Eye of the Wolf (3 page)

Judge Winslow stayed quiet a moment, peering again at his papers. Finally he looked up. “Well, it looks like we have a case of Mr. Montana's word against the word of the complainants.”

Larry Raven shifted from one foot to the other and glanced back at the rows of spectators. “Unfortunately, your honor, none of the complainants is here. I left messages at their homes this morning. I hoped they might show up so you could talk to them yourself.”

“Your honor,” Vicky cut in, “the tribal attorney knows that this is not an evidentiary hearing.”

“I can only surmise your honor,” the other lawyer continued, “that either the complainants didn't get the message as to the time of the hearing or that they are too intimidated by Mr. Montana to appear.”

“Your honor . . .” Vicky said again.

“Out of line, Mr. Raven.”

Vicky pushed on. “These are spurious charges made by three men who don't like my client. There is absolutely no evidence that my client attacked anyone. When the police arrested Mr. Montana, they searched his mother's house and his pickup. They did not find a rifle because there is no rifle. The only thing the tribal attorney has is the complainants' version of what happened, which contradicts my client's version. I intend to file a motion with the court to dismiss the charges for lack of probable cause. I ask the court to release Mr. Montana on a personal recognizance bond.”

The judge was quiet a long moment. Finally he said, “I'm inclined to go along with you. The fact is, Mr. Raven”—he gave a half-nod the tribal attorney—“this is a case of one man's word against the word of three other men, who may or may not hold some kind of a grudge. I'm going to grant the bond.”

The tribal attorney flinched backward, as if he'd been struck. “May I remind your honor,” he managed, “that Frank Montana has a record . . .”

“I know all about Mr. Montana's record.” The judge lifted one hand, then let it drop onto the bench top, making a loud, cracking noise. “You don't have a case here, Mr. Raven, and I'm stopping it from going forward until I consider the motion to dismiss.”

Behind her, Vicky could hear the labored breathing and a muffled sob. Lucille, sobbing with relief. Vicky felt her own wave of relief washing over her.

Now the judge was staring at Frankie. “Let me remind you that this is not the first time I've seen you in this courtroom. The tribal attorney is correct in pointing out that you have a record of offenses against the people on this reservation going back at least two years. Not a pretty record. I have no doubt that you're capable of assaulting three men. Let me warn you that if you are convicted of the charges, I will see to it that you are banished from this reservation. Do you understand?”

Vicky turned to the man beside her. “Answer him,” she whispered.

“Yeah, I understand.”

“You're free to go,” the judge said.

Vicky gathered her coat and briefcase and followed Frankie out into the side aisle. She waited until Lucille had stumbled after her son, coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape, glancing back with a look of gratitude on her face, dabbing a tissue at her eyes. Frankie's relatives crowded forward, patting him on the back as they moved through the double doors into the entry, where another small crowd was waiting for the next hearing.

“Thank you, Vicky,” Lucille said. They were walking through the snow that skimmed the sidewalk in front of the tribal building. The woman reached out and grabbed Vicky's hand. Her fingers were like clumps of ice.

“Listen, Lucille,” Vicky said, slowly removing her own hand from the woman's grip and keeping an eye on Frankie, striding around the group of relatives toward an old orange Ford sedan that Vicky guessed belonged to his mother. “I have to talk to Frankie a moment. Do you mind waiting?”

The woman blinked, then drew back, a look of fear shadowing her expression. “You go on,” she said.

Vicky swung around and hurried through the family after the young man who had flung open the passenger door and was about to lower himself inside. “Frankie,” she called.

Frankie Montana took a step back, then straightened his shoulders and rotated his head, flashing a victory grin back at the people clustered on the sidewalk. “Mom'll see you get paid, if that's what you're worried about,” he said.

“Do you know what banishment means?” Vicky came around the front of the Ford and faced the man. The door hung between them, Frankie leaning over the top.

“What do I care? You heard the judge. I'm outta here.”

“It means he has the power to keep you off this reservation.”

“What?”

