Suddenly she looked around. All eyes, startled and despairing at the same time. “Go away!” she screamed.
“Lela, wait!” But she was running full-out now, head down, arms pumping. Running with an awkwardness, feet flipping sideways. He could see the white soles of her sneakers. He dodged around a clump of willows and came out in front of her. She stopped, then threw out both hands to hold him off. She was tossing her head between the river and the trees, like a wild animal groping for the way out of the trap.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I want to help you.”
“He’s gonna make me go with him. He gave me a lot of b.s. about Monroe getting shot, so I’d get scared and come back to him, but I don’t wanna be with him anymore.” She gave him a look filled with misery, then hunched her shoulders and started to dart past.
“Tommy’s not leaving the rez. The FBI agent’s on the way here now to talk to him, and the police have a warrant for his arrest.” The man was lucky, he was thinking. He’d be safer in custody.
The girl blinked up at him, trying to decide if he was telling the truth. “Tommy’s not gonna talk to the fed,” she said finally.
“You saw what happened at the casino parking lot, didn’t you? You heard Dennis Light Stone threaten Tommy and the rangers.”
The girl shook her head and looked away.
“Captain Jack was shot this afternoon at Double Dives. He’s dead, Lela. Light Stone has to be stopped before he kills anybody else, and you and Tommy have to tell the fed everything you know.”
She was crying now, holding on to her arms and rocking back and forth. Tears flooded out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks. “I gotta get away from Tommy.” Her voice sounded like a little girl’s.
“Where will you go?”
“Aunt Mary’s got a girlfriend in Casper that Tommy don’t know about. Maybe I can stay there awhile, ’til Tommy forgets me and gets himself a new girlfriend.”
That was good, Father John was thinking. Even better, Dennis Light Stone wouldn’t know about Casper. “Will you call Gianelli’s office and let him know where you’re staying? You’re going to have to talk to him, you know.”
She didn’t move. Finally she gave a little nod and started forward, her palms over her cheeks, wiping away the wetness. “You won’t tell Tommy where I’m going?”
“I won’t tell Tommy,” he said, stepping aside. “Go on.”
The girl hesitated, then plunged forward and broke into a run—the same, awkward, feet-splayed run. She seemed so small and helpless and young, he thought. Dear God, what was she? Fifteen?
As he retraced his route through the trees, Father John spotted Gianelli lifting himself out of the white Blazer parked next to Tommy’s pickup. The other priest stood in the doorway, one hand propped against the jamb, a human bulwark to discourage any idea Tommy might have about bolting.
The agent slammed the door, walked to the rear and waited, the fronts of his blue sport coat blowing back in the wind.
“Girlfriend here, too?” he said when Father John was within earshot.
“She ran off.” Well, that was the truth, Father John thought. Not all of the truth, but the most important part. “She’ll get in touch with you, Ted.”
“Sure she will.” The agent lifted his eyes to the sky. “You let her leave here, and now I’m going to have to spend valuable time finding her.”
“You’ve got Tommy.” Father John nodded toward the black head at the kitchen window. “He’s the one who saw Dennis Light Stone and another man take Monroe this morning. The men work for Stan Lexson. They killed Pearson, Ted.”
The agent seemed to be filing this among the other facts floating in his head. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “A couple other agents are coming over from Casper. This is just the beginning.” He jerked a fist toward the guest house. “One witness, and not the most credible witness in the world, against Light Stone. Doesn’t matter what Willard says, you can bet Light Stone’s going to have a very persuasive alibi for today, backed up by Stan Lexson himself. Even if we get an indictment against Light Stone, it’s going to be difficult to connect Pearson’s and Monroe’s deaths to Lexson, not without hard evidence. Guys like that know how to cushion themselves. It’s the guys that work for them who take the fall.”
“Talk to Vicky,” Father John said. “She’s been trying to find evidence that Matt Kingdom has control of jobs at the casino. If the man’s been paid off, then he probably knows what’s going on.”
