Skeleton Man

SKELETON MAN

TONY

HILLERMAN

While the collision of airliners central to the plot of this book was real and triggered the creation of the Federal Aviation Administration and its flight safety rules, the story and all of its characters are purely fictional. However, several of these fictional folks use names borrowed from generous donors to a fund to assist children stricken with cancer.

The author acknowledges the help of fellow writers Scott Thybony, Michael Ghiglieri, and Brad Dimick—three men who know that great canyon as well as anyone alive—and ethnologist Tandra Love, biologist William Degenhardt, and naturalist Ann Zwinger, whose Down Canyon is an American classic. Marty Nelson’s research work, as usual, was a huge help.

Contents

1 Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, had been explaining…

2 As Leaphorn remembered it, the August day he’d been…

3 The text of the message on Joanna Craig’s answering machine…

4 Bradford Chandler suddenly swiveled in his beach chair…

5 Within minutes after getting home from his meeting with…

6 Almost everyone liked Bernadette Manuelito. Always…

7 Joanna Craig was determined not to let her impatience…

8 The thunderstorm that had been moving steadily toward…

9 The thunderstorm was gone from Gallup now, drifting…

10 Brad Chandler had pulled his rental Land Rover into the…

11 The plan, carefully drawn up by Sergeant Jim Chee, involved…

12 Joe Leaphorn was listening to the coffee perking and…

13 Joanna Craig had followed Tuve on his homeward trip.

14 Bradford Chandler had done all the things he needed to…

15 Joe Leaphorn found he had a way to get in touch with…

16 “Girl,” the woman said, “you shouldn’t be here. Here it is…

17 Joanna Craig sat on a shelf of some sort of smooth, pale…

18 Bradford Chandler had come to a series of conclusions.

19 Sergeant Jim Chee was standing on the rocky shelf overlooking…

20 Successful skip tracers develop through endless practice…

21 Bernie Manuelito was still not at the Salt Woman Shrine…

22 When she had first found her way into it, what seemed to…

23 “I wasn’t raising my voice,” Joanna Craig said, in something…

24 Bernie had reacted fast at the first sound of the voices.

25 “Put it down,” Joanna Craig said.

26 The flashlight blinded Bernie.

27 The first time he had been to the bottom of the Grand…

28 “I think it would be safe enough,” Bernie said. “The…

29 Captain Pinto returned to the table the Navajo Inn diner…

About the Author

Also by Tony Hillerman

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, had been explaining how the complicated happening below the Salt Woman Shrine illustrated his Navajo belief in universal connections. The cause leads to inevitable effect. The entire cosmos being an infinitely complicated machine all working together. His companions, taking their mid-morning coffee break at the Navajo Inn, didn’t interrupt him. But they didn’t seem impressed.

“I’ll admit the half-century gap between the day all those people were killed here and Billy Tuve trying to pawn that diamond for twenty dollars is a problem,” Leaphorn said. “But when you really think about it, trace it all back, you see how one thing kept leading to another. The chain’s there.”

Captain Pinto, who now occupied Joe Leaphorn’s preretirement office in the Navajo Tribal Police Headquarters, put down his cup. He signaled a refill to the waitress who was listening to this conversation, and waited a polite moment for Leaphorn to explain this if he wished. Leaphorn had nothing to add. He just nodded, sort of agreeing with himself.

“Come on, Joe,” Pinto said. “I know how that theory works and I buy it. Hard, hot wind blowing gets the birds tired of flying. One too many birds lands on a limb. Limb breaks off, falls into a stream, diverts water flow, undercuts the stream bank, causes a landslide, blocks the stream, floods the valley, changes the flora and that changes the fauna, and the folks who were living off of hunting the deer have to migrate. When you think back you could blame it all on that wind.”

Pinto stopped, got polite, attentive silence from his fellow coffee drinkers, and decided to add a footnote.

“However, you have to do a lot of complicated thinking to work in that Joanna Craig woman. Coming all the way out from New York just because a brain-damaged Hopi tries to pawn a valuable diamond for twenty bucks.”

