Hawk Moon (8 page)

I wasn't out long, two or three minutes at most.

My flashlight had fallen a few feet away from me. The beam was still on. It shone in my face. The grass around the face of the flashlight was very green.

And then the dog trotted into the flashlight's beam, a very pretty Border collie, with something smudged red across her pretty face.

She was friendly.

She came over and started licking my nose and cheeks. Her tongue tickled and I laughed. Ridiculous to laugh in my position but it was funny. She smelled of wet fur and mud and the foggy night. She belonged to somebody. She was too well-kept to be a stray.

I started to sit up. The headache was massive, arcing across the back of my head, up and across and down into my forehead.

They did a hell of a job for missing my most vulnerable area.

The collie came at me for another kiss but I gently touched her face and eased her away.

And that was when I felt something sticky in the palm of my hand. I reached over, picked up the flashlight, aimed it at my palm.

Blood.

That's what she had all over her face.

I reached out to bring her closer but she was playing hard to get now. Apparently miffed that I'd resisted her earlier advances.

She trotted off into the fog.

Blood.

I got up, which wasn't easy, and closed my eyes against the headache sawing through my cranium.

I liked David Rhodes even less than I had before. I was pretty sure he was the one who'd struck me.

And then my friend the Border collie came back, prim and pretty and proud about what she had in her mouth. My mind didn't want to register the reality of what she was carrying. But I saw how she'd managed to smear herself with blood.

The ripped, ragged arm belonged to a Native American female — that much I could tell even from here.

The upper arm was the part that gave me trouble. After all those years studying serial killers, I had convinced myself that the occasional atrocity didn't have much power over me. But I was wrong.

The contrast between the sweet proud dog and the obscenely severed arm carried in her mouth overpowered me for a moment. All I could do was stand in the vast desolate night, the fog enveloping me, and listen to the distant owl hooting his forlorn prairie wisdom.

I reached down and patted the dog on the head.

She was so damned sweet and earnest sitting there. I petted her some more. I didn't want to break her heart by telling her, "See, honey, we humans have these laws we make up, and one of them is that it's in bad taste to walk around with somebody's arm dangling from your mouth."

She dropped the arm.

She wanted more petting and apparently the limb was becoming something of a chore to keep fixed in her jaws.

I played my light on the arm.

A small light-brown birthmark on the inner elbow was the only distinguishing feature. It wasn't easy to see because of the bruise-like decay of the flesh. Several days dead, I presumed. The stench told me that — a high hard sour-egg smell.

The collie got interested again and dipped her head to sniff at the arm.

I picked her up.

This particular piece of evidence needed protection now from the elements and the collie alike.

There was a garage to the west of the house. I groped for a door and went inside. The fire had left it alone. It smelled of lingering heat.

The collie squirmed and wriggled as if she were enduring great torture.

After a minute, I found what I was looking for — a cardboard box. I left the collie in the garage, closing the door behind me, and took the box back to the arm.

I carefully set the box over the arm. Safe.

The humidity had sweat rolling down my face and chest and arms. The fog wrapped itself around me.

Maybe somewhere in the gutted remains of the house I would find the body to match the arm. But that was official police business and I was happy to let them take care of it. They could also let the dog out of the garage once the arm was safe as evidence.

I started back down the drive through the fog.

Ten minutes it took to find my car, and another twenty to move slowly along the road until I located the glowing light of a phone booth.

I pulled in, dug some change from my pocket and phoned the Cedar Rapids Police Department. At this point, I had no desire to get involved anymore than I was already. I wanted to talk to Cindy and then to David.

I told the police how to find what they needed and then I got in my car and drove inchingly back to my motel room in the fog.

I
ndians and blacks received justice in many cases. But when there was controversy, or when the crime was particularly savage, there was, on the part of law enforcement and the bench alike, a certain rush to wrap things up. To be fair, this same standard often applied to poor whites, as well.

Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

N
ot until 3:A.M. was Tall Tree brought out from his room atop the livery stable.

When Chief Ryan and Anna first knocked on his door, the Indian responded by climbing out his window and scaling the wall so that he could stand on the livery roof, where he proceeded to hold off twenty armed men until he was wounded in the shoulder by a sharpshooter and finally surrendered. He was very intoxicated and belligerent but denied knowing anything about the death of the young Indian woman he'd loved.

F
ollowing dinner the next night, Anna and Mrs. Goldman sat at a table in the parlor, Mrs. Goldman's new electric lamp burning fiercely in the shadows. For a time, they discussed the weekly shopping they did together downtown, when wagonloads of fresh produce were brought in from farms surrounding the city, and when all the shops filled their windows with the latest in picture hats and dresses. This Saturday there were to be several sales. Anna had saved two dollars for a new skirt.

Then Anna changed the subject and started talking about Tall Tree.

"He's innocent, Mrs. Goldman, I'm sure of it."

"The Chief won't listen to you?"

Anna shook her head. "Sometimes he will but not this time. He just sees it as open and shut."

