I switched on my hopelessly inadequate laser light and played it around the inside of the garage. Since I had little to store in the cavernous space, it didn’t take more than a few seconds to see it was untouched and no one was in sight. I slithered over to the stairway and crept up the stairs to my apartment, hating the eerie silence. Staring at the door, bathed in only the thin beam from my keychain light, I finally gathered the courage to reach for the doorknob and give it a turn. The door is still locked. Breathing an audible sign of relief, I inserted my key into the lock, pushed the door open and reached inside to flick on the light switch. Light flooded the room with daylight luminosity. I tiptoed cautiously throughout the apartment, searching behind furniture, under my bed, and in every closet. From what I could tell, no one had entered the premises.
Returning to the kitchen door to lock it, I stumbled into the living room and flopped onto the couch. My once thoroughly fatigued mind was pumped with a new supply of adrenaline and it was difficult to focus. Someone had definitely broken into my outside door to gain entrance to the carriage house. Why? And why hadn’t this person used the same ploy to gain entrance to my apartment? Nothing seemed out of place.
Minutes passed as I went over every possible scenario. Then the answer hit me. It’s not my apartment. It’s my darkroom. Someone wants what I have. But what? Photographs? Photos that may absolve me from complicity and pinpoint the real murderer? Os course! Photographs of Rendezvous events! I leaped off the couch and dashed to the kitchen, purposely making a lot of noise. I stomped from one end of the room to the other and finally thrashed through one of the drawers. If the intruder were still hiding downstairs, I wanted to give him the opportunity to make his getaway through the broken garage door.
Armed with a more powerful flashlight, I knew I couldn’t delay any longer. I started the long descent down the same stairway to my darkroom, located on the far side of the garage. I whistled and sang “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” hoping my off-pitch rendition would scare away any boogiemen. My hunch was right. The darkroom was in shambles. I groaned aloud. As my eyes roamed over the mess, I realized nothing was salvageable. Chemical powders had been pulled off the shelf and sprinkled over mountains of photo paper strewn across the floor. Drawers had been pulled out of my filing cabinet and their contents dumped. Mixed into the heap, I saw scissors, tongs, and other tools. When I nearly stepped on an X-acto knife, I gave up and returned to my living quarters. There was nothing I could do now that couldn’t wait for morning.
Minutes later, with a cold beer in hand, I stewed over the latest tragic event in my life. At least one person knows I’m innocent. That’s a given. I have to assume that person wants to ensure anonymity. Who? WHO? And the bigger question . . . was the break-in successful? Am I in danger?
Too frazzled to think straight, I triple-locked my apartment door, then called and left a message for Marty, asking that he repair the garage door and get electrical service restored to the downstairs as soon as possible. I made no mention of my destroyed darkroom.
As I dressed for bed, I peered into the bathroom mirror and saw my face of despair. Within one week my whole life had changed. I was now both a pursuer and the pursued.
Chapter 11
Sunday
After a fitful night of sleep, I rolled out of bed, walked zombie-like through my morning routine, dressed in a pair of well-worn jeans and a tank top, and then forced myself to go back downstairs. For the next couple hours, I sorted through the rubble in my darkroom and carried one boxful of ruined photos at a time into the garage. Several of my favorite enlarged Indian photos, which I had positioned on an easel, were destroyed beyond repair. Although I’d scanned the negatives into my computer, it would take time to reprint them.
As the morning wore on and the stacks in the garage grew higher, my frustration increased. I couldn’t account for a single missing photo. I stepped gingerly around the darkroom and, unexpectedly, caught sight of an envelope that was pasted to the floor. I recognized it as one I had picked up from Sanders’ office a couple days earlier. It was empty. All of the Rendezvous photos had been removed. Apparently, when the intruder opened the second drawer and found the photos he wanted, he had left the rest of the drawers intact. My one consolation was that, although the intruder would know whether or not he had been photographed, I could still get copies. Deputy Shaw had the originals in his office.
