Wild Sorrow (3 page)

The ear-splitting crack of the gunshot caused them both to freeze, and while the sound was still ringing against the walls, the cougar slithered out the door. Mountain dropped into a crouch and he trembled with fear. I lowered the gun from its skyward aim and blew out my breath. “It's okay, buddy,” I said, my pulse still racing. “It's okay.”

But a sleepless night ensued as the living stood watch over the dead—during which time I was plagued by the heartrending voice of the howling wind. It was the sound of wild sorrow.

Morning

When the first gleam of alpenglow began to shimmer on the horizon, I saddled Rooster and brought him outside into the dense, cold air. I walked him around the schoolyard, studying his gait. His leg seemed well enough to go the short distance I would need to ride to regain radio contact. The night winds had pushed snow into drifts against the west walls, and patches of white clung to low depressions, but most of it had blown across the mesa toward the mountains to the east.

While Mountain scampered around methodically marking everything in the area, I assembled a pile of large stones and a weathered sign and used them to secure the doorway so the cat could not reenter the chapel. The air was so frigid that even lifting and carrying the heavy stones did not make me break a sweat. When I returned to Rooster to mount up, he had a slick coat of frost on his rump.

I rode east under a thick, dull sky that had nearly strangled the light out of the sunrise, back toward Tanoah Pueblo. As I went, I watched for tracks of any kind that might have led to the school. But the winds had disrupted the soil, leaving the loose dirt of the desert ravaged.

An hour later, I saw the ATV on the horizon. Two men approached at high speed. My field superintendent, Roy, sat in the driver's seat, and before he could kill the engine, Kerry Reed, my forest ranger boyfriend, flew out of the other side and up to me. “Babe, are you all right?” He took my shoulders in his two hands and looked into my face.

“I'm okay,” I said. “My horse took a big splinter, but he seems fine.”

“Your coat. It's all torn.” His green-flecked brown eyes were full of worry.

“Yeah, I hit a gate. Rooster threw me.”

By then the Boss had gotten to us. “We'd have been here sooner but I forgot they had fenced that big federal training facility. Had to go around it.” He took Rooster by the reins and examined his fetlock. “How in hell did you end up all the way out here?” Roy said from under the horse.

“I was tracking a cougar,” I said. “Another attack on the pueblo flocks.”

He raised up. “Well, why didn't you let someone know?”

“I didn't think I would end up so far out, but when I knew we were closing in on her—”

“Her? It's a female?”

“Yes. With two young cubs. She's wounded, and she looks half-starved.”

“You must've got a good look at her, then.”

I nodded. “She visited last night.”

Kerry brought water for Mountain from the ATV, and a thermos of hot coffee. He poured some in a cup and handed it to me. I held it between my palms for a moment and watched the steam curl from the surface.

The sound of an engine whined from the east as another ATV approached, rocking and dipping over the rough terrain, disappearing into arroyos and then surfacing seconds later. Soon FBI Agent Diane Langstrom unfolded her long-legged form as she climbed out of the seat and gave me a dutiful smile. “We have got to quit meeting like this,” she said.

 

 

In the chapel, Diane circled the corpse with a camera, the flash shooting sparklike rays of white light into the dimly lit space. She snapped a lens cap over the camera's eye. “With the body frozen, it will be hard to determine the time of death.”

Roy, Kerry, and I watched as she got down on all fours and sniffed the victim's open mouth, then drew back. She lifted the hem of the dusty black dress and peeked underneath. The men turned away, pretending to examine the chapel's architecture.

Diane looked up at me. “The body's been moved since the victim died. There's signs on the tops of her legs that the blood pooled there, as if she'd spent the first hour or so after death facedown. I don't see any indication of sexual assault, but we'll let the medical examiner decide; she's on the way. These marks on the neck are from a rope. See the crosshatch pattern of the fiber? Nylon rope.”

“Hanged?” the Boss said, looking up at the vigas that spanned the roof.

“No, strangled. If she were hanged, there'd be a sort of upside-down V pattern where the rope pulled up on either side. This is straight around. She was strangled, and from the side, because it's worse here, on the left—the rope cut right through the flesh of the neck. Somebody made sure it took. I'm going to use my sat phone and make a call,” she said, springing to her feet and dusting off her hands. “This is a hate crime. We got a special unit for that.”

While we waited for the medical examiner to arrive, we split up to look for tire tread marks, footprints, or tracks in the surrounding ground surface, but it proved fruitless since the previous night's high winds had disturbed the topsoil, and patches of snow still covered some of the recesses. Plus, before I had been aware that it was a crime scene, I'd explored much of the area both on foot and horseback with the wolf alongside. I didn't mention that Mountain had trounced the corpse in his encounter with the cougar.

I approached Kerry as he crouched on the ground outside the compound wall, examining a pot shard. He looked up the slope to the ruin. “This must have washed down from up there,” he said, rising to his feet. Mountain came over to see what he held in his hand, sniffed the shard with disinterest, and then trotted away. Kerry looked at me. “Babe. What were you doing all the way out here by yourself?”

I shook my head. “I was doing my job.”

“You need to buddy up when you're this far out of range.”

“Buddy up? We don't even have enough staff in the winter to man the phones!”

“Well, you can call me if—”

“And you'll stop working at your job and come help me do mine?”

He turned his head to the side and looked at me, a furrow across his brow that nearly joined his brown eyebrows in the center. “It's just common sense. You shouldn't be out this far alone. Even an amateur hiker knows not to venture out by himself into the wilderness.”

I held up my hand. “That's enough.”

He stepped toward me and tipped my hat brim back. “You have a bad bump there on your forehead.”

“Yeah, the stirrup.”

He chuckled and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “I don't even want to know.”

