Malice

26

Although she'd never physically been to the property before, Lucy knew where she was the moment the police cruiser she was riding in turned off the highway and stopped at the gatehouse. Two-lane highway…but rural Idaho, not New Mexico…onto a gravel road.

Then as she waited with her mother and the others at the guard tower for a signal from Ireland to proceed to the gravel pit, a train whistled over in the direction of the highway. A train, just like in the peyote dream, then one mile to where the road splits off to the right. And I was thinking in Euskara!

Some people might have called it deja vu, but Lucy had no doubt that somehow the spirit of peyote had chosen to guide her through the final torment of Maria Santacristina. But for what reason, she wondered. John's not here, and I'm not going to tell anybody else about this. They'll think I'm nuts. Still, I am supposed to be here for a reason.

Lucy glanced down the road toward the gravel pit and shuddered. She looked back to her mother, just as Marlene got off the radio and gave a thumbs-up. "Okay, everybody," she shouted. "Plan A worked. Let's go!"

Everybody piled back into the cars and the convoy turned right down the road. After about three-quarters of a mile, they reached the entrance and stopped. The gravel pit was huge-more than a hundred acres according to the maps-and now that they were there, it looked bigger than that. Although the snow had melted from the sunny, southern exposures of the barren landscape, there were still large patches on the north sides of hills and in depressions.

"Which way?" asked Swanburg, who was riding in the first car with Marlene, Lucy, and Ned.

"Straight ahead about a mile," Lucy said.

The others turned to look at her. "Just a hunch," she said, and turned to look out the window.

Swanburg shrugged and looked at the small Global Positioning System display on the laptop computer next to him. "Looks like as good a place as any to set up shop."

A mile farther, the convoy stopped again. The Baker Street Irregulars got out of their respective vehicles and gathered around the pickup truck, where they began unloading their equipment from the back. All except for Warren, who opened the kennels, leashed his three dogs, and took them for a walk.

As they worked, Marlene walked back to the minivan, whose occupants were climbing out and stretching. She spoke to their leader. "Are you okay?"

Jose Katarain, aka Eugenio Santacristina, reached up and held Marlene by her shoulders. "I am the most okay I have been since my daughter disappeared," he said. "Today, we find Maria and take her home to her mother. Thank you, my friend."

"We're not there yet," Marlene cautioned. "This science isn't exact, but I feel in my heart that you're right. So let's get started. You know what you're supposed to do?"

Katarain snapped to attention. "Yes, my captain. We six are to set up and patrol a perimeter within line of sight of your people." He turned to the others near the van and snapped off an order they immediately obeyed. One man climbed back inside the van and began handing out rifles to the others, who expertly checked the weapons out and then slammed home the bullet clips like they'd been doing it all their lives.

Marlene nodded with approval. When she first made the suggestion to use Katarain and any Basque men who may have had some paramilitary training, Ireland balked about using civilians. "They're as likely to hurt themselves as the enemy."

Ireland had agreed after talking to Katarain, but he clearly was uncomfortable. "You were right," he told her later, sarcasm dripping from his tongue. "He's had military experience, and so have a few of his friends. I don't have to tell you what kind of experience, though it may come in handy in an exercise like this. But like I told you, it puts me in an awkward position. I'm sworn to uphold the law in Payette County and that man is a wanted terrorist."

"Relax, he's our terrorist now," Marlene said. "And by today's standards of evildoers, he's an Eagle Scout. Anyway, once we find his daughter, he goes back to being a loyal taxpayer. Then the ball's in your court."

Ireland had given her one of his "Give it a rest" looks, then said, "It's the only reason he's not in the Payette County jail right now."

Katarain divided his men into three two-man teams and sent the first two to patrol areas on the far side of the gravel pit. "Myself and Esteban will patrol down toward the entrance to the gravel pit in case there are patrols or anyone escapes from the compound," he said, pointing to the younger man who'd been in the van handing out the weapons. Then with a wave he set off.

