A Thief of Time

'Not to me, she didn't,' Mrs. Luna said.

'Or why she was excited?'

'I know some more of those polychrome pots had turned up. Several, I think. Same potter. Some identical and some with a more mature style. Later work. And it turned out they came from somewhere else -- away from the Chaco. She thought she could prove her potter had migrated.'

'Did you know Ellie had a pistol?'

Luna and his wife spoke simultaneously. 'I didn't,' she said. Luna said: 'It doesn't surprise me. I'd guess Maxie has one, too. For snakes,' he added, and laughed. 'Actually it's for safety.'

'Do you know if she ever hired Jimmy Etcitty to find pots for her?'

'Boy, that was a shock,' Luna said. 'He hadn't worked here long. Less than a year. But he was a good hand. And a good man.'

'And he didn't mind digging around graves.'

'He was a Christian,' Luna said. 'A fundamentalist born-again Christian. No more chindi. But no, I doubt if he worked for Ellie. Hadn't heard of it.'

'Had you ever heard he might be a Navajo Wolf?' Leaphorn asked. 'Into any kind of witchcraft. Being a skinwalker?'

Luna looked surprised. And so, Leaphorn noticed, did Jim Chee. Not at the question, Leaphorn guessed. That fooling around with the bones they'd found at the ruins would suggest witchcraft to anyone who knew the Navajo tradition of skinwalkers robbing graves for bones to grind into corpse powder. But Chee would be surprised at Leaphorn's thinking. Leaphorn was aware that his contempt for the Navajo witchcraft business was widely known throughout the department. Chee, certainly, was aware of it. They had worked together in the past.

'Well,' Luna said. 'Not exactly. But the other men who worked here didn't have much to do with him. Maybe that was because he was willing to dig around the burials. Had given up the traditional ways. But they gossiped about him. Not to me but among themselves. And I sort of sensed they were wary of him.'

'Davis told me Lehman came. The man she had the appointment with.'

'Her project supervisor?'

“Yeah.'

'Did he say what the meeting was about?'

'She'd told him she had one more piece of evidence to get and then she'd be ready to publish. And she wanted to show it all to him and talk it over. He stuck around the next day and then drove back to Albuquerque.'

'I'll get his address from you,' Leaphorn said. 'Did he have any idea what that one piece of evidence was?'

'He thought she'd probably found some more pots. Ones that fit. He said she was supposed to have them when they met.'

Leaphorn thought about that. He noticed Chee had marked it, too. It seemed to mean that when Ellie left Chaco it was to pick up those final pots.

'Would Maxie Davis or Elliot be likely to know any more about all this?'

Mrs. Luna answered that one. 'Maxie, maybe. She and Ellie were friends.' She considered that statement, found it too strong. 'Sort of friends. At least they'd known each other for years. I don't think they'd ever worked together -- as Maxie and Elliot sometimes do. Teamed.'

'Teamed,' Leaphorn said.

Mrs. Luna looked embarrassed. 'Sue,' she said. 'Allen. Don't you two have any homework? Tomorrow is a school day.'

'Not me,' Allen said. 'I did mine on the bus.'

'Me either,' Sue said. 'This is interesting.'

'They're friends,' Mrs. Luna said, looking at Sue, but meaning Maxie and Elliot.

'When Mr. Thatcher and I talked to them it seemed pretty obvious that Elliot wanted it that way,' Leaphorn said. 'I wasn't so sure about Miss Davis.'

'Elliot wants to get married,' Mrs. Luna said. 'Maxie doesn't.'

She glanced at her children again, and at Luna.

'Kids,' Luna said. 'Sue, you better see about your horse. And Allen, find something to do.'

They pushed back their chairs. 'Nice to have met you,' Allen said, nodding to Leaphorn and to Chee.

'Great children,' Leaphorn said, as they disappeared down the hallway. 'They ride the bus? To where?'

'Crownpoint,' Mrs. Luna said.

'Wow!' Chee said. 'I used to ride a school bus about twenty-five miles and that seemed forever.'

'About sixty miles or so, each way,' Luna said. 'Makes an awful long day for `em. But that's the nearest school.'

'We could teach them out here,' Mrs. Luna said. 'I have a teacher's certificate. But they need to see other children. Nothing but grownups at Chaco.'

'Two young women and one young man,' Leaphorn said. 'Was there any friction between the women over that? Any sort of jealousy?'

Luna chuckled.

Mrs. Luna smiled. 'Eleanor wouldn't be much competition in that race,' she said. 'Unless the man wants an intellectual, and then it's about even. Besides, I think in Randall Elliot you have one of those one-woman men. He left a job in Washington and worked his way into a project out here. Just following her. I think he's sort of obsessive about it.'

'Delete the `sort of,'' Luna said. 'Make it downright obsessive. And sad, too.' He shook his head. 'Elliot's a sort of macho guy most ways. Played football at Princeton. Flew a navy helicopter in Vietnam. Won a Navy Cross and some other decorations. And he's made himself a good name in physical anthropology for a man his age. Got stuff published about genetics in archaic populations. That sort of stuff. And Maxie refuses to take anything he does seriously. It's the game she plays.'

From down the hall came the high, sweet sound of a harmonica--and then the urgent nasal whine of Bob Dylan. Almost instantly the volume was muted.

'Not a game,' Mrs. Luna said, thoughtfully. 'It's the way Maxie is.'

'Reverse snob, you mean?' Luna asked.

'More to it than that. Kind of a sense of justice. Or injustice, maybe.'

Luna looked at Leaphorn and Chee. 'To explain what we're talking about, and maybe why we're doing this gossiping, there's no way Maxie would be jealous of Dr. Friedman. Or anybody else, I think. Maxie is the ultimate self-made woman from what I've heard about her. Off of some worn-out farm in Nebraska. Her father was a widower, so she had to help raise the little kids. Went to a dinky rural high school. Scholarship to University of Nebraska, working her way through as a housekeeper in a sorority. Graduate scholarship to Madison, working her way through again. Trying to send money home to help Papa and the kids. Never any help for her. So she meets this man from old money, Exeter Academy, where the tuition would have fed her family for two years. Where you have tutors helping you if you need it. And then Princeton, and graduate school at Harvard, all that.' Luna sipped his coffee. 'Opposite ends of the economic scale. Anyway, nothing Elliot can do impresses Maxie. It was all given to him.'

'Even the navy career?'

'Especially the navy,' Mrs. Luna said. 'I asked her about that. She said, Of course, Randall has an uncle who's an admiral, and an aunt who's married to an undersecretary of the navy, and somebody else who's on the Senate Armed Services Committee. So he starts out with a commission.' And I said something like,You can hardly blame him for that,' and she said she didn't blame him. She said it was just that Randall has never had a chance to do anything himself.' Mrs. Luna shook her head. 'And then she said, `He might be a pretty good man. Who knows? How can you tell?' Isn't that odd?'

'It sounds odd to me,' Leaphorn said. 'In Vietnam, he was evacuating the wounded?'

'I think so,' Luna said.

'That was it,' Mrs. Luna said. 'I asked Maxie about that. She said, You know, he probably could have done something on his own if he had the chance. But officers give each other decorations. Especially if it pleases Uncle Admiral.'Uncle Admiral,' that's what she said. And then she told me her younger brother was in Vietnam, too. She said he was an enlisted man. She said a helicopter flew his body out. But no uncles gave him any decorations.'

Mrs. Luna looked sad. 'Bitter,' she said. 'Bitter. I remember the night we'd been talking about this. I'd said something about Randall flying a helicopter and she said, `What chance do you think you or I would have had to be handed a helicopter to fly?' '

Leaphorn thought of nothing to say about that. Mrs. Luna rose, asked about coffee refills, and began clearing away the dishes. Luna asked if they'd like to spend the night in one of the temporary personnel apartments.

'We better be getting back home,' Leaphorn said.

The night was dead still, lit by a half-moon. From the visitor camping area up the canyon there was the sound of laughter. Allen was walking up the dirt road toward his house. As he watched him, it occurred to Leaphorn how everyone knew Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had left so early on her one-way trip.

'Allen,' Leaphorn called. 'What time do you catch the bus in the morning?'

'It's supposed to get here about five minutes before six,' Allen said. 'Usually about then.'

'Down by the road?'

Allen pointed. 'At the intersection down there.'

'Did you see Ellie drive away?'

'I saw her loading up her car,' Allen said.

'You talk to her?'

'Not much,' Allen said. 'Susy said hello. And she said something about you kids have a good day at school and we said for her to have a good weekend. Something like that. Then we went down and caught the bus.'

'Did you know she was going away for the weekend?'

'Well,' Allen said, 'she was putting her stuff in her car.'

'Sleeping bag, too?' Maxie said she owned one, but he hadn't found it in her apartment.

'Yeah,' Allen said. 'Whole bunch of stuff. Even a saddle.'

'Saddle?'

'Mr. Arnold's,' Allen said. 'He used to work here. He's a biologist. Collects rocks with lichens on them, and he used to live in one of the temporary apartments. Dr. Friedman had his saddle. She was putting it in her car.'

'She'd borrowed it from him?'

'I guess so,' Allen said. 'She used to have a horse. Last year it was.'

'Do you know where this Mr. Arnold lives now?'

'Up in Utah,' Allen said. 'Bluff.'

'How'd she sound? Okay? Same as usual? Nervous?'

'Happy,' Allen said. 'I'd say she sounded happy.'

Chapter Eleven

Ť ^ ť

FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE -- since his early teens at least -- knowing that he was smarter than most people had been a major source of satisfaction for Harrison Houk. Now, standing with his back pressed against the wall of the horse stall in the barn, he knew that for once he had not been smart enough. It was an unusual feeling, and chilling. He thought of that aphorism of southern Utah's hard country -- if you want to be meaner than everybody else without dying young, you have to be smarter than everybody else. More than once Harrison Houk had heard that rule applied to him. He enjoyed the reputation it implied. He deserved it. He had gotten rich in a country where almost everybody had gotten poor. It had made him enemies, the way he had done it. He controlled grazing leases in ways that might not have stood grand jury scrutiny. He bought livestock, and sold livestock under sometimes peculiar circumstances. He obtained Anasazi pots from people who had no idea what they were worth and sometimes sold them to people who only thought they knew what they were getting. He had arranged deals so lopsided that, when daylight hit them, they brought the high councilor of his Latter-day Saints stake down from Blanding to remind him of what was said about such behavior in the Book of Mormon. Even his stake president had written once exhorting him to make things right. But Houk had been smart enough not to die young. He was old now, and he intended to become very, very old. That was absolutely necessary. Things remained for him to do.

Now more than ever. Responsibilities. Matters of clearing his conscience. He hadn't stopped at much, but he'd never had a human life on his hands before. Not this directly. Never before.

He stood against the wall, trying to think of a plan. He should have recognized the car more quickly, and understood what it must mean. Should have instantly made the link between the killing of Etcitty and the rest of it. He would have when he was younger. Then his mind worked like lightning. Now the killings had made him nervous. They could have been motivated by almost anything, of course. Greed among thieves. Malice over a woman. God knows what. Almost anything. But the instinct that had served him so well for so long suggested something more sinister. An erasing of tracks. A gathering in of strings. That certainly would involve him, and he should have seen. Nor should he have thought so slowly when he saw the car turning through his gate. Maybe he would have had enough time then to hobble back to the house, to the pistol in his dresser drawer or the rifle in the closet. He could only wait now, and hope, and try to think of some solution. There could be no running for it, not with the arthritis in his hip. He had to think.

Quickly. Quickly. He'd left a note for Irene. He thought Irene would be coming back for her squash and she'd wonder where he'd gone. Pinned it on the screen door, telling her he'd be out in the barn working. It was right there in plain view. The worst kind of bad luck.

He looked around him for a hiding place. Houk was not a man subject to panic. He could climb into the loft but there was no cover there. Behind him bales of alfalfa were stacked head-high. He could restack some of them, leave himself a cave. Would there be time? Not without luck. He began a new stack against the wall, leaving a space just wide enough to hold him, groaning as he felt the weight of the heavy bales grinding his hip socket. As he worked, he realized the futility. That would only delay things a few minutes. There was really no place to hide.

He noticed the pitchfork then, leaning beside the door where he'd left it. He limped over, got it, limped back to the horse stall. Maybe there would be some chance to use it. Anyway, it was better than hiding and just waiting.

He gripped the fork handle, listening. His hearing wasn't what it once had been but he could detect nothing except, now and then, the breeze blowing through the slats. The smell of the barn was in his nostrils. Dust. Dry alfalfa. The faint acid of dried horse urine. The smell of a dry autumn.

'Mr. Houk,' the voice called. 'You in the barn?'

Add it all together, average it out, it had been a good enough life. The first fifty years, close to wonderful, except for Brigham being sick. Even that you could live with, given the good wife he'd been blessed with. Except for the downswings of the schizophrenia, Brigham had been happy enough, most of the time. The rages came and went, but when he was out in the wild country, hunting, living alone, he seemed full of joy. Thinking back, Houk was impressed again with the memory. He'd been pretty good himself outdoors as a kid. But not like The Boy. By the time he was ten, Brigham could go up a cliff that Houk wouldn't have tried with ropes. And he knew what to eat. And how to hide. That brought back a rush of memories, and of the old, old sorrow. The Boy, the summer he was seven, missing long after suppertime. All of them hunting him. Finding him in the old coyote den under the saltbush. He'd been as terrified at being found as if he had been a rabbit dug out by a dog.

That had been the day they no longer lied to themselves about it. But nothing the doctors tried had worked. The piano had helped for a while. He had a talent for it. And he could lose himself for hours just sitting there making his music. But the rages came back. And putting him away had been unspeakable and unthinkable.

'Houk?' the voice said. Now it was just beyond the barn wall. 'I need to talk to you.'

And now he could hear footsteps, the door with the draggy hinge being pulled open.

One thing he had to do. He couldn't leave it undone. He should have handled it yesterday, as soon as he found out about it. Yesterday-- personally. It had to be taken care of. It wasn't something you went away and left--not a human life.

He took out his billfold, found a business card from a well-drilling outfit in it, and began writing on its back, holding the card awkwardly against the billfold.

'Houk,' the voice said. It was inside the barn now. 'I see you there, through the slats. Come out.'

No time now. He couldn't let the note be found, except by the police. He pushed it down inside his shorts. Just as he did, he heard the stall door opening.

Chapter Twelve

Ť ^ ť

IT WAS RAINING IN NEW YORK. L. G. Marcy, the director of public affairs to whom Joe Leaphorn was referred, proved to be a slender, stylish woman with gray hair, and eyes as blue as blade steel. On drier days, the expanse of glass behind her desk looked out upon the rooftops of mid-town Manhattan. She examined Leaphorn's card, turned it over to see if the back offered more information, and then glanced up at him.

'You want to see the documentation on an artifact,' she said. 'Is that correct?' She glanced down at the open catalog Leaphorn had handed her.

'That's all. Just this Anasazi pot,' Leaphorn said. 'We need to know the site it came from.'

'I can assure you it was legal,' Ms. Marcy said. 'We do not deal in pots collected in violation of the Antiquities Preservation Act.'

'I'm sure that's true,' said Leaphorn, who was equally sure no sane pot hunter would ever certify that he had taken a pot illegally. 'We presume the pot came from private land. We simply need to know which private land. Whose ranch.'

'Unfortunately, that pot sold. All pots went in that auction. So we don't have the documentation. The documentation went to the buyer. Along with the pot,' L. G. Marcy said. She smiled, closed the catalog, handed it to Leaphorn. 'Sorry,' she said.

'Who was the buyer?'

'We have a problem there,' she said. 'It is Nelson's policy to cooperate with the police. It is also Nelson's policy to respect the confidence of our customers. We never tell anyone the identity of buyers unless we have their advance clearance to do so.' She leaned across the desk to return Leaphorn's card. 'That rarely happens,' she said. 'Usually, none of the parties concerned wants publicity. They value privacy. On rare occasions, the object involved is so important that publicity is inevitable. But rarely. And in this case, the object is not the sort that attracts the news media.'

Leaphorn put the card in the pocket of his uniform shirt. The shirt was damp from the rain Leaphorn had walked through from his hotel toward this office building before ducking for shelter into a drugstore. To his surprise, the store sold umbrellas. Leaphorn had bought one, the first he'd ever owned, and continued his journey under it -- tremendously self-conscious -- thinking he would own the only umbrella in Window Rock, and perhaps the only umbrella on the reservation, if not in all of Arizona. He was conscious of it now, lying wetly across his lap, while he waited silently for L. G. Marcy to add to her statement. Leaphorn had learned early in his career that this Navajo politeness often clashed with white abhorrence for conversational silences. Sometimes the resulting uneasiness caused belagana witnesses to blurt out more than they intended to say. While he waited, he noticed the prints on the wall. All, if Leaphorn could judge, done by female artists. The same for the small abstract sculpture on the Marcy desk. The silence stretched. It wasn't going to work with this belagana.

It didn't.

The pause caused L. G. Marcy's smile to become slightly bent. Nothing more. She out-waited him. About his own age, Leaphorn thought, but she looked like a woman in her mid-thirties.

Leaphorn stirred. Moved the umbrella off his lap. 'I believe the FBI notified your company that we are investigating two homicides,' he said. 'This particular pot seems to figure into it. Your client won't be embarrassed. Not in any way. We simply…'

'I'm not sure the FBI exactly notified us of anything,' Ms. Marcy said. 'An FBI agent called from…' She examined a notebook. '… Albuquerque, New Mexico, and told us that a representative of the Navajo Tribal Police would call today about an artifact we had handled. He said our cooperation would be appreciated. The call was referred to me, and when I questioned him about what the federal government interest might be, this agent, this Mr. Sharkey, he, well…' Ms. Marcy hunted politely for a word politer than 'weaseled.'

'He made it appear that his call was not official at all. It was intended as a sort of a personal introduction.'

Leaphorn simply nodded. Sharkey hadn't wanted to make the call, had foreseen embarrassment, had been talked into it. Having been caught at it, Sharkey would be angry and hard to deal with. But then in a few more days, nothing like that would matter. Leaphorn would be a civilian. He nodded again.

'There's a system for dealing with problems like this, of course,' Ms. Marcy said. 'One petitions the appropriate court for an injunction. You then serve this order on us, and we provide you with the information. The requirement that we make available evidence needed in a judicial proceeding supersedes our own need to maintain a confidential relationship with our customers.' Her expression was bland.

After a moment, Leaphorn said, 'Of course that's a possibility. We'd like to avoid it if we could.' He shrugged. 'The paperwork. We'd like to avoid all the delay.' And, he thought, the problem of persuading the court that an item circled in a Nelson's catalog has anything at all to do with anything.

'That's understandable,' Ms. Marcy said. 'I think you can also understand our position. Our clients rely on us to keep transactions confidential. For many good reasons.' She made an inclusive gesture with small white hands. 'Burglars,' she said, 'for one example. Former wives. Business reasons. So you must understand…'

Ms. Marcy began pushing back her chair. When she rises, Leaphorn thought, she will tell me that without a court order she cannot give me any information. He did something he almost never did. He interrupted.

'Our problem is time,' he said. 'A woman's life may be at stake.'

Ms. Marcy lowered herself back into the chair. That little motion brought to Leaphorn's nostrils an awareness of perfume, and powder and fine feminine things. It reminded him, with overpowering force, of Emma. He closed his eyes, and opened them.

