The next day, nawoj, my friend, when the women came again, Shining Falls was still sleeping. The women tried to awaken her, but she would not open her eyes. The women were frightened. When they tried to question the Evil Giantess, Ho’ok O’oks hid in the black cloud of her hair and would not answer them.
But there was one thing the Evil Giantess did not know and that the Indian women did not know, either. While Ho’ok O’oks was singing and waving the feathers over Shining Falls’s face, she had dropped a single white feather. It was Alichum S-toha A’an—Little White Feather. Shining Falls had put her hand over it, and while she lay sleeping, she held Little White Feather ever so tightly in her hand.
After a time, Little White Feather grew very tired from the weight of Shining Falls’s hand and cried out for help. Some White-Winged Doves—O-okokoi—heard Little White Feather’s cry for help. It was really a song, and it goes like this:
White Feather, White Feather, child of my mother,
You in the air look down on your brother.
Alone am I here in pain and in trouble.
One of the White-Winged Doves said to the others, “Why, I believe that is one of my feathers calling to us.”
You must understand, nawoj, my friend, that it is the law of the desert that you must always answer a call for help, so the White-Winged Doves circled in the air to try to learn what the trouble was.
BRANDON WAS SPEEDING south on Highway 79 when his phone rang. He answered it through the Escalade’s sound system, and Diana’s voice came out through the speakers.
“Have you talked to Lani today?” she asked with no preamble—without asking where Brandon was or what he was doing. That was unusual in and of itself.
“No, why?”
“Gabe’s gone missing,” she said.
“From Kitt Peak?” Brandon asked. That was the last thing he had known about the weekend’s plans—that Gabe and Lani were going to camp out on the mountain on Friday night and that the whole family planned to make a daylong expedition to the book festival in Tucson on Sunday.
“Not exactly,” Diana said. “Gabe and Lani evidently got into some kind of hassle, and he walked off the mountain. He made it home, but now no one can find him. Later, after Gabe left, Lani witnessed a shooting—heard it rather than saw it—in which two boys from Sells were killed. It’s a mess, and Lani’s really upset about it, but I have another panel to go to . . .”
“Not to worry,” Brandon said. “I’ll call her right now.”
He did so. “What’s going on?” he asked when Lani answered.
“You’re not going to believe it.”
“Try me.”
Brandon listened patiently to the whole story, but he noticed there were undertones of things not said. “I know Gabe,” Brandon said when Lani finally came to a stop. “He’s a good kid. And I’ve met Tim, too. I can’t imagine either of them getting mixed up in any kind of smuggling enterprise.”
“I believe it all started with one of Tim’s older brothers. Max was caught up in it to begin with. Then, after he got sent up for something or other, he must have passed his part of the business on to his younger brothers.”
Brandon and Lani had always been close, and he could tell from her voice that she was holding back.
“Okay,” he said, after a moment. “You’ve told me Dan and Leo are out looking for the boys, but I get the feeling that you left out a few pertinent details. How about telling me the rest of it?”
His question seemed to catch her off guard. “How did you know?” she asked.
“You’ve never been that good of a liar. Now spit it out.”
“I don’t think Gabe and Tim are just missing, Dad,” she said at last. “I think it’s worse than that. I’m afraid they’re both dead—Tim for sure and maybe Gabe, too.”
“Why?”
“Because there was another shot, one I haven’t mentioned to anyone but you,” she said. “A while after the first two volleys of automatic gunfire, I heard another shot, a single one that time. I couldn’t tell exactly where it came from, but it sounded like it was close enough to Rattlesnake Skull charco that it could be related.”
“You’re saying you think whoever killed Carlos and Paul José may have killed Tim, too?”
“Yes,” Lani answered, her voice trembling with emotion. “The poor kid is probably lying out there in the desert in a place where we’ll never find the body. I know the FBI agents are aware Tim has a phone, but I’m not sure they’ll be in any hurry to put a tracer on it. Finding the phone might not show us where he is now, but it would be a starting point.”
“Surely the FBI will get right on that.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Why?”
“Remember how you always used to complain about having to work with the FBI?”
“I do, but what does that have to do with this?”
