Killing Custer

by Margaret Coel

  She slid into the car, turned on the ignition, and shot backward out of the parking space. Then she drove onto the street, tires squealing around her like a wild, hurt animal. Scattered papers flashed in front of her. The office trashed this morning, and trashed again this evening. What was the guy looking for? Everything was on the computers, and he had taken the computers when he took Skip. He had what he wanted. Except . . .

  Angela gripped the steering wheel to keep from veering into one of the cars parked at the curb. It was so obvious. She should have realized this morning that whoever took Skip hadn’t gotten all of it. He hadn’t gotten the back-up flash drive that dangled from her keychain and clanked against the dashboard. A remnant from her job at the Wind River school district when her computer had crashed and everything was lost. And her boss—she could still see the fat woman with the red rash that looked like a magic marker had been slashed across her cheeks advancing on her desk, sputtering and gasping for air, angry because the computer had crashed. Angela had feared the woman would fall over, and all she could think of was, how would she ever be able to lift her off the floor? That evening she had gone out and bought a flash drive. Every day, the same routine—back up with the flash drive before she left the office.

  Totally unnecessary. Skip had laughed at her. There was a backup attached to his computer, and their two computers were linked. But the computers were gone, and so was the backup.

  Now the man in the black mask wanted her flash drive. In an instant, she understood. The slim, pocketknife-size flash drive that pinged and jangled with her keys was the ransom she would use to save Skip. The man would figure out that she had the flash drive and call her. When he did, she would tell him what he had to do. She felt herself begin to relax. She was in control.

  * * *

  ANGELA DROVE THROUGH the dark shadows of bungalows sheltering among pine trees, in and out of globes of yellow light from the streetlamps. A light-colored car had materialized in the rearview mirror. She turned right onto another residential street and laughed into the muffled buzz of the tires. In control? In control of nothing. Skip could be dead. Detective Madden could talk to her lawyer? She didn’t have a lawyer. At the corner was an all-night Laundromat. She pulled into the parking lot, fished her cell from the bottom of her bag, and punched in the number for information. The car had stopped at the corner. The driver—dark face; God, he was wearing a ski mask—was staring at her hatchback.

  She rammed the gear into reverse and spun backward across the lot. Forward, turning onto the street, gas pedal pressed hard, odometer needle swinging. Right at the next corner; the car in the mirror making a U-turn. Left into an alley, plunging toward the end, then another left onto the street. Racing, turning, until the side-view mirror was clear. She pulled into a driveway and parked next to a brick house. No lights in the windows, darkness falling around her.

  She realized the call had ended, and she punched the number for information again, half-turned in the front seat, watching the street. It took a moment before she had the number and heard Annie’s voice on the other end.

  * * *

  VICKY STOOD AT the stove running the spoon around chunks of beef and vegetables that sizzled and popped in the hot oil. The softness of evening settled in the apartment, the comfort of ordinary things. Behind her, she could hear Adam setting plates on the table, laying out knives, forks, and spoons.

  Then he was behind her. The weight of his hands moving around her waist. He leaned in close and kissed her neck. “You smell good,” he said.

  “I smell like onions and garlic.” She tried to ignore the little shivers running through her. Thinking this was as it should be. They could move forward, and she would not look back and she would not think of what could never be. She hadn’t seen John O’Malley in months, but she’d heard of him. Helping somebody on the rez. Moving the Black Horse family into the guesthouse at the mission after their house burned down. Getting a scholarship for the Redman kid to Creighton University. Her people, all of them. Sometimes it seemed he did more for her people than she did.

  “I like onions and garlic.” Adam started to move her around, and she had to set the spoon on the counter.

  He was kissing her then, and the ringing noise sounded far away, in some other apartment perhaps, except that part of her knew the ringing came from her cell on the counter. “Leave it,” he said, and kissed her again, but she felt herself backing away, pushing against the strength of his arms. A ringing phone always made her uneasy. Someone might need help.

