White Ghost Ridge Read online

  “Em, sarge,” Mendoza said as she stood behind him.

  “What?”

  “You kinda don’t have any underwear on.”

  “Damn it! Sorry!” he said as he used the gown to cover himself. “Guess they took off all my clothes when I passed out. I woke up in some scanning machine. Thought I was dead! Anyway, nothing you haven’t seen before, Mendoza.”

  “Yes, but not that much!”

  “Look away.”

  Locklear stood shakily and pulled on his clothes. Then he sat again on the bed and, as he bent down to put his socks on, the ground shot up towards him. He took a deep breath and waited for the dizziness to settle.

  “Are you OK, sarge?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mendoza came closer and pulled his socks and boots on.

  “I’m helping you get dressed but I’m not taking you out of here. I’ll pick you up first thing in the morning when the doctor is satisfied that you’re OK.”

  Locklear frowned and lay back on the bed.

  “I was telling you about Looks-Twice ...”

  “Yes, you were, right before you flashed me.”

  Locklear grinned. “My head hurts so much I can’t think straight but he ...”

  “He what?”

  “He called me a half-breed.”

  “And that hurt you?”

  “No, it didn’t hurt me, Mendoza. It’s just ... he said it as soon as I walked up his steps. He didn’t have time to get that good a look at me. It made me wonder if he knew who I was and knew who my family were.”

  “Sarge, when I first learnt that you were Native American, I hadn’t noticed it before that. I mean, I could see you weren’t white but I didn’t guess what your exact background was. But now that I know, yes, it’s obvious and I’m sure people around here can see it a lot quicker than people over east.”

  “I don’t think it’s that, Mendoza. There’s more to this. Something is unsettling me. I feel ... strange.”

  “Yes, it’s called concussion.”

  “Oh, Mendoza will you listen to me?”

  “Sorry. OK, what’s troubling you?”

  “I realise that maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way around. I’ve been scaring people since I got here and if I’m not scaring them they’re insisting they know me. First Cindy Geddis, then a native woman at the craft store, Han Pauls and now Looks-Twice. He actually spat at me.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  “Maybe Looks-Twice doesn’t know who my native family are. Maybe it’s my white family he knows. Grass told me a story about how the ridge near his house came to be known as White Ghost Ridge. It’s a pretty awful tale. A lot of Native Americans were killed at Wounded Knee and in retaliation the tribe in Pine Ridge killed a whole wagon train of white settlers. There were only two survivors. An albino woman and her little boy.”

  “And what? You think that our White Ghost is related to this woman and that … what? That you’re both descendants of her? That you’re related to the White Ghost?” Mendoza laughed. “Sarge, your concussion is worse than I thought!”

  “I’m serious, Mendoza!” Locklear snapped.

  The smile slipped from the young cop’s face. “OK, sarge. Sorry! Well, look, let’s just get this Tommy Rosenberg thing out of the way and then go back and talk to Looks-Twice. See what he can tell you. Unless, of course, sarge ...”

  Mendoza stood, walked to the window and turned to face him.

  “Unless you don’t want to know? Maybe that’s what’s really troubling you. Finding out you have family somewhere would change your life completely. You’d have people to care for. People who might want to care for you. Or maybe you’d find out they’re not good people. People who are different from you and your principles. I guess that’s something you need to think about. Do you want to open that can of worms? Is it something you can handle?”

  Locklear stood and walked to the window. He looked out into the dark night. A flash of lightning lit up the sky beyond White Ghost Ridge.

  Mendoza turned to him and studied his side profile. She raised her hand up and smoothed down his thick black hair which had become matted on the pillow.

  “It would still be better to know, though? Wouldn’t it?” she said. “If he knows something about you, you can decide what to do with that information. You can walk away or you can face it. Whatever you decide, I’m here for you.”

  Locklear exhaled. “OK. I’ll see you first thing in the morning, Mendoza, and don’t be late. It’s time to wrap up this case.”

