One Through the Heart (25 page)

‘It is. The detective at the time was here earlier.’

‘I’d like to talk with him.’

‘We can make that happen. His name is Abe Burtle, as in turtle with a B, and don’t ask me where the name comes from. He and I never got along and he’s about as crotchety a human being as I’ve ever met, but today he’s on good behavior. One other thing, and you’ll be interested in this: the neighbors right over there said that Royer spoke about finding the line between the living and the dead so he would be able to talk with his dead wife again. After that they didn’t want their children around him.’

‘New ideas are hard.’

‘Here comes Agent Coe. He looks like he’s getting ready to hike up a mountain.’

Raveneau tried to balance the taciturn man at Grate’s Place with a young, married ambitious man who lived here and whose life had spiraled down after his wife’s death. Royer was vulnerable and probably drawn in and at some point drank the Kool-Aid, but it was a long way from here to a mountain bike on Mt. Tamalpais and placing incendiary devices. Raveneau got out as Coe arrived and the sheriff answered a radio call.

Coe offered his hand and said, ‘I hope this is worth your time.’

‘It’s worth my time. The skulls were taken not far from here and there may be more information inside.’

‘We would have copied you on everything.’

In about two weeks you would have, he thought and then watched the FBI robot go in through the front door. Two hours passed as they tried to figure out a higher radiation reading inside the house before concluding it was naturally occurring radon. Then in a bedroom closet an FBI agent found a carrying case built to hold two vertical lead cylinders each with the international symbol for radioactivity stamped into the gray lead. They were moved out to a van.

After lunch Raveneau was inside the house with three agents and Coe. Raveneau wanted to sit at the computer but an agent much more agile and computer literate than him was rapidly searching files with keywords. When she finished he knew their next move would be to walk the computer out and he wanted a few minutes in front of it first so listened for her fingers on the keyboard as he and Coe sorted through papers and notebooks in the kitchen. This room seemed to be where John Royer lived his life.

On a short desk-high wooden countertop in the kitchen were three spiral notebooks, each with a pale brown cover and lined sheets and pages upon pages of printed notes in fine black ink. The letters were very small. The notebooks were each titled, again in small letters on the upper right-hand corner on the outside jacket. One had the title
Reported
, one
Actual
, and one
WK
. Coe was at his shoulder as he picked up
WK
.

‘What have you got?’

‘Notebooks with a lot of writing in them. This was his space. I’ll bet he built this counter and chair. It’s the same wood.’

Raveneau spread the three notebooks so Coe could read their titles. He read them aloud and then opened the one titled
Actual
. When he turned the pages they were perforated in places where Royer pushed with too much force as he put a period at the end of a sentence.

‘Why not use a computer?’ Coe asked. ‘He didn’t grow up with a pen in his hand. What’s this
Actual
about?’ After a few moments he said, ‘I get it. These are events that he was present at.’ He flipped more pages then opened the one titled
Reported
and started comparing the two. ‘He’s writing about what the press reported versus what he saw. Maybe I should start doing that. This one is a parade for returning Iraq vets in St Louis last winter.’

Raveneau pulled the chair out and sat down. He reached for the lamp on the counter, pulled it over and turned it on.

‘I saw you went for that one first,’ Coe said. ‘What’s “WK” mean to you?’

‘It’s about her writings,’ Raveneau said. ‘WK, Wounded Knee.’

Raveneau opened the first page and read about bright-colored ghost shirts with images of eagles and buffalo that the Sioux wore as they danced in the frigid winter wind and blowing snow. They believed these ghost shirts would stop bluecoat bullets and believed in the prophesy of a Paiute shaman, Wovoka, who saw the dead rising and the white man buried under a sea of new soil that would cover the land and bring back the prairies and the buffalo. Then the Sioux would leave the reservations and return to live life again in the old ways. Raveneau showed the phrase ‘the dead rising’ to Coe.

Coe read and didn’t respond immediately. He returned to the other notebooks and then turned back. ‘This is why you flew out. Does this go back to her death?’

