by Joseph Flynn
That image pleased Marlene enough to make her smile.
The agent said, “Happy to be of service. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
She gave him a nod of approval and he left.
The agent was wearing a wedding ring, but she knew she could have had him with a wink.
There was the answer for her. For the moment anyway.
Even if Tall Wolf was beyond her reach for the time being, she could still indulge her wiles, hunger and rage on other targets. Since she’d be on her way to Omaha soon, she saw no reason why she couldn’t start there. The idea perked her up.
Once Bodaway had dropped Marlene off at the airport, it was all he could do not to speed away. Reason overcame impulse, though, and he managed to keep to the speed limit. He had a full tank of gas and his list of possible destinations was as long as both continents of the Americas. He could take the Alaska-Canadian highway all the way to Fairbanks. From there, he could hire a bush pilot to take him into deep wilderness at any point of the compass.
Only Bodaway had no desire to go anywhere that might be even colder than Canada.
That still left him with the choice to turn south and get on the Pan-American Highway. That network of roads ran from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska all the way to Ushuaia, Argentina: 30,000 miles of what was described as “motorable road.” There had to be plenty of places to hide out along that enormous stretch of pavement. Warm places. Agreeable locations for both living and hiding.
Try as he might, though, Bodaway couldn’t persuade himself that there was any place he might hide that Coyote wouldn’t be able to find him, should she take up the hunt. To escape her completely, he’d have to leave the planet. Even that might not be a sure bet.
As he approached Interstate 40, he had the choice of turning east or west. He wasn’t sure if one direction might be better than the other for his purposes. With his education and experience in civil engineering, he was sure he could find work pretty much in any big city. After all, he was a military veteran — employers liked well-educated vets, especially those who’d been officers — and thanks to Great-grandfather, he had no criminal record in connection with the theft of the Super Chief.
Alan White River had refused absolutely to implicate any accomplices in that crime. Bodaway had scoured the internet, while in Canada, to make sure he hadn’t been charged in the matter. It warmed his heart that the old man hadn’t cut a deal with the government to reduce his time in prison in return for naming other participants. In Mafia parlance, Great-grandfather had proven himself to be a stand-up guy.
Bodaway wondered if the old man was still in prison. Still alive, for that matter. He’d have to find out. See if he could think of a way to see the old man without being noticed, assuming Great-grandfather had been turned loose and was still drawing breath.
Thinking of Alan White River led Bodaway to wonder about John Tall Wolf. That bastard was the one who’d proven himself to be the old man’s favorite. By all rights, Tall Wolf should be dead. He should have ridden around the bend of that New Mexico mountain on his motorbike and sailed right off the collapsed road and into oblivion.
Only somehow that bitch he’d been with must have overtaken him and stopped both of them from taking the plunge. That and collapse the canopy of his parachute with a rifle shot. He was sure she had been the one to do it because Tall Wolf wasn’t that ruthless.
He’d learned that much about his cousin from internet study.
Still, he wanted to settle matters with the woman who shot him out of the sky and Tall Wolf, before Coyote eventually returned and finished him off. He was sure that was her ultimate plan and …
It came to him in an epiphany. Thinking of Tall Wolf, led him to recall the encounter between Tall Wolf’s adoptive parents and Coyote. She had chased him away from the café table where he’d sat with her, but he hadn’t gone far. He hadn’t been close enough to hear their conversation but he’d been able to see all of them clearly.
Tall Wolf’s parents hadn’t feared Coyote. If anything, their body-language was aggressive. For all he knew, they might have been threatening Coyote verbally. How could they do that? How did they dare to confront her?
He knew from his more recent research of Serafina and Hayden Wolf that they were supposed to have mystical powers. He’d mentally scoffed at the notion. Of course, he’d done the same when Great-grandfather had told him of Coyote … right up to the time she’d had his throat in her teeth.
So, maybe Tall Wolf’s parents did know something he didn’t.
Something he might learn that would allow him to challenge Coyote.
Bodaway bypassed the entrance ramps to I-40 east and west.
