The Thirteenth Skull

by Bonnie Ramthun

  “A tarp. He thought it was going to rain and they were short a tarp,” Paul said.

  “Did it rain that day?” Eileen said.

  “No,” Paul said.

  “That must have been the day he found it,” Lucy said. Zilla had dozed off. Lucy smoothed Zilla’s soft head, her face in frowning thought. “Where was Jorie Rothman? And Beryl Penrose?”

  “They were already on their way to the funding meeting in Laramie,” Paul said.

  “Separately, or together?” Eileen asked. She had a little notepad and she flipped it open to make some notes. Joe swung his legs onto her lap so she rested the notepad against his shins. It was a very unprofessional position, but she didn’t care. She loved the sensation of his legs resting against her lap. It was frustrating to think about spending the night apart when they hadn’t seen each other in so long. But her parents’ rules were unbending and she had no intention of breaking them. After all, tomorrow there was the potential for a walk in the woods with a picnic lunch and a big blanket, murderer or no murderer.

  “Separately, I think. They each brought their own cars up here, unlike Howie and his crew. But they aren’t on vacation. They knew they’d have to travel back and forth from the University of Wyoming in Laramie,” Paul said.

  “Okay, then, what about your boys, Howie? Nolan and Mark and Jimmy?”

  “No alibis, any of them,” Howie said. “None for me, either, I’m afraid. This was our second day here so Paul was letting us get our feet under us. I think Nolan spent some time in the stable, checking out the horses. Mark was in his room on his computer all day trying to straighten out some mess at his company. Jimmy took a hike along the bluff. He took Zilla with him so he wouldn’t get lost but he was gone most of the day.

  “And you?” Eileen asked.

  “I was with Paul most of the day, but I took an afternoon nap. I know that sounds pitiful, but I’ve been working on some new material and I wanted to catch up on some sleep. I’m not eighteen any more.” Howie shrugged and grinned at them with his eighteen-year-old eyes. “So I could have done it too, you see.”

  “How about jealousy?” Lucy suggested. “Jorie and Beryl both love Dr. McBride. He decides he loves Jorie more than Beryl and she kills him out of jealousy.”

  “Why not Beryl more than Jorie?” Joe asked, and then frowned at the grins. “Oh, that’s right, Jorie is a hottie. I haven’t met them yet, you know.”

  “We know,” Eileen said and patted Joe’s shins.

  “I don’t think the jealousy thing will pan out,” Howie said.

  “How come?”

  “Because Nolan Simmons gave it his best shot the other day, and Jorie turned him down cold. He’s a good-looking kid and he’s been brought up right. His dad and I are good friends, go way back, and he never spoiled Nolan. Nolan doesn’t miss with the ladies, not usually. Anyway, Jorie told him she didn’t swing that way.”

  “Swing?” Paul said blankly.

  “She’s lesbian?” Joe said. “Damn, all the pretty ones. Except for you, of course, sweetie.”

  “Don’t call me sweetie,” Eileen said absently. “Really, she told him that?” She looked at Lucy who was frowning and shaking her head slowly.

  “I didn’t think so, either,” she said.

  “What?” Howie asked.

  “She acted like Jon McBride was her lover, not her colleague. I’d swear she was in love with him, which is where I got my theory. Which is now shot to hell, if she’s a lesbian.”

  “She was just very upset, perhaps,” Paul said. “A friend’s death can do that to you.” His face, lined and weathered, was sagging with weariness. He had an enormous burden on his shoulders right now, Eileen realized, and she was keeping him from his rest. He wasn’t a young man anymore, no matter how much he could still do.

  “Let’s stop beating this dead horse,” Eileen said, closing her notebook with a snap. “We need to get to bed. There’s someone I want to call tomorrow.”

  “Who’s that?” Howie asked.

  “Alan Baxter,” Eileen said, looking at her dad. He frowned a little and that pierced to the core of her. Then he met her eyes and nodded gravely.

  “Of course,” he said. “Don’t worry about me, punkin. We’ve had that talk already.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Eileen said.

  “Why Alan?” Joe said.

