Coyote Waits

“I can see why you’d want to find Tagert. I can see why you’d want to make sure.”

“Sure!” Chee said it louder than he intended. “I am sure. How sure can I be? The killer at the scene, drunk, with the smoking gun. He doesn’t even deny it. How goddamn sure can you be?”

“It sounds sure to me,” Jacobs said.

“And the FBI is happy. They took it to the federal grand jury, and got the indictment. They’re ready for trial.”

“This Lieutenant Leaphorn, is he—”

“A vote of no confidence,” Chee said.

“The tribal police think you got the wrong man?”

“Maybe. More likely Leaphorn is freelancing. He does that some. He’s sort of our supercop. Old as the hills. Knows everybody. Remembers everything. Forgets nothing. I worked with him a time or two before. Everybody does sooner or later because he handles the tough investigations wherever they are.”

“You didn’t get along?”

“I don’t think he held me in extremely high regard,” Chee said. “But we got along all right. To be fair about it. He even hired me to do a Blessing Way for him.”

He saw the question in Jacobs’s face.

“It’s a curing ceremonial,” he explained. “I’m a would-be shaman. A singer. A medicine man. Hataalii is the Navajo word for it. I was going to be one of the people who conducts the curing ceremonies to restore people to harmony. Or I was trying to be. Nobody seemed to want my services.” He produced a humorless chuckle. “And Lieutenant Leaphorn was my only legitimate patient. Only one outside the family.”

“You do sand paintings,” Jacobs said. “Is that right? That’s about all I know about it.”

Even while he was speaking, Chee had the sensation of standing outside himself, watching and listening. He saw self-pity, and heard it. Some anger, yes. But mostly he saw a man who felt sorry for himself. He hated that in others, hated it even more in himself. Now he felt ashamed. And beyond his anger, he was suddenly aware of the implications of Leaphorn’s involvement. It couldn’t be merely casual. How had the lieutenant found out about Tagert? That must have taken some digging. Chee felt his anger seeping away, replaced by a sense of urgency.

“Sorry about unloading my troubles,” he said. “I didn’t come in here for that. I came in to see if I could look at some of the paperwork. See if maybe it would tell us what Tagert and Pinto were working on. Tell us if Tagert was with him that day.”

“We can look,” Jean Jacobs said. “But I don’t think it’s going to help much.”

Look they did. But first Jean Jacobs closed the door. And locked it. “I feel sort of sneaky,” she said. “Looking through the old bastard’s stuff. Even though I work with a lot of it every day.”

“Just remember, I’m the arresting officer,” Chee said, and felt his mood improving.

The out-basket was empty. They checked the in-basket.

The mail, the memos, were a month old and, as far as Chee could tell, without relevance.

“How does he file things?” Chee asked.

“By subject, usually. Sometimes mail gets filed by name of the correspondent. Mostly by subject.”

“Let’s see if he has a Pinto file.”

No Pinto file.

“How about a Cassidy file?”

Cassidy folders occupied half a drawer in Tagert’s filing cabinet. Chee and Jacobs stacked them on his desktop and started sorting.

“What am I looking for?” Jacobs asked.

“Good question,” Chee said. “Anything related to Pinto, I’d say, for starters. Anything that relates to this robbery up in Utah and the chase. Stuff like—”

“Here’s stuff about the Utah robbery,” Jacobs said. “Copies of newspaper stories.”

The headline in the Blanding Defender was multiple lines, in turn-of-the-century newspaper fashion:

OLD HOLE IN WALL GANG BELIEVED

INVOLVED IN TRAIN ROBBERY

WITNESS SAYS HE SAW

BUTCH CASSIDY AMONG GANG

WHICH BOARDED

COLORADO SOUTHERN TRAIN AT FRY CREEK

WOUNDED BANDIT SAYS IT IS TRUE

DEAD BANDIT IS IDENTIFIED

AS RUDOLPH “RED” WAGONSTAFF

HIS FRIENDS SAY HE USED TO

RUSTLE CATTLE WITH CASSIDY

AND THE WYOMING WILD BUNCH

The story below repeated all that with more details and with a rehashing of what happened in the robbery. Three men had boarded the train when it stopped to pick up mail at Fry Creek. They had entered the mail car, and engaged in a gunfight with the two mail clerks. One clerk was killed, the other wounded in the upper chest. The bandit now identified as Wagonstaff was shot in the neck and died the next day in the Blanding hospital.

The bandits had stopped the train north of Blanding where an accomplice was waiting with horses. An off-duty Garfield County deputy sheriff had fired from the train window at the departing robbers. His bullet struck one in the back, causing him to fall from his horse. The newspaper account continued:

As their bad luck had it, this fellow was carrying the bags which contained most of the loot which had attracted the bandits. He is now in the hospital here in Blanding but the doctor has little hope for him. He told Sheriff Lester Ludlow that his name is Davis and that Butch Cassidy was leading the group.

Sheriff Ludlow said most of the loot taken in the robbery was recovered in the bags Davis had been carrying—which was the payroll money for the Parker Mine. He said the bandits probably got away with no more than three or four hundred dollars—mostly in bank notes, stamps and other supplies being delivered to post offices along the route south from Salt Lake City.

The rest of the story was mostly information about the dead and wounded mail clerks and about the posse formed to pursue the bandits. Chee skipped through it hurriedly and went on to the next item. It was dated a week later. Davis had died. The posse had tracked the two survivors southward. They had been seen by a Mormon rancher near Montezuma Creek—two men with four horses. Sheriff Ludlow expressed optimism. “The Sheriff said in his telegram to this newspaper: They will be caught.’”

A week later, Ludlow was not making such optimistic statements. “They have slipped away onto the Navajo Reservation. We have wired authorities throughout Arizona and New Mexico to look for them.”

The only mention of the robbery the following week concerned the wounded mail clerk. He was released from the hospital.

“Finding anything?” Jacobs asked. “Reading these old papers is like eating peanuts. You can’t stop. Here’s a piece about a stagecoach robbery. Imagine!”

“Wonder why he saved that?” Chee was thinking of motivations.

“One of the passengers said it was Butch Cassidy.”

Chee was still thinking of motivations, remembering the bandits had gotten away with very little money. That led to a thought of the coin-collector books at Redd’s place, the pennies on his table. If coins were involved, they’d be antiques now. And valuable.

“Redd had about a million pennies when we were there,” he said. “Do you know what that’s all about?”

“It’s all about how a graduate student stays alive,” Jacobs said. “Pays the rent. When Odell gets his paycheck, he cashes it at the bank and buys all the pennies he can afford. And then he sorts through them looking for keepers. Some of them are worth something to the collectors. Certain dates, certain mints. Maybe, for example, you find a 1947 penny minted in Baltimore might be worth a dime, or a ‘54 minted in Denver maybe would be worth twenty cents. He keeps those out and sells them to the coin stores, and takes the others back and buys more pennies.”

“Hey,” Chee said. “That’s smart. How much does he make?”

She laughed. “You don’t get rich. One week he found an Indian head worth almost four dollars. That week he made about five dollars an hour for his time.”

“What if you found coins taken in that train robbery? Would it be like a gold mine?”

“Not really,” Jacobs said. “Odell talked about that—how great it would be to find all those old coins. But he looked it up and it was a bad time for coins. They made tons of silver dollars and five-dollar gold pieces during those years. Scarcity is what makes coins expensive.”

“Like how much would a nineteen-hundred silver dollar be worth?”

“Maybe twenty dollars to a coin dealer, if it was in perfect condition,” she said. “And the newspaper said most of the money was bank notes.”

So much for that idea. And while he was thinking that, he found what he’d been looking for without knowing he’d been looking for it.

The manila folder was labeled PINTO/CASSIDY. In it was a thick sheaf of paper, typed double-spaced.

“They say it was the summer my brother was born. That’s when they say this thing happened.” Penciled in the margin was the notation “1909/10?”

They say the Utes had been bad about coming down that year. They would come down that trail past Thieving Rock and Blue Hill and at night they would steal horses and sheep from the people around Teec Nos Pos in the flats around the San Juan River, and even as far over as Cineza Mesa. They say this happened several times, and one time the Utes shot at a Navajo man over there. He was out there with his sheep and those Utes shot at him and he ran away. They say it was a Piaute Clan man named Left-handed.

Now Left-handed had a son named Delbito Willie and he had married a woman of the Yucca Fruit Clan and he was living with her over on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains. But he had come over there around Teec Nos Pos to see about his brothers and sisters and everybody told him about the Utes shooting at his father.

They say this Delbito Willie talked to two of his wife’s brothers, and some young men in his own Piaute Clan, and he told them they should go up north, go up there around Sleeping Ute Mountain, and they should steal some Ute horses and get all their sheep and goats back.

The Piaute Clan headman over there in those days was an old fellow they called Kicks His Horse and they talked about this idea with him, and he said they should wait. They say he said that because it was in Yaiisjaastsoh season, which in the biligaana language is Season to Plant Late Crops. They call it July. At that time there is lightning and the snakes are out feeding and then you can have the kind of curing ceremonial they would need before they went on that kind of a raid. And when they got back they would need to have an Enemy Way sing to cure them, and that could not be held either because you can’t hold those ceremonials until the Season When the Thunder Sleeps. You can’t hold them until the ground is frozen and the snakes are in the ground.

But they say Delbito Willie he was angry about the Utes shooting at his father and he wanted to go anyway. He didn’t care what anybody said. They say the Piaute Clan men listened to their headman and wouldn’t go, so Delbito Willie went back to his wife’s Yucca Fruit people and talked to them about it. He got seven of them to listen to him, mostly young men, they say, but one of them was Old Man Joseph. And so they got their best horses and they went off to the north toward Sleeping Ute Mountain. They say they forded the San Juan there at—

“Find something interesting?” Jean Jacobs was leaning over his shoulder.

“I think this is what Redd was telling us about,” Chee said. “Pinto’s story that puts Cassidy on the Navajo Reservation. Anyway it’s about a raid to steal Ute horses. And the dates would be about right.”

Chee flipped through the pages, read about Old Man Joseph being thrown from his horse. Flipped again, read about Delbito Willie deciding that they should take only horses arid mules from the pastures west of Sleeping Ute Mountain and not try to drive the goats because the Utes would chase them. Flipped again, read about the two of the men splitting off from the party to head west to Teec Nos Pos, taking eleven of the Ute horses. One of the Piaute Clan men had been shot in the leg somewhere back in one of the pages Chee had skipped. But a fight with the Utes wasn’t what he was looking for. He flipped again, scanning rapidly. Then he stopped.

They say there were Hosteen Joseph and Delbito Willie and the young men from the Yucca Fruit People still on their way home then, and they were camped out for the night somewhere between Rol Hai Rock and Littlewater Wash. They say Delbito Willie had gone out to get some firewood because they were cooking two rabbits they had shot. He saw dust over to the northeast. They put out their fire and watched. These two men were riding toward Beautiful Mountain, leading a mule. It is said that these were white men. They saw where Delbito Willie had left the Ute ponies, on their hobbles down below the cliffs of that place. These two white men, they scouted all around, looking for the people who owned those ponies, but they never did see Delbito Willie or the Yucca Fruit People with him. So they started to steal the horses. They were cutting the hobbles when Hosteen Joseph shot one of them, and the two men got back on their horses and rode away. Delbito Willie and the Yucca Fruit men were chasing them. They were shooting at them and the two men were shooting and one of them, the white man with the yellow mustaches they say it was, he shot Hosteen Joseph. The bullet hit Old Man Joseph in the chest, right below the nipple they say, and it killed him.

After that they chased the two white men. They almost got away once, but the one Hosteen Joseph had shot fell off his horse and the other one had to stop and help him back on. After that they say Delbito Willie shot the other man, but didn’t kill him. And then the two white men rode their horses out into a place where there is lava flow. Where it’s dangerous to ride a horse even in the daylight. The Yucca Fruit men followed slowly, keeping way back where they wouldn’t get shot because that man with the yellow mustaches, they said he was a good shot even riding on a horse. Finally they found where the white men had left their horses and went up into the rocks.

Chee skipped rapidly through the rest of it. The next morning, one of the white men had tried to come out and one of the Yucca Fruit boys shot him again—they thought in the arm this time—and he went back up into the rocks. The Navajos had waited all that day, and the next. They drank up their own water, and the water canteens the white men had left on their horses, and finally—on the morning of the fourth day—Delbito Willie had climbed up into the rocks. He followed the bloody spots back into the formation until he could see the bodies of the two men. Then the group had taken the horses and returned to their place on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains. An Enemy Way was held for all of them because of their contamination with the Utes and the white men.

Chee lingered over the section in which Ashie Pinto had described the ceremonial curing—an Enemy Way and a section of the Ghostway done, apparently, for Delbito Willie alone. It stirred his memory of an Enemy Way he’d attended as a child. The cure had been conducted by a hataalii who had been very tall and had seemed to him then to be incredibly ancient. The patient had been Chee’s paternal grandmother, a woman he had loved with the intensity of a lonely child, and the event had formed one of his earliest really vivid memories. The cold wind, the starlight, the perfume of the pinon and juniper burning in the great fires that illuminated the dance ground. Even now, he could see it all and the remembered aroma overpowered the mustiness of this office. Most of all, he remembered the hataalii standing gray and thin and tall over his grandmother, holding a tortoiseshell rattle and a prayer plume of eagle feathers, chanting the poetry from the emergence story, making Old Lady Many Mules one with White Shell Girl, restoring her to beauty and harmony.

And restore her it had. Chee remembered staying at the old woman’s place, playing with his cousins and their sheepdogs, seeing his grandmother happy again, hearing her laughter. She had died, of course. The disease was lung cancer, or perhaps tuberculosis, and people with such diseases died—as all people do. But it had been that cure that had caused him to think that he would learn the great curing ways, the songs and the sand paintings, and become a hataalii for his people. Unfortunately, his people showed no sign of wanting him as one of their shamans. He must have laughed because Jacobs asked, “Something funny? You find something interesting?”

“Just thinking,” Chee said.

“About what?” Jacobs said. “You’re not supposed to be holding out on me.”

“I was reading what Ashie Pinto told Tagert about these Navajo horse thieves,” Chee said. “They had a curing ceremonial for them when they got home and I was remembering my own boyish dreams about becoming a medicine man.”

Jacobs was looking at him, eyes curious. Or perhaps sympathetic. Perhaps both. Their eyes held. Chee made a wry mouth. Jacobs looked down.

“Anything in there that helps get Tagert home so I can quit doing all his work?” she asked.

Chee shrugged. “No,” he said. “Or if there is, I don’t understand it.”

But he was thinking about the Ghostway. He didn’t know it. Frank Sam Nakai, who was a respected hataalii and Chee’s maternal uncle and mentor in all things metaphysical, didn’t know it either. Why would part of it have been done for Delbito Willie and for no one else on the raiding party? And why had Ashie Pinto, with his Navajo storyteller’s predilection for telling everything in exhaustive detail, skipped so quickly over this?

Maybe Pinto would tell him that, even if he would tell him nothing else. Chapter 12

AS WAS HIS fashion (except when it violated his sense of order), Leaphorn went through channels. The former Vietnamese colonel named Huan Ji lived in Ship Rock, which was in the jurisdiction of the Ship Rock subagency of the Navajo Tribal Police. Leaphorn dialed the Ship Rock Tribal Police office and asked for Captain Largo.

“I’ve heard of him,” Largo said. “He teaches at the Ship Rock High School. Math, I think it is, or maybe one of the sciences. But we never had any business with him. What’s he up to?”

Leaphorn told him about the conversation with Kennedy.

“I remember now,” Largo said. “It was his car Jim Chee met when he was going to the Nez killing. The Bureau had us run it down for them. What’d he tell them?”

“They didn’t talk to him,” Leaphorn said.

“They didn’t?” Largo said, surprised. Then, “Oh, yeah.” He laughed—which with Largo was a deep, rumbling sound. “From what I hear he’s sort of an untouchable. Supposed to have worked for the CIA in Nam.”

“I think somebody ought to talk to the man,” Leaphorn said. “I think I’ll come and do it.”

“You want me to save you the drive?”

“No use you pissing off the Bureau,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll do it.”

“That sounds like you’re still thinking of retiring,” Largo said, and laughed again.

“One of these days. Anyway, I’m at the point where if a yelling match started with the feds, anybody who decided to fire me would have to move fast.”

Largo didn’t comment on that. He said, “Let me know when you’re coming, and if you need any help. Right now, I’ll just look that address up for you.”

“I’ll probably come this afternoon,” Leaphorn said. “Just as soon as I get my paperwork done.”

But just as he was moving the penultimate report from in-basket to out-basket, the telephone rang.

“A woman down here to see you,” the desk clerk said. “A Professor Bourebonette.”

“Ah,” Leaphorn said. He thought a moment. “Ask her to come on up.”

He put down the telephone, pulled the ultimate report out of the basket, opened it on his desk, and then stared out the window at the sun and shadows on Window Rock Ridge. A question of motive again. What brought the professor here? A long drive from Flagstaff. Either she had risen in the predawn darkness or she had spent the night somewhere. At the Window Rock motel perhaps, or at Gallup. A strong motive. Friendship, she said. Friendship might well be part of it. But what else?

As she came through his door, Professor Bourebonette’s words were apologetic. But her expression wasn’t.

“I realize we’re imposing on your time. Hosteen Pinto isn’t your responsibility. But I wondered if you could bring me up to date. Have you learned anything?”

Leaphorn was standing. “Please,” he said, motioning her to a chair. He sat, too, closed the waiting folder. “I haven’t learned anything very useful.”

“What did Professor Tagert say? I called his office and they told me he wasn’t in. They didn’t know when to expect him. That seems awfully odd. Their semester started two or three weeks ago. He’d have to be keeping office hours.”

“Dr. Tagert seems to have jumped ship,” Leaphorn said. “I got the same information you did.”

“He’s missing?” Dr. Bourebonette sounded incredulous. “Are the police looking for him?”

This was something that always had to be explained. Leaphorn did it, patiently.

“It doesn’t work that way with adults. You have a right to be missing if you want to be. It’s nobody’s business but your own. The police ‘look’ only if there’s some crime involved. Or some reason to suspect foul play.”

Professor Bourebonette was frowning at him. “There’s certainly a crime involved here. And isn’t he what you call a material witness?”

“He might be,” Leaphorn said. “If he is, nobody knows it. The crime is the Nez homicide. There’s nothing to connect him to that. Absolutely nothing.”

Bourebonette absorbed this statement, her eyes on Leaphorn but her thoughts, obviously, on something else. She nodded,

Coyote Waits agreeing with some inner notion. Leaphorn considered her. What was she thinking? It would be something intelligent, he was sure of that. He wished the thought, whatever it was, would provoke some remark that would give him a clue to what she was doing here.

“Have you considered that Tagert might be dead?” she asked. “Have you considered that whoever killed your officer also killed Tagert? Have you thought of that?”

Leaphorn nodded. “I have.”

Bourebonette was silent again, thinking. Long silences didn’t seem to bother her. Unusual in a white. From downstairs Leaphorn could hear a telephone ringing. He smelled coffee brewing. Professor Bourebonette was wearing a cologne of some sort. The aroma was very, very faint. So faint it might be his imagination.

“The trial should be postponed,” Bourebonette said suddenly. “Until they can find Professor Tagert.” She stared at Leaphorn, her eyes demanding. “How can we arrange that? Surely they can’t try Mr. Pinto without knowing what’s going on. Nobody knows what actually happened out there.”

