Текст книги "The Coyote"

Автор книги: Michael McBride

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SIX

Antone was remarkably lithe for such a large man. He scaled those hills and trails like he was part mountain goat. Granted, he held onto his belt with one hand the entire time to keep his pants up, but we made excellent time and reached the canyon itself before sunset.

I had to marvel when I turned around and stared off across the desert and the miles of seamless sand and rolling hills that stretched off into eternity. Everything glimmered with an almost ethereal red glow. There was a strange beauty to the landscape that was perhaps enhanced by the inherent danger of it. I felt somehow triumphant, as though I had both bested it and been accepted by it. As though I had survived some sort of trial by fire, the reward for which was a momentary glimpse behind the veil, a peek at the gentle soul lurking beneath the deadly exterior.

Antone clapped me on the shoulder. I glanced back to see him nodding to himself with an almost wistful smile.

“We’re burning daylight,” he said, and led me deeper into the advancing shadows, which had begun to fill the canyon like floodwaters.

The scuffing sound of our footsteps echoed back at us from the canyon walls, which grew steeper and taller until they nearly blocked out the sky. Skeletal shrubs grew from the cracks in the rocks and tufts of wild grasses and ambitious creosotes and sage fought over the pockets of sand where the occasional ray of light reached the ground. A ribbon of sand suggested that a trickle of water had flowed through here somewhat recently, and the rocks were marked with old water lines from the sporadic flash floods. There were a ton of footprints, one of top of another, moving single-file into the mountains. Trash and shed clothing were heaped against the rocks in some places, dropped right onto the ground in others. I saw weathered burlap sacks and crumpled wads of duct tape from the massive bricks of marijuana smugglers carried on their backs. I heard the rattle of diamondback tails more often than I would have liked, but never actually saw one. An owl hooted, a forlorn mooning sound, and bat wings whistled overhead. Stars materialized from the blue sky as the black of night encroached from the east.

My sweat cooled and then froze. I had goose bumps, which was a divine sensation after allowing my body to maintain such a high temperature for so long. Crazy to think that it was probably still in the mid-eighties. The air was crisp and dry. I felt alive in a way that I hadn’t before. It was almost as though I’d reached some sort of truce with the earth and we’d both agreed to a ceasefire, largely because the constant battles had gone on for so long that we’d forgotten who started the war in the first place.

Or maybe I was just mentally and physically exhausted and in desperate need of sleep.

“Just up ahead.” Antone was wheezing, but showed no outward sign of slowing. “Past the fork.”

“Why the rush?”

“You’ll see.”

Two thinner canyons merged ahead of us at a large stone formation that looked almost like a giant coyote in profile, sitting on its haunches with its snout raised to the sky. Its legs were eroded and discolored. Sand and desiccated weeds had swept up its back. Its rear end led to a narrow passage that wended to the right into the shadow of Baboquivari Peak. Antone led me down the opposite fork, which was even narrower. Ancient petroglyphs were barely visible on the stone walls where time and the elements had conspired to erase them, smoothing designs that must have been etched by hands as old as the Sonoran itself. The walls lowered to the point that I could see the cacti and brambles lining the edges, at least where there was enough dirt to take root. Other stretches were lined with rocks perched so precariously it was a miracle they didn’t fall on our heads.

I recognized the trail from the crime scene photographs, and I knew exactly where we were when the bottleneck formed ahead of us. The canyon had veered to the left as we walked, funneling us to the north. I could see just the upper crescent of the setting sun to my left, framed by two tall stone formations. It shined between them and through a crevice in the canyon wall in such a way that it cast a spotlight onto the giant faded smiley face.

“He knows this area intimately.”

“That’s why the rush. You needed to see it like this. It wasn’t just meant to be viewed. It was meant to be viewed at this precise moment.”

I stared at the massive design. The blood had dried and flaked away in sections, but the image was still more or less intact. I could even still see the ovular impressions of the pads on the canine paw the unsub had used as a brush. It was similar to the one I had seen earlier, only missing the strokes that showed the hint of the circular shape of the head, as though the picture became one step closer to completion from one instance to the next, chronologically speaking. I couldn’t find any corresponding Native American symbology, nor was there any modern societal correlation. I felt as though there were a deeper meaning I just couldn’t quite grasp. A tip of the tongue kind of thing. All I could say with any certainty was that not only was the killer thoroughly enjoying himself, he had every intention of continuing to complete his design unless we figured out a way to make him stop.

