The Story Teller Read online

  PRAISE FOR MARGARET COEL’S NATIONAL BESTSELLING SERIES . . .

  The Story Teller

  “Coel’s fourth Native American mystery may be her best work to date as she brilliantly ties together a who-done-it with Indian culture. The characters all ring true as they rapidly propel forward the tribal conflict with assimilation.”

  —Harriet Klausner

  “Another splendid mix of mystery and Native American culture.”

  —Library Journal

  “You finish [The Story Teller] not only well-entertained but all the better for it.”

  —The Arizona Daily Star

  “A welcome return to the fascinating world of the Arapaho people.”

  —Book Alert

  The Dream Stalker

  “Seamless storytelling by someone who’s obviously been there.”

  —J. A. Jance

  “Swift and compelling.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Coel weaves deeply human conflicts into her characters’ lives . . . Critics who have called Coel a ‘female Hillerman’ are right on the mark. Her breezy, fast-paced style and grasp of cultural details make The Dream Stalker a book that will keep you reading until late at night.”

  —Daily Camera (Boulder, CO)

  “Murder, romance, a nuclear storage facility and Indian lore blend appealingly in this third mystery . . . Another coup for Coel.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Ghost Walker

  “Margaret Coel guides us mystery lovers on another of her gripping tours of evil among the Wind River Arapahos.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “Coel is a vivid voice for the West, its struggles to retain its past and at the same time enjoy the fruits of the future.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “There is something so real, so good about the setting and the people in The Ghost Walker.”

  —Elaine Long, award-winning author of Jenny’s Mountain and Bittersweet Country

  “A tautly written, compelling mystery, grounded in and sympathetic to the Arapaho culture.”

  —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

  “A corking good read . . . Coel’s Catholic Irish Jesuit priest and his Arapaho friends and neighbors, each with their individual worldviews and sensibilities, make for interesting contrasts in this excellent mystery that focuses on the strange place Native Americans occupy in their own land. An outstanding entry in a superior series.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Engaging . . . Coel’s series in the Hillerman tradition finds a space where Jesuits and Native Americans can meet in a culture of common decency.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sharp writing and poignant characterizations.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “The writing has grown smooth in a way that makes it clear that Margaret Coel and Father John O’Malley will both be around for a long time to come.”

  —Mostly Murder

  The Eagle Catcher

  “Margaret Coel’s account of dastardly deeds among the Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation shouldn’t be missed by anyone interested in either new trends in mystery writing or contemporary American Indian culture. She’s a master at both.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “The best parts of The Eagle Catcher are Coel’s portrayal of the dual cultures that exist uneasily on the reservation and an uncanny sense of dialogue that make her characters ring true. Coel merges her grasp of history with the mystery genre. The result is so successful, you wonder what took her so long!”

  —The Denver Post

  “Insightful commentary about Arapaho culture, well-drawn characters and a lively pace.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The Eagle Catcher’s Native American theme will inspire comparisons to the work of Tony Hillerman, but its insights into the Arapaho way of life in our century are unique to this form.”

  —Loren D. Estleman, author of Edsel and City of Windows

  “Welcome Margaret Coel to the ranks of esteemed western mystery writers such as Hillerman, Hager, and Prowell. The Eagle Catcher is not only an alluring fresh mystery told with the authoritative voice of a historian, it is also a thoughtful testimony to the clash of cultures that endures in the West.”

  —Stephen White, author of Higher Authority and Private Practices

  “Intense and fascinating . . . Coel has gifted us with a western mystery full of characters we long to know better and a Wyoming setting that takes our breath away.”

  —Earlene Fowler, author of Irish Chain and Kansas Troubles

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Margaret Coel

  Catherine McLeod Mysteries

  BLOOD MEMORY

  THE PERFECT SUSPECT

  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 SPIDER’S WEB

  BUFFALO BILL’S DEAD NOW

  KILLING CUSTER

  NIGHT OF THE WHITE BUFFALO

  Anthologies

  WATCHING EAGLES SOAR

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  THE STORY TELLER

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 1998 by Margaret Coel.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

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

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-66373-8

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime hardcover edition / October 1998

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / September 1999

  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.