Leaphorn shrugged. But the shrug wasn’t good enough.

“I think we have a right to expect some sort of effort toward simple justice,” Bourebonette said. Her voice sounded stiff. “Mr. Pinto has a right to demand that.”

“I’ll admit I would have liked a little solider investigation,” Leaphorn said. “But it’s not my responsibility. It’s a federal case and the federals have all they need to convince a jury beyond any reasonable doubt. The game is played a little—”

“Game!”

Leaphorn interrupted the interruption with an upraised palm. He, too, could be aggressive. “—a little differently when the defendant does not deny the crime,” he continued. “In the first place, that reduces any worry that you have that you might have arrested the wrong person. In the second place, it leaves you without the defendant’s story to check. So there’s much less the arresting agency can do, even when it has the very best of intentions.”

Bourebonette was studying him. “And you think they’ve done all that’s necessary?”

He hesitated. “Well,” he said, “I would want to talk to Tagert, and there’s another loose end or two.”

“Like what? Lack of a motive?”

Leaphorn closed his eyes. Memory has no temporal limits. When he opened them again two seconds later memory had shown him a score of bloody scenes.

“Whiskey is the perfect motive,” he said.

“Then what?”

He wanted to turn the question around, to ask this woman to tell him why this drunken shooting was worth so much of her time. It was probably the book. Friendship and the book. She needed Pinto free to finish it. But maybe there was something deeper. If he asked her, she would simply ^repeat that Pinto was innocent, that Pinto was a friend.

“Well, Officer Chee met a car when he was driving toward the crime scene. This car might have driven past the scene. Perhaps not, but most likely it did. Maybe the driver saw something. Probably not, but I would have found him and asked.”

“Of course,” Bourebonette said. “You mean nobody did.”

“I hear they didn’t.”

“But why not?”

“Why not? Because they had their case. Smoking gun. Motive. No denial. They have other work to do, stacked on their desks.” He made an illustrative gesture at his own desk. Except for the single folder it was uncharacteristically, point-defeatingly clean.

“Too much trouble running him down. Too much trouble finding the car. When an old man is being tried for murder.” Her voice was bitter.

“We found the car,” Leaphorn said. “It belongs to a schoolteacher at Ship Rock. I’m going to talk to him today.”

“I’ll go with you,” Bourebonette said.

“I’m afraid that—” Then he stopped. Why not? No damage to be done. It wasn’t his case anyway. If the Bureau got mad, it would get no madder because this woman was along. And he wanted to know what she was after. This business was interesting him more and more.

They took the road that wanders over Washington Pass via Red Lake, Crystal, and Sheep Springs. Winding down the east slope of the Chuskas, Leaphorn stopped at an overlook. He pointed east and swept his hand northward, encompassing an immensity of rolling tan and gray grasslands. Zuni Mountains to the south, Jemez Mountains to the east, and far to the north the snowy San Juans in Colorado.

“Dinetah,” he said. She would know the meaning of the word. “Among the People.” The heartland of the Navajos. The place of their mythology, the Holy Land of the Dinee. How would she react?

Professor Bourebonette said nothing at all for a moment. Then: “I won a bet with myself,” she said. “Or part of a bet. I bet you would stop here and enjoy the view. And I bet you’d say something about naming this pass after Washington.”

This wasn’t what Leaphorn had expected.

“And what would I have said?”

“I wasn’t sure. Maybe something angry. I would be bitter if I was a Navajo to have anything in my territory named after Colonel John Macrae Washington. It’s like naming a mountain pass in Israel after Adolf Hitler.”

“The colonel was a scoundrel,” Leaphorn agreed. “But I don’t let the nineteenth century worry me.”

Bourebonette laughed. “If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s typically Navajo. You stay in harmony with reality. Being bitter about the past isn’t healthy.”

“No,” Leaphorn said. “It’s not.”

He thought: Professor Bourebonette is flattering me. Why? What will she want from this?

“I would be thinking of the insult,” Bourebonette said. “Every time I took this route it would rankle. I would think, why does the white man do this? Why does he honor the man who was our worst enemy and rub our noses in it? The colonel who murdered Narbona, that honorable and peaceable man. The colonel who broke treaty after treaty, and protected the people who captured your children and sold them into slavery in New Mexico and argued for a policy of simply exterminating your tribe, and did everything he could to carry it out. Why take such a bastard and name a mountain pass right in the middle of your country after him? Is that just the product of ignorance? Or is it done as a gesture of contempt?”

There was anger in Bourebonette’s voice and in her face. This wasn’t what Leaphorn had expected, either.

“I would say ignorance,” Leaphorn said. “There’s no malice in it.” He laughed. “One of my nephews was a Boy Scout. In the Kit Carson Council. Carson was worse in a way, because he pretended to be a friend of the Navajos.” He paused and looked at her. “Washington didn’t pretend,” he said. “He was an honest enemy.”

Professor Louisa Bourebonette showed absolutely no sign that she sensed the subtle irony Leaphorn intended in that.

The sun was halfway down the sky when they started down the long slope that drops into the San Juan River basin and Ship Rock town. They had discussed Arizona State University, where Leaphorn had been a student long ago, whether the disease of alcoholism had racial/genetic roots, the biography-memoir-autobiography of Hosteen Ashie Pinto the professor had been accumulating for twenty years, drought cycles, and law enforcement. Leaphorn had listened carefully as they talked about the Pinto book, guiding the conversation, confirming his thought that the Pinto effort was the top priority in this woman’s life but learning nothing more. He had noticed that she was alert to what he was noticing and that she had no problem with long silences. They were enjoying such a silence now, rolling down the ten-mile grade toward the town. The cottonwoods along the river formed a crooked line of dazzling gold across a vast landscape of grays and tans. And beyond, the dark blue mountains formed the horizon, the Abajos, Sleeping Ute, and the San Juans, already capped with early snow. It was one of those still, golden days of high desert autumn.

Then Leaphorn broke the mood.

“I told the captain in charge of the Ship Rock subagency I’d let him know when I got here,” he said, and picked up the mike.

The dispatcher said Captain Largo wasn’t in.

“You expect him soon?”

“I don’t know. We had a shooting. He went out on that about an hour ago. I think he’ll be back pretty quick.”

“A homicide?”

“Maybe. We sent an ambulance. You want me to call the captain?”

“Don’t interrupt him,” Leaphorn said. “When he comes in, tell him I went directly out to the Huan Ji residence. Tell him I’ll fill him in if I learn anything.”

“Huan Ji,” the dispatcher said. “That’s where the shooting was reported. That’s where we sent the ambulance.” Chapter 13

THEY MET THE ambulance returning to the Ship Rock Public Health Service Hospital as they turned off onto Huan Ji’s street. The emergency lights were flashing and the siren growling. Leaphorn had been around violence too long to be deceived by that. The driver was in no hurry. He recognized Leaphorn as they passed, and raised a hand in salute. Whoever had been shot at Huan Ji’s place was either in no danger or he was already dead.

Ji’s house was a rectangular frame-and-stucco bungalow in a block of such structures. They had been designed long ago by a Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrat to house Bureau of Indian Affairs employees. As they had weathered and sagged, they had passed from that existence and become tribal property—occupied now by schoolteachers, hospital clerks, road-grader operators, and similar folk. Ji’s house was instantly recognizable. It had attracted a cluster of police cars and a scattering of neighbors watching from their yards. Even without the magnet of this temporary tragedy, it would have stood out.

It was surrounded by a neat chain-link fence and flanked by a tidy gravel driveway that led to an empty carport. Inside the fence was a flower bed, precisely bordered by a perfectly aligned row of bricks. Six rose bushes were spaced on each side of the concrete sidewalk. Autumn had turned the Bermuda-grass lawn gray, but it was trimmed and ready for spring.

The house itself was a clone of its neighbors and as alien as a Martian. In a row of houses frayed, faded, and weary, its fresh white paint and fresh blue trim seemed a reproach to the dusty street.

Captain Largo, as neat as the house but somewhat smaller, was standing on the porch. He was talking to a skinny tribal policeman and a neat young man in a felt hat and a dark gray business suit—which meant in Four Corners country that he was either an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a young man making his mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Largo’s bulk made them both look unnaturally small. He recognized Leaphorn and waved.

Leaphorn glanced at Bourebonette, thinking of how to phrase his request.

She anticipated it.

“I’ll wait in the car,” she said.

“I won’t be long,” Leaphorn said.

On the porch, Largo introduced him. The skinny policeman was Eldon Roanhorse, who Leaphorn vaguely remembered from some affair out of the past, and Gray Suit was Theodore Rostik of the Farmington office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Mr. Rostik just transferred in this summer,” Largo said. “Lieutenant Leaphorn is with our criminal investigation division. Out of Window Rock.”

If Rostik was impressed by Leaphorn or his title, he concealed it. He nodded to Leaphorn, turned back to Largo.

“Window Rock,” he said. “How’d he know about this? How did he get here so quick?”

Once this rudeness would have irritated Leaphorn. That was a long time ago. He said, “I just happened to be up here on another matter. What do you have?”

“Homicide,” Largo said. “Somebody shot the owner here. Twice. No witnesses. Mailman heard him moaning. Looked in and saw him on the floor and turned it in.”

“Any suspects?”

“We’re talking to neighbors but nobody much seems to have been around when it happened,” Largo said.

“This will be a federal case,” Rostik said. “Felony on a federal reservation.”

“Of course,” Leaphorn said. “We’ll help any way we can. Interpreting, things like that. Where’s his wife?”

“Neighbors say he’s a widower,” Roanhorse said. “He was a teacher down at the high school. He lived here with his boy. Teenaged kid.”

“If we need help—” Rostik began, but Leaphorn held up his hand.

“Just a second,” he said. “Where’s his car?”

“Car?” Rostik said.

“We’ve got a call out on it,” Largo said, looking solemnly at Leaphorn. “I understand it’s an old white Jeepster.”

“The son wasn’t here?”

“Not unless he did it,” Rostik said. “When the mailman got here there was just Mr. Ji.”

“Mr. Rostik,” Leaphorn said, “if you don’t have any objection, I’d like to look around inside. Nothing will be touched.”

“Well, now,” Rostik said. He cleared his throat. “I don’t see what—”

Captain Largo, who almost never interrupted, interrupted now. “The lieutenant is usually our liaison with the Bureau in cases like this. He’d better see what you have here,” he said, and led the way inside.

The homicide team had drawn a chalk outline of where Colonel Huan Ji’s body had fallen against the front room’s wall. A great splotch of blood drying on the polished hardwood floor made the chalk redundant. Except for that, and a scrabble of reddish marks on the tan wallpaper, the room was as neat as the yard. Immaculate. And cool as the autumn afternoon outside.

Leaphorn avoided the blood and squatted beside the defaced wallpaper.

“He left a message?”

“He left two,” Rostik said.

“‘Save Taka,’” Leaphorn read. “Is that what it says?”

“His son’s name is Taka,” Rostik said. “According to the neighbors.”

Leaphorn was far more interested by the other message. Ji apparently had written them in his own blood by moving a shaky finger across the wall. SAVE TAKA above, and below it: LIED TO CHEE.

“Any theories about this bottom one?” Leaphorn asked.

“Not yet,” Rostik said.

Leaphorn pushed himself erect, grunting. He was getting old for the squatting position. He looked at Captain Largo. Largo looked back, expressionless.

“Unfortunately, Chee is a common name among Navajos,” Largo said. “Like Smith in Chicago, or Martinez in Albuquerque.”

Leaphorn drifted into the kitchen, looking at tidiness, touching nothing. Huan Ji’s bedroom was fairly large, but suggested a monastery cell—a narrow bed tightly made, a chair, a small desk, a dresser, a chest of drawers with what seemed to be a camera bag on top of it. Everything tidy. Nothing to suggest someone lived here. He stood at the desk, looking down at the blotter, the little cup holding paper clips, the pen in its holder.

Behind him, Rostik cleared his throat. “Don’t touch anything. We’ll go through all of this later,” Rostik said. “Everything in here. Everything in the house. With trained people.”

“Of course,” Leaphorn said.

Taka’s room was tidy by Leaphorn’s standards, if not by Huan Ji’s. An identical narrow bed, covers tight. Similar furniture. But the boy’s desk was cluttered with books and papers and his dresser was a gallery of photographs. Leaphorn, hands in his jacket pockets, examined these pictures. Most of them were of a girl, a moderately pretty Navajo of perhaps sixteen. One of these seemed to be a school yearbook portrait, re-photographed and blown up to eleven-by-fourteen-inch size. The others were candid shots, apparently taken when the subject wasn’t looking. Some included two or three other youngsters, but always with the girl. Many of them had been taken, judging from the compressed background, with a telescopic lens.

The back porch was screened, a repository for stored items. A door opened from it into a side room which Leaphorn guessed had been tacked on as a third bedroom. The door bore the stenciled legend: DARKROOM. KNOCK BEFORE OPENING. He glanced at Rostik, nodded at him, turned the knob. It was dark inside, the windows covered with opaque plastic, the air heavy with the smell of acids. Leaphorn switched on the overhead light. It was a small room, sparsely furnished. Along one side, a table bore a small enlarger, a set of developing tanks, and an array of the inevitable chemical containers. Beside that was another table and on it an open-faced cabinet held boxes which Leaphorn presumed held photographic paper. His gaze wandered over all of this and returned to the developing trays and the electric print dryer beside them. Eight-by-ten prints were stacked in the basket below the dryer.

Leaphorn picked up the top one by the edges. It was a black-and-white photograph of what seemed to be a rugged, irregular outcropping of rock. He replaced the print and picked up the one below it. At first he thought it was identical. Then he saw it was apparently another segment of the same outcropping, with some overlapping. He replaced it and reached for a third print.

Rostik touched his elbow.

“I don’t want anything touched,” he said. “The experts may want to go over this room.”

“Then I will leave it for the experts,” Leaphorn said.

On the porch again, he suddenly remembered the professor waiting in the car. He wanted to talk to Largo about Officer Jim Chee, but he didn’t want to wash any Tribal Police laundry in front of Agent Rostik of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. First he would explain things to Bourebonette. He’d tell her to start the engine and turn on the heater. He’d tell her that he wouldn’t be much longer.

As he started across the street, he saw the old white Jeepster turn the corner. It rolled halfway down the block, stopped, began backing away from the cluster of police cars at the Huan Ji house. Then it stopped again, remaining motionless on the street. Guilt, Leaphorn thought. Or perhaps fear struggling with curiosity. Whatever the driver’s motivations, the Jeepster rolled forward again. Leaphorn trotted across the street in front of it to his own car. Bourebonette had rolled down the window. She was watching him.

“It was about what we thought,” he said. “Someone shot Mr. Ji twice. Fatally. No one saw it or heard anything. No suspects. And this—” he nodded toward the Jeepster now pulling into the gravel driveway at the Ji residence “—will probably be Taka, who is Mr. Ji’s son.”

Professor Bourebonette was looking past him at the car. “Does he know?”

“Probably not. Not unless he did it.”

Bourebonette looked down. “How sad.” she said. “How terrible. Is his mother home? Do you think this could—” She stopped.

“Be connected with the Nez homicide?” Leaphorn finished. “Who knows. You don’t see anything on the surface, but—” He shrugged.

Across the street, Rostik and Largo were talking to a slender boy in jeans and a black leather jacket. Largo had his large hand on the boy’s shoulder. They moved through the front door and disappeared into the house.

“I think I’ll go back over there,” Leaphorn said.

“Do they need your help?”

Leaphorn chuckled. “The man in charge is the young man in the gray suit,” he said. “If he wants my help he has shown absolutely no sign of it. I’ll be quick this time.”

Roanhorse was waiting on the porch.

“Was that Ji’s son?”

“Right,” Roanhorse said. “Name’s Taka. Something like that.”

“He okay?”

“Looked like somebody hit him with a club when Rostik told him,” Roanhorse said.

Taka Ji was sitting stiffly on the edge of a recliner chair. Rostik was facing him, perched on the arm of the sofa. Largo leaned against the wall, his round, dark face devoid of expression. Leaphorn stopped just inside the door. Rostik glanced at him, looked irritated, chose to ignore him, continued his questioning.

He was good at it, Leaphorn noticed. Young, obviously. Probably inexperienced. But well trained in the job, and smart. Some of the questions replowed old ground from new angles. Some were new. Huan Ji’s son, still looking as if he had been hit by a club, answered them tersely.

He had not seen his father since he’d driven to school with him in the Jeepster. Right?

Taka nodded. “Yes,” he said. His voice was so small that Leaphorn could barely hear him.

And how had he gotten the Jeepster?

“My father, he said I could use it after school. He would walk home. He liked to walk. So after my biology class, I got it from the parking lot.”

“The key was left in it?”

“I have a key. My father has a key. I have one.”

“And where did you go?”

“I drove out toward Ship Rock. I am taking pictures out there. Photographs.”

“Pictures of who?”

Taka was looking straight ahead, seeing something in the wallpaper across the room. His face was pale. He closed his eyes. “I take pictures of landscapes,” he said.

“Who was with you?”

Leaphorn thought Taka hadn’t heard the question. But he had. Finally he said: “No one. I go alone.”

A Vietnamese in a Navajo school. A long time ago Leaphorn had been a Navajo in white Arizona State University. He understood what Taka had not quite said. What was it that Colonel Ji had written on the wall in his own blood? “Help Taka.” Something like that.

Rostik changed the subject.

“Did your father have enemies?”

Taka shrugged. “He was a man,” he said. “A long time ago he was a colonel in the army.” He looked up at Rostik. “The Army of the Republic of Vietnam.”

“But do you know of any enemies? Had he received any threats?”

Again it seemed Taka wouldn’t answer. Then he tilted his head, frowned. “I don’t think he would have told me.” This knowledge seemed to surprise him.

“No threat you know of then?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone named Chee?”

“Like I told you, there is a boy on the basketball team. There is a girl in my history class.”

“Does your father have any friends named Chee? Any enemies?”

“I don’t know,” Taka said. “There is a teacher. In junior high school. Her name I think is Miss Dolores Chee.”

“A friend of your father’s?”

“I don’t think so,” Taka said. “There are lots of Chees.”

Leaphorn glanced at Captain Largo and found Captain Largo glancing at him. Largo made a wry face.

And so it went. Leaphorn listened and watched. He assessed Rostik, and reassessed him. A smart young man. He assessed Taka as best he could. This was not the normal Taka. This was a stunned teenager. The death of his father was still unreal, an incredible but abstract fact. Rostik now was covering yesterday. How had Taka’s father behaved? What had he said? Leaphorn noticed the boy was shivering.

Leaphorn interrupted.

“Mr. Rostik,” he said. “Just a moment, if you don’t mind.” And he turned to Taka.

“Son. Do you have any relatives here? Anybody to go to?”

“Not here,” the boy said. “Not here at Ship Rock.”

A stranger alone in a strange land, Leaphorn thought. He asked: “Where?”

“My aunt and uncle. They live in Albuquerque.”

“Are they the ones you are closest to?” As he asked it, Leaphorn thought how different this would be for a Navajo boy. He would be smothered by family. But maybe it would have been that way for Taka Ji, too, if his people had not been uprooted by war. Perhaps the Vietnamese had not, like the biligaana, lost the value of the family.

Taka was nodding. “They are all there is,” he said.

“We’ll call them when you are finished here,” Leaphorn said, glancing at Rostik.

“I’m finished,” Rostik said to Taka. “I’ll just need to know where we can reach you if we need to know something else.”

