“Listen, Myrna, I appreciate the information.”
“There’s somebody else you might want to talk to,” Myrna said hurriedly, as if she sensed the call was about to end. “Alan Peterson works for the Indian Gaming Commission. Trust me, Vicky, the man knows every casino scam anybody ever thought about. If you think Great Plains has a problem, give Alan a call.” She gave a telephone number, which Vicky scribbled on the legal pad.
“Don’t forget, Vicky,” Myrna said. “You promised to keep the state informed.”
Vicky said she’d get back as soon as she had anything definite. Then she pressed the end button and dialed the number.
She’d expected to have to work through a maze of secretaries, but a man answered on the second ring. “Alan Peterson here.”
Vicky introduced herself and said she was a lawyer with Great Plains Casino.
“Just a moment.” The voice was formal, constrained. “Yes, I have the file on Great Plains. Arapaho casino on the Wind River Reservation, correct?”
Vicky said that was correct. “I’m concerned,” she began, choosing the words carefully, “about the company operating the casino. Lodestar Enterprises.”
“Lodestar.” The name hung on the line a moment. “Stan Lexson at the helm, I believe. What can I tell you, except the company’s been around seven, eight years, running profitable casinos in . . .” He paused. “Mississippi, Michigan, Wisconsin.”
Vicky told him what Myrna said about the umbrella company, the Hastings Group, and the fact that the majority owner, Mickey Vontego, had lost his gaming license in Nevada ten years ago.
“I’m sure you also know the license was reinstated. Mr. Vontego was accused of associating with unsavory characters.” A little laugh, like a cough, burst through the line. “Hard to work in the gaming business in Las Vegas without associating with unsavory characters. In any case, Mr. Vontego proved the accusations were false. Let me say this, Ms. Holden, we’ve never found reason to believe that Hastings or Lodestar Enterprises were anything but legitimate companies.”
“You’ve investigated them?”
Another laugh erupted at the other end. “We have four auditors, Ms. Holden, and fifteen full-time investigators. Oh, and did I mention that there are more than three hundred Indian gaming operations in twenty-nine states? To answer your question, no, we haven’t investigated Hastings or Lodestar. Even if we got a complaint, it would be several years before we could look into it.”
Vicky was jotting notes as fast as she could, but she felt as if the pen were moving in slow motion. What the gaming commissioner was saying was that Indian gaming was wide open, except for tribal or state regulations. She said, “Suppose a management company wanted to cheat the tribe?”
“Are you making a complaint?”
“No,” she said quickly. Complaint? She had nothing but a hunch, a half-formed theory. “I want to make sure there aren’t any infractions of regulations here.”
“Cheat the tribe, you say?” Vicky could imagine the man pushing back in a chair and staring out a window across a landscape of concrete and steel. “I see here that Lodestar Enterprises loaned eighteen million to the Arapaho tribe to build the operation. Any company with that kind of money out is going to make certain the tribe gets enough profits to repay the loan. Profits beyond that could be up for grabs.”
“What are you saying? The company might skim off money in the cage without the tribe’s knowledge?” Vicky held her pen in midair over the tablet. Was this what Kingdom had been paid to overlook?
“Not easily,” Peterson said. “There are videos surveying the cage, documenting the counting. Clever managers have more subtle ways of making sure a large percentage of the profits goes to the company. Placing ghost employees on the payroll, for example. Or purchasing supplies at inflated prices from friendly companies that give them a kickback. And you heard of the fill?”
Vicky jotted down the word and drew a sharp line underneath. She’d never heard of the fill until yesterday. “You mean,” she said, “chips brought to a table?”
“Let’s say,” the man hurried on, “that the dealer needs one thousand dollars worth of chips. He signs a slip for ten thousand. Of course, three other people have to sign the slip. Security guard, cashier, pit boss. A thousand dollars is delivered to the table, and nine thousand goes to the company. Multiply that by several tables, it adds up to a nice evening’s take.”
“But that requires cooperation from a lot of people.” Vicky heard the incredulity in her voice.
“Exactly,” Peterson said. “The name of the game is having the right people in the right places, people you can trust.”
Vicky thanked the man and set the receiver in the cradle. She stared at it for a long time. People you can trust, he’d said, and that’s what Matt Kingdom had delivered. The Arapaho managers were working side by side with Lexson’s own people, those he’d trusted for years. Dennis Light Stone, the pit boss who signed for the fill, along with the dealers and the cage manager—all Lexson’s people.
Adam was right. Stan Lexson ran a cozy, tight operation.
“Where do you stand, Adam?” she said out loud, as if the man were in the office, a sense of sadness and regret and lost possibilities radiating back at her.
It was a long moment before she could bring herself to lift the receiver and dial the local FBI office. The answering machine came on, Gianelli’s voice delivering the usual instructions.
After the beep, she gave her name and said she had to talk to him about operations at the casino. She’d be waiting at her office, she said.
25
TWO-VALLEY ROAD angled west out of Riverton, a strip of asphalt laid through the scrub brush and stunted pines. The music of Tosca rose over the wind and the thrum of the tires. Father John guessed he’d come about two miles from town. He’d grown accustomed to judging the distances by the landmarks: the streams and bluffs, the shadows, the blue intensity of the mountains in the distance, the same way the Arapahos had once navigated the vastness of the plains.
