Hawk Moon Page 5

  And it was then Perry Heston produced, as if she were part of a stage magic set-up, a very beautiful dark-haired woman in a starchy white blouse and designer jeans. "This is my wife, Claire."

  We shook. I was tempted to regain my masculinity by crushing her hand the way Bryce had crushed mine, but maybe she was stronger than she looked and would embarrass me.

  I shouldn't have liked her but I did. Beyond the somewhat mannered country club beauty, there seemed to be an actual human being. There was both pain and odd fleeting humor in her cornflower-blue eyes. In her white blouse and blue jeans and black flats, she possessed a casual elegance I found very feminine and sexy. She wore an air of melancholy like a very expensive and subtly sexual perfume.

  "Bryce told me what happened. I'm really sorry." She looked quite embarrassed about it all and glanced at her friend, the blonde, for guidance.

  The blonde was six foot and not slender in the way of ideal beauty but there was a peasant grace and sensuality to the Nordic features and short white-blonde hair that suggested intelligence, competence and a merry familiarity with the carnal arts.

  "David has been pestering our husbands, I'm afraid," the blonde said and put forth her hand. "I'm Evelyn Cook, Bryce's wife."

  And speaking of Rhodes, where was he? I'd tried to keep him in view, to see what he was doing the rest of the night. But now he was gone.

  It took me half a minute or so but then I spotted him. He'd found the boss, who was planting a wet kiss on the cheek of an old lady playing one of the slots.

  David was animatedly telling his boss something. He touched his stomach and then his throat. Even though I couldn't hear the words, I knew the story: "I'm sick. The flu, maybe. I need to take the rest of the night off."

  The boss didn't look happy about it, nor as if he particularly believed it. But he shook his head sorrowfully and then nodded, and shortly afterwards, David left.

  I turned back to Perry Heston. "I'm afraid I'm in a little bit of a hurry"

  "I didn't want you to get the wrong idea about us, Mr.—. Isn't that funny? I don't even know your name."

  I told him my name. "I appreciate the apology." I wanted to get out of there before he had Bryce shake my hand again. "Nice to meet you," I said to the women.

  "Thank you." Claire smiled, still looking painfully embarrassed. She did not once look at her husband.

  I excused myself quickly and left, moving fast through the casino in search of David Rhodes.

  I didn't find him.

  I wondered what was going on. He didn't want me to know what the parking-lot scene had been all about and neither did Perry Heston.

  David was probably going to go somewhere I'd find interesting. I wondered where that would be.

  I hurried to the parking lot.

  He was just pulling out as I reached it, intense-looking behind the wheel of a rusty five-year-old tan Ford.

  He didn't see me.

  A minute later, I was in my rental Chevrolet and following him down the two-lane asphalt toward the main highway.

  Chapter 7

  There was fog on the highway, twisting smoky serpents that coiled and uncoiled as I followed the narrow curving road toward Cedar Rapids. The rain had stopped. Rhodes was nothing more than tail-lights that occasionally flared when he tamped the brakes.

  We drove a long time this way, passing little towns that appeared then vanished in the fog like images out of nightmares. The neon of tumbledown country taverns was comforting now; at least a little bit of humanity had survived this demon-loosed night.

  And then we were in Cedar Rapids.

  The fog wasn't so thick here. The deeper we got into the city, heading east on First Avenue, the newer the buildings became, the urban-renewal monster gradually getting everything that wouldn't look good in a four-color brochure. A previous mayor had been obsessed with turning the downtown into a business area, and you could see the results of his handiwork now. What had once been wide open streets had now been narrowed and boutiqued, as if everything on each block were of a single piece. There was a certain obstinate pride about it all.

  Rhodes didn't even slow down much through the downtown area.

  His speed picked up again around Ninth Street, where the magic of downtown was lost on old and weary buildings that the urban-renewal monster probably dreamt of at night.

  By the time he reached Coe College, he was rolling again. He was apparently one of those people who feel that adherence to speed limits is an infringement of all those God-given rights we like to talk about when we've been caught breaking the law.

  By Nineteenth Street, the fog snakes had started whispering and winding through the air again. Houses were lost behind the coiling gray reptiles and an unnerving silence had descended on everything.

  He turned left.

  Fog and darkness blinded me momentarily.

  He began to drive fast up and down narrow streets. So fast that I wondered if he hadn't maybe spotted me and was now going to humiliate the hell out of me by getting me lost or smashed up.

  I cut down to fog-lights, visibility had got so bad.

  And then, somehow, we reached a long stretch of open country, several rolling acres of farmland here on the edge of the city.

  And then he was gone, vanished utterly inside the fog. Bastard.

  All I could do was keep driving, hoping to find the taillights again.

  I rounded a sweeping curve, angled up a climbing hill bordered with pine trees that wore the fog like white rags, and then started down an abrupt incline.

  At the bottom of which I saw a ghost-image of red taillights. For just a moment — and then it was gone.

  I speeded up. I had no choice: I had to find him again.

  I drove as sensibly as I could given the conditions.

  An oncoming car loomed up out of the fog, its giant headlights obscene in the gloom, glaring at me with great and hungry menace, and then nothing again. Just the fog and him somewhere ahead of me.

