Loe raamatut: «The Bride Price»

Chapter One

It was 6:22 a.m. on what promised to be a glorious September day. In the bedroom of her Kansas City, Missouri, apartment, Kyra Martin was still deeply asleep as she twisted and turned beneath her down coverlet. Divorced, childless, the twenty-seven-year-old, hardworking assistant federal prosecutor for the Western District of Kansas was immersed in a recurring dream, which had transported her back in time by almost five years to an erotic encounter she’d experienced beneath the graceful torrent of Havasu Falls with David Yazzie, her part-Navajo, would-be lover.

Though in her dream the water was like ice as it plunged about their shoulders, Kyra didn’t pay it any heed. Moaning with pleasure and a mounting sense of urgency, she felt her resistance melt as David’s mouth crushed hers. The expert way he was teasing her nipples through the fabric of her red bikini top was pushing her past the limits she’d set for herself. If they didn’t call a halt, and soon, she’d violate the promise she’d made to herself to remain a virgin until her wedding day.

“David…maybe we’d better stop,” she protested when he drew back to gaze at her with lust and longing in his beautiful eyes.

Moving around to her back with the calm audacity that so disarmed and captivated her, his strong, exquisitely shaped fingers tested the clasp on her bra preparatory to unhooking it. “Why should we,” he demanded reasonably, “when we both want it so much?”

Mad about him, she found it all but impossible to resist the longing that washed over her in waves as he pressed the front of his swim trunks against her lower body.

A moment later he was unfastening her top and letting it fall into the tumbling waters of the creek that swirled about their ankles. Thanks to the weather, which had turned somewhat chilly, and the fact that it was a weekday, the falls were deserted at that hour except for them. But that ideal state of affairs wouldn’t last long. Several of the hikers and campers who haunted the remote but beautiful off-shoot of Arizona’s Grand Canyon no matter what the season were bound to appear at any moment.

“Please,” she managed, begging him to save her from herself, “this is a popular spot. Despite the weather, some-one’s bound to come along and see us!”

His determination to have her seemingly as fixed as the North Star he’d woven into the retelling of a Native American legend beside their campfire the night before, David nuzzled his kisses lower. “Don’t worry,” he advised. “No-body’s going to gawk at your beautiful breasts. I’ll keep them covered with my hands and mouth…”

Abruptly Kyra’s bedside phone rang, shattering the scene her unconscious mind had chosen to present her with in a thousand shining fragments. Jarred and disoriented, with the flush of arousal it had brought to her cheeks slowly fading, she groped for the receiver.

“Hello?” she muttered, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“Kyra, it’s Dad,” her caller announced in his raspy baritone. “Did I wake you, sweetheart?”

Chief prosecutor for Coconino County, Arizona, for more than twenty years, Big Jim Frakes had been widowed for nearly as long. He’d raised Kyra by himself from the time she was eleven. Though he kept close tabs on her even now, he usually called around dinnertime. Something must be up, she thought. About to reassure him that her alarm was set to go off in a few minutes, anyway, she remembered it was a Saturday.

“Sort of,” she admitted, propping herself against some pillows. “But I needed to get up, anyway. What can I do for you, Dad?”

The momentary pause was uncharacteristic of him. “Frankly,” he said with regret, “I could use a little help.”

At sixty-four, and having developed a spot of heart trouble, Big Jim would be retiring soon. Lately he’d begun to make ever more insistent noises about wanting Kyra to return to Flagstaff and work for him—run for election in his stead when his current term was up. The problem was that he had a capable and likeable first assistant, middle-aged Tom Hanrahan, who’d been waiting in the wings for nearly eight years hoping to play that role.

Her father knew how she felt about going head-to-head with Tom. She wouldn’t want to do it. She’d told him so half a dozen times, at least. Her other reason for staying away from the town where she’d grown up and the gorgeous sweep of canyon, high desert and pine-clad mountain country she loved so much was one they couldn’t talk about. Any mention of David and the fact that he owned a ranch near Flagstaff—one with a striking stone-and-cedar house surrounded by ponderosa pines—would reopen too many wounds.

“Problems at work, Dad?” she asked lightly. “Or is it something of a more personal nature?”

Again she caught that slight hesitation.

“Both, I guess,” he admitted at last. “The fact is, I’m faced with trying Paul Naminga for murder. And I—”

Kyra gasped. “Not another tragedy in the Naminga family! I can’t believe Paul would ever commit such a crime.”