“Believe me, it would have been a lot worse if you’d been Indian instead of Anglo back then,” she said. “That female agent barely gave me the time of day. The FBI probably will get around to tracing Tim’s phone, but only when they’re good and ready and have a properly drawn search warrant in hand. Tim José is an Indian, Dad. When it comes to Indian kids, you could say the FBI has no real sense of urgency. I need to find someone who will go looking for Tim’s phone right now. Do you know of anyone who could do that for us, maybe someone from TLC?”
“Not offhand,” Brandon answered. “TLC’s brief is with cold cases rather than new ones, and I’d hate to think about what will happen if we get caught up in the middle of an active FBI investigation. Still, let me give it some thought. I’m coming up on Oro Valley right now. I may stop and grab a bite to eat. Give me a call if you hear anything about those boys, will you?”
“Yes,” she promised. “I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“And don’t worry,” Brandon added. “It’ll be okay.”
That’s what he told his daughter, but it was an outright lie. Brandon had been in law enforcement long enough to understand that if Gabe Ortiz and Tim José had gotten themselves crosswise with drug smugglers, they were most likely already dead, just as Lani feared. Brandon also knew that losing Gabe would break Lani’s heart, and she was the one Brandon was worried about.
That’s what fathers do where their daughters’ hearts are concerned. They worry.
I WON’T PRETEND that reading through the Kenneth Myers murder book was easy. Most of the entries were written in Sue Danielson’s back-slanted handwriting. Seeing that again after all those years came as a shock, and it wasn’t surprising that it was sometimes difficult to read the words themselves because tears kept blurring my eyes.
The skeletal remains had been discovered in 1990 by a highway department crew clearing brush during the completion of the I-90/I-5 interchange. The case had been assigned to Detectives Kramer and Danielson. There were autopsy notes showing some blunt force trauma, but the presumed cause of death was a shooting; two close-range bullet holes were in the back of the skull, either one of which would have been fatal.
A search of public records for the names on the pendant, Ken Myers and Calliope Horn, had eventually led Kramer and Danielson to a woman named Calliope Horn, who had in turn identified the dead man as someone named Ken Myers, Calliope’s former boyfriend, who had gone missing from a transient encampment in 1983.
That piece of information itself went a long way to explain why so little had ever been done. At the time, bum-bashing was more or less a popular spectator sport. Hazing at UDub fraternities often included tracking down bums and beating the crap out of them. If one of them died? It was no big deal because nobody really cared. In fact, I distinctly remembered Kramer waxing eloquent on the topic one day in the break room—talking about how taking down people like that was doing society a favor. I couldn’t help but wonder now if he and Sue had been working this very case at the time.
With that in mind, it was no surprise that Sue Danielson had done the lion’s share of the work. She was the one who had tracked down Calliope Horn and done the interview. I knew I could go down to Seattle PD and request a look at the interview tape. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to, because I dreaded seeing Sue’s face again. But it turned out I didn’t have to, because Amanda Wasser had worked her Freedom of Information Act magic. The next file I opened included a PDF transcript of the Danielson/Horn interview.
Transcripts are to interviews as raisins are to grapes. They’re lifeless and flat. They don’t contain the facial expressions and hand gestures that let homicide cops know when someone is lying, but they can still deliver a lot of information, even when done—as this one evidently had been—with some low-cost character recognition program that couldn’t make heads or tails of either Calliope or Puyallup. Fortunately I was able to fill in those information gaps, telling myself all the while that if I needed to see the tape itself, I could always do so. But even with the character-recognition difficulties, I could see that Sue hadn’t exactly handled Calliope Horn with kid gloves.
S.D.: For identification purposes, your name is Calliope Maxwell Horn and you were born in Puyallup, Washington?
C.H.: That’s right, that’s who I am, but why did you bring me here? Am I under arrest? What’s going on?
S.D.: You’re not under arrest, but tell me. Were you once in a relationship with someone named Ken Myers?
C.H.: Yes, I was. It was a long time ago. Kenny and I were sort of engaged. I mean, I didn’t have a ring or anything, but he’d asked me to marry him, and I’d said yes, but then he took off for Arizona. He told me that when he came back he’d have enough money that we’d be set. We’d be able to get our own apartment and start over. That’s what he told me, but it’s also the last thing he ever said to me. He left, and I never saw him again. But you still haven’t explained why I’m here.