I heard the crunching sound of footsteps and whirled, my Beretta already drawn and sighted on the source of the noise. Three people rounded the bend. I nearly drilled a hole through the forehead of the first and another through center mass of the second before my mind caught up with my instincts. The man in the lead wore his shirt tied over his head and jeans that were more dirt than denim. His shoes were mini porcupines of cactus needles. The woman to his right looked like she’d picked out her best blouse and blue jeans for a picnic in the park, but they were now ripped and tattered. She wore sandals that had obviously once had heels and her feet were caked with a crust of blood mixed with sand. The third figure was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. Her tears had dried in muddy smears on her cheeks and her hair was a nest of tangles. Her pretty white dress was shredded and filthy, her bare legs scraped so deeply in some places that they were going to have to be stitched closed when the dirt was eventually irrigated from the wounds.

All three froze and stared at me with wide eyes. The man reached behind him and cautiously drew the girl out of the direct line of fire.

I slowly lowered my pistol and slid my finger off of the trigger.

A curious expression crossed the man’s face, one I read as a series of conflicting emotions in rapid succession: fear, confusion, acceptance, gratitude. And then he and his family were gone.

Neither of us had known the other party was there. I could have gunned them all down and no one would ever have known.

“They don’t understand how far the journey is,” Antone said. “They’re led to believe that it’s just an afternoon hike after they’re dropped off at the border. Little do they know it ends up being closer to four days across the sweltering desert. The coyotes keep their money and consign them to their fates.”

I imagined the look of surprise on some poor migrant’s face as he or she rounded the corner into the deep shade of the canyon only to find death waiting with a glimmering blade.

“They mostly travel at night,” Antone said. “The smart ones, anyway. When the sun goes down and it’s cooler. And they’re impossible to track through these mountains after dark, even if you know these hills like the back of your hand.”

I turned in a complete circle, but didn’t see what I had thought I would. The canyon walls had to be at least twenty-five feet tall. A jump from that height was an unnecessary risk, and someone crouching up there would be clearly silhouetted against the sky. The killer would be better concealed down here in the shadows.

I found where he had waited about thirty feet deeper into the canyon, on the far side of the bottleneck. It had been easy enough once I located the nearly invisible scratch lines where the unsub had swept away his tracks. Interestingly, he had dragged the victim’s body deeper into the canyon, in the opposite direction of the trailhead. I lost the brush marks under a riot of migrant footprints within a few feet.

“What’s farther up there?”

“More of the same. What you’re really asking, though, is how did he get the body out of here?”

I nodded and switched on my penlight, but it did little to combat the advancing darkness. Without a full battery of spotlights, we wouldn’t be finding, let alone following, any tracks tonight.

“Coyote is the master of deception. If anyone knew his tricks, he would undoubtedly find his paw in a snare.”

I stared up at the moon as it took form in the sky.

I’d been approaching this from the wrong angle.

The smiley faces.

The canine paw.

Our unsub fancied himself a trickster. There was undoubtedly even deception involved in the creation of that illusion. If I was right, there was nothing even remotely amusing about the message he was attempting to deliver. Nothing at all. And we would only learn more about him when he chose to reveal it, when he completed the design he had started, despite the fact that every single one of us knew what the design would look like when it was completed.

Or did we?

Somewhere in the distance a coyote yipped and bayed at the same moon.

“I’m done here,” I said, and struck off back toward the car.

