Swindle asked Heavy to go to a secure phone and the big quiet Heavy Dunbar called back on a throw away flip phone and asked what he could do for Swindle Vetch.
“We’ve got heat,” Swindle said.
“What? What heat?”
“Division of Criminal Investigation, a full on detective coming by every day, she’s watching the place. You hear about the girls up here?”
“Someone killed Princess America and the girl from the bar. What does that have to do with us?”
“I don’t know, maybe something.”
“The black haired girl worked for us, it figures they’re gonna come around asking about her. Candy Bear can handle herself.”
“No. It’s not that she worked for us, it’s this guy Big Mick sent us to look after, this Donald Swain. He’s not cooperating.”
“Not cooperating how?”
“He’s not cooperating with the lady detective that’s been coming around or with me for that matter. We can’t find him. She wants to find his truck and look at his tires and his boots and shit like that. She has to be working on a warrant.”
For some moments there was only the track hoe rattling away in the junk.
“What do they have on him?”
“It can’t be much. He couldn’t have killed the rich kid, the first girl. He was with me in Montana, and I gave her the video from the garage eliminating him for the second girl, the girl from the bar, our waitress, Lara. He should’ve been cleared by now.”
“So what? It isn’t him doing it. What does this bitch want?”
“It gets worse. She saw Barney Oldman come here and she brought up the land deal. She can put us with the Indians, with the casino.”
Heavy groaned. “He needs to clear himself so she leaves. You say he couldn’t have done it. Get him to tell her so she can move on to her other leads.”
“He’s out in the woods. He knows enough about the operation to be a problem if he’s in a box with a detective trying to save his skin. That’s the problem.”
Swindle waited, the phone was quiet for a few moments. It seemed to him that Swain couldn’t have killed either girl. But listening to the lady detective had got him thinking. Why wouldn’t Swain cooperate? He may have slid out a side window that night, off camera, and gone back toward the bar and the girl. Heavy said,
“We need to be sure, so let’s look at him. If he won’t cooperate with her, then she won’t leave, and she’ll keep digging into our operation. He either clears himself, or else he needs to go away. If he goes away, so will she.”
Swindle Vetch ran his free hand from his widow’s peak into his graying ponytail and closed his eyes against the sun.
27.
Brouwer held the tea bag by its string, letting the water drip, and breathed the earthy heat. Ray Stone crossed the street toward her. Casual and good-natured, but heavily burdened, his call surprised her. Offering her his smiling eyes as he entered the café, he sat down with her. The server cleaned her hands with her apron and asked Stone whether he wanted coffee and he said that he would take one to go, as he needed to get back down to Wind River.
“What can I do for you Ray?” she asked.
“A lot I think,” he said. He was near retirement age and began wearing glasses, large black frames sat over his round cheeks.
“I heard you’re out of a job. You have free time now. You could be a lot of help to me, I think.”
“I’m not sure how I could be of help to you Ray,” she said. “I’ve been asked to step down from the case, and the Attorney General’s Office has agreed to that, if you can believe it.”
“Oh, I believe anything,” he said.
“State officials are sheepish after the drubbing they have taken politically up here. The Nathan Petrie debacle didn’t help, I guess. They asked me to remove my state police presence in this case.” She blew on her tea without sipping it, holding the cup before her face, self-conscious.
“So they asked you first?” he grinned. “To see if you’re okay with stepping down and relieving your command?”
“No, they didn’t ask exactly. Asshole Leeman wants me out of Jackson and it looks like he’s getting his way. The state’s going to do whatever he says.”
“He knows you’re a better detective than anyone the county has and that you'll steal the show. You threaten him because he doesn’t understand you. It doesn’t surprise me that he’d want you out of Jackson. Nor that the sheriff would go along.”
“You think Sheriff Hargrove wanted me out of here too?”
“I don’t know the sheriff’s mind. I wonder about him. I don’t know what kind of person he is. I worry maybe he is full of shit. You make him look bad, that I can tell you. If they don’t want you around, it’s their loss. We know better than that on the Reservation. We need your help. You don’t think the girlfriends killed the young women and I don’t think they did either.”
