The Ties That Bind (23 page)

"The shape-shifting kind," Sage confirmed, also using a euphemism. "Like whatever was on the porch last week."

I stared at her. "You think that was--"

"You think the same thing. You're just trying to find an explanation that fits your ideological framework. And this is why I don't talk to you about things like this," she finished, with a resigned, almost tired tone.

"Okay, back up," I said, defensive. "I haven't even said anything."

"You're thinking it." She still held my hand, but tension crackled in the air between us.

"That's not fair. Yes, I'm trained in certain traditions and certain methodologies. But will you give me a little credit? I considered the possibility that what happened on the porch was something maybe I hadn't encountered before." I pulled my hand from hers, a little stung.

"And what conclusion have you reached?"

I glanced at her, trying to determine if she was being sarcastic. "None. I don't know what it was. All I know is I don't like how it felt and I don't like the effect it had on you and I don't like not having a hook to hang my understanding on." I pushed off from the car and started to pace when Sage grabbed my forearm.

"Honey," she said, tone gentle.

"I don't know what it was," I said, more emphatically. "I don't think it was a dog. Or any kind of animal. And I don't know what to do with that."

"K.C.," she said. "Come here." She pulled me into her embrace and held on until I relaxed.

"And maybe I'm kind of jealous of you and Ellen," I muttered against her hair. "Maybe that brought up some Melissa stuff, like you thought."

"I wasn't fair to Melissa," she said against my shoulder. "When you told me about her affair with Hillary, I said I'd never do that to anyone. But I sort of already did, to Jim. Even though he and Ellen were in a bad place and not really seeing each other at the time--I was being hypocritical."

"It's in the past." And I hoped saying that aloud would somehow keep it there, though I was uneasy because Sage hadn't brought this up earlier. "But please, talk to me about things. I don't want to fall into patterns that fuck things up."

She giggled.

"What's so funny?" I didn't conceal the frustration in my voice.

"You. Me. This." She pulled away and brushed my cheek with her fingertips. "I love you so much and I know how hard you work, trying not to repeat your past. I have a hard time with mine sometimes and I forget that you're not part of that, and that I
can
tell you things." She put her fingers against my lips and I kissed them before she trailed them down my neck, leaving warmth in their

wake. "I should have told you about Ellen sooner."

"Yes, you should have. Because it feels kind of creepy and dishonest that you didn't." And I did not like that. At all. I needed to think a bit about that. Was it worth it to worry about? Should I wonder what else she wasn't telling me?

She kissed my neck. "You're right. I'm sorry. That's something maybe I should work on."

"Yes, it is. And apology accepted." But I still wasn't sure how to process this information, or if I should at all. "Goddammit," I whispered. "I don't know what that thing was on the porch. I don't know what the hell your dad has to do with anything. I don't even know why the fuck we're here. I don't know how to fix any of this."

Sage tightened her hold on me. "You can't," she said. "All we can do is get through it. As for my dad--I don't know, either. Maybe I'm just trying to understand who he was as a person, rather than as a parent. Maybe I'm looking for part of myself in all this. Or some kind of closure." She touched my face. "I just ask that you suspend your logic about some things."

I nodded, thinking that walking through fire might be easier for someone like me. "I'll try. I'm trying now."

"I know." She kissed me and some of the unease I felt dispersed beneath her lips. "And I love that about you, too."

"I love you back," I said against her lips.

"I'm so glad," she whispered against mine as her cell phone rang. She sighed and pulled away. "That would be our Diné hall pass. Let's find out when we can go to Shiprock."

I LEANED AGAINST my car, waiting for the rest of my motley posse to finish up in the motel so we could head over to Shiprock. The late morning sun forecasted a summer day, but the breeze presaged fall, a crisp, cool undercurrent flowing down from Colorado. With one hand, I held a cup of Starbucks coffee and with the thumb of the other, I speed-dialed Chris. She picked up on the second ring.

"Hey,
esa
. I was just going to call you."

"Yeah, yeah. You say that to all the girls."

Chris laughed. "So what's up? Did you see the autopsy report?"

