Buffalo Jump Blues (21 page)

She said she would, and told Sean that it was good to hear his voice, that she was looking forward to cooking for him again, that she'd make her venison stew with parsnips and juniper berries. He flipped the phone shut, feeling like he'd betrayed her family, that she would turn her head the other way seeing him walking down the street if she'd known what he'd done.

“If you feel like you have to go up there, I won't stand in your way,” Martha said. “But be careful.” She shook her head. “I sound like my mother.”

“I can't go without a car.”

“Yeah, you keep bumming rides off women. I'll have somebody drive you back to your place.”

“Can you spare Huntsinger for that? He might remember something else useful.”

“I doubt it, but sure. See if you can get anything more than a shrug out of him.”

Sean stood, hesitated.

“What now?”

“Money. I'm not working for Ida anymore and I've been turning away guide days that pay the bills.”

“You're on the county dole until I say you aren't. I thought I'd told you that.” She pushed back her chair. “You're what I call a Montana Renaissance man. You have about five different jobs and still you have to stick a hose down a gas tank to siphon up enough fuel to get to the store.”

“That's the fate of the artist,” Sean said.

“No, what it is, is pathetic. You own land, you've poured a foundation for a house, but three years later you're still living in a tipi and showering at your studio.” Her voice softened. “Look, Sean, I care about you. I
worry
about you.”

“Not enough to leave the light on.”

“This isn't about us. It's about you.”

“Just ring down for Hunt.”

“Sure. Whatever you say.”

When he shut the door, her shoulders fell. She looked at the ceiling and let out a long breath. He was halfway down the hall when she caught up to him and dragged him into a stairwell. “Hold me,” she said. “Don't say anything, just hold me.”

“No kiss?”

“Shut up.” She kissed him.

“I'm sorry,” Sean said.

“Sorry for what, being you? I'm sorry for being me every day.”

She tucked her chin into the hollow of his shoulder. “Don't you
dare die on me. Don't you dare do anything stupid up there and die on me.”

“I'm the one with the ermine tail, Martha.”

She pushed him back and fingered the tail out of his pocket. She didn't believe in magic. She didn't believe in fate, either. Or coincidence. And God was just the wish to never die. But she believed in the wisdom of the past, and the Indians had been here long before her people. She kissed the black tip and tucked the tail back into his pocket and buttoned the flap.

“Get out of here,” she said.

M
artha had been right. Huntsinger had given Sean little more to chew on before dropping him at the tipi, although at Sean's probing he'd revisited a point he'd mentioned earlier, about the semen found inside the body of the prostitute.

“You said it was too degraded for a DNA match with the perpetrator of the crime,” Sean said.

Huntsinger said that's what he'd been told.

How long did it typically take for that to happen?

The deputy had shrugged. It wasn't his area of expertise.

It was Georgeanne Wilkerson's area of expertise, however, and the newly constructed crime lab that shared quarters with the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks lab in a metal Quonset hut on the outskirts of Bridger was Sean's first stop after fueling the Land Cruiser. Wilkerson had returned from the game ranger's cabin in the valley a couple hours before and met him in the lot, where she was retrieving her lunchbox from her truck.

“You can't stay away from me,” she told him. To which he replied, “I want to talk about semen.”

“You've found the right girl,” she said.

He sketched in the reason for his visit as they entered the lab and she ushered him into her office, such as it was, a metal desk against a curved interior wall with one personal touch, a framed photograph of Wilkerson standing on a rocky beach with a bearded man about twice her size, both wearing wetsuits, a sea kayak pulled up on shore.

“That was in the Aleutians,” she said. “Last August.”

“Your paramour?”

“My fiancé. We're getting married next month at his parents' ranch up the Boulder.” She looked down, embarrassed. “It's just family. I couldn't invite all the people I work with.”

“I understand. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” She took a laboratory coat from a plastic garment bag hanging from a peg on the wall and shrugged into it. “So the man wants to know about semen,” she said.

“I do, but did you find anything interesting this morning?”

“Yes, but you first. Why do you want to know about jizz?”

He explained the circumstances of the prostitute's murder in Washington. Wilkerson's eyes widened behind her glasses at the mention of the bear.

