“You do realize that it is simply a myogenic muscular organ, right?”
I sighed and stood, leaving the copy of Playboy on my desk but folding and stuffing the gun magazine underneath in my back pocket. “I know it can carry a lot of weight.”
The Bear followed as I walked out of my lair and into the Turkish bazaar that had become my sheriff’s office. From somewhere, Ruby had procured paper plates and plastic utensils and even a triangular spatula that she was now using to divide up a pecan pie.
“How are the goods?”
The newly returned Saizarbitoria and Vic were sharing a bag of cookies and were seated on the bench beside the stairs; the Basquo was excited. “We should go back and buy more.”
“I bought them out.” I turned to Ruby. “Need I ask where our two lodgers are?”
She glanced at the old Seth Thomas on the wall above the stairwell. “Well, it’s 8:43, and I’d say they are downstairs watching the 8:43 showing of My Friend Flicka.”
“As opposed to the 7:13 or the 10:03 presentation?”
“Exactly.”
When Henry, Vic, Sancho, and I arrived at the base of the steps, the pair was still transfixed by the television on the rolling cart. I thanked the lucky star on my chest that Frymire had been able to find a dual-deck player that accommodated both DVDs and VHS tapes. A lot of our certification and training classes were still on videotapes, which I tried hard not to think about. “How’s the horse?”
We’d timed our entrance pretty well in that the end credit music was swelling, and the two looked over at us. Rockwell stood, the way he always did when Vic entered the room, to her unending puzzlement. “It is interesting that the story only changes in small ways each time the machine tells it.”
“I think you’ll find it’s exactly the same.”
The old man disagreed. “No; subtle but definitely different.”
“Uh-huh.” I made my way into the briefing room, pulled out one of the chairs, and sat. Vic and Santiago followed my lead, but Henry remained at the base of the steps.
Rockwell studied the Cheyenne Nation. “You have a savage with you.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Actually, he’s the most civilized of all of us.”
Henry made a show of waving at the crazy person.
“I was hoping that you might take a walk with him while I have a chat with Cord.”
Rockwell, probably weighing his odds, studied the Bear. “Where would we be going?”
The Cheyenne Nation spoke from the stairs. “Just down the block.”
The Man of God, Son of Thunder stood, gathered his coat from the chair beside him, and for the first time I noticed that he walked with a slight limp. “The cookies were delicious, but I could stand a real breakfast.”
Henry glanced at me and then back to Rockwell. “Sure.”
We all watched the unlikely pair do an exit dance at the foot of the stairs, with the Cheyenne Nation finally realizing the mountain man wasn’t going to allow the savage to get behind him.
We watched the two of them ascend, and then I turned to look at the young man. He was as earnest as usual but looked a little tired from watching the quadruple-feature of Flicka. “How you doin’, kiddo?”
“Good.” He smiled. “I’m hungry, too. Can we get something else to eat?”
“Soon, but I’d like to talk a few minutes if that’s okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
I leaned back in one of the plastic chairs, form-fitted to fit no one’s form. “I think I met some friends of yours over in South Dakota yesterday.”
“Who?”
“Eddy, Edgar, Merrill, and Joe Lynear.”
He smiled some more. “I do know them.”
“I also met some other members of the church—elders, I guess you would call them.” I waited a moment. “Any idea why it is that they would say they didn’t know you?”
His eyes dropped, and, trying to get a read on what was going on in his mind, I studied him.
He spoke slowly. “When you are banished from the First Order, you lose your seat in the celestial realm and are deemed a traitor. If they’ve decided I don’t exist, then that’s the best I can hope for.”
“What’s the worst?”
“Death.”
I glanced at Vic and Sancho. “They would try and kill you for leaving the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God?”
“For testifying against it.”
“Have you . . .” I had to choose my words carefully. “Known of them killing anyone?”
“I’ve never seen it, if that’s what you mean, but people disappear, especially since things changed.”
“People like you?”
He thought about that one. “My situation is different.”
“How?”
“I’m the One.”
“In what way?”
“Through lineage, I am the One of Three.”
I sighed. “Three what?”
“The One, Mighty and Strong.”
I could feel a headache coming on from all the cultspeak. “Who are the other two?”
“My brothers.” He then added, “My half-brothers. George and Ronald.”
I thought about how Eddy had referred to Edgar, and tried not to think about the tangled webs of ancestry within the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God. “And are they still in the church?”
“Yes. You see, my father’s teachings are different from those of the Church of Latter-day Saints; they believe through the proclamation of Joseph Smith Jr. in 1832 that there will be a leader of the church who will come to set the house of God in order, that he will be the One, Mighty and Strong. According to my father, the mistake they make is that it will be one man, when in reality it will be three.”
“So you’re the One, and your brothers George and Ronald go by the titles of Mighty and Strong?”
“Yes.”
I rested my face in a hand and spoke through my fingers. “So, let me get this straight: your father is Roy Lynear?”