Ray Stone placed a heavy manila envelope, a solid brick of documents onto the table between them and said,
“I was watching you at your task force briefing. I was thinking as you spoke about the murders in Jackson, that we’ve seen something similar to this recently, out on the Reservation.”
“Similar to what?” She pulled the heavy file toward her.
A young couple sat near the wall of the quiet cafe. Their large golden retriever lay at their feet beneath the table, and their baby squealed in delight.
“A young woman killed with under kill, murdered gently, to use your words. Look at your first victim, on the mountain with her friends; someone thrashed her, throttled her in a rage. Her neck was most likely broken, she died under a lot of force, I think. When I listen to you talk about the girl from the bar, the server, Lara Mazer, her killer did not strangle her in the same way. Her death looks familiar to me.”
“Familiar?”
“Most women when they are killed, uncontrolled rage is everywhere at the body scene. There is destruction. The woman is demolished. But not here, something else is happening to the victims. We had a beautiful young woman die on the reservation, similar to Lara Mazer, in the way you described. I want you to look at my case and tell me what you see.” He nodded to the brown envelope.
“Ray, I want to help you but I’m being told to stand down. By the end of the week, they’re pulling me out of here. Everything is gone for me. My life here, my cabin, my horses, this case, these young women, gone, it’s all over for me. They’ll tie me to a desk in Cheyenne, a bureaucrat. I shouldn’t be looking into this; I probably shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“The County asked that you stand down from their investigation and the state capitulated, they will close your office, but you’ve also been asked by the tribal police to assist with our own investigation and the state has accepted. You have a role here.”
“What?”
“For the state to assist the tribal police, the Reservation has to invite them to participate. We’ve done that. You’re assisting me in the investigation of a murder that may be connected to your previous investigation, but between you and me, the state doesn’t know about that connection. I told them it is an emergency measure, a request for state assistance on Wind River. They agreed that the state will assist on an emergency basis.”
“Ray, I don’t know what to say.”
“Say that you’ll help me look into this girl’s death. We have a lot of work to do and we’re running out of time.”
28.
Brouwer sat across from the mother and her boy. The woman’s face was a mask of damage; her blue veined arm reached a protective hand to her son, Decklin, a tertiary victim of these crimes.
Cosmetic surgery on her nose had blackened her eyes, defensive above the dark rings and gauzed cavity. A white bandage, starched onto her cheeks, taped over her nose, forced her to hold her mouth slightly open to breathe, and to wet her lips often with her tongue. She watched Brouwer coolly.
“Mr. Siboda, do you like to dress up and pretend to be a wolf?” Brouwer as
ked.
Decklin Siboda dangled a large stained sneaker over his knee, eyed her and looked away. Done with final exams at private liberal arts college in his native California, he looked the part of a junior basketball player, tall with blonde hair dusted red, curling over his ears.
“Don’t answer that,” his mother said. “He was here, with me, all weekend.”
The Siboda woman sat on a tall backed, embroidered chair, strawberry hair twisted in a messy bun, her hands were unsteady on her lap. “We watched movies in the theatre room.” She had shown Brouwer the home entertainment room in the basement, a big screen with commercial sound and tiered rows that could seat twenty comfortably.
“I wasn’t asking where he was on the weekend. I asked why he is wearing a wolf mask in a video recovered from a murder victim’s phone.”
Brouwer placed a still image onto the glass and steel table before the boy and his mother. The tall thin figure stands on a bed in a robe, the mask a fairy tale caricature of a gray wolf, the wolf’s nose long and cartoonish; a novelty mask.
“Who told you he is the person wearing the mask?” Lilac Siboda asked. “Never mind, it was one of those spoiled little witches.”
“Do you think you’re a big bad wolf Decklin? There are men in the mountain west that don’t dress up like wolves, men who have seen and done horrors you cannot imagine. I’m looking for one now. Bad enough that a wolf might dress up like him.”
