Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(9)

In the indirect lighting provided by the one surviving headlight, Tall Bear saw two people, kneeling facedown to the ground, less than twenty feet from the mangled cab of the truck. They were not moving.

"Hey, are you hurt?" Tall Bear yelled as he ran toward them, flipping on his flashlight as he ran.

Two faces stared back at him, eyes reflecting in the moving beam of the flashlight, a sight that brought him to a stop, weapon drawn. The heads sat side by side, at least five feet separating them from the kneeling bodies.

The silence of the night draped him like a blanket. Tall Bear did not bother to switch off the flashlight. If this were a trap, he would already be dead. No. Not a trap. This was a message.

His pulse still pounding from the initial shock of the scene, Tall Bear reasserted his self-control. Death was, after all, no stranger to him.

Moving forward once again, Tall Bear allowed the flashlight beam to sweep the bodies before returning to the two heads, each of which had a bullet wound in the forehead. As he passed the bodies, he stepped around the large pool of blood that had spread out from the twin torsos of the murder victims. The initial spurt of blood had spewed out several feet, but the heads themselves sat on the ground beyond the furthest extent of the splatter.

Moving methodically now, Tall Bear noted the small details: The bodies were in military uniforms, both wearing side arms, military issue 9mm Beretta pistols. The torsos had been ritualistically positioned so that they knelt in the manner of Muslims at prayer oriented due west instead of east, heads facing back to the east, five feet past the bodies.

The bullets had passed through the foreheads out the back of each head, although one of the exit wounds was much more massive, having blown out a significant portion of the skull.

What bothered Tall Bear had nothing to do with the way the corpses had been arranged. It had to do with where they died. It was all wrong.

Moving back to the cab of the truck, Tall Bear climbed up onto what was left of the running board and leaned inside. The force of impact had shattered the windshield. Shining his flashlight around the back of the truck's cab, Tall Bear found what he was looking for. Blood and bits of brain matter splattered the seats and rear wall. Within seconds, he located the holes where the rifle slugs had punched their way out of the cab after exiting the heads of the victims.

The sense of wrongness now had a reason. Both men had been shot in the head, right here in the cab of the truck, shot in the head by a high-powered rifle that had splattered parts of their brains around the truck's interior. How then, when they had been pulled out of the truck after it wrecked, had their hearts still been beating powerfully enough to provide full arterial spray when they were beheaded?

The chill bumps that rose along Tall Bear's arms and neck had nothing to do with the temperature of the night air. What was it that the Arabic-sounding voice on the 911 tape had said? Something about making sure to take a blood sample of the dead men before the federal authorities arrived on the crime scene.

The sound of police sirens snapped Tall Bear out of his reverie. That would be the boys from Espanola. If he was going to do something, it had to be now.

Jumping down from the truck cab, Tall Bear pulled a small round can of Copenhagen Tobacco from his pocket, suffering a momentary pang of regret as he dumped the contents of the nearly full can on the ground. Then he strode back to the spot where the corpses had spewed their life's blood into the dirt. Ignoring the Navajo aversion to touching a corpse, he scooped some of the blood into the can, then replaced the lid and slid the can back into his pocket.

As he stood up and turned to walk back toward the highway, Tall Bear stepped on the small spot where he had scraped up some of the blood, leaving a bloody boot print in its place.

Since he was about to be kicked off a crime scene that was outside of tribal jurisdiction, it bothered him very little to have disturbed such a small amount of evidence. No doubt, the Espanola Police would find some satisfaction in noting that the Indian cop had screwed up.

As Tall Bear reached the highway, the leading police car screeched to a stop beside him. Feeling the Copenhagen can in his pocket, Tall Bear had the uneasy premonition that he had just involved himself in something that felt like very bad medicine. It was going to take a powerful Ghost Sing to clear his mind to the point where sleep, once again, came easy.





9


"Hello?" Heather's head poked through the open front door of the Smythe house, followed immediately by the rest of her body.

"Hi, Heather," said Mrs. Smythe from the living room. "Mark and Jennifer are in the garage."

"Thanks."

As she stepped into the garage, Heather spotted Mark and Jennifer huddled together in the workshop area, peering intently at the cold fusion apparatus.

Mark spotted her first. "Hey, Heather. Get over here and take a look at these readings."

"Why? Is something wrong?" Concern colored Heather's voice as she moved around the workbench that held the tank.

Peering over Jennifer's shoulder at the laptop’s flat-panel display, Heather’s concern faded away. "It looks good to me," she said.

"That's just it," said Jennifer, her fingers flying over the keyboard, bringing up a scrolling display of recorded data. "It might be a little too good. The National Science Contest is next week, and I'm afraid this project is going to stand out as something a group of high school kids might not have been able to pull off."