  Chapter 27

  Paytah Hunter was exactly where he said he would be when Locklear drove by the intersection of Village and 18. The casually dressed youth was standing on the corner with a colourful backpack strung on his shoulder. He slithered into the car and shook Mendoza’s hand – but he didn’t look at her.

  She noticed that the young man’s hand was sweaty and his face was tightly set. Locklear pulled out and joined 18 due west.

  “Why are you going this way? Take the loop around Bia road. It’s shorter,” Paytah ordered, without looking up.

  “I don’t know that way,” Locklear replied as he eyed the nervous youth in the back seat.

  He noticed Paytah slide lower down in the back seat as they passed Maggie’s craft store. The woman was outside, looking into the distance as though she was searching for something. For the third time in days she locked onto Locklear’s car with such intensity that he too wanted to sink in the seat to avoid her stare. After they passed the store, Paytah sat up again and began to play with his cell phone. Locklear wondered if the woman was a relative of Paytah’s and if it was him she was looking for.

  “Do you live on this street?” he asked.

  Paytah made no reply.

  “OK, good to know,” Locklear said sarcastically as he glanced sideways at Mendoza for help.

  “Hey, kid!” she barked.

  Paytah put his phone down and shyly looked the trooper in the eye.

  “I think we should use this time for you to educate us on your activities,” she said.

  Paytah thrust his phone into his pocket and stared out of the window. “OK.”

  For the rest of the one-hour-and-forty-minute drive, Paytah Little-Eagle told Locklear and Mendoza about how, at Looks-Twice and Albert Whitefeather’s suggestion, he singled Tommy Rosenberg out on campus and built up a friendship with the socially awkward, lonely young man. He told them how Tommy trusted him and believed his story about being a city Native and how he had no interest in the culture or the history of his people. Paytah passed on information given to him by the trusting student about his parents and their colleagues’ travel plans which resulted in INTENT having valuable information about their next targets. Paytah explained how INTENT knew that they could not bring the diplomats to justice but instead waged a war on them by intercepting their missions and retrieving many artefacts being transported for sale.

  “So that’s what Professor Rosenberg meant when he said Whitefeather had been a thorn in his side for a long time,” Locklear said.

  Paytah told how they were funded to stop the traffickers by thousands of philanthropists but that they had failed to prevent a huge percentage of the thefts as items appeared on a secret website for sale, about how the group cared not only about the artefacts of their own community but of others and how a global movement was soon established to try stop the illegal sales. Paytah recalled how many of the items were never noticed as being stolen due to the cunning of museum curators, skilled forgers and money-hungry diplomats whose immunity made them excellent transporters of the goods.

  “How did Tommy get his grandfather to allow him to bring a Native American to an illegal dig?”

  Paytah laughed. “The professor didn’t want any of his students on site. They’d have to record what they found and he didn’t want any paper trail or to answer any awkward questions from smart grad students. These goods were going directly for sale. I was hoping I’d find out where but I couldn’t ge
t that out of Tommy. He probably didn’t know. He told his grandfather he’d bring a friend named Jim Hunter to help dig. I guess he was expecting a white kid. Tommy picked me up on campus and we drove to the site. Met Professor Rosenberg there. You should have seen his face when he saw me!” Paytah grinned.

  Even Locklear laughed at this.

  “I had Tommy prepared for how his grandfather might not like Native Americans so he told him this big story about how I was a city kid who didn’t have any involvement with the culture. Rosenberg had no option but to buy it. I was already there. It’s funny, right?”

  “It’s funny, Paytah, but it could have been dangerous,” Locklear said.

  Paytah said nothing for a while, then added, “On the way there Tommy told me that the other professor meeting us there was bringing one guy to dig but that he was pretty gullible.”

  “Poor Carter,” whispered Mendoza.

  Locklear tapped at the steering wheel as a question came to him. It was about the failures, the artefacts INTENT didn’t manage to save from being sold.

