Heydan Larroux grabbed the flashlight at the foot of the ladder and used it to illuminate the pathway. Then she charged down the narrow, sloping corridor, fearing it would not be long before whatever had entered the house would be coming down after her.
Chapter 9
“You really think this guy can help us?” Detective Hal Repozo asked Joe Rainwater.
“If anyone can, it’s him.”
“What’d you call him, a charmin?”
“That’s the toilet paper, wajin. This guy’s a shaman.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Indian for ‘medicine man,’ sort of.”
“And what’s wa-jeen mean?”
“ ‘White fuck.’ ”
It was early Wednesday morning. Almost thirty-six hours had passed since Injun Joe’s stakeout had resulted in his being first on the scene of the massacre at the Oliveras estate Monday night. A dozen heavily armed men had been carved up in a two-minute span.
“How were they killed?” Rainwater had asked Estes, the department’s chief pathologist, outside the drug lord’s mansion the previous morning.
Estes had worked through the night and looked it. His thinning grayish-brown hair was ruffled. The top buttons of his shirt were undone, and his tie was only half-knotted. He smelled of alcohol and formaldehyde. Rainwater had watched Estes sit down on the mansion’s front steps only after checking to make sure they were clear of blood. The medical examiner stuck a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it.
“They were torn apart.”
“I saw that much for myself.”
Estes lit his cigarette and held it away from his face. “Then you know as much as I do.”
Rainwater didn’t see Estes again until he stepped outside the precinct building just after four Tuesday afternoon.
“You spare an hour?”
Injun Joe sighed. “I’m due back at ten and I got to chair a meeting of the Informed Indians’ Council right now.”
“Cut the shit, red man. I’m being serious. Something out at the Oliveras house I want to show you.” He paused. “I wasn’t all the way straight with you this morning. Guy like you deserves to know, ’spite of the orders.”
“Orders?”
“You’ll see.”
Thirty minutes later, Estes slid his car through the main entrance, past the police guards posted before the mansion. He got out and led Injun Joe across the front lawn. Almost at the mansion’s entrance, Estes knelt down and ruffled a patch of grass.
“Take a look at this.”
“At what?”
“Found it right about here after you left this morning. Sun musta dried it out.”
“Dried what out?”
Estes looked up at him. “Made a plaster impression of it. You don’t believe me, I’ll give you a look. You and nobody else. I’m staying clear of this one.”
“You talking about a footprint? That qualifies as evidence even on the reservation, Kemo Sabe.”
“This wasn’t like any footprint I ever saw. Took it to a friend of mine at the zoo over lunch hour. He thought I was playing a fucking joke on him. Said nothing owns that print ever walked on this earth. Said it looked like a combination of a bird and a lizard.”
“You find only the one?”
Estes stood back up. “I look like a douche bag to you or what? Found two more between here and the gate. This was the clearest.”
“Nothing about footprints in your report.”
“Brass thought it’d be a good idea if I kept it out. Look, two years from now I pick up my pension and do consulting work on the side. Bad time to make waves.”
“Yet you brought me back here.”
“Yeah,” Estes said softly. “Thing is, red man, you get all the weird cases, and most of the time you solve them. Serial killers, kid busters, whackos … Way I see it, whatever did this last night is still out there. I figured you had a right to know that.”
Rainwater nodded. “Any way you can give me a better idea of what this print looks like?”
Back at his car, Estes pulled a plaster impression of the footprint from his trunk. Injun Joe took it from his grasp and ran his hands over the clawed extremity.
“This was a man’s foot, how tall would he be?”
“It’s not a man’s foot.”
“Educated guess.”
“Okay. You wanna hear it, I’ll tell you: based on the angle of the bone structure and the way these, well, talons I guess you’d call them, curve inward, whatever calls this its foot would be between eight and nine feet tall. Weigh maybe two-fifty, three hundred pounds.”
Injun Joe handed the plaster impression back to him.
It was too late to bother with sleep before beginning his ten o’clock shift, not that he could have managed to even close his eyes. He stayed at his desk throughout the night, uneventfully save for a pair of phone calls. At midnight he called a number and left a message. At six a call came in that had brought him to the airport where the United Airlines ten A.M. flight out of Boston into O’Hare had just locked home against the jetway.
“What’d you say this shaman’s name was?” Injun Joe’s sometime partner Hal Repozo was asking now.
“I didn’t.”
“You grow up with him or something?”
Joe Rainwater’s face grew reflective. “Yeah. I guess you could say that.”
“I hate when you get like this. Talking mumbo-jumbo and—”
Detective Hal Repozo stopped when Joe Rainwater stiffened at the sight of a figure that had just emerged through Gate 15. Repozo followed his eyes and did a double take.
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me? …”
The figure was that of an Indian who was seven feet tall if he was an inch. His coal-black hair showed a tint of gray and was tied behind his head in a ponytail. He wore a leather vest over a blue denim work shirt and thick khaki pants with badly scuffed brown boots tucked inside them. His face was as leathery as his vest, and his eyes were black ice on a winter night.
“Hello, Joe Rainwater,” the big Indian greeted him when he was a yard away from Injun Joe.
“Hello, John Wareagle.”
The two Indians looked at each other, motionless for what seemed like a very long time. At last Joe Rainwater extended a hand. Wareagle’s grasp swallowed it.
“Thank you for coming, John Wareagle.”
“Old times’ sake, Joe Rainwater.”
After being introduced to the big Indian, Detective Hal Repozo couldn’t resist asking what was on his mind. “Hey, how you guys know each other? Same tribe or something?”
The two Indians again exchanged stares, as if each was waiting for the other to speak. It was Rainwater who broke the silence.
“I’m Comanche. He’s Sioux.”
“Is that important?”
Wareagle looked down at Repozo. “If you’re a Comanche or a Sioux.”
“Okay, what then?”
“The hellfire,” Wareagle said.
“Say what?”
“Let’s go for a walk, John Wareagle,” Injun Joe said.
Wareagle’s luggage consisted of a single shoulder bag, almost hidden by his great bulk. He shifted it from his right shoulder to the left one as he and Rainwater moved slowly through the terminal, Repozo hanging well back.
“I really meant it when I thanked you for coming,” Injun Joe started. “I know you didn’t have to. I know seeing me brings up memories you’d rather leave buried.”