The Drowning Man (21 page)

“Was anyone else around?”

“Whole bunch of sheriff's cars came racin' down the road. I think there was an ambulance, some other cars. Deputies was struttin' around, in and out of the barn, all puffed up 'cause they got the killer so fast. I was tryin' to hold on, you know. I didn't wanna pass out. If they was gonna shoot me right then, I wanted to be lookin' 'em in the eye when they did it.”

Vicky looked away. It was hard to tell which was more depressing: the visitation area with the young couple holding hands, another inmate seated on the floor rolling a ball to a small boy while a young woman cuddled a baby nearby, the images moving soundlessly across the television screen. That, or the interview room and Travis Birdsong, with the white clothes and the dead-looking eyes, convicted before he ever set foot in the courtroom.

She made herself turn back to the Indian. “Did you see anyone as you rode back to the barn?” she said. “The foreman bringing horses to the corral? Marjorie Taylor?”

He was shaking his head. “I seen Lyle's pickup up at the house when I rode in, but I didn't see him anywhere around. Must've been somewhere close, though. He got down to the barn same time as I run off. Mrs. Taylor…” He shrugged. “Didn't see her. I figure she was in the office like usual that time of day.”

“What about the artist, Ollie Goodman?”

Travis studied the surface of the table a moment before he said, “I'm pretty sure he was around when I rode out that mornin'. He set up that whatchamacallit—easel—over in the pasture in front of the house. Paintin' another one of them pictures of his. He wasn't there when I got back.”

“You're telling me you didn't see anyone running from the barn after you heard the shot?”

“Maybe the guy that shot Raymond ran out the back door. How do I know? I didn't see nobody. ‘Trust me,' Gruenwald said. ‘They're never gonna convict you. All they got is Andy Lyle's word, and that don't prove nothin'. We're just gonna let 'em hang themselves. You're walking outta court a free man, my man,' he says.” Travis retrieved his arm from the back of the chair and leaned over the table, so close that the sour smell of his breath lay trapped between them. It was then that something changed, some disturbance in the atmosphere, and someone else seemed to emerge from behind the black, angry eyes, some stranger rising out of a dark abyss. Vicky was conscious of the weight of the PMT at her waist and the large red button blossoming on the wall.

“Makes me wanna puke. Wasn't for Gruenwald,” he went on, “I wouldn't've spent the last seven years in this hellhole. He tells me I should be grateful the jury went for voluntary manslaughter. Grateful! Grateful to go to prison for something I never done.”

“Why didn't he file an appeal?” Vicky sat back, away from the intensity and the electrical charge in the air.

“Sat right there in that chair”—Travis let his eyes rest on her a moment, as if he were seeing someone else in her place—“said I wasn't to worry; he was gonna get an appeal and the judge was gonna throw out my conviction. I never seen him again. He went away, dropped off the face of the earth. Just as well, 'cause if he ever come back, if I ever got in the interview room with him again…”

“What, Travis?” Vicky crossed her arms over her waist. The tips of her fingers touched the PMT.

“You figure it out.”

“The guards would come in seconds.”

“First responders? I had 'em timed. They wouldn't've gotten here in time.”

“You'd be in prison the rest of your life.”

“You don't get it.” He shook his head and glanced away. When he looked back, Travis was there again behind the dead eyes. “He was nothing but a damn drunk. I could smell the whiskey on him in court.”

An incompetent defense mounted by a drunk. That would be helpful, Vicky thought, if she could prove it. She looked back at the window. The table was vacant where the couple had sat holding hands. The woman and the two babies were gone; the last inmate, a skinny guy with a flattened look to the back of his head, stood at the door across the room, waiting to return to the population.

“The prosecutor let the jury think you and Raymond took the petroglyph,” she said, looking back at Travis.

“That was a stinkin' lie.” For a moment, Vicky feared the stranger would return.

“There were chips of rock and dust that could have been from the petroglyph in the bed of Raymond's pickup.”

“How do I know what Raymond did? He was a know-it-all hot-head, like I told you. He could've done anything.”

Beyond the window, Vicky saw the door open across the visitation room and the prisoner step through. The room was vacant now, the TV images flashing for an audience that was no longer there, the blue ball abandoned on the floor. Out of sight, just seconds away, she knew, were Officer Connor and the officer at the desk.