'A woman who was very interested in this particular pot--the woman who drew the circle around it in your catalog--she's been missing for weeks,' Leaphorn said. He took out his wallet, extracted his photograph of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, the bride. He handed it to Ms. Marcy. 'Did she come in to see you? This autumn? Or call?'

'Yes,' Ms. Marcy said. 'She was in.' She studied the photograph, frowning. Leaphorn waited until she looked up.

'Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal,' he said. 'An anthropologist. Published a lot of papers in the field of ceramics--and of primitive ceramic art. We gather that Dr. Friedman-Bernal believes she has discovered an Anasazi potter whose work she can specifically identify. Did she tell you all that?'

As he related this, Leaphorn was aware of how mundane and unimportant it must sound to a layman. In fact, it sounded trivial to him. He watched Ms. Marcy's face.

'Some of it,' Ms. Marcy said. 'It would be fascinating if she can prove it.'

'From what we can find out, Dr. Friedman-Bernal identified a decorative technique in the finishing of a kind of pottery called St. John Polychrome -- a kind made in the last stages of the Anasazi civilization. She found that technique was peculiar to one single specific Anasazi potter.'

'Yes. That's what she said.'

Leaphorn leaned forward. If his persuasion didn't work, he'd wasted two days on airplanes and a night in a New York hotel.

'I gather that this woman, this Anasazi potter, had some special talent which the doctor spotted. Dr. Friedman-Bernal was able to trace her work backward and forward in time through scores of pots, arranging them chronologically as this talent developed. The potter worked at Chaco Canyon, and her work turned up at several of the villages there. But recently -- probably earlier this year -- Friedman-Bernal began finding pots that seemed to come from somewhere else. And they were later pots -- with the woman's style matured. Your spring auction catalog carried a photograph of one of these pots. We found the catalog in Dr. Friedman-Bernal's room, with the photograph circled.'

Ms. Marcy was leaning forward now. 'But those pots, they were so stylized,' she said. 'So much alike. How… ?' She didn't complete the question.

'I'm not sure,' Leaphorn said. 'I think she does it the way graphologists identify handwriting. Something like that.'

'It makes sense,' Ms. Marcy said.

'From what we know, from what Friedman-Bernal told other anthropologists , she seems to have believed that she could find the place to which this potter moved when the Chaco civilization collapsed,' Leaphorn said.

'About right,' Ms. Marcy said. 'She said she thought this pot was the key. She said she had come across several shards, and one complete pot, which she was sure came from a late phase in this potter's work--an extension and refinement and maturing of her techniques. The pot she'd seen in our catalog seemed to be exactly identical to this work. So she wanted to study it. She wanted to know where she could go to see it, and she wanted to see our documentation.'

'Did you tell her?'

'I told her our policy.'

'So you didn't tell her who had bought it? Or how to contact the buyer?'

Ms. Marcy sighed, allowed her expression to show a flash of impatience.

'I told her the same thing I am telling you. One of the reasons people have been dealing with Nelson's for more than two hundred years is because of our reputation. They know they can depend, absolutely and without a qualm of doubt, on Nelson's keeping transactions in confidence.'

Leaphorn leaned forward.

'Dr. Friedman-Bernal flew back to Albuquerque after she talked to you. Then she drove back to Chaco Canyon, where she lives and works. The following Friday she got up very early, put her sleeping bag into her car, and drove away. She'd told her friends she'd be gone for a day or two. We suspect that somehow she found out where this pot had come from and went to see if she could find something to prove it. Probably to see if there were other such pots, or potsherds, at the place.'

He leaned back, folded his hands across his chest, wondering if this would work. If it didn't, he was near a dead end. There was Chee, of course. He'd asked Chee to find the Reverend Slick Nakai -- to learn from Nakai everything the man knew about where those damned pots were coming from. Chee seemed interested. Chee would do his best. But how smart was Chee? He should have waited, done it himself, not risked having it all screwed up.

'She vanished,' Leaphorn said. 'No trace of the woman, or car, or anything. Not a word to anyone. As if Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had never existed.'

Ms. Marcy picked up the photograph and studied it. 'Maybe she just went away,' she said, looking up at Leaphorn. 'You know. Too much work. Too much stress. Suddenly you just want to say to hell with it. Maybe that was it.' She said it as a woman who knows the feeling.

'Possibly,' Leaphorn said. 'However, the evening before she left she spent a lot of time fixing a dinner. Marinated the meat entree, all that. The professor she had worked with was coming in from Albuquerque. She fixed this fancy dinner and put it in the refrigerator. And at dawn the next morning she put her sleeping bag and things like that in her car and drove away.'

Ms. Marcy considered. She took the picture of Eleanor Friedman as a bride from the desk and looked at it again.

'Let me see what I can do,' she said. She picked up the telephone. 'Will you wait outside just a moment?'

The reception room had no view of the rain. Just walls displaying abstract prints, and a receptionist in whom Leaphorn's damp Navajo Tribal Police uniform had aroused curiosity. He sat against the wall, glancing through an Architectural Digest, aware of the woman staring at him, wishing he had worn civilian clothes. But maybe it wasn't the uniform. Maybe it was the damp Navajo inside it.

Ms. Marcy came out in a little less than ten minutes. She handed Leaphorn a card. It bore a name, Richard DuMont, and an address on East Seventy-eighth Street.

'He said he would see you tomorrow morning,' she said. 'At eleven.'

Leaphorn stood. 'I appreciate this,' he said.

'Sure,' she said. 'I hope you'll let me know. If you find her I mean.'

Leaphorn spent the rest of the afternoon prowling through the Museum of Modern Art. He sat, finally, where he could see the patio of sculpture, the rain-stained wall behind it, and the rainy sky above. Like all dry-country people, Leaphorn enjoyed rain -- that rare, longed-for, refreshing blessing that made the desert bloom and life possible. He sat with his head full of thoughts and watched the water run down the bricks, drip from the leaves, form its cold pools on the flagstones, and give a slick shine to Picasso's goat.

The goat was Leaphorn's favorite. When they were young and he was attending the FBI Academy, he had brought Emma to see New York. They had discovered Picasso's goat together. He had already been staring at it when Emma had laughed, and plucked at his sleeve, and said: 'Look. The mascot of the Navajo Nation.'

He had an odd sensation as he remembered this, as if he could see them both as they had been then. Very young, standing by this glass wall looking out into the autumn rain. Emma, who was even more beautiful when she laughed, was laughing.

'Perfect for us Dineh,' she'd said. 'It's starved, gaunt, bony, ugly. But look! It's tough. It endures.' And she had hugged his arm in the delight of her discovery, her face full of the joy, and the beauty, that Leaphorn had found nowhere else. And of course, it was true. That gaunt goat would have been the perfect symbol. Something to put on a pedestal and display. Miserable and starved, true enough. But it was also pregnant and defiant--exactly right to challenge the world at the entrance of the ugly octagonal Tribal Council meeting hall at Window Rock. Leaphorn remembered their having coffee at the museum cafe and then walking out and patting the goat. The sensation came back to him now--wet, cold metal slick under his palm--utterly real. He got up and hurried out of the museum into the rain, leaving the umbrella hanging forgotten on the chair.

Leaphorn took a cab to the Seventy-eighth Street address, got there a quarter of an hour early, and spent the time prowling the neighborhood--a territory of uniformed doormen and expensive dogs walked by persons who seemed to have been hired for the job. He rang the door chimes at eleven exactly. He waited on the steps, looking at the sky down the street. It would rain again, and soon--probably before noon. An old man, stooped and gray in a wrinkled gray suit, opened the door and stood silently, looking at him patiently.

'My name is Leaphorn,' he said. 'I have an appointment with Richard DuMont.'

'In the study,' the man said, motioning Leaphorn in.

The study was a long, high-ceilinged room down a long, high-ceilinged hall. A man in a dark blue dressing gown was sitting at the end of a long library table. Light from a floor lamp beside his chair reflected off the white of a breakfast cloth, and china, and silver.

'Ah, Mr. Leaphorn,' the man said, smiling. 'You are most punctual. I hope you will excuse me for not getting up to greet you.' He tapped the arms of the wheelchair in which he was sitting. 'And I hope you will join me for some breakfast.'

'No thank you,' Leaphorn said. 'I've eaten.'

'Some coffee, then?'

'I have never refused coffee. Never will.'

'Nor I,' DuMont said. 'Another of my vices. But seat yourself.' He gestured toward a blue plush chair. 'The woman at Nelson's told me you are hunting a missing woman. An anthropologist. And that murder is involved.' Du-Mont's small gray eyes peered at Leaphorn, avid with interest. Unusual eyes set in a pinched, narrow face under eyebrows almost identical in color to his pale skin. 'Murder,' he repeated, 'and a missing woman.' His voice was clear, precise, easy to understand. But like his face it was a small voice. Any background noise would bury it.

'Two pot hunters were killed,' Leaphorn said. Something about DuMont was unpleasant. Too much interest? But interest in such a man seemed natural enough. After all, he was a collector. 'Including the man who found my pot,' DuMont said, with what seemed to Leaphorn to be a sort of pleasure. 'Or so that woman at Nelson's told me.'

'We think so,' Leaphorn said. 'Ms. Marcy told me you would be willing to let me see the documentation he sent in. We want to know where he found the pot.'

'The document,' DuMont said. 'Yes. But tell me how the man was killed. How the woman is missing.' He raised his arms wide apart, his small mouth grinning. 'Tell me all of that.'

Behind DuMont, on both sides of a great formal fireplace, shelves formed the wall. The shelves were lined with artifacts. Pots, carved stone images, baskets, fetishes, masks, primitive weapons. Just behind the man, a pedestal held a massive stone head -- Olmec, Leaphorn guessed. Smuggled out of Mexico in defiance of that country's antiquities act.

'Mr. Etcitty and a companion were digging up an Anasazi ruin, apparently collecting pots. Someone shot them,' Leaphorn said. 'An anthropologist named Friedman-Bernal was specializing in this sort of ceramics. In fact, she was interested in this pot you bought. She disappeared. Left Chaco Canyon -- she worked there -- for a weekend and hasn't come back.'

Leaphorn stopped. He and DuMont looked at each other. The stooped, gray man who had admitted Leaphorn appeared at his elbow, placed a small table beside his chair, spread a cloth upon it, put a silver tray on the cloth. The tray held a cup of paper-thin china sitting on a translucent saucer, a silver pot from which steam issued, two smaller silver containers, and a silver spoon. The gray man poured coffee into Leaphorn's cup and disappeared.

'One doesn't buy merely the object,' DuMont said. 'One wants what goes with it. The history. This head, for example, came out of the jungles in northern Guatemala. It had decorated the doorway to a chamber in a temple. The room where captives were held until they were sacrificed. I'm told the Olmec priests strangled them with a cord.'

DuMont covered the lower part of his small face with his napkin and produced a small cough, his avid eyes on Leaphorn.

'And this Anasazi pot of yours. Why is it worth five thousand dollars?' He laughed, a small, tinkling sound. 'It's not much of a pot, really. But the Anasazi! Such mysterious people. You hold this pot, and think of the day it was made. A civilization that had grown a thousand years was dying.' He stared into Leaphorn's eyes. 'As ours is surely dying. Its great houses were standing empty. No more great ceremonials in the kivas. This is about when my pot was made -- so my appraisers tell me. Right at the end. The twilight. In the dying days.'

DuMont did something at the arm of his wheelchair and said: 'Edgar.'

'Yes sir.' Edgar's voice seemed to come from under the table.

'Bring me that pot we bought last month. And the documents.'

'Yes sir.'

'So stories are important to me,' DuMont said to Leaphorn. 'What you could tell me has its value here. I show my new pot to my friends. I tell them not just of the Anasazi civilization, but of murder and a missing woman.' He grinned a small, prim grin, showing small, perfect teeth.

Leaphorn sipped his coffee. Hot, fresh, excellent. The china was translucent. To the right of DuMont a row of high windows lined the wall. The light coming through them was dim, tinted green by the vines that covered them. Rain streamed down the glass.

'Did I make my point?' DuMont said.

'I think so,' Leaphorn said.

'Tit for tat. You want information from me. In exchange it seems to me only fair that you give me my story. The story to go with my pot.'

'I did,' Leaphorn said.

DuMont raised two white hands, fluttered them. 'Details, details, details,' he said. 'All the bloody details. The details to pass along.'

Leaphorn told him the details. How the bodies were found. How the men had been killed. Who they were. He described the scene. He described the bones. DuMont listened, rapt.

'… and there we are,' Leaphorn concluded. 'No leads, really. Our missing woman might be a lead to the killer. More likely she's another victim. But it's all vague. We know just that she was interested in the same pots. Just that she's missing.'

Edgar had returned early in this account and stood beside DuMont, holding a pot and a manila folder. The pot was small, about the size of a man's head. A little larger than DuMont's skull.

'Hand the pot to Mr. Leaphorn,' DuMont said. 'And the documents, please.'

Edgar did so. And stood there, stooped and gray, his presence making Leaphorn edgy. Why didn't the man sit down? Leaphorn placed the pot carefully on the table, noticing the smooth feel of the glazing, aware that it had nothing to tell him. He opened the folder.

It contained what appeared to be two bills of sale, one from Harrison Houk to Nelson's and one from Nelson's to DuMont, and a form with its blanks filled in by an awkward hand. It was signed by Jimmy Etcitty.

Leaphorn checked the date. The previous June. He checked the space marked 'Place of recovery.' The entry read:

About eight or ten miles down San Juan from Sand Island. From mouth of canyon on north side of river go up the canyon about five and a half miles to the place where there are three ruins on the left side of the canyon at a low level. Right there by the lower ruin are a bunch of pictures of Anasazi yei figures and one looks like a big baseball umpire holding up a pink chest protector. On the north side of the canyon one of the ruins is built against the cliff on the shelf above the canyon bottom. Above it on the higher shelf there is a cave under the cliff with a ruin built in it, and above that in a smaller cave there is another ruin. All these ruins are on private land under lease to my friend Harrison Houk of Bluff, Utah. This pot came from a trench beside the south wall of the ruin against the cliff. It was faceup, with three other pots, all broken, and a skeleton, or part of a skeleton. When found, the pot had nothing but dirt in it.

Leaphorn was surprised at the intensity of his disappointment. It was exactly what he should have expected. He checked the other blanks and found nothing interesting. DuMont was watching him, grinning.

'A problem?'

'A little case of lying,' Leaphorn said.

'Just what Dr. Friedman said.' DuMont chuckled. 'False, false, false.'

'You talked to Dr. Friedman?'

'Just like this,' DuMont said, delighted with Leaphorn's amazement. 'Your missing lady was right here. In that same chair. Edgar, was she drinking from the same cup?'

'I have no idea, sir,' Edgar said.

'Same questions, anyway.' DuMont gestured. 'Fascinating.'

'How did she find you?'

'As you did, I presume. Through Nelson's. She called, and identified herself, and made an appointment.'

Leaphorn didn't comment. He was remembering her note. 'Call Q!' Ellie seemed to have had a pipeline into the auction house that got her past Ms. Marcy.

'She said the certification was false? The location?'

'She said that canyon isn't where Mr… Mr. --'

'Etcitty,' Edgar said.

'Where Mr. Etcitty said it was.' DuMont laughed. 'Running the wrong way, she said. Too far down the river. Things like that.'

'She was right,' Leaphorn said. If that false location had an effect on DuMont's five-thousand-dollar pot, it had no effect on his humor. He was grinning his small white grin.

'She was quite upset,' he said. 'Disappointed. Are you?'

'Yes,' Leaphorn said. 'But I shouldn't be. It's exactly what I should have expected.'

'Edgar has made you a copy of that,' DuMont said. 'To take with you.'

'Thank you,' Leaphorn said. He pushed himself out of the chair. He wanted to get out of this room. Away. Out into the clean rain.

'And Edgar will give you my card,' DuMont said from behind him. 'Call me with all the details. When you find her body.'

Chapter Thirteen

Ť ^ ť

FINDING THE REVEREND SLICK NAKAI had not been easy. At the Nageezi site Chee found only the trampled place where the revival tent had stood, and the trash left behind. He asked around, learned that Nakai was known at the Brethren Navajo Mission. He drove to Escrito. The belagana at the mission there knew of Nakai but not his whereabouts. If he had scheduled a revival around there, they hadn't heard of it. Must be a mistake. Chee left, sensing that he wasn't alone in his disapproval of Slick Nakai. At Counselors Trading Post, where people tend to know what's happening on the north side of the Checkerboard Reservation, he hung around until he found someone who knew of a family not only fervently following the Jesus Road, but doing so as prescribed by the tenets of Nakai's sect. It was the family of Old Lady Daisy Manygoats. The Manygoats outfit, unfortunately, lived way over by Coyote Canyon. Chee drove to Coyote Canyon, stopped at the chapter house, got directions down a road that was bad even by reservation standards, and found nobody at home at the Manygoats place except a boy named Darcy Ozzie. Yes, Darcy Ozzie knew about the Reverend Slick Nakai, had in fact gone to his recent revival over at Nageezi.

'They say he was going to preach over between White Rock and Tsaya, over there by the mountains,' the boy said, indicating west in the Navajo fashion by a twist of his lips. 'And then when he was finished there, he was going way over into Arizona to have a revival over there by Lower Greasewood. Over there south of the Hopi Reservation.'

So Chee drove up the Chuska Valley toward Tsaya, with the Chuska Range rising blue to his left and autumn asters forming two lines of color along the opposite sides of the cracked old asphalt of U.S. 666, and snakeweed and chamisa coloring the slopes mottled tan-yellow-gold and the November sky dark blue overhead.

He had quit thinking of Slick Nakai about halfway between Nageezi and Coyote Canyon, having exhausted every possible scenario their meeting might produce. Then he considered Mary Landon. She loved him, he concluded. In her way. But there was love, and then there was love. She would not change her mind about living her life on the reservation. And she was right. Lacking some very basic change in Mary, she would not be happy raising their children here. He wanted Mary to neither change nor be unhappy. Which led him back to himself. She would marry him if he left the reservation. And he could do that. He'd had offers. He could go into federal law enforcement. Work somewhere where their children could go to school with white kids and be surrounded by white culture. Mary would be happy. Or would she? He could still be a Navajo in the sense of blood, but not in the sense of belief. He would be away from family and the Slow Talking Dineh, the brothers and sisters of his maternal clan. He would be outside of Dineh Bike'yah -- that territory fenced in by the four sacred mountains within which the magic of the curing ceremonials had its compulsory effect. He would be an alien living in exile. Mary Landon would not enjoy life with that Jim Chee. He could not live with an unhappy Mary Landon. It was the conclusion he always eventually reached. It left him with a sense of anger and loss. That, in turn, moved his thoughts to something else. He thought of Janet Pete, trying to work what little he knew of her character into the solution she would find to her own problem. Would she allow her lawyer to convert her into an Indian maiden? Not enough data to be sure, but he doubted if Janet Pete would ever buy that.

