Jumlin's Spawn (2 page)

“Serious as a myocardial infarction, I'm afraid,”
Darwin said. “And, we got the FBI flying down day after tomorrow,
seeing as it's Federal land.”

Elfie squinted hard, fighting to follow the
conversation. “The FBI? So…animal mutilations,
exsanguination.  Are you thinking there’s a weird ritual
killer on the loose or something?”

“Well, we’ve pretty much ruled out UFOs and
chupacabras. If it’s a ritual killer, it’s more than one,” Darwin
said.  “I mean, no one can pull down ten buffalo and live to
tell the tale without one heck of a lot of help.  To be
honest, I half-suspected Duryea was the head of some blood cult or
something, until he turned up dead.  His work, combined with
his familiarity with the north and south units, would have
festooned him with motive and opportunity.”

“I didn't know him, or his work, well enough to know
for sure. I can't say I'd eliminate the possibility,” Elfie
said.

Yancey moved around her side to stare at her directly
with more than a little surprise. “What the hell happened to Duryea
being your own personal Indiana Jones?”

“I was wrong, okay?” she replied, sending him an
angry stare. “You were right. I found out a lot of things in the
last couple of days.”

Darwin plunked down his coffee. “This is how it
works, Elfie. We need to send a team up to the Angel Caves
tomorrow. It'll take a couple of days to get there while covering
all the terrain. That’s the actual reason I wanted to speak with
you.”

“Okay,” she said warily, “and how am I involved?”

“Yancey's a cop, Oliver's an archeologist, and we
could use a damned good forensic anthropologist on this case. We
pull them out of the sheriff's office now and the guy there, well,
let's say he wouldn’t be my pick for second string. Yancey and
Oliver are going out toward Angel Caves tomorrow.”

“What does that have to do with me?” Elfie asked.

Darwin replied, “I'd really like you to go out there
with them. We need to see what's up before the FBI locks us down.
Not just for us, but for the Sioux, too.”

Elfie exhaled loud and long. She shut her eyes for a
long moment before asking, “Why Angel Caves?”

“That's where Duryea's body was found,” Yancey
said.

Elfie grew quiet, trying to sort through a thousand
bits of information and decisions to be made, all of them
important. Finally, she said, “Okay, I guess I owe you guys that
much. I'll go along...for the investigation.”

Darwin smiled. “Good. You three can firm up the
details. Where will you be tonight if I need to speak with you
again?”

“She'll be with us,” Yancey said. “We’ll get up
early. It'll be easier that way.”

Elfie centered herself internally to firmly reply, “I
have a reservation –”

“So have I,” Yancey said. “A big one. And I have a
nice house on a little part of it with a room just for you. You'll
be with us.”

Elfie smiled wanly across at the Captain. “I guess
I'll be with them.”

****

The big brown-hazed windows of Sioux Ann's Diner had
grown glazed through many years of sand, sun and rain. The diner
was located in what the three of them, when they were teenagers,
had considered the middle of nowhere. All of them orbiting thirty,
they now thought Sioux Ann’s was way too close to town, though
nothing had built up around it in the intervening years. The
distance measured had changed inside their minds.

After surviving Sioux Ann's Diner’s unique
interpretation of cheeseburgers and fries, the three friends headed
toward the car. Yancey had parked it outside the main gates of the
old, dead amusement park where they had spent many hours of their
shared youth. Rapid Fun City sat right across the road from the
diner. Yancey walked past the car and toward the amusement park's
main gates.

“Hey, where are you going?” Elfie called out.

“We're going to the Fun Zone,” Yancey called
back.

“Small problem, Crow Wolf. It’s closed. For like
fifteen years.”

Yancey smirked, flashing his shiny badge. “Everything
is open to the police, Elf. Anyway, this is where Duryea hid a lot
of his grave-robbing swag.”

She redirected her interest toward the overgrown
field of thrill ride ruins. “Makes sense. There’s nowhere more out
of the way than a dead amusement park.”

Badging them past the gate guards, Yancey led the way
around the Tilt-a-Whirl that had flopped over into the sand like a
shed tarantula skin. The nearby booth that had once vended ride
tickets now housed a gray coyote that stuck its nose through the
side door and glared at them.

