Blood trail

21

ON THURSDAY, Joe cruised his pickup on the gravel roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Fallen leaves like tiny cupped hands skittered across the lawns to pile up against fences and brush. Wood smoke from the chimneys of small box houses refused to rise in the cold and hung close to the ground. Some houses had lawns, fences, trees, hedges. Some had pickup trucks mounted on blocks without engines or doors.

He had always been struck by the number of basketball back-boards and hoops on the reservation. Nearly every house had one, and they were mounted on power poles and on the trunks of trees. In the fall, during hunting season, antelope and deer carcasses hung from them to cool and age. In the summer, they were used by the children. Joe counted six fat mule deer hanging in one block and realized the moratorium the governor had placed on state lands wouldn't apply to reservation lands, which were sovereign.

The reservation high school was a modern redbrick structure with well-kept lawns and nothing about to suggest the students were Northern Arapaho or Eastern Shoshone. The only student Joe saw outside was wearing a gray hoodie, smoking a cigarette, and listening to his iPod.

After checking the teachers' lot for Alisha Whiteplume's car (the SUV he'd seen through the binoculars), Joe parked and went in. THE MAIN HALLWAY of the school was dark and empty. His boots echoed on the linoleum. Classes were in session, and he glanced through windows in the closed doors to see teachers teaching, students sprawled at their desks, a few catching his eye as he passed. The teachers' names were printed on construction paper outside each door, and he paused at the one reading MISS WHITEPLUME. Inside was obviously a substitute teacher-a man in his midtwenties with shoulder-length hair and round wire-rimmed glasses. He was explaining something to the students but their glassy-eyed response unveiled his ineffectiveness.

Student artwork decorated the walls, pen-and-ink the medium. Joe was struck by how similar the work was to what he saw in the hallways of Saddlestring High School in town; how little distinctively Indian was included in subject and theme. In fact, he thought, he'd seen more warriors and mystical American Indian scenes in town than he saw on the reservation. Plenty of typical teenage dark-minded fantasy stuff, though, as well as NBA, hip-hop, and NASCAR-THEMED scenarios. Farther down the hall, closer to the office, were framed photos of graduating classes dating back more than forty-five years, many of which had once been displayed in the old high school before this new one was built. The graduate displays slowed him, and his eyes looted through the cameo photos.

The faces that looked back at him from year to year reflected the styles and attitudes of the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, to the present. The number of graduates grew and receded from year to year, and he couldn't tell if there were many more students at present than there had been forty years ago. There were sullen faces, hopeful faces, fierce faces, doomed faces. Because of the high mortality rate on the reservation, he recognized some of the recent names as accident victims, overdose victims, shooting victims. Too many from the recent classes were already gone, he thought. THE RECEPTIONIST looked up from behind the counter when he entered the school office. She was oval-faced and kindly-looking, a Native whose eyes showed she'd seen a lot over the years in that school. The name plaque on her desk read MRS. THUNDER. He liked that name and wished his name was "Joe Thunder."

Because he was wearing his uniform, Mrs. Thunder said, "Okay, who did what?"

"Nobody I'm aware of," he said.

"None of my boys shot a deer out of season or without a license?"

"Not this time," he said, placing her because of the way she said "my boys" as the heart and soul of the school, the Woman Who Knew Everybody And Everything. He always felt blessed when he met up with such women because they were generally the key to unlocking the secret doors to an institution.

"Ah," she said, "that's good to hear."

"I was going to ask to see the principal if he's in, but you can probably help me."

Mrs. Thunder shook her head, an impish grin on her lips. "I could, but it's not protocol. You should see the principal and he's a she. And she's in. I'll see if she has a minute. May I ask what you need from her?"

Joe said, "I want to ask about a teacher here, Alisha Whiteplume."

Mrs. Thunder's eyes flashed and Joe couldn't interpret the reaction.

"I'll be back," Mrs. Thunder said.

Joe wondered what he'd just done.

In a few moments, Mrs. Thunder reappeared and said, "Principal Shoyo is waiting for you in there," gesturing to an open door at the back.

Mrs. Shoyo was surprisingly young, Joe thought. She was dressed in a white blouse and business suit and wore a gold medicine-wheel pendant. She stood as Joe entered and they shook hands. Mrs. Shoyo had black hair that was swept back and piercing brown eyes. She was Native. He noted the pin on her lapel, a horizontal piece with a red wild rose on one side and a flag with parallel red and black bars on a field of white on the other side. The pin represented the two nations on the reservation: the rose the symbol of the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho flag.

"Joe Pickett," he said. "Thanks for taking a few minutes."

"My pleasure," she said, sitting back down.

He glanced at the wall behind her where she displayed photos of her family: three beautiful dark-haired, dark-eyed girls, a shot of her husband, he assumed, on a knee next to a dead bull elk he was very proud of; her diploma from the University of Wyoming; a certificate naming her one of the "Top 100 American Indian Women Leaders of 2001."