“How about a friend here? Somebody you can stay with tonight?”

Taka thought. He gave Leaphorn a name, the son of another of the high school teachers.

Rostik left. They made the calls on the colonel’s telephone and Roanhorse took Taka in hand. He’d deliver him to the house of the friend.

“I’ll lock the place up,” Captain Largo said. “We’ll keep an eye on it until the feds go over it.”

“One last look at the darkroom,” Leaphorn said. “No one will ever know.”

With Largo peering over his shoulder, he went through the stack of prints in the dryer basket—eleven photographs of segments of the same outcropping of what seemed to be part of a long basaltic ridge. They were taken—or seemed to be—from the same viewpoint, as if the camera with a telescopic lens had been shifted slightly on a tripod for each exposure.

“Landscapes,” Largo said. “If those are his landscapes he’s not going to get rich with them.”

“No,” Leaphorn said, and placed them back in the dryer basket. “You recognize the place?”

“They could have been taken any of a hundred places,” Largo said. “It just looked like a big bunch of extruded lava. Fairly old.

Could be out there around Ship Rock. Could be down in the malpais south of Grants. Could be over east of Black Mesa. Could be lots of places.”

On the porch, Largo paused to lock the front door.

“Can you think of any reason those pictures might have been taken?” Leaphorn asked.

“None,” Largo said. “No idea why any teenage kid does anything.”

“They might have been taken by the colonel,” Leaphorn said. “He was a photographer, too.”

Largo nodded. “True,” he said. But he wasn’t particularly interested.

“Odd though,” Leaphorn said. “When he feels better I might ask him.”

“Maybe the colonel did take them,” Largo said. “But so what. People are always taking pictures of rocks. They think they see a shape like a duck, or Ronald Reagan, or God knows what.”

“You think the boy did it?”

“The killing? I don’t. How about you?”

Leaphorn shook his head. The sort of a shake that avoids an answer.

“I’ve got another question,” Leaphorn said. “While Chee is a common name among us Dinee, unfortunately, it is not all that damn common. How the hell did your Jim Chee get himself mixed up with this?”

Largo’s expression was grim. “I intend to find out.”

“So do I,” Leaphorn said. Chapter 14

JANET PETE HAD not liked the idea. Basically, no matter what she said, Jim Chee understood that she hadn’t liked it because she hadn’t trusted him. At worst, she thought he might betray her. Chee doubted that she really believed that, although the possibility that she did lingered in his memory. And rankled. At best, she wasn’t certain she could depend on his discretion. On his good judgment. That rankled, too. In a way, that was even worse.

Chee had finally let his temper show. That was a weakness new to him, and he realized it. He explained it to himself as a product of raw nerves; of a hand which, with every twinge, reminded him it might never be fully useful again; of traumatic memories which recalled his failure to perform his duty. However he explained it, he didn’t like the way it felt.

“Janet,” he said. “Spare me all that lawyer talk. I’ve told you I won’t ask the old man for a confession. I won’t ask him what he was doing out there that night. Or how he got there. Or what the hell caused him to shoot Nez. I just want to ask him about the story he told to the professor. Just why he thinks the Enemy Way sing was done for all those horse thieves, and the Ghostway Chant added for one of them. I won’t ask him anything that would make any sense to the FBI. Or to you either, for that matter.”

That had touched a nerve. Janet’s voice turned chilly.

“I’ll spare you the lawyer talk. You spare me the ‘I’m more Indian than you are’ crap. Okay?”

Chee hesitated. “Right,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “But you play by the rules. I’m going to be there every minute. Ashie Pinto only answers what I want him to answer. You two speak better Navajo than I do, so if I want you to explain a question, you by God explain it until I understand what you’re getting at or it doesn’t get answered. Understood?”

Chee had understood perfectly.

Janet Pete set it up for three that afternoon and Chee took a cab down to the County Detention Center where federal prisoners were being held. It was a sunny, windless autumn afternoon with a fringe of high clouds drifting in from the northwest, reminding him that the TV weatherman had reported snow in Flagstaff last night and the front—as always—was drifting eastward. He showed his credentials to the desk clerk and a deputy jailer escorted him to the visitors’ room.

Janet Pete was waiting. She sat behind a long wooden table in a straight wooden chair looking small and tired and beautiful.

“Yaa’ eh t’eeh,” Chee began, and swallowed it and said, “Hello, Janet,” instead.

She smiled at him. “Yaa’ eh t’eeh,” she said. “I do know a little Navajo.”

“As much as I do,” Chee said, which was a blatant lie, but a guard ushered in Hosteen Ashie Pinto before she could say so.

Here, in this still, sterile room lit by a battery of fluorescent tubes, Ashie Pinto was not the man Chee remembered. He remembered a stumbling drunk illuminated in the yellow glare of his headlights, wet with rain, blurred by Chee’s own shock and Chee’s own pain. Now he was smaller, desiccated, frail, dignified, and terribly old. He sat in the chair next to Janet Pete, acknowledged her with a nod. He looked at Chee, and then at the heavy bandages wrapped on Chee’s left hand. Then Ashie Pinto repeated the only thing Chee had ever heard him say.

“I am ashamed,” he said, and looked down.

Chee looked down, too. And when he looked up, Janet was watching him. He wondered if she had understood the Navajo phrase.

“I think I told you Mr. Pinto speaks hardly any English at all,” she said. “I told him you were coming, of course, so he remembers who you are. He still does not want to say anything at all about the crime and I told him not to answer any questions until I tell him to.”

“Okay,” Chee said. “The question I want to ask him takes some explaining. Stop me if you get lost.”

And so Chee began.

“My uncle,” he said, “I think you may have heard of Frank Sam Nakai, who is a singer of the Blessing Way and the Mountain Top Chant and many of the other curing songs. This man is the brother of my mother, and he has tried to teach me to follow him and become a hataalii. But I am still an ignorant man. I have much yet to learn. I have learned a little of the Ways of the Holy People. And what I have learned has brought me here to ask you a question. It is a question about something you told to a professor named Tagert.”

Chee stopped, eyes on Pinto. The man sat as still as death, waiting. His skin was drawn tight over the skull bones, seeming almost transparent in its thinness. The desiccation made his eyes seem protuberant, larger than they were. They were black eyes, but the cornea of one was clouded by a film of cataract.

Sure now that Chee had finished his statement, Pinto nodded. Chee was to continue.

“You were telling the professor about a time, perhaps before you were born, when some young men of the Yucca Fruit People rode over to Sleeping Ute Mountain to get back some horses the Utes had stolen from them. Do you remember that?”

Pinto remembered.

Chee summarized the rest of the adventure, taking time to tell it carefully. He wanted to draw Pinto’s consciousness out of this room, out of his role as prisoner and into his past. Finally he had reached the place which had puzzled him.

“The way the biligaana professor wrote down what you told him may not be exactly what you told him. But what he wrote down is like this. That you said the hataalii the Yucca Fruit People called decided that an Enemy Way sing should be held for all of those young men. Is that true?”

Pinto considered. He smiled slightly, nodded.

“Then the biligaana professor wrote down that you told him that this singer decided he should also hold a Ghostway Chant for the man they called Delbito Willie. Is that true?”

There was no hesitation now. Hosteen Pinto nodded.

“That is the first of my questions,” Chee said. “Do you know why this Ghostway was needed?”

Pinto studied Chee’s face, thinking. He smiled slightly, nodded again.

“My uncle,” Chee said, “will you tell me why?”

“Not yet,” Janet Pete said. “I didn’t understand a lot of that. What are you driving at?”

“Basically, why a certain cure was prescribed for one of those men and not for the others. That suggests he broke a specific taboo. I wonder what it was?”

Janet Pete was obviously lost. “But how

? Oh, go ahead and answer it.”

Hosteen Pinto glanced at Janet Pete, then back at Chee, then at something out the window beside Chee’s shoulder. Chee waited. Through the glass came the sound of an ambulance siren, the sound of brakes applied. Somewhere in the building a door slammed, the clang of steel on steel. Chee could smell dust, an astringent floor cleaner, the aroma peculiar to old, old men. Pinto released his breath, a sighing exhalation. He looked at Janet Pete again, smiling. This man, Chee thought, this kindly old man is the man who murdered Delbert Nez. The man who burned my friend in his car. The man whose actions caused this terrible burn across my hand. Why did he do it? Whiskey. Todilhil. The Water of Darkness. Twice it had turned this old man into a coyote.

Hosteen Pinto shifted in his chair, seeking some comfort for old bones. “This young woman has become like a granddaughter to me,” he said. “She tells me that she knows you. She says that you are an honorable man. She says you follow the Navajo Way.”

He paused to give Chee a chance to respond to that. Then drew a deep breath.

“These things I told Hosteen Professor. I think they wrote these things all down on paper. And you read that paper? Is that right?”

“Yes. I read it all.”

Pinto looked puzzled.

“And you know the Navajo Way?”

“I have studied it some,” Chee said.

Pinto’s expression was slightly skeptical, as if he wondered how much Chee had studied.

“They say there were many skinwalkers then,” Hosteen Pinto began. “Even more than now. Do you understand skinwalkers?”

“I know something about them,” Chee said. He settled himself in his chair. This was going to take a long time. Pinto would begin in the beginning and talk his way through it. And the longer he talked the better the chance that he’d cast some light on this murky business. If, that is, anything connected with anything.

“They teach us that everything has two forms,” Hosteen Pinto said, starting even further back than Chee had expected. “There is the mountain we see there beside Grants, the mountain the biligaana call Mount Taylor. That is the outer form. And then they say there is the inner form, the sacred Turquoise Mountain that was there with the Holy People in the First World, the Dark World at the very beginning. And First Man brought it up from the Third World and built it on his magic robe, and decorated it with turquoise. And then there is the yucca. We see the outer form all around us, but it is the inner form of yucca that we offer the prayer plume for when we dig its roots to make the soap to clean ourselves.”

He paused, studying Chee. “You understand?”

Chee nodded. This was basic Navajo metaphysics. But he wondered if Janet had ever heard it.

“Bluebird has two forms, and the deer and the beetle. Two forms. They have the form of the yei and they have the outer form that we see. All living things. You too. And I. Two forms.”

Hosteen Ashie Pinto leaned forward, tiny in the yellow coveralls of the county prisoner, intent on Chee’s understanding.

“And then there is Coyote,” he said. “Do you know about Coyote?”

“I know something about Coyote,” Chee said. He glanced at Janet Pete. She was focused on Pinto, concentrating on what he was saying. Wondering, Chee imagined, where all this was leading. “I know about his tricks. I have heard the stories. How he snatched the blanket and scattered the stars into the Milky Way. How he stole the baby of the Water Monster. How he tricked the sister of the bears into marrying him. How—”

The amusement on Pinto’s face stopped him.

“The children are told the funny stories about Coyote so they will not be afraid,” Pinto said. The amusement went away. Pinto smiled a tight, grim smile and launched into the explanation—as old as the culture of the People—of why Coyote was not funny. Chee listened, wishing, as he had come to wish many times in such sessions with old taletellers, that Navajos did not have to start everything at the very beginning. He glanced at Janet again. She looked bemused, probably wondering what the devil he was hoping to learn from all this—a wonder Chee was beginning to share. But at least she couldn’t accuse him of trying to learn anything incriminating. Unless, of course, the old man talked long enough to tell him what Chee had come here to learn.

Now Hosteen Pinto was talking about how the name for Coyote in the Fourth World was not atse’ma’ii, or First Coyote, but atse hashkke, or First Angry, and what that implied symbolically in an emerging culture in which peace and harmony were essential to survival. He talked of Coyote as the metaphor for chaos among a hungry people who would die without order. He talked of Coyote as the enemy of all law, and rules, and harmony. He talked of Coyote’s mythic power. He reminded Chee how Coyote always sat in the doorway of the hogan when the Holy People met in Council, neither quite part of these representatives of cosmic power, nor totally allied with the wilderness of evil outside. And finally he reminded Chee that other wise people, like the old men in the Hopi kiva societies, knew that there was a time when humans had two hearts. Thus they were able to move back and forth from one form to the other—from natural to supernatural.

“I think your uncle must have taught you about the power of skin,” Pinto said. He looked up for confirmation in Chee’s face and, seeing it, went on:

“They say that’s how Changing Woman created the first Navajos. From the skin rubbed from her breast, she formed the Salt People, and the Mud Clan, and the Bitter Waters and the Bead People. I have heard of your uncle, of Frank Sam Nakai. They say he is a great hataalii. He must have taught you how Coyote transformed First Man into a skinwalker by blowing his hide over him. You know about that? About how First Woman wouldn’t sleep with him because now he had all the evil ways of Coyote, smelled like coyote urine, licked himself and tried to lick her, and did all those dirty things that coyotes do. And how the Holy People cured First Man by passing him through the magic hoops to strip away his coyote skin. Your uncle taught you that?”

“Some of it,” Chee said. He remembered a little of it. It was something reenacted in part of the Ghostway ceremony—a cure for the most virulent form of witch sickness.

“So then you know why this fellow had to have the Ghostway sing,” Pinto said. “He had to have it because he had been with the yenaldolooshi.”

“No,” Chee said. “I don’t understand that.”

Janet Pete raised a hand. “Wait a minute. I don’t understand this either. Yenaldolooshi? That is the word for animals that trot, isn’t it?”

Chee nodded. “Animals that trot on four legs. But it is also used for skinwalkers. Witches.”

“Where is this conversation going?” she asked. “Are you leading Mr. Pinto into something? Do you remember what you promised?”

Pinto was watching, puzzled.

Janet Pete switched to Navajo. “I wanted to make sure that Mr. Chee was not trying to get you to’say something that would hurt your chance in the trial,” she explained. “I want you to be careful about that.”

Hosteen Pinto nodded. “We are talking about something that happened a long time ago,” he said.

“I don’t understand, my uncle,” Chee said. “Why did they do the Ghostway sing for the one they called Delbito Willie when they did the Enemy Way for the others?”

“Because he went in there,” Hosteen Pinto said. His tone was patient. “He went in there—into Tse A’Digash. He went in there where the witches gather. He went in there among the corpses and the skinwalkers. He went in to the place where the yenaldolooshi do their ceremonies, where they do incest, where they kill their relatives.”

Silence, Chee thought about this. He frowned, glanced at Janet Pete. She was watching him. Well, he would ask it anyway.

“My uncle, would you tell me just where this Tse A’Digash is located?”

Pinto’s expression changed. “I cannot tell you that.”

“Could you tell me if Professor Tagert hired you to show him where it was?”

Hosteen Pinto stared at Chee. “When you arrested me that night, I could smell the fire in your clothing. I could smell where your flesh had burned. I said I was ashamed. I am still ashamed of that. But these things you ask me now, I cannot tell you.”

“What’s going on?” Janet asked.

Hosteen Pinto stood, limped toward the doorway, his old bones stiff from the sitting.

“Could you just tell me who gave you that whiskey?”

Hosteen Pinto tapped on the glass. The jailer was coming.

“Don’t say anything,” Janet said. Then to Chee, angrily, “So much for your promises.”

“I just want some of the truth,” Chee said. “Maybe the truth will make him free.” Chapter 15

JIM CHEE HAD not flown enough to learn to think creatively on an airplane. He spent the time on this Mesa Airlines turboprop flight looking down from his seat by the window at the early snow on the Jemez Mountain ridges below, and the great broken expanse of tan and gray of the Chaco Mesa country and finally, at the ribbon of fading yellow and black that marked the San Juan River Valley. His mind was on Janet Pete, who had been irritated with him—but not nearly as irritated as he had expected her to be. He decided, tentatively, that this was because Hosteen Pinto had told him nothing incriminating.

Still, she should have been furious because he’d tried to take advantage of her. That could be explained if Janet didn’t give a damn how he behaved. Chee didn’t like that explanation. It was true, perhaps, but he rejected it. More and more, he was giving a damn about Janet.

He retrieved his pickup from the airport parking lot and drove down off the mesa into the heavy after-work traffic on 550. He’d stop at the police station in Ship Rock and see if the captain was in. Largo had been around a lot longer than Chee and knew a lot more people in this part of the Reservation. He might have heard of the Tse A’Digash that Ashie Pinto had mentioned. It would be somewhere south of Ship Rock, Chee guessed. Somewhere in the volcanic outcrop country. Probably not too far from where he’d arrested the man. And if Largo didn’t know, he’d be likely to know some old-timer who would.

But Largo wasn’t at the station.

Angie was at the desk.

“Hey, man, how’s the hand?” she asked, grinning at him. And without waiting for an answer: “The captain’s been looking for you. Like he has something heavy on his mind.”

“What?” Chee asked, starting the automatic examination of conscience that such statements provoke. “I’m on sick leave.”

“I don’t know what. He didn’t say. But Lieutenant Leaphorn was with him. Up from Window Rock. And he looked pissed off.”

“Leaphorn?”

“Captain Largo,” Angie said. “Come to think of it, the lieutenant, too, I guess.”

“Was that today?”

Angie nodded. “They left here just a little bit ago.”

To hell with it, Chee thought. He’d see Largo when he saw him. The Leaphorn news disturbed him more. Leaphorn had been trying to reach Tagert. There could be just one explanation for that. The lieutenant, the supercop, had invited himself into the Pinto investigation. Not at the invitation of the FBI, Chee guessed. That wasn’t likely. More likely he’d guessed Officer Jim Chee had screwed it up. Well, to hell with Leaphorn.

“Angie, you’ve been here awhile. Do you know any places around this part of the Reservation that people call Tse A’Digash?”

Angie just looked at him.

Chee persisted. “A place with a bad reputation for witches? Sort of place people stay away from?”

“Sort of place people don’t talk about to strangers, either,” Angie said. “I’m from over near Leupp. Over on the southwest side of the Reservation. Three hundred miles from here.”

“I know,” Chee said. “But you’ve lived here ten or twelve years.”

Angie shook her head. “That’s not long enough,” she said. “Not to talk about skinwalkers with you.”

And it wasn’t. Chee knew that.

Chee drove home thinking about who, among his friends, was enough of a Ship Rock territory old-timer to know what he needed to know. He had three names in mind, with Largo the fourth. Largo was sore at him, apparently, at the moment. But that was not unusual. And Largo would tell him what he knew. He wondered what had upset the captain, and Lieutenant Leaphorn. And at the thought of Leaphorn, he was irritated himself.

As he tilted his pickup off gravel and onto the steep track that led downward through the rabbitbrush toward his trailer house, he saw he had a visitor. A car was just pulling away from the trailer, coming toward him. A Navajo Tribal Police patrol car.

It stopped, went into reverse, reparked just where Chee usually parked his pickup. He parked beside it.

Captain Largo was driving, another policeman beside him.

“Glad to see you,” Largo said, hoisting himself out. “We’ve been looking for you.”

“That’s what Angie said,” Chee said. “You want to come in?”

“Why not,” Largo said.

The other policeman emerged from the passenger door, putting his uniform hat back on a head of short-cropped gray hair. Lieutenant Leaphorn.

“Yaa”eh t’eeh,” Leaphorn said.

The afternoon sun still lit the high side of Ship Rock town but here in the cottonwoods beside the river Chee’s trailer had been in shadow for long enough to be cold. Chee turned on the propane heater, filled his coffeepot with water, got out three cups and three of the paper filters he was now using to brew the stuff right in the cups. Why had the captain been looking for him? Why was Leaphorn here, so far from his desk at Window Rock? Chee lit the fire under the coffeepot, conscious that he was more cautious with fire than he used to be. The captain and the lieutenant occupied his two chairs. Chee took a seat on the edge of his bunk.