  “Who is Alan?” Howie asked.

  “My birth father,” Eileen said levelly. “I was adopted at four, and I found my birth father last year. His name is Alan Baxter and he lives in the San Luis Valley, in Colorado.”

  “Does he live with Marcia?” Paul asked. “Is that why you’re going to call him?”

  “Don’t ask,” Joe said to Howie, smiling at his confused expression. “I’ll fill you in on all the details. Marcia Fowler is Alan Baxter’s friend. She’s a sweetie. Plus, she’s an expert in every strange legend and off-the-wall theory you’ve ever heard of. She’s a former schoolteacher and she’s spent her whole life investigating paranormal activity.”

  “Paranormal activity,” Howie said with a grin, puffing on his evil cigar. “This just gets better and better. What, you think the skull killed Dr. McBride?”

  “Just a hunch,” Eileen admitted, tapping her pencil on her notebook. “Crystal is a new-agey kind of thing. Marcia wears a crystal around her neck all the time. So perhaps the crystal skull has some sort of paranormal meaning.”

  “That’s right, you found that so-called UFO murderer,” Howie said. “Big press. You even had a little glossy article in People, didn’t you? Hero detective and all that.”

  “Yes,” Eileen said.

  “Camera hog,” Lucy teased. Eileen flashed a quick, grateful smile at her. Lucy had helped in that case; her research at the Pentagon had helped Eileen solve the crime. Lucy didn’t get any publicity since no one in the media had discovered that someone from the CIA had been involved. If that tidbit had gotten out the publicity might have been bigger and more uncomfortable than a tiny snip of an article in People magazine.

  “Alan and Marcia don’t live together, they’re working their way around to getting together in a grumpy, old-folks kind of way,” Joe said. “That’s my take on it, anyway. The whole little community of Crestone is full of spiritual people. There’s more Navajo influence than Lakota down that way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone knew everything about the Aztecs. Marcia, probably. She knows everything.”

  “Just as long as these two don’t spill the beans to the press,” Howie said. “We don’t want that. I don’t want that. No People articles for me.”

  “None of us want press,” Lucy said. “Including Jorie and Beryl. Their careers are at stake.”

  “Alan and Marcia wouldn’t give a journalist the time of day,” Eileen said. “So let’s get to bed. We’ll talk to Alan and Marcia tomorrow, and find out all about crystal skulls and Aztec priests.”

  “What about Joe?” Howie said. “Don’t we get to hear about his adventure?”

  “I think,” Eileen said slowly, “that I had better listen to Joe’s story alone. He works at a high security Air Force base. It might have something to do with his work, and if it does, it’s classified. Not even you can listen, Dad,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” Paul said without regret. “I’m tired. Let me know whatever you can, and try not to stay up too late.”

  Howie stubbed out his cigar and rose to his feet. “That’s my cue too. I don’t want to hear any government secrets. I have enough trouble with the IRS. Miss Lucy, you going up with me?”

  “I’ll put Zilla out first,” Lucy said smoothly. “Then I’ll be right along.”

  Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles, California

  Rene sat in first class waiting for the plane to dock. Out the window the airport screamed with light and color. Planes stacked up on each runway, lights flashing. Baggage carriers trundled like slow beetles under and around the docked planes. He tried not to look, not to remember. He couldn’t
stop his memories. Los Angeles International Airport was the departure point of his delightful, happy childhood. LAX was the end of the dream.

  He and his father had flown to Paris from Los Angeles International Airport. They had flown back to France in disgrace, in bewildered and bitter anger, and there six-year-old Rene had found that although he was a citizen of France he had been raised as an American child and he didn’t fit in at school at all. America was denied to him, and France turned its back on him, the thin French boys with their skinny strong arms and the rocks they threw at him. He survived. He loved Paris now, he loved France. He despised America with all his heart, every crass piece of her. He reserved his deepest hatred for this city, Los Angeles.