"Mrs. Thunder said you were asking about one of my teachers, Alisha Whiteplume."

"Yes," Joe said.

"What about her?" Shoyo asked, her eyebrows arching, "Did she commit some kind of game violation?"

Joe laughed. "Not at all. I wish I weren't wearing this uniform shirt right now. No, I'm here because she was last seen in the presence of a friend of mine I'm trying to track down. I was hoping she could help me find him."

Mrs. Shoyo narrowed her eyes as if to read him better.

"I hope that's all this is about because Alisha is one of my best, if not the best teacher I've got here. She left the reservation after graduating from here and went off and made a success of herself. Then she chose to come back, to help her people. She's such a role model because she's bright and attractive and her students always do the best on the aptitude tests. She's also one of my closest friends."

Joe now knew why Mrs. Thunder had flinched.

"Then you know of Nate Romanowski," Joe said.

Mrs. Shoyo smiled gently, but Joe could see that she had placed an invisible shield between them. "Everybody knows Mr. Romanowski," she said, which somewhat surprised Joe. "But my understanding is he's in Cheyenne in jail waiting for his trial."

"He's out," Joe said. "He's supposed to be in my custody."

"But he isn't," she said.

"But he isn't," he sighed.

"Are you saying you think Alisha is with him, wherever he is?"

"Possibly."

"And by finding her you might find him."

"That's the idea," he said.

She raised her hand and fit her chin into her fist, studying him across the desk, making a determination, he assumed, about how much she should tell him and what she should keep to herself.

"Is Alisha in trouble?" she asked.

"No."

"Why should I believe you?"

Joe shrugged. "Because I'm telling you the truth. I just want to find Nate."

Mrs. Shoyo nodded as if she'd come to a conclusion. She leaned forward on her desk and showed him her palms. "I'd like to know where Alisha is as well because I'm starting to worry about her. She called in yesterday morning so we could line up a substitute teacher. I didn't talk with her, Mrs. Thunder did. Alisha told her she might be out for a few days so to try and get a good replacement. I don't think we did, though. I think we hired a man who spends all his time telling the students how hip and sympathetic he is to them instead of teaching them math and science."

Joe recalled the man in Alisha Whiteplume's classroom: it fit.

Joe asked, "Did she say where she was calling from?"

"No, she didn't," Mrs. Thunder answered from just outside the doorway, where she'd been listening.

"You can come in, Alice," Mrs. Shoyo said, doing a quick eye roll for Joe's benefit. "Nothing goes on in this school that Alice isn't aware of."

"I understand," Joe said, looking over his shoulder at Mrs. Thunder, who came into the room.

"I don't think she was calling from her house, though," Mrs. Thunder said. "I could hear the wind in the background, like she was outside somewhere. I assumed she was calling from her cell phone. I didn't question her. It's her right to call in sick and she hardly ever has until this year. She's had trouble shaking cold after cold this year, and she's missed quite a few days the past few months."

"Outside," Joe said. "Could you hear anything else? Background talk? Highway noises?"

"No."

"And she didn't call again this morning?"

Mrs. Thunder shook her head.

Joe dug in his pocket for two business cards and handed one to Mrs. Shoyo and one to Mrs. Thunder. "If she shows up or calls in again, can you let me know? And if she calls, can you please try to find out where she is and when she'll be back? I'm not asking you to rat on her-she's not in trouble at all. I just want to make sure she's safe and knows what she's doing."

Both women took the cards and looked at them in the long, contemplative, and deliberate way Joe had noted before in many American Indians.

"Alisha is a smart woman," Mrs. Thunder said, finally. "I'm sure she wouldn't do something stupid."

"But she's with Nate Romanowski," Joe said, immediately regretting he'd put it that way.

"How can she be," Mrs. Shoyo said slyly, "if he's in your custody?"

"Not you too," Joe moaned, and both women laughed. AS JOE walked back down the long hallway toward the parking lot, the bell rang. The hall was suddenly filled with students pouring out of doors, gathering books, chattering, bound for their next class. Rather than swim against the tide, he stepped to the side and flattened himself against the wall. Due to his uniform and sidearm he got his share of inquiring looks. A pack of fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boys passed close by him talking loudly to one another in a staged exchange:

"Benny, are we still on to go poach some antelope after school today?"

"Absolutely, man. I got two guns and a bunch of bullets in my car! We can shoot a whole herd of 'em just like we did last night!"

"It's a good thing there ain't no smart game wardens around here, huh, Benny?"

"Yeah, that's a good thing. Otherwise, he'd know we were killin' and poachin' fools!"

