The Man Who Fell from the Sky (8 page)

The small, white shop with Fergus Auto Body painted in black letters across the front window stood on the south side of Main Street. A bell over the door jangled when Vicky entered. The place was all brown—vinyl floor, paneled walls, and counter. Voices came from behind the rear wall. Vicky stepped to the counter and pressed a metal bell. It was a couple of minutes before a large man with dark, curly hair and big arms came through the back door. “Help you?”

Vicky said she would like to speak to Alan Fergus, and the man nodded, as if to say,
You found him
. Then she told him she was a friend of Ruth Walking Bear's.

“Real sorry about her husband,” Fergus said. “Sure a shock for my boy, seeing the body. I've told the FBI agent all I know.”

“I went to the lake after Robert died,” Vicky said. “There were a lot of tire tracks, but the coroner, the FBI agent, and other law enforcement had been there. I was hoping you might remember if there were tracks other than those from Robert's pickup.”

The man tapped thick fingers on the countertop and squinted toward the window behind her. “Maybe,” he said. “I wasn't paying real close attention. Might have been tracks around a campsite where I turned around.”

“The campsite farther along the road?”

“Yeah. Hard to tell for sure.”

THE ROAD SEEMED
steeper, the curves tighter. Occasionally columns of deep, black shade blocked the sun. Vicky gripped the wheel, keeping an eye out for rocks that might have hurtled downslope since yesterday. She had called Annie before she started into the mountains and asked her to reschedule her afternoon appointments. “Where are you?” Annie had wailed. “Roger saw you leave the coffee shop. By the time he got to his car, you had driven off.” She had told her secretary she talked to the man who had found Robert's body and was now on her way to Bull Lake. That had brought on another wail. “You're going alone?” She told Annie all of it then, what the caller had said, the fear that had come down the line like an invisible current.

Now it was the conversation with the anonymous caller that ran through her mind. Robert, murdered. It didn't make sense. Surely if he had been murdered, there would have been a sign of
struggle. Something indicating his death had been violent. But the coroner had even suspected Robert might have drowned himself. And something else that didn't make sense: why had the caller waited so long to come forward?

Come forward? She gave a scoff of laughter. He hadn't come forward at all. He was hiding in anonymity, expecting her to go to the fed with his crazy accusation. And not even an accusation. He hadn't accused anyone, which meant he might not know the so-called killer. Or if he did know the killer, he hadn't wanted to name him.

She came around another curve and plunged into a long, black shadow that felt like an eclipse of the sun. Then out again into the clear, bright light. In the rearview mirror, she saw a white truck dart into the shadow. A lot of white trucks in the area. She had no reason to believe it was the truck she had seen at the coffee shop. But the feeling of unease crept over her like invisible insects. There hadn't been any other traffic on the road; she had been completely alone, just her and the mountain. Now someone was behind her. She pressed down on the accelerator and took the next curve so fast that the Ford rocked on the axles. She kept going, wanting to put as much distance as she could between herself and the white truck, and all the time telling herself this was a public road, she didn't own it.

But Robert hadn't come here to die. He had never been depressed, Ruth said. He was exuberant about life, excited about what he was doing. On a treasure hunt! He hadn't come to be killed! Had he known a killer was waiting, he wouldn't have come.

The lake below came into view, smooth and placid, rolling shades of deep blue and purple edged with silver in the sunlight. A beautiful place, she was thinking, to die.

God! She was as crazy as the caller, buying into his story. Most
likely the cause of death was accidental drowning. Why couldn't she leave it at that? Refuse to take any more calls from Anonymous and let the fed handle whatever might come next.

But that was the problem. Something terrible might come next. The caller could be in danger. She had heard the terror running below the confidence in his voice. The same masked terror she had heard in the voices of witnesses testifying against their will, scared almost into incomprehension, eyes bobbing around the courtroom—the floor, the ceiling—everywhere except on the defendant they were condemning.

The road had turned downward, and the lake was coming closer. The white truck shimmied in the rearview mirror, and she forced herself to look away. She tried to remember what Ruth had said about Robert's treasure map. Ruth said Robert had gotten his map from his grandfather, but people who had purchased maps claimed they'd gotten them from some ancestor who had known Butch Cassidy. And what had become of Robert's map? Ruth hadn't said, as if the map didn't matter. An excuse to go treasure hunting. The map was probably in Robert's truck, and the fed hadn't yet released it.

