Avina Zadeh took steps in twos up the grandstand bleachers. When she stood on Brouwer’s row, she changed her mind and stepped down again to sit a few rows below. She huddled her slight body around a half cigarette and lit it cupped from the wind. When the younger woman did not receive a greeting, she sat in silence and watched the redheaded girl ride the horse through the course of rodeo barrels.
The girl ran the appaloosa flat out, whipping the sides of her horse with the length of reins, hooves pummeled the finely ground dirt of the riding ring.
“Have you ever ridden a horse?” Brouwer said finally.
“Ah, yeah I guess so.”
“In Denver?”
“Uh, yeah. I rode when I was little. Do you ride horses?”
“I ride my horse about every day. You cut your hair. It’s a mistake to change your appearance while under investigation.”
Avina sat forward with her small feet in low cut sneakers, held together on the footing of the grandstand. The wind drew sparks off her cigarette, and worked a wave of thick black hair on top of her head. The rest of her head was bald.
“The White Buffalo Café says you haven’t been in to work,” Brouwer said.
“No I guess I haven’t been.” Avina said her words deliberately, formally, a hint of affected Englishness to her voice.
“Detective Brouwer, it sounds really weird, but I had a nightmare about you. There was this huge gross beast, like an animal man, following Helen and I and Paula, my best friend from Denver. It was chasing us through the forest and we hid in a cave. Then we saw, through the trees, that it was running from something. Do you know what it was running from?”
“What was it running from Avina?”
“It was running from you. You were following it to kill it. You were hunting it and it was terrified of you. What do you think that means?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Brouwer said. “I never remember my dreams. Is that why you agreed to see me? To tell me about your dream?”
“You wanted to know about us being in the woods before, with Catherine? We went into the woods all the time toward the end. The time you’re talking about, we did a photo shoot with Catherine in the trees. We were wearing Catherine’s designs. They were forest nymph gowns. It was the portfolio for Catherine’s application to Fashion School. A hunter had followed us into the trees, when we were going to start the photo shoot, I saw the hunter. He was a fat little dude in camouflage peering at us while he played with himself behind a rock. The hunter told you that we were a witches’ coven doing a ceremony. But we were artists and he was a random pervert that followed us.”
Helen Hearne paid the hunter back for leering at them. In the cowboy bar with his fat hunting friends, the girls recognized him, and Helen confronted him. She laughed him down saying that he was pulling his little pecker in the woods behind a rock. That he was spying on them, a peeping tom. The man blushed and rushed out of the bar, reduced to a bullied child. His redneck buddies howled in laughter with the city women behind him.
Brouwer turned her head away to face the south edge of town, toward Snow King Mountain and suppressed a smile, hiding it from the girl.
“Are you from here?” Avina asked.
“From Jackson? No, I grew up in Montana, on the other side of the parks. I rode horses my whole life, like this girl riding here.”
“They say you’re looking all day and night for Catherine’s killer.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t know,” Avina said. “Do you know who killed Catherine?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Did the same person kill Lara?”
“I don’t believe the man that killed Lara is the man that killed Catherine.”
“But you think it’s a man?”
“Of that I’m pretty certain,” Brouwer said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, others don’t agree.”
Avina faced her.
“Do people ever get away with this?” she asked. “It seems like no one gets away with anything. Maybe they do for a while, but eventually police catch everyone. I mean, they use surveillance on the internet and cell phones and banking and everything. No one gets away with anything anymore.”
“People get away with things all the time,” Brouwer said.
“I don’t think you’ll let him get away with this,” Avina said.
The young rider cooled the Appaloosa by gently trotting around the ring. Foam lathered on the horse’s shoulders.
“You’re right,” Brouwer said. “But I need you to help me”
“I know,” Avina said. “I’m going to help you.”
“You are?” Brouwer leaned down toward her, “Well, the way to help me Avina is by telling me the truth. You’re not telling me everything that you know. You’re withholding information, wasting my time, and in that time, someone else like Catherine could be hurt. I think you know who could’ve done this. Catherine knew her killer and I think that means you know him or her too.”
Her thick black hair whipped as the breeze swept across the exhibition grounds. She held her slight bare shoulders as the wind dried her body, wet with sweat from the blazing sun.
“There’s something I have to do first, and then I can help you.”
Avina got up and walked down the grand stand to her Land Rover Defender.
“It’s not me that needs help,” Brouwer called down. “It’s Catherine and Lara.”
Avina stood on the worn grass at the riding ring fence and looked up at her. “You need help too,” she called.
She got into her truck and drove out of the rodeo grounds.
39.
Deputy Ridge watched Avina Zadeh exit the driveway of her guardian’s estate near Wilson and make her way over the strands of the Snake River into Jackson. He watched her through field glasses as she parked next to Brouwer’s utility vehicle and sat with the state police detective for a handful of minutes on the rodeo grounds.
She’s meeting with Brouwer, he texted Sheriff Hargrove.
WTF?
