“So they were here, and now they’re gone,” Sam said.
“Alicia’s kidnappers must have taken them,” Ukiah said.
“Or Alicia herself.”
“Alicia isn’t that type of person,” Ukiah said. “She forgot to pay for a pack of gum once, and we had to drive back ten miles to the store to pay the fifty cents.”
“Forgot to pay?”
“She forgot she had them in her hand. She was—is really absentminded.” And suddenly it was so awful that a few days short of vanishing, she had sat and cried for him. The nearly indestructible one.
They had a dispirited lunch at Taco Bell down the street from the library. True to his word, Rennie kept out of sight, but Ukiah still sensed him, roving on the edge of his awareness. It was a comforting feeling after viewing Magic Boy’s murder.
Sam and Max talked over the logistics of comparing the arson suspects with the list of people Alicia had come in contact with. During their investigation, Sam had noted everyone the team had interviewed into a slim tablet with a brief description of their interaction with Alicia. Back at her offices, however, were the case files for the house fires. Those included employment records of the dead, insurance and arson reports, any arrest records of survivors, background checks of beneficiaries and area newcomers, and in some cases, even family trees. The result was measured in the square feet of paper. Sam’s office, she said, would hold only two people with very little space to spread out paperwork. Neither Max nor Sam wanted to work in a public place such as the library or the hotel room. Reluctantly, Sam suggested that they retreat to her house to filter through the lists.
Arranging to meet at the park behind the library, Sam went off to gather her files from her office.
Max and Ukiah hit a supermarket for supplies, filled the Blazer’s gas tank, and drifted back to the park. Ukiah sprawled on the shaded grass, trying not to think of the grisly photos, while Max made a series of phone calls, trying to keep their business back in Pittsburgh from unraveling.
Both of their part-time investigators, Chino and Janey, were good at stakeouts and trailing suspects without being noticed, which made them good for surveillance. They could hold their own in a brawl, which made them wonderful company while looking for skips or serving papers.
Investigative legwork, much like Max, Sam, and Ukiah had been doing daily in Pendleton, however, eluded the two. It seemed as if they couldn’t conceive the next step to take once they reached the end of each task. Max needed to chop each case up into segments, talking them through each procedure.
“I know it’s not because I’m a bad teacher,” Max growled as he hung up. “I taught you fine. You understand how to follow leads and ask the right questions. They just don’t get it.”
“Why can’t I find Alicia, then?”
“Working a case and solving it are two different things, the second sometimes having little to do with skill and much to do with luck.”
They fell silent, and the wind moved through the trees, throwing dappled shadows on them.
“Alicia was doing a great job of finding my family,” Ukiah noted. “She couldn’t have known how close she was when she found that photo at the Tamástslikt, or even the book. The obituary would have listed Jesse Kicking Deer, and if she talked to him about me—” He fell silent, realizing where that thread would lead.
“It keeps going back to the Kicking Deers,” Max murmured.
“No,” Ukiah snapped. “They had nothing to do with Alicia’s kidnapping.”
Max spread his hands wide. “A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money for most people. Maybe we should look into who gets the money if Jesse doesn’t hand it out as a reward.”
Ukiah leaped to his feet, unable to deal with his anger at Max. It was a foreign emotion, and he flailed about, trying to find a way to get rid of it. “It couldn’t have been one of them. Jared was with us when I was shot, and when the kidnappers went to Bear Wallow Creek to get Alicia’s stuff. And it wasn’t Zoey, or Cassidy, or Jesse, either!”
“I’m just saying that every time we turn around, there’s something to do with the Kicking Deers.”
“It’s just because Alicia was trying to find my family.” Ukiah flung out reasons. “And I’m trying to find them, and Jared’s the sheriff. The man in the woods was blond and blue-eyed.”
“Elaine Kicking Deer is blond and blue-eyed. Maybe the kidnapper is a distant cousin who has very little Indian blood.”
