White Ghost Ridge

by Carol Coffey

  O’Brien had told a disappointed Mendoza that he hadn’t found any more emails of interest on Holton’s computer – only the four Caird had reported seeing. He had found nothing on an organisation named INTENT and reported that the files entitled INTENT were empty. Neither had he found any evidence of the email Carter insisted Holton had sent to him inviting him to call to his apartment, an email which had also miraculously disappeared from Carter’s inbox.

  “Someone very clever is messing with their computers,” O’Brien had said, without looking at Mendoza as he typed.

  “There’s someone smarter than you?” she’d quipped.

  O’Brien did not react to the compliment but continued to do various searches on his computer while Mendoza stood over him.

  He had, thankfully, figured out what the words Toh-way-cheen which appeared at the end of the emails meant. It was not a person’s name as Caird had thought but was in fact a Sioux term for ‘to revenge’.

  Locklear only expressed mild interest when Mendoza informed him that O’Brien’s maternal grandmother had been a Lakota Sioux and that the IT nerd had spent many of his summers with her in South Dakota. O’Brien had also figured out that Holton’s relationship with the man who had shown up at his apartment – Albert Whitefeather, a Native American army veteran from Rapid City – had been in existence for a couple of years and it was only the more recent emails that showed any signs of aggression towards Holton.

  O’Brien had also managed to find a record of an assault on a museum curator in New York who reported that a Native American had tied him up at his home and had cut along his hairline in an hour-long attack. This matched the MO’s of two Native Americans, one of whom was Whitefeather – but Whitefeather’s alibi was watertight and the second suspect was in prison at the time of the attack.

  After an hour-long stop, the American Airlines flight took off on the last leg of the six-hour flight to Rapid City. Mendoza sat in the window seat and stared out at the clear blue sky as the plane made its way westwards to a state she had never been to. When she tired of gazing at the horizon, she focused on her sleeping boss who had placed himself in the aisle seat as his long legs would not fit into the cramped economy seat beside her. As they had settled into their seats, she’d noticed the relief on his face when he realised that there was no-one else allocated to the three-seat row and that he would not have to come into close proximity to her during the flight. She knew her boss did not like to be touched and especially did not like it when she touched him. Mendoza often wondered what had happened to Locklear to make him so averse to human contact. He was a good man, a kind man, who tried hard to cover up his compassion for people with his gruff personality and sharp retorts. But she knew that deep down he was like a hurt child who had built a protective wall around himself and that she, and possibly Kowalski, were the only two people who had become as close to Locklear as he was ever likely to permit another human being to be. Mendoza mused that she and Locklear were alike in a way. She had been both physically and emotionally hurt by the husband who was trying to push his way back into her life. She had closed the wounds he had inflicted on her, both physical and psychological, had licked both scars through her love for her child and her commitment to her work and she had succeeded. She did not need Manuel in her life, not when she had tried so hard to give their son the security he had lacked in the early years of his life. Her ex-husband was remarried now. She had found his new family’s Facebook page and had stared into the face of the pretty Mexican widow and her two young sons sitting proudly beside her new American husband. One boy looked to be around the same age or slightly younger than Santy while the other was no more than two or three years old. The young Latina’s physical similarities to Mendoza did not go unnoticed by her. Both women had the same long, unruly black hair and deep brown eyes. The woman also shared Mendoza’s high cheekbones and small nose. It was almost like Manuel had sought out a woman who looked like her and the idea of this made her shiver. She did not believe for one moment that her husband had turned over a new leaf. But for now she would watch and wait in the hope that her ex-husband had changed and would not hurt her child. She suspected Locklear had endured a different form of abuse which made him separate from all those around him, made him avoid connections, attachments and emotions. Whatever happened to her boss in his early life had had a lasting impact on him and she did not want this happening to her only child. She hoped that Locklear might someday feel close enough to her to tell her what he had endured but doubted that this would ever happen. She knew other cops that had worked alongside him for decades yet knew nothing about his life outside of the station.

  Mendoza leant across the empty seat between them, a representation she felt of their relationship, near enough to touch but yet so very far. Despite her sexual orientation, there was something about her boss that attracted her. She looked into his face and reasoned that he was a handsome man. His hair was thick and black and his face had that high-cheek-boned chiselled look that she found attractive. She raised her hand and was about to touch his unshaven face when he half-opened his eyes. She pulled back and pretended to fuss with the thin airline blanket that had fallen to his lap, pulling it roughly upwards to cover his arms. He closed his eyes but she knew that he was awake.

  She lifted her phone and checked for messages from Santiago but there were none. She grinned at the expletives and threats in Benson’s response to her email that she had decided to take urgent leave. She responded with a simple “OK” to her temporary boss, knowing this would annoy him further and knowing that she, like Locklear, would have to face the music when Kowalski returned.

  As they approached landing, the plane began to rock back and forth. The sky lit up and loud thuds erupted through the cabin. Mendoza gripped Locklear’s hand. She was not afraid of flying but she hated turbulence. She felt him tense in his seat but he did not pull away as she would have expected. He kept his eyes closed tight and did not look at her. The thunder became louder and she began to mutter some words of comfort to herself.

