Hearts of the Missing

by Carol Potenza

  The high color left the captain’s face and his shoulders relaxed. He tipped his head to one side and stared at her, brows furrowed.

  “And, sir,” she said, “I have questions about the autopsy report—”

  Pinkett cut Nicky off. “Why? The final document is pristine.”

  “That’s very atypical for the particular pathologist, Lieutenant. David Saunders?”

  “Oh. Saunders.” Pinkett snorted. “He still has a huge chip on his shoulder when it comes to dealing with Indians.”

  “What’s this about?” Captain swiveled halfway to Pinkett, the creaking of the chair harsh.

  “It was before your time here at Fire-Sky, sir. Saunders is one of the OMI docs who took hearts and other internal organs from autopsied Indians without permission back, oh, ten or fifteen years ago. He’s kind of a pill to work with, always sloppy in his autopsy reports for pueblo tribal members,” Pinkett said.

  Captain gestured to the folder. “But there’s nothing wrong with Saunders’s autopsy report this time.”

  Nicky hesitated. “No, sir, but my instincts—”

  She clamped her jaw. How do you tell your bosses about hallucinogenic visions of an old woman’s face in the glass, most likely brought on by sleep deprivation? Or chasing after a hopping white bunny that represents an underworld spirit, and not get fired?

  “You’re not paid to follow your instincts, Sergeant,” Captain said in a patronizing tone. “You’re paid to close cases like this: simple suicides perpetuated by drug addicts. I want the final report in my office, on my desk, Monday morning.”

  “Sir—”

  “Matthews. Am I not making myself clear?” His cold gaze bored into her.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, her voice tight.

  She’d had enough, and pivoted to leave.

  “Matthews. You are not dismissed.” Captain drew out each word. Heat rose in her face and she gritted her teeth. He pulled his chair forward and moved the mouse on his desk. The bright light of the screen made his visage glow blue. His fingers clicked the mouse.

  “What’s going on with the threatening emails you’ve been receiving? From, er, Acid Rain.”

  “Yes, sir. The emails link Acid Rain to Howard Kie in one of the message lines. He appears to be a friend of Sandra Deering.”

  Captain’s brows beetled as he looked back and forth across the monitor. “Rabbits, knives, and hearts.” He looked up at her, one eyebrow cocked. “You considered these threatening?” His tone was mocking.

  Pinkett shuffled around the chair and pointed to the screen, his shaved head shining under the fluorescent lights.

  “This is the one, sir, that caused us to send them emails to the FBI Cyber Division.” His gaze flickered up to Nicky as Captain opened the file and sat back.

  Red and yellow flashes colored his face from Howard Kie’s last email message, the one that triggered her to report it to Pinkett. It started out with dozens of white rabbits hopping around the page, their movements becoming more and more frantic, until one by one they were impaled by a flying knife and exploded into fiery balls of light.

  Under any other circumstances she would’ve dismissed the emails and Howard Kie as a nuisance, doing nothing more than sending uniformed officers to threaten him with arrest—or maybe offer him help. It was more than obvious the guy had mental health issues. But taken together, the messages were deemed threatening.

  The emails had stopped immediately after she’d reported them to the FBI. She hadn’t heard from Howard since.

  Captain made a noncommittal sound.

  “What’s the status?” he asked.

  “Still pending, sir,” Nicky answered.

  She didn’t tell him Mike Kapur, her contact at the FBI Cyber Division, was scheduled to call her personal cell later that evening. He’d texted a couple hours earlier, saying he’d found something interesting about her threatening email case. No matter what Captain said, her instincts told her his information might open a whole new perspective on Sandra’s death.

  “Well, in my opinion, the emails don’t appear to be related to the Deering suicide. Just some stupid drunk Indian with too much time on his hands,” Captain said. He sent her a challenging look.

  Nicky’s hands curled into tight fists at her side, hot words on her tongue, ready to tell her captain where he could—

  Pinkett’s eyes widened and he gave her a tiny shake of his head. She swallowed. Captain leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, his lips twisted into a satisfied sneer.