Marlene walked back to the last truck in the line, where a small, dirty man in a battered miner's helmet leaned against the driver's-side door, smoking a cigarette. He looked up sideways when she walked up and grinned, exposing a set of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.

The man's face and head were so covered with long, wiry pewter-gray hair that all she could see was a small dirty space around his yellow eyes and the tip of a pointy nose. So much gray hair also poked out of every opening in the pink, faded long underwear he wore beneath his overalls that she was sure his entire body was as furry as his head.

"So what's next, missy?" he said with a voice that had definitely been ravaged by too many filterless cigarettes.

Marlene looked back at the Baker Street Irregulars. "We wait for them to work their magic and then we dig," she said, nodding at the trailer. "Tell me about your machine."

During their meeting in Colorado, as James Reedy had pointed out, even in late March the ground would still be frozen in that part of Idaho. "Hard as iron; you could swing a pick all day and not get anywhere," he said. "We're going to need an air track drill and someone who knows how to operate one."

He was confident that both could be found, because there were still active hard-rock mines in the area. "Gold and silver, mostly," he said. "I'll call around and see if I can find a miner with the right machine."

Who he found was R. P. Brown, a five-foot-eight, 140-pound gold miner who boasted about not having had a hot bath since the previous December, when he'd treated himself to one for Christmas.

"The man smokes, cusses, drinks, and fights like a fiend-which is why we're pretty familiar with him at county lockup," Ireland said when asked what he knew about the man. "But I'm told he's also the best hard-rock miner in these parts, and while you wouldn't know it to look at him, some say he's been pretty successful at finding gold in them thar hills."

Brown had turned out to be every bit as disagreeable as promised. In fact, about the only person on the team he seemed to get along with was Jojola. They seemed to have an understanding and had even been seen laughing together over some private joke. When Marlene later asked what was so funny, Jojola waved a hand in the air. "Oh, nothing really, the old codger's just got a lot of the trickster in him. As you know, the coyote is my totem, and I suspect his, too, so we get along fine."

No one else wanted to be around "the old codger," but his mine was only five miles from the Unified Church property and he had an air track drill. Not that it was free, mind you.

Marlene had first met him two days earlier. After listening to her describe the search for Maria Santacristina, he'd agreed to loan the machine and run it "for five hundred dollars, half now, half when I'm done digging. And you pay my gas to get there and my diesel to run the machine. And it's five hundred more if anybody starts shootin' at me."

Now he was looking at Marlene through his glittering yellow eyes as if there was something suspicious about her question regarding how his air track worked. But when he realized that she was just curious, he actually looked pleased that she asked.

"Well, missy, that there bitch is a Gardner Denver Model 3100," he said proudly. "It's really just a big fuckin' hammer on tracks. The business end of that baby is driven by an air compressor and will pulverize its way through the toughest rock, and go through this frozen ground like shit through a goose."

Marlene was trying to figure out how shit went through a goose when Brown decided he'd said enough. "Now, if you'll leave me be, I'll get Sally down from her carriage. The others look like they're getting started."

Brown was right about the others. Marlene arrived back at the truck just in time to watch Jesse Adare start the gas-powered motor of the large model airplane he'd snapped together in a matter of minutes. Sounding like a swarm of angry bees, the plane darted down the road and then lifted into the air.

"Turning on the camera," he called over to Jack Swanburg, who was monitoring the laptop computer he'd set up on a portable table.

"Coming in nice and clear," Swanburg yelled back.

Adare had explained to her earlier that day that he planned to send his aircraft up with a specialized camera that would send its images back to the laptop computer as a three-dimensional contour map. The first step would be to locate the Bucyrus steam shovel, and then, by aligning the image the plane's camera was sending back over the photograph taken of the Cadillac, get an approximate direction the photographer on the ground had been facing.

