Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty by Craig Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

Canada—Northwest Territories.” I refolded the sandwich and stared out the window. “Transferred from one of the residential boarding schools to a private orphanage when he was eight. They tested him, and his IQ was off the chart. Raynaud ran away to live with his non-Indian father, who took responsibility for him. Two years later a social worker stopped in to check on the boy and discovered that the father had died eight months earlier.”
    Sancho stared ahead. “What’d you do, commit the file to memory?”
    I thought about it, about the parts I wasn’t telling. “That ten-year-old boy had been living in a cabin with his dead father in the bedroom for eight months. He got kicked around to a number of foster homes before being adopted by a couple in Lodge Grass. The woman was Cree; her husband, Crow. She was related to Shade’s mother, but there were problems, behavioral and otherwise; he ended up dropping out of school. That must’ve been the period when he killed Owen White Buffalo, and who knows who else. He returned to Canada and joined the army up there—Dwyer Hill Training Center outside Ontario.”
    Sancho reached down and turned the defrosters to full, and I watched the already-ice-encased tree line as we passed, the conifers looking like some gigantic army standing at attention along both sides of the road.
    “He was married, and his wife disappeared during a camping trip. There was a provincial hunt in Ontario, but she never turned up—must’ve killed her, too. A year later one of Shade’s buddies went missing, and the Ottawa Police Department started asking some questions. The military stonewalled it, but Shade was drummed out. He turned up as a suspect again in Factory Island Reservation, Ontario, in a search for an outfitting business partner a couple of years later. He was arrested, and when they searched his apartment they discovered blood trace from the guy he killed.”
    “Jesus.”
    I pulled my cup from the holder and sipped my coffee. “They stuck him in Kingston Penitentiary, but he got transported to a psychiatric prison for observation and, after three months there, he escaped into the U.S., hid out up in Lodge Grass, and killed the old couple that had taken him in when he was a child.”
    Saizarbitoria shook his head as we slid around another sweeping corner.
    “He’s supposedly a very interesting case, a specific form of psychotic schizophrenic where the subject is overcome by a culture-bound syndrome and hears voices—sees . . .” I couldn’t help but pause. “Sees apparitions. He refers to them as the ‘Seldom Seen’ and believes that he’s actually possessed by evil spirits that force him to sacrifice others.”
    “Sounds like the old Basque priest at the Catholic Church who believes in fairies.”
    I nodded. “The versions vary from tribe to tribe, but these spirits are purported to be malicious, supernatural beings. The people they inhabit supposedly have malevolent spiritual powers but are shunned by their own people.”
    There was some chatter on the Feds’ radio about the mobile unit coming down from Baby Wagon, and I was glad to hear it. The Basquo slowed for another curve, and I could feel the Chevrolet fishtail. He glanced at me. “You believe that stuff?”
    I was just as glad that he hadn’t been privy to my experiences in this very area of the mountains more than a year ago, when I had seen and heard my share of strange things. “I believe there were spiritual signposts that these tribes put into place so that no matter how dire the situation, the members would never be tempted to do things the tribe considered absolutely taboo.” I felt tired and slouched into the seat. “Imagine beginning to see people, things that no one else can see, and in punishment the real people around you begin drawing away—leaving you to these . . . spirits.”
    “Isn’t that kind of like pitting the monsters of your imagination against the monsters of human nature?”
    I