Death Along the Spirit Road (14 page)

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Authors: C. M. Wendelboe

BOOK: Death Along the Spirit Road
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Willie shook his head and retrieved his can of Copenhagen. “The car was parked by Crazy George’s toolshed. It’s outside the corral, so the horse couldn’t get to the thief. Odd thing is the car was still there when Crazy George woke up that morning.”
“Then why does he think it was stolen? Did his horse whisper it to him?”
“Mileage,” Willie winked. “Crazy George knows it was stolen because there’s exactly two hundred fifty more miles on the odometer than when he drove it last.”
“That’s a pretty good memory.”
“Crazy George is crazy,” Willie said. “Not stupid.”
Manny eyed the fresh sandwiches. On cue, his stomach growled in mock hunger. He felt a tug at his waistline from a belly bigger than he wanted, and passed on another sandwich. Jenny Craig wouldn’t approve, and neither would his side stitches when he hit the road tonight. “What’s all the rest in that folder?”
“Lab tests,” Willie answered. “At least some results are back on the homicide.” Willie rifled through the papers. He licked his thumb, then turned a page. Lick and turn. Lick and turn.
“You going to tell me what the tests results are, or just watch me squirm?”
Willie dropped the folder on the table and handed Manny the fingerprint report. “They developed a set of partials on the handle of the war club,” Willie pronounced as if educating a jury. “Five points on one latent, seven on the other. Report says they appeared smudged and unreadable.”
“Wiped?”
Willie shrugged. “Can’t tell. Not enough points for an ID. But there was a second set of prints.” He handed Manny another report. Twelve full points had been developed on this second set, enough to identify a suspect. “The lieutenant sent the prints into Pierre and faxed a set to Quantico.”
“And the prints on the blood around the handle?”
Willie grabbed another sheet. “Unidentifiable, same as the other set.”
“DNA?”
Willie laughed. “Here on the rez? Now where would we get the funds for a private lab to do DNA testing?”
“I’ll take care of that. I’m certain the blood will match Jason’s.”
Willie stood to refill both cups again when two girls walked into the convenience store. “
Han, sic esi
,” one said to Willie. She smiled as she passed him.
“
Hau, hankasi
,” he answered back, and matched her smile. Willie’s glance wandered down to the girl’s tight Levi’s.
He didn’t take his eyes off the girls as he walked back with the coffee. Was Manny ever that young? Not worried about what to do about his diet, not worried about what to do about his nicotine withdrawal, not worried about what the hell to do with himself when retirement came. “Pretty friendly there.” Manny snapped his fingers in front of Willie’s eyes. “Girlfriend?”
“Who, Doreen? Nah, she’s in one of my college classes.” When Manny just looked at him, Willie blurted out, “She’s a Big Eagle. Moved here from Crow Creek this last year to go to college. She’s just a friend.”
“Well, you talk the talk pretty good with her.”
“Margaret’s been teaching me that, too,” Willie said, and leaned sideways around Manny to watch the girls. “Besides teaching me the healing ways, Margaret’s teaching me Lakota. She says if we don’t keep our language alive, it will die as surely as the
mazaska
, the corn, dies every fall.”
Manny once sat across from Unc at the base of a cottonwood, a blanket between them holding their afternoon snack. They hiked the steep cliffs of Buffalo Butte to gather elderberries that afternoon. “
Tunska
, if we don’t talk the talk,” Unc told him as he addressed him in the traditional word for nephew, “we’ll be like a man losing an arm or a leg. Our society will never recover our heritage without constant stumbling.”
It was up to the youth of each generation, Unc told him, to carry on traditions that White people scoffed at, and Manny often regretted not keeping up with his Lakota language. He intended to get back into it when he was discharged from the army and working on the reservation as a tribal cop. He’d even attended a Sun Dance that first summer to get his mind right with the old ways. But when the FBI hired him, he’d figured his Lakota language skills would be useless in Virginia. He’d been wrong. As many times as he was assigned cases on reservations, being able to converse in Lakota would have been useful. At least being back on the Pine Ridge again was bringing back some of his dormant skills.
“Why don’t you take Doreen somewhere for a nice meal and a movie?”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” Willie blushed. Manny laughed. The very large man in front of him had turned into a shrinking, intimidated little boy, and Manny empathized.
He let Willie off the hook. “You said other tests were back.”
“So I can quote you by saying Jason’s blood was found on the murder weapon? Along with unknown prints?” Sonja Myers stood beside their table and sipped delicately from a Coke cup. “May I?” She slid in the booth beside Manny and scooted close. Her legs touched his, but he was as close to the window as he could get.
“How did you know where to find us?” Then he answered his own question. “I’ll bet that nice Lieutenant Looks Twice.”
“Why, yes.” She looked sideways at Manny, her flowing hair cascading down her—what?—“bosom,” as Willie would say.
“We really have nothing new …”
“Well, this is new.” She reached for the lab report. Manny snatched it and jammed it into the manila envelope. “We have nothing more. I can call you when we do.”
“Look, Agent Tanno. I got a job to do same as you. If I don’t give my editor something on this Red Cloud case, it’s back to the mail room for me. Can you see me exiled to the mail room?”
Be a damned shame to stuff her somewhere people couldn’t see her.
“I’ll call you when I have something I can release.”
She feigned disappointment, then smiled. “That’s a promise?”
