Tribal Ways
Alex Archer
A centuries-old grudge… A power feared beyond all others…A frigid spring morning at a Native American archaeological dig erupts into sudden and brutal violence, leaving five people dead and one man gravely wounded. And in a hospital, with archaeologist Annja Creed at his side, the last survivor utters his final words to name his killer–a skinwalker.The skinwalker is feared among the Navajo and Apache. It is witchcraft of a most terrible nature that allows a man to take the shape of a wolf–and kill. But as Annja delves into the mystery of the skinwalker, she finds herself pulled into an underworld of violence and vicious radicals, threaded with legend…and sociopathic intent.In this world, Annja is unwelcome. And in this world, she could be the creature's next victim….
“There’s a mass murderer on the loose.”
“You didn’t forget already?” Ten Bears asked.
“No,” Annja said slowly. “I didn’t.”
“Let us professionals handle him. We do a bad enough job without any help.”
She wasn’t sure quite how to take that. He seemed like a man who, for all his cockeyed banter, took his job very seriously. She also didn’t think his tongue was more than halfway in his cheek, and wondered just who wasn’t doing their job quite so well.
“One more thing before you go,” he told her as she started for the door of his small office. “We got us some young South Plains braves here in western Oklahoma who don’t much like white-eyes. And they play rough. Tempers are extra short right now since some of them don’t like it that we got us a great big new casino opening up in a few days.”
He laughed at her expression. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They can’t fire me for calling them braves. Any more than they can make us Indians call ourselves Native Americans. That fight we won, anyway. Maybe it’s a trend.”
She had to laugh. She found herself liking the lieutenant. “Maybe it is.”
But as she left she found herself thinking, I don’t believe in werewolves.
But there are plenty of things I don’t believe in that have a nasty habit of turning up anyway….
Titles in this series:
Destiny
Solomon’s Jar
The Spider Stone
The Chosen
Forbidden City
The Lost Scrolls
God of Thunder
Secret of the Slaves
Warrior Spirit
Serpent’s Kiss
Provenance
The Soul Stealer
Gabriel’s Horn
The Golden Elephant
Swordsman’s Legacy
Polar Quest
Eternal Journey
Sacrifice
Seeker’s Curse
Footprints
Paradox
The Spirit Banner
Sacred Ground
The Bone Conjurer
Tribal Ways
Rogue Angel
Tribal Ways
Alex Archer
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
THE LEGEND
…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.
The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.
Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.
Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn…
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Prologue
Standing in the open door of the RV with a mug of coffee steaming in his hand Paul Stavriakos cursed the freezing wind and wondered why he’d ever moved to the Great Plains.
“Either go or stay, but shut the damn door,” Allison York called from the bed. “That wind is freezing.”
Paul sighed and stepped down to the grass, still dry and tan from winter. He shut the door behind him. The wind howled around him.
Dawn was still a drizzle of red along the horizon. Clouds hid the stars overhead.
The land was all tilted planes. It was flat, in a way, but flat that tipped this way and that in big plates furred in yellow-brown grass. There wasn’t much relief; but it was deceptive land, with more hollows and heights than first struck the eye.
“Not enough to cut the damn wind, though,” he muttered to himself.
Lights appeared in the trailer that Donny Luttrell shared with TiJean Watts. The battered Toyota pickup with the camper shell belonging to Dr. Ted Watkins from the State Archaeological Division was rocking on its suspension more than the wind’s buffeting would account for. Paul hoped he was pulling on his jeans. The muffled swearing coming from inside seemed to support that thesis.
“Ever wonder why those old Indians picked a miserable spot like this to make their camp?”
Paul turned. Eric James was swinging off the back of his old buckskin gelding. He wore a sheepskin coat and a battered felt cowboy hat. The hair hanging in thick braids to either side of his head was gray as slate. The wide face between, the color of Oklahoma clay, had a tough and weathered quality but was barely lined. A full-blooded Comanche and full-time rancher, he owned the land where they stood.
He returned to his saddle for a moment, then turned back to Paul. He held white bags with a colorful logo in each hand.
“Brought doughnuts for you kids,” he said. “Hope you make decent coffee. Wasn’t carrying that in my saddlebags.”
Paul smiled. It felt as if ice was cracking off his face. The digging season seemed to start earlier each year. The ground wasn’t fully frozen. That was about all you could say for it.
Then again, he thought, it’s getting harder and harder to beat the protestors out here. Digging in colder and worse weather was one way of keeping them at bay as long as possible. Even so, they’d be out there with their signs and their shouting as soon as the day warmed up.
The trailer door opened. TiJean started down the steps wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He let out a yelp and popped back inside like a startled prairie dog. The door banged behind him. A second-generation Haitian from Miami, he didn’t quite get winter. Even if it was supposed to be spring on the Great Plains.
Like an unlovely butterfly from its cocoon Ted emerged from his camper. Unlike their host his face looked as if each of his fifty years had stomped it hard on the way out the door. He was skinny, with long dark-blond hair hanging out from his grimy Sooners ball cap, white stubble sticking out of his long chin and gaunt cheeks. He wore a drab plaid lumberman’s jacket. He completed his ensemble with faded blue jeans over pointy-toed cowboy boots.
“Another lovely day in western Oklahoma,” he muttered. “Christ.”
Paul winced as the older man unwrapped a piece of gum and popped it into his mouth. Ted was trying to quit smoking. Apparently gum was his designated substitute crutch.
Allison started out from the RV. Like the trailer it was owned by their employer, the University of Oklahoma at Norman. Unlike the trailer it was at least relatively modern. Since Paul and Allison were the assistant professor and graduate student on the dig, they claimed it by right of rank. Allison had a red wool knit cap pulled down over her long, straight blond hair and a white Hudson’s Bay blanket with big bold stripes of blue, yellow, green and red wrapped around her slim frame. Gray sweatpants showed below the bottom of the blanket above fleece-lined moccasins.
“Hey, Ally,” Paul called softly. “Could you make more coffee?”
He didn’t speak loudly, partly out of consideration for Allison, but mainly to keep his own head from cracking open. They probably shouldn’t have drunk quite so much last night, he thought. Indeed, they shouldn’t have been drinking inside the RV at all, since it was contrary to university policy.
Not that it’s the only rule we’re breaking, he thought. And what the hey? We have proud archaeologist traditions to uphold.
Allison scowled. The spanking of the cold wind was making her cheeks red and her blue eyes water. “Why me?”
“Because you’re still mostly inside where it’s warm,” he said, “and we have the only coffeemaker that works.”
“Chauvinist,” she said. “Did your girlfriend who’s coming to visit make you coffee?” She turned and went back inside, banging the door.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he shouted at the door. “She’s just an old friend.”
Actually, Annja Creed was a young friend. She was a year or two younger than Paul. They’d met on a dig four years ago. Sparks had flown; the fire they kindled flamed up and flamed out. The end.
Now she was a semifamous cable-TV personality and globe-trotting archaeologist, coming out at his request to touch bases and look the dig over. Inviting her hadn’t even been his idea. It had been at the department’s request, in the probably unrealistic expectation that the resident expert on Chasing History’s Monsters might bring some good publicity their way.
“Women,” Donny said. He had emerged from the trailer to stretch and yawn, like an outsize nearsighted cherub with his dark curly hair and beard, his thick-lensed glasses and his belly sticking out between his green-and-white University of North Dakota T-shirt and sweatpants. He was a cold-weather guy and liked to show off his indifference to low temperatures. He wore sandals on otherwise bare feet. “You can’t live with them, you can’t—”
“We Numunu have an old tradition,” Eric said, interrupting him, using the Comanche word for his people. “We kill anybody says a cliché. Scalp ’em, too.”
Paul tried not to wince. Native Americans on campus usually believed, or at least said, all the right things. Outside the university those he met almost to a man and woman defiantly called themselves Indians and expressed contempt for political correctness in any form. You just had to get used to it. And for what it was worth Eric seemed genuinely friendly.
For one thing he let them dig his land—invited them to, when he accidentally unearthed the paleo-Indian site—in the face of rising rumblings of opposition from some of his people. For another he brought doughnuts. Even if they were bad for you.
Paul looked to Eric. “Really nice of you to be okay with us diggin’ up your ancestors, dude.”
“Not my ancestors,” their host said. “We didn’t live here then. Either we or the Kiowa ran off the people whose ancestors these were around three hundred years ago.”
He shook his head. “Well, one good thing about this damn cold wind—it’ll keep the professional Indians inside by their space heaters for a while. As much money as I give to the Nation every year the loafs-about-the-fort got nothing better to do than send me death threats and try to trespass so they can picket me on my own land.”
“Are you crazy, man?” TiJean’s voice, muffled by the layers of clothing he had donned before venturing forth again, rose perilously near to cracking. He was a freshman, only nominally out of adolescence. “Why don’t you got nothin’ on your feet?”
He was staring in horror at his roomie’s feet.
“Jesus, TiJean,” Donny said. “What, are you dressed to scale Everest?”
“For Sweden,” Ted added. The Floridian undergrad wore a blue-and-yellow parka with the fur-clad hood over his head.
Allison emerged from the RV bearing a tray with a pot of coffee and an assortment of chipped and colorful mugs. “All right, you big, strong, helpless men. The woman comes to the rescue.”
“Ah,” Ted croaked. “The stuff of life itself!”
Allison held the tray while the rest crowded around.
“Best leave some for me,” she said ominously, “if you don’t want to wind up wearing it. Whoa, does anybody hear a hissing?”
“Wow! Doughnuts!” Donny exclaimed, his eyes belatedly lighting on the two paper bags Eric had left on the grass.
“Yeah,” Paul said after a beat. “I do. Strange.”
Midway to the doughnuts Donny froze. “Don’t tell me there’s a snake?”
TiJean crowed laughter. “Who’s a wimp now, Eskimo Boy? Afraid of a little bitty old snake.”
“Whoever heard a snake hiss that continuously?” Allison asked.
“Or that loud, to hear it over this wind,” Paul said.
“Wait,” Donny said. “Did you guys see a shadow move? Off there to the left—”
“Shadow?” Paul said, feeling an inexplicable chill that had nothing to do with the wind.