Captain Largo, who had driven down from his Shiprock office to attend a conference on the drunk-driving problem, entered the discussion. “Trouble is, Joe, the time gap is just too big to make you a good case. You say it started when the young man with the camera on the United Airlines plane was sort of like the last bird on Pinto’s fictional tree limb, so to speak. He mentioned to the stewardess he’d like to get some shots down into the Grand Canyon when they were flying over it. Isn’t that the theory? The stewardess mentions that to the pilot, and so he does a little turn out of the cloud they’re flying through, and cuts right through the TWA airplane. That was June 30, 1956. All right. I’ll buy that much of it. Passenger asks a favor, pilot grants it. Boom. Everybody dead. End of incident. Then this spring, about five decades later, this Hopi fella, Billy Tuve, shows up in a Gallup pawnshop and tries to pawn a twenty-thousand-dollar diamond for twenty bucks. That touches off another series of events, sort of a whole different business. I say it’s not just another chapter, it’s like a whole new book. Hell, Tuve hadn’t even been born yet when that collision happened. Right? And neither had the Craig woman.”

“Right,” said Pinto. “You have a huge gap in that cause-and-effect chain, Joe. And we’re just guessing the kid with the camera asked the pilot to turn. Nobody knows why the pilot did that.”

Leaphorn sighed. “You’re thinking about the gap you see in one single connecting chain. I’m thinking of a bunch of different chains which all seem to get drawn together.”

Largo looked skeptical, shook his head, grinned at Leaphorn. “If you had one of your famous maps here, could you chart that out for us?”

“It would look like a spiderweb,” Pinto said.

Leaphorn ignored that. “Take Joanna Craig’s role in this. The fact she wasn’t born yet is part of the connection. The crash killed her daddy. From what Craig said, that caused her mama to become a bitter woman and that caused Craig to be bitter, too. Jim Chee told me she wasn’t really after those damned diamonds when she came to the canyon. She just wanted to find them so she could get revenge.”

That produced no comment.

“You see how that works,” Leaphorn said. “And that’s what drew that Bradford Chandler fellow into the case. The skip tracer. He may have been purely after money, but his job was blocking Craig from getting what she was after. That’s what sent him down into the canyon. And Cowboy Dashee was down there doing family duty. For Chee, the pull was friendship. And—” Leaphorn stopped, sentence unfinished.

Pinto chuckled. “Go on, Joe,” he said. “How about Bernie Manuelito? What pulled little Bernie into it?”

“It was fun for Bernie,” Leaphorn said. “Or love.”

“You know,” said Largo. “I can’t get over our little Bernie. I mean, how she managed to get herself out of that mess without getting killed. And another thing that’s hard to figure is how you managed to butt in. You’re supposed to be retired.”

“Pinto gets the blame for that,” Leaphorn said. “Telling me old Shorty McGinnis had died. See? That’s another of the chain I was talking about.”

“I was just doing you a favor, Joe,” Pinto said. “I knew you were getting bored with retirement. Just wanted to give you an excuse to try your hand at detecting again.”

“Saved your budget some travel money, too,” Leaphorn said, grinning. He was remembering that day, remembering how totally out-it-all he’d felt, how happy he’d been driving north in search of the McGinnis diamond—which he’d never thought had actually existed. Now he was thinking about how a disaster buried under a lifetime of dust had risen again and the divergent emotions it had stirred. Greed, obviously, and hatred, plus family duty, a debt owed to a friend. And perhaps, in Bernie Manuelito’s case, even love.

Captain Pinto pushed back his chair, got up.

“Stick around,” Leaphorn said. “I want to tell you how this all came out with Bernie and Jim Chee.”

“Going to get some doughnuts,” Pinto said. “I’ll be right back. I want to hear that.”

2

As Leaphorn remembered it, the August day he’d been pulled into the Skeleton Man affair had been a total downer moodwise. He’d never felt more absolutely retired in the years he’d been practicing it. The young man across the desk from him, Captain Samuel Pinto, had interrupted jotting something into a notebook when Leaphorn tapped at his door. He’d glanced up with that irritated look interruptions produce, gestured Leaphorn into a chair, put aside the notebook, fished through a stack of folders, pulled two out, and looked at them.

