Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  “Give me the bad news.” The senator spit out the order, managing to cough and growl at the same time. He was in a foul mood, Harry thought, not unlike his mood most mornings before he’d had the requisite half pot of black coffee. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  Colbert pulled a thin stack of papers out of the briefcase balanced on his lap. He’d gotten to the office by 5:00 a.m. as usual. He liked to be ahead of the day, collect the messages that had come in during the night, read the Post and New York Times for whatever damaging statements they might have attributed to Senator Russell, some of which the senator himself had most likely given to some reporter who had cornered him in the corridors of the Senate Office Building when Colbert wasn’t around to run interference. It was getting so that Colbert couldn’t let the man out of his sight.

  “Fax came in two hours ago.” Colbert drummed his fingers on the top page. “Your esteemed colleague Senator Adkins has scheduled the briefing for the Indian Affairs Committee.”

  “Bastard!” Senator Russell barked out the word, and Colbert watched him tighten and release both fists, as if he were working a pair of worry balls. “So Governor Lyle got to him. Wants to stand up in front of a bunch of politicians who couldn’t find Colorado on a map with a magnifying glass, never heard of Arapahos and Cheyennes, and don’t give a rat’s ass whether the state gets another casino. Make Lyle and Adkins both look like geniuses, plotting to keep more casinos out of the state.”

  “The voters have rejected other casinos,” Colbert said.

  “What do they know? Whipped up by a lot of do-gooders running ads about the social ills of gambling. Christ, let people spend their money any way they want. Little recreational gambling never hurt anybody. They sure weren’t thinking about the economic impact and all those lost jobs when they cast those ballets. Christ, it’s a crummy business we’re in. Try to give the state a multimillion-dollar windfall every year and do a good deed for a poor bunch of Indians and what d’ya get? Nothing but opposition from liberals always shouting about how they’re gonna help the poor people. Well, this here’s the chance, and what do Adkins and Lyle do? Try to flush the whole project down the toilet. Why the hell haven’t we attached a rider to a bill and settled this thing?”

  “The bill we had decided was appropriate was postponed, remember?”

  “Adkins’s doing?”

  “Most likely. I’m trying to confirm what happened. My guess is that Lyle called Adkins’s office, asked him to do whatever he could to stall the bill in committee.”

  “That newspaper reporter . . .” Russell drew in his lower lip, as if he were drawing on a cigar. “What’s her name?”

  “Catherine McLeod at the Journal.”

  “Oh, yes. Lawrence Stern’s ex-wife. He never could control her. Should’ve taught her the way things are. She wrote that article about the riders that got the Indian casinos in other states. Tipped off Lyle that we might try the same maneuver, the bitch. We would’ve had this matter settled before he knew what had happened.”

  “It could have backfired on us,” Colbert said.

  Russell was quiet, but he’d shifted sideways, and Colbert could feel the old man’s gaze burning into his skin. He hurried on. “McLeod’s been talking to Arcott and Rummage, asking questions about who will be making money on the casino deal. She would have made it look as if the only reason you attached a rider that approved the settlement was to benefit certain business interests.”

  “Nonsense. Arcott Enterprises and Denver Land are engaged in legitimate business transactions.”

  “Made possible by your actions,” Colbert said. He stopped himself from saying that the briefing was the best thing that could have happened and Russell should have called it himself. He didn’t want to remind the senator that he hadn’t suggested the briefing to him. They were weaving through the traffic into the city, the Potomac rippling in the morning light. “In any case, Lyle’s only concerned about his own standing in the polls,” he said, taking a conciliatory tone. “He thinks that if Congress approves the settlement and the Indians build a casino, voters’ll crucify him. Throw him out of office, and that would be the end of his starry-eyed visions of succeeding you.”