A Hopi paramedic who’d chosen to live and work in Flagstaff rather than remain in the Second Mesa village of Mishongnovi on the reservation where he’d been raised, Paul Naminga was known and liked in both the Anglo and Native American communities. Still, the family had a history of trouble. Five years earlier, Paul’s mildly retarded, alcoholic older brother, Leonard, had been on trial on charges of manslaughter, grand theft auto and driving under the influence. It had been during this trial that Kyra, then a second-year law student, and David Yazzie, who’d been employed as the first-ever Native American assistant on Big Jim’s staff, had gotten to know each other.

Because the alleged crimes had taken place off the reservation, a short distance from the Lariat Bar on Route 89 north of town, the case had been prosecuted in state rather than federal court. Despite Leonard’s frantic, somewhat garbled denials of any wrongdoing, all the available evidence had pointed to him. He’d been found drunk and confused behind the wheel of Dale Cargill’s pickup truck, which had been reported missing by its owner a short time earlier. At some point prior to the arrival of the sheriff’s deputies on the scene, the truck had plowed into a shabby sedan, killing both occupants, a local man and woman in their late sixties.

Off for the summer, Kyra had volunteered to help with the case, which, while tragic, had seemed basically open-and-shut. Slowly, however, both she and David had begun to wonder whether Leonard Naminga might be innocent. Sublimating their loyalty to Big Jim, they’d done their best to check out their hunch.

The effort had come to nothing. Leonard had been convicted, anyway, and sent off to state prison. A few days later David had quit Big Jim’s staff and walked out of Kyra’s life without a word or a backward glance, leaving her stunned and heartsick. The resulting downward spiral of her emotions had threatened to sink her third-year grade point average.

At least, it had until her father had explained the part he’d played in David’s disappearance. Shamefacedly he’d confessed to bribing the man Kyra loved with ten thousand dollars to dump her—for her own good. He’d justified the costly, underhanded move by arguing that he’d wanted her to finish law school and establish a legal career for herself instead of dropping out to get married and have David Yazzie’s babies.

She’d refused to believe it in the beginning. Told him he was lying, that David would never stoop so low. It was only when he’d shown her the entry in his checkbook, explaining that the canceled check hadn’t been returned to him yet, that she’d begun to think it possible. Sobbing that she wouldn’t have dropped out if David had asked her to marry him, Kyra had refused to speak to her father for several months.

Only later had she become suspicious that, despite Big Jim’s apparent liking for David, and his frequently stated admiration for the handsome young assistant prosecutor’s savvy and toughness, his real reason for attempting to break them up had stemmed from the fact that David was part Native American. She’d been furious with both men—David for selling her out and her father for his unstated prejudice.

She’d finally forgiven the latter after numerous abject apologies on his part. No apologies or communication of any kind had been forthcoming from David. Though she’d married fellow law graduate Brad Martin on the rebound and divorced him three and a half years later because they’d had nothing in common, not even their principles, the pain and deep sense of loneliness David had caused by accepting her father’s bribe remained the major hurt in her heart.

It still rankled with her that he’d almost certainly used the money to set up a shoestring legal practice, parlaying it into a highly successful career. In the five years since they’d seen each other, he’d made a name for himself representing clients of modest means, many of them Native American, against the government and wealthy corporations. In the process, he’d won some spectacular judgments. Lately he’d begun to be quoted as a legal expert on television.

He stepped over me on his way to fame and fortune, Kyra thought. Yet, who can blame him? Asked to make a choice, he embraced what mattered to him most. She only wished his fleeting, unconsummated romance with the county attorney’s daughter had occupied a more important place in his heart.

Now Paul Naminga’s life and liberty were at stake. “Who’s Paul supposed to have killed?” she asked, pushing down the heartsick feeling that always troubled her when thoughts of David surfaced.

“Ben Monongye,” Big Jim was saying. “You remember him…the thickset Hopi with the scarred right cheek who put together a successful construction business with the help of federal setasides for minorities.”

Kyra did. Though she’d admired Ben’s hard work and tough-mindedness, she’d always thought him a little brash and self-seeking. From what she’d heard via the grapevine, he’d considered himself something of a Casanova with the ladies.

“He and Paul were both scheduled to perform in the Hopi segment of a multitribe dance festival that was held on the Museum of Northern Arizona grounds last weekend,” her father continued. “Apparently Ben had been hitting on Paul’s wife, Julie. He and Paul traded blows about it shortly before they were due to put on their costumes. We’ve got umpteen witnesses.”