Who killed Nails and Etcitty? Find the motive. There lies the answer. But there could be a dozen motives and he had no basis for guessing. Leaphorn, obviously, believed Slick Nakai somehow fit into that puzzle. But then Leaphorn knew a lot more about this business than Chee. All Chee knew was that Nakai bought pots from Etcitty--or perhaps was given them. That Etcitty was one of Nakai's born-again Christians. That Leaphorn believed Nakai sold pots to the woman missing from Chaco Canyon. That was the focus of Chee's assignment. Leaphorn's voice on the telephone had sounded tired. 'You want to stick with me a little longer on this Friedman-Bernal business?' he asked. 'If you do, I can arrange it with Captain Largo.'

Chee had hesitated, out of surprise. Leaphorn had identified the pause as indecision.

'I should remind you again that I'm quitting the department,' Leaphorn had interjected. 'I'm on terminal leave right now. I already told you that. I tell you now so if you're doing me a favor, remember there's no way I can return it.' Which, Chee had thought, was a nice way of saying the reverse--I can't punish you for refusing.

'I'd like to stay on it,' Chee had said. 'I'd like to find out who killed those guys.'

'That's not what we're working on,' Leaphorn had said. 'They're connected, I guess. They must be connected. But what I'm after is what happened to the woman missing from Chaco. The anthropologist.'

'Okay,' Chee had said. It seemed an odd focus. Two murders, apparently premeditated assassinations. And Leaphorn was devoting his leave time, and Chee's efforts, to a missing person case. Same case, probably, the way it looked now. But going at it totally backward. Well, Lieutenant Leaphorn was supposed to be smarter than Officer Chee. He had a reputation for doing things in weird ways. But he also had a reputation for guessing right.

At Tsaya, Chee found he'd missed Slick Nakai, but not by much. Nakai had canceled his planned revival there and headed north.

'Just canceled it?' Chee asked.

He was asking a plump girl of about eighteen who seemed to be in charge of the Tsaya Chapter--since she was the only one present in the chapter house.

'He sort of hurried in, and said who he was, and said he had to cancel a tent meeting that was supposed to be for tonight,' she said. 'It's over there on the bulletin board.' She nodded toward the notices posted by the entrance.

'NOTICE!' Nakai had scrawled at the top of a sheet of notepaper:

Due to an unexpected emergency

Reverend Nakai is forced to cancel his revival for here. It will be rescheduled later if God wills it.

-- Reverend Slick Nakai

'Well, shit!' said Jim Chee, aloud and in English, since Navajo lends itself poorly to such emotional expletives. He glanced at his watch. Almost four-thirty. Where the devil could Nakai have gone? He walked back to the desk where the girl was sitting. She had been watching him curiously.

'I need to find Nakai.' Chee smiled at her, happy that he hadn't worn his uniform. A good many people her age looked upon Navajo Tribal Police as the adversary. 'Did he say anything else? Like where he was going?'

'To me? Nothing. Just borrowed a piece of paper for his note. You one of his Christians?'

'No,' Chee said. 'Matter of fact, I'm a hata-thali. I do the Blessing Way.'

'Really?' the girl said.

Chee was embarrassed. 'Just beginning,' he said. 'Just did it once.' He didn't explain that the one time had been for a member of his own family. He fished out his billfold, extracted a business card, and handed it to her.

JIM CHEE

HATATHALI

Singer of The Blessing Way Available for other ceremonials, For consultation call

(P.O. Box 112, Shiprock, N.M.)

Since he had no telephone at his trailer, he'd left the number blank. His plan had been to list the Shiprock police station number, gambling that by the time Largo got wind of it and blew the whistle, he'd have a reputation and a following established. But the dispatcher had balked. 'Besides, Jim,' she'd argued, 'what will the people think? They call for a singer to do a ceremonial and when the phone rings somebody says, `Navajo Tribal Police.''

'Give me some more,' the girl said. 'I'll stick one up on the board, too. Okay?'

'Sure,' Chee said. 'And give them to people. Especially if you hear of anybody sick.'

She took the cards. 'But what's a hatathali doing looking for a Christian preacher?'

'A minute ago, when I asked you if Nakai said anything about where he was headed, you said not to you. Did he tell somebody else?'

'He made a phone call,' she said. 'Asked if he could borrow the phone here'--she tapped the telephone on her desk--'and called somebody.' She stopped, eyeing Chee doubtfully.

'And you overheard some of it?'

'I don't eavesdrop,' she said.

' `Course not,' Chee said. 'But the man's talking right there at your desk. How can you help it? Did he say where he was going?'

'No,' she said. 'He didn't say that.'

Chee was smart enough to realize he was being teased. He smiled at her. 'After a while you are going to tell me what he said,' Chee said. 'But not yet.'

'I just might not tell you at all,' she said, grinning a delighted grin.

'What if I tell you a scary story? That I'm not really a medicine man. I'm a cop and I'm looking for a missing woman, and Nakai is not really a preacher. He's a gangster, and he's already killed a couple of people, and I'm on his trail, and you are my only chance of catching him before he shoots everybody else.'

She laughed. 'That would fit right in with what he said on the phone. Very mysterious.'

Chee managed to keep grinning. Just barely.

'Like what?'

She made herself comfortable. 'Oh,' she said. 'He said, did you hear what happened to so-and-so? Then he listened. Then he said something like, it made him nervous. And to be careful. And then he said somebody-else-or-other was who he worried about and the only way to warn him was to go out to his hogan and find him. He said he was going to cancel his revival here and go up there. And then he listened a long time, and then he said he didn't know how far. It was over into Utah.' She shrugged. 'That's about it.'

'About it isn't good enough.'

'Well, that's all I remember.'

Apparently it was. She was blank on both so-and-so and somebody-else-or-other. Chee left, thinking 'over into Utah' was over into the country Leaphorn wanted Nakai cross-examined about--the source of Friedman-Bernal's pot obsession. He was also thinking that heading into the Four Corners would take him past Shiprock. Maybe he would take the night off, if he was tired when he got there. Maybe he would run Slick Nakai to earth tomorrow. But why had Nakai changed his plans and headed for the Utah border? Who knows? 'So-and-so' was probably Etcitty. 'Somebody-else-or-other' probably another of Nakai's converts who stole pots on the side. To Chee, Nakai was seeming increasingly odd.

He was driving through the Bisti Badlands, headed north toward Farmington, when the five o'clock news began. A woman reporting from the Durango, Colorado, station on the letting of a contract for range improvement on the Ute Mountain Reservation, and a controversy over the environmental impact of an additional ski run at Purgatory, and a recall petition being circulated to unseat a councilman at Aztec, New Mexico. Chee reached up to change the channel. He'd get more New Mexico news from a Farmington station. 'In other news of the Four Corners country,' the woman said, 'a prominent and sometimes controversial Southeast Utah rancher and political figure has been shot to death at his ranch near Bluff.'

Chee stopped, hand on the dial.

'A spokesman for the Garfield County Sheriffs Office at Blanding said the victim has been identified as Harrison Houk, a former Utah state senator and one of southern Utah's biggest ranch operators. The body of Houk was found in his barn last night. The sheriffs office said he had been shot twice.

'Some twenty years ago, Houk's family was the victim of one of the Four Corners' worst tragedies. Houk's wife and a son and daughter were shot to death, apparently by a mentally disturbed younger son who then drowned himself in the San Juan.

'Across the line in Arizona, a suit has been filed in federal district court at…'

Chee clicked off the radio. He wanted to think. Houk was the man to whom Nakai had sold pots. Houk lived at Bluff, on the San Juan. Maybe Etcitty was Nakai's 'so-and-so.' More likely it would be Houk. Could Nakai have heard of Houk's murder en route to Tsaya? Probably, on an earlier newscast. That would explain the abrupt change in plans. Or maybe Houk was 'somebody-else-or-other' -- the man Nakai wanted to warn. Too late for that now. Either way, it seemed clear that Nakai would be headed to somewhere very close to Bluff, to where Houk, his customer for pots, had been killed.

Chee decided he would work overtime. If he could find the elusive Nakai tonight, he would.

It proved to be surprisingly easy. On the road north toward Bluff, far enough north of Mexican Water so he was sure he'd crossed the Arizona border into Utah, Chee saw Nakai's tent trailer. It was parked maybe a quarter-mile up an old oil field road that wanders off U.S. 191 into the rocky barrens south of Caso del Eco Mesa.

Chee made an abrupt left turn, parked by the trailer, and inspected it. The tie-down ropes were in place, all four tires were aired, everything in perfect order. It had simply been unhooked and abandoned.

Chee jolted down the old road, past a silent oil pump, down into the bare stoniness of Gothic Creek, and out of that into a flatland of scattered sage and dwarf juniper. The road divided into two trails--access routes, Chee guessed, to the only two Navajo families who survived in these barrens. It was almost dark now, the western horizon a glowing, luminous copper. Which route to take? Far down the one that led straight ahead he saw Nakai's car.

He drove the five hundred yards toward it cautiously, feeling uneasy. He'd been joking with the girl at Tsaya when he cast Nakai in the role of gangster. But how did he know? He knew almost nothing. That Nakai had been preaching on the reservation for years. That he encouraged his converts to collect pots for him to sell to help finance his operation. Did he have a pistol? A criminal record? Leaphorn probably knew such things, but he hadn't confided in Chee. He slowed even more, nervous.

Nakai was sitting on the trunk of the massive old Cadillac, legs straight out, leaning against the rear window, watching him, looking utterly harmless. Chee parked behind the car, climbed out, stretched.

'Ya te'eh,' Nakai said. And then he recognized Chee, and looked surprised. 'We meet again--but a long way from Nageezi.'

'Ya te,' Chee said. 'You are hard to find. I heard you were supposed to be'--he gestured southward--'first at Tsaya and then way down beyond the Hopi Country. Down at Lower Greasewood.'

'Ran outta gas,' Nakai said, ignoring the implied question. 'This thing burns gas like a tank.' He jumped down from the trunk, with the small man's natural agility. 'Were you looking for me?'

'More or less,' Chee said. 'What brings you up here into Utah? So far from Lower Greasewood?'

'The Lord's business takes me many places,' Nakai said.

'You planning a revival out here?'

'Sure,' Nakai said. 'When I can arrange it.'

'But you left your tent,' Chee said. And you're lying, he thought. Not enough people out here.

'I was on empty,' Nakai said. 'Thought I could save enough gas to get where I was going. Then come back and get it.' He laughed. 'Waited too long to unhook. Burned too much gasoline.'

'You forget to look at your gauge?'

'It was already broke when I bought this thing.' Nakai laughed again. 'Blessed are the poor,' he said. 'Didn't do no good to look at it. Before I got outta gas, I was outta money.'

Chee didn't comment on that. He thought about how he could learn what Nakai was doing out here. Who he came to warn.

'Have a brother lives down there,' Nakai explained. 'Christian, so he's my brother in the Lord. And he's Paiute. My 'born to' clan. So he's a brother that way, too. I was going to walk. And then I saw you coming.'

'So you just got here?'

'Five minutes, maybe. Look, could you give me a ride? Maybe eight miles or so. I could walk it, but I'm in a hurry.'

Nakai was looking down the trail, westward. Chee studied his face. The copper light gave it the look of sculpture. Metal. But Nakai wasn't metal. He was worried. Chee could think of no clever way to get him to talk about what he was doing here.

'You found out Harrison Houk was killed,' Chee said. 'And you headed out here. Why?'

Nakai turned, his face shadowed now. 'Who's Houk?'

'The man you sold pots to,' Chee said. 'Remember? You told Lieutenant Leaphorn about it.'

'Okay,' Nakai said. 'I know about him.'

'Etcitty dealt with you, and with Houk, and with these pots, and he's dead. And now Houk. Both shot. And Nails, too, for that matter. Did you know him?'

'Just met him,' Nakai said. 'Twice, I think.'

'Look,' Chee said. 'Leaphorn sent me to find you because of something else. He wants to locate this Eleanor Friedman-Bernal woman -- find out what happened to her. He talked to you about her already. But now he wants more information. He wants to know what she said to you about looking for pots right out here in this part of the country. Along the San Juan. Up around Bluff. Around Mexican Hat.'

'Just what I told him. She wanted those smooth polychrome pots. Those pinkish ones with the patterns and the wavy lines and the serration, or whatever you call it. Pots or the broken pieces. Didn't matter. And she told me she was particularly interested in anything that turned up around this part of the reservation.' Nakai shrugged. 'That was it.'

Chee put his hands on hips and bent backward, eliminating a kink in his back. He'd spent ten hours in that pickup today. Maybe more. Too many. 'If Joe Leaphorn were here,' he said, 'he'd say no, that wasn't quite it. She said more than that. You are trying to save time. Summarizing. Tell me everything she said. Let me do the summarizing.'

Nakai looked thoughtful. An ugly little man, Chee decided, but smart.

'You're thinking that I am a cop, and that these pots came off the Navajo Reservation where they are mucho, mucho illegal. Felony stuff. You're thinking you are going to be careful about what you say.' Chee slouched against the pickup door. 'Forget it. We are doing one thing at a time and the one thing is finding this woman. Not figuring out who shot Etcitty. Not catching somebody for looting ruins on Navajo land. Just one single, simple thing. Just find Eleanor Friedman. Leaphorn seems to think she went looking for these pots. At least that's what I think he thinks. He thinks she told you where to find them. Therefore, I'd appreciate it, you'd win my gratitude and a ride to wherever you want to go, if you'll just tell me all of it. Whether or not you think it matters.'

Nakai waited awhile, making sure Chee's outburst was finished.

'What matters isn't much,' he said. 'Let me remember a minute or two.'

Behind Nakai the sunset had darkened from glowing pale copper to dark copper. Against that gaudy backdrop, two streaks of clouds were painted, blue-black and ragged. To the left, a three-quarter moon hung in the sky like a carved white rock.

'You want her words,' Nakai said. 'What she said, what he said, what she said. I don't remember that well. But I remember some impressions. One. She was thinking about very specific ruins. She'd been there. She knew what it looked like. Two. It was illegal. Better than that, it was on the Navajo Reservation. She good as said that. I remember I said something about it being illegal, and she said maybe it shouldn't be. I was a Navajo and it was Navajo land.'

Nakai stopped. 'How about the ride?'

'What else?'

'That's all I know, really. Did I say it was in a canyon? I'm sure it was. She said she'd been told about it. Didn't say who told her. Somebody she'd bought a pot from, I guess. Anyway, the way she described the place it had to be a canyon. Three ruins, she said. One down by the streambed in the talus, one on the shelf above it, and a third one out of sight in the cliff above the shelf. So that would have to be in a canyon. And that's all I know.'

'Not the name of the canyon.'

'She didn't know it. Said she didn't think it had one. Canyon sin nombre.' Nakai laughed. 'She didn't tell me much, really. Just that she was very, very interested in pots, or potsherds, even little fragments, but only if they had this pinkish glaze with the wavy light lines and the serration. Said she'd triple her price for them. That she wanted to know exactly where they came from. I wondered why she didn't go try to find the place herself. I guess she didn't want to risk getting caught at it.'

'Leaphorn thinks she went. Or, I think he does.'

'Now,' Nakai said, 'I earned my ride.'

Chee took him to a hogan built on the slope of a wash that drained into Gothic Creek--using three-quarters of an hour to cover less than eight jarring miles. It was almost full dark when they pulled onto the slick rock surface that formed the hogan yard, but the moon was bright enough to show why the site had been picked. A growth of cottonwoods, tamarisks, and rabbitbrush at the lip of the wash showed where a spring flowed. It was probably the only live water within thirty miles, Chee guessed, and it wasn't lively enough to support a family in the dry season. A row of rusty water barrels on a wooden rack told him that. Chee parked, raced the pickup engine to make sure the hogan's occupants had noticed their arrival, and turned off the engine. A dim light, probably from a kerosene lamp, showed through the side window. The smell of sheep, a smell that always provoked nostalgia in Chee, drifted down from a brush compound behind the house.

'You have another little problem now,' Chee said.

'What?'

'This brother of yours who lives here. He steals pots for you. You want to tell him about Etcitty, and Nails, and Houk. You want to tell him to be careful--that somebody's shooting pot hunters. But I'm a cop so you don't want me to hear it.'

Nakai said nothing.

'No car. No truck. At least I don't see one. Or see any place to put one on this flat rock where I couldn't see it. So somebody who lives here has gone off with the truck.'

Nakai said nothing. He drew in a breath and exhaled it.

'So if I just leave you here, as you'd intended, then you're stuck. No gas and no ride to where you can get some.'

'One of his sons probably has the truck,' Nakai said. 'He probably keeps some gasoline here somewhere. At least a five-gallon can.'

'In which case you walk that eight miles back to the Caddy with it,' Chee said. 'Or maybe he doesn't have any gas.'

A blanket hanging over the hogan doorway swung aside. The shape of a man appeared, looking out at them.

'What do you have in mind?' Nakai said.

'You quit playing the game. I'm not going to arrest anyone for stealing pots. But I gotta find out where they came from. That's all I care about. If you don't know where that is, this Paiute Clan man here does. Let him tell me. No more games.'

The Paiute Clan man was called Amos Whistler. A skinny man with four of his lower front teeth missing. He knew where the pots had come from. 'Way over there, toward the west. Toward Navajo Mountain,' he said, indicating the direction. 'Maybe thirty miles across the Nokaito Bench.' But there were no roads, just broken country, sandstone cut by one wash after another. Whistler said he had heard about the ruins years ago from an uncle, who told him to stay out of the place because the ghosts were bad in there. But he had learned about Jesus, and he didn't believe in ghosts, so he packed in with a couple of horses, but it was tough going. An ordeal. He'd lost a horse. A good one.

Chee owned an excellent U.S. Geological Survey map of the Big Reservation, a book in which each page showed everything in a thirty-two-mile square. 'What's the name of the canyon?'

'I don't know if it has a name,' Amos Whistler said. 'Around here they say its name is Canyon Where Watersprinkler Plays His Flute.' It was a long name in Navajo, and Whistler looked embarrassed when he said it.

'Would you take me in there? Rent the horses and lead me in?'

'No,' Amos Whistler said. 'I don't go there no more.'

'I'd hire you,' Chee said. 'Pay you for using your horses. Good money.'

'No,' Whistler said. 'I'm a Christian now. I know about Jesus. I don't worry about Anasazi ghosts like I did when I was a pagan. Before I walked on the Jesus Road. But I won't go into that place.'

'Good money,' Chee said. 'No problems with the law.'

'I heard him in there,' Whistler said. He took two steps away from Chee, toward the hogan door. 'I heard the Watersprinkler playing his flute.'

Chapter Fourteen

Ť ^ ť

LEAPHORN MANAGED a forward seat by the window when he changed planes in Chicago. There was nothing to see -- just the topside of solid cloud cover over the great flat, fertile American heartland. Leaphorn looked down at this gray mass and thought of the river of wet air flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, and of cold rain, and bleak, featureless landscapes closed in by a sky no more than six feet above one's forehead. At least Emma had saved them from that by holding him on the reservation.