“Yes.”
“And does he know where you are?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
I threw a thumb over my shoulder. “Then who sent your bodyguard, Mr. Rockwell, the Danite, Man of God, Son of Thunder?”
“I don’t know.”
I brought my face up to look at him. “Have you discussed this with Mr. Rockwell?”
“Yes, and he won’t say.”
“Well, I’ll take that up with him. In the meantime, do you remember the conversation you had with Nancy Griffith, the school psychologist?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, she told me that you said something about the possibility that your mother might be dead.” He didn’t say anything but looked at the blank screen on the television as if there might be some comfort there. “She mentioned that it might’ve been something that happened recently.”
He cleared his throat, then blinked and nodded with a disconcerting certitude. “She’s dead.”
I let that one settle for a while before continuing. “I’m sorry to have to ask these questions, Cord, but how do you know?”
His eyes glanced off mine for an instant. “She hasn’t come looking for me.”
“She was in the Butte County Sheriff’s Office a few weeks ago, asking for you.”
He nodded and continued to stare at the screen.
I glanced back at Vic and Saizarbitoria, sitting on the edge of their seats. “If she was killed, who do you suppose killed her?”
He stammered. “I . . . I’m not sure.”
“I think you are.” I reached behind me and pulled the gun almanac from my back pocket. “Is this yours?” He nodded as I leafed through the dog-eared pages. “You’ve got a lot of high-powered weaponry circled—any idea who you might want to use them on?”
His eyes went back to the TV, blank as the screen. “I get angry sometimes.”
“That’s normal; everybody gets angry.” I waited, but it didn’t seem as if he was willing to
come forward with anything more. “Cord, if someone has done something bad to your mother, then I’m in a position to do something about it.”
We sat there in the silence for a while, and then he spoke again. “Those horses down at that ranch . . . They weren’t friendly like Flicka.”
I smiled at the change of subject. “No, those are loose range ponies and they don’t have that much interaction with human beings.”
His mouth moved, but no words came out for a moment. “Do . . . Do you think they can smell it?”
“Smell what?”
“The killing; do you think they can smell the killing on us?”
I was at a loss as to how to respond to that and discovered my hand had crept up to grip the lower part of my jaw. “What do you mean by killing?”
His eyes shifted to the floor, and but for the subject I could’ve sworn he was discussing the weather. “When we misbehaved one day, they took us out to one of the cattle ranches back in Texas, Mr. Lockhart’s ranch.”
“And who is Mr. Lockhart?”
“One of the elders of the church; he’s tall like you but with bristly hair.”
The man on the road with the black polo shirt and the crew cut.
“It was one of the places they took you if you were bad.” The intake of breath rattled in his lungs like tin siding in a high wind. “There was a metal rack that held the cattle. . . .”
“A squeeze chute?”
His eyes rose to mine but then sank again, and his voice grew quiet and almost inaudible. “It held the cattle still with their heads sticking out.” His cobalt eyes stared at the concrete floor. “They had a chain saw there, and they made us cut the heads off the cows.” He swallowed, but his voice was dry like a rasp. “While they were still alive—said it would toughen us up.”
• • •
I’d never met Bishop Goodman from the Church of Latter-day Saints and had never even darkened the doors of the church that made its home in the now-defunct carpet store at the south corner of the Durant bypass that reconnected with the interstate highway.
“He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Mormon church and its teachings.”
Henry Standing Bear and I were having lunch with the bishop at the Busy Bee Café, and I was watching Cord through the sometimes swinging door as he washed dishes in the kitchen like a madman. The madman we were discussing at present, Orrin Porter Rockwell, was asleep on a bunk in my holding cell. “So, he is a Mormon.”
“More than that.” Goodman glanced at the Bear. “When your friend came walking into the church, I thought I was having a vision. Not only is he the living embodiment of the historical figure physically, his understanding of the church is absolutely period as well.”
“Meaning?”
The tall, thickset man with an unruly head of hair adjusted his glasses and leaned forward. “The Mormon Church of Latter-day Saints has gone through a number of reformations, including disavowing polygamy in 1890 with the threat of excommunication, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of any of these things. His knowledge of the church seems to have had an arrested development and stops at around 1880. Also, his personal knowledge of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Ina Coolbrith . . . He even told me of a personal conversation he’d had with the explorer Richard Francis Burton when he was staying with Bishop Lysander Dayton in a village near the City of Salt Lake, and how, over the bishop’s objections, he had sent for a bottle of Valley Tan Whiskey. The two of them sat there all night, shot for shot, and Rockwell advised the Ohioan to sleep with a double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun and to make a dry camp miles from any campfire and to avoid the main trail because they were choked with White Indians. No offense, but you know . . .” He looked at Henry. “Individuals who passed themselves off as real Indians so that they could prey on travelers on the roads to California.”
The Bear looked back at him. “None taken.”
