When had her marriage become a battleground? She wasn’t sure, but she suspected whatever was broken between them had been breaking long before the murders at Strong Lake. Was it the strain of raising a precocious child? The stress of her job? Or something more, a persistent incompatibility that had made itself more and more apparent as the years went on?
“You’re sick, Maria. You are mentally ill, and do you know what mentally ill people do? They go to the doctor. They don’t run off to a homicide in the middle of the night.”
She’d resented his attack on her sanity, but now that she was alone, miles of highway unwinding in front of her like a ribbon, she was able to sympathize with his point of view. What was he supposed to think? He’d found her standing over their sleeping daughter with a butcher knife.
But she wasn’t crazy, and the only way to prove it to him was to finish her investigation and find whoever was responsible for the killings at Strong Lake. Once she did, this other madness would stop. It had to.
“I could call the captain. One word about what happened here tonight and you’d be suspended. They’d force you to get help, force you to take this seriously.”
Her fingers clenched as she recalled Ben’s threat. Didn’t he understand the work was holding her together right now? That without it, she would give up, become the madwoman he so obviously thought she was? Of course not. When had he ever understood what this job meant to her? It wasn’t a job at all; it was a calling.
Her own response had been every bit as harsh. “You do that, and this will be a permanent situation. I mean it, Ben. If you involve the captain, our marriage is over.”
They’d survived some tough times in the past. There had been many heated arguments, objects thrown, even some pushing-and-shoving matches she wasn’t proud of. But never before had she threatened divorce.
The door she’d slammed behind her had punctuated the point. Now she had to wait and see if her husband did the right thing, if he still believed in her.
She had to focus on the subject at hand. Whatever mess her marriage had become hadn’t happened overnight, and it wouldn’t be fixed overnight, either. The turnoff for the campground loomed ahead, ominous in the dark. Maria sighed in relief as she drove past the sign, pressing harder on the gas on her way to the reservation.
Traversing the dirt road in her Suburban felt like surviving the spin cycle in a washing machine. Maria gritted her teeth, clutching the wheel and fighting for control as she was jostled and bounced all over the place. Simply keeping the vehicle on the road required so much concentration that she almost missed Kinew waving at her.
A house light illuminated the chief, casting a ghostly glow. She wished for the hundredth time that Jorge were there with her. Why had Kinew been so insistent she come alone? She couldn’t bear to contemplate how many rules she’d shattered just by being there. Any murder on the reservation was the responsibility of the state and tribal police. She was so far out of her jurisdiction she might as well have been on the moon.
It’s a trick, her well-trained cop’s brain whispered, but she knew it wasn’t. Kinew had asked for her, and that could only mean one thing. Somehow, this homicide was related to the others.
He moved to meet her and opened her door. “Detective.” Whatever emotion she’d heard on the phone was gone. Kinew was back to his tightly reined, impassive self. Good. That would make her job easier.
“Chief. Where’s the body?”
Even in the meager light, she could see pools of blood on the trailer’s step, spilling over to soak the ground beneath. Whoever the victim had been, they hadn’t gone peacefully. Her stomach lurched at the telltale stench of death.
“She’s inside, but that’s not what I wanted you to see. Not yet.” He studied her, appearing to have aged several years since she’d last seen him. “It’s not pretty. Damned thing tore Rose apart.”
Damned thing? “I can handle it.” What in the hell did he think she’d seen at the campground, for Christ’s sake? A Disney movie?
Giving the front walk a wide berth, Kinew beckoned for her to follow him. Maria’s pulse quickened. Maybe Ben was right – maybe she was insane. Why else would she be on a reservation in the early morning hours with a man she didn’t know?
Her indecision vanished the moment Kinew crouched in the dry grass next to the step. He pointed at something, gesturing for her to bring the light closer. This was it – this was why he’d called her. She kneeled beside him, shining her Maglite over his shoulder.
She tightened her grip on the flashlight when she saw it. There it was, every cop’s dream. Clear prints in the blood on the step. A killer’s calling card.
Only these weren’t shoe prints. They were hoof prints.
“This is what you wanted to show me?” She bit her lip to keep from groaning. “So a deer walked through your crime scene, so what? There are probably plenty of deer around here.”
“Open your eyes, Detective. Clear your mind. These aren’t the prints of a deer.”
Dumbfounded, she stared at the marks in the blood until her eyes crossed. Her frustration increased as her knees began to ache from kneeling so long. Not a deer, so what else had hooves? An antelope? What was he trying to tell her?
Kinew appeared to understand she needed to figure it out for herself, for he kept silent. The man’s patience was infinite, as always.
And then she got it. There were two hoof prints in the blood. Two, not four. The pool of blood was large enough that there should have been four.
“What the – is this a joke?” Maria had the ludicrous image of a killer using a deer’s foot to make the prints.
“You see it, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“I see that there are two prints instead of four, as if the deer was walking upright.”
