Alex Archer - Tribal Ways

“He was a friend of yours?”

Ten Bears nodded. “I know a lot of people in our region. Know a whole lot of Indian good old boys like me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. Listen, it was a pretty ugly scene out there, Ms. Creed. I’ve worked a lot of homicides over the years. I’ve worked some pretty terrible accident scenes. Never saw anything like that anywhere. I can’t really tell you anything the department hasn’t already released to the media. Tell the truth, I’m sorta glad.”

He sat back, looking at her. He seemed not unfriendly. Not unkind, in fact. From the laugh lines bracketing his eyes and mouth she guessed he was by nature a pretty decent guy. She also knew that a seasoned homicide investigator wouldn’t hesitate to feign those emotions when he didn’t feel remotely kind or friendly, if it would help advance the case.

“What’d the decedent tell you?” he asked quietly.

“He said he was attacked by what, frankly, sounded more like a movie monster than anything in the real world.”

“You’ve had some experience investigating monsters, I guess,” he said. “What’s your take on that?”

“Are you serious? I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I’m not trying to be uncooperative. It just sounds like—a strange question for somebody who seems so no-nonsense to be asking.”

“I try not to close any possible avenues of inquiry. Especially in a case like this. I’m not giving away any confidential information when I tell you we don’t have a whole lot of ideas on this thing. Not ones that make any sense. So, hey, I’ll at least give a listen to ones that might not seem to make much sense. I don’t believe in werewolves. But if our perp really is a damn werewolf, I want to be there when they pump silver into his veins or whatever they’d use for an execution. Maybe you’d call it putting him to sleep.”

A strangled squeak of laughter escaped Annja’s lips before she could clap her hand over her mouth. She bent forward in her chair, then straightened.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m…not normally like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Ten Bears said. “Sometimes I’ve got pretty lousy taste in jokes, too. I can see you’re shaken up some. Anybody would be. Nice young woman like you isn’t used to having people up and die right in front of her.”

She managed to show no reaction to that statement. Unfortunately she was used to having people up and die in front of her. Poor Paul wasn’t even the first ex-lover and friend Annja Creed had seen die. Although she was sure she would never get used to that.

None of which she wanted to admit to the lead investigator on Comanche County’s most lurid multiple-murder case of modern times.

The thought helped her compose herself. “This has hit me hard, I must admit,” she said. “I have to ask you to believe me that I’m not going to pieces on you. And I’m determined to find out what happened to those people.”

“All right,” he said, nodding and drawing it out. His accent was a weird blend of Indian staccato and cowboy drawl, something she wouldn’t have thought was possible. “So, not to be boring or anything, what do you make of what Mr. Stavriakos told you?”

“I don’t believe in werewolves, either, Lieutenant. Yet I know Paul Stavriakos is—was—a trained scientist, and not what I’d call an impressionable man. Obviously, something terrible and…unusual happened out at the dig site this morning. The suddenness and speed of the attack, the shock of seeing his friends brutally murdered, the terrible emotional impact of having someone attack him in person, the physical injuries he took—none of those things leads to careful observation.

“The thing is, there are no documented reports of wolf attacks on humans in North America. And I have a hard time imagining any North American animal, no matter how hungry or scared or angry or even rabid, attacking a group of six adult humans, much less being able to kill or mortally wound them all. So I’d have to imagine a very strong man, berserk even, probably wearing a wolf skin or even some kind of costume, was responsible for the attack.”

She shook her head. “It’s hard for me to imagine what happened no matter what.”

“I been doing some digging since I got back from interviewing Mr. Stavriakos at the hospital, before you got there,” Ten Bears said. “It turns out there are some pretty well-documented wolf attacks on people. Just a lot of people said there weren’t, and everybody got believing it. But there hasn’t been a wolf seen in Comanche County since the 1890s. And again I’m not giving away much when I tell you that’s how I got it sized up, too.”

“I understand from the news reports that there have been previous attacks under similar circumstances,” Annja said.

“Yeah. Two in New Mexico. One out near the Continental Divide between Gallup and Grants, one between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. All of them on archaeological digs, all of them nasty. Mr. Stavriakos’s passing brings the death toll to fifteen. In all three attacks at least one witness survived. They all gave similar details—including that their attacker was either a great big wolf or something that looked like a man-wolf hybrid, like the wolfman from the movie.”

He paused, frowning. “Along with what you said, the whole notion it’s a single animal with one helluva range, much less three separate animals that suddenly and simultaneously developed a serious taste for archaeologists, strikes me as a lot more far-fetched than it’s being a werewolf. We got evidence from all three attacks that tells us there was just the one perpetrator. To me he’s obviously got to be a crazy man in some kind of murder suit, like that old Zodiac killer gone Hollywood.”

He shifted in his swivel chair and sighed. “Public’s gonna be crawling straight up our…trouser legs on this one. I don’t even blame ’em. All we can do is try to keep calm, do good police work, let the forensics people do their thing, try to identify this killer and wrap him up before he can do this again. And barring that, hope that next time he tries, some good-old boy archaeologist will pull an octagonal-barrel Winchester lever action out the rifle rack of his pickup truck and let some badly needed sunlight into this bad boy’s skull. If you’ll pardon my speaking what you might call frankly.”

“Nothing I disagree with, Lieutenant,” she said. “One thing. Paul seemed very specific that the attacker was a skinwalker. A Navajo wolf—he called it that, too. Beyond the fact that there are legends of skinwalkers, I don’t know anything about that, or what might make Paul so positive that was what attacked him. Do you know anything about skinwalker myths?”

“Not much more than you. They’re a Navajo thing, just like he said. Not something us Numunu—Comanches—would get up to. Nor the Kiowa, either. Not even Plains Apache, far as I know. They still speak an Apache language, but they picked up Plains Indian culture since they joined up with the Comanche and the Kiowa a couple of centuries back.”

“I want to see the site, Lieutenant.”

He looked at her with frank appraisal. “Is this a personal thing? Or are you gonna go for journalistic status, try the power of the press routine?”

“Whatever it takes,” she said. “I want the killer caught. It is personal. Of course it is. I’ve consulted with investigative agencies before—I know enough to keep out of the way of real forensic investigators. And as an archaeologist I certainly know how to avoid contaminating or disturbing a site. Also I may be able to infer something from the dig site that someone who isn’t a trained and experienced archaeologist would miss.”

His black eyes gazed at her for the space of several breaths. “I’m not proud, Ms. Creed,” he said. “Leastwise, not prouder than I am eager to save a whole bunch more poor folks from getting torn up like that. I could use any information I can get. So let’s go ahead and call you a consultant on this one. You need a contract?”