After dinner, Mark’s mother got him ready for bed. Dressed in his favorite pajamas, the ones covered with the blind superhero Daredevil, Mark washed his face and brushed his teeth. His mother read him two stories before she turned out the light and left him alone in his bedroom. The killer saw the mother mix herself a drink and watch a movie. She was tall and skinny, with pinched features and very short, blond hair. A pretty woman, the killer thought, but obviously lonely. After the late news, the mother stripped naked and crawled into bed without washing her face or brushing her teeth. She read a magazine for a few minutes, then turned off the lamp, and quickly fell asleep.
The killer waited in that tree until midnight. The knife felt heavy and hot. With surprising grace, the killer stepped from the tree, walked up to the front door, and slipped the knife between the lock and jamb. The killer was soon standing inside a dark and quiet house, tastefully decorated in natural wood and pastel colors, with stylish prints hanging on the walls. With confidence, the killer explored the living room, bathroom, and study downstairs. Then the killer walked upstairs and into the master bedroom, where the mother slept alone. She had thrown off her covers, and the killer studied her naked body, pale white in the moonlight streaming in from the window. Small breasts, three dark moles just above the light brown pubic hair. She was almost too skinny, prominent ribcage, hipbones rising up sharply. The killer knelt down beside the bed as if to pray. Then the killer did pray.
Later, after that prayer was over, the killer walked down the hallway into the boy’s room. Mark was curled up in a fetal position. An active dreamer, he was mumbling something the killer could not understand. The killer recognized the superhero on Mark’s pajamas. Daredevil, the blind superhero, who used his other highly developed senses to fight crime. The killer’s eyes closed. The killer wondered if the boy could be found by using other senses. The boy’s smell, toothpaste, sleepy sweat, socks. By touch, warm and sticky skin. With eyes now open, the killer leaned over close to the boy and softly licked his face. Salt, something bitter, a slight sweetness. The boy stirred, opened his eyes, and stared at the killer’s face, which shimmered and changed like a pond after a rock had been tossed into it. The killer set two owl feathers on the pillow beside Mark Jones’s head and then gently lifted the boy from the bed.
2
Hunting Weather
1
The Aristotle Little Hawk Fan Club
JACK WILSON GREW UP white and orphaned in Seattle. Dreaming of being Indian, he’d read every book he could find about the First Americans and had been delighted to learn that they raised their children communally. An Indian child moved freely between tepees, between families. A child could be loved and disciplined by any adult in the tribe. During the long, cold nights, every campfire was a welcome sight for a lonely child. Wilson loved the idea, and tried to find some tribal connection with his eleven foster families, but could only advance a little beyond uncomfortable formality with one household before he was forced to pack up his meager belongings and move to another. Lying in strange beds, Wilson read about Indians and recreated himself in the image he found inside those books. He saw himself as a solitary warrior on horseback, crossing miles of empty plains, in search of his family.
Wilson’s mother had died of cancer when he was a baby, and his father had died in a car wreck when he was ten, but something in Wilson refused to believe in their deaths. He always expected a phone call from her, to see him come bursting through the front door with unexpected news. But it was a lie. Wilson knew about liars. And what the TV and movies said about Indians were lies. That they were evil. That they raped white women and ate white children. Indians were said to worship the devil. His teachers tried to tell him all these bad things about Indians, but Wilson had always fought them.
“So,” said his high school principal when Wilson was sent in to see him yet again. “What about Indians this time?”
“I’m part Shilshomish Indian,” Wilson said. “I looked it up. There was an old medicine man named Red Fox who lived in a shack on Bainbridge Island. Back in the 1920s or something. His Indian name was Red Fox, but his American name was Joe Wilson. My dad used to say that Joe Wilson was his great-uncle.”
“Well, now, that’s very interesting. How does it have anything to do with your visit to my office?”
“Mrs. Jorgenson said all the Indians were dead. I told her it wasn’t true. I said I was Indian. She said I was a liar, and I said she was the liar. Then she sent me here.”
