Killing Custer

by Margaret Coel

  * * *

  VICKY SAT IN the car several minutes, engine humming, the air hot and dry in her throat. The picture clear now, as clear as a photograph with none of the smeared edges of oil paints on canvas. As clear as if she were in Skip Burrows’s office, a witness to what was happening. Edward Garrett demanding his principal so that he could buy the ranch near Dubois. Skip trying to put him off. Cajoling. Reasoning. Why would he want the principal withdrawn from the Granite Group when he was making thirty percent? Where could he get that kind of money? They had a great thing going.

  Garrett insisted. They had argued, Angela said, and Garrett had stormed off. But what had he said before he stormed off? What had he threatened? To go to the police? To blow the whistle on Skip Burrows’s Ponzi scheme?

  Because that was what he was running. Collecting money—a half mil was the minimum—from new investors to make interest payments to old investors. It worked, as long as new investors came in, and Skip had made sure that happened. Visiting Jackson, but not living there! Not staying too close, where people could ask too many questions. All working, until Edward Garrett demanded to withddraw his money.

  She shifted into reverse and twisted around to watch the driveway unfurl behind her. Then, in drive, she started down the winding road and struggled to contain the fear that welled inside her. Skip had cashed out on Friday afternoon. He had decided to take off with what he had. A briefcase full of money. Then, a moment of what? Panic? Remorse? Fright? He had called her office. Another lawyer. Maybe he’d had second thoughts. Maybe he wanted to stop the whole thing, the running, the waiting—there had to be the waiting—for the moment when everything crashed down around him.

  She hadn’t been in the office. And he hadn’t run. He’d gone to Jackson with Angela. On Monday morning he was back in his own office. Had he intended to call her again?

  But Angela had seen the briefcase of money. What if she had told Colin?

  Vicky turned into the outskirts of Lander and slowed for the stoplight ahead. She swallowed hard against the taste of acid erupting in her throat. Maybe everybody was right. Madden, the bartender, Reece Mishko. Colin had killed Garrett. Then, Monday morning, he had abducted Skip and his briefcase of money. My God. She hadn’t wanted to believe it could be true. She had been blindfolded.

  At the red light, she drew out her mobile and punched the key for St. Francis Mission. John O’Malley would test her theory, tell her where she had taken a wrong turn, set her back on the right trail. She had to speak with him! The need running through her was like a dull ache she had tried for a long time to ignore.

  “St. Francis Mission.” The voice was only slightly familiar.

  “Is Father John in?”

  “It’s you, Vicky?” the Bishop said. “He’s at Riverton Memorial. Colin Morningside was shot this afternoon.”

  31

  THE WAITING ROOM was empty except for Lou Morningside crouched on a plastic chair in a far corner, eyes fixed on the metal swinging doors in the opposite wall. Father John walked over, laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder, then sat down beside him. He didn’t say anything. It was enough that Lou knew he was there.

  A long moment passed. Then Lou made a gurgling noise, as though he had to swallow the whole terrible reality before he could speak of it. “They tried to kill my grandson.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Nothing. Just worked on him, peered down at him, punched needles in his arm, hooked him up to plastic bags.” His shrug was filled with hopelessness. “They’re going to take him into surgery. Told me to wait out here.”

  Father John felt the faintest prick of hope. Colin was alive! “We can pray for him.”

  The old man nodded. “All I been doing. Praying and praying. I’m begging the Creator not to take him. Not yet. He still has a lot to do, so much good to do.”

  Father John patted the old man’s shoulder again, then clasped his hands between his knees and bowed his head. “Dear Lord.” He was whispering, but the words seemed to fill up the empty space. “Have mercy on your child, Colin. Remember him and hold him close to you. Have mercy on the doctors and guide their hands. We place our trust in you.”

  He waited. Whatever had happened to Colin, Lou wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. They might have been in a vacuum, the muffled sounds of traffic far away, the click of footsteps and traces of conversation wrapped in hospital quiet.

