Geistmann

by Singer, Ron

  On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.

  With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.

  With dew about my feet may I walk.

  With Beauty may I walk.

  With Beauty before me, may I walk. At the sing

  With Beauty behind me, may I walk.

  With Beauty above me, may I walk.

  With Beauty below me, may I walk.

  With Beauty all around me, may I walk.

  In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,

  lively , may I walk.

  In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,

  living again, may I walk.

  It is finished in Beauty.

  It is finished in Beauty.

  Early that morning, still in his hotel in Albuquerque, before setting out toward Nageezi, Geistmann had accessed an EPA map of an abandoned uranium mine site just outside Chilchinbito. Now he came down to the site from Kayenta, not on Route 59, but on the smaller Route 591. He parked the truck behind a slagheap about three hundred yards west of the hamlet. Seeing no one around who might have witnessed his arrival, he made his final preparations, loaded his backpack, and strolled over to the chapter house, behind which the sing was taking place.

  It was exactly seven o’clock. The sing was at full throttle. From the shadows on the periphery of the crowd, the lights of one or two small fires back lit parts of the scene. Geistmann, who was wearing his cowboy outfit, saw the five Yei, the dancing, chanting Yeibichei, or masqueraders, who were performing (in Navajo, of course) the Beauty Way. They were all big men with heavy guts, wearing leggings, moccasins, jewelry, paint, powder, feathered headdresses, and blue face masks that looked like elephant trunks or anteater snouts. One of them --the Chief, presumably-- wore a fuller headdress and somewhat finer garments than the rest. Their shuffling, stomping dance was accompanied by the repetitive, pleasant chanting, alternately sung deep and in falsetto, and by the sounds of their variously pitched seed rattles. There had been no drumming, at least not since he had been there. Drums were a cliché about Indian music. So was the one about the hypnotic effect of the music, but that one was true.

  The dancers moved slowly forward toward the spectators, who were gathered in two semi-circles at the end of the clearing farthest from the small, concrete chapter house. At the locus of the inner circle was a big fat armchair. Sunk in its depths was a tiny old woman swaddled in a Navajo blanket, as were many of the surrounding spectators in the inner circle, her kin, presumably, who were also seated, but on folding chairs. Two places to the right of the celebrant/patient was a single, standing biligaana. This had to be Mr. Gordon Billings.

  The executive was tall and lean, with a lantern jaw, bottlebrush mustache, bolo tie, and black baseball cap with a gold logo –it was him, all right. Bogusly, condescendingly, he cast a benign eye over the proceedings. Geistmann sensed that Billings was the kind of man whose violence was always at the ready, barely under control, to be unleashed when it was safe to do so. That suited Geistmann perfectly. The additional fact that Billings looked like a formidable specimen also cheered him. Too many of his recent victims had been pathetic --puny or obese. He got ready to wait.

  Then, he saw John Robinson and his minder, fifty feet and one hundred ten degrees from him across the arc of standing spectators in the outer circle. From this distance, the closest he had been so far, he studied Robinson. The clever little librarian looked trim, decent and alert. It had been eight days now.

  As expected, the wind was blowing lightly from the northwest, so Mr. Robinson and his minder, a tough-looking, stocky cowboy-Navajo wearing a black hat with a fancy band, were downwind. There were so many smells in the evening air, anyway –the small fires, the cooking and pinon smells, pollution from the mine, and a few unknowns—that Geistmann was certain of his olfactory invisibility. Although there were one or two other biligaanas in the outer ring, there were no more hunters in sight, neither U.S. Marshals nor FBI. Any of those people would have been as easy to spot here as a woolly mammoth or a saber-toothed tiger. They would probably have been wearing feathers and war paint. One of the other biligaanas did, however, look very familiar, despite the fact that he was standing back in the shadows. Wasting no more time, Geistmann faded into the shadows, himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Robinson’s minder edge backward, and he saw the familiar biligaana, a tall, wiry man, also edge farther away from the light of the fires.

