CHAPTER TWENTY

A block west of the coffee shop, Starr noticed Minkey pacing on the sidewalk in front of city hall, where they’d agreed to meet. She looked at her watch. Nine a.m. He was punctual; she’d give him that.

Starr had planned to march into the mayor’s office to ask why the hell she’d been gifted a deputy, but after talking to Holder she’d decided on a different approach. This wasn’t Chicago. Starr shook her head at the thought of a loan like this happening in Chicago. No one she knew would willingly take a bite out of their own budget, so she’d decided to sniff around first and find out who she was dealing with. Especially now that the work was piling up, not to mention the boxes of cold-case files lining her office that she had yet to investigate.

The mayor’s office was part of a new complex that housed Dexter Springs’ fire and police departments as well as its city administration. Fancy for a small town, Starr thought as she followed Minkey inside.

The lobby was artificially cool, bright and quiet. A windowed dome overhead gave cathedral height to the open rotunda and flooded it with sun. As Starr’s boots sounded across the tiles she thought of the PBS documentary she’d zoned out to last night. The Missouri State Capitol had a rotunda whose curved walls carried sound, enabling visitors to hear whispered exchanges—even from across the hundred-foot space. A whisper gallery. A lion’s den.

A receptionist, who Starr later learned doubled as a payroll clerk, hit a buzzer and came around a counter to open a security door.

“I’ll be back. You can wait here,” Starr told Minkey. Although she’d planned to bring him along as evidence, she now thought better of it. He looked surprised but nodded agreeably.

The receptionist led her through an office-lined corridor where she caught glimpses of people peering at computer screens. Near the mayor’s door, at the end of the hall, Starr could see an exit that must also serve as a private entrance.

“Marshal,” said a friendly voice. Starr turned into a large office in time to see a woman rise from behind a flimsy-looking folding table.

“My desk,” the woman said. “How do you like it?”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“It’s in next year’s budget, I think—I hope—but I’m glad to make do. We’ve been busy, as you can see,” she said, and raised both arms in a gracious sweep, indicating, Starr thought, the entire complex. “Please, sit down.”

Starr sat on the edge of a folding chair. The room smelled of fresh paint and new carpet. There was an engraved nameplate on the makeshift desk: Mayor Helen Taylor.

“It will all be done in good time. This building—this entire complex, really—has been years in the making. Taking another year to outfit my office won’t hurt.”

None of this had been what Starr expected. The cavernous lobby, the layers of security, the poorhouse furniture amid grand, new construction, and least of all, the mayor. She was Quinn’s size—no more than five feet four inches, with thick blond hair tied back in a simple ponytail. Starr had pictured an old white guy in a too-small suit coat, but this mayor looked like she might be leaving in a few minutes to coach a Little League soccer team or play a round of golf on her lunch hour. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt, her toned arms tan.

This, as much as anything, made Starr decide to dive right in.

“Look, this Minkey thing. I was surprised to find an officer on loan in the marshal’s office. My office. It wasn’t exactly welcome, and I’d planned to come here and”—she hesitated—“read you the riot act for interference, influence, you name it….”

At the sound of a quick knock the mayor looked over Starr’s shoulder.

“Oh, yes, Bernard,” the mayor said brightly, “come in. I’d like you to meet Marshal Starr, from over at the reservation.”

Starr gritted her teeth through a series of awkward niceties and avoided saying that she already knew who he was. She’d witnessed his nervous presentation at the tribal council meeting. She was eager to get to business and felt like pushing Bernard back out into the hallway and slamming the door shut.

“I’ll be back later. Nothing urgent,” he said.

Starr stood and closed the door behind him.

“Turns out I could use the help, temporarily. So thank you, but there is something else too. I’d like to keep this under wraps until we make more progress on this case. The body we found—” she began, but the mayor interrupted.

“Is it the missing girl?”

Well-informed, Starr thought, but the mayor had probably seen Chenoa’s face on the flyers, like everybody else who went into Rita’s Roast.

“Maybe,” Starr said. “Could be.” No sense in giving too much away, not until she knew who she was dealing with. The only thing she knew so far was that the homicide victim wasn’t Chenoa, but she was keeping that to herself for now.

“She was found on tribal land? Was there foul play? Terrible shame. I can’t imagine, as a mother, what her family must be going through. You’ll let me know when you have her identified?”

“As a courtesy, sure,” Starr said. “Now, about this loaned officer. You may not be aware, but my post as marshal is funded by the BIA, and as part of that job, I’m tasked with hiring a—”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said the mayor, waving off Starr’s words. “Glad there’s some attention being given to this…this epidemic of missing Indigenous women. And what happens to our neighbors on the reservation affects Dexter Springs too. It has taken me years to get the city to this point. But finally we have the right people in the right place at the right time to make some progress.”

Starr pictured the dais in the city hall public meeting room, each chair filled by a consort to the mayor, their ruling queen.

“And now that we’ve gotten the community support to build this complex, the process by which we’ve been successful can function as a blueprint for future projects. Transparency builds trust, and trust is essential to making progress. But it takes so little for the public trust to waver.”

Starr hadn’t come for a civics lesson, but she was starting to understand why a town the size of Dexter Springs had a brand-new city hall. The wall behind the mayor’s temporary desk was thick with plaques and award certificates.

“And one of those future projects is to attract a major employer to the area. We have a company on the line, an international energy company, and we’re already mapping out infrastructure. But do you know what happens when there’s trouble on the reservation?”

She paused, and Starr wondered briefly if it was a practiced affectation. She could envision the mayor making earnest and impassioned speeches to sway doubters toward her pet projects.