Ukiah searched through his memory, finding the places where he made skin-to-skin contact with the various Kicking Deers. Zoey kissing Ukiah’s cheek. Jared rubbing his thumb along Ukiah’s newly healed radius bone. Cassidy brushing Ukiah’s hair from his eyes. The siblings were too close to give a broad Kicking Deer “pattern.”
He called up his visit to the hardware store, with the various Kicking Deer men. Had he touched any of them?
A stray memory leaped out from the flow.
Sam sighed at the news and tossed one of the candies to Ukiah. “One of the deputies, Matt Brody, lost his kid in June. He’s one of my drowning victims.”
“Oh.”
“He and his wife took it hard . . .”
Ukiah stilled, as it triggered another memory, from later that night, as Max was cutting off his cast.
“. . . One of Kicking Deer’s deputies, he’s one of those big dumb-blond ox types, has a theory that a hunter shot you, despite the fact it’s out of season for just about everything.”
“What is it?” Max asked, recognizing that Ukiah had thought of something.
“Jared’s deputy.” Ukiah whispered.
“Which one?”
“The big blond with the hunting-accident theory, the police scanner, the wife, and the drowned boy.”
“Wife?”
“The female kidnapper.”
“Oh, shit.” Max’s eyes scanned back through the days. “You haven’t met him to do a DNA match on the kidnapper’s hair.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s way beyond poker-faced. Wooden.” Max took out a cheroot, moved downwind, and lit it. “He set off my creep alarms, but then they told me about his son, and I put it down to grief. I thought I knew something of what Brody was going through.”
Max’s wife had vanished without a trace. Months later, Max learned that she had gone out antique hunting and spun her Porsche off the road and into a lake. No one had seen the accident, and she had been so far from her normal area that no one thought to look for her in the lake.
“After something like that,” Max said quietly, “you walk around with all your feelings shut down, because it hurts too much to feel.”
“Except Brody’s out kidnapping Alicia and shooting me.”
Fury gathered in Max’s face, and his eyes went cold. “Damn the bastard. He’ll pay for this.”
“I’m just guessing at this, Max. Until I compare his DNA with the hair I found, we can’t know for sure.”
“And then it will be your word against his. We’ll need something more concrete than a stray hair before we can point fingers.”
If Brody were Alicia’s kidnapper, he had stayed one step ahead of them, carefully removing evidence. What had he done with Alicia? Today would mark a full week since her kidnapping. Ukiah tried to believe she was still alive, but all the deaths that Sam was investigating loomed up, condemning any hope Ukiah had for Alicia.
He peered at Max through his dark bangs. “You think Brody might have killed his own son?”
Max recognized Ukiah’s fears for Alicia. He reached out to the boy and gripped his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ukiah, but yes. There’s been something about the man that raised my hackles from the start, so to speak.”
Ukiah flopped back onto the grass to watch sunlight diamond through the shifting leaves. Obviously, Brody had the locals fooled. Max and he would have to play within the rules and find something that would nail Brody without obtaining it illegally. Ukiah cast his thoughts back over the last week, and found the ho
le in their investigation.
“We never found the sniper site of my shooting. Brody wouldn’t have had a lot of time to set up, and he might have left in a hurry, to establish an alibi in another location. He might have left evidence.”
“Good boy!” Max clapped him on the shoulder. “See. I’m a great teacher!”
“Change of plans,” Max announced when Sam returned. “We’re going south, one car, so we can talk.”
Sam frowned at Max as she reluctantly got out of her car. “South?” She glanced to Ukiah, and read something on his face that Max managed to hide. “You’ve got a new lead.”
“Possibly,” Max said. “Bring your files.”
Ukiah reached out to Rennie, who drifted on the edge of his senses. “Rennie? We’re going down to where I was shot.”
Rennie’s faint reply grew stronger as the Pack leader moved to intercept them. “I hear you. I’ll tag along behind and make sure you’re not followed.”
Sam shifted her case files across to the Blazer and they headed out of Pendleton for the national park. “What’s up?”