“You heard me, Frankie. Just like in the Old Time when the chiefs banished troublemakers from the villages. They couldn't see their families. They had to make their own way on the plains, hunt for their own food, find their own shelter. No one would talk to them. They were completely alone. Most of them died.”

“He can't kick me off the rez.”

“Yes, he can, Frankie. That's exactly what he can do.”

The man shook his head and gave a snort of laughter. “I ain't worried,” he said, ducking into the car and pulling the door after him.

“Take my advice, Frankie,” Vicky shouted over the closing door. “Clean up your act.”

FATHER JOHN GUIDED
the pickup through the wash of snow that passed for a narrow road, bouncing over rocks and ridges, winding around frozen patches of sagebrush and wild grasses. The music of
Il Trovatore
washed through the cab. He'd been enjoying the opera lately, playing it over and over until the music had become as familiar as the music of
Aida, Rigoletto,
and
La Traviata.
He could see the wavy marks of fresh tracks ahead. One of the ranchers in the area, he thought. He'd driven through Lysite thirty minutes ago, the last place that resembled a town—general store, three or four houses, an abandoned gas station—and continued north into what the Arapahos called the badlands, a vast, empty expanse of bluffs that dropped into deep ravines a thousand feet below and ran uninterrupted into the sky all around. There were no trees as far as he could see. Gray clumps of sagebrush broke the monotony of the snow. From time to time, he spotted antelope tracks running alongside the road and, in the far
distance, the dark cluster of ranch buildings. From time to time, the faint afternoon sun tried to break through a sky that had turned the color of lead.

This morning, pulling out of the senior center, he'd come close to calling the Fremont County sheriff. He'd punched in half the numbers on his cell before he'd hit the end button. What would he say? Father Nathan had gotten a strange telephone call that might refer to dead bodies? It was possible the bodies were at the Bates Battlefield? Or any one of hundreds of other battle sites? Might? Possible? And a whole platoon of sheriff's deputies and who knew how many other law enforcement officers could be off on a wild-goose chase.

He'd stopped at the mission before heading out to the battlefield. The moment Father John had let himself through the heavy wooden door of the administration building, Father Ian McCauley, his new assistant, had emerged from his own office at the far end of the corridor. A tall, narrow man with trimmed, blond hair and the usual serious expression stamped on his face, he was closing in on forty, younger than Father John by eight or nine years. When the Provincial had called and suggested the man for the assistant's job, Father John had been struck by the similarities. Nine years ago, he'd been like Ian McCauley, fresh out of rehab at Grace House, desperate for a job, desperate to prove himself. Oh, Father John remembered what that had been like. And he needed an assistant. The last priest had packed up and left almost three months ago—
You know I love it here, John, but a teaching position at Georgetown!
—leaving him to run the mission alone for most of the winter. A few weeks ago, Ian McCauley had arrived with a couple of bags, several cartons of books, and an eager gratitude stamped all over him, the kind that Father John recognized had been his own.

“There you are, John.” Ian had come striding down the corridor with the bearing of a military general, waving a file folder. He'd followed Father John into his office on the right and launched into a speech about how they had to get their ducks in a row before tonight's parish council meeting so that they knew which programs the mission would have to
cancel this summer. Naturally they'd have to back up their decisions with facts and figures.

“Naturally,” Father John had agreed, flipping through the mail, checking the calls on the readout of the answering machine, half expecting to see an unidentified caller who would have a mechanical voice, making sure there wasn't anything that needed his attention before he drove out to Bates.

Father Ian had nudged a wooden chair across the study, sat down, and plopped the folder on the desk between them. “As I see it,” he'd begun, riffling through the papers in the folder, “and believe me, John, I've spent a great deal of time going over the numbers, we're going to have to cut back on thirty percent of the summer's programs. Donations have dropped off.” He whipped out a sheet from the center of the stack with the enthusiasm of the alcoholic intent on substituting one addiction for another. “Take a look.” He'd pushed on. “AA, social committee, new parents group all meet at Eagle Hall, which means we need maintenance and electricity an additional eight hours a week. By cutting those hours, we can save . . .”