The big building Yancey led them toward had once been
the Dakota Arcade. The glass double doors remained unlocked. They
walked inside.

One wall had been lined with shutdown arcade games.
One arcade game was situated in their direction—a Top Gun pinball
machine, still playing a few shrill bars of Danger Zone, over and
over, as an enticement to play. The game lights sprang on in
sequence around the play screen’s edges, but the sparkle effect had
been muted from the many years of dust.

“God, that movie sucked,” Oliver said.

Yancey tossed him a grouchy glance. “I liked it.”

“You liked it because Tom Cruise’s ass was in it,”
Elfie added.

“Hey, say what you will, koka kola, but do not mock
my first love,” Yancey replied.

They kept walking until the door marked DURYEA came
into view. Yancey groped for a key from his pocket. He found it and
opened the door. Boxes had been stacked floor to ceiling, in what,
even in daylight, was a dark room. Elfie slapped along the wall for
a light switch. She finally connected with one, and the overheads
flashed on.

At once, they all heard a burbling noise, followed by
the scuffle of tiny feet. The scuffling clamored down a room beyond
them and quickly departed.

“Damned coyote puppies,” Yancey said, with some
degree of forced certainty in his voice.

“That was a weird ass sound, though,” Oliver
added.

“The Badlands are filled with weird ass sounds,”
Yancey said.

“Oliver,” Elfie said, having left the other two to
open a nearby box. She removed from a thrown-together box lot a
bird-shaped clay figure. “Is this Cahokian?”

Oliver moved around to take the offered object into
his hand to study. “Maybe. It looks like an Aztec grave artifact.
At least the bastard wasn't picky in his grave-robbing.”

“Looks like he stole from everybody,” Yancey said,
shaking his head. “I wonder how he'd have felt if somebody dug up
his grandma and sold her skull on eBay.”

“How do we know he didn't?” Elfie asked.

“Boy, you really don’t like him now, do you?”

She made a hum of affirmation and then placed the
artifact back in the box. “Heaven knows what else he has in
here.”

“Maybe even the sacred stuff. Boy, wouldn’t that make
the traditionals crazy?” Yancey asked.

Elfie shook her head. “No, the sacreds are somewhere
else.”

Yancey looked at her strangely. “How do you
know?”

“We’ll get to that later,” she said. “When we’re
somewhere more private. Just trust me on that one.” “Okay,” Yancey
replied, glancing around again. “Based upon our initial
investigation,

we have reasonable cause to think these are all
stolen Indian artifacts. Can we all sign-off on that?”“I’d rather
not search through every box,” Oliver said. “So I’ll just
stipulate, yes.”

“What about you, Elf?”

Elfie nodded, without hesitation. “Yeah, I
agree.”

Yancey pulled out a roll of yellow tape. “Then this
is officially a crime scene. Let’s tape it off so we can get back
to our place and talk for real.”

**** 

His home had once been a modular house onto which
Yancey had grafted handcrafted pieces of his soul.  Yancey’s
huge carved owl still hung above the archway.  His willow
hoop dream catcher still dangled at its side.  His medicine
wheel swung off the verticillated transom. As they crossed the
house's threshold, Elfie felt like she had awakened from anesthesia
after being knocked out for the better part of a year.

A mountainous Newfoundland sprung up from the front
room’s hearth.  The dog trotted over to greet her and leaned
against her like the old friend she was.

“Hey, Mato boy,” she said gently, scratching behind
the dog’s ears.  She looked over at Yancey.  “Where’s
Chikala?”

“He took the journey two months ago. Bone cancer,”
Yancey said, with his face still grim, “I had to put him
down.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said softly, absorbing the news
with a hesitant sigh.  She gently patted Mato’s head, as if a
stand-in for an unseen lost friend.  “I know how badly that
must have hurt.”

“Oh, it hurt. Like hell,” Yancey said
sharply, “but not like the hell Oliver and I went through in
losing you.”

“Yancey –” she said softly, as if bereft of anything
further to say.

He waved away her reply, and then pointed toward the
hallway. “Forget the past for now. Let's head to the den and go
over tomorrow.”