  “How did you know about the failures? Say the museum puts a copy of an artefact in place and sells the original, how would INTENT know it was ever stolen, especially if the website selling the goods is secret?”

  “That’s the biggest problem we face now. We don’t know as much as we used to. There was a guy working for INTENT a while back. He was able to find out what was stolen and who was selling it, but in the end it became too risky for him. It was long before I met up with Tommy Rosenberg and the group were trying to focus in on the professor. The guy was a cop but he left the organisation and joined the Native movement instead. Looks-twice said he was a coward in the end and couldn’t take the heat.”

  “A cop?”

  “Yeah, he was a mastermind at computers. That’s how he knew what was for sale. There was nothing he couldn’t find on the internet. He could literally infiltrate any site.”

  Mendoza looked at Locklear and watched as his hands tightened around the steering wheel.

  “What was his name?” she asked as nonchalantly as she could muster.

  Paytah shrugged. “I’ve only been working with Looks-Twice a couple of years so it was before my time but I know the guy was only part Native. Part-Irish, I think.”

  Mendoza turned and raised her eyebrows at Locklear.

  Locklear kept his eyes on the road and gave a very slight shake of his head, so Mendoza knew not to reveal that they knew O’Brien and now knew that O’Brien was a double agent or had been. She also knew that the fact that he had been giving information to a side that was fighting for a good cause was immaterial to Locklear.

  “How are we going to do this? Mendoza asked.

  Locklear took a sharp intake of breath. “I didn’t sleep a wink after you left. Some patient was roaring all night. So, I’ve had a long night in the hospital to think about this. I drove the nurses crazy until they let me out of bed to use the phone and I put in a call to Rubin in the early hours of the morning. He knows a little about diplomatic relations and he said that we can’t arrest Tommy Rosenberg no matter what we find on his actual person.”

  “What? Jesus, sarge! What’s the point in going to the airport then?”

  “Calm down! I have a plan. We couldn’t have arrested him anyway, Mendoza. Don’t forget we have no jurisdiction here and we’ll be relying on the local cops to help us. Rubin said that the cops can’t arrest or detain a close family member of a high-ranking diplomat like Tommy’s father but Walter Braff is also on that plane and, as a low-ranking diplomat, the cops can detain him if they have good cause to search him.”

  “But I don’t know what he looks like,” Paytah said.

  “I do,” Locklear said as he unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Mendoza.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “When Patrick Lewis organised to meet a seller on the pretence of wanting to buy artefacts, he took photos of Braff for evidence. I phoned him and asked if he would scan the photo in and email it to the nurse’s desk.”

  “And the nurses agreed to that? Jesus, Locklear, you have concussion. You shouldn’t even be driving.”

  “I used my charm,” he said with a grin.

  “You keep talking about your charm but I haven’t seen a shred of evidence that it exists,” she retorted.

  “And you keep saying what a great driver you are, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that! You drive too fast and you’re reckless. And I think better when I’m driving.”

  “You’re delusional,” Mendoza said, rolling her eyes.

  Locklear shrugged. “I described the man in the photo to Rubin. He checked their system and it looks like the man Lewis photographed in the car is definitely Braff. They’re coming in on a commercial flight so we’ll wait at arrivals. Paytah, I need you to get Tommy’s attention and walk outside with him. I’ll be with you. I’m your uncle and we’ve come to collect your aunt but her flight was cancelled. Mendoza, you stay in the car directly behind the cab line-up area and be ready to take off as soon as Paytah and I get out of the terminal. OK? Hopefully we’ll mange to convince Tommy to take a ride with us and find out where exactly Braff is going.”

  Paytah nodded but the look on his face said he’d rather be anywhere else than sitting in the car right now.

  Locklear turned and looked into the back seat to give Paytah a look that said ‘don’t mess with me’.

  The UA flight from JFK landed in Rapid City on schedule at exactly 9.02am. Locklear and Paytah stood in the background watching out for a redheaded, freckle-faced kid carrying a heavy carry-on case. Crowds surrounded the area waiting for their loved ones to return from vacation and the noise emanating from the arrivals hall was unbearable.

