CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

MONDAY

The old woman’s words were still on Starr’s mind as she pulled up to the marshal’s office the next morning. She extinguished what was left of a blunt before putting it in her shirt pocket, then spritzed a bottle of Febreze over her head, letting the droplets rain down in a fine mist. She’d taken the long way to the community building, smoking and watching the sky turn a turbid gray as she drove.

Follow a man, Lucy Cloud had said. The problem was knowing which one. Byrd carried enough anger about his daughter to be a danger, but that wrath was aimed at the reservation’s stagnation—and at Junior. Starr had already cleared Junior. And she believed Junior’s story about the deer, how Holder had stolen the kill. Holder had rubbed her wrong the first time she’d seen him, what with all his mansplaining and the meanness in his eyes. She pulled the whiskey from under the seat and took a slug—an antidote to the hours she’d stayed awake searching BIA case files; fortification for the long day ahead.

Starr left the Bronco and the weatherman’s near hysterics about the early arrival of the first winter storm. When she entered the community building the cold followed her inside, sticking to her clothes, her hair, her exposed skin. Her boots tapped a familiar rhythm across the concrete floor to the marshal’s office, where the door was ajar. She didn’t expect Winnie this early. Then she noticed the smell. Beneath the musty odor of commodity boxes and BIA files, she caught the scent of cologne.

Starr swung the door open and Minkey stood from where he’d been crouching over a stack of files.

“Minkey,” she said, her heart racing. “What are you doing here already?”

“Marshal, I was, uh, hoping that…well, what I mean is, I’d like to—” Minkey stammered. “I wanted the chance to talk to you this morning, you know, in private.”

“Go for it,” Starr said, settling the Bronco’s keys in a desk drawer. “Got a lot to do today, so get cracking. Maybe start with why the hell you took off from Junior’s yesterday.”

“Yeah, that’s what I want to talk about. That and…” He handed Starr a slip of paper with a woman’s name and phone number on it. “You’ll probably want to verify what I’m about to tell you. You can call this woman, Megan Begay. She lives here, on the reservation, and I coach her oldest son. See, he’s on my basketball team, but it’s just the mom and him and his little brother, and he’s been getting into some trouble. She wanted me to look for him that night.”

“What night? Look for him where?”

“The mom was worried about what he might be getting into. He’d been hanging out with some older guys from Dexter Springs, coming in late, lying. When he wasn’t home before dark that night, she was worried he’d ended up at the creek, maybe at a party out there. She asked me to see if he was there.”

“Minkey,” Starr said slowly. A shiver worked its way up the back of her neck. “What night were you at the creek?”

“Wednesday.”

Sherry Ann had been found the next morning, just hours after her death. Minkey had been at Turkey Creek too, and now he stood between Starr and the door, an escape. She shifted, putting a hand to the weapon on her belt.

“You got something to tell me?”

“That’s what I’m doing.” Minkey backed away, palms up. A supplicant. “Why I’m here. To tell you. I went down to the creek, like I’m saying, and I looked around for the kid.”

“Take it easy, Minkey.” She pulled the Glock. “Just stay right there.”

“The boy. He wasn’t there. At the creek. But before I took off, I talked to this girl sitting by the fire. Never asked her name. It was only for a minute. Look, I didn’t know who she was until—”

“The Awiakta girl.”

“Yes, Sherry Ann. I didn’t say anything the next day, at the autopsy, because,” he said, “to be honest, I was trying not to get sick. I had no idea I knew the victim in the case you were working, or that anything had happened to her after I left the creek—not until later. It was a shock when I put it together, when I learned who she was, and that I’d met her in the hours before she died. Believe me—I wanted to tell you, but I knew how it looked. Suspicious.”

“I need you to kneel now, Minkey. Get to your knees.”

“I swear she was fine when I left. Said she was going to watch the fire for a while and then go home.”

“Now, Minkey. Drop.”

“Hey, you don’t need to do this. I swear, you don’t. Call this number too,” he said, lowering himself to the floor while holding out another slip of paper. “Ask for Opal. She’s the secretary over at the United Methodist, and she’ll tell you, by eleven o’clock that night I was at the church.”

“You have the right to remain—”

“It was a lock-in, a youth group lock-in! I’m one of the group leaders. I was inside the church all night, and I wasn’t alone for more than a minute for twelve hours. You said it yourself, that Dr. Moore believed Sherry Ann was killed well after midnight.”

“So why come to me now and confess, when you could have told me all along? When it would have been a hell of a lot more useful for you to—oh, I don’t know—maybe give me a list of the people you saw at the party? Fuck.” Starr holstered the Glock and glared at him. “Get the fuck up, Minkey.”

“There’s one more thing…about Junior. He was at the party. I didn’t see him myself, but he must have seen me. The other day, at the Trading Post, he said some odd things while you were inside, talking to witnesses, and I didn’t think too much about it. But yesterday, at his place, he threatened to tell you. Are you, uh, still looking at him for this?”

“Damn it, Minkey. You know that you’ve jeopardized this entire investigation. And that’s the best-case scenario.”

Starr paced to her desk. She had thought something was off about Minkey. Suspected it from the first time she saw him.

“I know it,” he said, lowering his head. “I thought I could help, maybe make up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, so I went back to her house when we canvassed the rez.”

“Her who?” Starr said.

“Megan Begay, like I was saying. I mean, I saw a bunch of faces at the creek but not anyone I knew, so I went back to ask her who was in the usual crowd down there.”

The woman with the little boy. Minkey hanging laundry on the line with her. That painfully domestic scene.

“And what did you find out?”

“Nothing. She didn’t know. Like I told you, she said she’d seen Sherry Ann about a year ago but didn’t know who she was, didn’t even know her name. I wondered if there were any older cases that might shed light on this one. I wanted to find who did this so it wouldn’t matter where I’d been, where I’d happened to be, that night.”

“So that’s why you were digging through my files when I came in this morning?”

“Yeah,” he said, “it was. But I realized that it would follow me. Even if I got past this case, what about the next? The one after that? If it ever came out that I’d been dishonest about my whereabouts, every case I touched would come into question. Every single one.”

Starr nodded. He wasn’t wrong. She thought of the night in Chicago, the way she’d turned her career into a tightrope she walked every day.

“I wanted to look in the files, to see if there was any evidence that might link me to Sherry Ann. I mean, there shouldn’t be,” Minkey said. “And I guess I also need to resign.”

“Since I never hired you in the first place, how about you run back to Mayor Taylor and tell her how well this went, how you’re a real asset to the force? How I didn’t need you here in the first place.”

Starr looked at the BIA boxes filled with the names of missing women, murdered women, lost girls. Little paper coffins all their own.