  Senator Russell threw his head back and squared his shoulders. He shouldn’t have said that, Colbert realized. The senator never liked being reminded that four years ago, Lyle—“that assistant district attorney nobody ever heard of,” Russell called him—had come within a few percentage points of defeating him. Two years later, Lyle was elected governor, but it was no secret that he was only biding his time in the governor’s mansion until the next Senate election. It was a topic not to be discussed openly, as if the possibility that a man like Lyle, who’d come to the state only ten years ago, might take over the Senate seat held by the founding fathers and their sons was too incomprehensible to discuss.

  And yet it hovered over every discussion they had. Russell would be seventy-three his next birthday. He was from another generation, another time when there was a certain order to things, certain ways in which events should unfold, certain people who were in charge. He could hardly speak the language of his constituents. Environment? Health care? Better schools and roads? He had no idea what they were talking about. But that was his job, Colbert thought. Translate the twenty-first century for the old man. Steer him around like a fin-tailed Cadillac out for a drive across the state on I-25. Tell him what to say, what to do, how to vote. Keep the Cadillac on the highway.

  The truth was time was running out and Russell knew it. It wasn’t as if the old man didn’t have an agenda. He meant to preserve as much of the old ways as he could, cement them in place, make it impossible for any newcomer like Lyle to change them. There were certain things he meant to accomplish before he left the Senate. Settling the Arapaho and Cheyenne claims in exchange for a casino was at the top of the list, and Colbert intended to make certain that happened.

  “I’ve given the briefing some thought,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure you have. How are we going to stop it?”

  “We’re not.”

  “I’m in no mood for your levity.”

  “We’ll turn it to our advantage. The governor can say anything he wants about the so-called will of the people. We’ll have Norman Whitehorse and a few of those old Indians talk about the Sand Creek Massacre, all the atrocities. The U.S. military scalping Indians and chopping off women’s breasts and parading their trophies through the streets of Denver. We’ll have them talk about how Governor Evans and Colonel Chivington sent the tribes to Sand Creek to wait for a peace agreement, and how as soon as the tribes set up their camps, Chivington launched a surprise attack. We’ll read an excerpt from the Fort Laramie Treaty that says the land belonged to the Indians. We’ll have the elders plead with Congress to honor the treaty. Lyle will look like he opposes justice for the Indians. Senator Adkins and Governor Lyle just made the settlement a certainty.”

  “Get ’em here,” Russell said. “All of them. Whitehorse, the elders, and anybody else you can think of. I want this done, Colbert. You understand. We have to finish this.”

  The jangling noise cut through the blackness. Catherine struggled upward into consciousness and tried to open her eyes. The shaft of sunlight streaming past the curtains burned into her pupils. She was curled on the floor, the carpet rough against her cheek. The empty wine bottle lay a foot away. Red wine had trickled onto the carpet. Her head pounded in an erratic rhythm to the noise of the cell. The radio was still playing, a soft jazz number that she didn’t recognize. She managed to lift herself upright and grabbed the cell off the desk. Then she curled herself back against the carpet. “Who’s there?” she said. Her voice sounded thick and groggy bursting out of the drum that was her head.

  “Catherine?” She blinked around the sound of the voice that broke through the pounding, unsure of her own judgment, conscious only of the nausea foaming inside her. “It’s Nick Bustamante. Are you all right?”

  “Maury�
��s dead,” she said. The awful reality crashed over her again, sweeping her back into the surge of grief. She tried to sit up along the wall and squeezed her eyes shut against the tears rolling down her cheeks, tasting of salt and musty carpet fibers.

  “I know.” Bustamante sounded calm, an anchor in the storm, and yet there was something in his voice that allowed for her own grief. “I’m very sorry,” he said. She jabbed her fist against her mouth and bit her knuckles to stifle the sobbing that threatened to overtake her again. “Where are you, Catherine?”

  It was a moment before she felt in enough control to respond. “Hiding,” she said.

  “I have to see you. There’s something I have to talk to you about.”

