couldn’t help noticing you carry a double-action revolver, Lieutenant,” she said. “Looking at the other troopers I thought the Oklahoma Highway Patrol issued Glock 22s.”
He looked as if her query surprised him. It clearly didn’t displease him.
“Smith & Wesson 657,” he said with unmistakable pride. “It’s a .41 Magnum, N-frame, stainless. Custom Hogue grips. Got me a special exemption from the department to carry it. Helps I’m a Comanche and all, plus I’ve been with the patrol since old Quanah Parker was a lance corporal. I got nothing against the Glocks—they’re pretty good guns, even if I can’t help feeling like they’re flimsy for being half made out of plastic and all. And there’s nothing wrong with .40 caliber. I just like the authority the .41 Mag gives you, without it having so much recoil it takes all day to haul it back down on target every time you shoot, like a .44 Magnum does. And maybe some of that cowboy wheel-gun mystique.”
He slapped the weapon affectionately. “This pup got me all the way through the fast drive to Kuwait City in ’91. Not much call to use it then, although it was a power of comfort to me. Been out of the holster a time or two since, though. And never once let me down.”
“Kuwait City, 1991? Wait, you were Force RECON?”
“That’s right, ma’am. You wouldn’t be former military yourself, would you? Or from a service family? You seem to know a fair amount about the forces.”
“I have a lot of friends in the military. But—you’re a Marine.” She already knew better than to say ex-Marine.
“Semper fi, ma’am!”
“The young man in the photos on your desk is Army.”
Ten Bears’ thin-lipped mouth tightened ever so slightly, and his eyes narrowed just a hair. “Boy always did know how to piss me off,” he muttered. “Even if he did make Ranger.”
“Well, thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll let you know if I find anything that I think you might be able to use.”
“You look like a woman who knows how to take care of herself,” he said.
“I like to think I can.”
“Well, this isn’t the time or the place to show how tough and independent you are.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“There’s a mass murderer on the loose,” he said. “You didn’t forget already?”
“No,” she said slowly. “I didn’t.”
“I’m just joshing you,” he said. “About the forgetting part. Not about the murderer. I don’t think this fella plays well with others.”
“I’ll try to stay away from him.”
“You be sure to do that. Let us professionals handle him. We do a bad enough job without any help.”
She wasn’t sure quite how to take that. He seemed like a man who, for all his cockeyed banter, took his job very seriously. She also didn’t think his tongue was more than halfway in his cheek, and wondered just who wasn’t doing their job quite so well.
She also knew better than to ask. Lieutenant Ten Bears clearly thought of himself as a stand-up cop. He’d never bad-mouth a fellow officer to an outsider. But he might not be above dropping some sidewise comments about his comrades who didn’t measure up.
“One more thing before you go,” he told her as she started for the door of his small office. “We got us some young South Plains braves here in western Oklahoma who don’t much like white-eyes. And they play rough. Tempers are extrashort right now since some of them don’t like it that we got us a great big new casino the Nation’s opening up in a few days.”
He laughed at her expression. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They can’t fire me for calling them braves. Any more than they can make us Indians call ourselves Native Americans. That fight we won, anyway. Maybe it’s a trend.”
Annja had to laugh. She found herself liking the lieutenant.
As she left she thought, I don’t believe in werewolves. But there are plenty of things I don’t believe in that have a nasty habit of turning up, anyway.
3
The site was a bust.
The sun was setting when Annja got there. The only people present in the mellow dusk light slanting beneath gray clouds were some gloved techs moving gingerly around inside the yellow-tape perimeter whipped constantly by the wind, and a pair of Comanche County deputies in cowboy hats. Both were lean young men, one with hair cut so painfully short it suggested a recent military discharge, the other with gleaming black braids hanging over the dark brown shoulders of his jacket. They both gave her a rock-hard look.
She told the deputies Lieutenant Ten Bears had sent her. Having seen more than her share of interdepartmental rivalry in law enforcement she wasn’t sure how they’d respond. But they both instantly broke into smiles. When she showed them her ID they readily allowed her access.
“I’ve seen you on TV, Ms. Creed,” the braided deputy said. He looked marginally older than his partner, and was clearly senior. “I know you’ll be careful. Not like some people we’ve had out here. And on a totally unrelated subject, the FBI just left.” He frowned. “I reckon we’re mainly out here to keep them federal boys takin’ over altogether.”
“I was surprised they didn’t offer to tip us on the way out,” his partner said. He reminded her slightly of the young man in the pictures on Ten Bears’ desk, only not so handsome.
Annja nodded, keeping her expression neutral. Like most local law-enforcement types, their regard for the self-billed world’s leading investigative agency tended to vary proportionally to their firsthand experience with them.
For her part Annja tried to keep on good terms with people. Especially the ones with guns and implied or explicit permission to use them.
She smiled and nodded in response to the deputies’ conversation, which wasn’t hard since they seemed to be pleasant and earnest young men. She was surprised and flattered when the junior deputy asked shyly for her autograph. He seemed way too impressed when she signed his notebook with a little note of thanks for his help.
Inside the tape the techs nodded brusquely toward her and went about their business. They kept studiously clear of the dig itself, marked off and gridded by string stretched between stakes. If she wasn’t supposed to be there, they clearly reasoned, the county boys would never have let her step over the tape. The evidence team had jobs to do and not much daylight left to do them. She guessed nobody wanted to be out there with a generator going and stand lights shining as the temperature dropped and the prairie wind came up.
She walked around with her arms crossed in front of her. The wind was indeed picking up as the sun fell toward the rumpled horizon in the west.
The geographic region lay in the Red Beds Plains, which ran all the way from Kansas down across the Red River into Texas. Unlike the true Great Plains farther north, this land was wide but rolling, dotted with small stands of trees. There weren’t any signs of cultivation in view. This particular part of the Red Beds was walled off