Ukiah leaned over the front seat between Max and Sam. “Tell us everything you know about Deputy Brody.”
“Matt Brody?” She glanced to Max and saw that they were serious. “Brody is a good cop. Yeah, he’s gotten weird since his son died, but Harry’s the second kid the Brodys have lost, and they can’t have any more.”
“The second one?” Ukiah asked.
“The whole family was in a car accident four years ago; a drunk driver hit them. Matt Brody lost one of his kidneys. Vivian Brody took massive trauma to her intestinal tract; they thought she was going to die. Their little girl—the car seat failed, and she went through the windshield.”
“How did his son die?” Max asked coldly.
“He was the first drowning victim this year. June thirtieth. Vivian Brody reported him missing out of the yard, and he was found dead two miles away in the McKay Reservoir the next day. Coroner ruled accidental drowning sometime during the day he disappeared.”
“No sign of being held under?”
Pain flashed across Sam’s face for the dead child. “No. He was just five. The Brodys say he couldn’t swim.”
“So it wouldn’t take much,” Max said. “Just carry him out deeper than he could stand, and let go.”
Sam glared at Max and took out her tablet to flip through it. “We don’t have Brody on Alicia’s list.”
“If you do a search on the name ‘Kicking Deer,’ Jared is the only one that comes up,” Max said. “The listing has him as sheriff of Umatilla County, no home information. Alicia could have gone looking for him at the sheriff’s department and ran into Brody there.”
“Is Brody on the other lists?” Ukiah asked.
Sam nodded reluctantly. “But I don’t put any weight to it. All the fire and emergency people show up on the lists as being at the scene.”
“What’s his wife like?” Max asked.
“Vivian? She’s just a little thing,” Sam said. “A munchkin Martha Stewart.”
“Five foot tall, a hundred pounds, and size five shoe?”
Sam said nothing, only stared out the window at the shimmer of sun on water. Ukiah suddenly realized that the lake they were passing was the reservoir itself. They traveled on in silence, each with their grim thoughts.
Sam broke her silence with, “Brody shoots at the same gun range that I use. He’s got an M40.” It was the gun that the Marines used as sniper rifles. “And he’s good with it.”
Umatilla National Park, Oregon
Monday, August 30, 2004
Your mind had been going round and round, cub. Rennie stood down wind on the cliff heights: The Pack leader had put his duster back on for the road trip, and the stiff breeze flared it out behind him. What is it?
It had only taken a short part of the trip from Pendleton to locate the sniper’s location in Ukiah’s memory. At first he couldn’t pick up the muzzle flash. But then he paid careful attention to the direction of the rifle crack. By backing through his memory of being shot, he was able to pick out the small flare among the green. All that was needed was to stand on the cliff and line up the flash. Chances were that they would find only footprints and tire marks. Ukiah hoped they weren’t killing three or four hours for so little, but it was all they had left to go on.
The remainder of trip, he tried to match Brody to the other crimes. Opportunity? In a squad car, Brody had eight hours of freedom. No one would find it odd that a policeman had a weapon in his car. His presence at a crime scene would go unnoticed.
Motive? What reason could Brody have for killing so many people, possibly even his own son? The possible grounds were so impenetrable, Ukiah found himself sliding off to another troubling question.
Did Alicia’s investigation into Magic Boy’s death in 1933 have anything to do with her disappearance?
“I was killed in 1933,” he told Rennie. “The day you came to Pendleton and found Degas covered in blood.”
Rennie cocked an eyebrow at him. “You think Degas killed you?”
Ukiah hadn’t considered that. “No. I think he might have killed the Ontongard that murdered me—and kept it from discovering exactly what it had just slain.”
“Their sloppiness is our gain.” Rennie gave a wolfish grin. “Hex and his Gets can’t tell you from a normal Pack dog without checking closely.”
“You and Hellena couldn’t tell at first either.”
Rennie cuffed him. “Why worry about it now, cub?”
“If Alicia had found old evidence of the Ontongard, who better to take it and her than one of Hex’s Gets?”
