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“Yah,” said Du Pré.

Rolly swung up into the cab and he moved out toward the rising sun.

“I
NEED TO LEARN
how to say ‘No’ better,” said Bart. He looked tired. The huge lowboy trailer that had tires running nearly the entire length of it, on both sides, triple tires, sat in its spot. The giant diesel shovel, boom tucked, sat on it.

“Big job, eh?” said Du Pré.

“Biggest I have done,” said Bart “I should have another operator for Popsicle, there, but I kinda hate to hand her off to anyone.”

Du Pré snorted. Bart loved his diesel shovel. Bart had, Du Pré had heard, hundreds of millions of dollars. He would have been much happier if he had been born poor. But he wasn’t. It almost killed him. Du Pré remembered Bart’s drunken, bloated red face the first time he had seen him. Sticking out the window of the too-big house. Booger Tom had burned the house down on Bart’s orders.

Long time ago.

Bart, he had gotten drunk a few times, gotten sick, but the times got farther apart and there hadn’t been one in over three years.

Du Pré nodded.

Bart, he is doing good. Wish he could find him a woman, but when he does he spends too much money on them and they feel bought and go away.

The day was already bright and hot. The eagle was high on the updraft from the fields of wheat that reached from the foothills of the Wolf Mountains behind the ranch house clear out south to where the rain fell so scantily the soil held water enough only for sagebrush.

“Wheat’s up,” said Booger Tom. The old man had come round the side of the house. He moved slowly now, his many injuries from a life of hard riding were coming due. Arthritis. Bones broken many times. Hands gnarled and twisted like the roots of willows.

Old cowboy, tough enough.

“I can see it’s up,” said Bart. “I keep telling you I want to lose money. I get half of the crop, if it’s five-dollar wheat this year then I lose … oh, fuck it. Numbers, all it is.”

“I keep tryin’,” said Booger Tom. “Tryin’ hard.”

“I think,” said Bart, “that the old bastard is pulling my dick.”

“Give the damn wheat to charity,” said Booger Tom. “Give it to them damn Rooshians.”

“Yah, yah,” said Bart. He went inside.

“It don’t rain, then maybe harvest in a couple weeks,” said Booger Tom. “Them combine crews are about a week behind.”

Du Pré thought about the contract harvesters. Started down in Texas and worked north, on the road five or six months out of the year. Chaff and dust and itch and long hours. But damn good money. Good people, worked very hard.

Then, a hailstorm could come up and knock all the kernels off the heads and you got nothin’. Don’t pay to comb the field.

Farming.

Ranching, you got your cows, looking for a place to hide, or your sheep, looking for a place to die.

People here, they got to be tough some.

Bart appeared at the screen door.

“Du Pré,” he said, “phone. Harvey Wallace.”

Du Pré flicked his butt out on the yard and he went inside and he picked up the portable phone and went back out. It crackled a little, not too bad.

“Mornin’” said Harvey.

“Yah,” said Du Pré. “Nice out here. How is that Washington, D.C?”

“Foul,” said Harvey. “Sticky, full of slimy politicians and government titsuckers like me. The founding fathers hated the idea of democracy. They stuck it out in a swamp and waited for the mosquitoes to give everybody yellow fever and kill it off. I take it my man Rolly put you up to this?”

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

“Well,” said Harvey. “We are all low-rent riverboa? gamblers here, you know, and you want to peek at our hand.”

“How is that Pidgeon?” said Du Pré.

“Her of the gorgeous knockers and mean mouth?” said Harvey. “Thriving. I relayed your request to her and you know what she did?”

“Uh,” said Du Pré.

“Pulled out a computer printout and said she knew you were bright and would get around to this.”

“Christ,” said Du Pré. “There are what, one hundred fifty of them crosses on that map? One hundred fifty?”

“A lot,” said Harvey. “I doubt that all of them can be credited to one or two accounts.”

“How long you know there are two of them?” said Du Pré.

“Gabriel,” said Harvey, “quit spitting at me. I don’t know there are two. I know there are a lot of dead bodies. I thought I would let you just run and see what you came up with. If I had told you everything we think we know, that’s what you would have looked for.”