  She’d risen to his bait this time, damn him. Nicky slowly relaxed her hands. She wouldn’t bite.

  But one day …

  The expression in Captain Richards’s eyes promised her that one day couldn’t come soon enough.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Nicky pulled her truck onto the Kuwami K’uuti unpaved overlook and stepped out onto the hard-packed dirt. Her face relaxed into a faint smile as she leaned against her unit and soaked in the warmth of the setting sun. The panoramic view of distant mesas and the sloping plateau below, dotted to the horizon with scrubby piñon and juniper, made her heart swell. This evening the sun had painted the brush and trees orange and stretched their gray-brown shadows eastward behind them. A small village—Chirio’ce (the rez kids called it Cheerios)—stood on the flattened top of a broad hill, just visible to the south. The colored rays of the sunset made the weedy trailers and junked cars stark and picturesque instead of tired and sad.

  Behind her, the landscape started its rugged upward climb to the summit of Scalding Peak. Piñons quickly gave way to taller pines, jagged tumbles of rocks, and miles of dirt road that led up to the sacred shrines of the mountain, off-limits to anyone except the elemental war chiefs.

  The breeze hummed through the trees. It snagged her ponytail and fluttered the ends against her cheek. She breathed in the dusty pine-scented air. The bluff was quiet and private, a perfect place to wait—and think.

  Nicky tightened the band on her ponytail and absentmindedly combed her fingers through the ends of her hair. The perfect autopsy and the expedited toxicology report were unusual. She didn’t like unusual in her investigations.

  Which actually brought her full circle to Howard Kie, the guy from the mini-mart canvass, and the reason for Mike’s off-the-record call.

  The sun disappeared below the horizon and the breeze turned chilly. Nicky reached in through the open driver’s-side window and grabbed her jacket. She shrugged it on and checked the time on her cell phone.

  Howard Kie hadn’t even been on her radar as connected to Sandra until days after her suicide when Nicky’s inbox filled with a flurry of bizarre emails. They had all been written by “Acid_Rain,” but only one could be definitively linked to Sandra because of the subject line. He’d written: Sandra is My FRIEND. The body of the email had been cryptic and paranoid, saying he was being watched, and that Sandra’s death was a warning to them all. The following emails contained the rabbits, knives, and hearts Captain had used to mock her.

  Her cell phone rang, right on schedule. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to get involved in the email investigation because she was still the potential victim of a possible crime. But when Howard’s name came up in Sandra’s case, her focus shifted.

  She needed information. And sometimes you had to bend a few rules.

  “Hey, Nicky.”

  “Mike. Thanks for this.”

  “Yeah, this Howard Kie guy,” he launched in, rapid-fire, “must have installed some pretty sophisticated software since the last time he popped up for a trace. Honest to God, the only reason we knew where to start this time was your tip, and even then it still took us a friggin’ week. I would love to recruit his ass if he wasn’t mad as a hatter.”

  “What?” Nicky said sharply.

  “You know. A few sandwiches short of a picnic. Not the sharpest tool in the shed?” When Nicky didn’t respond, he muttered, “Tough crowd. Anyway, the setup to cloak his location and identity was brilliant, like nothing I�
��ve ever seen. But I doubt he could pass the mental eval.”

  “No. What do you mean, since the last time?”

  “I mean a couple of years ago he sent a bunch of emails to the FBI bureau chiefs in New Mexico and Arizona about some kidnapped and murdered Fire-Sky tribal members. You remember. The ones found in the Chiricahua Wilderness. I have their names here. Um … Maryellen Kay-sh—”

  “Maryellen K’aishuni and Vernon Cheromiah.” Nicky pressed her hand against her throat. “Maryellen had Down syndrome. They thought at first she’d wandered off. Vernon was the tracker her family hired to find her.”

  “Yeah. Sad. Anyway, the emails had the same shit about rabbits, hearts, and knives. I don’t have clearance, so I couldn’t get access to the whole file, but I was able to sneak a cyber peek at a couple of pages. It seems the FBI sent a team in to talk to Howard because of the rabbit reference. Weird, huh?”