“We have to wait until the water boils,” he said. “Just takes a few minutes.”

Largo cleared his throat, producing a rumble.

“We had a man killed here in Ship Rock today,” Largo said. “Shot.”

This was not anything like what Chee had expected.

“Shot? Who?”

“Fellow named Huan Ji,” Largo said. “You know him?”

“Wow,” Chee said. He sat stock still, digesting this. Digesting how he was learning it, too. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t exactly know him, but I’ve talked to him. Once. Last week. It was his car I saw out there where Delbert was killed.” Then another thought. “Who shot him?”

He noticed Leaphorn sitting, arms folded across his chest, watching him.

“No suspects,” Largo said. “Apparently somebody came to his house this afternoon. It must have been very soon after he got home from school. Or maybe they were there waiting for him. Anyway, whoever it was shot him twice. Left him on the floor in the front room.”

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Chee said. “Any idea why anybody’d shoot him?”

“None,” Largo said. He was leaning his chair back against the wall, looking at Chee over his glasses. “How about you? Any ideas?”

“None,” Chee said.

“What did you talk to him about?”

“About what he might have seen that night Nez got killed.”

“What did he see?”

“He said he didn’t see anything.”

“He left a note,” Largo said. “Wrote it on the wallpaper there where he was lying. He wrote ‘Take care of Taka’ and under that he wrote ‘Tell Chee I lied.’ He put his finger in his own blood and wrote it.”

“Be damned,” Chee said.

“What do you think he meant?”

Chee hesitated. “Well, I knew he lied about one thing. He said he didn’t see any other cars. He had to have seen my police car. He was coming toward me, his Jeepster was, and he did a right turn just before we met. My siren was going and the flasher. And my headlights were right on him. No way he wouldn’t have seen me.”

The three of them considered that.

Leaphorn said: “Odd thing to lie about.”

“I thought so, too,” Chee said. “I wondered why.”

“Did you ask him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think it would lead anywhere.”

Leaphorn considered this, and nodded. He said: “Why did you go talk to him? You’re on convalescent leave. And it’s a federal case.”

Chee felt himself flushing. “The FBI hadn’t talked to him,” Chee said. “I thought he might have seen something.”

Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He said: “The water’s boiling for your coffee.”

Once Joe Leaphorn had been addicted to cigarettes—smoking unfiltered Pall Malls at a rate of two packs a day and, when he shifted to niters in response to Emma’s concern, three packs a day. He had broken that habit early in Emma’s terminal illness. He had bitten the nicotine deprival bullet as a sort of offering to her, who loved him. And to the gods—that this small, lovely woman would be left with him. As the yearning for cigarettes faded he had found it replaced by a delight in coffee. Now he awoke each morning in his lonely bed anticipating that first sip and savoring it. His working day was measured out in the intervals between the cups. Being Leaphorn, being logical, he’d known that this obsessive affair with coffee represented a flaw in his character, a weakness, as well as a risk to his health. He’d made a logical compromise: no more than four cups before noon and nothing but decaffeinated stuff after lunch. With that he lived fairly happily.

But today he’d had almost no coffee. He had drunk his usual two cups with what was left of last night’s mutton stew for breakfast. He had stopped at the store beside the highway at the Newcomb junction for another cup. But none had been available. At lunch in Shiprock the product served had been a reheated stale brew obviously left over from breakfast and undrinkable even by Leaphorn’s relaxed standards. And then the homicide of Huan Ji had interfered. Now, as Jim Chee poured boiling water through the coffee grounds, the aroma that reached Leaphorn’s nostrils was indescribably delicious.

He’d never seen coffee made that way before. Chee had arrayed three mugs beside the sink, put a little black cone-shaped gadget atop one of them, inserted a paper filter into it, dumped a spoonful of Folger’s into that, and poured the water through. Then he replaced the grounds and repeated the process in the other cups. Wasteful, Leaphorn thought, and time-consuming. But when he tasted the results, he was impressed. Downright fine. As good as any he’d ever tasted. He studied Chee over the rim of the cup. Odd young man. Good-looking in a way, with the sort of long, sensitive face women seemed to like. A fairly good cop, excellent in some categories, weak in others. He remembered that Largo had tried him out as an acting sergeant once. It hadn’t lasted long for some reason he had forgotten or, more likely, had never known. But he could guess the reason. Chee wasn’t an organization man. He was a loner. Liked to freelance. A man who worked inside the system only until the system interfered. One of those who marched to his private drummer. This business of trying to be a hataalii and a policeman at the same time, for example. It wasn’t just impractical. How the hell could a cop get time off at the drop of a hat for a nine-day sing? It was incongruous. It was like being an investment banker and a Catholic priest at the same time. Or a rabbi and a clown. People wouldn’t accept it. They expect a shaman or a priest to be different from ordinary humans, expect him to live in the shadow on the dangerous mystical fringe of the supernatural. Now Chee was refilling the pot, the heavy bandage on his left hand making it a clumsy project. The fruit of freelancing, Leaphorn thought. But in fairness he should say a dead policeman was the result of the rules-bending, the burned hand the product of Chee’s bravery. He wondered if he would have walked into that fire, gripped that red-hot door handle, to save another man’s life. He wasn’t sure he would have. He might have stood there, calculating the odds of success—trying to do what was rational.

“Is it still painful?” Leaphorn asked. “The hand?”

“Not much.” Chee sat on the bunk again. “Not if I’m careful.”

“You mentioned one thing Ji lied about when you talked to him. Do you think that’s what the message was about?”

Chee was tucking a stray end of the gauze back into the bandage—concentrating on that.

“No,” he said. “I doubt it.”

Smart, Leaphorn thought. Of course it wasn’t that. “What do you think it was?”

Chee hesitated. “This is new to me,” he said. “I need a minute to get it together.”

Leaphorn sipped, enjoyed it. Wonderful coffee.

“Take your time,” he said.

Chee looked up from the bandage. His face was full of anger.

“I have a question for you. What pulled you into this? Into the Delbert Nez homicide?”

Leaphorn considered Chee’s expression, the anger in his voice. “Somebody shot Huan Ji,” he said. “That pulled me into it.”

“No,” Chee said, shaking his head. “Last week you were looking for a professor named Tagert. What’s up? You think I arrested the wrong man? You think I screwed that up, too?”

Captain Largo shifted in his chair. “Take it easy,” he said.

Chee’s emotion was interesting. What motivated it? Leaphorn turned his cup in his hands.

“I wondered how Pinto got where you found him,” he said. “The FBI didn’t check it out. They didn’t see any reason to, I guess, since you gave them the man with the smoking gun.” Leaphorn was silent a moment, looking into Chee’s anger. There was absolutely no reason for him to tell this young man anything. No reason except the bandaged hand and what it represented.

“I wondered about that,” Leaphorn continued, “and then Pinto’s niece came to see me. She’s Turning Mountain Clan. A relative of my late wife. She wanted to hire a private detective to find out who gave the old man the ride. I decided to do it for her.”

Chee nodded, unmollified.

“You wondered, too, I noticed,” Leaphorn said. “You went to the trouble of finding out about Tagert hiring him, too.”

“Did he hire him?” Chee said. “All I knew was that Tagert had used him in the past. As a source for old legends. That sort of thing. Had Tagert hired him this time?”

“Yes,” Leaphorn said. He told Chee about the letter Old Man McGinnis had written, about the vehicle seen driving away from Pinto’s place. “How did you make the Tagert connection?”

Chee told him about Janet Pete, about climbing into the formation where the crazy painter Nez hoped to catch had been defacing the rocks. He told him what they had seen there, that the painter had carried a ladder into the formation, painting high places, ignoring low ones, painting part of the surface of one formation, skipping the next one. He told him about the car with the REDDNEK plate, about going to the library at UNM to listen to Pinto’s tapes, noting who had taped them. He told Leaphorn about what he had learned from Jean Jacobs and Odell Redd.

“You think Tagert is chasing down something about Butch Cassidy then?” Leaphorn asked.

“They think so,” Chee said. “That seems to be his connection with Pinto. That old story about the horse thieves and the two whites.”

“So what do you think Ji lied to you about?”

The abrupt change of subject didn’t seem to bother Chee.

“I don’t think Ji was driving the car,” Chee said. “I think he lied about that.”

“Why?” Leaphorn asked. “Why do you think that?”

“He didn’t see my car. He didn’t see the fire. He was very cautious about the way he answered questions. He didn’t volunteer anything that would catch him out. He just waited for a question and then gave a very careful, limited answer.”

“Why would he lie about that? You have any theories?”

“What else did you say he wrote on the wall?” Chee asked.

Captain Largo answered that: ” Take care of Taka.’”

“No,” Leaphorn said. “It was ‘Save Taka.’”

“That’s his kid?” Chee asked. “Right?”

Leaphorn smiled slightly, approving of the way Chee’s mind was working. “So you’re thinking that Taka was driving the car? I think that’s not a bad guess. He was driving it after school today. He drives it a lot, I think. He told me he even has his own key to it.”

“I suspect he didn’t want the boy pulled into a police investigation,” Chee said. “I don’t know why.”

“He seems to have been a special friend of the Central Intelligence Agency. Back from his days in Vietnam,” Leaphorn said. He explained what Kennedy had told him.

“So maybe Colonel Ji was just the nervous sort. Is that what you’re thinking?” Chee asked.

Leaphorn shrugged. “A man makes a career out of playing hard games, it would be difficult to get over that sort of thinking. A policeman gets killed. You don’t want your child touched by something like that.” He shrugged again. “Good a guess as any. We just don’t know enough.”

“No,” Largo said. “We don’t know a damned thing. Except homicide is a felony and we don’t have jurisdiction in any of this. Nez nor Colonel Ji.”

“We have jurisdiction in a vandalism case,” Leaphorn said. “Tell me about that?”

Largo looked puzzled. “What vandalism?”

Chee said, “You mean the painting on the rocks? You know what was in the report. Well, Delbert noticed this maybe two or three weeks earlier. Somebody putting white paint here and there in a rock formation out there between Ship Rock and the Chuska Range. He got interested in it and he started swinging past there whenever his patrol would allow it. He was hoping to catch the guy. But he never did.”

“And he thought he saw him that night?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And it sounded like he was going after him?”

“That’s how it sounded.”

Leaphorn put down his coffee cup. He glanced at the stove. Steam was jetting from Chee’s pot, but this wasn’t the time to break this chain of thought.

“What do you think?” Leaphorn asked. “You see any connection? Was Ashie Pinto painting rocks? That seems totally unlikely. Did Pinto being there have something to do with the painting? Anything at all to do with it? Or was it just that Nez, thinking he was chasing his painter, turned out to be chasing Pinto? And he catches himself a homicidal drunk. Or what? What do you think?”

Silence.

Largo got up and turned down the burner under the coffeepot. He picked up the funnel that held the grounds. “How do you make this stuff?” he asked. “And as far as the painter and Ashie Pinto are concerned, I pick number two. Nez thought he was chasing his nut and he catches Pinto.”

Chee scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “that sounds the most probable.”

“No connection otherwise, then?” Leaphorn said. “Neither of you can think of any?”

Chee got up, collected the cups, lined them beside the sink, and picked out a fresh filter.

Another cup of coffee would be fine, Leaphorn thought. And then he would go and pick up Professor Bourebonette and be on his way. She had come up with a graceful way to get out of his way when he’d come out of Ji’s house and returned to the car.

“You’re going to be busy for a while,” she had said. “Just drop me off at the community college. I have a friend in the library there I’d like to see.”

Nothing more was going to come out of this conversation. He would drink his coffee, drop by the library to pick up the professor, and then head back to Window Rock. Neither Chee nor Largo seemed to be able to think of any connection between a rock painter and a policeman’s murder. But there must be one. Because Leaphorn’s logic told him that somehow Colonel Ji had tried to tell them that with his blood-smeared finger. The man must have known he was dying. Protect his son, he’d told them, and then that he had lied to Chee. There must be a connection, and the connection—as Chee thought, too—must be that the boy had been driving his car that night. Driving it out where an old drunk was killing a policeman and a madman was painting random patterns on an outcrop of lava.

Random, Leaphorn thought. Random. When he was a young man, a junior at Arizona State, running around, drinking, chasing the girls, he had gone to a sing-dance once over between Kinlichee and Cross Canyon. It had rained that night, and he and Haskie Jim, his father’s older brother, had watched the first drops pattering into the dust. He had been full of the mathematics he was studying, and of his own wisdom, and he had talked to his old uncle of probabilities and of randomness. He had always remembered the scene.

“You think these raindrops are random?” his uncle had asked. And Leaphorn had been surprised. He’d said of course they were random. Didn’t his uncle think they were random?

“The stars,” Haskie Jim said. “We have a legend about how First Man and First Woman, over by Huerfano Mesa, had the stars in their blanket and were placing them carefully in the sky. And then Coyote grabbed the blanket and whirled it around and flung them into the darkness and that is how the Milky Way was formed. Thus order in the sky became chaos. Random. But even then … Even then, what Coyote did was evil, but was there not a pattern, too, in the evil deed?”

That had not been the time in Leaphorn’s life when he had patience for the old metaphysics. He remembered telling Haskie Jim about modern astronomy and the cosmic mechanics of gravity and velocity. Leaphorn had said something like “Even so, you couldn’t expect to find anything except randomness in the way the rain fell.” And Haskie Jim had watched the rain awhile, silently. And then he had said, and Joe Leaphorn still remembered not just the words but the old man’s face when he said them: “I think from where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.”

After he had thought about the meaning in that, Leaphorn had looked for order in everything. And he usually found it. Except in the events of insanity. Joe Leaphorn didn’t think a man—or a woman—who carried a ladder along with a paint gun into the hills would be insane.

There was a pattern there, and a motive, if he could only find them. Chapter 16

DEPUTY T. J. BIRDIE was on duty when Jim Chee arrived at the San Juan County jail at Aztec. T. J. said he was just too busy right now.

“We’re short-handed. I got the desk and the telephone switchboard, and the radio and everything all to myself. Just George back there in the jail and me. Come in tomorrow during regular hours and somebody will do it for you. It’s not as easy as you make it sound. All that sorting around. Putting stuff back where it was.”

“Come on, T. J.,” Chee said. “Don’t act like a horse’s ass. All you got to do is pull the file on booking Ashie Pinto and let me take a look at the inventory of what stuff he had.”

“Can’t leave the phone,” T. J. said. “Sheriff’d hang me up by the balls if he calls in here and I’m not on it.” Deputy Birdie was a stubby young man with his black hair cut short—half Apache. It was gossiped in political circles that the sheriff had hired him in the interest of attracting votes from the nearby Jicarilla Apache Reservation and still didn’t know Birdie was a Mescalero, whose numerous kinfolks and clansmen voted two hundred miles south and east in Otero County. Chee knew that Birdie was actually White Mountain Apache whose folks voted in Arizona and he was pretty sure the sheriff had hired him because he was smart. Unfortunately he was also lazy.

“Come on, damn it,” Chee said. He came around behind the counter. “Just get in there and pull out the Ashie Pinto file. I’ll answer the telephone for you.”

“Well, hell,” T. J. said. “What’s the big hurry?”

But he left, muttering. And when he returned five minutes later he handed Chee the folder.

The inventory of Hosteen Ashie Pinto’s impounded possessions was short:

wallet containing: two fifty-dollar bills -photo of woman - photo of two men - one pocketknife - one comb - one tin chewing tobacco containing corn meal - one leather pouch (jish) containing: two crystals feathers mineral stones - bull durham pouch of pollen - assorted small jish items

Chee handed the folder back to Birdie.

“That it?” Birdie said. “Can I get back to doing my duty for San Juan County now?”

“Thanks, T. J.,” Chee said.

“What were you looking for? Did you find it?”

“His jish. The old man is a crystal gazer,” Chee said. “I wanted to see if he was working. If he had his medicine bundle with him.”

“Well, hell,” Birdie said. “I was here the night they brought him in. I could have told you that. Saved me all that work if you’d just asked.”

It was late but Chee decided to make the four-hour drive to Albuquerque, turning the new information over in his mind. First, there was the fact that Tagert had hired Pinto. Presumably he’d picked up Pinto at his hogan and taken him to the vicinity of whatever he was hunting. Pinto had taken along his crystals—the tools of his profession as a finder of the lost and seer of the unseen. Some white men around the Reservation used crystal gazers but Tagert didn’t seem the sort. He guessed the historian was more interested in the old man’s memory than in his shamanistic powers. Memory of what? Logically it would be connected to Tagert’s interest in two white men who seemed to have died a long lifetime ago in a rock formation on the Navajo Reservation. Presumably Tagert would be hunting their bodies, for evidence that one of them was the notorious Butch Cassidy. Logic suggested that the rock formation would be somewhere fairly close to where he’d arrested Pinto. There were plenty of them around—the product of the same paroxysm of volcanic action that cracked the earth and formed the basaltic spires of Ship Rock. It might be the same formation into which he and Janet Pete had taken their stroll to study the work of Delbert Nez’s nutty vandal. If all else failed, he might search that formation again. Given a day or two to cover it better and more daylight he might find something.

Or get snakebit. But Pinto’s old tale suggested witches were involved. First he would see where that could lead him.

And then there was the business of Colonel Ji. Who? Why? Probably Ji had lied to protect his son, Chee guessed. What had his son done? Or was it just a father’s concern that his kid might be involved in something dangerous?

He turned it over, and over, and over. And the thinking kept him awake while he drove the endless miles of N.M. 44 toward Albuquerque. He had relied on a translator’s transcript of Hosteen Pinto’s tale of horse theft and homicide. He wanted to hear it for himself in the old man’s own voice. Chapter 17

THE YELLOW TAPE used to isolate the scene of a crime dangled loosely across Colonel Ji’s front gate. Leaphorn detached it, ushered Professor Bourebonette through, and reconnected it behind them.

“You’re sure this is all right?”

“The people from the Bureau are all finished in here,” Leaphorn said. “But keeping your hands in your pockets, not moving anything—that’s a good idea.”

Actually, it wasn’t exactly all right. It would be better if Bourebonette waited in the car. Better still if he had made this recheck of the colonel’s darkroom before he picked her up at the library. But he hadn’t thought of it until too late for that. And then the idea pressed on him. A feeling of urgency that he couldn’t really understand.

He unlocked the door, felt the little sigh of cold air that empty houses release when he opened it. It was a familiar sensation to Leaphorn—one he felt each evening when he unlocked his own house in Window Rock.

Nothing had changed in the front room, except it was silent now and the sills and surfaces bore the faint gray stains of fingerprint powder. He noticed Professor Bourebonette looking at the chalk lines that marked where the colonel’s body had been. He noticed the colonel’s messages were still on the wall, looking blacker now under the artificial yellow glare of the ceiling bulb. He noticed the professor’s expression. Strained? Sad? Mournful? Obviously this is unpleasant for her. Why was she here?

Everything in the darkroom was as he remembered it—a cramped, airless space, musty, nostrils filled with the acid smell of print-developing fluids. The prints were where he had seen them but now they also wore traces of gray powder. Would an FBI lab technician be sorting out Joe Leaphorn’s fingerprints? He checked his memory. No, he had handled everything carefully, by the edges.

