CHAPTER ELEVEN

Starr parked in front of the marshal’s office and glanced at the time on the dash. Eight a.m. She pushed a piece of gum into her mouth, chewed for thirty seconds, then spit it into her hand, got out and flung it into the dried weeds that clung to the side of the building. A liver-spotted dog was tied to a steel boot scraper that stood sentinel by the entrance. The dog leapt back and forth, straining the rope and barking like it had treed a bear.

Starr watched the dog absently as her mind moved through next steps. A dead girl. What a fantastic start to my fourth day on the job. It was just her luck to catch a bad case, although there had been a time in her career when she’d longed to take the lead in a murder investigation. Once she had the opportunity, she started racking up solves before others could even make the homicide squad. But that was before. Some things, she knew now, you didn’t come back from.

Starr didn’t know yet whether this dead girl matched Chenoa Cloud’s description. She wondered if later that day she’d be delivering news that would turn Odeina’s life into a before and after too.

The lights were on in the office when Starr entered. Winnie pointed to a boy, who looked to be twelve or maybe thirteen, sitting in a chair. Chief Byrd was there, rubbing the kid’s shoulder. Winnie looked stricken.

“This him?” Starr said. “C’mon, kid.”

The boy looked at Byrd as if for permission, then rose and went toward her.

“We’ll talk on the way. Can you show me what you found?”

“This is Achak,” said Byrd, stepping between them, pronouncing it Ay-shack. “I’ve spoken with his father, and he agreed to let the boy go with you.” He turned to the boy. “We’ll make this quick as we can.”

“Just him,” Starr said. “You wait here if you want.”

The last thing she needed was for Byrd to interfere. He’d already been chatting up the boy when she came in, she could tell. Now the kid’s story would be different. The mind starts filling in blanks, adding or subtracting until everything seems to fit. She’d learned long ago to get to the witness first, and to go slowly before she put together a narrative. Avoid making assumptions.

Assembling the narrative was the most important part of working a case, crafting a story to figure out how pieces of evidence fit within the whole. She’d had only a couple of truly complex cases in Chicago. Motives—and their outcomes—were much simpler than people thought, and Chicago was a two-interviews-and-you’re-done kind of place. Drugs. Abuse. Infidelity. Same song, different verse.

Byrd started to protest, but Starr offered a “we’ll be back” wave as she opened the door for Achak. Outside, the boy moved to untie the dog, which bounded happily toward him, its entire body wiggling.

“Leave the dog,” Starr said, “and get in.”

“But Chief Byrd said I could take him with me,” he said. “He promised.”

“Fine. But you keep him on a leash. He doesn’t touch anything near the scene. Got it?”

On the way, Achak—“Call me Chak,” he said—took some prompting to talk. He haltingly explained that he sometimes took his dog, Bandit, out to Crawl Canyon to train. Turkey Creek, which ran the length of the divide, was wide and shallow, perfect for throwing and retrieving bait ducks. And, it turned out, he was only eleven. Tall for his age.

“That why you go by Chak, like Shaquille O’Neal?” Starr asked, and the boy grinned.

“You play basketball?”

“Used to. I had the height for it, but it was like my arms and legs grew too fast.” She waved her arms. “No coordination.”

Chak laughed, and pulled his dog away by the collar as it tried to lick his face.

Not doing too bad for what he saw this morning, Starr thought. But she’d seen kids recover remarkably quickly from some pretty terrible things.

“Hey, don’t you have school today?” Starr realized.

“Meant to go,” he said, then shrugged. “But it’s duck season.”

It took more than thirty minutes to reach the Crawl Canyon area by car, and like the whole of the reservation’s wilderness area, it wasn’t accessible by road. They’d have to hike in.

“Do me a favor and keep your dog on a short leash, okay?” Starr said. “We can’t have him making tracks anywhere we might have evidence. And if I tell you to wait, you stop. Don’t take another step until I give the go-ahead. Now, what direction are we headed?”

Chak pointed, and then curled a length of the dog’s rope around his hand. He’d already said the body was a few miles in, maybe three or four. Starr was almost glad for the company. By the time they’d walked for at least an hour, she’d had time to think about jurisdiction. It was strange to be first on the scene. No paramedics, no fire, no police cars, no coroner team ribboning off the evidence. This was reservation territory. She was it.