“Yeah,” Allison said. “I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Like a dog or something.”
“Shit,” Donny said, “that’d be a big dog.”
They were all turning and staring around. Paul felt a little woozy. Maybe he was turning too fast, getting dizzy.
“We should all chill,” he said. Then he noticed that Eric James had drawn the slab-sided .45 automatic he wore on his hip and was holding it two-handed with its muzzle tipped toward the unfriendly sky. His face was the consistency of stone.
“This is starting to freak me out—” Donny began.
Allison’s scream, sharp as glass, made Paul spin toward her. As he did something hot splashed across his face.
For a moment he thought she’d thrown scalding coffee on him.
Then the darkness hit him.
1
It was all over the flat-screen TVs hung from the rafters and tuned to CNN when Annja entered the airport terminal. Five dead and one gravely injured in an inexplicable attack on an archaeological dig in western Oklahoma.
It’s so tragic about those other poor people, she thought as she headed to the baggage claim. Does it make me a bad person that I feel glad that Paul’s the one who survived?
She hadn’t been coming to rekindle any old embers. It had been good with Paul while it lasted. And when it was done, it was over. He was still a sweet guy, if a little bit of a player, and a good archaeologist on the tenure track at the university.
Now she just hoped he was still on any track at all.
She collected her single black bag. And I thought I was due for a little relaxation here, she thought as she walked briskly through the crowds toward the car rental desk.
Because of the severity of his injuries, Paul had been taken by helicopter from the site west of Lawton to the trauma unit in Norman, right outside Oklahoma City.
Finding the trauma center wasn’t hard. Once inside amid the bright lights and muted sounds and quietly purposeful traffic of the hospital, things got a little dicier. The staff initially tried to keep Annja from seeing Paul in intensive care.
It seemed to be a well-run facility, so Annja didn’t even try playing her journalist-cum-TV-personality card. It was never her first choice in any event. But Paul’s family had yet to arrive, given that the crime had actually occurred while she was in transit from New York to Houston. His next of kin, it seemed, would only arrive late that evening. Though the nurses wouldn’t say so, Annja got the sickening impression they didn’t expect him to live long enough to see them.
In the meantime, Paul was asking incessantly for Annja Creed so his doctors and the police officer in charge of the case agreed to let her in.
Sunlight streamed through the window. The early online weather reports had showed clouds over western Oklahoma, but they’d dissipated by the time her flight touched down.
Paul was all tubes and bandages and taped-on wires. Half his face was obscured by a bandage. But his good brown eye was open. It turned toward her as she walked in the door.
“Annja,” he said. His voice was a croak. He tried to sit up.
“Paul.” She stopped in the doorway, momentarily overcome.
The nurse who had escorted Annja to the room—a short, wide woman—moved past Annja. Though a head shorter she was heavy enough to push Annja aside as if she were a child. Annja frowned, but held her temper. She’s doing her job, she told herself.
“Now, Paul, calm down,” the nurse said. She turned and glared back with narrowed blue eyes. “Ms. Creed, I’m afraid you’re going to have to cut short your visit, after all.”
“No,” Paul said. Alarms shrilled as his heart rate spiked. “Please, Roslee. Please! I have to talk to her. I have to tell her.”
The nurse gave Annja a speculative scowl. The businesslike amiability with which she had initially greeted Annja was long gone.
“Okay,” she said. “He seems to really need to get something off his chest. It may be good for him to have company. I’ll give you five minutes. And I do not want you stressing my patient. Please tell me you understand.”
Annja took no offense at the woman’s words or her tone. A good nurse had the same outlook on anyone or anything that might prove detrimental to her patients as a mother grizzly bear toward potential threats to her cubs.
“I understand,” Annja said. And she did. Perfectly. Herself a chronic defender of innocence, she could only approve of the nurse’s protectiveness.
The nurse looked at her a beat longer. Then she nodded. “All right. Call me if any changes happen. I’ll be right outside.”
The nurse left. Annja sidestepped to give her plenty of clearance. Then she moved forward and took Paul’s unbandaged hand.
“Paul, what happened?”
The torn lips quirked into a painful smile. “Something right up your alley, Annja.”
“What’s that, Paul?”
Suddenly his fingers clenched hers in a death grip. “A monster,” he said.
For a mad moment she thought he was making a joke well beyond good taste. But his lone visible eye showed white all around, and a tear rose in the corner of it and rolled down his cheek. His whole body seemed to tense.
“Paul,” she said, trying to keep her own voice low and steady. “Please calm down.”
“No! There’s no time. There’s something out there, Annja. Something awful. It killed them.”
“What did?”
His fingers dug into her hand. “I told you. That—creature.”
“Paul, please. Settle down. You’re getting upset and not making any sense.”
“Annja! I saw it. It was a wolf, but it wasn’t. Sometimes it seemed like a man, sometimes like an animal. And it killed and killed.”
“That’s just in the movies,” Annja said.
“No! It looked like a wolf but didn’t move like one.”
He shook his head from side to side so violently Annja was afraid he’d pull something loose. “No! No! It was terrible. Oh, God. It killed them. It was so fast. So strong. Not anything natural—”
“Why would a wolf attack such a large group of people?” she asked. It made no sense to her that a solitary member of a pack-hunting species would attack multiple human beings. It totally reversed the whole mathematics of wolf predation.
“It wasn’t natural, I tell you. Wasn’t an animal!” His eye rolled. “Annja, listen. It wasn’t an animal. It wasn’t. And it’s hunting me!”
He sat up and grabbed her arm with his good hand. Alarms began to shrill.
“It was a skinwalker! A Navajo wolf! I saw his eyes—those glowing—”
The frantic cry ended.
Paul seemed to shrink, then fell back onto the bed. His one visible eye stared at the ceiling.
The keening of the flatline alarms was barely audible through the roaring in Annja’s ears.
2
“What’s your interest in this poor deceased fella, Ms. Creed?”
Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol sat down behind the plain wooden desk in his office. He had the unmistakable look of an officer who’d spent many years with the force. Not a tall man, he was built strong and low to the ground, short in the legs, wide around the middle, suggesting still both strength and a certain agility.
Annja sat across from him in a not very comfortable wooden chair. It reminded her way too much of being called before the Mother Superior back at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. She suspected the visiting-the-principal effect wasn’t entirely accidental.
“We’re friends, Lieutenant,” she said. “Uh, were friends.”
The highway patrol officer’s round, pockmarked face, beneath a salt-and-pepper military cut, was set in lines and contours of grave compassion. He probably gets a lot of practice with that look in his line of work, she realized. It also didn’t mean he didn’t feel it.
The office walls were wood paneling. An Oklahoma state flag hung behind him, along with a plaque in the arrowhead shape of the OHP patch, certificates of completion from training courses and numerous citations, including a commendation from the Comanche Nation. From his features and body type, which would have been burly and bearlike even if he hadn’t been carrying a certain excess above the belt, Annja suspected he was a member of the Nation himself. She gathered they hadn’t named this Comanche County for nothing.
“My condolences,” he told her. “I know that don’t help much. All the times I’ve offered condolences over the years, I never yet figured out a way that actually does a body any good. I keep trying.”
“I appreciate it, Lieutenant. Really.”
“It was unusual for them to let you in to see him. But the ICU staff tell me he kept asking for you so insistently they figured it was better for him to let him see you.”
“Maybe that was a mistake,” she said, faltering.
He shook his head. “No point second-guessing something like that, Ms. Creed. That poor boy was pretty torn up. I don’t reckon he could’ve lasted long regardless of anything you did or didn’t do.”
“Thanks,” Annja said.
She drew in a deep breath and tried to ignore the stinging in her eyes. “I was coming out to visit him,” she said. “He was also kind enough to want to consult with me on the dig, even though pre-Columbian North American archaeology is way outside my area of study.”
“You’re doin’ me a favor, Ms. Creed, by comin’ out here to see me,” he said. “I was needing to interview you, anyway.”
He put on a pair of heavy-framed reading glasses and moved his mouse around on the pad, peering at a flat-screen monitor set at an angle so as not to intrude between him and a visitor. Aside from an in-box stacked with papers, the only other objects on his desk were a picture of a grinning young and handsome Indian man wearing an Army uniform, a much younger girl, maybe twelve, with pigtails, both built along much more aerodynamic lines than the lieutenant, and another picture of a young man in BDUs and combat gear with a bullet-pocked adobe wall for a backdrop. The soldier held a CAR-4 assault carbine decked out with the usual array of sights and lights. He looked like the same person as the grinning kid in the other photo, only older. Not so much in years, maybe, but still much older, Annja thought.
“So you work for a television show,” he said.
“Yes. I’m kind of the resident skeptic—the token voice of reason. I suspect Paul’s superiors hoped that by inviting me out they might put their department in the way of some free publicity.”
“The anthro department at OU wanted to get on something called Chasing History’s Monsters?”
She shrugged. “The hope of getting on TV can have a strange effect on people. Even intelligent, well-educated ones.”
He made a face, took off the glasses and looked at her. “Maybe the monster thing’s actually appropriate now. Is that what brings you to see me, Ms. Creed?”
“I want to learn everything I can about what happened to my friend,” she said. “Also his colleagues. And the poor man whose property the dig site was on.”
“Old Eric,” Ten Bears said. “Pretty righteous guy. Did well for himself and his family from leasing natural-gas rights on some of his land out there south of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge. Always quick to help out a fellow Nation member or crack a joke. Even if he did have lousy taste in ’em.”
“He was a friend of yours?”
Ten Bears nodded. “I know a lot of people in our region. Know a whole lot of Indian good old boys like me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks. Listen, it was a pretty ugly scene out there, Ms. Creed. I’ve worked a lot of homicides over the years. I’ve worked some pretty terrible accident scenes. Never saw anything like that anywhere. I can’t really tell you anything the department hasn’t already released to the media. Tell the truth, I’m sorta glad.”