Vicky tapped on the brake and turned into the two-track that ran parallel to the lake. Had she kept going, she realized, she could have driven straight into the lake. She had to concentrate. The Ford skittered over the troughs dug by other vehicles. The white truck had stopped at the turnoff and was making a U-turn. She felt the muscles in her stomach begin to relax. The truck had bothered her more than she realized.
Listen to your instincts,
Grandmother always said.
Your instincts know the truth.
She watched the truck complete the turn and start back. Why had the driver come all this way, if he didn't intend to go to the lake?

She drove toward the strip of land that jutted out into the lake,
where Robert had parked his truck. Water lapped at the rocks on the thin strip of swampy, wind-stroked beach. She stopped about thirty feet from the strip and got out. The yellow tape that had been here yesterday was gone. Case closed, she thought. Accidental drowning.

She passed the strip and kept walking toward the campsite she had discovered. She wondered if she could find it again with the wind bending the grass and clumps of sagebrush. Easy for things to disappear in this landscape. So many stories of the Old Time that Grandfather had told about the people scattering across landscape like this, hiding in the dirt and brush, scarcely breathing, not letting out a sound. The soldiers had ridden past, their white eyes unaccustomed to the play of sunshine and shadow, the wind moving everything about.

She stopped to get her bearings. How far from the strip had she walked? Half a mile? She saw the slight depression then. She pulled over and started walking across the grass. Footprints were still visible, hers and Ruth's. She wondered if there had been footprints here when Gianelli and a forensics team were crawling over the area, and if they had made casts. In the Old Time, no footprints would have been left behind. Those who went last would sweep and brush the trail behind them. The people could cross the plains without leaving a sign.

The campsite looked the same as yesterday, and she wondered what she had hoped to discover. Something she and Ruth, as well as the investigators, might have missed? Something that might identify an anonymous caller? But there was no proof he had been here. He could have been farther along the lake, up above, looking down. Hiding in the grass where no one could see him. Except that someone had been at this campsite recently, and whoever it was had a full view of the strip of land.

She found a stick and started prodding the ashes. The forensics team would have done the same, scattering them about as they prodded. If anything had been left behind, they would have found it. A few feet from the fire pit was a flat-topped boulder. She sat down, thinking that the caller could have sat here and looked out at the lake. And did nothing! If Robert was murdered, the caller had done nothing to help him. Now she had a better sense of the man: scared to death for his own life; unable or unwilling to help someone else.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the white truck coming around a curve above. She could feel the knot tightening in her stomach as she watched the truck pull to the side and stop. The driver wore a cowboy hat, wide brimmed and tan-colored, that shaded his face. It was a man, she was sure. Powerful shoulders, a red plaid shirt.

She was certain it was the caller, as certain as if he had walked down the slope and announced himself. He must have been waiting near the coffee shop and had followed her, expecting her to go to the fed. Wasn't that his instruction? But she had come here hoping to find something—she had no idea what it might be—to take to Gianelli, other than the claim of an anonymous caller.

She fought back the impulse to jump up and start running. Take the diagonal route through the grass, run all out for the Ford. She glanced over her shoulder. The Ford was a long ways away. It would take a few minutes to get there. And then what? Drive back along the road, around the curve where the white truck would be waiting? She got to her feet, feeling slightly shaky and disoriented. She was alone here. Annie and Roger were the only ones who knew where she was, and they were in Lander.

Now she was pushing the stick through the ashes, as if this were the most ordinary thing to do, the white truck a blur in her
peripheral vision. She would not let the man in the cowboy hat see her fear. She dug past the ashes and into the burned ground, forking up chunks of dirt. An exercise in futility that proved nothing. Forensics would have swept the campsite clean, taken anything they found.

She tossed the stick aside and started for the Ford. It struck her that the white truck could turn downhill, barrel through the brush and grass and spindly stalks of trees, and cut her off. She willed her legs to stretch out, go faster, as if the Ford were an oasis where she could hide, a dirt cave from the Old Time where she could make herself small and invisible.

