EIGHTEEN
They stood on the lonely stretch of Interstate 5 outside Rogue River, Oregon, where Timothy Little had met his death, dusk just beginning her first warnings, the western sky enormous, entertaining no clouds, stern and grim and going on forever. This particular stretch of highway was all loneliness and silence, alloyed with the vague and trivial life of insects. The roadbed here rose ahead of them on a slant that took a sharp curve and a hill ahead. In the median there were trees, a thick copse of jack pine and fir wherein black holes peeped out at them. Anyone or anything could be hidden in the dense woods around the scene of the murder.
If it were a setup, there could be no better isolated spot to attack long-awaited prey. Other than the black tire marks of the single vehicle, there was no indication a chase took place, no second set of squealing tires.
“If we're here, looking at where the car came to rest,”
Lucas said to Harold Lempel, “then whereabouts did you decide Little first lost control of the car?”
“Back up yonder,” Harold pointed.
'Take us back there, please.”
There was nothing save a police marker to indicate what horror had taken place here two nights before. Harold backed the squad car along the shoulder. Passing motorists, seeing his flashing lights, slowed, but not by much, children in back seats waving naively and wildly at them.
In a moment, they came to the spot where Little's tire marks indicated he was first in trouble. Lucas and Meredyth climbed from the squad car to have a cursory look at the black tire marks snaking all over the road.
Meredyth asked Deputy Lempel, “Your office has gotten no calls from witnesses; absolutely no one saw anything?”
“Not squat, Doctor. People must've seen something, flashing lights twirling with the car, something, but no… nobody wants to get involved.”
Lucas looked up and down the roadbed, his attention again going to the median across from them. Once more a stand of trees provided a dark cave in the crook of a bend just before the motorist would reach the bridge up ahead. Lucas walked across the asphalt to the median, stepped past road kill, and walked toward the trees, while the others stared after him. He pointed toward the trees ahead and shouted across the roadway, saying, “I'm going down there to have a look.”
Two cars sped by, making it impossible to hear him. He went toward the grassy tree oasis some hundred or so yards off to the left.
“What's your friend doing?” Harold asked Meredyth.
“He's part Indian,” she said with a shrug, which seemed to say it all.
“A tracker, you mean?”
She had read somewhere in Stonecoat's file that he listed among his abilities hunting and trapping and tracking, all lessons learned from his days on the reservation near Huntsville, Texas, where he had grown up.
“We scoured the whole area. He ain't going to find anything in the median anyway.”
Both the deputy and Meredyth put their dark glasses on. It had been a brilliant morning in which white struggled against the blue sky of an Oregon afternoon, one of those days when the wind tells you you're lucky to be alive so you can breathe it in, and now the sun in the west blinded them with golden plumes, making it difficult to see just what Stonecoat was up to. In fact, it was as if the Indian had walked into a time warp. He had essentially disappeared. Meredyth could just barely pick out his form. He was camouflaged by the stand of trees he now knelt among.
She studied Lucas, thinking how changed he seemed since that day she had followed him into the bar where he was drinking on duty, the same day he had taken on two would-be robbers at a gas station. He was a crazy man.
Kneeling at a spot just in front of the trees at a crook in the road, just ahead of the bridge overpass where cars sent jeweled reflections back at her, the Indian seemed to be praying. Lucas was staring hard at the ground, almost sniffing it the way a hunting dog might.
“He's found something. Come on,” she told Harold.
When they caught up to Stonecoat, he was sitting cross-legged in the grass, a faint smile on his smug face, his hands extended to cover his find. 'Tire marks, clean and untouched. The killers fired from this position, no doubt about it. And if you search the woods over there, you might even find a third arrow shaft, one that missed the car completely.”
“Hell,” complained Harold, “anybody might've pulled in here for a rest or a camp. How can you know what you're saying is even half true?”
“Not just anybody carries these.” he countered, lifting a steel arrow shaft between two fingers at the feathers.
“God Almighty…”
“They left tracks this time.” said Meredyth.
Lucas quietly agreed. “Many more tracks here than at the butchering sight.” He pointed out three separate, distinct shoe prints. “It's a bit more soggy here from the rains. When did it last rain hereabouts. Deputy?”
Harold looked at the evidence of at least three sets of footprints here, all male, all adult. He shrugged off the question about rain.
“Now it looks like the work of at least three men,” said Lucas.
Harold scratched the back of his head, staring at the shoe prints in the mud here. “Damn, maybe Sheriff's right… maybe it was our local union boys.”
“Drunks aren't going to hit that target down there,” said Lucas, pointing back to the deputy's windshield. Meredyth had to agree. “Whoever did this was stone sober and very, very good…”
“Very good with a high-powered, scoped crossbow with infrared targeting equipment, top of the line.” Lucas stood up, grimacing with a sudden stab of pain, hiding it by averting his face. He then asked Harold, “At least two hundred fifty, maybe three hundred pounds on the bows. That kind of power means high-tech equipment. Do you know anybody around here with that kind of hunting equipment?”
“Couple of folks, maybe. 'Course, Billings's old hunt club store carries some pretty high-tech items. We could start there.”
The quick trip around town to the people who might know something about high-tech crossbows proved a monumental waste of time. They were all Disney characters, as if they'd stepped out of another time period, their smiling, ingratiating ways making them either Step ford Wives or simply pure and honest village folk. Everywhere the Houston authorities went, they heard the same lament about Timothy Little. “Just awful, and him such a fine man who done so much for our area…”
To save time and taxpayers' money, they decided to fly back late the same night, allowing the locals to run their string of arrests out on their own. Harold's boss, Sheriff Lowell Barnette, only surfaced at the airport to see them off. He remained convinced that the killers were a pack of local boys who had it in for Little.
Barnette was a huge man, intimidating, with leather for skin. He looked genetically suited to the hardships of the outdoors. Robust and powerful, his forehead massive, creating a hanging cliff over his dark, brooding eyes, the man merely shook his head over Stonecoat and Meredyth, apologizing brusquely for not having had time to monkey-cart them around all day. as he put it, punctuating with the phrase “damn that, damn that,” and finishing with. “But, by God, I have a hell of a situation on my hands here, folks, and I'm specting the FBI in any time, and there's some confessions to get before then. But I know what I can do for you…”
“What's that. Sheriff?”
“I can give you a crack at these boys we got locked up.”
“Is that right? Well, we'd like to, but we got folks waiting for us in Houston,” countered Stonecoat. 'Thanks all the same.”
“You got some pure Injun blood in you, don't you, boy?”
Meredyth watched Lucas's reaction to this with interest. He showed no sign of displeasure.
“Some of the best,” replied Lucas.
“What're you, then? Coming from Texas, does that make you Coushatta,” he massacred the name, “Apache, a li'l of both?”
“Cherokee, but I break bread from time to time with the Coushatta and the Apache-what's left of them.”
