Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  Rummage gave her a crooked smile. “Privileged information, as I’m sure you know. If the investors wanted their names public, they would have placed them on the articles of incorporation, which I’m sure you’ve already pulled.”

  “Why the five hundred acres owned by Denver Land?” Catherine pushed on. “There’s a lot of undeveloped land around the airport, valuable land that will only become more valuable. Eventually the area will be developed into hotels, restaurants, warehouses . . .” She threw out both hands with the endless possibilities of what the future might hold. “I’m curious as to why the company would want to sell so early.”

  Rummage was shaking his head. Amusement flooded his eyes. “Buy. Sell. Denver Land makes buy-sell decisions everyday. In this situation, the company’s sense of public responsibility determined the decision.”

  “I don’t understand,” Catherine said.

  Rummage leaned forward and flattened his hands on the desk. “Let me make it as clear as I can. Denver Land has operated since 1983. The company has always been a good citizen, and we are aware of our public responsibilities. After a hundred and fifty years, the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes deserve a fair settlement to legitimate land claims. I’m sure you agree. I’ve been following your stories.” He paused for the briefest moment, as if he expected her to thank him, then went on. “The company is proud to be part of the settlement. Our parcel of land near the airport is a perfect location for a casino. It will draw thousands”—he lifted his hands and spread his fingers—“of visitors and generate a flow of capital for the tribes. We believe this is a worthy venture, and we’re convinced the people of Colorado will also agree when they know the facts.”

  “So the company has no problem with selling to the government?”

  “We expect to trade the land.”

  “Trade?”

  Rummage sat back in his chair. He clasped his hands across his middle and began swiveling side to side. “The usual accommodation in agreements such as this. The federal government owns a lot of this country. National forests, BLM land. The tribes will receive title to five hundred acres of ancestral lands, and we’ll receive five hundred acres of BLM land in Colorado.”

  “Where?”

  Rummage pursed his lips together a moment, considering. “I’m afraid the exact location hasn’t been finalized.”

  “Pitkin County? Eagle County?” She was guessing, a stab in the dark. But if she was right, the Indian settlement could be a lucrative deal for Denver Land Company. The two mountain counties comprised some of the state’s most valuable land. Aspen was located in Pitkin County; Vail was in Eagle County.

  Rummage gave an exaggerated shrug.

  “So it’s possible.”

  “The federal government owns lands across the state, including Pitkin and Eagle counties.” He pushed away from the desk and stood up. “I’m afraid you’ve exceeded your five minutes. I’m expecting a client.”

  Catherine got to her feet. “Who initiated the proposal for a tribal land settlement that included a casino? Denver Land? Arcott Enterprises? The tribes?”

  A slow smile burned through his features. “Justice for the Arapahos and Cheyennes has been delayed too long, Ms. McLeod,” he said, sounding like a public relations flack. She could have written down the next statement before he’d mouthed the words: “All the parties agreed to the proposed settlement.”

  Catherine pushed on: “Whose idea was it, Mr. Rummage?”

  “You’ve interviewed Norman Whitehorse. I’m certain he told you it was the tribes’ idea. The company has joined the proposal as a public service.”

  “Are you working with Senator Russell?”

  “Enough, Ms. McLeod.” Rummage hauled himself around the desk, walked over to the door, and snapped it open. “I believe you have everything you need. The interview is over.”

  Catherine stepped across the room. A curious choice of words, she was thinking. Everything you need. Did he really believe that he could determine what she needed, that he was in control of the story? She stopped in front of him. “Shall I say that you refused to comment on whether Denver Land Company is working with Senator Russell?”

  Rummage drew in a long breath of exasperation. “Senator Russell is a great friend of the Indians,” he said. “Naturally all the parties interested in justice for the Arapahos and Cheyennes are working together for the settlement.”

  “What about Governor Lyle? He opposes the settlement. Does that mean he isn’t a friend of the Indians?”