He was depressed. He had done what he had gone to do and achieved nothing useful. All he knew that he hadn't known before was that Et-citty had been too smart to sign a pot documentation admitting a violation of federal law. Leaphorn was fairly sure that the physical description of the site must be accurate. He could think of no reason for Etcitty to have made up such a complicated description. It seemed to flow from memory. An unsophisticated man following the form's instructions, describing reality with the single lie to avoid incrimination. That helped very little. The Utah-Arizona-New Mexico border country was a maze of washes, gulches, draws, and canyons. Thousands of them, and in their sheltered, sun-facing alcoves, literally scores of thousands of Anasazi sites. He'd seen an estimate of more than a hundred thousand such sites on the Colorado Plateau, built over a period of almost a thousand years. What Etcitty had given him was like a description of a house in a big city with no idea of its street address. He could narrow it down some. Probably in southern Utah or extreme northern Arizona. Probably north of Monument Valley. Probably east of Nokaito Mesa. Probably west of Montezuma Creek. That narrowed it to an area bigger than Connecticut, occupied by maybe five thousand humans. And all he had was a site description that might be as false as its location obviously was.

Perhaps Chee had done better. An odd young man, Chee. Smart, apparently. Alert. But slightly… slightly what? Bent? Not exactly. It wasn't just the business of trying to be a medicine man--a following utterly incongruous with police work. He was a romantic, Leaphorn decided. That was it. A man who followed dreams. The sort who would have joined that Paiute shaman who invented the ghost dance and the vision of white men withering away and the buffalo coming back to the plains. Maybe that wasn't fair. It was more that Chee seemed to think an island of 180,000 Navajos could live the old way in a white ocean. Perhaps 20,000 of them could, if they were happy on mutton, cactus, and pinon nuts. Not practical. Navajos had to compete in the real world. The Navajo Way didn't teach competition. Far from it.

But Chee, odd as he was, would find Slick Nakai. Another dreamer, Nakai. Leaphorn shifted in the narrow seat, trying vainly for comfort. Chee would find Nakai and Chee would get from Nakai about as much information as Leaphorn would have been able to extract.

Leaphorn found himself thinking of what he would say to Emma about Chee. He shook his head, picked up a New Yorker, and read. Dinner came. His seatmate examined it scornfully. To Leaphorn, who had been eating his own cooking, it tasted great. They were crossing the Texas panhandle now. Below, the clouds were thinning, breaking into patches. Ahead, the earth rose like a rocky island out of the ocean of humid air that blanketed the midlands. Leaphorn could see the broken mesas of eastern New Mexico. Beyond, on the western horizon, great cloud-castle thunderheads, unusual in autumn, rose into the stratosphere. Leaphorn felt something he hadn't felt since Emma's death. He felt a kind of joy.

Something like that mood was with him when he awoke the next morning in his bed at Window Rock--a feeling of being alive, and healthy, and interested. He was still weary. The flight from Albuquerque to Gallup in the little Aspen Airways Cessna, and the drive from Gallup, had finished what reserves he had left. But the depression was gone. He cooked bacon for breakfast and ate it with toast and jelly. While he was eating the telephone rang.

Jim Chee, he thought. Who else would be calling him?

It was Corporal Ellison Billy, who handled things that needed handling for Major Nez, who was more or less Leaphorn's boss.

'There's a Utah cop here looking for you,' Billy said. 'You available?'

Leaphorn was surprised. 'What's he want? And what kind of cop?'

'Utah State Police. Criminal Investigation Division,' Billy said. 'He just said he wants to talk to you. About a homicide investigation. That's all I know. Probably told the major more. You coming in?'

Homicide, he thought. The depression sagged down around him again. Someone had found Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's body. 'Tell him ten minutes,' he said, which was the time it took for him to drive from his house among the pinons on the high side of Window Rock to police headquarters beside the Fort Defiance Highway.

The desk had two messages for him. One from Jim Chee was short: 'Found Nakai near Mexican Hat with a friend who says ruins is located in what the locals call Watersprinkler Canyon west of his place. I will stay reachable through the Shiprock dispatcher.'

The other, from the Utah State Police, was shorter. It said: 'Call Detective McGee re: Houk. Urgent.'

'Houk?' Leaphorn said. 'Any more details?'

'That's it,' the dispatcher said. 'Just call McGee about Houk. Urgent.'

He put the message in his pocket.

The door to the major's office was open. Ronald Nez was standing behind his desk. A man wearing a blue windbreaker and a billed cap with the legend LIMBER ROPE on the crown sat against the wall. He got up when Leaphorn walked in, a tall man, middle-aged, with a thin, bony face. Acne or some other scarring disease had left cheeks and forehead pocked with a hundred small craters. Nez introduced them. Carl McGee was the name. He had not waited for a call back.

'I'll get right to it,' McGee said. 'We got a homicide case, and he left you a note.'

Leaphorn kept his face from showing his surprise. It wasn't Friedman-Bernal.

McGee waited for a response.

Leaphorn nodded.

'Harrison Houk,' McGee said. 'I imagine you know him?'

Leaphorn nodded again, his mind processing this. Who would kill Houk? Why? He could see an answer to the second question. And in general terms to the first one. The same person who had killed Etcitty, and Nails, and for the same reason. But what was that?

'What was the message?'

McGee looked at Major Nez, who looked back, expression neutral. Then at Leaphorn. This conversation was not going as McGee had intended. He extracted a leather folder from his hip pocket, took a business card from it, and handed it to Leaphorn.

BLANDING PUMPS

Well Drilling, Casing, Pulling

General Water System Maintenance

(We also fix your Septic Tanks)

The card was bent, dirty. Leaphorn guessed it had been damp. He turned it over.

The message there was scrawled in ballpoint ink.

It said:

Tell Leaphorn shes still alive up

Leaphorn handed it to Nez, without comment.

'I saw it,' Nez said, and handed it back to McGee, who put it back in the folder, and the folder back in his pocket.

'What do you think?' he said. 'You got any idea who the `she' is?'

'A good idea,' Leaphorn said. 'But tell me about Houk. I saw him just the other day.'

'Wednesday,' McGee said. 'To be exact.' He looked at Leaphorn, expression quizzical. 'That's what the woman who works for him told us. Navajo named Irene Musket.'

'Wednesday sounds right,' Leaphorn said. 'Who killed Houk?'

McGee made a wry face. 'This woman he wrote you about, maybe. Anyway, it looks like Houk quit trying to find a place to hide to tell you about her. Sounds like you two thought she was dead. Suddenly he sees her alive. He tries to tell you. She kills him.'

Leaphorn was thinking that his terminal leave had five more days to run. Actually, only about four and two-thirds. He hadn't been in a mood to screw around like this for at least three months. Not since Emma got bad. He was in no mood for it today. In fact, he had never been tolerant of it. Nor for being polite to this belagana, who wanted to act as if Leaphorn was some sort of suspect. But he'd make one more effort to be polite.

'I've been away,' he said. 'Back east. Just got in last night. You're going to have to skip way back and tell me about it.'

McGee told him. Irene Musket had come to work Friday morning and found a note on the screen door telling her that Houk was in the barn. She said she found his body in the barn and called the Garfield County Sheriffs Office, who notified Utah State Police. Both agencies investigated. Houk had been shot twice with a small-caliber weapon, in the center of the chest and in the lower back of the skull. There were signs that Houk had been rearranging bales of hay, apparently into a hiding place. Two empty .25 caliber cartridge casings were found in the hay near the body. The medical examiner said either of the bullets might have caused death. No witnesses. No physical evidence found in the barn except the shell casings. The housekeeper said she found the back screen door lock had been broken and Houk's office was in disarray. As far as she could tell, nothing had been stolen.

'But then, who knows?' McGee added. 'Stuff could be gone from his office and she wouldn't know about it.' He stopped, looking at Leaphorn.

'Where was the note?'

'In Houk's shorts,' McGee said. 'We didn't turn it up. The medical examiner found it when they undressed him.'

Leaphorn found he was feeling a little better about McGee. It wasn't McGee's attitude. It was his own.

'I went Wednesday to see him about a woman named Eleanor Friedman-Bernal ,' Leaphorn said. He explained the situation. Who the woman was, her connection with Houk, what Houk had told him. 'So I presume he was telling me she was still alive.'

'You thought she was dead?' McGee asked.

'Missing two, three weeks. Leaves her clothes. Leaves a big dinner waiting to be cooked in her fridge. Misses important appointments. I don't know whether she's dead or not.'

'Pretty fair bet she is,' Nez said. 'Or it was.'

'You and Houk friends?' McGee asked.

'No,' Leaphorn said. 'I met him twice. Last Wednesday and about twenty years ago. One of his boys wiped out most of the family. I worked a little on that.'

'I remember it. Hard one to forget.' McGee was staring at him.

'I'm just as surprised as you are,' Leaphorn said. 'That he left me the note.' He paused, thinking. 'Do you know why he left the note in the screen door? About being in the barn?'

'Musket said she'd gone off and left some stuff--some squash--she was going to take home. He'd put it in the refrigerator and left the note. It said, `squash in the icebox, I'm in the barn.' She figured he thought she'd come back for it.'

Leaphorn was remembering the setting--the long, weedy drive, the porch, the barn well up the slope behind the house, a loading pen on one side of it, horse stalls on the other. From the barn, Houk would have heard a car coming. He might have seen it, watched its driver open the gate. He must have recognized death coming for him. McGee said he'd started preparing a hiding place--stacking bales with a gap behind them, to form a hidey-hole probably. And then he'd stopped to write the unfinished note. And put it in his shorts. Leaphorn imagined that. Houk, desperate, out of time, sticking the calling card under his belt line. The only possible reason would be to keep his killer from finding it. And that meant the killer would not have left it. And what did that mean? That the killer was Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, who would not want people to know she was alive? Or, certainly, that Houk knew she was alive.

'You have any theories yet?' he asked McGee.

'One or two,' he said.

'Involving pot hunting?'

'Well, we know about Etcitty and Nails. They were hunting pots. Houk's been dealing with `em for years and not particular where what he buys comes from,' McGee said. 'So, maybe somebody he cheated got tough about it. Houk screwed one person too many. He had a reputation for that. Or maybe it was this woman he was selling to.' McGee got up stiffly, adjusted his hat. 'Why else the note? He saw her coming. Back from the dead, so to speak. Knew she was after him. Figured she'd already bagged Nails and Etcitty. Started leaving you the note. Put it where she wouldn't find it and get off with it. I'd like you to tell me what you know about that woman.'

'All right,' Leaphorn said. 'Couple of things I have to do and then I'll get with you.'

He'd stayed away from his office since Emma's death and now it smelled of the dust that seeps gradually into everything in a desert climate. He sat in his chair, picked up the phone, and called Shiprock. Chee was in.

'This Watersprinkler Canyon,' he asked. 'Which side of the river?'

'South,' Chee said. 'Reservation side.'

'No question of that?'

'None,' Chee said. 'Not if this Amos Whistler knew what he was talking about. Or where he was pointing.'

`There isn't any Watersprinkler Canyon on my map. What do you think it is?'

'Probably Many Ruins,' Chee said.

It was exactly what Leaphorn would have guessed. And getting into the north end of it was damn near impossible. It ran for its last forty miles through a roadless, jumbled stony wilderness.

'You knew Harrison Houk was shot?'

'Yes sir.'

'You want to keep working on this?'

Hesitation. 'Yes sir.'

'Get on the telephone then. Call the police at Madison, Wisconsin. Find out if handguns are licensed there. They probably are. If they are, find out who does it and then find out exactly what kind of pistol was licensed to Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. It would have been…' He squeezed his eyes shut, recalling what Maxie Davis had told him about the woman's career. 'Probably 1985 or `86.'

'Okay.'

'If she didn't license her gun in Madison, you're going to have to keep checking.' He gave Chee other places he knew of where the woman had studied or taught, relying on his memory of his talk with Davis and guessing at the dates. 'You may be spending all day on the phone,' Leaphorn warned. 'Tell `em three homicides are involved. And then stay close to the phone where I can get you.'

'Right.'

That done, he sat a moment, thinking. He would go to Bluff and take a look at the barn where Harrison Houk had done the remarkable -- written him a note while waiting for his killer. He wanted to see that place. The action jarred on him. Why would Houk care that much about a woman who was merely a customer? 'Shes still alive up,' the note had said. Up? Up to today? Up what? Up where? Up Watersprinkler Canyon? She had taken her sleeping bag. The boy had seen her loading a saddle. But back to Houk. Starting the note. At that point, almost certainly, Houk had been interrupted by the killer. Had run out of time. Had presumed the killer would destroy the note. Would not want the police to know that 'she' was alive. So was 'she' Eleanor hyphenated? Who else would care about the note? And yet Leaphorn had trouble putting into the picture the woman who marinated the beef and prepared the dinner so lovingly. He could not see her in that barn, firing her little pistol into the skull of an old man lying facedown in the hay. He shook his head. But that was sentiment, not logic.

Major Nez stood in his door, watching him. 'Interesting case,' Nez said.

'Yeah. Hard one to figure.' Leaphorn motioned him in.

Nez simply leaned against the wall, holding a folded paper in his hand. He was getting fat, Leaphorn noticed. Nez had always been built like a barrel, but now his stomach sagged over his broad uniform belt.

'Doesn't sound like something you can get sorted out in less than a week,' Nez said. He tapped the paper against the back of his hand, and it occurred to Leaphorn that it was his letter of resignation.

'Probably not,' Leaphorn said.

Nez held out the letter. 'You want this back? For now? You can always send it in again.'

'I'm tired, Ron. Have been a long time, I guess. Just didn't know it.'

'Tired of living,' Nez said, nodding. 'I get that way now and then. But it's hard to quit.'

'Anyway, thanks,' Leaphorn said. 'You know where McGee went?'

Leaphorn found Detective McGee eating a late breakfast at the Navajo Nation Inn and told him everything he knew about Eleanor Friedman-Bernal that seemed remotely pertinent. Then he drove back to his house, dug his pistol belt out of the bottom drawer of his dresser, took out the weapon, and dropped it into his jacket pocket. That done, he drove out of Window Rock, heading north.

Chapter Fifteen

Ť ^ ť

THE YOUNG WOMAN to whom Chee's call was referred at the Madison Police Department had a little trouble believing in the Navajo Tribal Police. But after that was settled, things became most efficient. Yes, handguns were licensed. No, it would be easy to check the record. Just a moment. It was not much more than that.

The next voice was male. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal? Yes, she had been issued a license for a handgun. She had registered a .25 caliber automatic pistol.

Chee noted the details. The pistol was a brand he'd never heard of. Neither had the clerk in Madison. 'Portuguese, I think,' he said. 'Or maybe it's Turkish, or Brazilian.'

Step two went almost as quickly. He called the San Juan County Sheriff's Office and asked for Undersheriff Robert Bates, who usually handled homicides. Bates was married to a Navajo who happened to be 'born to' the Kin yaa aanü -- the Towering House People -- which was linked in some way Chee had never understood to his grandfather's To` aheedlinü' -- the Waters Flow Together Clan. That made Chee and Bates vaguely relatives. Just as important, they had worked together a time or two and liked each other. Bates was in.

'If you have the lab report back, I need to know about the bullets that killed Etcitty and Nails,' Chee said.

'Why?' Bates asked. 'I thought the FBI decided that killing wasn't on reservation land.'

'Out on the Checkerboard, the FBI always decides that,' Chee said. 'We're just interested.'

'Why?'

'Ah, hell, Robert,' Chee said. 'I don't know why. Joe Leaphorn is interested, and Largo has me working with him.'

'What's going on with Leaphorn? We heard he had a nervous breakdown. Heard he quit.'

'He did,' Chee said. 'But not yet.'

'Well, it was a twenty-five-caliber pistol, automatic judging from the ejection marks on the empties. All the same weapon.'

'You have a missing person's report on a woman who owns a twenty-five-caliber automatic pistol,' Chee said. 'Her name's Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. She worked out of Chaco Canyon. Anthropologist. Where Etcitty worked.' He told Bates more of what he knew about the woman.

'I got her file right here on my desk,' Bates said. 'I just a minute ago got a call from a Utah State Policeman. They want us to do some checking up on her out at Chaco. Seems they had a fellow shot up at Bluff and he left a note to Leaphorn telling him this woman is still alive. You know about that?'

'Heard about the killing. Not about any note.' He was thinking that a few years ago this weird roundabout communication would have surprised him. Now he expected it. He was remembering Leaphorn chewing him out for not passing along all the details. Well, there was no reason for Leaphorn not to have told him about this. Except that Leaphorn considered him merely an errand boy. Chee was offended.

'Tell me about it,' he told Bates. 'And don't leave anything out.'

Bates told him what he'd been told. It didn't take long.

'So Utah State Police think Dr. Friedman showed up and offed Houk,' Chee concluded. 'Any theories about motive?'

'Big pot hunting conspiracy is what they seem to think. They've had a federal crackdown up there on pot thieves last year. Bunch of arrests. Grand jury sitting in Salt Lake handing down indictments. So they're thinking pots,' Bates said. 'And why not? Big money in it the way prices are now. Hell, when we was kids and used to go out and dig `em up around here, you were lucky to get five bucks. Listen,' he added, 'how you coming on being a medicine man?'

'No clients.' It was not a subject Chee wanted to discuss. It was November, already into the 'Season When Thunder Sleeps,' the season for curing ceremonials, and he hadn't had a single contact. 'You going to Chaco now?'

'Soon as I get off the telephone.'

Chee gave him a quick rundown on the people he should talk to: Maxie Davis, the Lunas, Randall Elliot.

'They're worried about the woman. Friends of hers. Be sure and tell them about the note.'

'Why, sure,' Bates said. He sounded slightly offended that Chee had even mentioned it.

There was nothing to do then but stick close to the telephone and wait for Leaphorn's call from Bluff. He dug into his paperwork. A little before noon, the phone rang. Leaphorn, Chee thought.

It was Janet Pete. Her voice sounded odd. Was Chee doing anything for lunch?

'Nothing,' Chee said. 'You calling from Shiprock?'

'I drove up. Really just went for a drive. Ended up here.' She sounded thoroughly down.

'Lunch then,' he said. 'Can you meet me at the Thunderbird Cafe?'

She could. And did.

They took a booth by the window. And talked about the weather. A gusty wind was rattling the pane and chasing dust and leaves and now a section of the Navajo Times down the highway outside.

'End of autumn, I guess,' Chee said. 'You watch Channel Seven. Howard Morgan says we're going to get the first blast of winter.'

'I hate winter,' Janet Pete said. She hugged herself and shivered. 'Dismal winter.'

'The counselor has the blues,' Chee said. 'Anything I can do to cheer you up? I'll call Morgan and see if he can postpone it.'

'Or call it off altogether.'

'Right.'

'Or there's Italy.'

'Which is warm, I hear,' Chee said, and then he saw she was serious.

'You hear from your Successful Attorney?'

'He flew all the way to Chicago, to Albuquerque, to Gallup. I met him at Gallup.'

Not knowing what to say, Chee said: 'Not exactly meeting him halfway.' It sounded flippant. Chee didn't feel flippant. He cleared his throat. 'Has he changed? Time does that with people. So I'm told.'

'Yes,' Janet Pete said. But she shook her head. 'But no. Not really. My mother told me a long time ago: `Don't ever expect a man to change. What you see is what you live with.''

'I guess so,' Chee said. She looked tired, and full of sadness. He reached out and took her hand in his. It was cold. 'Trouble is, I guess you love him anyway.'

'I don't know,' Janet Pete said. 'I just…' But the sympathy was too much for her. Her voice choked. She looked down, fumbling in her purse.

Chee handed her his napkin. She held it to her face.

'Rough life,' Chee said. 'Love is supposed to make us happy, and sometimes it makes us miserable.'

Through the napkin he heard Janet sniff.