  Version_1

  For Aileen Marie Harrison

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank the many people who lent their expertise and advice to this novel. Among them are:

  Dr. Tom Noel, professor of history, University of Colorado at Denver; Michael L. Fiori, detective, Homicide/Investigations, Denver Police Department; Jennifer C. Rowe, officer, Denver Police Department; Ginger Jones, coroner’s investigator, City and County of Denver; Dr. David F. Halaas, chief historian, Colorado Historical Society; Dr. Virginia Sutter, member of the Arapaho tribe; Anthony Shor
t, S.J.; Karen Gilleland, Ann and Tony Ripley, Sybil Downing, Beverly Carrigan, George Coel, and Kristin Coel.

  Special thanks to David F. Halaas, Andrew E. Masich, Richard N. Ellis and Jean Afton for their book, Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat.

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Margaret Coel

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Margaret Coel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  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

  Prologue

  Professor Mary Ellen Pearson adhered to a carefully constructed routine every Monday evening. This evening was no different. At ten minutes before nine o’clock, she checked her briefcase to make certain all of her papers were in place. Discreetly, of course. It would never do for one of the students in her Culture of the Plains Indians seminar to suspect she was eager for the class to end. At the first pealing of the bells from St. Elizabeth’s across the campus, she hoisted the briefcase, bid her students good night, and departed the classroom.

  She hurried down the wide corridor paved with caramel-colored tiles, in and out of shafts of light streaming from the fluorescent bulbs overhead, and swung through a doorway into a small office much like her own. She froze in disbelief. The office was empty. Mavis Stanley had left without her. How could Mavis have done so? They always left together on Monday evenings, two female professors at the edge of retirement, hurrying along the shadowy campus paths, a formidable phalanx to deter waiting muggers.

  Not that the University of Colorado campus in Denver was unsafe, as their male colleagues often reminded them. Nevertheless it was an urban campus sprawled against the southern curve of downtown Denver, and the leafy trees and grassy knolls could not conceal the noise and energy of the city lurking beyond. One could not be too careful.

  With clenched jaw, Professor Pearson retraced her steps along the corridor. The overhead lights seemed dimmer, the building silent as a vault. Her footsteps clacked into the emptiness. Other classes had let out; students had already fled. She was alone.

  Avoiding the elevator, which was often unpredictable, she made her way down two flights of stairs, skimming past the shadows on the landings, and exited the building through the glass-paned door on the west. The Rocky Mountains rose in the distance, a jagged darkness against the last milky band of light in the sky. Skyscrapers looming on the north, windows ablaze, cast eerie patterns of light and shadow across the dark campus.

  Professor Pearson gripped her briefcase under one arm as she plunged down the walkway to the parking lot on the other side of Speer Boulevard. Several students—even one of her own colleagues—hurried by. How silly, her fearfulness, she told herself. Other people were still about. She was perfectly safe. She was becoming an addled old woman.

  She crossed Speer Boulevard on the green light, passing through the yellow columns of headlights from waiting vehicles, and started up the gentle rise of earth that surrounded the parking lot. Traffic belched into the darkness behind her, but ahead the parking lot sat in a well of light shining down from the metal poles around the periphery.

  A few cars were scattered around the lot; she could see her Impala at the far end. Relaxed now, she started down the rise, her feet groping for solid underpinnings in the soft dirt, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a figure darting along the rise across the lot.

  She stopped, eyes glued to the figure—it looked like a man—lurching in and out of the shadows, hesitating, watching. Suddenly he ran down the little slope and across the asphalt. Ran toward her! She stumbled backward, pivoting, trying to get a purchase on the uphill slope. The squeal of tires, the screech of brakes burst through the night as she caught herself against the hard coldness of a metal light pole. Sheltering behind it, she stared down at the white 4×4 rocking to a stop.

  In an instant, two men were running toward the shadowy figure zigzagging between the parked cars, dodging the grasping arms. Then she saw the raised arm, the glint of metal, the thrust toward the crouching figure, and heard the whack of metal on bone. The figure staggered, dissolved before her, and the others scooped him up, lifting arms and shoulders and legs, pushing him into the back of the 4×4, a bag of rocks now, something not human, crowded and folded onto the floor as the tailgate slammed shut. The others jumped into the front seat; there was the sharp, hollow sound of doors slamming.

  The scream welled inside her, an enormous flood rising in her throat, stoppered by her own fear. They’ve killed him!—her mind shouted the words—and she had done nothing, had allowed her legs to turn into numb and formless objects over which she had no control. The shame of her inaction fixed her in space, the metal pole a shaft of ice in her hands, the briefcase at her feet.

