CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Finally, at a quarter to seven—after Starr had released Minkey from duty, settled Junior and taken him home—she lugged a file box to the old Bronco and drove to the rental house in Dexter Springs, where she pulled a card table from the garage and set it up in the empty living room. She laid out the maps she’d borrowed from the library or spirited from Odeina, and used empty Jameson bottles to pin down the corners.

One of the maps showed looped trails in reds and blues, with icons by a few isolated trailheads; the other showed the reservation’s varied geography. Different than she’d thought. She had imagined that the area was a wide, flat plain with more cowboys than careers, but Oklahoma was full of surprises. She thought of Junior trailing women who entered the Trading Post, offering them protection bundles from his pockets, desperate gifts he believed could change their fates.

Starr had known there was a problem with missing Indigenous women. This was why she’d been hired to take the marshal position. Qualified, even.

But now. There were so many. Gone.

They could be here, she thought, and used a finger to trace across the acres plotted on the paper maps. Or somewhere far from here, and she thought of interstate highways. The women could have been picked up by a driver catching I-44 to Oklahoma City and beyond.

Any one of these girls could still be alive.

The itch was starting; Starr could feel it under her skin. It would grow and grow until there was nothing to do but think about the cases. Go over every detail again and again.

She didn’t understand her own process, even after all these years. Most people thought the work went in a straight line. A murder. An investigation. Clues. An arrest.

Starr knew better. Sure, in hindsight a completed investigation made sense. She’d distilled her own actions into reports enough times to know what to leave out and what to put in. But she also knew there was a wasteland between starting and closing an investigation, and that sometimes you wandered in it, lost.

It was too late for the girl at the morgue. No matter how fast Starr moved forward with an investigation, she could never bring her back.

She stared at the file box she’d brought from the rez. Most of the girls in the files it contained had disappeared under largely unknown circumstances, but there had been a few clues. Three of the girls had been seen walking along the road that leaves the reserve, which wasn’t unusual. Nor was it out of the ordinary to hitch a ride. Four more seemed to vanish into the night. Another had been spotted six months after she was last seen but had never turned up again. And now there was the victim by Turkey Creek. Starr was looking for patterns in chaos and coming up empty; sorting through details that could ultimately fit together, or mean nothing at all.

Starr took a file at random from the middle of the stack and sank into the camp chair she had stationed by the card table. She opened the file and slid the slick photographs around like a child shuffling playing cards. She needed new eyes, but the Jameson was starting to take hold. She’d been measured in her drinking that evening, allowing one shot, and then another one, only after she had thought about certain things.

The first file yielded no answers; nor did the second, third or fourth.

But here, in her hands now, was something different. Starr looked at the date on the file she held. This case was at least a decade old: A young Indigenous woman had been discovered buried and badly decomposed near a remote trail, too far gone to offer much information. Images of her body, pale and still, swam up at Starr. She skimmed the autopsy report. Posthumous skull fracture. And something else that sent Starr’s heart racing. The victim’s mouth had been filled with soil. But not just any soil. It was a white particulate—like what filled the mouth of the body she’d studied under the brush near a bend in Turkey Creek, with the vultures biding their time on the changing currents over Crawl Canyon.

Were there more victims who had been discovered with a similar calling card?

Starr flipped through file after file. Missing. Missing. Still missing.

Her uniform buzzed. Starr leapt from the chair and pulled her cell phone from a pants pocket. She checked the caller ID. Eight-four-seven area code. Earlene.

“Been hell trying to get hold of you.”

Starr smiled. “Earlie, I knew I could count on you. Tell me something good.”

“Aw, girl, I got nothing to say. Not what you want, anyway.”

“Nothing?”

“Look, I went over that wood up, down and sideways. With a fine-tooth comb. If it was there, I would have gotten it.”

Starr’s gut wrenched. Not the news she wanted. More loose ends in a case that seemed to be made of them. She looked at her watch. Friday, nearly nine p.m. Time was moving too fast.

“Talk to me,” Earlie said. “What else you got? You said it was a blunt object, so sure, it could be this wood here, but did the medical examiner find wood fibers?”

“Yep,” Starr said. “All around the wound. Split the skin and fractured the skull, and internal damage too. Lacerations on the brain.”

“Something solid. That’s for sure,” Earlie said.

The line was quiet, both women absorbed in their own thoughts. Starr’s mind moved through the scene: the blows, the death—probably slow—and afterward, the burns. She knew that collecting DNA from the log had been a long shot, and even without the outcome she needed, she was grateful to be able to count on someone from her old life.

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Earlie said. “What’s going on out there, anyway?”

“Caught a case, that’s all,” Starr said.

“Just one?”

“For now.”

When the call ended, Starr thought again of the striking similarity between the two cases, old and new: the white soil at the centers of both deaths. If there was a serial killer in the area, there were bound to be more victims.

She didn’t want to go this route, thinking a serial killer was to blame, but she knew the statistics from the cases she’d worked in Chicago: At any given time, there were twenty-five to fifty-five serial killers operating in the US, and they often made use of the interstate highway system to move around.

She stared at the maps until the lines blurred.

There were so many cases, and none of them seemed to fit the two she’d flagged. So many files on murdered Indigenous women who were victims of domestic disputes, bad drugs, gun violence. And from the rez, even with its relatively small population, more than half a dozen women were currently missing. There could be so many reasons why. A driver with bad intentions offers a ride. A runaway runs into trouble. A trafficker is masked as a boyfriend.

Why was she always leaning into long odds? She had one old file with an MO that matched that of the murder by the creek, and even that link was tenuous. She had to keep an open mind, steer clear of tunnel vision.

From the start, this newest victim’s death wasn’t like any other case she’d worked. She was spinning in the wind, with no cooperating agencies to call to her aid in setting up a perimeter, interviewing all who came and went from the reservation…. And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

Worse, she knew the BIA didn’t have a comprehensive national database to track missing Indigenous women, even though Indigenous women were seven times more likely to be murdered than white women. The ratio of Indigenous women who were missing was even higher.

Starr reached into her shirt pocket, pulled out a joint bent and worn from the day. She opened a new bottle of Jameson and flicked fire from her silver lighter, wondering whether she cared about breaking the no-smoking rule that would forfeit her deposit.

What did the BIA think she was really going to accomplish out here? It was like they tried to make it easy for the bad guys. Tried. It was entirely possible for a killer to make a go of it on the rez virtually undetected.

But that didn’t mean Chenoa was gone. Hell, maybe Chenoa was still out in some part of the reservation’s wasteland, right under Starr’s nose. She could still find Chenoa, even though she had not found Quinn in time…but that thread unspooled into dangerous territory, didn’t it?

Starr took a long drag and held it like she was underwater.