Sacred Ground

by Mercedes Lackey

  "I can tell you right now that he hasn't made any friends in this business," Sarah said immediately. "If you asked someone in Tulsa, they would probably talk your ear off, but even out in Claremore we know about him. He's cutthroat, and they say he's cut-rate. Anything he builds never meets more than the absolute minimum standards and whenever he can he builds outside municipal boundaries so he doesn't have to meet city codes."

  "Interesting." That wasn't illegal-but it was cheesy by some standards. And someone who built things that way might be tempted into something just as cheesy.

  Or maybe not. He might not think he was doing anything cheesy-he might think he was simply being a good businessman. He might not even consider shading the truth to get cheaper insurance to be fraud. She'd have to have more information, and she said as much to her mother.

  "Well, I can get it for you, honey," Sarah said cheerfully. "I think Marge had some dealings with him, and you know how Marge loves to talk."

  "Only too well; she cornered me at your last company picnic," Jennifer groaned. "I thought my ear was going to fall off."

  "Jen-I hope you know I worry about you, but I wouldn't ask you to stop what you're doing." Sarah sounded hesitant, but Jennifer knew why. They'd had this little talk before.

  "I know, Mom. You can't help worrying; I'm your kid. You'd worry about any of the guys, too." Jennifer couldn't help smiling. "You also know how good a shot I am, and that I'm pretty good at martial arts. And I don't think that being a shaman hurts."

  "I know all that. I also know that people have a breaking point-and that if you push them too hard, sometimes they get ugly." Sarah did not sound like a nagging mother; she sounded like a concerned one. Not worried, but cautious. "I don't like what I've heard about this Calligan man. He sounds like he's used to getting his own way, and if you cross him-"

  She did not complete the sentence, but Jennifer did it for her. "If I cross him, he is very likely to react badly. So I'll do my best not to cross him." She hoped the slight smile she wore now crept into her voice. "If I can manage it, I won't be more than another reporter; I'll try not to let him know what my job really is. If I have to talk to him, I'll try to make him think I'm just a dumb Indian babe." Now her tone turned ironic. "Sometimes a prejudice can work for you."

  "That's my smart daughter," Sarah chuckled. "I'll give this to your father as soon as he comes in; if you call back tomorrow, he'll probably have a little something for you, if there's anything at all to know."

  "Thanks, Mom," Jennifer said. "Now what's all this about quill embroidery?"

  They talked of ordinary things for a while longer, then Jennifer hung up when she heard the "call waiting" click on her mother's side of the line. Besides, she still had some more work to do before she gave up for the night.

  She had two lines, one for the phone and one for her computer. She wasn't the only P.I. in Tulsa using a computer, but she thought she might be one of the few to use it to its full potential. There were a lot of databases available to people who knew how to get into them, all of them quite legal to access, so long as you knew how.

  A little cross-checking proved that Sleighbow's number was indeed one of the Romulus internal numbers. A little more cross-checking showed that Romulus, like many other companies, had voice mail. And since Sleighbow had said he was going home-

  She reached for her phone and dialed his number again. After the fourth ring, there was a pickup. She listened as the voice-mail service told her she had, indeed, reached Sleigh-bow's number and told her how to leave a voice-mail message. She hung up without leaving anything.

  But she had learned that Sleighbow worked for who he said he worked for. Now to find out if he had the authority to hire her.

  She looked through the database for the number of the live internal operator, and dialed that. After a moment, a real person answered.

  "Do you have the number for the accounting department?" she asked.

  The operator was perfectly happy to give it to her, and then, somewhat to her surprise, added, "Since it's month-end, there are probably a lot of people still down there. Would you like me to put you through now?"

  "Yes, please!" Jennifer replied, trying not to sound as surprised as she felt. If she could confirm Sleighbow's authority to hire her, she could be on this case tonight.

  A few more hours to chalk up to the Romulus account wouldn't hurt.

  The phone rang through, and someone picked it up. Jennifer explained who she was, and why she was calling, and the young man at the other end replied, "I'm just a programmer, man, but hold on a sec, I'll get the supervisor."

  This was going better than she had any reason to expect.

  Five minutes later, she hung up the phone, still blinking in pleased surprise. Not only had she confirmed that she had been hired by someone with the authority to do so, but the supervisor of accounting had laughed, and told her he'd seen the account with her name on it opened just before quitting time.

  She pinched herself, just to make certain this wasn't some kind of dream.

  Then again-

  She sobered, suddenly. There were usually reasons for things going this well, early in a case. It meant that the case itself was going to be a bitch.

  Well, if it's going to be that bad, I'd better get on it tomorrow early, while my luck is still running. She closed down computer and modem, picked up her purse, and headed back out. And meanwhile, I'd better make a good grocery run, because I bet I won't have time for one once this heats up.

  As she passed him in the living room, Grandfather looked up, and gave her one of his Patented Inscrutable Expressions.

  Now what in the hell was that all about? she wondered. With him, it could be anything from toilet paper on my shoe to the fact that I'm about to walk into a trap and he doesn't feel like telling me about it.

  As she closed the front door behind her and headed for the truck, the shrill klee-klee-klee of a bird screamed out above her head. She looked up.