Frowning, Kyra tried to picture the scene.

“A couple of bystanders broke it up,” Big Jim said. “Paul ordered Ben to stay away from Julie and stalked off toward his trailer. Ben went into another trailer to dress. He never showed up onstage. Though he made it, Paul was late. During the dancing, a couple of kids fishing around in the trailers for loose change discovered Ben’s body.”

“The fact that Paul was late for the performance doesn’t prove he was the killer,” Kyra objected. “There could have been any number of reasons…”

She could almost see her father shaking his head.

“I know you like Paul,” he said, sighing. “I do, too. But Red Miner was right to make the arrest. There’s just too much evidence against him.”

Red Miner was the Coconino County sheriff.

“Give me a ‘for instance,’” Kyra requested.

“Okay, sure. Take the minute spatters of blood the crime-scene techs found on Paul’s Koyemsi costume. Preliminary analysis suggests it matches Ben’s, and I’m betting the DNA report will confirm it. Plus a young girl came forward to say she saw someone costumed like Paul go into Ben’s trailer after everyone headed for the bleachers.”

He paused. “Of course, her testimony doesn’t make it an open-and-shut case. As you probably remember, unlike the sacred clown dancers, the Koyemsi are masked. We don’t have an eyewitness, as such.”

The thought that maybe Paul didn’t do it settled a little deeper into Kyra’s consciousness. It was like a replay of what had happened to his brother, she thought. Most of the evidence was circumstantial.

“Paul claims he’s innocent,” Big Jim said. “That he was late for the performance because some Navajo kid ran up to him as he was about to get dressed and begged him to come revive one of his friends, who’d been sniffing glue. Unfortunately we couldn’t locate any of the boys to corroborate his story.”

In all likelihood, her father was right. The blood on the costume would match Ben’s. And the evidence would pile up. Lacking another suspect, a jury would convict Paul. It didn’t look good for him.

Meanwhile, Big Jim hadn’t explained what kind of help he wanted. Her heart sank a moment later when he let it be known that David Yazzie had taken charge of Paul’s defense.

Her dream taking on the aura of a premonition, Kyra conjured a mental picture of David’s broad shoulders and slim hips. How she’d loved the brilliant flash of smile that could illuminate his tanned, chiseled features like sunlight breaking through storm clouds over a distant mesa. And his hands. Oh, his hands…

“This will likely be my last big case,” her father was saying. “I don’t want to lose it, especially not to him. With your help—”

The prospect of running into David on the street had been enough to keep Kyra’s visits to her hometown to a minimum. Now she was supposed to return voluntarily, battle it out with him in the courtroom, face-to-face?

“What about Tom Hanrahan?” she said. “Surely he can give you all the help you need.”

“Sorry. But he can’t, honey. Tom’s hospitalized in Missoula, Montana…in traction with a broken leg. He got injured on a hunting trip. He’ll be out of the picture for quite a while.”

He hadn’t said so, yet Kyra guessed her father thought David would be gunning for him. Though David might have taken her father’s money and run with it five years earlier, he wouldn’t have thanked him for making the offer. Despite his own mercenary behavior he’d have been deeply insulted to realize Big Jim didn’t consider his mixed Navajo, Hispanic and Anglo blood good enough for his daughter—whether or not he’d ever had serious designs on her.

“I remember you mentioning recently that you’ve accrued a mountain of compensatory time,” her father said. “If it wouldn’t be too much of a hardship, I wish you could take some of it off. Come down to Flag and help me prosecute.”

Kyra realized he was probably hoping her presence on the prosecution team would rattle David, create sufficient tension to give the prosecution an edge. However, she was well aware of his respect for her ability. Thanks to her experience in the Office of the U.S. Attorney, she was Tom Hanrahan’s equal at the very least.

Dad’s getting older, she thought. And tired. He wants to go out with his head up. Maybe because of David’s reputation as an attorney who doesn’t take many cases he can’t win, his faith in his ability to do that has become a little shaky.

Much as she wanted to help, she wasn’t ready to see David again. Her hurt over his betrayal, and her heart’s stubborn inability to get over him, still ran deep. Still, she’d just put an important case to bed. And she had been working a lot of seventy-hour weeks. She didn’t want her father to realize David was still a burr under her saddle. She could, she supposed, drive down, go over his brief for him, suggest some arguments.

“You know I want to help,” she hedged. “But I’ll have to talk to my boss before making any promises. We’ve got a lot of important work coming up. If he can spare me, maybe we can work something out.”

