Vidkrayani

“To do love medicine for yourself can be dangerous and difficult, although to do it for others is relatively easy. War medicine is relatively easy also, unless you have a similarly skilled opponent.” – traditional Native American saying

From Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo, the Coast Starlight passenger train weaved its way toward the Western Gate, the cape near Gaviota and Lompoc, sacred to the Chumash people. Then it turned northward, where the red root Ceanothus trees cover the curving hills of the seaside, on the way to Santiago, California.

Out the left window was the vast Pacific. Out the right were the hot coastal hills.

The town’s Chief Detective Nestor N. Trigue called me in to review the crime scene of the young girl’s murder. I am a rather expert forensic medical examiner – they say I have my own agenda. I’ve helped put some people in jail, but no one yet to death, at least not formally. Arriving, I saw the blood on the rails and the platform at the familiar Santiago train station. There was a lot of blood. It was seeping into the concrete and etching into the iron of the pedestrian bridge over the tracks. The tracks were several, glinting in the comfortable November sun, and the pedestrian bridge was red with rust and blood.

I just could not trust anybody about this case. I could see that right away.

I did not feel comfortable wearing white in the mournful situation, because I had had a passing acquaintance with the victim. She had flirted with me a couple of times, twenty years younger than I though she was, in the local bars and restaurants.

Blood on the rails and the platform at this California train station, seeping into

concrete and etching into iron. Drops of blood descended the concrete steps of the pedestrian bridge, one drop every four or five steps. At the bottom of the steps, only two final drops. There had to have been more than one killer to have gotten the bleeding girl into the escape vehicle so quickly.

I tried to photograph forensic evidence and correlate trajectories and splattered drops, before the local cops would wash away the blood. The cops did not wash with me. Nestor and I had not been getting along recently, either.

Sure enough, they started their washing.

“Stop! You’re destroying crime scene evidence!” My white coat meant nothing.

“So you’re Dr. Rick Martin, eh? Forensic investigator? Talk to Detective Trigue about it, Doc.” His eyes pierced into mine, with a very small measure of sympathy.

It seemed to me that the prime suspect was a drug dealer I had noticed and had reported to Nestor N. Trigue. Trigue had done nothing. The dealer had been guarding certain railroad cars that I had suspected of smuggling heroin and weapons from Stockton to Long Beach.

It was several months and another murder later that the first girl’s tortured corpse was found by Santiago’s finest on a remote canyon property, near a cultish cabin. She had been buried in a shallow grave among spikenard bushes. Nestor could have arrested my suspect and prevented another senseless murder.

I went out to talk with the owner of the property, without telling Nestor.

Old salty dog flotilla alcoholic Captain Bill Crove knew how to talk to police, I could see that right away. I could just imagine him talking with the cops, but I could not fathom what they might have said. I could smell the acrid roasted-turnip smell of opium.

Crove knew about my Cherokee roots and my criticisms of some American government policies, and maybe that was why he kept talking with me about Mao Tse-Tung in glowing terms. Chairman Mao’s classic photo was framed nearby. A crosshatch symbol was prominent on the wall, near magic squares of Albrecht Durer and other mystical artists. Spiders crawled on hundreds of counter-cultural books from the Sixties. I wish I could really remember exactly what Crove said, but he had tried to recruit me into his neo-Maoist philosophy. He had told me how his wetwork network had upset the balance of power in Sicilian organized crime in the 1970s. I did not see how that had done anything more than shift global criminal power toward the Chinese Tong gangs.

I thought about one parallel – Mao had campaigned against sparrows, trying to kill them all, resulting in massive ecological imbalance in China.

After I left, I looked back. Crove entered his nearby “psychedelic revival” house, nervously watching me departing through the red poppy fields around him. The investigating detectives had ignored the opium poppies. The red-orange flowering fields reminded me of the scene from The Wizard of Oz.

I figured Crove was sitting down and smoking opium near his classic picture of Chairman Mao, transforming himself into his favorite monster.

Weeping relatives, friends, and I buried the girl, her photo on the gravestone.

It was not the only funeral I had attended recently. You get older, and you go to more and more funerals. Friends disappear from Internet contact – maybe it means they have died. A dear friend, a historian of my James Gang cousins, had also recently died from an unknown mysterious disease that had perforated his intestines. I had noticed that he had had an unusual smell before his death. I smell things that others do not – perhaps it is my curse, or my blessing. It makes me picky about food and public facilities.

I was back in my office, working on the murdered girls’ forensic medical records, trying to put the case together. Both girls had been tortured, and a crosshatch symbol like a gunsight had been carved into their breasts, along with a crescent Islamic symbol. The same had been done to another girl found dead at the foot of a cliff a month before the railroad yard murder.

I was disturbed by the arrival of the flirtatious senseless sirens Genieve and Laura. They were trying to peer over my shoulder at my medical records, and the crosshatch.

Witchily, Genieve proclaimed, “No use crying over spilt blood, Rick.”

Laura echoed witchily, “Yeah, you’re in over your head in the Zodiac Wheel.”

“Sorry, girls, I’m working.” I had already had enough of these foolish former flames. They had become lesbian lovers after each having had their turn with me.

I researched the crosshatch gunsight symbol. It had been found on other murdered girls’ bodies at a variety of locations across the country, it had been used by the notorious Zodiac Killer, and it had also figured prominently in Ukrainian culture as a sort of neo-Aryan symbol. I deduced that Ukraine could be a focus for Crove’s crew.

Disillusioned with decadent California bisexuals, I decided to surf dating sites for Ukrainian women, and prepare to travel to the former Soviet republic to see if there was a connection to the crosshatch symbol in the murder cases. I saw a really nice photo, and the bio of Sveta of Krivoy Rog, and I sent her an email. After a few days I received an email from Tanya of Vinnitsya with her photo.

Unbeknownst to me, Crove was using his home computer to surreptitiously observe everything I had done. He probably then called someone and said, “Pick him up. Yeah, that bird Martin.”

I was brought to Crove by two heavies, my eyes black, cheeks and mouth bleeding.

Crove said, “Every dog in town knows you are going to Ukraine, Rick. Looking for what you think are normal girls. Good luck.”

I was sarcastic, with swollen lips. “Yeah, I have such a big mouth sometimes.”

He held his anger. “You have some pretty big balls too, to interfere with this operation. I will break them, as your Italian friends like to talk about. Listen, I know … you are of … very … noble Roman and Scottish ancestry. We could use you, you know, and pay you very well.”

I was resentful, with black eyes. “No thanks. I will not be recruited.”

“Well, then, bon voyage! You know how glad I am to see you go.”

“I hope I never see your big pickled nose and your little onion eyes again on your red beet face, Crove.”