  There was her Spirit Animal, a kestrel, sitting on the phone line above her head. The little falcon, a female by her markings, stared down at Jennifer and screamed again.

  "That's easy for you to say," Jennifer retorted, inserting her key into the lock. "You don't have to live with him!"

  _CHAPTER FIVE

  rod calligan had not expected so many reporters to show up; he would have thought by now, after a day had passed, that the explosion was old news. He managed to send the last of the reporters packing, turned away to his car, and straightened his tie, just in case there was a camera still operating somewhere around. This was a hell of a way to spend a hot afternoon, standing out in the direct sunlight, courting a sunstroke. One of the advantages of being the boss was setting your own hours, and he liked to take his afternoons off. It was well past the time he'd usually have been home, and he was damned tired of nosy reporters demanding answers to questions they had no right to ask. What did his wife have to do with this, anyway? He was angry, but he hoped he had not showed anything other than contempt for the "reporter" in question. This had not been in the plan, and he had not been prepared to face all those inquisitors. Still, he thought he'd handled it all pretty well. He'd managed to field their questions cautiously and carefully, and he thought he might have succeeded in planting the idea that the explosion had been the fault of terrorists. He hadn't actually come out and said that terrorists did it, but he'd talked about the vandalism and sabotage at laboratories that used animals, and the spiking of trees in logging areas. He'd even managed to work in the supposed trouble with Indians in almost the same sentence, so without actually coming out and accusing anyone, he figured plenty of people would put two and two together for themselves. With luck, one or two of them would be reporters; there was a right-wing regional rag that would probably report things that way. There were plenty of people around here who thought Indians were trash; they'd be only too happy to believe anything bad about them. The neo-Nazis and skinheads would probably start rumors for him.

>   The jerk at Romulus had sure been a pain, though. His regular man had been away from his desk when he'd called in the bombing, and that Sleighbow was a suspicious bastard. He had as many questions as the reporters. "Why didn't you say anything about these threats before?" "And when, exactly, did you start getting phone calls?" "Did you save the letters?" "Why didn't you report this to the police?"

  He thought he'd gotten through that all right, but he'd better make sure. Before he headed home, maybe he'd better check up on the state of things at Romulus. It didn't do to have loose cannon rolling around on the deck. He got into his car, started it and the A/C, and dialed the contact number on his cellular phone, savoring the cool sterility of the air-conditioned breeze coming from the vents.

  This time his man was in.

  Calligan let out a sigh of relief, although if John hadn't been there, this time he could simply have hung up. There had been a certain amount of urgency about getting the explosion reported to Romulus; now he could afford to take things the way he had planned them. He explained what had happened, quickly. "I got assigned to a guy named Sleighbow, a real company man. He gave me some trouble. What's he doing about this?"

  "Call me from your office," the man said. "I'll have to check his desk. I saw him leave, so that shouldn't be a problem. Just let it ring until I pick up." There was a click, and Calligan hung up quickly. No use paying for minutes of cellular for nothing but an open line.

  Calligan stared out the windshield at the remains of the bulldozer, a little smile on his face, then drove the short distance to the site office, a portable trailer. He had an auxiliary office and phone in there. He'd be alone; the secretary was long gone, since he'd sent everyone at this site home early. There would be no problems with being overheard. He wouldn't have that security at home.

  The window in his office looked out over the same area of course, though from a different angle. There were still police swarming all over the remains of the dozer, but it looked to him as if they had gotten everything they were going to. After all, they'd had all night and all this morning to glean clues. And there were a couple of cars and trucks parked off on the shoulder, their occupants peering out the windows at all the activity. Bunch of ghouls, he thought with contempt. They were no better than the bloodsucking reporters, who wanted to know "how extensive the injuries were."

  He allowed his smile to become a grin now that there was no one to see it. The explosion had worked perfectly, all according to plan. The dynamite came from the company stores, a shed most of the construction workers had access to. The detonator came from there, too. And the garage-door opener came from K-Mart. There was nothing to trace back to him that couldn't lead back to anyone on the crew as well.

  His hand went to his inside jacket pocket, and he took out a palm-sized bundle of what seemed to be soft, mahogany-brown leather. It was wrapped around other things, bones, feathers, who knew what; old, brittle, and dark with age. He put it on the blotter and fondled it as he picked up the phone with his other hand. He left it alone just long enough to dial the number of his contact, and then went back to caressing it.

  His good-luck piece, he thought. And grinned again.

  It had been a real piece of good luck, finding this thing, although it was not the sort of object he would normally have touched, much less picked up and taken with him. After acquiring it, he'd visited one of the Indian museums to try and identify it. He thought it might be a fetish bundle; it looked like the ones in the museum. Whatever it was, finding it had given him the key to making this whole scheme work.