"Then when we've narrowed the search area, we'll look at the contour map and guesstimate the probable flow pattern of the groundwater through the area," Adare said. "That's where the pipes and dogs will come in."

"Of course, that's assuming the steam shovel is a relic and hasn't moved," Swanburg noted. "If it has, then we'll try something else."

The steam shovel had not moved and a short time later, the team was looking across a stretch of the gravel pit toward the ancient mechanical dinosaur, perhaps a mile away. It was still a lot of ground to cover, and the searchers were well aware that as soon as word about the raid on the Unified Church got out, the group's lawyers were likely to come crawling out from under their rocks, seeking injunctions to stop their work.

"We need to get this done today," Charlotte Gates said.

As Adare had said, now was when the pipes and dogs came in, as well as a lesson in subsurface hydrology. As the team gathered around the truck, Reedy pulled a large six-foot-long canvas duffel bag out and explained that "the easiest way to look at what we're going to do is to imagine that you're standing above an underground river.

"Essentially, water flows underground the same way it does above," he said. "Gravity pulls it downhill, and it follows the path of least resistance, although over time, water is a powerful force for change and will make its own path, as in the Grand Canyon."

Reedy went over the facts. One, the car was buried somewhere between them and the steam shovel. However, the photographer had not been high enough for them to be able to accurately gauge the distance between the car and the shovel. "Unless you have more of a perspective from the air, distances can be deceiving in a photograph. Nor do we know if the photographer used a zoom lens and cut out some of the distance between himself and the car."

Therefore, they were going to have to "feel our way upriver, so to speak, and narrow the search area as much as we can. And that," Reedy said, unzipping the duffel and pulling out long, thin pipes, "is where these babies come in. I had them made special by a tent company-titanium, pointed on the end for penetration, and drilled in several places in that first couple of feet to allow water to seep in."

Warren took up the narrative. "We've noticed in the past with the dogs that they would hit on groundwater that came to the surface hundreds of yards below a grave farther up a hill," he said. "Then we had one case where the dogs kept hitting on the leaves of a bush but weren't interested in the ground around it. We dug up the bush, thinking maybe it had grown up on top of the grave. There wasn't a body, but the dogs were all over the water at the bottom of the hole. It was our botanist who said that kind of bush had very deep roots and suggested that the roots had pulled the scent up into the bush and it was coming out of the leaves. That's when we came up with the idea of using these pipes to tap into the groundwater and letting the dogs sniff the tops to see if they'll hit."

Like tag-team wrestlers, Reedy jumped back in. "The idea is to narrow a search area downstream from a suspected grave by placing the pipe in an arc across the flow of that underground river you're standing on. Then, through a process of elimination, we'll let the dogs follow the scent back upstream."

Taking one last look at the contour map, Reedy and Adare set off with the pipes and began to hammer them into the ground, spacing them about twenty feet apart in an arc. Then they moved another fifty feet "upstream" and hammered in another set of pipes.

As they were working, Jojola and Tran arrived and filled everybody in on the operation over at the Unified Church compound. "Ireland's guys have about eight hard-core types holed up in a barrack, but they're not going anywhere," Jojola said.

"How long before our racist friends start calling their lawyers and word gets out?" Marlene asked.

Tran laughed. "Ireland can move fast when he wants," he said. "But he can also move slow. He's taking his time processing everybody. Then he's going to load them all up on the county jail bus and ship them to the 'pokey,' where he'll process them again."

Two hours later, the group was standing with Warren and his dogs. The hounds had followed the scent up and to the right of the main "stream" until reaching a set of pipes the dogs had no interest in. "I'd say we're now upriver from the grave," the dog handler reported.

Everyone turned and looked at the snow-covered field between themselves and the last set of pipes where the dogs had "hit" on the scent. The area was half the size of a football field. They sighed collectively, thinking about the work still to be done, when a snow-white owl flying low above the ground swooped in and snatched a mouse from a spot near the middle of the field. Lucy looked at Jojola, who nodded, but they said nothing.

