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Danny stepped out of the shower just in time to hear his cell phone buzz. He closed the bathroom door. With quick strides, he stalked naked across the motel carpet.
Restricted number. His palms started to sweat. It took two swipes to unlock the cell and answer the call. “Yeah?”
“Danny boy, how’s it going?”
Danny wasn’t deceived by the man’s jovial tone. He’d fucked up. Royally.
“Fine, sir. I’m going to bring her—”
“Milo’s already fixed it.”
Danny’s breath jammed up in his lungs. Milo had fixed what?
Stojanovic was still talking. “I told Milo you did what you did for a good reason. Now Milo...Milo isn’t quite a believer in you like I am. I said you’d make this right.”
Danny swallowed. He sank down on the unmade bed before his legs gave out.
“I will, sir. You’ll be pleased. I’ll have—.”
The bathroom door opened, and Laurie stepped out naked.
Danny’s dick didn’t even twitch.
“I like you, Danny. I don’t give everyone a second chance.”
That Stojanovic had given him a second chance should have made him feel relieved. Instead it made him want to puke. “Thank you, sir.” His words were spoken to a dead line.
He stared down at the phone as though it were a snake—alive and ready to bite. It slipped from his nerveless fingers. Sweat poured off him in buckets. His stomach heaved. No way could he fix this. Everything had turned to shit. He dropped his head into his hands. He was a dead man.
Laurie climbed up onto the bed behind him. The heat from her body made him sweat more.
“What’s wrong, Danny.” She started to knead the tight muscles in his shoulders.
He shoved her away. “Get dressed.”
Her face transformed from teasing pleasure, to fear, to anger. She jumped off the bed and snatched up her scattered clothes.
He paced the small room. How was he going to make this right? He stopped in his tracks. How had the old man found out so quickly? And what had Milo fixed? Danny glanced at his phone lying on the stained brown carpet. She hadn’t returned his text. A feeling of sick dread filled his gut until his bowels rumbled.
He rushed to the motel window and whipped back the drapes. His naked reflection stared back at him as he scanned the motel parking lot looking for the black truck. Only two cars in the lot—his and a beat up old rust bucket that belonged to Hank.
But beyond the motel’s single street lamp was the road and then the Iron Café and its lot.
“Fuck.”
A dark truck with parking lights on idled in the Café’s lot. Milo’s black Dodge Ram?
“Get dressed,” he said again to Laurie. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
∞
John floored the accelerator as the Jeep took the last eighth of a mile to the motel. Less than five feet of visibility lay beyond the headlights of his service vehicle, but he knew each rut and dip in the road like the lines on his face. The closer the Jeep got to the Starlight motel the more a red mist crowded the periphery of his own vision, blocking out caution and wisdom.
The Jeep took the turn into the motel on two wheels. Dirt and rocks flew up creating a dust storm in the glare of the headlights. Headlights that showcased Danny Matisse’s skinny frame in midflight. The boy froze like a rabbit hypnotized by oncoming danger. Laurie was caught in the same glare.
Zora reached out and placed a restraining hand on John’s arm. Until that moment he’d forgotten she was in the car. Now he ignored her warning, as he hopped out of the Jeep leaving it running and the lights trained on his daughter and this punk she couldn’t seem to rid herself of.
John took three strides and was in the boy’s face. “Didn’t I warn you about showing up on the reservation again?” Above the roaring of his pulse, his voice sounded loud and alien to his ears.
The kid’s chest puffed up like a rooster. John grabbed a fistful of the punk’s shirt and lifted him off the ground. Somewhere in the distant reaches of John’s mind where reason still lived, he noted the boy was shoeless.
“John!”
Zora’s voice and his daughter’s stricken horror penetrated his haze. He loosened his hold on Danny Matisse at the same time unfurling his fisted right hand. The boy dropped to the ground but hopped back up like a dog on speed—snarling and spitting.
Danny’s hand went to the back of his waist band. “Listen, old man. I could kill you where you stand.”
John cursed silently. He’d let his anger get control of his brain. He’d thought so little of Danny it never occurred to him the kid could have a gun. Men backed into a corner with nothing but the false courage of a weapon were desperate men. Unpredictable men.
“I’d advise you, if you’re carrying, to leave it where it is.”
Danny’s chest expanded and deflated and expanded again with each breath. “What do I have to lose?”