  He still remembered, clear as day, when he'd found it. . He had come across it right after the flood on Mingo Creek-the one his Mingo development had caused. Not that he'd ever told anyone. He hadn't really expected any problems, at least, not that soon. Just because he'd paid off the team doing the environmental-impact statement to ignore that little drainage problem that Sunnyvale was going to produce-

  Of course, they hadn't dared admit that, or they'd have been in just as much trouble as he would. So everybody had kept their mouths shut, and the worst thing that had happened was that a bridge had gotten washed out along with some creek bank, and the Army Corps had extended their flood-control project on Mingo to go a bit above Owasso. No big deal. Too bad that bridge was gone-there wasn't enough money in the county budget to cover replacing it, so the hicks in the sticks would just have to do without it. It didn't make a lot of difference to him.

  They'd said that a big chunk of land had gotten washed out, that Mingo had temporarily changed its course, and the Army Corps had to put in a fair amount of work to get it to go back to its bed. Well, that was baloney. Rivers and streams changed their beds all the time in Oklahoma. They couldn't point the finger at him, or at anybody. It just happened.

  But he'd had to take a stroll down there himself, when it had happened, just to make sure that there was nothing that could point to him and his development as the cause. That was when he'd found his good-luck charm.

  The little fetish bundle was simply lying on the ground beside the now-shrunken stream, in the middle of a flat patch of sand, as if it was waiting for him. God only knew where it came from; it was as clean as it was now. He picked it up.

  And he still didn't know why. But ever since that moment, things had been going all his way.

  Even then, the Riverside Mall project was sinking like a lead boat. There were no stores signed up, and no prospect of any. It was a combination of the abysmal economy and the fact that there was no one who was fool enough to sign up for a site that was inevitably going to flood some time in the next twenty years. Tulsa summers were getting wetter, not drier; "hundred-year floods" were happening every couple of years.

  He had a choice at that point; close the project down and take a loss, or keep going and chance a bigger one. But the rest of the investors in the project would demand their money back, and that would be a disaster.

  Until he picked up the bundle-and "John Smith" at Romulus Insurance gave him that fateful little call. His name wasn't Smith, of course, but that was how Rod was told to refer to him from the time of that conversation.

  It started badly, with "John Smith" telling him he'd been checking into the Riverside Mall project for Romulus, and that it didn't look good. That he didn't see how Romulus could possibly insure a project that was going to go under at any moment.

  Rod tried to bluff; John Smith wasn't having any.

  But then the conversation took an abrupt U-turn. Smith suggested that he might "forget" some of the things he'd uncovered in his report, for a price. But that wasn't all Smith had in mind.

  "You're a good businessman, Mr. Calligan," Smith had said. "Let me make you a proposition."

  John suggested that there might possibly be a way to close down the project and still turn a profit-if he could find a way to get some kind of extremists or terrorists to close the project down for him because of sabotage.

  He was holding the bundle at the time, and that was when the entire plan sprang into his mind, as if it had been placed there. He and Smith had most of the details worked out between them before he'd hung up.

  First, he would go to a remote Indian burial ground on private land, a place he knew existed because he had camped and hunted there as a young boy. The place was supposed to be haunted, and none of his friends would stay there overnight or take any of the artifacts that occasionally surfaced in the area. Now he was glad he knew it existed, because it was going to be the key to his plan. He would dig up some of those graves, take the bones and artifacts, and seed his own site with them.

  He would wait until his men uncovered the planted "graves"-and being superstitious Indians, they would, of course, raise a fuss. Probably they would even refuse to continue working there; certainly they would refuse to work until he brought in some kind of witch doctor. He would order them to continue digging and to burn what they found-and if they were not already refusing to work, that would ensure that they walked off the job. Then he wo
uld arrange a "terrorist bombing" that he could blame on the Indian activists.

  While he was setting all this up, he would be siphoning development money into a fund at Romulus; probably some kind of investment fund that he and John Smith had access to. He would invoice things he had not purchased and put the cash into the fund. He could blame the Indians for stealing the supplies, too. Once the first bombing took place, he would have a scapegoat. Indian activists.

  He could then stage several more "accidents," giving credence to the idea that Indian activists had turned to terrorism. Then he would complete the plan with a final bombing that would destroy the office, his office computers, and all the records, covering his embezzlement.

  At that point, he could even declare bankruptcy; it was about time to get out of the development game in Oklahoma anyway. The gravy train had run out a long time ago, and the economy of this region was not likely to get better until the year 2000: He wasn't prepared to wait around, working on piddly shit, until that happened. He could try something else. Ostrich farming, maybe; there would be good money in it for a while.

  Whether or not he declared bankruptcy was secondary anyway. He'd also be able to collect insurance money from Romulus. So, he would have his secret nest egg, shared with John Smith, and his insurance payment.

  Well, right now he'd worry about Phase One: making sure all the blame for the bombings and other sabotage fell on the damn Indians. With any luck, he could make himself look really good-make a big point about how he'd gone out of his way to get them jobs, and carry on about ingratitude and superstition. He'd have to wait until the press came out and asked him if the rumors of Indian terrorists were true, but the way he figured it, that should happen some time later in the week. Certainly it would happen as soon as the second bomb went off.

  The phone rang on. Periodically, Rod would hang up and hit the redial button, just to end the monotony. Smith picked up his phone, finally. And as always, Calligan activated the tape recorder. He had all kinds of recordings and paper trails, just in case. It always paid to have "insurance". . . .