"If he's really innocent, Anna, then you'll have to keep pushing the Chief."

She looked fondly at Mrs. Goldman and smiled. "I will. I just hope he doesn't fire me."

A
nna sat up late in the parlor, examining the things she'd found while combing the crime scene that night.

1. She'd made some casts of boot prints she'd found. There were several styles. There were no moccasin prints.

2. She'd found three buttons — two belonged to an expensive male vest; one to a woman's dress.

3. She'd found a tortoiseshell comb that fashionable ladies wore in their hair these days. The comb might have belonged to the victim.

4. She'd found a scrap of paper torn in half. The remaining letters were

ay

ouse

She had no idea what this meant.

5. She'd snuck into the funeral parlor and taken a look at the dead girl's wounds. The killer must have stood too close to her to get much sweeping force because the wounds were curiously shallow, even the fatal one in the heart.

6. She'd found three different sets of ladies' shoeprints but had run out of material for casting.

7. She'd found a strange fishing lure — one in the shape and color of a black moon.

8. She'd found a cravat stickpin that was gold-painted.

She was frustrated that none of these things pointed her in any particular direction.

What good was "scientific detection" if it didn't offer you a road map?

M
rs. Goldman, regal in her rustling robe, came down just after midnight and woke Anna from sleeping at the parlor table.

She helped Anna gather up her crime-scene evidence and then assisted her yawning young boarder up the stairs to bed.

T
here was somebody in my room.

I walked back to the motel office and went up to the desk, where a fifty-ish woman in a flowered blouse and a beehive hairdo (I think she was doing a one-woman salute to some of the Motown girl groups) read a Janet Dailey novel while occasionally glancing up at Jay Leno through her pinkframed eyeglasses.

"Hi," I said.

She took a long moment to raise her eyes from her book.

"Hi."

"There's somebody in my room."

"Somebody?"

"Umm-hmm. A thief or somebody. I wondered if you'd call the police."

She gave me a good, hard look. She was searching, I think, for evidence that I'd been partaking of the grape.

"Why do you think somebody's in your room, Mr. Payne?"

"I heard them."

"They were talking?"

"No. They were knocking things over."

She hooted, then. That was the only word for it. She threw her head back and made a hooting noise.

"That little pecker!"

"What little pecker?"

"Ralph."

"Who's Ralph?"

She set down her Janet Dailey novel, reached over and turned around a small sign that read
Back in a Minute
.

"C'mon, hon," she said. "I'll show ya."

Ralph turned out to be a large and not entirely attractive
hog who, the motel clerk assured me, was perfectly harmless as long as you didn't leave anything breakable out in your room. Ralph lived in the back, the best friend of the motel owner's eight-year-old daughter. He was an industrious and talented hog, our Ralph. He could climb up on the garbage cans and then shimmy through your window if you'd been silly enough to leave it open. It cost them a lot to replace screens every now and then, but it was worth it for the laugh, and Ralph didn't do it all that often, anyway.

I said goodnight to both Ralph and the lady. The lady was still giggling. Ralph was still grunting.

I did all the things I'd been wanting to do for the past couple hours, including taking a small overdose of aspirin, and then I slipped into bed and slept.

T
he knocking on my door seemed to be part of the dream I was having. Two, three times they knocked before I realized it was for real.

I didn't know where I was, not at first. That happens sometimes when I'm on the road. Back in my Bureau days that was a problem. Traveling isn't good for a guy who is a small town boy at heart.

I tugged on my trousers and stumbled to the door, taking my Ruger with me for company.

There was an eye-hole and I used it.

Cindy Rhodes stared back at me. Her fine-boned face looked kempt and pretty even in the middle of the night. Only the dark eyes revealed something wild and frantic. She'd changed shirts. This one was a blue western-style one, and it fitted her most appealingly.

I opened the door and the hot muggy dark leapt inside like a pet who was supposed to stay outside all night.

"Could we go get some coffee?" Cindy asked me, straight out.

"Sure," I said.

"There's a truck stop not far from here."

"All right."

"This is really shitty of me, waking you up this way."

"You wouldn't do it unless it was important." I smiled and yawned. "At least, I hope you wouldn't."

T
he truck stop was full of cowboy truck drivers in western shirts and Elvis sideburns and an endless hankering for Hank Williams Jr. records. Sleepy-eyed waitresses transported lots and lots of scalding black coffee to tables and
booths. Men came and went from the showers in the back. I couldn't imagine their lives. You hear about the hookers and drugs, but most of these men and women are decent, hardworking folks with families and a real sense of responsibility. The loneliness must get pretty bad: you out there somewhere in Utah in the middle of a midnight blizzard, and your wife and daughter back in Texas dreaming of Daddy in their uneasy slumber.

We had some of the scalding coffee.

Cindy said, "He's in trouble."

"David?"

"Right. Bad trouble."

"I'm not sure what that means." I waited for her to explain.