Clearly pleased that she hadn’t turned him down flat, Big Jim promised to call her Monday night. “I’ll be mighty appreciative of whatever you can do to help,” he said. “No doubt it’s a proud father speaking. But you took to prosecuting like a duck to water. With Tom laid up in Missoula, I couldn’t do better than to have you on my side.”

Putting down the receiver after exchanging a few more words with him, Kyra headed for the shower. Inevitably, as she shampooed her sun-streaked blond hair and scrubbed her body with foaming jojoba-scented gel, the spray brought back her dream of Havasu Falls and all the volatile, half-buried emotions it had evoked. In a couple of weeks, if Big Jim had his way, she’d be seeing David again— gazing into stunning eyes capable of undressing her soul and extracting its every secret.

Unwillingly, because she didn’t want to fall under his spell again, she imagined herself running her fingers through his thick, sweet-smelling hair, which was as sensuous to the touch as coarse, black silk. How she’d loved being crushed by his powerful arms. Kissed everywhere she’d allowed his libidinous mouth to wander.

Just to watch him address a jury, smolderingly handsome in a business suit and tie, or sauntering toward her in faded jeans with the bred-in-the-bone grace of his Native American ancestors and a knowing grin on his face had caused her to thank God every morning that she was young, female and relatively good-looking in the world he inhabited.

She thought of his powerful sexual allure and her apprehension over his formidable reputation as a defense attorney who seemed to possess an extraordinary talent for unraveling the facts of a case. Though she tried to shake them off, these memories clung to Kyra as she tugged on jeans, a sweatshirt and a windbreaker to jog in a park near her home and go about her Saturday errands.

Though his morals hadn’t extended to refusing her father’s bribe, David apparently was unswerving in his demand that the clients he accepted be guiltless and/or deserving of redress, according to several newspaper and journal articles she’d read about him. If that’s true, he must believe in Paul Naminga’s innocence, since he agreed to defend him, she acknowledged as she unloaded a week’s worth of groceries at the checkout counter of her favorite supermarket. Her father’s job as prosecutor was going to be tough despite the evidence Red Miner had collected.

When Kyra broached the matter of a sabbatical with her boss, U.S. Attorney Jonathan Hargrave, on Monday, he insisted she take as much time as she needed to help her father. “You’ve been driving yourself way too hard,” he lectured her. “I don’t want you to burn out. Or fall prey to some stress-related ailment. Take a breather…six weeks at least, more if you need it…and do what you can for your dad. You might even try smelling a few roses.”

Her father was elated when she gave him the news. “You’ll never know how much I appreciate this, honey,” he said.

They worked it out that she’d drive down to Flagstaff two weeks hence, in time for the exchange of discovery between the defense and the prosecution.

“You don’t need to sit in on the discovery session unless you want to,” her father said, in deference to what he probably realized were her strong misgivings. “Of course, I’m hoping you’ll choose to be present. You’re damn good at sniffing out the weaknesses in a defense case, you know. You might pick up on something I miss.”

He wants me there to throw David off base, she thought again, her earlier speculation strengthening. He doesn’t realize that, despite my anger over the shabby way David treated me, a part of me still yearns for him. Or else his fear of going out a loser is pretty strong. Whatever the reason for his comments, Kyra reflected, it was narrowly possible that her going wouldn’t be a mistake. While it was too much to expect that she’d feel nothing when she and the part-Navajo defense attorney she’d once loved came face-to-face, she might use the moment as a springboard for getting over him.

Three days later, thirty-six-year-old David Yazzie was currying his favorite saddle horse, Born for Water, outside the barn on his Yebetchai Ranch. A little tired, having just come off a case himself—one that he’d resolved in his client’s favor—he was glad to be home again. Living out of the motor home that became both office and sleeping quarters when he was on the road pleading cases in Wyoming, North Dakota or New Mexico was okay, he guessed. But it didn’t give him the sense of peace and rootedness he felt on his three-hundred-plus acreage studded with ponderosa pine and juniper. With all his heart he loved the ranch and the house he’d built of stone and cedar to his own specifications in the shadow of the sacred mountains.

So why did he feel so restless this morning? he wondered.

Most of what he consciously wanted was within his reach. From impoverished beginnings on the reservation, as the son of a widowed, mostly Navajo mother and a father of mixed Navajo, Anglo and Hispanic background, who’d been killed in a railroad accident before his birth, he’d come a long way. Thanks to the U.S. Army, which he’d joined in order to be eligible for the G.I. Bill, he’d earned a bachelor’s degree, then begged and borrowed his way into law school.