‘I think so. Alan Siles is a charismatic proselytizer who sees himself as a visionary, but she was a thinker and her thoughts are the glue that holds these guys together. She was a historian first. She imagined the ghost dances. She saw the fires and snow blowing through the rising smoke into a bitter cold night. She saw the Sioux in ghost shirts dancing and the frightened American Indian Agent assigned to the tribe calling for troops. She understood the death of Sitting Bull. I think her gift was she could feel across generations. She felt the anguish of the Sioux tribe, the desperation in the ghost dance and the reaching for what was gone.’

‘And your theory is they all talked themselves into believing this?’

Raveneau looked up from the notebook. ‘Talked themselves into what?’

‘Into believing the dead can rise.’

‘I don’t know what they believe as a group. Royer is dead. Lindsley stands off. He’s not quite inside, so that leaves a group of two as far as we know, Siles and Latkos. Latkos worked as a hacker for the US government, Russian mobsters, and herself. I don’t know how spiritual she is, but I know something about the other two. Siles is the true believer. He’s the one we’ve got to find.’

But what did these notebooks add up to but laborious handwritten thoughts vanished into a death ride down a mountain as he torched open country and watershed? Raveneau read and took it in. He asked for a scanned copy of each notebook and was promised he’d get them.

A dead man doesn’t care what you take from his house and the Feds took everything they could carry. The neighbors watched all this, as well as watching the guy in the lead suit walking around in the yard with the Geiger counter. He wasn’t surfing the sand for dropped change, but Raveneau doubted he would find anything.

He followed Sheriff Jenny to the house of Abe Burtle, the retired detective, and Burtle acted like they were late. It was also clear he didn’t like Jennie Crawford much and didn’t want to hear her talk. He helped that by finishing the sheriff’s sentences for her. He waved at his couch.

‘Sit down. You want to know about John Royer and McCabe his neighbor? You want to know what I think happened?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t think McCabe was disoriented or confused. He was just old and weak. He tried to get back in his front door and then worked his way around the house. Without his glasses he was nearly blind and it was snowing hard and forecast to snow until two or three in the morning. He tried the garage door and his back doors and had trouble getting through his gate and came back around to his driveway and went a hundred paces down to the street before going back to his house and trying to break a window. Or that’s what it looked like.’

‘Were there tracks for all that?’

‘Of course there were tracks. He was walking in snow. But he wasn’t dressed for the cold and his glasses were found on the floor near the front door. Now, would he go outside without his glasses? Would you? Of course you wouldn’t, and if Royer killed him it was by taking away his glasses before carrying him outside in his robe. They say McCabe slept in front of the TV every night. He was a widower. Wife died in a car accident in 1991. He didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. He was a little fella who had shrunk.’

‘Like you,’ the sheriff said.

‘That’s right, Jennie, and I miss you just as much.’ He turned back to Raveneau. ‘The storm blew through and the dawn was cold and clear and Royer told me he was leaving for work when he saw McCabe’s front door open and the lights on. He stopped in front of McCabe’s driveway and walked to the door and knocked, and then saw tracks and McCabe’s body down along the side of the front of the house.

‘I called an old friend of mine, a tracker, and he came out and looked it over. He spent a couple of hours sorting it out. I promised we’d take care of his time, but I couldn’t get him paid later. In this county we only pay for law enforcement work if you’re sitting down. You can sit in your car or sit in the station, but if you get out and actually do something you don’t get paid.’

‘I’m not going to say anything,’ Jennie said. ‘I’ll just sit here.’

Burtle continued as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘The paramedics and the rest of the fools trampled through all the tracks in the driveway and around the front door. So did Royer. It looked to me like he went out of his way to erase them. Still, Bob found pieces of frozen older ones that weren’t the old man’s bare feet.’

‘Barefoot.’

‘Yes, sir, which fits with the idea he was disoriented. I thought I explained that.’

‘It also fits with the idea he was lifted out of his chair and carried outside.’

‘That’s right, and McCabe was so weak he couldn’t fight him off. I suspect Royer. I have no right to and Royer is dead now himself, so we’re never going to know. I suspect him of creeping through McCabe’s house locking the doors and then carrying McCabe outside and turning the lock on the front door.’

‘Why would he?’