Finally giving up any notion that I could handle this new situation on my own, I called my attorney. “You can’t withhold this information, Cassandra,” he said. “After you inform Shaw of the break-in, I’ll go to his office and get new copies of all the photos for you.”
“I’ll trust your judgment, Lawton,” I said, heaving an exaggerated sigh. “You know I can’t stand the guy, but I’ll call Shaw right now. If he wants to meet with me, I need you to run interference for me. Will you be available?”
“It’s Sunday, Cass. I doubt he’ll want to see you until Monday morning. Let me know, though. I’m here to see you through this ordeal.”
Fortunately, I was able to inform Shaw of the break-in and the missing Rendezvous photographs through his voice mail. I added that Sanders would be visiting him on Monday to make a new set for me, to replace the stolen ones. I didn’t bother to suggest that this might prove I wasn’t his murderer.
Later, with a stale cup of coffee, I collapsed on the sofa. I felt drained, yet strangely wired at the same time. I had a starting point for my own investigation. As soon as Sanders brought me a new copy of the photographs, I would spend hours poring over every detail. I would see who was at every event. As I was mulling over my plan, the doorbell chimed. “Who’s there?” I called down the stairs, one hand clutching my throat as I swallowed my fear. It was silly, of course. If my nighttime intruder was both Eric and Randy’s murderer, he wouldn’t ring my doorbell in broad daylight. Or would he?
“It’s me. Jack.”
Dashing down the stairs, I pulled open the door and stared at him, thankful to see a friend.
He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another, seemingly unsure of his reception. “I was in the area, so I decided to stop by,” he said. “I didn’t like the way our last conversation ended.”
I motioned him inside and we climbed the stairs to the living room. “Make yourself comfortable,” I said, examining him from the sides of my eyes. I perched on the edge of a club chair facing him, where he sat stiffly on the couch.
He rubbed his hands nervously over his jeans-clad knees. “I’m on your side, Cass. I’m not your enemy. You can trust me.”
After studying his face, I rose to stand at the window. The leaves on the old maple tree that obstructed my view of Marty’s house fluttered in the breeze. “Right now, I’m taking everything at face value, Jack,” I said. “And if something smells a little ‘off,’ it goes into the ‘suspicious’ file I’m carrying around in my head.” I turned to see his reaction to my not-so-friendly words.
He nodded. “That’s fair. I’d probably feel the same way. I just hope you can file away that I’m your friend and available to help you, if I can.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you.” I absently straightened magazines on the coffee table.
“Good.” He scanned my apartment. “Nice place.” He rose from the couch and pointed toward the Indian pictures hanging on the fireplace wall. “Very nice. Your work, I’m sure. I can see why you like living here . . . but you don’t have the best security. The downstairs door doesn’t have a lock on it.”
I managed a smile. “Well, at least the doorbell is working. Which means Marty’s got the electricity back on.”
“Electricity?” He scowled. “Shouldn’t that be a given?”
When I told Jack about the break-in, his eyes lit up with the possibility of a “law-enforcement issue” to pursue. “Did they take all the photos of the Rendezvous?”
“They took all the color prints.”
“A damn shame. You spent hours on that project. Have you got any more?”<
br />
“I have a compact disc of photos the sheriff returned to me. They’re in my computer.” I nodded toward my office.
“Shows that the intruder wasn’t tuned into contemporary times,” he said, shaking his head. “Bet he thought he had cleaned you out.”
I straightened a pillow on the couch and moved across the room. “I should take a look at the ones in the computer right now. They might give me a clue as to what he was looking for.”
“I’ll help, if you want. Two sets of eyes are better than one.”
“Sure, I’d appreciate the company. I’m still a little on edge.” I led the way to my office. Once settled in front of my notebook, I opened the file that included the photos.
“Holy shit! There must be hundreds of pictures in your computer!” Jack said. “This is not a ten-minute job.”
I laughed. “It’s easy to take a ton of digital photos when you don’t have to think about film costs.” I started up the slide show, which displayed each individual photo full screen.
