'We thought the same.' His tone was full of irony, and she sensed that he found these stories just a little too pat. 'Still, that doesn't change what happened today. If there really were threats, it went beyond them to action.'
'And this is what was on the news?' she asked.
'And will probably make CNN,' he confirmed. 'It's ugly, Miss Talldeer, and I've got some small experience in sabotage. There's no way to soften this-someone blew up a bulldozer, and killed four people, including the foreman. There are a half dozen more workers in the hospital or who were treated and released.' He paused for a moment to let that sink in.
It came as a shock, still. That was the kind of thing you expected to hear about in Greece, or the Mideast, or even New York. Not in your own backyard. 'My god-' she said, finally. 'What happened?'
'Preliminary investigation indicates that there was an explosive device planted somewhere on the bulldozer, one that was triggered by an electronic detonator.' He took a deep breath, but it did not cover the anger in his voice. He was outraged by this, personally. As well he should be. 'It was probably something like a garage-door opener.'
The analytical part of her mind was the first to recover. 'Not easy to trace.' She made notes rapidly as things occurred to her. First and foremost, this was a job for the police, not a private investigator.
'True, given that there are several hundred thousand of them in the Tulsa area alone. But that is not what we want you to look into. The police can handle the criminal investigation.' Sleighbow was firm on that, and she appreciated it. She was not a Magnum, P.I. She'd never handled anything worse than a spouse-beater before this, and she really didn't want to start butting in on police territory now. 'That's their job, and we are willing to let them do it,' he continued. 'It'll be murder charges before this is over, and an insurance company does not need to handle a potato as hot as that. What Romulus wants you to do is to look into who or what is behind this. Is it a conspiracy, and if it is, did the developer try to defraud us by concealing it? Or was this simply an isolated act of a single disgruntled employee? That's what we want to know. Was there fraud going on; was the developer deliberately misleading us?'
'I can live with that,' she told him, much relieved. 'More, that's something I can do.' It would not be the first fraud case she had handled, although it was certainly the biggest, and potentially the nastiest. 'Now, why me? Because I'm Native American and you figure the crew and the protesters will talk to me where they won't talk to the police?'
To her surprise, Sleighbow chuckled. 'That, and because you are by all accounts a very attractive and small woman. Construction workers are less likely to think you're a threat.'
She answered his chuckle with one of her own. 'You're figuring out all my secrets. But you're putting me between a rock and a hard place, you know. If I find out there was a conspiracy-'
'That's all we need to know. We don't need to know if the conspiracy actually performed the sabotage. I want you to understand that from the beginning.'
'In other words,' she said dryly, 'no Nancy Drew.'
'Right.' He sounded relieved that she understood. 'All we need to know is that there really were threats previous to the explosion, that there was a reason to think that the risk was greater than we had been informed, and that because of that, this developer went into the contract with the intent to defraud us.' Sleighbow's sincerity came through even over the bad speaker on the phone. 'If you uncover anything else, you know what you have to do. I would turn anything suspicious over to the police, and I think you will too, but I'm not going to dictate to your conscience. And Romulus will not be double-checking on you. In the words of Rhett Butler, 'Frankly, Scarlett-''
'Uh huh.' She couldn't fault him or the company, really. Criminality was not their business, and he was evidently quite conscious of the fact that he was hiring her to find information that might prove to be harmful to her people. This was the best compromise he could offer.
Yeah, I know what I have to do-turn the evidence or even the suspicions over to the police. This is murder; my duty lies with those who were killed, even as an Osage shaman-or at least the kind of shaman Grandfather has taught me to be. But that doesn 't make doing that duty any easier.
Still, how many times had Grandfather made it clear that the time for purely tribal loyalties was gone? That her 'tribe' was humanity? Besides, there were plenty of P.I.s in Tulsa who would be very happy to find him the proof of conspiracy he wanted-even if it wasn't there. They'd at least be getting a fair shake with her in charge.
And there were those pesky bills to pay-
'Well, Mr. Sleighbow, I guess you've just hired yourself a P.I.,' she said slowly. 'I'd rather it was me than someone with a prejudicial axe to grind.'
'So would we, Miss Talldeer.' Yes, that was relief in his voice too. 'This way no one can be accused of not giving the Native Americans under suspicion the benefit of the doubt. Send your invoices to me, directly-'
He dictated an address, which she noted down; while this seemed to be a perfectly legitimate job, she would be taking no chances. She'd be checking both the job and Sleighbow, tonight and tomorrow before she actually did anything at all on the case. There had been cases of people pretending to an authority they did not have; there had been hoaxes perpetrated on P.I.'s too.
They both made polite if hurried good-byes, and she hung up the phone. But she did not return to the living room; instead, she remained at the desk, thinking hard, absently doodling on her notepad. Dust danced in the golden light coming in through the miniblinds at her office window, and there was a pair of blue jays pigging out at the feeder just outside.
She had to think this thing through, very carefully. She had to be absolutely sure of her own feelings and motivations before she found herself tangled in something she was not prepared to handle, emotionally and mentally.
If there was a conspiracy-if it was activists-
Her own people. Possibly a cause she had been involved in herself. One she was emotionally supporting-
I still have to turn them in. This was murder, terrorism. I can't play cute little semantics games and call them 'freedom fighters.'
Yes, that was it. There was a line that had to be drawn. What was the old saying? 'The freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.' The freedom to be passionate about a cause ended when people could be hurt because of that passion.
People who murder innocent people in the name of a cause are still terrorists, no matter how noble that cause is. She had drawn that line for herself; now she must stick to it.
I hate terrorists. I hate them and everything they are. They're cowards who won't face the enemy honorably. They 're like the cowards who used to scalp women and claim they had taken warriors' scalps-like the ones who attacked villages when the men were on the buffalo hunts.
That was another line of demarcation; the line between 'warrior' and 'terrorist.' A warrior was one who fought an enemy who knew he was the enemy-who fought other warriors, openly. There had been times in Osage warfare when coups were not even counted by taking a warrior's scalp, but by merely touching him and getting away again. That was the purest form of warfare.....
But there had been times when the enemy did not abide by the rules, when he too became a terrorist. There was a site not that far from her home in Claremore where that had happened, where a band of mixed Heavy Eyebrows scum, renegade Cherokee, and rejects from other tribes had overrun an Osage village, killing, torturing, and raping the women, old men, and children left behind. Claremore Mound, it was called now. She could never come near the site without feeling rage overcome her, a rage triggered by all that helpless blood spilled-by the powerful grief and fear and pain left behind by the victims.
Anyone who sets bombs in bulldozers is no warrior, and he deserves to die like a poisoned dog, without honor, without a way for Wah-Ko'n-Tah to recognize him, so that his spirit joins the mi-ah-luschka and he wanders forever-
She felt that old rage building in her and stifled it.
You can't just condemn an entire race for things people who weren't even their ancestors did. That was why she had broken with the more ardent activists back in college. You can't shove everyone into the same pile just because of their bloodlines. She wanted her rights, and the rights for all of the Native Peoples, just as much as any of them did-they'd all been cheated and lied to for too long, deprived of homes, of religion, of heritage-
Even her family, who had only kept their ways at the cost of hiding them, who had not until her father's generation been able to be Osage openly.