“Uh,” said Du Pré. “Yah, well, I do not know either. It makes me sick, all those girls, this guy, these guys, years they do this. No one sees them.”

“The Green River Killer out in Washington?” said Harvey. “Killed as many as ninety. Then stopped. He died or moved away. We doubt we will ever know. I have a collage of the faces of the murdered women. It is on the wall of my office. To remind me that there is evil in the world.”

“These girls,” said Du Pré. “Not many of them, you know, we find out who they are.”

“There are a hundred thousand runaway teenagers at least out there at any given moment,” said Harvey. “Some parents are just glad that they are gone. Some parents don’t have one single photograph of their child. Not one. Nothing. Some of them never report anything. They don’t care. Kids are gone, not eating, taking money for booze or drugs. There are some real pieces of shit in the world. Lots of them.”

“That Pidgeon,” said Du Pré. “How come she has not called me?”

“She’s in Europe,” said Harvey, “helping out Scotland Yard. They have some bastard dismembering prostitutes around Edinburgh. Jock the Ripper, of course.”

Du Pré snorted.

“We have some information,” said Harvey. “But in so many cases the bodies weren’t discovered until they were nothing but bones. Can’t get a real good fix on that.”

“How many skinned?” said Du Pré.

“Nineteen,” said Harvey, “or maybe more, we just haven’t found the skins.”

“This guy is pretty smart,” said Du Pré.

“Very smart,” said Harvey. “We may never catch him.”

Du Pré snorted.

“We’re gonna try good, though,” said Harvey. “Where is that god damned Benetsee?”

“Dunno,” said Du Pré.

“He ever gone this long before?” said Harvey.

“No,” said Du Pré.

“You know how to get hold of him in Canada?”

“No,” said Du Pré, “I ask people, who are from there, but, one thing, I don’t even know what tribe he is. I guess maybe Cree but them Cree they don’t talk, each other’s business at all. Very close. Anybody publish anything about their religion, they sue them. They don’t want them fool New Age people bothering them.”

“Like Bear Butte,” said Harvey.

“Yah,” said Du Pré.

Bear Butte was sacred, a vision place to many Plains tribes. So now men’s movement groups and New Age idiots went there, did what they thought were Indian ceremonies. How they like it, we have a Sun Dance in the cathedral, there in Washington? We don’t do that. Leave Bear Butte alone. Leave us alone.

Du Pré snorted. Here I am, bad Catholic, worse Indian. I guess I am more religious than I know.

“Shit,” said Harvey. “We even tried some psychics. Not helpful. Or maybe we just can’t unravel their babble. I dunno. I’d try reading animal guts like the Romans I thought’d help.”

“Oh,” said Du Pré, “I am forgetting, Rolly, he say to tell you hello.”

Harvey laughed long.

“That son of a bitch,” he said. “I can’t help but like the guy. Though I’d never admit it, like every other American, when Banker Bob takes it in the shorts but good I can’t help but feel a little better.”

“Him got something else,” said Du Pré.

“What?” said Harvey, suddenly collected.

“I don’t know,” said Du Pré. “I have just this hunch, you know, that he was going to tell me something else and then he changed his mind.”

“Damn,” said Harvey.

“One other thing,” said Du Pré. “That Rolly he is a killer.”

“Killed who?” said Harvey.

“Dunno he did,” said Du Pré, “yet.”

“You’re right there,” said Harvey.

“So maybe he think he get close he just do that, see if this stops,” said Du Pré.

“That has worried me,” said Harvey.

“Uh,” said Du Pré. “He got them eyes, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” said Harvey.

“Maybe I am wrong,” said Du Pré.

“Nope,” said Harvey. “Another thing worries me.”

“Uh,” said Du Pré.

“You got those eyes, too, Gabriel. Remember, I’ll bust your ass.”

“Thanks,” said Du Pré.

Harvey hung up.’

D
U
P
RÉ STOOD BY
the silvered pile of boards still marked with the yellow tape that the investigators had used to cordon the area off. The dirt under where the single body had been found was turned and mounded. There were bootprints on the loose soil and the marks of the feet of horses and cattle.

A coyote had scratched at the earth, perhaps scenting the meat that had rotted here. But not much. Then the coyote trotted on toward the slash of pale green where a tiny plume of water ran through the soil, coming out as a small spring miles away.