  “Stop praying. It’s just a storm. They happen here all the time,” he said without opening his eyes.

  “I wasn’t praying,” she retorted, releasing his hand.

  “You were. Might as well have Carter with us.”

  Mendoza laughed. “I hope he’s OK.”

  “Me too,” he replied softly.

  The plane came down with a loud thump and rocked back and forth on the runway until it finally came to an abrupt stop. When the passengers began to applaud, Mendoza saw no reason to join in. It was expected that the pilot would deliver them onto terra firma as he or she was paid to do, and Mendoza saw no reason why she should congratulate them for doing so.

  When they entered the terminal, Locklear made his way purposefully to the shopping area and bought a light-brown Stetson. He placed it firmly on his head.

  “Looks good on you,” Mendoza said with a grin.

  Locklear’s phone beeped. He listened to a message from Carter. He was free on strict bail conditions and had taken Locklear’s advice and gone somewhere no-one would expect to find him but which would not break the terms of his bail.

  Locklear pressed redial and clenched his hand in fury when the naive ex-trooper answered his phone.

  “That was a test, Carter. Don’t answer your phone. I don’t trust this guy Sartre and he has your number. I told you I think he’s involved. Somehow.”

  “Sir, I doubt it, he hardly even knows me. Why would he try pin something like this on me?”

  “Because you’re an easy mark and so was Holton so don’t end up like him. Tell your wife and kids to go stay with relatives. Don’t text me to tell me where you are. Don’t contact me or Mendoza at all. Get yourself a burner phone and give the number to the guy whose jaw you think I broke. When we met, remember? If I need you, I’ll contact him.”

  “My fa–”

  “God damn it, Carter. Don’t say one more goddamn word.”

  “You think
my phone is bugged?”

  “Goodbye, Carter. I’ll let you know when this is all over.”

  Locklear snapped his phone shut and looked for the terminal exit.

  They made their way outside.

  Mendoza stood gazing out at the mountain range which surrounded the small regional airport. Dark storm-clouds, peppered with purple and red hues, hung over the top of the range. A flash of lightning lit up the sky, turning the mountains into a blanket of scarlet silk.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, more to herself than to her boss who showed little interest in their surroundings.

  Locklear pulled his bag onto his shoulder and walked fast, leaving Mendoza trailing after him pulling a large suitcase behind her.

  “You travel light,” she gasped as she caught up with him at the cab terminal.

  “You don’t,” he replied curtly.

  Locklear hailed the first cab and eased himself into the front seat. He looked over at the driver who weighed about a hundred pounds and was drinking coffee from a steaming cup. Locklear sniffed and caught a familiar aroma. Whiskey.

  “Nope,” he said as he got out and pulled their luggage from the car.

  He raised his hand and gestured to the next cab driver who was parked second on the line.

  “Didn’t like the look of him?” Mendoza asked.

  Locklear ignored the question as he threw his bag into the waiting cab. He checked the driver over. A woman. She had an easy smile and a photo of her three teenage kids on the dash. He returned her smile and tipped his hat.

  “Motel 6, East Latrobe Street, please, ma’am,” he said as he fastened his seatbelt.

  Mendoza noticed how relaxed her boss had suddenly become.

  “Is this home to you?” she asked from the back seat of the cab.

  Locklear did not answer but thought about the question posed to him. No one place was home, he reasoned, when you’ve moved around as much as he had. Everywhere and anywhere was home.

