TCD3

Huge swaths of the high plains still lay under snow that first fell in November of ’42, but it was a dry cold and the roads were clear. From the air Headwater looked like an abstract map drawn in fine black ink on paper bleached an unearthly white.

The victim was found by a man in his eighties named Tashunka. He was older than the town of Headwater, a mere boy of the People when the Golden Gift came to Wanica in that final hunt. The biggest animal he ever killed was a coyote baited with a rabbit he caught in another trap. Tashunka almost didn’t see the girl. Her body was dangling at a roadside attraction that had always bored him. On a map somewhere one line terminated on another. Three states came together at this place, but even when there was no snow Tashunka had never seen any lines.

What caught his eye was not so much that the dead girl was naked but how her head and arms drooped back, and how her feet didn’t touch the ground, as though she were nailed to an invisible cross. So he backed up his truck and parked in the little tri-state corral. There were two other set of tire tracks in the snow and two sets of footprints which became a tangled net near the body.

Tashunka tried to be careful in his approach to leave the site clean for the sheriff. He could see no movement of the girl’s chest and no condensation from her mouth. The dead girl was too pale to be one of the People. Of a certainty she had part of the White Wing of the Church of Green Dome. Her ponytail gave that away. And Tashunka wept with frustration that he could not do the simple kindness of closing her frozen eyes staring out upon eternity.

Tashunka recognized the dead girl at last: Kimberly Zinter. Then he wept more deeply, knowing why she was murdered and guessing who the killer must be. Of a certainty the unhappy union of the Red Wing and White Wing of the Church was finished. He retraced his steps to the truck.

An hour later Tashunka returned with Sheriff Roddy Walker to the little fenced-off area nigh to the road. The tri-state marker was a wooden beam embedded in the ground, one foot square with a sloping top, and Kimberly’s back rested on this, held fast by frozen blood. The sheriff told deputy Bill to start snapping pictures while deputy Bob followed Roddy around with a notepad and took down a running commentary.

“I need to steal your sole with my camera, Chief,” Bill said, so “lay it out there.”

Tashunka smiled weakly at the joke and lifted one leg as best he could. Bill got a photo of the bottom of both the old Indian’s boots to make sure they could differentiate his footprints from that of the perps. Then Tashunka was left behind as Bill methodically photographed his way to the girl’s body.

Roddy and Bob followed in his wake while ld Tashunka watched from the road.

When the sheriff and his deputies completely surveyed and documented the murder scene they all pitched in, lifted Kimberly free of the survey marker, and laid her gently on a foldaway stretcher that sheriff Walker had brought with him. Tashunka was surprised to hear the sheriff shout an oath. Roddy has read the plaque that Kim’s body was covering and realized they were at the exact place some surveyor decided the corners of two states ran flush against the border of a third.

At a stroke that made the case Federal.

Then they walked the body out of there, pausing a moment for Tashunka to get another close look at it.

“This was Kimberly Zinter,” he told them, and he put his fingers on her face just long enough to melt the eyelids so he could close them. “I’ve seen her at Temple.”

The sheriff dug around in the glove box of his truck and came back with a manila folder containing a photo, which he compared to the dead girl’s blood-streaked face.

“The gentleman is right, boys. This was the local girl the FBI was looking for. One of the two, anyway.”

He noted how the girl wore a headdress that was similar to one that some of the Kuwapi townspeople often wore. It was a lattice of beads adorning two sharp white horns.

After the deputies carefully loaded the body of the girl in the canopy of the department’s green 1940 Dodge half-ton truck, Bob said, “So this wasn’t gonna be our case from the gitgo, even if she wasn’t lying dead spread out over three states. What do we do now, sheriff?”

Tashunka said, “I remember when you were just a boy, sheriff, and I remember when you left us. None of your men are Greendomites. You might not be up on Church politics and they can’t help you. I don’t know who did this terrible thing to the girl but I can tell you why.”

But inactivity had cooled the sweat under Roddy’s coat and he shivered in the face of a stiff wind from the frozen plains. “This is not the place, Tashunka,” he said, “This body must go to our little hospital. But if you meet me at the station in an hour I will listen to what you have to say about this.”

After that Sheriff Roddy drove deputy Bill and the body around the large hill near the crime scene which was named Green Dome. It was almost five thousand feet above sea level, but only eight hundred feet above the town of Headwater, and it was never green at all in January.