  Hank Yazzie sensed someone behind him, but it was too late. After only a momentary, peripheral glance at his assailant, he felt a sharp blow from a blunt instrument to the back of his head. Some minutes later, he awoke, dizzy, in a sitting position, still wearing his backpack. His own handcuffs had been used to secure him to a pinon tree, and his mouth was taped.

  As Hank had whispered for him to do before running off to try to circle around behind Geistmann, Robinson kept his eyes on Mr. Billings. Since there was no visible FBI or USMS presence, he assumed Peters had opted for a modicum of discretion, after all. By now, his team had presumably surrounded Chilchinbito, ready to shoot Geistmann when he appeared at one of the choke points.

  Five minutes later, a tall old woman wearing a ratty, voluminous blanket limped past the armchair, her body twisted by advanced arthritis. She tapped Mr. Billings on the shoulder, startling him and causing a very big, tough-looking cowboy-Navajo to materialize on either side of him. The old woman said something to these bodyguards, who did not react. Then, she smiled piteously at the tall biligaana and spoke to him. Billings waved the guards off, and patting his inside left jacket pocket, replied to the woman. He smiled and reached into the pocket, but she stopped his hand, shrugged, and gestured toward the shadows. With a word to his guards, he followed her out of the circle of light. Groping for the night vision goggles in his backpack, Robinson ran around the outer circle in the direction they had disappeared.

  Yazzie was waiting for his head to clear and for help to arrive. Three minutes later, wearing the goggles, John Robinson skidded to a stop beside him. He had remembered to allow for the distortion that makes objects seem closer, when viewed through NVG’s.

  “The keys are in my left pants pocket,” Hank said, his voice hoarse. A piece of duct tape dangled from his left sleeve.

  After Robinson had freed him, Yazzie took a moment to shake the circulation back into his arms and legs. Then, he put on his NVG’s, and they trotted off in the direction in which the old woman had led Gordon Billings. For the first minute or so, all they could hear were the sounds of the sing behind them. Then, from about a hundred yards ahead, came the growl of a small engine revving, and they saw the single headlight of a motorcycle zigzagging across the rough terrain, headed north-northwest toward Route 591. Fifty or sixty yards behind the motor cycle, two big white U.S. Marshall Service vans lumbered and bounced, with sporadic bursts of semi-automatic fire and muzzle flashes spewing from both passenger windows.

  Still running, Robinson and Yazzie came to a big slagheap. Behind it, they found the gray truck. They also saw a ramp –a sturdy twelve-inch plank—leading down to the ground from the truck bed. They turned and raced back toward their cruiser.

  Snug in his sleeping bag, Monty Tsinojinie had been only half-awake, gazing at the stars and thinking, not too seriously, of getting up and wandering over to the sing. He had unrolled the bag next to his plane on the soft, warm, flat tarmac, just to the left of, and upwind from, the lingering engine fumes. Fifty yards behind, and to either side of the plane, two parked Bell 429 Peabody Company helicopters stood like shadowy sentinels. Even farther back, on the periphery of the airstrip, stood two big U.S. Marshall Service cruisers, their motors idling.

  The next thing Monty knew, he was shocked awake by the loud rattling of large caliber gunfire and the whine of a small motorcycle tearing through the bushes a few feet to his left. The bike was heading north by northwest, and the cruisers peeled rubber as they took off down the tarmac after it.

  “Shit,” he thought, “that must be him.” I
f he had had his hunting rifle with him, Monty might, himself, have tried to stop the “suspicious stranger” Hank had mentioned. A peaceful man, Monty would only have tried to take out a tire. He jumped up and, aware that the cruisers had torn into the bushes after the motorcycle, he ran toward the light from the fires at the chapter house.

  “Peter? Hank Yazzie. Do you read?”

  “Right, what’s happening?” They could hear the whine of a small plane.

  “Subject headed for Kayenta, probably the airstrip, on a motor cycle. Left Chilchinbito on 591 North about ten minutes ago. We’re chasing him in my cruiser.”

  “We’re on our way to the company strip. Over.”

  The transmission was cut. A minute later, two single, booming 308 rounds from two night-scoped sniper rifles, one on either side of the road, tore out the two front tires of Hank’s cruiser, which bumped into a wash and flipped over.