“What specific things are we looking for?” Jack pulled his chair closer to the table.
“Don’t have a clue,” I said. “But for openers, I’d say shots of anyone we know. Eventually, I can organize them by subject, but not today.”
We viewed photos of people and events taken from several angles and various distances— close-ups, long shots, some with backgrounds out of focus, others in clear context. “Some nice shots of my landlord,” I said, displaying the photos of Marty. “Here he is, in the ’hawk-throwing contest.”
I leaned closer to the screen. It was hard to see Marty’s features, because he wore a wide-brimmed hat, pulled low over his eyes. The rest of his face was shadowed by his bushy beard. I had caught him in one moment of short-lived jubilation when the ’hawk landed where he wanted. He had pulled off his hat and was waving it in the air, while he kicked out one of his boot-clad feet. I had zoomed in to get a close-up, but he turned just as I clicked the shutter. I regretted I hadn’t photographed him standing on the sidelines after the competition. And, unfortunately, I had taken no pictures of him before the contest either.
In another photo, Willis Lansing was drinking coffee at a vendor booth in the early morning light. He was dressed in the costume of a trader—white cotton shirt tucked into pants held up by red suspenders. His pant legs were tucked into leather boots. He carried his beaver hat under his arm, as he used one hand to wipe away perspiration from his brow.
I especially liked some of the people shots and knew that Photoshop magic would turn them from okay shots into very good ones. “Isn’t that Eric behind the Indian woman doing the weaving? Yes, it is! I’d recognize him anywhere.” I marked the photo. “And, there’s Randy, over by the horse corral.” I felt my shoulders droop. “Both dead,” I murmured. “Both murdered in the same week. I can’t stop asking myself why.” The slide show had run its course. I turned to face Jack. His eyes were glazed over and he looked ready for la-la land. “See anything suspicious?”
“Not a thing. It looks like a big party to me. Everyone’s having a good time. It’s hard to believe a murder was being committed nearby at the same time some of these pictures were taken. A murderer is loose in our town. A murderer who was probably in your house last night.”
Chapter 12
Monday—Week Two
I was up at the crack of dawn, after a night of tossing and turning and sitting up to hear sounds that weren’t there. Clearly, my Saturday night visitor had me spooked. I had relived every hour of every day since finding Eric’s body in the sweating lodge. Nothing special stood out, except something Deputy Shaw had said in his last questioning session. He had asked me how well I knew Frank Kyopa, the head of the Prairie River Band. Although I had testified in his favor, by labeling the photograph Eric had taken of him entering a land developer’s building in Chicago as a fake, I hadn’t mentioned it. I had passed off my knowing him only as a casual business contact. I hadn’t been convincing. My dancing around the mulberry bush had kept me firmly on Shaw’s suspect list, especially since the episode I had failed to mention on my own was the one that ended Eric’s career at the Star-Tribune. But why was Shaw so interested in connecting me to Kyopa? Certainly he didn’t think Frank and I were in cahoots and out to get Eric.
Only one way to find out. Ask the man himself. I dialed Frank’s office and reached his assistant, who told me Frank was a busy man. I cut to the chase. “This is Cassandra Cassidy. A deputy sheriff is linking me to Frank in the matter of Eric Hartfield’s murder. It is critically important that I be able to talk with him about it. This morning, if possible.”
Thirty seconds later, I was given my appointment. Frank would see me as soon as I could get to his office. It was in northern Clayton County, not far from where the Rendezvous took place. I was buckling the seatbelt in my Jeep by 8 a.m., to allow myself plenty of time in case I got lost.
Frank Kyopa made a memorable impression. I’d photographed him in his reservation office, after he’d been elected president for his second term. In one picture, he was seated in a high-backed leather desk chair, his forearms resting on the massive mahogany desk. Dressed in a custom-tailored gray suit like the CEO he was—a man who steered the sizable fortunes of the tribe’s casino—he gazed confidently at the camera lens. The pinstripes in no way disguised his muscular physique. In my favorite photo of him, he was standing near the window in three-quarter profile, with the outside light reflecting on his sharply chiseled face, brown as a walnut. The light bounced off his black hair, shot with gray, and delineated the dozens of facial fissures formed from a lifetime of smoking Camels.