“I just can’t win, Bill,” Roddy lamented. “Half the male population of Headwater between 18 and 45 is off killing Japs and Krauts and Eye- talians. Things were getting real quiet around here. Then the FBI sets up shop and stay all summer. Now I got my first homicide.”

They passed the stretch of national grasslands where the Bureau parked their trailer but there were no lights on, no smoke from a wood stove.

Bill said, “The FBI was here last summer but now people are saying they saw some G-men back in town, staking out the bus station and ask- ing people of they’ve seen our victim and another girl named Sofie Krause. Those girls were in federal custody somewhere for half of last year, but apparently they’ve escaped and made the FBI look … hell, they are incompetent.”

“But they wouldn’t kill the girl for doing that, if your thoughts are trending on those lines, Bill.”

Roddy drove around the northern slopes of Green Dome and Headwater came into view, the biggest town for a hundred miles around. The population was down to a thousand, now, owing to the war.

Bill asked, “What do you want me to do after we give the body to Dr. Wahkan?”

“Develop the film and file it,’ Roddy told his deputy. “Then get back to the scene and help Bob look for the murder weapon. I didn’t see prints leading away from the marker so I figure the perpetrator either tossed it away or kept it. To know what he chose would be a good thing for me to know.”

The town’s sole doctor was known as Wahkan to the People, but the whites called him Plenty Practice. No one had ever died under his knife, but even a local legend such as Doctor Wahkan could not call back the dead.

“Kim Zinter,” he said when he saw the bloody corpse. “Heartbreaking.” Dr. Wahkan donned a pair of rubber gloves. “I have never carried out this protocol for you, Sheriff, and for your father I have only done so five times. I last saw this girl last spring. And I also saw the other girl, the one named Sofie Krause. They both had the same symptoms.”

“Symptoms?”

Dr. Wahkan pulled Kim’s headdress away, but the two white horns remained in place. Holding out the jewelry, he said, “I know you’ve seen this before.”

Roddy nodded. “It’s a Kuwapi thing.”

Wahkan reached down to grabbed one on the horns on Kimberly’s head and he shook it, which caused her whole head to shake as well. “They wear the jewelry to cover up the fact that these horns are real.”

“I’ll be damned,” Roddy said. “I never guessed!”

Dr, Wahkan lifted Kim’s hair away so the sheriff could see how the skin of her scalp lay where the horns emerged from her skull.

“We call this the Change,” the doctor told him. “Naturally both girls were alarmed when it started to happen to them, but they were actually quite safe. The Change is known among the Kuwapi people. It spreads by sexual contact, but some are born with it. I told Kim and Sofie it had been present among some members of the Red Wing for a human lifetime and more, but they wouldn’t listen to me. Then I tried to explain it to their mothers, but they insisted on a second opinion. Now Headwater is infested with outsiders.”

“Headwater is a good place, Doctor, but my hand is forced simply by where the killer chose to leave the body. Kim was draped across three states. I must report the crime to the very outsiders who have made things not so good here over the last few months, and I’m not best pleased. So help me learn who did this to her, and why. I never knew the horns were real until you showed me just now, so I don’t think anyone else suspected, and I can’t believe she was killed just for wearing Red Wing jewelry.”

The town of Headwater, true to its name, sat at the source of the Squaw River. Paved road ended there, as did the railroad. There were no hotels. West, north, and south of the town was nothing but empty grasslands. No one from outside of town ever spent the night in Head- water because no one ever passed through. The Bureau had to crane off a trailer just to have a place for its agents to sleep.

The Church of Green Dome had steadily lost adherents since peaking in 1917 but there were still many congregations scattered across America and even a few in Europe. When families of the deceased came to Head- water for the Last Rite often the only place for them to stay was the Temple itself.

The C Wing had six modest rooms which were offered to visiting fami- lies for their brief stay of a day or two. Klaus Hansen had never giv- en them much thought. As far as he knew or cared the beds made them- selves, so when he arrived at the temple with Paul Bergin in tow he was startled to find Dory and Gabriel cleaning the rooms.

“What is this?” he demanded.

“It went with the position of Extraordinary Lay Minister of the Last Rite,” Gabriel replied. “Somebody has to get the rooms ready, and now I guess the Deacon does it.”

“Then what’s she doing here?”

“Cousin Dory is pitching in.”

“I’m reclaiming Sundays for the White Wing. I only want Red Wingers to be here on Wednesdays.”