“That's way cool,” she said. “That's a case I'd liked to have worked on.” She paused. “Semen's all over the map when you're talking DNA. I mean, nothing could be more important than semen carrying sperm and sperm carrying DNA, right? The future of the species depends on it. But when the all-knower made the human body, he made a few mistakes, especially with reproduction. Here you've got the clitoris where it can't receive direct stimulation during coitus—that's what makes you figure the creator had to be a man. Then, a lot of females have an allergic reaction to their mate's semen. I mean, come on. We're the only mammal allergic to our own reproductive juices? Really? And finally, when the semen actually does get where it can do some good, the sperm stop swimming and die. From a forensic perspective, the problem with semen is it degrades quickest in a warm, moist environment like the vagina, which of course is exactly where you'd want it to persist. The ability to identify DNA from semen deposited in the vagina drops like a stone after about twelve hours, and after forty-eight hours you typically can't build a useful profile to compare with the genetic markers of a suspected donor.”

Sean wanted to ask a question, but Wilkerson was warming to her subject.

“Now, dried semen,” she said, “that's tougher stuff. It retains identifiable DNA practically forever. I mean, if you could find semen on the petrified skin of a Tyrannosaurus, you could build yourself a Tyrannosaurus. That's why when I go to a scene, I'm looking for stains on clothing or a film of semen dried on the thighs or caught in pubic hair, because that stuff's gold. And it's a pet peeve of mine that so many women are waxing off their hair, because the semen stays in hair long after it's washed away or rubbed off the skin. I'm like, ‘Sister, grow your 'fro. Give me a comb and I'll send him to Rome'—Rome like being where men have sex with each other.”

“I get it. But it's still really dumb, right, to rape without a condom?”

“Major league. Serial rapists learn to put a papa-stopper on it if they don't want to get caught. You mentioned two victims. I'm guessing the second one there isn't any semen, so you're wondering if it's a different MO, does that mean it's not the same perp?”

Sean nodded. “I don't want to delude myself into thinking there's a connection between these two if there isn't.”

“So these Karlson brothers, I take it they were proximate to this crime as well as the Hoh River murder?” He explained the circumstances of the second death.

Wilkerson nodded. “I wouldn't put too much emphasis on semen versus no semen. What we're finding out about rape is that for a significant percentage of the perps, it isn't a once-or-twice deal. Serials are the norm, not the exception, and there's a learning curve. The pro in Washington might have been their first and they didn't start covering it up until they went Ivy League.”

She cocked her head. “You want to know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I think you're on the right track. Come here, I want to show you something. I really didn't find much of interest after you and Martha left, but I did have time to work up a fingerprint analysis for the suicide note.”

“And . . .”

“And now I'm not so sure as I was.”

She retrieved an acid-free plastic sheath from a filing cabinet. “It can be hard lifting latents from copy paper, but disulfur dinitride usually does the trick. See here, the purple partial at the very edge? This ridge pattern is what you'd find on the edge of the thumb, like you were barely pinching the paper between the thumb and your forefinger. It's too incomplete to provide enough points of similarity to prove a match, but it's complete enough to eliminate whose fingerprint it isn't. And it isn't Thackery's. These”—she tapped a half dozen other prints, partials and completes exposed by the disulfur dinitride—“
are
Thackery's.”

“So that means the note's genuine.”

She nodded. “The signature at the bottom matches others I found on business correspondence in his study. That, together with the prints on the paper, are, in my opinion, conclusive proof of originality.”

“Yet someone besides Thackery handled the note.”

“Well, someone handled the paper. I can't absolutely rule out that the dissimilar print was made before the note was written.” She peered up at him with her magnified eyes.

“So what do you make of it, Gigi?”

“Well, if you read the note, it says that there are brothers involved in the buffalo jump. At the same time it says that Gary Hixon's death was accidental. So what if they, Brady and Levi, went up to the cabin to off Thackery. But they were too late and he'd already killed himself. They see a suicide note that places brothers at the scene. That could mean people in a brotherhood, could mean this, could mean that, but it could mean them. At the same time, the note exonerates these brothers”—she scrolled quote marks with her fingers—“from culpability for the fatality. At least Thackery takes the blame.”

“Puts them in a bind,” Sean said.

Wilkerson nodded. “It makes them think. If they just leave it lying about, then maybe somebody with a badge comes knocking at the door. Who knows, there could have been people who saw them with
Thackery before the jump, and this would confirm their participation and put them at the scenes of two deaths. But if they destroy the note, there goes Thackery taking the blame. So they go about it half-assed. They put it where it might not be discovered for days or even weeks. That way, if the department comes up with evidence down the road that paints them as perps, they can tell somebody where to find the note, which is their get-out-of-jail pass. They can say that they hid it because they didn't want to be associated with the jump.”

“They admit to the lesser crime.”

“If running buffalo is a crime at all.”

“It's complicated,” Sean said, “but it fits. Gigi, I think you've missed your true calling.”

“Nah.” But she blushed anyway.

“So, does this mean that it was definitely suicide?”