As the girl tentatively drove, Ridge followed her in an unmarked truck. Cautious at stop signs, waiting patiently for pedestrians to cross, she then drove to the fringes of town. She stayed stopped for a full twenty seconds at a four way stop that had no other vehicles while Ridge took a side street and pulled ahead of her to distance himself. She fell in behind him and he kept a hundred feet ahead of her. Slowly navigating a poorer neighborhood not far from Nathan Petrie’s trailer, near some condemned buildings surrounded by overgrown brush and poplar, she eventually idled to a stop on blighted half block.
Down out of the four-wheel drive truck, she landed lightly on both feet onto the street. Sweeping her Mohawk brush cut down, she put on Ray Ban sunglasses. Ridge used a digital camera to take her image as she walked into the unruly brown and green grasses at the front of the shed.
Beside the shed, two men emerged through the trees into the grass to meet her. Barney Oldman, leader of the Indian street gangs and head of security for the Indian casino on Wind River, and Victor Langlais, recently released from serving time for firearms violations.
Ridge captured images of the three as they came together on the yard. Oldman wore tight fitting black jeans and a black t-shirt, his forearms thickly tattooed. Victor Langlais wore a Chicago Blackhawk’s hockey jersey and skate boarding style shorts. Avina Zadeh was in her trademark short shorts and tank top. The three entered the small shack and went out of sight.
Deputy Ridge called Sheriff Hargrove.
40.
Avina Zadeh sat opposite Barney Oldman at a table and bench salvaged from a pull behind camper. Small windows blacked out by tinfoil and duct tape held out the blazing sun.
“Nice place.” Avina Zadeh looked up at a roof yellowed with smoke.
“We don’t get a lot of wealthy society ladies calling us. We wanted to take you somewhere special.”
Oldman smiled at her. With his forearms across his knees, he reviewed the girl closely. “I like your Moha
wk, very punk rock.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I like your hair too, very cool. Do all your people wear braids?”
Oldman had the front of his hair up in a pompadour, highly stylized, with long black braids. He wore a necklace of ivory Elk jaw teeth and wolf incisor fangs. He smiled. “Yeah quite a few do. Don’t you know that being an Indian is back in style?” His expression was wry.
“Oh yeah? Well your hair style is very old school Crow Indian,” she said. “Crow men in the old west were famously vain. They were show offs.”
Oldman smiled his easy grin, a grin to put women at ease.
“I didn’t recognize your name. What is it, Iranian? We cannot supply anything to, nor do any business with, Arabs or Muslims of any kind, company policy. We are, unfortunately, in the age of terrorism. You see, a jihadist is not someone who would survive a meeting with us.” Oldman’s tone was serious, but his eyes were smiling. He seemed to be teasing her.
Victor Langlais smiled and raised his chin to her. “Muslims are very bad for business. We’re proud Americans and you better believe that.”
“I’m not Arab or Muslim, I’m a secular Persian American,” she said.
Oldman looked her in the eyes.
“Oh that’s right. The papers say you’re Persian, to be precise.” He smiled.
“What else do the papers say?”
“They say you’re a rich girl, a spoiled brat. You girls run around with too much money, partying, doing drugs, you’re reckless.”
“You want me to believe that you’re opposed to partying?”
“When bodies drop the party’s over.”
“Do you pass judgment on all your clients?”
“Only the rich girls, we admit it’s a double standard.”
Oldman reached to Victor Langlais who pulled a compact black auto-loading pistol out of his waistband and put it in Oldman’s hand. Oldman released the pistol’s magazine, slid the clip out into his palm, and set them onto the chipboard camper table. Victor opened a drawer and placed a box of .380 cartridges beside the pistol.
Oldman said, “You got into trouble and this is how you see getting out?”
Avina picked up the magazine clip, pressed .380 hollow point shells into it and slid the clip into the pistol. Rolling the auto slide back enough to ensure that no cartridge was chambered; she then held the pistol toward a window at the length of her delicate arm.
“It’s good on you,” he said. “Compact and light, a .380 won’t buck too much. You can control it easy enough. But it’ll stop a dude.”
“I didn’t bring a bag or anything. Is there something here?”
There were no cupboard doors in the shack’s kitchenette. Victor took a plastic garbage bag from beneath the sink and she wrapped the box of bullets and the pistol into it.
“Anything in particular you have in mind for that heater?”
Avina Zadeh sat with the rolled up garbage bag on her tan thighs and shrugged.
Oldman searched her face. “The thing is, you got a lotta heat on you, state police, the whole bit. You and your girlfriends are all over the late night news, you use this thing,” he nodded at the black bag, “and they’re gonna wanna know where it came from.”
Her shoulders slouched forward in her black tank top. “The last thing they’re going to care about is where I got the gun.”
Oldman said, “Maybe it is not a gun that you need. You see, sometimes when we want to use a gun all we really needed was some bear spray. You gotta use the right tool for the job. A girl like you should carry bear spray anyway.”
“Yeah, I carry bear spray,” she said. “Now I need a pistol.”
Oldman and Langlais looked at one another and then at her.