The Siboda woman said, “I don’t know what you are trying to do miss. You know perfectly well that Decklin was acquainted with the Kinderdine woman, if he could help you he would. Again, he was here with me, I told you and the sheriff’s office both already.” She clutched the corner of a cushion with knuckles ringed in gold. The bandage on her pliable nose suctioned with her breathing.
“Well, that’s just the word right there, acquainted. I understand he wasn’t out in the wilderness with the girl when she died; nevertheless, he’s the only man in the Jackson area in repeated contact with Catherine Kinderdine and is the only male I can find with a presence in her social media and smart phone. That’s bad news for him, being the only boy around, being acquainted. It makes him a person of interest.”
“What do you want from us?”
“I would like to hear from him, if he can speak for himself.”
“What can he possibly do?”
“He can be someone who cooperates and tells me anything he may know, or he can be contrary, and frustrate an investigation into multiple murders. It’s a matter of what role he wants to play.”
Brouwer watched the frail woman as she spoke. The slight trembling, visible when she arrived at the Siboda mansion, was now an anxious stirring.
“What’s this really about? You are harassing my son because someone put drugs in his backpack five years ago. Backcountry, cow-shit kicking police see his record and come to him for anything that goes wrong. Let me make something clear lady: any implication of wrongdoing on the part of my son and you’ll regret it. You mention my son’s name in the same sentence as drugs and you’ll be vigorously pursued for slander.” The pillow cushion crinkled in a grip on her lap.
“Well then, it’ll be a relief for you to learn that I don’t care a goddamn bit about drugs. I don’t shrink from threats either, frankly. I’m a homicide detective with the Wyoming police and I need to know what happened to Catherine Kinderdine, and I need to know right now.”
The boy’s eyelids blinked lazily at sheer gray cliffs.
“And your son knows more than he is saying.” Brouwer took back the photograph of the man in the wooden fairy tale wolf mask and asked Decklin Siboda if he was wearing the mask. The red-haired woman said he was not. Brouwer said to the boy, “Your mother told the sheriff’s deputies the name of the movie you two watched together Friday. It makes an alibi for you Decklin. So, Decklin only, what movie did you watch Friday night?”
Decklin said, “Fargo. It’s about a simple Midwestern woman trying to figure out a crime.”
They had the same story. She tried changing her tone, to find something in him worth reaching. “Decklin, you knew Catherine, a beautiful young woman, and she was attacked and murdered and left for dead out in the forest. Is there anything you can tell me that could help capture the person responsible? Anything at all.”
“If you want to know why Catherine is dead, ask her girlfriends,” Lilac said. “Any future interactions will now be handled by our lawyer.”
Lilac Siboda handed her a Bay Area attorney’s card.
29.
Brouwer thought about Helen and Avina, and wondered who these women truly were. Before she left, Helen agreed to talk about Avina, as long as it stayed simply on the subject of what type of girl Avina was. Not a generous offer, but it would have to do.
Helen told Brouwer a story. Late last summer, browsing art galleries in Jackson town center, Avina and Catherine and Aoi Aoki and Helen strolled together among packs of tourists along the boardwalk. Perusing tacky t-shirts, trying on cowboy boots and trinket jewelry, they modeled for one another, posing before change room doors, overweight men, losing sight of their families, gawking. Avina bought a pair of turquoise armadillo boots.
Helen Hearne noticed something strange about Avina Zadeh. The aloof Avina usually said little, except perhaps to laugh along with the other women, offering little more than sheepish appendages to the cutting worldly insights of Helen or Catherine. Avina had changed. She began mimicking Catherine, aping her. When Catherine said, “Oh my god those boots look wicked.” Avina Zadeh would repeat it, sitting on the bench in the cowboy outfit Shoppe,
“They do, don’t they?” She said. “They look wicked.”
Speaking the same way that Catherine had, mimicking her in a false and hollow voice, as though she was her double. Aoi Aoki rolled her eyes to Helen, who was about to call Avina out but Catherine gave her a look that kept her silent. They went on.
