Before Sunrise

He followed her into her office with a puzzled smile. “For me?”

“Well, for you and the FBI, really,” she had to confess, handing him a folded piece of paper and the CD. “It’s every little detail I could recall about what the man said, how he sounded, background noise, and so forth. It’s not much, but it may trigger some sort of connection when you know more about him.”

He was reading while she was talking. “Hey, this is pretty good,” he said, nodding. “You’ve got a good ear.”

“I don’t go down the road playing my radio so loud that people’s houses shake,” she replied, mentioning a pet peeve. “And when someone finally tells those people that they’re risking not only hearing loss but actual brain damage at those high sound levels, there will be lawsuits.”

“Amen,” he seconded, chuckling.

“Anyway, I hope those notes help catch whoever did it. Nobody should be killed for being a little crazy,” she said.

“You don’t think there’s a chance he was telling the truth?” he asked hesitantly.

“Not a chance on earth,” she said firmly. “Now what do I owe you for those bullets? And you’d better tell me the truth, because I’m calling the local gun shop to ask.”

He grimaced and told her. She wrote him out a check.

“And thank you for the lessons and the loan of the pistol,” she added. “I’m really grateful.”

“No problem. I’d better get back to work. You watch your back,” he added.

She smiled. “Sure.”

THAT EVENING, when Drake got off work, he knocked on the door of the room in a local motel where Cortez was staying.

“Come in,” the older man said, sounding weary.

Drake opened the door. There sat Cortez in a chair in his sock feet, jeans and a black T-shirt with a sleeping toddler sprawled on his broad chest. His hair was loose down his back and he looked as if he’d die for some sleep.

“He’s teething,” Cortez said. “I finally took him to the clinic and got something for the pain. For both of us,” he added without a smile, but with a twinkle in his dark eyes. “What do you want?”

“I brought some information.” He handed the slip of paper to Cortez and watched him unfold it. “That’s what Miss Keller remembers about her conversation with the anthropologist. It was on disk, but I had it transcribed for you.”

“She’s very thorough.”

“She should be doing ethnology, not overseeing some little museum,” Drake said. “She’s overqualified for the job.”

Cortez glanced at him. “What do you know about ethnology?”

“Are you kidding? I’m Cherokee. Well,” he corrected quietly, “part Cherokee. My father was full-blooded. My mother was white and she got tired of her family making remarks about her little half-breed. She walked out the door when I was three. Dad drank himself to death. I went into the army at seventeen and found myself a home, where a lot of people have mixed blood,” he added coldly.

Cortez studied him silently. “I had a Spanish ancestor somewhere.”

“It doesn’t show,” Drake said flatly. “I imagine you fit in just fine with your people.”

“Your people outnumber us.”

“Which half of my people do you mean?” Drake asked ruefully.

“The Indian half. And even among my people, there are only about nine hundred of us who still speak Comanche,” Cortez said. “The language is almost dead. At least Cherokee is making a comeback.”

“No two people speak it alike,” Drake said. “But I get your point—it’s still a viable language.” He looked at the little boy with soft eyes. “Going to teach him how to speak Comanche?”

Cortez nodded. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he studied Drake. “But he’ll have your problem. His mother is white.”

Drake was looking at the sleeping child intensely. “Does she live with your people?”

Cortez’s eyes flashed. He averted them. “She…died a month after Joseph was born,” he said reluctantly.

“Sorry,” Drake said at once.

“It wasn’t that sort of marriage,” the older man said coldly. “I appreciate the notes. Did Phoebe tell you to give them to me?”

“She said they might be useful to the FBI,” Drake hedged.

Cortez’s big hand absently smoothed the sleeping child’s back. He stared ahead of him without seeing anything. “She lives in a dangerous place, so far out of town.”

“I’ve got the guys doing extra patrols,” Drake said. “She knows how to shoot. I think if her life depended on it, she would use it to protect herself.”

“She’d shoot to wound an attacker and she’d be dead in seconds,” he said flatly.

“You’re full of cheer,” Drake said with faint sarcasm.

Those coal-black eyes pierced his face. “Why did he call her?” he asked abruptly. “Why not go to the state authorities or local law enforcement…why Phoebe?”

Drake frowned. “Well…I don’t know.”

Cortez lifted the sheet of paper again and studied it. His eyes narrowed. “He mentioned a daughter.”

“That’s about as much as we know about this John Doe,” Drake said grimly. “His fingerprints aren’t on file in any database. That’s the first thing we checked..”

“I know. Our investigator ran them last night,” Cortez told him. “We drew a blank as well, and I won’t tell you how our criminalist convinced the lab to leapfrog over other pending cases to do ours.”

“The anthropologist was of Cherokee descent,” Drake reminded him. “That means he might have relatives on the Rez…”

“That’s an assumption. The larger part of your nation is in Oklahoma,” Cortez interrupted.

Drake stopped speaking with his mouth still open. “That’s right!”

“I live in Oklahoma,” Cortez murmured absently. “So we’re left with two questions. What the hell was he doing here, and where did he come from? Maybe he has a car, but in another state.”

“That’s a lead I’ll check out as soon as I get back to work. I’ll go see the tribal council, too,” Drake told him. “Maybe he’s got relatives in one of our clans. If so, the same clan in Oklahoma would know him, if he’s from there.”

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