Victor Langlais spoke from over Oldman, “I’ve been watching you on the news, learning about you. People don’t know who you are and I wonder if maybe you don’t know that either. They don’t see what I see. You got some grit, you got some stones.” He stood up from leaning on the counter, “but I’m telling you, that if you use that piece, you take someone’s life, believe me, you’ll never be the same person again. The life you take, your spirit and their spirit become welded together forever. You gotta think about that. Think about eternity and what it means to have that person’s life and their fate, entwined with yours.”
She was small behind the stained table. Hunched over the rolled up garbage bag in her short shorts and low top sneakers crossed at her ankles on the filthy linoleum.
“I’m already not who I was,” she said, speaking to Oldman. “They killed my best friend and a cool girl, a girl that everyone liked. Lara Mazer should not have died. I don’t know who I am and I don’t care. Who I am doesn’t matter.”
Victor Langlais looked down at the floor.
Barney Oldman breathed deeply and let out a sigh, he said, “The pistol won’t come back, and it’s legit anyway, never used in a beef, and bought legal. If they catch you with it, you say you were planning to take it to the County Sheriff’s office to get your concealed carry permit. Whether you are a resident of Wyoming or Colorado, it’s the same shit. You say you’ll get the toaster carded in Denver once you’re back there. That’s all they need to hear.”
“I already have a concealed carry permit,” she said.
“Right on, it’s all good then. You have a permit. They see the piece and you show them the permit but that’s it. Remember that a pistol is not a reason for them to search you and they can’t hold you for it. They can’t hold you on suspicion. Either they charge you with a crime or they let you walk. You got state police busting your balls but you do not have to tell them shit. They cannot hold you unless they have evidence to arrest you and it takes a lot more than you think for them to charge you. You don’t have to tell them a damn thing. You don’t even have to tell them your name. Let them sweat it all they want. Let them go ape shit. But don’t be a dummy. Let me tell you something girl, from personal experience, prison is filled with dummies.”
“Do I look like a dummy to you?”
Both men laughed.
“Nah girl, just the opposite, you look like a boss.”
“Remember what Vic said though,” Oldman continued. “When you dust someone, you do it because you had to. You dust his ass because he wants to do the same to you. You do it up close and you do it right. You impose your will. Only the aggressor lives.” He leaned back and squared his shoulders. “Teton County has to believe that he got what he had coming. They are okay with that. Killing a man that wants to kill you is something the good white folk understand. White men dream about it. They will identify with you. It gives them a way to let you walk.”
“Hell,” Victor Langlais said. “Dust a rapist and they’ll make you an honorary citizen.”
Oldman placed his elbows on the table and closed his hands together. “When it comes to killing, the white folks that run the town are no different than you or me.”
She nodded understanding, pulled two rolled up one hundred dollar bills from the band of her shorts, placed them on the table, and went out into the bright sun through the long grass of the yard. She drove away.
41.
Avina Zadeh stood over Lilac Siboda and turned pill bottles in the moonlight of the floor to ceiling window. Anti-depressants and prescription sleeping aids, opiate painkillers and half-empty glasses of wine cluttered the nightstand. Placing the muzzle of the .380 pistol to Lilac’s red haired temple, Avina looked her over, looked over the silk sheets coiled through her legs, and decided that the senseless woman was unconscious.
The blue and white lights of Jackson sparkled in the flat valley below. Stepping lightly to a custom bureau near a walk in closet, she slid open the top drawer of a jewelry box. A gold money clip held hundred dollar bills folded around a black credit card, and she pushed the small bundle into her tight black jeans. She washed a pencil-sized flashlight through the drawers, turned a delicate wristwatch cast in rose gold in her fingers, its precise brown dial like a sliver of chocolat
e encrusted with diamond flakes of sugar. She slid it into her jeans.
Down the hall, down a wide staircase, to a private residence within the massive Siboda cabin home, she tried a door and found it locked. With the tiny flashlight in her teeth, she tried locksmith master keys until a long cylindrical one worked. Cutting the light, she opened the door slowly, and followed the pistol into the room.
A king sized bed stood against the far wall elevated by several steps. To the right, a TV glowed blue in a sunken den. Behind her gun, she went further into the dark room.
On a large lacquered tabletop sat a disorderly mess of sporting goods, hygiene products and sneakers, an open pizza box and a wooden wolf mask, the mask from the snowboarding party where he burned the old house down. She saw him.
Leaned back on the sofa, his feet splayed out. A terry cloth robe and loose boxer shorts, printed with San Francisco 49ers emblems, were all he wore. She studied his face without making a movement. His hands were palm up on the sofa beside him and she realized that he was asleep. She shined the pencil light into his face until his eyes opened and widened onto the pistol.
“Stand up and keep your mouth shut,” she said.
He did as she told him.
“Put your hands behind your back, don’t move and don’t say anything.”
He started, “my mother is upstairs, and security can be here in under a minute.”
“That won’t save you.”
He put his hands behind his back and she looped a plastic zip tie strap around his wrists, pulled back on his arms, and held him in place with her foot until the ties were tight on his wrists.
“You’re coming with me,” she said.
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