"Ha-ha," said Joe, and the boys broke up into self-congratulatory laughter. AS THE halls thinned and cleared he found himself looking at the framed photos of the Class of 1991, which had graduated seventeen years before. There she was, Alisha Whiteplume. Her beauty was striking, and intelligence shone in her eyes. But there was another female student two rows up from Alisha who was familiar as well. This girl exuded brash self-confidence. Her eyes seemed to challenge the photographer to take the picture, and she had an inscrutable smile of self-satisfaction. Joe knew her now as Shannon Moore, Klamath's wife. "THAT DIDN'T take long," Mrs. Thunder said when Joe returned to the office.

"I was hoping you could give me some background on another student I saw in one of the photos in the hallway," Joe said.

"I'll try," Mrs. Thunder said. "I've been around this place for thirty years. If it's before that I might not be able to help you."

"Class of 'ninety-one," Joe said.

"That"-Mrs.Thunder beamed-"was a very good year. That's when Alisha graduated."

Joe nodded. "And the other student I think I recognize. Her name is Shannon Moore now, but I don't know her name at the time she graduated."

Mrs. Thunder sat back, puzzled. "Shannon?"

Joe's heart sank for a moment. Had he screwed up and mistaken one face for another? Then: "Maybe I can point her out to you."

"Show me," Mrs. Thunder said, plucking the 1991 high-school yearbook off a shelf behind her and opening it on the counter.

Joe used his index finger to guide him through the photos of graduating seniors. It settled on the one he'd seen in the hallway. As he read her name, Mrs. Thunder said, "So she goes by Shannon now, huh?"

"It says here her name was Shenandoah Yellowcalf," Joe said. "Do you know her?"

Mrs. Thunder snorted. "Do I know her? She was only the best girls' basketball player we've ever had here. I'm surprised you don't know her."

Joe explained he'd only been in the valley for eight years.

"Here," Mrs. Thunder said, flipping through the yearbook pages, "let me show you."

Joe looked at countless photos of Shenandoah Yellowcalf in the activities section of the yearbook. There were action photos of her on the court, at the foul line, and in the lane, another of her cutting down the net at the state championship.

"You've never seen a girl play like Shenandoah played," Mrs. Thunder said softly, caressing the photos with a stubby fingertip as if drawing memories from them. "She had a blinding crossover dribble as good as any great NBA point guard as she brought the ball down the court, and she left her opponents flailing at air in her wake. She made us gasp the way she played. There has never been a player here with so much determination. She was so fierce. Shenandoah led our team, the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, which was made up of only seven girls, to win the state championship game."

Joe read from the yearbook. "She scored fifty-two points in the championship game?" he said. "Good Lord!"

"Oh, she was good," Mrs. Thunder said, shaking her head. "Alisha was on that team too," and pointed her out in the team photo.

"Was Shannon-um, Shenandoah-recruited by colleges?" Joe asked.

Mrs. Thunder nodded enthusiastically. "She was offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, all the national powers. We were so proud of her."

"Where did she go to school?" Joe asked.

"She didn't," Mrs. Thunder said sadly.

Joe shook his head, confused.

"Shenandoah's grandmother got really sick, so she stayed on the reservation to take care of her. I think she was scared-there was so much pressure on her-and I told her that, but she said she would go to college and play basketball when her grandmother was better. Like all those schools would just wait for her."

She looked up at Joe, moisture in her eyes. "I get disappointed to this day when I think about the potential she had and the opportunity she missed."

Joe nodded, prodding her on.

Mrs. Thunder looked down, as if she didn't want Joe to see her eyes, didn't want to see how he reacted to an all-too-common story on the reservation. She said Shenandoah did, in fact, nurse her grandmother for a year, then two. Her devotion was extraordinary for a girl her age, she said, but didn't entirely mask the fact that part of the reason she stayed was because of her fear of leaving the cloistered reservation for the punishing high-profile world of big-time college sports-or at least that's what Mrs. Thunder surmised. Plus, there was the pressure from those she'd grown up with, her friends and family and coaches. Too many people lived vicariously through her, saw her triumphs as their triumphs. When she failed, they failed too.

"Kind of like me," Mrs. Thunder said. "I'm guilty of that as well. I think of a lot of these kids as my own, and I wanted her to do so well, to make us all be able to say, 'I knew her when.'"

"Where did she go?" Joe asked gently, knowing where she ended up but not how she got there.

"Nowhere, for way too long, I'm afraid," she said. "The time away from sports didn't do her any good. She gained a lot of weight the way kids do when they're used to playing sports all the time and they just stop. It was pretty obvious after a couple of years that it would be tough if not impossible for her to get a recruiter interested, even if they still remembered her. But that's me speaking… I don't even know if she tried."