He wouldn’t head south either.
He stayed on I-25 and headed north, back to Santa Fe.
By being careful and as close to invisible as he could manage, he would learn everything he could about Serafina and Hayden Wolf. Gain as much knowledge as he could about whatever means they had to stand up to Coyote. Master those skills for himself.
Then he would best both Coyote and Tall Wolf.
He would live up to the meaning of his name, Bodaway.
Fire-maker.
Reduce anyone who got in his way to ashes.
Omaha Reservation — Nebraska
Omaha Chief of Tribal Administration Thomas Emmett greeted John, Dr. Lisle and, most effusively, Alan White River in his office. He had his entire staff with him. He pleaded with White River to spend a night or two on the reservation so that all the Omaha people there, and those who lived within a day’s drive, might come to hear him talk of stealing the Super Chief.
John whispered in Great-grandfather’s ear, “See what I mean about a public-speaking career?”
“I still do not wish to be rich,” White River quietly replied, “but I take your point that I might raise money for good causes.”
He accepted Chief Emmett’s invitation of hospitality.
It didn’t hurt that Dr. Lisle had told him she did indeed get her good looks and her smarts from her grandmother.
After several photos were taken of White River and his smiling hosts, the staff left the office and the remaining guests took seats in front of Emmett’s desk. They got down to business without the benefits of coffee, water or light snacks.
John took the lead by informing Emmett that Dr. Lisle’s laptop computer had been stolen from her laboratory in Washington and that it held data regarding a possible medical breakthrough of the sort that would be worthy of a Nobel Prize.
Emmett momentarily disregarded the crime that had been mentioned and looked at Dr. Lisle with a regard befitting a proud parent.
“I remember you when you were a schoolgirl, Yvette. Always top of your class. You made everyone here so proud.”
Dr. Lisle blushed, lowered her head for a moment and then looked back at Emmett. “Thank you, sir. I’ve always tried hard, but I’m not without my faults. Ones I regret right now. I obviously trusted someone I shouldn’t have, and I didn’t report the theft as quickly as I should have.”
Emmet turned to John for further explanation.
“She turned to Great-grandfather, who then came to me,” he said. Turning to Dr. Lisle, he said, “Tell the chief the idea you shared with me this morning.”
She nodded and said to Emmett, “I know this sounds far-fetched, incredible really, but has anyone recently tried to buy any of the reservation’s land?”
That was indeed a touchy subject for a people who had lost much of their land to governmental coercion and opportunistic swindlers. From the way Emmett’s face darkened and his mouth tightened, the question had clearly struck a nerve.
John took notice and said, “Someone did try to buy tribal land?”
Emmett shook his head.
White River was the one who intuitively understood the situation. “Someone came to you saying he would do the tribe a favor. He was so generous he even would pay for the privilege of helping you.”
Emmett nodd
ed.
“Exactly what kind of a con game was this person trying to sell?” John asked.
The chief said, “It was just yesterday. A Mr. Brice Benard and a soil scientist, Dr. Darnell Elston, came to see me. Mr. Benard said he is looking to buy land adjacent to the reservation, and Dr. Elston found that the land Mr. Benard has his eye on has arsenic contamination caused by airborne contaminants from coal burning. Mr. Benard is willing to pay for bioremediation for both the land he wants to buy and Omaha land so he won’t be building next to a toxic waste site.”
John asked, “Did he say how much he’d be willing to spend to help out the Omaha people?”
“He said it could be ten million dollars or more.”
John looked at Dr. Lisle. “That would be far more than he’d need to collect the microbes he’d need, wouldn’t it?”
“Microbes?” Emmett asked.
Dr. Lisle gave Emmett the layman’s explanation of her work to develop antibiotics that would kill bacteria that had become immune to the present generation of medicines.
Emmett sat back and rested his hands on his midsection. “Damn, we’ve got something really valuable. Thanks to you, Yvette, we now also know it. What’s your plan here?”