  “Ms. McLeod, please.” Catherine felt the weight of Rummage’s hand on her shoulder, nudging her through the door. “You’ll have to take that up with the governor.”

  Catherine took a different route back toward the garage, operating on instinct. Walk on the other side of the street, two blocks out of the way to Sixteenth Street, hop on the shuttle and ride a short distance to the end of the line. It was good to vary her routine; she had to remember that. Erik couldn’t expect her to do anything or be anywhere. She couldn’t become reliable. She got off the shuttle into crowds milling around the corner of Colfax and Broadway. A bus pulled alongside the curb, doors wheezed open, and passengers shouldered their way to the sidewalk. A crowd waited to board. Traffic churned past, drivers downshifting and revving the engines. Then the bus started off, followed by a long exhilaration of exhaust that blended in to the cacophony of city noise.

  The light changed, traffic squealed to a halt, and she stepped into the stream of people crossing Colfax. The golden dome of the capitol shone in the sun. She could feel the heat of the pavement working through the soles of her shoes. The sun was hot on her arms and face, her blouse was damp with perspiration. She glanced about: the Hispanic woman pulling two young children along; the three men in dark business suits, intent on some conversation; another man in a lawyer suit, a cell pressed to his ear; several families in the tourist attire of shorts and tee shirts; a group of young women in flowing skirts and open-toed sandals. Across the street, on the lawn that swept down the hill in front of the capitol, knots of homeless lounging in the pockets of shade beneath the trees. There was no sign of him, no man with yellowish blond hair anywhere about.

  She headed for the red cart on the corner, with Hot Dogs painted in white letters on the side, and waited while a middle-aged black woman in a red apron handed out chips and soda and hot dogs to a group of teenagers. The heat from the grill radiated around the sidewalk. Catherine bought a hot dog wrapped in aluminum foil and a lukewarm can of Coke and started toward a wrought-iron bench in a slice of shade.

  Then she saw him.

  21

  Blond hair that looked dyed, too yellow to be natural, walking along Broadway. Tan shirt, khaki slacks, blending into the sidewalk. He had just left the library. Of course, that was it. He had assumed she would go back to the library to do more research. How long had he sat in the main corridor, watching patrons passing by, or hung around in the Western History Department? He would have posed as a patron, thumbing through who knew how many historical documents, keeping an eye on the entrance, studying every woman who walked in.

  He was on the other side of the street, less than a half block away, looking around, a hunter searching for his prey. He slowed down, studied the small group of women coming toward him, then sped up.

  Catherine swung about and started up Colfax, keeping a steady even pace. She dropped the can of Coke into her bag and tried to blend into the small crowd of tourists that had just disembarked from the bus next to the curb. Elderly looking, gray heads and thick middles, but they moved right along, determination in the way they propelled themselves up the slight incline toward the west door of the capitol. She walked next to a large, white-haired man; she was his wife. He would think she was one of the tourists!

  He was behind them somewhere, and he knew how to find her. She tried to think how he knew, flipping through images from the last two days as if they were a deck of cards. Keeping one image, discarding the next. She’d interacted with do
zens of people. Dozens had seen her disguise. Most didn’t count. The shuttle driver and the black woman at the red hot dog cart, the clerk at the police station, the bellman at the Brown Palace. They didn’t know who she used to be. But Newcomb knew, and Ramona at the secretary of state’s office. And the secretary in Arcott’s office would remember her, the way she’d tricked her into saying that Peter Arcott was at the Brown. Rummage’s secretary this morning, and Arcott and Rummage themselves. They could all describe her: short sandy-colored hair, plain looking with no makeup, wearing casual tan slacks and a cream-colored, nondescript blouse. No one would ever pick her out of a crowd.