“That must be why she called.” Gianelli looked away a moment. “Left a message couple hours ago that she’d be in her office and wanted to talk to me. But when I got there, her Cherokee was out in front, but she was gone.”
“Gone?” It wasn’t like Vicky to make an appointment and leave.
“Front door was locked, like she left for the day. Got the answering machine when I called her apartment.” The agent hesitated. “She called back . . .”
“When? When did she call back?”
“Thirty minutes ago. Just before you called. We were cut off.”
Father John started to ask where the call had come from, but before he could say anything, the agent said, “It was an unlisted number. I figure she’d gotten called away on something else and she’d get back to me.”
“Something’s happened to her.” Father John blurted out the words. He was barely aware of the other priest stepping off the stoop and coming toward the Blazer, head cocked toward them.
“Take it easy,” the agent said, but Father John could see in the set of the man’s jaw that he wasn’t taking it easy. There’d been one death today—most likely a homicide—and another homicide five days ago, both connected to the casino, and Vicky could have the evidence to put the casino manager out of business. Maybe into prison.
“I’ll have the Lander PD do a safety check at her office and apartment,” Gianelli went on. “What about relatives? Friends? Anybody likely to have come and picked her up, headed out for dinner? You know who to call, don’t you?”
Vicky’s Aunt Rose, Father John was thinking. Will and Josephine Standing Bear. A daughter in Los Angeles, a son in Denver. An ex-husband, dead. She was so alone. Except that now, there was Adam Lone Eagle. Vicky could have gone out with Adam Lone Eagle.
He wanted to believe it was true. Why couldn’t he believe?
“She’s okay, John,” Gianelli said, as if he read his mind. “Somebody probably called needing a lawyer, and she had to leave the office. Could be at the Fremont County Jail right now, talking to somebody arrested on a disturbance charge or DUI. Try not to worry about her.”
He knows, Father John was thinking. The fed had worked with him and Vicky on dozens of cases; how could the man not know how he felt about Vicky? And now Father George knew.
He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that she was safe.
“Call me when you hear from her.” The agent stepped past the other priest and went into the house.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Father George said as they walked down the alley. Gravel skittered about their boots. Somewhere out on the plains around the mission, a dog was barking.
Father John didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to discuss Vicky with his assistant. He had no intention of defending the way he felt about her; it was as it was. He’d come to accept his feelings, the reality of them. At times, they seemed the most real thing in the world. He’d even come to think of them as a gift and a blessing. So unlike the longing and the emptiness that still came over him at unexpected moments, but something plentiful and generous. How could loving someone else not be a blessing? He’d kept his vows—that had been the hard part—and she had made the only decision she could make. But the feelings remained; they were real.
“Looks like Leonard’s back,” Father George said as they came around the corner of the church. The brown truck was nosed into the curb in front of the residence, a rifle locked across the back window. Next to
the truck was a police cruiser, an officer pulling himself out of the front seat.
“Found Leonard Bizzel,” the officer said, walking toward them. “Man’s sober, all right.”
“Leonard doesn’t drink,” Father John said.
“Says some guys at the casino are trying to kill his wife.”
“The same men who killed Captain Jack Monroe this afternoon.” Father John gestured with his head in the direction of the guest house. “Gianelli’s talking to a witness now. Tommy Willard.”
“Willard’s here? We been looking for him. Got a warrant for his arrest for assaulting Vicky Holden in the casino parking lot. Over in the guest house, you say?” The officer’s eyes narrowed into slits, as if the situation had suddenly veered onto a familiar path that he was anxious to take. “Bizzel’s got himself calmed down. All right if he stays here for a while?”
Father John nodded. He waited until the police car had turned around Circle Drive and nosed into the alley before he started up the sidewalk to the house, barely aware of Father George lumbering behind him and the in-and-out noise of the man’s breathing, his own thoughts on Vicky. She’d driven out of the mission yesterday morning, determined to learn whether Matt Kingdom was handing out casino jobs. And this afternoon, she’d called Gianelli. Which meant she’d found something.