“Are you lying?”
“No,” Wilson said. “I promise. I looked it up. Well, my dad used to say he’d heard of a relative named Joe Wilson, who was a crazy old man. But that must be Red Fox, don’t you think?”
Twelve years later, in 1977, when he was a rookie police officer in the Fourth Precinct of the Seattle Police Department, Jack Wilson still believed that Red Fox was a relative. He walked a beat downtown and knew the names of most of the homeless Indians who crowded together beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct and in Pioneer Square. Lester, Old Joe, and Little Joe always together, Agnes and her old man, who was simply known as Old Man, the Android Brothers, who’d come here from Spokane years earlier and were collecting spare change for bus tickets back home. Beautiful Mary, who was still beautiful, even though a keloid scar ran from the corner of her left eye to her chin. She thought Wilson was handsome and called him by some word in her tribal language. She told him that it meant First Son, but it actually meant Shadow.
One evening, Beautiful Mary pushed Wilson into a dark doorway, unzipped his pants, pushed her hand inside, and stroked his penis. Wilson’s knees went weak. He leaned against the door for support. He tried to kiss Mary but, still stroking him, she turned her face away. Then, without warning, she released Wilson and stepped back.
“What’s wrong?” Wilson asked, his face red and sweaty.
Beautiful Mary shook her head. Wilson grabbed her arm with more force than he’d planned. He could see the pain in Mary’s eyes. She twisted away from him and ran away.
Beautiful Mary was almost forty years old when she was murdered. Wedged between a Dumpster and the back wall of a parking garage beneath the Viaduct, she had been raped, then stabbed repeatedly with a broken bottle. Wilson had immediately emptied his stomach on the pavement. Then he had found a stray newspaper and covered her face. Her eyes were still open. He had called in quickly, but it took an hour for the ambulance to show up. While the attendants were loading Mary into the ambulance, one homicide detective arrived to investigate.
“You found her body, correct?” the detective asked Wilson.
“Yes, sir.”
“And?”
“And what, sir?”
“And what did you notice? Any suspicious people? Witnesses? Evidence?”
“I didn’t notice, sir. I, I knew her. Her name is Mary, sir. Beautiful Mary.”
“She isn’t so beautiful anymore,” said the detective. He took a few notes, closed his book, and walked away. Wilson had assumed they would solve the case quickly. Beautiful Mary was a very visible member of the homeless community. Somebody must have seen something. Wilson read the newspaper the next day, looking for a story about Beautiful Mary. Nothing. No story the next morning, or during the next two weeks, either. He asked a few questions around the station house. Nothing. Three weeks after Mary’s death, Wilson bumped into the police detective who was supposed to be investigating her murder.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Wilson. “Have you learned anything more about Mary?”
“Mary?” asked the detective. “Who’s Mary?”
“Don’t you remember? Mary? Beautiful Mary? The Indian woman who was killed downtown? I found her body. A few weeks ago?”
“Oh, shit, of course. I remember you. The rookie. Lost your breakfast.” Wilson blushed. “Shit, that case is low priority, rook. One dead Indian don’t add up to much. Some other Indian guy killed her, you know. Happens all the time. Those people are like that. You ask me, it’s pest control.”
“Sir, I don’t think so.” Wilson fought the urge to punch the detective.
“You don’t think what, rook?”
“I know those people, sir. The Indians. They’re my people. They wouldn’t hurt each other. We’re not like that.”
“How the hell are they your people?”
“I’m Indian, sir.”
The detective looked at Wilson’s blue eyes and blond hair. Wilson was tall, six foot, but slight of build. The detective laughed. Indian, my ass, he thought.
“Okay, Sitting Bull,” said the detective, “I’m happy you’re so proud of your people. But it’s still low priority. You want to look into it, be my guest.”
“I just might do that, sir.”
The detective patted Wilson on the head, as if he were a dog, and walked away, laughing to himself. “Indian,” he said and laughed some more.