The next step fell to Reedy, who went back to the truck and returned with an eight-foot-long pole with what looked like white coffee cans attached to either end. He plugged a cable from the pole into a harness apparatus that he slipped on and then opened the chest pack, which contained a readout screen.

Reedy flipped a few switches and began to walk slowly over a piece of ground, then called out to Swanburg, who with Ned's help had moved his table and computer to the search site. "You getting this, Jack?"

"Clear as a bell," Swanburg shouted.

Marlene, who had walked over to stand behind Swanburg so she could see the computer screen, couldn't tell what she was looking at that was so clear. It looked like a bunch of colorful globs reminiscent of the psychedelic poster she'd hung in her college dorm room.

"That's called a gradiometer," Swanburg said, pointing to where Reedy was making adjustments to the machine on his chest. "I won't go into all the scientific mumbo jumbo. But the short explanation is that the earth is essentially an enormous magnet with magnetic fields running north and south. As we all know, ferrous materials-objects made of iron, including the steel used to build Cadillacs-can become magnetized and will have magnetic fields of their own, also running north and south. These can be differentiated from the earth's fields, as well as any objects around them, with the gradiometer, which essentially gives us this colorful map that indicates the intensity of any particular magnetic field. Right now, it's not picking up much of anything, thus the confused blobs."

"Can that thing be used to find gold?" a rough voice behind Swanburg asked.

R. P. Brown had strolled up behind Swanburg, where he'd been trying to act uninterested while still peeking over the scientist's shoulder with Marlene.

Swanburg chuckled. "Sorry, R.P., no. It's only good for objects with iron content."

"Damn," Brown swore. "Then what the hell good is it."

"Well, it has many uses," Swanburg observed. "Obviously, it's handy for finding buried iron, like ore deposits, or utility pipes, or we've even used it to find buried steel drums, one of which had a body stuffed inside, and other illegally dumped toxic wastes. In this case, we're hoping to find a 2003 Eldorado."

Brown was unimpressed and went grumbling back to his Sally. But Marlene hung around and kept asking questions. "So when Jim walks over the car, one of those blobs will suddenly look like a bird's-eye view of a Cadillac?"

"Well, actually no, the lowest values on the readout will be directly above the car," Swanburg answered. "And none of it will look like a car. Remember when you were a kid and someone, maybe a teacher, put iron filings on a piece of paper and then rubbed a magnet underneath? Do you remember the shape the iron filings created?"

"It looked like a butterfly," Marlene said.

Swanburg beamed. "Exactly. The iron filings lined up in a sort of halo around the negative and positive ends of the magnet-sort of like the outer edges of a butterfly's wings."

"So when we find this butterfly's wings we dig down between them," Marlene said.

"Now you're thinking," Swanburg replied. "At least that's the plan."

"Will we know how deep to dig?"

Swanburg shook his head. "Nope. A gradiometer measures magnetic intensity, not depth."

"Okay, set on this end," Reedy yelled. He looked around and suddenly seemed to realize he was one man with a lot of area to cover, and it was already past noon with the sun high overhead and the snow slushy for walking. "Uh, anybody have an idea on where to start?"

"Where the owl caught the mouse," Lucy called out. The others looked at her. "Humor me," she said, and walked across the field until she found where the tips of the owl's wings had left the slightest imprint on the snow where it seized its prey. "Right here, Jim, try right here."

Reedy glanced at the crowd around Swanburg with an amused look on his face. "Actually, I was kidding," he said to Lucy. "We usually divide up the search area into grids so that I don't miss a section. I start in one corner and work from there."

"That will take a long time," Lucy said. "Please, start here. If it doesn't pan out, then go back to your grids."

Reedy tilted his head, looking at Lucy, then shrugged. "Why the hell not," he said, and walked over to Lucy, who bent down and picked something up off the ground.

