In the low dusk, the tiny girl watched him. He crouched behind the boulders above the hollow. As his eyes focused in the waning light, the girl opened her mouth to reveal the black space between her white teeth. She was smiling at him.
35.
The spotlight cast a yellow arc along the edge of the road and ditch. Browns and greens of tall grass at the road’s edge blurred as she cruised her Jeep Cherokee through a long curve.
Brouwer took the mountain pass hard and fast. The road fell down into a hollow and crossed an old narrow bridge with steel guard rails banged up and scratched on each side. She slowed and parked on an approach to a narrow dirt road that headed into a rancher’s pasture, the entrance was fitted with a Texas gate, rusted pipes over a black hole. She cut the engine and lights. Jackson sparkled in the flat below. She spent the sleepless hours of that night cruising back roads for anyone in a four-wheel drive with the poor luck to come by her. She had seen almost no motorists on the back roads she patrolled. She radioed Deputy Ridge, positioned in an unmarked ford pickup truck within view of the Jackal’s Service garage. There were a few motorcycles at the Nite Ride Saloon, but no movement from the garage and no four-wheel drive trucks came or went. “Should I be talking to you?” He nervously asked her. He decided after all that he should not be. The radio went silent.
The lights of the town glittered and sparkled with the stars in the night sky and blurred with the lights of Teton village and Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Ski runs sat quiet, sutured with the lights of gondolas and stilled ski lifts. She leaned her back against the truck’s front fender and listened to police dispatch chatter on the radio. Officer Newberry had pulled over a drunk driver and requested the breathalyzer. A corporal would bring it from the town police station.
A plane descended into the valley and made its approach to the Jackson Hole Airport. Its beacon lights blinked over the mountains. It was a private jet. Headlights of traffic wound along United States Highway 89, carved out of the mountainside, past the National Museum of Wildlife Art into the town below. The lights of RVs, getting in late from Yellowstone, and tractor-trailers in from the small cities to the North, crept along the far highway.
If she reported firing off her pistol at her own residence, they would take her out of the field forever. They wouldn’t believe her, even if they did, the men she seemed to threaten so badly could say that she imagined a stalker for herself. It would get worse for her the longer she waited, but she would wait.
She cruised the Jeep at a rolling speed into the town square and flipped her siren on-and-off at a jaywalker full of booze slaloming his way from a bar into the street. At the siren’s whip-whip blare, he stumbled onto the far sidewalk and hulked toward his hotel. People wandered the town square beneath the Elk antler arches and sidewalks to further restaurants and bars. Groups of revelers called out to one another and crossed the street. The season was getting busier and it was a busy summer season already.
A line up formed at the Last Cowboy Bar. Girls in queue wore novelty cowboy hats and tank tops, short skirts with cowboy boots and buckles on cut off blue jeans. One girl in high wasted shorts with short cropped hair wore knee length riding boots bellowed at the top and fitted with silver Nazarene spurs, in the style of a Patagonian gaucho. A large marquee announced the band playing as “The Six Guns” country rock band. An electric guitar and Texas steel slide fought for supremacy. The sound drifted over the street.
Beyond the green traffic light, a young woman in a short, tight cocktail dress ran stiffly across the street in high heels and Brouwer waited for her to cross. As she got to her group, she cried mocking salutations in an artificially high and piercing voice. A bouncer dressed as a rodeo cowboy, complete with a protective vest to save gorging by bull horns opened a red velvet rope and let certain women into the bright entrance of the bar.
More girls dawdled in groups toward the bar’s entrance. A huge neon sign sprayed the street with golden red. A young woman affected a punk rock snarl at Brouwer’s police utility vehicle and signed devil horn symbols with her hands up in the air. “Fuck the Police!” she called in a shrill cry, as her straightened brown hair shimmered in the neon. Her girlfriends laughed in mock hysterics and called out to her in the crude lingo of urban slang.
Brouwer rolled her cruiser beneath the neon lights and down the street, and left the girls to the night.
36.
