by AULT, SANDI
At the back of the church, I tugged on the arched door and it gave a deep groan, then a wailing sound that whistled down a long hall with doors along each side, which I presumed were the school’s classrooms. I guessed that this wing led to the other big building in the U-shaped compound, probably the living quarters for its residents. I closed the door again, sure that whoever had left the old woman’s body here was long gone.
I needed to get Rooster inside before the blizzard worsened. I pushed and shoved on the chapel’s entrance doors, but just the one would move, and only a few more inches before its sagging hinges drove the bottom of the heavy wood slab into the stone floor. I tried to tug Rooster by his reins so he would muscle into the barrier, but seeing the obstacle before him, he pulled away instead. Finally, I pressed my back into the old door, bent my knees, and gave it all I had. There was a grinding rasp, then the sound of wood cracking as the lower hinge ripped from the frame. I straddled the door, heaved upward, and managed to lift it slightly and drag it back enough to lead Rooster through. Once inside, I attempted to push the door closed again to keep out the frigid air, but the hinge had warped and would not comply. The door stood ajar, snow driving through the opening, and within a matter of minutes, a drift began to build on the inside of the entry.
At the rear of the chapel I hobbled Rooster to keep him from straying. I removed my saddlebags and inventoried my provisions: jerky, two energy bars, some dried fruit, dog cookies, a small bag of oats for the horse. There were matches, toilet paper, a first aid kit, and a good knife. My bedroll, kept dry in a stuff-sack, had an extra set of clothes rolled inside. But my canteens were low—if we stayed more than a night, I’d have to find a way to build a fire and melt some snow.
After I unsaddled the horse, I dressed the small wound below his fetlock, where the wood shard had penetrated, with some antibiotic ointment and a gauze wrap. I shook the bag of oats and offered a handful to Rooster, but he snorted and drew back.
Mountain stood close, watching my every move. “At least there’s one good thing about spending the night here,” I said to the wolf, to whom I often talked, since he was my live-in companion. “It will give Rooster’s leg a chance to rest.” It was so cold that my breath was visible when I spoke, and the layer of ice still frozen to my coat made it heavy and brittle. I held up a stick of jerky. “You want something to eat, buddy?”
The wolf snapped his head to one side, as if the sight of the meat offended him.
I couldn’t have eaten either, if I’d tried.
Since I’d taken my gloves off, my fingers ached and had begun to stiffen. In the cold darkness of the big, empty chapel, the wind gusted in gales, and with each one, a terrible groaning noise emitted from the bell tower. Mountain began to howl as if he could not bear the sorrow of the sound. This was more than I could endure. I went to explore the source of this horrible noise. I stood in the square adobe turret and looked up, the light of my headlamp projecting a few feet above my head. Lashed to iron spikes driven high into the walls, heavy ropes were tied around the old iron bell to keep it from moving, and it strained against the silencing bonds with every squall. As if to demonstrate, a bone-chilling bluster set the ropes to singing, and the hideous groaning sound reverberated against the slick walls of the belfry.
I knew I should roll out my bedroll and try to rest, but I could not bring myself to do it. First, there was the cold—a heavy weight of deepening chill that seemed to sink into the joints. Then there was the hate lingering around the remains of the woman whose final hours had clearly been spent in humiliation. But there was something more: I felt haunted by the sorrows that had seeped into the walls of this place. Even if I tried to sleep here, there would be no peace with that wailing wind.
I decided to explore the premises. Mountain followed as I beamed my flashlight ahead of us, and we pursued the pool of lemon-colored light down the hallway. Inside the first room on the right, several boxes slumped against a wall. The top one contained a cache of old items, including several group photos of the Indian children who had resided at the school.
The first, an aged, sepia-toned print, showed three rows of small boys, nine in each line: the first row seated, the second kneeling, and the third standing in regimental order. They wore brimmed high caps, round-collared coats buttoned to the neck, knickers, socks, and lace-up boots. Every item of their apparel appeared to be gray. No boy could have been more than six years of age, and not one of them had even a hint of happiness in his face. I felt such sadness as I looked at the photo that I set it aside, hoping the next would be a happier scene.