He sat back, looking at her. He seemed not unfriendly. Not unkind, in fact. From the laugh lines bracketing his eyes and mouth she guessed he was by nature a pretty decent guy. She also knew that a seasoned homicide investigator wouldn’t hesitate to feign those emotions when he didn’t feel remotely kind or friendly, if it would help advance the case.
“What’d the decedent tell you?” he asked quietly.
“He said he was attacked by what, frankly, sounded more like a movie monster than anything in the real world.”
“You’ve had some experience investigating monsters, I guess,” he said. “What’s your take on that?”
“Are you serious? I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I’m not trying to be uncooperative. It just sounds like—a strange question for somebody who seems so no-nonsense to be asking.”
“I try not to close any possible avenues of inquiry. Especially in a case like this. I’m not giving away any confidential information when I tell you we don’t have a whole lot of ideas on this thing. Not ones that make any sense. So, hey, I’ll at least give a listen to ones that might not seem to make much sense. I don’t believe in werewolves. But if our perp really is a damn werewolf, I want to be there when they pump silver into his veins or whatever they’d use for an execution. Maybe you’d call it putting him to sleep.”
A strangled squeak of laughter escaped Annja’s lips before she could clap her hand over her mouth. She bent forward in her chair, then straightened.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m…not normally like that.”
“I’m sorry,” Ten Bears said. “Sometimes I’ve got pretty lousy taste in jokes, too. I can see you’re shaken up some. Anybody would be. Nice young woman like you isn’t used to having people up and die right in front of her.”
She managed to show no reaction to that statement. Unfortunately she was used to having people up and die in front of her. Poor Paul wasn’t even the first ex-lover and friend Annja Creed had seen die. Although she was sure she would never get used to that.
None of which she wanted to admit to the lead investigator on Comanche County’s most lurid multiple-murder case of modern times.
The thought helped her compose herself. “This has hit me hard, I must admit,” she said. “I have to ask you to believe me that I’m not going to pieces on you. And I’m determined to find out what happened to those people.”
“All right,” he said, nodding and drawing it out. His accent was a weird blend of Indian staccato and cowboy drawl, something she wouldn’t have thought was possible. “So, not to be boring or anything, what do you make of what Mr. Stavriakos told you?”
“I don’t believe in werewolves, either, Lieutenant. Yet I know Paul Stavriakos is—was—a trained scientist, and not what I’d call an impressionable man. Obviously, something terrible and…unusual happened out at the dig site this morning. The suddenness and speed of the attack, the shock of seeing his friends brutally murdered, the terrible emotional impact of having someone attack him in person, the physical injuries he took—none of those things leads to careful observation.
“The thing is, there are no documented reports of wolf attacks on humans in North America. And I have a hard time imagining any North American animal, no matter how hungry or scared or angry or even rabid, attacking a group of six adult humans, much less being able to kill or mortally wound them all. So I’d have to imagine a very strong man, berserk even, probably wearing a wolf skin or even some kind of costume, was responsible for the attack.”
She shook her head. “It’s hard for me to imagine what happened no matter what.”
“I been doing some digging since I got back from interviewing Mr. Stavriakos at the hospital, before you got there,” Ten Bears said. “It turns out there are some pretty well-documented wolf attacks on people. Just a lot of people said there weren’t, and everybody got believing it. But there hasn’t been a wolf seen in Comanche County since the 1890s. And again I’m not giving away much when I tell you that’s how I got it sized up, too.”
“I understand from the news reports that there have been previous attacks under similar circumstances,” Annja said.
“Yeah. Two in New Mexico. One out near the Continental Divide between Gallup and Grants, one between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. All of them on archaeological digs, all of them nasty. Mr. Stavriakos’s passing brings the death toll to fifteen. In all three attacks at least one witness survived. They all gave similar details—including that their attacker was either a great big wolf or something that looked like a man-wolf hybrid, like the wolfman from the movie.”
He paused, frowning. “Along with what you said, the whole notion it’s a single animal with one helluva range, much less three separate animals that suddenly and simultaneously developed a serious taste for archaeologists, strikes me as a lot more far-fetched than it’s being a werewolf. We got evidence from all three attacks that tells us there was just the one perpetrator. To me he’s obviously got to be a crazy man in some kind of murder suit, like that old Zodiac killer gone Hollywood.”
He shifted in his swivel chair and sighed. “Public’s gonna be crawling straight up our…trouser legs on this one. I don’t even blame ’em. All we can do is try to keep calm, do good police work, let the forensics people do their thing, try to identify this killer and wrap him up before he can do this again. And barring that, hope that next time he tries, some good-old boy archaeologist will pull an octagonal-barrel Winchester lever action out the rifle rack of his pickup truck and let some badly needed sunlight into this bad boy’s skull. If you’ll pardon my speaking what you might call frankly.”
“Nothing I disagree with, Lieutenant,” she said. “One thing. Paul seemed very specific that the attacker was a skinwalker. A Navajo wolf—he called it that, too. Beyond the fact that there are legends of skinwalkers, I don’t know anything about that, or what might make Paul so positive that was what attacked him. Do you know anything about skinwalker myths?”
“Not much more than you. They’re a Navajo thing, just like he said. Not something us Numunu—Comanches—would get up to. Nor the Kiowa, either. Not even Plains Apache, far as I know. They still speak an Apache language, but they picked up Plains Indian culture since they joined up with the Comanche and the Kiowa a couple of centuries back.”
“I want to see the site, Lieutenant.”
He looked at her with frank appraisal. “Is this a personal thing? Or are you gonna go for journalistic status, try the power of the press routine?”
“Whatever it takes,” she said. “I want the killer caught. It is personal. Of course it is. I’ve consulted with investigative agencies before—I know enough to keep out of the way of real forensic investigators. And as an archaeologist I certainly know how to avoid contaminating or disturbing a site. Also I may be able to infer something from the dig site that someone who isn’t a trained and experienced archaeologist would miss.”
His black eyes gazed at her for the space of several breaths. “I’m not proud, Ms. Creed,” he said. “Leastwise, not prouder than I am eager to save a whole bunch more poor folks from getting torn up like that. I could use any information I can get. So let’s go ahead and call you a consultant on this one. You need a contract?”
She shook her head. “Nor do I need any fees. Let me use your name, and back me up if I need it. I promise I won’t embarrass you.”
He nodded. “Good enough. And thanks for not asking for any money—things are pretty tight, budgetarily speaking, even for a sensational case like this. I’ve worked with archaeologists before. Heck, I worked with Ted Watkins, the archaeologist who got killed out there this morning. So I know you understand about not trampling through a crime scene like a herd of buffalo. I wish half the law enforcement people who’ve been up through there already had half the sense about that kind of thing as you people do. I’ll give you the little speech, anyway. Stay out of the way of any cop types, whether they’re troopers, county mounties or, heaven help us, the Feds. If you encounter the suspect do not try to detain or interact with him, for God’s sake. Otherwise, knock yourself out. And I’ll put out the word you’re helping me on a discreet kinda basis.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“I’m not sure it’s a thanking matter, ma’am.”
They both stood. He was a good three inches shorter than her. Annja nodded at the beefy revolver holstered at his right hip. It was matte silver metal with contoured wooden grips. They looked well-worn.
“I couldn’t help noticing you carry a double-action revolver, Lieutenant,” she said. “Looking at the other troopers I thought the Oklahoma Highway Patrol issued Glock 22s.”
He looked as if her query surprised him. It clearly didn’t displease him.
“Smith & Wesson 657,” he said with unmistakable pride. “It’s a .41 Magnum, N-frame, stainless. Custom Hogue grips. Got me a special exemption from the department to carry it. Helps I’m a Comanche and all, plus I’ve been with the patrol since old Quanah Parker was a lance corporal. I got nothing against the Glocks—they’re pretty good guns, even if I can’t help feeling like they’re flimsy for being half made out of plastic and all. And there’s nothing wrong with .40 caliber. I just like the authority the .41 Mag gives you, without it having so much recoil it takes all day to haul it back down on target every time you shoot, like a .44 Magnum does. And maybe some of that cowboy wheel-gun mystique.”
He slapped the weapon affectionately. “This pup got me all the way through the fast drive to Kuwait City in ’91. Not much call to use it then, although it was a power of comfort to me. Been out of the holster a time or two since, though. And never once let me down.”
“Kuwait City, 1991? Wait, you were Force RECON?”
“That’s right, ma’am. You wouldn’t be former military yourself, would you? Or from a service family? You seem to know a fair amount about the forces.”
“I have a lot of friends in the military. But—you’re a Marine.” She already knew better than to say ex-Marine.
“Semper fi, ma’am!”
“The young man in the photos on your desk is Army.”
Ten Bears’ thin-lipped mouth tightened ever so slightly, and his eyes narrowed just a hair. “Boy always did know how to piss me off,” he muttered. “Even if he did make Ranger.”
“Well, thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll let you know if I find anything that I think you might be able to use.”
“You look like a woman who knows how to take care of herself,” he said.
“I like to think I can.”
“Well, this isn’t the time or the place to show how tough and independent you are.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“There’s a mass murderer on the loose,” he said. “You didn’t forget already?”
“No,” she said slowly. “I didn’t.”
“I’m just joshing you,” he said. “About the forgetting part. Not about the murderer. I don’t think this fella plays well with others.”
“I’ll try to stay away from him.”
“You be sure to do that. Let us professionals handle him. We do a bad enough job without any help.”
She wasn’t sure quite how to take that. He seemed like a man who, for all his cockeyed banter, took his job very seriously. She also didn’t think his tongue was more than halfway in his cheek, and wondered just who wasn’t doing their job quite so well.
She also knew better than to ask. Lieutenant Ten Bears clearly thought of himself as a stand-up cop. He’d never bad-mouth a fellow officer to an outsider. But he might not be above dropping some sidewise comments about his comrades who didn’t measure up.
“One more thing before you go,” he told her as she started for the door of his small office. “We got us some young South Plains braves here in western Oklahoma who don’t much like white-eyes. And they play rough. Tempers are extrashort right now since some of them don’t like it that we got us a great big new casino the Nation’s opening up in a few days.”