  She held up a hand and tried to ignore the mixture of hurt and acceptance that crossed his face. “It’ll just take a minute,” she said, swinging toward the phone.

  Annie’s voice at the other end. Racing on about Skip Burrows’s secretary and a lot of money missing and a man in a black mask.

  “Hold on,” Vicky said. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Angela Running Bear. She’s scared to death. She was attacked tonight at Skip’s office, and the detective thinks she’s involved in his disappearance. Will you see her?”

  “Tell her to come in tomorrow.”

  “I mean now, Vicky. She’s hysterical. She thinks the cops will arrest her. She’s afraid to go home. I told her to go to the rez, but she says the cops there are working with the Lander cops. They’re all working together. They’ll find her wherever she goes.”

  Vicky held her breath and studied the way the light ran around the edge of the counter, aware of the heat of Adam’s gaze boring into her. Finally she said, “Where is she?”

  “On her way to my place.”

  “I’ll meet her there in ten minutes.”

  Vicky set the phone down and turned toward Adam. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Skip Burrows’s secretary may be in trouble.” When he didn’t say anything, she went on: “She’s alone in town, scared to go to the rez. She doesn’t know what to do. The cops think she knows what happened to Skip. I’ll be back in a hour, and we can eat then.”

  “I don’t think so,” Adam said. His mouth drew in the familiar rigid line of the old argument. Everything came first, he’d told her—how many times? Any Arapaho in trouble came first. Always ahead of him.

  He walked past her and took hold of the doorknob. “Call me when you have some time,” he said. “I won’t be sitting by the phone.”

  “Don’t go, Adam,” she said. “I’ll be back within the hour.”

  It was a moment before his hand relaxed on the knob and he turned toward her. She could see the concentrated effort going on inside him, like the effort of a cowboy trying to stay on a bronco. “If you want me to be with you,” she said, “you have to let me go.”

  11

  THE FRONT DOOR of the small brick house flew open. Annie stood in the doorway backlit by the light inside. She motioned Vicky past her.

  From somewhere came a low, anguished moaning. “Thanks for coming,” Annie said. Her voice was shaky.

  “What did Angela tell you?” Vicky waited while Annie closed the door, taking her time as if a sudden jolt might aggravate the moaning. The living room had a lived-in look, cushions crumpled on the sofa and easy chair, an array of mugs and plates scattered over the coffee table, a vase of drooping, dying flowers, a pair of men’s loafers in front of the chair.

  “She’s not making a lot of sense.” A grid of worry lines creased Annie’s forehead. She looked strained and thin in blue jeans and a pink tee shirt. “She thinks the attacker followed her.”

  “Followed her here?”

  “She says she lost him.” Annie gave a noncommittal shrug, as if the story might be true, or only partly true, or a figment of Angela’s imagination.

  The sound of footsteps cut through the moaning. Roger Hurst emerged in the living room. “Sorry you had to come out,” he said, fixing Vicky with a tired smile. “Annie and I have been trying to get her to calm down, but she’s convinced somebody killed her boss a
nd wants to kill her. I’ve been trying to tell her there’s no evidence Skip is dead. This morning, the search party checked the alleys, fields, and creek banks. The fact that we didn’t find anything is a good sign, you ask me. I can’t convince her. She wanted to talk to you. Only an Arapaho lawyer can help her.” His expression froze for an instant, as if he wished he’d reined in what he’d said. He threw out his hand, like an usher, and motioned her into a hallway.

  Angela lay curled into the pillows on top of a bed, legs drawn beneath her, sandals half falling off her feet. A fist was jammed into her mouth, against the eerie sounds erupting from her throat. Her eyes were wild and unfocused. Vicky dropped onto the edge of the bed. The girl was probably in her early twenties, younger, Vicky thought, than her own kids, Lucas and Susan. Fragile and vulnerable looking, the way Susan had been at that age, before she’d found a way to plant her feet firmly on the earth and walk forward.

