Amazon Ink

Chapter Eighteen

I sought strength in a piece of quiche before facing Zery. It was good. Having a hearth-keeper around really had some benefits-at least until hearth-keeper junior showed up. I guess I’d see if having fresh-baked quiche for lunch balanced out waking to a baby screaming at two A.M.

After picking the crust off the quiche that was still in the pie plate and popping it into my mouth, I squared my shoulders and went in search of Zery.

She was on the phone and, lucky for me, she looked happy.

“We found another girl who went to that bar and she named two others. The first is at the Florida safe camp. The other two are somewhere between Illinois and California. When they arrive in California, the queen knows to keep them there. We’ll find out what they know and keep them there, watched and safe.”

“How are you going to do that?” The Amazons had a complex structure. Each Amazon had loyalty to their family group, identified by their telios, and to the six reigning queens-especially the queen whose safe camp they were visiting. But for the most part, we hadn’t changed a lot from our nomadic past. We had tribe loyalty and were constantly pressured to follow tribe rule, but I’d never heard of an Amazon (outside of the queen and high priestess) being grounded to one safe camp. It went against one of our basic tenets of survival and our history as nomads-keep moving, never settle in one place too long.

“We’ll do it.” Her expression dared me to say otherwise.

“You think that does it? You think the killer was only targeting the girls who went to the bar?” I was truly curious. I wanted to believe rounding up the girls and keeping any others from visiting the bar would stop further killings, but I just didn’t know.

“Pisto’s taking another group to the bar tonight. Dana told her about parties they went to after the bar closed. Next party, we’ll be there.”

And what? Beat each and every person there until they admitted to being the killer?

“The parties are probably on the weekends,” I said for lack of anything else to add.

“Maybe.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you here?”

I ran my finger over the top of a file cabinet that sat by the door. It came back coated in dust. I wiped the dirt on my jeans. “I need to talk to you about something.”

She stood up and walked around to the front of the desk. “Talk.”

“I…” Despite the fact that most of the tribe still despised me, Zery trusted me right now. I didn’t want to say anything to endanger that, but her trust also meant maybe she’d at least listen to me when I suggested it was time to bring the Amazons out into the open.

“Like I said before, the police contacted me. Earlier, before you moved into the gym.”

She tilted her head. “You mentioned that. They thought you might know something about the girls’ tattoos.”

I nodded. “He’d taken them to some Milwaukee shops. Artists told him it looked like my work.”

“And?” She hadn’t moved an eyelash.

“And nothing. I told him I didn’t know anything.”

Her posture softened, but her gaze didn’t. If anything, it became more piercing. “But you didn’t tell me. When you saw those tattoos, you had to know the girls were Amazons. Why didn’t you warn me?”

She knew as well as I did that I had told her-that I had left the stone fetishes at the safe camp. She was giving me a second chance to explain that. I ignored her offer.

“We didn’t exactly leave things on the best of terms.”

She started to say something, but I barreled on. “Point is, this cop, I’ve gotten to know him some. He really cares. He really wants to find the killer, and I was thinking that we haven’t been making a lot of headway. Maybe we…you…should talk to him.”

She pulled back like I’d slapped her, or tried to. “Have you been gone that long? We don’t work with humans. And we can certainly police our own problems-we’ve been doing it for millennia.”

“But the Amazons have never had to deal with a problem like this. No one has ever preyed on the Amazons. And you seem dead set on not believing Alcippe could be involved. Who does that leave?” I didn’t wait for her to state the obvious: me. I kept going. “If it isn’t someone in the tribe, it’s someone outside of it. Outside of your reign. You’ll have to deal with humans sooner or later.” If the killer wasn’t Alcippe. But no matter what, I still believed the Amazons opening to the outside world was the right move-that ultimately their insistence on a closed community was what had led to the girls’ deaths. And I didn’t want Amazons to reveal everything about who they were, just be more open, stop looking down on people who weren’t Amazons, be more aware of how the world had changed.

Her lips thinned; the skin surrounding them turned white. “We can take care of our own.”

I took a step forward. “I never thought you’d let arrogance cost Amazons their lives. The police can get information we can’t. Why not use that?”