Dory and Gabriel, being Red Wingers both, made as though to leave, but Klaus said, “Not you, boy.”

“I’ll pick you up at five, cuz,” said Dory on her way out.

When sha was out of earshot, Klaus asked, “How’s your back?”

“The same as last time, sir.”

“Last time? You’ve been flogged before?”

Gabriel nodded hez head. “Lotsa times, sir. The fellas I run around with, we whip each other every now and then just to see how much we can take. And they’re not just love taps, let me tell you.”

“Where’s the Golden Gift?”

“It’s right here in the Temple, sir, just as we agreed.”

“How do I know that’s true?”

“This is the Temple of Green Dome, sir. Liars have no part in the life to come.”

“Show it to me.”

“Sir, Mike told me to only bring it out at need.”

“Who’s Mike?”

“Michael, sir. As in the original Michael.”

“Nevermind. Fuck Mike. You need to show it to me.”

Gabriel unlocked a supply room similar to the one downstairs in the temple basement. A red butter cookie tin sat on a shelf. It was empty but Gabriel needed the can for his trick. When che reached outside of the universe it always looked like somebody chopped hez hand off with an ax, which would need explaining. Gabriel produced the relic. To Hansen’s eyes it looked like che pulled it out of the tin.

“How do I know that’s not just something you whipped up in metal shop and painted gold? Make this box disappear for me.”

Paul Bergin set down a cardboard box he was carrying.

“What’s in the box, sir?”

“Old clothes and shoes. Never mind what’s in the box, just make it disappear with your alleged relic.”

Gabriel squeezed the Artifact. The hissing shifted down in pitch as the black rip in reality grew, drinking in the light and air of the room. Hez ponytail tossed in the growing breeze as he lapped up the box into nothingness. He tried not to damage the floor but it was unavoidable.

Neither Klaus Hansen nor Paul Bergin had never been so close to the Golden Gift in operation and they were entranced by the sheer other- worldliness of it. Gabriel was amazed at hez self-restraint for not slicing the men in half where they stood.

“Alright, Gabriel,” said Hansen when the thrill of the Golden Gift wore off, “put it back in the can and lock this room back up.”

Gabriel gave a very convincing performance of putting the Artifact away. A clever slight-of-hand never entered the mind of Klaus.

When it was done Klaus told hem to hand over the key and the look on his face seemed to dare hem to show even a twinge of insubordination, but he got nothing. “Who else has a key?”

“Paul does, sir,” replied Gabriel. “He never returned it after he quit.”

“I never quit,” Bergin said.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Hansen said. “Your wife is dead.”

“Oh, I know, sir.”

“What do you mean, you know? You don’t seem too cut up over it.”

“Cut up. I get it, sir.”

“The last thing I need from you is your mouth, boy.”

“She predicted it would happen, sir,” Gabriel said. “Besides, our Lord himself said, ‘He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

“Do you know what I believe, son? I believe the death of your so-called wife makes me the Prophet of the Church, and I believe that in turn makes Paul the Apostle. We’ll be in the office making it official in the founder’s Green Book. And I believe you still have some rooms to clean.”

Tashunka waited outside the sheriff’s office long past when Roddy said he’d meet him, trying to stay warm inside his running truck. Roddy apologized for the delay and invited the old fellow to come indoors for some fresh coffee. “Doctor Wahkan had some interesting things to say,” the sheriff told him.

Tashunka followed Walker inside and sat shivering in his seat until the coffee was ready. “And what of the three stupid boys who took a bullwhip to a plains Indian and didn’t think he’d have friends who could do something far worse in retaliation?”

“The three stupid boys were still there looking perfectly miserable until they laid eyes on the dead girl. That seemed to make their whole day. Would that Headwater had a bigger hospital. They wouldn’t tell me what was so funny. I figure you’re about to tell me.”

Tashunka leaned back in his seat nursing the coffee. His eyes landed on a photograph of the elder Sheriff Walker, now deceased. Two years already? “Everyone greatly respected your father, Roddy, both White Wing and Red Wing alike. I was there at his Final Rite.”

Roddy flushed with sudden anger, but it was not directed at the old Indian. “And I, his only son, trained to replace him, was not permit- ted to be there at his precious Rite because I don’t believe in fairy tales about angels and sun gods and killing relics and I made the mis- take of letting everybody know that.”