  For a moment, she had an image of herself behind the wheel of the rental car, plunging through the rush-hour traffic on I-25 to downtown, watching everything—the passing cars, the cars in front and in the rear—but that was the woman she had been yesterday, with a friend named Maury, and that woman didn’t exist anymore. “I can’t,” she said. Then she added, as if to make sense of something, “I left the rental car in the garage by the art museum when I ran.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “We missed him. The officers had him in sight but he spotted them and turned into one of the galleries. By the time they got there, he was gone.” He was quiet a long moment before he said, “We will get him, Catherine. That’s why I have to see you. We’ll talk wherever you are. I’ll have a couple of men bring the rental car to you. Where are you?”

  She gave him the address then, the small bed-and-breakfast on the northern edge of the Tech Center, far enough from the highway that the sound was no more than a background buzz. “I’ll need a little time,” she said. The pounding in her head seemed calmer, and the room was no longer spinning. Still she had to swallow back the nausea.

  They agreed on forty-five minutes, and she managed to pull herself to her feet. She had to stand over the desk a long moment, holding on to the edge to steady herself, before she found the courage to walk to the bed, dig some clean underwear out of the backpack, and head for the shower.

  Catherine waited inside the entry next to the window that framed views of the street and the intersection. The coffee smells coming from the kitchen stirred up the nausea again. No, thank you, she’d told the owner who had materialized from somewhere deep inside the house and invited her to the dining room for breakfast as Catherine had come down the stairs. The thought of scrambled eggs, sausage, and apple fritters had made her stomach lurch. The owner had retreated to wherever she’d come from, heels clacking on the wood floors, and Catherine had turned back to the window. Surely Bustamante wouldn’t arrive in a police car. He was a detective, for godssakes. The owner would never forget a writer who had dyed her hair bloodred in the upstairs bathroom and waited for a policeman in the entry.

  She saw the gray Taurus coming through the intersection first, followed by a blue sedan a few feet behind. The Taurus was at the curb, the sedan pulling in behind when a squad car appeared. The switch-off was smooth, she had to give Bustamante that. An officer got out of the rental, tossed the keys to Bustamante as he was climbing out of the sedan, then slid into the squad car that had barely slowed down.

  Catherine watched Bustamante come up the sidewalk. Tan slacks flapping against his legs, an open-collared white shirt under a summery-looking sport coat, and a holstered gun, she suspected, somewhere under the sport coat. He looked handsome, all that black hair and the strong-looking face—her handsome knight coming to save her. She had to stifle a laugh, because she knew that she would start crying and she wasn’t sure if she could stop. She fished her sunglasses out of her bag, opened the door, and went to meet him. “We can’t talk here,” she said.

  “There’s a place nearby.” He pressed the keys into her hand. She could feel his eyes moving over her, taking her in—she might have been a woman he’d never seen before, and yet something was familiar about her. “I’m very sorry about Maury,” he said again, as if he’d glimpsed the grief curled inside of her like a wounded animal and caught the sound of the drumming in her head. She felt the slight pressure of his hand on her elbow, guiding her back down the walk and into the front seat of the blue sedan.

  In a moment, he was behind the wheel and they were driving through the Tech Center, the morning sunshine slicing past the office buildings and rippling over the stretches of lawn. Knots of people hurried up the walks, briefcases banging against their skirts and pant legs. She should be hurrying into the newspaper office, Catherine thought. An ordinary activity—going to work in the morning. She had never thought about it, how extraordinary it was.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Bustamante glanced at her, and when she met his eyes, he gave her a little smile—a flash of white teeth in a dark face, the mixture of sympathy and understanding in the brown eyes.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be all right,” she said. “I’ll just be different.”

  He was quiet a moment, his eyes back on the traffic. They had turned onto Belleview and were heading west, the sun bursting through the rear window and flooding the sedan with a welcome warmth. Catherine realized how chilled she’d been since the ringing had drawn her out of the wine-induced coma this morning. The floor had been chilly, she guessed. She hadn’t cared. She’d wanted only to lose herself in forgetfulness.

  “That’s how it is,” Bustamante said, glancing her way again. “After a terrible loss, the kind of trauma you’ve been through. It changes people.” She caught his eye again for the briefest moment, and wondered what this police detective might have been through and who he might have been before.