The Gazette had said that Rodney Pearson lived two miles outside of Riverton. The house, cabin, trailer—whatever it was that Pearson had called home—should be coming up. Father John let up on the accelerator and scanned both sides of the road. No sign of any dwelling.
He’d gone another half-mile, when he spotted the trailer almost lost in the grove of cottonwoods on the right. He turned into the driveway and stopped behind a pickup truck with cardboard cartons stacked in the bed. The door to the trailer stood open. Inside, it looked as if everything had been cleared out.
By the time he snapped off the tape player and got out, Mo Pearson was standing in the doorway, her light hair held back with a scarf that fluttered in her face.
“What d’ya want?” she called, pushing away the scarf.
“I’d like to talk to you, Mo,” he said, crossing the graveled yard.
“You found the Indians that killed Rodney?” She stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind her. There was a sense of futility about the place, as if, at any moment, the trailer might shift off the cement blocks and sink into the earth.
He said, “I think we both know your husband wasn’t killed by any Indians.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The woman’s hands were trembling. She jammed them into the front pockets of her blue jeans. “Those Indians out on the well were all the time giving Rodney shit . . .”
Father John cut in. “So you told me. You forgot to tell me about Rodney’s gambling.”
She flinched. The wind whined around the side of the trailer and whipped the scarf across her face.
“How much did he lose?”
Mo Pearson brushed the scarf back and sank down alongside the door, a slow folding together of her legs and arms and shoulders. Father John reached out to steady her as she dropped onto the step. Her breath was coming in quick, hard gasps.
“So Rodney left some cash at the tables,” she said after a moment. “S
o what?”
Father John crouched down beside her. The shadows of the cottonwoods flitted across the woman’s face. “Did Rodney lose the trailer? Is that why you’re moving?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” She glared at him. “You come around here like you got everything all figured out, and you don’t know shit.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
The woman looked away. He could see the moisture glistening in her eyes. “Yeah, Rodney lost the trailer. And the two acres we scraped and saved to buy so we could build ourselves a real nice house someday and live like decent people with kids and a couple horses, instead of white trash drinking and fighting all the time. We was gonna change all that.” She was crying now, the tears running down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them away.
“I’m sorry.” He gave her a moment, then he said, “Tell me about the loan sharks, Mo.”
The woman slid her eyes toward him and started laughing. Laughing and crying at the same time. Finally, she said, “I guess I underestimated you, Father O’Malley.”
“How did Rodney get involved with them?”
He could see the argument playing out in her eyes. A couple of seconds passed before she said, “They come up to him in the casino parking lot after he lost his paycheck. Lost two or three paychecks, for all I know. You need some cash? they said. Goddamn fool, Rodney. Always gonna make the big pot. Win so damn much money, we was gonna be floating in it. So he borrowed a couple thousand off ’em, like they was his best friends. Pretty soon, they started calling here. Called all night long. Gotta have payment, Rodney, they said. Don’t wanna have to crush your fingers, Rodney.”
The woman squeezed her eyes shut. “They said, we can fix it so you won’t be good for nobody, Rodney, especially not your wife, you understand? So he sold his truck and give ’em the money. That kept ’em happy for about a week. Then he sold the acres with the trailer, but they said he owed more. All a sudden, he owes ’em nine thousand, and there’s no way . . .”
Mo Pearson tipped her head back into the door and sobbed out loud a moment. Finally, she said, “They shot him like a dog out at Double Dives. They give me a week to come up with the nine thousand. I ain’t never seen that much money. They said they could make an arrangement, that’s what they called it. They said they got places where I can work it off.”
“Who are they?”
“How do I know?” She rolled her head against the door. “Voices on the phone. I don’t wanna die.”
“They threatened to kill you?”
She let out a shout of laughter. “They know that I know they shot Rodney. All I gotta do is tell the fed how Rodney borrowed money off guys in the casino parking lot, and they’re gonna do me like they did him.”
“So you tried to convince Rodney’s killers that you didn’t know the truth. You told Agent Gianelli that Arapahos on the drilling site had shot your husband. You told his friends, and you gave me the same story.” Father John tried to swallow back his impatience. There was no logic to it, no sense, except . . .
The woman was scared to death. You could never account for what people might do when they were scared.
“I gotta get out of here.” Mo Pearson started rising along the door.
“Listen, Mo.” Father John got to his feet beside her. “You have to tell the fed about the loan sharks.”
She stared at him out of eyes wide with disbelief. “You crazy?”
“He can protect you.”
“How’s he gonna protect me? Nobody knows who those guys are ’til they come at you out of the dark.”
“They’ll find you, Mo. The fed’s your only chance.”
For the first time, she raised her hands and wiped away the moisture on her cheeks. Then she glared at him. “What do you know about it? I’ll just bet you come from a fancy home. Nice mamma and daddy that didn’t knock you around. Nice fancy school and a big education, but you don’t know shit about me and Rodney and where we come from. We come from dirt, Father O’Malley. The fed might come runnin’ to protect your kind, but me and Rodney? He don’t see us. He don’t know we exist, ’cause we’re nobody. Well, Rodney’s dead, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna end up the same way. I gotta take care of myself. That’s the way it is where me and Rodney come from. So back off. It ain’t your business.”