By the time I arrived in Colton Mills, Frank had already served as tribal chairman for four years. He was respected by all factions . . . Indian, business, and government alike. But his path to tribal respectability hadn’t always been pretty. I’d learned that much from trying to winnow fact from fiction in Eric’s news stories. A decade ago, the tribe was wallowing in debt, a not uncommon condition for reservations before casino gambling made some of them rich. Frank had left the rez after high school graduation and received a business degree, thanks to an athletic scholarship from the University of Minnesota. He worked for a couple of corporations to learn the ropes, then started a manufacturing business in the eighties. That company now employed several hundred employees. During all this time, he had remained connected to the reservation, returning for family events and to stay current with the rough-and-tumble political shenanigans that characterized the community. Trouble was, those who got the upper hand, politically speaking, used their positions to line their own pockets.
In 1990, Frank cut his ties to the company he had founded, pulled up stakes, and moved to the reservation. His return was not universally applauded, according to articles printed in the Minnesota Review. Entrenched tribal leaders resisted his “interference” and, sometimes, the going got rough. Articles also documented the political carnage and trail of victims, as Frank clawed his way through the ranks.
Eric hadn’t taken either side in his articles. He had mocked the entire state of affairs, calling tribal government a “Laurel and Hardy way to run a government.” He had painted Frank as an opportunist, no better than the leaders who had been feeding from the tribal trough for decades. He had scoffed at Native American sovereignty, feeling the entrenched system was bogus and most problems would be solved if the tribes were governed by the U.S. government and managed by “professional managers.”
Frank and I had become friends as we ran into each other at powwows where I photographed the events. He had bought several photos of urban Indians I’d taken in Minneapolis. Our friendship had culminated when he consulted me about Eric’s doctored photo a year ago.
Frank’s sense of power came through, as I shook hands with him now in his wood-paneled office. “Cassandra, good to see you again, in spite of the circumstances.” He motioned for me to be seated in the chair fronting his desk. Then he took his place in the high-backed leather desk chai
r. “My assistant told me Deputy Shaw has you on his list of murder suspects and I am, somehow, linked to you in some sort of subversion, I suppose. Tell me your version of the events.”
I filled him in on what I knew and included the details of my unpleasant encounter with Eric at the Rendezvous. He fiddled with a silver paperweight on his desk, thinking. “Does anybody know why Eric was in the sweat lodge in the first place?” he asked. “He must have been going there to meet somebody, don’t you think?”
“Beats me,” I said, shrugging. “And it’s as mysterious to me that Shaw is interested in exactly how friendly we are. What’s that all about?”
“I’m also on Shaw’s list of suspects.”
Stunned, I stammered out a response. “I-I . . . I don’t know what to say, Frank. Because of . . . your past history with Eric? Or . . . or that fake picture fiasco?” Their shared history was volatile, to say the least. I suddenly remembered a confrontation between the two that had taken place in March during a hearing about the proposed development at the reservation. Eric had been baiting Frank with questions.
“Why do you think the Indians have more right to this property than tax-paying American citizens do?” he had said to Frank, who was leading the meeting.
Frank had responded angrily. “You know damn well we may own a small portion of the land around the lake, Hartfield, but that is because the land was unfairly taken from us a century ago.” He had shaken his finger at Eric not two inches from his smirking face. “When we try to buy it back, asking prices go higher and higher. Now this development corporation comes in with its money and its plans to build houses for a few rich Americans. If it turns into houses for city people, they will bring their noisy, polluting jet skis and motorboats. They will clog the winter ice with their icehouses. It is our right to enjoy the same clean water, natural resources, and pristine environment as our ancestors enjoyed. And we don’t need a creep with the morality of a fencepost to come up here and tell us there’s a better use for that land than leaving it just like it is.”
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