Winding their way through families of tourists to an exhibit in a contemporary gallery where Aoki had paintings on commission. Walking the town square and its shops, taking photos together, the camera held by a nervous middle-aged man, his wife waiting with the children. T-shirts snug their youthful bodies and short cut offs exposing smooth legs. The tiny Aoi Aoiki turned heads in tight shorts, bikini top and vintage sneakers. Avina Zadeh, already wearing the boots she had paid over $1000.00 for, limped in unbroken leather. In the Hysteria gallery, they had a glass of white wine and celebrated Aoki’s paintings. In the Last Cowboy Bar, they straddled the saddles used as bar stools and the bartenders snapped photos of them on iPhones. They played the jukebox, outlaw country and gangster rap, and drank long necked bottles of beer, flirting duplicitously with aging drunks at the bar. In the hot afternoon, men gathered to play pool against them and they laughed with the strangers, and then walked out into the sun lightheaded. That’s when they saw the old crone.
The old witch woman wanders Jackson and comes upon you harsh, like an alarm clock going off in the middle of a pleasant dream. She tells tourists she is a medicine woman named Little Pine, which is not true. Crumpled dollars hurried out of purses from tourists willing to listen to a story about the coyote and the creation of the earth, before they rush away holding a loved one near.
Big and impressive, the tourists are afraid of her. She stinks from her smiling mouth; her teeth decayed by solvents huffed to get high. According to Helen, anyone who knows anything talks to the old witch adorned in beadwork, tall and leathered like a display in the foyer at an Indian casino. Her face is like a distressed leather jacket, her hair thick and ropey behind her head is black turning to grey. To Helen she is magnificent, and the only part of the town square that will not bore you to death.
The old crone wandered the streets busking in a town so small you cannot escape her, telling trickster tales. But the Midwestern tourists are too xenophobic, too bourgeoisie to value her performance. If Jackson Town Police are bored and up for a drive, they take her back to Wind River Reservation or pass her of
f to the county for a place to sleep off the malt. The grainy smear an ache alive behind her eyes. Usually, she wandered harmlessly until she had enough to buy malt liquor and drink it in the alleys behind the patios and restaurants out of the wind, falling asleep in the shade of stacked wooden pallets.
That afternoon the girls were buzzing from beers and wanted to hear a story. She lumbered over them, heavy, her body draped in leather despite the heat. Her sweat and stale body odor mixed with the raw leathers and aerosol hair spray she inhaled to wind herself up. Jittery energy coursed over her, as though faeries danced on the fine ends of her nerves. She swayed over them, the chemicals working through her beneath the dense hide, an aura around her. Her face was burned by hair spray she huffed to get high. Too stoned one morning, the spray flared off a lit cigarette left in her mouth, and scorched her face. Sweat trickled over the burn scars in shining rivulets, Avina Zadeh squirmed, wanting to run away, but Helen held Avina’s arm and drew her close to the woman.
“The trickster is the one,” the crone said, “that shows the world is to be laughed at and that men are fools. The trickster proves that life is lark, he is a god that doesn’t care what you think about him, or if you think at all.”
Helen asked her for a story about the trickster coyote, excited by the old woman, unfolding a twenty-dollar bill and holding it before her.
When the street woman had the twenty in her fist she said, “For that kind of money I’ll give you a real Shoshone legend.” She stood tall, close, over the young women.
“In the beginning there was the first Wolf, a creator, a god, and all living things revered him. Wolf ruled the forest with his she-Wolf. One day, his little brother the coyote, who was a bull-shitter, a trickster, came to see him and asked him, ‘Brother! Why are there so many rabbits but only a few Wolves?’ Wolf replied, ‘because the wolf is so well respected and feared, there only needs to be two. She-wolf looks over the whole territory for me. This means that little foolish coyotes should stay out of the forest, live on the plains, and chase mice in the cold wind.’
Dream of the Wolf Page 15