The other priest had stopped in midsentence, and Father John realized he'd been shaking his head the whole time. “What?” Ian had asked.

“We'll have to discuss this later,” Father John had said, starting around the desk.

“Six new parents at last week's meeting.” His assistant had followed him into the corridor. “No way do the numbers justify the expense.”

Father John had yanked open the front door and glanced around at the man planted a few feet behind him. “I'll be back for the meeting,” he'd said.

“For Godsakes, John. We have to talk about this before the meeting.”

“Okay, then. I don't intend to cut any programs.”

“Be reasonable, John. How can we pay for everything?” Ian had rolled his eyes skyward, and Father John had read the other priest's assessment of him: stubborn, refuses to see the facts smacking him in the
face. He'd stepped outside, pulling the door shut behind him, and hurried to the pickup.

Now he realized that the narrow road had started winding downward. He was dropping off the top of a bluff, and the landscape was beginning to change. A thin line of trees—a black smudge in the whiteness—marked the banks of Bates Creek below. Tire tracks were still running ahead, which struck him as strange. Ranches out here were scattered over the bluffs. There was nothing in the valley, except the battlefield.

He was getting close, and yet, nothing was as close as it seemed in the empty spaces. He'd once decided to take a walk across the plains to the home of a parishioner—the direct route, the way the eagle flies. He figured it would take thirty minutes. It had taken more than two hours.

The road flattened out through the valley, the tracks heading west toward a canyon burrowing through slopes that rose like granite skyscrapers. The snow was deeper, and the sky darker, so that he had a sense that he was plunging toward an abyss. It occurred to him that if another spring blizzard set in, he could be stuck out here for days. He'd meant to get new tires for the pickup during the winter; there'd never been enough money in the budget. He concentrated on working the accelerator—easing up when the road smoothed out, pressing down for the climb over the ridges, always aiming for the tracks that chased ahead.

He could feel the pickup balking in the snow, the back wheels slipping and churning. He jammed the accelerator into the floor and willed the old vehicle to keep going. A couple of hundred yards, it looked like—he couldn't be sure—to the mouth of the canyon. The pickup nosed into a ditch hidden under the snow and started crawling up the other side. Then it stopped, the wheels grinding in place. He shifted into reverse and tried to back up. The tires whined; the rear end shimmied sideways. It was no use. He was stuck.

He turned off the engine, hit the stop button on the tape player, and
got out. He fished his gloves out of his jacket pocket and pulled them on. His hands felt stiff. The air was colder in the valley, the earth striped with blue shadows. Reaching back inside the pickup, he grabbed the cell phone and a pair of old binoculars that he kept in the glove compartment. He slammed the door shut—a loud crack through the sound of the wind rippling over the snow—and started out, stuffing the cell in his pocket, taking off his hat, looping the cord of the binoculars around his neck, and setting his hat back on. He walked in the packed snow of one of the tire tracks running ahead. Chances were that he could hitch a ride later with whoever was here, if he had to.

It looked as if the canyon had been swallowed by the black shadows falling down the rock-strewn slopes. He could see the scraggly line of trees veering right around the base of the mountain. And the tire tracks also veered right, he realized. They crossed the road and plunged toward the trees. Father John stopped. He stared after the tracks a moment, wondering where the driver was headed. Animal tracks danced around the tire tracks. Antelope. Deer. Maybe elk. And wolves, he knew, had also been seen in the badlands.

He dipped his chin into the folds of his jacket collar and set off at a half-run down the road, making his own tracks now, the snow swirling around his boots. He'd look for the other vehicle later.

It was like running into the night, he thought, as he headed into the narrow canyon, moving in and out of the shadows down a corridor of frozen air. The slopes closed in around him, clumps of rocks and boulders rising up to the flat faces of granite that towered overhead. Scattered among the rocks were a few junipers and limber pines that cast their own long shadows, like the shadows of dead men. Above, the sky was a milky strip of light. The snow-covered floor of the canyon was pockmarked with sagebrush and clumps of dead grass. There were a few trees along the edges of the canyon floor. Gusts of wind zigzagged over the snow, lifting white puffs into the air and dropping them back to the ground.