It was a white feather. "For good luck," she said.

With a half-smile on his face, Reedy began to walk in the direction of the owl's flight path, which had gone from south to north. The smile disappeared and he shouted, "Are you seeing what I'm seeing, Jack?"

"Sure am! You think you got that thing calibrated right?"

Marlene looked at the computer screen and saw the distinctive shape of a butterfly's wings with dark red around the edges, gradually moving to a cooler blue in the middle of the "body."

Reedy walked some distance away from the area and walked a little more. "I got nothing," he yelled.

"Nothing here," Swanburg agreed.

The geologist then returned to the first site and slowly began to pace back along the owl's path. On either end, he bent down and placed pin flags-stiff wires with small plastic squares on the top-along the edge of the perimeter of the "butterfly's wings."

When he finished, he trudged over to the main group and looked at Swanburg's computer. "I'll be damned," he said. "Judging by the length of the anomaly, I'd be willing to bet we just found a Cadillac."

A cheer went up from the group. But Swanburg cautioned. "It looks good. But let's remember, this is a gravel pit with lots of old machinery that could be lying about and even buried."

"Oh, Jack, you're such a wet blanket," Charlotte Gates teased. "This is as good a place to start as any. Let's get that air track over here and start digging."

As they waited for Brown to drive his clanking machine to the site, Lucy walked down and knelt where she'd found the feather. Reedy turned to Marlene. "So you didn't tell me that your daughter was psychic," he said with a quizzical smile.

Marlene smiled back. She was used to Lucy's insistence that her invisible friend St. Teresa was real, as well as the unsettling effects of her almost supernatural gift for languages and for "knowing things."

"I don't know what it is," she said. "I guess that someday science will have explanations for people who seem hyperintuitive or psychic. Maybe some people just pick up more from the environment-they see, hear, or even feel things differently than 'normal' people because their brains are wired differently. I mean, how do idiot savants instantly, and correctly, guess the number of matches that have fallen to the floor, or play a Mozart concerto after hearing it once, or memorize every number in the telephone book after one time through. Yet they can't function well enough to tie their shoes, and only a couple of centuries ago might have been burned at the stake as witches. All science can do is shrug and say that their brains are wired differently. I'm guessing that if there's anything to psychic abilities, we'll learn that there's a similar explanation. Maybe Lucy felt the electromagnetic field when we walked over the area earlier, just like Tom's bloodhounds catch a scent none of us even notices. And, well, there's always God."

"Hey, nothing wrong with any of those theories, even God," Gates said. "As a scientist, I believe that there is a scientific explanation for every phenomenon. But if the explanation for Lucy is that she's wired differently, who's to say that God wasn't the electrician."

"Amen," said Swanburg as Brown and his machine rattled up to the middle of the space between the pin flags.

Within minutes, the crusty little miner had the air track drill pounding away at the frozen ground. And while it might not have gone quite as smoothly as shit through a goose, the crew was astonished at how quickly it broke up the soil, which he stopped to remove from time to time.

"How will we know when he gets to the car?" Lucy asked after about an hour, when the air track was still hammering away two feet down.

"Oh, we'll know," Reedy said. "He has the drill set for the consistency of the soil. When the drill meets something else, like the metal of the car, the machine will behave differently than it does pounding through rock or frozen soil."

As if to demonstrate what Reedy was talking about, the air track suddenly started to buck like a horse at a rodeo, and a screech of metal striking metal filled the air as Brown rushed to shut down the machine.

"What do you think, R.P.?" Reedy yelled.

Brown peered into the hole, then looked up with a grin. "I think a little touching up around the edges to make your job easier, and I'm finished," he shouted. He looked at Marlene. "Better go get your piggy bank, missy, time to pay up."

A half hour later, the group was peering down at the roof of a big car. The walls of the pit had been cleared back to a foot on either side, which Gates now shored up with plastic planks through which she drove stakes to hold them in place.

