The Night Is Watching

Page 13

“I’m on my way.”
He started back to the car without saying anything to Jane.
She followed him, slipping into the passenger seat as he held the door.
Once in the car, he turned to her. “This isn’t just a ride-along. It really means ride. The trail area where Heidi found the corpse is out back from where my home is. We’ll drive to my place and get the horses. You ride, don’t you?”
He hoped she’d say no.
“Yes, I ride.”
Of course she did.
He called Johnny Bearclaw as he drove, asking him to saddle Kanga and Roo.
“Kanga and Roo?” Jane asked as he rang off.
“I didn’t name them,” he said. “My grandfather got them from an old friend years ago. Kanga is a mare, Roo is her colt. They’re good horses,” he said briefly.
They were good horses. Despite that, over the years, one or the other of the two had lost a rider—they could turn so sharply. They never hurt anyone; riders just slid off.
He wondered if he was hoping she’d take a tumble...and not be able to come with him.
At his property, he walked around the house and straight to the stables, where Johnny had both horses saddled and ready to go.
Sloan introduced Johnny and Jane. They were cordial to each other, and Johnny smiled, honestly happy to meet Jane. She was easy and relaxed, and Sloan was forced to admit that he was the only one who seemed to be awkward with her.
She admired Kanga and Roo and, naturally, Johnny was pleased.
“We need to get moving,” Sloan said. “I’ll take Roo. Johnny, give Jane a hand up, will you?”
The horses were both seventeen hands tall. He swung up on Roo, leaving Jane to ride his beautiful grande dame. She tended to be a slightly smoother ride. Roo sometimes thought he was still a colt.
Jane politely accepted Johnny’s hand but straddled Kanga with agility. She knew how to ride, just as she’d said.
He kneed Roo, and they started off at a long, smooth lope to the rear of his property and onto the trails beyond that led through the foothills. She followed easily at his pace. A half mile into the ride, through desert, rocks and scraggly brush, they connected with the standard trail the stables used for their rides.
They passed one of the entrances to the old silver mines, then the Old Trading Post set up by the stables, where no one actually worked but a few vending machines could be found, and finally reached the Apache village the stables had created as a halfway point on the ride. Although the Apache had never lived in this little array of tepees, they’d set up some placards that accurately described life for Natives of the area; they’d also been hired to fashion the tepees and fireplaces, drying racks and weapon stands that formed the village.
He saw Heidi sitting forlornly on a rock near the placard that gave a history of Geronimo. She held her horse’s reins loosely and looked as if she was on the verge of tears.
“You’re here! Thank God! Oh, Sloan, you’re here!” she said, rising. Heidi was thirty-three, thin and athletic with short-cropped blond hair and dark brown eyes. An excellent rider, she often borrowed Roo when she entered barrel-racing competitions. Although Sloan had no interest in being part of a rodeo, he didn’t mind lending Heidi his horses. She was calm, assured and competent, not to mention friendly and garrulous—a great tour guide. She didn’t own the stables or the tour company, but she did the managing and scheduling.
He dismounted, aware that Jane was doing the same behind him.
“Heidi, you called 9-1-1? Where’s the body?”
“We’re right in the middle of no-road-ville. I’m assuming the med techs are coming by horse-drawn wagon. But I told them—oh, they were being ridiculous. They kept telling me to try emergency procedures, artificial respiration. Sloan, he’s dead. I mean, dead. I am not putting my lips on a corpse!”
“Heidi, they weren’t here. Their job is to save lives,” Sloan told her. “Where—”
“Over here, Sloan,” she interrupted, walking around behind another pile of rocks. She glanced back at Jane. “Uh, hello.”
“This is Agent Everett,” Sloan said.
“Oh, hi, nice to meet you. You’re the artist, right? You make faces out of skulls.”
“Something like that,” Jane said.
Sloan had reached the corpse. He stopped, staring at it incredulously.
As Heidi had reported, the corpse was just about mummified. Brown leathery skin stretched so tightly over the skull and bones that it seemed like an eerie caricature. A dusty old hat sat on the corpse, which was propped up against a rock almost as if he’d sat down to take a nap—and never awakened. He was dressed in dust-covered pants, an old shirt and a vest; it appeared that he’d been buried beneath the sand for years and dug up to sit on the trail.
“See! And they wanted me to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation! Gross! He’s—I mean, he’s real, right?”
Sloan hunkered down to study the corpse more closely. Jane knelt beside him, studying the dead man in silence.
“The clothing is certainly old. Handmade, I think,” Jane said. “I’m not an expert on this, but it does look like the cloth is incredibly fragile—almost disintegrating—and that this man has been dead for years....”
