Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

“You’re not being fair.” Maycomb hooked a thumb over her shoulder, up Egan toward the hospital. “Cutter had to choose between saving a drowning child and catching the guy.”

Beason glared at her, acting like he’d just realized she was there. “And who are you again?”

She extended her hand. “Lori Maycomb. KTOO. Assuming you’re with the FBI, I talked to a couple of your agents yesterday.”

“Maycomb?” Beason recoiled as if he’d been smacked in the face. “You need to beat it.” He turned to Cutter. “Donita Willets was this woman’s informant. She’s a person of interest herself, in case that little investigative tidbit slipped by you. I don’t know what you’d call that in the Marshals Service, but we—”

“We call it not being a dick while we’re interviewing a witness,” Teariki said. “You should try it sometime.”

Cutter snugged the blanket a little tighter, past caring. Beason’s grumbling was directed at him, so he shrugged it off.

Lola had trotted across the street, crowding into the group, thinking she needed to be there to keep Cutter from pulling Beason’s head off. She’d heard the last. She handed Cutter a dry shirt she’d grabbed from his room after he’d called her.

“That’s enough, Lola,” Cutter said. She held the blanket while he stripped out of his wet shirt and slipped on the new one, feeling better instantly. The Fjällräven pants were clammy but relatively dry already.

Lola wedged herself farther between Cutter and Beason, holding up the blanket with both hands, like a matador. She spoke over her shoulder to Cutter. “What? You know you wanted to say it yourself.”

“I’m good,” Cutter said, buttoning up the shirt. “He can be a dick to me. Just not my people.”

“Well,” Lola said. “You’re my people…”

Fortunately for Beason, Rockie Van Dyke pulled up in her SUV, interrupting his response. The detective ignored Maycomb altogether when she approached the group. “Hey. Dispatch got a call from Mary Dutchik two minutes ago. She’s a scanner fan, monitors JPD radio more than a rookie patrol officer on his days off. She heard the call go out about the pursuit and the little kid in the water. Sounds like she had an appointment with a man this morning who wanted to sell her a Tlingit shaman’s rattle. According to her, this guy had bandages on his hands.”

“Where is she now?” Lola asked.

“Her shop’s right around the corner. We can walk there.”

“Can I come?” Maycomb asked.

Beason started to protest, but Lola cut him off, looking at Van Dyke.

“Your caller said this guy was trying to sell her a shaman’s rattle. Native culture is probably going to be germane to the investigation.”

Cutter looked at Maycomb with a wary eye. He hated to agree with Beason, but he wasn’t completely convinced either. “You familiar with shaman’s rattles, things like that?”

“Of course,” Maycomb said. “I’m happy to help however I can.”

“Settled,” Lola said. “It might be good to have someone along who has more than a cursory knowledge of artifacts.”

Rockie Van Dyke closed her eyes, the muscles in her jaw tensing. “You say so. But she’ll let us down. I guarantee it.”

“Odd deal all around,” Mary Dutchik said. “Strange men aren’t exactly at a premium around here, but this one is especially weird.”

Dressed in a fashionable wool cardigan and matching gray gabardine slacks, she reminded Cutter of one of his high school English teachers. Short silver hair was still wet from a walk in the early-morning rain. She looked tired, as if she’d come in earlier than usual. It made sense. Cutter couldn’t imagine the foot traffic at an art gallery would be very heavy at seven in the morning when there were no cruise ships in town.

The waist-high display cases contained an assortment of engraved silver and gold bracelets and other Native carvings of spruce and cedar. Each item was set against black velvet to make it pop from its surroundings and neatly spaced so it stood out from everything else. The cases formed a U on the three sides of the showroom – all but for the storefront itself, and a small gap that led to what Cutter assumed was an office or storage area.

Bright lighting gave the gallery a sparkling feel, like a high-end jewelry store. Wooden masks of Raven, Bear, and men with twisted faces hung on the wall above the cases between similarly painted canoe paddles and other art. Like the totem poles Cutter had seen around Southeast Alaska, the predominate colors were red and black. Everything was beautiful, bright, and expensive. No made-in-China tchotchkes here.

“And the artifact,” Mary Dutchik continued. “That was very unusual as well. As far as I know, most Tlingit rattles were carved of wood. Raven steals the moon, Frog, man, that’s the general motif. I’ve seen some with small deer dewclaws tethered to the outside that sound when the rattle is shaken. Others have stones inside a carved, gourd-like hollow. The thing is, wood rots, so only a very few authentic artifacts have survived that are older than the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Those were discovered on expeditions in the early 1920s—”

“Robbed from graves,” Lori Maycomb whispered.

Dutchik shrugged. “That’s sad, but it is the truth. In any case these would have rotted as well but for the fact that they were found and put in museum collections.”

“The one from this morning,” Cutter asked. “Do you think it was authentic?”

“I believe so,” Dutchik said. “But it was different. The body of this rattle looks like it was made of animal horn, likely Dall sheep, boiled so it could be shaped. A length of long bone – probably from the same sheep that provided the horn – made the handle.”

Cutter looked directly at Maycomb. “And that’s unusual?” he asked. “A… bone rattle?”

She gave a noncommittal shrug. “But it makes sense. Some Tlingit traditions say the first animal hunted after the great flood was a bighorn sheep. Many taboos are associated with the animal. Hunters going after