  Rabbits. Ryan said they were an omen of death, of restless underworld spirits. His statement came back hauntingly. Whoever Wind Mother wants you to rescue is either already dead or will be soon. She shivered.

  Was that why Howard was using those images in the emails? Had he linked the rabbit Nicky followed after the mini-mart break-in to Sandra’s death?

  But how was any of this related to the Chiricahua murders?

  The uneasy feeling crept into her head again.

  “Can you send me that info, Mike? I’d like to interview Mr. Kie but need these emails cleared up before I can get involved. Protocol.” Still, she could drive by Howard’s trailer tonight, just to check on him.

  “Sure. I’ll attach them to my final report, make it official. You should have it in the next couple of days.” He paused. “You do realize none of what I’ve told you merits an off-the-record phone call.”

  “Yes, Mike, I do.”

  His voice dropped, but there was an edge of smug satisfaction. Mike loved to impart bureau gossip. She could picture his Cheshire Cat grin on the other end of the line.

  “Two things. First, Howard set up a bunch of cyber traps to alert him to anyone who came sniffing around his Net presence. Once I found him, I hung out and watched his online activity. The thing is, I, apparently, was not the only one with an interest in your Mr. Kie. Someone else had a hard-on for him, too, and got caught. Howard was alerted and just up and digitally disappeared.”

  Was that why Howard’s emails had stopped so abruptly?

  “Who? Another agency?” she asked.

  “No idea. I tried to trace the source, but came up empty. But that’s not even the most interesting thing about your guy.”

  “Spit it out, Mike.” Tension coiled in Nicky’s chest.

  “Nicky, Nicky. Can’t a guy indulge in a little foreplay? A little cyber phone sex?” He chuckled at her impatient huff. “Turns out Howard Kie’s FBI file has some tags on it. I checked them out. A couple were placed two years ago, right after the Chiricahua murders and the FBI personal visitation to his abode, but…” He stopped again, obviously enjoying himself.

  “Come on, Mike,” Nicky coaxed. “How about I send you some nice Hatch green chile if you cut the crap?”

  “Aaannnd she comes through in the clutch. Do you know what passes for spicy on the East Coast? Del Taco. I want the hottest stuff you can find this time,” he said. “Okay. The tags function to automatically send anything new in Howard Kie’s file to a series of IP addresses.”

  “Can you—?”

  “No, I’m not going to trace them,” he said. She snapped her mouth closed. “I like my job and want to keep it. But I do kinda recognize one of the addresses because…”

  He paused dramatically, but Nicky already knew what he was going to say. The skin prickled on the back of her neck and she clutched her phone tighter.

  “It’s a server in your system. Turns out someone on the Fire-Sky Reservation is cyber-stalking Howard Kie. So, by extension, he or she knows about you. Oh, and, by the way, the last tag was only placed a couple of weeks ago.”

  He let out a snigger.

  “Looks like you got an FBI mole in your midst. Or maybe I should say, rabbit.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Nicky sat in her unit and stared into the night. She’d started her Tahoe, ready to head home, but she normally used the drive to her small house in Bernalillo to unwind from her day. Her mind was running way too fast for that. She would stay, parked and quiet, until she could organize her thoughts.

  The breeze had dropped to nothing. The trees and chamisa skirting the lookout were still. The hum from the truck’s engine was a low, soothing background sound and the heater blew warm air into the cab. Nicky tipped her head back and fixed her eyes on the ceiling. The complications of this case—the layers of information—left her edgy and tight. She breathed deeply in and out, relaxed her body, forced tension away. Her eyelids fluttered closed.

  Something else was going on at Fire-Sky. FBI thought Howard was the key, but she wasn’t so sure. Still, Howard seemed to be a link between two pueblo tribal members murdered in the Chiricahua and Sandra Deering’s suicide.

  Why, why, why? How were they linked?

  She didn’t know much about the murders, and made a mental note to read the files. What she did know was the victims found in the Chiricahua cave—Maryellen and Vernon—had gone missing.

  Her eyes moved rapidly beneath closed lids. A hand twitched on her lap.