She kept her eyes on his a moment, then ducked past and walked around the front of the brown pickup. There was fury and determination in the way she opened the door and threw herself inside, as if she dared him to stop her.
He watched the back end of the pickup bounce over the ruts as she drove down the driveway. She turned left, tires squealing, a gray plume of exhaust shooting out of the tailpipe. The exhaust still hung over the road after the pickup had rounded the bend out of sight.
FATHER JOHN PRESSED the cell phone hard against his ear with one hand and guided the pickup back along Two-Valley Road. There was a faint crackle of static. He’d already lost the connection three times. And then the answering machine came on. “You’ve reached the local offices of the FBI . . .”
He hit the end button. Mo Pearson could be on the highway—heading who knew where?—before he got ahold of Gianelli. Wyoming was a big state with vast, open spaces and networks of dirt roads that dumped into dried streams and cottonwood groves and meandered over mountains. The woman could get lost, if that’s what she wanted. Except that—he felt chilled with the certainty—whoever had killed her husband would find her.
Father John guided the pickup through a curve and punched in the number of the BIA police. When the operator answered, he told her about Mo Pearson, a woman in a brown truck, trying to outrun her husband’s killers. “Somebody has to stop her. BIA, state patrol, sheriff. Agent Gianelli’s going to want to talk to her.”
“Take it easy, Father,” the woman said. “We’ll notify the other departments. Looks like we got another homicide on the rez. Some kids found another body out at Double Dives. Chief Banner and Agent Gianelli are out there now.”
26
THE ASSORTMENT OF police vehicles in the cottonwoods at the river looked like refuge tossed about in a flood. Father John drove down the steep dirt road off the bluff and stopped behind Gianelli’s white Blazer. About fifty feet away, wedged between a couple of thick trees, was a brown truck. Someone was slumped over the steering wheel.
Father John lifted himself out of the pickup. The lapping sounds of the river mingled with the subdued voices of the officers milling about and the name, Dennis Light Stone, playing like a drumroll in his head. Missing five days, and now this . . .
“Who is it?” Father John asked Gianelli who was coming toward him. He could feel his muscles tense, waiting for the reply.
“Looks like Captain Jack Monroe put a bullet through his right temple.”
“What?” Father John walked past the agent toward the truck, trying to absorb the reality. In his mind was the image of Captain Jack Monroe, square-shouldered behind his desk, a commander planning the next battle in the mission to close down the casino.
“You ever meet the man?” Gianelli fell into step alongside him.
“He arranged for me to pay him a visit out at his headquarters yesterday.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“Check your answering service, Ted.”
Gianelli stopped behind the truck. “What else do you have to tell me?”
“Let me say a few prayers first.”
The photographer was leaning into the cab, sending white flashes of light over the body. When he stepped back, Father John moved in close. Monroe’s chin rested against the far side of the steering wheel, his eyes wide and fixed on something beyond the windshield, mouth opened as if he’d died in the midst of a scream. His right hand flopped a couple inches from the black revolver on the passenger seat.
Father John reached through the opened window and made the sign of the cross over the body, praying silently. May God have mercy on your soul. Forgive you your sins. Take yo
u to everlasting life. The old prayers that usually brought his own soul a moment of comfort, but now he felt only a jarring sense of unreality, as if he’d wandered into a world of chaos where there was no logic, no patterns that made sense.
When he’d finished the prayers, he nodded across the truck toward the photographer and two police officers, then walked back to the fed. “Monroe wasn’t the type to commit suicide,” he said. “He had a mission, something he believed in . . .”
“Mission ended this morning,” Gianelli cut in. “The tribal judge issued a restraining order that prohibits Monroe and anybody working for him from trespassing on casino property. The man was also looking at a charge of conspiracy to commit assault. He was losing control, John. Maybe he snapped. People can snap, you know, things stop going their way.”
Blue-uniformed officers were moving through the trees, pushing aside the brush, checking the ground. The photographer kept the camera pressed to one eye; white lights flashed through the shadows. A couple of plainclothes men from the coroner’s office, Father John guessed—were spreading a gray plastic body bag on the ground.
Maybe Gianelli was right, Father John thought. Maybe Monroe had given up.
He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t reconcile the image of Captain Jack Monroe with the idea of the man holding a gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
Father John looked back at the agent. “There’s something else,” he said, and he told him about Rodney Pearson and the loan sharks.
“Loan sharks!” Gianelli stood with both hands jammed into the pockets of his tan slacks, the fronts of his blue blazer pulled back. He squinted into the sun. “Mo Pearson told me they sold their property so they could move out of the area. Said Rodney wanted to put as much distance between himself and the Indians as possible.”
“She’s scared, Ted. She’s been covering up the truth, hoping whoever killed her husband would think she didn’t know what was going on. She packed up her truck and drove off about an hour ago.”
Killing Raven (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 18