“You sit there.” Connor ushered Vicky toward the chair next to the large red button on the wall. “Any trouble, hit that button. I’ll be outside.”
Travis had already dropped into the other chair, as if he knew the routine. He’d had other visitors. He clasped his hands, set them on the table, and waited while Vicky sat down. Still waiting, with the patience of a man who had nothing but time, as Officer Connor backed out of the room and closed the door. The television noise disappeared, leaving the silence of a vacuum. The faintest odor of soap permeated the air.
“Your grandfather came to see me,” Vicky said.
For the first time, the hint of a smile started at the corners of the man’s mouth. “Grandfather’s been tryin’ to get a lawyer to take up my case for seven years. They’re all too busy, they say. Nothin’ to go on. No new evidence to reopen the case. But he don’t give up. Calls me every week and says, ‘Travis, don’t give up. Some lawyer’s gonna help us out.’ In the meantime, I just do my time, keep my nose clean. So I tell him, ‘Don’t worry about it. Three more years and I’m walkin’ out of here,’ but he says, ‘I ain’t gonna be here that long, Travis. I wanna see you walkin’ out.’”
Vicky leaned over the table. She could feel the PMT’s hard plastic bite into her waist. “What happened the day Raymond was killed?”
“You gonna take my case?”
“I need your story, Travis.”
He shrugged. “That day was like every other day on the ranch. I herded some horses to the upper pasture to graze. Took most of the day. Started back for the ranch in the afternoon. That’s when I heard the gunshot…”
Vicky put up a hand. “You were riding back when you heard the gunshot?” That hadn’t come out in the trial.
“Yeah. I know a shotgun when I hear it. Out there, you can hear noise like that all over the place. Everybody heard it.”
“Andy Lyle, the foreman, heard it,” Vicky said. “That’s what brought him to the barn.”
“Well, I got there first; that was the problem. Didn’t see nothin’ when I rode into the corral, so I left the mare and went into the barn. That’s when I seen Raymond on the ground. Then I seen the blood. He was layin’ in a puddle of blood, and I seen the shotgun beside him. Should’ve been in the rack on the wall, but it was on the ground. I got outta there fast. Started runnin’. I didn’t know where I was goin’. All I knew was I had to get as far away as I could, ’cause everybody was gonna think I shot him.”
“Because you and Raymond had gotten into a fight the day before?”
“We got into lots of fights, me and him.” Travis unclasped his hands and began drumming his long fingers on the table, making a slow, rhythmic noise like the ticktock of a clock. “Raymond had a big mouth. Always blowin’ hot air, tellin’ me how to do the job, like he knew so much. I told him to lay off and he threw a punch. So we got into it. Didn’t mean nothin’.”
Vicky didn’t take her eyes from the man. An uneasy feeling had come over her, like a chill moving across her shoulders. The same feeling that gripped her in the courtroom when a witness was lying.
“Tell you the truth”—fingers drumming harder now—“I used that shotgun couple days before Raymond got shot. Andy told me to get the coyote that was botherin’ the cattle. I knew my fingerprints were all over that gun.”
“What’s the rest of the story?”
Travis hooked an arm over the back of his chair and surveyed the visitation area beyond the windows. Vicky followed his gaze: a white-clad inmate talking across a table to a young woman with black hair that fell down her slim back. “The rest of the story…” Travis shook his head and brought his eyes back. “I was runnin’ full out, but Andy came after me in a pickup. I could see the highway—some cars and trucks whizzin’ by. If I could’ve gotten out there, I could’ve hitched a ride to the rez. I could hear the pickup’s engine screamin’ behind me. I started zigzaggin’, but Andy kept comin’, like he was runnin’ down a coyote. Drove up alongside me; he was grinnin’ like a fool, keepin’ that pickup right beside me. I’d swerve away, and that damn pickup was right on me.”
“You’re telling me he ran into you?”
“I seen him grinnin’. I seen him jerk on the steerin’ wheel. I jumped sideways and the front bumper caught me in the leg. Next thing I know, I’m rollin’ on the ground and Andy’s on top of me. Poundin’ me with everything’s he got. Finally, he gets enough and pulls me up. Man, everything was spinnin’ around. My leg was hurtin’ like hell. He pushed me into the pickup and drove back to the ranch. I don’t know how long it was before a sheriff’s deputy showed up. Andy pulls me outta the pickup. ‘Here’s your killer,’ he tells the deputy.”
