Tainted Trail

  “Ah, I forgot.” Sam snapped her fingers. “You’re a Kicking Deer.”

  “What does that mean?” Ukiah asked.

  “The Kicking Deers are local legends,” Sam said. “Stronger. Faster. Healthier. They say that the Cayuse horses are so sturdy because the Kicking Deers bred with them.”

  “What?” Max said.

  “Oh, it’s an old Indian tale.” Sam said. “A Kicking Deer woman ran off with one of the stallions and turned into a horse, and had colts with him. You listen to enough of these stories and you start to wonder if they didn’t spend much of their time on peyote.”

  Max gave Ukiah a worried glance, and then did a frowning double take. “You sure you’re up to this? You look wiped.”

  “I’ll be better once I eat.”

  Max headed them toward the front door, keeping a light hand on Ukiah’s arm, as if to catch him if he fell. “Ukiah tells me that you’re doing insurance work.”

  Sam fell into step with them, helmet tucked under her arm. “Oregon Life and Home handled all three houses that burned. Not surprisingly. This is a small town. They cover most of the homes. Three home policies. A dozen life-insurance policies. They’re suddenly paying out a large chunk of money, and they don’t want the trend to continue.”

  Max opened the door, and held it wide for Sam and Ukiah to go through. A flood of information spilled out of the restaurant. People. Alcoholic drinks. Cooked food. Twanging country music. Max caught Ukiah’s arm, actually supporting him now, without comment. “What are we talking about, moneywise?”

  “A few hundred thousand.” Sam didn’t say it the same way Max would have. A hundred thousand was petty cash to Max. She said it as if it was quite a bit of money. “Maybe as much as a half-million dollars. The houses weren’t mansions, but they’re insured at replacement cost.”

  “So a fifty-thousand house, built new today, is actually a hundred-thousand-plus home.”

  “More or less, plus all the appliances were at replacement, not depreciated costs. So you’re talking three refrigerators, three stoves, three dishwashers, so on and so forth. What was there might have been twenty years old and the shit busted out of it, but the people paid for it to be replaced with new if the houses were burned.”

  “Televisions, carpets, beds, clothes,” Max added to the list.

  “The whole works. Each family had thirty thousand dollars’ replacement allowance. Then you get into the life insurance. One family was insurance-happy, and even the kids had policies.”

  A hostess showed them a corner booth. Ukiah leaned against the wall, eyes closed, trying to shut out the flood. The waiter came up, wearing too much Polo aftershave.

  “They’ve got a good beer selection,” Sam said, a familiar voice out of the dark rumble.

  Max ordered Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and then asked if they had milkshakes.

  “We have soda, unsweetened tea, hot tea, milk, and coffee.” The waiter’s unfamiliar voice and breath tore through Ukiah’s awareness like barbed wire, snaring and snarling all his thoughts.

  “The kid will have a milk, and a bowl of whatever soup you have.” Max paused, apparently consulting the menu. “A plate of calamari rings, a shrimp cocktail, the langostino, and the breaded, smoked salmon, whatever that is.”

  A song Ukiah had heard the day before came on the sound system, mourning a lost love, the words and tune now familiar. With the waiter gone, the tide of the information receded enough for Ukiah to open his eyes.

  “I’ve heard that your client was definitely kidnapped,” Sam was saying.

  Max’s eyes narrowed, and his smile faded slightly. “How did you hear?”

  “Police scanner.” Sam held up her hands to hold off Max’s wrath. “Like I said, it’s a small town. I figure if you three are staying in town for a while, we can join forces. I’ve got the contacts. The kid’s a tracking wonder, and yes, it would be nice to have armed backup with kidnappers running loose.”

  The waiter returned, forcing silence on the table as he thunked down glasses, beer bottles, and a steaming bowl of vegetable beef soup. Ukiah curled himself around his soup.

  Max relaxed back into his seat, giving a slightly smug grin. “You’re just wanting another peek at my piece, eh?”

  Sam snickered, pouring out her beer. “Of course. So, we work together?”

  “I’m not saying we wouldn’t welcome the help.” Max poured his own beer. “But are you sure you’re not haring off on a wild-goose chase? Alicia’s disappearance might not have anything to do with your case. It would make it tough getting paid.”

