Ghost Medicine (31 page)

“And the hostage? The girl?”

“Apparently she’s fine—terrified but okay. The family’s
already packing up. They refuse to stay here, until a
hataalii
can come out to do a blessing.”

“They can’t go until we take their statements,” Ella said firmly. “I trust my brother to go to the station later, but there was a hostage situation here, and we need to get the details of what happened from the new residents. What we can do is offer to take them to the station and question them there.”

“I told them essentially the same thing,” Justine said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, but the gun the suspect had looks just like our friend’s old Glock. It even has the same grips. I’ll double-check ballistics when I’m back in the lab and run the serial number, but I think it’s the same one.”

Soon they began working the area, taking photos and carefully documenting all the evidence. Since
Ralph and Joe were at Truman’s, looking for more evidence, the job at this crime scene fell to Justine, Ella, and Benny.

The ME arrived forty minutes later after almost getting stuck in the sand. Ella, who’d been helping interview the witnesses and victim, excused herself and went to talk to Carolyn, who climbed out of her vehicle, still shaking her head.

“It should be open and shut this time,”
Ella said.

Carolyn walked over to the body and crouched beside it. “Two bullets to the chest. That’s your COD right there.”

Ella waited while Carolyn conducted her preliminary examination.

After several minutes, Carolyn finally looked up. “Both rounds penetrated his heart, one almost dead center.”

Ella remained silent. For now, she wouldn’t ask which round had done that, her brother’s or her
own.

Just then her radio crackled. “It’s Joe,” Neskahi’s voice came over clearly. “I think you better get over here. Ralph’s found something you’re going to want to see.”

“Copy that.” Ella saw Justine talking to the family, and hurried over. “I’m needed at the suspect’s residence,” she said, avoiding the use of names.

“Go. A patrol car is on the way. I’ll catch a ride back to the station with
them,” Justine said, gesturing to the family, then tossing Ella the SUV’s keys.

Fortunately, the old man who’d directed them to their current location volunteered to give Ella a ride back to where the Suburban was parked.

Forty minutes later, when Ella arrived at Truman’s, she saw Joe searching the grounds. She was just getting out of the SUV when another large SUV pulled up.

Ella waited, ready
to run interference in case it was a civilian. To her surprise, Victoria Bitsillie emerged a second later.

She hurried over and joined Ella. “Dan Nez is at your house right now. I was going to relieve him, but I heard from dispatch that the man who threatened your family is now dead, and you were en route to search the subject’s home. I figured I would be of more use to you here.”

“Thanks. I’d
like you to focus on anything that might lead us to a hidden dig site, and the location of more Native American artifacts,” Ella said.

Joe came over and smiled at both of them. “We’ve found a few things that you’ll both find interesting. Ralph’s already inside. Come join us.”

“Lead the way,” Ella said.

TWENTY-TWO

Joe, wearing a single pair of gloves, opened the flaps of a large cardboard box containing very old pottery, carefully packed in straw, foam peanuts, and Bubble Wrap. “The pots have traces of that purple fountain grass Truman used to landscape some of his yard. That tells me that he either packed this up outside or the dig’s really close by.”

“Why would he bring those back here
from another location, then pack them up outside the house? That doesn’t make sense,” Ella said. “The dig’s got to be here somewhere.”

“If there’s a dig around here, we haven’t found any sign of it,” Ralph said. “The house is constructed on a concrete slab and the crawl space is just that, barely. There’s a landscaped backyard, a horse corral, a loafing shed full of straw bales, a vegetable garden,
and the fence.”

Ella gave Victoria a speculative glance.

“Uh-uh,” Victoria said. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re way off base. People think I’m some kind of seer, but I’m just a trained cop with an eye for detail.”

Unsure, Ella said nothing. When she was Victoria’s age, she’d also dismissed anything she couldn’t prove, often labeling it superstition. Yet her many years on the Rez had
shown her a different truth.

Ralph cleared his throat. “Let’s go back outside and search again. We can consider this building ground zero and work outward.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ella said.