Right. He might well have died around the time Sage McCormick disappeared—only to appear again in Lily as a skull more than a hundred years later. What the hell was going on here? Another macabre joke? Or were these dead showing up for a different reason?
“Who would do this?” Heidi demanded. “Who would dig up this poor guy and put him here? It’s so creepy! I can’t believe I stayed here waiting for you. I thought...I was so afraid he’d move. I never could have stayed if it was night!”
Sloan took a pen from his pocket and gingerly touched a darkened spot on the shirt. It was difficult to see clearly, but it seemed that the corpse had taken a slug in the chest.
“Poor fellow was shot a hell of a long time ago,” Jane noted.
Sloan felt a vibration and heard the rumbling of the horse-drawn wagon as it arrived on the scene. Two emergency techs jumped out of the covered wagon that was kept at the stables for emergencies in the desert. They could also bring helicopters, but most often, the wagon made its way to the desert. He knew many of the county techs but not all, and he didn’t know these two.
Sloan stood. The men approached, both of them staring at the corpse.
“Well,” the older one said.
“I told you I couldn’t revive him!” Heidi said.
“This is a waste of time for us,” the younger man said. He looked at Sloan. “I’m sorry, I mean...well, this is unusual.”
“Why did no one believe me when I said dead, dead as a doornail?” Heidi asked.
“Heidi, sometimes people think they’ve found a dead person when people are unconscious or in a coma. We always try to hope for life first,” Sloan said. He introduced himself and Jane, and the med techs did the same.
“I don’t know what protocol is here,” the older man, who’d introduced himself as Gavin Bendle, said. “I get the feeling this guy’s been dug up as some kind of a joke. I almost feel as if...we should just rebury him here. No muss, no fuss.”
“I say bring him to the medical examiner’s office. They can make the call there,” Sloan said. “You’ve already got the wagon out. I’m sure historians and anthropologists will want to examine the corpse before...before he’s reburied, I guess.”
“This is Lily,” the younger man, Joe Rodriguez, murmured.
Sloan laughed. “Right. And the town has no morgue. Our dead go to the county.”
“Can I go back?” Heidi asked hopefully.
No one answered her. They were all staring at the corpse.
“I’m afraid to try to move it,” Joe admitted.
“Might break,” Gavin agreed.
“Maybe we should get some kind of scientist out here,” Joe said.
“Maybe I could go back?” Heidi asked again.
Sloan turned to Heidi. “Of course. I’ll get a formal statement from you later.”
“A formal statement?” Heidi repeated. “I took out a trail ride. I saw this corpse sitting here. I called it in. That’s my formal statement.”
“He’s pointing,” Jane said suddenly.
“What?” Sloan asked.
“See how his hand is lying there? It looks as if someone arranged him so his fingers are pointing...in that direction,” she said.
She rose, walking in the direction in which the fingers pointed.
Sloan followed her. He didn’t see anything at first. Neither did Jane. She seemed perplexed.
“He’s definitely pointing this way,” she said.
“The tepee,” Sloan suggested. The tepee that stood a few feet from him was real; it just hadn’t ever been lived in by an Apache. Sloan ducked down and entered. There were cold ashes where a central fire would have burned. Indian blankets were rolled against the sides, and old cooking utensils had been set up as if ready for use.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. Then Sloan realized he was breathing in a scent he’d learned all too well over the years.
The scent of death.
He walked toward one of the blankets and tugged at it.
A corpse rolled out.
He felt Jane behind him. She didn’t scream, but behind her, Heidi let out a terrified yelp. “Oh, my God! It’s another dead man!”
Gavin and Joe came in behind her.
“No!” Heidi said. “Oh, God!”
“It’s a fresh one,” Gavin muttered.
And so it was.
They had an old corpse....
Pointing the way to a new one.
What the hell was going on in Lily?
4
Sloan pulled out his penlight to examine the man and try to determine who he might be and how he’d died. He didn’t want to disturb the corpse any more than he needed to, until the medical examiner arrived.
The corpse was dressed in dirty denim jeans and a cotton shirt. He was wearing work boots, and Sloan noted that his hands and nails were dirty, as if he’d been doing manual labor. He judged him to be about forty years of age, but he’d never seen him before. At first, the cause of death wasn’t apparent. Then Sloan noted that the red on the blanket was deeper because of the blood that had escaped from a bullet hole in the back of the man’s head. He dug into his pocket for the gloves he hadn’t needed yet in Lily but carried anyway because of his days in Houston. He checked the man’s pockets, but he wasn’t carrying a wallet or any form of identification.