“Your life.”
“You’d kill me like your slut of a girlfriend killed my father?”
Zora made a harsh, strangled cry.
John wanted to lash out at the boy. To tell him his father died like he lived—gutless. But something about seeing the boy without his shoes had tapped into John’s memory of another boy flying in the face of another man twice his size and strength. A man who had no compulsion about shoving his fist into that boy’s face. John would not be that man.
“Let me give you a word of advice—”
Leading with his chest, Danny moved into John’s space, sensing rightly that John wouldn’t hit him. “I don’t need your advice, old man. I got powerful people behind me now. People who could wipe you off the face of the earth.”
John’s eyes narrowed. Who had Danny aligned himself with since he’d left the reservation? John had no illusions. They were people who dealt in things illegal. Danny had risen from that environment. He would seek what he knew—what he was comfortable with.
“Stay away from my daughter. Because if you don’t, it won’t matter who you know. I’ll come for you and grind your miserable hide into the ground.” John turned his attention to his daughter. “Get in the car.”
Laurie’s gaze shot from Danny to John and back to Danny again. Not waiting for her to obey, John grabbed her arm and dragged her to the Jeep. She didn’t cry or say a word. Jaw tight with anger, she kept her gaze straight ahead. He stuffed her into the vehicle’s back seat.
When he straightened he glanced around. They’d drawn an audience. The motel’s owner, Hank, stood to one side, his tattered bath robe hugging his bony frame. People had stepped out of the Iron Café, crossed the street and stood on the motel’s property to gawk.
“Get on home,” John shouted. “The show’s over.”
He threw one parting shot at Danny Matisse. “Get off the reservation, and this time stay off. My daughter’s off limits. I’m bigger and I’m meaner. I won’t be as accommodating the next time.” He held the boy’s gaze for a heartbeat then climbed back into his service vehicle. In the high beams of the Jeep’s headlight, the spectators scattered like roaches.
∞
All John could see were his shoes—the shoes of a beat cop. He walked until the streets changed from busy upscale shops to vacant boarded up houses. Weeds poked up through cracked and uprooted sidewalks. Up ahead cars were parked in front of one house. This house, the only one not boarded, had no lights on. Lacy curtains fluttered outward from open windows.
John sensed there were people inside. His gaze kept coming back to the windows, waiting. Tension built in his chest until his abs knotted and cramped.
He woke in a sweat. Swinging his legs out of bed, he sat on the edge, trying to break the tentacles of the dream. Had his confrontation with Danny last night triggered some old memory?
He didn’t believe in premonitions. He left that kind of mumbo-jumbo to Joseph Bearkiller. The mattress shifted as Zora moved. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Go back to sleep.”
He rose and went to shower.
He rarely thought about his time as a cop on the Minneapolis police force. It was another time, a period he compartmentalized and sealed away. But the remnants of the dream kept leaking into his consciousness.
He dried himself and wrapped the towel around his waist. Leaning over the sink, he searched his memory for a case that might explain the dream. Nothing came to mind.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
Zora’s concerned face stared back at him in the partially fogged bathroom mirror.
“Yeah, just thinking.”
Usually her come back would have been something like, “Don’t hurt yourself.” Instead she placed a steaming mug of fresh brewed coffee on the sink, touched his shoulder, and left him to his dark thoughts.
By the time he’d climbed into the Jeep, the dream had all but dissipated. Almost.
With Danny Matisse on his mind, John stopped at the Starlight Motel before heading into the office. Hank, looking old and frail, manned the peeled Formica counter that served as the front desk.
“Quite a show last night. Better than the Fourth.”
Just being back in this shabby establishment made John’s anger resurface. Laurie hadn’t said a word to him last night. She’d stormed off to her room. He’d moved to follow her, but Zora caught his arm and shook her head. “Later,” she’d mouthed.
Since his daughter hadn’t listened to anything he’d said before, reason—which John hadn’t a lot of at that moment—told him she wouldn’t heed a word he said now.
“If you’re checking on the boy, he’s gone.”
Hank’s words brought John back to the here and now.
“Checked out right after you left.”
“Do you know where he went?”
The proprietor grinned, showing missing teeth. “If he had any sense he left Little River.”
If he’d had any sense he wouldn’t have returned. “Right.” John rapped his knuckles on the counter top. “Let me see his registration info.”