Wilson tried to talk to the Pioneer Square Indians, Old Joe and Little Joe, Agnes and Old Man, the Android Brothers, but they refused to give him any answers about Beautiful Mary’s murder.
Wilson eventually arrested a homeless white man named Stink and brought him in. The detective who had dismissed Wilson took over the case, led Stink into an interrogation room, and obtained a confession.
Stink hung himself in his cell that night, before he ever had a chance to go to trial, and Wilson was issued a small, vaguely insulting commendation for his “valuable assistance” in solving the crime. But Wilson had earned some respect, and he made detective in 1980. Working homicide, he quickly learned that monsters are real. He also knew that most of the monsters were white men. Plain, quiet men who raped and murdered children. Plain, quiet men who cut women into pieces. Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, the I-5 Killer. Famous killers, obscure killers. The white man who grabbed his infant son by the ankles and smashed his head against the wall. The white man who doused his sleeping girlfriend with gasoline and then dropped a lit match on her face. While black and brown men were at war with each other, their automatic gunfire filling the urban night, the white men were hunting their own mothers, lovers, and daughters. Wilson never grew numb to any of it. Every Sunday, he knelt at a pew and confessed the sins of others. He worked hard, helped solve more than half of his cases, and slept poorly at night. His record was distinguished only by the small number of days he called in sick. While the other detectives had families and outside interests, Wilson had only his tribe of monsters. Wilson worked homicide for eight years before he injured his knee while on duty. He stepped out of his car near the end of his shift, slipped on oily pavement, and tore a couple of ligaments all to hell. He was desk-bound for a year, all the while in fruitless rehabilitation of his knee. Finally, he retired on a full disability pension. Since he had never married, or even been in love, he wound up alone in his little apartment on Capitol Hill.
A year into his retirement, after another boring Monday Night Football game, he was forced to weigh his options as a middle-aged, lonely ex-cop. Somehow, he found himself missing the monsters. He had no idea how that happened, but he knew he needed something to fill the hole that had opened inside himself. He could become a drunk, spend all his time in one of the cop bars, and get free beer and pity from active officers. He could sink into a deep depression, swallow the barrel of his revolver, and be buried with full honors. Or he could do something. He could, for example, sit down and write. Now, he had never written before, but he had always been good with a story, had always loved books. So he bought the most expensive typewriter he could find, because real writers didn’t work on computers. He brought the typewriter back to his apartment and began to type.
His first book, titled Little Hawk, was published by a small local press. It received fairly decent reviews and sold a few thousand copies, so Wilson was hooked. Wilson’s second book, Rain Dance, based on the murder of Beautiful Mary, was released a year later and became a regional best-seller. Both of Wilson’s books starred Aristotle Little Hawk, the very last Shilshomish Indian, who was a practicing medicine man and private detective in Seattle. He was tall, so tall, according to the first paragraph of Little Hawk, that his long, black hair was taller than most people all by itself. Little Hawk was brutally handsome, of course, with a hawkish nose, walnut skin, and dark eyes.
A beautiful white woman fell in love with Little Hawk in each book, although he was emotionally distant and troubled. The beautiful white women fell in love with Little Hawk because he was emotionally distant and troubled. White women wrote letters to Wilson and confessed their secret love for Little Hawk. They wished they could find a man like Little Hawk, a quiet warrior with a good heart. Wilson knew it was all sort of ridiculous, but he loved the money and attention. Fan letters, small articles in the local newspapers, a three-minute interview on public radio. His fellow officers thought he had become rich and famous, so he went out and bought a brand-new 1994 Chevy pickup with a vanity license plate that read SHAMAN.
Lately, a New York literary agent had signed him up.
“Indians are big right now,” said Rupert, the agent. “Publishers are looking for that shaman thing, you know? The New Age stuff, after-death experiences, the healing arts, talking animals, sacred vortexes, that kind of thing. And you’ve got all that, plus a murder mystery. That’s perfect.”