Oliver gestured toward her luggage, which he had
placed on the floor. “I'll take these to the guest room.”

“Thank you, but actually,” Elfie said, reaching for
the smallest case, “I'll take this one with me now. I have
something to give back to Yancey.”

“You do?” Yancey asked.

She failed at a smile. “Yes. I do.”

Oliver led their way down the hall with as much city
grace as Yancey followed with flat-footed Sioux directness. As they
moved toward the den, Elfie realized they were approaching the
Door. 
The Door
.

Through their years of friendship, she had walked
past the Door a hundred times on her way to somewhere in Yancey’s
house.  The last walk by before this one, she had been stopped
dead in her tracks.  The Door was the door to Yancey’s
bedroom-the open door to Yancey's bedroom. What she had seen there
in that moment almost a year before had changed her life
forever.

The stark clarity of the series of images had faded
little over the last year.  The memory rushed through her like
an aftershock every time she recalled it.  

At first, she had remembered it in every moment she
wasn’t thinking of something else…anything else…Oliver and Yancey,
intertwined. Yancey’s long black mane streaming over Oliver's blond
hair as their mouths mashed together. Oliver seizing the other
man’s shoulders and flipping Yancey over, only to have Yancey’s
lips clamp down on Oliver’s tongue.

That was all she had seen.  All she had needed
to see.  She’d walked in on them by accident.  They
hadn't even noticed.  

Even now, they had no idea what she had seen. They
didn't know yet that she was aware her two best friends, to whom
she had once been the third musketeer, whom she had known and loved
since junior high, had chosen a deeper relationship with each other
than the one they shared with her. She had been disqualified and
eliminated. And no one had bothered to tell her. Which was why she
left.

Of course, Oliver and Yancey had happened
before.  She knew they had slept together before.  They
swore it was a one-time thing. But, what she had seen in the
bedroom that day meant it hadn't been just a fling. And now?

“You okay?” Yancey's voice interrupted her, as she
hesitated there, staring through the Door into his room.

She fought to brush-off the visceral impact of the
image. “Yeah, sure, just tired,” she murmured, then followed him
into the den.

Oliver’s man-eating television occupied a far
wall.  The last she had seen it, the set was sitting in his
Rapid City condo. His impressionist paintings had been moved into
Yancey’s place and now hung on another wall.  This house had
clearly stopped being Yancey’s pad and started being Yancey and
Oliver's home.

Elfie perched herself precariously at the edge of a
sofa, to which she once would have surrendered like a second
home.  She set the suitcase she had carried in beside her.

“So, no more Duryea hero-worship, huh?” Yancey asked
briskly.

“No,” she said matter-of-factly, “you had his number
from the very beginning.”

“Don't start the Duryea pillory without me. Dead or
not, I hated the bastard,” Oliver said, returning from depositing
Elfie's other bags in the guest room…a room that had once been
Elfie’s room.

Oliver seated himself in a big, overstuffed armchair.
In his black suit and cultured finesse, he was the antithesis of
nearly everything around him. He swept back his hair, removed his
glasses, and leaned forward, toward the suitcase that Elfie had
carried in with her. He looked up into her eyes directly.

Elfie drew the small case toward her and opened it. A
protective sheet of cushion plastic obscured its contents.

Yancey came around to stand between Oliver and Elfie.
“So, what is it?”

“This is what I was talking about earlier. When
Narvel died under such suspicious circumstances, my curiosity got
the best of me,” Elfie explained. “I had been restricted from his
storage areas. This concerned me, since it was my job to speak for
the whole of the collection. Yesterday, after you two called me, I
decided to break the locks and investigate. What I found there far
exceeded my worst fears.”

She peeled away the protective cushion wrap from the
sheltered pieces of hardened clay, chiseled rock and black
glass.

Yancey leaned over them like a protective big
brother. “It's the Jumlin antiquities,” he said, in a hushed voice.
“That thieving son of a bitch.”

“From looking at his records,” Elfie said sadly, “I
think the rare antiquities that he didn't steal; he bought off poor
locals who were just trying to survive. Then, he sold the items to
big city collectors at a massive mark-up.”

“I wonder why he kept these,” Yancey said.