Wind Spirit [Ella Clah 10] (9 page)

“Sounds like something that would really help our investigation. Do it.”

As he walked away, Ella noted paramedics joining some of the firemen in one of the smaller rooms of the house. They had a stretcher. From the looks of it, they’d found Mrs. Hunt. As she waited for confirmation, Ella joined Tache, who was photographing the hot spot beneath the window. A broken bottle lay in shards around a charred black spot.

Justine came up with a set of forceps and began to collect the glass, placing it in a box.

Ella sighed. “You won’t find any fingerprints on that.”

“What do you know that we don’t know?” Tache asked, looking at her intently.

Ella suddenly realized that she’d spoken aloud. “It’s just a hunch.” One she knew was right, however. Her intuition, something her mother believed to be something else, was rarely wrong.

A few minutes later, the paramedics came out with a body bag on the stretcher.

Ella stopped them. “The wife?” she asked, not using the name of the recently deceased in accordance with Navajo customs.

“It’s hard to tell,” one of the Navajo men answered. “The body was so badly burned. But there was a ruined wheelchair beside the remains and that makes me think your guess is right. The ME asked us to transport the body to her lab and she’ll be making the final determination.”

Before Ella could say anything more she heard running
footsteps. As she turned her head, she saw Lewis Hunt, the councilman. He stopped abruptly inches from the stretcher and stared at the black plastic body bag in horror.

“Is that—” His voice was barely audible. He tried to finish the sentence, but the words wouldn’t come.

“We don’t know who it is for certain, Councilman. A medical examiner will be making the identification. All we know is that it wasn’t your in-home care nurse,” one of the emergency medical team members answered.

“Was there a wheelchair nearby?”

The EMT nodded.

“Then it’s my wife,” he said and began to shake violently. “There’s no one else it could be.” He took a step back and stumbled, weak at the knees.

Ella steadied him and nodded to the EMTs, who continued on with the body. “We’re investigating this now, Councilman,” she said, making sure he saw her badge. “It’s still too early to be certain, but the fire appears to be the work of an arsonist.”

“Arson? Who would do such a thing to my beautiful wife?” he whispered and crossed his arms in front of his chest in an effort to stop shaking.

“We need to find whoever was responsible,” Ella answered softly, leading him away from the site.

He stopped by the mailbox that was at the front of the house near the street and looked back. “Who hated me—us, enough to do this?” he asked in an anguished whisper.

“I’d hoped you’d be able to tell us.”

Hunt took several deep breaths as he stared at an indeterminate point across the highway. Then his eyes narrowed. “It may be connected to the radio show. Did you hear about that?”

“I’ve heard a few things. I’ll learn more.”

“Maybe one of Branch’s loony callers decided to come after me.” He started to say more, stopped, wavered slightly,
then covering his mouth with one hand, ran over to the side of the road and vomited.

Ella waited. His grief and shock were stunningly real. She considered telling him what she’d experienced in her own close call with death, thinking it might ease his pain a little, then decided against it. She had no proof that any of it had been real.

Lewis Hunt returned to where she was standing a few minutes later. Ella’s heart went out to him. His eyes were dull and lifeless. His spirit had been broken. “Councilman, I know this is a terrible time, but—”

“Ask me whatever you need,” he said wearily.

“Did your wife have any enemies?”

“Not ones who’d do something like this,” he said, his voice unsteady. “My wife had a law degree and was active in politics. She didn’t run for office because that wasn’t what she wanted, but she was actively involved with me campaigning for the gun restrictions I wanted to pass. She spoke to any and every group that would listen to her—from Chapter Houses, to political science classes at the college.”

“Do you think she made enemies doing that?”

He shrugged. “Lots of people disagreed with us on gun registration, but that’s just because they don’t realize how prevalent handguns are on the reservation. Kids carry them around on the streets and in their cars, bring them to dances and social events, even to school. Although, so far, we’ve averted any major tragedies like the ones that have happened in other places, our luck will run out one of these days. Perhaps Shiprock will be next,” he answered, parroting what she suspected was his standard speech.

“Getting back to your wife. Is there anyone in particular who has given her—or you—a hard time recently?”

“I received some nasty hate mail this morning—a backlash from Branch’s radio show—but it wasn’t unexpected. I put it into a file just in case something comes of it.”

“I’ll want to examine that mail. Did anyone at the college classes or Chapter House meetings that your wife attended seem openly hostile to her, during or afterward?”

He considered it. “Pam Todacheene and my wife have never gotten along. They’re both attorneys and could argue a case nonstop for hours on end—and they did just that several times over the gun proposal. But she wouldn’t have hurt my wife or me.”

Hunt looked around as if lost, then waved halfheartedly at someone who’d just pulled up. “That’s my brother-in-law and chief aide, Cardell Benally. He’ll help me with the arrangements I’ll have to make. Do you need anything else from me?”

“No, sir. Thank you, Councilman. I’ll be sure to keep you appraised on our progress.”

“Yes. And I’d like to ask you to do something for me, Investigator Clah?”

“Yes, Councilman?”

“Find the person who did this. And when you do, gather enough evidence so that even the . . . stupidest jury in the world will convict him and put him away for life. My wife has been denied justice once already, I won’t have it happen again.” Hunt’s voice was shaking now, and it wasn’t just from grief. He was angry.

