Hawk Moon Read Free Page B

males. And the suicide rate among teenagers on some reservations approached fifteen per cent. The incidence of addiction to liquor and hard drugs was depressing. I knew all this because of the book I was writing, the one I'd promised my wife I'd get around to and never did. Not while she was alive, anyway.
    I had an egg-salad sandwich and a glass of iced tea for lunch. I also had a new pal on the stool next to me. Leather-stocking had taken off in search of casino riches. My new buddy wore a green John Deere cap and wanted to talk about last week's murder in town here.
    "Cut her nose off."
    "That's what I heard," I said.
    "The Indians used to do that."
    "I know."
    "So did the Egyptians. Long time ago, I mean."
    "Uh-huh."
    I had been going to treat myself to a slice of apple pie with maybe a scoop of vanilla ice cream on the side but somehow the conversation killed my appetite. I wanted to be back up in my old biplane watching Iron Crow in his Snoopy helmet grinning his ass off.
    I decided I must have unwittingly taken the unlucky stool at the counter. The one where people didn't let you eat your egg-salad sandwich in peace. The one where people wanted to talk about the most depressing things they could think of.
    With my luck, the next guy who sat down would want to tell me how Attila the Hun had once slaughtered more than 3,000 children in a single afternoon.
    I paid my bill and left.
     
    W hat you have to remember about the Indians is that they saw their own kind slaughtered to a degree that is unthinkable in most cultures. At Sand Creek, for example, the US Army, in less than thirty minutes, killed 123 Indians — of whom (according to one observer) 98 were women and children.
    Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal
     
    May 7, 1903
    Just about the entire Cedar Rapids Police Department — all twenty-one members — turned up at the murder scene that night.
    The reason was simple enough. Cedar Rapids didn't get that many murders, and rarely one as savage as this.
    Her name had been Rain Tree and she had been twenty years old and she had been quite beautiful as young Indian women went. Had been. After stabbing her three times in the chest, once directly in the heart, her killer had then cut off her nose.
    Anna Tolan had been spending a quiet night at Mrs. Goldman's boarding house, reading a new book she'd ordered on "scientific detection." Though everybody on the force laughed about all the books she read on the subject, Anna believed that in this century pioneers such as the French rogue-turned-detective named Vidocq, Sir Edmund Henderson of Scotland Yard and Alan Pinkerton of the United States would all be proved correct — that murderers could be brought to justice through scientific means. Oh yes, and there was one other, perhaps the most important of all: a Frenchman named Marie-Francois Goron, who had dubbed his new science "Criminology."
    Only Mrs. Goldman encouraged Anna. Mrs. Goldman's husband had been a high-school teacher and an educated man before his untimely death six years earlier . . . and so Mrs. Goldman was open to exciting new scientific concepts. As she always said, "Just walk down the streets of Cedar Rapids and look around. Electric lights and telephones and motorcycles and electric streetcars — who could have predicted these things?"
    After the death of her parents in a terrible flood, Anna had moved to Cedar Rapids and gone to live in Mrs. Goldman's boarding house. The stylish, sixty-ish woman became a second mother to Anna, helping her through the worst of the ridicule and scorn when she decided to become a police officer, something many people in Cedar Rapids, including several fundamentalist ministers, publicly and angrily criticized. Mrs. Goldman had also introduced Anna to the women's movement. Anna now spoke openly of a woman's right to vote.
    Anna, too, went to the murder scene that night.
    The body was found near the Lymington brick factory on a leg of the Cedar River. Lanterns lit the