And across from her, a man who didn't deny the debris from a stolen petroglyph in his friend's pickup, a man who could be lying. What had Norman said?
Best leave Travis where he belongs.
And Hugh Trublood?
He killed my brother.
She should get up and walk out. And yet, guilty or innocent, Travis Birdsong had deserved a fair trial.

“I'm going to take your case,” she heard herself say. Her voice was almost a whisper. “I can't make any promises. I may not be able to help you. Do you understand?”

Travis got to his feet. “Don't make me no promises you can't keep.” He opened the door and headed across the room toward the door through which the other prisoner had disappeared.

Vicky walked back to the desk. “All set?” Officer Connor asked, satisfaction in her voice, as if she'd been responsible for a reunion between Vicky and an old friend.

Vicky nodded and followed the woman through the steel doors, across empty rooms and hot sand blowing through concertina wire. Then she was in the Jeep, heading down the arrow-straight road into the vastness and freedom of the plains.

SHE WOULD TAKE
his case, Vicky had told Travis Birdsong, the grandson of Amos Walking Bear, who believed him innocent, incapable of shooting a man. It was Travis's case, not the case of the stranger who had invaded the interview room for a moment, that she would try to get the district court to reopen. Travis's conviction that she would try to get the judge to overturn.

She watched the asphalt fling itself across the plains ahead, vanishing into the haze of heat. A truck swooshed past in a cloud of dust, a pickup that she'd passed some time ago that had blurred into the landscape framed in the rearview mirror. Clumps of gray sagebrush, wilting in the sun, passed outside the windows, and in the distance red-tinged bluffs rose out of the expanse of brown earth. The only signs of life were the sleek herds of antelope that appeared from nowhere and loped alongside the Jeep before veering away and blending back into the plains.

An innocent man, Travis. A man who had just threatened to kill his first defense counsel.

Well, that wasn't exactly true. He hadn't actually voiced a threat, but the innuendo, the implied intention, the stranger behind the eyes, and the charged atmosphere, she had
sensed
the threat. And yet, if he hadn't shot Raymond, it was Gruenwald's incompetence—the incompetence of a drunk—that had sent him to prison.

Vicky drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Reba McIntyre was on the radio, and the music mixed with the hum of the air conditioner and the steady hum of the tires on the asphalt. This was what she kept coming back to: She had agreed to take the case of a man who could change, and the man he changed into might be capable of shooting another human being. And maybe the changed man was the one Norman and Raymond's brother and a lot of other people had seen, the man nobody wanted back on the reservation.

But there was something else: There were holes in the stories of the witnesses, holes that Gruenwald had made no effort to fill. The foreman had heard the gunshot and run to the barn. Well, so had Travis, if what he'd said was true, and there was always the possibility that it was not. “Are all your clients guilty?” John O'Malley had asked. She wanted to believe them innocent, give them the benefit of the doubt. But there was always the possibility…

In any case, there were other people on the ranch: the foreman, the owner. And who knew when Ollie Goodman had packed up his easel and paints and driven away? Others who could have been in the vicinity of the barn. And here was the irony: It was her own client, the man she had agreed to help, who corroborated their alibis. Andy Lyle?
I seen Lyle's pickup at the house.
Marjorie Taylor, the owner?
In the office like usual.
Ollie Goodman? No sign of him when Travis had gotten back to the barn.

Her fingernails drummed faster on the warm plastic. There was no new evidence, nothing that she could introduce that wouldn't strengthen the prosecutor's case. But there was this: The defense attorney was a drunk. He had come to the trial inebriated.

And it was also possible that Raymond Trublood had been involved in the theft of the first petroglyph, which meant that the prosecutor's theory about motive could be right. It was just that he had the wrong accomplice. Which meant that someone else might have had a motive to want Raymond dead. Maybe Raymond wanted a bigger cut. Or maybe he'd had an attack of remorse over taking a sacred carving from Red Cliff Canyon, and the other thief had gotten worried he might go to the police. There could be any number of reasons—any number of motives—for one thief to kill another and…

And kill anyone else who got in the way of the profits.