When he bothered to try to sleep, Sheriff Hargrove now did so at his county office. There was a locker room in the basement and a cot. The lonesome police barracks were better suited to contain night terrors.
It was likely that Yolanda had finally left him, but Brouwer did not know for sure. Brouwer had thought about calling to ask how the sheriff was doing, to share her concerns, as she had begun to worry, but calling Yolanda was not something she could bring herself to do. Yolanda was a popular figure in the small, tightknit Spanish-speaking community, but she was never particularly warm to Brouwer. The suspicion was alive in Yolanda’s eyes when she brought the children by the county office to see their dad. Brouwer felt distrust in Yolanda’s glances, a spark between Brouwer and the sheriff was obvious. Calling Yolanda was not a good idea.
Yolanda could no longer have him stay at the house. He acted out his nightmares, thrashing and fighting as if with a ghost. She huddled with the children on the eldest child’s bed, watching him but not him. Someone terrible walked around inside him; maldito, possessed. Incoherent ramblings in the night, elaborate apologies, he pleaded for forgiveness. Around and around in the living room in his briefs carrying a lamp, its electrical cord dragging behind him, he begged a specter in his mind to tell him what he needed to do. Yolanda could no longer lay awake at night in dread waiting for him to enter his nightmare. It was not who she had married. Brouwer knew this from him, not her. She would leave it to Yolanda to reach out if she needed.
Brouwer waded guardedly down the stairs to rows of lockers and a shower to the left. To the right, a small room was fitted with a cot and army blanket. Steam from the shower hovered around the lockers. When the shower faucet screeched off, she announced her presence to him and stood uncomfortable in the humid basement. His back was to her while he lathered to shave with a towel around his waist. He drip-dried.
“The tip from the hunter in the woods is telling,” he said over the sink, and shaved himself in the small mirror on the white tiled wall. “He saw the girls taking part in some strange ceremony, a ritual like the one at Lara’s body site. Our witness from Utah saw something similar on the road. The girls are more than a clique. They’re a cult.”
“We don’t know what they were doing,” Brouwer said. “I want to interview the Jackal prospect, Donald Swain. He saw Lara Mazer the night of her murder, but hasn’t met with me yet. I’ve been out searching for him.”
“You would interview him under what command exactly? You’ve been directed to close the state office here Lane. Anyway, many people saw Lara the night she died.”
His broad back arched over the low porcelain sink. He shook the safety razor in the water.
“I’d like to interview him, but the other Jackal, the bookkeeper known as Swindle, doesn’t know where Donald Swain is. I think he’s of interest. He has the right build for one thing, and he’s hiding.”
“Interview him? Again, under what authority?”
“Good Question. You’re quite a partner, cantering for the attorney like a show pony.”
The razor sat still on his cheekbone. His eyes moved to her in the mirror. After a moment, he continued shaving.
“You know I had nothing to do with your bosses closing your office. Hell, I would deputize you right now if I thought you’d accept.”
“No, that’s okay,” She said. “I prefer police work to whatever it is the county does.”
Sheriff Hargrove pulled the metal safety razor over his jaw. He dried his fingers on the hand towel draped over his left shoulder.
“You need to tread carefully right now Lane,”
he said. “You don’t have any jurisdiction or support to go running after Jackals and you saw the film from the Jackal’s garage. The video proves Donald Swain and Swindle Vetch were in the garage that night. When they left the saloon, Lara was alive and safe with other women. The Jackal members have been eliminated as suspects.”
“I know that,” she said. “I just need to find Donald Swain and question him. I set out to interview everyone that was in the Nite Ride with Lara and I need to complete that job before I leave. It’s a simple as that.”
The black figure had stood outside her cabin and looked into her window. It had entered her sleep. Had it run low in the cover of the sagebrush toward her, on all fours like an animal? She could no longer imagine that to be true. She doubted what she saw with her own eyes. Sheriff Hargrove wouldn’t understand but it didn’t matter now. The county had gotten their way. She’d leave the valley.
Setting the folder with the photo from her cabin motion camera on a steel table in the corner, she decided to tell him later, after more time, maybe.