Shenandoah started running with the wrong crowd, she said, a bad mixture of Indians and town kids. She got involved with alcohol and drugs, and was arrested for dealing crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation as well as small-town Wyoming. Her grandmother died and Shenandoah drifted back and forth from the res to town. Mrs. Thunder said she'd hear of Shenandoah from time to time, that she worked as a barmaid, a waitress, even as a roughneck on a coal-bed methane crew. She hired out as a cook and a guide for elk camps as well, Mrs. Thunder said, raising her eyebrows as she said it.

Joe grunted. While there certainly were legitimate cooks for elk camps, there were also "cooks"-mainly younger women-who provided other services for well-heeled, mainly out-of-state hunters. Joe had seen and met some of the camp cooks in the mountains, and it was obvious few knew anything about making breakfast. He felt the same irony and sadness Mrs. Thunder conveyed as he imagined the scenario and looked at Shenandoah Yellowcalf 's bold face and eyes in the yearbook. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-year-old Northern Arapaho "camp cook" they'd hired was once one of the greatest basketball players in the state of Wyoming, he thought. He searched his memory; there was something familiar about the story. Something about a young female Indian camp cook. Something he'd heard years before when he was a trainee working under the former game warden Vern Dunnegan…

But he'd sort that out later.

He asked, "Do you know if Shenandoah and Alisha were friends?"

Mrs. Thunder smiled. "They were best friends. I think Alisha did everything she could to help Shenandoah."

"Did they keep in touch?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I assume they did."

Joe said, "Hmmmm."

"What?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "But I can tell you that Shenandoah is back and doing very well. I saw her recently. She looks good and she has a little baby. She's married to a guy named Klamath Moore."

It was obvious from Mrs. Thunder's expression that she was grateful to hear the news but didn't know who Klamath Moore was.

"I'm so happy to hear that," she said, growing misty again. "That's so good to hear. Please, if you see her again, tell her to come by the school. Tell her I'd love to see her again."

Joe smiled. "If I get the chance, I'll pass along the invite."

"Tell her that old Alice Thunder wants to give her a hug." JOE WAS buoyed as he walked out into the parking lot. The best entree to Klamath Moore would no doubt be through his wife, Shannon… and Alisha. Maybe that was the angle Nate was working.

If his friend was working on anything at all. HE SAT in the pickup without starting the motor. His mind raced. What was it Vern Dunnegan had once told him about the Indian camp cook?

Vern told a lot of stories. He talked nonstop. Joe had learned to tune him out because the chatter was incessant and many of Dunnegan's stories were mean-spirited. Joe had tried to forget everything Vern had told him once Vern showed himself to be a liar and a criminal eight years before; he'd done all he could to expunge Vern Dunnegan from his mind. But he tried to remember this particular story about the camp cook. He hoped he'd written it down in his notebook at the time, and he planned to locate his old notes to try to refresh his memory. THERE WERE two messages on his cell phone and he punched in the access number to hear them.

The first was from Stella, saying Randy Pope was doing everything he could to meet with the governor to get his blessing to leave Cheyenne and take over supervision of the case. She was running interference, but she said she couldn't hold him off forever. What, Stella asked, was going on?

The second was from Portenson of the FBI, saying Bill Gordon was prepared to meet Joe that night in the little town of Winchester. He said Gordon wanted to talk and he had something to say. Portenson said Joe was to be at the park promptly at eight. No earlier, no later. If Joe wasn't there on time and alone, Gordon, Portenson promised, would flee. And if something bad happened-if Joe was late or Gordon smelled a trap-there would be no more meetings, because the informant couldn't risk them and, frankly, he had no idea if Joe could be trusted in the first place.

"You've got one shot at our man," Portenson said. "Don't fuck it up."

Joe was grateful Portenson didn't mention Nate, which meant he didn't yet know. But Joe assumed the FBI would know soon, one way or another-possibly even Pope would tell them in an effort to take over-and he wondered if he'd hear the explosion from 350 miles away. IT WASN'T the new knowledge of Shenandoah Yellowcalf, or the calls from Stella or Portenson that suddenly unnerved Joe, caused the hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck to stand on end, his flesh to crawl. It wasn't something that had happened or what he'd learned as much as what he was feeling: there was something malevolent in the air.

He was being watched.

Over the years, he'd come to trust his instincts in this regard. When he had felt he was being watched he habitually discarded the notion, convinced himself he was imagining things, tried to move on, only later to learn that he had been correct in the first place.

He raised his eyes, surveyed the cars in the parking lot. No one. He scanned the school grounds, anticipating the sight of a student skulking in the shadows and alcoves, maybe sneaking a smoke, keeping his eyes on Joe. He scanned the windows of the school for a face. Maybe Mrs. Thunder and Mrs. Shoyo looking out at him, seeing him off. Maybe those boys who had been pretending to be "poaching fools" were having another laugh at his expense.

He scanned the sagebrush-covered hillsides that flowed like frozen swells toward the foothills and the mountains beyond. There were pockets of pine and aspen, plenty of vantage points to hide in.

Joe saw no one.