“Ah, yes,” said Captain Pinto, “here we are.”

Just a few minutes earlier Leaphorn had been hit with the day’s first reminder of how unimportant retirees become. At the reception desk below he’d stood, hat in hand, until the young woman in charge looked up from sorting something. He informed her that Captain Pinto was expecting him. She punched a number into the switchboard and glanced up.

“Do you have an appointment?”

Leaphorn had nodded.

She peered at her desk calendar, looked up again at the once-legendary lieutenant, and said, “And you are…?”

A knife-to-the-heart question when delivered in a building where one has worked most of one’s adult life, given orders, hired people, and become modestly famous for a mile or two in every direction.

“Joe Leaphorn,” Leaphorn said, and saw the name drew not a glimmer of recognition. “I used to work here,” he added, but the young lady was already back on the telephone. “Long time ago, I guess,” talking to himself.

“The captain said to send you up,” she said, and waved him toward the stairway.

Now, in the office marked Special Investigations, where Leaphorn used to keep his stuff and do his worrying, Captain Pinto motioned him to a chair.

“I hear Sergeant Chee is finally getting married,” Pinto said, without looking up from the paperwork. “What’da you think of that?”

“High time,” Leaphorn said. “She’s a good girl, Bernie. I think she’ll make Chee grow up.”

“So we hope,” Pinto said, and handed the two folders to Leaphorn. “Take a look at these, Joe. Tell me what you think. Top one’s the FBI file on that robbery-homicide down at Zuni. Bunch of jewelry taken and the store operator shot, remember that one? Few days later a Hopi, a fellow named Billy Tuve, tried to pawn an unset diamond at Gallup. He wanted twenty dollars. Manager saw it was worth thousands. He asked Tuve to stick around while he got an appraisal. Called the police. They took Tuve in. He said an old shaman down in the Grand Canyon gave it to him years ago. Didn’t know the shaman’s name. McKinley County Sheriff’s Office had that jewelry store robbery on its mind. They held him until they could do some checking. Some witnesses they rounded up had reported seeing a Hopi hanging around the jewelry store before the shooting. Then they got an identification on Tuve, found his fingerprints here and there in the store. So they booked him on suspicion.”

With all that rattled off, Pinto peered at Leaphorn, awaiting a question. None came. The sound of a Willie Nelson song drifted up from the first floor, a song of lamentation. A piñon jay flew past the window. Beyond the glass Leaphorn saw the landscape that had been his view of the world for half his life. Leaphorn sighed. It all sounded so comfortably familiar. He started reading through the newer folder. On the second page he ran into something that stirred his interest and probably explained why Pinto had wanted to see him. But Leaphorn asked no questions. He’d leave the first questions for Pinto. As a felony committed at Zuni, thus on a federal reservation, this was officially an FBI case. But at the moment it was Pinto’s job, doing the legwork, and Leaphorn’s old office was now Pinto’s office and Leaphorn was merely a summoned visitor.

He finished his study of the new folder, put it carefully on Pinto’s desk, and picked up the old one. It was dusty, bedraggled, and very fat.

Pinto waited about five minutes until Leaphorn looked up from his reading and nodded.

“Have you noticed where this Zuni homicide maybe crosses the path of an old burglary case of yours?” Pinto asked. “It’s a very cold case out at Short Mountain. You remember it?”

“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “But what brought that one out of the icebox?”

“Maybe it’s not actually out,” Pinto said. “We just wanted to ask you. See if you could think of any connection between this current case here”—Pinto tapped the new folder—“and this old burglary of yours.”

Leaphorn chuckled. “You’re thinking of Shorty McGinnis’s diamond?”

Pinto nodded.

Leaphorn smiled, shook his head, picked up the new file, and opened it. “I must have misread that. I thought the diamond the Hopi fella tried to pawn was valued at…” He turned to the second page. “Here it is: ‘Current market value of gem estimated at approximately twenty thousand dollars.’”