‘Why would he? You ask the neighbors and they’ll tell you Royer didn’t like McCabe. Royer kept odd hours and was up to something and now this proves it. I think McCabe saw something and Royer knew it. Maybe he asked Royer about it and Royer started thinking he had to kill the old man. When I came back to re-interview Royer he was gone and then I couldn’t find him. I should have known he’d go to California.’

‘Why is that?’

Burtle never answered, and Raveneau followed Sheriff Crawford to Cagdill and her office. He read through everything she had on the river flooding and the caskets washed out into the field and along the road. He read her notes and sat and talked with her over dinner and then drove back to St Louis in the late night. He flew home early the next morning.

W
hen Raveneau’s cell screen lit up with the words Unknown Caller his gut said it was Lindsley. An hour later he drove into the Presidio graveyard. The road climbed in a slow loop and Lindsley was parked at the upper end and standing outside his car watching Raveneau approach. He wore a dark-brown hoodie that shadowed the sides of his face and moved away from his car and started climbing the grassy slope before Raveneau parked. Rows of gravestones rose through the grass toward trees and Lindsley was well above him when Raveneau started up, calling out as he did, ‘Wait there. I’m not going to chase you.’ When he caught up, he asked, ‘What are we doing here? What are you going to show me?’

‘A place Lash took me to up there. We have to get above the grass and the graves. It’s up there in the trees if I can find it again. I haven’t been here in a long time.’

‘How far into the trees?’

‘Maybe fifty yards.’ He leered. ‘Nobody watching will be able to see us. If that scares you we don’t have to go. I look like I scare you.’

‘You’d scare anybody.’

But the truth was that the color was gone from Lindsley’s face. He was sweating and that could be the hood over his head and the mild exertion of starting up this slope, but Raveneau didn’t think so.

‘Is this the way you came with Lash? I want to know when and how you got here the first time.’

‘We came here in his car and parked where I’m parked.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t remember the year yet. I may never remember it.’

‘But it was when you and he were still going to collaborate on writing books.’

‘You got it, Inspector, you brought your A game today.’

‘How many more surprises have you got, Brandon?’

‘Not many. But I learned a long time ago to keep something to negotiate with.’

‘What did you have then?’

‘I didn’t have anything and they kept me awake for forty-eight hours as they questioned me. They lied and did everything they could to get me to confess including showing me a faked statement that my best friend supposedly made. They tried to mimic his handwriting, the whole thing.’

‘How did you know it wasn’t him?’

Lindsley turned, eyes fever bright and meeting Raveneau’s gaze only momentarily. ‘I knew his handwriting. You know, right now, I’m getting some of that same good old feeling of having a target on my back. No matter what I say or do the plan is to charge me with whatever they charge Siles and Latkos with. I’ll get wrapped in and then they’ll offer me a much shorter sentence as long as I testify against them. I’ll still get eight years.’

‘It’ll give you time to finish that book.’

‘There you go. It’s an opportunity.’

They reached the edge of the grass and started into the trees and there was the pungent eucalyptus smell and the memory of walking the grove below the cottage with Ann Coryell. He followed Lindsley, marking the route in his head, pushing Lindsley again, saying, ‘You came here before her remains were found.’

‘Like I said, you’re on your A game today. I never asked what was buried up here. He just showed me where to find what is buried. He either knew I wouldn’t go to the police or he didn’t care if I did. I’ve thought about it ten thousand times since and still wonder. It’s stupid to bring you here because somehow it’ll get turned against me. I’m going to say it again: I don’t know what, if anything, is buried up here. He could have just been messing with me, testing to see what I would do with it. But tell me I’m doing the right thing. I love it when you tell me that.’

‘Why do you think he brought you here?’

‘He must have known I wouldn’t tell anybody until it benefited me. He knew I would keep it like money in a wallet. The professor is a risk taker and I was an ambitious failed grad student. The day before Professor Lash showed me this he told me we would collaborate on three books. The next morning he brought me up here. I could have called the police an hour later, but I didn’t. I have to go slower now and look for slash marks on the trees.’ He turned and smiled. ‘I’m like you when you were trying to find your way back to where she was found on Mount Tam.