Another Man's Moccasins

I got up with a sense of finality as Santiago followed me to the holding-cell counter. We donned our disposable latex gloves and began the preliminary. Dog followed us and the second bag.

The pocketbook was covered with mud only on one side and was waterlogged where the water of Murphy Creek had entered the unzipped cavity. We began by opening the main compartment. There was an imitation silk scarf, which I carefully allowed to unfold toward the floor. “Doesn’t look expensive.”

Saizarbitoria nodded and continued to write on the property roster attached to the clipboard at his lap. “Except for the mud, the pocketbook looks new.”

“Yep.” I dropped the scarf into an evidence bag and reached in again, pulling out a set of keys on a remote. “GM.”

My deputy looked at the fob. “Yeah.”

There were some other keys but they had no manufacture or code numbers. I dropped them into another bag and set them aside.

There was a romance novel with a bodice-ripper cover of a young woman standing on a cliff with an ocean below her. It was in French and dog-eared about a quarter of the way through, but there was nothing else peculiar other than a zippered pouch that matched the purse, which was filled with about eighteen dollars, all in quarters.

I picked up the pocketbook and started thinking about the young woman who had owned it. It was possible that she was a dust child—a child of a Vietnamese mother and an American father. One generation removed, she still looked Vietnamese to me. "Sancho?” He looked up. “Get the car keys checked.”

He scribbled on the margins of his legal pad. “Got it.” There was a side compartment on the purse. I unzipped it, and there was a photograph plastered against the inside in a crease where, if you weren’t looking, you’d never find it. I turned and looked at Santiago. “No money except for the quarters, no ID, and a book in French. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? ”

“Yes.” He looked up from the clipboard. “What’d you find on him?”

I glanced at the sleeping giant in cell one. “There was a child’s wallet with some photographs but nothing really incriminating and nothing current except a matchbook from the Wild Bunch Bar.”

“You want me to head back down to Powder Junction?”

“Yep, please. I’m afraid Double Tough and Frymire are going to be laid up for a while, and I still haven’t heard from the Ferg.”

I pulled the photo from the damp insides of the purse lining and flipped it over to look at it. It was old and sun-faded, curled at the edges where the water had soaked the paper. It was a snapshot of an Asian woman on a barstool. She was reading a newspaper with a man seated at a piano to her right with his back to the camera. He was wearing fatigues, and his face was partially turned. He was big, young, and heavily muscled with a baby face and a blond crew cut.

And he was me.

4

My daughter held my hand. Ruby and Henry sat at the reception desk and looked at me, Henry with the receiver still at his ear.

Saizarbitoria had put our set of photographs of the young woman’s body on Ruby’s desk, and they lay scattered beside the battered snapshot. I had sent Sancho to Powder Junction to ask some questions at the Wild Bunch Bar, and Lucian lay on the entryway bench, still thankfully sound asleep.

"Daddy?” She was nuzzled up close, standing right next to me with her arms trailing down mine and her chin at the scar tissue on my clavicle. “Daddy, is it possible...?”

I looked at her, and it was almost as if she wanted it to be true. “No.”

“Then why would she be here?”

“I have no idea.”

Ruby looked again, studying the photos with renewed vigor. I faced the blue yonder in her eyes, and she nodded. “Walt, they could be related.”

I compared their faces. There was a resemblance, but with the swelling and discoloration of the victim in our photos, it was hard to make the leap.

Or I simply didn’t want to.

Henry began speaking into the phone in Cheyenne; I could understand the references to Brandon White Buffalo, but that was about it.

She was smiling at the camera, and she had great teeth, just as I’d remembered. There was a nervousness in the smile, though, a wayward tension that showed that she wasn’t used to having her photograph taken.

I thought about the body of the dead young woman by the highway and tried to connect it with the smiling woman in the old photo and to the one in my memory. I reached down and turned one of our photographs so that the profile of the woman matched the snapshot. Some of the bone structure was the same.

I glanced at Henry, and it looked like he was on hold again. He nodded toward the pictures. “It is possible.”

I crossed to the bench beside the stairwell and sat, careful to avoid Lucian’s boots; the last thing I needed was for him to wake up. I sat there thinking and looked at the streaming patterns of sunlight on the hardwood floor. Thinking about Vietnam, about Tan Son Nhut and Mai Kim—remembering the heat, the strange light, and the moral ambiguity.

“Who was she?”