Blood Trail

Joe shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on anymore.”

Nate and Alisha exchanged a long look. Joe stared. He felt Marybeth’s hand on his arm.

“Joe, do you have a minute? There’s something I want to show you.”

He looked at her, puzzled at what could be of such importance. She looked back wide-eyed, nodding, urging him on.

“Excuse me,” he said, getting up, following her from the kitchen and up the stairs to their bedroom.

“What?” he asked.

“Joe, you can be so dense sometimes,” she said, shaking her head. “Can’t you see what’s going on?”

“No, obviously.”

“Those two are deeply in love.”

“That I can see.”

“It’s not just that,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Nate wants to tell you something but Alisha isn’t sure she wants him to. She thinks he’d be breaking a confidence with her, and he’s asking her permission to do that. Alisha can’t decide if Nate’s relationship with you is more important than his relationship with her.”

Joe was flummoxed. “How can you possibly figure that out? Is that why she’s so angry with me? And what relationship are you talking about with me? Sheesh.”

She shrugged. “Trust me on this.”

“How can I look at them and not see any of that?” Joe asked. “How is that possible?”

“This is why you need me,” she said, smiling. “You can be as thick as a brick sometimes.”

He agreed. “So what is it Nate wants to tell me?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s about Alisha and Shannon—or Shenandoah Yellowcalf, and probably what Shenandoah has told Alisha about Klamath Moore. You know how it can be on the reservation—they don’t like to openly air their dirty laundry, and I don’t blame them. Alisha has let Nate inside, and he respects that. You should too.”

“But we’re talking about murders here,” Joe said. “I don’t care about reservation gossip.”

She sighed.

“What?”

“You might need to prepare yourself for losing him,” she said. “I hope you’ll be okay with that.”

Joe made a face. “Are we back to the relationship thing again? Come on, Marybeth, we just work together.”

“He may choose her and her secrets, is all I’m saying.”

“This is getting too complicated,” he said.

“It is what it is,” Marybeth said ruefully.

He turned and opened the closet and squatted down, shoving old boots and shoes aside and reaching for a cardboard box.

Marybeth asked, “What are you doing?”

“Looking for some old notes,” he said, sliding the box out and taking the lid off. “I’ve kept all of my old patrol journals since I was a trainee. I’m looking for the one from when I worked under Vern Dunnegan.”

“I despise that man.” She shuddered.

“Me too,” Joe said, digging through the thick spiral notebooks until he found the one from nine years before.

WHEN JOE and Marybeth returned to the kitchen, Nate was still at the table but Alisha was across the room, leaning against the counter. She was stoic, avoiding his eyes, and Joe could tell nothing about what had gone on in their absence.

Nate cleared his throat, said, “When you told me about the governor hiring that master tracker and Randy Pope personally overseeing the murder of the hunters, it struck me as all wrong.”

Okay, Joe thought, Nate and Alisha had come to an understanding.

Joe said, “How so?”

“It was typical law-enforcement procedure. Get the experts in to look at the physical evidence, try to figure out what was going on scientifically. And when Klamath Moore showed up it established a motive and a philosophy for the murders. You all put yourself in that particular stream of thought and never got out of it. You’re like trout sitting in a channel waiting for insects to come to you. When the insects stop coming, you don’t move to another part of the river. You just sit there, finning in one place, wondering why you’re getting hungry. You, Joe Pickett, are right there with the rest of ’em in that stream.”

Joe nodded, said, “Finning,” with a hint of sarcasm. He was used to Nate’s circular and obscure reasoning and had learned to let it play out, see where it led. Sometimes it wound up nowhere, in the ether.

“There’s nothing wrong with hiring experts and gathering evidence and doing forensics tests and all of that,” Nate said, “but without on-the-ground intelligence it’s all just technical jerking off. It gives bureaucrats something to do. I learned a long time ago when I worked for the government myself that there is no substitute for intelligence, for talking to people where they live. By being sympathetic, actually listening to what they say and sometimes what they don’t. By doing that, you might find a whole other way to look at what’s going on.”

Joe flashed back to what Marybeth had told him upstairs, how they had both looked at Alisha and Nate and seen different things.