Page 58 of Dead Mountain

“Honored to be invited.” He leaned over and took Nora’s hand, then Skip’s and the lawyer’s, greeting them all.

“What are you doing here?” Nora whispered.

“I’m a friend of the tribe,” he whispered back. “Our office has been able to, shall we say, help them with a few matters.”

With this mysterious pronouncement, the hour arrived, and they fell into silence. Watts removed his hat. The drummer began to beat a mournful rhythm, long and slow, on the painted cottonwood drum tightly covered with hide. After a moment, several singers broke into a high, quavering song that rose and fell in the wind.

After a few moments an elder, wrapped in a woven blanket, with long white braids down his back, came forward and sprinkled pollen and cornmeal from a small painted pot over the two coffin-boxes. The singing rose in cadence and the beat got louder, remaining at the same slow pace. The old man stepped back, covered the pot with a piece of sandstone, raised it up, and placed it back in a leather satchel.

The singing slowly died away as the drumbeat softened, then ended with the shake of a bone rattle.

The elder stepped forward and began speaking in the Isletan language, which Nora understood was Southern Tiwa. It wasn’t so much a spoken requiem as it was a low, repetitive chant, with a funereal intonation. His quavering voice was whisked away by the cold wind, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but always elegiac. As the chanting continued, Tenorio and three other council members stepped forward and grasped the green straps around each coffin, which they used to raise up and carefully lower the caskets into the two holes, first one and then the other. The few grave goods—including, Nora saw with dismay, the micaceous pot—were then lowered into the graves. Each council member in turn took a silver spade and tossed in a bit of earth from the piles. The elder gestured for everyone else who was present to come forward and add their own spadefuls of earth, as the chanting dirge continued.

And then it was over. Everyone shook hands with each other in silence, and they headed back to their vehicles, while some remained behind to finish filling in the graves.

Watts fell alongside of Nora and Skip as they walked back to the car.

“Sorry to hear about the Hawley incident,” said Watts, shaking his head. “He’s an embarrassment to the state.”

“You’re not kidding,” said Skip. “I got everything on video, but I guess he’s erased it by now.”

“Of course he has.”

Lightfeather joined them and they stood next to the car.

“What do you know about him?” Skip asked the sheriff.

Watts paused. “Well . . . We had a little dustup once. It’s a long story. All I can say is, I’m glad you got yourself a good lawyer.” He grinned and laid his hand on Lightfeather’s shoulder. “I’d love to see you put one over on old One-Bally.”

Lightfeather nodded, a twinkle appearing in his eye.

Skip leaned forward. “One-Bally?”

“We know him as One-Bally Hawley.”

“Why?”

Watts gave a low chuckle. “This isn’t the time or place to talk about it. For now, I’ll just say this much: Hawley’s a real son of a bitch, and you’d better be prepared.” He donned his hat, stepped into the sheriff’s department vehicle, then gave them a little wave as he pulled away.

31

CORRIE WALKED INTO her apartment and set her laptop and notebooks down on the worktable. What with the Gold interview and the drive there and back, it felt like a long day even though it was just half past four. High-profile or not, the Dead Mountain case was still full of humdrum work: checking off every lead, filling out paperwork, following up on useless tips. Bellamy, O’Hara, and the others had been out in the field all day, doing exactly that: currently, they’d moved on to interviewing people even tangentially connected with the case. Meanwhile, now that they’d spoken with Gold, she had assigned herself the problem of the knife.

Once she’d learned the initials “MHT” matched nobody in the Tolland family, she began looking farther afield. She’d hit upon the idea of calling the registrar at NMIT, to learn if there were any students with those initials around the time of the Manzano tragedy. She had managed to catch an administrator just before the registrar’s office closed, and it had taken a little standard-issue FBI pressure to loosen the bureaucracy, but in the end she’d been rewarded with a class list of students roughly contemporaneous with the fated nine. One name stood out: Matthew Hartley Tanner, who’d graduated in 2010 with a PhD in biochemistry. He now worked at a company outside Stanford, specializing in the vetting of new pharmaceutical applications for the FDA.

She put some water on to boil, then, checking her watch, turned on the TV. Amid the flood of streaming content, she’d accidentally found a local channel that, as if thumbing its nose at a dystopian present, stubbornly devoted afternoons to airing reruns of chestnuts like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Lone Ranger, and Hogan’s Heroes. These brought back good memories to Corrie—afternoons when she got home from school, before her mom finished work, and she enjoyed their background murmur. Besides, she’d had a youthful crush on Clayton Moore—with his black mask and white-handled pistols—that hadn’t entirely gone away.

Corrie opened her laptop and updated her case log to reflect the work she’d done that day. Then she went over her notes and turned down the TV—just as the Lone Ranger was ordering Tonto, in a most un-woke manner, to ride into town—and made a call on her cell phone. She checked her watch: quarter to five, near the end of the workday—a good time to call.

“Tanner,” came the crisp voice on the other end of the phone.

“Is this Matthew Tanner?”

“This is Dr. Tanner. Who am I speaking with?”

“Dr. Tanner, my name is Agent Corinne Swanson. I’m with the FBI, and we’re investigating the recent developments in the Manzano case.”

There was a brief pause. “You mean the two bodies.”

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