around us. “Pepper? What are you… How…”

  “Oh, no!” I was in no mood to be placated. Or held on to. I ripped my arm out of Jesse’s grasp, the better to point a finger directly at Dan’s already puffy nose. “Don’t you try to play innocent,” I growled. “All this time, I’ve been desperate to find you. And I’ve been defending you up one side and down the other. And all this time, you’re the one who’s been behind it all.”

  Dan fingered the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t mean…” He looked over his shoulder toward the skeleton. “If you’re talking about this, I’ve got to admit, I don’t understand it, either. There’s a legend about the bones of an Indian who knew the secret hiding place of the sacred bowl, but these can’t be them. I mean, how could they? Those bones are buried back at Garden View. You’ve got to believe me, Pepper, I’m just as confused as you are.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  So okay, it wasn’t exactly a stinging comeback, but apparently Dan didn’t notice because he snarled right back at me, “Yeah.”

  Not the tender reunion scene I had always envisioned having with Dan someday. But still too leisurely for Jesse. In one smooth movement, he stepped behind Dan and slapped on his handcuffs.

  “Hey! What’s going on?” Dan actually might have tried to wriggle away if Jesse hadn’t had such a tight hold on him. “I’m the victim here. These four guys kidnapped me and—”

  “Save it.” It wasn’t until he finally spoke that I realized Jesse was even angrier than I was. There was a knife-blade edge to his voice, and his eyes glinted in the light of the flickering candles. “You can tell your story to the tribal council. And the FBI. And a couple federal prosecutors. Maybe by then you can figure out a way to explain how you forged those phony excavation papers.”

  Sure, the light was bad. That didn’t keep me from watching Dan turn as waxy as those candles. “Don’t be ridiculous. Come on, Pepper, tell this guy you know me and you know I wouldn’t do anything like that. The permits were legit. They had to be. Besides, I never signed them. That was all left up to—”

  He swallowed the rest of what he was going to say, and come on, it doesn’t take a detective to figure out why. Too bad I never had a chance to astound the Taopi with my keen insights. Before I could utter a word, a couple things happened. A movement across the mesa caught my eye and I saw Caridad step out of her tent. That is, right before she took off running.

  Like skinny little Caridad actually thought she could outrun the Taopi Police, the shaman, the elders, me, and oh yeah, Dan? He wrestled his way out of Jesse’s grasp the moment he saw Caridad, and it helped that Dan was familiar with the terrain. Even with his hands cuffed behind his back and in the twilight that swallowed us as soon as we were a few feet from the candles, he knew his way. The rest of us raced after him.

  Something told me Caridad wouldn’t have stopped at all if she hadn’t run out of breath. Good news for us because Dan caught up with her, we caught up with Dan, and Pete Olivas put him in a hold there was no way Dan could escape. Once the running was over, we found ourselves near a gigantic boulder that stood guard at a spot where the mesa ended and the awesome nothingness of the New Mexico night sky began.

  “Caridad? Honey?” Dan called out to her. “What’s going on here? These people are saying crazy things. Do you have any idea—”

  “Of course I do not.” Caridad gulped in breath after shallow breath. She was dressed in jeans and a light-colored jacket, and in the high bea
ms of the flashlights aimed in her direction, I saw her raise her chin and throw back her slender shoulders. When she looked at the half circle of people gathered around her, her eyes sparked. “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s exactly what we’d like to know.” Yeah, that was me. It was what Jesse was bound to ask, anyway, so I didn’t feel guilty about stepping on his procedural toes. “You were told to stay off the mountain.”

  “Yes, and of course, I would have done this. But Dan…” Caridad turned to me, her eyes big and moist and pleading, her breathing ragged. “You remember what we talked about, Pepper? You remember how I asked if you would do anything for the man you loved? When my husband called me and told me he needed my help, of course I came here to the mountain. To him.”