  Los Angeles took his father, Jacque Dubois, and made him a minor celebrity. Dubois was a cinematographer in the days when cinematographers were just another member of the film crew. Dubois was one of the first to elevate the craft into an art form. The way he arranged light and form, when he was allowed to, was just short of miraculous. He had a way of arranging women in light so that they looked spectacular, moody and mysterious and inexpressibly lovely. Actresses started requesting him by name. He was beginning to realize wealth and work when the last remnants of the McCarthy era, already over, struck him down.

  Rene turned in his chair, looking away from the window. He thought of his father, the way he’d been when Rene was a young boy. His father was tall and handsome, lean and brown haired, with eyes like dark flashing jewels. He held a cigarette as though he were ready to flick it aside and fight a duel at any moment. His laugh was a cascade of sound, infectious and joyous. He was everything a little boy would want in a father.

  Then someone in Hollywood, even though the House Un-American Activities Committee was disbanded, decided that Jacque Dubois’s membership in the French Communist Party was enough to cause him to be blackballed. Senator Joe McCarthy had been in his grave a year, dead of drink, when Jacque Dubois was brought down.

  McCarthy was the junior Senator from Wisconsin in 1950 when he began a meteoric, spectacular political career by claiming he knew of Communists working in the United States State Department. His claims of Soviet-controlled communists actually turned out to be correct, years later when the Soviet Union fell and journalists began to ferret out communist documents of the era. But it was McCarthy’s lists of American communists, and the Hollywood film people that were on the list, that terrified the film industry.

  Blackballing, where companies refused to hire anyone on a special blacklist, was elevated to a high art in Hollywood in the fifties and early sixties. It carried on past McCarthy’s quick disgrace at the hands of other, outraged senators, who passed a censure of the man that ended his career. Joe McCarthy died less than three years after the HUAC committee was disbanded, died in Bethesda Naval Medical Center of what was kindly called peripheral neuritis but which was really high-octane whiskey and lots of it. But in Hollywood, where backstabbing was a way of life, blackballing continued like a virus gotten loose and still raging.

  Without a single morsel of proof or a trial, Jacque Dubois had been convicted and sentenced to the death of his career by whispering innuendo, by the blackball, by the fear of another Joe McCarthy and a new HUAC committee. Or perhaps by other jealous cinematographers, who resented Dubois’s brilliance, or even by directors jealous to share the limelight with a mere camera boy who refused to stay in his place. Rene never found out. Without work or the possibility of work, Jacque Dubois was forced to return to France.

  Worst of all, he hadn’t really been a communist at all. He joined the party years ago, in France, in order to date a girl that wasn’t even Rene’s mother. A lark, as he would have called it. Just for fun. Nothing he did could clear his name. No appeal would give him a job that he loved more than his life itself.

  Rene avoided Los Angeles International Airport whenever he could, just to keep the worst memories of his life safely locked away.

  Yet they clamored at him now, as rudely as the boys in his new school where he started in a thick and unfamiliar uniform, a small boy trying to speak French that he barely understood. He went home every day to a father grown more depressed and despondent by the day, a lamp whose wick had blown out. When Jacque Dubois died, when Rene was eighteen, only his body stopped working. His mind had long since gone.

  The plane rolled forward, and Rene tried to relax the bunched muscles of his jaw. He had business to attend to. Since murder was his business, he had murder to do. Doing it in the hated city of Los Angeles would only make the finish sweeter.

  Chapter Ten

  The Reed Ranch, Wyoming

  “I don’t feel guilty at all,” Lucy said. “Where are the paper napkins?”

  “Under that cabinet to your left,” Eileen replied, sliding a second frozen pizza onto a baking sheet. “Joe, I know there’s beer in the fridge.”

  “I’ll get some for you and Lucy,” Joe said, “but I better not, not with the pain pills and all. They might not be all the way out of my system yet.”

  “Then we’ll all have milk,” Lucy said, smiling at Joe. He looked worlds better than he had that afternoon, but he was still bruised and shaky. A pizza would do him good, pizza and a glass of milk and maybe some cookies to finish it off. No cookies for her, though. She wasn’t built to burn calories like Joe and Eileen were. She slapped the napkins on the table and went back for plates. Zilla hopped nimbly out of her way. Joe sat at the kitchen table with a jug of milk and three glasses. Zilla curled up at his feet as he carefully poured the tumblers full of milk.