Father John could almost feel the danger, like the darkness of a storm moving toward her.
He turned around and started back down the sidewalk, ignoring the startled look in the other priest’s eyes. “I’m going out for a while,” he said over his shoulder.
31
HOW STRANGE, HE thought, that the evening could be so beautiful, filled with red and violet light that lingered over the deep blue mountains at the edge of Lander and the sounds of children riding bikes down the sidewalks, running and shouting in the yards. Everything normal and safe, and people capable of taking men to Double Dives and shooting them in the head, people capable of hurting Vicky—people like that were a million miles away.
Except that Stan Lexson and Dennis Light Stone and the other killers were close by.
Father John drove through the residential neighborhood west of Main Street. From a half block away, he spotted Vicky’s Cherokee parked in front of the bungalow that was her office. He was struck by the irony: On a normal day, the Cherokee would be a sign that she was there. But this evening, he knew it could be a sign that she hadn’t yet returned.
He walked up the sidewalk, past the sign with Vicky Holden, Attorney at Law, shimmering in the light, and tried the front door. Locked. He knocked hard, but there was no sound except for that of kids playing down the street and a car backfiring somewhere. He peered through the sliver of glass next to the cardboard in the window frame. There was no one in the reception room or in the office beyond the opened French doors. She wasn’t at her desk.
He knocked again, waited a moment, then he stepped off the porch and made his way around the side of the house and pounded on the back door. Still no answer. He tried the knob. To his surprise, it turned in his hand, and he stepped inside, standing on a landing below six stairs leading up to the kitchen. A sense of wrongness gripped him like an icy hand that he couldn’t shake off. Vicky wouldn’t have walked away and left the back door unlocked.
He took the stairs two at a time, calling out her name. The kitchen was deserted. Her office, the reception room, the two bedrooms turned into storage rooms and the bathroom on the side of the house—all deserted. He walked back into her office and sat down at her desk. The top was nearly clear, except for the phone, the caller ID machine, and a stack of papers at the edge with a file folder on top, as if she’d finished her work and left for the day.
He opened the folder and glanced through the copies of her handwritten notes; lists of casino managers connected to Matt Kingdom; lists of companies from which the casino bought supplies and equipment. Sister companies, Vicky had written at the top of the sheet, owned by the same company that owned Lodestar Enterprises.
There was more: three sheets of notes on conversations with Alan Peterson in the Indian Gaming Commission that detailed the ways in which a casino management company might cheat an Indian tribe, and pages of personnel records.
This was the information Vicky intended to give to Gianelli, the reason she’d called the fed. Father John knew now with a certainty as real as the wood desk he was leaning into that she wouldn’t have left before the agent arrived. Unless, someone had forced her.
He reached over and started pushing the button on the caller ID. Names flashed behind the narrow glass: Unidentified, three times, Federal Bureau of Investigation, twice. No other calls this afternoon.
He picked up the receiver, dialed her apartment and listened to the sound of a phone ringing into the void, the receiver cold and inert. When her recorded voice answered, he hit the disconnect button. He was about to call Gianelli when the phone rang in his hand. He pushed the on button and waited.
“Vicky?” It was a man’s voice, a note of panic sounding below the surface.
“Who is this?”
“Adam Lone Eagle. Let me talk to Vicky.”
“She isn’t in.”
“Where is she, and who are you?”
“Father O’Malley.”
The unidentified calls were from Adam Lone Eagle, Father John realized. The Lakota who’d brought Vicky into the casino. Why? To allay suspicions, discredit Captain Jack Monroe, and camouflage the truth? Which side was the man on?
There was a half beat before Lone Eagle said, “What’s going on? I’ve been trying to reach her all afternoon.”
Father John closed the folder and pushed it aside.
