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brought the colors vibrantly to life. None more brilliantly than the red of the shirt of a man stretched out on the fresh earth of Eurleen Cransford’s plot.
    â€œHe’s sleeping on Eurleen’s grave,” Archie whispered.
    I said nothing. My eyes were sharper. Sharp enough to see the flies buzzing around the man’s head.
    â€œOh, my God.” Archie jumped back like he’d stepped on a rattlesnake.
    Jimmy Panther lay with one side of his face flat against the dirt. Behind the upturned ear, a circular hole of dried blood marked the entrance of the bullet that had taken his life. A white piece of paper lay under a stone beside his outstretched hand.
    I pulled a clean handkerchief from my hip pocket, set the stone aside and lifted the folded paper. Inside were four pencil-scrawled words: “The only good Indian.”
    ***
    â€œIs a dead Indian.” Tommy Lee completed the old racist phrase and then dropped the paper in an evidence sleeve. He looked down at Jimmy Panther’s body. “What do you think he was doing at Eurleen’s grave?”
    The sheriff and I stood inside a perimeter of yellow crime tape and waited on the arrival of ME Howard Tuppler and the mobile crime lab. My fellow deputies had set up a roadblock at the base of the cemetery road and secured the immediate area around the pickup.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “There’s no sign of vandalism. Maybe someone saw him here and thought the worst.”
    Tommy Lee knelt down by Panther’s head. “This was an execution. You can see the muzzle was placed against the scalp. All six tells of a contact shot.” Tommy Lee circled his finger around the wound. “We’ve got skin abrasion, unburned gunpowder, soot, seared skin from the heat, triangular skin tears from gas going into him, and I can see the muzzle contusion from the expanding gas pushing the scalp back against the barrel. From the shape, I’d say a semiautomatic twenty-two.”
    â€œSmall caliber for a pistol.”
    â€œNot for a close range execution.” Tommy Lee rose. “Surprised it was just a single tap. Either the killer was confident or he fired a single shot in anger and fled.”
    â€œSomeone angry like Luther?”
    Tommy Lee nodded. “But how did he get so close? And how did he know Panther was up here?”
    â€œWhat do you want me to do?”
    He fixed his one eye on me. “What do you think? Lead the investigation, of course. Reece can secure the scene here. I’ll work with Tuppler and the lab boys. You get your butt to Luther’s house and find out where he was last night.”
    I looked down at the body. “And notification?”
    â€œI’ll take care of contacting tribal police. We could be facing a jurisdictional mess and a political nightmare.” He held up the sleeve with the note. “No word about this. Not only is it inflammatory, but I want it withheld so we’ve got a piece of evidence to corroborate any confession. We’ll analyze it for comparison to the messages Archie and Luther received.”
    â€œOK. So, I’m off. Alone.”
    Tommy Lee grimaced. “Ah, hell, what was I thinking? If Luther shot Panther, he might do anything. Take Wakefield as backup.” He flashed a crooked smile. “But be careful. I’d hate to lose Wakefield.”
    Luther Cransford lived in a gated community called Glendale Forest that was two miles on the other side of town. I took a patrol car from the murder scene and the guard at the gatehouse waved us through without asking for our destination. I wouldn’t have given it to him if he had.
    Wakefield and I parked a half a block away so that Luther wouldn’t see our vehicle. The white, two-story house bore a striking resemblance to our funeral home, except instead of being antebellum to the Civil War it was one of those faux plantation houses antebellum to the Iraq War and more suited to a