“Sheriff, if you allow your heart to grow black then you will take everything I tell you as coming from the left hand of the damned. What you call the ‘killing relic’ sets the Church of Green Dome apart from all other faith assemblies. It is evidence of divinity which can be seen.”

Roddy glared at him while he took another sip of coffee, then lowered his eyes. Soon he was calm again and said, “You are absolutely right, Tashunka, and I know how important the relic is in the life of your Church. So let us call it by its right name, the Golden Gift.”

“You know Mark Lange was the first Prophet of the Church, and Wanica was his Apostle. When Wanica died, Prophet Lange chose Peter Two- feathers to replace him. Then Lange himself died, making Twofeathers the Prophet, and he in turn chose Klaus Hansen to be the Apostle, though he was very reluctant to do so. Years intervened before he was pressured to name Hansen.”

Roddy nodded. “Yes, I know authority in the Church moves from White to Red Wing and back, over and over so long as heaven and Earth last. That was the theory, anyway. It worked like a charm until the day the authority actually moved to the Red side and the White side didn’t much like it.”

Tashunka said, “Red and White wings swap power but the Golden Gift stays in the Red Wing. God gave it to Chief Wanica, who gave it in turn to Twofeathers. Hansen says the Apostle should have it. Twofeath- ers thought it would quiet things to personally give it up, but he gave it to Gabriel Shybear.”

“Gabriel Shybear. That explains how he got his whipping. And he said his house and the Temple had been ransacked too. They must have been trying to beat the Golden Gift out of him. Oh, it’s a good thing I never embraced the faith of the Green Dome Church as my own, Tashunka. It’s much too violent for me.’

“It gets better,” Tashunka said. “Twofeathers said he was setting aside the rule that Greendomites can only marry their cousins, in just one instance, so that Gabriel could marry Kim Zinter. When they heard that the Apostle, Klaus Hansen, and half the Bunners stood up and walked out of the Temple.”

Roddy smiled at Tashunka’s use of the word ‘Bunners’. By strict canon law all Greendomites had to wear their hair in a ponytail, even the men, but in the White Wing this ponytail was done up in a bun, even for the men. He shuddered at how close he had come to being a Bunner.

But even people who had nothing to do with the Church knew about their biggest hobby horse. For a time the Mormons had polygamy. The Greendo- mites have mandatory cousin marriage. Roddy knew a deep current of racism ran among the Bunners but the requirement for consanguineous marriages had kept a firm lid on it. Kim Zinter was fourth generation White Wing at least, she’d have no kin among the Red Wing. Her marriage and any subsequent children would have blown the door wide open.

As though he could read Roddy’s mind, Tashunka said, “Hansen would see this marriage between Gabriel and Kim as a horrible disease infecting the body of the Church. Their children would have marriageable cousins in both wings and it would just grow worse from there.”

“So now I have a possible motive,” the sheriff said.

Deputies Bill and Bob rushed in just then and threw a Cellophane bag on the sheriff’s desk containing the murder weapon. “We found it,” Bob said, “Just like you guessed, Sheriff, not more than throwing distance from the body.”

The blade was thin and flexible, nothing more than a steak knife per- haps.

Roddy picked up the bag and frowned with disappointment. “This game isn’t as fun when the other side isn’t even trying to win. Not a run- of-the-mill Sears Roebuck kitchen knife: no, something handmade, some- thing an admirer would make special just for the Church Apostle.’

Next came a duty Sheriff Walker found to be every bit as distasteful as his father described, the five times he had to do it. Roddy recal- led the recent death of Erik Zinter and he yearned to dodge the responsibility to notify Clara Zinter of the discovery of her daugh- ter’s body. How does one break it to a newly-widowed woman that her family has now been entirely wiped off the face of the earth?

The young woman who answered the door was not Clara Zinter. Her hair was a rich, dark red. She had eyes that were a light, icy green, striking for being so rare. She also had a pretty face but she was a little too chubby even for a time before film actresses and models made being skinny sexy.

“Are you…?” Roddy was looking at the spitting image of the deceased, Kimberly Zinter, standing in the doorway, patiently waiting for him to speak. He pulled out his file to be sure. Identical. He was not aware that Kim had a twin sister. “Is Mrs. Clara Zinter at home?”

