Death Without Company by Craig Johnson Page A

so that he could read it. He was smiling. “What?”
    “How did you know?”
    “Know what?”
    “That I’m Basque?”
    I kept looking at him and, in a flash, it all fit. “Just a lucky guess.”
    “I’m French Basque.” I contemplated that one as he looked back at the piece of paper and the scribbled hand. “It says ‘We can no longer say.’ ” He waited, and it was an old world wait, the kind that doesn’t concern itself with giving you a fast answer. The Cheyenne and Crow were masters of such things, but the kid was pretty good. “I’m not sure if it means anything, but it’s also a line from a poem by Jean Diharce about Guernica.” It didn’t take him long to remember the translation. “Guernica. This name inflames and saddens my heart; centuries will know its misfortunes. . . . We can no longer say the names Numancia and Carthage without saying in a loud voice in Euskara, lying in its ruins, Guernica.” There wasn’t a lot of drama in the presentation; he stated it as if it were history. “Is this from the woman that died?” I nodded, and he studied it some more. “You think it’s important?”
    “Everything’s important when you don’t know what you’re looking for, or if you even should be looking.”
    “She was Basque?” I nodded some more. “Is there anybody you’d like me to talk to?”
    I sighed, thought about the old priest, Mari’s cousin, and looked at the scrap of paper. “Maybe.” I looked back up at him. “You got a place to stay tonight?”
    “I figured I’d just stay here.”
    “Okay, but you might need a vehicle. If anything happens, take Vic’s. There’s an extra set of keys on the wall by the door.”
    I couldn’t tell if he was smiling when he left my office, and that probably was a good thing. I picked up the piece of paper. “We can no longer say.” It was capitalized at the beginning, which led me to believe that it wasn’t the continuation of a stanza or part of a poem. I didn’t know Mari Baroja but thought she might have had enough on her plate without political intrigue. She was Basque, though.
    I stuffed the paper scrap back in my pocket and picked up my life in Post-it form. Vic appeared in my doorway with her jacket over her shoulder and wine glass in hand. “I can’t fucking believe you’re gonna get laid before me.”
    “Maybe you should stop looking at this as a competition?”
    “You are such an asshole.” She took a sip. “Not that I give a shit, but where have you been all day?”
    I took a sip of my wine, its complex bouquet undiminished by the styrene stemware. “Following up on this Baroja thing.”
    “There’s a thing?”
    I blew out and thought back on my day. “Spoke with the ME from Billings. His opinion is that she smoked too much, she drank too much, and I’m coming to the conclusion that she might have done other things too much as well.”
    She shrugged and toasted with her glass. “That’s how I wanna go.”
    I curbed the urge to say something about slow starts. “Talked to the personal physician.”
    “Who is?”
    “Isaac Bloomfield, who concurred. There was something else, though.” She held the edge of the plastic against her lip. “She’d been consistently beaten.” Her eyes widened. “Massive tissue damage on the back and other areas.”
    The lip slipped away. “Holy shit.”
    “It gets better. I went to see the granddaughter.”
    When I told her what Lana had said, she came and sat in the chair opposite my desk and scooted it in so that she could lay her arms on the flat surface and rest her chin there. The glass dangled over the edge, unseen. Her voice was low, but it cut like only a woman’s voice can. “No fucking way. Lucian?”
    “It gets better.”
    “It can’t get any better, unless you found the body.”
    “Trust me, it gets better.” I told her about the conversation with the judge.
    “Fuck me.” She glanced around the room; she had just been given a passport to strangeland where I