  “Me? Called you?” Dan did a little squirming, but in spite of being short, Pete was no pushover. A bit of arm twisting and the squirming stopped. “Caridad, honey, I’m completely confused. You called and said—”

  “You see what those kidnappers, you see what they have done to him?” When she looked at her husband, her smile was bittersweet. “He is confused. I believe this is from lack of water. Pepper, she was the one who told me you had been kidnapped, Dan. I was worried. So very worried. And then I arrived here this evening to pick up a few things, and I found Dan here. The kidnappers, they must have left you here, though I do not understand why.”

  Dan tried to step toward his wife, but by now, Pete had hold of his one arm and another of the cops had his other. He wasn’t going anywhere. “But that’s not how it happened! I mean, yes, some of it is. I was kidnapped.” As much as he was able, Dan turned to Jesse. “Brian Reynolds, he’s this ghost hunter I know from Cleveland… he and these three friends of his, they showed up here at the excavation last spring on their way home from Indians spring training in Arizona. You know, just to visit. It was great to see him. And I thought that was that. But then they showed up again a couple weeks ago and I was showing them around and… I don’t know, they must have knocked me out or something. One minute, I was here at the excavation, and the next thing I knew, I was in some cabin somewhere and they were talking about bones.” He looked over his shoulder toward the altar and Goodshot’s remains. “That’s not really Goodshot Gomez, is it? How could it be? He’s buried back in Cleveland.”

  The fact that Goodshot had made the cross-country trip might have been something of a bit of news to Strong Eagle and the elders. Rather than let them get all discombobulated about it, I decided to gloss over the how and get right to the why.

  “The kidnappers wanted the bones in exchange for you,” I told Dan. “Only then Norma stole the bones and she got killed and Arnie did, too.”

  Dan nodded. “So that’s what happened to Arnie. He left the cabin one evening, see, and he never came back. The other two guys—John and Gregory—they got all upset. They insisted something was wrong, that Arnie had gone to the cops and that they were all going to end up in big trouble. They argued with Brian. He wanted to stick around. They weren’t paying attention to me, and I managed to loosen my ropes and slip out of the cabin. Lucky for me, city guys aren’t as used to roughing it as I am. I spent the night in the wilderness, hiked down the mountain the next day, and called—”

  There it was. Another one of those too-obvious-to-be-overlooked hitches in Dan’s explanation. Like I could stop myself? I turned to look exactly where Dan was looking.

  And Dan was looking at Caridad.

  “Of course you called her first,” I said. “She’s your wife. And you figured she was worried about you. Worried sick. But you’re not going to say that, are you, Dan? Because you know what it means.” A quick look at him before I turned back to the missus. “He’s trying to protect you.”

  This shouldn’t have come as a big surprise to Caridad, but her eyes snapped to mine, anyway.

  “Come on, Caridad, give the guy a break,” I told her. “The next thing you know, Dan is going to confess that the kidnapping was all a hoax designed to get a hold of Goodshot’s bones. Just so nobody figures out that you’re the one who did it.” I swung back around in Dan’s direction. “I’m right, huh? You’re keeping quiet, Dan, about who was in charge of those permits, and about who you called after you escaped. That’s because it was Caridad. And if you talk, it’s going to make her look as guilty as sin.”

  Dan’s chin quivered. “Don’t be silly. How could you possibly—”

  “There’s the old legend for one thing.” I glanced toward Strong Eagle, a sturdy, middle-aged guy with kind eyes and big, tortoiseshell glasses, and since a walk on the woo-woo side was no longer my stomping grounds, I let him take over.

  “The legend says that the bones of the last person who knew the location of the sacred silver bowl needed to be brought here to the pueblo,” he said. “The story tells us that once the bones are here and the prayers are spoken, the spirits will appear. They will show us where the bowl is hidden.”

  “Yes.” The other Taopi gathered around nodded and murmured. “That is so.”

  “And that silver bowl…” I watched Caridad carefully. “That silver bowl has magical healing powers. That explains it all, doesn’t it? I should have seen it from the start. But I didn’t. Not until right now. Not until I watched you huffing and puffing your way across the mesa.”

  Caridad was still breathing hard, so it wasn’t very convincing when she grumbled, “I do not know what you are talking about.”

