The Silent Spirit Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Margaret Coel

  BLOOD MEMORY

  Wind River Mysteries

  THE EAGLE CATCHER

  THE GHOST WALKER

  THE DREAM STALKER

  THE STORY TELLER

  THE LOST BIRD

  THE SPIRIT WOMAN

  THE THUNDER KEEPER

  THE SHADOW DANCER

  KILLING RAVEN

  WIFE OF MOON

  EYE OF THE WOLF

  THE DROWNING MAN

  THE GIRL WITH BRAIDED HAIR

  THE SILENT SPIRIT

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Coel.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  eISBN : 978-1-101-13996-7

  1. O’Malley, John (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Holden, Vicky (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  3. Wind River Indian Reservation (Wyo.)—Fiction. 4. Women lawyers—Fiction. 5. Arapaho

  Indians—Fiction. 6. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.O347S55 2009

  813’.54—dc22 2009014625

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Jim and Mary Seels

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One of the great pleasures of writing a novel is the opportunity to meet so many interesting and wonderful people who are willing to share their expertise and experiences and offer suggestions that, without a doubt, make the story better than it otherwise might have been. I thank them all for their generosity.

  Jim Seels for suggesting a novel featuring Tim McCoy, for providing key books and articles on McCoy, especially Tim McCoy Remembers the West: An Autobiography with Ronald McCoy, and even DVDs of The Covered Wagon and several McCoy silent films, and for taking the time to show me around Hollywood and Cahuenga Pass. I could not have had a more enthusiastic and well-informed guide.

  Robert Pickering, PhD, forensic anthropologist and deputy director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, for good naturedly extending advice on arcane forensic matters to a neophyte such as myself.

  Merle Haas, director, Sky People Higher Education, Northern Arapaho Tribe, the Wind River Reservation, for her encouragement and friendship and for sharing pertinent information on Tim McCoy.

  Todd Dawson and Doug Walker, FBI special agents in Lander, Wyoming, for their generosity in taking the time to speak with me and help me navigate the thickets of procedural matters.

  John Horton, district supervisor, Wyoming Department of Probation and Parole, in Lander, Wyoming, for advising me on ways in which his department works.

  The Reverend Thomas J. Holahan, CSP, vice rector of Santa Susanna Church in Rome, for allowing me to read his “Rome Diary” and giving me a sense of an American priest’s experiences in Rome.

  Carl Schneider for proving to be a compendium of information about all sorts of matters.

  Fred Walker for advising me on various types of guns.

  For Virginia Sutter, PhD, a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, for her ongoing encouragement and friendship.

  Karen Gilleland, Bev Carrigan, Sheila Carrigan, Philip F. Myers, Carl Schneider, and my husband, George Coel, for reading the manuscript and making the many suggestions that enhanced the story and left me deeply in their debt.

  Long hair has never returned,

  So his woman is crying, crying.

  Looking over here, she cries.

  —Oglala Sioux “kill song,” from Black Elk

  Speaks by John G. Neihardt

  Hollywood is a town that must

  be seen to be disbelieved.

  —Walter Winchell, about Hollywood in the 1920s

  1

  THE HITCHHIKER LOOMED out of the brightness. A large figure standing at the side of Seventeen-Mile Road, huddled in a bulky jacket, a black cowboy hat pulled low, left in a cloud of snow from a truck speeding past. He held out a gloved hand like a policeman stopping traffic. Father John O’Malley pressed on the brake pedal. He could feel the tires on the old Toyota pickup grappling for purchase in the snow. “È il sol dell’anima” came from the tape player on the seat beside him. Snow had fallen during the night, and now the snow drifted and sparkled like diamonds over the road and the flat, open land that ran into the blue sky all around. The second Friday in February, the Moon of Frost Sparkling in the Sun as the Arapahos marked the passing time, and the sun was as bright as an August day.

  Father John had passed the hitchhiker before the pickup skidded to a stop. In the side mirror, he watched the man lope across the snow, pulling a backpack off one shoulder. The passenger door swung open and the hitchhiker stuffed himself onto the seat, waves of cold folding around him, specks of moisture spattering the da
shboard, and the faint, sour odor of sweat invading the cab.

  “You see that truck go by?” he shouted. “Pulled away like I wasn’t standing there freezing to death.”