He laughed at her expression. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They can’t fire me for calling them braves. Any more than they can make us Indians call ourselves Native Americans. That fight we won, anyway. Maybe it’s a trend.”
Annja had to laugh. She found herself liking the lieutenant.
As she left she thought, I don’t believe in werewolves. But there are plenty of things I don’t believe in that have a nasty habit of turning up, anyway.
3
The site was a bust.
The sun was setting when Annja got there. The only people present in the mellow dusk light slanting beneath gray clouds were some gloved techs moving gingerly around inside the yellow-tape perimeter whipped constantly by the wind, and a pair of Comanche County deputies in cowboy hats. Both were lean young men, one with hair cut so painfully short it suggested a recent military discharge, the other with gleaming black braids hanging over the dark brown shoulders of his jacket. They both gave her a rock-hard look.
She told the deputies Lieutenant Ten Bears had sent her. Having seen more than her share of interdepartmental rivalry in law enforcement she wasn’t sure how they’d respond. But they both instantly broke into smiles. When she showed them her ID they readily allowed her access.
“I’ve seen you on TV, Ms. Creed,” the braided deputy said. He looked marginally older than his partner, and was clearly senior. “I know you’ll be careful. Not like some people we’ve had out here. And on a totally unrelated subject, the FBI just left.” He frowned. “I reckon we’re mainly out here to keep them federal boys takin’ over altogether.”
“I was surprised they didn’t offer to tip us on the way out,” his partner said. He reminded her slightly of the young man in the pictures on Ten Bears’ desk, only not so handsome.
Annja nodded, keeping her expression neutral. Like most local law-enforcement types, their regard for the self-billed world’s leading investigative agency tended to vary proportionally to their firsthand experience with them.
For her part Annja tried to keep on good terms with people. Especially the ones with guns and implied or explicit permission to use them.
She smiled and nodded in response to the deputies’ conversation, which wasn’t hard since they seemed to be pleasant and earnest young men. She was surprised and flattered when the junior deputy asked shyly for her autograph. He seemed way too impressed when she signed his notebook with a little note of thanks for his help.
Inside the tape the techs nodded brusquely toward her and went about their business. They kept studiously clear of the dig itself, marked off and gridded by string stretched between stakes. If she wasn’t supposed to be there, they clearly reasoned, the county boys would never have let her step over the tape. The evidence team had jobs to do and not much daylight left to do them. She guessed nobody wanted to be out there with a generator going and stand lights shining as the temperature dropped and the prairie wind came up.
She walked around with her arms crossed in front of her. The wind was indeed picking up as the sun fell toward the rumpled horizon in the west.
The geographic region lay in the Red Beds Plains, which ran all the way from Kansas down across the Red River into Texas. Unlike the true Great Plains farther north, this land was wide but rolling, dotted with small stands of trees. There weren’t any signs of cultivation in view. This particular part of the Red Beds was walled off to the north by the rough granite ramparts, built on a foundation of Cambrian sandstone beds, of the Wichita Mountains. Annja’s maps showed none of them got as high as twenty-five hundred feet, and the general elevation of the landscape was around a thousand. To Annja they were really just rugged hills by the standards of the ranges not far to the west in New Mexico and Colorado. Much less the Andes and the Himalayas, which she also knew firsthand. But the locals seemed adamant about their “mountain” status, so she felt disinclined to argue.
There really wasn’t much to see but some nasty dark splashes, now pretty dried out, on the short grass and the rocks. Where it was bare the red soil had sucked the blood down without much trace she could see, although the techs were taking samples and the spots where blood spatter had been found were marked with little plastic tabs. As were the places where the bodies had been found.
The dig team had been housed in a small RV, a trailer and a small camper pickup. If there was any sign the attacker had entered any of them Annja hadn’t been told. She decided to keep clear of them. She wasn’t looking for criminal evidence, and part of being a trained professional at site preservation meant minimizing the risk of messing anything up.
She searched for tactical evidence. How had the attack happened? How had the killer come so swiftly on the six people, whose attention, the transcript of Ten Bears’ interview with Paul indicated, had been innocently focused on coffee and doughnuts?
Some blurred tracks in the dirt suggested the killer had gotten close by using the trailer for concealment, before launching a blitz assault. If the tracks had given the investigators any clues as to the true nature of the monster—and whatever or whoever it was, there was no doubt it was a monster—they hadn’t shared them with her. She didn’t expect they would.
Following a few quiet words from Ten Bears the troopers at the Troop G HQ had also permitted Annja to see photos of the attack scene taken before the bodies were removed. They seemed surprised at how calmly she studied them.
They had affected her. But she was long past the point of breaking down from seeing butchery, no matter how horrific. Especially not mere images.
Now she tried to retrace the killer’s steps. He had worked incredibly fast, ripping or slashing open state archaeologist Dr. Watkins’s throat, then those of the two undergrads, Watts and Luttrell. Next it attacked Allison York, eviscerating her at a single blow.
All this occurred while Paul had his head turned, and apparently without his becoming aware of it. That was according to what he had told the trooper who rode with him in the helicopter when he was airlifted to Norman.
The killer then struck Paul. The landowner, Eric James, apparently tried to jump the killer when he was attacking Annja’s friend. The killer then knocked the Comanche man away, leaped on him and savaged him before turning back to further maul his other victims.
Even with the deadly advantages of surprise and shock, it had been a breathtakingly effective assault. Annja tried to envision what weapons the killer used. Did he carry knives, or wear Freddy Krueger-style knife gloves? Did he actually bite his victims? The highway patrol had declined to divulge to Annja any such particulars. She understood. She had no need to know, and those were the very kinds of things investigators always tried to hold back, on the theory that they could trap the killer, or authenticate any confession, on the basis that he knew details about the crime no one else had access to except detectives.
Also it spared the victims’ families reading about or, worse, seeing on TV too many titillatingly horrific details about their loved ones’ terrible last moments.
Annja couldn’t see the murderer in her mind. Just a blur, blood, people falling. In her mental movie there was no soundtrack. She felt grateful for that.
Having gotten what little she could from the murder scene Annja raised her face to the wind and looked around. The site was along an ancient dry streambed that ran from northwest to southeast. The trailer was parked on the north of the dig team’s camp, forming an upside-down U with the camper on the west side and the RV on the east. There was a pretty short line of approach to the humpback trailer from the natural cover provided by the northerly rise and some rocks and tall weeds.
The wind sighed and whispered, promising secrets it never delivered. Annja nodded politely to the evidence techs, then climbed carefully back over the flapping yellow tape and made her way up the little slope to the north.
She found another area marked off by yellow tape fluttering between plastic pickets. Tracks, blurred and indistinct. She realized they’d no doubt been broken down from having impressions taken.
She walked around, trying to survey with an attacker’s eye. It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar operation to her.
The approach and setup to the attack had been dead easy. The dig camp had been sited with no remote notion that defense could conceivably be necessary in a normal, orderly, law-abiding universe. The victims had not bothered keeping a lookout. Not even their genial host, secure in the midst of his own domain—unlike his ancestors of a century before, who had found themselves chivvied constantly from one ever-shrinking sanctuary to the next. The fact he’d carried his own Marlin lever-action carbine in a saddle scabbard on his horse, which had bolted back to the barn after the attacker spooked it, suggested nothing of paranoia or even wariness to Annja. It was just a Western thing. He did it because he could, and because it came naturally to him.
She began to walk around the camp, periodically coming across more recovered tracks. Using the brushy, rocky terrain, the killer had circled around and around. Scoping his target. That part, at least, had been painfully simple.
He’d stalked them like a cougar hunting sheep. Waited, in the strange, almost submarine predawn light, until he was sure all his prey had come out of their shelters and clumped into a nice compact group. Then he’d slipped down to his final line of departure, crept to the rear of the trailer and attacked.
He’d probably rehearsed the whole event in his mind, crouching there by the trailer. Savored it like a hungry man’s anticipation of a juicy steak. Reveled in the sense of power—of knowing something those poor, hapless people didn’t know. They were about to die.
She shuddered. “You’re not a profiler,” she reminded herself in a soft voice.
But Annja had stalked human prey before. And killed. They were all violent men, sometimes women. Not victims but victimizers.
They were always wary, those whose lives she took. And always armed.
By contrast the wolfman was picking easy prey. Like any standard-issue serial killer who picked prostitutes to murder because they’d voluntarily get in the car with him.
And isn’t that what any successful predator does? she reminded herself. She shivered. Such moments of identification as this, with a being who epitomized the very evil she lived to fight against, chilled her worse than the rapidly cooling prairie wind.
She shook her head. A strand of her long chestnut hair had worked its way loose from her ponytail. The wind whipped it ticklingly across her face. The same wind teased her with little voices that hinted at meaning but never revealed it.
The western sky was changing from blood to mauve. The sun was long gone. It was time to emulate it. She went back to her rental car, waved to the deputies and drove away.
“DAMN!”
Annja slammed a palm on the steering wheel. The rented car’s motor was jerking and coughing. Jouncing along the no-name dirt track, severely rutted before even the spring rains came in earnest, wasn’t making the car any happier.
The day’s final remnants were a line of hot-iron-red glow along the western hills. Overhead the sky shaded from indigo to star-shot black. Some clouds, their bottoms showing just a faint yellowish glow of artifact light, were sweeping in from the east, piling up darkly as if to show bad intentions.
“Don’t do this to me,” she told the car. “I don’t want to hike up to the highway in freezing rain.”
The country was getting seriously hilly, preparatory to becoming the Wichitas. Highway 62, which ran from Lawton straight as a leveling laser west and formed the southern boundary of a spur of the military reservation that stuck out under the wildlife refuge, still lay, as closely as she could reckon, three miles north. And it was cold. Despite the heater she could feel the chill beating off the car windows like a negative furnace.
For the dozenth time she hauled out her phone. Still no bars. Her GPS was frozen.
Ahead to her considerable relief she saw artificial lights—a red-and-yellow oasis in a sea of dark. They weren’t bright lights, but then again this definitely wasn’t the big city. It wasn’t even the town of Cache, whose glow was faintly visible a few miles north, with its booming population of twenty-four hundred.