“She—or, I mean…” Chak said, then changed his mind. Simplified, started over. “I walked down this bank here.”

Starr looked to where he pointed. They were right at a change in the landscape, from acres of prairie grass bowing in the wind to a riparian area with trees, and below that, to a wide and sandy bank.

Starr stared down at the water glinting diamonds in the crisp morning air. Here, the canyon wall was little more than a steep incline on the far side of the creek bank. Around them, the grass was a sea of russet and gold. She noticed the dark bodies of large birds making sweeping ovals overhead. The boy followed her gaze.

“Buzzards,” he said.

“All right, show me where you walked and how you found the…her.”

Without another word, Chak started down the incline to the creek. Starr watched him for a moment, wondering what it would have been like to spend her childhood on the rez, where even finding a body didn’t rattle a boy’s nerves.

The bank was bordered on both sides by scattered loblolly pines and scrub cedar, trees that stayed thick with green needles throughout the fall and winter. Around Starr and Chak, thorny trees sent branches into a shared space so tangled that the boy steered wide, kicking one of the trees’ fallen hedge apples in an arc.

“Wait there,” Starr called out as Chak and his dog reached the creek. He stopped, and the dog sat obediently at his side. About two hundred yards away there was a pile of burnt limbs and other debris beside the creek, just as the boy had said there would be. Teens from the rez—and townies, for that matter—partied here, he’d said. But not him, he’d added quickly. Not his thing.

Starr was imagining a crew putting up crime-scene tape as she reached Chak, who explained where he’d been with the dog and how it had put its nose to the ground and snuffled around before taking off like a shot. He then pointed to a stand of bushes.

“Okay, sit tight. I’ll take a look,” Starr said. “I may be over there awhile, so get comfortable. Just don’t let this guy wander around.” Starr ruffled the dog’s ears and left for a better look.

From her vantage point, the stand of currant bushes looked like everything else. Natural. But once Starr walked around to the creek side she saw two bare feet, heels up and visible beneath the rangy branches whose purple fruit was spent and fallen. There were trails of ants using the fruit as highway markers, and even with the morbid addition, a half dozen cardinals flocked noisily to the fruit. They burst into flight as Starr came within reach.

Starr stood near the body for a long time, taking in every visible detail, then glanced back to make sure the boy was still where she’d left him. She bent closer.

The kid had been right. Young. Female. Dead.

Starr removed a pen from her pocket and used it to lift the woman’s fingers, still pliable and soft. Damn it. Another girl who, only a few hours before, had been alive.

Starr had come here to get away from this. Why had it followed her? With a sinking feeling, she knew why.

She deserved it.

She wasn’t going to escape from it. She couldn’t run far enough or long enough or to the right place, where it wouldn’t be part of everything she did.

Quinn.

The air shimmered and Starr could feel—actually feel—how she’d pulled Quinn’s small frame into a hug, how she’d inhaled the smell of her daughter’s thick blond hair. Lavender and mint. When she said it smelled good, Quinn laughed at her. But what Starr couldn’t explain was that her own reaction was about more than that smell, no matter how much she loved it. It was the way she could press her face into Quinn’s thick hair and feel it on her skin while they hugged. It gave Starr a moment, her expression unseen, to drink her daughter in. It happened less often as Quinn bounded into adolescence and, increasingly, away from her, but it was the last thing they had shared. Weirdo, Quinn had said, and she held Starr at arm’s length before collapsing into another hug.

She’d seen Quinn’s feet that day too. Seen them first, before her mind would allow her to take in anything else. They were two points under a white sheet on stainless steel. She couldn’t bear to see her daughter’s sweet face, wasn’t ready to confirm something she wasn’t ready to comprehend. Still, this was a formality she’d been compelled to undertake.

Starr had kept her eyes low, didn’t look at the attendant standing near the head of the morgue table, ready to pull the sheet back. Instead, Starr lifted a corner of the sheet covering her daughter’s feet, took in the painted toenails—on all but one; the tiniest little piggy without a nail. It was something that happened to them both, the little toe rubbing on shoes and the friction releasing the nail. It didn’t even hurt; the nail just dangled there until it was pulled off. It was their own weird joke, their shared history, their strange genetic connection. Theirs.

