Big Medicine (A John Tall Wolf Novel Book 5) Page 2

  He also found it interesting that a medical scientist acknowledged spiritual beliefs.

  For the moment, though, John turned the conversation back to a practical law-enforcement point of view. “I don’t suppose anyone got a look at whoever stole your data and write-ups? Or was it done online by hackers?”

  “I work on my computer, but not online,” Dr. Lisle said. “It’s a stand-alone system to make sure it can’t be hacked by anyone outside my lab.”

  John nodded. He liked the simplicity of the doctor’s solution to cyber-attacks.

  Apparently, though, she’d still needed better locks on her doors.

  “No witnesses?” he repeated.

  “Not the flesh-and-blood kind, but we have security camera footage.”

  She took an iPad, one of the big ones, out of her purse, brought up a video file and handed the tablet to John.

  He hit the play icon, took a look and stopped the video immediately.

  “These three are the thieves?”

  Dr. Lisle nodded. “No one else entered the lab between the time I left the night before the theft and when I returned the morning after.”

  John said, “But these guys—”

  “The one on the right’s a girl,” White River interjected.

  John took a second look and saw his great-grandfather was right.

  “Still, they’re all just kids.”

  “I think they’re no more than 12,” Dr. Lisle said. “Mr. White River says maybe 13 or 14 at the high end.”

  Great-grandfather nodded.

  John asked the doctor, “Do you know of any scientific prodigies with criminal tendencies?”

  She shook her head.

  John thought for a moment. “Still, someone with an understanding of your work’s medical significance, and its potential monetary value, knows three adolescents capable and trustworthy of pulling off this crime, even if they don’t understand the value of what they grabbed.”

  White River said, “Maybe they do.”

  Los Angeles, CA

  As a secret token of the homesickness Rebecca Bramley felt for Canada, she kept the current weather conditions for her hometown of Calgary, Alberta on her iPhone. That morning in late January the Calgary temperature was -8º. Of course, her phone, knowing it was in the U.S., had converted the temperature reading to the Fahrenheit scale. Using the Celsius measurement that Canada had adopted in the 1970s, the number would be -22º.

  The weather in L.A. at the moment was a relatively cool 55º with a partial cloud cover, but sunny and 70º was the prediction for the coming weekend. That was the kind of weather that made Canadians, with the financial means and the free time, flock south to the U.S. in winter. Going somewhere warm when there were icicles hanging from your roof, and possibly your nose, was a treat.

  However, living in a mild climate had made warm, sunny days routine for Rebecca. Humdrum. Unwelcome, even, for Christmas and New Year’s Day. Cold and bracing were what she wanted then.

  What she desired even more than that was the company of her new husband, John Tall Wolf. He, however, was on the far side of the U.S. in Washington, DC. The distance between her and John seemed immense. Canada was more than 150,000 square kilometers — there was the metric system again — larger than the U.S., but three-quarters of the Canadian population lived within 100 miles of the border with the U.S.

  In a lot of people’s minds, or Rebecca’s anyway, that made home seem like a broad but narrow land. The U.S., by contrast, had crowds of people everywhere, coast to coast and border to border. With an astounding, sometimes appalling, number of them on their roads and highways.

  Especially in Los Angeles.

  She avoided the freeways at every opportunity. Surface streets were the way to go for her. Even so, she was always on the lookout for byways the locals and the tourists either eschewed or hadn’t found yet. If her drive to work took longer, so be it. Arriving with her blood pressure in a safe range was more important than saving a few minutes or even an hour.

  Despite any drawbacks she had to deal with, she often reminded herself that after losing her niche in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police she’d landed on her feet in a rather fine fashion. She’d married a man she loved and quickly found a new job in a country that long had been the world’s magnet for people with ambitions for a better life.

  Hordes of immigrants would gladly have traded places with her. Her new job with McGill Investigations International started with a six-figure salary, a housing subsidy for the rent on her new apartment, and a paid three-year lease on the new Audi A7 she was driving. The offices she was renting in Westwood — having declined a site in Beverly Hills — were first class, too.

  All of her perks combined to put more than a little pressure on Rebecca to get her office up and running, providing a positive return on the money Mr. McGill had invested in her. So far, though, she’d been unable to find the four satisfactory associate investigators the business plan allotted to her office. That was just the initial personnel grouping that had been anticipated.

  Los Angeles, with its huge population of wealthy, eccentric and otherwise unpredictable characters, was anticipated to be a major profit center for the company.

  So far, however, Rebecca had managed only to find an office manager she liked, Arcelia Martin. Arcelia had reached the United States by way of Venezuela. Her dad had played four years of major league baseball for the Oakland A’s. That and a successful career transition to the front office of the San Francisco Giants had given his family a path to citizenship and a comfortable standard of living.

  Arcelia’s father had paid her way through four years at the University of California at Berkeley out of his own pocket. He’d told his daughter, “Baseball makes me happy. Study something that makes you happy.”

  Given that measure of license, she’d accumulated a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English. Her father hadn’t asked what line of work she might find with that educational background and was reassured when his daughter had paid her own way through grad school, working in human relations for a Silicon Valley startup.