The flickering red neon sign read Bad Medicine Bar & Grill.
Below the battered sign stood a rectangular shack with a slanted tin roof, fronted by a wooden porch under a swaybacked roof of planks. The yellow light came through frosted front windows. The joint looked as if it had been built during the boom of interstate construction after World War II, possibly as an ersatz Indian trading post to attract the tourists. That struck Annja as optimism insane even by the standards of fifties-boom thinking.
As her rental lumped and bucked closer she saw there were no actual cars in the parking lot. There was a pickup truck and a minivan, not too unexpected in this part of the world, and another pickup hunched in the shadows out back. Dominating the dirt-and-gravel lot were at least a score of motorcycles shining in the light of the sign. The long low-slung beasts had heavily modified frames with burly V-twin engines. With pride of place in the middle of the pack sat the least visibly modified bike of the lot: a big Indian motorcycle with the trademark metal fairings over the tires. It looked to Annja’s none-too-expert eye like an original, not one of the never-too-successful attempts to revive the design, or at least the brand.
She went inside. She felt little trepidation. While a single woman had to tread warily in the borderlands, in the U.S. as well as everywhere in the world, she didn’t feel much concern. She had no problem with outlaw bikers, which in her experience had meant they had no trouble with her. She tended to take people on their own terms, and that seemed to work.
Of course, part of her intrinsic self-confidence sprang from the proven fact that if you did have a problem with Annja Creed, then you had a very bad problem, indeed.
The first things to hit her were heat and the slam of heavy-metal music blasting from a jukebox. Annja pushed on inside and let the door swing closed behind her.
After the darkness of the Plains night the bar’s dimly lit interior was still pretty dim. She paused just inside the door a moment to get her bearings. As the place resolved out of gloom she noticed it followed through with the outside’s deliberately rustic look, with a wood ceiling and exposed rafters bolstered in placed by square columns so rough-cut they looked as if you’d get splinters if you brushed up on one. It had the usual split-backed vinyl barroom chairs, tables to match the architecture, a bar with a long fly-specked mirror behind it. Bare bulbs cast a faint yellowish glow from lamps hung from the ceiling. Most of the illumination seemed to emanate from the jukebox beside her, which pulsated with polychromatic lights. Glancing down she saw the floor was actual wood planks. With sawdust on it, no less, like the Old West saloon the joint was obviously trying hard to emulate.
Her mental tracking system had already located the bar’s occupants. A few bellied up to the bar on foot or rickety-looking wood stools; the rest clustered around tables, or kibitzed while a short, wide man with a black bandanna tied around his head lined up a shot on the pool table in the far corner. Everyone in view but the bartender was dressed in the standard dark-hued biker drag; she could tell that much at a flash impression. She realized the truck and van outside were probably support vehicles for the club. Any joking and talking had stopped when she entered.
Time to break the ice, she thought.
“That’s a nice Indian out front,” she said.
Then she stopped dead.
There were nothing but Indians inside the bar.
And they looked anything but nice.
4
Everyone was staring at Annja, with nothing resembling a smile or eye twinkle in sight. She was quite aware she may have just said the wrong thing.
It was the classic situation where any attempt at explanation could only make things worse.
“Right, then,” she said. “Sorry to intrude. My car broke down. My cell phone isn’t getting a signal.”
She held the offending object up by her face and waved it. “I’ll just borrow the phone, make a quick call and get out of your…way.”
She was deliberately playing typical airhead tourist, in hopes they’d think her an idiot too innocuous to be worth bothering with. Not a great plan. But no really great options jumped up to present themselves, either.
She stepped up to the bar, noting that the two burly men next to her had colors on the backs of their old-school bad-biker denim jackets that showed an Indian warrior bestriding an Indian motorcycle—it looked suspiciously like the bike parked out front—shooting a bow. The legend on the back of the nearer biker read Iron Horse People MC, Comanche Nation. The other was similar, but substituted Kiowa for Comanche.
The bartender was a white guy, skinny as an alley cat, with craggy features and wild white hair. He looked white, anyway. Annja knew of numerous people who’d been born into full membership of their respective tribes who looked no more native. His blue eyes were piercing and unwelcoming when they turned on Annja. He didn’t ask her pleasure.
“May I borrow the phone, please?” she asked politely.
He jerked his head. “Pay phone,” he said. “Booth in the back.”
She raised a surprised eyebrow. In this cell-phone era pay phones were becoming an endangered species.
“It’s a dead zone,” said the biker who stood farther away from Annja to her right. He was a big bearlike guy with his black hair hanging free to his shoulders in twin braids.
“And we like it that way,” said the man next to her.
With a shock Annja noticed, more than a beat late, one of the very sort of details she was normally adept at picking up on quickly—he wore a semiautomatic pistol holstered on his left hip. A SIG-Sauer, she thought. She realized just about everyone in the bar was packing.
She was pretty sure it was a violation of Oklahoma law to carry a firearm into an establishment that served alcohol. She decided not to bring it up.
Annja turned in the direction indicated by the bartender and headed for a niche sunk in a plank wall beside a faded and torn poster for a bullfight, in Madrid in September 1963.
Suddenly she found herself blocked by a figure a good three inches taller than she was. It was a woman, with hair bound back from a long, strikingly beautiful face with high exotic cheekbones and long, narrow eyes. She looked to Annja as if she came from a North Plains nation, Cheyenne maybe. Despite the weather outside, she wore a black tank top under a denim vest. Where lots of bikers sported U.S. flag patches she wore a yellow-and-red Gadsden flag. The one with the snake and the motto Don’t Tread on Me.
She had, Annja felt, a somewhat snaky appearance in general. She was smaller in the chest and hips than Annja, and moved with sinuous grace that suggested the serpentine. The metaphor was extended by tattoos that twined from her biceps down her bare brown forearms—rattlesnakes striking with fangs sticking straight out from their gaping jaws like Kiowa lances.
“Excuse me,” Annja said, and started to go around.
The woman seemed to flow in front of her again. “The white-eyes made us sign away our ancient right of roaming for reservations. Then they cheated us out of those and turned us out. So we tend to be a bit territorial these days. And you’re off your reservation here, white-eyes. This is Indian country,” she said.
“Yes, that whole land-grab thing sucked,” Annja said as conversationally as she could. “And neither of us was alive back then, so it’s probably way too late to debate it, isn’t it? Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
She sidestepped once again. To her relief the woman didn’t move to intercept her. Annja noted the 1911-style Springfield Armory .45 that rode in a black Kydex holster on her left hip. A gunfighter’s rig for an old-school gunfighter’s piece.
Annja made for the pay phone only to see that the bearlike guy had stopped playing pool and had slipped into the booth. She realized with a start that he didn’t have a shirt on beneath his own denim vest, and that his considerable paunch was covered in an intricate blue tattoo.
He showed her a happy grin. “Sorry,” he said with patent insincerity, trapping the handset between his shoulder and his ear. “I got to call my broker to see how much money I lost on stocks today. I’m still waitin’ on my personal bailout.”
He punched a number and pretended to listen. All the while he smiled beatifically at Annja out of his wide, round face.
She found it much scarier than the snake woman.
“You should probably go,” he said, as if as an afterthought.
After a moment Annja said, “You’re right.” She turned and started to walk out.
Discretion, in this case, was the better part of staying alive. Anyway I can hike to the highway much better if both my legs aren’t broken, she told herself.
A young biker emerged from a dark oblong opening in the back wall next to the phone booth. He was tall and straight, long-legged and narrow-waisted in his blue jeans, broad-shouldered in his colors. Unlike almost everybody else in the bar, men or women, he wore his long black hair unbound in a straight gleaming fall down his back. He was, undeniably, gorgeous.
From his carriage, from the way the feeling in the room suddenly shifted, he was clearly the boss. His dark-chocolate eyes locked on Annja’s. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.
She made a beeline for the door. Away from him.
She felt a strong hand clamp on her right biceps.
“Not so fast,” the biker chieftain said, spinning her around. “I got a few questions for—”
Annja used the momentum imparted by his yanking her around to jam her left knee into his groin really hard.
Okay, this is probably not the brightest thing you’ve ever done in your life, she thought even as she brought her knee up to its inevitable rendezvous with the juncture of those long, lean legs. It didn’t diminish in the slightest the sheer fierce satisfaction she felt. He had laid hands on her. Even in the lion’s den boundaries must be drawn, and rigorously enforced. Perhaps even more so. And Annja had not had a good day.
Clearly her victim didn’t remotely expect any such response to trying to turn the interloper around. The breath burst out of him and he doubled over, then collapsed to the floor.
Despite herself, Annja was impressed by her results.
Unfortunately the entire bar full of rough Indian outlaw bikers were too. And after a beat or two of goggling at their pack leader lying there helpless on the sawdust-covered planks—was that even in code?—they got pissed.
“She dropped Johnny!” a voice cried. “Get her!”
A heavy weight landed on Annja’s shoulders, staggering her. She reached back to grab a handful of coarse hair, then jackknifed forward, pulling hard. A figure flew over her back to slam on the planks in a cloud of sawdust. Annja saw it was a woman.
Hands clutched at Annja from several directions. A hand grabbed her jacket. Somebody yanked her hair. She slapped the hands away, lashing out with quick jabs and backfists. All the time she waded through the crowd toward the door.
As if materializing from the gloom itself the snake woman blocked Annja’s path. She grabbed a handful of Annja’s blouse through her open jacket and cocked her left fist back for a punch.
As she did she rocked her weight back. Annja grabbed the woman’s left wrist and stepped quickly forward with her right foot, stepping out so that her hip brushed the woman’s right hip. Her left hand shot up and around to grab the denim vest up near the slim neck. At the same time Annja pressed her elbow into her opponent’s upper arm, effectively fouling the blow.
Annja twisted hard counterclockwise, putting her hips and all the strength of her own long legs into it. The other woman was wiry-strong, but Annja was strong, too; and she’d been practicing her grappling techniques. With her own weight already going backward the taller woman was easily toppled over Annja’s outthrust hip and slammed flat on her back onto the pool table. Her head hit with a crack and the air rushed out of her.