S.D.: Are you aware that human remains were discovered last week at the I-90/I-5 interchange?
C.H.: I guess I saw something about that in the paper. But what does that have to do with me?
S.D.: The victim, a male in his late twenties or early thirties, died of homicidal violence, shot in the back of the head with a .22. I’m sorry to tell you that he was wearing a pendant shaped like a heart, with two names engraved on it—Calliope Horn and Ken Myers. If I’m not mistaken, you’re wearing a similar item. Is this one engraved the same way?
C.H.: (nodding) I still wear it. (holding up a necklace) He didn’t have enough money for a ring, so he got us matching pendants instead. But are you saying Kenny is dead? That he never went to Arizona? That he died right here in Seattle? That’s not possible. He can’t be dead. He can’t. (sobbing)
S.D.: That’s how we found you, Ms. Horn, because of the pendant. Calliope Horn is a distinctive name. We were able to locate you through your driver’s license records. Unfortunately, we’ve found no trace of Mr. Myers. No birth records; no driver’s license. Are you sure Kenneth Myers is his real name?
C.H.: That’s the name he gave me. I didn’t exactly ask him to show me his ID. As for his license, he told me he lost it. Because of a DUI, I think.
S.D.: Do you know where he came from? Or do you have any idea who his next of kin might be so we can notify his family?
C.H.: (shaking her head) He came from somewhere in Arizona. Phoenix, I think. Or maybe Tucson. I told him Phoenix was a place I’d always wanted to visit. It sounded warm.
I remembered seeing notes in the murder book that Sue had checked with authorities in both Phoenix and Tucson, looking for someone named Kenneth Myers. She’d come up empty, of course, because cops in Arizona knew Myers by the name of Kenneth Mangum.
S.D.: Do you remember when Mr. Myers left town?
C.H.: May 1, 1983.
S.D.: You remember that date exactly after all these years?
C.H.: Yes, I remember it. When you’re in love, you remember things like that. At least I do.
S.D.: How did you and Mr. Myers meet?
C.H.: We were both homeless and living in a tent city up on the hillside just east of I-5. A shelter had been cobbled together using old tarps and pieces of canvas. There must have been twenty of us or so living in camp at the time, but I didn’t really notice Kenny until we were standing in line for a Thanksgiving dinner offered by the Salvation Army. It was cold and rainy. It was nice to be inside, out of the weather, and to have a hot meal for a change. We got our food, sat at the same table, and then started talking.
S.D.: What happened then?
C.H.: We hit it off and started hanging out together—and drinking together, too. We were both drinkers then. Eventually we started to trust each other, but I don’t think either of us ever expected to fall in love. A homeless camp doesn’t sound very romantic. (laughter) But it was for us. People teased us and said that we walked around in a funny little bubble.
It turned out Kenny and I had a lot in common. We’d both come from broken and abusive homes; we’d both dropped out of high school our sophomore year. We’d both done time. There’s nothing like spending time in the slammer to give you something to talk about. (laughter) After I got out on good behavior, I couldn’t find work. That’s how I ended up in the camp—me and plenty of others. Just because you get out of jail doesn’t mean you get your life back.
S.D.: What did you get sent up for?
C.H.: I’m sure you’ve got my record right there in front of you.
S.D.: Tell me anyway.
C.H.: Domestic violence. Manslaughter. I killed my ex. Ray came home drunk and was beating the crap out of me. He tried to choke me. I kicked him in the balls hard enough that I got loose. He liked to play ball with the guys, and his baseball bat was standing in the corner of the living room, behind the front door. I grabbed that and bashed his skull in.
We’d both been drinking that night. I had enough cuts and bruises that it should have been considered self-defense, but I had a worthless defense attorney, and the prosecutor argued that I had hit him more than once after he was down. Which was true. I hit him way more than once.
Taking a deep breath, I had to stop reading for several long minutes. I couldn’t continue, not when I knew what had happened to Sue much later. I found myself once again reliving her last moments frame by frame, fighting it out with her enraged and fully armed ex-husband in a battle that had ended with both of them dead.