  “You wanted to see me,” Vicky said.

  The girl was crying softly. She clasped her hands on her head and buried her face into the pillow. Shaking so hard Vicky could feel the mattress moving. She set a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Try to take a deep breath.” She was thinking the girl might need a doctor. “I knew your grandparents before they died.” She stopped herself from saying she had gone to school with Angela’s mother. Stabbed to death in a bar in South Dakota. “I know your family. You can trust me.”

  After a moment, Vicky felt the shuddering subside. The girl began to push herself upright, unfolding her legs and dropping them over the edge of the bed. “I love him,” she said, sitting up, clasping and unclasping a piece of bedspread. “I love Skip. He lied to me. Cheated on me, and the cops think I know what happened to him. They think I’m responsible.”

  Vicky was quiet. They must have hidden the affair, Skip and his secretary. She hadn’t heard any gossip, but she knew she missed a lot of the gossip. Not everything on the moccasin telegraph reached her. She said, “What happened tonight?”

  Angela let out another stuttering moan, like that of an animal in pain, and looked at Vicky. There was the wild, uncontrolled stare in her eyes. “I was attacked.”

  Before Vicky could say anything, the girl hurried on: “I saw a light in the office. I thought Skip had come back. I ran inside, and someone knocked me down.”

  “Who?”

  “He was big, all in black, a black mask. I blacked out, and he ran off. The office was even more of a mess than this morning.”

  “What was he looking for?”

  The girl hesitated, gathering the answer, eyes clouded, as if she were looking inside herself. A vein in the center of her forehead throbbed. “Money,” she said finally.

  “Skip kept money in the office?” Odd. Maybe petty cash to buy coffee and donuts, but the kind of money that would lead someone to abduct Burrows and search the office?

  “Four hundred thousand dollars! He cleaned out his bank account. The cops think I know about it.”

  Vicky didn’t say anything. Her thoughts ran to the blue-bonneted woman in her office who thought she was Libbie Custer. Who might have preferred to be Libbie Custer, but had found herself in the twenty-first century. And had married Edward Garrett, who thought he was Custer. Garrett had also withdrawn a lot of money from a bank account.

  “Why do you think Skip took out so much money?” she said.

  “He didn’t tell me.” Angela paused. “He didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t tell me about his girlfriend in Riverton. All he said last night—the last time I saw him—was that something had come up. He had a busy day today. The cops think he broke up with me, but he didn’t.”

  A man with four hundred thousand dollars? What if the cops were right and Skip had broken up with her? No wonder they thought Angela might know more than she let on.

  More than she let on. The thought stuck, like a broken record. Something about the girl was vacant, closed off, as if there was more that she didn’t want to talk about. Listen to your instincts, Grandmother always said. Listen to what feels right. Something about Angela Running Bear did not feel right.

  The girl had started sobbing. “I suspected he was cheating on me,” she managed. “I didn’t want to know, you understand?”

  Vicky nodded. Easier to look away from the lipstick smudges and the perfume smells. She had looked away from Ben Holden, even from Adam. Easier not to know.

  “I believed his lies. I found out today he was still seeing an ex-girlfriend, Deborah Boynton in Riverton. White woman, Realtor. Whenever she called the office, I told myself she was another client.” She shuddered and emitted a little laugh that sounded like a cry.

  Deborah Boynton. The Realtor who had helped Edward Garrett locate a ranch in Dubois. Vicky was barely aware that the girl had grabbed her arm. “The man in the black mask killed Skip.” Angela was shouting. “He thinks I know where the money is, so he followed me tonight. He’s going to kill me.”

  “Skip is missing,” Vicky said, trying for the soothing voice she used in the courtroom to gain the trust of a reluctant witness on cross-examination, hoping the witness might open a door into the hidden places. “It doesn’t mean he’s dead.”

