Chapter Twenty-two

Jack and Oscar took a walk on the square and sat on a bench in the park. The shooter had escaped and they had looked for Tommy for an hour but found only his cycle tracks. Tracks that disappeared into the desert.

“He's probably out of the state by now.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, “but we really need to find out what he was talking about. He told me about this ceremony tomorrow night. The winter solstice. I think he was talking about somebody using Jennifer as a human sacrifice.”

“Jesus. He never gave any clue where it was going to be held?”

“Yeah, he did. ‘Under,’ he said. Underground, somewhere.”

“What else?”

“Well, he mentioned the Anasazi Indians. The ancient tribe from New Mexico. And something else. The Nombee?”

“Jesus,” Oscar said. “It's not Nombee . . . it's gotta be the Namba . . . the Tupinamba.”

Jack looked at him in shock.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“I studied Latin American culture at UCLA, partner. I was thinking about being a diplomat at one time. I was hoping I might get a post in Brazil. I even went down there on a student exchange deal one semester. I found out all about the Tupinamba. They were a very well-organized tribe in the rain forest. Mostly were naked and self-sufficient. But there were a lot of wars with other tribes. Eventually most of them were wiped out.”

“That's fascinating, but what the hell does it have to do with Jennifer's kidnapping?”

Oscar stood up and began to pace.

“I don't know. I wish I hadn't spent so much of my time in college comparing brews. I know more about freaking beer than what I studied. But there was something ... I know it. C'mon, amigo. We got to do some research.”

In Oscar's room they did a Google search on “Tupinamba.” Within seconds they had thousands of sites. The first few said basically the same things that Oscar had remembered.

Then they came to another site. Oscar pounded the desk.

“Look at this.”

The link said: “Tupinamba prisoners.”

Oscar began to read aloud.

The Tupinamba seemed to be one of the most enlightened tribes. If they took a prisoner, they gave him a house, food, and a woman to sleep with, and, basically, treated him like an honored guest. For years this is all anyone knew of them. They seemed civilized compared to the other tribes. But anthropologist Mark A. Reynolds of the University of California, Berkeley, found evidence that there was one more step in the prisoner's incarceration. After being wined and dined and treated like a prince, he was, on an appointed day, tied to a stake, burned alive, and eaten by the Tupinamba tribal members.

“Holy shit,” Jack said. “And the Anasazi?”

“I don't know about them. I always thought they were peaceful. There was something about them that I read once, though. They believed they had discovered the secret to eternal life. Some kind of black magic.”

Oscar quickly Googled that, too, and found a connection to the Tupinamba. Within seconds they were reading about how recent scholarship had destroyed the ancient myth of the Anasazi as ancient, peace-loving Indians.

“Listen to this. ‘The Anasazi Indians of New Mexico and Arizona believed they had found the secret of eternal life.’” Oscar scrolled down the page. “Jesus, look here! ‘By eating the flesh of their victims they took part in what they called sacred cannibalism. They took their enemies’ spirit and youth. They believed that through this ritual they could return to their own youth and live forever.’”

The two men looked at each other in shock.

“That's madness,” Oscar said. “Who would believe such a thing now?”

Jack shook his head. “ I'll tell you who. People who are going to die. Old people looking for the answer to the most terrifying question in the world: Why must I die? And it's been there all along, staring us right in the face. Christ, they even have a department at Blue Wolf called Ancient Ways, run by that woman Sally Amoros.”

“But you said that no one would care that they didn't have the answer to aging.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “ No one would. Everyone knows it's a sham, a mere cosmetic procedure, a kind of make-believe weekend in which older people pretend they can become young again. No one would kill anyone for telling people that it was all bullshit. But what if they really could reverse the clock? What if they had found something that worked, or half worked anyway? That's got to be it, Oscar. Think of Tommy, his skin . . . half old, half. . . something else. Maybe he was in the middle of changing. He told me there are many levels. You see?”

“Many levels? So maybe it's like if you pay so much you get to turn the clock back ten years? But if you pay more you get the full treatment? You get to become really young?”

“It must be something like that. They must be using young people's body parts as replacements for older ones. And somehow cannibalism has to be a part of what they do. And now I see something else. Why was Kim Walker so anxious to get me to go back to the Jackalope? To make me think that this whole thing was about girls being sent into prostitution.”

“A wild-goose chase?”

“Exactly. And the pig. They must have some kind of animal testing lab somewhere around here, too. They were using Ole Big as a test animal and Zollie was trying to save him, but they had already operated on him. That's why his intestines were gone. It's wild but it all adds up.”

“That means it isn't Lucky,” Oscar said. “He couldn't come up with any of this.”

“That's right,” Jack said, “but he could use his bikers to grab the people for somebody who then did the operations.”

“Alex Williams and Blue Wolf,” Oscar said. “ But Lucky and Alex hate one another.”

“At least that's what they want us to believe,” Jack said. “ Maybe that fight they had in the Red Sombrero was staged. And now that I think about it, that woman I saw in the hospital, Mary Jo. She said they promised her she'd be young again. Not feel young again but really be young. She even showed me a picture of herself as a girl. Said they'd make her look like that again.”

Oscar shook his head.

“Okay, I don't say I buy it all, but just theoretically what does all this have to do with them kidnapping Michelle Wu?”

Jack looked hard at Oscar, and smiled.

“What did you just say?”

“ Oh, right, I said Michelle Wu but I meant Jennifer. Just a slip of the tongue, amigo.”

“No,” Jack said. “You just might be a genius, Oscar.”

“What do you . . . You mean that they may have kidnapped . . .”

“Yes, whoever did this might have kidnapped Jennifer Wu by mistake. Maybe Michelle found out about their secret, and maybe she tried to deal herself in.”

“That sounds like our girl,” Oscar said.

“Doesn't it?”

“So maybe Lucky sent his boys out to grab her and they picked up her sister by mistake.”

“Then her sister knows nothing at all about any of this.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they're both involved. Anyway, once they took Jennifer they couldn't very well give her back. She's got to die. We've got to get to Michelle fast. Find out what she really knows.”

“Hell,” Oscar said, “they could pick her up, too.”

Jack dialed Michelle's cell phone number. The phone rang but there was no answer.

“Come on, Osc. Let's get back to the hotel and see if she's waiting for us there.”

As they headed out Jack felt a sinking sensation in his heart. This time he had really risked something of himself with her. This time he had been really convinced that she was going to try and change her ways.

Instead, if their speculations were right, she had played him for a bigger sucker than ever.

It was probably her own machinations that had got her sister kidnapped. And the reason that she had gotten Jack involved instead of calling the local cops? Easy. She knew she could manipulate his feelings for her so that she could stay out of jail.

And if there was a formula for turning back the clock, and somehow Alex Williams had stumbled upon it, it was a sure bet that Michelle wanted it for herself.

That was how she really was, Jack had to remind himself. In spite of their lovemaking up in his room, in spite of the way she looked at him and her lost little girl routine ... in spite of all that, Michelle was a predator.

And anyone, even those she loved, who got in her way became her prey.