  “She got Brian to kidnap Dan because she knew I’d bring the bones to ransom him,” I said for the benefit of the elders. “And Brian needed Norma’s help. Poor Norma, that pretty much sealed her fate.”

  “But if Brian wanted the bones, why pretend they’d been stolen?” It was a good question, and I acknowledged it with a nod toward Pete.

  “Because the guys Brian brought here to New Mexico with him, they were true Cleveland Indians fans. They believed Brian when he said he was doing this for the team. They thought that once they had the bones, they really were going to bury them here on the pueblo. That would have been perfect because not only would it lift the curse on our baseball team but it would put Goodshot right back where he belonged. Only Brian never had any intention of burying the bones, did he, Caridad?”

  She tossed her head and aimed a laser look at Jesse. “I cannot believe you, a professional, would let this… woman… make these ridiculous accusations. You cannot listen to her. She does not know what she is talking about.”

  “Hello, I’m talking about how you’re the one who really wanted the bones.” Since Caridad was ignoring me so she could try her best oh-poor-me look on Jesse to gain his sympathy, I waved my hands in front of her face. “And Brian couldn’t let his buddies know that. That’s why the bones had to get stolen at Taberna. And that’s why somebody had to keep Norma quiet about her part in this whole thing. Was it you who killed her? Or Brian?”

  “This is insane!” Caridad made a move to get past us, but one of the elders stepped in her path and that gave me the opportunity to keep putting the pieces together. Now that I knew Caridad was the spider in the center of the web, the rest made perfect sense.

  “Once Norma was out of the way, I’ll bet you and Brian thought everything would be A-OK. He was going to sell the bones to you. That was when Arnie and the others realized they’d been double-crossed. They weren’t going to save their favorite baseball team. So Arnie contacted me and then… Poor Arnie never stood a chance, did he? Once you bumped him off, you were free to do the deal with Brian. You paid him for the bones. That explains all the money they found in his pockets. And man, you must have been pissed the first time you tried the ceremony and nothing happened. That’s when you realized Goodshot’s hand was missing, right? And I’ll bet anything the ceremony requires all the bones, not just most of them. That’s probably when you started following me to see if I had the hand. It’s probably why you killed Brian, too. You figured if I didn’t have the hand, it meant he held out on you.”

  I didn’t hold i
t against Jesse for coming up with a logical protest. After all, this whole mess was about to get sucked into the legal system, and there would be more pointed questions to come. “But the person who killed Arnie had to be an expert shot,” he said. “Arnie got hit on the first try, and Pepper, we never got hit at all. The shooter just wanted to scare us away.”

  “She just wanted to scare us away.” I turned again to Caridad. “You want to just come right out and confess? Then we can all get out of here and get back to the feast. I wouldn’t mind a couple more of those cinnamon cookies.”

  Caridad didn’t say a thing. She didn’t need to. It was Dan who spoke, and when he did, his voice was low and so full of pain, it hurt to listen to him. “She was on the Spanish Olympic team.” He did his best to move closer to his wife, but no way Pete was going to let that happen. “Caridad, they’re going to find that out, they might as well know right up front. She’s an expert marksman, rifle and pistol. But that doesn’t mean anything.” When Dan looked at me, there was pain in his eyes. “Pepper, you’ve got it all wrong. That doesn’t mean—”

  “Let me guess…” I wasn’t trying to be mean, but I had to get Dan to face the truth. “When you escaped from Brian and his buddies and finally got off the mountain, Caridad was the first person you called?”

  “Of course. She’s my wife, and she was so relieved to hear from me—”

  “That she told you to lay low, stay out of sight, and not contact the authorities.” This from Jesse, and I wasn’t surprised. He was smart, and he knew exactly where I was going with this.

  Dan swallowed hard. “She said there was some confusion about the excavation permits, that the cops were looking for me, and until things were straightened out, it was better if nobody found me.”

  “Which also gave her time to follow me and see if I had the skeleton hand. I did. But Caridad, you didn’t know that until today at the feast. You must have seen me take it out of my pocket and when I tried to bury it—”