Now he spread the prints on the cabinet top in two neat rows and examined them methodically. They were all the standard eight by ten inches on black-and-white glossy paper. All seemed to be exposures of parts of the same dark basaltic outcrop. They seemed to have been shot from a considerable distance through a telescopic lens. Or perhaps they had been magnified in the enlarger. The same negative had been used to make several of the prints, each blown up to a different magnification. But the angle in all was almost exactly the same—as if all the negatives had been exposed from the same location, but had been made by using lenses of different focal lengths and by shifting the camera on the tripod. All included the same segment of that outcrop. Some more of it, some less, depending on the lens. But in all, the same features were near the center of the print.

Leaphorn showed them to Bourebonette and explained what he was thinking.

“Why telescopic?” she asked.

“Notice this juniper in the foreground here in this one? Here it is in this other one. Notice how the relationship in size has changed. A telescopic lens compresses the distance like that.”

Bourebonette nodded. “Sure,” she said. ‘That’s the way the optics would work.”

“You know the Reservation pretty well. Does this look familiar?”

She studied the prints. “They’re all the same place, obviously. But we don’t get enough of it to put it in the landscape.”

“Have you seen it?”

She laughed. “Probably. Or something like it. It could be about forty places in the malpais down around Grants. Or maybe out in the Bisti badlands, or in the Zuni Mountains, or on the Black Mesa side of Monument Valley, or down around the Hopi Buttes, or out here beyond Ship Rock toward Littlewater or Sanostee. Or one of those volcanic throats east of Mount Taylor, or—” She shook her head, and handed the prints to Leaphorn. “Hard to tell. Any place that lava bubbled up through the cracks during a volcanic period. And that happened a lot out here.”

“It would be near here someplace, I think,” Leaphorn said. “We can presume Ji or his son shot them. Do you have any idea why either one would do that? Or make all these prints?”

“No idea,” she said. “But they certainly weren’t taken for the beauty of the landscape. Could you call the boy and ask him?

Didn’t you say he was staying with some friends here?”

“They decided against that. They’re taking him to Albuquerque to stay with some relatives instead. He won’t be there yet. But let’s see if we can locate the negatives. Maybe they’ll include enough background to tell us where this is.”

They spent almost thirty minutes sorting negative files without finding anything useful.

Leaphorn pulled the wastebasket from under the sink, sorted through it, and extracted a crumpled sheet of photographic paper. It was part of the same scene, blown up larger on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet. The print was much darker. Overexposed in the enlarger, Leaphorn guessed, and thrown away. He spread it on the cabinet, looked at Bourebonette, raised his eyebrows in a question.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe big enough to work with.” She looked at Leaphorn and grinned. “But work on what?”

“I think maybe we’re just wasting our time,” he said and put the picture back in the wastebasket.

“I’m thinking you’re in a strange business,” she said.

“Oh, not usually,” he said. “All this is an oddity.”

“A single-minded photographer,” she said. “Rocks and this girl.” She touched the portrait of the teenager Leaphorn had noticed earlier. “Several of these. Probably the boy’s girlfriend, I’d guess.”

“It looks like it’s a photocopy,” Leaphorn said. “Not very good.”

“Out of this, maybe,” she said. The Ship Rock High School yearbook was on the shelf behind the enlarger.

They found the girl’s portrait among the cheerleaders. She was a junior. Jenifer Dineyahze.

“I think we should go find Jenifer Dineyahze,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe she can tell us something useful.” But even as he said it, he doubted it.

Jenifer Dineyahze proved to be a rider of the Ship Rock school bus.

“It’s a little tough to tell you exactly where the Dineyahzes live,” the acting assistant principal told them, and he dug a map out of his desk drawer and showed them which school bus she rode and just about where the bus picked her up. “Back in here,” he said, putting the tip of his pencil on the slope of Beautiful Mountain. “Or here, maybe.” And he moved it a little toward Sanostee. “You’ll see the place where the track takes off to the left.”

Before they left Ship Rock, Leaphorn filled the tank of his patrol car—as he always did on junkets that would take him onto the back roads. But at least this errand took them south and west, toward Window Rock and home. And it would take them past the place where Jim Chee had arrested Ashie Pinto. It would give him a look at the rock formation where the painter had done his vandalism.

“What do you think you’re going to learn?” Bourebonette asked.

“Frankly, nothing,” Leaphorn said. “I think tomorrow I’ll get on the telephone and try to get hold of the boy in Albuquerque and I’ll ask him about the pictures. But it’s sort of on the way home—or back to your car. And you never know.”

They turned west off Route 666 toward Red Rock on Navajo 33.

Bourebonette pointed south toward Rol Hai Rock and then toward Barber Peak across the highway. “Those pictures,” she said. “It could be a little piece of either one of those.”

“Or even of some of those rays that run out from Ship Rock,” he said. “Any new ideas by now of why he took them?”

“No. Not even an old idea. How about you?”

“I have an old idea,” Leaphorn said. “I’m thinking that when we get to that rock formation Nez’s vandal was painting, maybe it will turn out to be the same formation Ji, or Ji’s boy, was photographing.”

Bourebonette thought about this. “Why?”

Leaphorn chuckled. “I was afraid you’d ask me that,” he said. “I think it’s because since my wife died I’ve started watching television. That’s the way the plot ought to work out.”

Bourebonette didn’t comment for a while. And then she said: “Well, there had to be some reason for somebody to shoot Colonel Ji. He was up around where the painter was working the night Mr. Nez was killed. At least his car was. And he took pictures of the rocks. So maybe there’s a connection.”

Leaphorn glanced at her, caught her looking at him. She shrugged. “Sounds silly, but the same rocks—” she said,”—that would be some connection.”

Leaphorn made a left turn off the asphalt onto a dirt road which hadn’t been on this year’s road grading schedule. They bumped down it, raising dust. “Well,” he said. “We’ll soon know.”

Leaphorn parked at the place the car of Officer Nez had burned. It had been hauled away—an unusual fate for a derelict vehicle on a reservation where they commonly rusted away where they died—but the place was marked by the skeletons of partially burned junipers and scorched cactus.

“There it is,” Bourebonette said, pointing. “See the painted places?”

The formation rose to the southeast, one of many old volcanic extrusions scattered along the flanks of the great upthrusts that form the multitude of mountain ridges of the southern Rockies. “Where?” Leaphorn asked and, as he said it, saw a stripe of white, and another, and another, where no white should be.

“Ah,” he said, and reached behind the seat of his car for his binoculars. But before he used them, he studied the formation, looking for the same pattern of shapes he memorized from the photographs. He didn’t see it.

The formation seemed to have been produced by a series of eruptions. In some places the basalt had been worn smooth by eons of time and softened by growths of lichens—its cracks sprouting buffalo and bunch grass, cactus, and even scraggly junipers. Elsewhere it was newer, still ragged and black. A couple of miles long, Leaphorn guessed, with a smaller formation beyond it extending perhaps another quarter of a mile.

Through the binoculars the formation seemed even rougher and more complex. In places the upthrust seemed to have forced overlying sandstone upward, producing broken walls and leaning slabs in a chaotic labyrinth. There, in the highest part of the ridge, the painting had been done.

Done carefully. Despite what Chee had told him, that surprised Leaphorn. At the point where the binoculars were focused, the black of the basaltic surface and the white of the paint formed a slight curve, not perfect but generally clean-cut. He shifted his vision to the next spot. The shape seemed irregular. Perhaps that was because of his perspective. But here, too, the margin was clean. He could see too little of the other painted surfaces to form a judgment.

He handed the binoculars to Professor Bourebonette. “Notice the edges. Notice how carefully done,” he said. While she looked, he thought about what she was seeing. As he did he understood exactly where the photographs had been taken.

His uncle had been right. Things seem random only because we see them from the wrong perspective.

He told Bourebonette about it as they drove down the bumpy road toward the Dineyahze place.

“It still sounds crazy as hell,” he said, “but I think either Ji or the boy took all those photographs and blew them up to plan where to put the paint.”

Professor Bourebonette looked suitably surprised. She considered. Leaphorn slowed, let the car roll across the borrow ditch and onto a road, which quickly became simply two parallel tracks through the bunch grass and snakeweed.

“Okay,” Bourebonette said finally. “If you wanted to paint something regular on a totally irregular surface, I guess that’s how you could do it.”

“I think so,” Leaphorn said. “You’d pick the spot you wanted to see it from, and take the photographs, mark out the places where the paint had to go. Little bit here on this corner of this slab, and then back here, and up there and so forth.”

“That leaves the really big question, though,” she said. “The big question is why anybody sane would want to paint something out here. And what it would be.” She looked at him. “You have that part of it figured out?”

“Afraid not,” Leaphorn said.

“I think that would take some real genius.”

The patrol car eased up a long slope, jolting over rocky places. The windshield was coated with dust, but the sun was low in the southwest now, out of their faces. Leaphorn shifted down, and up, and down again. And suddenly he found another answer. Or maybe he did.

“I have another thought,” he said. “About ‘what.’ Or more about ‘why.’”

Bourebonette looked at him, waiting.

Leaphorn considered whether he would look stupid if he was wrong. It occurred to him that he was showing off. And enjoying it. He considered that. Why would he be showing off? Why enjoying this?

“Are you going to tell me?” Bourebonette asked.

Leaphorn shifted up again as the tracks leveled off. “When we get to the top of this ridge here, we’re going to be able to see that formation again. From a different perspective now. “I think we’re going to see those painted spaces coming together. Forming a unity.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Something to do with this little girl we’re going out to visit.” And as he said it, realized that it sounded absurd. It would be wrong. The painting would remain, forever, a crazy jumble.

They reached the summit of the ridge. The shoulder was wide here, blocking their view of the formation. But they could see the Dineyahze place. It was built on the slope opposite them. The Dineyahze outfit included a small oblong of house with a tarpaper roof weighed down against windy weather by a scattering of old automobile tires, a hogan built of stone, a mobile home set on concrete blocks, and the usual brush arbors, corrals, and storage sheds.

“If I’m guessing right, the Ji boy took those photographs from the ridge above the house. He wanted the same view that Jenifer would have from her yard.” He glanced at Bourebonette, who was looking impressed.

“If I am guessing wrong,” he added, feeling sudden embarrassment, “then I have made myself look foolish.”

“Right or wrong,” Bourebonette said, “I’d say you have made yourself look like an innovative thinker. None of that occurred to me at all.”

The rock formation emerged slowly into view as the car moved along the ridge. And then they could see the paint.

Leaphorn stopped the car. He pulled on the parking brake. He stared.

Jubilation!

It wasn’t perfect from this perspective. But you could easily make it out. The white-against-black read:

I LOVE JEN

“Can you see it?” he asked. “Can you read it?”

“How about that?” Professor Bourebonette said. “Congratulations to you, Lieutenant Leaphorn.”

Her smile engulfed him with warm approval.

“I should have thought of it sooner,” he said. “I had all the information I needed. As soon as I knew where the girl lived, I should have guessed.”

“Modesty,” Bourebonette said. “I think that was right out of Sherlock Holmes.”

“To tell you the truth, I’m sort of proud of it myself,” he said.

“I wonder what the girl thinks?” Bourebonette said. “I think I’ll ask her.”

“I don’t see much need to bother her now,” Leaphorn said. “We were going to ask her if she had any idea what would be going on with Taka. Now we know.”

“We sure do,” Bourebonette said.

She was silent while he backed the car around. Then she said: “What we don’t know is why somebody shot his father.”

“No, we don’t,” Leaphorn said. But he was beginning to think he might know that, too. Chapter 18

CHEE HAD HOPED to catch Janet Pete before the federal court session convened. But there was the problem of finding a parking place in downtown Albuquerque. So he emerged from the elevator just in time to see the U.S. marshals ushering Hosteen Pinto into the courtroom.

“Jury selection today,” the receptionist at the Federal Public Defender’s office had told him. “She’ll be over in Judge Downey’s court in the new Federal Building. On Gold.”

“How long will that take?” Chee had asked, and the answer had been “Maybe all day. Maybe tomorrow. Probably you can catch her before it starts. If you hurry.”

He’d hurried, but not quite enough. Maybe, he thought, there would be a recess and he could talk to her then. He nodded to the bailiff at the door and started in.

“You’ll have to sit over by the wall, and about the fourth row,” the bailiff told him. “All the front rows are for the jury panel, and they use the back rows until their names get called.”

Chee sat against the wall in the fourth row and watched the panel being ushered in. There would be sixty of them if he remembered the procedure—men and women from around New Mexico with nothing much in common except that they lived in this judicial district and had registered to vote. Thus their names had been drawn for this duty.

When the last one was seated a middle-aged woman in a dark blue dress began spinning the bingo cage on a table beside the judge’s bench, pulling out names. An elderly Hispano named Martinez was first. He came down the aisle through the gate in the railing, turned right, and took the first chair in the row inside the railing.

“Mrs. Eloise Gibbons,” Blue Woman read, and a slender young woman in a gray pant-suit came down the aisle and took the chair next to Martinez.

“Mr. William Degenhardt,” Blue Woman said, and a conservative-looking man with a conservative haircut and a conservative gray suit took the chair to her right.

Blue Woman continued the litany, filling the row of chairs inside the railing, and then the two rows behind it. Slightly more women than men, Chee estimated. Altogether, seven Anglos and Hispanics, a Vietnamese or Cambodian, a middle-aged Navajo woman, a man who might be an Apache, and two who were clearly Pueblo Indians, although Chee couldn’t identify which of the Pueblos.

Janet Pete and a man who Chee guessed must be the federal prosecutor assigned to this case were standing in front of the high desk where the judge sat. The three were discussing something with her. Would that be an advantage? Woman judge, woman lawyer? Chee doubted it. It would be fairly common these days.

Chee felt tremendously drowsy. It was warm in the courtroom and he’d slept very little last night. He thought of his hand, which was itching under the bandage. How much use of it would he recover? He thought of what he wanted to tell Janet Pete—about Ji’s son being the driver of the car he’d seen the night Nez was killed. About Ji’s message on the wall. He thought of how Janet Pete looked. She was wearing something dark green with a skirt that came far below her knees. She had pretty knees, not that he’d seen them often, and pretty ankles.

Janet was standing facing the jury panel now and the judge was asking if any panelist knew her, knew her family, had had any dealing with her. A very classy woman, Chee thought. He felt a wave of affection, and of chauvinistic Navajo pride in her. And more than that, he felt a hunger for her. And a sense of failure. Since the day she’d come to the hospital to see him he’d lost ground with her. He was sure of that. She liked him less now than she did that morning.

The prosecutor was standing, undergoing the same scrutiny from the jury panel. One man on the front row put up his hand, and said he knew the man. They were members of the same church. He was excused.

Then Ashie Pinto stood. The business suit issued by the Bernalillo County jail for this appearance was too large for him, making him look even thinner than Chee had remembered.

“Face the jury panel, please, Mr. Pinto,” the judge said.

Hosteen Pinto reacted to his name. He looked back at the judge, puzzled.

“Interpreter!”

The interpreter responded to the impatience in Judge Downey’s voice. He awoke from whatever had been occupying his thoughts, stood, said something in Navajo too low for Chee to understand.

Hosteen Pinto looked at the man, cupped a hand behind his ear.

“She wants you to look out at those people,” the interpreter said, much louder now. “So they can see you.”

Pinto looked out at them, his expression sometimes embarrassed, sometimes determined. Pinto’s eyes moved across the courtroom, hesitating a moment when they came to the Navajo panelist, hesitating another moment when they met the eyes of Jim Chee.

Chee looked away, down at his itching hand.

No one knew Hosteen Ashie Pinto. The whites didn’t know him, nor the Hispanics, nor the Apache, nor the Pueblos, nor the Asian. Nor Janet Pete, nor me. He is a shaman. He is a stranger to us all.

The prosecutor looked at his notes then looked up. “Mrs. Greyeyes, I believe you live at Nakaibito. On the Navajo Reservation. Is that correct?”

“Actually, closer to Coyote Canyon,” Mrs. Greyeyes said.

“But on the Reservation?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a Navajo?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any clan relationships with the defendant?”

“I don’t know what he is.”

The prosecutor looked at his notes.

“I have two clans written down here. Turning Mountain Dinee and the Bitter Water People.” He looked at the interpreter. “Is that right? Two clans?”

“Mother’s and father’s,” the interpreter said. “Two clans.”

“I am born to the Sage Brush Hill People,” the woman said. “And born for Towering House Clan.”

“So there is no connection? Correct?”

“We’re not kinfolks,” the woman said.

Judge Downey leaned forward and stared at the interpreter. “Miss Pete,” she said, “do you think your client should know what is going on here? Shouldn’t it be interpreted for Mr. Pinto?”

Janet Pete looked abashed.

“I would like to have it interpreted,” she said.

“So ordered,” said Judge Downey.

The interpreter was a man of perhaps forty with a disheveled look that was probably genetic. He explained in loud and precise Navajo the exchange between Mrs. Greyeyes and the prosecutor.

Chee began to doze. Snapped awake. The man with the conservative look was being questioned now by Janet Pete.

“Mr. Degenhardt, I want you to tell me if you have ever had or if anyone in your family, or even a close friend, has ever had any unpleasant experience involving a member of the Navajo Tribe. Have you ever been in a fight with a Navajo? Anything like that?”

Mr. Degenhardt thought about it.

The interpreter said: “She asked him if he ever been in a fight with a Navajo.”

Mr. Degenhardt shook his head. “No.”

“Can you think of any reason why you could not give this gentleman here, Mr. Pinto, a fair trial?”

“She say you be fair?” the interpreter said.

“No, Ma’am,” Degenhardt said.

“He say yes, he be fair,” the interpreter said.

Chee stopped listening. Who was the interpreter who translated Ashie Pinto’s words from the tape to the transcript? Had he been as lazy as this one? Skipping? Summarizing? Or, if he was a traditional Navajo, perhaps leaving out unpleasant parts about witches and skinwalkers? He was remembering he’d decided yesterday to hear Hosteen Pinto’s story in Hosteen Pinto’s very own words. This business of selecting a jury would take hours. Chee got up and moved quietly out the door.

Finding a parking place near the Federal Building downtown was child’s play compared to finding a place to park anywhere near the university library. Finally Chee left his pickup in a POLICE VEHICLES ONLY space behind the campus police station. He identified himself to the duty sergeant, explained his business, and got reluctant approval to leave it there.

By the time he climbed the stairs to the Reserve Room in Zimmerman Library, checked out the tapes and transcripts, and went to work, it was almost noon. He was hungry. He should have stopped for lunch.

He started with the horse thief tape. He’d listened to some of it already, with a lot of skipping around, and he’d read a copy of the transcript in Tagert’s office. Now as he listened to Pinto’s voice droning the same story into his earphones his sleepiness returned. But he fought it off, checking what he was hearing with the library’s copy of the transcript. When he came to a discrepancy, he stopped the tape and replayed it. The revisions tended to be minor corner-cuttings or sometimes eliminations of repetition. By one P.M. he’d found nothing that changed the meaning or left out anything significant.

Sleepiness was almost overpowering. His stomach grumbled with hunger. He put down the transcript, took off the earphones, yawned and stretched. The air around him had the deadness common to rooms without open windows, common to rooms where old things are stored. The silence was absolute, the place empty except for himself and the young woman who sat behind the desk at the entrance, working on files.

He would walk across the mall to the Union and get something to eat. No, he would walk across Central Avenue to the Frontier and have a green chile enchilada. But first he would skip ahead and see if the translator had cheated when the subject became witchcraft. When he’d read the transcript before, it had seemed that Pinto had said remarkably little about why the Ghostway cure had been needed for Delbito Willie. Perhaps he’d actually said more.