“Mother isnt here anymore,” the young lady said, “I swapped places with her. Mom’s with her own folks in Pennsylvania. You’re Sheriff Walker, right? I’m Robyn. Do you want to come in? I’m sure you have questions and it will be better than standing here in the doorway.”

Roddy took off his hat and accepted her offer. The hardwood floors were covered with throw-rugs. He could smell the light odor of a gas furnace. A radio was playing “Ive Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, and Robyn turned it down.

“Please, Robyn, if you could turn the radio entirely off. Its hardly appropriate for what I must tell you.”

The girl complied, and invited the sheriff to be seated. He did so and got the overall impression that the Zinter family was firmly in the middle-class. Not destitute by any means, but not ostentatious either.

A small coffee table lay between them. Robyn smoothed out her plaid dress and Roddy saw that she wore bobby socks and saddle shoes. “You were about to tell me that you found the body of my sister,” Robyn said, “and that she had been brutally murdered.”

On one level Roddy felt relief. His duty to notify the next-of-kin had been mooted. But Robyn had stated things she should not know. “You dont seem to be too upset about it,” Roddy said, taking a small note- book and pen out of his jacket liner. The sympathetic bearer of bad news was a detective again. “When did you know your sister was dead, Miss Zinter? Did an old Indian fellow pay you a visit today?”

“Just Robyn, please,” she said. “One name. Robyn. Not Miss Zinter. No- body else has visited me today. I find it difficult to say how I knew she had died. If I speak it will be the truth, but then you would believe me to be insane.”

Roddy said, ‘Robyn, this is a murder investigation so I exhort you to hold to that thought, that whatever you tell me must always be the truth. Now, as for believing you are insane, I’m already having trouble with your attitude toward the news of your twin sister’s murder.”

Robyn asked the sheriff whether he had heard stories about identical twins who seem to have a link that defies any explanation. Perhaps stories about twins who were separated at birth. They never met, yet they led lives with coincidence piled upon coincidence, with the same type of job, and even the same type of spouse.

“Robyn, are you saying you and Kim had some kind of radio in your head that let you know what was happening to the other? If that’s what you- ‘re trying to tell me, young lady, I wouldn’t believe you were insane. I would run you in to the station for further questioning, for knowing material facts about this case with no plausible explanation why.”

But Robyn was shaking her head. She stood up and walked over to her record collection, where she pulled a ten inch 78 RPM record from its sleeve. Holding it up for Roddy she said, “Let’s do this by analogy. This is Kim. And in every instant of time, a copy is made of her. By the time shes seventeen Kim is quite a stack of records. But something happens to her that she can’t explain. Maybe she starts skipping. Her friend Sofie is another stack of records who starts skipping too. The music store says nothing is wrong with them. But Kim’s mother is a stickler for high fidelity and she won’t take that for an answer. She quits her job at the music store and takes Kim to Lusk for a second opinion, and she convinces Sofie’s parents to do the same. Soon after, both re- cord stacks are in impound. There’s six months of tests but nobody figures out why Kim and Sofie skip. The girls realize they’re never getting out of quaran- tine, so they escape, but that’s another story. Kim Zinter changes her label and becomes Robyn. Sofie Krause changes her label to Hunky. And soon Hunky is back with Doriel, and Robyn is back with Gabriel. Robyn and Gabriel want to get hitched, and the Prophet says he can swing it. But the Apostle says: ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome platter? So the Deacon takes a kitchen knife to her. Now enter an otherworldly giant named Mike. Seven and a half feet tall! Somehow he reaches back into that stack of records named Robyn and pulls out a disk from after the Deacon stole it, but before he broke it, and starts a new stack.”

Robyn fell silent and stared placidly at Roddy.

Finally he said, ‘You win, Robyn. People as growing stacks of records? Thats too batshit crazy to take you downtown or lock you up. The Deacon did it, you say? Paul Bergin?”

She nodded yes.

“You didn’t give me enough probable cause to even check him out.”

Robyn said, “My sister was killed with a knife from Bergin’s kitchen, one with a distinctive handle.”

Roddy held his face immobile and said, “Possibly.”

“Tomorrow is trash day. If you dig in his garbage can you’ll find the whole set. You wont even need a search warrant since he has already thrown it out.”

“Now that I can use,” Roddy said. “Kim’s body was found on the tri- state marker, which makes it a federal case. Whoever killed her did that on purpose. That’s why I’m trying to break this case before the FBI gets here, on the principle that you never give a perp what he wants.”