He straightened in his chair and shook his head. “The man is a veritable storehouse of historical knowledge.”
I sipped my coffee. “Bishop Goodman, you don’t really believe that . . .”
“No, of course not, but if the man’s dementia has caused him to research the real Orrin Porter Rockwell to the point where he may be one of the world’s foremost experts, then he needs desperately to write a biography of the man.” He smiled. “If not an autobiography.”
“Maybe you should write it.”
“I might.” He thought about it. “Any idea how long he’s going to be around?”
I shrugged. “Oh, seventy-eight to ninety-seven months if the government has anything to say about it.” The bishop looked confused. “Kidnapping of any sort is a column-one federal offense.”
“Are you going to turn him in?”
“Not if he behaves himself; I mean he’s obviously as nutty as a pecan log, but he seems to dote on Cord and the kid calls him his bodyguard, so I don’t think he’s any real danger.”
Henry raised a hand to get Dorothy’s attention and a possible refill. “What did you find out from the IAFIS?”
I glanced at the puzzled look on Goodman’s face. “The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.”
“Ah.”
I looked back to the Bear and shrugged. “Nothing.”
He looked surprised. “Really.”
“I don’t know why you’re so amazed; it happens on the Rez all the time.”
“Yes, but this is a white guy.” He turned to Goodman. “No offense.”
The bishop nodded, still preoccupied with the thought of cowriting a historical religious epic. “None taken.”
• • •
We walked along the two blocks that were downtown Durant before the Cheyenne Nation broke the silence. “Is that the old jacket your parents bought you?”
I’d made a nod to the fact that the weather was cooling off and deigned to wear the thing. “Yep.”
We walked on. “I was trying to remember if I ever saw your father in a church.”
“You didn’t.”
“Ever?”
I shook my head. “Ever.”
“Why?”
“He just didn’t believe in organized religion.” I thought about it. “I don’t think he believed in much of organized anything.”
“Your mother did.”
“Yep.”
He studied me. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“This case appears to be concerning you, perhaps more than others, and I was just wondering if it has something to do with the religious aspect?”
“I don’t know.” I breathed a sigh. “I haven’t been in a church since Martha died, you know that. I’ve been in more sweat lodges than churches in the last five years.” He nodded but said nothing. “Like anything else, I think organized religion, like most human endeavors, is good when it’s doing good and I think it’s bad when it’s doing bad.”
“And you think these people are bad?”
“I think the people in charge are, yes.” The wind blew up Main, and I watched as the leaves trembled. “I’ve always been taught that religion is supposed to be a comfort to people, not a threat. I think these people have perverted something that’s supposed to be holy and turned it into a weapon.” I pulled in a lungful of the crisp air. “I think there’s a hierarchy at work here and quite a bit of megalomaniacal madness. I mean, the patriarch is climbing on his roof naked and building spaceships in his backyard.”
He smiled. “And you do not want them here?”
I stopped and looked at the cracks in the sidewalk and in my own logic. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not approve of their methods.”
“Their methods or their beliefs?”
I stopped and turned to face him. “Well, one’s kind of responsible for the other, now, isn’t it?” He continued smiling, and I continued walking. “And stop grinning at me.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
&n
bsp; “Well, nobody’s threatening Cord. . . .”
“Mostly because you haven’t formally told his father, who is lodged in the southern part of your county, that you have him.”
“That’s the next step.”
“So you are still concentrating on the missing woman?”
“Yep.”
We walked along. “Speaking of missing women, have you heard from your daughter lately?”
“No.” I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at him again. “Have you?”
“No.”
We continued walking. “I think she’s glad she bought that old tannery building; it’s got plenty of room, and since there are going to be three of them . . .”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets as we started up the steps leading to the courthouse. “The baby is due in January, yes?”
“Yep.”
“Lola.”
“Lola.” I paused for a moment. “I mean I don’t know if she’s told Michael. I think she wants it to be a surprise.”
A funny look played across his face.
I broke eye contact with him and looked back down the main drag at the banner proclaiming the impending homecoming festivities. “I told you, it’s something that Virgil said on the mountain.”
“Live Virgil or dead Virgil?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “I haven’t decided yet.” I glanced up at the Bighorns, at the new snow there. “He made some predictions about my life; about it not all being good.”
“Whose is?”
“This sounded a little more dire.” I watched the breeze pull at his hair—a wind that seemed to urge us southeast away from the mountains. “I guess I’m getting scary in my old age.”
He climbed a few stairs and turned to look at me. “You are truly concerned?”
“I suppose.”
“What would you like to do?”
I thought about it and shook my head. “Nothing. I mean there’s nothing I can do besides call Cady and tell her I’ve got a bad feeling and she should stay at home and hide in the closet.”
“I do not think she will do that.”
“Me either.”
“You put a great deal of stock in Indian prophecies?”
I grunted. “More and more these days.”
He stepped back down and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Then I will make one—she will be fine.”
A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery wl-9 Page 11