“No, it could still have been murder and made to look that way. But if that was the case, Thackery had already written the note. They just beat him to the knockout punch.”

Sean nodded. “I gotta run. Will you pass this on to Martha, all of it, including your deductions?”

“I can't guarantee she'll listen.”

“I think you're wrong about that. Tell her I'm heading back up to the reservation.”

“You're a man on a mission and here I thought all you wanted to do was talk dirty.”

“Next time, I promise.” He thanked her and congratulated her again on her engagement.

She smiled and frowned in the same breath. “It will be interesting. He can do biceps curls holding me like a barbell, but he can't stand the sight of blood.”

“True love knows not logic nor lust, but the synchronized beating of hearts.”

“Is that Shakespeare?”

“Sean Stranahan. When you live in a tipi with a dog, you think deep thoughts.”

—

Deep thoughts took him from Bridger to Three Forks, from Three Forks to Helena, from Helena to Augusta, where Sean once more found himself stretching his back muscles where Joseph was born, this time at a little past four, with the Sun River living up to its name. He'd been in and out of cell range for the past five hours, mostly out, and had no way of knowing if Joseph had tried to contact him. He surprised himself by picking up a bar and made the call to Heart Butte. Joseph's mother didn't answer and that was just as well. If he'd got through and she asked why he kept calling, he wouldn't know what to say.

You're the closest to a white friend I ever had,
Joseph had said, standing on the exact spot where Sean's shoes dented the damp gravel. Sean climbed back into the Land Cruiser and continued north, his face grim.

Clouds with a sickly yellowish tinge had been building to the west, and he drove under them and then into them, entering Heart Butte with raindrops staggering down the windshield. The brittle-whiskered cat meowed to be let in as he knocked on the door. The Pinto was parked on the street. No other car. No answer. He tried the knob. The door opened and the cat darted past him into the living room.

“Joseph?”

It was a small house. If he wasn't in the living area or kitchen, he was behind the closed door to his bedroom. Sean knocked on the door, a feeling like motion sickness in his belly.

“Joseph, you there?” Louder, reaching for the knob: “Joseph?”

“That you, Cuz?”

Sean took a deep breath and felt his ribs collapse as he let it out. “It's me. You had me scared to death.”

“You pound on the door I'm taking a nap, you think I'm not scared?”

Sean entered the room. Joseph was dressed in boxers and a Daffy Duck T-shirt. He held a lever-action carbine at port arms and set it down onto the rumpled sheets on the bed.

“My grandfather's,” he said, sheepishness in his voice. “See all the brass tacks in the stock? There's twenty-seven, one for every white settler
his
grandfather shot with it.”

“Really?”

“Nah, he was just telling stories. Maybe one for every deer if he was lucky. I only got a few cartridges that came to me with the rifle, after he died. Must be about a hundred years old. They'd be like a dud firecracker now or blow up the rifle.”

“You never shot it?”

“No, but I pointed it at a BFI who was threatening my mom with a Coke bottle, like about something she didn't know anything about, some grudge against her sister or something.”

“BFI?”

“Big Fucking Indian.”

“What happened?”

“He took it from me and slapped my face. I was, like, eight. That's the rez giving you an update, keeping it real, case you forget.”

“You want me to make some coffee?”

“Sure, I'll get dressed.”

He got around to it halfway through the first cup. He and Jerry had driven to the lakes on the list Sean had given him, and hadn't seen a black Highlander at any of them. The last lake they visited was Mitten, where a couple men were bait fishing, waiting for a flat to be inflated by an act of God, their words. They had seen two white men fishing the lake in a pontoon boat, and yes, they were driving a black SUV. The white guys fit Joseph's description, and the men said that the boys had helped them change their first flat before leaving. Then, like idiots—again their words—they had kept fishing as the spare deflated, instead of getting the hell out to the pavement. They gave
Joseph a number to call so a friend could bring them another tire. The friend might not make it until tomorrow—did Joseph have any food? He had Spam and baked beans. He and Jerry ended up eating with the two guys, using the hood of Jerry's truck for a dinner table, that's why he was so late getting back.

Sean asked him if the brothers told the fishermen where they might be heading. Joseph said they hadn't.

“You're going up to the house, right? Where John is.” The old cat had jumped into Joseph's lap and was rubbing its face against his knuckles. “You ever think that you call, somebody might answer?”

Sean dialed the landline number that Melvin Campbell had given him on his first trip to the house. It rang. No answering machine.

“I'm going with you,” Joseph said.

“No way. I practically had a heart attack worrying about you on the drive. That reminds me.” Sean placed the ermine tail on the table. “I'm not leaving this house until you take it.”

Joseph picked it up. “But I'm still going,” he said.