He ran the tape fast forward, listening to Pinto’s old voice quacking in his ears until he found the proper place.

“

And then the two white men rode their horses out into a place where there was a lava flow. It is dangerous to ride a horse in there, even in daylight, because, you know, he might get his hoof in one of those cracks—just a little slip, you know, and break his leg and throw you onto the rocks.”

Chee stopped the tape and checked the translation. Just as he remembered, the copy he’d read omitted the digression about the horse breaking its leg. He started the tape again.

“

The Yucca Fruit Clan men followed very slowly. The lava was rough there and they kept way back anyway because of the man with the yellow mustache. They say he was a very good shot even riding on a horse. Finally they found where the white men had tied up their horses and went up into the rocks. Right there, Delbito Willie and the Yucca Fruit Clan men they stopped, too, because they knew Yellow Mustache would be protecting his horses with his rifle and because they saw then where it was the white men had gone. It was up there in the place where the witches gather. It was up there in the cave where the evil ones come to make somebody into a skinwalker. Some of those Yucca Fruit Clan men knew about it. They lived over on the other side of the Carrizo Mountains, but they had heard about this place. And you could tell it was this place because of the way the rocks were formed there. They say it looked like the ears of a mule sticking up. If you looked at it from the west, that’s the way it looked. Two sharp spires with a low saddle between them. They say it looked like a saddle, like one of those McClellan saddles, with the steep rise up the back side and the horn sticking up on the other side. Reminded people of a saddle.”

Chee stopped the tape. None of this, not a word of it, was in the transcript he’d read at Tagert’s office. He turned the pages of the library copy. None of it was here, either. Two pages were missing, cut out with a very sharp knife or a razor blade.

He ran the tape again, hearing how Delbito Willie wanted to go in after the white men, to see if they were dead. If they were he would take the rifle of Yellow Mustache—a very fine rifle. The argument had lasted two days, with all of the Yucca Fruit men against it until finally, when they all agreed the white men must be dead by now, one of the Yucca Fruit Clan agreed to go partway with Willie—but not as far as the witches’ cave. And Willie had gone in and had come out with the rifle of Yellow Mustache, and the word that both men were indeed dead.

He checked the tape and transcript in at the desk.

“Is there a way to find out who did the translating? Any record kept of that?”

“Just a minute,” the woman said. “I think so.”

She disappeared into a door marked STAFF ONLY.

Chee waited, rechecking his reasoning. He thought he knew who the translator would be.

He was right.

The woman reappeared, holding a file card.

“Someone named William Redd,” she said. Chapter 19

LEAPHORN WAS HAVING one of those frustrating mornings which cause all bureaucrats to wish the telephone had never been invented.

At first, he got nothing but a no answer at the number of Mr. Doan Van Ha, the Albuquerque uncle to whom Taka Ji had been sent for safekeeping. Finally, when someone did pick up the phone it proved to be an elderly woman who identified herself as Khanh Ha. Her command of English was barely rudimentary. After a few minutes of total failure to communicate, Khanh Ha said: “You stay. I get boy.”

Leaphorn stayed, telephone receiver held to his ear, listening to the silence in the home of the Ha family. Minutes ticked away. He noticed his windows were dusty. Through them he noticed that one of the that used the cottonwoods across the road from the Justice Building had lost some wing feathers and flew out of balance. He noticed that the high clouds he had seen when he came to work had thickened and spread from the northern horizon across most of the sky. Maybe it would snow. They needed it. It was late. He thought of Emma, of how she gloried in these days when time hung stalled between the seasons, urging winter on, then cheering for spring, then happily announcing that tomorrow it would be summer and thunderstorm season. Then pleased to see the summer die, anxious for the peaceful gold of autumn. Emma. Happiness was always on her side of the horizon, safely in Dinetah, safely between the Sacred Mountains. She never felt any need to learn what lay beyond them.

A door slammed faintly in distant Albuquerque. Then came the sound of footsteps on a hard floor, and a boyish voice said: “Hello?”

“This is Lieutenant Leaphorn, Taka,” Leaphorn said. “Remember? We talked at your house in Ship Rock.”

“You have the wrong number,” the boy said. “I think so.”

“I am calling for Taka Ji,” Leaphorn said.

“This is Jimmy Ha,” the boy said. “I think they took Taka to my aunt’s house. Down in the South Valley.”

“Do you have that number?”

Jimmy Ha had it, but it took another five minutes to find it. Then, when Leaphorn dialed it, he got another no answer.

He fiddled ineffectively with his paperwork, passing enough time to make another try sensible. Again, no answer. He hung up, dialed the Federal Public Defender’s office in Albuquerque.

No, Jim Chee wasn’t there. He had been in this morning but he’d left.

“To go where?” Leaphorn asked.

To the federal courthouse.

“How about Janet Pete? Is she in?”

Janet Pete was at the courthouse, too. A jury was being selected.

“When she comes in would you tell her that I have to get a message to Jim Chee. Tell her to get word to him that I have to talk to him. Tell her it’s important.”

When he hung up, he made no pretense of doing paperwork, he simply sat and thought. Why had Colonel Ji been killed? He swiveled in his chair and stared at his map. It told him nothing. Nothing except that everything seemed to focus on a rock formation south of Ship Rock. Nothing made any sense. And that, he knew, was because he was seeing it all from the wrong perspective.

He thought about Professor Bourebonette.

He thought about Jim Chee. Unreliable perhaps. But a good mind.

He noticed his wastebasket. The maintenance man who had been neglecting to wash his windows had also neglected to empty it. Leaphorn leaned over and fished out the brochure describing the wonders of the People’s Republic of China. He spread it on the desk and studied the pictures again.

Then he threw it back in the wastebasket. Chapter 20

ODELL REDD WAS not at home. Or if he was, he didn’t respond to Jim Chee’s persistent knocking. Chee gave up. He found a vacant parking place in a loading zone behind the Biology Building and walked over to the History Department.

No, Jean Jacobs hadn’t seen him, either.

“Not this morning. He came in yesterday. We went out to lunch.” Jean Jacobs’s expression made it clear that this was a happy event.

“No idea where he is?”

“He should be working on his dissertation. Maybe in the library.”

The idea of hunting through the labyrinthine book stacks at Zimmerman held no appeal to Chee. He sat down.

“How about your boss? Still missing?”

“Nary a word,” Jacobs said. “I’m beginning to seriously think he died someplace. Maybe his wife killed him, or one of his graduate students.” She laughed. “They’d draw straws. Stand in line for it if they thought they had any chance of getting away with it.”

“What kind of car does he drive?”

“I don’t know.” She opened a drawer and extracted a file. “I’ve seen him driving a white four-door sedan, and sometimes a sexy sports car. Whorehouse red.”

She extracted a card from the file.

“I think that’s when his wife gave up on him, after he bought that red one. Let’s see, now. Oldsmobile Cutlass. Nineteen ninety. Corvette coupe. That’s a 1982 model. But cool, you know. Impresses the cute little coeds looking for a father figure to take them to bed.”

Jean Jacobs laughed when she said it, but it didn’t sound like the thought amused her.

“That’s his application for a parking permit?” ,

“Right,” Jacobs said. “It covers both cars. You just hang it on the one you’re driving.”

Chee looked down at his hand which was itching furiously. He resisted an impulse to rub it, adjusted the bandage instead. Jacobs was watching him.

“Healing up okay?”

Chee nodded. He was thinking about a low-slung Corvette, or a brand-new Oldsmobile, banging over those tracks south of Ship Rock.

“Which car did he drive mostly? Which one was he driving that last day you saw him, that evening when he came in to pick up his mail? You have any way of knowing what he was driving?”

“No,” Jacobs said. She hesitated. “He just came in and got his mail. And stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Well, he took some stuff he’d collected for a paper he was doing. It had been on his desk there. And a couple of letters that were in his out-basket.”

“Was he all right? What did he say?”

Jacobs sat looking out of the window. She glanced at him and back out the window again.

“Were you here when he came in?”

“No.”

“Just the next day you noticed he’d been in and picked up stuff?”

Jacobs nodded.

They considered each other.

“But he left me a note,” she said. She rummaged in her desk drawer, extracted a salmon-colored WHILE YOU WERE OUT slip, handed it to Chee.

Scrawled across it was:

“Jacobs—Call admissions. Get class lists on time for a change. Tell maintenance to clean up this pigpen, get windows washed.”

“He doesn’t sign his notes?” Chee asked.

Jacobs laughed. “No please. No thank you. That’s Tagert’s signature.”

“But it’s his handwriting?”

She glanced at the note. “Who else?”

He used Tagert’s telephone to call the Federal Public Defender’s office for Janet Pete. The receptionist’s voice boomed in his ear, telling him that Miss Pete was still at the courthouse. He held the receiver away from his ear, frowning.

Jean Jacobs was smiling about it. “The professor is hard of hearing,” she said. “He kept complaining to the telephone people about their equipment mumbling so they came in finally and put in that high-volume phone.”

“Wow,” Chee said.

“Just hold it a little way from your ear. It’s easy once you know how to handle it.”

The receptionist was talking again, less painfully now that he was following Jacobs’s advice.

“But there’s a message for you,” she was saying. “For her actually. She’s supposed to tell you to call Window Rock. ‘Please tell Mr. Chee to call Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn at his office.’”

Chee called.

“You in Albuquerque?” Leaphorn asked.

Chee said he was.

“We’ve got sort of a funny situation,” the lieutenant said. “It turns out that Taka Ji is the rock painter that Delbert Nez was after.”

“Oh,” Chee said. He digested the thought. “How’d you find out?”

Leaphorn told him.

“Has anyone talked to him?”

“I can hardly hear you,” Leaphorn said. “It sounds like you’re standing out in the hall.”

Chee pulled the mouthpiece closer to his lips. “I said has anyone talked to him? He was out there the night Nez was killed. Maybe he saw something.”

Leaphorn explained that the boy had been taken to Albuquerque to stay with relatives. He gave Chee the name and the number. “Nobody home when I called. But I think somebody should talk to him in person.”

“Did you tell the FBI?”

Chee’s question provoked an extended silence. Finally Leaphorn chuckled. “The Bureau was not particularly interested in a vandalism case at the moment.”

“They don’t see the connection?”

“With what? The agent handling the Ji killing is new out here, and pretty new in the business for that matter. I got the impression that he’ll talk to the boy one of these days but I don’t think he could see how painting his romantic message on rocks had anything to do with somebody shooting the colonel. I think they see some sort of link back to Vietnam. And what he did there.”

“How about with somebody shooting Officer Delbert Nez?” Chee asked.

Another pause. Then Leaphorn said: “Yeah. That’s what troubles me, too. I think that’s the key to it. Have you got it figured out?”

Chee found, to his surprise, that being asked that question by Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn pleased him. The question was clearly serious. The famous Joe Leaphorn, asking him that. Unfortunately he didn’t have an answer. Not a good one.

“Not really,” he said. “But I think once we understand it, we’re going to find there was more to the Nez homicide than we know about.”

“Exactly. Has the trial started yet?”

“They’re picking the jury. Maybe they’ll start it tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“You’ll be one of the first witnesses, I’d say. That right?”

“I’m under subpoena. The prosecutor wants me to tell about the arrest. What I saw.”

“So you’ll be in Albuquerque,” Leaphorn said. “I know you’re on leave but I think you ought to go see the Ji kid. See what he’ll tell you. See if he saw anything.”

“I was planning to do that,” Chee said.

“Unofficially,” Leaphorn said. “Not our case, of course.” There was a pause. “And get that telephone fixed.” Chapter 21

THE ADDRESS LEAPHORN had given him for the Ha residence was in the opposite direction from the Tagert address. But Tagert’s house wasn’t far from the university campus and Chee made the detour. He had a hunch he wanted to check.

It was a single-story, brick-fronted house on the lower end of the middle class—the sort of house history professors can afford if they are frugal with their grocery buying. Chee parked on the street, walked up the empty driveway, and rang the bell. No answer. He rang it four times. Still no answer. Then he walked across the yard and peered through the garage window. It was dirty, but not too dirty for Chee to see a red Corvette parked inside and beyond it a white Oldsmobile sedan.

The Ha residence was neat, standing out for its tidiness in a weed-grown neighborhood which was on the upper end of the lower class. There was no car in the driveway, but as Chee parked his truck at the curb, an elderly blue Chevy sedan pulled up beside the carport. The boy sitting beside the young woman who was driving was Taka Ji.

They started their talking in the driveway, Chee leaning on the sedan door, the boy standing stiffly facing him, and Miss Janice Ha, the driver, standing beside Taka—a silent, disapproving observer.

“I was the officer who made the arrest out there that night,” Chee told the boy. “I saw you driving your father’s car. I was in the police car you met just before you turned off the pavement toward Ship Rock.”

Taka Ji simply looked at him.

“Now we know some more,” Chee said. “We know you’re the one who painted those rocks. It might help us catch the man who shot your father if you tell me what you saw.”

Janice Ha put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I think we should go inside,” she said.

The front room of the house was almost as small as Chee’s own cramped lodgings—but there was space in it, between the two front windows, for a shrine. The shrine featured a foot-tall plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin in her traditional blue-and-white robes looking down serenely at two small candles and two small pots of chrysanthemums. A woman who reminded Chee of a smaller, slightly older, and female version of Colonel Ji was sitting on the sofa beside it.

She was Thuy Ha, and she bowed deeply to Chee when Janice Ha introduced him.

“Taka’s father was my mother’s younger brother,” Janice Ha explained. “Her English is not yet good. It was a long time before we could get her released by the Communists. She joined us only last year.”

“I hate to intrude at this bad time,” Chee said. He looked at Taka Ji. “But I think Mr. Ji here might be able to help us.”

Janice spoke to the woman—translating Chee presumed—and Thuy Ha said something in response. “She said he will help you any way he can,” Janice Ha said.

The older woman spoke again, a longer statement this time. The girl responded briefly and the older woman responded. Her voice sounded angry.

“Mrs. Ha asked me to tell you that the Communists killed Colonel Ji,” Janice Ha said. She looked embarrassed. “She said I should tell you Colonel Ji worked faithfully for the Americans, and made many enemies because of that, and the Communists sent someone all the way over here to America just to kill him.”

The woman was watching Chee intently.

“Would you ask her if she knows who might have done it?”

Janice Ha translated. Mrs. Ha spoke a single word.

“Communists,” Janice Ha said.

Taka Ji broke the brief silence that followed that.

“I didn’t see very much,” he said. “It was getting dark, and the storm was coming.”

“Just tell me what you saw,” Chee said.

First he had heard a car. He had climbed down from the ladder and was sitting on the sand beside it, looking at the blown-up photograph of the rocks, deciding exactly where he should add the next section of paint. He had heard the engine of a vehicle, revving up, driving in very low gear, coming in closer to this formation than vehicles usually come. He had folded up the ladder and put it out of sight. Then he had hidden himself. But after a while he heard voices, and he climbed up to where he could see what was going on.

“There were three people. They had left the truck, or whatever it was, parked back behind some of those junipers on the slope. I could just see the roof. And three of them were walking toward the formation. Not toward me, but more toward the west. At first I thought it was one man and two women because one was larger than the other two. But then I saw when they got a little closer that one of them was a real thin old man.”

“Ashie Pinto?”

“Yes,” Taka Ji said. “I saw his picture in the Farmington Times that Sunday, after he was arrested. It looked like the man who killed the policeman.”

“The other two? Did you recognize them?”

The boy shook his head.

“Could you, if you saw them again?”

“One of them, I think. The bigger one. I got a better look at him. The other one, I don’t know.”

“But the other one was a woman?”

“I don’t know. I think I thought that just because of the size. They had on a dark-colored felt hat, and a big jacket, and jeans.” Taka stopped, looking doubtful. His aunt said something terse in Vietnamese.

“Okay,” Taka said. “After that, they disappeared up into the rocks. I just stayed there awhile, where I was. I was thinking I should go, because I didn’t want anybody to know what I was doing.” He stopped, glanced at his Mrs. Ha, said something haltingly in Vietnamese.

She nodded, smiled at him, reached over and patted his knee.

“He said he was afraid people would think what he was doing was silly,” Janice Ha said. Her expression said she agreed with her cousin. They would think it was silly.

“I thought if I left now, they would maybe see me driving away. I always left the car down in the arroyo where nobody could see it, but they would see me driving away. So I decided I would wait until they left.” He stopped again.

“Go on,” Janice said. “Tell us what happened.” She looked at Chee. “We didn’t know anything about this either. He should have told the police.”

Taka flushed. “My father told me not to tell anybody. He said it sounded like something I should not be mixed up in. He said to just be quiet about it.”

“Well, better late than never,” Janice said. “Tell us.”

“I wondered what was happening over there, so I decided to get closer so I could see. I know that place real well by now, or the part of it where I was working anyway. It’s full of snakes. They come in there when the weather starts getting cold because those black rocks stay warm even in the winter and the field mice move in there too. And, normally, those snakes hunt at night because that’s when the kangaroo rats and the little mice come out to eat, but in the winter it’s cold at night and the snakes are coldblooded reptiles so they stay in their holes after

“

Taka had noticed Janice’s expression—impatient with this digression into natural science.

“Anyway,” he said hurriedly, “I know where to walk and how not to get snakebit. So I went over in the direction I had seen the three people go and in a little while I could hear voices. Talking up there in the rocks. So I moved around there—it was just beginning to get dark now and there was lightning up in the mountains. And then I saw the one who killed the policeman. He hadn’t gone up in there with the other two. He was sitting out by a pinon tree on the ground. I watched him awhile, and he didn’t do anything except once in a while he would drink out of a bottle he had with him.

I thought about that for a while and I decided that if that one was drunk, then when it got just a little darker, I could get down to the arroyo and get my car and slip away without being seen. I just sat there and waited a little while. I heard the two who went up into the rocks yelling. It sounded like they were really excited. I thought they had stirred up some of the snakes back in there.”

Taka Ji stopped, looked at his aunt, and at Janice, and finally at Chee. He cleared his throat.

“Then I heard a shot,” he said. “And I got out of there and got the car and went home.”

The boy looked around him again. Finished. Waiting for questions.

Janice Ha was looking startled. “A shot! Did you tell your dad? You should have told the police.”

Mrs. Ha said something in Vietnamese to Janice, got an explanation, responded to that. Then Janice said to her mother: “Well, I don’t care. We’re living in America now.”

“Where did the sound of the shot come from?” Chee asked.

“It sounded like from back in the rocks. Back in there where they had been yelling. I thought maybe they had shot at a snake.”

“Just one shot?”

“One,” Taka said.

“Were you still there when Officer Nez came?”

“I heard the car. I heard it coming. There’s a track that runs along there west of that rocky ridge where we were. It was coming along that. Toward us.”

“Did he have his siren going? His red light on?”

“No, but when I saw it, I saw it was a Navajo Tribal Police car. I decided I better go. Right away. I got away from there and went to the arroyo and got the car and went home.”

“Do you remember meeting me?”

“It scared me,” Taka said. “I saw your police car, coming fast, toward me.” He paused. “I should have stopped. I should have told you I heard the shot.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Chee said. But he was thinking that it might have saved Colonel Ji’s life.

Mrs. Ha was watching them, listening to every word. Chee thought that she must know a little English.

“I want you to give me some directions,” Chee said. “I have a big-scale map out in my truck. I want to show you that and have you mark on it exactly where those people were in that rock formation.”

Taka Ji nodded.

