Wild Indigo Read Free

with you, did you?”
    I shook my head no. “The pueblo dogs don’t like the way Mountain smells.”
    â€œGood. Okay now, who was the guy?”
    â€œJerome Santana.”
    â€œSantana.” He thought a moment. “I don’t think I knew him. You know him?”
    â€œYeah, I knew him.”
    â€œFriend?”
    â€œKinda. I was visiting his mother when—”
    â€œYeah, I just had my ass chewed at the tribal council office about that,” he cut in. “We’ll talk about that later on. Right now, I gotta go speak with the Gs. Who’s the agent in charge?”
    â€œDiane Langstrom.”
    â€œYou already talked to her?”
    â€œJust briefly. We’re going to talk again.”
    â€œSo this was a suicide. You were a witness, you gave her your statement. That’s pretty much it, right?—other than getting the buffalo back.”
    I winced.
    His eyebrows lifted. “What?”
    â€œI saw him, Roy. Yeah, it looked like a suicide, there was no one else around, he didn’t even try to get out of the path of those bulls. But I still don’t know.”
    â€œWhat do you mean you don’t know?”
    â€œHe looked like he might have been drugged.”
    â€œ On drugs, or drugged?”
    â€œI knew the guy. He didn’t do drugs.”
    â€œYou tell that to Langstrom?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œShe doesn’t see any evidence of foul play.”
    â€œOkay, then. She’s in charge.”
    â€œYeah…only she’s wondering about it, too.”
    The Boss blew out a blast of air. “Well, I don’t know what we can do with that. Normally the coroner could do a drug screen but we’re on Indian land—no jurisdiction for the county M.E. unless this is a suspicious death. And the tribal government won’t want an autopsy, they have a religious thing about that. The only way we’d have an autopsy is…” Roy’s head slumped to one side. “Aw shit. This could get to be a real mess.”
    â€œIt would take an act of God now, and probably an exhumation, too. The tribe has already taken the body to ceremony.”
    â€œAlready? How’d that happen?”
    â€œLike I said, Langstrom had no evidence of a crime.”
    Roy batted the brim of his hat with one hand, knocking the dust off of it. He gripped the crown and then paused and looked out at the mountains. “And you think there was a good chance he might have been drugged?”
    â€œI don’t know, Roy. He wasn’t…” I searched for a way to say it. “…right.”
    â€œWell, when the medical examiner doesn’t get invited to the party, then it’s up to the FBI to make the call for an autopsy. You said you told Langstrom your suspicions?”
    I shook my head yes.
    â€œAnd she thought it smelled funny, too?”
    â€œShe called her superiors in Albuquerque; they told her to let the tribe have the body, keep the file open, and send ’em the reports for now. She looked Santana’s corpse over good, got pictures, told me to put everything in my report. There was nothing to keep the tribe from taking the body. Without evidence of foul play, it’s their ball game. And it was getting late in the day—you know their thing about the sun not setting on a spirit in passage.”
    â€œWell, how bad do you want to pursue this drug thing? We could have a real mess here.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œUp to now, the council seemed to be more worried about the fact that you were out here when the pueblo was closed than they were about losing one of their own. The war chief must have reminded me five or six times how it’s Quiet Time. I got my butt dragged through a steel trap about it.”
    â€œYeah, they were all over me when they got here. Even when I pointed to the body and told them what had happened. They tried to shoo me off like a fly until I reminded them