He patted her hand. 'This sounds like a cliche, or whatever it is, but I know how you feel. I really do.'

'I know,' Janet said.

'But you know, I've decided. I'm giving up. You can't go on forever.' As he heard himself saying that, he was amazed. When did he decide that? He hadn't realized it. He felt a surge of relief. And of loss. Why can't men cry? he wondered. Why is that not allowed?

'He wants me to go to Italy with him. He's going to Rome. Taking over their legal affairs for Europe. And Africa. And the Middle East.'

'He speak Italian?' As he said it, it seemed an incredibly stupid question. Totally beside the point here.

'French,' she said. 'And some Italian. And he's perfecting it. A tutor.'

'How about you?' he said. Why couldn't he think of something less inane. He would be asking her next about her passport. And packing. And airfares. That wasn't what she wanted to talk about. She wanted to talk about love.

'No,' she said.

'What did he say? Does he understand now that you want to be a lawyer? That you want to practice it?'

The napkin was in her lap now. Her eyes dry. But they showed she'd been crying. And her face was strained.

'He said I could practice in Italy. Not with his company. It has a nepotism rule. But he could line something up for me after I got the required Italian license.'

'He could line something up. For you.'

She sighed. 'Yeah. That's the way he put it. And I guess he could. At a certain level in law, the big firms feed on one another. There would be Italian firms doing feed-out work. The word would go into the good-old-boy network. Tit for tat. I guess once I learned Italian I would be offered a job.'

Chee nodded. 'I'd think so,' he said.

Lunch came. Mutton stew and fry bread for Chee. Janet was having a bowl of soup.

They sat looking at the food.

'You should eat something,' said Chee, who had totally lost his appetite. He took a spoonful of the stew, a bite of fry bread. 'Eat,' he ordered.

Janet Pete took a spoonful of soup.

'Made a decision yet?'

She shook her head. 'I don't know.'

'You know yourself better than anyone,' he said. 'What's going to make you happy?'

She shook her head again. 'I think I'm happy when I'm with him. Like dinner last night. But I don't know.'

Chee was thinking about the dinner and how it had ended, and what happened then. Had she gone to his room with him? Had she spent the night there? Probably. The thought hurt. It hurt a lot. That surprised him.

'I shouldn't let things like this drag on,' she said. 'I should decide.'

'We let ours drag on. Mary and I. And I guess she decided.'

He had released her hand when lunch arrived. Now she reached over and put hers on his. 'I have your napkin,' she said. 'Slightly damp but still' -- she looked at it, a rumpled square of pale blue paper -- 'usable in case of emergency.'

He realized instantly that this was her bid to change the subject. He took the napkin, dropped it in his lap.

'Have you realized how lucky you are to have been brought to the only cafe in Shiprock with napkins?'

'Noted and appreciated,' she said. Her smile seemed almost natural. 'And how are things going with you?'

'I told you about the Backhoe Bandit. And Etcitty?'

She nodded. 'That must have been gruesome. How about finding the woman?'

'How much did I tell you about that?'

She reminded him.

He told her about Houk, about the note left for Leaphorn, about Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's pistol and how it was the same caliber used in the killings, about Leaphorn's obsessive interest in finding the Utah site to which Friedman's long-lost potter seemed to have moved.

'You know you have to file for a permit to dig sites like that on the reservation. We have an office in Window Rock that deals with it,' Janet Pete said. 'Did you check that?'

'Leaphorn might have,' Chee said. 'But apparently she was trying to find out where the stuff was coming from. You'd have to know that before you could file.'

'I guess so. But I think they're all numbered. Maybe she would just guess at it.'

Chee grinned and shook his head. 'Back when I was an anthropology student, I remember Professor Campbell, or somebody, telling us there were forty thousand sites listed with New Mexico Laboratory of Anthropology numbers. That's in New Mexico alone. And another hundred thousand or so on other registries.'

'I didn't mean just pick a number at random,' she said, slightly irked. 'She could describe the general location.'

Chee was suddenly interested. 'Maybe Leaphorn already looked into it,' he said. He was remembering that probably he would be hearing from Leaphorn soon. He'd left word with the switchboard to relay the call here. 'But would it take long to check?'

'I could call,' she said, looking thoughtful. 'I know the man who runs it. Helped him with the regulations. I think, to dig on the reservation, I think you have to apply to the Park Service and the Navajo Cultural Preservation Office both. I think you have to name a repository for whatever you recover, and get the archive system approved. And maybe…'

Chee was thinking how great it would be if, when Leaphorn called, he could tell him the map coordinates of the site he was looking for. His face must have showed his impatience. Janet stopped midsentence. 'What?' she said.

'Let's go back to the station and call,' he said.

The call from Leaphorn was waiting when they walked in. Chee gave him what he'd learned from the Madison police and from Bates at the San Juan County Sheriff's Office. 'They're expecting a report from the Utah State Police,' Chee added. 'Bates said he would call when he gets it.'

'I've got it,' Leaphorn said. 'It was twenty-five-caliber, too.'

'Do you know if Friedman applied for a permit to dig that site you're looking for?'

Long silence. 'I should have thought of that,' Leaphorn said finally. 'I doubt if she did. The red tape takes years and it's a double filing. Park Service clearance plus tribal clearance, and all sorts of checking and screwing around gets involved. But I should have checked it.'

'I'll take care of it,' Chee said.

The man to call, Janet Pete said, was T. J. Pedwell. Chee reached him just back from lunch. Had he had any applications from Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal to dig on a reserved Anasazi site on the reservation?

'Sure,' Pedwell said. 'Two or three. On Checkerboard land around Chaco Canyon. She's that ceramics specialist working over there.'

'How about over on the north side of the reservation? Up in Utah.'

'I don't think so,' Pedwell said. 'I could check on it. Wouldn't know the site number, would you?'

`'Fraid not,' Chee said. 'But it might be somewhere near the north end of Many Ruins Canyon.'

'I know that place,' Pedwell said. 'Helped with the Antiquities survey all up through that part of the country.'

'You know the canyon the local people call Watersprinkler?'

'It's really Many Ruins,' Pedwell said. 'It's full of pictographs and petroglyphs of Koko-pelli. That's the one the Navajos call the Watersprinkler yei. '

'I have a description of the site, and it sounds unusual,' Chee said. He told Pedwell what Amos Whistler had told him.

`Teah,' Pedwell said. 'Sounds familiar. Let me check my files. I have photos of most of them.'

Chee heard the telephone click against something. He waited and waited. Sighed. Leaned a hip against the desk.

'Trouble?' Janet Pete asked.

Pedwell's voice was in his ear before he could respond.

'Found it,' Pedwell said. 'It's N.R. 723. Anasazi. Circa 1280-1310. And there's two other sites right there with it. Probably connected.'

'Great!' Chee said. 'How do you get there?'

'Well, it ain't going to be easy. I remember that. We packed into some of them on horseback. Others we floated down the San Juan and walked up the canyon. This one I think we floated. Let's see. Notes say it's five point seven miles up from the mouth of the canyon.'

'Dr. Friedman. She apply to dig that one?'

'Not her,' Pedwell said. 'Another of those people out at Chaco did. Dr. Randall Elliot. They working together?'

'I don't think so,' Chee said. 'Does the application say he was collecting St. John's Polychrome pots?'

'Lemme look.' Papers rustled. 'Doesn't sound like pots. Says he is studying Anasazi migrations.' Mumbling sounds of Pedwell reading to himself. 'Says his interest is tracing genetic patterns.' More mumbling. 'Studying bones. Skull thickness. Six-fingeredness. Aberrant jaw formation.' More mumbling. 'I don't think it has anything to do with ceramics,' Pedwell said, finally. 'He's looking at the skeletons. Or will be if your famous Navajo bureaucracy, of which I am a part, ever gets this processed. Six-fingeredness. Lot of that among the Anasazi, but hard to study, because hands don't survive intact after a thousand years. But it sounds like he's found some family patterns. Too many fingers. An extra tooth in the right side of the lower jaw. A second hole where those nerves and blood vessels go through the back of the jaw, and something or other about the fibula. Physical anthropology isn't my area.'

'But he hasn't gotten his permit yet?'

'Wait a minute. I guess we weren't so slow on this one. Here's a carbon of a letter to Elliot from the Park Service.' Paper rustled. 'Turndown,' Pedwell said. 'More documentation needed of previous work in this field. That do it?'

'Thanks a lot,' Chee said.

Janet Pete was watching him.

'Sounds like you scored,' she said.

'I'll fill you in,' he said.

'On the way back to my car.' She looked embarrassed. 'I'm normally the usual stolid, dull lawyer,' she said. 'This morning I just ran off in hysterics and left everything undone. People coming in to see me. People waiting for me to finish things. I feel awful.'

He walked to the car with her, opened the door.

'I'm glad you called on me,' he said. 'You honored me.'

'Oh, Jim!' she said, and hugged him around the chest with such strength that he caught his breath. She stood, holding him like that, pressed against him. He sensed she was about to cry again. He didn't want that to happen.

He put his hand on her hair and stroked it.

'I don't know what you'll decide about your Successful Attorney,' he said. 'But if you decide against him, maybe you and I could see if we could fall in love. You know, both Navajos and all that.'

It was the wrong thing to say. She was crying as she drove away.

Chee stood there, watching her motor pool sedan speed toward the U.S. 666 junction and the route to Window Rock. He didn't want to think about this. It was confusing. And it hurt. Instead he thought of a question he should have asked Pedwell. Had Randall Elliot also filed an application to dig in that now-despoiled site where Etcitty and Nails had died?

He walked back into the station, remembering those jawbones so carefully set aside amid the chaos.

Chapter Sixteen

Ť ^ ť

TO LEAPHORN, the saddle had seemed a promising possibility. She had borrowed it from a biologist named Arnold, who lived in Bluff. Other trails led to Bluff. The site of the polychrome pots seemed to be somewhere west of the town, in roadless country where a horse would be necessary. She would go to Arnold's place. If he could loan her a saddle, he could probably loan her a horse. From Arnold he would learn where Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had headed. The first step was finding Arnold, which shouldn't be difficult.

It wasn't. The Recapture Lodge had been Bluff's center of hospitality for as long as Leaphorn could remember. The man at the reception desk loaned Leaphorn his telephone to call Chee. Chee confirmed what Leaphorn had feared. Whether or not Dr. Friedman was killing pot hunters, her pistol was. The man at the desk also knew Arnold.

'Bo Arnold,' he said. 'Scientists around here are mostly anthropologists or geologists, but Dr. Arnold is a lichen man. Botanist. Go up to where the highway bends left, and take the right toward Montezuma Creek. It's the little redbrick house with lilac bushes on both sides of the gate. Except I think Bo let the lilacs die. He drives a Jeep. If he's home, you'll see it there.'

The lilacs were indeed almost dead, and a dusty early-model Jeep was parked in the weeds beside the little house. Leaphorn parked beside it and stepped out of his pickup into a gust of chilly, dusty wind. The front door opened just as he walked up the porch steps. A lanky man in jeans and faded red shirt emerged. 'Yessir,' he said. 'Good morning.' He was grinning broadly, an array of white teeth in a face of weathered brown leather.

'Good morning,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm looking for Dr. Arnold.'

'Yessir,' the man said. 'That's me.' He stuck out a hand, which Leaphorn shook. He showed Arnold his identification.

'I'm looking for Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal,' Leaphorn said.

'Me too,' Arnold said enthusiastically. 'That biddy got off with my kayak and didn't bring it back.'

'Oh,' Leaphorn said. 'When?'

'When I was gone,' Arnold said, still grinning. 'Caught me away from home, and off she goes with it.'

'I want to hear all about that,' Leaphorn said.

Arnold held the door wide, welcomed Leaphorn in with a sweep of his hand. Inside the front door was a room crowded with tables, each table crowded with rocks of all sizes and shapes--their only common denominator being lichens. They were covered with these odd plants in every shade from white through black. Arnold led Leaphorn past them, down a narrow hall.

'No place to sit in there,' he said. 'That's where I work. Here's where I live.'

Where Arnold lived was a small bedroom. Every flat surface, including the narrow single bed, was covered with boards on which flat glass dishes were lined. The dishes had something in them that Leaphorn assumed must be lichens. 'Let me make you a place,' Arnold said, and cleared off chairs for each of them.

'Why you looking for Ellie?' he asked. 'She been looting ruins?' And he laughed.

'Does she do that?'

'She's an anthropologist,' Arnold said, his chuckle reduced again to a grin. 'You translate the word from academic into English and that's what it means: ruins looter, one who robs graves, preferably old ones. Well-educated person who steals artifact in dignified manner.' Arnold, overcome by the wit of this, laughed. 'Somebody else does it, they call `em vandals. That's the word for the competition. Somebody gets there first, gets off with the stuff before the archaeologists can grab it, they call 'em Thieves of Time.' His vision of such hypocrisy left him in high good humor, as did the thought of his missing kayak.

'Tell me about that,' Leaphorn said. 'How do you know she took it?'

'She left a full, signed confession,' Arnold said, fumbling in a box from which assorted scraps of papers overflowed. He extracted a small sheet of lined yellow notepaper and handed it to Leaphorn.

Here's your saddle, a year older but no worse for wear. (I sold that damned horse.) To keep you caring about me, I am now borrowing your kayak. If you don't get back before I do, ignore the last part of this note because I will put the kayak right back in the garage where I got it and you'll never know it was gone.

Don't let any lichens grow on you! Love, Ellie

Leaphorn handed it back to him. 'When did she leave it?'

'I just know when I found it. I'd been up there on Lime Ridge collecting specimens for a week or so and when I got back, the saddle was on the floor in the workroom up front with this note pinned on it. Looked in the garage, and the kayak was gone.'

'When?' Leaphorn repeated.

'Oh,' Arnold said. 'Let's see. Almost a month ago.'

Leaphorn told him the date Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had made her early-morning departure from Chaco Canyon. 'That sound right?'

'I think I got back on a Monday or Tuesday. Three or four days after that.'

'So the saddle might have been sitting there three or four days?'

'Could have been.' Arnold laughed again. 'Don't have a cleaning lady coming in. Guess you noticed that.'

'How did she get in?'

'Key's over there under the flower box,' Arnold said. 'She knew where. Been here before. Go all the way back to the University of Wisconsin.' Abruptly Arnold's amusement evaporated. His bony, sun-beaten face became somber. 'She's really missing? People worried about her? She didn't just walk off for a few days of humanity?'

'I think it's serious,' Leaphorn said. 'Almost a month. And she left too much behind. Where would she go in your kayak?'

Arnold shook his head. 'Just one place to go. Downstream. I use it to play around with. Like a toy. But she'd have been going down the river. Plenty of sites along the river until you get into the deep canyon where there's nothing to live on. And then there's hundreds of ruins up the side canyons.' There was no humor at all left in Arnold's face. He looked at least his age, which Leaphorn guessed at forty. He looked worn and worried.

'Ceramics. That's what Ellie would be looking for. Potsherds.' He paused, stared at Leaphorn. 'I guess you know we had a man killed here just the other day. Man named Houk. The son of a bitch was a notorious pot dealer. Somebody shot him. Any connection?'

'Who knows?' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe so. You have any more specific idea where she took your kayak?'

'Nothing more than I said. She borrowed it

before and went down into the canyons. Just poking around in the ruins looking at the potsherds. I'd guess she did it again.'

'Any idea how far down?'

'She'd ask me to pick her up the next evening at the landing upstream from the bridge at Mexican Hat. Only place to get off the river for miles. So it would have to be between Sand Island and Hat.'

Her car too could be found between Sand Island and Mexican Hat, Leaphorn was sure. She would have to have hauled the kayak within dragging distance of the river. But there was no reason now to look for the car.

'That narrows it down quite a bit,' Leaphorn said, thinking Ellie's trips were into the area Etcitty had described in his falsified documentation, the area Amos Whistler had pointed to in his talk with Chee. He would find a boat and go looking for Arnold's kayak. Maybe, when he found it, he would find Eleanor Friedman, and what Harrison Houk meant in that unfinished note. '… shes still alive up.' But first he wanted a look at that barn.

Irene Musket came to the door at Harrison Houk's old house. She recognized him instantly and let him in. She was a handsome woman, as Leaphorn remembered, but today she looked years older, and tired. She told him about finding the note, about finding the body. She confirmed that she had found absolutely nothing missing from the house. She told him nothing he didn't already know. Then she walked with him up the long slope toward the barn.

'It happened right in here,' she said. 'Right in that horse stall there. The third one.'

Leaphorn looked back. From the barn you could see the driveway, and the old gate with its warning bell. Only the front porch was obscured. Houk might well have seen his killer coming for him.

Irene Musket stood at the barn door. Kept out, perhaps, by her fear of the chindi Harrison Houk had left behind him and the ghost sickness it would cause her. Or perhaps by the sorrow that looking at the spot where Houk had died would bring to her.

Leaphorn's career had made him immune to the chindi of the dead, immune through indifference to all but one of them. He walked out of the wind and into the dimness.

The floor of the third horse stall had been swept clean of the old alfalfa and prairie-hay straw that littered the rest of the place. That debris now formed a pile in one corner, where the Utah crime lab crew had dumped it after sorting through it. Leaphorn stood on the dirt packed by a hundred years of hooves and wondered what he had expected to find. He walked across the barn floor, inspected the piles of alfalfa bales. It did, indeed, seem that Houk might have been rearranging them to form a hiding place. That touched him oddly, but taught him nothing. Nothing except that Houk, the hard man, the scoundrel, had set aside a chance to hide to make time to leave him a message. 'Tell Leaphorn shes still alive up' -- up the canyon? That seemed likely. Up which canyon? But why would Houk have put his own life at greater risk to help a woman who must have been nothing more than one of his many customers? It seemed out of character. Not the Houk he knew about. That Houk's only weakness seemed to have been a schizophrenic son, now long dead.

Outside the barn the wind shifted direction slightly and howled through the cracks, raising a small flurry of straw and dust on the packed floor and bringing autumn smells to compete with the ancient urine. He was wasting his time. He walked back toward where Irene Musket was standing, checking the stalls as he passed. In the last one, a black nylon kayak was leaning against the wall.

Bo Arnold's kayak. Leaphorn stared at it. How could it have gotten here? And why? It was inflated, standing on one pointed end in the stall corner. He walked in for a closer look. Of course it wasn't Arnold's kayak. He had described his as dark brown, with what he called 'white racing stripes.'

Leaphorn knelt beside it, inspecting it. It seemed remarkably clean for this dusty barn. He felt inside, between the rubber-coated nylon of its bottom and the inflated tubes that formed its walls, hoping to find something telltale left behind. His fingers encountered paper. He pulled it out. The crumpled, water-stained wrapper from a Mr. Goodbar. He ran his fingers down toward the bow.

Water.

Leaphorn pulled out his hand and examined his wet fingers. Whatever water had been left in the kayak had drained down into this crevice. How long could it have been there? How long would evaporation take in this no-humidity climate?

He walked to the door.

'The inflated kayak in there. You know when it was used?'

'I think four days ago,' Irene Musket said.

'By Mr. Houk?'

She nodded.

'His arthritis didn't bother him?'

'His arthritis hurt all the time,' she said. 'It

didn't keep him from that boat.' She sounded as if this represented an argument lost, an old hurt.

'Where did he go? Do you know?'