Father John stopped running. He was breathing hard, the air jabbing his lungs like icicles. This was a wild-goose chase, he told himself.
A crank call, just as Father Nathan had suspected. Nothing here but the emptiness and the pervasive quiet of remote places.

He lifted the binoculars and worked at adjusting the focus knob. His fingers felt as stiff as wood. Through the lens, the canyon dissolved into the sameness of snow wrapped in shadows, broken by a tree here and there and the gray hulks of sagebrush. The wind had picked up, howling across the slopes. No wonder that the elders said you could still hear the cries of the women and children at Bates and the howling of wolves.

He was about to turn around when the binoculars brought up something different—a long, horizontal shape, like a log partially covered with snow. Two round, dark smudges jutted from one end. He crept forward, keeping the shape in the lens. He'd gone about twenty feet when the smudges came into focus. He could see clearly—the black hair, the hump of a shoulder in a dark jacket, the long shape of a body.

He dropped the binoculars and started running, gulping in the icy air that ripped through his chest, the binoculars thudding against the front of his jacket. His heart pounded in his ears. A few feet from the body, he stopped. It was the body of a man, reclining on his side, right arm stretched over his head as if to ward off a blow. Little mounds of snow covered the gray jacket, the plaid shirt poking above the collar, the blue jeans, the tops of brown boots. There was no hat, no gloves, no footprints, which meant that the body had been here before last night's snowstorm, possibly since Saturday, when the temperature was in the sixties—hatless, gloveless weather.

Father John moved closer and went down on one knee in the snow. His breath stopped in his throat. The scavengers had already found the body—magpies, ravens maybe. They had picked at the eyes, so that the dead man seemed to be staring out through jagged, dark holes. Pieces of skin had been peeled away from the face and hands. Father John wondered how long it would be before the wolves came. They came with the ravens, he knew. They worked together.

He didn't take his eyes from the body. The man looked Indian, with prominent cheekbones, black hair falling over his forehead, wide nostrils.
A sheen of frost lay over what was left of the face, which looked leathery and gray, almost colorless. Even the right hand—half lost in the snow—had a gray pallor of frozen flesh. There was a hardened puddle of blood on the front of the jacket, another puddle on one shoulder. And there was something else—something familiar about the way the body lay, right arm pulled up above the head, left arm folded helplessly across the abdomen.

He'd seen dead bodies like this in old photographs of fallen warriors—soldiers moving across a battlefield in the stillness following an attack, snapping pictures of dead bodies lying on their side, right arms stretched overhead from the way they'd run forward, waving white pieces of cloth and American flags. But there was no surrender cloth here, no flag. Only the outstretched arm.

He understood then: The killer had
posed
the body.

“My God,” he said out loud. The sound of his voice was almost lost in the quiet of the canyon.

He dropped his head and thumped a gloved fist against his forehead. In his mind, as clearly as if the tape had started to play, was the mechanical voice:
Frozen enemy of old. Dead in the gorge.
The voice of a madman who had re-created the battle scene from the past.

It was a moment before Father John could push past the horror. “May the good Lord have mercy on you,” he said out loud. “May He forgive you your sins, whatever they may be, and may you live forever in His peace.”

Finally he struggled to his feet and peered through the dim light along the canyon floor.
Bodies in the snow
, the voice had said, and he knew with a certainty that there were more bodies. He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and studied the floor again. Left. Right. The temperature must have dropped ten degrees, and the shadows were deepening, beginning the slow meld into dusk. It was going to be hard to spot any other bodies, he realized, sweeping the binoculars back to the left.

There it was—another horizontal shape interrupting the expanse of snow. The same dark, rounded smudges of a head and shoulders at one end.

Father John started walking, not taking the binoculars down, afraid of losing sight of the body. As he stumbled over something hard—a rock, a frozen stalk of sagebrush—the crack of his boots against the object lingered in the silence. He kept going until the body loomed up in front of him.