For a moment the way cleared. Annja started to move for the door but the short, wide guy who’d occupied the phone booth now stood in her way.
A flash decision faced Annja. She had an ace in her sleeve, but it wasn’t one she cared to turn up in public. And also there were all those guns. If this confrontation turned lethal she’d be able to hope for nothing better than an honor guard to take into the afterlife with her.
Besides, even though these people were attacking her, Annja knew she was the intruder. And they hadn’t used weapons yet. Should the need arise, she knew she could summon her sword from the otherwhere. But she did not want to have to explain the sudden appearance of the weapon to a bar full of people.
But she was going to have to even the odds somehow. And that entailed a certain risk.
She grabbed a discarded pool cue that lay on the pool table near the moaning, disoriented snake woman and snapped it right over the wide guy’s cannonball head. He thumped to his knees, grabbed his head with both hands and howled.
She raced past him. Holding two feet of cue in a wide grip she used it as a riot baton or a pitchfork, prodding and levering bodies out of her path.
“Stop her!” Annja heard the leader call out. To her satisfaction she noticed his voice was still pretty choked.
But she was fast and very determined. She sent tables and chairs spinning to the sawdust in her wake, with a clatter of heavy glass and yeasty slog of beer arcing through the thick air. In a few steps she reached the door.
Tossing the broken cue aside she yanked the door open. She stepped into the teeth of a now-icy wind, hauling the door closed behind her.
If the pursuit didn’t develop too quickly she’d try to start the balky car and get as far as she could. If that didn’t pan out she’d run off into the hills. Outlaw bikers weren’t famous for their cross-country running abilities. And their motorcycles, heavy and low-slung as a lot of them were themselves, were optimized for high-speed cruising on paved road. The opposite of dirt bikes, they’d quickly bog down in the rolling landscape.
Annja liked her chances of evading the Iron Horse People in the dark. Whatever they might like to pretend, they weren’t their ancestors, wild children of the wind, grass, sun and moon. They were products of the same modern cell-phone and flat-screen culture as she was.
She neared her car. And suddenly men stood from behind it. The bar sign’s jittery pink glow glistened on faces painted black.
And on the knives and hatchets in their hands.
From the footsteps and angry shouts she understood a bunch more bad guys had crowded in between the vehicles behind her. She’d fled just in time.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw a brighter light stretched across the gravel from the direction of the bar’s sagging facade. The front door was opening.
A male voice bellowed, “Dog Soldiers!” Then a lot of shouting erupted inside the bar in a guttural language she didn’t understand.
That was the most fortuitous diversion she could ever have hoped for. She had a flare of hope that the sudden discovery of the Dog Soldiers, whoever they were, and the consternation that caused among the Iron Horse People, would cleanly cover her getaway.
She heard handgun shots popping from the parking lot. The deep hard-edged boom of a shotgun answered from inside the bar.
Annja never broke stride. She had her plan and she followed through. She ran straight to the back of the bar, cut around behind it and then, when she was sure she was out of everybody’s sight, beelined right up a low ridge nearby and was gone with the wind.
5
Even though Annja’s GPS built into her phone stayed AWOL, she was not lost.
She could see the bright yellow glow of Lawton to the east. The clouds actually made that a better beacon by providing a handy surface for the lights to reflect off. As long as Annja kept that glow, the largest in the vicinity in any direction, on her right, she knew she was heading north toward the graded-earth country road and eventually the highway.
She wondered whether the two groups of crazy outlaws back at the bar might sort things out enough to give chase to her. It was so frigid in the wind and rain that it felt as if her bones would break. She knew the bikers might be the least of her problems.
Every time the chill grew intolerable she picked up the pace a notch.
Even though she reckoned later she hadn’t been hiking even twenty minutes—after what seemed an eternity—she reached the county road. She walked on, hoping to eventually get a signal on her cell phone.
Approaching from the right, a quarter mile off, she spotted a pair of headlights.
Coming out of the east made it unlikely the car was chasing her from the bar. There was always the frightening possibility that it might contain reinforcements for either set of her enemies.
That concern died away as she saw the Lawton sky-glow refract through the light-bar atop the car as it neared her. It slowed as if to come to a stop beside her.
Even before it did, Annja recognized, illuminated by the multicolored lights of the onboard computer and dashboard, the indefatigably cheerful face of Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears.
“Little cold out to be hitchhiking, ain’t it, Ms. Creed?” Ten Bears asked.
“Yes,” she said, hugging herself tightly against the biting cold. She wasn’t really in the mood for a lot of ironic repartee.
“Hop on in and get warm, why don’tcha?” he asked.
She could think of any number of reasons why she wouldn’t, actually. None of them was as compelling as either getting out of the cold or putting the symbolic bulk of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol between her and the bikers and midnight ambushers. She wasn’t naive enough to believe a lone trooper in a cruiser would necessarily deter them. But along with his .41 Smith & Wesson, Ten Bears had a radio.
She settled into the passenger’s seat. Beaming between his uniform collar and his peaked cap, Ten Bears put the cruiser back in gear and drove off along the county road at a just-over-walking pace.
She regarded him through narrowed, suspicious eyes. “Small world, huh?”
“Small world,” he agreed. “Welcome to Indian country, Ms. Creed. Not much goes on here that folks don’t see. What they see, they like to talk about. Especially when you’re a white-eyes from outside. And most especially a real nice-looking lady white-eyes, if you get my drift.”
Annja knew full well that the coming of any stranger would spark gossip in a tight-knit community. While Annja didn’t think of herself as particularly beautiful, she knew that her tall, lean-muscled, leggy form tended to attract added attention that, say, a dumpy fifty-year-old bearded archaeologist would not.
“I heard some things got me kind of concerned,” the lieutenant said. “I checked your motel but you weren’t there. Them Comanche County deputies told me you’d left the dig site right around sundown. So I wondered if you hadn’t broken down along the way. Or something.”
Or something, she thought. But carefully did not say.
“The breakdown scenario. My rental car died on me. I just managed to ditch it in the parking lot of the Bad Medicine Bar.”
“Hoo,” Ten Bears said. “Tell me you didn’t go inside?”
“No cell-phone coverage out there,” she said. “I didn’t think I had much choice.” She shrugged. “The reception I got didn’t exactly make me feel welcome. So I left.”
He laughed at that. “Them boys rowdy you up some?” he asked.
“Let’s say I got out of there before things got really out of hand,” she said with a grin.
“You’re a big TV star and all. Anything happened to you, it’d reflect poorly on the department and the Comanche Nation. Also you seem like a nice lady, if a bit idealistic,” he said.
“Thanks. I think.”
“See, there’s something going on in Indian country. Mostly western Oklahoma and northern Texas. Something not so good. We got some people here, young people, who are kind of on the radical side.”
He glanced at her. “You met some of them tonight. Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club.”
“I see.” She tried to keep her tone neutral.
“They got a rival bunch,” he said, “call themselves the Dog Society. Both sets want to live in the good old days, you know? Ride around whooping and hollering and shooting buffalo. They don’t much like the government. Okay, nobody does. They are also not too fond of the white-eyes.”
He drove a moment in silence. To their right the land began to pitch up into rough granite hills. Ten Bears didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get anywhere. That he was heading away from Lawton didn’t particularly alarm Annja. She had fairly well-honed survival instincts. She didn’t sense anything sketchy from Ten Bears, just concern.
She knew he wasn’t telling her everything. Police never told outsiders everything about a live investigation. It didn’t mean much.
“Most of all they don’t like each other,” he continued. “There’s trouble between ’em. Regular trouble. Lots of bad blood. And it’s getting worse.”
“I don’t ever see anything about this on the news,” Annja said.
“I hope you don’t, Ms. Creed.” He looked at her. “I hope you won’t be going public with it.”
“Not much danger of that,” she said with a little smile. “I’m an archaeologist, not a reporter.”
“Nation’s trying to keep it all quiet. So’s the state. The Comanche Nation’s got this new casino opening up in a few days, you know. Your young bloods, the radical-traditional types, aren’t happy about that. It’s Indian business and white-eyes don’t much care. Anyway, if word of the problem does get out, what with the whole continuing terror hysteria and all, it’s just going to bring more grief to Indians without calming the passions that are causing the problems.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Most people here are good folks. Indians, whites, blacks, Asians, whatever. But there are strong under-currents of racism and anger. And plenty of areas where white-eyes aren’t in the majority. And not real popular. You know?”
“I got the impression.”
He chuckled softly.
“So why don’t I give you a ride back to the motel,” Ten Bears said amiably. “I’ll talk to the car rental company. You can call them in the morning to retrieve your broke-down ride and get a new one. Better still, why not just fly on back to New York City, get yourself some nice arugula?”
“I’m not a big arugula fan, Lieutenant. I’m more the unabashed carnivore. I promise I won’t interfere with your investigation. I’ll do my best to keep from turning up on the news for any reason whatever. But I lost a good friend today. I’m not ready to pack it in and head home.”
She turned away from him and wiped moisture from her cheek. The ghostly fun-house-mirror image of her face looked back at her with exaggerated eyes. Snowflakes beat against the windows like suicidal moths bent on flame.
Ten Bears sighed theatrically. “I figured you’d take that line. Well, it was worth a try. Listen. The whole skinwalker angle is tough for a cop to approach. Even a native cop—we’re supposed to be close to the spirits and the earth and all that. But us Indians don’t like to give our brother officers too many excuses to roll their eyes when they think we’re not looking, you know? You want to give me a real leg up catching the party or parties who murdered your friend, I’d certainly be willing to look at any evidence you might turn up on that aspect of the case.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant.”
“Don’t thank me. I should probably lock you up or something. But if I could make a small suggestion, you might want to take a closer look at the earlier attacks. As in, firsthand. They took place in what would seem more like skinwalker country, anyway.”
“Conveniently distancing myself from Comanche territory?”
“Exactly! I knew you were a smart lady.”
I’m not too unhappy about making myself scarce for a while, either, come to think of it, she thought.
