Blood Memory

A bright morning, light glowing through the gauzy curtains, the walls of the hotel room a soft golden color, and the sound of the telephone screeching through the muffled noise of traffic on the street below. Catherine stared into the room and tried to recall where she was, every part of her heavy with sleep. A dull ache crept through her head. She reached for the cell on the nightstand.

The cell felt cool and inert in her hand. Whoever had wanted to kill her was in police custody, and for a moment, the possibility of normality flashed in front of her. She could return to the town house, go to the newsroom every day, walk Rex whenever she felt like it. But not yet, she realized. Not until she was certain. She told Bustamante she would meet him at police headquarters in forty minutes.

Catherine parked in the garage near Civic Center, and walked along 13th Avenue. A block away was the city and county building, a great expanse of white stone and columns that looked over Civic Center Park. A couple of blocks ahead was the beige brick building of the Denver Police Headquarters that resembled a fortress abutting the sidewalk. It was already hot, the morning sun bathing the pavement and reflecting off the brick, and the heat added to her sense of queasiness and the persistent aching in her head.

Inside the lobby, she waited at the counter while the policewoman tried to calm a Hispanic woman weeping into a wad of tissue and clutching the hand of a little girl with black braids and scared, brown eyes. After several minutes, the woman wandered over to the blue plastic chairs in the waiting area, pulling the little girl behind her, and Catherine told the policewoman that she was there to see Detective Bustamante.

Catherine took the last vacant chair. The Hispanic woman sat across from her, face buried in the black hair of the little girl gathered on her lap. There were several other women with children, but most of the people waiting were men—young men and older men, black and brown and white men—sprawled on the chairs, staring into space, arms crossed over their chests. Others sat hunched forward, elbows propped on thighs, studying the floor. The air was filled with odors of perspiration, tobacco, and the sense of hopelessness.

In the alcove behind the counter, the elevator doors parted and Nick Bustamante stepped out. Catherine watched him scan the waiting area before his eyes settled on her. She got to her feet and walked over. “I didn’t recognize you at first.” He stuck an arm between the sliding doors and ushered her into the elevator.

“But then you did,” she said. She felt the pull of gravity as the elevator rose and wondered what else she ought to do. A pair of black framed glasses, perhaps, the floppy clothes of an older woman. She would keep changing if she had to, keep peeling away until there was nothing left of her.

The elevator bell clanged. The doors parted and they stepped out into a wide corridor. “This way,” Bustamante said, nodding her ahead. A pair of uniformed officers stepped to one side to give them room. They passed a succession of closed doors before Bustamante stopped in front of one. The knob made a clicking noise when he turned it. He pushed the door open, and Catherine walked into a small cubicle similar to the one where he had interviewed her two days ago. A table with chairs on either side filled up most of the space. A thin stack of folders had been arranged in the center of the table.

Bustamante walked around and dropped into the chair beneath the window. Daylight streamed past the tan window shade and shone in his black hair. Lines of fatigue fanned his eyes, and she wondered if he had been awake all night. She sat down across from him.

“Jefferson County sheriff needs your statement about the shooting on the highway yesterday. We’ll be videotaping you”—a nod toward the one-way mirror—“same as before.”

“Is that why you brought me here? You said you’d arrested the bastard.” She was thinking that he’d expected her at headquarters yesterday, but she’d had no intention of going to a place where the gunman might be waiting outside. “I told you what happened on the phone,” she said.

She looked away. Nick Bustamante was altogether too good-looking and too—what was it about him?—trustworthy, as if he was the man he appeared to be, a man who said what he meant. She wasn’t used to that. She had never known when Lawrence was saying what he meant. The night at the ranch had only confirmed that fact. And she was a reporter, for godssakes. Accustomed to people saying what they wanted to read in the paper, trying to project an appearance of who they wanted to be. She was always trying to get below the surface, to strip away the pretense.

“I saw a brown sedan parked between the entrance road and the highway.” She hesitated, watching the scene play out again in her mind. How strange for it to be parked there, she had thought. But there was something else she’d seen, or maybe she was just seeing it now. “I saw the flash of metal,” she said. “I jerked the steering wheel to the right. It was instinct.”

Catherine lifted her hands to her mouth and bit at a thumbnail. Maybe, she thought. But she couldn’t be sure. What had happened, and what did she later think had happened? She shook her head again.

“That was the way he operated. Held a gun on his victims, threatened to shoot if they fought him. Do you think you’re up to seeing him?” He picked up the file folders. “There might be something about him that you recognize. Two of the victims have given a positive ID, and with the DNA evidence we have, we’ll nail him. It would be good to know if he’s the man who came after you.”

She nodded. She was thinking that her own theory seemed to be crumbling into pieces around her feet. Someone wanting to kill her for what she might write about a casino and an act of genocide at Sand Creek? It seemed preposterous with a rapist sitting in custody somewhere close by, listening to the faint clank and whir of the air-conditioning system.