  Except that yellow hair would know how to pick her out of a crowd, despite the cheap hairdo. He had known everything about her: where she worked and where she lived, phone number, e-mail address, how she walked Rex in the evenings, how she might turn to her ex-husband and try to hide at the Stern Ranch. Everything. He could recognize the way she walked and held her shoulders and tilted her head to one side, pretending to be part of a conversation that wasn’t taking place with the elderly man beside her.

  The tourists veered toward the capitol, and Catherine fell in beside a group of young women, secretaries on a late lunch break, giggling and teasing one another. Now she was one of them. She stayed with them, past the statue of the Civil War soldier. A woman with a black ponytail shook a cigarette out of a pack, then offered the pack to the others. They turned onto the grass and headed toward a wrought-iron bench. Catherine kept going.

  She waited for a break in the traffic on Fourteenth Avenue, then dashed across, feeling exposed, the lone duck in a shooting gallery. She headed downhill toward Broadway. Past the corner of the Colorado History Museum, she could see the garage across the plaza a block away. She had to reach the garage, get to the second floor, and drive off in the Taurus. There was some kind of construction going on at the corner—a new pipe being laid in the street—and a man in a yellow hat held up a stop sign. She bunched with the other pedestrians, waited for the sign to drop, and crossed Broadway, staying with a couple of women. She kept looking up Broadway where she’d spotted him, but he’d disappeared. He might have spotted her walking toward the capitol. He could be inside the capitol now; he could be anywhere.

  She turned left and hurried past the grassy area next to the library. Then she was walking along the front of the library, the afternoon sun bathing the stone façade and radiating from the sidewalk. She felt nauseated from the fear and heat and the emptiness in the pit of her stomach. The aluminum-wrapped hot dog felt clammy and mashed in her hand. She took a few diagonal steps across the sidewalk and dropped the hot dog into a trash can. And she saw him again.

  In the corner of her eye, retracing his steps down Broadway, and he had spotted her, too, because he picked up his pace. Half walking, half jogging, he was not even a block away, and he was coming toward her.

  Catherine ran for the library entrance and threw herself past the doors. There was always a guard at the desk just inside the door. Sometimes he was white with white hair and the bored expectation of retirement in his expression, and sometimes he was black with short, cropped hair and a friendly “hello,” and sometimes he was fat and out of shape, and sometimes he looked like a Bronco. He was always there! But he wasn’t there now. There was nothing but the worn-looking desk that had probably been moved out of some storeroom, and the vacant chair pushed sideways, as if he’d gotten up in a hurry to tend to some emergency.

  She darted past the inner doors and ran down the wide corridor that divided the resource room from the stacks and reading rooms, past the table with the sign that said “Library Picks” and the books on display; past the teenagers hovering outside the reading room, and the sixtyish woman standing next to the table covered with brochures—“Help you?” she called—and past the line forming in front of the machines that automatically checked out books. She glanced around only once, and he hadn’t yet come through the entrance, but he would. He’d seen where she’d gone.

  The doors at the end of the corridor led onto the brick plaza that connected the library with the plaza in front of the art museum and the garage. The bricks spilled into a walkway across Thirteenth Avenue, and Catherine was still running as she crossed the street. She headed for the entrance to the garage, then veered right, operating on instinct, her heart pounding against her ribs. He hadn’t come into the library behind her. He was running when she saw him; he could have run a block and entered the library before she reached the other exit, but he hadn’t. Because he knew where she was heading. He expected her to go to the garage. There was only one entrance, a concrete box with glass doors to the first parking level and an elevator and a metal and concrete stairway to the next levels. He would be waiting for her there.

  She flung open the heavy glass door that led into the Denver Art Museum. “Tickets Ahead” said the sign teetering next to the black ropes meant to control the crowds, but there were no crowds today, just small groups of visitors milling about in front of the ticket counter. The agents were busy, heads bent into their tasks. Catherine turned to the left and started upstairs, through a canyon rising into the high, open spaces of the atrium. Little white paper birds fluttered on the walls. She felt as if she were ascending into a vacuum, the sounds of footsteps and conversations muffled far below. She looked around. No sign of him yet.