  He turned into a shopping center and drove across the parking lot. Only a few cars scattered about. The shops wouldn’t open for another hour and a half. He pulled into one of the vacant spaces close to the flat-fronted brick buildings and got out. Catherine was out of the sedan before he got around to her side. A coffee shop was located in the corner, metal tables and chairs arranged around the sidewalk, and that was where they were headed, she knew. She liked the idea that there was no one around, no one seated at the tables, no brown sedans parked anywhere. She liked the sound of Bustamante’s footsteps behind her as she started for the coffee shop.

  Through the plate glass window, Catherine could see the blurred figures at the tables inside. She sat down at one of the outside tables. She had a sideways view of the front door and a clear view of the parking lot and the street beyond.

  “Coffee?” Bustamante said, standing over the table like a waiter, a big silver watch visible below the cuff of his sport coat. She must have flinched at the idea. The smells of coffee seeping through the brick wall and the plate glass window had set her stomach to churning again. He started toward the front door. “Some tea might help,” he said over his shoulder.

  A few moments later, he emerged from the shop carrying two paper cups with white lids. Behind him was a leggy twenty-year-old girl in a short skirt and tight tee shirt, with clumps of long, blond hair dropping over her shoulders. He stepped aside as the girl set a plate of toast on the table. “Enjoy,” she said, the blond hair swinging around.

  Bustamante set a cup in front of her, then sat down beside her, which also gave him an unobstructed view of the lot, she realized. “I asked her to make you some toast,” he said, fishing in his side pocket for something. He drew out a small white package and pushed it toward her. “Toast and aspirin,” he said. “Washed down with a little tea. Always works for my hangovers.” He gave her a quick smile, then he said, “We may have found something.”

  25

  “We’ve gotten reports of similar shootings around the country.” Bustamante wrapped his fingers around the coffee cup.

  When Catherine didn’t say anything, he went on: “We sent out a BOLO to detective bureaus in major cities.”

  “BOLO?”

  “Be on the lookout,” he said. “Asked if anybody had any similar cases. Blond-haired man stalking and trying to k
ill somebody. Using a Sig 226 Tactical with a silencer. Six bureaus responded. All fatal cases and all unsolved. The bullets match the ones we found in your town house and the bullet recovered from the man shot on Highway 285. This Erik chose an accurate, reliable gun. He’s a professional.”

  Catherine sipped at the tea, half expecting it to come back up, and stared at the man next to her, trying to make sense of it. “A serial killer,” she said finally.

  “Serial assassin.” Bustamante sat back and tapped the edge of the table with his index finger. He didn’t take his eyes from her. “He moves around the country. L.A., Salt Lake City, Dallas, St. Louis, Baltimore, El Paso. Covers his tracks wherever he goes, uses cheap cells that he tosses, steals what he needs, like BlackBerries. Previous victims included a dentist most likely having an affair with his assistant, owner of a hardware store, owner of a plumbing company, wealthy developer, wealthy lawyer, bankrupt entrepreneur with nothing left other than a big life insurance policy with his wife’s name on the front. All the suspects are close to the victims—spouses, business partners—but there’s no evidence to tie them to the killer.”

  He took a couple of moments before he went on. “I’m going to ask your ex-husband to come downtown for more questioning.”

  Catherine gave a little laugh, low and sarcastic. Lawrence Stern appearing at police headquarters for questioning was like an image out of a bad science fiction film, unrelated to reality. “There isn’t a Stern who even knows where police headquarters are located,” she said. “He won’t like it.”

  “Exactly. It might unnerve him, rattle him a little. We’ll see what he has to say.”

  “He’ll bring a lawyer. He doesn’t go to any meeting without a lawyer.” She took another long sip of tea. It was tepid now. “Why would Lawrence hire someone to kill me?” she said.

  “That’s what I intend to ask him.”

  “Come on, Bustamante.”