Starr was outside her body now, watching herself hold the corner of the sheet, watching herself put her hand on Quinn’s foot, too cold to the touch. She needs socks, Starr thought wildly. She should have brought socks with her. Quinn must be freezing in here.

“Are you done now?” said a voice from behind her. Starr looked around. When had she left the scene, moved up the bank, returned to the boy? The currant bushes, the body, were yards away.

There was a deer antler at his feet.

“You see that?” Starr said, too quietly. “Do you see that?” Too loudly this time. Chak retreated a few steps and looked at her like she had grown antlers. “Those. Those antlers there. Did you touch those? Maybe find those antlers somewhere else and bring them here? Like a prank, maybe?”

“No,” he said. “No way.”

“They weren’t there before, were they?”

Chak eyed her warily and shrugged.

“All right, let’s go.” Starr motioned back toward the way they’d come. This place was making her crazy. “You didn’t touch anything when you saw…when you noticed the feet?”

Chak shook his head. No.

“Anyone you might recognize?”

Also no.

“Oh, hey, there’s sometimes a truck parked by that ridge.” Chak pointed into the distance, beyond the creek. “Tall guy. Glassing for deer, looks like. Sometimes we get poachers out here.”

Starr handed him her notepad.

“Hike back to the Bronco. Should be an extra pen in the glove compartment. Draw me what you saw. Everything. I’ll meet you there in a while.”

Maybe she should deputize him, she thought, as he and the dog ran ahead. At least he’d known better than to wander around touching things. She hoped to hell she hadn’t trampled on any evidence, with the way she’d walked away from the crime scene and come to her senses right in front of him—with no memory of how she’d gotten there.

She thought fondly of Chicago, of lab attendants in white suits, of sterile kits, of stacks of evidence markers, of herself ordering, Send it to the crime lab.

Starr retraced her steps and returned to the body, her eyes tracking the distance from the burned-out campfire to the scorch marks on the victim’s skin. Some of her skin had blistered. There was a circle of burnt earth around the girl’s legs, but the fire had put itself out before the currant bush covering her body could catch. Too green. There were a few half-charred logs nearby—the kind someone would have intentionally cut to an arm’s length for a campfire—but the soft rain that had fallen in the night had wiped the sand of footprints and kept the logs from burning all the way down.

“Who did this to you?” Starr asked.

She knelt and gingerly leaned under the branches. There was something else too. She took the pen from her pocket again and lifted the girl’s dark hair from where it had fallen across her face.

What was wrong with her mouth? It was open at an unnatural angle, and filled with…something. Dirt?

Starr leaned back. The victim’s mouth was jammed with what Starr guessed amounted to handfuls of silt. Only it was lighter in color than the sand that lined the creek bed. And finer. She pressed into it with her pen. Packed tight.

Starr felt her scalp shrink with the horror of it. Had this happened before or after the victim died?

Starr stood and rubbed her palms against her thighs. She wanted a shot of whiskey, but she needed coffee. She dialed the county medical examiner’s office on her cell phone; it took three tries to get the call to go through.

“Yeah, Dr. Moore? This is Marshal Starr from the Saliquaw Nation, and we’re going to need your crew over here.”

She paused to listen, waving a hand at the flies that had begun to gather.

“One victim. Female. Mid to late twenties. Recent, by the looks of it…Yeah, I’m putting markers out and will stick around until they get here. I’ll send someone to show the way, but let them know they’ll have to walk in. Road only goes so far.”

Starr pulled a large evidence bag from her pocket and settled it around a charred log near the girl’s head that had a suspicious smear that could be blood. After she collected the wood, she took a few pictures with her cell phone even though she’d instructed the ME to send out a photographer for crime-scene images.

“Bag the antlers too,” she said to a blue jay, which disregarded her instructions from its perch on a nearby evergreen branch.

Starr looked again at the victim’s feet and noted a series of stars tattooed on one ankle. Chenoa didn’t have a tattoo.

She needed to reach Odeina before word of a dead girl got around.