“That’s the figure the appraiser gave the FBI. Said it was three-point-eight carats. The fed jewelry man called it a ‘brilliant white with a memory of the sky in it’ and said it was ‘a special Ascher version of the Emerald Cut,’ whatever that means. It’s all in that report there.”

Leaphorn shook his head again, still grinning. “And mention is made in that new federal file of an expensive unset diamond taken in that old burglary of the Short Mountain Trading Post. I’ll bet the FBI man who wrote that is new out here. Can you imagine an expensive diamond at the Short Mountain Trading Post? Or McGinnis actually having one?”

“Well, no,” Pinto said. “It would be hard to imagine that. It would strain the mind.”

“Anyway, he didn’t mention any diamond among the stolen stuff when we investigated that burglary. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t believe him. I’m sure you noticed that this note that the diamond should be added to the loot was stuck in the report about a year late. That was after the insurance company complained to the FBI that our burglary report didn’t match McGinnis’s list of losses.”

Pinto was smiling, too. “Maybe he just forgot it. Didn’t remember it until he filed his insurance claim.”

“Have you asked McGinnis about this?”

“McGinnis is dead,” Pinto said. “Long time I think.”

Leaphorn sucked in a breath. “Shorty’s dead!” he said. “Be damned. I hadn’t heard that.”

He rubbed his hand across his forehead, trying to accept it. It was hard to believe that tough, wise, grouchy old man had been just another mortal. And now he had to be added to that growing list of those who had made Leaphorn’s past interesting—if not always fun—and left a special vacuum in his life when they died. He looked past Pinto out the window behind him, at the vast blue sky, the thunder-head forming over the Chuskas to the north, remembering sitting with McGinnis in his cluttered trading post, the old man in his rocking chair, sipping whiskey out of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola glass, passing along just as much gossip as he wanted Officer Joe Leaphorn to know and not a word more. Leaphorn looked down at his hands, remembering how McGinnis would hold his glass, tilting it back and forth as he rocked to keep the whiskey from splashing.

“You know,” Leaphorn said, and produced a wry chuckle, “I’d forgotten about that burglary.”

“I wish the FBI had forgotten it,” Pinto said. “Apparently the old man listed the diamond on his insurance claim at ten thousand dollars—which I guess would make it worth twice that these days. And the insurance company complained, objected, and the feds looked into it as maybe a fraud case way back then. And now somebody did a sort of diamond-diamond match in their computer files. It looked strange and they wanted us to check it out.”

“Now, doesn’t that sound easy? Did they say how to do it?”

“They want to know where that McGinnis diamond came from. Was it recovered? So forth. They seem to have a fairly good witness identification on the Hopi, prints in the store, all that stuff, but the only material evidence is that diamond he was trying to pawn. The theory of the crime seems to be the Hopi took it when he did the Zuni robbery. And it’s the only material evidence available so far. So they’d like to know if McGinnis got his diamond back, and did he have one of those jewelry certification forms describing its cut and weight and size and so forth.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“So we sent a man out from Tuba City to the store. He said the place had a ‘Closed’ sign on the door and looked deserted. Said he stopped at a place down the road and they’d heard the old man had a heart attack. Thought he’d been hauled off to Page. Never came back. Checked the hospital. He wasn’t there. No record of him. Maybe died in the ambulance or something. Probably his family came and took care of the funeral somewhere.”

Leaphorn let that pass without comment. Did Shorty have a family? He couldn’t quite imagine that. After a while, Pinto would get to the reason he’d asked Joe to drop in. No hurry. Pinto shuffled some papers, put them back into a folder, looked across the desk at Leaphorn.

“Joe,” he said, “did McGinnis tell you where he got that damned diamond? Anything about that?”

“Not a thing. If I had known he’d put it on his insurance claim, I would have asked him. I’d have said, ‘Mr. McGinnis, how did you come to have such a fancy diamond?’ and McGinnis would have said, ‘Officer Leaphorn, that’s none of your damned business.’”

Pinto waited for an expansion of that. Leaphorn let him wait. “No ideas, then?”

