CHAPTER ELEVEN

Arthur woke slowly but sensed instantly he was not in bed alone. The unmistakable smell of wolf-dog hung in the air, and the heavy extra weight that caused the mattress to sink told him that Ak’is had been keeping a watchful eye on overnight.

Arthur reached out a shaky hand and raked it over the big dog’s head, down his thick neck, and over his muscular, furry shoulder. He often found it worked as a tranquilizer for him, the way they say therapy dogs work for seniors and kids in hospitals. He managed to lift his head enough to see Ak’is’ golden eyes staring back at him with what appeared to be a worried look. Arthur told him in Diné not to worry. That he was strong. The wolf-dog expelled a deep breath and turned his head into Arthur’s petting hand.

Arthur’s eyes moved toward the windows of his and Sharon’s bedroom, noticing that they had been opened to allow the high-desert breeze to carry in the healing scent of the sage that surrounded their home. He watched as the Creator’s breath played with the lace curtains and made them dance. The docking station where his phone charged showed 9:56 a.m. floating in its ocean of incandescent blue. As he cradled his throbbing head back into the pillow, all he could remember was that they had arrived home around six the night before after spending most of the previous day in the hospital after being shot at and surviving the accident the night before that. He remembered Sharon helping him upstairs and her putting him to bed while Ak’is had followed carefully behind. Now it was two hours from noon, almost two days later. Man, he thought, time really flies when you’re comatose.

Ak’is licked his lips twice and continued to watch Arthur from under a thick brow that moved with each new eye position. Arthur could hear the big dog’s deep, steady breathing, and it added to the calming effect washing over him. Both of them had just closed their eyes when Sharon entered the bedroom carrying a tray of food and a mug of coffee. Arthur looked at her and smiled. “Wow. Breakfast in bed? I should get hurt more often.”

“Ha ha,” Sharon remarked playfully. “I suggest you don’t, or I’ll have to tie you to this bed and keep you as my prisoner.”

Arthur struggled to sit himself up and propped his back against the headboard. The pain in his body was definitely still there. His legs hurt, his back ached, and his head still had a residual fog blowing through it that rivaled a London night back when Jack the Ripper ruled.

“As I recall,” Arthur joked, “that didn’t end well for James Caan.”

Ak’is raised his head just enough to sniff the aroma wafting from the tray. Sharon set it on Arthur’s nightstand. Not sensing anything appetizing, Ak’is rested his big head back on the bed. Sharon stood with her arms crossed in front of her.

“Don’t worry,” Sharon said, “I don’t know where you keep the sledgehammer.” Her grin suddenly took a devious turn. “Although I would have you all to myself …” She sat on the edge of the bed and slid a soft hand down his smooth, muscular chest and under the single sheet that covered him. He could feel her fingers searching slowly, the tips of them gently brushing his skin. “I could do whatever I wanted to you for as long as I wanted …”

“Do tell,” Arthur said. Groggy or not, he wanted to see where this attempt at morning seduction went.

Suddenly, and to his great dismay, she pulled her hand away and readjusted the sheet. “But that’s only if I were in the mood. Which I’m not, because you need your rest. I wouldn’t want to take advantage of an injured man.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Arthur said. “Take as much advantage as you like.”

Sharon laughed, picked up the tray and placed it on his lap, took one of the napkins and opened it, laid it over his chest. “Just eat your breakfast and shut up. And by the way, mister, why is it I’m always the one cooking for you and you’re never cooking for me?”

“That’s because I let my fingers do the dialing.” Arthur picked up his fork and ate some of the eggs still hot on the plate.

“Well, there are times when a girl likes to be taken care of, you know?”

“I’ll make a note.” He sipped some coffee.

Sharon feigned frustration and said, “I’ve got some news for you.”

“What kind of news?”

“I had my assistant at the station do some checking on Margaret today, had her go through public records and whatever else she could find.”

Arthur swallowed the coffee and replaced it with two bites of thick bacon. “Checking out my old girlfriend, are you?”

Sharon grinned and gave Arthur a wrinkled look. “Not hardly. I just thought I’d follow up with her while you were sleeping.” She sucked on the tip of her middle finger and tapped it against the corner of her husband’s mouth, rescuing a crumb of bacon that had clung there. “You don’t mind a little help, do you?”

He watched her lips close around the finger and suck off the bacon crumb. He was starting to enjoy breakfast in bed.

“Not at all,” he said, still savoring the taste of bacon. Which ranked right up there with his taste for mutton, but not even Sharon could prepare mutton the way his maternal grandmother could, back when she was alive. “What were you hoping to find?”

Sharon slowly, seductively withdrew her finger from her mouth and said, “I wasn’t sure, but what she did turn up surprised me.”

Arthur ate some more bacon with his eye on the orange juice sitting in the frosted glass. “And what was that?”

Sharon wiped her finger on his napkin. “Did you know that Margaret owns land off of 550?”

Arthur stopped midsip and swallowed. “She never men­tioned that to me. Not even when we were kids.”

Sharon looked at him quizzically. “Really? Hm. Well, somewhere back around 1874 the allotment processes the government put in motion divided our land and gave Margaret’s family forty acres east of Huerfano and south of Angel Peak badlands.”

“That seems like a lot of land for the white man to have given an Indian in those days. Are you sure about that?”

“Didn’t pay attention much in rez public school, did you?”

Arthur ate some eggs as she explained.

“The provisions of the Dawes Act of 1870 granted the head of a family one hundred and sixty acres, an orphan or person over eighteen years of age eighty acres, and a person under the age of eighteen forty acres. I’m guessing Margaret’s family member—probably a male—was under the age of eighteen.”