  “Good evening, Mr. Geistmann, this is the FBI speaking,” announced Special Agent Scott Peters, through a battery-powered bullhorn. “Exit your vehicle slowly with both hands raised above your head, palms open, or we will shoot to kill.”

  Luckily, Yazzie and Robinson had both been wearing helmets and the heavy-duty three-point seat belts standard on all Navajo Nation police vehicles. After a few moments, dazed but otherwise mostly undamaged, they staggered from the cruiser, hands, as directed, raised.

  “Jesus wept!” said Peters, still into the bullhorn.

  “Could say,” replied Yazzie, whose voice was fairly steady, but somewhat reedy, in the high-altitude night air. Robinson had heard Peters use that expression before.

  Friday, April 5, 2008. Chilchinbito, Pinon and Window Rock, Arizona; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Washington, D.C.

  It was still very early in the morning, which had broken completely clear with light winds. The scudding cumulous clouds up here on the Mesa were among the most beautiful Robinson could remember. Having camped out in the unheated chapter house, and then having breakfasted on FBI road rations, the assembled men looked ghastly.

  Robinson, Yazzie, Diodor Fedoruk, Arnold Weatherbee, and Mauro Baltazar and his BAU Forensics team, all wearing disposable latex lab gloves, stood in a semicircle looking down at the still fully clothed (except for the cap) remains of Mr. Gordon Billings. Baltazar and his half-dozen assistants also wore white lab suits; the others still wore their clothes from the previous night. In the dawn light, Robinson thought that the victim’s big, bald, pale-blue head, spotted with coal dust, eyes bulging and tongue protruding, coupled with the crimson ligature around his neck, made him look like a dead clown.

  “Chloroformed, then asphyxiated by means of manual strangulation –-garroted,” Baltazar pronounced. “Not a pleasant death, certainly, but at least it was quick. He would have been unconscious within seconds, dead within minutes. When we autopsy him, I suspect we’ll find orthopnea and other symptoms of congestive heart failure. But that will be the least of it.”

  “So he didn’t just die of suffocation from being entombed?” Robinson asked. As he spoke, he remembered that French Foreign Legionnaires were trained in the garrote, and he entered the point in his mental dossier.

  “No,” Baltazar replied. “The entombment was after-the-fact. Symbolism, again, presumably.”

  Alongside the corpse in a clutter lay a pick, shovel, rags, a length of baling wire, and the rest of the paraphernalia Geistmann must have used. The backdrop was the pyramid-shaped slagheap, around a corner of which peeped the gray truck. The “doorway” in the face of the slag heap, which Geistmann had carved out, through which he had dragged Mr. Billings to his tomb, and from which Mr. Billings had just been extracted by Baltazar’s team, gaped.

  “He likes to bury them, doesn’t he?” Robinson remarked, remembering the New York real-estate developer. Aside from an unhealthy, exhausted pallor of his own, Robinson looked relatively unscathed. “But no message this time.”

  “Oh, there will be,” Weatherbee said, frowning. He added an apparent non sequitur. “Lots of hungry bears in Yellowstone.”

  Apparently lost in their own thoughts, neither Yazzie nor Fedoruk appeared to be paying attention. So the Ukrainian had been sent to the Reservation, after all. Then, one of the technicians emerged from the opening, holding something aloft between the gloved thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It looked like a small dead animal. Without speaking, he handed it to Baltazar, who shook his head in disgust.

  “It’s a toupee’,” he explained. “And it looks like it’s made of human hair.”

  “There’s our ‘note,’ ” said Robinson. “Geistmann seems to have counted coup on Mr. Billings. If there’s an implied message in this bizarre scenario, it’s something like this: ‘He scalped the Navajo and robbed them of their breath of life.’ He probably took the baseball cap for a trophy. Listen, Arnold,” he said to Weatherbee, who seemed pale, exhausted, and shrunken. “Before we feed Scott Peters to the bears, what happened last night doesn’t make any sense. It couldn’t have been Peters’ fault. He’s a skilled professional. How could he possibly have been waiting for a gray pickup truck and shot out the tires of a white cruiser? Who coordinated the ambush, anyway? Where is Peters this morning? And, speaking of the missing, where’s your man Friday, Arnold?” Yazzie’s small smile suggested he had been thinking of the same questions.