Another corridor, then past other closed doors, down the elevator in the rear of the building, and through an underground parking garage to another elevator that took them up into a room inside the jail. About twelve feet wide, Catherine guessed, and twenty feet deep with chairs arranged in front of a platform. Bustamante said something to the two officers inside the door, then nodded her to one of the chairs. “Ready?” he said.

Catherine dropped onto the hard chair. The room darkened, then a bright light beamed on the platform and seven men walked out, like actors making an entrance from stage right. They stood in a line and blinked out into the darkness. On the white wall behind were black lines that measured height. They were all about six feet, all wearing the same baggy jail uniforms. Catherine realized that she could see them, but they could not see her.

Bustamante stood with the other officers next to the door. Even from three feet away, she could sense that he was waiting, that anything she might recognize could be important—the mole on the side of one of the men’s neck, perhaps, except that she had never seen it before. The sharp knobs on another man’s hands, but Erik had worn gloves at the town house. He had been dressed in black.

There was nothing familiar about any of the men on the platform. She shook her head toward Bustamante, and he gave some inaudible command and the men began a slow, lumbering exit to stage right.

Catherine turned toward him. “He was inside the sedan. Just somebody. I couldn’t make out his face.” The ceiling lights had come up, and Catherine could see the patience in Bustamante’s eyes. She looked back at the vacant platform, in shadows now, and remembering now. Remembering the flash of metal inside the sedan—and something else. A moving blur of color.

She could feel Bustamante waiting, but she took her time before she said, “It’s not the rapist. The man in the sedan had blond hair. Yellowish blond hair. I caught a glimpse. And the night at the town house, I think I saw blond hair at his neck when his cap slipped.”

He’s still out there. He’s still out there. The words drummed inside her head in rhythm to their footsteps as they took the elevator down into the underground garage and rode the other elevator back up into the corridors of the police building. “Where are you staying?” Bustamante said.

Catherine was quiet again. So many gaps in the story, so many anonymous, shadowy figures behind the scenes. Investors and landowners who might stand to benefit from an Arapaho and Cheyenne casino. But something else was hovering in the background—a hundred-and-fifty-year-old massacre.

Bustamante pushed the button for the elevator to the main lobby. There was a ding, and the doors opened. Catherine moved inside and swung back toward the man still in the corridor. “I’ll call you when I figure it out,” she said into the closing doors. She wasn’t sure whether he said that she should be careful, or whether she had just imagined it.

She felt the downward pull and with it, a kind of excitement that always came over her when she realized that she was on to a bigger story than she had thought, that she had only started to explore the dark, hidden places.

Outside in the shade falling over the building, Catherine pulled out her cell and pressed the numbers for Philip’s cell. It rang a long time. When the ringing finally stopped, she felt her muscles tense, waiting for the recorded voice—leave your name and number—but it was Philip himself on the other end, weary sounding and sleep drugged. “Hello,” he said.

“Holding his own when I left the hospital this morning.” He paused a moment, swallowing back tears, Catherine thought. “Maury’s strong. I have to believe he’ll be okay.”

Catherine glanced at her watch. She had twenty minutes to get to the capitol. Then she checked her voice mail. A call from Marie. Catherine called her back and assured her everything was fine. She shouldn’t worry. Marie said that Rex was doing okay at the breeder’s house, but he missed her. He didn’t have much appetite. Catherine squeezed her eyes shut at this and fought against the idea that her life was gone forever, that things would never be the same, she and Rex out for a walk in the coolness of the evenings, moonlight washing the sidewalks.

There was another voice mail. She realized her hand was shaking as she pressed the phone against her ear and waited for the low, familiar voice: “I look forward to our next rendezvous. Say good-bye, Catherine.”

Catherine pressed the keys that sent the message on to Bustamante. Then she slipped the phone inside her bag, her hand still shaking. She hurried down the concrete steps and started toward Colfax Avenue, checking the faces of the lawyers and bail bondsmen and other pedestrians coming and going, wondering if Erik were that straw-haired man, or the lanky, blond-headed fellow approaching, or that blond man across the street. She could see the golden dome of the capitol gleaming against the sky. She started running.

The granite-slabbed, neoclassical capitol building occupied the hilltop above Civic Center Park, an expanse of lawn and shade and stone walkways. Adjacent to the park was a collection of official-looking buildings, state offices, and museums, the Denver Public Library and the Denver Art Museum. The whole area exuded a sense of history, Catherine thought. Even the trees in the park. The black walnuts, she’d read somewhere, descended from saplings transplanted a century ago from Lincoln’s home in Illinois.

She walked up the sidewalk that bordered the park, scanning the groups of tourists and homeless men milling about. The yellow-haired man was still out there somewhere. The thought sent a shiver rippling through her. Cars and buses churned past on Colfax, depositing faint smells of exhaust in their wake. The sun was warm on her bare arms. Ahead, the golden dome of the capitol seemed to sway with the clouds floating through the blue sky.

She entered the capitol on the west side and went through security—place bag in the plastic tub, please; step through here, please—and then she was in the lower level. She hurried up the staircase, heels ringing on the marble steps. Light glinted on the brass railings. Everything about the building summoned the past—the paintings and sculpture, the pink marble walls, the marble floors polished and worn by the footsteps of Colorado’s founding fathers. She could almost imagine the voices from the past blending into the conversations of the tourists grouped in the rotunda, heads tilted back, eyes fixed on the interior of the dome shining overhead.