  Several minutes passed before Lou cleared his throat again. “No need to shoot the boy. All they had to do was tell him what they wanted, where they were gonna take him. I been thinking on what happened since I got the call from the tribal police saying Colin was shot and I should get over to the hospital. He was so close to being free. Thirty miles from South Dakota, then over the border into Pine Ridge. Mike and him could’ve stayed there until this business got cleared up and the cops stopped blaming them for killing Custer. Stopped blaming Colin for murdering the girl he loved all his life, and started looking for the real killers. Instead they went after Colin and Mike. Got word to all the cops in Wyoming and South Dakota to be on the lookout for them. Well, they found them. State patrol pulled them over, handcuffed Mike, started to handcuff Colin . . .”

  “He took off.” It was like a movie running in Father John’s head. Colin, trapped like an animal, smelling the hopelessness. How would he ever prove himself innocent? Dear Lord, Madden had enough circumstantial evidence to file charges of murder against both Colin and Mike.

  “Where was he gonna go? Nothing but the plains going on forever. Arroyos and hills and no water. Shot him in the lower back, crazy bastards. Didn’t want him making it across the border.”

  “Why did they bring him here?” Father John knew the answer even before he had finished the question. He tried to push down the thought that they had brought him close to home to die.

  “It’s good he’s here,” Lou said. “He needs people around that love him.”

  Father John glanced about the empty space. Odd it wasn’t crowded with Arapahos, cousins and relatives so far removed that nobody was sure how they were related, friends and the grandmothers who always showed up to sit with the grieving. “Can I call someone?”

  Lou nodded. “Lorene Morningside, my brother’s granddaughter. I left the rez so fast, didn’t call anybody.”

  Father John slipped the cell out of his shirt pocket. It took a moment to find the woman’s number, then he keyed it in and listened to the ringing noise that sounded close enough to be in the waiting room. Finally, a woman’s voice, an anxious note in the way she said hello, as if she had been expecting bad news.

  He told her Colin had been shot and was about to be taken into surgery at Riverton Memorial. He was in the waiting room with Lou.

  “Oh my God.” He could hear the heavy, sporadic breathing, as if the woman had run up a hill. “I’m on the way.” What she didn’t say was obvious: She would put out the word on the moccasin telegraph. She would make two or three calls, and the news would flash across the reservation. The waiting room would fill up.

  Father John put the cell back into his pocket. Now there was only the waiting. Waiting and praying. He’d lost track of the number of times he had sat in this waiting room with parents and grandparents half-crazed with worry and grief, jumping off the seats the instant the steel doors swung open and a doctor from the labyrinth beyond appeared. You could always tell by the look on the doctor’s face when the news was bad.

  After a moment, he said, “What happened to Mike?”

  “Took him to jail. Gonna charge him with conspiracy to murder, being an accomplice.” He shook his head. “Nothing makes sense. They’re even looking for his mother. Say she tried to run down that Lander detective, so they’re going to get her for attempted assault.”

  Father John glanced out the glass doors at the thin steam of traffic crawling past the far side of the parking lot. He could picture Darleen Longshot
driving a pickup attached to a horse trailer, a target as big as a house, down Seventeen-Mile Road. The cops would have pulled her over before she’d gotten home. Or they would have been waiting for her there. But he knew Darleen wouldn’t have turned left onto Seventeen-Mile Road when she left the mission. She would have turned right and headed across the border into Riverton. The pickup and trailer would be parked in a shed in a trailer park where some of her relatives lived. Brownie grazing in the pasture. He felt the smile pull at his mouth. The woman had outsmarted a whole fleet of cops.