  “How can you hang around with a kid like Rosenberg when you know what he does?” Locklear asked while keeping his eyes firmly trained on the glass arrivals door.

  Paytah sighed. “I just kept focused on what the organisation was trying to achieve. I joined the drama group to get close to him though I didn’t like lying to him. After a while, Tommy started confiding in me. He told me how lonely he was, how he didn’t want to go back to Paris, that he had no friends there and what he really wanted was to finish his degree in drama studies and become an actor.”

  “A degree? There’s such a thing?”

  Paytah laughed. “Yeah, old-timer. Tommy’s kind of lonely. Parents don’t really want him. They fly around here and there, stuff him in one school after another and take off, come back, uproot him again. It’s been like that his whole life. He’s got no community. Tommy thinks he’s important in the family now but, if he got busted, I know they’d walk away from him and hope he wouldn’t sing. I didn’t like using him but it was for a better cause.”

  “You’re a good kid, Paytah.”

  Slowly, the arrivals hall began to fill with people from regional and international flights. Locklear watched as they hugged their waiting family members and made their way to the exit. He watched reunion after reunion but there was still no sign of Braff or Tommy Rosenberg.

  After twenty further minutes of waiting, Tommy Rosenberg’s shock of wiry, untamed red hair appeared through the arrivals door. Locklear watched the young man closely as he executed his ‘easy-going hipster dude without a care in the world’ look. He swung his hips to music plugged into his ears but held tightly onto a holdall that looked like it weighed a ton. His clothes were also a good disguise: filthy blue jeans, worn sneakers and a creased black T-shirt depicting a skull and bones. Tommy did not look like a boy whose parents were rich. The diplomatic pass which allowed him to move unchecked through customs would gain envious glances from airport security staff standing in starched uniforms for twelve-hours shifts while the hippy-looking kid breezed through the crowds, and through life. His friendly demeanour would, to Locklear’s mind, only add to airport staff’s desire to move him on quickly. Nobody doing their crappy jobs wanted to look at a condescending rich kid asking how their
day has been for any longer than they had to. Rosenberg, he reasoned, was not as stupid as he looked.

  “Well, let’s hope your acting classes in USD pay off here.”

  Paytah followed Locklear’s eyes and sprang into his routine. He waved from the distance and called out. Tommy looked around and smiled warmly when he saw his college friend.

  “Hey, it’s The Chief! Jimmy, what’s up, man?” he asked as he swaggered over to where Locklear and Paytah stood.

  Locklear got a strong smell of dope off the kid’s clothes and wondered how security could bear to let him pass through. He guessed that stopping a high-ranking diplomat’s son on suspicion of carrying drugs was more than their job was worth.

  Paytah introduced Locklear as his uncle, Two-Sides, and explained that they had come to meet his aunt but her flight had been cancelled so she wouldn’t be arriving until the following day and they were just about to leave the airport and head to Rapid City.

  “Wanna ride with us?” he asked.

  “Sure. But first I gotta drop off something, if that’s cool?”

  “Cool.”

  “Hey, dude, what happened to your face?” Tommy asked Locklear.

  “You should see the other guy!” Locklear joked.

  Locklear stared into Tommy Rosenberg’s freckled face and, in particular, his dilated pupils. The kid was stoned. It was probably how he got through each of his deliveries. His nerves were probably shattered and the only way he could pull off his laissez-faire attitude was to get cooked before he got onto a plane and maybe even top himself up throughout the journey.

  Tommy’s eyes moved quickly around the room.

  “You looking for someone?” Locklear asked.

  “Yeah, my buddy – well, he isn’t my buddy. I’m just travelling with him – well, not with him – I’m on the same plane. I was supposed to take a cab ride behind him.”

  “Behind him?” Locklear asked.

  “Yeah, we don’t ride together … you know, cos ... em ... who did you say you were?”