Kitty Takes a Holiday

A man named David O'Farrell showed up in a series of articles. This was Ben's father, who at the time owned a ranch near Loveland. He was arrested several times on ille­gal weapons charges and went straight to the top of the fist of people suspected of being the head of the Mountain Patriot Brigade, one of a network of paramilitary groups that gath­ered and trained in the backcountry, with the ultimate goal of defending by force their right to use public lands. Through the early nineties they had almost constant confrontations with local law enforcement—except in a few cases where local law enforcement happened to be members.

Eight years ago, after lengthy FBI surveillance and a carefully prosecuted case, Ben's father had been con­victed on various felony weapons violations and conspir­acy charges. He was still in prison.

The name Cormac Bennett didn't show up in conjunction with the Mountain Patriot Brigade in any of the articles and references I found. He'd never been arrested or suspected of any wrongdoing as part of the group. Espinoza's infor­mation about him came from FBI and police reports about the group. Young Cormac didn't rate the attention that the group's leaders did. He hadn't been considered a threat. But the association was there, especially since he was David O'Farrell's nephew.

I found another newspaper article, from a couple of years earlier than all the Mountain Patriot Brigade busi­ness, that featured Cormac. It reported on the strange death of Douglas Bennett. The coroner reported that the forty-eight-year-old had been mauled by an animal, possibly a bear or a very large dog. The police, on the other hand, claimed that he'd been murdered by a deranged assailant. Douglas's sixteen-year-old son, Cormac, had witnessed the attack, and shot dead the assailant. The police had the all-too-human body, with Cormac's rifle bullet in its head and Douglas's flesh between its teeth. The shooting was deemed a case of self-defense. No charges were filed against Cormac, who went to live with his aunt's family, the O'Farrell clan. His mother had died in a car accident when he was five.

It was deja vu, this disagreement between the witnesses and the coroner's report. And Cormac had been in this situation before. Cormac had killed his first werewolf when he was sixteen years old. 1 didn't even know what to think about that. Once, I asked Cormac how he'd become a werewolf and vampire hunter, where he'd learned the tricks of it. He said it ran in the family. Which might explain why Douglas was in a position to get mauled to death in the first place, and why Cormac was there to wit­ness it: Douglas had been training him.

I wondered what his mother would have thought of that, if she'd been alive to see it.

I printed off that article and a dozen or so others. By then, it was dinnertime. I called the hotel room, but no one answered. That meant Ben was either off being lawyerly— I hoped—or he was moping. I took a chance and picked up a pizza and beer for dinner.

When I got back to the room, Ben was there. Doing a little of both, it seemed: my laptop was on, plugged into the phone jack, and papers were spread over the table and half the bed. But he sat in the chair, staring at the wall. I couldn't even say that he was thinking hard. He was back in that fugue state.

He jumped when the door opened, clutched the arms of his chair, his mouth open slightly, like he was about to growl. He calmed down almost immediately, slouching and looking away. Tense —just a little.

'Hungry?' I said, trying to be nonchalant.

'Not really.'

'When was the last time you ate?' He only shook his head. 'You ought to eat something.'

'Sure, Mom.' He gave me the briefest flickers of a glance—half accusing, half apologetic. I must have glared at him. I didn't appreciate the label. I didn't appre­ciate having to behave like that label.

He cleared a spot on the table where I deposited the pizza.

I pulled my stack of papers out of my bag and set them between us. I'd put the one about Cormac's father on top. A grainy, black and white picture of the man occupied the middle of the page. He'd been lean and weathered, with short-cropped, receding hair. In the picture, a candid snapshot, he was smiling at something to the left of the camera, and wearing sunglasses.

Ben stared at it a moment, his expression blank. I thought 1 knew him pretty well by now, but I couldn't read this. He was almost disbelieving. Then, his lips quirked a smile.

Finally, he said, 'I'd forgotten about that picture. It's a good one of him. Uncle Doug.' He shook his head, then looked at me. 'You've been busy.'

'Yeah. It's funny how much of your family's history is plastered all over the newspapers.'

He started shuffling through the articles. 'Real busy.'

'Just remember that the next time you think you can keep a secret from me.'

'Why go to the trouble?'

'I wanted to make sure that you and Cormac aren't bad guys. I have to say, you have kind of a creepy past. When you say this stuff doesn't matter, I really want to trust you.'

'I'm not sure that's such a great idea. You might be bet­ter off on your own. Get out of Dodge while the getting's good.'

We were pack. I'd see this through. 'I'll stick around.'

'I haven't seen my father in over ten years. We had a throw-down screaming match over this Patriot Brigade garbage. I was twenty, first one in my family to go to col­lege and so full of myself. I was educated.' He gave the word sarcastic emphasis. 'I knew it all, and there I was to throw it back in the face of my poor benighted father. And he was so full of that right-wing nut-job rhetoric… 1 left. Cormac was still there, helping him work the ranch. That's the only reason he got tangled up with that crowd, was because of my father. When I left, so did he. 1 still don't know if it was something 1 said that convinced him. Or if we'd just spent so much time looking out for each other—we were already kind of a team, then.