  “How’d you get that job?” her father had asked.

  “Talked my way into it. You can’t beat an English major for knowing how to use the language.” True enough, but it helped to impress the start-up’s CEO that she was also fluent in Spanish and French.

  When Arcelia told her father she wanted to move to L.A., he gave her one of his old baseball bats and said, “See if you can learn to swing this thing better than I did.”

  He meant, of course, to keep anyone who wanted to steal either her heart or her TV at bay.

  Arcelia was still working on her bat speed when she talked her way into a job with Rebecca Bramley. The first thing, during her employment interview, she’d nodded at the photo of John Tall Wolf on Rebecca’s desk and asked, “Any more like him at home?”

  That set the tone and the two women became fast friends.

  After that, when they spoke of John or potential boyfriends for Arcelia, the two women used French, not English.

  When Rebecca arrived at the office that morning, she asked the always earlier arriving Arcelia, “Anybody need a private eye, today?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  Even with Patti Grant out of the White House and James J. McGill having exited with her, the other offices of the new McGill enterprise still enjoyed an afterglow effect; clients found their way to them with a variety of investigative needs, corporate and personal. In L.A., however, once you stepped out of the limelight, people gravitated to those who still basked in it.

  Rebecca moved on to her customary second question for Arcelia. “Any of the job recruiters turn up an investigator candidate for us?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Double damn. I think maybe I better start checking with my old colleagues in the RCMP.”

  Arcelia feigned a look of horror. “What, bring more immigrants into
our country?”

  “Yeah, I know. After you and I got in, it was time to slam the door.”

  “Right,” Arcelia said. “I mean, first we brought in farm labor, then techies for Silicon Valley and now we can’t even grow our own private eyes?”

  Rebecca sighed. “Apparently not any that meet my exacting standards. You think Lieutenant Proctor might chew my ear off if I ask her for any more referrals?”

  Emily Proctor was with the LAPD. Jim McGill had met her working a case in town and been impressed. He’d arranged with Emily to bird-dog any prospective coppers looking to move into the private sector. Rebecca eagerly had taken advantage of the connection … only she hadn’t liked any of the six police detectives that Lieutenant Proctor had sent her way.

  Three of them hadn’t wanted to let her review their job records; the other three, she felt, wouldn’t be comfortable working for a woman. So she hadn’t even bothered asking for their records. On their way out, two of them had called her a bitch and one had given her the finger.

  It had taken serious exercises in self-restraint for Rebecca not to start fights with those three. Calling on Lieutenant Proctor again probably wouldn’t be either wise or helpful.

  But Arcelia told Rebecca, “You don’t have to call; she’s waiting in your office.”

  “Emily Proctor is?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Rebecca winced. “Did she come to chew me out?”

  Arcelia grinned. “No, she said something about looking for a job.”

  Jackson, Wyoming

  Marlene Flower Moon stood on the balcony of a ski chalet adjacent to the Jackson Hole Ski Resort. The temperature was -3º, but she wore only a deerskin dress that left her arms uncovered and had a hemline that stopped just above her knees. Her feet were bare. She’d taken down the deer herself.

  As the animal lay dying in the snow, she’d thanked it for giving her its hide.

  She’d skinned it herself, too.

  She left the meat for whatever scavengers that happened by first.

  The skin was tanned by an immigrant from Italy, a couturier who’d had to leave home abruptly to escape charges of massive income tax evasion. His business had collapsed behind him, but he still had a fine eye, a deft hand and a sublime sense of design. He’d lit out for the American West as a place to disappear.

  After all, who would imagine him taking shelter in a land of cowboys?

  Marlene had spotted him the moment he’d hit town. When she’d brought him the deerskin and asked for a dress made from the animal’s skin, he’d almost swooned. To use material that had so recently been alive and fashion it to flatter so beautiful a woman … he wanted to ravish her at that very moment. Take her every measurement and not just with a tailor’s tape, but with his mouth, his hands, his …

  Better judgment asserted itself. To make the garment and see the woman wear it, that would be his reward. Well, that and to start a new fashion line using only leather from the freshest hides of wild beasts. If the animal-rights people wailed and shrieked at him, he would spit on them in return.

  The designer’s new business plan was but one of a multitude he’d had that never came to fruition. After Marlene had the deerskin dress in her possession, she’d turned the couturier in to the FBI. He was shipped home and promptly jailed.

  Marlene hadn’t wanted anyone wearing a copy of her dress.

  She wore it, though, only when she walked in the forests of the nearby national parks, Yellowstone and Grand Teton. She might just as well have gone nude. Cold air couldn’t bother her. Neither would any acorn she stepped on or bramble she brushed against. She wore the dress to see if she might understand vulnerability.

  The way the deer must have felt when she’d claimed its life for herself.

  As she stood on the chalet’s balcony, she was unable to empathize with the idea of being a victim. She’d strode fearlessly through the high woodlands that conservation efforts had plentifully restocked with predators: grizzlies, mountain lions, wolves and, of course, coyotes.