“It’s not a deer.”
“If it isn’t a deer, what is it?”
He stared at her in silence for a moment, like the passage of time would help impart the proper seriousness to what he said next. In the shadows, his eyes were impossible to read, just endless darkness. It was unnerving.
When she was about to seize him by the shoulders and shake him, he spoke.
“Wendigo,” he said.
Rose’s once cozy home had become an abattoir, with streaks of blood and gore coating the walls and furniture. Maria took a quick look inside and then backed out again, but not before she saw the poor woman’s head. Rose’s eyes were anguished, her mouth frozen in a silent scream. For the first time in her career, Maria had to turn away.
“We shouldn’t be here. You need forensics. The more people who go in there, the harder it will be to find out who did this to her.”
“I know what did this to her. Now it’s a matter of finding out who in our community has been infected.”
While many in her department would find this talk of wendigos ridiculous, they were no laughing matter to those who believed. Her own grandmother had told her frightening stories of these creatures with ferocious appetites, who possessed people and turned them into monsters. She needed to tread carefully. Brushing off Kinew’s theory would be seen as disrespectful.
Then there was the matter of that nervous flutter in her gut as she studied the strange prints with the echo of that word wendigo in her mind. As much as she hated to admit it, her cop’s instinct agreed with Kinew. Did that make her insane, or unusually open minded?
Rose’s body looked like it had been torn apart by an animal. Maria couldn’t reconcile the crime with anything human. Perhaps forensics would be able to tell them more.
“I need to call this in,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t be offended. It was one thing to believe in wendigos, but another altogether not to properly process a crime scene.
He nodded, moving away while she phoned, and as he faded into the darkness, panic took hold, squeezing the air from her lungs. The feeling of
vulnerability, of being watched by something with evil intentions, was strong here. She found it difficult to breathe until she stood next to him again.
“I have some questions for you, but I’d rather we went somewhere else.”
“Don’t you need to wait for them?” he asked.
“I’ve told dispatch I’m questioning a potential witness. They’ll be able to start without me. Your tribal police will need to be involved.”
“They won’t want any part of this as soon as they see those prints.”
“Still, this is their jurisdiction. Legally, we can only get involved if they ask for our help.”
“I’ll make sure they do. They’ll be more than happy to hand this one over.”
Maria waited as he made the necessary calls before suggesting she follow him to Happy’s, the same diner they’d been to before. Once she was in her truck, she realized how much her hands were shaking. She couldn’t get the image of Rose’s horrified face out of her mind. For some reason, the gruesome scene at the woman’s trailer had bothered her even more than seeing what had become of Reese’s friends at the campground. Perhaps because his friends had been barely recognizable as human, while she knew she’d be seeing the terror in Rose’s eyes for the rest of her life.
“She was a good woman. She didn’t deserve to die like that.”
No one deserves to die like that. But Maria stayed silent. She understood what he meant, and he was upset enough as it was. Kinew sat across from her, not saying a word until he had a full cup of coffee in him.
“Tell me about her.”
He stared at the table for so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer. She couldn’t help but wonder what his relationship to Rose had been. He was too upset for them to have been casual acquaintances.
“Everyone loved Rose. She had no enemies.” He shifted his focus to Maria, voice hardly above a whisper. “The community is never going to recover from this.”
Everyone turned into a saint once they died, but Maria suspected it was different with Rose. Kinew had told her about the woman’s work as a healer and seer on the reservation, work she often hadn’t had the heart to charge for.
She decided to risk saying what was on her mind. “You must have cared for her a great deal.”
“Everyone did. She was special.”
“Forgive me for asking, but was she—”
“Were we lovers?” A wisp of a smile touched his lips before vanishing. “No, Rose had more sense than that. Not that I didn’t try to convince her otherwise in my impetuous youth. But that was a long time ago.”
Maria found it hard to imagine this cautious, guarded man ever being impetuous, but she understood better than most how age and experience could change a person. “Can I ask what you were doing at her trailer in the wee hours of the morning?”
He looked down at his hands. “I had a dream—what our people call a vision—that Rose needed me. So I went to check on her, figuring that if everything seemed all right, I’d leave her be. But it was obvious from the second I arrived that nothing was all right.”
“I’m really sorry. She sounds like a wonderful person.”
“She was. I know you’ve had training in observing witnesses, and I realize you’re seeing the depth of my grief and wondering what it stems from, but it’s not what you think. Rose was a dear friend, but there was nothing the slightest bit untoward about our relationship.”
“It doesn’t have to be untoward if you loved her and she loved you. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“And if that were the case, the woman would have had a ring on her finger so fast it would have made her head spin, believe me. I’m no fool. But, like I told you, my feelings for Rose were very much unrequited, and she was better off for it.”
Unrequited love was often a motive for murder, but Maria had no doubts that the man sitting across from her was telling the truth. Kinew wasn’t the most forthcoming person in the world, but he also wasn’t a liar. And he’d loved the victim too much to have ever hurt her – she’d stake her own life on that.