Rupert had gotten Wilson a deal with a New York publisher for his third book, which he had yet to write. His modest success had him struggling with writer’s block. Every morning, he woke up early, ate his breakfast, and stared at the blank page in his typewriter. He had spent most of the advance money, and his agent and publisher were putting pressure on him to finish.
“How’s the book coming along?” asked Rupert.
“It’s going well,” said Wilson, lying.
“They want to publish in the fall,” said Rupert. “You think you can finish in time?”
“Sure,” said Wilson. After he hung up the phone, he suddenly felt dizzy and nearly passed out. He needed help.
Trying to relax, Wilson drove over to the Seattle Police Department’s Fourth Precinct on Second Avenue, his old haunt. He parked in a reserved space, but all the officers recognized his vanity plates and never had him towed. He limped into the precinct, still blue-eyed and blond, although he had put on forty pounds in the last couple of years. He was forty-seven years old, bulky, and working on an ulcer.
“Hey there, Mr. Mystery,” said the desk sergeant, who often felt sorry for Wilson. The sergeant thought Wilson spent entirely too much time at the precinct, as if he were a twenty-two-year-old former high school football star who still went to games because he had nothing else to do. “How you doing?”
“Doing fine, doing fine,” Wilson said. “What have you got?”
Wilson depended on the desk sergeant for inside information. The sergeant never gave him anything important, really, just interesting details that might find their way into his books. The first Little Hawk mystery was based on a true case of what some might put down to spontaneous combustion. An elderly woman had simply turned to ash while watching television in her apartment. There was no rational explanation for it, no hint of foul play. She had been sitting in a chair that also should have gone up in flames. But the chair was just a little charred, mostly intact, and covered with her ash. In the book, the victim was a gorgeous fashion model. In real life, the old lady’s case was quietly filed away and never mentioned again. In the book, Little Hawk caught the murderer, an ex-fireman who’d been spurned by the model. The dead model’s best friend, an even more beautiful and successful model, had fallen in love with Little Hawk.
“I’ve got a good one for you,” said the desk sergeant, wanting to give Wilson something more substantial than he’d given him before. “But you’ve got to keep this one way under your hat.”
“I don’t wear a hat,” said Wilson. It was an old joke between the two men.
“Well, then, keep it in your shorts,” said the sergeant, finishing the joke.
“What is it?”
“You h
eard about that white guy they found dead the other day?”
“David Rogers?” asked Wilson, who knew about the white man’s disappearance from the Tulalip Tribal Casino. Wilson kept a neat file of newspaper clippings about such crimes.
“No, not him,” said the sergeant. “He’s still missing. I’m talking about the other one. The one they found in that house in Fremont.”
“Yeah, the Summers guy, what about him?”
“Well,” said the sergeant, glancing around to make sure nobody could hear him. Everybody in the precinct knew he gave Wilson inside information, but he’d never before revealed details about an open case. “The killer left two feathers behind. Like a signature or something.”
“Feathers?” Wilson blinked once or twice. “What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? Feathers. Like as in Indian feathers, you know? But I can’t tell you what kind. We can’t go public with that. The city would go crazy.”
“Really?”
“Really. I thought that would interest you. Kind of right up your alley, ain’t it?”
“Maybe,” said Wilson.
“And that UW student, David Rogers, who disappeared from the Indian casino? I won’t say the killer did that one, but we’re looking real closely at it. And you know that kid, Mark Jones, the one who was kidnapped?”
“Yes.”
“This killer took him.”
“How do you know that?”
“The killer left behind two feathers on that little boy’s bed. Hell, we haven’t even told his parents what those feathers mean. What do you think they’d do if they knew about the killer?”
“Go crazy.”
“Yeah. And this killer’s got a name. You want to hear it?”
Wilson nodded. He knew that police officers and newspaper reporters loved to give clever names to the monsters.
“We’re calling him the Indian Killer. Good, ain’t it? Now get the hell out of here before I get in trouble.”