After thirty minutes, Justine and the others who’d worked the earlier crime scene came to join the search at Truman’s. Another ninety minutes passed, and although they found two shallow holes that had been
freshly dug, those appeared to be the result of someone taking fill dirt to place elsewhere. The dig site, if it really was close by, still remained a mystery.

Justine came up to Ella, who was looking around the front yard one last time before leaving for the station to question Eileen.

“You really need to push Eileen, Ella. She’s been living with the guy. She must know the location of the dig,”
Justine said.

Victoria, who’d been looking around the driveway, joined them. “For what it’s worth, ladies, I think what we’re looking for is right here on the property somewhere. We’re just overlooking it.”

“Gut feeling?” Ella asked.

“Yeah, but it’s one based on the evidence we have, like the purple fountain grass we found inside the boxed Anasazi pots. That plant isn’t native to our area.”

Ella nodded. “Yeah, makes sense.”

“You’re leaving to question the girlfriend?” Victoria asked.

“Yeah. Blalock will probably take the lead and I’ll follow up.”

“I took a training course in reading body language and learned to spot small tells. I may be of use to you there,” Victoria said.

“Good. Follow us back to the station,” Ella said.

*   *   *

Ella and Justine arrived just ahead of Victoria.
As they went inside, Ella saw Blalock standing in the hallway next to the one-way glass, watching the suspect inside the interrogation room.

Seeing Ella, he greeted her with a wave. “Hey, Supergirl. Heard you deflected another bullet today.”

“Good thing for Kevlar and instinctive body-mass shots. How’s our girl reacting to captivity?”

“She’s nervous and way out of her element, so I think she
can be pushed,” Blalock said. “If we let her know that she’s going to serve hard time as an accomplice to murder, I think she’ll cooperate.”

“Don’t underestimate her.” Victoria, who’d come up behind Ella, spoke as she watched the woman. “She’s more composed than she appears to be. Look at her more closely. Yes, her eyes are darting around and she’s hugging herself, but she’s handling her fear.
She’s not pacing, she’s just waiting, knowing she’s probably being watched. That’s a woman with a plan. She’s made up her mind what she’s going to do next, and now she’s biding her time.”

“Dwayne, let me go in alone, at least at first,” Ella said. “We need to establish a line of communication, and for that to happen, she has to lower her guard. The fact that she and I are both Navajo, and women,
may help me loosen her up.”

“Then go for it,” Blalock said.

Ella went inside, and instead of sitting across the desk, she sat on the empty chair beside the prisoner. “I’m going to give it to you straight, Eileen,” Ella said. “As it stands now, the evidence says you’re an accomplice to murder, but I’ve got a feeling that you just followed Truman’s lead. At first you looked the other way, then
things escalated and one day you realized you were in way over your head.”

Eileen nodded. “That’s exactly what happened,” she said, almost eagerly. “I fell in love with Truman. We moved in together, and at first things were great. Then he lost his teaching job and everything changed. He was angry all the time and started fighting with Norman and Mrs. Yazzie. He really hated them.”

“How did the
skinwalker thing get started?”

“The Yazzies kept provoking Truman, cutting across his land, letting sheep get into my garden, and creating ruts with tire tracks that turned into ditches every time it rained,” Eileen said. “That’s when Truman got the idea. I warned him that it was dangerous, but Truman said he’d stay in control and wouldn’t let it get out of hand.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Norman
found out. He came over one day and said that unless we moved out, he’d tell everyone that Truman was a skinwalker. Truman refused to leave, so things got worse after that,” she said, then in a whisper-thin voice added, “Truman never figured out how Norman knew it was him.”

“But you did, because you were the one who told Norman,” Ella said, taking a guess.

“Yeah, but it was an accident, I swear.
Norman got angry with me at the café one day when I got some lunch orders mixed up. He really lit into me, so I told him to back off or I’d tell the skinwalker to witch him. I never actually said it was Truman, but after that, he knew.”

“So things went even further downhill,” Ella said, and saw her nod. “Tell me about today. Start with why you left work early.”