Rennie stilled, staring at him.
“There are thirty people dead in this county in the last two months,” Ukiah continued. “Whole families wiped out by fire. Individual family members drowned. This feels so wrong, Rennie.”
Rennie turned to look off to the north where Pendleton lay beyond the horizon, nostrils flaring as if to catch the scent.
“Hex? Here?”
“There’s no reason for Brody to do these things.”
Rennie growled softly. “Sometimes men don’t need reasons.”
“You don’t think it’s the Ontongard?”
“You’ve been here a week. I’ve been here for two days. So far neither of us has caught the scent of them.”
“I’ve actually spent much of that week holding down a bed in various locations.”
Rennie grinned, then sobered. “The sad truth is that sometimes, cub, men make perfect monsters without the influence of the Ontongard.”
“So what do we do?”
“What we always do—keep your eyes and nose sharp and be ready to fight.”
Following the memory of the muzzle flash, Ukiah loped through the forest, Rennie by his side. Straight as a bullet, nearly half a mile from the cliff, they found where the sniper pulled off the road.
The shooter had pulled hastily under trees to hide any windshield glare. He had trotted a short distance to where he was screened by a fallen pine but had a clear view of the cliff. By the depth of the faint footprints, he had only waited minutes before Ukiah came into view. The sniper fired twice, the spent casings still glittering in the grass.
With Ukiah assumed dead, the shooter ran back to his vehicle and sped off.
“Do we call Jared or the FBI?” Ukiah asked Max, leaving the evidence for the police to find.
Max sighed. “You trust Jared, don’t you.” At Ukiah’s nod, Max glanced to Sam. “You too?”
“He’s as good as cops come.”
“We call them both, and make sure neither of them use the police radio.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pendleton, Oregon
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
The Brody home was a carefully kept brick ranch on Tutuilla Creek Road, perhaps a mile and a half from the interstate. Max and Ukiah followed behind a long convoy of cars—FBI, State Police, Umatilla County Sheriff’s Department, and Pendlet
on Police Department—as it ran along the shallow Tutuilla Creek. Parking under a rare shade tree, the private investigators watched as law officers broke down the Brodys’ front door and swarmed into the house.
For several minutes, the world sat in utter silence and stillness.
“It’s clear,” came a report over their hastily purchased police scanner. “There’s no one here. We’ve got some blue jeans here, though, with Celtic knots painted up the side. Women’s size fourteen, long. The girl was here.”
Yesterday, their luck had held, and the FBI lifted a perfect thumbprint from the spent casings and matched it to Brody’s prints on his permit to carry a concealed weapon. Still it had taken nearly twenty-four hours to work through the legal channels and arrange the search warrants for a number of locations where the Brodys might be holding Alicia, starting with their house.
With the possibility of Ontongard in the area, Rennie had kept close to Ukiah as the number of law officers allowed. It was a fine line Rennie had to dance, since now was not the time to be distracted by FBI agents trying to arrest him. At the moment, he was making himself scarce to the point of being beyond Ukiah’s senses. Hopefully, with nearly twenty policemen nearby, Rennie’s protection wouldn’t be needed.
An hour after the FBI first entered the house, Ukiah’s wireless phone rang.
“Oregon,” he answered without looking at the display.
“It’s me,” Indigo murmured into his ear. Just her voice uncoiled some of the tension inside of him. “I’ve got that information you asked for last night. Of the Ontongard killed in Pittsburgh, two were identifiable as from the West Coast. One was a Portland native, reported missing three years ago. Another one was Pendleton native, a Jason Barnhart, reported missing in May.”
“Barnhart?” Ukiah flashed to the author of the Death of Magic, Hannah Barnhart. “Who filed the report?”
“James Barnhart, his father.”
A Jason and James. Ukiah couldn’t help but think of the Kicking Deers and their inclination for naming boys with ‘J’ names: Jay, Jesse, Jared. Were these Barnharts part of his family?