“Like I said, she never mentioned it to me,” Arthur said, adding hot sauce to his eggs.

“Probably slipped her foggy memory. Didn’t you say she was a glonnie?”

“What? No!” Arthur glared at her. “Her life’s been ripped apart, Sharon, and she looked for solace in a bottle. Big deal! She’s no drunkard. Never has been.”

Sharon hesitated, realizing an invisible line had just been crossed, before testing her next question. “You sure you’re not looking through the skewed lens of adolescent love?”

Arthur shook his head absently, the thoughts of Margaret and that morning three days ago playing out briefly in his mind. “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” Sharon said. “I understand what you mean.”

“Do you think there’s a way to tie her property to the killings of Tsela and Tahoma? Could NMX have wanted her land badly enough to kill for it?”

“I don’t know. But I could do some more digging and see what I come up with.”

Arthur drank some coffee. “If we go down that rabbit hole, my guess would be they probably tried to buy her out, or made her an offer to lease, and she refused. Or, if we want to get archaic, they could have seen her as an obstacle and decided to revert back to the tried-and-true Colonial way of acquiring Native lands: by taking away her reasons for not selling.”

Sharon said, “That’s a wild stretch in today’s world.”

Arthur’s phone broke up the conversation from atop the docking station. Sharon reached over quickly and grabbed it while it continued to ramble through the agonizing xylophone scale. Recognizing the familiar name and number, she tapped the big Accept button.

“Yá’át’ééh abíní, Jake,” she said.

“I hope I’m not bothering you two this morning,” Bilagody said, “but I was hoping to speak with our resident stunt driver.”

Sharon smiled. “Hold on.” She handed Arthur the phone.

“What’s up?”

“I wanted to tell you we pulled a latent print off that gum wrapper you found.”

“How’d you manage to do that?” Arthur glanced at Sharon.

Jake said, “I figured if we’re going to have a chance at solving this before someone else gets killed, we don’t have months to wait for a lab—they’re overworked and underfunded. I simply decided to go a different route.”

“And what route was that?”

“I have this new officer here, Alicia Tom, and she had this crazy idea she could help. She saw me staring at that damn baggie with the wrapper in it the other day and mumbling to myself and told me if I couldn’t come up with an answer, maybe she could.”

“That’s taking a helluva risk with possible evidence.”

“Yeah, well, that risk paid off,” Jake expressed confidently. “The next day she brought in a small plastic container—the kind you’d put leftovers in—and a bottle of iodine crystals.”

Arthur tapped the speaker function on his cell phone so Sharon could hear what Jake was saying. “Iodine crystals?” Arthur repeated.

“She does a lot of backpacking and uses them to purify water. Anyway, she sprinkles some of these crystals in the container and puts the wrapper inside using tweezers from her purse and closes the lid.” Jake paused briefly to grab a breath of air before continuing. “Then she went over to the sink and poured some steaming hot water into a pot and floated the container in it.”

Arthur could hear the excitement building in the cop’s voice, and he smiled at Sharon. She smiled back and said softly, “Girl sure sounds resourceful.”

Ak’is still paid them all no mind. He was enjoying relaxing on his parents’ bed for a change. He wasn’t usually allowed on the giant bed, and he was going to take full advantage of it.

“Arthur, I’ll be damned if after a few minutes I couldn’t see some vapors floating around inside that container! And after about five minutes, she pulls the container out of the water, dries it off, and opens it. She pulls out your wrapper with the tweezers and lays it on the counter, and I’ll be damned again if you couldn’t see fingerprints! Kind of a brownish orange, but there they were. Had some pretty good ridge detail, too.”

“So you plan to give it to our FBI pal Thorne with prints already developed on it?”

“That’s the best part!” Jake said. “The prints were so well formed I had her take digital pictures of them to save them. She said they would probably vanish in a few hours anyway, so by the time I hand them over to the feds, it’ll just look like a plain gum wrapper again. But I’m going to tell them what we did and show them the digital photos, give them my findings and explain that the situation called for fast action.”

“And you think Thorne will be willing to work with you knowing you tampered with evidence?”

“We’ll be just as friendly as the when Democrats and Republicans work together across the aisle.” Jake’s jovial attitude disappeared quickly. “You’re not going to like the result though.”

Arthur and Sharon waited.

Finally, Bilagody said, “You sitting down?”

“Better,” Arthur said. “I’m laying down.”

“When we ran the prints through the system they came back as John Sykes’.”

“No way!” Arthur sat upright in bed. Sharon grabbed the tray. Ak’is did nothing. “I don’t believe you. Run ’em again!”

“What the hell do you think I did?” Jake countered. “I ran them three times and got the same result each time. There’s no way around it. Sykes is our killer. When I turn the wrapper over to the FBI, the first thing they’ll want to do is go out to his place. I’ve already chosen a liaison officer to go with them.”

“Don’t get the feds involved yet,” Arthur said. “I want a chance to talk to John first. Text me his address.”

“That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Jake scolded. “What makes you think he won’t kill you? He’s already tried once. And don’t forget someone out there hired him to do it.”

“I can’t explain it, Jake, but if anyone can talk to him, it’ll be me. And we all know who hired him. Elias Dayton.”

“I still say you’re reaching.”

“Look, John’s not stupid. If he’s our killer, and the feds get there before I have a chance to talk to him, he’ll see them coming.” Arthur calmed his voice in order to convey his point. “They’ll never even hear the shots that kill them.”

Arthur heard Jake’s heavy breathing as he contemplated his answer. “You’ve got four hours. Then I call them. I’ll send you the address.”