Gates hopped out of the hole to let Jesse Adare climb in with what looked like a giant pair of tin snips. "Jaws of life," he said. "Cops use them to cut accident victims out of smashed-up cars. I had a feeling they'd come in handy, so I 'borrowed' them from my employers. Just have to get them back by tomorrow night before anyone notices."

It only took five minutes for Adare to peel back the roof of the car and remove it in pieces. There was a space of several inches below where the sand and gravel had not completely filled in or settled, but below that it was packed solid.

"Okay, my turn again," Gates said, and climbed back in the hole with a trowel and a bucket. Probing and scraping gently, she began to remove the material filling the area directly above the driver's seat.

Inch by meticulous inch she placed the material in the bucket, which from time to time she handed up for the others to pour through a screen, to make sure they didn't miss any evidence that remained in the car. After an hour, Gates stopped digging with the trowel and started to brush away at something with her hand.

Perched on the edge of the pit, Marlene glanced up and saw Katarain was standing on the opposite edge, peering in with tears streaming down his dark, suntanned cheeks. His comrade, Esteban, stood next to him with a consoling hand on his shoulder.

One more brushstroke and Gates exposed a lock of long, dark hair. She paused with her hand on top of the hair. "A moment of silence, please," she said. "I believe we've found Maria Santacristina."

As the others bowed their heads, the girl's father sank to his knees and wept. After a minute, Marlene and Jojola moved to his side and with Esteban, escorted him away from the grave.

"I want your memories of Maria to be those of a living girl," Marlene said, looking in his eyes. "That over there is a body we will treat with respect. But she is no longer there."

Katarain nodded and reached up to touch Marlene's cheek. He then turned to Jojola and shook his hand. "Thank you," he said. "I can never repay you for what you have done. Whatever happens from here on out, I want you to know that I am finally at peace."

Two hours later, the sun was getting low in the west as Gates prepared to climb out of the hole. She'd worked her way down to where the girl's chest and hands were exposed. "But I think we're going to have to call it a day and finish up tomorrow."

Although the clothing had mostly rotted into shreds, the anthropologist was surprised at how well the body was preserved with shriveled flesh still on the bones. "I'm guessing the soil is pretty sterile and that there are natural salts present, which have acted as a preservative," she said.

Lucy was staring down at the girl's hands, which were still tied together at the wrists and clenched in front of her. She was recalling the peyote dream when a man had leaned across her to start the car and she'd reached up to strike him and instead pulled something from his neck.

"Sasikumea!" Lucy shouted. The others looked up, wondering what she was saying. "Sasikumea," she repeated, and pointed. "Look in her hand."

Gates turned to Reedy. "Hand me a clean towel, Jim." She then placed the towel beneath Maria's right hand and with a bamboo probe, she gently pried open the fingers. Something dark fell out onto the towel.

"Good call, Lucy," Gates said, climbing out of the hole with the towel wrapped around the object. "That could have fallen when we removed the body. Then we might have been able to tie it to the car, but not necessarily to Maria."

The anthropologist walked over to the screen table, where she carefully rubbed at the sand and soil around the object. She then held it up for the others to see. It was a medallion in the shape of three interlocking triangles.

"A Valknut," Lucy whispered.

Gates turned the medallion over and rubbed at the back. "There's some initials," she said. "R.P."

As everybody turned toward him, R. P. Brown backed away with a wild look in his eyes and his fists held in front as if ready to fight. "It ain't mine!" he shouted.

"Don't worry about it, R.P.," Marlene said. "We know someone else with those initials. His name is Rufus Porter."

Brown lowered his fists with a look of relief. "Oh, I know that son of a bitch. He's always over at that Unified Church place. Piece of shit thinks he's real tough when he's hanging around with those assholes."

Jojola laughed. "Couldn't have put it better myself, old friend."

Brown grinned. "Thanky kindly."