  Locklear looked out of the window as they turned onto Highway 44 and thought about the time he had spent in the small town. He stared silently as they passed green fields and farmhouses and as the sun set he felt his mood darken. He had come back here in his youth because it was the place his mother had wanted to spend the last months of her life. She had given birth to him here, he knew, with no family around her. No husband. No boyfriend. Not one person to care for her. In nine days, on June 21st, it would be exactly fifty-eight years to the day that he had been born in a small free clinic in the poorer part of town. The name she had given at reception had not been her real name, or if it had he could find no birth record for Wachiwi Locklear matching his mother’s age. He did not know for sure if she had been born in South Dakota or if she had come from another state to Rapid City to give birth to him, and so his efforts to find whatever kin she had resulted in failure because he had nothing to go on. Not even her unusual first name led to any firm leads. In time, he gave up looking because he reasoned that if anyone was still looking, if anyone still wanted Wachiwi after all of these years, they would have found her. Only once did he remember someone coming for them, or rather, for his mother because the Indian that barged into their trailer showed no interest in Locklear and, if anything, objected to his very presence. Whoever that man had been, his mother did not want to do whatever it was he had asked her to do. Locklear was still just a boy at the time and if he did not understand their words, he understood that this man wanted his mother to do something she would not agree to. He had honoured his mother’s dying wishes and had rented a small house in the south-east of the town but the move only added to the agitation and confusion her illness caused. She did not recognise any place or anyone. She had not been back to the state since his birth and he spent those last months wondering what she had hoped for, who exactly she had been looking for. In time, she stopped speaking English and wandered around the house mumbling in her native tongue. During those sad and lonely weeks he wished more than anything that he had learnt to speak his mother’s language. Instead, he understood only when she was hungry or scared. The time came when he could no longer care for her and he could still remember what she was wearing when he drove her to a care facility only a couple of hundred yards from the place she had given birth to him. A nurse held her hand as he walked away from her in her faded purple floral dress, her long hair spread around her narrow shoulders, still dark despite her middle age with only a few stray white hairs framing her brown, smiling face. She had waved to him as he left, not knowing or understanding that he was leaving her in someone else’s care. Not knowing who he was. It occurred to him then, despite his youth, that he had never known her and that now he never would. The secrets Wachiwi kept from him during his troubled youth died with his mother and sentenced him to a rootless life without any family or place to call his own. With the passing years, he understood that she had come looking for something in Rapid City but by the time they returned to the place that had bound them together, her condition deteriorated so quickly that her memories were washed away, drowned under the rising tide of dementia. His mother had come back to South Dakota to find herself but it was too late. She had roamed around the country for too long for her to ever find whatever it was that haunted her tormented mind. In the weeks coming up to her death she called out, almost endlessly, some words he could not understand. He had written those words down as best he could in the hope that they would lead him somewhere, to someone. He remembered them still. Magaskawee. Chaska. His mother said those two words with a love and longing that almost hurt him to hear. But akecheta – a word she did not say often, was said with a venom and hatred that had not come naturally to the woman he had known. Wachiwi had loathed only herself and, by consequence, her son. He checked maps across South Dakota in the hope that these were places she had known, places perhaps where she had once lived, but found nothing. In time, he could no longer bring himself to visit her. He could no longer bear to watch her suffering, to watch her mind search for something that was always beyond her reach. The day he got the call to say she had died, he cried alone in the last home they had shared together. Their journey together was over. He was alone, alone in a different way to the loneliness he felt trying to care for her during her troubled drinking days, during the days she went missing and abandoned him as a teenager, leaving him to fend for himself with whatever money she had left behind. But she always came back to him. His mother always returned and they would carry on wordlessly as though she had never left. He would never know where his mother went during those brief times she drove away or what she was running away from and he would never have any answers to the questions he had about who his mother had been or where she had come from.

  Slowly, the green fields gave way to service stations, pizza joints and small casinos. Farmhouses disappeared and were replaced with fragile-looking houses that were easy pickings for the many storms that swept through the city. Locklear moved his eyes to the other side of the highway to avoid looking at a large, rundown trailer park perched at the side of the highway. He had spent too many years cooped up in that kind of cheap accommodation and couldn’t bear to look at them, no matter what city he happened to find himself in. He counted three large pawn joints along the road which told him that the city still had that edge to it, that side of poverty that made poor people desperate to pawn whatever valuables they owned, money that would most likely only put food on the table for a week until they had to repeat the whole process over again.

  The cab swung right onto Campbell Street and drove three more blocks until it merged onto East North Street. After one block they turned left onto East Anamose Street, a street he was familiar with and where he had worked for a short time as a rookie cop before eventually getting a transfer to New York and then to Richmond. They followed the long road as it wound its way through a sandy expanse on either side. They took Luna Avenue and then Eglin before taking a sharp right onto Pine, eventually turning sharply left onto Latrobe and into the lot of Mot
el 6.

  Locklear took off his seat belt and surveyed the basic motel which he had handpicked because of its narrow, brightly lit car park which would afford him a view of people coming and going from the lot.

  “Sarge?” Mendoza asked.

  “Huh?” he replied, looking back at his trooper.

  “I asked you back there if this was home?”

  “It is. For now.”

  Chapter 8

  Motel 6 was exactly like dozens of motels Locklear had stayed in during his long police career which took him throughout Virginia on cases Kowalski knew no-one else could solve. He turned the key in the door at the end of a long corridor and took in the room. The large neatly made bed and the small wooden bedside locker took up most of the small space. A tiny dining table and one chair sat just inside the door under a long narrow window which faced out into the parking lot. At the other side of the room an old-fashioned TV stood atop a faded dressing table. A wood-panelled door on the other side of the bed led to the bathroom which was small but functional and painted the same shade of bright orange as the bedroom.

  Locklear looked at his watch. It was a little after 10.30 pm. Although the room had cooled from what was probably a hot June day. He turned on the air conditioner but found it was broken. He banged twice on the white metal casing but the machine was dead. He noted the lack of a coffee machine or fridge and looked at his watch.

  He jumped into the shower, shaved and knocked on Mendoza’s door which was next to his.

  His trooper opened the door in her bathrobe. Her hair was loose and she had removed all of the heavy make-up she had worn earlier that day. Locklear reasoned that she looked more beautiful without it.

  “You up for starting work?”

  Mendoza yawned. “Sure.”

  After a quick meal and two strong coffees in the diner adjacent to their motel, Locklear and Mendoza made their way on foot to the rundown motel which was listed as Albert Whitefeather’s last known address. As they approached the single-storey building, Mendoza smirked at the motel’s name. Heaven Motel.