  But they would find her. It was only a question of time. Mike and Colin would both face charges, and so would Darleen. He tried to ignore the spasm in his chest muscles. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Colin and Mike were innocent. No matter the circumstantial evidence—it was still circumstantial. And yet he had watched other Arapahos sentenced to prison on circumstantial evidence not as strong as what Madden had against Colin: an eyewitness who could place him at the house where Angela Running Bear was murdered; a motive, since Angela had left him for Skip Burrows. By now an Arapaho warrior who had taken part in the dare run was probably willing to testify he had seen Colin pull out a pistol and shoot Garrett, willing to say Mike had covered for him, willing to say anything to stop the interviews, the suspicions, the chance of having his own parole rescinded.

  The steel doors opened and a thin, wiry man in his forties, light-colored hair thinning away from his forehead, walked over. Father John stood up. Dr. Peter Mason was printed in black on the tag pinned to the man’s white coat.

  “Mr. Morningside.” He bent over the old man, who was staring up with black, rheumy, frightened eyes. “Would you like to see your grandson before we wheel him into surgery to . . .” He stopped, compassion and hope in the words, the tone of his voice, and the fact that he hadn’t said, “tell him good-bye.”

  Lou struggled forward in the chair, and Father John took hold of his elbow and helped him to his feet. He could feel the strength in the man, the sinewy muscles carved from years of hard, outdoor work, the work of a cowboy. Lou took a moment to steady himself, then started after Dr. Mason, who was holding open one of the steel doors.

  Father John stayed with the old man down the green-lined corridor, smells of antiseptic floating in the air, hushed voices and clacking computer keys behind the closed doors. Around a corner and down another corridor. He could see the gurney ahead, the plastic bags hanging from steel poles, the yellowish hose running downward to the figure beneath the white sheet.

  Dr. Mason lifted a hand, and three men in green scrubs stopped wheeling the gurney toward another bank of steel doors. He motioned Lou forward. The others made room.

  Lou stood close to the side of the gurney, eyes fixed on the blood-drained face of his grandson. Colin’s eyes were closed. Words formed in the old man’s throat like a tentative rumbling of thunder. “My boy,” he said. “My boy, my boy.” Thin streams of tears started out of his eyes and gathered in the wrinkles of his cheeks. He touched the sheet over Colin’s chest, then he gave Father John a pleading, beckoning look, as if he thought Father John might be a miracle worker, able to raise the dead.

  Father John moved in closer, aware of the muscles in his chest, so tight that he had to gulp for air. He looked for some sign of life in Colin, a twitching finger, the flicker of an eyelid. Some will to live. Leaning over the gurney, he said, “Colin, it’s Father John.” There was no response. He could hear his own heart hammering. He had been present at the deaths of so many people. It was never easy. He had the sense he was talking to a corpse. “Listen to me,” he said. “You are Colin Morningside. You are not Crazy Horse. You do not have to die. You must live. Your grandfather is here. He loves you and needs you. People are coming to the hospital, your relatives. They love you and need you. You must live for them, Colin.”

  There was an instant before the gurney started rolling toward the steel doors, the attendants and Dr. Mason alongside, the figure under the white sheet silent and still, that Father John wondered if he had detected the faintest movement behind the closed eyelids, or had only imagined it.

  He steered the old man by the elbow back along the corridors. Even before they’d reached the waiting room, he could detect the change in the atmosphere, the sense of fullness, the undertone of conversation. He pushed through the steel doors and watched as the crowd of Arapahos surged toward Lou, enclosing him and leading him into the center of the room. Black heads bobbing about, brown arms reaching for the old man, patting the stooped back. A dozen voices, all asking the same questions: “How is he?” “Is he going to be all right?” “Where’d they shoot him?” “What’s the doctor say?”

  Loreen Morningside turned to Father John. As short and thin as a girl, narrow face frozen in worry. He knew her from St. Francis, where she volunteered to teach preschoolers in Sunday school. Gone was the cheerful and laughing and positive woman he saw on Sunday mornings. “It will kill him to lose Colin,” she said.

  Father John was quiet. There were no words, no platitudes that would allay the woman’s worry, nothing but prayer and hope and the skill of doctors in the operating room.