Ella didn’t know how to answer the man, and he was beyond consoling any more, so she just nodded and walked away. Quickly she joined her team, worked beside them for another hour, then took Justine aside. “I’m going to pay George Branch a visit,” she said, recapping what she’d learned about his last broadcast.

“Would you like me to meet you there? I’m going to be finished here shortly, and Ralph can take the evidence back to the station without me.”

Ella shook her head. “I need you to do something else. Find out when the last Chapter House meeting around here
was held and if the deceased attended. If she did, find out how her views were received and if anyone in particular gave her a hard time.”

“Done.”

Ella drove to the radio station located in the off-reservation city of Farmington, glad to be working a case again. Arson, murder—these were crimes she understood, and something she was trained to deal with effectively. Trying to figure out intangibles of any kind—particularly what happened after death—was just an exercise in frustration.

As Ella entered the large cinder-block building off Main Street, she found Branch in the hallway getting hot cocoa from a vending machine. He’d easily put on another twenty pounds since the last time she’d seen him. The man had to tip the scales at close to two-seventy or -eighty.

“Hey, Clah,” he said, seeing her. “Figured you’d be dropping by. Hoskie told me what happened.”

“Then let’s cut to the chase and save us both some time. I’d like a list of your callers—the loony ones. Or is that redundant?”

“Charming as ever, I see.” The half-Navajo radio personality took the steaming cup from the machine dispenser and sipped it slowly. “But I’m feeling charitable so it’s your lucky day. The station won’t release phone records, naturally, but you can listen to a tape of the show and take all the notes you want.”

Branch led her to a booth down the hall from his office, then brought down a CD containing the audio of his last show and handed her a headset. “I didn’t take any callers for the first half hour of the show, but from then on, we had a flood of listeners expressing their opinions.”

Ella spent the next two hours forcing herself to listen to Branch’s show. Callers usually identified themselves only by their first names and she had no doubt that some of them had used aliases. Most of the callers had been really incensed by
the issue and had expressed negative viewpoints, but none of them had mentioned Hunt specifically. There was nothing for her here.

As she walked outside to the hall, George Branch met her and she handed him the CD and headset.

“All done?” he asked.

“For now.”

“You and I don’t see eye-to-eye on much, Clah, but even you have to admit that
if
this is a reaction to the things said on my show, I’m still not to blame.”

“Your radio show is known for stirring up people’s emotions and getting them to react. You may have done a better job than you realized. Either way, an innocent woman was killed and I intend to find out who did it.”

“I’ve heard a rumor that Arlene died in the fire. Has this been confirmed?”

Ella nodded. “It’s not official yet, but I’m pretty sure the body they found was hers.”

“Damn.” Branch leaned back against the wall and stared at her, his face drawn. “I met her a few times. The woman had a mouth on her, but I admired her. She had guts and never pulled her punches, and in this day and age when everyone’s trying to be politically correct, that’s quite a virtue. I always thought
she
should have been the council member, not that spineless idiot she married. She’d have had enough sense to drop that gun issue and carry the ball on the youth offender bill, something most of us can agree on.”

“Off the record, and, in your personal opinion, are any of your regular callers capable of something like this?”

Branch shrugged. “My callers, as you’ve heard, are passionate people. Gun registration is a particularly volatile issue. The People won’t take kindly to anyone who’s working to restrict their rights.”

“Save the speech for your program. Just answer my question.”

He scowled at her. “People are people, Clah. They’re capable of almost everything.”

“Well put. But you might keep that in mind, too. One of these days you’re going to piss off the wrong person.” Ella walked away from him, glad to finally be able to put some distance between them. Dealing with someone like Branch always left a bad taste in her mouth.

By the time Ella crossed the parking lot and reached her vehicle, she had a plan. Picking up her mike, she called Justine. “I need you to handle something else for me. Go talk to Janet Joe’s parents. See if they have any idea who may have wanted to set fire to the Hunt residence. Janet’s parents are right there on the front lines with Hunt on this issue. They’ve been victimized themselves already.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Justine said. “What really bugs me about this case is that even if we catch the perp, chances are all we’ll get him for is manslaughter. He’ll go to prison and then get out in a few years. Yet the way she died . . . that cries out for tougher justice, you know?”

“We’ll make the best case we can against the perp,” Ella said. “That’s all we can do. Our duty stops there.”

A part of her felt just like Justine did, but catching the perp was paramount in her mind now, not the eventual sentence. First, they had to restore order. Harmony wasn’t as passive a concept as she’d believed when she’d first returned to the Rez. It required a struggle and watchfulness to make sure that evil was held in check by good—that the balance was maintained.

It was ten-thirty that evening when Ella finally got the chance to open the book on life after death experiences she’d discovered in the Shiprock drug-store’s extensive book rack on the way home. Dawn was asleep, and for the first time today, Ella was on her own.

She was still sore, maybe from the accident, or perhaps her many work-related injuries were kicking up again. She had to fidget around on the sofa to get comfortable but finally she put her feet up on the cushions and began to read.

The book was written by an MD who’d interviewed hundreds of people who’d survived what he called “bodily death,” and she was amazed at the similarities in the described experiences. She’d finished the first chapter when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rose peer into the living room, then leave. About fifteen minutes later, Rose came back in again and quickly left before Ella could say a word.