“Promise.”
“Don’t force me to look you up.”
“I won’t. But I’d bet the lieutenant will have new information. We haven’t checked in with him this morning yet.”
“You might be right.” Sonja stood and smoothed her white blouse, and her eye contact lingered a moment longer than Manny thought the occasion warranted. “We’ll meet again soon.”
“Of course,” he stammered.
Now it was Manny’s turn to watch tight Levi’s walk away.
“You could ask her out. A nice meal, maybe a movie.”
“I got other things on my mind right now. Like the lab results?”
“Oh, yeah.” Willie flipped through the papers until he found another page and handed it to Manny.
“That stuff we thought was sweetgrass? It was. And that leaf you thought was cut-grass: It was.”
The report showed that the material embedded in Jason’s trouser cuffs was concrete dust.
“That’d fit your brother.” Willie seemed to be reading Manny’s mind.
“Or it could have been picked up on Jason’s pants legs when he was inspecting the construction site. More people than Reuben work with concrete around here.” What the hell was he doing, defending Reuben? Manny dismissed it as being just the open mind of a trained investigator, not a
kola
protecting his brother. “Who else works around concrete?”
“Can’t say.”
“Think.” If he could get Willie reasoning on his own, one day he would be a top investigator. And spare Manny another trip to places like Pine Ridge. “Who else could have deposited this at the crime scene?”
“The Heritage Kids,” Willie said. “There’s six of them by last count. How do we narrow it down among them?”
“Not so fast.” Manny reached deep into his pocket and came away with a piece of Nicorette gum to take the edge off his craving.
Unless the gum could be rolled and smoked
.
“But they work concrete all day.”
“Construction is pretty common here. New foundations, footings for houses, curb and gutter work. That doesn’t mean one of them killed Jason.”
“I see your point. Just one more thing to add when we put all this together.”
“Now you’re learning.”
Willie smiled and sat a little straighter in the booth. Manny knew the praise of a senior officer. His first pat on the back by Chief Horn had raised his rookie head inches one day. It was the end of a long night, when Manny had tracked a runaway boy from the Red Cloud School to the edge of the Stronghold region. The kid had been a runner, but Manny had humped these hills with Unc, and still ran when he got the chance between work and college classes. When he caught up with the runaway, the kid was as surprised as the rest of the officers were when Manny returned to town with him.
“Oh, and we got some info on the war club.” Willie smiled and spread papers on the table. This time Manny allowed Willie to explain the report at his own speed.
“The war club—which, to the lieutenant’s chagrin, was an original—was stolen. Along with other artifacts from the Prairie Edge store in Rapid City three weeks ago. Forty grand worth.”
“When the other antiquities surface, we might know more.”
“They have.” Willie handed Manny a list of stolen Lakota artifacts dating back to pre-1890: a bone whistle, a medicine pouch in the shape of a turtle, a pair of beaded moccasins, a stunning pink and rose colored star quilt. “All original. And all returned.”
“Returned?”
Willie paused as if speaking to an anxious crowd. “The morning of Jason’s murder, someone left them on the front doorstep of the Prairie Edge. They were all stuffed into a Sioux Nation grocery bag, undamaged.”
Returned undamaged. Manny rolled that around in his mind. Someone stole forty thousand dollars’ worth of artifacts, then just returned them. “Have they been seized?”
“They have.” Willie slid a pinch of Copenhagen under his lip, dragging his explanation out like a skilled attorney. “Rapid City PD seized them. Detective Harold Soske told me they developed some good prints from the bone whistle, and some partials on the grocery bag. He’ll call if they get a suspect.”
Manny stood abruptly. He grabbed their paper plates and tossed them into the garbage. He patted his pocket for his notebook, and checked his watch for the first time since entering Big Bat’s. “You going to be on Indian time all day?” he called over his shoulder. “I need to get some work out of you today.”
Without waiting for an answer, Manny walked to the patrol car with his hand on his throbbing head to ease the itch in his stitches, grateful that he had the case to take his mind off the pain.
CHAPTER 7
 
 
Willie slowed to allow a cow and her calf to cross the road. “If I had a brother, I wouldn’t want to have to arrest him either. Even if he is an ex-con.”
Dispatcher Shannon Horn located Reuben’s jobsite from construction permits he had filed on behalf of his Heritage Kids.
“I keep telling myself it really doesn’t matter if Reuben is the killer or not. Just as long as I do my job. See justice done. All that ideological bullshit. It would easier if it was someone else, though. But right now he’s our best suspect.”
Willie pulled over and stopped the car. He reached into his briefcase and came away with a handgun in a brown shoulder holster.
“I don’t need a gun.”
“You need one here.”
“I haven’t needed one in years, except for qualifications.”
“Last night should have taught you that you need a gun on the rez. You need to be armed. As many homicides as you’ve investigated should have taught you that an armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Hell, you’re safer walking around Watts or Harlem unarmed in the middle of the night than you are Pine Ridge.”
“You’re right. It is foolish of me, but I’m kind of rusty with guns.”
“Don’t worry.” Willie slid the Glock 9 mm from the holster. After dropping the magazine and clearing the round from the chamber, he handed it to Manny. “It’s like a revolver. Just point and shoot. There’s no safety to worry about, and there’s seventeen rounds in that thing, plus this spare mag.”

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