She said, “Investigator Stone and I believe we have a third girl murdered by the same attacker. Kelly Yellowbird, home from college for thanksgiving. Her body was found back in the fall.”
“Ray Stone? You have no authority right now in this county. You sure as hell don’t on Indian lands.”
“Well, at least Ray is doing police work.”
He turned from the sink, his full jaw was tight, and he turned back to the mirror.
“The tribal police deal with a lot of crime like this, a lot of violent crime, it doesn’t usually spill over into the counties proper,” he said. “There are a lot of rough patches on that big old Reservation. An Indian Reservation is a dangerous place, for women and white tailed deer.”
His voice was tinny coming from the small tiled bathroom, his tone distant.
“I need you to have more humanity in your voice when you talk about my victims,” she said. “We’re not talking about deer are we? I’m not getting enough sleep to have a sense of humor, gallows humor or not. I’ve had about as much attitude as I can take.”
“The girls are your victims are they?” he said.
She turned her back on him. Desk lamps on a table lit his makeshift sleeping quarters. Maps and photographs scrawled the wall, modeling headshots of Helen Hearne, and Lara’s white body on stainless steel. Avina Zadeh spanned his walls in sprawling disorder. Leaving the Vahedi mansion estate in Wilson, getting in and out of her Land Rover, with Helen Hearne on closed circuit cameras, sitting isolated in thought, the wall was a college of the young woman from Denver. Image after image of Avina Zadeh in close up glossy, her face had a scared strength; she was captive but defiant. Image after image of her papered the wall of the basement barracks.
“Did you have a chance to review the break and enter video?” She asked. She suddenly needed to clear her throat.
The sheriff walked out of the barracks bathroom patting down his face with the towel draped over his shoulder and across his chest. “I’m not interested in breaking and entering right now Lane,” he said.
“The break in at the antique shop shows risk taking. It shows someone losing control of his impulses. It happened only days before Lara’s murder. Someone openly hunting young women will be making other transgressions as well. I believe that film depicts an image of our killer,” she said.
“We haven’t cleared our suspects yet and you’re looking for more? The girls are the hunters, not the hunted. Everything we have pieced together about these girls shows that they are nihilistic and as capable of killing as anyone else is. You know damned well that being female is not an alibi. Girls kill other girls all the time,” he said.
She picked up a towel from a folded pile and wiped her face. She was wet with steam from the shower and felt smothered in humidity.
“They don’t kill their queen,” she said, drying her hands.
“Excuse me?”
“Girls don’t kill their queen. I agree these young women are on some other level. I even believe they are capable of murdering a rival girl. So I see the same thing you do. They may kill a weaker girl perhaps, but never a stronger one. They don’t kill a girl they worship. Your case rests on the fact that they had infighting and that they turned on Catherine. That is entirely unlikely. They didn’t abuse and bully Catherine they worshipped her. Those other women would have followed Catherine Kinderdine into a burning house. You and Leeman think Helen Hearne is Medusa with an iPhone but she wouldn’t dare cross Catherine. These women lived by Catherine’s opinion of them. Helen was Catherine’s handmaiden, not her rival.”
“Helen is a bully, a vicious one, and we have proof she terrorizes other women.”
“No, we don’t. Helen’s toughness is an act, just as Avina’s weakness is an act. The personas you and Leeman are consuming are fictions. You don’t know what these women are.”
“Fine, I’m not an expert on women, God knows that. Show me a man who says he knows what women are thinking and I’ll show you a bull-shitter for real. What we do know is that Catherine died with them, we don’t know why. You cannot eliminate them as suspects or you would have by now. You said yourself you thought the Persian girl was guilty.”
“Persian girl? By the look of your walls, I think you know her name.”
He cocked his head, muscle twined in his powerful neck. “She’s guilty of this, of Catherine’s death. You see it in her too.”
“I told you she has a guilty conscience, that doesn’t mean she killed her friend.”