“Deals fall through; that’s what. And we just can’t have that, now, can we?”

Was it the ponytail that reminded her of Quinn? Starr tried to pull her thoughts back, hated the way she’d changed, the way she was only partially there at any given time. Now it was Quinn who filled her mind, face down on the bank of a dirty creek, her thick hair spread around her like a halo, like a crown, the blond turned the color of dried blood. No. Starr shook her head. That wasn’t Quinn. That was another girl, that other crime scene. She’d come here to discuss the officer she’d left in the lobby.

The mayor reached behind another table, also temporary, and moved a bag of golf clubs out of the way to search through rolls of huge engineering prints.

“Those your clubs?” Starr thought of the dead girl, of blunt objects, of blows to a skull in the dark.

“Hmm?” Helen said absently as she unfurled a large map across the table. “Oh, those? Yes, I play a little. Love the putting green, especially now that my favorite driver seems to have walked off. Callaway too. That’ll teach me to keep track.” She studied the map for a moment, then shook her head, rolled it up and reached for another.

“Ah, that’s the one,” she said.

She spread the map and stopped the ends from curling by placing a stapler on one side of the map and her cell phone on the other.

Starr watched as the mayor unrolled other maps, laying them out in order. The letters GCIS were printed along the bottom of each, along with the date on which the topographical survey occurred. There was one for each section of town, and if Starr could have oriented herself to the streets and buildings, she was sure she’d find the filling station turned café where she’d met Holder.

“Here are the initial proposed plans.” The mayor ran one tan index finger along the printed ink.

Starr moved around to the mayor’s side of the table. She smelled expensive. She was probably wearing Chanel No. 5, which always made Starr think of her mother.

“Here’s the highway from Dexter Springs to the reservation,” the mayor said.

“What’s the yellow?”

“That highlighted route is something you should be familiar with,” Helen said, turning her head to look at Starr. From this vantage point her eyes were gray, Starr decided. She could make out individual flecks of gold around the edges.

“Or you will be soon, I imagine. That’s the proposed highway the city will be constructing. Are you familiar with the reservation’s partnership with Blackstream Oil? This is Dexter Springs’ contribution to the project, building this access road right to the edge of the drilling field, and, with Chief Byrd’s permission, into the reservation.”

Starr traced two yellow stripes running into the open territory of the reservation’s wilderness area.

The pipeline, this road, the murdered girl and Chenoa, who might be missing. Were any of these things connected? She couldn’t see how they all fit together, but she didn’t believe in coincidences either. She’d long ago decided that if she heard hooves she was going to bet on a horse, not a zebra.

The most likely explanation was usually the truth, but she was beginning to think everything here would be far more complicated than she’d assumed.

Maybe that was why she followed through with her new plan and, before she left the mayor’s office, agreed to keep Minkey on loan for a few weeks. Or maybe the fog of grief had turned her soft.

She spotted Minkey inside the lobby entrance and waved him out. As soon as they reached the sidewalk, her cell buzzed.

“Marshal Starr.”

“Dr. Moore here. I have some preliminary results on the soil found in the victim’s mouth. I knew it didn’t look right for Oklahoma, but I wasn’t sure where it originated. See, our dirt is usually reddish brown, sometimes quite red. Iron oxide gives Oklahoma soil its color. The iron oxide dates back to the Permian geological era, about three hundred million years ago, and leaches out of sandstone and shale. This red dirt has special significance for the Native people here. It’s not only a representation of Indigenous blood spilled during their forced relocation, but also a reminder of their connection to the earth.”

“Okay, but what we saw in the vic’s mouth was white, not red,” Starr said.

“Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. This victim was found on the reservation, correct?”

“Yes, by a dry creek bed.”

“What we found in her mouth is not our red soil at all, but kaolin. Pure kaolin.”

“What is that, a new kind of drug or something?”

“No, not at all,” said Dr. Moore. Starr could hear something behind her words, an upswell. “This white dirt is a type of clay, soft and chalky. I did a little research, and while there isn’t a sizable deposit of kaolin in northeast Oklahoma, it’s common in the southeastern United States. The thing is, kaolin is quite valuable. There’s a huge demand for it, everything from cosmetics to pharmaceuticals.”

Blinking in the bright midmorning sun, Starr paused on the sidewalk. Kaolin. This added a new layer to the investigation. Why had it been important to the killer to fill the victim’s mouth with kaolin? And where had it come from? The soil could be crucial to the investigation. She would add it to Minkey’s line of questioning when he went door to door on the rez. She hoped today’s knock-and-talk would yield more information than the day before, at least for her. She’d received the same frosty welcome she had on Wednesday, when her official vehicle had been tagged with colonizer. Meanwhile, Minkey seemed to have a way with people. He was an outsider too, even more than she was. Yet she’d seen him get a woman not only to answer the door but to invite him in. What did Starr have to do so that someone, anyone, would open up to her? What was she missing that Minkey seemed to understand?

“Thanks, Doc,” she said, and hung up. She turned to Minkey. “Interview everyone on the rez that you can. Get a bead on people. Flash the picture; find out what anyone knows about a young woman fitting our vic’s description. There was a white chalklike particulate in her mouth that Dr. Moore says is kaolin. It’s valuable, so someone could be keeping a small amount of it in a bowl, a bucket, a baggie, that sort of thing. Keep an eye out for it. Find out if anyone’s heard of it. Oh, and ask about Chenoa, when they last saw her.”

Starr shaded her eyes. A reflection was making her squint, and she tracked it across the street, where a window washer was soaping and scraping the glass on an old limestone building until it shone. The library.

It was time to find a better map.