She said, “To get my computer back, to get my data from any other machine or server onto which it might have been uploaded. To work as hard as I can to reach my goals. To make any new antibiotic I come up with available to the Omaha and other native peoples first, and then to make it universally available at the cost of production with no profit mark-up.”
John smiled and White River nodded his approval.
Emmett said, “Maybe we could make just a modest profit to benefit the tribe.”
When he saw resistance to that notion in Dr. Lisle’s eyes, Emmett added, “You would have the final say on any expenditure, of course.”
“Very well,” Dr. Lisle conceded. “But think of basic things: a library not a football stadium.”
The chief looked momentarily disappointed, but he said, “As you wish.”
John asked him, “Did Dr. Elston mention where he got his doctorate?”
Emmett said, “It was in the letter Benard sent to me. Michigan State.”
“Give me a second here,” John told the others.
He took out his phone and started Googling. “Well, Michigan State is very highly ranked in soil sciences and …” He searched further. “Dr. Darnell Elston was the head of a department there, but it was the English Department. The good doctor specialized in Elizabethan poetry, and he died in 1976.”
White River said dryly, “Maybe he’s back from the Great Beyond.”
“Or somebody thought the local folks wouldn’t check all that deeply,” Emmett said.
John asked the chief, “Did Mr. Benard leave you a business card? Presumably, he’d want to give you at least a working phone number you could call.”
Emmett handed John a card. “Came with his letter. He told me yesterday his offer would be good only for a week.”
John said, “I’ll contact the FBI and maybe the local police. We’ll find Mr. Benard and have a long talk with him. See if he knows anything about a missing computer … and if by chance he’s acquainted with a fellow named Wilbur Rosewell.”
John got to his feet and shook Chief Emmett’s hand.
Dr. Lisle said she’d stay and introduce White River to her grandmother.
John headed back to the town of Omaha by himself.
Melrose Avenue — Los Angeles, California
After Rebecca and Emily made a quick stop at Fred Segal to pick up a pair of ridiculously priced black jeans for each of them and, more important, the Segal label bags dangling from their hands to show off their affluence, they stepped into Daisy Jane’s Pictures, by its own reckoning the cutting-edge art gallery in town.
Rebecca’s internet search had revealed the gallery was where Jack Murtagh exhibited his work. Confirming Emily’s hunch about the artist’s criminal tendencies, Rebecca also found a Boston Globe story online saying that Murtagh had been arrested in connection with an art-fraud charge. A Boston-area art gallery owner had sold one of Murtagh’s paintings by representing it as a Jamie Wyeth work. The painting was a likeness of a boy just hitting his teens. He was reaching into a dresser drawer with one hand while keeping a sharp eye on a nearby door that was open just a crack.
The overt impression was the kid was about to filch something that didn’t belong to him. Maybe it was his father’s dresser. Maybe the kid was grabbing some money, car keys or a condom. The painting had fetched $25,000. Shortly afterward, the credulous buyer had been informed by a more knowledgable friend that a bargain Wyeth oil painting would sell for ten times the price he’d paid. Also, to the friend’s knowledge, Wyeth hadn’t painted any juvenile sneak-thieves.
The buyer had been further informed that the feeling of the faux Wyeth was more in the spirit of a combination of Norman Rockwell and Mad Magazine. The kid in the painting did bear a certain resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman. All of which led the bamboozled buyer to go to his lawyer and then to the police.
The cops arrested the owner of the gallery that sold the painting and hauled in the artist, Jack Murtagh, too. At the time of his arrest, Murtagh had been seventeen. He told the cops and the Suffolk County assistant district attorney that when he’d sold the painting to the art dealer it was signed: “After Jamie Wyeth by Jack Murtagh.”
After being the art world’s way of saying “in the style of,” he told the authorities.
Young Murtagh also pointed out how crude the brushwork around Jamie Wyeth’s name was compared to the rest of the painting.
“I’ll bet you,” he said, “that guy covered up my name.”
He pointed to the dumbfounded gallery owner, a recent immigrant from Portugal.