“You’re pointing fingers at me? What about those fetishes? How did you get them? Maybe Alcippe is right-you too, for that matter. Amazons have never been ‘victims.’ We’ve never had to fear anyone because, loose as our structure is, we respect tradition-know what being an Amazon means, know how important keeping ourselves separate is. But then you leave, mingle with humans, live as a human, raise your daughter as one.

“As your friend, I can’t believe you killed your own kind. I can’t.” Her eyes were huge and her voice rough. “But as queen, I have to consider that you seem to value being human more than you ever valued being an Amazon. Is there a side to you I’m just not seeing? Is our friendship blinding me to your guilt? Did you kill those girls, or know who did?”

Anger swelled to a roar inside me. “We have been over this. If I was the killer, why would I let you stay here? Why would I be encouraging you to talk to the police? Why would I be here at all? Why wouldn’t I have run by now?”

She wrapped her fingers around the edge of the desk. I had the uncomfortable feeling it was to keep from grabbing onto me. “Why indeed? Maybe I’m not the only one who’s arrogant.”

I left without replying.

Zery wouldn’t talk to the police. I couldn’t make her.

I stepped out of the gym and into glaring sunshine. Four Amazons sat on the ground outside, talking. When I walked out, they stopped and followed me with their eyes. Their animosity was tangible-worse than before. I guessed they’d heard of my run-in with Pisto or seen the evidence. I doubted Pisto would have run home and tattled. Not her style.

I felt their gazes like stones attached to my back as I walked away.

Damn them. I was not the enemy. Why couldn’t they see that?

Over dinner I realized a hole in my thinking. I couldn’t make Zery talk to the police, not of her own free will. But I could bring the police to her. I could tell the police about the Amazons without revealing who and what they truly were.

Half truths. A new art I seemed to have mastered.

I went to bed with the knowledge I was going to make use of it tomorrow.

I called Reynolds first thing the next morning and got voice mail offering a cell-phone number. I called it. He was already in his car and on his way over. It would have been flattering if I hadn’t gotten the distinct feeling he was fingering his handcuffs as we chatted-and not in a let’s-have-some-fun way. When I told him I was ready to talk but wanted to do so on neutral ground, he named a coffee shop not far from campus.

“I was a member of a cult.”

Reynolds set his coffee cup down without taking a drink. “A cult?”

“Well…” I twiddled a plastic stir stick between my fingers. “I wouldn’t call it a cult.”

“You just did.”

“I know.” I tapped the stick against the paper cup. “It’s just hard to put a term to it.”

“Closed group with a charismatic leader who keeps the members cut off from outside society?”

I bit into the stick, flattening it with my teeth, then dropped it back into my cup. “The point is-I was part of a group that’s a tad shy.”

“Secretive.” He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a notepad.

“They don’t surround themselves with barbed wire or anything.” Wards were a lot more effective. “And members come and go all the time.”

“So do Hare Krishnas.”

I snorted. “Believe me, none of these women are selling flowers at the airport.”

“They sell fortunes instead?” He looked at me without raising his head from the notepad.

“That’s not illegal.”

“Depends on how it’s done.”

“Listen.” I swished the stir stick around a few times, then jerked it out and dropped it on the table, leaving a little snake of coffee in its wake. “Do you want to hear what I have to tell you or not?”

He leaned back, one arm propped on the back of his chair, and made a circular motion with one hand. “By all means. That’s why I’m here.”

“I left the group ten years ago.”

“Any reason?”

I gave him a glare. He held up his hand in surrender. “Tattoos are…important to the group. Everyone has them. Girls get them sometime during puberty-preferably right at the beginning. When you brought me the pictures…I didn’t recognize the girls, but I recognized the tattoos, the style anyway. I knew they were from the group.”

“But you didn’t do them?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not.

“Address?”

“For what?”

He lowered his pencil. “The whatever you called it…camp.”

“You don’t need to go there.” I wanted him to talk to Zery, not drop in unannounced on Alcippe and company. My horror must have shown.

“Why not? What could happen?” He had that tense look again, like the barista behind me had pulled a gun and he was trying not to show he’d noticed.

“Nothing. I mean, some of the group, the leader, in fact, is at my shop.”

“I thought you left.”