John copied down the address. Danny resided just two hours north of the reservation. John tucked the sheet into his shirt’s breast pocket before heading outside to his vehicle.
As he drove to the police station, he mulled over the heated conversation with Danny last night. Who did the boy work for? Why was he back? It sure wasn’t to see Laurie. If you cared about someone—John couldn’t bring himself to say love—why wait thirteen months to see them again? The way Laurie had pined around the house for the last year told John she’d had no contact with Danny.
Twenty minutes later he stalked into the office and came up short when a woman with blonde-streaked black hair rose from one of the plastic visitor seats. He glanced at his dispatcher.
“Linda White Cloud,” Maggie said as an introduction.
Linda White Cloud was the mother of the second girl Emma had mentioned. John didn’t bother taking her into his cramped office. He motioned for her to have a seat.
“Coffee?” he asked.
The woman, medium height and thin, shook her head.
“Mrs.—”
“Ms.,” she said quickly, meeting his gaze squarely.
“I’m John Iron Hawk. Do you know Emma Bearkiller?”
“No.”
“She’s one of the volunteers at the Boys and Girls Club. She hasn’t seen Katie at the club in a while and was worried about her. Is Katie okay?”
A crack appeared in Linda White Cloud’s composure. “I haven’t seen her in two or three months.”
“Do you know where she is?”
Linda White Cloud shook her head.
“You said two or three months?” John repeated. “Which is it? Two or three?”
“I’m not sure. She told me she was going to stay with her dad.” Ms. White Cloud glanced up. “He lives off the Rez. When I didn’t hear from her after a couple of weeks, I called him. He said she wasn’t there. Didn’t even know she was coming.”
“You and Katie’s father didn’t set up the visit?”
Linda White Cloud’s expression soured. “We don’t talk much.”
John rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. He knew he wasn’t the perfect father but still... He cut off that thought. He wasn’t here to pass judgment, just find out what had happened to the teen.
“How was she to get to her father’s house?”
“A friend was going to take her.”
“Which friend?” John signaled to Maggie to write down the name.
“She didn’t tell me.” Linda White Cloud mumbled.
He let out a long breath. “Where was she going to meet this friend?”
“I dunno. I work long hours at the Casino, so I’m not home in the evenings. I’m asleep when she leaves for school and gone when she gets home. We see each other on the weekends.”
“Why didn’t you report her missing after you learned she wasn’t with her father?”
She shrugged, her narrow shoulders almost lost in the baggy plaid shirt she wore. “She’s done this before. Run off. She always comes back.”
“How many times has she run off?” John said, using the mother’s term.
“Two or three times.”
“Where does she go?”
“I don’t know. I assumed she stayed with friends here on the Rez.”
“You never asked her?”
“I tried the first time she came back, but she clammed up and wouldn’t talk. So glad she was back, I didn’t push.”
“Did she do drugs?”
Ms. White Cloud chewed on the corner of her bottom lip. “I don’t think so.”
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“I—”
Oscar charged into the office waving a sheet of paper. “Hey, Chief—” He stopped when he saw Linda White Cloud and pivoted toward Maggie’s desk instead.
“The boyfriend?” John said trying to get the teen’s mother back into the conversation.
“Yes, she had one, but I only saw him one or two times.” She looked apologetically at John. “Lee or Leon. Something like that.” She shrugged. “They broke up over the summer. I thought he was the reason she wanted to go to her dad’s place—to get away.”
“Who were her friends?”
Ms. White Cloud stared off over his shoulder, her face scrunched up in thought. “One girl I remember Katie talking about was Dreena or maybe Dina. I’m not sure.”
“Did she go to Katie’s high school?”
“I think so.” Linda White Cloud nodded. “I’m pretty sure she did. How else would Katie know her?”
John didn’t respond to the question. With Ms. White Cloud working in the evenings, she obviously knew very little about her daughter’s afterschool activities. This Dreena or Dina could have been a Facebook friend or whatever social media kids were on these days.
“Does your daughter have a cell phone?”
“She has one of those phones where you put minutes on a card.”
Most people on the reservation couldn’t afford a plan through a company. When you had a few extra dollars, you loaded up on minutes.
Linda White Cloud answered his unspoken next question. “She hasn’t answered my calls.”
He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “My dispatcher will give you the paperwork to fill out to report your daughter missing. Also give me her cell number before you leave.”