"Yes. This morning. Detective Simmons was very amenable, as you suspected." I set my cup down and rubbed my forehead for a moment, trying to stave off a headache. "There's some weird shit in it."

"Like what?"

I took another sip of coffee and set the cup back down on the hood of my car next to my legal pad, hoping the caffeine would help with my headache, since I hadn't had any yet and it was almost lunchtime. "Okay," I said, scanning my notes. "Bill's body was found off one of those unmarked roads near the Shiprock formation. Graded dirt, not used much. You know how it is out there. Long stretches of nothing but wind and sagebrush. The Medical Examiner estimates the time of death within about five days of his body being found. That would put his death around the Saturday after he mailed the letter to River, or maybe Sunday."

"What day did you see that newspaper article?"

"It was in Saturday's paper, a week after Bill disappeared. According to Simmons, his body was found on Wednesday morning but the story wasn't released for a couple of days as they started the investigation."

"Who found him?" Chris's questions were crisp and clipped out of long habit of taking reports and collecting concise information.

"Um--" I searched my notes. "A guy named Tom Manyhorses. Simmons talked to him and took a statement. She said he's an older rancher guy out there who was on his way to town on Wednesday. She's originally from that area. She asked him who else lived out there and he said two other families, but they don't need to pass by the spot where Bill was to get to town. The road dead-ends just past Manyhorses' place."

"So it's not beyond reason," Chris mused aloud, "that it would take a few days to find Bill's body."

"Seems that way. I think we're going to go out and have a look at the area. Sage and River both want to."
Can't say I'm looking forward to that.

"Injuries?"

I looked at my notes again. "Consistent with getting hit by a car. The ME concluded that Bill was hit on his left side. From the way the bones fractured, the point of impact came from behind, so the car was traveling on the right side of the road, as it should've been, and its right front end hit Bill hard enough to knock him off the road and twenty to thirty feet away from the graded part. From the photos of the scene, it would have been easier for him to be walking on the road itself because both sides have that dirt pile from grading along the edges. And if it was dark, it would have been easier to just stay on the road."

"So lots of internal injuries and broken bones? Did he land wrong?"

"Yes and yes. His neck was broken. ME thinks he died quickly."

Chris was quiet for a moment. "The driver must have known he hit something," she said. "But kept going."

"Yeah. If it was someone from Ridge Star trying to keep Bill quiet, that would explain why he kept going. He ran Bill down and bailed. But if it wasn't, then Bill's death might have been accidental, and the guy we're looking for might be somebody who freaked out when he realized he'd hit somebody. So his death might not even be related to Ridge Star."

"That still doesn't explain what he was doing out there without a car and without ID."

"I asked Simmons about that, because I was trying to be Detective Thorough-pants like you, and she checked the crime scene notes and even called the guy who did the processing and no, no ID. Not even money in his pocket." I flipped the page on my notebook, which now was on the hood of my car. "Okay, more weird stuff. There was a length of rope around his left wrist, tied in a pretty good knot. The other end was frayed and kind of rough, like he'd rubbed it on a rock or something to cut it."

"Huh," Chris said, and I knew she was thinking about that.

I waited for her to continue.

"So maybe he was tied to something," she added. "He couldn't get the knot loose--was his other wrist tied?"

I took another sip of coffee. "No evidence of it. No marks, either."

"He couldn't get the knot loose, even with his free hand. So he did the next best thing and hacked through it with something. Maybe a rock, like you said."

"All right, scenario time," I said. "What if some Ridge Star thugs decided to scare Bill? Really scare him, since according to Tonya and his former coworker--this Jamison Purcell we talked to yesterday-- Bill had been getting beaten up and warned to quit digging into Ridge Star affairs and it wasn't working. So they took him out to the Rez, smacked him around, threatened him, threatened to do not-sonice things to Tonya, and then left him out there to 'think about it.' Maybe they had every intention of coming back to get him and see if the tactic worked. But Bill managed to get away and he got hit by a car, accidentally. The thugs go to get him the next day, he's gone, and they figure 'good riddance'. They check the usual haunts, don't find him, problem solved."