Vicky wasn't sure when the brown truck took shape in the rearview mirror. She was still trying to work it all out, picking up all the strands, trying to weave them together into some kind of coherent possibility. Follow the logic. She could hear John O'Malley's voice in her head. Whoever took the first petroglyph came back seven years later for the Drowning Man. The thief had already killed once. A man capable of killing someone who was in his way had gotten away with it.

Oh, it was logical, all right. Whoever had helped Raymond cut out the first petroglyph had shot him and made it look as if Travis Birdsong had pulled the trigger. Which brought it back to Andy Lyle, the only witness, the man who swore he'd seen Travis running out of the barn right after he'd heard the gunshot.

Andy Lyle, whose truck had been at the house, according to her own client.

Vicky glanced in the rearview mirror again. The brown truck was gaining on her, a Chevy coming up fast. She watched it grow out of a dark blur and take shape, metal bumpers and trim flashing in the brightness. The sound of the engine bearing down was like the roar of the wind. She could see the figure of a man hunched over the steering wheel, cowboy hat pulled low. There was another cowboy hat bobbing in the windshield on the passenger side. She slowed to about sixty-five. The truck would pass her.

But the truck wasn't pulling out into the other lane; it was looming in the mirror, bearing down on her, and beneath the brim of the driver's cowboy hat, she could see the white-toothed flash of a grin. She pushed down on the accelerator and sped ahead, putting the distance of two vehicles between them, but her advantage was momentary. The truck was speeding up, engine howling. Then came the crash of metal against metal, and she felt herself jerked backward, like a dog on a leash. The Jeep jumped ahead before it started shimmying back and forth across the road. She gripped the wheel hard and tried to steer the vehicle in a straight line, conscious of the truck looming closer in the rearview mirror. The speedometer trembled at eighty, eighty-three, eighty-eight. There was nowhere to go, nothing but the highway uncoiling into the haze ahead. She was trapped in a vast emptiness, like an animal flailing inside an invisible cage.

The highway started climbing. She could feel the Jeep straining with this new effort. The brown truck couldn't have been more than two feet behind. And ahead, at the top of the incline—oh, she remembered now—the plains dropped away on both sides of the road. The cowboys were waiting. They would ram her again when they reached the top. An image of the Jeep hurtling off the road, plunging downslope, flashed in her mind.

And then she saw it: In the blur of asphalt and brown earth outside the passenger window the ditch was beginning to flatten out, so that the edge of pavement ran into the plains without any separation. There was already a slope developing, but it looked like a gradual drop down the hill. There was a chance…

Keeping an eye on the truck, she pushed hard on the accelerator to gain a few feet of safety, then pulled the steering wheel to the right and headed onto the plains, barely aware of the truck also swerving right. There was the loud thump as the truck clipped the rear of the Jeep and sent it fishtailing over the dusty ground, barreling faster and faster down the slight slope. She was barely aware of the blur of the truck speeding past. She took her foot off the accelerator and concentrated on steering the Jeep over the ruts and ridges. Stalks of sagebrush gripped the undercarriage and clouds of dust churned around her. A curtain of dust fell over the windshield. She was driving blind, trying to keep the vehicle upright, tapping on the brake pedal.

Then she came to an abrupt stop, and something white and hard crashed around her. She heard the air rush from her lungs, like air rushing from a balloon. She was pinned to the seat, unable to move, and the darkness, when it came, descended like the blackest night.

 

“
WE HAVE THE
Indian.” Ted Gianelli pushed back in the chair and swiveled from one corner of the desk to the other. The window behind him framed a rectangular view of the flat-roofed buildings across Main Street in Lander. Flowing from the CD player on the bookcase against the wall were the soft notes of
La Gioconda.
The agent was the only one Father John knew who loved opera as much as he did.

He didn't take his eyes from the man on the other side of the desk, forcing himself to concentrate on the implications of what he'd just said, his mind still racing with thoughts of Lloyd Elsner. After the pickups and sedans had driven out of the mission, no one else had come. The kids hadn't shown up for the baseball game, and he'd called the Riverton coach and forfeited. The mission was deserted. The phone hadn't rung all day. Then, with the afternoon wearing on, the sound of the phone ringing had burst into the quiet of his study. He had sprung for the receiver, shouted the provincial's name into the mouthpiece, and kept going on—“What have you done?”—when Gianelli's voice had cut over his own. “John, it's me, Ted. We need to talk.”