Throughout the Calliope Horn interview I read enough between the lines to realize that Sue suspected Kenneth Myers, like Calliope’s first husband, had died as a result of domestic violence. I couldn’t help wondering if she had some inkling at the time—some premonition—that a similar fate awaited her. Probably not. My problem was that I had no such luxury. The curse of hindsight was slamming into every fiber of my being as I read those bare-bones questions and answers.
Finally gathering my roiling emotions, I returned to the text.
C.H.: Now I get it. That’s what this is all about and why I’m here, isn’t it. You think that just because I bashed Ray’s head in that I killed Kenny, too? Am I a suspect? Do I need a lawyer?
S.D.: You’re not under arrest, Ms. Horn. You’re free to go anytime you wish. We’re hoping you can help us locate Mr. Myers’s next of kin. So you were both living in the homeless shelter at the time he disappeared?
C.H.: Yes.
S.D.: Did Mr. Myers have a beef of any kind with someone from the camp?
C.H.: No, he didn’t, not at all. I wasn’t the only one who thought he was a good guy. So did everyone else.
S.D.: Did you have any ex-boyfriends hanging around at the time?
C.H.: No, I didn’t. Nothing like that—no boyfriends of any kind.
S.D.: At the time Mr. Myers left, did you report him as missing?
C.H.: No, I didn’t. At first I didn’t worry because he said he was going to Arizona and that he’d be back in a couple of weeks after he did whatever it was he had to do.
S.D.: How was he planning to travel—by plane? By car?
C.H.: He didn’t have a car or a driver’s license and he didn’t have money for plane fare. I figured he was going to hitchhike.
S.D.: At some point, you must have realized that he was gone for good. Why didn’t you report him missing then?
C.H.: Because the cops would have laughed at me. You can’t go missing from a homeless shelter. Most of the people in homeless shelters are already missing from somewhere else. Besides, by then, I’d finally tumbled to the fact that he probably had a girlfriend on the side. I figured he’d hooked up with an old flame and that he’d gone back to Arizona to be with her.
S.D.: What girlfriend?
C.H.: I don’t know for sure that she was his girlfriend; I just assumed that’s what she was. A few days after Kenny left town—after I thought he left town—one of the guys in the camp, Carl Jacobson, mentioned that he’d seen Kenny with another woman the afternoon of the day he left. Carl claimed he saw them sitting together down by the convention center.
S.D.: Did Mr. Jacobson describe her to you?
C.H.: Sort of. He said she was well dressed and classy looking—definitely not homeless. I didn’t pay that much attention at the time because, you know, I still thought Kenny would be back when he finished doing whatever it was he had to do. Then later, when he still wasn’t back by the end of May, I realized that he was probably gone for good. That’s when I finally made the connection with the woman from the convention center.
S.D.: Do you know where we can find Mr. Jacobson?
C.H.: No idea. Homeless people come and go. They don’t leave forwarding addresses.
S.D.: So you don’t know for sure that Mr. Myers and the unidentified woman were involved in a relationship of some kind?
C.H.: I don’t have proof positive, no, but that’s what I believe.
S.D.: You said there were two matching pendants—engraved pendants. If you were both homeless, where did he get the money to buy them and have them engraved?
C.H.: Beats me. Probably worked as a day laborer somewhere to get it.
S.D.: You mentioned that Mr. Myers had a drinking problem?
C.H.: We both did, but by early spring we were working on getting sober. Then, all of a sudden, he was gone. When I realized he was gone for good, I fell off the wagon in a big way. I was furious that he’d left me for someone else and was spending the happily ever after he’d promised me with her. That’s what I always believed until just now when you told me Kenny was dead. All this time I thought he was alive and well and living with someone else instead of me.
S.D.: Let’s talk about her, then—that alleged girlfriend. Did Kenneth ever mention other girlfriends by name?
C.H.: No. We never talked about previous relationships. By mutual agreement those were off-limits. But once he was gone and once I suspected another woman might have been involved, I started putting things together and wondering if maybe she was someone he’d knocked up and she’d come to him looking for child support.
S.D.: Did Kenneth ever indicate to you that he had kids?
C.H.: It never came up and I didn’t ask him. Since I didn’t have kids, I assumed he didn’t, either. By the time I was ready to ask those questions, it was too late. He was gone.