  I went right past him.

  All I got was a glimpse of his car door in the fog and then I was 100 yards down the road.

  He'd stopped: I wondered why. Maybe he was hoping I'd go right past him and wouldn't see him. He'd cut his lights. He'd have been awful easy to miss.

  There was only one way I could find out. I pulled the rental off to the side of the road, grabbed my flashlight, shut off the ignition, cut the lights and got out.

  I was standing on a planet I didn't recognize. Shifting mists and screens of fog cut my visibility down to a few feet.

  My footsteps on the muddy gravel of the roadside were loud in the silent gloom. The humidity was oppressive; a cold sweat had started filling my armpits.

  Without quite knowing where I was going, following the angle of the road, I walked maybe five minutes until I came to Rhodes' car. I played my light inside. Empty.

  Why would he have stopped the car here? If all he'd wanted to do was lose me, he could have simply turned his vehicle around after I passed, and driven back the way he'd come.

  But he'd left the car.

  More monster sounds; menacing monster eyes. A van was roaring toward me, fog running off its sleek sides like smoke. Gone in moments. Leaving me again to the fog and the silence.

  I walked several yards past Rhodes' car and it was there I found it. Narrow asphalt driveway. Rural-style mailbox on a pole.

  Was this where Rhodes had gone?

  I trained my light on the side of the mailbox, looking for a name. There'd been one once, but it had been crudely covered up with spray paint.

  Somewhere down the road, maybe twenty yards, a car engine started and headlights came on. More glowing monster eyes.

  Whoever it was, was in a hurry, sweeping quickly from the roadside to the road, and hitting thirty miles an hour by the time they came abreast of me.

  I had to jump back. Either the driver didn't see me at all or saw me and wanted to hurt me. All I got was a glimpse of a new green Ford with a crumpled passeng
er fender.

  Then the green Ford was one with night and fog; in moments, I couldn't even hear it let alone see it.

  I followed the drive, spending the next ten minutes feeling not unlike a child in a nightmare, the realization slowly beginning to dawn that I had no idea where I was or where I was going. The Grimm Brothers would have loved this place. Any kind of creature from hell you could imagine might lurk in this dark, muggy night.

  I was one with the fog now. It was so thick I couldn't even see my own body unless I made an effort.

  An owl cried out; and then a dog. The dog sounded nearby.

  And then in front of me, running at a frightened angle, a doe on sweet spindly legs rushed to the grass on the other side of the drive. Her eyes were trapped momentarily in the beam of my flashlight. I wanted to give her a reassuring hug but knew that would only scare her all the more. She ran on.

  I don't know when the house started to take shape in the murk. It was gradual. First I saw the outlines of the roofs and gables, and then, closer, the square tower or campanile if you want to be technical, and finally, even closer, the shape of the balconies and bay windows. I knew enough about architecture to have a sense of what I was seeing: an Italianate-styled Victorian house.

  The owl cried again.

  The desolation became overwhelming suddenly and I was once again more child than adult. The fog lapped and swirled, and elongated once more into tatters, and then into sinuous shifting snakes. The moon was lost utterly now

  I stepped forward and as I did so, put the flashlight in my left hand. I gave my right hand the responsibility of slipping my Ruger from its holster and making it snug and ready for use in my grip.

  The dog barked again and I felt less alone.

  Not until I was very close did I notice the charred areas on the stone exterior walls, and then the smashed-out windows.

  I went up to one of the mullioned windows, tapped away to remove a shard of glass so it wouldn't cut my knuckles, and angled my flashlight inside.

  The place had been gutted.

  The walls were coal-black with char; the floor was heaped with debris; the elegant Victorian furniture had been disfigured by flames and smoke. There was no smell of burning, though. Whatever had happened here had happened long ago.

  The fog had penetrated the house, too, twisting in and out of the rooms.

  I had just pulled my light back when somebody hit me.

  It wasn't a good, clean hit — he or she hadn't struck at the most vulnerable spot on the back of my head — but it was strong enough to do the job.

  I heard shoe-leather squeak on the grass behind me.

  I wanted to turn and see who'd done it, but—

  I fought against going out but it was a useless fight. My body simply shut down. Vision first; and then hearing; and then warmth. A terrible chill shuddered through me. And I collapsed to the ground.

  I wasn't out long, two or three minutes at most.

  My flashlight had fallen a few feet away from me. The beam was still on. It shone in my face. The grass around the face of the flashlight was very green.

  And then the dog trotted into the flashlight's beam, a very pretty Border collie, with something smudged red across her pretty face.

  She was friendly.

  She came over and started licking my nose and cheeks. Her tongue tickled and I laughed. Ridiculous to laugh in my position but it was funny. She smelled of wet fur and mud and the foggy night. She belonged to somebody. She was too well-kept to be a stray.

  I started to sit up. The headache was massive, arcing across the back of my head, up and across and down into my forehead.

  They did a hell of a job for missing my most vulnerable area.

  The collie came at me for another kiss but I gently touched her face and eased her away.

