hasn't, and I ask him to keep his ear to the ground, he might.
She dialed the familiar number without even looking at the buttons, and waited. It was picked up on the first ring this time.
'Talldeer residence, Sarah Talldeer speaking. Can I help you?'
Jennifer grinned to herself, and replied in Cherokee, 'Beloved Mother, you are going to get yourself stolen by a marauding Japanese seller-of-goods if you continue to answer the telephone that way. We shall have to go on the war trail in order to steal you back, and you know the Japanese have no good horses to take! How shall we get your worth in raiding with no horses to carry off?'
'Jennie darling, you are going to confuse the hell out of the nice FBI man tapping the phone if you keep speaking foreign languages,' her mother countered, this time in English. She laughed, and so did Jennie.
That was a family joke, although at one point there probably had been a tap on the phone, either because of Jennifer's activism or because of her current occupation. There might be again. Oddly enough, no one in the family really cared. Sarah Talldeer's attitude was that since no one in her family had anything to hide, there was no reason to worry. Jennifer, although she would have been outraged when she had been in college, was now fairly philosophical about it. And both her brothers and her father took a kind of puckish pleasure in the idea that some poor fool might be listening in.
Sarah thought the whole idea of a phone tap was rather stupid. If someone really wanted to listen to long conversations with her real estate clients, or the trials and tribulations of the adolescent and college-age Talldeers, they were welcome, so far as she was concerned. And heaven help them if they weren't also fluent in Osage and Cherokee; the family used all three languages, as they had all their lives, to make certain that their, children were fluent in the tongues of their heritage.
'By now they probably have translators,' Jennifer told her. Then, in Osage, she made an indecent suggestion about what could be done with the late FBI founder's body- just in case someone was listening.
'If your Grandfather taught you that one, I don't think I want that translated, honey,' Sarah replied serenely. 'It has to be something obscene. Poor Mr. Hoover, he must be spinning in his grave like a high-speed lathe. Your brother told me you'd called; has something come up?'
'Sort of.' She licked her lips. She might as well come straight to the point. 'Have you - ah - seen the news yet? Any news?'
Although Sarah was not strictly a Medicine Woman, Grandfather had hinted that at least part of Kestrel's ability might have come from her mother's side of the family. Kestrel didn't doubt that at all, for Sarah had an uncanny ability to cut straight to the subject someone wanted to discuss, whether or not it had even been mentioned.
That ability did not fail her this time. 'You mean the explosion? The one where the bulldozer blew up and all those poor men were killed?' Her voice sharpened with anxiety. 'Isn't that a police thing? How did you get involved?'
'Obliquely. Don't worry, I'm not going to get underfoot with the cops, I don't think.' Quickly, she explained as much as she could without betraying client confidentiality, then continued. 'Basically, I need to know if Dad's heard anything that might apply - you know, young hotheads shooting their mouths off just before they shoot themselves in the foot - or if the Principal Chief has.'
'Hang on a moment, I've got my real estate books and mortgage calculation sheets spread out all over the table, and I want to write all this down so I get it right.' She listened to the background sound of paper shuffling for a moment, as her mother re-stacked her work and reached for something she could take notes in. 'All right, would you take it from the top for me?'
Jennifer repeated it all, carefully. Sarah had been a secretary and kept her shorthand up; a skill she had taught Jennifer. It had come in useful in college, and both of them still used it, although Jennifer had augmented her note-taking with a microcassette recorder.
'Dear, this developer-can you tell me his name? I might get something, if I nose around a little.' Sarah's offer came as something of a surprise, and Jennifer found herself staring at the wall with her eyebrows lifted. She hadn't considered her mother as a possible information source, but Sarah was right-if it had anything to do with land, real estate agents heard about it, and they talked. She could have hit herself for not thinking of it, too. Normally she was a bit better at thinking of the obvious.
'Mother, that would be fabulous,' she said honestly. 'And yes, I can tell you, since it's pretty well public knowledge. They'll probably say something about it on the ten o'clock news; they might even have an interview with him. It's a fellow named Rod Calligan. And I would love to hear every juicy little rumor you have on him.'
'I can tell you right now that he hasn't made any friends in this business,' Sarah said immediately. 'If you asked someone in Tulsa, they would probably talk your ear off, but even out in Claremore we know about him. He's cutthroat, and they say he's cut-rate. Anything he builds never meets more than the absolute minimum standards and whenever he can he builds outside municipal boundaries so he doesn't have to meet city codes.'
'Interesting.' That wasn't illegal-but it was cheesy by some standards. And someone who built things that way might be tempted into something just as cheesy.
Or maybe not. He might not think he was doing anything cheesy-he might think he was simply being a good businessman. He might not even consider shading the truth to get cheaper insurance to be fraud. She'd have to have more information, and she said as much to her mother.
'Well, I can get it for you, honey,' Sarah said cheerfully. 'I think Marge had some dealings with him, and you know how Marge loves to talk.'
'Only too well; she cornered me at your last company picnic,' Jennifer groaned. 'I thought my ear was going to fall off.'
'Jen-I hope you know I worry about you, but I wouldn't ask you to stop what you're doing.' Sarah sounded hesitant, but Jennifer knew why. They'd had this little talk before.
'I know, Mom. You can't help worrying; I'm your kid. You'd worry about any of the guys, too.' Jennifer couldn't help smiling. 'You also know how good a shot I am, and that I'm pretty good at martial arts. And I don't think that being a shaman hurts.'
'I know all that. I also know that people have a breaking point-and that if you push them too hard, sometimes they get ugly.' Sarah did not sound like a nagging mother; she sounded like a concerned one. Not worried, but cautious. 'I don't like what I've heard about this Calligan man. He sounds like he's used to getting his own way, and if you cross him-'
She did not complete the sentence, but Jennifer did it for her. 'If I cross him, he is very likely to react badly. So I'll do my best not to cross him.' She hoped the slight smile she wore now crept into her voice. 'If I can manage it, I won't be more than another reporter; I'll try not to let him know what my job really is. If I have to talk to him, I'll try to make him think I'm just a dumb Indian babe.' Now her tone turned ironic. 'Sometimes a prejudice can work for you.'
'That's my smart daughter,' Sarah chuckled. 'I'll give this to your father as soon as he comes in; if you call back tomorrow, he'll probably have a little something for you, if there's anything at all to know.'
'Thanks, Mom,' Jennifer said. 'Now what's all this about quill embroidery?'
They talked of ordinary things for a while longer, then Jennifer hung up when she heard the 'call waiting' click on her mother's side of the line. Besides, she still had some more work to do before she gave up for the night.
She had two lines, one for the phone and one for her computer. She wasn't the only P.I. in Tulsa using a computer, but she thought she might be one of the few to use it to its full potential. There were a lot of databases available to people who knew how to get into them, all of them quite legal to access, so long as you knew how.
A little cross-checking proved that Sleighbow's number was indeed one of the Romulus internal numbers. A little more cross-checking showed that Romulus, like many other companies, had voice mail. And since Sleighbow had said he was going home-
She reached for her phone and dialed his number again. After the fourth ring, there was a pickup. She listened as the voice-mail service told her she had, indeed, reached Sleigh-bow's number and told her how to leave a voice-mail message. She hung up without leaving anything.
But she had learned that Sleighbow worked for who he said he worked for. Now to find out if he had the authority to hire her.
She looked through the database for the number of the live internal operator, and dialed that. After a