Mrs. Ha said something in Vietnamese, said it directly to Jim Chee and then glanced at her daughter, awaiting the translation.

“She said: ‘We have a saying in Vietnam -” Janice Ha hesitated. “I’m not sure of the word for that animal in English. Oh, yes. The saying is that fate is as gentle with men as the mongoose is with mice.”

Chee shook his head, nodded to the woman. “Would you tell your mother that Navajos say the same thing in different words. We say: ‘Coyote is always out there waiting, and Coyote is always hungry.’”

It was obvious when the elevator doors opened that federal district court was recessing for lunch. People were milling in the hallway. Janet Pete was hurrying for the elevator, directly toward him. He let her in, along with twenty or thirty other citizens. “I found Colonel Ji’s boy,” Chee told her. “I just came from talking with him.” He explained what Leaphorn had learned—that Taka Ji was the elusive painter of stone, that Taka Ji had been out on the basalt ridge the evening Delbert Nez was killed.

“You’re going to tell me that you have your witness now. That that boy saw Ashie Pinto shoot Delbert Nez.”

She was pressed against him, sideways, in the jam-packed elevator. All Chee could see was the top of her head and part of her cheek. But if he could see her face, the expression would be disappointed. He could tell that from her tone.

“No,” Chee said. “As a matter of—” The fat man with the briefcase and the Old Spice cologne leaned against his hand, causing Chee to suck in his breath. He raised the hand gingerly and held it above his head, preferring looking silly to risking the pain.

“As a matter of fact, I wanted to tell you I may have arrested the wrong man. Could you get the trial postponed a little? Maybe a few days?”

“What?” Janet said, so loudly that the buzz of competing conversations surrounding them hushed. “We shouldn’t be talking about the case in here,” she said. But then she whispered, “What did he see?”

“Before Nez got there, there were three people out there. Pinto and two other people. Maybe two other men, maybe a man and a woman.”

Janet had managed to turn herself in the crush of people about forty-five degrees—a maneuver which Chee found most pleasant—and looked up at him. Her face was full of questions. He went on, “He said Pinto sat down by a tree on the grass and was drinking from a bottle. The others climbed up in the rocks. He heard them yelling up in there, and then he heard a shot. He thought they’d killed a rattlesnake. Remember those?”

Janet’s face expressed distaste. She remembered them all too well.

“Then he heard Nez’s police car. And he left.”

Chee had his chin tucked against his chest, looking down at her. He was conscious of her faint perfume, of her hip pressed against him, of hair which smelled of high country air and sunshine. He could see her face now. But he couldn’t read her expression. It baffled him.

“You think that helps prove you caught the wrong man? Helps Hosteen Pinto?”

“Helps Hosteen Pinto? Well, sure it does. Somebody else had the pistol, or at least a gun of some kind, before Nez was shot. All Pinto had, as far as the boy could see, was the bottle. Sure it helps. It creates a reasonable doubt. Don’t you think so?”

Janet Pete had put her arms around his waist and hugged him fiercely.

“Ah, Jim,” she said. “Jim.”

And it took Chee, bandaged hand held high over his head, several seconds to realize that everyone on the elevator who faced the right way must be staring at them. And when he realized it he didn’t care. Chapter 22

TAKA JI PROVED to be as efficient at marking Jim Chee’s map as he had been plotting out his romantic signal to Jenifer Dineyahze. Chee drove almost directly to the site and found the place in the adjoining arroyo where Taka had hidden his father’s vehicle. He climbed out of his pickup and stood beside it for a moment, stretching cramped muscles and plotting the most efficient way to climb into the outcrop.

Somewhere back in those black rocks was what Professor Tagert was looking for—probably the skeleton of Butch Cassidy. There was also something that had caused Redd to change a translation to foil Tagert, something that eighty years ago had caused a stubborn Navajo to undergo a cure for exposure to witches. Back in there two biligaana bandits had probably died a long time ago. And back in there, Taka Ji last month had heard someone shoot a snake, or perhaps another human, or perhaps nothing.

Since leaving Albuquerque in the early afternoon, Chee had been racing against the weather as well as the sun. As far south as the point where Highway 44 entered the Jicarilla Reservation, he’d been conscious of the darkness on the northwestern horizon. “A slow-moving storm, this one, and that means we might get some substantial snow,” Howard Morgan had told them on the Channel 7 news. “But of course, if the jet stream moves north, it could miss most of New Mexico.” The storm had indeed moved slowly, much more slowly than the reckless seventy to eighty Chee had been pushing his pickup in defiance of law and common sense. Even so, by the time he passed the Huerfano Mesa two-thirds of the sky was black with storm and the smell of snow was in the air.

His nostrils were still full of that aroma of cold wetness as he stood beside the truck. The sun was almost on the horizon, shining through a narrow slot not closed in the west between cloud and earth. The slanting light outlined every crevasse in shadowy relief, making apparent the broken ruggedness of the ridge. It rose, ragged and tumbled shapes in black and gray, out of a long sloping hummock—what a million years or so of erosion had left of the mountain of volcanic ash that had once buried the volcano’s core. From where Chee stood there seemed to be dozens of ways up into the ridge. Most of them would dead-end at walls of lava.

He found what traces of Taka Ji’s tracks the rain that night had left and followed them—helped by the angle of the light. Then he found other tracks, easy-to-follow high-heeled cowboy boots among them. They led up into the malpais.

They led, as Chee was thinking, into Tse A’Digash. That was the term Hosteen Pinto had used—the rocks where witches gathered. There was that to think of. That, and the variety of rattlesnakes which would have been accumulating here since the first autumn cold snaps, taking advantage of a final few days of warmth from the rocks before hibernating for the winter. Maybe they would already be in hibernation. Chee doubted it. The old shamans watched such things closely. And they would not have yet started scheduling those curing rituals which could only be held when the snakes were safely asleep. Ah, well. Snakes preyed on animals small enough to be swallowed, not on men. But snakes struck men in self-defense. With that thought in mind, with the reputation this place had earned—even a hundred years ago—for witches, Chee moved cautiously.

The first path he chose led into a pocket of rocks with no exits. The second, after he climbed a difficult tilted slab of stone, led him higher and higher into the ridge. The dying sunlight no longer reached this path but the going was relatively easy. Obviously this walkway had been used for many years by animal and man. Here a cactus had been broken by a careless step, and healed with time. There a clump of buffalo grass had been distorted by the pressure of footsteps. Now and then, where the rocky formation fended off the rain, Chee picked up recent boot prints. The high-heeled boot marks were no longer evident. They must have been Ashie Pinto’s boots. Ashie Pinto had been too wise to enter here. Pinto had sat beside a pinon on the grass, not taking any chances with destiny. But Coyote had been waiting out there, too.

Chee was high in the rocks before he saw his first snake. It was a smallish prairie rattler which had been moving slowly across the pathway just as he turned a corner between shoulder-high boulders. Chee stopped. Snake stopped. It formed itself into a coil, but the motion was lethargic. Chee stepped back to where his human smell would be less likely to reach the reptile. Waited a moment, looked around the rock. The snake was gone.

Chee paused as he stepped over the snake’s track across the sand and took time to erase the zigzag marking with his toe. He couldn’t remember the reason for this action, just that it was one of the litany of taboos and their counters his grandmother had taught him—a small courtesy to Big Snake.

Not fifty feet beyond where the snake had been, he found the place he had come to find.

In some forgotten time, a great upsurge of molten magma had produced a cul-de-sac walled in by slabs of weathered, lichen-covered basalt. At the wide end, a bubble of this molten rock had burst—forming a small cave. Eons of migrating sand, dust, and organic material had been trapped here, borne directly in by the wind or washed down from the rocks above. It had formed a flat floor on which bunch and needle grass grew when enough water seeped in from above. At the near edge of this little floor, Chee saw the weathered ruins of what had been a saddle.

Chee stopped and studied the place.

Even from where he stood, yards away, he could see the floor had been disturbed by foot tracks. He heard a scraping sound. Or thought he did. When he had left his truck there had been a breeze, the edge of what weather people call “proximity wind” stirred up on the edges of a storm. Now that had died away, leaving the dead calm that so often comes just as the first flakes fall.

Had he heard something? Chee couldn’t be sure. Probably just nerves—the proximity of witches. Witches. That caused him to think of Joe Leaphorn, to whom belief in witches was superstitious anathema. Chee had come to terms with them in another way. He saw what the origin mythology said of them as a metaphor. Some choose to violate the Way of the People, choosing incest, murder, and material riches over the order and harmony of the Navajo Way. Call them what you like, Chee knew they existed. He knew they were dangerous.

Now Chee listened and heard almost nothing. A meadowlark somewhere out of sight ran its soprano meadowlark scales. Down near the arroyo where he’d parked, the crows were quarreling. He heard nothing to explain his nervousness.

The sun was down now just below the horizon, and was coloring the bottom of the storm cloud a dazzling yellow in the far west and dull rose over Chee’s head. Reflected light washed the rocky landscape with a dull red tint—making vision deceptive. No time to waste.

He walked past the old saddle into the cul-de-sac. And stopped again.

First he saw the hat. Sand had drifted over most of it, but part of the brim and much of the crown were visible. Apparently a very old hat of once-black felt now faded into mottled gray. Beyond the hat, over a low partition of sloping rock, he saw a pant leg and a boot—also mostly buried under the drifted dust.

Chee drew a deep breath and let it out, steadying himself. Apparently, old Hosteen Pinto’s story was true. At least one man had died here a long time ago. In a moment, he would check for the second one. No terrible hurry. Chee, like most Navajos who hold to the traditions of the People, would avoid a corpse as diligently as an orthodox Jew or Moslem would avoid roast pork. They were taboo. They caused sickness.

But there were cures for such sickness if it couldn’t be avoided. Chee walked over to inspect the corpse.

The man who wore the pant leg lay mostly far under an overhang of stone—seeking shade probably when he was dying. Now, too late, it protected him from wind and weather. But the desiccating heat had converted him into a shriveled mummy swaddled in faded clothing.

There should be another man, Chee thought. He found him in the little cave.

This had been a bigger man, and he, too, had been partly mummified by the dry heat. His hat had been placed on his face but under its brim Chee could see a long mustache, bleached a gray-white. This body had been moved, pulled out flat on the sand. It still wore a gun belt but the holster was empty. Here seemed to be Professor Tagert’s famous Butch Cassidy. Here was Tagert’s revenge upon his detractors.

He stood studying the body. Part of the man’s vest had been torn away and part of the other clothing had pulled apart when it had been dragged from under the sheltering rocks. Or perhaps, totally rotten, had fallen away by its own weight. Or perhaps Tagert had gone through Mr. Cassidy’s pockets in search of identification.

Had Tagert been here? He must have been one of the two people Taka Ji had seen. Chee checked for tracks. They were everywhere. Tracks of two people. Flat-heeled boots with pointed toes, about size ten, and something much smaller made by patterned rubber soles.

Where were their saddlebags? One had been strong enough to carry his saddle up. Surely he would have brought the bags. He looked for a place they might be hidden. The shelf behind him—the most logical place to toss them—was empty. He noticed a deep slot about shoulder high between two layers of rock. He peered into it—cautiously, because it was a perfect place for a snake to rest. Indeed, a snake was coiled back in the crack. It looked like a full-grown diamondback rattler. To the left of the snake, where the slot was a little deeper, Chee could see the tannish-gray color of old canvas. A saddlebag had been pushed back there out of sight. He could reach it, he thought, if he didn’t mind risking irritating the snake.

He looked around for an adequate stick

Coyote Waits and settled for a limb broken from an overhanging juniper.

“Hohzho, Hosteen Snake,” Chee said. “Peace. Live with beauty all around you.” He moved the stick into the slot. “Just take it easy. Don’t mean to trouble you.”

He could reach the saddlebag without getting his hand in range of the snake. But he couldn’t move it.

The snake tested the air with its tongue, didn’t like the human aroma it detected, and began readjusting its coil. The tip of its tail emerged. It rattled.

“Hohzho,” Chee said. He withdrew hand and stick and looked around, seeking something more suitable for extracting the saddlebags.

Then he noticed drag marks.

They were fresh. Something large and heavy had been pulled across the sandy space to his left and into the rocks.

Chee followed. He turned the corner.

William Odell Redd was standing there. He had an oversized revolver in his hand, pointing more or less at Chee’s knees. And there, at Redd’s feet, was the body of a small man, face up, as if Redd had dragged him by the shoulders.

“I wish you hadn’t come back here,” Redd said.

Chee thought, So do I. But he said: “What are you doing here?”

“I came after some things of mine,” Redd said. “I guessed you’d be coming. I was going to be gone before you got here.”

“I guess Jean Jacobs mentioned it to you,” Chee said.

“A great girl,” Redd said. “Really.”

“I thought so too.”

Redd was looking down at Tagert. “He treated her like dirt,” Redd said. “He treated everybody like dirt. The son-of-a-bitch.”

“Is that why you shot him?”

“No,” Redd said, still looking down at the professor. “Probably should have. Long ago.”

Chee was looking at the pistol. It looked about a hundred years old. It probably was. Probably it had come from the holster of Butch Cassidy, or whoever the bandit turned out to be. What mattered was whether it would still work. It looked ancient and dusty. But not rusty. It was cocked. The hammer had gone backward so it would probably come forward. Fast enough to detonate the cartridge? Maybe. Would the cartridge still be good after all these years? It seemed doubtful, but this arid climate preserved almost everything. Taka had heard a shot up here. This pistol? Shooting Professor Tagert? Chee found it difficult to think of anything but what Redd planned to do with the weapon. But he didn’t want to ask..

It was snowing now. Small dry flakes drifted in, hanging in the air, disappearing. Chee found his mind working in an odd way. It had deduced why Colonel Ji had been killed, which was not at this moment a high-priority question. He and Janet had talked about Ji in Redd’s house, about Ji being the owner of the car seen leaving this area after Nez’s death. Redd must have seen it that night, too. Must have presumed the murder of Tagert had been observed. Must have gone to Ship Rock and killed Ji as soon as he’d learned from them (or thought he had learned) the identity of the witness. And killed the wrong person. But there was no right person. Taka hadn’t seen the killing either.

Now, suddenly, Chee saw how this information might be useful. If he could be subtle enough. He said:

“Did you see the boy in here that night? The boy who was painting the rocks?”

“What boy?” Redd looked surprised.

“The Ship Rock High School boy,” Chee said. “He saw your car in here. Saw you with Hosteen Pinto and,” Chee glanced at the body, “with the professor. Climbing up here. The two of you, he said. Not Pinto. He said Pinto stayed behind and got drunk.”

Redd looked stricken. “It was the math teacher,” he said. “Not a boy.”

“We were wrong about that. It wasn’t the math teacher. It was a high school kid.”

“Ah, shit,” Redd said. “Ah, shit.” He leaned back against the rock. “So they’ll be after me, then. No matter what.”

“Best thing would be to turn yourself in,” Chee said.

Redd wasn’t listening. He was shaking his head. “Weird,” he said. “Weird. The way this all started.”

“How did it?”

“I was just going to squeeze a thousand bucks out of the old bastard. Just what he owed me for the overtime he was always working me and not paying me for.”

“By holding out part of the translation?” Chee asked. “You knew he wanted to find this place. These dead cowboys, or whoever.”

“Butch Cassidy,” Redd said, absently.

“Yeah. I left that part of the story out. The part that located this place. Then I told Tagert that since I know Navajo and can talk to people I’d be able to find it. He gave me a five-hundred-dollar advance.” Redd looked up at Chee, and laughed. “I found this ridge all right. That was easy enough with the details Pinto had in his story. But I couldn’t find this spot. The son-of-a-bitch wanted his money back. Then I got the idea of hiring Pinto. As a crystal gazer, you know. Sometimes that works, I heard, especially if the shaman knows something he’s not telling.”

“So Pinto found it for you?”

“We brought him here. He looked in his crystals. Put ‘em on the ground, used pollen, did some chanting and looked into them and told us where to climb up into here. He was very vague about it at first but Tagert poured the whiskey into him. Loosened him up.”

“So why did you kill Tagert? He wouldn’t give you the other five hundred bucks?”

Redd was staring at him. “You said the boy saw me shoot Tagert? That’s right?”

Chee nodded.

“You bastard,” Redd said. “No he didn’t.” He laughed. Relieved. Delighted.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I didn’t kill the son-of-a-bitch. I didn’t shoot Tagert. The boy couldn’t have seen that. I’ll bet he didn’t see a damned thing.”

“He saw you,” Chee said, but Redd wasn’t listening.

“I do believe this is going to work out after all,” Redd said, half to himself. He stepped over Tagert’s body, looked down at it.

“I’ll tell you why I should have shot him, though. Not for any five hundred dollars.” He poked Tagert’s shoulder with the toe of his boot. “For lots of money.”

The pistol was now pointed directly at Chee and Redd was looking at him over it.

“Do you know about the robbery? The one these two bandidos were running from?”

“A train robbery, I think. Up in Utah, wasn’t it?” Chee asked. But he was asking himself what Redd meant. That he hadn’t shot Tagert. If he hadn’t, who had?

“Right,” Redd said. “Not much money in it, and they lost most of that because the third man in the bunch was carrying it and he got shot. But the train was making stops at all the little post offices out here, stocking them up with stamps and stuff. There were just twenty or thirty silver dollars and some five-dollar gold pieces in the bag they had. But there were a dozen or so packages of stamps. You know what that means?”

Chee was remembering the stamp collector’s book he’d seen in Redd’s house.

“I’d guess it means a lot of money,” he said.

“A lot of money! Dozens of sheets of un-cancelled stamps. All kinds. I’m no stamp man but I looked some of them up. Five-cent William McKinleys worth like four hundred dollars for a block for four. Tencent Louisiana Purchase memorials worth eight hundred bucks for a block of four. Some of those one-centers worth over a hundred bucks apiece. I didn’t add it all up, but we’re talking about three or four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Lot of money,” Chee said, but he was thinking about whether the old pistol Redd was pointing at him would work, about how the hell to get out of here. And he must not have sounded properly impressed.

“It may not sound like much to you, with a regular job. But if you’re starving your way through graduate school, it sounds like a hell of a lot,” Redd said. “It sounds like an escape from never having a dime and doing slave labor for bastards like this one.”

“What was the problem, then? Did Tagert want to keep it all?”

Redd laughed. “He didn’t need money. He had it. He needed fame. And getting even with the other historians who don’t agree he’s God. No. He was going to leave it all here—just like I found it for him. Then he was going to call in the authorities. Most especially he was going to call in somebody important from the U.S. Post Office. He wanted official certification that this mailbag and all in it came off that Colorado and Southern train.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “I guess I see. He wanted a solid connection between these bodies here and that identification of Cassidy as the train robber. To make those other historians eat crow.”

“I think he’d found some sort of identification on the body. And he measured it. Can you believe that? Laid it out straight as he could and measured it. He said Cassidy was five foot nine inches and so was the mummy with the mustache. He said Cassidy had a scar under one eye. And two deep scars on the back of his head. He claimed he found those, too, but the thing’s so dried-up I couldn’t tell.”

“I say it would be safe to say he’s Cassidy without all that. How you going to prove it isn’t?”

“You don’t know historians,” Redd said. “And Tagert’s a single-minded bastard. I told him what it would do—if he called in the authorities. The Post Office would claim the mailbags, and the stamps. Face value of those stamps to them, maybe a hundred dollars, and we lose a fortune.”

“What did you want to do?”