“Not a one. But now I have a question for you. None of my damned business either, but it seems to me our federal friends are unusually interested in this diamond. I’ll bet you noticed that, too, and you asked whichever special agent is dealing with this about it. What did he say?”

Captain Pinto smiled, and it turned into a laugh. “Ah, hell, Joe,” he said. “It was George Rice. He said it was just routine, and I said, ‘Come on now, Special Agent Rice, you can be honest with me,’ and he said, ‘Well, you know how it’s been since the politicians invented that Homeland Security Agency. They laid a fat new level of political patronage bureaucrats on top of everything we already had to deal with.’ Rice said he had a feeling maybe one of the campaign fund-raisers in Washington was doing somebody a favor. You know how it works. Called the regional jefe in Phoenix on the old buddy-buddy basis and told him somebody in the White House would be happy to hear anything we could find out about where this diamond came from. And I told Rice that sounds mysterious, and he said he had the impression it has something to do with a huge estate settlement lawsuit going on back there, and I said that’s mysterious, too, and he said it was also a mystery to him, and since it sounded like more Washington politics to him, he’d be happy to keep it that way.”

Leaphorn considered this a moment.

“Well,” he said, “that makes me sort of glad I’m retired. But why don’t you get somebody at work finding McGinnis’s family, or whoever claimed his body. They’d have his stuff, if anything was worth keeping. Maybe that would…” He stopped. Shook his head. “You know, I’m having trouble believing that old man has left us.”

“They say the good die young. But even men like Shorty have to go sometime.”

“How did it happen?”

“Just natural death. He was old as the mountains, wasn’t he?”

Leaphorn sat awhile, staring out the window. Shook his head. “Hard to believe old Shorty just died naturally,” he said. “Wasn’t shot or something.”

“Well, we never heard anything to the contrary,” Pinto said.

Leaphorn got up, recovered his hat.

“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful,” he said. “And if I happen to learn anything about the McGinnis diamond, I’ll let you know. But I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

Which, of course, proved to be wrong.

3

The text of the message on Joanna Craig’s answering machine didn’t seem very important. But the tone of her lawyer’s voice told her it was.

“Miss Craig,” he had said. “This is Hal Simmons. Our investigators have notified me of something that I should discuss with you. I’ll be in my office all afternoon. Please call me when you have time.”

She had hardly spoken to Simmons since they’d completed the legal work after her mother’s funeral. Now she found his law firm’s number in the telephone book, got a busy signal, then called the apartment house doorman and asked him to get her a taxi.

The receptionist at the Simmons law office remembered her from the days when she was there a lot, trying to tie up all those loose ends that death leaves behind even well-organized people. And Joanna Craig’s mother was not organized at all. She was erratic, forgetful of things that had happened yesterday, remembering things that had never happened. “Senile dementia,” her psychiatrist had called it. Joanna had protested that her mother was too young for senility, and he had said, “Your mother’s been through a lot of stress. And her mind has always been—Well, better to say your mother has always had a mind of her own.”

However you phrased it, Joanna knew what caused it. It was the death of John Clarke, Joanna’s father, and the cruel treatment her mother had received from Clarke’s family. Her mother had rarely talked to her about it, and never without crying. But Joanna knew of the injustice. The way her mother had been treated must have been as painful as the loss of her lover. It certainly hurt her daughter.

It wasn’t the money, Joanna told herself. She didn’t need it. She was getting along fine without it, just as her mother had managed to. It was the cruelty of it. The contempt. That had been a wound that would never heal unless she could finally give her mother justice. And revenge. Maybe what Simmons would tell her would mean that would finally be possible.

He rose from the high-backed chair behind his battered old desk, smiling at her. A big, broad-shouldered man who her mother had told her she could always trust. And she did.

“Miss Craig,” he said. “Have a seat. Get comfortable. Explaining this will take a while. I don’t want you to expect too much out of what I’m going to tell. But at least it seems to me to represent a chance.”

Joanna felt suddenly weak.

“A chance?”

“One of those diamonds seems to have turned up.”