  Weatherbee’s voice was barely audible. “Gone. Now we know who the mole is.” He sounded on the verge of tears.

  No one seemed to have anything more to say. The gathering broke into two groups. Weatherbee, Baltazar, and Fedoruk stood looking silently down at the corpse. Yazzie gestured for Robinson to follow him around the slagheap and over to the gray truck.

  “You okay now?” Robinson asked. Yazzie had a round pink band aid the size of a quarter covering a shaved spot on the back of his head. Robinson also smelled some sort of unfamiliar, but pleasant, embrocation.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. But you know what? It wasn’t Geistmann knocked me out. No way. He had backup. If he’d tried to circle around behind me, I would have been expecting him. It was a taller guy, and he used a cosh. He came up right behind me from the sing. I think it was that big guy over there, not the BAU guy, the other one.” He nodded his head toward the slagheap. Robinson knew whom he meant.

  “Bon soir, Armande. Ca va? Hop in.”

  “Bon soir, Pierre. Tres tres bien. Beaucoup de mercis, mon ami.” Geistmann grinned at the tow-headed, rail-thin pilot, whose long legs barely fit beneath the tiller, and they exchanged a brief, crisp handshake.

  “Que t’est fou!” Peter said. [You’re nuts.]

  “Rectifiez toujours a ma mode,” Geistmann sang.” [Always true to my fashion.]. “Se soit eteint, puis?” [Let’s be off, then?]

  The single engine of the Piper Cherokee Archer was already humming, Peter turned on the headlight, throttled, and they bumped down the short runway of the Pinon airstrip.

  Pinon, or, as the Dine’ call it, Be’ek’id Baa’ Ahoodzani, or “Under the Lake,” is 52.5 miles by road from Chilchinbito. But it is only about forty-five, via Indian Routes 591 (south, that is –the killer had doubled back), and then 593 and 8034, and U.S. 41 and 4, plus all the trails, washes, and open country across which Geistmann had bushwhacked. He had sped through the night barefoot, wrapped in the blanket, with the trekker’s pack on his back, and Mr. Billings’ baseball cap worn tightly and reversed. His black calfskin racing gloves gripped the handlebars of the two-stroke 250cc dirt bike, and he navigated via the bright single headlamp, his NVG’s, and a text-to-voice GPS mounted on the handlebars.

  It was with great regret that, after removing the GPS, he had abandoned the bike. Unable to bring himself to immolate it, he left it on its kickstand beside the runway. At a few minutes before nine, the little plane lifted off into the moonless, starry sky.

  Episode Thirteen

  Episode Thirteen.

  Friday, April 5, 2008. Chilchinbito, Pinon and Window Rock, Arizona; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Washington, D.C.

>   Leaving Mauro Baltazar and his team to finish combing the murder scene, after which they would start in on the area around the pinon tree, the others got ready to leave. After huddling in a corner with Weatherbee, with a curt nod to Yazzie and Robinson, who kept his counsel for now, Fedoruk got into in a mid-size white sedan and sped north on Route 59 toward Kayenta.

  Weatherbee looked sick. Arranging to meet Robinson back at Albuquerque International Sunport that afternoon, without saying another word, either about his renegade assistant, the botched ambush, or the also absent (still without explanation) Scott Peters, he shook hands with Robinson and Yazzie. Then, he climbed heavily into the back of an unmarked black Escalade SUV that looked as if it had been confiscated from a drug kingpin. Robinson wondered if the driver, a huge, pale man wearing a black suit and mirror sunglasses, came with the car.

  Robinson and Yazzie prepared to return to Window Rock in a borrowed Navajo Nation police sedan. The vehicle had been delivered from Kayenta in convoy with a second, identical one in which the two young drivers had sped off together, but not before one of them had made a little joke about the corpse that caused Hank to frown and shake his head. Robinson guessed the disrespectful joke had been too much even for the detribalized Hank.