She made a vague gesture. 'Just down the river.'

'Do you know how far?'

'Not very far. He would have me pick him up down there near Mexican Hat.'

'He did this a lot?'

'Every full moon.'

'He went down at night? Late?'

'Sometimes he would watch the ten o'clock news and then we would go down to Sand Island. We'd make sure nobody was there. Then we'd put it in.' The wind whipped dust around Mrs. Musket's ankles and blew up her long skirt. She held it down, pressed back against the barn door. 'We would put it in, and then the next morning, I would drive the pickup down to that landing place upstream from Mexican Hat and I'd wait for him there. And then…' She paused, swallowed. Stood a moment, silently. Leaphorn noticed her eyes were wet, and looked away. Hard as he was, Harrison Houk had left someone to grieve for him.

'Then we would drive back to the house together,' she concluded.

Leaphorn waited awhile. When he had given her enough time, he asked: 'Did he tell you what he did when he went down the river?'

The silence lasted so long that Leaphorn wondered if his question had been lost in the wind. He glanced at her.

'He didn't tell me,' she said.

Leaphorn thought about the answer.

'But you know,' he said.

'I think so,' she said. 'One time he told me not to guess. And he said, `If you guess anyway, then don't ever tell anybody!' '

'Do you know who killed him?'

'I don't,' she said. 'I wish they would have killed me, instead.'

'I think we will find the one who did it,' Leaphorn said. 'I really do.'

'He was a good man. People talked about how mean he was. He was good to good people and just mean to the mean ones. I guess they killed him for that.'

Leaphorn touched her arm. 'Would you help me put the kayak in? And then tomorrow, drive my truck down to Mexican Hat and pick me up?'

'All right,' Irene Musket said.

'First I have to make a telephone call. Can I use your telephone?'

He called Jim Chee from Houk's house. It was after six. Chee had gone home for the day. No telephone, of course. Typical of Chee. He left Houk's number for a call back.

They slid the kayak into the back of his truck, with its double-bladed paddle and Houk's worn orange jacket, tied it down, and drove south to Sand Island launch site. Bureau of Land Management signs there warned that the river was closed for the season, that a license was required, that the San Juan catfish was on the extinction list and taking it was prohibited.

With the kayak in the water, Leaphorn stood beside it, feet in the cold water, doing a last-minute inventory of possibilities. He wrote Jim Chee's name and the Shiprock police station number on one of his cards and gave it to her.

'If I don't meet you by noon tomorrow down at Mexican Hat, I hope you will call this man for me. Tell him what you told me about Mr. Houk and this kayak. And that I took it down the river.'

She took it.

He climbed into the kayak.

'You know how to run that thing?'

'Years ago I did. I think I'll remember.'

'Well, put on the life jacket and buckle it. It's easy to turn over.'

'Right,' Leaphorn said. He did it.

'And here,' she said. She handed him a heavy canteen with a carrying strap and a plastic bread sack. 'I got something for you to eat out of the kitchen,' she said.

'Well, thanks,' Leaphorn said, touched.

'Be careful.'

'I can swim.'

'I didn't mean the river,' Mrs. Musket said.

Chapter Seventeen

Ť ^ ť

TRAILERS ARE POOR PLACES to sleep on those nights when seasons are changing on the Colorado Plateau. All night Jim Chee's narrow bed quivered as the gusts shook the thin walls of his home. He slept poorly, wrestling with the problem of Elliot's application while he was awake, dreaming of jawbones when he dozed. He rose early, made coffee, and found four Twinkies abandoned in his otherwise empty bread box to round out his breakfast. It was his day off, and time to buy groceries, do the laundry, check three overdue books back into the Farmington library. He'd refilled his water reservoir, but his butane supply was low. And he needed to pick up a tire he'd had repaired. And, come to think of it, drop by the bank and see about the $18.50 difference between his checkbook balance and their records. Instead he looked in his notebook and found the number Dr. Pedwell had given him for the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. 'That would have an MLA number,' Pedwell had told him when he'd asked if Elliot had also applied to excavate the site where Etcitty and Nails had been killed. 'It's in New Mexico, and apparently on public land. If it's on a Navajo section, we record it. If it's not, Laboratory of Anthropology handles it.'

'Sounds confusing,' Chee had said.

'Oh, it is,' Pedwell had agreed. 'It's even more confusing than that.' And he'd started explaining other facets of the numbering system, the Chaco numbers, the Mesa Verde, until Chee had changed the subject. Now he realized he should have asked for a name at Santa Fe.

He made the call from the station, drawing a surprised look from the desk clerk, who knew he was off. And it took three transfers before he connected with the woman who had access to the information he needed. She had a sweet, distinct middle-aged voice.

'It's easier if you know the MLA number,' she said. 'Otherwise I have to check through the applicant files.'

And so he waited.

'Dr. Elliot has eleven applications on file. You want all of them?'

'I guess so,' Chee said, not knowing exactly what to expect.

'MLA 14,751. MLA 19,311. MLA--'

'Just a moment,' Chee said. 'Do they have site locations? What county they're in. Like that?'

'On our map, yes.'

'The one I'm interested in would be in San Juan County, New Mexico.'

'Just a minute,' she said. The minute passed. 'Two of them. MLA 19,311 and MLA 19,327.'

'Could you pin the location down any more?'

'I can give you the legal description. Range, township, and section.' She read them off.

'Was he issued the permits?'

'Turned down,' she said. 'They're saving those sites to be dug sometime in the future when they have better technology. It's hard to get permission to dig them now.'

'Thanks a lot,' Chee said. 'It's exactly what I need.'

And it was. When he checked the legal description on the U.S. Geological Survey map in Captain Largo's office, MLA 19,327 proved to share range, township, and section with the oil well pump beyond which he'd found the U-Haul truck.

He had less luck trying to call Chaco Canyon. The phone was suffering some sort of satellite relay problem that produced both fade-out and echo. Randall Elliot was out of reach at one of the down-canyon ruins. Maxie Davis was somewhere. Luna was doing something, unintelligible to Chee, at Pueblo Bonito.

Chee glanced at his watch. He calculated the distance to Chaco. About a hundred miles. He remembered the condition of that last twenty-five miles of dirt. He groaned. Why was he doing this on his day off? But he knew why. Much as Leaphorn irritated him, he wanted the man to pat him on the head. To say, 'Good job, kid.' Might as well admit it. Also he might as well admit another fact. He was excited now. That grotesque line of lower jaws suddenly seemed to mean something. Perhaps something important.

The strange weather slowed him a little, rocking his truck when he stretched the limit on the fast pavement of N.M. 44 across the sagebrush flats of Blanco Plateau. End of autumn, he thought. Winter coming out of the west. Behind him over Colorado's La Plata range, the sky was dark, and when he left the pavement at Blanco Trading Post, he had a direct side wind to deal with--and the tiring business of steering against it as he fought chugholes and ruts. And tumbleweeds and blowing sand chased him across the parking lot at the Chaco visitors' center.

The woman he'd talked to was at the desk, looking trim in her park ranger uniform and glad to have Chee break the boredom of a day, and a season, that brought few visitors. She showed him on the Chaco map how to get to Kin Kletso, the site where Randall Elliot would be working today, 'if he can work in this wind.' Where Maxie Davis was seemed a mystery, 'but maybe she'll be working with Randall.' Luna had driven into Gallup and wouldn't be back until tonight.

Chee went back to his truck, leaning into the wind, squinching his eyes against the dust. At Kin Kletso, he found a Park Service truck parked and an employee sitting in the shelter of one of the walls.

'Looking for Dr. Randall Elliot,' Chee said. 'Did I miss him?'

'A mile,' the man said. 'He didn't show up today.'

'You know where…'

The man waved a dismissive wave. 'No idea,' he said. 'He's independent as a hog on ice.'

Maybe he was home. Chee drove to the temporary housing. Nothing in the parking area. He knocked at the door marked Elliot. Knocked again. Walked around the building to the back. Randall Elliot hadn't pulled the drapes across his sliding-glass patio door. Chee peered into what must be the living room. Elliot seemed to have converted it into a work area. Sawhorses supported planks on which cardboard cartons were lined. Those that Chee could see into seemed to contain bones. Skulls, ribs, jawbones. Chee pressed his forehead against the cool glass, shading his eyes with both hands, straining to see. Against the wall, boxes were lined. Books on shelves against the kitchen partition. No sign of Elliot.

Chee glanced down at the lock that held the door. Simple enough. He looked around him. No one visible. He dug out his penknife, opened the proper blade, slipped the catch.

Once inside he closed the drapes and turned on the light. He hurried through a quick search of the bedroom, kitchen, and bath, touching hardly anything and using his handkerchief to avoid leaving prints. This made him nervous. Worse, it made him feel dirty and ashamed.

But back in the living room he lingered over the boxes of bones. They seemed to be arranged in groups, tagged by site. Chee checked the tags, looking for either N.R. 723 or MLA 19,327. On the makeshift table by the kitchen door he found the N.R. number.

The tag was tied through the eye socket of a skull, number on one side, notes on the other. They seemed to be in some sort of personal shorthand, with numbers in millimeters. Bone thickness, Chee guessed, but the rest of it meant nothing to him.

The N.R. 723 box contained four lower jaws, one apparently from a child, one broken. He examined them. Each contained an extra molar, or a trace of one, on the right side. Each had two of the small holes low in the bones through which Elliot's petition had stated nerves and blood vessels grow.

Chee put the jaws back in the box exactly as he had found them, wiped his fingers on his pants legs, and sat down to sort out the significance of this. It seemed clear enough. Elliot's genetic tracking had led him to the same site as had Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's pottery chase. No. That didn't state it accurately. In their mutual fishing expeditions, both had struck pay dirt in the same ruins. Perhaps, Chee thought, one of the jawbones belonged to the potter.

He thought about site MLA 19,327, the lined jawbones, the missing plastic sack from the box of thirty. Thinking about that, he made another search of the apartment. He found a black plastic sack in the bottom of a wastebasket in the kitchen. He carefully set aside the table scraps and wadded papers that had buried it and put it on the counter beside the sink. The top was tied in a knot. Chee untied it and examined the plastic. SUPERTUFF was printed around the top. The missing sack.

Inside it were seven human mandibles, two of them child-sized, two broken. Chee counted teeth. Each had seventeen--one more than standard--and in each the superfluous molar was second from the back and out of line.

He put the sack back in the wastebasket, recovered it with waste, and picked up the telephone.

No, the woman at the visitors' center said, Elliot hadn't reported in. Nor had Luna or Maxie Davis.

'Can you get me Mrs. Luna?'

'Now that's easy,' she said.

Mrs. Luna answered on the third ring and remembered Chee instantly. How was he? How was Mr. Leaphorn? 'But this isn't what you called about.'

'No,' Chee said. 'I came out to talk to Randall Elliot but he's away somewhere. I remembered you said he went to Washington last month. You said his travel agent called and you took the message. Do you remember the name of the agency?'

'Bolack's,' Mrs. Luna said. 'I think just about everybody out here uses Bolack's.'

Chee called Bolack Travel in Farmington.

'Navajo Tribal Police,' he told the man who answered. 'We need to confirm the dates of an airline ticket. Don't know the airline, but the tickets were issued by your agency to Randall Elliot, address at Chaco Canyon.'

'You know about when? This year? This month? Yesterday?'

'Probably late last month,' Chee said.

'Randall Elliot,' the man said. 'Randall Elliot. Let's see.' Chee heard the clacking sound of a computer keyboard. Silence. More clacking. More silence.

'That's funny,' the man said. 'We issued them, but he didn't pick them up. It was an October eleven departure, with an October sixteen return. Mesa from Farmington to Albuquerque, American from Albuquerque to Washington. You just need the dates?'

'The tickets weren't picked up? You're certain?'

'I sure am. Makes a lot of work for nothing.'

Chee called Mrs. Luna again. Listening to the ring, he felt a sense of urgency. Randall Elliot wasn't in Washington that morning Eleanor Friedman-Bernal drove away to oblivion. He didn't go. But he pretended to go. He arranged it so that everyone in this gossipy place would think he was in Washington. Why? So they wouldn't be curious about where he'd actually gone. And where was that? Chee thought he knew. He hoped he was wrong.

'Hello,' Mrs. Luna said.

'Chee again,' he said. 'Another question. Did a deputy sheriff come out here yesterday to talk to people?'

'He did. About a month late, I'd say.'

'Did he tell you about the note left for Lieutenant Leaphorn? The one that sounded like Dr. Friedman might still be alive.'

'Is alive,' Mrs. Luna said. 'He said the note said, Tell Leaphorn she is still alive.` '

'Does everybody here know about that? Does Elliot?'

'Of course. Because everybody was beginning to have their doubts. You know, that's a long time to just disappear unless something bad has happened.'

'You sure about Elliot?'

'He was right here when he told Bob and me.'

'Well, thanks a lot,' Chee said.

The wind had fallen now into something near a calm. Which was lucky for Chee. He drove back to Blanco Trading Post much faster than the rutted dirt roadbed made wise, and then much faster than the law allowed on N.M. 44 to Farmington. He was worried. He had told Undersheriff Bates to tell the people at Chaco about Houk's note. He should not have done that. But maybe these suspicions were groundless. He thought of a way he could check -- a call he should have made before he left Chaco.

He pulled into the grocery store at Bloomfield and ran to the pay phone, then ran back to his truck for the supply of quarters he kept in the glove box. He called the Farmington airport, identified himself, asked the woman who answered who there rented helicopters. He jotted down the two names she gave him, and their numbers. The line was busy at Aero Services. He dialed Flight Contractors. A man who identified himself as Sanchez answered. Yes, they had rented a copter that morning to Randall Elliot.

'Pretty sorry weather for flying, even in a copter,' Sanchez said. 'But he's got the credentials and the experience. Flew for the navy in Nam.'

'Did he say where he was going?'

'He's an anthropologist,' Sanchez said. 'We been renting to him for two, three years now. Said he was going down over the White Horse Lake country hunting one of them Indian ruins. If you're going to fly in this kind of weather that's a good place to fly. Just grass and snake-weed down that way.'

It was also just about exactly the opposite direction from where Elliot was really flying, Chee thought. Southeast instead of northwest.

'When did he leave?'

'I'd say maybe three hours ago. Maybe a little longer.'

'Do you have another one to rent? With a pilot.'

'Have the chopper,' Sanchez said. 'Have to see about the pilot. When's it for?'

Chee made some instant calculations. 'Thirty minutes,' he said.

'I doubt it by then,' Sanchez said. 'I'll try.'

It took Chee a little less than that, at considerable risk of a speeding ticket. Sanchez had found a pilot, but the pilot hadn't arrived.

'He's the substitute pilot for the air ambulance service,' Sanchez said. 'Man named Ed King. He didn't care much for this weather, but then the wind's been dying.'

In fact the wind had moderated to a steady breeze. It seemed to be dying away as the weather front that brought it moved southeast. But now the sky to the north and west was a solid dark overcast.

While they waited for King, he'd see if he could get hold of Leaphorn. If he couldn't, he'd leave word for him. Tell him about finding the missing wastebasket liner hidden in Elliot's kitchen with the bones in it, and about Elliot's rejected applications to dig those sites. He'd tell Leaphorn that Elliot hadn't taken the flight to Washington the weekend that Friedman-Bernal disappeared. That provoked another thought.

'Mr. Sanchez. Could you check and see if Dr. Elliot took out a helicopter on, let's see, the thirteenth of October?'

Sanchez looked as doubtful as he had when Chee had said he should bill the copter rental to the Navajo Tribal Police. The look had hardened, and Chee had finally presented his MasterCard and waited while Sanchez checked his credit balance. It seemed to have reached the minimum guarantee. ('Now,' said Sanchez, cheerful again, 'if it's okay with the tribal auditors you can get your money back.')

'I don't know that I'm supposed to be telling all this stuff,' Sanchez said. 'Randall's a regular customer of ours. It might get back to him.'

'It's police business,' Chee said. 'Part of a criminal investigation.'

'About what?' Sanchez looked stubborn.

'Those two men shot out in the Checkerboard. Nails and Etcitty.'

'Oh,' Sanchez said. 'I'll check.'

'While you do, I'll call my office.'

Benally was in charge of the shift. No, Benally knew no way to get in touch with Leaphorn.

'Matter of fact, you have a message from him. Woman named Irene Musket called from Mexican Hat. She said Leaphorn headed down the San Juan--' Benally paused, chuckling. 'You know,' he said, 'this sounds just like the screwy stuff you get mixed up in, Jim. Anyway, she said Leaphorn took off down the San Juan yesterday evening in a boat, looking for a boat this anthropologist you're looking for took. She was supposed to pick him up this morning at Mexican Hat, and call you if he didn't show up. Well, he didn't show up.'

And just then the door opened behind Chee, letting in the cold breeze.

'Somebody here want a chopper ride?'

A burly, bald-headed man with a great yellow mustache was standing holding it open, looking at Chee. 'You the daredevil who wants to fly out into this weather? I'm the daredevil here to take you.'

Chapter Eighteen

Ť ^ ť

FINDING THE KAYAK Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had borrowed seemed simple enough to Leaphorn. She could have gone only downriver. The cliffs that walled in the San Juan between Bluff and Mexican Hat limited takeout places to a few sandy benches and the mouths of perhaps a score of washes and canyons. Since Leaphorn's reason and instincts told him her target ruin was on the reservation side of the river, his hunting grounds were further limited. And the description he had been given of the woman suggested she wouldn't be strong enough to pull the heavy rubber kayak very far out of the water. Therefore, finding it, even in the gathering darkness with only a flashlight, would be easy. Finding the woman would be the tough part.

Leaphorn had calculated without the wind. It treated Houk's little craft like a sail, pushing against its sides and forcing Leaphorn into a constant struggle to keep it in the current. About four miles below the Bluff bridge, he let the kayak drift into a sandbar on the north side of the river, as much to stretch cramping muscles and give himself a rest as in any hope of finding something. On the cliffs here he found an array of petroglyphs cut through the black desert varnish into the sandstone. He studied a row of square-shouldered figures with chevron-like stripes above their heads and little arcs suggesting sound waves issuing from their mouths. If they hadn't predated the time his own people had invaded this stone wilderness, he would have thought they represented the Navajo yei called Talking God. Just above them was the figure of a bird -- an unambiguous representation of the snowy egret. Above that, Kokopelli played his flute, bent so far forward that it pointed at the earth. The ground here was littered with shards of pottery but Leaphorn found no sign of the kayak. He hadn't expected to.

Relaunched, he paddled the kayak back into the current. Twilight now, and he found himself relaxing. Someone had said that 'the rush of the river soothes the mind.' It did seem to, in contrast to the sound of wind, which always made him tense. But the wind was moderating now.

He heard the call of a bird behind him, and a coyote somewhere on the Utah side, and the distant voice of rapids from the darkness ahead.

He checked two possible landing points on the reservation side, and spent more time than he'd planned looking at the mouths of Butler Wash and Comb Creek on the Utah side. When he pushed off again, it was into the light of the rising moon -- a little past full. Leaphorn heard an abrupt flurry of sound. A snowy egret had been startled from its roosting place. It flew away from him into the moonlight, a graceful white shape moving against the black cliff, solitary, disappearing into the darkness where the river bent.