She saw the small, white flash under a sagebrush, scooped up the torn, half-burned piece of paper, and kept going. Not until she had gotten into the Ford, locked the doors, and maneuvered through a U-turn back to the junction of the two-track and the dirt road, did she open her palm and examine the piece of paper. A faint scribbling of boxes and
X
's and lines with arrow signs. It looked like part of a tourist map, but different. The paper dingy with age; the scribbling almost formal, deliberate. The piece had been torn off from what looked like the right corner of a larger piece. The torn edge charred and burned.

She drove up the incline to where the road started bending around the mountain, the white truck out of sight, but still there, she was certain. Except that when she came around the curve that overlooked the strip of land and the campsite, the truck was gone. She could make out the tire tracks at the edge of the road where it had parked. The in and out of her breathing sounded loud and shallow around her. He could still be ahead, waiting. She slowed down, peering around each curve as she drove, half expecting to see the white truck stopped in the middle of the road, where she would have to brake hard. Every possibility of flying off the road.

She kept going until she emerged onto the flat road that sloped gently down into Lander. Still no sign of the white truck. She tried to shake away the unpleasant sense of having been shadowed by a cowboy she didn't know, a cowboy who knew her. A few cars and pickups on the road now, the usual traffic between the houses in the foothills and town. Even if the white truck were nowhere in sight, she had the feeling she was still being watched.

*   *   *

TED GIANELLI WAS
a big man with a thick neck inside the open collar of a denim shirt. He had black hair streaked with gray and gray eyes that gazed at her with curiosity. He had kept her waiting a few minutes in the entrance to the FBI office building, staring at wanted posters on concrete walls. Finally the metal door had swung open and the fed had beckoned her inside. Down the wide corridor past a warren of offices, the sound of his boots bouncing off the walls, and into a roomy office with paper and file folders stashed around the open laptop computer on his desk. Opera music played in the background; she recognized “Caro nome” from
Rigoletto
. John O'Malley had been playing the aria once when she had visited his office, and for a long time afterward the melody had stayed in her mind. She smiled. Two opera lovers, John and the fed, in the middle of Wyoming.

“What brings you here, counselor?” Gianelli motioned her to a side chair and sat down behind the computer. “Which one of your clients did I arrest in the last day or so? What kind of deal are you hoping to make?”

Vicky stopped herself from laughing out loud. Gianelli had never been willing to make a deal. He was as hard-nosed as they came. He tapped a ballpoint against a folder in rhythm to the aria while she told him she had come about Robert Walking Bear's death.

“It might not have been an accident.” That caught his attention, and he stopped tapping, his gaze locked on her. She told him about the anonymous caller and the message he had delivered. Then she told him that she had driven up to Bull Lake and that she was sure the caller had followed her in a white truck. “I found this near the site where Robert died,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out the piece of paper. Tiny flakes of blackened ash rose in the air. She slid the paper across the desk. “It's part of a map. Ruth said Robert had a map with him when he died.”

Vicky waited while Gianelli placed the piece of paper inside a clear plastic bag and sealed the top. Then she went on, explaining before he could ask why she had removed evidence from a possible crime scene. “It was under sagebrush close to a campsite,” she said. “It would have blown away.”

“We combed the area. Nothing to suggest the fire pit had been used at the time of Robert's death.”

“The ashes looked recent.”

“You know that how?”

She wanted to say: from years of sitting around campfires when she was a kid, listening to old stories. “Ashes remain in place for days,” she said. “They could have been warm when Robert's body was found.”

A fixed, concentrated look came over the man's face. “Even if the campsite was used recently, there is no way to know exactly when. Campers could have been there days before Robert Walking Bear's death.” He drew in a big breath and tapped the ballpoint several times, staring across the room. Finally he looked at her. “This investigation is ongoing. If someone claims he witnessed a murder, I'm going to take that seriously.”

“If I hear from the caller again”—and she would, she was
thinking; the scared, desperate cowboy would call again—“I can try to convince him to come forward.”

“Good luck with that,” he said.

*   *   *

THE HEAT OF
the day settled over the parking lot and sucked at the asphalt. Vicky could feel it grabbing the soles of her shoes as she raised the tailgate on the Ford and lifted out the sack of groceries she had bought on the way home. Salad for dinner, bread, a carton of milk that squished against the bread. She closed the tailgate and headed down the sidewalk toward the glass entryway to her apartment building. From the distance came the faint hum of going-home traffic, hardly rush hour traffic yet, but heavier than during the day. A faint, intermittent breeze carried odors of exhaust and hot asphalt.