Night of the White Buffalo: A Wind River Mystery Read Free Page B

times he had bolted away, leaving Father John with the unsettled feeling there was something painful and sad and hard to talk about.
    â€œI’ve chatted with Dennis and his wife a few times,” he said. “Ordered buffalo burgers at the powwows. Dennis brought buffalo meat to the mission.” He was barely acquainted with the man, he thought. Two white men from outside the rez, from a different culture, from different places, planted on a reservation. White men among Arapahos and Shoshones. Probably the reason that Banner, an Arapaho himself, assumed he would know the man.
    â€œWe’ll be here for a while yet, then I’ll head over to the ranch to notify Carey’s wife.”
    â€œI’m on my way.”
    *   *   *
    COOLNESS SLICED THROUGH the night air, the day’s heat having receded ahead of the wind blowing off the high peaks of the Wind River mountains. It was the first Monday in August, the Moon of Geese Shedding Their Feathers, as the Arapahos kept time. He flipped on the CD player on the seat next to him as he drove around Circle Drive, past the old mission buildings, quiet sentinels from another time bathed in shadows. The white steeple of the church rose overhead, gleaming in the moonlight. The music of
La Traviata
filled the cab, drowning out the shush of the wind over the half-opened windows. He had been back with Verdi lately, the arias beautiful and familiar. Like reconnecting with an old friend.
    He drove through the tunnel of cottonwoods with thick, heavy branches arching the road and turned left onto Seventeen-Mile Road. Another death, he was thinking; another murder. There had been so many senseless deaths in the decade he had been at St. Francis. An important part of his pastoral mission, tending to the dead and to those left behind. It never got easier. Never routine.
    The reservation seemed suspended in time, as if life had stopped for the night. The flat, open plains ran into the darkness, small houses popped up here and there alongside the road, an occasional light flared in a window, and shadowy objects—pickups sloped sideways with missing wheels, swing sets and abandoned refrigerators and cartons—lay scattered about the dirt yards. Only a few other vehicles on the road. Taillights flickered ahead, and an occasional pickup passed in the opposite direction.
    An uneasy feeling, almost as if he were being watched by invisible eyes, had settled over him. The rancher had been shot in the forehead, Banner said, killed instantly. There had been several random shootings on the highways in the past year, but Carey’s death looked like a premeditated killing. He could still hear the cool, certain voice of the man in the confessional almost two months ago now, the words acid-burned into his mind.
It was premeditated, okay
?
Get that in your head
.
    The man had killed someone, and yet no murders had been reported on the rez in several months before the man had come into the confessional. If he was telling the truth, the body of his victim might be anywhere. In one of the dry arroyos, in a mountain cave or rock pile. In the Old Time, Arapahos had buried people in the rock piles on the mountain slopes, covered the corpses with boulders to protect them from wild animals. Is that what the killer had done?
    Or he could have committed the murder somewhere else. Miles away from the reservation, a different county, a different state. Anywhere. Then why had he found his way to a mission on the reservation?
    The man was still out there someplace. He could still be on the rez, driving the roads, mingling with the people. Now someone on the rez had been killed.
    What if the man in the confessional had shot another victim? He hadn’t asked the man if he planned any more murders. He should have asked, and that regret had kept him awake night after night. The seal of the confessional was inviolate; he could never betray the penitent. Yet he could have talked to