  “I’ve had a hunch about this since I heard the first all-points. Frankly, it looks more and more like I’m right.”

  The waiter returned, doing a balancing act with plates of appetizers, bread, napkins, and silverware. He carefully set the food in the center of the table. Max snagged a piece of the fried fish and moved the plate directly in front of Ukiah.

  “Are you ready to order dinner?” the waiter asked, his presence still grating. He’d had a cigarette since serving them—Marlboro 100s—and the traces of smoke leaked out with his breath. “Or should I come back?”

  Max frowned at the menu and ordered the baked lemon-herb salmon, a salad, and decided to try the mashed baby reds. “They have twenty-ounce porterhouse, kid. Want it?”

  Ukiah nodded, mouth stuffed with smoked salmon. Max ordered it rare, and picked out a baked potato as the side. He checked the menu, and added sautéed mushrooms and shrimp to Ukiah’s dinner.

  Sam ordered sautéed langostino without glancing at the menu. She watched Max edge the other appetizers in Ukiah’s direction. “For one crazy minute, I thought we were going to share all that food.”

  “If you want some, grab it now.” Max demonstrated with a calamari ring. “Much as I love it, I can’t take this level of fat anymore. Goes right to the midsection.”

  “Your midsection looks fine to me.”

  Max covered another smug grin by sipping at his beer.

  “So, do you have a photo of your client?” Sam helped herself to one of each appetizer.

  Max reached into his pocket and pulled out his PDA. “I downloaded a few photos before we left.” As a hobby, Max took professional-level photographs. Despite of, or perhaps because of, his rampant paranoia, he could see and capture the inner beauty of people. It was as if he peered past all illusions.

  He tapped through menus and Alicia gazed out of the small screen. Despite her glad clothes and the spread of glitter on her cheeks, she seemed the portrait of bitter sorrow. “This is her at the Fourth of July. She’s twenty-three. Kraynak was her legal guardian until her birthday two years ago, but she still lives with him and his family. She’s his older brother’s only child. Her folks were killed in a 737 crash just outside of Pittsburgh in . . . when was that, Ukiah?”

  “September ninth, 1994,” Ukiah said.

  “She survived the crash?” Sam asked.

  Max shook his head, selecting another sad photo of Alicia from the Fourth. “She wasn’t on the plane. Everyone was killed. The plane exploded on impact. They had to piece everyone back together in order to identify the bodies. Alicia’s parents had gone to Chicago for the wedding of a distant relative on her mother’s side and left her with Kraynak. The airplane crashed on their way home.”

  Ukiah felt bad that he never found out why Alicia had been so sad at Max’s picnic on the Fourth. In the picture, she looked ready to cry.

  “That’s rough,” Sam said of the Kraynaks’ deaths.

  “Speaking of insurance, Alicia was attending graduate school on the money from her parents’ policy.” Max tapped his PDA and the photo changed to one of Ukiah and Alicia at Kraynak’s Christmas party. In this photo, Alicia was her normal exuberant self. She leaned against Ukiah, arms looped around his shoulders, just noticeably taller than him, pale face pressed close to his dark cheek, smiling brightly to his quiet retreat in the face of the party confusion.

  All traces of Sam’s smile vanished
from her face. “Oh,” she breathed, taking the PDA and gazing at it closely. “I didn’t realize you two were friends of the family.”

  “Kraynak and I served together in the Gulf. Military police. We were the only ones in our unit from Pittsburgh. We stayed friends after discharge. We’ve been through some rough times together.”

  “When Alicia turned sixteen, she wanted a job other than flipping burgers. I hired her to do work at the agency. She did gofer work, library searches, and such like that. She quit when she started grad school last year.”

  “I’m sorry.” Sam handed back the PDA. “What was—is she like?”

  Max sipped his beer before answering. “She’s the kind of person they invented the phrase ‘full of life’ for. I think her parents’ death made her obsessed with being impulsive. Seize the moment. Party hardy. Dance naked in the streets.”

  Sam made a sound like “gak.”