SEVEN

I was already formulating my report—which I would deliver via private videoconference directly to my Special Agent-in-Charge, Thomas Nielsen, when I reached my pool vehicle—as I walked down the trail toward the chief’s car. My SAC was a good guy, as far as agents in his position went, but he was a lot more politically motivated than most. I don’t know whose chair he had set his sights on; all I knew was that he didn’t intend to remain in his for long. Denver wasn’t New York or Los Angeles or Houston, but it wasn’t a backwoods posting either. Nearly the entire front range of the Rocky Mountains fell under our jurisdiction. Phoenix could have made a legitimate argument for this being their case since it was in their backyard, but Nielsen would never have allowed it. In this case, I was his golden ticket. If my face ended up on the evening news, you could wager a vital organ that Nielsen’s would be right there beside mine. He had pulled out all the stops on this one. He had a native—albeit half-breed—O’odham with an excellent track record working a high profile case with the full tactical support of a dozen federal agencies and the backing of the brain trust back at Quantico.

I’d never worked directly with Behavioral before. They’d profiled a few unsubs for task forces I was a part of in the past, but I’d never really brushed shoulders with them. If I even got to now. It was a distinct possibility that Nielsen would usurp that role, too. I was curious to see how they worked, though. My formal training was minimal, at least compared to most of the profilers with their multiple doctorates. The majority of what I’ve learned has been in the field. I have a B.S. in Cognitive and Developmental Psychology from the University of Denver, but rather than pursuing a doctorate, I had elected to join the FBI. Or, as I like to say, I was seduced by the dark side. I wasn’t the kind of guy who could tolerate being cooped up in an office, nor was I the kind to spend my weekends in seminars or lectures.

And it turned out I really enjoyed carrying a gun and a shield.

Field work was even more fun than I had initially thought it would be. I loved the hunt. I lived for the chase. It was a game played on an open field with no rules and only our opposing wits as our allies. The only problem was the stakes involved. The longer we played this game, the more people died. And that, in my mind, was an unacceptable outcome. The time had come to put an end to this game.

Unfortunately, unless I got lucky, someone else was going to have to die first.

If they hadn’t already.

Again, I was happy enough to let Antone take the lead. The visibility was decent since the moon was nearly full, but I figured there was no harm in letting the chief pick the way down the trail for me. If he went down, I’d know where not to step. I didn’t own enough suits to sacrifice a decent pair of slacks like these.

The chief stopped dead on the path in front of me. Before I could ask why, I smelled it, too.

We had company.

The faint aroma of cigarette smoke. Hand-rolled, not domestic. Sweet. I could see the faint glow of a cherry downhill as the smoker took a drag, momentarily casting an orange glare over the Ford pickup truck against which he leaned.

Antone shook his head and started down the path again, his momentary burden noticeably lifted. He glanced back over his shoulder as we neared, a crooked grin on his face. Again, it was an expression I couldn’t quite decipher, but I was starting to establish a baseline.

There were actually two men waiting for us when we arrived. They’d parked right behind the chief’s cruiser, canted upward on the slight slope. The taller of the two dropped his butt, ground it into the dirt, and stepped away from the pickup. He was tall and slender and clad nearly entirely in faded denim, from his well-worn jacket to his open shirt and his jeans. The leather of his boots had paled to the color of dust and he wore the brim of his Stetson low, hiding his face in shadows.

The other was shorter and stockier, but even from afar it was apparent he was an impressive physical specimen by the slope of his shoulders and the taper of his waist. He hopped down from where he sat on the tailgate and rolled what sounded like a bottle deeper into the bed. He wore a checked flannel shirt open over a tight white T-shirt and even tighter blue jeans. A long, dark braid snaked out from beneath his cowboy hat.

Whoever they were, the chief obviously didn’t perceive them as a threat. He approached them with his guard down and his fists on his hips. I thought I saw a smile form in the shadows lurking under the brim of the tall man’s hat.

“How did I know we’d end up running into you sooner or later?” Antone extended his arm and shook the tall man’s hand. “I guess word travels even faster than I thought around here.”

“It does when the FBI rears its ugly head on our reservation. People go straight into panic mode thinking we’re about to find ourselves in the middle of another Pine Ridge situation.” He turned to face me. “Finally decided to show up, I see.”

“Roman and his boy here were the ones who found what I just showed you,” Antone said. He pronounced it Row-mahn. I couldn’t help but think that made it sound pretentious.

“I figured I would look you up when it was a good time for me, rather than waiting for you to track me down when it was convenient for you. And I was curious. Can’t fault a guy for that, can you?”

