Before Sunrise (8 page)

“You don't think there's a chance he was telling the truth?” he asked hesitantly.

“Not a chance on earth,” she said firmly. “Now what do I owe you for those bullets? And you'd better tell me the truth, because I'm calling the local gun shop to ask.”

He grimaced and told her. She wrote him out a check.

“And thank you for the lessons and the loan of the pistol,” she added. “I'm really grateful.”

“No problem. I'd better get back to work. You watch your back,” he added.

She smiled. “Sure.”

 

T
HAT EVENING
, when Drake got off work, he knocked on the door of the room in a local motel where Cortez was staying.

“Come in,” the older man said, sounding weary.

Drake opened the door. There sat Cortez in a chair in his sock feet, jeans and a black T-shirt with a sleeping toddler sprawled on his broad chest. His hair was loose down his back and he looked as if he'd die for some sleep.

“He's teething,” Cortez said. “I finally took him to the clinic and got something for the pain. For both of us,” he added without a smile, but with a twinkle in his dark eyes. “What do you want?”

“I brought some information.” He handed the slip of paper to Cortez and watched him unfold it. “That's what Miss Keller remembers about her conversation with the anthropologist. It was on disk, but I had it transcribed for you.”

“She's very thorough.”

“She should be doing ethnology, not overseeing
some little museum,” Drake said. “She's overqualified for the job.”

Cortez glanced at him. “What do you know about ethnology?”

“Are you kidding? I'm Cherokee. Well,” he corrected quietly, “part Cherokee. My father was full-blooded. My mother was white and she got tired of her family making remarks about her little half-breed. She walked out the door when I was three. Dad drank himself to death. I went into the army at seventeen and found myself a home, where a lot of people have mixed blood,” he added coldly.

Cortez studied him silently. “I had a Spanish ancestor somewhere.”

“It doesn't show,” Drake said flatly. “I imagine you fit in just fine with your people.”

“Your people outnumber us.”

“Which half of my people do you mean?” Drake asked ruefully.

“The Indian half. And even among my people, there are only about nine hundred of us who still speak Comanche,” Cortez said. “The language is almost dead. At least Cherokee is making a comeback.”

“No two people speak it alike,” Drake said. “But I get your point—it's still a viable language.” He looked at the
little boy with soft eyes. “Going to teach him how to speak Comanche?”

Cortez nodded. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he studied Drake. “But he'll have your problem. His mother is white.”

Drake was looking at the sleeping child intensely. “Does she live with your people?”

Cortez's eyes flashed. He averted them. “She…died a month after Joseph was born,” he said reluctantly.

“Sorry,” Drake said at once.

“It wasn't that sort of marriage,” the older man said coldly. “I appreciate the notes. Did Phoebe tell you to give them to me?”

“She said they might be useful to the FBI,” Drake hedged.

Cortez's big hand absently smoothed the sleeping child's back. He stared ahead of him without seeing anything. “She lives in a dangerous place, so far out of town.”

“I've got the guys doing extra patrols,” Drake said. “She knows how to shoot. I think if her life depended on it, she would use it to protect herself.”

“She'd shoot to wound an attacker and she'd be dead in seconds,” he said flatly.

“You're full of cheer,” Drake said with faint sarcasm.

Those coal-black eyes pierced his face. “Why did he call her?” he asked abruptly. “Why not go to the state authorities or local law enforcement…why Phoebe?”

Drake frowned. “Well…I don't know.”

Cortez lifted the sheet of paper again and studied it. His eyes narrowed. “He mentioned a daughter.”

“That's about as much as we know about this John Doe,” Drake said grimly. “His fingerprints aren't on file in any database. That's the first thing we checked..”

“I know. Our investigator ran them last night,” Cortez told him. “We drew a blank as well, and I won't tell you how our criminalist convinced the lab to leapfrog over other pending cases to do ours.”

“The anthropologist was of Cherokee descent,” Drake reminded him. “That means he might have relatives on the Rez…”

“That's an assumption. The larger part of your nation is in Oklahoma,” Cortez interrupted.

Drake stopped speaking with his mouth still open. “That's right!”

“I live in Oklahoma,” Cortez murmured absently. “So we're left with two questions. What the hell was he doing here, and where did he come from? Maybe he has a car, but in another state.”

“That's a lead I'll check out as soon as I get back to
work. I'll go see the tribal council, too,” Drake told him. “Maybe he's got relatives in one of our clans. If so, the same clan in Oklahoma would know him, if he's from there.”

“Good thinking. One other thing we dug out,” Cortez added. “Someone staying at the motel saw a dark SUV parked outside the night of the murder. It hasn't been seen since. You might have your colleagues keep an eye out…why are you laughing?”

“I guess you haven't noticed that every other vehicle in this county is an SUV,” Drake murmured. “They're perfect for mountain driving, with four-wheel drive.”

“Damn.” His broad chest rose and fell with a frustrated deep breath. The child made a murmur at the movement and then shifted his little body and went back to sleep. “There's another possibility,” Cortez said after a minute, his heavy brows drawn together in thought. “We were told that a lot of Cherokee people work in construction around here. What if our visiting anthropologist was related to one of them?”

Drake pursed his lips. “That's possible. If I can track down his clan, I may be able to dig up a few relations here. I'll get Marie to help. She is a bit of a talker, but she's very smart, too. She and I together have more cousins on the Rez than our tribal council—and that's saying something.”

“Marie?”

“My cousin. She works for Miss Keller at the museum.”

Cortez averted his eyes. “I remember her. She spoke Cherokee to me. I was…abrupt with her.”