But it was not. The second photo bore the inscription Sewing Class. Eighteen young girls wearing identical sackcloth dresses, dark boots, and stockings sat like automatons in their chairs, which were aligned in a semicircle around baskets on the floor heaped with cloth. Each girl had her sewing in her lap, and looked down at it dutifully. Behind the students, three white women watched sternly over their charges, and five older girls sat at antique-looking sewing machines. On the wall hung a portrait of the Virgin Mary, a length of wire tacked to the top of the frame, allowing it to tilt downward so that the Virgin looked down upon the little children. Dark shades covered the windows; the only light in the photo came from a partly open door. A rack of newly made garments lined one wall. The children were manufacturing clothing.
There were photos of small boys blacksmithing, a picture of students hoeing weeds in an impossibly parched garden, group shots of small soldiers posed in perfect military formation in front of the chapel doors I had just damaged, older girls working in the laundry, and a nighttime glimpse of little tots in white nightgowns kneeling in prayer beside makeshift cots with threadbare blankets on them.
The last photo showed a priest in a long black frock surrounded by twenty or so thin, dark boys perhaps eight to ten years old. The group stood in the front yard of the school—I recognized the chapel with its bell tower. When this picture was taken, two large wooden crosses adorned the top of the chapel’s front wall. One of the boys held a football—at last, a sign that the children were permitted to play! But I was relieved too soon. As I studied the photo further, I saw a small group gathered on the sidelines. A little boy who sat in a wagon had no feet. Another leaned on crutches. Beside him, a pale, emaciated boy with one arm in a sling had a disfigured face covered with boils and sores.
As I studied this last photo, the sound of a disturbance came from the chapel. Rooster whinnied and brayed, and I heard his shoes clattering on the stone floor. Mountain raced ahead of me as I made my way out of the classroom and back to the nave.
The sorrel strained against his tether, rearing and huffing, his eyes fixed on the chapel entry. I followed his gaze. In the spare glow of my headlamp and flashlight, I saw the big cat just inside the door, encroaching on the deceased’s remains. The cougar was thin and ragged, a large place in the meat of her back thigh black with blood. She stood her ground, clearly out of desperation and hunger, and she opened a huge mouth full of powerful, pointed teeth. From deep in her throat, a deafening gnaaagh rang against the walls and reverberated across the room. Mountain charged forward, the hair along the ridge of his back standing spiked, and he gnashed his teeth as he growled and snarled. The cougar hissed and lowered her head, unwilling to concede defeat. The wolf postured, pulling his lips back hard and showing his teeth, lowering into a crouch, only a few yards from the cat.
“Mountain, no!” I yelled, moving toward him as I pushed my hand into the pocket with the gun. With the other hand, I kept the flashlight trained on them. I swallowed hard, tried to calm my voice and yet still be heard over the hissing and growling. “Mountain, stay,” I said. “You stay.”
The two opponents began to circle slowly around the body on the floor, the lion moving clockwise, and Mountain squaring off by shifting directly opposite her. The cougar gave another powerful warning waul, and rotated her huge head to look at me. Mountain lunged across the corpse and toward the cat, who drew up and utte
red such a deep, rumbling growl that I could feel it in my gut. Just a foot from her face, the wolf snarled and snapped, and the cat recoiled from his gnashing teeth, one of her paws poised to slash.
The ear-splitting crack of the gunshot caused them both to freeze, and while the sound was still ringing against the walls, the cougar slithered out the door. Mountain dropped into a crouch and he trembled with fear. I lowered the gun from its skyward aim and blew out my breath. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said, my pulse still racing. “It’s okay.”
But a sleepless night ensued as the living stood watch over the dead—during which time I was plagued by the heartrending voice of the howling wind. It was the sound of wild sorrow.