  “He didn’t kill anybody,” she said. “He doesn’t have it in him. Cops got up a theory, and started turning the rez upside down looking for the warriors in the parade.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “One of them said he saw Colin shoot that Custer guy, and Mike was right beside him.”

  Father John felt his jaw clench. It was what he and Lou had feared. Somebody desperate.

  “The warrior just got out of Rawlins,” Loreen was saying. “He’s twenty-three years old, scared to death the cops will find some way to get his parole revoked. Says no way he can go back.”

  Father John looked over at the new group of Arapahos pushing past the glass door. A full-bore investigation on the rez, showing up at all hours, pulling people in for interviews, and finally, finally making a connection. A part of him felt sorry for the young man willing to lie to stay out of prison himself.

  Outdoors, beyond the relatives sweeping into the waiting room, he watched a woman dart across the parking lot and thread her way around the parked cars. Before she lifted her head, he had known it was Vicky.

  Loreen was leading Lou over to a chair, and Father John managed to catch the woman’s attention and motion that he was going outside. Vicky was coming through the ambulance bay when he stepped past the glass doors.

  32

  “TELL ME.” VICKY stood still with the wind whistling across the asphalt, whipping at her hair, wrapping her skirt against her legs.

  “He’s alive. They’re operating now.”

  “Well, that’s something,” she said. Her shoulders relaxed a little. The faintest look of hope flared in her eyes. And yet there was something else. He knew her so well. It was as if he had memorized her, all the different shades of emotion and worry.

  “What is it?”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  A car door slammed behind them, and another group of relatives flowed toward the glass doors. He took her arm and guided her along the sidewalk to an iron bench in the shade of a cottonwood. Cigarette butts had been stamped out in the sand in the top of a small receptacle. The odor of tobacco smoke circled the bench.

  He waited until Vicky had sat down, then sat down beside her. “What is it?”

  She drew in a breath and gave him a long look. “I’ve been to two banks and talked to people who knew Skip Burrows.”

  “Burrows?” He felt a little pinch of surprise. Burrows was the last person he’d expected her to be investigating.

  “You don’t understand,” she said, and he realized she had read his mind the way he often read hers.

  “They’re connected,” she was saying. “Burrows, Garrett. Even Angela. What it comes down to is, Burrows was running a Ponzi scheme. The Granite Group. He and Garrett were army buddies from twent
y years ago, and when Garrett sold his ranch in Laramie, he invested with Skip.”

  He was aware of her eyes searching his, waiting. “Let me guess,” he said. “Garrett found another ranch he wanted to buy and asked for his money back.”

  “There was no money. At least not the full amount. I think Garrett threatened to go to the cops and blow the whole scheme out of the water. Angela told me they’d had a big argument in Skip’s office and Garrett had stomped off. Friday afternoon, Skip withdrew all the money, then he called me. But I had already left the office. He didn’t leave a message. I think he may have been panicking, looking for a way out.”

  Father John took a moment, turning over the pieces of information, examining each piece and its relationship to the others. “You think Skip decided to plan his own disappearance?”

  Vicky nodded, then looked away, gaze roaming the parking lot, another car of Arapahos pulling in. “He had to make sure Garrett didn’t report him before he could leave the country.” She turned back. “Angela said he was building a house in Mexico. I suspect that’s where he went. He took a briefcase of money, about four hundred thousand. I won’t know the exact amount until I get access to records from the Granite Group. But there’s more money, I’m sure of it, stashed away in the Cayman Islands or somewhere. He had investors in Jackson who liked belonging to a secret investment club that returned thirty percent. Of course, he had to keep finding new investors so he could pay off the old. The whole scheme was bound to collapse sooner or later. Garrett would have brought it down now.”

  “Skip had him killed.”

  Vicky lifted her hand and began rubbing her forehead, as if she could make the thoughts inside her head vanish. He understood. He didn’t want to believe it either, he didn’t want it to be true. “You believe he hired Colin to kill Garrett,” he said finally.