“So I heard.”

Cortez glanced toward the other man, who was smiling amusedly. “I hadn't seen Phoebe in three years,” he said. “It was a difficult day.”

Drake hesitated. “I don't know you. Probably I'm going to tick you off for even asking. But Miss Keller is a unique woman…”

Cortez turned his head and looked at the younger man.

Drake held up a hand. The expression was like a loaded gun. “I'm not involved with her, or likely to be,” he added at once. “Let me get the words out before you take offense.”

Cortez still glared.

Drake cleared his throat. “I've only known her a short time. But Marie's been with her for three years. She said that Miss Keller was a basket case when she came here. An older woman, her aunt I believe, came to visit and asked Marie to keep a close eye on her, because she'd had some sort of personal problem that almost caused an emotional breakdown. She'd taken some pills…”

“God!” Cortez exclaimed harshly.

The look on Cortez's face stopped the words in Drake's throat. He swallowed, hard.

The toddler stirred and protested. Cortez fought to calm down. He soothed the little boy's back and took a deep, slow breath. His big hand had a faint tremor.

“Miss Keller doesn't know that Marie told me that,” Drake said, his voice quieter, softer now. “But I thought you should know, too.”

Cortez didn't look at him. He was staring into space again, his whole body tense. “Coyote lies in wait everywhere for us,” he said with bridled fury, mentioning a character from Native American folklore which was common to almost every tribe—Coyote, the trickster, the enemy spirit.

“He does,” Drake agreed quietly. “But sometimes we can outwit him.”

The dark, turbulent eyes met his. “I'd cut off my hand before I would voluntarily hurt Phoebe. What happened…was a family matter that forced me into a decision I would never have made, if I'd had any freedom of choice at all.”

Drake frowned. “Would it have something to do with that little boy?” he wanted to know.

“Everything,” Cortez said heavily. He looked at Joseph
with loving eyes. “I thought it would be easier for Phoebe if she hated me.” His eyes closed. “I never dreamed that she might…” He couldn't even finish the thought. It tormented him that a woman like Phoebe, so bright and loving and full of life, could be driven to such sorrow because of him. It wounded his very soul.

“All of us have done desperate things in a moment of despair,” Drake said. “We usually have the good fortune to survive them.”

Cortez touched the little boy's hair with his fingertips. “I took a month off and spent it breaking wild horses on a cousin's ranch, just after I got married.”

The older man was making a point, and Drake understood. “I imagine you didn't even get kicked,” he mused.

Cortez laughed without humor. “I got bitten twice.” He glanced at Drake. “You can't die when you want to.”

“Yeah, I know. I'm not a suicidal person, but I joined a combat unit after my girl dumped me,” he replied. “Her people didn't want her to have a half-breed's kids.”

Cortez's dark eyes lost their last trace of hostility. “Somebody once told me that we live in a world that no longer discriminates.”

“Bull,” Drake said passionately.

“That's what I told her,” Cortez agreed. “You can't legislate equality or morality. Pity.”

Drake chuckled. “Yeah.”

Cortez indicated Phoebe's note. “Thanks for bringing this by. I'll share it with the unit tomorrow and we'll see what we can come up with.”

“You're welcome. I'll help keep an eye on Miss Keller.”

“Thanks.”

Drake shrugged. “I like her, too. She doesn't see color, did you notice?”

Cortez gave him a look that spoke volumes.

Drake held up a hand defensively and grinned. “I'll see you around, then. Oh, one other thing,” he added from the door.

“Yes?”

“Under the circumstances, don't you think it's a little careless to be sitting in here with a child, with the door unlocked?”

Just as he said that, the doorknob turned and a woman who looked about Drake's age walked in with a bag of disposable pull-up diapers. She stared at Drake intensely with dark eyes in a pretty round face surrounded by long, thick black hair. She grinned suddenly, her white teeth startling in her dark face.

“Are you going to arrest him?” she asked Drake enthusiastically, nodding toward Cortez. “Can I put the handcuffs on?”

Drake was nonplussed. He couldn't think of a reply.

Cortez chuckled. He looked suddenly years younger. “That's Tina,” he said. “She's my cousin. My regular baby-sitter is back in Lawton, Oklahoma, with a bad case of shingles. My father's too old to be a nanny and I couldn't manage Joseph alone, so I talked Tina into coming up here with me. She lives in Asheville. She works in the local library, but she moonlights as a tour guide at the Biltmore Estate on weekends,” he added, naming a famous tourist spot.

“Everybody around here thinks I'm Cherokee,” she said, the grin widening. “Hi. I'm Christina Redhawk.” She noticed the look her cousin was giving her and she chuckled. “He uses the name Cortez. I like our own family name better.”

“I'm Drake Stewart,” he replied.

“You live here?” she asked.

“I'm a deputy sheriff.”

She made a face. “Another lawman.” She shook her head and went to put the diapers down on one of the beds. “He's always playing matchmaker for me, with every new single agent who works with him,” she indi
cated Cortez. “That's why I moved to North Carolina. I date a policeman in Asheville.” She gave Cortez a speaking look. “Of course, he isn't half as cute as you are, Drake,” she added with a sly look.

“Drake was leaving,” Cortez said at once, standing up carefully so as not to wake the child. “Here.” He handed Joseph to her. “He's going to have to sleep in your room tonight. I've got some work to do on the Internet.”

“I'll take good care of him.” She took Joseph and paused at the door where Drake was standing. “Maybe I'll see you,” she said with a grin.

Drake chuckled. “Maybe so, if we can ditch him,” he jerked his thumb toward Cortez playfully.