“I did, but with the girls…some bonds are hard to break, okay?” I sounded frustrated, guilty, and apologetic all at once. And I was pretty sure all the emotions were targeted not at him, or even the Amazons, but at myself.

“Why didn’t they come forward before this?”

I sighed. “They didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what? That the girls were missing? How do you not know that? One of those girls looked about fourteen.”

He was showing his age. To me she looked every one of her seventeen years or more; to the bartender who served her downtown, she must have looked older. Even the greediest of bar owners wouldn’t serve a fourteen-year-old, fake ID or not.

“Or that they were dead?” he continued. “They not watch the news…read a paper? It’s been everywhere. If my teenage daughter went missing, I’d be scouring every inch of ground from here to the borders-of the U.S., not Wisconsin. And if I didn’t find her, I’d keep going. You mean to tell me they saw all the coverage and didn’t even think it might be their girls? What are they hiding?”

“You have a daughter?” I asked. It was an inappropriate question, cutting off his passionate diatribe, but I was curious. I hadn’t seen him as having kids, or a wife.

He blinked. “Two. One’s married. One lives with her mother-in Rockford.”

Divorced. That intrigued me too. Since Amazons never committed to a relationship with a man, the whole marriage thing confounded me. I’d have loved to ask what drove him to commit, then what drove him-or her-to walk away. But I didn’t. I had used my one inappropriate and personal question for the day-maybe forever.

There was no reason to think Reynolds and I would have any kind of conversation after today. I would introduce him to Zery. He’d understand what a tiny role I’d had (or was pretending to have) in this mess, and he’d back off. Go back to doing whatever he did to solve this crime.

He rapped his notebook against the table. “So, he must know about the girls now-if he’s staying with you.”

“She.” The pronoun came out harsher than I’d meant it to, but it annoyed me that he’d assumed Zery, the person with power, was a man. It was an unfair judgment on my part; he was victim to his own society’s norms, not the ones I’d been raised with. And I had my own issues-obviously.

“She?” The corners of his mouth curved down, in surprise or thought…whatever, it was obvious he hadn’t expected the female bit.

“The entire group is.”

Still digesting my previous revelation, it took a minute for him to catch my latest.

“Is what?”

“Female. No men.”

“No men at all?” His expression morphed from surprise to shock. “How do they work that? I mean there are kids, right? Or is it a new group? Only been around a few years?”

“No, not new.” I really hadn’t foreseen the need to explain the Amazons like this. I was beginning to get a sick feeling in my stomach. “It’s just a group, okay? None of that matters, does it? You just needed to know how I was connected, and I told you. Now you know where the girls came from, maybe it will help you with the case.”

He raised a brow. “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to tell me what you want me to know and expect me not to ask anything else. Two girls were murdered.”

“I know.” I sat against the back of my seat hard. “Listen, I want to stop the killer. I have a daughter too, you know.”

“Are you worried about her?”

I almost threw my coffee on him then. Of course I was worried about her-some things didn’t need to be said.

“When we started, I asked if I gave you something if you could give me something in return. I gave you something-two somethings.” I picked up the printout from the Web site that I’d brought with me.

He didn’t move, just stared back at me with his eyes shuttered, not giving away any of his thoughts.

“I want to know who put those pictures out there.” I held out the printout.

“Why?”

I opened my mouth, then closed it.

“You’re not involved, right? And even if you were, there’s no reason for you to know that. You or one of your not-a-cult friends wouldn’t go looking for the person, right?”

I shifted my eyes to the side and took a breath. When I looked back, I was calm, kind of. “I want the killer stopped. We all do. It’s about the only thing me and my ‘group’ have in common anymore. But I don’t want them harassed. They’re private. If I’d thought you were going to dig into every aspect of who they are, I wouldn’t have told you about them.”

He smiled, his eyes understanding, but sad. “I get that, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t get to pick and choose what I use. I don’t even get to pick and choose. I just follow whatever lead I can.”

I stood up and walked out of the shop, leaving him with the dirty cup and my chewed-on stir stick. I was pissed, but nowhere near as pissed as Zery was going to be.

I needed to get home and prepare her. Little did Reynolds know he might have another murder to investigate-mine.