Egrets, he thought, were like snow geese and wolves and those other creatures -- like Leaphorn himself -- that mated only once and for life. That would explain its presence here. It was living out its loneliness in this empty place. Leaphorn's kayak slid out of the darkness under the cliff and into a moonlit eddy. His shadow streaked out from that of the kayak, making a strange elongated shape. It reminded him of the bird, and he waved the paddle to magnify the effect. As he rested with his arms relaxed, he became the stick figure of the yei Black God as Navajo shamans represented him in the dry painting of the Night Chant. Bent over the paddie, pulling his weight against the water, he was Kokopelli, with his hunched back full of sorrows. He was thinking that, as the current swept him around the cliff into the dark. Here, with all black except the stars directly overhead, the shout of the river drowned out everything.

As the San Juan drops toward its rendezvous with the mighty Colorado, its rapids are relatively mild. It is the goal of those who run rivers for joy to nose their tough little kayaks into the throats of these cataracts for the thrill of being buried under the white water. It was Leaphorn's goal to skirt the bedlam and keep dry. Even so, he emerged soaked from the waist down and well splashed elsewhere. The river here had cut through the Comb Ridge anticline -- what millions of years of erosion had left of the Monument Upwarp. Here, eons ago, the earth's crust had bulged outward in a massive bubble of bending stone layers. Leaphorn drifted past slanting layers of stone which, even in this dim light, gave the eerie impression of sliding toward the center of the earth.

Beyond the anticline, he used his flashlight to check another sandy bench and the mouth of two washes. Then, around another bend and through another rapids, he guided the kayak into the eddy where Many Ruins Wash drained a huge expanse of the Navajo Reservation into the San Juan. If he had a specific destination when he left Sand Island, this was it.

Leaphorn had long since stopped trying to keep dry. He waded knee-deep through the eddy, pulled the kayak well ashore, and sat on the sand beside it, catching his breath. He was weary. He was wet. He was cold. Abruptly, he was very, very cold. He found himself shaking and unable to control the motion. His hands shook. So did his legs. His teeth chattered. Hypothermia. Leaphorn had suffered it before. It frightened him then and it frightened him now.

He pushed himself to his feet, staggered down the sand, the flashlight beam jittering erratically ahead of him. He found a place where a flash flood had left a tangle of twigs. He fumbled the lip balm tube in which he kept kitchen matches out of his jacket, managed to get his shaking fingers to open it, managed to stuff desiccated grass under a pile of twigs, managed on the third match to get the fire going. He added driftwood, fanned the fire into a blaze with his hat, and stood beside it, panting and shaking.

In his panic he had made the fire in the wrong place. Now, with his jeans steaming and some warmth returning to his blood, he looked around for a better place. He built this new fire where two walls of stone formed a sand-floored pocket, collecting enough heavy driftwood to keep it going until morning. Then he dried his clothing thoroughly.

This was where he'd expected to find the kayak. Up this canyon somewhere he expected to find the site that had drawn Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. When the river delayed him, he'd decided to wait for daylight to hunt the kayak. But now he couldn't wait. Tired as he was, he picked up the flashlight and walked back to the water.

She had hidden it carefully, dragging it with more strength than he credited her with far up under the tangled branches of a cluster of tamarisks. He searched, expecting to find nothing, and finding only a little nylon packet jammed under the center tube. It held a red nylon poncho. Leaphorn kept it. Back at the fire, he kicked himself a loosened place in the sand, spread the poncho as a ground cloth and lay down to sleep, leaving his boots close enough to the flames to complete the drying process.

The flames attracted flying insects. The insects attracted the bats. Leaphorn watched them fluttering at the margin of the darkness, darting to make their kill, flashing away. Emma had disliked bats. Emma had admired lizards, had battled roaches endlessly, had given names to the various spiders that lived around their house and--all too often--in it. Emma would have enjoyed this trip. He had always planned to take her, but there was never time, until now, when time no longer mattered. Emma would have been intensely interested in the affair of Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, would have felt a rapport with her. Would have asked him, if he'd forgotten to report, what progress was being made. Would have had advice for him. Well, tomorrow he would find that woman. A sort of gift, it would be.

He shifted himself into the sand. A chunk of driftwood fell, sending a shower of sparks up toward the stars. Leaphorn slept.

The cold awakened him. The fire had burned to dim embers, the moon was down, and the sky over him was an incredible dazzle of stars humans can see only when high altitude, clear, dry air, and an absence of ground light combine. Below these black thousand-foot cliffs, it was like looking into space from the bottom of a well. Leaphorn rebuilt the fire and dozed off again, listening to the night sounds. Two coyotes were on their nocturnal hunt now somewhere up the canyon and he could hear another pair very distant across the river. He heard a saw-whet owl high in the cliffs, a cry as shrill as metal rubbing metal. Just as he fell into sleep he heard the sound of a flute. Or perhaps it was just part of his dream.

When he awoke again, he was shivering with cold. It was late dawn, with the coldest air of night settled into this canyon slot. He got up, flinching against the stiffness, restarted the fire, drank from his canteen, and looked for the first time into the sack of food Irene Musket had sent with him--a great chunk of fry bread and a coil of boiled Polish sausage. He was hungry, but he would wait. He might need it much more later.

Despite their age, he found a fair set of Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's tracks pressed into the hard sand under the tamarisks--where the hanging vegetation had protected them from the moving air. Then he methodically searched the rest of this junction of canyons. He wanted to confirm that this was the place Houk had come, and he did. In fact, Houk seemed to have come here often. Probably it was his monthly destination. Someone, presumably Houk, had repeatedly slid a kayak up the sloping sand at the extreme upper end of the bench and left it under a broken-off cottonwood. From there a narrow trail took an unlikely course about five hundred yards through the brush, through the little dunes of blown sand, and down into the bottom of Many Ruins. It stopped at a little cul-de-sac of boulders.

Leaphorn spent a half-hour in that much-used spot, partly because he could find no sign that Houk had gone beyond it. This sheltered place seemed to be where Houk's moonlit journeys ended. Again, he was looking for confirmation of what he was now sure must be true. This damp and protected place held footprints well, and Houk's were everywhere. Many were fresh, evidence of the final visit before his murder. On these Leaphorn focused his attention, narrowing it finally to two prints. Both had been pressed upon by something heavy and partly erased. A soft, edgeless pressure. But not a moccasin. Something odd about it. Finally, looking at both prints from every possible angle, Leaphorn realized what caused the strange lines. Fur. But they weren't animal tracks. When patched together in Leaphorn's mind, the pressed places had the shape of a man's foot.

With nothing else to learn, Leaphorn started up-canyon. While he walked he considered what he was now almost certain were the facts. Brigham Houk probably had not drowned. Somehow he had managed to get across the river. Brigham Houk, the boy who had slaughtered his mother, his brother, and his sister, was somewhere in this canyon. Had been here almost twenty years, living away from people as he had longed to live. Houk had found the boy after the hue and cry of murder died away, had sustained him secretly all these years with whatever this born hunter had needed to stay alive. Nothing else seemed to explain Houk's note. Nothing else Leaphorn could think of would have motivated the man to stop an admittedly futile effort to build a hiding place to write a note. Houk didn't want this mad son of his abandoned here. He wanted him found by the same policeman who had once shown some awareness of the boy's humanity. He wanted him cared for, and he'd given up whatever minuscule chance he'd had of living to write his note. The writing had been tiny, Leaphorn remembered, and started at one end of the card. What would Houk have said had time allowed? Would he have explained about Brigham? He'd never know.

About two miles up the twisting canyon Leaphorn found the only sign of modern human occupancy. The bare poles of an old sweat bath stood on the broad shelf above the canyon floor. The ashes under it suggested it hadn't been used for years. If the canyon had ever been grazed, it hadn't been recently. He found no tracks of horses, sheep, or goats. The only hoofprints he found were mule deer, and there seemed to be plenty of rabbits, porcupines, and small rodents. He noticed three game trails leading to a deep spring-fed pothole at the canyon bottom. Four miles up, he stopped in a shady place and ate a small piece of the bread and a couple of inches of the sausage. There was heavy cloud cover over the northwest sky now. It was colder and yesterday's wind was back again now with a vengeance. It blew cross-canyon, forming powerful eddies of air that swirled this way here, and that way there. It made the odd sounds wind makes when it pours through stony crevices. It sent whirlwinds of fallen leaves sweeping around Leaphorn's legs. It blotted out all other sound.

The wind made walking difficult, and the crooked, erratic nature of the canyon bottom made estimating distance -- even for one as experienced as Leaphorn -- little more than guesswork. Double guesswork, he thought. He had to guess how much of this climbing over tumbled boulders and detouring around brush would have added to the five and a half miles Etcitty had estimated. It would be less than that, he was sure, and he'd been looking for the landmarks Etcitty had mentioned since about mile three. Just ahead, where the canyon bottom made a sharp bend, he saw a crevice in the cliff walled in with stones--an Anasazi storeroom. On the cliff below it, half obscured by tall brush, he saw pictographs. He climbed the soft earth to the floor of the bench and pushed his way through the heavy growth of nettles for a closer look.

The dominant shape was one of those broad-shouldered, pin-headed figures that anthropologists believe represented Anasazi shamans. It looked, as Etcitty had described it, 'like a big baseball umpire holding up a pink chest protector.' Leaphorn recrossed the canyon bottom and climbed the shelf on the other side. He saw what he had come to find.

Near its beginnings in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins Canyon is cut deep and narrow through the Chinle sandstone formation of that plateau. There its cliffs rise sheer and vertical almost a thousand feet above a narrow, sandy bottom. It is much shallower by the time it emerges into Chinle Valley and becomes a mere drainage wash as it meanders northward toward Utah through the Greasewood Flats. But the cut deepens again in its passage through the Nokaito Bench to the San Juan. Here the crazy mishmash geology of the earth's crust had given Many Ruins a different shape. One climbed out of it on a series of steps. First the low, sometimes earthen cliffs that crowded its narrow streambed, then a broken sandstone shelf hundreds of yards wide, then more cliffs, rising to another shelf, and still more cliffs rising to the flat top of Nokaito Mesa.

In the spring when the snowpack melts a hundred miles away in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins carries a steady stream. In the late-summer thunderstorm season it rises and falls between a trickle and booming flash floods, which send boulders tumbling like marbles down its bottom. In late autumn it dries. The life that occupied it finds water then only in spring-fed potholes. From where he stood on the sandstone shelf above such a pothole, Leaphorn could see the second of the ruins Etcitty had described. Two ruins, in fact.

Part of the wall of one was visible in an alcove in the second level of cliffs above him. Another, reduced to little more than a brushy hump, had been built along the base of the cliff not two hundred yards from the alcove.

All this day he had fought down his sense of excitement and urgency. He had a long ways to go and he went at a careful walk. Now he trotted across the sandstone bench.

He stopped when the alcove came in full view. Like those invariably picked as building sites by the Anasazi, it faced the low winter sun, with enough overhang to shade it in the summer. A cluster of brushy vegetation grew under it, telling him it was also the site of seep. He walked toward it, more slowly now. He didn't consider Brigham Houk particularly dangerous. Houk had called him schizophrenic -- unpredictable but not likely to be a threat to a stranger. Still, he had killed once in an insane rage. Leaphorn unsnapped the flap that held his pistol in its holster.

Eons of water running down the inner face of the alcove had worn a depression several feet into the sandstone below it. Water stains indicated this held a pool about four feet deep in wetter seasons. Now only a foot or two was left -- still fed by a tiny trickle from a mossy crevice in the cliff, and now green with algae. It was also the home of scores of tiny leopard frogs, which hopped away from Leaphorn's feet.

Only some of them hopped.

Leaphorn squatted, grunted with surprise. He studied the small scattered frog bodies, some already shriveled, some newly dead, each with a leg secured by a yucca thread to a tiny peg cut from a twig. He stood, trying to make sense of this. The pegs followed a series of faint concentric circles drawn around the pothole, the outside one perhaps four feet from the water. Some sort of game, Leaphorn guessed. He tried to understand the mind that would be amused by it. He failed. Brigham Houk was insane, probably dangerous.

He considered. Brigham Houk almost certainly would already know he was here.

Leaphorn made a megaphone of his hands. 'Eleanor,' he shouted. 'Ellie. Ellie.' Then he listened.

Nothing. Outside the alcove, the wind made whimpering sounds.

He tried again. Again, nothing.

The Anasazi had built their structure on a stone shelf above the pool. About a dozen small rooms once, Leaphorn estimated, with part of it at two levels. He skirted around the pool, climbed over the tumbled walls, peered into the still-intact rooms. Nothing. He walked back to the pool, puzzled. Where to look next?

At the edge of the alcove, a worn set of footholds had been cut into the sandstone--a climb-way leading to the shelf above the alcove. Perhaps that led to another site. He walked out of the alcove around the cliff to the brushy hump. Immediately he saw it had been plundered. A ditch had been dug along the outside wall. Bones were scattered everywhere. The digging had been recent--hardly any rain since the earth was disturbed. Leaphorn inspected it. Was this why Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had slipped away from Chaco, slipped down the San Juan? To search this site for her polychrome pots? So it would seem. And what had happened then? What had interrupted her? He checked in the disturbed earth for shards and collected a handful. They might be the sort that interested her. He couldn't be sure. He looked down in the trench. Jutting from the earth was part of a pot. And another. In the bottom were a half-dozen shards, two of them large. Why had she left them there? Then he noticed an oddity. Among the bones littering the trench he saw no skulls. On the earth outside more than a dozen were scattered. None had jawbones. Natural, probably. The mandible would be attached only by muscle and gristle, which wouldn't survive an eight-hundred-year burial. Then where were the missing mandibles? He saw five of them together beside the trench, as if discarded there. It reminded him of the jawbones lined so neatly at the dig site where Etcitty and Nails had died. But where was the woman who had dug the trench? He went back to the pool and inspected the footholds. Then he started climbing, thinking as he did that he was far too old for this. Fifty feet up the cliff, he was aware of two facts. These Anasazi footholds were in regular current use, and he was a damn fool to have attempted the climb. He clung to the stone, reach-

ing blindly for the next handhold, wondering how many remained. Finally the slope eased. He looked up. He had done it. His head was almost even with the top. He pulled himself up, his upper body over the edge.

Standing there, watching him, was a man. He wore a beard cut straight across, a nylon jacket so new it still had the creases of its folds, a pair of tattered jeans, and moccasins that seemed to have been sewn together from deer hide.

'Mr. Leaphorn,' the man said. 'Papa said you coming.'

Chapter Nineteen

Ť ^

AS HARRISON HOUK'S MESSAGE to him had promised, Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was still alive. She lay dozing under a gray wool blanket and a covering of sewn-together rabbit skins. She looked very, very ill.

'Can she talk?' he asked Brigham.

'A little,' he said. 'Sometimes.'

It occurred to Leaphorn that Brigham Houk might have been describing himself. He talked very little and sometimes not at all. What you'd expect, Leaphorn thought, after twenty years of no one to talk to except once every full moon.

'How bad is it? Her injuries I mean?'

'Knee's hurt,' he said. 'Arm broken. Place in her side. Place in her hip.'

And probably all infected, Leaphorn thought. Thin as her face was, it was flushed.

'You found her and brought her here?'

Brigham nodded. Like his father, he was a small man, tightly built, with short arms and legs and a thick, strong torso.

'Do you know what happened to her?'

'The devil came and hurt her,' Brigham said in an odd, flat voice. 'He hit her. She ran away. He chased. She fell down. He pushed her off. She fell into the canyon. Broke everything.'

Brigham had made a bed for her by digging a coffin-shaped pit in the sand that had drifted into a room of the sheltered ruin. He'd filled it with a two- or three-foot layer of leaves. Open as it was to the air, it had the sickroom smell of urine and decay.

'Tell me about this,' Leaphorn said.

Brigham was standing at what had been the entry door to the little room--now a narrow gap into a roofless space. Behind him the sky was dark. The wind, which had fallen during the afternoon, was blowing again now. It blew steadily out of the northwest. Winter, Leaphorn thought. He kept his eyes locked with Brigham's. The young man's eyes were the same odd blue-gray as his father's. Had the same intensity about them. Leaphorn looked into them, searching for insanity. Looking for it, he found it.

'This devil came,' Brigham said, speaking very slowly. 'He dug up the bones, and sat on the ground there looking at them. One after another he would look at them. He would measure them with a tool he had. He was looking for the souls of people who never had been prayed for. He would suck the souls out of the skulls and then he would throw them away. Or some of them he would take away in his sack. And then one day the last time the moon was full--' He paused and his somber bearded face converted into an expression of delight. 'When the moon is full, that's when Papa comes and talks to me, and brings me what I need.' The smile drifted away. 'A little after that, this woman came.' He nodded at Friedman-Bernal. 'I didn't see her come and I think maybe the angel Moroni brought her because I didn't see her come and I see everything in this place. Moroni left her to fight with that devil. She had come to the old cliff house down below here where I keep my frogs. I didn't know she was there. I was playing my flute and I frightened her and she ran away. But the next day, she came to where the devil was digging up the bones. I saw them talking.' Brigham's mobile face became fierce. His eyes seemed to glitter with the anger. 'He knocked her down, and he was on top of her, fighting with her. He got up and was searching through her pack, and she jumped up and ran over to the edge where the cliff drops down to the streambed and then she fell down. That devil, he went over and pushed her over with his foot.' Brigham stopped, his face wet with tears.

'He just left her there, where she fell?'

Brigham nodded.

'You kept her alive,' Leaphorn said. 'But now I think she is starting to die. We have to get her out of here. To a hospital where doctors can give her medicine.'

Brigham stared at him. 'Papa said I could trust you.' The statement was reproachful.

'If we don't get her out, she dies,' Leaphorn said.

'Papa will bring medicine. The next time the moon is full he will come with it.'

'Too long,' Leaphorn said. 'Look at her.'

Brigham looked. 'She's asleep,' he said, softly.

'She has fever. Feel her face. How hot. She has infections. She has to have help.'

Brigham touched Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's cheek with the tips of his fingers. He jerked them away, looking frightened. Leaphorn thought of the shriveled bodies of the frogs and tried to square that image with this tenderness. How do you square insanity?

'We need to make something to carry her on,' Leaphorn said. 'If you can find two poles long enough, we can tie the blanket between them and carry her on that.'

'No,' Brigham Houk said. 'When I try to move her, to clean her after she does number one or number two, she screams. It hurts too bad.'

'No choice,' Leaphorn said. 'We have to do it.'

'It's terrible,' Brigham said. 'She screams. I can't stand that, so I had to leave her dirty.' He looked at Leaphorn for understanding. Houk had apparently given him a haircut and trimmed his beard on the last visit. The old man was no barber. He had simply left the hair about an inch long everywhere, and whacked the beard off a half -inch under Brigham's chin.

'It was better to leave her dirty,' Leaphorn said. 'You did right. Now, can you find me two poles?'

Brigham nodded. 'Just a minute. I have poles. It's close.' He disappeared, making no sound at all.