  Max flashed a smile and then shrugged. “She’s really a sweet, intelligent kid with lots of common sense—which she works hard to ignore. She gets herself into one mess after another, but she usually gets herself back out of trouble, and you only hear about it later. She only mildly drove me nuts when she worked for us.”

  “Only mildly?” Sam made a face. “You’ve got more patience than I do, then.”

  Max poured the rest of the beer from the bottle into his glass. “It was hard to listen to her complain about her newest mess when you knew she flung herself into it with her normal reckless abandon. There’s always this part of you afraid that one day it might land her in a body bag.”

  It was odd hearing Max’s impression of Alicia. Max often dissected clients, laying bare to Ukiah what truly motivated them, patiently explaining human behavior to him, but he rarely turned his abilities on friends and family, letting Ukiah make up his own mind about them.

  “Alicia liked people,” Ukiah said. The deep aches in his bones were vanishing as the food worked through his system. “I’m not sure if it was because she was fearless, or she just expected the best from people, but she’d talk to anyone. She was very patient and kind.”

  “So she could have gotten herself hooked up with the wrong people?” Sam asked.

  “To Alicia, being wild and crazy is like surfing—it’s a game you play when you’ve got the time,” Max admitted. “Judging by Alicia’s ex-boyfriends, she wants a guy to ride the waves with her. What she keeps finding are guys who make waves just to upset the world around them.”

  Sam made another rude noise. “Those aren’t hard to find.”

  “When you’re in the water, it’s hard to tell the difference.” Max forgave Alicia. “She dumps the losers once her common sense kicks in, but she’s made more than one phone call for help while locked in a strange bathroom.”

  “Pendleton isn’t Portland. She’ll have limited access to a party crowd,” Sam said, and then cocked her head, frowning. “What was a girl like her doing as a geology grad student?”

  “Process of elimination, I think,” Max said. “As an undergrad, she changed her major at least six times. Even taking summer classes, she graduated three months late, and that doesn’t reflect the classes that she attended for a week and then dropped, switching to something else before the term got too far along for her to play catch-up.”

  “She said she liked the permanence,” Ukiah told them. “A rock stays a rock despite almost anything you do to it.”

  Sam shook her head as if it still didn’t make sense to her. “I would have thought with her uncle a cop, and working with you two, she’d end up in law enforcement. It’s exciting work.”

  “At first, her major was criminology.” Max stalled by sipping his beer, then reluctantly explained. “Alicia’s junior year in college, we ran into a serial killer by the name of Joseph Gary. He was kidnapping people, killing them, and eating them—a real wacko. He had grabbed the hiker we were tracking, and we ended up in a shootout with him. Alicia didn’t like that.”

  “I didn’t like it,” Ukiah muttered around a mouthful of shrimp.

  “Up to that point,” Max finished. “I think she glamorized the work. The shootout brought the danger too close to home. Afterwards, she started switching majors until she settled into geology.”

  “This is the case that started the bulletproof-vest habit?” Sam asked.

  The waiter appeared with a tray of dinners. He cleared off empty glasses and appetizer plates to make room. Ukiah’s dinner came on multiple plates, the twenty-ounce steak covering one entire plate. After the protein-loaded appetizers, Ukiah had the patience to attack it with knife and fork instead of picking it up and biting off large mouthfuls. As a sure sign of how badly hurt he had been, even after all the earlier food, the meat tasted sublime, a creation of heaven. He chewed with his eyes half-lidded with pleasure.

  Max uttered affirmation to Sam’s earlier question, and clarified with, “Joe Gary nearly killed Ukiah. He shot him in the chest with a rifle—luckily it just grazed him. I think that’s what bothered Alicia the most; Ukiah was just eighteen.”

  Actually, they knew now that Gary had killed Ukiah, only not permanently. Fired at extreme close range, Gary’s bullet had not scratched Ukiah, but instead punched a hole through Ukiah’s chest. His cells, recognizing that continuing to pump blood would merely geyser it out of his body, shut all heart functions down while they shuffled about to patch the wound. A relatively small wound with only soft flesh damage, it had taken only a short time before his collective self restarted.

  Half unconscious from a blow to the head, Max had felt for Ukiah’s pulse a few moments prior to this. For a few anguished filled minutes, Max thought he had gotten Ukiah killed. Then Ukiah woke up.