“Thought you’d catch a glimpse of the FBI’s token Injun?”

His smile grew even wider. There were flecks of tobacco along his gum line.

“Like I said, can’t fault a guy for being curious.”

I heard the scuffing sound of boots from my left and felt the weight of Roman’s son’s stare on me. I turned casually to find his eyes fixed directly on my face. I nodded, but solicited no appreciable reaction whatsoever. I turned back to his father.

“Anything you want to tell me about the nature of your discovery?”

“Nothing I didn’t already tell the chief.”

“What were you doing up there when you found the crime scene?”

“Hunting.”

“Hunting what?”

“Little of this. Little of that.”

“Get anything that day?”

“It had been a fairly productive hunt, all in all.”

“I assume you have an alibi for the time of the murder.”

“Tell me when that might have been and I’d imagine I could scrape one up.”

“Without a body, you can’t fix time of death,” his son said. I turned to find him still staring directly at me. I think he might even have advanced a step, but I couldn’t be completely sure. This “boy” had to have been in his mid-thirties. I would have initially guessed lower based on his physique. Up close it was apparent that he wore his age in the lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. There was something oddly familiar about him, but I couldn’t quite place it. His face was devoid of expression, save for the slightest twinkle of what I read as both amusement and hostility in his eyes. Or maybe merely distrust. “So there’s no way you can pinpoint a date, let alone a time for which an alibi would be necessary.”

“What do you know about the body?”

“Only that there wasn’t one.”

“And what do you think might have happened to it?”

“A lot of things can happen out here in the desert. Could have been a coyote dragged it off—”

“Coyote?”

He was about to say something else when his father cut him off.

“Whole desert’s thick with them. We don’t know any more about the body than you do, I’m afraid. We’d have told the chief if we did.”

I glanced back at the son. He was still staring at me, but he had distanced himself enough that he was no longer in my personal space. The way the moonlight hit him made him look like someone I knew, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out who. There was something so familiar about his face that I was almost certain I had seen him somewhere before. It was the eyes. Something about his eyes—

He caught me looking and turned away to face the desert.

“Anything at all out of the ordinary you might remember could end up being important,” I said to the father. “Don’t hesitate to call the chief. He’ll know how to reach me Mr.…Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Walker,” he said. “Roman Walker. And this is my son, Ban.”

EIGHT

To say it was surreal standing in the home in which my father grew up would have been an understatement of titanic proportions. I felt like I had crossed over into some parallel universe where the father that was my father had never been my father, but some stranger who wore his skin and lived a completely different life.

I’m the kind of guy who needs to be in control of any given situation, which, in this case, was like trying to walk straight up a wall. I simply had to resign myself to the fact that I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and do my best to land on my feet. I had an investigation to conduct and could ill afford any sort of distraction, let alone one of a personal nature.

Despite my earlier gripes, I was fortunate to have ridden with the chief to the canyon. The long ride back to the station had granted me the opportunity to sort through my thoughts. And staring out into the desert at night—with the pitchfork saguaros lording over the sand and the sky so clear I could almost imagine reaching right up and grabbing the stars—did wonders to help me find something resembling a moment of clarity.

I don’t know why I hadn’t expected to encounter blood relations while I was here. It was naïve to think that my father’s parents were his only physical link to this reservation. Considering he never talked about them, why in the world would he mention an older brother? Maybe there would have come a time when my father explained the situation to me, maybe even brought my mother and me out here to see where he was from. Maybe that had always been his intention and he simply ran out of time in the end. We all make plans for the future without seriously contemplating the fact that we could be struck by a car or diagnosed with some terminal disease or vaporized by a Scud missile the very next day. I may not have known my father as well as I would have liked, but I had known him well enough to understand that he wasn’t a man willing to run forever. He was the kind who faced his demons, one way or another. Just on his own terms. Or at least that’s the way I choose to remember him, the way I choose to be myself.