“Split it,” Redd said. “Just split it. Fifty-fifty. That would be fair. After all, he never could have found it without me.”

Chee was thinking, How about thirds? How about Ashie Pinto sitting out there under his tree with his bottle? You wouldn’t have found anything without Pinto. But he said: “What did Tagert say?”

“He just sneered at me. Said I had made a deal for a thousand and I had five hundred coming out of that.”

“So you shot him?”

“I didn’t shoot him. I grabbed the mailbag and it turns out he had a pistol in his coat pocket. He pulled it out. Said he would shoot me if I didn’t leave things alone.” Chee watched Redd’s face register surprise at this manufactured memory. “You know, I think he would have done it too.”

Play along, Chee thought. Play along. “1 wouldn’t be surprised. What I’ve heard about him.”

Redd laughed. “No,” he said. “Talk about irony. Old Ashie shot him.”

Of course. And Nez, too. Lay the blame on old, drunk Ashie Pinto.

But Chee said: “Pinto. What’s ironic about that?”

After the first flurry, the snow had stopped. But now it began again, brushing Chee’s cheek with flakes and swirling them around the knees of Redd.

Redd had been thinking, not listening. Sorting things out in his mind. He motioned Chee with his pistol.

“Let me have your gun,” he said.

Chee shrugged. “No gun,” he said. “I’m off duty.”

“Don’t bull me,” Redd said. “You cops always carry guns.”

“No we don’t. I’m on convalescent leave.” He held up his left hand, displaying the wrappings. “Because of this.”

“You have a gun,” Redd said. “Lean up against that rock there. Use your good hand. I’ll see.”

“No gun,” Chee said. Which, unfortunately, was true. Chee’s pistol was where it always seemed to be when he wanted it—in the glove box of his truck.

Redd checked his pockets, his pant legs, the tops of his boots.

“Okay,” he said. “I noticed you looking at this old hogleg. If you’re thinking it won’t work, it will. I tried it.”

“What are you planning to do?” Chee asked. “You didn’t shoot anybody. So, why not turn yourself in?”

Redd had walked to the cleft in the basalt where he had hidden the saddlebag. He was pointing the pistol at Chee, reaching in, leaning against the stone, trying to give his fingers a grip on the canvas, eyes still on Chee, a sardonic grin on his face.

“Turn myself in for what?” he asked. He grunted as his fingers slipped off the canvas. “Damned thing’s jammed back in there,” he said. “I didn’t want somebody to happen in here and find it. Like whoever was watching.”

“Why didn’t you take it with you?” Chee asked. Every nerve was tense. When Redd pulled the bag out, that would be the time to make a run for it. He had ruled out jumping the man long ago. Redd outweighed him by forty pounds and had two good hands.

“Because that goddam cop car came rolling up. First it was Nez. And then you.” Redd pulled the arm out, empty-handed again. “I didn’t have time to decide what to do. I just wanted to get away from here.”

“Why burn him?” Chee’s voice was strained.

“That crazy bastard,” Redd said, and Chee presumed he meant Pinto—not Nez. He stared into the crevice, estimating distance. “I shouldn’t have pushed it in there so far,” he said, half to himself. “The cop was already dead. The fire—he was shooting

I don’t know what happened. Dealing with a drunk, I guess you could call it an accident. Everything that’s happened has been sort of accidental when you think about it.” He laughed. “Kismet,” he said. “Fate.”

“Fate,” Chee said. “Yeah. Blame it on old Coyote.”

“Like you and the girl coming out here the day I came back to pick up the mailbag. I figured the cops would find it and stake the place out. And when I finally decided that hadn’t happened and came out to get it, it was the same day you and that woman came out. So I thought I’d just leave it until after the trial. Get it when everything got cooled down and forgotten.”

While he talked, he was looking around for something to pry the saddlebag with. He looked at Chee’s stick and rejected it. “It had been here like almost a century. What’s another few months?”

“What did you mean, ironic that Pinto shot the professor?” Chee asked.

“Well, hell,” Redd said, and leaned into the cavity as far as he could reach. “I meant Tagert gave the old man the whiskey. Coaxed him. Had him smell it. Told him he’d brought a really sweet kind because he knew Pinto liked it sweet.” He laughed. “I think he put Nutrisweet in Scotch.” Redd raised his voice, mimicking Tagert. ” ‘Just taste it. You don’t have to get drunk. Just take a taste.’ Just to make him drunk so he’d tell us more than he wanted to. When we were driving over to pick Pinto up, Tagert told me he did that. He said: ‘The old devil always tries to leave stuff out when you hire him to tell you something, but he can’t handle whiskey. So when he starts getting coy, I get him started drinking and once he’s drunk he tells me—’” Suddenly Redd grunted. He was leaning into the cleft, straining to reach. “Ah,” he said. “Now I got it.”

Just then the rattlesnake struck.

Redd jerked away from the rocks, gripping the saddlebag by some sort of reflex action. The great gray snake dangled, writhing, from the side of his neck, its fangs hooked through the neck muscles just below Redd’s left ear. Redd screamed, a terrified, gargling sound. He dropped the bag, grabbed the diamondback by its flat, triangular head, pulled it loose, and threw it back among the basalt boulders.

Chee wasted perhaps two seconds watching this—first too startled to move and then thinking Redd would drop the pistol. He didn’t. Chee ran.

Moving fast over rough country comes naturally to young men raised in a culture in which skill at running is both respected and useful. Within a minute, Chee was sure enough that Redd couldn’t find him, so he stopped, looked back and listened. It was snowing hard now, the flakes no longer tiny or dry. They stuck to the black rocks for long seconds before warmth from the stone converted them to water.

Redd wasn’t following him. Chee hadn’t really expected him to. Redd didn’t seem to know much about snakes but he’d know a rattlesnake when he saw one. And he’d probably know the neck was a hell of a poor place to get bitten. The venom had only a few inches to move to reach the brain. Redd would be running for help.

Chee climbed, looking for a place from which he could see something. He found one, and he saw Redd almost immediately despite the blowing snow. He was out of the ridge formation, running down the grassy slope toward the arroyo, and then up the arroyo. Probably to his Bronco II, Chee thought. He was still carrying the saddlebag.

Chee climbed down, found the path, and found his way through the snow to his pickup truck.

The driver’s side window had been broken out.

Chee climbed in and tried the starter. Nothing happened. He pulled the hood release, climbed out, and found exactly what he had feared he’d find.

Redd had torn loose the wiring.

Chee stood beside the truck, creating a map of this landscape in his mind. Where would be the nearest telephone? Red Rock Trading Post. How far? Maybe fifteen miles, maybe twenty. If he walked all night he could be there about opening time tomorrow morning. Chapter 23

CHEE PUSHED THE up button of the elevator in the Albuquerque Federal Building a little after ten thirty. He looked like a man who had spent a sleepless night walking out in the snow, which he had. The minuscule amount of nighttime traffic that Navajo Route 33 normally carries had been cut to zero by the storm. A disappointing storm as it turned out, depositing less than two inches of snow across the arid Four Corners landscape, but enough to keep people at home. Chee had finally reached Red Rock Trading Post and got to a telephone a little after dawn. He’d called the station at Ship Rock and reported everything that had transpired. Then he called Mesa Airlines and reserved a seat on its nine A.M. flight. Finally he’d persuaded an early-rising Navajo rancher who’d stopped for gasoline to give him a ride to his trailer and from there to the airport. From the airport, he’d tried to call both Janet Pete and Hugh Dendahl, who was prosecuting this case for the U.S. attorney. Both of them had already left for the courthouse. He left messages for them both.

A U.S. marshal in a suit that had been big enough last year spotted Chee as he headed for the courtroom door.

“Where the hell you been?” he asked. “Dendahl has been looking for you.”

“He get my message?”

The marshal looked blank. “No message. He was making sure all his witnesses were ready.”

“He said he wouldn’t need me until this afternoon,” Chee said. “Maybe not then if they had trouble getting a jury.” Maybe not at all when he finds out about Redd, Chee was thinking. They’ll have to start over on this one.

“They got themselves a jury,” the marshal said. “Opening arguments this morning. He may need you right after lunch.”

“Well, I’m here,” Chee said.

The marshal was looking him over. No sign of approval.

“You live close?” he asked. “Maybe you could go home and clean up a little. Shave.”

“I live at Ship Rock,” Chee said. “Let me borrow your pen. And have you got a piece of paper?”

The marshal had a notebook in his coat pocket. Chee wrote hurriedly. Two almost identical notes to Janet Pete and Dendahl. He was thinking that as a witness they wouldn’t want him in the courtroom now. But what the hell. This trial wasn’t going to be held now anyway.

“Thanks,” he said, and handed the marshal his pen. “I have to get this note to Dendahl.”

The bailiff stopped him at the door.

Chee folded the notes, handed them to the bailiff. “This one goes to Dendahl,” he said. “This one to Janet Pete.”

Something was going on in the courtroom. The jury was being brought in. Janet, Dendahl, and another assistant district attorney who Chee didn’t know were huddled in front of Judge Downey. The judge looked irritated.

“What’s going on?” Chee asked.

“I don’t know,” the bailiff said. “I think the old man’s going to change his plea, or something. But he demanded that the jury be in here to hear it. He wants to make a statement.”

“Change his plea?” Chee said, incredulous. “You mean plead guilty?”

“I don’t know,” the bailiff said, giving Chee a “you dumb bastard” look. “She has him pleaded not guilty, so if he changes it, I guess that’s what you’d get.”

“Look,” Chee said. “Those notes are important, then. They have to get that information right away.”

The bailiff looked skeptical. “All right,” he said, and waddled down the aisle.

Chee moved inside, found a back-row seat, and watched.

Hosteen Ashie Pinto was sitting, too. Waiting. He noticed Chee, looked at him, nodded. The conference at the bench ended. Janet sat next to Pinto, whispering something to him. Pinto shook his head. Judge Downey tapped tentatively with her gavel, looking out of sorts with it all. The bailiff waited patiently for the proper opportunity to deliver his messages.

“The record will show the defendant wishes to change his plea,” Judge Downey said. “Let the record show the defendant, after consultation with counsel, requested that the jury be brought in. The record will show defendant wishes to make a statement to the court.”

Janet Pete motioned to Ashie Pinto. He stood, looked around him, wiped his hand across his lips.

“I am an old man, and ashamed,” Hosteen Pinto began. His voice was surprisingly strong. “I want everybody to know, all of you to know, how it was that I killed that policeman. And how it was—”

Pinto’s interpreter signaled him to stop. He stood, looking surprised and uncomfortable, and converted Pinto’s confession into English, and nodded to Pinto when he was finished and said: “Go on now.”

Chee sat stunned. Did the old man kill Nez? Not Redd? He’d presumed Redd was lying. He’d presumed—

“And how it was when I was a young man,” Pinto continued, “I killed a man in my father’s clan at a sing-dance out at Crooked Ridge. Every time it was the same thing. Every time it was whiskey.” There are several words in Navajo for whiskey in its various forms. Pinto used the one that translates to “water of darkness.” Then he stopped, stood, head slightly bowed, while the interpreter translated.

Chee was watching Janet Pete. She looked sad, but not surprised. Pinto must have finally confided in her. He had wanted to do this and she had arranged it. When?

Pinto was talking again, to a silent, intent audience.

“

When they came out of the rocks there, Mr. Redd and the man I would kill, that man had a pistol in his hand. He was pointing that pistol at Mr. Redd. Now that man with the pistol was the man who gave me the whiskey. He gave it to me some other times. Before, when I worked for him. He knew how it was for me. This whiskey. He knew that when I drank it I would do wrong things. I would tell him what I didn’t want to tell him. He knew it made my tongue loose and he knew that when it was in me it took over my mind. It made the wind that blows inside me blow as dark as night.”

The interpreter was tugging at Pinto’s sleeve.

“Going too fast,” he said, and Pinto stopped.

Pinto had gone too fast. The interpreter missed a little of it, cut some corners.

Pinto told them Redd was a good young man, that Redd had signaled him to get the man’s pistol, and when they were all three getting into his car to drive away, he had gotten it.

“So I shot him,” Pinto said. “By the car. Then I shot him again.”

The interpreter translated.

“Then Mr. Redd he carried the body of that man away. I think he didn’t want the police to find it. The man I shot is a very little man and Mr. Redd is big and he carried him back up into the rocks where nobody would find him. And I was waiting there by the car when the policeman came. He was talking to me about painting things. I didn’t know what he was talking about but he acted like he wanted to arrest me so I shot him, too.”

The interpreter translated but Chee didn’t wait to hear it. He still wondered why Pinto had set the car on fire. Maybe the old man would explain that, but he didn’t want to hear the answer. Not now. He hurried out the door and down the elevator.

He’d taken a taxi from the airport. This lack of wheels was an oddity he had little experience dealing with. He stopped in the main-floor coffee shop, ordered a cup, and thought about it. He had a headache, which was as unusual as the lack of transportation. Probably the product of lack of sleep last night. Or maybe lack of breakfast. He wasn’t really hungry but he ordered a hamburger.

Redd would be arrested by now, probably.

Or dead. If he hadn’t checked into a hospital fast to have that venom dealt with it had probably killed him. Chee considered that. That and the value of three or four hundred thousand dollar’s worth of old stamps. What would Redd have bought with it that he didn’t now have? A better car? A better house? Then he faced the fact that he was thinking of this because he didn’t want to think of the note he’d sent to Janet. To Dendahl, too, for that matter, but to hell with Dendahl.

“Ask for a recess,” he’d told them both. “I don’t think Pinto did it. Redd was there. He killed Colonel Ji. I think he killed Tagert and Nez. I think we can prove all of it.”

Wrong again. Redd had killed Colonel Ji because he thought Ji had seen too much. Ji would find the bodies, and the stamps.

Wrong about it all. Looking foolish. Feeling foolish.

He ate his hamburger slowly, thinking of Janet hugging him in the elevator. Was that before or after Pinto had told her? Something about his memory of the moment made him think it was after. That she already knew Pinto was guilty. But why, then, the hug? Quite a hug it was, with her pressing against him like that. The hug was about the only bright spot of this whole business. Then Janet came hurrying up. “I saw you in here,” she said, and sat beside him in the booth. “How much of that did you hear before you left?”

“Up to where he said he shot Delbert,” Chee said. “I left then. Did I miss anything?”

“You missed part of Mr. Pinto’s speech about whiskey. How it destroys everything it touches. He asked the jury to have all whiskey everywhere poured out on the ground. That’s what he was waiting for. Why he wouldn’t say anything before. He remembered the time he was tried before, and sent to prison. He thought that this would be the time to warn the world about whiskey.”

“Good as any, I guess,” Chee said. “Anyway, it’s just about what you’d expect from a nutty old Navajo shaman. The spoken word has great power, you know.” He sounded bitter.

She was grinning at him. “Don’t be sarcastic. It does have power. Did you notice the press was here? He wasn’t so nutty.”

The grin disappeared. “I got your note. I want to hear all about that. About Odell Redd.”

“All right,” Chee said. “You want something to eat?”

“Maybe some coffee.” She signaled the waitress. “How did you figure Redd out?”

“You mean about him shooting Delbert Nez? How did I get that wrong, too?”

She noticed his tone. She was serious now.

“You didn’t get it wrong. You arrested Ashie Pinto. Hurt as you were, you arrested him. It was me. I thought he didn’t do it.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Okay.”

“I was wrong about something else, too,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like about you,” she said. “You made me think for a while that all you cared about was proving you were right.”

“What do you mean?” Chee asked.

“Oh, forget it,” she said. And to his amazement Janet Pete hugged him again, even harder this time. Chapter 24

LEAPHORN HAD SPENT all morning in his office. By a little after ten, he’d leaned back in his chair and spent a long moment just enjoying the scene—his in-basket was empty, his out-basket full but neat, the surface of the desk bare. Wood visible. Nothing cluttering the blotter except a ballpoint pen.

He picked up the pen, dropped it in the top drawer, and looked at the desk again. Even better.

Then he worked through the Nez homicide again. He fished the Gallup Independent out of the wastebasket where it had landed in this paroxysm of housecleaning. He reread the story of Ashie Pinto’s confession and his indictment of alcohol. Leaphorn agreed with every word of it. Death in a bottle, Pinto had called it. Exactly. Death, sorrow, and misery. The story said Judge Downey had delayed his sentencing pending a medical and psychiatric examination of Pinto. The worst the law allowed under the circumstances would be life in prison. Downey would probably give him something less. But it wouldn’t matter, life or ten years. The story said he was “about eighty.”

Satisfaction from the clean desk waned. Leaphorn considered Officer Jim Chee. A screwup, but an interesting young man. Intelligent, the way he had made the connections to tie everything in. But he’d never make a good administrator. Never. Nor a team player, and law enforcement often required that. Maybe he would work better in criminal investigations. Like Leaphorn. He smiled at the thought. Where screwing up didn’t matter much if you had a creative thought now and then. He would talk to Captain Largo about it. Largo knew Chee better than he did.

He considered everything about the affair of Delbert Nez.

His mother would have said Coyote was waiting for Nez. Bad luck. For that matter for Redd as well. All he seemed to have wanted was some decent pay for his skills as a linguist. And he ended his game killing the wrong person for the wrong reason.

Anyway, Coyote ate Redd. They’d found the old Bronco in a ditch and got him to the hospital, another Dead on Arrival.

He turned to his map and pulled out the few pins this business had inspired. They hadn’t helped much this time.

Even a pin for Professor Bourebonette. The question of her motive. He smiled to himself, thinking of that. Emma had always accused him of being too cynical. She was right this time, as she often was. He had checked on Bourebonette. He’d called an old friend in the anthropology department at Arizona State. Did he know someone at Northern Arizona who would know Bourebonette, the mythologist in American Studies there? Could this person determine how she was coming on her new book? She could. The manuscript was off to the publishers. It should be out early next year. So much for that. He would get a copy. He’d like to read it.

They’d talked of mythology on their way back from Short Mountain Trading Post that night. She had talked a little, and slept a bit, and when she awoke she was full of conversation. She’d questioned him about his own knowledge of Navajo myth and where he had learned it. And then they had covered the nature of imagination. How the human intelligence works. The difference between mind and brain. It had been a pleasant ride. She had talked, too, of the time she’d spent in Cambodia and Thailand collecting animism myths and working with the shamans who select the exact place where the bones of one’s crucial ancestor must be kept to ensure good family fortune.

From his window, Leaphorn could see four cattle semitrailers in a convoy rolling to a stop at the tribal barns across Navajo Route 3. That would be rodeo livestock for the Tribal Fair. He made a face. The fair was an annual problem for every cop on the Reservation. Then, too, it meant winter was coming. This year he dreaded winter.

He would go to lunch. Alone. He picked up his cap, put it on. Took it off again. Picked up the telephone. Dialed information.

She answered the telephone on the second ring.

“Hello.”

“This is Joe Leaphorn,” he said. “How are you?”

“Very well,” she said. “Are you here in Flag?”

“Window Rock,” he said. “My office.”

“Oh? By the way, I found out you did some checking up on me. About my book.”

“I was skeptical about your motives,” Leaphorn said. “It’s one of my flaws. Cynicism. Emma used to fuss at me about it.”

“Well, I guess that’s reasonable. For a policeman.”

“Professor Bourebonette, I think I’m going to China,” Leaphorn said. “Would you like to go along?”

###########

TONY HlLLERMAN 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 Hall of the Dead. He is also the author of The Great Taos Bank Robbery. He lives with his wife, Marie, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.