“Was anyone else around?”
“Whole bunch of sheriff’s cars came racin’ down the road. I think there was an ambulance, some other cars. Deputies was struttin’ around, in and out of the barn, all puffed up ’cause they got the killer so fast. I was tryin’ to hold on, you know. I didn’t wanna pass out. If they was gonna shoot me right then, I wanted to be lookin’ ’em in the eye when they did it.”
Vicky looked away. It was hard to tell which was more depressing: the visitation area with the young couple holding hands, another inmate seated on the floor rolling a ball to a small boy while a young woman cuddled a baby nearby, the images moving soundlessly across the television screen. That, or the interview room and Travis Birdsong, with the white clothes and the dead-looking eyes, convicted before he ever set foot in the courtroom.
She made herself turn back to the Indian. “Did you see anyone as you rode back to the barn?” she said. “The foreman bringing horses to the corral? Marjorie Taylor?”
He was shaking his head. “I seen Lyle’s pickup up at the house when I rode in, but I didn’t see him anywhere around. Must’ve been somewhere close, though. He got down to the barn same time as I run off. Mrs. Taylor…” He shrugged. “Didn’t see her. I figure she was in the office like usual that time of day.”
“What about the artist, Ollie Goodman?”
Travis studied the surface of the table a moment before he said, “I’m pretty sure he was around when I rode out that mornin’. He set up that whatchamacallit—easel—over in the pasture in front of the house. Paintin’ another one of them pictures of his. He wasn’t there when I got back.”
“You’re telling me you didn’t see anyone running from the barn after you heard the shot?”
“Maybe the guy that shot Raymond ran out the back door. How do I know? I didn’t see nobody. ‘Trust me,’ Gruenwald said. ‘They’re never gonna convict you. All they got is Andy Lyle’s word, and that don’t prove nothin’. We’re just gonna let ’em hang themselves. You’re walking outta court a free man, my man,’ he says.” Travis retrieved his arm from the back of the chair and leaned over the table, so close that the sour smell of his breath lay trapped between them. It was then that something changed, some disturbance in the atmosphere, and someone else seemed to emerge from behind the black, angry eyes, some stranger rising out of a dark abyss. Vicky was conscious of the weight of the PMT at her waist and the large red button blossoming on the wall.
“Makes me wanna puke. Wasn’t for Gruenwald,” he went on, “I wouldn’t’ve spent the last seven years in this hellhole. He tells me I should be grateful the jury went for voluntary manslaughter. Grateful! Grateful to go to prison for something I never done.”
“Why didn’t he file an appeal?” Vicky sat back, away from the intensity and the electrical charge in the air.
“Sat right there in that chair”—Travis let his eyes rest on her a moment, as if he were seeing someone else in her place—“said I wasn’t to worry; he was gonna get an appeal and the judge was gonna throw out my conviction. I never seen him again. He went away, dropped off the face of the earth. Just as well, ’cause if he ever come back, if I ever got in the interview room with him again…”
“What, Travis?” Vicky crossed her arms over her waist. The tips of her fingers touched the PMT.
; “You figure it out.”
“The guards would come in seconds.”
“First responders? I had ’em timed. They wouldn’t’ve gotten here in time.”
“You’d be in prison the rest of your life.”
“You don’t get it.” He shook his head and glanced away. When he looked back, Travis was there again behind the dead eyes. “He was nothing but a damn drunk. I could smell the whiskey on him in court.”
An incompetent defense mounted by a drunk. That would be helpful, Vicky thought, if she could prove it. She looked back at the window. The table was vacant where the couple had sat holding hands. The woman and the two babies were gone; the last inmate, a skinny guy with a flattened look to the back of his head, stood at the door across the room, waiting to return to the population.
“The prosecutor let the jury think you and Raymond took the petroglyph,” she said, looking back at Travis.
“That was a stinkin’ lie.” For a moment, Vicky feared the stranger would return.