  Missing. Maryellen and Vernon had gone missing. Sandra had gone missing. Sandra’s presentation was on the missing.

  No. The UNM professor had changed the title of Sandra’s presentation to “The Hearts of the Missing Still Beat.” But the word Sandra had used was perdido. Not missing. Lost.

  Was this the link? Were all these people lost? According to Ryan, that would mean something vital was taken from their bodies. Their spirits could not rest.

  Nicky’s thoughts meandered in the blackness, clues, evidence, and faces swirling in a slow tornado above her, assembling, disassembling, trying to fit together and build the answer. But black holes of missing information made the structure weak. It would collapse, only to come together again.

  As she drifted, the purring of the truck’s motor changed. Once soothing, it took on an edge, a buzzing, like thousands of distant bees. The air vibrated with it. It penetrated her skin and seeped into her body, until everything around her was humming.

  Nicky’s scalp prickled. Her breath stuttered and her flesh crawled with a bone-chilling cold. Fingers curled into fists. She was being watched. Could feel the icy burn of it on her face.

  Her eyes popped open. Slowly, slowly, she rolled her head to look out the driver’s-side window. She choked back a scream.

  Juanita Benami stood next to her truck. She stared unseeingly through the glass, eyes glazed white, her expression frozen in a rictus of grief. A dozen glinting chains and pendants hung around her neck, stark against her black dress.

  Nicky sat up, never breaking eye contact, and placed a shaking hand on her weapon. But as she slipped her fingers over the butt of her sidearm, the old woman—her body like a rag doll—was yanked away, back into the dark shadows of the trees not twenty steps from the truck.

  And there, she changed. The black of her shoes crawled up her legs to become tall moccasins. Dark, rusty clothes transformed around her hunched body into a deerskin dress and cloak. Her silver jewelry slithered and snaked from her neck to weave into a gleaming breastplate of shell, turquoise, onyx, and coral. Long white hair swirled out of the bun at the back of her head, ruffled in an unearthly breeze, and her eyes now glowed a deep golden brown in the light of the rising moon.

  This ancient woman had visited Nicky before. She was the face reflected in the glass.

  Ánâ-ya Cáci. Wind Mother.

  As if she heard Nicky’s thoughts, she bowed. Then she lifted her face and arm toward the black slopes of Scalding Peak. The chamisa behind her shivered and swayed, and a dozen white rabbits poured out to hop around her feet, only to burst into bouncing spots
of light.

  Like Howard Kie’s email.

  The apparition turned back to the truck, and Nicky’s breath strangled in her throat. The flesh was gouged away from her skull, her eyes and mouth gaping black pits. She raised her hands and the globes of lights surrounding her streamed into the dark openings of her face. Her chest swelled as she tipped her head to the sky and blew the light at the mountain.

  Nicky kicked open her door, and planted her feet on the hard-packed earth. Her gaze followed the balls of light as they swirled upward. Their unearthly glow faded, then disappeared into the blackness of the rocks, like they’d entered holes in the mountain.

  Not holes. Caves. This side of Scalding Peak, the side exposed to the southern plateau of the reservation, was riddled with caves.

  The humming that filled the air stopped and Nicky jolted awake. Disoriented, she sat in her truck. Memory flooded her as she swiveled her head to stare out the window. The old woman and the rabbits were gone.

  She opened the door, breath harsh, and climbed out. Fumbling at her waist, she switched on her flashlight and pointed it at the heavy shadows that lurked between the branches and leaves. Her breath came easier as she crept forward and angled the beam at the ground. There were no footprints, no paw prints. She knew there wouldn’t be. But … brows knit, she knelt and touched the powdery dirt.

  The ground seemed to have been swept clean.

  Nicky stood and gave the slopes of Scalding Peak one last lingering glance, before she slid back into the driver’s seat of her unit. She started her truck and stared for a long time at the trees and bushes.

  She’d swing by Howard Kie’s trailer tonight.

  Might as well. The drive home would offer no chance for her to unwind now.

  CHAPTER TWELVE