Kitty Takes a Holiday

"Like any of this makes sense," I muttered. "You don't have to wait until the full moon to Change. The wolf part knows that. It's always trying to get out."

Watching him, I could almost see the analytical part of him trying to figure it out—the lawyer part of him on the case. His eyes narrowed, his face puckered up with thought.

He said, harshly, "Where does the part about that side of it being a strength come in?"

I could have said something cutting, but our nerves were frayed as it was. He needed a serious answer. "Being decisive. Sometimes it helps seeing the world as black and white, where everyone's either a predator or prey. You don't let details muddy up your thinking."

"That's cynical."

"I know. That's what I hate about it."

"You know what the trouble is? We all see this case—what they're doing to Cormac—as black and white. But we're looking at white as white and Espinoza's looking at white as black. Does that make any sense?"

"When maybe if we all saw it as gray we'd be able to come to some sort of compromise."

"Yeah." He tapped the steering wheel as he lost himself in thought.

It started snowing as we left the mountains.

Northern New Mexico was bleak, windswept, and touched with scattered bits of blowing snow from the storm. Stands of cottonwoods by the river were gray and leafless. All the colors seemed washed out of the landscape, which was barren desert hemmed in by eroded cliffs and mesas.

We didn't have much to go on. The woman's name, the missing person report. We arrived in Shiprock in time to stop at the police department—Tribal law enforcement. Shiprock was on the Navajo Reservation. The town's namesake, a jagged volcanic monolith rising almost two thousand feet above the desert, was visible to the south, a kind of signpost.

Ben spoke to the sergeant on duty at the front desk, while I lurked in the back, peering at them with interest.

"I'm looking for information about Miriam Wilson." He showed them a picture from the coroner's office. A terrible, gruesome picture because half her face was pulped, but the other half still showed recognizable fea­tures. Her cheeks were round, her large eyes closed. "A missing person report was filed on her about three months ago. I don't know if the Huerfano County sheriff's depart­ment sent you the news that she was killed in Colorado."

"Yeah, we got word," said the man behind the counter, a Sergeant Tsosie according to his nameplate. He had short black hair, brown skin, dark eyes, and an angled profile.

"You don't seem concerned."

"She won't be missed."

Ben asked, "Has her family been notified? The Coroner up there hasn't received any instructions about what to do with her body."

"He's not likely to, either. She's not going to have any­one asking about her. Trust me."

"Then who filed the missing person report on her in the first place? Families who don't want to find out where their kids went don't normally do that."

"This isn't a normal family," Tsosie said, almost smiling.

"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 co

"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, u

"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.

He stared at them for a long minute. "I'm not going to complain. I am absolutely not going to complain. This is fixable."

I had to agree. When something was fixable, you didn't complain.

He retrieved his belongings, then went to get us a room.

The walls of the building couldn't keep out the weird taint in the air. It was like I could hear howling, but it was in my head. No actual sound traveled through the air.