Here is how it must have been when man lived as predator, Leaphorn thought. He developed the animal skills, and starved with his children when the skill failed him. How had Brigham hunted? Traps, probably, and a bow to kill larger game. Perhaps his father had brought him a gun -- but someone might have heard gunshots. He listened to the sound of Eleanor Friedman's shallow breathing, and over that, the wind sounds. Suddenly he heard a thumping. Steady at first, then louder. He leaped to his feet. A helicopter. But before he could get into the open there was only the wind. He stared into the grayness, frustrated. He had found her. He must get her out of here alive. The risk lay in carrying such a fragile load over such rough terrain. It would be difficult. It might be impossible. A helicopter would save her. Why hadn't Houk done more to get her out? No time, Leaphorn guessed. His son had told him of this injured woman, but perhaps not how near she was to death. Houk would have wanted a way to save the woman without giving up this mad son to life (or perhaps death) in a prison for the criminally insane. Even Houk needed time to solve such a puzzle. He was too crippled to bring her out himself. If he did, she would talk of the man who had nursed her, and Brigham would be found--an insane triple murderer in the eyes of the law. The only solution Leaphorn saw would be to find Brigham another hideaway. That would take time, and the killer had allowed Houk no time.

The woman stirred, moaned. He and Brigham would have to carry her to the canyon bottom, then five miles down to the river. They could tie the kayaks together, put her litter on one of them, and float her to Mexican Hat. Five or six hours at least, and then an ambulance would come for her. Or the copter would come from Farmington if the weather allowed. It hadn't been too bad for whatever had just flown over.

He walked out under the dark sky. He smelled ozone. Snow was near. Then he saw Randall Elliot walking toward him.

Elliot raised his hand. 'I saw you from up there,' he said, pointing past Leaphorn to the rim of the mesa. 'Came down to see if you needed help.'

'Sure,' Leaphorn said. 'Lots of help.'

Elliot stopped a few feet away. 'You find her?'

Leaphorn nodded toward the ruin, remembering Elliot was a copter pilot.

'How is she?'

'Not good,' Leaphorn said.

'But alive at least?'

'In a coma,' Leaphorn said. 'She can't talk.' He wanted Elliot to know that immediately. 'I doubt if she'll live.'

'My God,' Elliot said. 'What happened to her?'

'I think she fell,' Leaphorn said. 'A long ways. That's what it looks like.'

Elliot was frowning. 'She's in there?' he said. 'How did she get here?'

'A man lives out here. A hermit. He found her and he's been trying to keep her alive.'

'I'll be damned,' Elliot said. He moved past Leaphorn. 'In here?'

Leaphorn followed. They stood, Elliot staring at Friedman-Bernal, Leaphorn watching Elliot. He wanted to handle this just exactly right. Only Elliot could fly the helicopter.

'A hermit found her?' he said softly, posing the question to himself. He shook his head. 'Where is he?'

'He went to get a couple of poles. We're going to make a litter. Carry her down to the San Juan. Her kayak's there, and mine. Float her down to Mexican Hat and get help.'

Elliot was looking at her again, studying her. 'I have a helicopter up on the mesa. We can carry her up there. Much quicker.'

'Great,' Leaphorn said. 'Lucky you found us.'

'Really, it was stupid,' Elliot said. 'I should have remembered about this place. She'd told me once she'd found the polychrome pattern she was chasing on potsherds in here. Back when she was helping inventory these sites. I knew she'd planned to come back.' He turned away from the woman. His eyes locked with Leaphorn's.

'As a matter of fact, she said some things that made me think she had come here earlier. She didn't exactly say it, but I think she did some illegal digging in here. I think she found what she was looking for, and she came back to get some more.'

'I think you're right,' Leaphorn said. 'She dug up that ruins on the shelf down below here. Dug up a bunch of graves.'

'And got careless,' Elliot added, looking at her.

Leaphorn nodded. Where was Brigham? He'd said just a minute. Leaphorn walked out of the ruin, looking along the talus slope under the cliff. Two poles leaned against the wall not ten feet away. Brigham had returned and seen his devil, and gone away. The poles were fir, apparently, and weathered. Driftwood, Leaphorn guessed, carried down Many Ruins all the way from the mountains by one of its flash floods. On the ground beside them was a loop of rawhide rope. He hurried back into the room with them.

'A very skittish man,' Leaphorn said. 'He left the poles and disappeared again.'

'Oh,' Elliot said. He looked skeptical.

They doubled the blanket, made lacing holes, and tied it securely to the poles.

'Be very careful,' Leaphorn said. 'Knee probably broken. Broken arm, all sorts of internal injuries.'

'I used to collect the wounded,' Elliot said, without looking up. 'I'm good at this.'

And Elliot seemed to be careful. Even so, Eleanor Friedman-Bernal uttered a strangled moan. Then she was unconscious again.

'I think she fainted,' Elliot said. 'Do you really think she's dying?'

'I do,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm giving you the heavy end because you're younger and stronger and not so exhausted.'

'Fair,' Elliot said. He picked up the end of the poles at the woman's head.

'You know the way back to your copter, so you lead the way.'

They carried Eleanor Friedman-Bernal carefully down the talus, then toward a long rock slide which sloped down from the rim. Beyond the slide -- probably the cause of it -- was a deep erosion cut which carried runoff water down from the top. Elliot turned toward the cut.

'Rest a minute,' Leaphorn said. 'Put her down on this slab.'

He was fairly sure now what Elliot planned. Somewhere between here and the helicopter, wherever that was, something fatal had to happen to Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. Elliot simply could not risk having her arrive at a hospital alive. Ideally, something fatal would also happen to Leaphorn. If Elliot was smart, he would wait until they had climbed a hundred feet or so up the cut. Then he would push the litter backward, tumbling Friedman-Bernal and Leaphorn down the jumble of boulders. Then he would climb back down and do whatever was needed, if anything, to finish them off. A bang of the head on a rock would do it and leave nothing to arouse the suspicion of a medical examiner. Figuring that out had been easy enough. Knowing what to do about it was another matter. He could think of nothing. Shooting Elliot was shooting the copter pilot. Pointing a gun at him to force him to fly them out wasn't practical. Elliot would know Leaphorn wouldn't shoot him once they were airborne. He'd be able to make the helicopter do tricks that Leaphorn couldn't handle. And he probably had the little pistol. And yet, once they started that steep climb, Elliot had simply to drop his end of the litter and Leaphorn would be helpless.

'Is this the only way up?' Leaphorn asked.

'Only one I could see,' Elliot said. 'It's not as bad as it looks. We can take it slow.'

'I'll wait here with the lady,' Leaphorn said. 'You fly the copter down here, land it somewhere where we don't have to make the climb.'

You could land a copter on this shelf if you had to, Leaphorn guessed. You'd have to be good, but someone who'd flown evacuations in Vietnam would be very good.

Elliot seemed to consider. 'That's a thought,' he said.

He reached into his jacket, extracted a small blue automatic pistol, and pointed it at Leaphorn's throat. 'Unbuckle your belt,' he said.

Leaphorn unbuckled it.

'Pull it out.'

Leaphorn pulled it out. His holster fell to the ground.

'Now kick the gun over here to me.'

Leaphorn did.

'You make it tough,' Elliot said.

'Not tough enough.'

Elliot laughed.

'You'd rather not have a bullet hole in me,' Leaphorn said. 'Or her either.'

'That's right,' Elliot said. 'But I don't have any choice now. You seem to have figured it out.'

'I figured you were going to get us far enough up the rocks to make it count and then tumble us down.'

Elliot nodded.

'I'm not sure of your motive for all this. Killing so many people.'

'Maxie told you that day,' Elliot said. The good humor was suddenly gone, replaced by bitter anger. 'What the hell can a rich kid do to impress anyone?'

'Impress Maxie,' Leaphorn said. 'A truly beautiful young woman.' And he was thinking, maybe I'm like you. I don't want this to go wrong now because of Emma. Emma put little value on finding people to punish them. But this would really have impressed her. You love a woman, you want to impress her. The male instinct. Hero finds lost woman. The life saved. He didn't want it to go wrong now. But it had. In a very little while, wherever and whenever it was most convenient, Randall Elliot would kill Eleanor Friedman-Bernal and Joe Leaphorn. He could think of nothing to prevent it. Except maybe Brigham Houk.

Brigham must be somewhere near. It had taken him only minutes to get the poles and return. He had seen his devil, recognized him, and slipped away. Brigham Houk was a hunter. Brigham Houk was also insane, and afraid of this devil. What would he do? Leaphorn thought he knew.

'We'll leave her here for now and we'll walk over there,' Elliot said, pointing with the pistol toward the edge of the shelf. It was exactly the direction Leaphorn wanted to go. It was the only way that led to convenient shelter. It must be the way Brigham had gone.

'It's going to look funny if too many people fall off things,' Leaphorn said. 'Two is too many.'

'I know,' Elliot said. 'Do you have a better idea?'

'Maybe,' Leaphorn said. 'Tell me your motive for all this.'

'I think you guessed,' Elliot said.

'I guess Maxie,' Leaphorn said. 'You want her. But she's a self-made, class-conscious woman with a lot of bad memories of being put down by the upper class. On top of that, she's a tough one, a little mean. She resents you, and everybody like you, because it's all handed to you. So I think you're going to do something that has nothing to do with being born to the upper, upper, upper class. Something that neither Maxie nor anybody else can ignore. From what you told me at Chaco it's something to do with tracing what happened to these Anasazi by tracking genetic flaws.'

'How about that,' Elliot said. 'You're not as dumb as you try to act.'

'You found the flaw you were hunting in the bones here, and over at the site on the Checkerboard, too, I guess. You were digging here illegally, and our friend here came in and caught you at it.'

Elliot held up his empty hand. 'So I tried to kill her and screwed it up.'

'Curious about something,' Leaphorn said. 'Were you the one who called in the complaint about Eleanor being a pot hunter?'

'Sure,' Elliot said. 'You figured why?'

'Not really,' Leaphorn said. Where the devil was Brigham Houk? Maybe he'd run. Leaphorn doubted it. His father wouldn't have run. But then his father wasn't schizophrenic.

'You can't get a permit to dig,' Elliot said. 'Not in your lifetime. These asshole bureaucrats are always saving it for the future. Well, if a site is being vandalized, that puts it in a different category. Not so tough then, after it's already been messed up. I was going to follow up later with some hints about where to find digs Eleanor was stealing from. They'd find her body, so they'd have their Thief of Time. They wouldn't have to be looking for one and maybe suspecting me. And then I'd get my dig permit.' He laughed. 'Roundabout way, but I've seen it work.'

'You were getting your bones anyway,' Leaphorn said. 'Buying some, digging some up yourself.'

'Wrong category, friend,' Elliot said. 'Those are unofficial bones. Not in site.' I was findingem unofficially, so I'd know where to find 'em officially when I got my permit. You understand that?' Elliot peered at him, grinning. He was enjoying this. 'When I get my permit to excavate, I come back and the bones I find then are registered in place. Photographed. Documented.' He grinned again. 'Same bones, maybe, but now they're official.'

'How about Etcitty,' Leaphorn asked, 'and Nails?' Over Elliot's shoulder, Leaphorn had seen Brigham Houk. He saw Houk because the man wanted Leaphorn to see him. He was behind a fallen sandstone slab, screened by brush. He held something that might have been a curved staff and he motioned Leaphorn toward him.

'That was a mistake,' Elliot said.

'Killing them?'

Elliot laughed. 'That was correcting the mistake. Nails was too careless. And too greedy. Once the silly bastards stole that backhoe they were sure to get caught.' He glanced at Leaphorn. 'And Nails was sure to tell you guys everything he knew.'

'Which would have been bad for your reputation,' Leaphorn said.

'Disastrous,' Elliot said. He waved the pistol. 'But hurry it up. I want to get out of here.'

'If you're working on what I think,' Leaphorn said, 'there's something I want to show you. Something Friedman-Bernal found. You're interested in jaw deformities. Something like that?'

'Well, a little like that,' Elliot said. 'You understand how the human chromosome works? Fetus inherits twenty-three from its mother, twenty-three from its father. Genetic characteristics handed down in the genes. Once in a while polyploidy occurs in the genetic crossover points. Someone gets multiple chromosomes, and you get a characteristic change. Inheritable. But you need more than one to do a trace which has any real meaning. At Chaco, in some of the early Chaco burials, I found three that were passed along. A surplus molar in the left mandible. And that went along with a thickening of the frontal bone over the left eye socket, plus--' Elliot stopped. 'You understanding this?'

'Genetics wasn't my favorite course. Too much math,' Leaphorn said. What the devil was Brigham Houk doing? Was he still behind that slab up ahead?

'Exactly,' Elliot said, pleased by this. 'It's one percent digging and ninety-nine percent working out statistical models for your computer. Anyway, the third thing, which sort of mathematically proves the passalong genes, is that hole in the mandible through which the blood and nerve tissue passes. At Chaco, from about 650 A.D. until they turned out the lights, this family had two holes in the left mandible and the usual one in the right. Plus those other characteristics. And out here, I'm still finding it among these exiles. Can you see why it's important?'

'And fascinating,' Leaphorn said. 'Dr. Friedman must have known what you were looking for. She saved a lot of jawbones.' He was almost to the great sandstone slab. 'I'll show you.'

'I doubt if she found anything I overlooked,' Elliot said. He followed Leaphorn, keeping the pistol level. 'But this is the way we were going anyway.'

They were passing the sandstone now. Leaphorn tensed. If nothing happened here, he would have to try something else. It wouldn't work, but he wouldn't simply stand still to be shot.

'Right over here,' Leaphorn said.

'I think you're just--'

The sentence ended with a grunt, a great exhalation of breath. Leaphorn turned. Elliot was leaning slightly forward, the pistol hanging at his side. About six inches of arrow shaft and the feathered tip protruded from his jacket.

Leaphorn reached for him, heard the whistle and thump of the second arrow. It went through Elliot's neck. The pistol clattered on the stone. Elliot collapsed.

Leaphorn retrieved the pistol. He squatted beside the man, turned him on his back. His eyes were open but he seemed to be in shock. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

There was snow in the wind now, little dry flakes that skittered along the surface like white dust. Leaphorn tested the arrow. It was the sort of bow hunters buy in sporting goods stores and it was lodged solidly through Elliot's neck. Pulling it out would just make things worse. If they could be worse. Elliot was dying. Leaphorn stood, looking for Brigham Houk. Houk was standing beside the slab now, holding a great ugly bow of metal, wood, and plastic, looking upward. From somewhere Leaphorn heard the clatter of a helicopter. Brigham Houk had heard it earlier. He stood very close to cover, ready to vanish.

The helicopter emerged over the rim of the mesa almost directly overhead. Leaphorn waved, saw an answering wave. The copter circled and disappeared over the mesa again.

Leaphorn checked Elliot's pulse. He didn't seem to have one. He looked for Brigham Houk, who seemed never to have existed. He walked over to the litter where Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal lay. She opened her eyes, looked at him without recognition, closed them again. He tucked the rabbit fur cloak around her, careful to apply no pressure. Now it was snowing harder, still blowing like dust. He walked back to Elliot. No pulse now. He opened his jacket and shirt and felt for a heartbeat. Nothing. The man was no longer breathing. Randall Elliot, graduate of Exeter, of Princeton, of Harvard, winner of the Navy Cross, was dead by arrow shot. Leaphorn gripped him under the arms and pulled him into the cover of the slab where Brigham Houk had hidden. Elliot was heavy, and Leaphorn was exhausted. By pulling hard and doing some twisting, he extracted the arrows. He wiped the blood off as well as he could on Elliot's jacket. Then he picked up a rock, hammered them into pieces, and put the pieces in his hip pocket. That done, he found dead brush, broke it off, and made an inefficient effort to cover the body. But it didn't matter. The coyotes would find Randall Elliot anyway.

Then he heard the clatter of someone scrambling down the cut. It proved to be Officer Chee, looking harassed and disheveled. It took some effort for Leaphorn not to show he was impressed. He pointed to the litter. 'We need to get Dr. Friedman to the hospital in a hurry,' he said. 'Can you get that thing down here to load her?'

'Sure,' Chee said. He started back toward the cut at a run.

'Just a second,' Leaphorn said.

Chee stopped.

'What did you see?'

Chee raised his eyebrows. 'I saw you standing beside a man slumped down on the ground. I guess it was Elliot. And I saw the litter over there. And maybe I saw another man. Something jumping out of sight back there just as we came over the top.'

'Why did you think it was Elliot?'

Chee looked surprised. 'The helicopter he rented is parked up there. I figured when he heard she was still alive he'd have to come out here and kill her before you got here.'

Leaphorn again was impressed. This time he made a little less effort to conceal it. 'Do you know how Elliot knew she was alive?'

Chee made a wry face. 'I more or less told him.'

'And then made the connection?'

'Then I found out he had filed for permission to dig this site, and the site where he killed Etcitty. Turned down on both of them. I went out there to talk to him and found--you remember the box of plastic wastebasket liners at the Checkerboard site. One missing from it. Well, it was hidden in Elliot's kitchen. Had jawbones in it.'

Leaphorn didn't ask how Chee had gotten into Elliot's kitchen.

'Go ahead, then, and get the copter down here. And don't say anything.'

Chee looked at him.

'I mean don't say anything at all. I'll fill you in when we get a chance.'

Chee trotted toward the cut.

'Thank you,' Leaphorn said. He wasn't sure if Chee heard that.

It was snowing hard by the time they had the litter loaded and the copter lifted off the shelf. Leaphorn was jammed against the side. He looked down on a stone landscape cut into vertical blocks by time and now blurred by snow. He looked quickly away. He could ride the big jets, barely. Something in his inner ear made anything less stable certain nausea. He closed his eyes, swallowed. This was the first snow. They would come when the weather cleared to recover the copter and look for Elliot. But they wouldn't look hard because it was so obviously hopeless. Snow would have covered everything. After the thaw, they would come again. Then they would find the bones, scattered like the Anasazi skeletons he looted. There would be no sign of the arrow wounds then. Cause of death unknown, the coroner would write. Victim eaten by predators.

He glanced back. Chee was jammed in the compartment beside the litter, his hand on Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's arm. She seemed to be awake. I will ask him what curing ceremony he would recommend, Leaphorn thought, and knew at once that his fatigue was making him silly. Instead he said nothing. He thought of the circumstances, of how proud Emma would be of him tonight if she could be home to hear about this woman brought safely to the hospital. He thought about Brigham Houk. In just about twenty-four more days, the moon would be full again. Brigham would be waiting at the mouth of Many Ruins Canyon, but Papa wouldn't come.

I will go, Leaphorn thought. Someone has to tell him. And that meant that he would have to postpone his plan to leave the reservation, probably a long postponement. Solving the problem of what to do about Brigham Houk would take more than one trip down the river. And if he had to stick around, he might as well withdraw that letter. As Captain Nez had said, he could always write it again.

Jim Chee noticed Leaphorn was watching him.

'You all right?' Chee asked.

'I've felt better,' Leaphorn said. And then he had another thought. He considered it. Why not? 'I hear you're a medicine man. I heard you are a singer of the Blessing Way. Is that right?'

Chee looked slightly stubborn. 'Yes sir,' he said.

'I would like to ask you to sing one for me,' Leaphorn said.

TONY HILLERMAN is past president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received their Edgar and Grand Master Awards Among his other honors are the Center for the American Indian's Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe's Special Friend Award His many novels include Finding Moon, Sacred Clowns, Coyote Waits, Talking God, A Thief of Time, and Dance Halt of the Dead He is also the author of The Great Taos Bank Robbery He lives with his wife, Mane, in Albuquerque, New Mexico