'Dad called me right before that last trial. I'd just passed the bar. He wanted me to represent him. I said no. I'd have said no even if we were on good terms. He really needed someone with experience. But all Dad heard was that his only son, his own flesh and blood, was turning his back on him. The funny thing about it all, I wanted to convince him he was wrong. There wasn't a govern­ment conspiracy out to get him, I wasn't trying to sell him down the river. But everything that happened, from the FBI wiretaps to me walking out on him, confirmed every­thing in his mind. He's too far gone to come back.'

'You haven't been to see him. You haven't talked to him at all,' I said. 'Do you want to? Do you think you should?'

He shook his head. 'I made a clean break. We're all better off if it stays that way. Cormac and I always kind of knew that something he'd done in the past would come back to haunt him. I didn't think it would be this.' He tossed the printouts back on the table.

'Where's your mom?'

'She divorced my dad after thirty years of marriage, sold the ranch to pay his legal expenses, and is now work­ing as a waitress in Longmont. And that's the whole story of my sordid, screwed up family.' He shook his head absently. 'You know what's always gotten to me? My dad and I aren't that different. It's where we came from, that whole independent rural culture. I remember telling him, yeah, sure, take back the government, put it back in the hands of the people. That's great. But you're not going to do it with a stockpile of dynamite and hate speech. Me—I went to law school. Thought I'd work the system from the inside, sticking it to the man.' His smile turned sad. 'Maybe we were both wrong.'

I wanted to hug him and make silly cooing noises. That Mom thing again. He had this traumatized look to him. Instead, 1 hefted the grocery bag. 'I brought beer.'

'My hero,' he said, smiling.

We settled down to beer and pizza. 'What have you been working on?'

'Precedents,' he said. 'You'd think in a state where half the population totes around guns in their glove boxes this sort of thing would have come up before. We have a Make My Day law for crying out loud. But there isn't too much out there to cover if you shoot something thinking it's a wild animal, then it turns out to be a person.'

'Except for the werewolf that killed Cormac's dad.'

'Which isn't going to help Cormac's case at all if the prosecutor digs it up, so I'd really appreciate it if you didn't draw anyone's attention to it. Judges get nervous when weird things keep happening to the same person.'

I turned an invisible key at the corner of my mouth. 'My lips are sealed.'

He gave me a highly skeptical look. I wanted to argue—then realized I couldn't, really. We fell into a moment of silence, eating and drinking. He stared at the computer screen as if it would offer up miracles.

'How did the rest of your day go?' I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

'Pretty well, I think,' he said, but the tone was ambivalent, and he still looked exhausted instead of fired up. 'Tony's going to stick around to give a statement, Alice is downright enthusiastic about testifying. She seems to think she owes you a favor. But you know what? 1 keep running into that same problem.'

'What problem? I don't see a problem. Eyewitnesses, that's what you need, that's what you have. Isn't it?' I had the feeling he was about to tangle me up in some legal loophole.

'Why were we all there in the first place?' he said.

I wasn't sure I could explain it anymore. It seemed so long ago. 'We were going to remove Alice's curse. Tony said he had a ritual.'

'Magic. Witchcraft,' he said curtly. 'So how do you convince the legal system that this is real? That when Tony and Alice talk about casting their spells, they're serious, and it's real. That they're not crackpots. I'm afraid Espi­noza's going to use that angle to discredit their testimony. He'll say, of course a couple of people who are out in the woods at dusk lighting candles and burning incense are going to think up some story about how this woman really turned into a wolf. Of course they'll say that even shot through the chest and dying she was a threat because she was a skinwalker. He'll say they're as deluded as Miriam was and therefore their testimony is suspect.'

He was twisting the words, manipulating the story. Just like a lawyer. Just like Espinoza. Ben was thinking of all the angles, but none of them seemed to work in our favor.

'So you can't use their testimony.'

'Oh, I'm going to use it and hope for the best. Maybe I'm wrong and Espinoza won't shoot them down.'

This was looking grimmer and grimmer. Grasping at straws. 'What about Marks? He had it in for me in the first place—that 's why we were at the cabin when Miriam attacked. Can't you use that to discredit him as a witness?'

'If you want to sue Alice and Sheriff Marks for harass­ment, I'm all for it. I think you have a good case against them. You don't even have to bring up magic to prove that leaving dead dogs in someone's yard is harassment. But it's a different case. I'll certainly bring it up, but the judge might decide that a suit against Marks doesn't have any bearing in the case of Miriam Wilson's death.'

The pizza had gotten cold and I'd lost my appetite. Ben wasn't eating either.

'The whole thing seems rigged,' I said. 'It's not fair.'

'Welcome to the American justice system.' He raised his bottle of beer as if in a toast.

'Cynic.' I pouted.

'Lawyer,' he countered, grinning.

'Ben. Drink your beer.'

I went to see Sheriff Marks the next morning. I told Ben 1 was taking a walk to the grocery store for donuts.

Carefully, I approached the front desk at the sheriff's department like it was a bomb. I asked the woman work­ing there, a nonuniformed civilian, 'Hi, is Sheriff Marks in? Could I speak to him?'

'Yes, I think he is. Do you have an appointment?'

'No,' I said, wincing. I fully expected Marks to refuse to see me. But I had to try.

The receptionist frowned sadly, and I tried not to be mad at her. She was just doing her job. 'Then I'm afraid he probably won't be available, he's very busy—'

'It's all right, Kelly.' Marks stood in the hallway to the side, just within view. His expression was guarded, point­edly bland, like he'd expected me to be here all along and didn't mind. He knew his