  She walked on the far side of the railing where he couldn’t see her when he entered—and he would enter the museum, she was certain. He would wait for her in the garage only a few moments before he understood that she wasn’t coming. He might even have seen her run into the museum.

  She walked hurriedly and with purpose. She knew the layout of the museum; she’d spent a day wandering through the slanting halls and galleries, climbing up and down the stairs, and she’d written a long article about the Hamilton addition that made no attempt to contain the thrill of experiencing it. The white walls slanted at various angles, the galleries were like giant cubes tossed together, and there were visitors who said the walls gave them vertigo. How can you enjoy paintings hanging on walls that jut toward you or threaten to fall on you? But the walls didn’t fall, and people kept coming, drawn, she thought, by the collections and the architecture and the way the architecture shook visitors out of their complacencies and maybe allowed them to experience the art differently, all preconceptions wiped away.

  She hurried through the galleries until she came to the steel and glass walkway over Thirteenth Avenue that connected the new addition to the old museum, a gray castle that rose over Civic Center. The windows in the walkway were wedged between steel pillars. She stopped at the edge of the first window and peered down. Traffic hummed underneath. She could feel the faint vibrations in the glass. A busload of tourists must have arrived, because there was a large group of kids gathering at the museum entrance. Just past the kids, she watched two girls in shorts and tee shirts enter the garage. The sun glinted in the glass when they closed the door behind them.

  The door opened again, and he walked out. He looked across Thirteenth toward the library, then his eyes searched the brick apron in front of the museum. He took a moment to decide before he walked past the kids. She lost him behind the roof that crept out over the entrance. She spun around and ran along the walkway into the galleries of the castle, the voice of the guide who had taken her through the complex that day sounding in her head. The space flows harmoniously, as you can see, from the Hamilton to the old museum, which is still a fine building housing many of the museum’s collections. That was the goal, of course, to tie everything into a first-class complex. Truly worthy of a major city like Denver, wouldn’t you agree?

  And of course she had agreed. It had all flowed harmoniously, and the stairs were over there somewhere. She remembered traipsing after the guide, following her downstairs into the large entry of the old building. She took the steps fast—it felt like hopping—crossed the entry and went outside into the heat that rolled like waves through the noise of traffi
c on Colfax. The light at the corner was green, and she hurried to get across before it could change and leave her stationary and helpless waiting for the cycle of yellow, red, and finally green again. And all the time, he would be gaining on her.

  She ran along the sidewalk, cutting past the other pedestrians, knocking into a man in a dark suit, almost stumbling, then righting herself— excuse me, excuse me—and running on. She turned a corner and ran another block to Sixteenth Street where she hopped on the shuttle. The seats were taken, and she leaned into a metal pole to steady herself. She could hear her heart hammering in her ears; she was breathing hard and her blouse felt wet and clingy. The shuttle lumbered ten blocks, and she got off. She’d gone farther than necessary, but that meant she could come at the hotel from a different direction.

  She pulled her cell out of her bag, walking fast—half running— weaving through knots of pedestrians, trying to put as much space as possible between herself and a man with yellow hair named Erik. She managed to press the keys for Bustamante. It took a moment before he picked up. “Detective Bustamante.” His voice sounded distracted, far away.

  “He spotted me,” Catherine said.

  “What? Where are you?”

  “Downtown.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “He came out of the library. I walked up to the capitol, came down Fourteenth, and ran through the library and art museum. My rental car’s in the garage.”

  “God, Catherine. The capitol is swarming with state patrol officers. All you had to do was go inside and find one.”

  “Well, there’s always a guard inside the library, too, but he wasn’t there.” She heard herself shouting. A couple of women passing by glanced at her. She lowered her voice. “I was scared. I ran.”

  “Okay. Okay. Where’d you last see him?”

  “He followed me into the museum.”

  “How’s he dressed?”