“If you want to pick up on some of the cultural backdrop, both on South Plains Indians and the Navajo,” he said, “there’s somebody I know you might want to talk to, since you’ll be down Albuquerque way, anyway….”
THAT NIGHT THERE was no mention at all, on TV or online, about anything at all happening at a lonely bar in the sticks of western Oklahoma. Nor was there any the next morning.
In between Annja slept like one dead.
6
To Annja’s complete surprise, the car rental agency not only failed to give her a molecule of grief when she called them the next morning to report her mishap, but they insisted she have a replacement without her even asking. They’d come pick her up.
She suspected the jovial and heavy hand of one Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears, OHP. She could imagine him calling the agency to talk over what she had told him and in that self-effacing, aw-shucks, good-old-boy way of his, making it quite clear, in case they didn’t get it up front, what it would mean to them if they were difficult with her.
So almost before she knew it, Annja found herself driving north up I-44 behind the wheel of a shiny new rental car. Then she turned west on Interstate 40 and headed to New Mexico.
The land flattened out as Annja drove through the Texas panhandle. As she entered New Mexico, the terrain gradually became vast wide swoops of tawny land. The occasional lone peak, most likely a volcanic extrusion, showed in the distance. The vegetation ran mostly to short grass, dotted with scrub.
Once, she saw a herd of pronghorn antelope grazing away off to her right.
As she neared her destination the land rose and grew more broken, mounting to what Annja, with all respect to the Wichita Range, considered something closer to real mountains, with ridges and slopes densely furred with straight-boled pines. These, she knew, were the Sandias.
The mountains rose left and right of the highway, then fell steeply in sheer granite walls to foothills that became high desert, sloping gently down to a line of trees that marked the course of the Rio Grande. Before her and to each side stretched the gray and chrome encrustation of an urban concentration—Albuquerque. She stopped there for lunch before continuing west into the desert.
Past the Acoma Reservation and the triangular bulk of Mount Taylor lay the small town of Grants. Following her GPS, confirmed by reference to a Google Earth map she’d summoned in her motel room in Lawton the previous night, a few miles west of Grants Annja turned left down a none-too-obvious dirt road. It wound quickly upward between steep, scrub-covered hills into the Zuni Mountains with their forests of ponderosa pine, along the Continental Divide.
The first attack had taken place at a dig in the Cíbola National Forest, working what was believed to be the remnants of an encampment of Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache led by the great guerrilla master Victorio during his war with the U.S. during the 1870s. The excavation had been protested by Native American groups even though the Mescalero tribe—which incorporated most of the survivors of the various Chiricahua groups except the Mexican Chiricahua, who were still in Mexico—offered no objection. It lay in a steep-sided draw. It had been discovered by a USDA team checking the results of reseeding by air after the area was burned over in a 2004 fire.
The attack had occurred the previous autumn. No signs remained of the dig or the murders. The excavation had been canceled after the incident. Wind and weather had smoothed out the disturbed earth.
Annja found no great mystery as to how the attacker could have struck from ambush there, either. The site lay along one side of a dry streambed, with the tree line beginning barely twenty yards away on one side and a rock outcropping looming twelve feet right above where, from the files, she knew the actual excavation had taken place. It would have taken a very athletic man to have dropped that distance without injuring himself. Then again it also took a very athletic man to kill three able-bodied adults—two men and one woman—and fatally wound a third man.
The sun was falling behind the divide as Annja drove back east. Although she still felt mostly numb about Paul’s death, in between wracking bouts of grief, she’d had a stressful couple of days. Not to denigrate the sheer physical toll long travel and combat took. She pulled off the highway just east of the river and spent the night in the Hotel Albuquerque on Rio Grande Boulevard, just north of Old Town.
AFTER EATING BREAKFAST the next morning at Little Anita’s near the hotel, she walked a few blocks south to the Old Town Plaza. It was a pleasant morning, still crisply cool, although warmer than out on the Plains near Lawton, with the sun just beginning to sting where it touched exposed skin. She sat on a cast-iron bench across from the old cathedral, beneath elm branches starting to turn green, while she used her computer to check her e-mail and confirm some information for her day’s quest. Then she made a few calls on her cell phone and hiked back to the hotel for her car.
The second attack had taken place in early March on land owned by San Ildefonso Pueblo between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The pueblo itself had invited a state team in to excavate what was believed to have been a temporary settlement by Pueblo Indians sometime predating the great Pueblo Uprising that threw the Spanish out in 1680. Despite that fact, and the fact that both State of New Mexico archaeologists and pueblo experts had confirmed the absence of human remains, the site had once again drawn protestors. There had been an ugly confrontation when pueblo police removed them for trespassing, although there was no record of injuries, nor charges filed.
Apparently there was some sentiment, in the Southwest at least, that any kind of archaeological excavation of potential Indian sites was profane.
Although this massacre was just a few weeks old Annja didn’t learn anything new there, either. As in the other two cases a cautious approach could easily have gotten the killer in range for a final rush without being seen. Especially since nobody would really have been looking.
She got back to Albuquerque about two o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon as she waited for her next appointment going through local and national news accounts of the murders online at a coffee shop on a fairly rustic-looking section of Rio Grande Boulevard a few miles north of her hotel.
The common threads among the murders, aside from the obvious gross similarities, were that they took place on dig sites that were protested by obscure groups. These had no apparent connection between themselves, other than professed radical pro-Native American sympathies. It wasn’t even clear how many of the protestors were actually Indians themselves.
She sat on the outdoor patio beneath a cottonwood beginning to leaf, drinking tea and pondering a few questions. Was the fact that all three attack sites had been protested significant or purely coincidental? If significant, what was the connection? Even the FBI, notoriously eager to discover terrorist conspiracies even where they weren’t, had either actively cleared the protestors of involvement or at least failed to list them as persons of interest.
Plus, frankly, people who’d go out and picket an archaeological dig struck Annja, who’d encountered a few in her time, as precisely the sort who would not be inclined to carry out impossibly violent blitz attacks ending in multiple murders. Nor, for the most, capable.
The light took on a late-afternoon yellowness. The sun had gotten tangled in the branches of the massive old cottonwoods across the boulevard. Time to go, she told herself, and folded her computer shut.
7
The western sky blazed in orange like burning forests when the silver Prius pulled up to the curb by the park and stopped. A tall woman got out of the driver’s side. A skinny young girl in jeans, T-shirt and a yellow Windbreaker, with her black hair in pigtails, got out of the passenger’s side. A big floppy yellow Lab pup, an adolescent probably, spilled out after her.
“You must be Dr. Watson,” Annja said, rising from the picnic table a short way down a grassy slope from the street as the woman walked toward her. She was handsome if a bit heavy in face and hip, and the hair hanging unbound around the shoulders of her mauve cable-knit sweater was black with silver threads. She wore a long dark-blue denim skirt over dark purple suede boots with silver medallions on them.
“Yes,” the woman said. “And you’re Annja Creed?”
Annja agreed she was. “And I’m Sallie,” the girl announced. “It’s short for Salamander!”
“No, it isn’t, Alessandra,” her mother said. “Don’t be untruthful.”
Annja laughed. Something about the girl’s appearance tweaked her subconscious. She couldn’t pin down exactly what.
The dog sniffed Annja’s legs. She hunkered down to stroke its head. “What’s his name?” she asked Sallie.
“It’s a she,” Sallie said. “Her name’s Eowyn. She’s kind of silly.”
“Young Labrador retrievers act that way,” her mother said. “Why don’t you and she go play?”
The girl was looking intently at Annja. “You’re on TV, aren’t you?” she said.
Her mother looked stern. Annja said, “Yes.”
“Oh. I like your show.”
“Thanks,” Annja said.
Sallie reached in a pocket of her jacket and produced a pale-green tennis ball, which she launched down the hill. The dog bounded in pursuit. Sallie ran after her, romping through the shadows of big elm trees lengthening across the hills of Roosevelt Park, which was located roughly halfway between the University of New Mexico campus, where Watson worked, and downtown.
“Thanks for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Watson,” Annja said.
“Susan, please. I’m certainly willing to do anything I can to get to the bottom of these terrible crimes. And I thank you for being willing to meet with me under such unusual circumstances. I don’t really have any time free at school this week, and I don’t want to leave Sallie at day care longer than necessary.”
She leaned forward and fixed Annja with a disconcertingly probing look. Even without the low boot heels she had to stand six feet clear. Annja did not envy any student of Dr. Watson’s who failed to measure up to her expectations.
“So, is your interest in skinwalkers personal or professional?” Watson asked.
If she wanted to keep things up front Annja could match that. “Both,” she said. “I lost a close personal friend in the last attack.” She felt a nasty twinge as she said it.
“Also the authorities in Oklahoma have asked me unofficially to consult on certain anthropological aspects of the case.”
“You’re an archaeologist by training, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Of course, my training included extensive education in social and physical anthropology, as well as subjects like geology.”
“Oh, yes.” Watson herself was a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the study of Southwestern native cultures. “So what can I do for you?”
“My specialty’s the European Renaissance. It’s a little far afield from the South Plains and the Rio Grande Valley. And to be perfectly honest, while we studied Native American history and cultures, my memory isn’t as sharp as it could be.”
“I understand,” Watson said with a grin. “I forgot all my geology pretty much the instant I turned in my last exam.”
“So if you could fill me in a bit on the cultural background of the Southwest and Plains cultures, and any hint you can provide me as to why something out of Navajo folk belief would be operating in the Comanche country of western Oklahoma would definitely be appreciated.”
“Well, to start with, the Indian cultures of North America didn’t live in vacuums, much less isolation from one another,” Watson said.
Annja was only mildly surprised at a tenured professor using such a politically incorrect term as Indian; very few Native Americans she’d ever met showed anything but the most strident contempt for the phrase Native American. Tom Ten Bears hadn’t had much use for it, either.
“Even before the Europeans’ arrival, my own people, the Kiowas, were especially famed for their roles as raiders and traders. Rather as the Vikings were in Europe and even the Mediterranean. So were the Comanches, especially after the two nations allied in the late eighteenth century. Comanche relics have turned up in the Cahokia Mounds. Kiowa tradition recalls trading voyages to the country of the Maya—who were themselves noted for the long journeys of their own traders, who also served as proselytizers for their religion.”