3
Morning
When the first gleam of alpenglow began to shimmer on the horizon, I saddled Rooster and brought him outside into the dense, cold air. I walked him around the schoolyard, studying his gait. His leg seemed well enough to go the short distance I would need to ride to regain radio contact. The night winds had pushed snow into drifts against the west walls, and patches of white clung to low depressions, but most of it had blown across the mesa toward the mountains to the east.
While Mountain scampered around methodically marking everything in the area, I assembled a pile of large stones and a weathered sign and used them to secure the doorway so the cat could not reenter the chapel. The air was so frigid that even lifting and carrying the heavy stones did not make me break a sweat. When I returned to Rooster to mount up, he had a slick coat of frost on his rump.
I rode east under a thick, dull sky that had nearly strangled the light out of the sunrise, back toward Tanoah Pueblo. As I went, I watched for tracks of any kind that might have led to the school. But the winds had disrupted the soil, leaving the loose dirt of the desert ravaged.
An hour later, I saw the ATV on the horizon. Two men approached at high speed. My field superintendent, Roy, sat in the driver’s seat, and before he could kill the engine, Kerry Reed, my forest ranger boyfriend, flew out of the other side and up to me. “Babe, are you all right?” He took my shoulders in his two hands and looked into my face.
“I’m okay,” I said. “My horse took a big splinter, but he seems fine.”
“Your coat. It’s all torn.” His green-flecked brown eyes were full of worry.
“Yeah, I hit a gate. Rooster threw me.”
By then the Boss had gotten to us. “We’d have been here sooner but I forgot they had fenced that big federal training facility. Had to go around it.” He took Rooster by the reins and examined his fetlock. “How in hell did you end up all the way out here?” Roy said from under the horse.
“I was tracking a cougar,” I said. “Another attack on the pueblo flocks.”
He raised up. “Well, why didn’t you let someone know?”
“I didn’t think I would end up so far out, but when I knew we were closing in on her—”
“Her? It’s a female?”
“Yes. With two young cubs. She’s wounded, and she looks half-starved.”
“You must’ve got a good look at her, then.”
I nodded. “She visited last night.”
Kerry brought water for Mountain from the ATV, and a thermos of hot coffee. He poured some in a cup and handed it to me. I held it between my palms for a moment and watched the steam curl from the surface.
The sound of an engine whined from the east as another ATV approached, rocking and dipping over the rough terrain, disappearing into arroyos and then surfacing seconds later. Soon FBI Agent Diane Langstrom unfolded her long-legged form as she climbed out of the seat and gave me a dutiful smile. “We have got to quit meeting like this,” she said.
In the chapel, Diane circled the corpse with a camera, the flash shooting sparklike rays of white light into the dimly lit space. She snapped a lens cap over the camera’s eye. “With the body frozen, it will be hard to determine the time of death.”
Roy, Kerry, and I watched as she got down on all fours and sniffed the victim’s open mouth, then drew back. She lifted the hem of the dusty black dress and peeked underneath. The men turned away, pretending to examine the chapel’s architecture.
Diane looked up at me. “The body’s been moved since the victim died. There’s signs on the tops of her legs that the blood pooled there, as if she’d spent the first hour or so after death facedown. I don’t see any indication of sexual assault, but we’ll let the medical examiner decide; she’s on the way. These marks on the neck are from a rope. See the crosshatch pattern of the fiber? Nylon rope.”
“Hanged?” the Boss said, looking up at the vigas that spanned the roof.
“No, strangled. If she were hanged, there’d be a sort of upside-down V pattern where the rope pulled up on either side. This is straight around. She was strangled, and from the side, because it’s worse here, on the left—the rope cut right through the flesh of the neck. Somebody made sure it took. I’m going to use my sat phone and make a call,” she said, springing to her feet and dusting off her hands. “This is a hate crime. We got a special unit for that.”