Murtagh told the assistant D.A., “You get a good art restorer to remove that sloppy paint, you’ll see what I’m telling you is true.”
The authorities did just that and found exactly what Murtagh had described to them. The gallery owner, who claimed he was new to the art business as well as the country, insisted to the end that he was innocent. He asserted that Murtagh had told him he could make a bundle on the painting, and had paid Murtagh $2,500 for it.
The problem for the novice art dealer was that Murtagh was just a kid, and he had no criminal record. Why would someone like that lie? How would he even come up with such a devious scam? All the gallery owner could tell the authorities and later the judge, was, “That boy is evil.”
The court found the gallery owner guilty of grand larceny, and ruled Jack could keep the $2,500 he’d received as there was no evidence he’d done anything wrong.
When Rebecca and Emily, who’d agreed to call themselves Becky and Em in public, entered Daisy Jane’s gallery, they spotted Jack Murtagh himself, twenty years on from Suffolk County, and a woman they guessed to be Daisy Jane at the rear of the shop. The proprietor and the artist eyed them across the length of the gallery. Daisy Jane’s eyes went first to their Segal bags, then to their shoes and finally to their bracelets and Rebecca’s wedding ring — a tasteful item for which John Tall Wolf had spent a small fortune.
Murtagh looked at the drape of their blouses over their boobs, their legs and their faces, in that order. The corners of his mouth turned up, forming more of a leer than a smile. Daisy Jane was already on her way to greet the new arrivals. Her smile was genuine.
Motivated by the fact that she thought she might have a couple of live ones here.
“Good morning, ladies. Would you like a guided tour of the shop or just browse?”
Rebecca and Emily looked at each other and responded intuitively and simultaneously.
Rebecca said, “Guided.”
Emily said, “Browse.”
They looked at each other and giggled.
Daisy Jane renewed her smile. If she couldn’t make a big sale to these two ninnies …
Emily didn’t wait for further conversation. She walked off to
look at the shop’s paintings. Well, she focused on the art, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see Murtagh watching her. He hadn’t aged badly, going by the online photo and what she saw now, but in person, she could see a predatory gleam in his eyes that the old picture hadn’t captured.
Rebecca took a more direct approach with Daisy Jane. “Who’s the guy back there? He looks like he might steal something.”
The question made the gallery owner blink, before she laughed with real humor.
“He’s no thief,” she said. “That’s Jack Murtagh. He’s my ‘Featured Artist of the Moment.’”
“The moment?” Rebecca said. “Fame is fleeting, huh?”
“In this town, you bet it is,” Daisy Jane said, “but cool lasts forever. And buying something when it’s hot is as cool as it gets.”
Or as foolish as you could get, Rebecca thought, but she didn’t want to seem too argumentative. Instead, she pursued another line of conversation. “So what about the guy back there? Has he painted something that will be cool beyond the next moment or two?”
She noticed that Murtagh was sidling over to Emily.
Leaving one of them unattended was working the way they’d hoped.
Daisy Jane told Rebecca, “Why don’t we take a look around? Maybe you’ll see something you’ll like longer than this year’s hairstyles.”
That made Rebecca laugh. “Okay, let’s do that.”
As they started their tour, she saw Murtagh had just struck up a conversation with Emily. Turning her attention to the art on the walls, Rebecca was hit by conflicting feelings. Murtagh had real gifts. His draftsmanship, composition, color sense, and use of light and shadow were all first rate. Maybe not quite in the class of modern masters, but in the neighborhood.
The thing that spoiled all those fine qualities for Rebecca was that Murtagh insisted on putting someone or something discordant or even downright creepy in every last painting: a group of laughing young kids danced around a sunlit Maypole while a lecherous troll-like figure in the distance kept time with a tapping foot and clapping hands; a teenage couple sitting on a sofa, seen from behind, shared what might be a first kiss while the TV in front of them showed Thelma and Louise driving off a cliff; an elderly man held the hand of an old woman lying in a hospital bed, perhaps to say a final farewell, only he was glancing at his watch as if being kept from something more important.