  “I feel great,” he said. “You know?”

  “We know,” Lucy and Eileen said together, and smiled at each other. Lucy did feel great. With the others safely off to bed they were free to talk at last.

  “And it’s not just the pizza,” Eileen said. “Here’s the first batch, let me cut it up and we’ll eat.”

  “You eat, I’ll talk,” Joe said. He reached down and started patting Zilla’s head. “I hope you believe me. Okay, here goes. I must have been driving home from a war game. I don’t really remember. The first thing I remember was waking up on the clouds…”

  “Oh, my God,” Lucy said in her squeakiest, tiniest voice, when Joe had finished. It was the best she could manage. She felt like the time when she was six and she’d fallen off the back yard swing set and landed flat on her back.

  Her pizza lay, untouched, on her plate. Eileen hadn’t touched hers, either. Her face was pale and distressed. Zilla, undisturbed, snoozed with her head on Lucy’s foot.

  “I guess that means you believe me,” Joe said. His hand was pressed to his forehead, right below the stitches.

  “Eat some pizza, Joe,” Eileen said. “You need some food.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. His face brightened as he picked up his pizza. “I feel better, actually.”

  “Of course we believe you,” Lucy said, still feeling dazed. She took a bite of pizza, cooled to perfect munching temperature. Her security clearance was higher than Joe or Eileen’s. The reason she’d met Detective Eileen Reed and computer programmer Joe Tanner was because of her analyst job with the CIA. She’d been given an old file several years ago, a file that contained a series of murders of missile defense scientists. She had a copy, in the CIA computer database, of Harriet Sullivan’s autopsy results and the police report of her accident.

  She’d never solved the murders. She and Eileen, together, had caught a serial killer at Schriever Air Force Base, where Joe worked now. But the earlier murderers and accidents like Sully’s were never solved. Many believed them to be a series of coincidences, which was why Lucy’s file was on inactive status.

  “I dreamed that Sully described her murderer,” Joe said, “and then they came for me, too. Do you think Sully was just a dream?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Dream or not, it got you out of that car before they came back,” Eileen said.

  “We have to find out who they are,” Lucy said. Her pizza was gone to the last scrap a
nd she tried to suppress a longing for Tracy’s chocolate chip cookies. “I never thought the trail would pick up again. There hasn’t been a murder added to my file since we met out at Schriever.”

  “I would have been a new one,” Joe said. “And I still will be, if we can’t figure out who they are. We have to go back sometime, you know.”

  “Unless they decide to come up here,” Eileen said coolly. Joe flinched visibly, startled. Lucy turned to Eileen. Eileen shrugged, eyebrows raised. “Why not?”

  “They don’t know about you,” Joe said. “Nobody knows about you and me.”

  “Joe,” Eileen said with a funny, rueful sort of smile. “I’ve been planning our wedding for months. We bought my engagement ring. I’ve been talking to caterers, florists, music services, and places for the reception. We told my pastor, remember? Everybody in the police department knows about you now.”

  “Oh, shit,” Joe said, his hands to his face. “I forgot.”

  “Don’t worry,” Eileen said.

  “Why?” Lucy said. She looked out the kitchen windows as though Joe’s murderers would drive over the hill from the highway at any second. How far behind Joe could they be?

  “Because my parents don’t have an address,” Eileen said. “They only have a post office box. How are Joe’s bad guys going to find this place?”

  “Ask at Hulett,” Lucy said. “How’s that for starters?”

  “Butch knows everyone in town,” Eileen said. “He runs the Conoco station, and that’s the only gas station. If strangers start asking about the Reed place, they’re going to call the sheriff. I’ll call the post office tomorrow, and talk to Sylvia, and we’ll have Dad talk to Butch and to the sheriff. But they won’t risk coming up to Wyoming.” Eileen stared at her plate and stirred the crusts of her pizza with a finger. “I bet they’ll set a trap in Colorado Springs,” she continued. “Which means we’ll just have to set a bigger one.”