S.D.: How long did it take for you to figure out that he wasn’t coming back?
C.H.: For sure by the middle of June. After that, I spent months drinking and got picked up for being drunk and disorderly. The judge ordered me into mandatory treatment. Once I got sober, I realized that since I couldn’t count on anyone else to save my sorry ass, I’d have to do the job myself. If my life was going to have any kind of happy ending, finding it was up to me.
Someone from AA helped me get into a shelter run by the YWCA. The people there helped me find a job and start taking classes. First I got my GED and then I enrolled in college. I have my own studio apartment now, and I’m halfway through my junior year.
S.D.: What are you studying?
C.H.: I’m majoring in religious studies. After I graduate, I want to earn a degree in divinity. It’s one thing for people in the suburbs to come swanning into some shelter during the holidays to serve turkey dinners and tell themselves that they’re doing their Christian duty. I want to minister to the homeless because I’ve been homeless. I know what it’s like.
S.D.: Some people might think you were operating with a guilty conscience.
C.H.: Those people would be wrong.
S.D.: When Mr. Myers said he was leaving, he led you to believe that he was expecting to make a score of some kind? That he’d be coming back with enough money for the two of you to move out of the homeless camp?
C.H.: That’s right.
S.D.: Is it possible that he was involved in some kind of illegal activity?
C.H.: You mean like drug smuggling or something? No, Kenny drank, but he didn’t do drugs, and I never thought he was a crook.
S.D.: Let me ask you this, Ms. Horn: Did you kill Mr. Myers?
C.H.: No, absolutely not! I swear. Like I said before, I didn’t even know he was dead until just a little while ago when you told me. I always believed that he had taken off with another woman.
S.D.: Miss Horn, would you be willing to take a polygraph test?
C.H.: You mean a lie detector test? Of course. I’d do it in a heartbeat.
The interview ended there. And that’s when I realized I’d already seen a copy of the results from Calliope Horn’s polygraph test. It had been right there in the evidence box. The results indicated that Calliope Horn had known nothing about Kenneth Myers’s death. She had been telling the truth.
With those thoughts in mind, I went on to the other interviews. Calliope Horn’s wasn’t the only one that had been transcribed into what more or less passed for English. Between the time Myers disappeared and the time his remains were found, the encampment had been disbanded and most of the people who had lived there had moved on to wherever homeless people go when they have to go somewhere else. Only a few of the former residents had ever been identified, to say nothing of located.
Interviews with the few individuals who had been found, especially ones conducted by Kramer working alone, were easier for me to read than the ones with Sue’s name on them, but they shed little light on the matter beyond the fact that they all agreed Kenny had disappeared sometime in the spring of 1983. Calliope was the only one who had been able to supply an exact date.
Carl Jacobson, the person who had supposedly witnessed Ken Myers talking to the “ex-girlfriend” and who might have been able to give a description of her, was one of the MIAs. As a consequence, the closest individual to an eyewitness was never interviewed.
Turning off my iPad, I could see why the case had gone cold: No murder weapon. No witnesses. No time of death. No actual crime scene. It wasn’t until years later that Mel Soames, using dental records, had linked the Myers homicide up to an Arizona missing persons report on someone named Kenneth Mangum. That report had been filed years earlier by Ken’s mother, who was deceased by the time the cops came calling with the bad news that her son had been murdered decades earlier in Seattle.
There was no explanation of why he had left Arizona, moved to Seattle, and changed his name. Yes, Ken Mangum had done time in jail on a DUI charge—presumably the same one that had cost him his driver’s license. That meant that his fingerprints were probably on file somewhere, too, but he’d never been arrested again or linked to any other crimes, and the skeletal remains found at the crime scene hadn’t included fingerprints.
Mangum/Myers had died in Seattle. That meant solving the homicide was still Seattle’s responsibility. Once the cops there reached out to Arizona law enforcement in an attempt to notify the next of kin, cops in Arizona weren’t required to do anything more. In other words, the unsolved case was now cold twice over in two separate jurisdictions. With that in mind and given Seattle PD’s lack of enthusiasm for solving bum-bashing cases, I didn’t hold out much hope that it would ever be solved. Not by me, not by Seattle PD, and certainly not by Ralph Ames’s cold case group, TLC.