  But none like her, of course.

  All the carnivores of the wild gave her a wide berth.

  She was something more dangerous than they were, and they knew it.

  So why had she been frightened — how was it that she could be unnerved — by a woman’s soft voice that had come to her as she slept? Even she needed her rest, and that was when the voice told her, “It is time to stop.”

  That was all, but said three times.

  The voice’s tone was gentle but its insistence brooked no refusal.

  Time to stop what, Marlene had wondered.

  And who on earth might insist that she do anything?

  Didn’t this foolish woman understand who she was dealing with?

  Then after months of plaguing her sleep, the injunction became a warning. “It is time to stop … or I will stop you.” And that was when Marlene understood who her tormentor was. Serafina Wolf y Padilla, John Tall Wolf’s adoptive mother.

  Marlene knew that Serafina had sent night terrors to Bly Black Knife, John Tall Wolf’s biological mother, when Bly had tried to reclaim custody of her son after he’d lived for six years with his adoptive parents. The targeted nightmares had worked. Bly had dropped her custody suit.

  But did the foolish woman think she could actually scare Marlene?

  Impose her will upon Marlene?

  Serafina was reputed to be a witch, and her husband was said to be a conjurer, but did they truly think they were of a stature to confront her? Someone whose very nature was far beyond their power to comprehend. And yet …

  They had taken the risk. That had to be considered.

  Coyote was nothing if not calculating. Was it possible they had some resource at their disposal that she didn’t? Could they contrive some sort of a trap that might actually ensnare her? If they did manage that, what might they do next?

  That was when Marlene remembered something Tall Wolf had once told her.

  What if the time came when she did get to eat him and didn’t like the way he tasted?

  That would be a bitter irony indeed. Marlene needed time to think. She’d handed in her resignation as Secretary of the Interior and left Washington, the idea of eventually becoming president having lost its appeal. She’d seen how that job worked at close range, and the crushing burden of obligations that went with it had destroyed her taste for the job.

  Taste. There was that word again. If there was no satisfaction, no pleasure, no memorable flavor to be had in taking revenge against Tall Wolf or anyone else, why bother?

  Marlene was tempted to pay a visit to Tall Wolf’s parents, get a feeling if they could do more than talk a good game. Of course, if it turned out that they could, and they were setting a trap for her, then going to them would be exactly the wrong move.

  They might also be ready for her to approach Tall Wolf himself in defiance of Serafina’s warning.

  But what about Tall Wolf’s new wife, the Canadian woman?

  What about Rebecca Bramley?

  Prometheus Labs, Washington, DC

  The outer door to Dr. Yvette Lisle’s laboratory, in a building adjacent to the American University campus in Northwest Washington, had better locks than John Tall Wolf had expected. The doctor had to swipe a key-card and submit both a thumb-print and a retinal scan to gain entry. There were no metal key or number-pad alternatives.

  The door itself, John found once Dr. Lisle had opened it, was a hefty, closely fitted slab of steel. It wasn’t a bank vault but it would withstand any attack short of an acetylene torch. The adjacent masonry wall was also formidable.

  All of which made John wonder how a trio of middle school brats had effected an illegal entry. Of course, if guile had been used instead of brawn … but how did you outsmart biometric protection measures? He didn’t recall that being covered in the coursework at Glynco, Georgia, where prospective federal agents were sent to learn their trade. Then again, that part of his education had taken place several years a
go.

  Before the advent of the iPhone, even.

  Could be he needed a refresher course.

  Once John entered the lab with Dr. Lisle and Alan White River, he saw that the space’s electrical lighting was supplemented with daylight, courtesy of a series of skylights.

  So, maybe the adolescent thieves had the climbing skills of young monkeys. Make your way up to the two-story roof and you could drop right in. Climb back out again, too.

  Before John could say a word, Dr. Lisle noticed he was looking up and disabused him of that line of thought.

  She told her guests, “The roof has weight sensors. You put anything heavier than a chihuahua up there, you’d think there was an air-raid siren going off. And the skylights are made of polycarbonate resin not glass. You could beat on them with a hammer and the panes wouldn’t break.”

  Then she added, “They would get scratched, though, and I don’t see any signs of damage.”

  Neither did John.

  Dr. Lisle led him and White River into her office and invited them to sit in the two guest chairs. She stepped behind her desk and used her key-card and a thumb to open a drawer. No retinal scan was required to do that.

  She took out a MacBook Pro computer and put it on the desk in front of her. She raised the lid and said, “This is one of my backup machines.”

  “The others are the same make and model?” John asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you tell them apart?”

  “Other than the fact that I brought this one from home this morning?”

  She tapped the keyboard and showed John the monitor. She’d written something in a language he didn’t recognize. White River did, it was plain to see.

  “Grandfather?” John asked.

  White River had told him not to include “great” when addressing him.

  “It is a transliteration of the Umo-ho — Omaha — language. If I have it right, Dr. Lisle has written, ‘What is your name?’”

  She smiled, nodded and hit the return key.

  The machine responded by producing an audio message in English, “I am number two.”