  For three years, they thought they had gotten lucky that day, and Max merely failed to find Ukiah’s heartbeat. In June, after all the insanity that came with Ukiah learning the truth about himself, they realized that there had been no pulse to feel. Early in July, they went back to the cabin to collect the blood mice accidentally left behind. The colony had merged together into a solitary rattlesnake. After years of not remembering the fight, Ukiah now had fuzzy, scattered recollections. Between the change to mice, then rattlesnake, and the years of surviving alone, however, parts of his genetic memories had been lost.

  “So,” Sam said. “Tell me what you know about our kidnappers.”

  “There were four kidnappers, as far as I can tell. Three men. One woman. The first is a blond, male, slightly taller than Max, heavier than Max by forty or fifty pounds. He wore size ten Timberlands, blue jeans, and a blue flannel shirt. Early thirties. O-positive blood.”

  Max had taken out his PDA and jotted notes as Ukiah talked. He winced slightly, reminding Ukiah too late that blood type wasn’t something most trackers could determine.

  Sam was also taking notes, in a small paper notebook of the type reporters used when they hadn’t switched over to PDAs. “Kraynak’s right. You’re damn good.”

  “The second was a female,” Ukiah continued between bites. “She drove the car. Size five shoes, cross-trainers or walking shoes. She’s small, around five foot, maybe shorter, and around a hundred pounds. She kept back, away from the violence.” He chewed for a few minutes, searching his memory to see if there were any other clues he had picked up without realizing it. No. “The third seems to be a man, five ten or eleven, around two hundred pounds, size nine cowboy boots, blue jeans. The fourth also seemed male, tall, maybe about six-two, but skinny, around a hundred and seventy. He wore size twelve tennis shoes.”

  “How are you determining sex?”

  “Size and weight, style of the shoe. They could be very tall women wearing men’s shoes.”

  Sam nodded, making notes.

  Max explained about the ring, and then asked Ukiah about the car the kidnappers used.

  “Four-door, front-wheel drive, all-weather treads, probably with a trunk instead of a hatchback. They put Alicia into the back and drove toward town during the daylight, so I’m guessing that it’
s not a station wagon either. Whatever it is, midsized. “

  Max made a noise at the vagueness of the description.

  Sam, however, seemed happy. “This is great!” When they looked at her in surprise, she added, “You found evidence that someone acted against Alicia. There are over thirty people dead in the last three months without a shred of evidence that someone killed them. Hell, there might be people missing that we’re not aware of. Hitchhikers. Seasonal workers. Drifters.”

  Ukiah and Max traded glances, and Max told Sam how the kidnappers seemed well-practiced at herding a person to a waiting car.

  “The bodies are probably well-hidden to keep the death count down,” Sam theorized.

  “Why do you think Alicia’s kidnapping has anything to do with your house fires?”

  “Sheer gut instinct,” Sam admitted. “There’s nothing that links all of this together except the skewed numbers.”

  “Nothing at all?” Max asked.

  “Nothing that I can see,” Sam amended. “I’ve been on this case for a month. I’ve listed out everything about the victims. Where they worked. Where they lived. Where the kids went to school, including teachers, classmates, and kids outside of their class that they played with at recess. Church. Relatives. Neighbors. God, the number of possible suspects could drive you nuts. If you draw it out, it looks like a massive spiderweb—everything’s connected—and yet, when you look closely, there’s nothing obvious linking all three families.”

  Max gave her a sympathetic smile. “Sometimes doing all the legwork, you get too close and you can’t see the obvious.”

  “Actually, I’d love for you to go over my notes with me,” Sam said. “See if you can spot something I’ve missed. I haven’t talked to anyone in town about it, because anyone might be involved.”

  Max grinned at the mildly paranoid comment, which was very similar to what he’d say. “Good thinking.”

  Sam flashed a look at him and then returned her attention to her meal. “It might be a glut of information is masking the true connection. That’s why I think Alicia’s going to be the key to the case. Everyone else has a billion connections above and beyond the ones I’ve recorded. Maybe their link with the killers happened ten years ago, or is somehow related to what their parents did together as children, or maybe it was their grandparents. Who can tell?”