I could compartmentalize when I had to. The commitment to maintaining two lives—one professional and one personal—had been a prerequisite for joining the Bureau, especially as a field agent. The problem was that in this case, I had yet to determine where to draw the line between them. I don’t believe in cosmic forces or serendipity or even coincidence. I couldn’t ignore the fact that my uncle and cousin, who previously hadn’t even existed in my wildest dreams, were the first to find the scene of a murder that was always meant to fall into my lap. Not because fate or destiny or some mystical shaman decreed it, but because I was the only logical choice for the assignment based on who I was and the skill set I possessed.

I had delivered my report via my laptop in my Crown Vic in the parking lot of the station after Antone dropped me off on his way home for the night. I think I did a reasonable job of appearing in control of the situation. I obviously hadn’t been in a position to pass along anything resembling an actual development, but Nielsen had become somewhat detached himself after learning of the second similar case that had never made it onto our radar. It could have been easily misplaced or overlooked or dismissed out of hand. Things like that happened all the time. We needed to confirm that one of those scenarios had happened, though. Otherwise the spotlight of suspicion fell squarely onto the chief and, to a lesser extent, my newfound kin.

It hadn’t taken very long to locate Roman’s truck after that. I maybe cruised a dozen different roads before finding it parked in the dirt driveway of a small adobe house with nothing but open desert stretching away from it into the night. If I had any chance of seizing the advantage, if there even was one to seize, I needed my arrival to be totally unexpected.

I must have been really losing my touch. Roman had been sitting in a wooden rocker on the crumbling concrete pad that served as a front porch when I arrived.

“This one here is your daddy and me when he was maybe eight and I was ten.” Roman pointed at one of roughly fifty framed pictures tacked to the cracked adobe wall. We were in a narrow hallway that separated the two bedrooms from the main living area, which itself was little more than an extension of the kitchen. In a way, the tiny house reminded me of every family housing unit on every Air Force base around the world. “That was the day I taught him how to shoot my twenty gauge.”

I stared at the two young boys, one who had grown up to be my father, the other a complete stranger. It was obvious the children were related, but looking at the man beside me now, I had a hard time believing my father would have looked anything like him. This man was old, for starters. A quick mental calculation placed him in the neighborhood of sixty. The father from my memory had never aged beyond his early thirties.

There were pictures of the boys everywhere. Some were in black and white, others in faded color. The clothes looked mostly homemade and both boys had worn their hair long clear up until the point when they’d been able to braid their locks back over their shoulders. I don’t think I ever saw my father with hair more than half an inch long. I found myself smiling at the boys, who always smiled right back. They were happy children. Their smiles reached their eyes. I couldn’t help but wonder what possibly could have happened to drive a wedge between them.

And then we passed from the pictures of the boys to those of their parents and the seemingly countless generations of theirs. These were people who didn’t smile for the camera and appeared largely annoyed by its mere presence. I won’t say the wives looked fearful of their husbands, but they certainly weren’t overjoyed to be in such close proximity, especially as the timeline went further and further back. The most recent portraits were something of an enigma though. There were plenty of inconsistencies from one to the next, perhaps as the nature of their relationship changed. The man made every effort to appear hardened, but I could tell it was merely a suit of armor he wore. The woman’s eyes twinkled with life until, abruptly, whatever spark animated them fizzled.

“Those are your grandparents. Our parents. It really is too bad you never got to meet them. And they never got to meet you.”

“They didn’t even know I existed.”

Roman turned and looked at me long and hard. His expression was one of contempt. At first, anyway. And then it softened to one of sympathy.

“I want to show you something.”

He led me down the hallway and ducked into the room on the right. It was obviously the master, and it was a room in transition. The bed and coverings must have belonged to my deceased grandparents. As had the majority of the furniture. The clothes in the antique wardrobe and the majority of the prints and tapestries hanging on the walls reflected tastes I attributed to my uncle, who had moved into this house after his parents had been committed to a kind of assisted living arrangement that sounded more like a hospice to me. He stopped before a tapestry with the logo of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

“I always wanted to play pro ball,” he said, as if that explained anything, then yanked on the decoration, sending pushpins flying. “I didn’t have the heart to take these down.”

I managed not to gasp, but just barely. There was no hiding the surprise on my face, though.

There were pictures thumb-tacked to the wall.

Pictures of me.