“What if I went to talk to them?”
“Good luck with that. The Wilsons are impossible to deal with.”
The officer looked nervous. He kept glancing around— over his shoulder, toward the door, like he expected someone to come reprimand him. “You want some advice? Stop asking about her. She was bad news. That whole family’s bad news. You keep going on about this, you won’t like what you find, I guarantee it.”
“Bad news,” Ben said. “Would you be willing to testify to that in court?”
The officer shook his head quickly—fearfully, I might have said. “I won’t have anything to do with it.”
Ben leaned forward and almost snarled. “I’m the defense attorney for the man who shot her. I need to show that it was justifiable, and you need to help me do that.”
Tsosie’s lips pressed together for a moment while he hesitated. Then he made a decision. I could see it settle on his features. “Hold on a minute.”
He went to a filing cabinet off to the side of the room. He opened the top drawer and flipped through a few folders, drew one out, and studied the top sheet for a moment. Then he brought the whole folder over and lay it open in front of Ben. “Take it,” he said. “Take all of it. And your client? You thank him for us.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that,” Ben said, a little breathlessly. “Thanks. Look, it would really help him out if I could get a statement. Just a signed statement.”
“I’m not sure a judge would look twice at anything I could say about her.”
“Anything’ll help.”
He got the statement. One paragraph, vague, but it was on the department letterhead and had a signature. It was a start.
Tsosie watched us leave, an unsettling intensity in his eyes.
“What was that all about?” I said as we returned to the car. I drove this time, while Ben studied the folder’s contents.
“We just witnessed what happens when a police force wants a person put away, either behind bars or with a bullet, but they don’t have any right to do it themselves. Miriam pissed somebody here off real good, but for whatever reason—no evidence, no real crime committed— they couldn’t touch her. Tsosie here has expressed his gratitude that somebody was able to do it.”
“Then why won’t he testify on Cormac’s behalf?”
“If they don’t have any evidence against her, then he’s just a bitter cop bitching about some local nobody liked.”
“What did she do?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.” He turned a page over, studied it. “Looks like she’s got an arrest record. Drunk and disorderly, disturbing the peace, vandalism. Typical juvenile delinquent–type stuff. A bad kid heading for trouble. Nothing unusual. But here’s something.” He shuffled a couple of pages aside and studied a typed report. “A little family history. Her older sister Joan died about three months ago.”
“How?”
“Pneumonia. Natural causes. She was only twenty-three.”
“Then what’s it doing in a police file?”
“Someone thought it was important. It happened right before the missing person report was filed. Maybe there’s a connection. Maybe that’s what caused her to snap. And here’s her brother John’s death certificate. Two gunshot wounds. No investigation conducted.”
“Does that seem weird to you?”
“It seems like no one was too sorry to see him dead, either. They must have made quite a pair. Here it is: Lawrence Wilson, her grandfather. He’s the one who filed the missing person report.”
“Just her grandfather. What about her parents? What would they say?”
He studied the file for a moment. “There’s an address. It might be worth dropping in on them. We can do that tomorrow. Let’s find out if my car got towed.”
Ben had left his car in the parking lot of the motel in Farmington, some thirty miles away from Shiprock, where he and Cormac had stayed during their ill-fated hunting expedition. After two weeks, the sedan still lurked in the parking lot, unnoticed. It was the kind of place that might slowly sink into the ground without anyone thinking to panic. The motel was part of a national chain, but that couldn’t remove the veneer of age and fatigue that rested over it. Over this entire region.
“Now let’s see if the windows are broken and the radio’s gone,” he said, wearing a thin smile.
They weren’t. He’d locked his laptop and other belongings in the trunk. But the tires were slashed. All four wheels sat on their rims.