While we waited for the medical examiner to arrive, we split up to look for tire tread marks, footprints, or tracks in the surrounding ground surface, but it proved fruitless since the previous night’s high winds had disturbed the topsoil, and patches of snow still covered some of the recesses. Plus, before I had been aware that it was a crime scene, I’d explored much of the area both on foot and horseback with the wolf alongside. I didn’t mention that Mountain had trounced the corpse in his encounter with the cougar.
I approached Kerry as he crouched on the ground outside the compound wall, examining a pot shard. He looked up the slope to the ruin. “This must have washed down from up there,” he said, rising to his feet. Mountain came over to see what he held in his hand, sniffed the shard with disinterest, and then trotted away. Kerry looked at me. “Babe. What were you doing all the way out here by yourself?”
I shook my head. “I was doing my job.”
“You need to buddy up when you’re this far out of range.”
“Buddy up? We don’t even have enough staff in the winter to man the phones!”
“Well, you can call me if—”
“And you’ll stop working at your job and come help me do mine?”
He turned his head to the side and looked at me, a furrow across his brow that nearly joined his brown eyebrows in the center. “It’s just common sense. You shouldn’t be out this far alone. Even an amateur hiker knows not to venture out by himself into the wilderness.”
I held up my hand. “That’s enough.”
He stepped toward me and tipped my hat brim back. “You have a bad bump there on your forehead.”
“Yeah, the stirrup.”
He chuckled and gave my shoulder a squeeze. “I don’t even want to know.”
Roy strode toward us, pumping his arms. “Jamaica, how long since you fed Mountain?”
“He wouldn’t take any jerky last night, so . . . yesterday morning.”
“Well, I had a big old deer sausage one of the guys gave me and a breakfast burrito I had picked up on the way to work, and that wolf got in the ATV and ate every bite. The whole sausage. Enough for four or five meals. And the burrito, too.”
Mountain slunk up beside me, noting the tone of Roy’s voice.
“I’m sorry, Boss. I should have kept him with me.”
“Damn right you should have. That was enough sausage for a big party! I was looking forward to having some of that.”
“I’ll buy you some sausage when we get back to town.”
Roy huffed out a breath and waved me off. He started to go back to the ATV, but turned and looked at me. “Whatever happened to that cell phone I issued you?”
“I’ve got it.”
He nodded his head, then gave a little snort. “Ever turned it on?”
“Yeah . . . I, yeah.”
“What’s that number again?” He cocked his head slightly.
“The
cell phone? I . . . I don’t know it.”
“You turn it on and use it. Today.”
“It won’t work out here, Boss. There’s no cell phone coverage half of the places I go.”
“So turn it on and use it the other half. I’d just like to be able to keep track of you at least some of the time.”
“Actually, half’s probably an exaggeration. I bet I don’t have cell phone coverage more than ten percent of the time when I’m on the job.”
Roy reached a hand up and toggled his cowboy hat slightly to reposition it on his head. “Use the cell phone. That’s an order.” As he walked away, he muttered, “Damn, it’s cold out here! I didn’t get any breakfast. I’m hungry.”
4
The Silver Bullet
Diane Langstrom and I had worked together on several cases, from cattle mutilation to murder, and we’d become friends over the course of our last investigation. She was an avid practitioner of martial arts, a crack shot, and as good a person to have at your back as anyone could want.
We watched as Kerry rode away on Rooster, headed back to Taos, with Roy idling the ATV behind him.
“This guy that’s coming from the hate crimes unit,” Diane said, “they call him the Silver Bullet.”
“Why?” I asked.
“His name is Sterling—Agent Sterling. He’s a legend in the bureau. I’ve been dying to work with him. I’ve heard stories about him ever since I trained at Quantico.”
“What kind of stories?”
“There are droves. He’s nailed serial killers, kidnappers, even solved cases that had gone completely cold. He’s incredibly fast and highly intuitive. He starts where all the leads have played out for others, and he goes from there. He just thinks differently, thinks of things no one else would. They call him in when they’re all out of options.”
“So he only does hate crimes?”