After serving as one of Jim Frakes’s assistants in Flag to establish some credentials for himself, he’d gone on to create a way of life that included a good income—by virtue of his successful lawsuits against negligent corporations— and the satisfaction of helping deserving underdogs win vindication or redress.

In many ways he’d achieved the best of what the Anglo world had to offer. Meanwhile, his Native American ancestors had bequeathed him a rich spiritual heritage. From his great-grandfather, who’d died of advanced old age several years earlier, he’d learned ancient medicine man secrets known only to a few, which allowed him to step beyond the distortions of the present and get at the hidden truth in situations.

Yet something fundamental was missing from his day-to-day existence. He felt it most whenever he finished a case and returned to Flag, with enough leisure to step back from the quotidian flow of work and think about his situation.

This time, because of the trouble that had befallen Paul Naminga, there wouldn’t be much time for reflection. Yet the prospect of defending the Hopi paramedic in what would probably be Jim Frakes’s last major case hadn’t assuaged his yearning.

A chance discovery had only made it worse. While going through some notes David had saved from the Leonard Naminga trial on his first night home, he’d run across a group snapshot taken in the county attorney’s office on the occasion of Tom Hanrahan’s fortieth birthday. In the picture, a smiling, slightly younger version of himself stood with his arm around slim, blond Kyra Frakes—Martin now, he reminded himself. Bronze in contrast to the freckled paleness of her skin, his fingers curled about her upper arm, which was bared by her sleeveless blouse.

He’d almost been able to smell the perfume she wore, feel the heat and vitality that radiated from her body as he stared at the photograph. I shouldn’t have let Jim talk me into walking out on her that way, he thought now, by the corral, for perhaps the thousandth time. I could have helped her finish law school—made whatever sacrifices it took. As husband and wife, we’d have lit up the sky with a fire that would be still burning.

If she cared at all after so much time had passed, that caring took the form of aversion, he guessed. He supposed he could count himself lucky that she wouldn’t be around during the trial to make the besotted thirty-year-old inside him, whose memories were alive and well, eat his heart out. Being civil to the former boss who’d wanted him out of her life for what in retrospect he considered offensive reasons would be difficult enough.

Finishing with the horse, David patted the glossy animal’s neck and led him to his stall. He was just closing the stall gate when the cellular phone in his hip pocket chirped.

His caller turned out to be Jim Frakes’s secretary since time immemorial, Jody Ann Daniels. “Hey, gorgeous. How ya doin’?” the fortyish mother of three greeted him. “The boss asked me to call and set up the discovery exchange in State v. Naminga for a week from Monday. That fit with your schedule?”

He hadn’t been able to do his usual thorough investigation yet. “So long as he’s willing to revisit if and when new information comes to light,” he conceded.

Jody Ann laughed outright. “Knowing you’d ask, he so stipulated. By the way…your old friend Kyra’s taking a leave of absence from her high-powered Kansas City job to help her pop, what with Tom Hanrahan bedridden in Missoula. Guess she’s a little freer to flit around the country, now that she’s divorced. It’s gonna be like old home week around here!”

Kyra was divorced. She was coming back to Flagstaff.

Folding the phone and slipping it back in his pocket after saying goodbye to Jody, David walked back to the corral and leaned over the fence. He rested the astonishing blue gaze he’d inherited from Anglo ancestors on his father’s side and W. W. Trask, the legendary Irish-American-Native American scout who’d been his mother’s great-great-great-grandfather, against the mountains’ enduring beauty.

Did he still have a chance with her? His thoughts in turmoil, he found himself staring into the void his estrangement from Kyra had created. Though he’d tried to phone her a year after they’d parted, around the time she’d graduated, he hadn’t been able to reach her. Soon afterward he’d heard she had been married. After that the notion of contacting her had seemed pointless.

They hadn’t talked or even glimpsed each other in passing since the day her father had pressured him into leaving her for her own good, and he’d been fool enough to swallow the bait.

Now fate had taken a hand.

Seeing her again will either cure me or reinfect me with the same old yearning, he thought. As he pondered what to do about it, a remark his mother’s grandfather had once made drifted through his head. You can’t change the past, even if you acquire the wisdom to visit it, Henry Many Horses had observed in his quiet way. But you can learn a great deal from the lessons it has to teach.