Lucy walked up to Gates and hugged her. "We…she…was pregnant. Please make sure the baby is buried with her mother and grandmother." She then turned and walked away so that only her mother, who was closest, heard her say, "Me aflijo para usted y su nino… I grieve for you and your child."

"Katarain told me that he found a positive pregnancy indicator strip in Maria's trash," Marlene said to Gates, who nodded and turned back to her task. "By the way, where is Katarain?"

Jojola looked back to the road leading to the compound. He pointed to the figures of Katarain and Esteban, who were joined by the other four Basques, as they continued marching.

"Marlene, I think you better get to your radio and let Ireland know that trouble's on the way," Jojola said. He and Tran then took off for the van, jumped in, and roared off in pursuit of the Basques.

A few minutes later, Sheriff Steve Ireland winced as he looked up at the approaching van. The wound in his side, which was more than just a grazing and, he figured, was going to require a surgeon, was starting to stiffen up. However, they were almost done.

Most of the prisoners had been loaded onto the county jail bus and taken to the lockup. The bus had just returned for the last eight, who were the hardcores who'd holed up in the barracks.

He'd cut their power, which had left them with no communications, as cell phones didn't work on the property. He'd then given them a liberal dose of flash-bang grenades and tear gas, which had set off the barracks' sprinkler system.

Dumb thing to have, he thought as the temperature dropped and the shivering, stunned holdouts gave up and surrendered.

The eight were still shivering as they waited to board the bus when the van slid to a stop and Katarain and the other Basques stepped out with their rifles.

Ireland frowned. "I thought our deal was I wouldn't see you," he said to Katarain.

"Deal's off," Katarain said grimly. "We found my daughter. Now I've come for one of her killers. I think he's here." The Basque turned to the prisoners. "Rufus Porter, step forward and meet your justice in the name of Maria Santacristina."

Back in the line of prisoners, Rufus Porter blanched. Up to this point, he'd been playing the tough guy, threatening Ireland with all sorts of dire consequences "when my dad hears about this."

Ireland had just grinned and replied. "Your daddy's going to have his hands full trying to keep his baby boy from serving time in prison as some big hairy hillbilly's girlfriend."

Porter had scoffed and looked at his fellow prisoners. "We'll see who's bending over and taking it in the ass when this is all over."

Now Porter turned to Ireland with a sneer. "I'm your prisoner," he said. "Tell this spic to get lost."

However, before Ireland could do anything, the Basques suddenly pointed their rifles. "Looks like they got the drop on me and my boys," the sheriff said with his hands in the air.

Katarain spoke to the man behind him. "Esteban, the rope." The younger man stepped forward with a rope on which a hangman's noose had already been fashioned.

Porter blanched and started to tremble. "Sheriff, do something! I don't know what the hell he's talking about."

"Sorry, son," Ireland replied. "But your miserable neck ain't worth the lives of me or my men."

Porter stared bug-eyed at the lynch party. "Okay, okay, I was there. But I was only tagging along. That attorney, Barnhill, he called my dad and said Huttington had a problem he needed taken care of. I just got the boys together. Rick, Skitter, and Jonesy, they're the ones that did it."

Porter pointed to three other men in the group, who scowled and cursed him. "You're a dead man, Porter," Skitter spat.

"We'll hang them next," Katarain said as two of his men pulled Porter from the others and he placed the noose over Porter's head.

Porter was pulled roughly over to a large cottonwood tree where Katarain threw the end of the rope over a low branch and tied it off to the trunk. A pickup truck was brought over. Katarain climbed in and hauled the screaming man into the bed, where he was forced to stand.

"Oh God, Sheriff, don't let 'em lynch me," Porter cried as a dark spot grew in his underwear.

"Sorry, boy, nothin' I can do, and by the way, you pissed on yourself, tough guy," the sheriff said, and turned away.