  Father John recognized the man. Kiki Wallowingbull, about twenty-five years old, and at least ten of those years spent incarcerated—juvenile detention, tribal jail, state prison—for drug possession and distribution and probably a list of other offenses. Father John had met him a couple of years back, before Kiki was sentenced to the state prison for selling drugs in Riverton. He knew Kiki’s grandfather, Andrew Wallowingbull, one of the Arapaho elders. Andrew had never lost faith in the young man. “One of these days, he’s gonna get himself straightened out,” he’d told Father John more than once.

  “What’s that?” Kiki looked down at the tape player.

  “Rigoletto,” Father John said. “You like opera?”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Where you headed?” Father John eased the pickup back into the lane. The truck had disappeared down the white road ahead.

  “Hollywood,” Kiki said.

  “Hollywood?” Father John glanced over at the man with the bulky jacket bunched up around his ears, knocking his hands together on top of the backpack. “That’s a long way.”

  “Just get me to the highway.” There was a sharpness in the voice, a lashing out. “I’ll catch a ride to Rawlins, hop a freight to LA,” he went on, a little softer now, staring straight ahead, as if he were reading the rest of it off a teleprompter. “Used to listen to them trains goin’ by. Sounded real loud and clear when I was inside. Made up my mind I was gonna ride one out to Hollywood and take care of some business, soon as I got paroled.”

  “How long have you been out?” Father John said.

  “Long enough. Why do you care?”

  “The parole officer knows you’re leaving?”

  “No reason for him to know what don’t concern him.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Father John could see Kiki swiveling his head about, glancing from one side of the road to the other like a hunted man. Desperation rolled off him like sweat. He had counseled men like Kiki. Wound up tighter than a spring, ready to snap. Anything might set them off.

  He said, “LA’s a long way to go on business.” He was thinking that the drug pipeline ran from Mexico to LA, and from LA all the way to the reservation.

  “I’m done with drugs if that’s what you’re worrying about,” Kiki said. “I’m going to LA for my grandfather. I owe him big time. He deserves to know what happened to his father.”

  Father John shot another sideways look at the man. “What do you mean?”

  “You heard of the Shoraps that was in the old cowboy-and-Indian movies?”

  “That was a long time ago.” Father John had read about the Arapahos and Shoshones from the reservation who had gone to Hollywood in the 1920s and acted in some of the silent Westerns.

  “Had to have long hair to get in the movies,” Kiki said. “Otherwise they didn’t look like real Indians. Some of ’em were old buffalo Indians, still dreaming about the Old Time when they hunted the buffalo before they was sent to the rez.” He pounded one gloved fist against the other. “They had to dress up in costumes and hop around some campfire ’cause some director says that’s what Indians do. Everybody forgets what happened.”

  “What are you talking about?” Father John looked over again. “What happened?”

  “My great-grandfather got killed, that’s what happened.” He kept pounding his fists, as if he were beating a drum. “Charlie Wallowingbull, Grandfather’s dad. Only Grandfather never knew him, ’cause he was born after Charlie left the rez with the rest of the Shoraps, thinking they was gonna be movie stars. Three hundred of ’em went off to be in The Covered Wagon. All of ’em came back from Hollywood, except Charlie. Grandfather says his mother kept waiting and waiting. Waited for twenty-five years, sure he was gonna come back ’cause he wasn’t ever gonna leave her and his kid. Everybody said he’d walked away, went to Mexico or someplace. But Grandfather says he knew the truth from the minute he was born. Some things you know in your bones. He wasn’t ever gonna have a father ’cause his father was dead.”

  The thrum of the tires on the snow and ice filled the silence. A sign as large as a billboard rose at the side of the road ahead: St. Francis Mission. How easily he had settled back into the old routines after the six-month sabbatical in Rome, Father John thought, as if he knew the routine in his bones. It was the way things were. Breakfast this morning at the senior center with several of the elders, and in thirty minutes, the monthly meeting with the social committee would get under way at the mission. A dozen pickups would pull into the mission grounds and park around Circle Drive.

  He had left Rome the previous Wednesday, a cool morning with a thin sun struggling to break through the cloud cover and the roar and exhaust of motor scooters and the bleating horns of square-framed cars filling the streets, and a persistent, hurried buzz running through everything. Twelve hours later, the small plane that he had boarded in Denver was circling Riverton, the pilot unsure of whether to attempt setting down in the blizzard. Then, finally bumping across the runway, plunging through snow and ice. He had wanted to laugh out loud with the sheer joy of coming home.

