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midnight?”
    Anthony clasped his hands together and laid them on the table in front of him. Vicky saw the raw stubbornness and barely contained rage in the young man’s eyes. It wouldn’t have surprised her had he blurted out that it was none of their business.
    â€œJust answer him,” she said.
    â€œI spent the night with a friend.” Anthony’s lips hardly moved.
    Miller had pulled the little spiral notebook out of his inside jacket pocket and flattened it on top of the table. He was already busy filling in the first couple of lines on one page. “Name?” He didn’t look up.
    â€œI left the powwow about eight o’clock and didn’t go back. So it doesn’t matter who my friend is.”
    Miller glanced up sideways, locking eyes with the young Arapaho at the end of the table. “Not good enough. I need a name,” he said. Anthony didn’t flinch.
    Vicky saw it all in a second’s flash, as if a moving picture had fast-forwarded in front of her. Anthony had spent the night with a girlfriend, and the girlfriend was someone he wanted to protect. That meant she was from around here, and, more than likely, she was white. If Anthony didn’t want to divulge her name, no power on the face of the earth was going to make him do so even if he had to sit out the rest of his life in Leavenworth for a murder he didn’t commit. Vicky felt the muscles tightening in her throat.
    â€œYou’ve got your answer,” she said to the agent. “My client has an alibi. He was with a friend at the time of his uncle’s murder. Should you come up with any real evidence against him, backed up by scientific tests, which is doubtful in the extreme since he’s innocent, we will supply the name.”
    She shifted in her chair toward Anthony and shot him a look meant to warn him against blurting out “the hell we will.”
    Miller bent over his notebook. “Refused to answer,” he said, pen scratching the paper.
    Banner leaned forward. “You and Harvey get into some kind of fight last night?”
    â€œNo fight. Argument.”
    â€œWhat kind of argument?”
    â€œWhat kind?”
    â€œYeah. What was it about?” the chief persisted.
    Anthony drew in a long breath, as if to pull in a string of thoughts. “About how, for no good reason, he changed his mind about buying the Cooley ranch, about how some oil company will probably buy the ranch now, and Arapahos will never get back what used to be ours. That’s what it was about.”
    â€œYou expect us to swallow some bull story that you and your uncle got into a violent argument over some land deal?” Miller had stopped writing, but kept his pen poised over the next empty line.
    â€œThat’s your characterization,” Vicky said, laying her forearms on the table. She felt more relaxed, more in control now that she knew Anthony had an alibi. “There’s no evidence the argument was violent.”
    â€œYou want violent arguments? Why don’t you talk to Ernest Oldman?” Anthony’s words came like a blast from a shotgun.
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” Banner asked.
    Anthony shrugged. “Ernest got into a lot of arguments with Harvey this summer. They were all violent. Last week he came out to the ranch drunker’n a skunk. Stood out at the gate and shouted his head off ’til Harvey went out. I went out, too, case Harvey needed help. You never know about drunks.” He shot a glance at Vicky, took a deep breath, then went on. “He was shouting something about his per capita being cut way back and Harvey not taking care of it. Like it was Harvey’s responsibility.”
    Vicky pushed back against the hard wooden slats in the chair. She’d heard that several wells on the reservation had stopped pumping this summer. Ernest wasn’t the only Arapaho to wake up one morning and feel the effects of even a few oil pumps standing