“But it might. I am tired of listening to you Lane. You had your chance to bring us something and you failed. I spoke to Leeman again today and you know he’s starting to convince me that its better you go to Cheyenne? You need to stand down and let us do our job.”
She threw the towel into the hamper and looked him over. She knew then she couldn’t tell him that she was helping Ray Stone. He might tell Leeman, who would surely run to the Attorney General. She had to help Ray Stone quietly, but the sheriff had to know that there were more of these murders. She said, “I am here to tell you that Ray Stone and I believe that the first of these murders happened on Thanksgiving last fall. That this started on Wind River in November.”
“You want to involve a murder on Wind River? You don’t know what you’re getting into there.” He shook his head. “It’s true what they say about you. You get in your own way, and everyone else’s way, for that matter. You’ll destroy the work we’ve put together,” his voice echoed in the tiled shower room. “I know you don’t like it, but these girls have done this type of thing before. They took that girl into the woods to do some kind of ritual. Their minds are gone. They violated the Kinderdine girl. For all we know Helen Hearne was fucking her, she was almost certainly fucking Lara. You say they weren’t rivals, what were they? I’ve had enough of this.”
He dried his face and hands with the towel draped on his shoulder, exposing his square muscular shoulders and wide pectorals. He came into her space and she took a step back into the darkened row of lockers and out of instinct, her right hand came up to her pistol. She quickly moved her hand back to her waist. The basement fell silent but for the humming of air ducts in the false ceiling.
On his left pectoral muscle was a large black tattoo of a beautiful young Arab woman in a black robe. She looked out above his heart at the onlooker. The towers of a mosque and combat helicopters were in the air behind her. Arabic writing formed a banner above the young woman’s head. Her black eyes had long black eyelashes. She was coquettish on his athletic chest. Her eyes were lustful and cartoonish.
He tried to smile and stepped toward her and she took another step back between the narrow rows of lockers.
“My deputies are no longer working surveillance on the Jackal’s club house Lane,” he said. “There’s no sign of your big bad wolf. The subject of this homicide investigation is the women who were present at the time of the murders. We’re charging Helen with capital murder as soon a
s we work a confession out of Avina, as accessory. That’s coming soon.”
37.
Someone had broken into an antique shop nestled between high-end art galleries near the town square. The security video was in three-second intervals. A figure strode down the back entrance hallway in the middle of the night. The camera’s timed exposures moved the figure in leaps of time; it was at the back door then suddenly five feet into the hallway. A second camera showed the figure entering the main room of the shop and walk comfortably around the floodlit room as though blind but having lived there for decades. As it passed the camera, the familiar crushed face sits for a moment directly before the lens.
In the back office, it spent half an hour trying to crack an antique safe before giving up. Opening a half fridge, it smelled a sandwich, and then ate it in several large bites. Standing with long thin legs looking into the faces of the display animals, it then pocketed gold coins, confederate bill notes, and a Pinkerton detectives’ badge. Glass cases of knick-knacks and posters of Wild West shows rowed the room. It entered the back office and returned wearing a wolf head hat. The gray wolf’s nose and mouth twisted in a deadly snarl; canine incisors veiled the face further. It was a stop motion wolf.
It did not crack the safe but successfully picked the lock on a gun cabinet in a backroom. Reentering the front shop, a Ruger Mini-14 carbine rifle slung at mid-thigh, the wolf’s fangs faced the street. Tourists out for nightlife passed by oblivious to the figure on the other side of the glass. The image started and stopped, and the figure moved as though at super human speed. Closer to the security camera, a vintage Colt Navy revolver became visible in its waistband. After more time, it left the shop.
38.
A lone horse and rider circled the barrels in the otherwise vacant rodeo grounds. Letting her hat fly off, the sandy red hair of the young rider blew back in the wind of her forceful riding. Slung low into a deep turn at the far barrels, then thudding past the bleachers, the horse’s hooves struck hard into the soft brown dirt. Whistles from the nearby football field carried on the light breeze, teenaged men and boys at practice, coaches in blue team jackets commanded instructions at young players running drills.
Dream of the Wolf Page 18