"Plausible," Chris agreed. "After all, why would they tie him up somewhere then let him go and run him down? I'm not feeling that angle. If they wanted to do that, they could have beaten the shit out of him, laid him out in the road, and finished him off. But that seems like a lot of work. Plus, wouldn't they have seen his body if they left him then went back?"

"True. And it is a lot of work. I'm wondering if maybe they thought if they took him out there and left him and something happened to him, Bill's rep as a drunk and sometime rabble rouser might point investigators in a different direction. Maybe whoever took him out there wanted it to look like he got drunk and pissed somebody off in a bar." I flipped through my notes again. "This is kind of a mafia approach. Get the guy, take him somewhere to scare the shit out of him, leave him for a while."

"If that's what happened. What kind of rope was it? Did you see a picture?"

"How is it I know you so well?" I asked with a long-suffering tone. "Because I did get that information. Plain ol' nylon. The kind of rope you can find in any hardware or Walmart-type place."

"I'm glad I'm rubbing off on you,
chica
," Chris said, a smile in her voice."The rope's not going to pan out as any kind of lead, then. What else? Did the perp do anything to his tattoos?"

"No. Which could mean whoever it was wasn't planning to kill him and thus make it hard to identify him." I re-read that section of my notes.

"Why take his wallet, then?"

"To make it hard for him to do anything if he managed to get away, maybe? No money, no calling cards, no ID, no credit cards. Unless the wallet fell out when he was hit. But the crime scene team didn't find it. They ID'ed him through dental records. He was going to one on a regular basis." I picked up my cup again. "None of this makes much sense. I'm coming up with more questions for every one I think I can answer. What the hell?" I swallowed my irritation.

"The nature of the beast," Chris said, trying to be soothing.

"Fuck. Speaking of beasts..." I told Chris what Sage had said about Ellen and the time she'd spent on the reservation. When I finished, Chris didn't say anything for a few moments. I sipped my coffee in the interim, waiting for her to tell me she was going to call the psych ward.

"
Esa
, this is a bit out of my jurisdiction," she finally said, in a tone I recognized as her "okay, I'll humor you a little" approach. "And I don't know much about Navajo beliefs. But you live here long enough, and no matter what culture you are, you eventually hear about things like skinwalkers. Did Sage tell you specifically what she saw on the Rez?"

"No," I responded, a little relieved that she wasn't dismissing me. "But I told you I looked some of this shit up, after that weird incident on the porch, and there are accounts of non-Native people seeing things that might have been a 'walker while driving across the Rez. It seems to happen at night, and the witches try to hurt people by scaring them off the road. Or whatever else they can do to make people get hurt. If this shit is true, it's creepy as hell." Though I was trying to avoid using the full term for "skinwalker," even talking about them in as benign a way as I was with Chris was making me uncomfortable.
What's wrong with me? It's not even my belief system.

"All right," Chris said with what sounded like resignation, "since you're already on this road, I'll come with you for a bit. I did hear a couple of stories a while back from the state patrol. A couple of guys saw something out there, south of Gallup. Two separate cops. Both said whatever it was looked like it attached itself to their vehicles but then they realized that the thing was running alongside, keeping pace. Which would be consistent with descriptions of skinwalkers, since they're supposed to be really fast."

I took a huge swallow of coffee.
Running alongside a car?

"I remember, too, a cadet in the academy with me from Grants said that most people know not to travel the Rez after dark. If you're new to the area, someone'll tell you that. I went to a training session in Gallup a few years ago. Three days, two nights. And even the guy running the session told us it wasn't a good idea to go onto the Rez after dark, but he said it was because it was isolated and if anything happened to you, it'd be difficult to get help. But one of the Indian guys said it was because weird shit happened out there."

When she finished, I had a bad case of the willies. Right there in the parking lot of the Super 8, in eighty-degree heat, and I didn't like the way this conversation was going. "Excuse me, Officer. I'm looking for Detective Chris Gutierrez. Have you seen her? Tall, dark, rational?"