New investigator: M. Dudley, private investigator from Massachusetts hired by WIE Insurance, Inc. to look into circumstances surrounding the deaths of the Begay family, for whom relatives are trying to collect life insurance policies.
The investigation continues:
“Am I under arrest?” asks Scot Thompson. Jones tells him he is not. “Then I want to go home.” Jones drives Thompson back to the Marina and they discuss the events that transpired in Mecca.
“Lots of people went into a rage. Must’ve been something in the water,” says Thompson.
“Then why didn’t it affect you?” asks Jones.
“Who said it didn’t?” he replies.
They speak very little for the rest of the trip, and when they arrive at the dock Thompson deliberately leaves his backpack, containing the Rupert-cylinder, in the back seat of the car, so that it can perhaps listen in on conversations and relate them to him at a later time.
The next morning, Thompson pulls up his dissertation on the vision of the Coyote Spirit he experienced a dozen years ago in the desert. He convinces himself that spirits don’t leave footprints, and takes his boat down to Ensenada.
M. Dudley, the private investigator, leaves his room at the Quality Inn near the airport and drives his rental Lincoln Continental up to the Los Coyotes Reservation.
Agent Harley O’Brian receives a call from Jones to report to the FBI trailer that is temporarily stationed on the Begay Ranch. When he arrives, he hears a knock at the trailer door. He answers it to find a man of about fifty, thin, with a full head of David Hasselhoff hair. The man introduces himself very self-assuredly, and asks O’Brian for the details of the situation. Death reports? Police report numbers? Suspects? O’Brian is overwhelmed by the man and tries to close the door. M. Dudley blocks it with his foot and steps into the trailer. O’Brian madly sends some plaintive text messages to Jones and Sangumbo that there is “a man in the trailer.” M. Dudley, looking to avoid trouble, asks for the flustered young man’s supervisor’s number.
He calls the number and reaches Sangumbo, who blows him off. “Call the coroner’s office,” he tells him. M. Dudley steps under the police tape and paces the Begay property, taking pictures and making notes.
Agent Sangumbo, without a vehicle, calls Sheriff Colorados to pick him up at Warner Springs Ranch on the way to the gas station, where he would like to continue his investigation in daylight. Colorados complies, and together with a handful of volunteers from the Reservation they continue searching the station and surrounding landscape. By noon they turn up nothing of interest at the station itself (Sangumbo had been looking specifically for something that might incriminate Major Frank Garrett, whom he distrusts) and they find no more shallow or open graves. However, he does find coyote prints surrounding the grave they exhumed the night before, and he determines that they are indeed the prints of a large coyote and not somehow manmade. As before, the trail these prints create begins and ends abruptly.
O’Brian discovers the backpack in his car. It is heavy so he opens it and finds a strange metallic cylinder with odd devices connected to it. He carries it into the FBI trailer and tells O’Brian to examine it. As O’Brian looks for a means of opening the thing (it appears seamless), it announces “The time is now one o’clock. Ping!” O’Brian checks his watch. It is not 1:00 yet.
“Get Scot Thompson back up here,” he tells him. O’Brian calls headquarters and an agent is dispatched, but calls back 40 minutes later to report Thompson’s boat is gone. O’Brian begins checking Thompson’s recent credit card transactions. Jones heads off to join Sangumbo in his search.
Throughout the day, the cylinder says several strange things to O’Brian. “Victoria Falls is the world’s highest waterfall. Ping!” and “Your Easy Mac is ready. Ping!” He tests it for any trace explosive compounds and finds none, but is unnerved by the thing anyway and places it outside.
Around noon, Garrett arrives at the gas station and takes them to the stretch of highway where the abandoned cars were discovered. He has spoken with the tow truck driver and has a fairly high level of confidence as to the correct locations. Soon Sangumbo picks up a coyote trail but loses it in a rocky area. Garrett, however, locates an opened grave containing the exsanguinated bodies of the elderly Dutch couple a few hundred yards up the hillside.
“What do you know about the coyotes?” asks Jones.
“I told you before,” says Colorados. “The Coyote Spirit is helping us.”
“I think we need to speak with the shamans you were telling us about.”
“They should be home this evening. We can go see them if you want.”
Meanwhile, O’Brian is doing some research. Mack Tooley had shot himself in the head, and the coroner who examined him committed suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) in Nashville two weeks later. He seemed at a dead end, but found another case of disembowelment around the same time in the same city: a certain Father Franklin Willard, who ran a homeless shelter killed himself in the same manner when he fell under investigation for a string of disappearances among the local homeless community.
Further, Elijah Jackson, a homeless man who had been staying at the shelter, made the news when shortly thereafter he was shot in the stomach and killed after walking into a man’s house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This man, David Charles, appeared dead in a Houston hotel room soon after that. The autopsy listed the cause of death as disembowelment, but labeled it a suicide even though no knife was found at the scene.
He also looks up the massacre in Mecca of a few months earlier and turns up an interesting blog on the subject, with entries posted by a certain “R.P.” He pulls an archive of Rupert Putkin’s writing from the Union Tribune (“2003 Del Mar PoodleFest”) and generates an algorithm to compare the writing styles. It is a very close match, 90-95%. He retrieves the IP information and orders the ISP to turn over the user’s information connected with this address.
Sangumbo and Jones arrive at the FBI trailer in the late afternoon and O’Brian fills them in. From his parked rental car, M. Dudley listens in on their conversation with a Spytek remote listening device. The trail of murders seems to move steadily from east to west chronologically, and have all the telltale signs of Satanic Ritual Abuse. Clearly, the Begays were willingly involved in some ritual suicide, which precludes their relatives from collecting their sizeable insurance payouts. Case closed.
Around dusk they arrive at the shamans houses, three dilapidated shacks on the outskirts of the Reservation. There is nobody home. Jones peers in the dingy window of one house and sees it is elaborately decorated with kitschy Native American art pieces, with coyotes heavily represented.
Colorados heads into town and returns with a younger man who he introduces as the son of one of the shamans.
“I expected them back tonight. My dad was supposed to come to my house for dinner.”
“Do you know where they are?” the agents ask.
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t want to go there in the dark. You could break an ankle up there. I will take you in the morning.”
In Ensenada, Scot Thompson is patronizing his favorite local bar, The Corral. He flirts with his elderly waitress. “Man, I’d like to dry-dock that grandma,” he says to himself.
That night, Jones and O’Brian share a room at Warner Springs Ranch. O’Brian continues to experiment with the cylinder. He submerges it in the bathtub and finds it to be waterproof. “There’s a Gilligan’s Island Festival on all night tonight. Ping!” it tells him. O’Brian wakes up at 6:00am after a mere two hours sleep.
They assemble at the Shamans’ houses and begin their journey on foot. “We’ll need lots of water,” says the young man. “It gets hot up there.” He takes them through strange, circuitous trails that they would otherwise be unable to discern, seeming to double-back on themselves yet always gradually increasing in altitude. Finally, after about four hours, they arrive at a low valley and can see a cave opening a the other side. The shaman’s son calls his father by name.
“Proudfoot?” says Jones.
“No, you asshole, his name is Dave,” he tells him.
There is no answer, so he heads down the hill followed by Jones and Sangumbo. As he steps in front of the cave opening, a gunshot rings through the valley and the young man is blown to the ground. Agent Sangumbo rushes to his side to determine the extent of the injury, and the unseen gun fires again, striking Sangumbo in the shoulder. He scrambles back around some boulders for cover. Garrett and Colorados quickly assume defensive positions…
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