James Doss - The Shaman Laughs

"You'll want to hire your daddy a lawyer." Moon paused to let this sink in. "A real good lawyer." He waited.

"My father," she said finally, "did not kill my husband."

"I understand you want to protect your daddy." Moon waved his hand to indicate a stapled sheaf of papers on his desk. "But the evidence against him is pretty solid." The papers were last month's gasoline receipts.

Her gaze followed the impressive document as Moon put it into a desk drawer. And turned a key in the lock. "I can give Daddy an alibi."

"Sure." Moon did his best to sound skeptical. "You tell me he was somewhere else, I'll listen." This was it. Either she would or she wouldn't. "But I doubt it'll help Fidel."

"How do I know you won't use something I say to… to create a problem for me?"

"Whatever you say is off the record." He saw the hesitation in her eyes. "You have my word."

Emily put her face in her hands and sighed. You could trust Charlie Moon. That was one of the few constants in Ignacio. "Herb Ecker did tell my father that Arlo had gone to visit your aunt. Father and I went to look for him early the next morning. We found his car stalled on the gravel road. Daisy wasn't at home, so we drove farther up into the canyon." She closed her eyes. "We found Arlo under a scrub oak… almost naked… head bleeding…"

Moon's tone was sympathetic. "I imagine you got pretty upset."

She glared back at the policeman. "Of course I was… practically in shock."

"And angry?"

Emily squeezed a rose stem, pressing a tiny thorn into her finger. "Angry? Why would I be angry?" She sucked the drop of blood from her finger.

Moon took a deep breath. Now or never. "Because he… uh… gave you a disease?" He hadn't intended to make it sound like a question.

Emily's mouth dropped open. "How… how could you know about that?"

"Cecelia Chavez visited you that same night Arlo was late." True enough. The public health nurse had admitted to the visit, but nothing more. Now for the big guess. If he was wrong, Emily would realize how little he really knew and the game would be over. "She came to tell you that the blood you donated didn't pass the test." He watched her face. Emily's pupils dilated ever so slightly. Time to play the hand out. "I've had a talk with Doc Anderson." Moon's expression was confident, as if he knew everything. Emily's personal physician had flatly refused to discuss his visit to the Nightbird residence, had even threatened to destroy Emily's medical files at the least hint of a court order. The doctor was hiding something, but what? There was a long silence. Moon wondered if he'd gone too far. Too fast.

Finally she spoke, barely above a whisper. "So you know." She looked at a rose, rubbed her finger across the delicate petals. "HIV-positive. AIDS. That's what Cecelia said the test on my blood indicated." Emily found a lace handkerchief in her purse. "I was awake all night. First, I cried." She trembled at the memory. "I was afraid to die.

By first light, I was furious. I called my father, told him everything. When we found Arlo, he had a lump on his head but he wasn't dead. He opened his eyes." She squeezed the handkerchief into a tiny ball. "The filthy little bastard grinned at me! I must have went berserk. It was like I was outside my body… floating up above… watching someone else. Arlo's knife was on the ground beside him. I used it to…" She couldn't go on.

"So you castrated him," Unconsciously, Moon pulled his knees together.

She patted the handkerchief on her eyes, but there were no tears. "It was the surest way to make sure he wouldn't infect someone else."

The logic, he realized, was unassailable. "But… you shoved his balls down his throat." The policeman tried, without success, to swallow.

"He started screaming. I had to make him stop." Emily's voice trailed off. "You have to believe me, Charlie. Angry as I was, I wouldn't have done anything like that… if I'd been in my right mind."

So. She was already considering an insanity plea. Wouldn't need it. She had his word that this conversation was off the record. But that promise was academic. He hadn't read Emily her rights, so the confession wasn't admissible in any case. And no Colorado jury would convict her. Not after her husband had infected her with a deadly disease, then attempted to rape Benita Sweetwater. Moon's hands were cold; he flexed his fingers to encourage the blood to circulate. "Then," he said softly, "you… uh… cut off his ears so it'd look like whoever mutilated Gorman's bull also butchered your husband?" A pretty calculated plan for a woman who was out of her mind.

She winced at the word 'butchered.' Emily passed a delicate hand over her eyes, as if to erase the ghastly picture from her memory. "Having some kind of plan was the farthest thing from my mind. I simply dropped the knife and walked back to Daddy's truck. I don't remember much after that."

"Then it was Fidel that…"

She sighed. "Daddy took Arlo's knife. And… I didn't find out until later… he also… removed Arlo's ears." Her eyes were now blank, like a large pair of black buttons sewn on a doll's face. "You already know what he did with Arlo's turquoise ear stud." At the edge of hysteria, she began to giggle.

Moon leaned over to put his hand on her shoulder. When she became quiet, he spoke. "Emily, you can't just kill your husband because he's…"

Her delicate little face was a picture of genuine puzzlement. "Why?"

He tried to think of a reason that would sound credible to this fascinating half-Apache woman. He couldn't. "It's against the law," he said lamely.

Emily Sombra was quiet for a long time before she looked up at the Ute's face. "Charlie, I solemnly promise never to do anything like that again." She waited. "You do believe me?"

"Sure I do." Anyway, no more than a fifty-fifty chance. If a future husband trifled with her, murder would be much easier the second time. But Moon didn't want to arrest this woman. There were, after all, good reasons to leave her be. First, Arlo pretty much deserved what he got. Well, almost. Second, Emily was half Indian, even if that half was 'Pache. But something nagged at his conscience: James Hoover had pointed out that the his wife was the killer (in sixty percent of the cases?) where the murdered husband was unfaithful. Moon told himself that the distasteful prospect of proving Hoover right had nothing to do with his decision to forget about Arlo's murder. But there it was.

She inhaled the sweet fragrance of the roses. "You tricked me with that story about my father." There was no hint of accusation, only curiosity. "You knew Idid it. But how?"

He couldn't tell her that it had begun when Scott Parris had received Nancy Beyal's paperback romance. Village of Shadows. Aldea del Sombras . Parris had a hunch that Daisy's vision of the shadow was related to Emily's father's name. Sombra . Shadow. But his matukach friend, who wanted to pin the murder on Fidel Sombra, had not understood the Ml meaning of Daisy's vision. There was, after all, the owl with blood on its talons. But Parris probably didn't know that Emily had taken up her maiden name after Arlo's death. Somehow, Aunt Daisy had gone to that dark place and seen it all: Shadow that was transformed into Owl and dipped its talons in the warm blood of the Nuu-ci . And then became Shadow again. The Sombra woman had married Arlo and become a Nightbird. Then, she had dipped her hands in the blood of the People. She was now, once again, a Sombra. A Shadow. He wondered whether his aunt had made the connection between her strange vision and Emily Sombra-Nightbird-Sombra.

"It wasn't really my fault," she whispered almost to herself, "it was all asilly mistake."

Moon raised an eyebrow. "Mistake?"