Robert Tanenbaum - Malice

Lucy clapped her hands. "You built a sweat lodge?" she cried happily.

Jojola pointed to a hunched-over pinon tree, the drooping branches of which formed a natural cave. He'd covered the branches with blankets and had a small fire going near the entrance. "It's a wickiup, more like my brothers to the north, the Utes, used instead of teepees or adobe buildings. I prefer the kivas of my people because they offer a place to sit while we sweat, but this will do."

Lucy understood. Kivas were pits dug into the earth, some of them quite large, and had been used for thousands of years. The Anasazi, a Navajo word meaning "the ancient ones," who had once lived in the American Southwest, had built kivas in their cliff dwellings before they'd abandoned their homes.

Anthropologists believed that the Anasazi were the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, and Lucy figured that they must have shared a similar belief that kivas represented the hole from which they'd emerged to inhabit the earth in their creation mythology. The tribes clung tenaciously to that belief, which made them truly Native Americans, despite the efforts of scientists who contended that they were the descendants of people who had crossed into North America from Asia.

A few minutes later, Lucy and Jojola were sitting in the sweat lodge as he poured water on the rocks he'd been heating in the fire outside. There was an immediate rush of steam filling the lodge.

Lucy giggled at the thought that she was sitting naked next to a fifty-five-year-old man, a fact that would have thrown her conservative cowboy boyfriend, Ned, into a jealous pique, though he, too, adored Jojola. She'd felt a moment's embarrassment when she first stripped down outside the wickiup. But Jojola had kept his back turned until they were inside and then he busied himself with the preparations of bringing in superheated rocks from the fire and pouring water over them slowly. Soon, her body was drenched with sweat and she could almost feel the toxins from the peyote leaving through her pores.

"If you like, I can tell you a story about the owl," Jojola said. "It is from my cousins in the Zuni tribe. It is a sad story in the end. But it is also a love story and shows that the owl is a compassionate totem."

"Yes, I'd like to hear it," Lucy replied.

"Okay, then, once upon a time," Jojola said with a smile, "there was a young warrior whose beautiful and much-loved wife died. He was so devastated that he decided to follow her into the land of the dead and find a way to return her to the world of the living. The spirit of the young woman helped her husband by placing a red feather in her hair…"

Lucy's eyes flew open at the memory of St. Teresa with the feather in her hair. But Jojola continued with his story and in the comforting rumble of his voice, her eyes closed again.

"Spirits gradually grow invisible as they approach the land of the dead," Jojola continued. "So the feather was to help him keep track of her."

The spirit of the young woman and her faithful husband eventually came to a dark lake. She plunged in, but he could not follow. "As he sat in despair on the shore of the lake," Jojola said, "Owl Man saw how much he loved his wife and took pity on him. So Owl Man brought him to a cave in the mountains where his people lived and gave him a sleeping potion. 'When you awake, you will be with your wife. Take her back to your village, but do not touch her until you reach the village,' the Owl Man warned. As promised, when the young warrior woke up, his wife was there, waiting for him to guide her back to their village and the land of the living."

They almost made it, Jojola said, but as they drew close to the village, the warrior's wife grew tired and lay down. Soon she was fast asleep. As she rested, the warrior could not resist touching her. "Whereupon she woke, but instead of continuing on, she had to go back to the land of the dead, leaving her husband to grieve all the more."

"That's so sad," Lucy said. "If he'd just waited a little longer, they could have been together. What's it supposed to mean?"

Jojola shrugged his shoulders. "Different things to different people. Some might say it is a parable that love cannot exist without the physical side. Or maybe it is simply a reminder never to take those we love for granted because when they are gone, they are gone forever and no amount of wishing to touch them can bring them back."

Outside of the wickiup, an owl hooted. "See," Jojola said solemnly. "Your totem agrees with me."

Butch Karp stopped pacing long enough to glance out of the big picture window of the loft at the apartment across Crosby Street. A strikingly attractive dark-haired woman painted at an easel, stopping every so often to look southwest as dusk settled over Lower Manhattan. Dabbing at the canvas with her brush, she tilted her head in an odd way that indicated that she saw better from one eye than the other.

The painter, his wife, Marlene, finished a long stroke and then turned in his direction. Seeing him, she smiled and gave a little wave before returning to her project. He responded by raising his hand, and with a sigh turned back to his own work, which was laid out on the kitchen table across the room. He walked over and picked up a yellow legal-sized notepad on which he'd written a series of names formed into columns.

Some of the names had been crossed out; others had lines connecting them to names in other columns; a few names were in multiple columns. He'd been trying to connect the dots and was frustrated by the feeling that the forest was in front of him, but he couldn't see it for the trees. What he could see were the faces of the six children murdered during Andrew Kane's escape as they had appeared in their school photographs. He'd arranged them on the table in two rows, like jurors in the jury box waiting for him to deliver his closing argument.

He wasn't sure why he'd asked Gilbert Murrow to bring the photographs from his office. If he did that with every murder victim he'd ever been connected to, he and Marlene would have had to add another room to the loft. Trying to explain it to her, he'd theorized that these victims were different because they'd been killed as a result of a decision for which he felt in some way responsible. It would have been different if their deaths had been committed within the jurisdiction of the New York DAO, and his office was simply pursuing murder charges. But these children had died because they'd been sacrificial pawns for Kane and security for the motorcade had been at least in part arranged through his office.

Maybe we should have fought harder to keep him at the Tombs and forced his psychiatrists to examine him there, Karp had said to Marlene, referring to the New York City jail.

But it was the FBI and U.S. Marshal's Office that had primary responsibility for transporting Kane, she pointed out. And it was the FBI's guy, Michael Grover, who turned out to be a traitor… You know, you're starting to sound like Clay Fulton, who was only riding shotgun because you asked him to and didn't even have his own guys. But I'm telling you, just like I told Clay, there was nothing that could have been done that would have made a difference. The judge was going to let them take Kane to his psychiatrists, and Kane had a guy on the inside who no one could have guessed at.

I know you're right, Karp replied. And it's not just the kids. They're the faces I can put on something deeper than an FBI agent who sold their lives for money. Grover already paid for his crime when Kane killed him. And Kane and the terrorists are all dead, too. But those photographs won't let me forget that Kane could not have pulled this off alone-not even with the help of Grover and his terrorist pals. Someone else, someone with a hell of a lot of pull and resources, did this and they're still out there.