Roy strode toward us, pumping his arms. “Jamaica, how long since you fed Mountain?”

“He wouldn't take any jerky last night, so . . . yesterday morning.”

“Well, I had a big old deer sausage one of the guys gave me and a breakfast burrito I had picked up on the way to work, and that wolf got in the ATV and ate every bite. The whole sausage. Enough for four or five meals. And the burrito, too.”

Mountain slunk up beside me, noting the tone of Roy's voice.

“I'm sorry, Boss. I should have kept him with me.”

“Damn right you should have. That was enough sausage for a big party! I was looking forward to having some of that.”

“I'll buy you some sausage when we get back to town.”

Roy huffed out a breath and waved me off. He started to go back to the ATV, but turned and looked at me. “Whatever happened to that cell phone I issued you?”

“I've got it.”

He nodded his head, then gave a little snort. “Ever turned it on?”

“Yeah . . . I, yeah.”

“What's that number again?” He cocked his head slightly.

“The cell phone? I . . . I don't know it.”

“You turn it on and use it. Today.”

“It won't work out here, Boss. There's no cell phone coverage half of the places I go.”

“So turn it on and use it the other half. I'd just like to be able to keep track of you at least some of the time.”

“Actually, half's probably an exaggeration. I bet I don't have cell phone coverage more than ten percent of the time when I'm on the job.”

Roy reached a hand up and toggled his cowboy hat slightly to reposition it on his head. “Use the cell phone. That's an order.” As he walked away, he muttered, “Damn, it's cold out here! I didn't get any breakfast. I'm hungry.”

The Silver Bullet

Diane Langstrom and I had worked together on several cases, from cattle mutilation to murder, and we'd become friends over the course of our last investigation. She was an avid practitioner of martial arts, a crack shot, and as good a person to have at your back as anyone could want.

We watched as Kerry rode away on Rooster, headed back to Taos, with Roy idling the ATV behind him.

“This guy that's coming from the hate crimes unit,” Diane said, “they call him the Silver Bullet.”

“Why?” I asked.

“His name is Sterling—Agent Sterling. He's a legend in the bureau. I've been dying to work with him. I've heard stories about him ever since I trained at Quantico.”

“What kind of stories?”

“There are droves. He's nailed serial killers, kidnappers, even solved cases that had gone completely cold. He's incredibly fast and highly intuitive. He starts where all the leads have played out for others, and he goes from there. He just thinks differently, thinks of things no one else would. They call him in when they're all out of options.”

“So he only does hate crimes?”

“No, he's done everything. But right now, he's head of the hate crimes unit in this region, and that's a lucky thing for me.”

I thought of the woman on the stone floor in the chapel. It was hard to think about luck in a situation like this. But I also knew that Diane's detachment from the horror of this crime was a vital element for her survival and success in her work. You couldn't let it get to you, or you wouldn't last—you were no good to anyone. I wasn't as adept at this as my friend. I'd seen plenty of death—more than my share. I never got used to it.

We'd walked out a few hundred yards to a flat place on the mesa, near where Diane had left her ATV when she arrived. We cleared some brush to make a heliport, then tied several long lengths of yellow Crime Scene tape to the ATV, which Diane parked on the perimeter on the west side. The lutescent tape fluttered in the morning breeze, creating a marker for the pilot as well as a gauge for wind speed and direction.

“The Silver Bullet could sure give my career a boost,” Di said as we worked. “I've been stuck here in Taos without any opportunity for advancement for three years now.”

“What can this guy do? Can he get you a promotion?”

“He's got long coattails. Everyone who works with him moves up. I could get out of here and get someplace civilized.” She tossed a stone away into the brush. “Look at my hair,” she said, coming toward me. “Look at this side here.” She pointed to the place in front of her left ear. “I had to cut that way back because it was burned. And check out my eyebrows. They're singed, too.”

I inspected her face. “What happened?”

“My oven blew up on me. I told that worthless landlord it wasn't working right, and he had some creepy cousin of his named Benny come out to fix it. But all he did was ogle me and fool around with the stove like he knew what he was doing, which he didn't. The next time I went to use the oven, I opened the door, and flames shot out.”

“Wow. You're lucky you didn't get burned.”

“That's just one example of how it has been for months now. I leased from this guy, I paid him first and last month's rent and a deposit, and I've had nothing but trouble with him. The fridge either freezes all my food, or everything spoils. And the front door won't even shut properly. I've come home and found it standing open. I have to slam it so hard just to get the darn thing to stay closed that the front window rattles in the frame. And this guy has said he'll evict me if I make any more complaints. He doesn't care if I'm happy, there's a long list of poor schmucks who will give him a deposit and first and last month's rent, and he triples his money every time he gets a new renter.”

“Isn't there an agency that regulates . . .”

“I've checked. It's hard to enforce tenant rights in New Mexico. I read the statutes, and they are nine-tenths about the right to evict. The only thing I could do would be to take the guy to court.”

“Maybe there's a better place to rent while you figure all this out.”

“Nah, I've looked. There's not much out there, unless I want to live in a trailer. And I can't afford one of those new condos. But it's not just the rental situation. Taos is the only third-world country in the United States.”

I was quiet. The thing I loved about Taos was how time seemed to stand still, how the past refused to give in to the present and held steadfast to ancient customs and rich cultural distinctions. Taos was timeless, and fiercely so.

Diane's sat phone rang. “Give me that lat and long,” she said to me, nodding toward the small yellow GPS we'd used to calculate our exact location.

I read the coordinates to her. Within minutes, we could hear the hum of the chopper coming; then we saw it buzzing toward us from far away, like an oversized mosquito bearing down on its target. As soon as the wolf recognized the sound, he broke into a run, away toward the high ground near the ruin.