Now, locking eyes with the agent, Father John said, “What do you mean, you have the Indian? You arrested him? We'll lose the petroglyph.”

“Take it easy, John.” Gianelli stopped swiveling and jerked one thumb in the air. “We know where he's staying. Riverton PD spotted the sedan and followed it to a motel on the east side of town. He parked in the back for all the obvious reasons. Only way the police could have seen the vehicle earlier would have been from the alley. Manager says he checked in Monday evening and handed over cash for a week. Spends most of his time in the room. Keeps the drapes closed, TV going day and night. Manager heard him drive off a couple of times. Saw the Indian carrying bags of fast food into the room. No calls in or out, which means he has a cell. Lives like a hermit. A hermit with a cell.” Gianelli gave a little laugh and swung sideways.

“He's waiting for the next instructions.” The boss, whoever he was, was calling the shots, Father John was thinking. The Indian was just the messenger. But the Indian knew who he was working for. He knew where the petroglyph was.

“Police got the vehicle identification number,” Gianelli said. “Dead end, like the license plates. The sedan was last sold five years ago. I suspect that car's changed hands—legally and illegally—more times than a twenty-dollar bill.”

The agent turned back to the center of the desk, dragged over a file folder from the stack at one side, and flipped it open. He picked up a sheet of paper with a small photo at the top and pushed it forward. “We might have something. Recognize this guy?”

Father John studied the photo a moment, aware of the plaintive melody of “Voce di donna” washing the air. The black hair hung in braids, not slicked back; the face looked beefier, the eyes harder, and the shoulders more muscular. But it was the Indian all right—a younger, surlier version of the man who had pulled in behind him at Ethete and delivered the message. In small black print beneath the photo was the name Benito Behan.

Father John handed the paper back. “It's the Indian. How'd you get this?”

“Sent out a memo to other FBI offices in the region.” Gianelli tossed one hand in the direction of the computer on the side table next to the desk. “Requested information on investigations into stolen Indian artifacts in the last three years. Responses have been coming in all week. You know how many of these investigations are ongoing? New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado—agents are chasing after clowns digging up Indian burial sites, walking out of small-town museums with Indian artifacts tucked under their shirts, drilling petroglyphs out of rocks.” The man was shaking his head. “We're talking about thousands of miles of prairie and desert and mountains with nobody around. By the time an agent gets a report of looting, the looters are hundreds of miles away hitting another area. And the artifacts have been sold. So long as there's a market…” He shrugged. “It's not going to stop.”

Gianelli picked up the sheet of paper and stared at it a moment. “Came in this morning from Nevada. Benito Behan, Navajo, thirty-eight years old, wanted in connection with the plundering of Indian graves on public land. Investigating agent believes he's part of a gang that has been looting sites for years. Behan here was last seen in Denver,” he said, tapping at the photo. “Agents have gotten close to him, but they've always been about five minutes too late in picking him up. Seems that the man has an uncanny sense of survival. He knows when it's time to move on.”

“It's not time, not until he thinks he and his boss can collect the ransom.”

“His job is to handle the locals. He's native. Fits himself into a reservation without drawing a lot of attention. That's the way he worked in Nevada. Makes contact with locals who know where artifacts are located, sets everything up, arranges for the artifacts to be delivered to his boss. Goes away, and the locals disappear into the landscape. So far the Indian and the masterminds have managed to avoid arrest.”

“You're saying that locals stole the petroglyphs in Red Cliff Canyon?”

“Who else knows where the oldest and most beautiful petroglyphs are located? This is a big area, John. Hundreds of square miles of wilderness, petroglyphs in a lot of places. That's Behan's pattern.”

Father John leaned into the back of his chair and stared at the stack of components on the bookshelf. The aria was nearing the end. Pattern—there was always logic in a pattern. He didn't like the conclusion. After a moment, he said, “You're saying that Travis Birdsong and Raymond Trublood were the locals. After Raymond was killed, Behan fled the area.”

“With the information we now have, that's what it comes down to. Behan's going to stay around until his job is done or until something goes wrong and he has to hightail it out of here. For the moment, he's lying low in the motel. Sedan's parked in the alley. The police have a surveillance crew across the street.”