“Really?”
Watson nodded. “So the South Plains people were common visitors to New Mexico. What’s now northeastern New Mexico was part of their customary range. In fact, the Kiowa-Comanche alliance got its start in the 1790s on what’s now the site of Las Vegas, New Mexico—you did know there was one, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yes. In the mountains east of Santa Fe,” Annja said.
“That’s it. You’d be surprised how many people have only heard of the one in Nevada. Or maybe you wouldn’t. At any rate, the relationship between the Pueblos and the South Plains people was especially problematic. Sometimes the Plains folk came to the Pueblos to trade, sometimes to pillage and kill. It was the usual antagonism between settled groups and nomads.”
“I’m familiar with that,” Annja said. “So where do the Navajos come in?”
“Originally as rivals,” Watson said with a smile. “As an Apachean subgroup of the Athabascan peoples they and their fellow Apacheans also raided the prosperous and populous riparian communities. That often brought them into conflict with the South Plains people. Usually the Apache came off second best.”
Annja noted a half-hidden grin at that. That was something she’d noticed in her dealings with people of Plains Indian extraction—no matter how vocally they tried, as many did, to disavow violence and war, they remained at core warrior cultures. And thoroughly proud of their histories.
“It wasn’t perfectly straightforward, of course,” Watson said.
“Are human interactions ever?”
Watson laughed. “Not that I’ve noticed.” She shook her head, seemed to go introspective for a moment. “Anyway, one thing that happened was that the Jicarilla band of Apaches early on settled in northern New Mexico, and entered into alliance with the Taoseños. They provided security for the great annual Taos trade fairs.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. So there was always considerable contact between the people of the Southwest and of the South Plains. A famous hide painting exists of a battle—at about the time of the American Revolution—between Spanish troops with Apache mercenaries and French ones alongside Comanche allies.”
“Who won?”
“The French and Comanche. I’m tempted to add of course. Anyway, the contacts, if anything, grew stronger with the conclusion of the wars of Indian subjugation. After the final surrender of the Chiricahua Apaches to the U.S. Army in the 1880s they were eventually shipped to Fort Sill in Oklahoma.”
“Which is the heart of Comanche territory.”
“Yes. About half the Nation still lives around Sill and Lawton. Of course, by the time the Chiricahua gave up their relatives the Navajo had long since come to terms with the inevitable and settled down to become sheep-herders. Meanwhile, the Chiricahua had extensive exposure to Comanche culture on the reservation.”
“I didn’t think there were any reservations in Oklahoma,” Annja said.
“There aren’t anymore. It was the usual story. The free peoples of the Plains kept being restricted to smaller and smaller chunks of less and less desirable real estate. Then as soon as they got settled in, somebody would discover something on the land they’d been ceded—gold in the Black Hills, say—and they’d be pushed off again.
“In Oklahoma the Kiowa and Comanche were both forcibly settled onto reservations, which were then whittled away to nothing. The last Kiowa were forced out for white settlement in 1901, the Comanche in 1906.”
“That’s sad,” Annja said.
“Yes. It is. Don’t worry—I know you didn’t do it.”
Annja laughed. “So what can you tell me about the Dog Society?”
“Originally a Cheyenne warrior society. One of six, actually.”
“Why would Comanche radicals be calling themselves after a Cheyenne group?”
Watson shrugged. “You’d have to ask them. However, the Cheyennes spent a lot of time in the South Plains, and had much contact with the Kiowas and Comanche. They still do. Also, the Dog Soldiers were known for their extreme aggression. They were eventually outlawed and cast out of the Cheyenne tribe after one of their members murdered a fellow tribesman, and formed their own band. That could be part of the attraction for violent radicals, that aggressive association.”
“I see. What I still don’t understand, I’m afraid, is how and why someone evidently caught up in Navajo witchcraft would wind up committing murders in Oklahoma.”
“Again, I have no good explanation to give you. Such an individual would be very…twisted, by the standards of any human culture. Navajos—Athabascans—still take witchcraft with the utmost seriousness. It’s the blackest evil to them. People accused of witchcraft still have a tendency to turn up dead.
“The Navajo wolf, or skinwalker, is basically the worst kind of witch. You can only gain that kind of power through extensive contact with the dead—something most of the Southwest Indians are very leery of, and which the Athabascans in particular dread. Also, the shape-changing power can only be won through committing one or more ritual murders.”
“Wow,” Annja said.
“That’s not a life-way I’m terribly conversant with. Modern Navajos don’t like to talk about it for two reasons. The acculturated ones dislike associating their people with what seems to them a potentially pernicious superstition. The traditionalists dislike talking about religious beliefs to outsiders because to talk about witches invites their attentions, which traditional Navajos believe can be literally deadly.”
Watson shook her head. “Really, I’d say even a lot of the most modern Navajos feel at least a certain thrill of dread about skinwalkers. Just as atheists raised amid Christian society sometimes harbor secret fears of hell.”
“I’m familiar with that phenomenon,” Annja said.
“Now, there is someone who might be able to expand on what little I can tell you about the Navajo wolf phenomenon. I can put you in touch with Dr. Yves Michel of the World Health Organization. He’s spent the past couple of years among the native peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, studying Southwest Indian health issues on behalf of the U.N. Particularly mental health issues—he’s a psychiatrist as well as holding a doctorate in cultural anthropology. A very erudite man. Although I have to caution you—he can be difficult.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“He does, however, like to talk about his areas of interest. In particular, he’s made an intensive study of the skinwalker belief complex. While he has yet to publish any papers, he’s passed drafts around to many friends and colleagues that I understand have created quite a stir.”
“Wait—I think I’ve heard of him.”
In fact, Annja was pretty sure she’d seen his work on skinwalkers discussed on alt.archaeology, a Web site she frequently visited that was devoted to discussions of fringe archaeology. While she considered herself a stout skeptic, she also felt she owed it to her discipline to maintain an open mind; hence, her continuing attention to the outer limits of archaeological research. It was entirely possible that among the piles of printouts stacked on the sofa or coffee table of her Brooklyn loft apartment was actually a copy of Dr. Michel’s draft paper. She spent so little time there these days she couldn’t keep track of everything.
Dr. Watson took out one of her own business cards and wrote Dr. Michel’s phone number and e-mail address on the back of it. As she did so Sallie came racing back with Eowyn loping behind her. The girl plopped herself on the cold cement bench near her mother. The Lab lay down beside her, panting and grinning.
Annja found herself studying the girl. Sallie noticed and, like any bright child instinctively mistrusting adult scrutiny, said, “What? Do I have a booger?”
“Sallie!” her mother said sharply. She passed the card to Annja. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. It’s rude to stare. You just look familiar somehow.”
“Wait till I’m famous,” Sallie said. “I’m going to be a superheroine.”
Watson sighed exaggeratedly. “We Plains people tend to have active imaginations. A cultural thing, I think.”
She reached out to tousle the girl’s hair. Sallie endured it a moment, then leaped up and went dashing off once more with Eowyn in happy pursuit.
“I guess you wonder why a middle-aged woman has such a young daughter,” Watson said. “She was the outcome of an attempt to save a marriage.”
She sighed. “And like most such attempts, it didn’t work. I try not to talk about that where she can hear. I hate keeping things from her. But it’s a terrible responsibility to lay on a child. She’s a wonderful child.”
Light began to dawn on Annja. “She wouldn’t have an older brother, would she?”
“Yes. His name’s John. He’s fourteen years older than she is. They love each other, but there are limits to how close they can be across that kind of gap.”
“I think I know why she looks familiar. Please forgive my asking a highly personal question, but you wouldn’t happen to have been married to Lieutenant Ten Bears, would you?”
“Yes,” Watson said.
Annja sagged as if she’d been sandbagged. “So that’s why he recommended I talk to you.”
Watson laughed again. She had a hearty laugh. “I’d like to think a degree of respect for my competence influenced him. We do respect each other, even if we’re miles apart in most of our viewpoints on things. I’m a leftist, if not an entirely respectable one—he’s a right-winger, a total gung-ho patriot. I guess what you’d expect from a war hero and lifelong cop. We still feel…affection for each other, too. The divorce was amicable. Of course, you couldn’t say that for the last few years of our marriage.”
“Wait—your son’s name is John? Johnny?”
“Why, yes,” Watson said. “He served with the Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he came home he was changed.”
“And now he’s leader of the Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club?”
“He’s a community activist,” Watson said, “who prefers to think of himself as an outlaw biker. Not that I altogether approve of what he’s trying to achieve. Sometimes he seems way too much like the militia crazies of the nineties, who’re starting to make such a comeback now. But I’m much calmer about his activities than my ex-husband is.”
A dog barking vigorously broke the thread of conversation. Annja and Watson looked across the large park. The sun had set. The air grew chilly, with only a bloodred band on the horizon and reddish undertints on a few clouds. The evening filled the hollows of the park like velvet.
Down in the bottom of the depression between the slope the picnic table stood on and a hill, Sallie was digging her heels in to restrain Eowyn, apparently newly leashed. The adolescent Lab barked furiously toward the top of the far hill. The yellow pup didn’t sound floppy-friendly now. Even a hundred feet away Annja could see the hackles standing up on her neck. She was in serious guardian mode, with only Sallie’s determination keeping her from launching a preemptive attack on something she perceived as immediately dangerous.
Following the line of the dog’s fury Annja felt the hair at her own nape rise. Silhouetted on the hillcrest was the broad head and pointed ears of what appeared to be a wolf. Otherwise, it was indistinct, a black shadow against the twilight.
“Why is Eowyn so mad at that Malamute, or whatever it is?” Watson asked, rising. “She’s usually so friendly with everybody. Dogs as well as humans.”
Annja was up and running down the slope.
As she came up to Sallie the girl finished reeling in the leash, grabbed the bristling Eowyn’s collar and sat down with her legs braced. “You’re not going anywhere, girl,” she said through clenched teeth. “What’s gotten into you?”
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