She felt an unfamiliar twinge and was startled to realize it was jealousy. Had Ben ever loved her this way? She doubted it. Kinew had met his ideal woman, and when she’d refused him, he’d remained single. Maria couldn’t picture Ben pining for her. If she’d rebuffed his attentions, he would have simply married someone else. Probably a pretty young music teacher who was far less complicated, and who never would have tried to murder their daughter.
“Are you all right?”
She jumped at Kinew’s touch on her hand. “Yes, I’m fine.” And then she heard how ridiculous that sounded. “Considering.”
“I’m sorry. It was wrong for me to drag you into this. You’ve been ill, you’re under enough stress. I shouldn’t have let you go inside. It was selfish of me.”
“No, you were right to call. I’m not sure how Rose’s death is related to the campground murders, but they were both so brutal. Somehow, there has to be a connection.”
He hadn’t mentioned the wendigo theory since they’d left Rose’s trailer, and she certainly wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up.
“There is. What you’re picking up on with me isn’t my love for Rose, though there was plenty of that and always will be. It’s my guilt.”
“Guilt?” Survivors often felt guilty after the death of a loved one, particularly a person as saintly as Rose, but something in his voice gave her pause. “What reason would you have to feel guilty?”
Reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket, Kinew retrieved a small, cloth bag, which he laid on the table before her.
“Because,” he said, “I’m the reason she’s dead.”
Chapter Thirty
He never left her alone, not even while he slept. Whatever uncanny abilities the man had always demonstrated remained, and he read her mind with ease. His primary task had been removing every weapon from her reach, but a sharpened branch would do what was needed, should she manage to get her hands on one.
That was impossible as long as he had access to her every thought. As soon as she moved toward the forest, he was on her, pulling her back. Being the subject of his constant surveillance drove her mad. She yelled at him, and hit him, pummeling her fists against his chest, but he didn’t react, which infuriated her more. Causing him discomfort would have brought some small measure of satisfaction.
Each and every night, as she glared at him across the fire while he cooked their dinner, he simply smiled.
“You are very angry with me now, but one day you will be grateful.”
“I will never be grateful to you, ever.”
He did not argue, but she could feel his smugness, his sureness that he was in the right and that if he waited her out, she couldn’t help but come around to his way of thinking. Maddening.
“You cannot force me to have this child, Lone Wolf. Someday, you will not be watching, and when that moment comes, I will rip it from my womb if it kills me. I will use my bare hands if that’s all that’s available.”
“You are a born mother, Little Dove. You will see. There will come a time before too long when your natural instincts take over. Whether the child you carry follows your path or his father’s is your choice.” He handed her the best of the rabbit he had cooked, and even that enraged her, as it was a time-honored sign of respect their people gave to the mothers of the community. And she was not a mother, not anymore. She would never be again. She imagined her womb as a cold, dead place full of despair, very much like the rest of her.
But as always, Lone Wolf was right. Once her belly rounded and she felt the flutter of life inside, her anger deserted her. She thought of Grey Mother and the others less, and more of the new life to come. The shaman began leaving her alone again, but she didn’t notice. She was too busy preparing for the birth of her second child, a child that would be born and rai
sed without the benefit of many mothers. How could she do it on her own? Lone Wolf was hardly a substitute for the lullabies of Quivering Birch or the expert swaddling of Rushing Waters. Still, they would have to find a way.
The child came in the spring, which promised good things, as it followed the cycle of their animal brothers and sisters.
He was a stocky little boy, born with a thatch of thick, brown hair and tiny hands that grabbed at everything. From the time he was a newborn, he would seize an offered finger and hold on with surprising strength. In the beginning Little Dove fretted over how pale her son was, but as the days turned warmer, his skin tanned to a golden nut-brown and wild poppies bloomed in his cheeks.
When he began to walk, his exaggerated swagger made them both laugh. Lone Wolf had spoken true – a new life was a blessing, no matter how it had come about, but she tried her best not to think about the boy’s father. Her son already appeared to be taking measure of her, tilting his head and gazing at her with his huge eyes, as if he could see through her. She didn’t want him to glimpse her sadness and wonder where it came from.
The moons passed quickly, and soon it was time to name him. Since neither the son nor the mother would exist without the patient care of the man who lived with them, she decided her child’s name would be a tribute.
“I would like to name him Little Wolf,” she said, feeling almost shy.
The shaman shook his head. “He is your son, Little Dove.”
“He wouldn’t have drawn breath if not for you. It would be an honor if you’d lend my boy your name.”
Her son chose that moment to stagger toward them on his chubby, dimpled legs, waving his tiny hands in the air and making a strange, guttural noise as he struggled to speak. Lone Wolf burst out laughing as he held out his arms in time to catch the boy. “This one is a Little Bear. He has chosen his own name.”
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