"You buried her alive, sasikumea, you bastard," Katarain snarled into Porter's ear. "Quit trying to blame others, Huttington didn't know what you did to my daughter."

"Yes, he did. Yes, he did," Porter screeched in terror. "We sent him a photograph that Reverend Hamm took. Showed the four of us standing around the car with the girl inside. He's the one that mailed it to that girl I raped to scare her. And there's more…Huttington let Hamm and whoever he works for use the university's computers. I can tell you more, please, just don't kill me."

"Too late," Katarain said, and pushed Porter off the back of the truck.

"Nooooo!" Porter screamed, and kept screaming when the knot around the tree gave way and he hit the ground. It took most of a minute for him to realize that he wasn't swinging by the neck and slowly suffocating.

The Basques, the sheriff and his men, and even some of the prisoners were laughing. Esteban hauled Porter to his feet and took the noose off his neck, but then stepped back and wrinkled his nose. "I think he shit his pants."

Porter looked around, wide-eyed. Then yelled at the sheriff, who was wiping tears from his eyes. "You tricked me, you son of a bitch," he said. "Ain't no way what I just said ends up in court."

Ireland shrugged. "Fine by me. I think we got plenty to nail you with anyway, ain't that right, Jojola?"

"Oh yeah," Jojola said as he and Tran got out of the van.

They'd intercepted Katarain halfway back and talked him out of murdering Porter on the spot. "Marlene's gone through a lot to do this the right way," he'd argued, and the Basque had finally relented. Then they'd cooked up the "lynch mob" and radioed ahead to Ireland.

"There's plenty to put this piece of shit away," Tran added.

"Good, then I think you can just rejoin your buddies over there, Rufus," Ireland said, pointing to where the Aryans were glaring at their former comrade. "Explain to them your little tirade. You can all kiss and make up in the pokey."

Porter eyed the other prisoners and swallowed hard. "Hey, guys, you know I was just shining these freaks on. Didn't mean none of it," he said, but received only more glares and curses.

A deputy grabbed him by the arm to lead him to the bus, but Porter pulled his arm away. "Uh, Sheriff, can we talk?" he said.

"Why, sure, Rufus," Ireland said. "You can ride back to Sawtooth with me, and if you'd like to give a statement on the way, I'll see what can be done about getting you your own room in my little hotel with bars."

Porter nodded and was led off toward the sheriff's Hummer as Ireland turned to Katarain, who stood in the midst of his men. He appeared to be saying good-bye to them as he hugged each one.

When he saw the sheriff approach, Katarain handed his rifle to Esteban and stepped forward with his arms outstretched.

"I ain't gonna hug you if that's what you're thinking," Ireland said, pulling out a Mancuso and offering one to Katarain.

"No, I was offering my wrists to be handcuffed," the Basque said.

"What the hell for?"

"Our agreement," Katarain replied, a confused look on his face as he accepted the cigar. "I hope you will allow me to attend the funeral for my daughter before I am extradited. Otherwise, I am your prisoner."

Ireland lit Katarain's cigar and stepped back. "Still have no idea what you're talking about, Santacristina." He looked back at the compound, where the prisoners were being loaded onto the bus. "Not a bad day's work," he said. "Minimal bloodshed, too. In fact, only one casualty. But at least it was one of the bad guys-seems the noted Basque terrorist, Jose Luis Arregi Katarain, resisted arrest and died in a hail of gunfire."

A look of understanding passed over Katarain's face and he smiled, but then shook his head sadly. "No, my friend," he said. "The Spanish authorities would demand some proof, and then you would be in trouble."

"Like hell I would," Ireland replied. "Did everything by the book. Fingerprinted the bastard, sent them off to Interpol, who identified the dead man as a wanted terrorist. Story over, book closed."

"You would do this for me?" Santacristina/Katarain said, choking up.

"Hell no," Ireland replied, and clapped him on the shoulder. "I'm doing it for your little girl."