  “You expect to find out what happened to your great-grandfather?” he said.

  “I’m gonna find out who killed him, if that’s what you mean.” There was a snarl in Kiki’s tone, a residue of bravado probably left over from long days and months in prison.

  “How about I buy you breakfast?” Father John drove past the entrance to the mission. “Then I’ll drop you on the highway wherever you want.” He was thinking that Lucy Running Bear, the high school girl he had hired to help out in the office, would take detailed notes at the social committee meeting, assuming some kind of emergency had come up, and in a way it had. A young Arapaho with a backpack and chip on his shoulder, hitching rides and catching a freight train to Hollywood to find out what had happened to his great-grandfather somewhere back in the 1920s.

  “How about a drink? You being the Good Samaritan and all.”

  “I don’t drink anymore,” Father John said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the young man shrug and let out another muffled laugh. “What the hell,” he said.

  THE RESTAURANT IN Riverton was a collection of tables and booths arranged on a green-tiled floor with traces of icy footsteps and melting water. Moist smells of bacon and fresh coffee wafted over everything. They sat at one of the booths in front of the plate-glass windows that looked out over the parking lot with snow-covered vehicles scattered about. Across the lot, thin lanes of traffic ran along Federal Boulevard.

  Kiki bent over a stack of pancakes, pushing pieces around in a pool of syrup until the white surface of the plate showed through, washing it all down with cup after cup of steaming coffee that he refilled from the brown plastic container in the center of the table. From time to time he glanced around at the other tables or pitched sideways and stared out the plate-glass window. And all the time talking on and on about the old movies, the silent Westerns, the Arapahos and Shoshones playing the Indians. Real Indians acting like Indians, he said.

  Father John finished the two slices of toast that he had ordered, pushed the plate aside, and refilled his own cup. “How did they get to Hollywood?” he asked.

  Kiki took another gulp of coffee. “Rode horses down to Rawlins, took the train. Only they went to the Utah-Nevada line where they was filming The Covered Wagon. After they got done making the movie, some of ’em went to Hollywood to promote it. My great-grandfather was one of ’em, only he never come back.”

  “They took the horses?”

  Kiki lifted his shoulders in a half shrug that was like a twitch. “Got paid more if they brought their own ponies. Tipis, too. Cowboy from these parts, white man name of Tim McCoy, set up everything. Went around the rez talking to the longhairs and buffalo Indian
s, told ’em how there was good money in making movies, and how they needed real Indians ’cause they were tired of slapping brown makeup on a bunch of white men that didn’t know a pony from an elephant and kept falling on their asses. Didn’t take much talking, Grandfather says. Those old buffalo hunters was happy to get off the rez. You watch the movie and you can see how happy they was. They’re supposed to be looking fierce and mean, but they look happy, like they was making more money than they ever knew existed and all they was doing was being themselves.”

  “What’s your plan?” Father John asked.

  “You think I don’t got one?”

  “I think you do. That’s why I asked.”

  Kiki stuffed the last forkful of pancake into his mouth and chewed for a couple of seconds. “I been doing a lot of thinking. I got it figured out what happened. All I gotta do is fill in the names, find out who was responsible.” He sipped at the coffee, eyes narrowed into brown slits, staring over the rim, locked on some movie unfolding in his head.

  “You think someone was responsible for your great-grandfather’s disappearance?”

  “Disappearance?” Kiki let out a loud guffaw. Specks of coffee flew over the table. “I told you. Somebody killed him. I been listening to Grandfather’s stories all my life. I been talking to some folks, putting it together, one piece at a time until it all started to get real clear. He was a good actor, Charlie was. You ever watch The Covered Wagon?”

  Father John shook his head.

  “Best-looking guy in the movie. He’s the Indian all the important white folks talk to, like he’s as important as they are. Rest of the Indians, they’re riding around attacking wagon trains. But Charlie, he’s smart, he knows what’s going on. Everybody listens to him. It’s sad how the bad guy kills him.” Kiki shook his head a moment, as if the movie were a sign of Charlie’s fate. “He was a real good actor. Could’ve won one of those Academy Awards if they’d been giving ’em then. Could’ve stayed on in Hollywood, kept on making movies, moved the family out to California. I could’ve grown up like one of them Hollywood rich kids.”