And then he saw it, stuck to the edge of the desk blotter, a yellow Post-It with one word scrawled on top: Casino.
“Vicky’s at the casino,” he said, his voice hard with certainty.
“She hasn’t been here all day.”
“Ask your boss where she is.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Ask your boss.”
Father John pushed the disconnect button and dialed Gianelli’s office. Another answering machine, and after the beep, he told the fed what he’d found at Vicky’s office: the unlocked back door, the Cherokee, the file folder with the evidence, a Post-It note that said casino. “She left us a message,” he said. “They’ve taken her to the casino.”
He could imagine the fed’s response: Whoa, John. You saying the guys that killed Monroe came for Vicky? Why would they take her to the casino?
He heard himself hurrying on, the logical sequence spilling out. “Lexson wants to know how much she knows and whether she’s told anybody. When he gets the information, he’ll have his goons kill her. I’m going after her.”
32
THROUGH THE DARKNESS came a throb of pain. Swimming upward toward consciousness, Vicky struggled to open her eyes. The room swirled around—window, draperies, dresser, chair; her head was pounding. She could still see the white towel pressing down on her face. The sticky, anesthetic smell clung to her nose and mouth, or was it a memory of the smell? How long had she been unconscious?
She tried lying very still, waiting for each new stab of pain until, finally, the pain was no more than a dull throb. Scarcely moving, she surveyed her surroundings. She was lying on top of a satiny bedspread in the middle of a large bed in a large room that had the plastic, superficial look of a hotel room. The red-tinged light of early evening floated past the filmy curtains at the window. Heavy draperies were folded at either side. Across the room, a small desk and a two-door armoire that probably concealed a television. On the table to the left was a remote control next to a clock with lighted red numbers: 8:08. On the other table, a phone.
Vicky managed to prop herself upright against the headboard, a slow, deliberate motion, not wanting to set the pain loose again in her head. She picked up the receiver. There was no dial tone. Her fingers danced at random over the buttons. Nothing.
She tossed the receiv
er across the bed and swallowed back the hysterical laughter erupting in her throat. How could she have imagined that Lexson would put her in a hotel room with a working phone? Which meant—she stared across the room at the door—she was locked in. She edged toward the bed and swung her legs over the sides. Her shoes thudded against the carpet. She still had her shoes; that was good, but her bag? Where was her bag? She had a cell phone in her bag, a fingernail file, a tiny flashlight—any number of things that might help.
Then she remembered: She’d dropped it onto the floor in Lexson’s office and run out without it.
She lifted herself off the bed and, trailing one hand along the edge, almost afraid to step out on her own, moved toward the foot. So far, so good. The dizziness had gone, and the aching was tolerable. Cool air washed over her. She pushed off and walked to the door. The knob stayed frozen in her hand, glued in place. Pressing her face against the smooth wood, she peered through the peephole. The corridor stretched away to either side, empty and silent, a row of doors on the opposite wall. To the right, almost out of sight, were the bronze doors of the elevator.
She sank against the wall. Lexson had her locked in one of the hotel rooms when he could have had her taken someplace and shot. Why hadn’t he? Because he still wasn’t certain how much she’d learned and—most important—he didn’t know who she’d told. It was only a matter of time before he came to the hotel room, and he would bring Light Stone and Barrenger and Felix with him.
She had to get out of there.
She darted to the right and flung open the first door. The bathroom was on the other side—all white marble gleaming in the light from the round bulbs above the mirror. Everything was solid—the ceiling and walls and floor. No panels to kick open and try to crawl through.
She backed away and opened the second door. A narrow closet with wooden hangers dangling from a metal rod. She tried to push the rod out of its brackets with some crazy notion of using it as a tool to break down the door, but she couldn’t budge the rod. The tears started coming, hot and salty on her cheeks, and she tried to blink them away. The last thing she needed was to break down and cry.
Killing Raven (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 21