She scribbled a number on a napkin from her purse that bore the insignia of the Casino then passed it to John. When she started toward Maggie’s desk, Oscar rushed over.
“Thought you’d want to see this.” He handed John the sheet of paper he’d been clutching when he’d entered.
John glanced down at the sheet in his hand. It was an announcement about the next council meeting—a meeting open to all residents. One of the topics for discussion was the upcoming election for John’s position.
He handed the sheet back to Oscar.
“Aren’t you worried?”
“Why?” John asked. “Either I’m reelected or I’m not.” He didn’t feel quite so unconcerned, but he didn’t want to go into detail with his deputy. Until Crow took John’s position, he had a job to do.
“I need you to go around to the high school and see if can find two students. One is a Deena or Dina and the other is a Lee or Leon who hung out with Katie White Cloud last school year. No last name for either one.” He scribbled the names on a sheet of paper and handed it to Oscar.
“I’m going to check out Cheyenne Henry and Katie White Cloud’s rooms,” John said.
∞
Later that afternoon in the squad room, John hunched over a page of scribbles that would only mean something to him—the time line of Destiny Little Feather’s disappearance and the discovery of Cheyenne Henry’s body. He wondered if Katie White Cloud had met with foul play. Her mother was to bring a picture of the girl to the station, and John would show it to Vilachek. Maybe the girl had been one of his customers. In the meantime, he had Oscar working on unsolved murders within a four-hour drive of Little River.
From the opposite side of the room, Special Agent Watanabe pounded on Cheyenne’s computer. John had hit pay dirt when he’d found the computer while searching the dead girl’s room. Now if only the agent could find something useful.
“I want a lawyer. I know my rights.” Dave Neville shouted from the holding cell.
“I bet you do,” John mumbled.
“Do you think he kept her somewhere for those two months?” the agent asked, jerking his head back, indicating the holding cell behind him.
“You mean like a love nest?”
Watanabe nodded.
“I doubt it. He doesn’t strike me as smart enough or have the money to juggle two households.”
“So where do you think she’s been?”
John shrugged. “I wish I knew.”
“Maybe she was living with a boyfriend,” Watanabe suggested.
John looked over at the agent. This was the most conversation he’d gotten out of the young agent. John had pegged this guy as a renegade. Longish hair instead of the buzz cut most agents wore. Hell, the fact he was Asian was odd in itself. A few blacks but not many nonwhite agents in the Bureau, at least in this area. Was he new with the agency, or had he pissed off someone and gotten stationed in South Dakota?
“And?” John asked.
Watanabe pushed his hair back from his face. “So she had a fight with him, and he killed her.”
“One possibility,” John said.
“But one you’re not buying.”
John shrugged. “Not enough information.” He pointed toward the computer. “Having any luck?”
“Not yet.”
John grunted and went back to his timeline. Maybe there wasn’t a connection between the girls. As he’d said to Watanabe, teens ran away all the time. With the high suicide rate, the poverty and sense of hopelessness on the reservation, who’d want to stay? He’d thought about running away many times as a teen, but he couldn’t leave Lydia to deal with their father.
“You hear me out there?”
John pushed back from the desk and made for the holding area. Neville stood with hands and face pressed between the bars.
“You can’t hold me in here.”
“Mr. Neville, we’re investigating the murder of your stepdaughter. You, sir, are a suspect in that murder. We can hold you for forty-eight hours. If the district attorney finds sufficient evidence, you can be brought up on murder charges. If convicted of those charges, you’ll be in for a lot longer than forty-eight hours.”
Dave Neville’s face morphed into hard lines and protruding bones. “I didn’t kill her.”
John stalked out.
“I didn’t kill her.” His shouts followed John back into the squad room.
Oscar stood in the middle of the room, his hand gripping Robbie Lone Wolf’s arm. The boy’s eyes were huge as they took in everything.
“Have a seat,” John directed the boy into a chair.
“Oscar, this is Special Agent Watanabe from the FBI.”
The two men nodded to each other. Watanabe went back to working on Cheyenne’s computer, and Oscar backed up, leaning his bulk against the wall adjacent to the entrance.
John straddled a chair and studied Robbie. “I have a feeling you’ve left out a few things when we talked.”
Neville continued his shouting from the other room.
“I...” Robbie’s head swiveled from the door leading to the holding area to Watanabe to John seated in front of him.