  And that was when I felt something sticky in the palm of my hand. I reached over, picked up the flashlight, aimed it at my palm.

  Blood.

  That's what she had all over her face.

  I reached out to bring her closer but she was playing hard to get now. Apparently miffed that I'd resisted her earlier advances.

  She trotted off into the fog.

  Blood.

  I got up, which wasn't easy, and closed my eyes against the headache sawing through my cranium.

  I liked David Rhodes even less than I had before. I was pretty sure he was the one who'd struck me.

  And then my friend the Border collie came back, prim and pretty and proud about what she had in her mouth. My mind didn't want to register the reality of what she was carrying. But I saw how she'd managed to smear herself with blood.

  The ripped, ragged arm belonged to a Native American female — that much I could tell even from here.

  The upper arm was the part that gave me trouble. After all those years studying serial killers, I had convinced myself that the occasional atrocity didn't have much power over me. But I was wrong.

  The contrast between the sweet proud dog and the obscenely severed arm carried in her mouth overpowered me for a moment. All I could do was stand in the vast desolate night, the fog enveloping me, and listen to the distant owl hooting his forlorn prairie wisdom.

  I reached down and patted the dog on the head.

  She was so damned sweet and earnest sitting there. I petted her some more. I didn't want to break her heart by telling her, "See, honey, we humans have these laws we make up, and one of them is that it's in bad taste to walk around with somebody's arm dangling from your mouth."

  She dropped the arm.

  She wanted more petting and apparently the limb was becoming something of a chore to keep fixed in her jaws.

  I played my light on the arm.

  A small light-brown birthmark on the inner elbow was the only distinguishing feature. It wasn't easy to see because of the bruise-like decay of the flesh. Several days dead, I presumed. The stench told me that — a high hard sour-egg smell.

  The collie got interested again and dipped her head to sniff at the arm.

  I picked her up.

  This particular piece of evidence needed protection now from the elements and the collie alike.

  There was a garage to the west of the house. I groped for a door and went inside. The fire had left it alone. It smelled of lingering heat.

  The collie squirmed and wriggled as if she were enduring great torture.

  After a minute, I found what I was looking for — a cardboard box. I left the collie in the garage, closing the door behind me, and took the box back to the arm.

  I carefully set the box over the arm. Safe.

  The humidity had sweat rolling down my face and chest and arms. The fog wrapped itself around me.

  Maybe somewhere in the gutted remains of the house I would find the body to match the arm. But that was official police business and I was happy to let them take care of it. They could also let the dog out of the garage once the arm was safe as evidence.

  I started back down the drive through the fog.

  Ten minutes it took to find my car, and another twenty to move slowly along the road until I located the glowing light of a phone booth.

  I pulled in, dug some change from my pocket and phoned the Cedar Rapids Police Department. At this point, I had no desire to get involved anymore than I was already. I wanted to talk to Cindy and then to David.

  I told the police how to find what they needed and then I got in my car and drove inchingly back to my motel room in the fog.

  Indians and blacks received justice in many cases. But when there was controversy, or when the crime was particularly savage, there was, on the part of law enforcement and the bench alike, a certain rush to wrap things up. To be fair, this same standard often applied to poor whites, as well.

  Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

  Not until 3:A.M. was Tall Tree brought out from his room atop the livery stable.

  When Chief Ryan and Anna first knocked on his door, the Indian responded by climbing out hi
s window and scaling the wall so that he could stand on the livery roof, where he proceeded to hold off twenty armed men until he was wounded in the shoulder by a sharpshooter and finally surrendered. He was very intoxicated and belligerent but denied knowing anything about the death of the young Indian woman he'd loved.

  Following dinner the next night, Anna and Mrs. Goldman sat at a table in the parlor, Mrs. Goldman's new electric lamp burning fiercely in the shadows. For a time, they discussed the weekly shopping they did together downtown, when wagonloads of fresh produce were brought in from farms surrounding the city, and when all the shops filled their windows with the latest in picture hats and dresses. This Saturday there were to be several sales. Anna had saved two dollars for a new skirt.

  Then Anna changed the subject and started talking about Tall Tree.

  "He's innocent, Mrs. Goldman, I'm sure of it."

  "The Chief won't listen to you?"

  Anna shook her head. "Sometimes he will but not this time. He just sees it as open and shut."

  "If he's really innocent, Anna, then you'll have to keep pushing the Chief."

  She looked fondly at Mrs. Goldman and smiled. "I will. I just hope he doesn't fire me."

  Anna sat up late in the parlor, examining the things she'd found while combing the crime scene that night.

  1. She'd made some casts of boot prints she'd found. There were several styles. There were no moccasin prints.

  2. She'd found three buttons — two belonged to an expensive male vest; one to a woman's dress.

  3. She'd found a tortoiseshell comb that fashionable ladies wore in their hair these days. The comb might have belonged to the victim.

  4. She'd found a scrap of paper torn in half. The remaining letters were

  ay

  ouse

  She had no idea what this meant.

  5. She'd snuck into the funeral parlor and taken a look at the dead girl's wounds. The killer must have stood too close to her to get much sweeping force because the wounds were curiously shallow, even the fatal one in the heart.