“When that good-looking Navajo
guy came into the diner, I saw the badge on his belt. He wasn’t tribal because it was a star, like the deputies wear, so I didn’t worry about it,” she said. “I served him and because he was nice to look at, I watched him through the little window in the kitchen door. That’s when I saw him switching water glasses and putting the one I’d touched into his jacket pocket. I’d seen that on
CSI,
so I
knew what he was doing. I called Truman right away, and he told me to come home as soon as I could.”

“Truman used you to do his dirty work, so you knew that the net would close in on both of you once we had your fingerprints.” Ella’s voice was soft as she pressed Eileen.

“No, that’s not really true. I’m still not sure why you needed my fingerprints.”

“We lifted a partial from Harry Ute’s silver
belt buckle, the big rodeo one. Truman got you involved, sure, but you’re now in this up to your eyeballs. You’ve got to give me something so I can help you, Eileen. Without that, you’re going to be an old woman before you’re ever out of prison.”

Ella had placed no particular inflection on her words, and maybe that’s what ended up scaring Eileen most.

She sat up in the chair and stared at Ella,
wide-eyed. “But that’s crazy! I never hurt anyone! Even when we were on the run, he kept all three guns.”

“I’ll need more than that, Eileen. Give me something substantial, then we can make a deal.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said, almost in tears. “Truman killed the private investigator. Did you know that?”

“And you had no part in that?”

“I told you, I never hurt anyone!”

“Tell
me what you know,” Ella said.

“The day the PI was killed, Billy O’Donnell came over. I heard him warn Truman that the Navajo ex-cop they’d spoken about before was closing in on their operation. Truman decided to check out O’Donnell’s story and found the PI staking out the road leading to the house. I went to work after that. It wasn’t until I got home that evening that I found out what happened,”
she said, and shuddered.

Ella gave her a moment to compose herself. “And?”

“It was horrible. Truman told me that he’d gone back with his rifle and shot the PI. He said he gave him time to bleed out, and once he was dead, he took all the man’s things, including his gun. He also did things to him … with a knife and bolt cutters. He wanted to make it look like the work of a skinwalker.” Eileen’s
hands began to tremble and she clasped them together so tightly, her knuckles turned white.

“You weren’t there?”

Eileen shook her head. “No, I told you. I was at work. That’ll prove I had nothing to do with that,” she said. “Truman also told me that he’d used the man’s keys to get into his apartment and steal his computer and flash drives. He wanted to make sure there was nothing that could
lead back to him.”

“So what happened to the things he stole, including the laptop computer and drives?”

“Truman destroyed them as much as he could with a hammer, then threw the pieces into the river.”

“The gun, too?”

“No, Truman thought he might need that someday, so we drove over to that arroyo, put it in two layers of plastic bags along with an extra magazine of bullets, and he buried them.
That’s what I was digging up today when those two cops showed up. Truman had gone back to the car, so I hid in the arroyo when the shooting started. When you showed up, he ran over to where I was. We didn’t know what was going down, but we figured we better make a run for it.”

“You still haven’t given me any proof,” Ella said. “I’m trying to help you, Eileen, but you’ve got to give me something
I can take to the DA.”

She considered it for a moment. “I’ve got videos on my phone that show some of Truman’s meetings with O’Donnell,” she said at last. “I also recorded Truman telling me about the PI’s death, though he didn’t know I was doing that. The phone was in my purse at the time, so the words are muffled. But I can fill in a lot of the details.”

“Why did you videotape and record all
that?” Ella asked. “Were you trying to get back at him for something?”

“No, but I was afraid he’d leave me, and I wanted something that would force him to stay. I’d always thought I could make him fall in love with me again, but when he asked me to sleep with that detective, I realized I was just fooling myself. No man would ever tell the woman he loved to have sex with another guy.”

“Why did
he want you to hook up with Harry?” Ella asked.

“I was supposed to find out how much he knew. But I didn’t get anywhere. I tried to get him to lower his guard and mess around—that’s how my prints got on his belt buckle—but he wasn’t interested. I don’t think he trusted me.”

Ella bit back a smile. That was Harry. When he was working a case, nothing else was allowed to interfere, no matter how
tempting, and he always had good instincts about people.