“There were chips of rock and dust that could have been from the petroglyph in the bed of Raymond’s pickup.”
“How do I know what Raymond did? He was a know-it-all hot-head, like I told you. He could’ve done anything.”
Beyond the window, Vicky saw the door open across the visitation room and the prisoner step through. The room was vacant now, the TV images flashing for an audience that was no longer there, the blue ball abandoned on the floor. Out of sight, just seconds away, she knew, were Officer Connor and the officer at the desk.
And across from her, a man who didn’t deny the debris from a stolen petroglyph in his friend’s pickup, a man who could be lying. What had Norman said? Best leave Travis where he belongs. And Hugh Trublood? He killed my brother. She should get up and walk out. And yet, guilty or innocent, Travis Birdsong had deserved a fair trial.
“I’m going to take your case,” she heard herself say. Her voice was almost a whisper. “I can’t make any promises. I may not be able to help you. Do you understand?”
Travis got to his feet. “Don’t make me no promises you can’t keep.” He opened the door and headed across the room toward the door through which the other prisoner had disappeared.
Vicky walked back to the desk. “All set?” Officer Connor asked, satisfaction in her voice, as if she’d been responsible for a reunion between Vicky and an old friend.
Vicky nodded and followed the woman through the steel doors, across empty rooms and hot sand blowing through concertina wire. Then she was in the Jeep, heading down the arrow-straight road into the vastness and freedom of the plains.
21
SHE WOULD TAKE his case, Vicky had told Travis Birdsong, the grandson of Amos Walking Bear, who believed him innocent, incapable of shooting a man. It was Travis’s case, not the case of the stranger who had invaded the interview room for a moment, that she would try to get the district court to reopen. Travis’s conviction that she would try to get the judge to overturn.
She watched the asphalt fling itself across the plains ahead, vanishing into the haze of heat. A truck swooshed past in a cloud of dust, a pickup that she’d passed some time ago that had blurred into the landscape framed in the rearview mirror. Clumps of gray sagebrush, wilting in the sun, passed outside the windows, and in the distance red-tinged bluffs rose out of the expanse of brown earth. The only signs of life were the sleek herds of antelope that appeared from nowhere and loped alongside the Jeep before veering away and blending back into the plains.
An innocent man, Travis. A man who had just threatened to kill his first defense counsel.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He hadn’t actually voiced a threat, but the innuendo, the implied intention, the stranger behind the eyes, and the charged atmosphere, she had sensed the threat. And yet, if he hadn’t shot Raymond, it was Gruenwald’s incompetence—the incompetence of a drunk—that had sent him to prison.
Vicky drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Reba McIntyre was on the radio, and the music mixed with the hum of the air conditioner and the steady hum of the tires on the asphalt. This was what she kept coming back to: She had agreed to take the case of a man who could change, and the man he changed into might be capable of shooting another human being. And maybe the changed man was the one Norman and Raymond’s brother and a lot of other people had seen, the man nobody wanted back on the reservation.
But there was something else: There were holes in the stories of the witnesses, holes that Gruenwald had made no effort to fill. The foreman had heard the gunshot and run to the barn. Well, so had Travis, if what he’d said was true, and there was always the possibility that it was not. “Are all your clients guilty?” John O’Malley had asked. She wanted to believe them innocent, give them the benefit of the doubt. But there was always the possibility…
In any case, there were other people on the ranch: the foreman, the owner. And who knew when Ollie Goodman had packed up his easel and paints and driven away? Others who could have been in the vicinity of the barn. And here was the irony: It was her own client, the man she had agreed to help, who corroborated their alibis. Andy Lyle? I seen Lyle’s pickup at the house. Marjorie Taylor, the owner? In the office like usual. Ollie Goodman? No sign of him when Travis had gotten back to the barn.
Her fingernails drummed faster on the warm plastic. There was no new evidence, nothing that she could introduce that wouldn’t strengthen the prosecutor’s case. But there was this: The defense attorney was a drunk. He had come to the trial inebriated.