  The 4×4 was gathering speed, racing across the lot, banking into a sharp right onto the street and heading north into the maze of skyscrapers. The sound of squealing tires faded into the darkness, overridden now by the piercing sounds that rose around her, surprising her as she anchored herself to the pole and screamed and screamed.

  1

  A white-yellow haze hung over Highway 287 as Vicky Holden drove north along the foothills of the Wind River Mountains. To the east, the plains ran into the distance, parched and cracked under a sky bleached pale blue by the sun. A dry breeze scuttled across the clumps of wild grasses and bent the sunflower stalks. It was the first Tuesday in June, the Moon When the Hot Weather Begins, but it was already the kind of heat the elders told about in stories of the Old Time, when her people had lived free on the plains—the kind of heat that melted the hooves of the buffalo into the ground and pulled the shaggy hides over their bones, like gunnysacks. The kind of heat, she knew, that could take her breath away.

  She had the highway to herself. Since crossing the southern boundary of the Wind River Reservation a good thirty minutes ago, she’d passed only a couple of pickups. She held the Bronco steady at sixty-five, trying to ignore the irritation that nipped at her like a yapping dog she couldn’t shake off. If the cultural director of the Arapaho tribe had wanted an appointment, he could have driven to her law office on Main Street in Lander. Instead she was driving to his office in Ethete, at least thirty minutes each way, when her desk was piled with other matters demanding her attention.

  “We want to avail ourselves of your services,” Dennis Eagle Cloud had said on the phone this morning. “Best you come to the reservation.” There had been something hard to define in his tone—a hint that whatever he wished to discuss should be taken out and examined only on the reservation, not in a white town. Or had she imagined it? She wished now she had asked for some explanation, pleaded her own busy schedule.

  But she hadn’t. Hadn’t suggested a meeting at her office because she didn’t want him to call another attorney. It had been almost four years since she’d come home and opened a one-woman law practice in the naive and idealistic hope she might help her people. But so far her list of clients included as many whites as Arapahos. She was the lawyer for divorces, adoptions, wills, and real-estate leases, while matters such as tribal lands, and oil and gas and water—important tribal matters—went to a law firm in Casper. The tribal officials had never sought her services.

&
nbsp; Until this morning. Which, she knew, was the reason she’d agreed to the two o’clock meeting in Ethete. She’d put down the phone feeling elated and discouraged at the same time. The call had finally come, yet Dennis Eagle Cloud was not a member of the tribal council—the business council, as the Arapahos called the six elected members who handled Arapaho affairs on the reservation. He was a tribal employee, a low-level official. How important could the matter be?

  Then it hit her. As the cultural director, Dennis had been working with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the federal law that allowed tribes to reclaim some of their artifacts from museums. The Arapahos had already taken back numerous sacred objects. Maybe he had run into some kind of snag and needed legal advice. Her irritation began to subside. This could be a very important matter indeed, and Dennis had called her, not the Casper firm.

  For a moment she allowed herself to wonder if the cultural director was also involved in efforts to claim some of the old lands in Colorado—lands promised to the people who’d been attacked in the Sand Creek Massacre more than a hundred years ago, but never given to them. She shrugged off the idea. That was a matter for the business council, which meant the Casper firm was undoubtedly doing the legal work. But if Dennis was about to hand her the chance to work on something involving NAGPRA—well, it could be an opportunity to prove herself worthy of other important matters.

  She slowed for an easy right into Ethete and parked in the shade washing down the front of the red-brick building that housed the tribal offices. Grabbing her briefcase and black shoulder bag, she slid out into the heat, trying not to bang her door against an old pickup, although the pickup sported so many dents and scrapes and rust patches that another one of the world’s hard knocks hardly seemed to matter.

  It was cool inside the tribal building, a startling, man-made coolness. She nodded at the receptionist behind the desk across the lobby and hurried down the corridor on the right. Dennis Eagle Cloud stood outside a door at the far end, as if he’d seen her drive up and had been waiting while she negotiated the parking lot and lobby. He was about her age—early forties—with dark skin and dark eyes and black hair that curled over the opened collar of a white cowboy shirt. “We been waiting for you,” he said, waving her forward, an impatient gesture.