“Destiny told you where she was going.”
Robbie shook his head in rapid head movements.
“Come on, Robbie. She’d just lost her mother. She wasn’t close to her grandparents. Hell, she didn’t know them. You were her only friend. From what I’ve learned, she didn’t find it easy to make friends. That’s not the kind of person who’d just go off on her own.”
Beads of sweat popped out on the boy’s forehead.
“Her grandparents are worried sick about her,” John said in a quiet voice. “All kinds of things can happen to a girl out there. There are some people who have no problem taking advantage of a young girl on the streets.”
Robbie wet his lips.
“If you’re her friend, you’ll give me the name of the person she left with.”
Robbie Lone Wolf’s head jerked up. “She didn’t—”
“Leave with anyone,” John finished. He remembered what Zora had said earlier. “Who was she meeting?”
For a full minute the only sound was Watanabe pounding on the computer keys. For some reason, the agent had taken out his gun and it lay on the desk beside the computer.
Robbie studied the fire arm, then shifted his attention back to John. “Destiny has a bang up voice.”
“By bang up, you mean she could sing?”
The boy nodded.
He and Robbie were on the edge of a crevasse. One untimely word from John and the investigation would fall off a cliff. He willed himself to be patient. He’d never been a patient man.
“She found out about auditions for The Voice. Someone was going to get her in.”
John barely breathed. He hoped Neville kept his trap shut, so the kid wouldn’t get spooked.
“Who was going to get her in?”
Robbie shook his head. “Don’t know.”
“Where was she meeting this person?”
“In Rapid City.”
“Do you know where?” John asked. “Rapid City is a big place.”
The kid shook his head. “She wouldn’t tell me. She only said she knew how to take care of herself.”
If she were Dorrie Mae Little Feather’s daughter, she would have to know her way around. John ran a hand through his hair. “How did she meet this person?”
“On the Internet.”
“A chat room?” Watanabe asked. No longer slumped over the computer’s key board, the agent’s body seemed to hum with tension.
The boy glanced over at the agent and nodded.
“Do you know which one?” the agent asked.
Robbie shook his head.
“Did she have a computer?” John asked the boy.
“No. She did everything on her phone.”
According to Mrs. Little Feather Destiny didn’t have a cell, and she didn’t have the money to purchase one.
“Shit,” John muttered under his breath. Watanabe had watched John’s questioning of Robbie Lone Wolf with interest.
“You have something?” John asked the junior agent.
“Maybe.”
John turned his attention back to Robbie. “I want that cell number.”
The boy complied.
“Now where did she get the money for a bus ticket?”
Robbie’s eyes shifted from left to right. “Her mother left her some money?”
John made the sound of a gong from a television game show. “Wrong. Now tell me how she got the money.”
Neville started shouting again. Robbie jerked, his gaze going toward the holding area.
John leaned in close. “You want to share a jail cell with that guy? It can be arranged.”
Robbie swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “No, sir.”
“Where’d she get the money?”
“My grandmother gave it to her.”
John grunted. Right. “Try again.”
“I—”
John held the boy’s gaze.
“Ah... Don’t tell Granny. She thinks she misplaced it.”
John rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Tell your grandmother or I will.”
Robbie swallowed then nodded.
“Did Granny also pay for Destiny’s cell phone?”
“I don’t know where she got the money for the phone.”
When John stared hard at the boy, the kid said, “Honest.”
“Did you know Cheyenne Henry?” John asked, switching subjects.
A frown marred Robbie’s acned forehead.
“Cheyenne Henry?” John prompted.
“I saw her around school but not recently.”
“Does Destiny know her?”
The boy’s gaze took on a faraway look. “I don’t think so. Kinda seems like Cheyenne was gone by the time Destiny showed up at school.”
“You heard it was Cheyenne’s body we found out at the quarry?”
Robbie swallowed nervously. “I...I didn’t kill her.”
“Never said you did.”
John studied the boy, wondering what he might be holding back. “Did Cheyenne have a good voice? Would she have visited the same chat room Destiny did?”
Robbie held up his hand. “Hey. I...didn’t know Cheyenne like that. She barely knew I existed.”
“Did you want her to know you existed?”
The boy’s eyes widened, and he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbling like a cork in water. “She was pretty but way out of my league.”
“Whose league was she in?” John asked.
“Every guy’s but mine.”