And it was also possible that Raymond Trublood had been involved in the theft of the first petroglyph, which meant that the prosecutor’s theory about motive could be right. It was just that he had the wrong accomplice. Which meant that someone else might have had a motive to want Raymond dead. Maybe Raymond wanted a bigger cut. Or maybe he’d had an attack of remorse over taking a sacred carving from Red Cliff Canyon, and the other thief had gotten worried he might go to the police. There could be any number of reasons—any number of motives—for one thief to kill another and…
And kill anyone else who got in the way of the profits.
Vicky wasn’t sure when the brown truck took shape in the rearview mirror. She was still trying to work it all out, picking up all the strands, trying to weave them together into some kind of coherent possibility. Follow the logic. She could hear John O’Malley’s voice in her head. Whoever took the first petroglyph came back seven years later for the Drowning Man. The thief had already killed once. A man capable of killing someone who was in his way had gotten away with it.
Oh, it was logical, all right. Whoever had helped Raymond cut out the first petroglyph had shot him and made it look as if Travis Birdsong had pulled the trigger. Which brought it back to Andy Lyle, the only witness, the man who swore he’d seen Travis running out of the barn right after he’d heard the gunshot.
Andy Lyle, whose truck had been at the house, according to her own client.
Vicky glanced in the rearview mirror again. The brown truck was gaining on her, a Chevy coming up fast. She watched it grow out of a dark blur and take shape, metal bumpers and trim flashing in the brightness. The sound of the engine bearing down was like the roar of the wind. She could see the figure of a man hunched over the steering wheel, cowboy hat pulled low. There was another cowboy hat bobbing in the windshield on the passenger side. She slowed to about sixty-five. The truck would pass her.
But the truck wasn’t pulling out into the other lane; it was looming in the mirror, bearing down on her, and beneath the brim of the driver’s cowboy hat, she could see the white-toothed flash of a grin. She pushed down on the accelerator and sped ahead, putting the distance of two vehicles between them, but her advantage was momentary. The truck was speeding up, engine howling. Then came the crash of metal against metal, and she felt herself jerked backward, like a dog on a leash. The Jeep jumped ahead before it started shimmying back and forth across the road. She gripped the wheel hard and tried to steer the vehicle in a
straight line, conscious of the truck looming closer in the rearview mirror. The speedometer trembled at eighty, eighty-three, eighty-eight. There was nowhere to go, nothing but the highway uncoiling into the haze ahead. She was trapped in a vast emptiness, like an animal flailing inside an invisible cage.
The highway started climbing. She could feel the Jeep straining with this new effort. The brown truck couldn’t have been more than two feet behind. And ahead, at the top of the incline—oh, she remembered now—the plains dropped away on both sides of the road. The cowboys were waiting. They would ram her again when they reached the top. An image of the Jeep hurtling off the road, plunging downslope, flashed in her mind.
And then she saw it: In the blur of asphalt and brown earth outside the passenger window the ditch was beginning to flatten out, so that the edge of pavement ran into the plains without any separation. There was already a slope developing, but it looked like a gradual drop down the hill. There was a chance…
Keeping an eye on the truck, she pushed hard on the accelerator to gain a few feet of safety, then pulled the steering wheel to the right and headed onto the plains, barely aware of the truck also swerving right. There was the loud thump as the truck clipped the rear of the Jeep and sent it fishtailing over the dusty ground, barreling faster and faster down the slight slope. She was barely aware of the blur of the truck speeding past. She took her foot off the accelerator and concentrated on steering the Jeep over the ruts and ridges. Stalks of sagebrush gripped the undercarriage and clouds of dust churned around her. A curtain of dust fell over the windshield. She was driving blind, trying to keep the vehicle upright, tapping on the brake pedal.
Then she came to an abrupt stop, and something white and hard crashed around her. She heard the air rush from her lungs, like air rushing from a balloon. She was pinned to the seat, unable to move, and the darkness, when it came, descended like the blackest night.
“WE HAVE THE Indian.” Ted Gianelli pushed back in the chair and swiveled from one corner of the desk to the other. The window behind him framed a rectangular view of the flat-roofed buildings across Main Street in Lander. Flowing from the CD player on the bookcase against the wall were the soft notes of La Gioconda. The agent was the only one Father John knew who loved opera as much as he did.
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