Du Pré looked up. The eagle was a speck so high in the sky that he never could have seen it had he not known exactly where to look.

That eagle, Du Pré thought, he must like it up there some. Nothing to eat, and by the time he dive the thing he is after would be ten feet under the ground.

Du Pré remembered nearly forty years before, when he was hunting with his father, Catfoot, that they had come to the edge of a meadow covered three feet deep in snow, hoping for elk on the far side. But what they saw was a deer with an eagle on its back. The big golden bird had its talons sunk in the deer’s back near the neck and the eagle was flapping its wings and the deer, tongue lolling from exhaustion, was trying to run to safety but there was none.

The eagle let go and lifted and the deer stood quivering, and then the eagle’s mate stooped and grasped and the deer leaped forward again.

Du Pré and his father went on. When they came back hours later, pulling the gutted carcass of a dry cow elk, the eagles were feasting on the deer.

“Them do that,” said Catfoot. “Eagle, him smart bird, the gold ones. Them balds not so smart. They just steal from smaller birds.”

Du Pré looked down at his feet. They seemed far away. There was a sprig of sagebrush caught in the cracked sole of his boot.

Du Pré tried to fly up with the bird, to think what this land looked like from high in the air. He could have got someone to fly him but he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.

Du Pré closed his eyes.

Old house was here. Had a well, must be there, where the water ran underground.

The tracks of the tires come in here, ranchers, hunters, they go from the road off into the sagebrush past this old house that is gone, taken by the wind, to the place where there is a little saddle. Rock on either side of it is in shelves six feet high, so that is the way that you have to go to get on out into the prairie.

High plains.

Desert.

All the prophets came from the desert.

It is the place of clarity.

I have spent too much time with that Bart and his books.

This is all Red River.

The road went west, the snaking ribbon of green that followed the fractured invisible rock beneath went north. They crossed right here.

The two bodies crossed one on another were over there. Under the left arm of the cross.

Christ’s right hand was on the left arm of the cross.

Du Pré shook his head.

He walked a spiraling path around the spot where the first body was found. The spiral was tight. He could see clearly ten feet or so on a side. Twenty feet wide, the ribbon of earth in his eyes unspooled.

There.

Du Pré saw some tiny leaves, little plants which had just taken root in the turned earth. Not very much turned earth. That much could be cut open here with a knife. A little trench scraped.

Filled and patted and tamped.

But the seeds knew the air and water there were enough.

They sprouted, and then …

There wasn’t enough water.

The plant was dwarfed.

Not dead, dormant. Take a few years here, where a single season would be enough if there was enough water.

Du Pré pulled the folding tool from his belt and he opened it and selected a long file with a square tip and he locked it in place and he shut the handle.

He dug at the earth beneath the little plant.

Nothing anywhere here like that little plant.

Du Pré felt it. He wiggled the tip of the file and clods of earth broke apart.

Stainless steel gleamed.

Du Pré dug the knife out.

Short, triangular blade, black plastic handle with the brand marker scraped off.

Gleam of metal.

Gold.

Du Pré lifted out an engagement ring. Small diamond, but the gold was good, probably eighteen-carat.

Hopeful ring. We don’t got much money starting out here, but some time, I get you a better one.

Du Pré pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and he dropped the knife and ring into it and snapped it shut, punched a little hole in the side of the bag with the file and squeezed out the air and put the bag in the pocket of his canvas jacket.

He dug around the spot, as far as the earth was disturbed.

Little piece of duct tape.

Little agate ring, silver mounting.

Two gold post earrings.

Du Pré felt the root of the sagebrush. End of the little trench.

Fucker might buy them damn knives by the gross, Du Pré thought. Hah. He buy one here, one there.

But I bet that he got a lot of them to hand. Neatly laid out in nice rows.

Duct tape.

Right hand of Christ.

I am getting something here.

Du Pré turned and he looked back through the sagebrush to the place where the woman’s body had lain.

Clear view.

Knife blade pointing directly to the spot.

Du Pré got up and he walked down the line of sight, looking to the left and right.

Only place you can see this far in to where the body was.