She headed down a wide corridor, pushed open the heavy oak door with “Governor” in black lettering on the pebbled glass, and stepped into a large, paneled waiting room. The redheaded receptionist glanced up over the computer on the desk inside the door, and Catherine told her that she had an appointment with the governor. “I’ll get Marcy,” the receptionist said, picking up the phone.

In a moment, Marcy Norton was in the doorway on the far side of the waiting room, motioning her forward. About thirty, stylish blond hair, an air of efficiency about her, Marcy Norton had taken the job of press secretary about the same time that Catherine had gone back to work at the Journal. They had stumbled through the first weeks of their jobs together, which had created a kind of bond. More than once, Marcy had squeezed out a few minutes from the governor’s schedule for an interview that gave Catherine a scoop ahead of the rest of the press.

They were walking down a corridor past a warren of cubicles, people moving about and phones ringing. Marcy stopped at the door beyond the cubicles. She knocked once, then pushed the door open. “Catherine McLeod’s here,” she said, leaning inside. “Sorry, Catherine. Ten minutes is all.”

Catherine walked into the spacious office with a desk that curved in a half circle, light sweeping over the surface, and Governor Mark Lyle, a large man with black curly hair and glasses perched partway down his nose, hunched over the papers spread in front of him. It was a long moment before he glanced over the top of the glasses and motioned her toward a vacant chair.

“Nice to see you again.” He gave her a practiced smile. Always a politician, Catherine thought, on the campaign trail, shaking hands with the voters. He had on a white shirt, sleeves rolled over thick forearms, red tie loosened around the open collar. A dark blue suit jacket was draped over the back of his chair. The cowboy, Lawrence and his friends called the governor, from out in the state somewhere. A nobody who had bumbled into the governor’s seat and had the temerity to aspire to Russell’s seat in the Senate. “We’ll get to the cowboy,” she’d heard Lawrence say on the phone one evening when it looked like a business deal was about to stall, but as far as she could tell, they had never been able to get to the cowboy. Governor Lyle had a reputation for not bending the rules or caving in to the demands of any interest group.

He pulled a folded copy of this morning’s Journal from under a stack of papers and waved it across the desk. “You exposed Arcott’s technique. Get in bed with a senator and see that he attaches a rider to some innocuous bill so that Congress ends up settling the land claims for various tribes. And what do you know, the tribes build casinos on their newfound land, Arcott being the builder and operator. Reservation shopping is what I call it. Worked in other states and now he’s hoping it will work in Colorado.”

Catherine smoothed the top page of the notebook that she had pulled out of her bag. “What about Senator Russell? Does he intend to attach a rider that will push the settlement through Congress?”

Governor Lyle gave a cough of laughter. “Maybe he thinks you’re not the friendly press.” He folded his arms over the papers strewn in front of him and leaned toward her. “I have no intention of leaving the matter to Senator Russell. I’ve asked Bill Adkins to schedule a briefing before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Russell won’t be able to make any moves before the briefing.”

Well, well. This was news. Catherine jotted down: Senator William Adkins, committee briefing. “Date’s not set yet. Russell will be foaming at the mouth. That’s off the record. I intend to be at the briefing, along with the entire Colorado delegation. Everyone except Russell opposes another casino in this state.”

He sat back and regarded her a moment. “I read your interview with the elders,” he said finally. “Who sold them on this scheme? Arcott or the company that owns the land?”

Catherine stopped writing. “As soon as Congress hears about the atrocities committed at Sand Creek, there could be a rush to settle the claims. Isn’t it true the hearing could work against your position?”

A slow smile crossed the governor’s face. “The Arapaho and Cheyenne land claims have long been settled,” he said. He waited a moment, allowing the words to hang in the air. “We’ll simply remind Congress that, in 1965, the government paid the Arapahos and Cheyennes $15 million for their ancestral lands. State attorney says the agreement is final. End of the matter.”

The governor held up one hand, something else still on his mind. “Only reason Russell’s behind this is because he thinks it will be good for business. He’s always favored the businesses of this state, whether it comes to easing environmental restrictions or pushing through tax breaks. Check his voting record.”

Catherine got to her feet. She was thinking of Russell’s record. The Journal had been the only newspaper to expose the economic consequences for ordinary families of the bills he’d muscled through Congress. Even if he had planned to run for office again, she doubted he would be reelected.

She thanked the governor, who was lifting himself out of his chair and smoothing down his shirt sleeves at the same time. Then she retraced her route through the office, across the marble floors, and down the staircase, checking the text messages and voice mail on her cell. Nothing more from him. She made her way past the security station and out the door. It was cool in the shade of the building, a little breeze stirring the air, the leaves rustling on the trees. For the briefest moment, everything seemed almost normal. She thought about the land claims and the plan for the casino. And the entire plan based on what Norman and the elders claimed to be an act of genocide committed at Sand Creek.