  Angela stared at her, wide-eyed. “You didn’t see the blood. I saw the blood on the carpet. On the windowsill. He was hurt. Someone took him. The search party looked everywhere in case his body had been dropped in a field or by the river. Seventy, eighty people spent hours looking for Skip. Everybody loved him. Who would hurt him? Who would do that?”

  “Listen to me, Angela. We have to think about your safety. Can you go to rez, stay with family?”

  The girl was shaking her head. “He’ll know where to find me.”

  “If he’s not Arapaho, he won’t know.”

  Angela stared straight ahead, unblinking. “How do I know who he is?”

  True, Vicky thought. The man from the office could be anyone. She forced herself to focus on what the girl was saying, something about Colin Morningside. “We were together until Skip came along. The cops think I told Colin about the money.” She started shaking again. “They think Colin shot that Custer guy, so what difference would it make if he killed Skip?”

  Vicky remained quiet. A skein of thoughts crossed one another, like yarn in a weft. A pattern started to emerge. The connections, the touch points. Two white men, both with zero bank balances. One shot to death in a parade, the other abducted from his office, leaving a trail of blood behind, and the police thinking the incidents could be related. “Tell me,” she said. “Did Skip know Edward Garrett?”

  A shadow of surprise and consternation came over the girl’s face. “I told the cops,” she said. “Far as I know, they weren’t exactly friends, just army buddies from a long time ago. The first Iraq war, Skip told me, like I should care. I was just getting born. Garrett showed up when he was in town. They sat around and talked about the old days. Sometimes they went out for coffee.”

  “Did Garrett come to the office last week before the parade?”

  “Like I told the cops, the general—that’s what he liked to be called—showed up, walked right past me, and let himself into Skip’s office. I saw Skip get up and shut the door. Usually he didn’t care if I heard him shooting the breeze with somebody.”

  “When was this?”

  Angela rolled her eyes and contemplated the ceiling. “Thursday, I think. I heard them arguing. The door opened and Garrett—he looked like Custer, you ask me—came flying out. Fists clenched and face red as a beet.”

  An uneasy feeling gripped Vicky. She could still see the prim, Victorian woman on the other side of her desk. Her client. If the cases turned out to be connected, she would have a conflict of interest if she were to agree to represent the girl.

  “He slammed the door behind him,” Angela was saying. “I got up and went into Skip’s office. He was sitting with his back to the desk, looking at the wall. ‘Eve
rything okay?’ I asked. He said everything was okay. Misunderstanding with an old buddy. Nothing for me to worry about. He said I should go back to typing the reports he wanted to get out.”

  Vicky stood up and walked over to the window. She pushed the flowery patterned curtain away from the frame and looked out through the slim opening. A forest of bright stars filled the sky, and a circle of faint light flared over the sidewalk and street. Her Ford parked at the curb, a hatchback sedan in the driveway that probably belonged to Angela. She turned back. “You live in town?” She could guess the answer before the girl nodded. She had known other Arapaho girls like Angela, eager to escape the rez, work in the outside world, blend in, be part of something bigger. Skip Burrows would have been the answer to her dreams. She would never go back to the rez. It would mean erasing part of herself, the part that had found the courage to move away.

  “I rent a place,” Angela said. Then she told Vicky the address, as if the address made it real.

  “Would you be comfortable going home if a police officer kept an eye on your neighborhood tonight?”

  “Where else am I going to go?” The girl gave Vicky a long, pleading look. “You’ll help me?”

  “I can give you some advice, probably the same advice Roger gave you. Don’t talk to the cops again without a lawyer present.”

  “You’ll be my lawyer?” Vicky felt her muscles tense at the sharp hope in the girl’s voice.

  “I can’t promise. I may have a conflict.” She started to recommend Roger, but the girl had already rejected a nonnative lawyer. In any case, Roger was part of her firm, part of the conflict. And Adam Long Eagle was part of her. She looked away from the disappointment in the girl’s eyes and headed toward the hallway, then turned back. “Who’s the cop who questioned you?”

  “Detective Madden,” Angela said, her voice barely a whisper.