She sat down. Closed her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Simmons buzzed his secretary, ordered a glass of water.

“Just the diamonds?” Joanna said, in a voice almost too faint to be heard.

Simmons peered at her. Took the water glass from his secretary and presented it to Joanna, who was looking out the window at the busy streets, at the gray, overcast sky, at the traffic rolling below.

“Remember how your father carried those diamonds, padlocked to his wrist in that special carrying case your mother told you about? It seems to me that finding them…” Simmons paused, looking for a way to put this. “Well, that may finally give us a chance to find his bones. And we’ve heard a little more about that, too. Just a collection of rumors, perhaps. But…”

“Yes,” Joanna said. She sat up and straightened her blouse collar. “Tell me everything you’ve heard. Tell me what you think we should do next.”

Simmons tilted back in his chair, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, replaced the spectacles, and studied her thoughtfully.

“As friend of your mother, or as lawyer?”

Joanna considered that.

“As lawyer,” she said. “Not that you haven’t been a good friend.”

Simmons sighed. “As friend, I would remind you that you are getting along very well. Good job, and I think the funds your mother left you were always well invested. So you could buy diamonds if you want them and you don’t need to make yourself a multi-multimillionaire and start dealing with all the troubles that brings with it. Right?”

“Well, yes,” Joanna said. “But that’s not the point. It never has been the point.”

“I know,” Simmons said. “Your mother suffered a lot. And you’d like to see old Plymale pay for that. So would I. But Joann—”

Joanna Craig raised her hand, cut him off. “I’d like to see justice done. I’d like to see him burn in hell.”

Simmons considered that a moment, leaned forward.

“Then I’ll tell you that if you can find those bones—find anything from which your father’s DNA can be extracted—I think we can get your estate claim back into court. With that, and with the evidence in those letters your mother left you, we can establish legally that you are a direct descendant of John Clarke, and thus a direct descendant of Clarke’s father. Thereby you can reclaim the Clarke family estate. Thereby you can make Plymale suffer and, from what I’ve heard of how he has looted that foundation, make him do some burning in bankruptcy court, and probably criminal court as well.”

Joanna Craig smiled. “I guess it doesn’t sound very Christian. But I’d like that. In fact, I’d enjoy it immensely.”

Simmons considered that a moment, shrugged.

“The only way I know of to locate those bones is to find the person who found that container of diamonds. We know it was locked to your father’s arm. Trace it back. For the first time that looks faintly possible. And knowing old Plymale, I must warn you that he will be well aware of that possibility. Probably losing sleep thinking about it. Planning what he can do to keep that from happening.”

Joanna Craig was still smiling.

“So you are saying go find them?”

“As your lawyer, yes. We’ll renew our contract with that investigations agency. I’ll keep you informed and advised.”

“How about as a friend?”

Hal Simmons shook his head.

“Joanna, as a friend of your mother, as your friend now, I’d say just go home and forget all this. Try to be happy. Even with this diamond showing up, the odds are very slim his body can be found after all these years. And hunting something Plymale doesn’t want you to find is sort of like hunting a crocodile in the crocodile’s own river.”

“Just tell me how to go about it. How to start.”

Simmons sighed. “Well, you’ll find the man who had the diamond in New Mexico. In the McKinley County jail in Gallup waiting to be indicted for murder. That’s where you’ll start.”

4

Bradford Chandler suddenly swiveled in his beach chair to keep the sea breeze out of his ear. The old bastard had finally said something interesting. Something about diamonds?

Chandler had let his mind wander away from this rambling conversation, just enjoying the feel of the sand blown against the bottom of his bare feet by the Caribbean wind, and the sensation of the sun on his legs, and the sight of the nicely tanned and very shapely girl strolling along the surf line clad in a string bikini and not much else. Thinking of her as prey. Thinking of himself as predator. Enjoying, too, just being here on this very private beach, and his memory of the polished limo pulling up beside the old bastard’s private jet with the big black driver holding the door open for him. Savoring the feel of luxury. Knowing that was the way fate intended it to be for Bradford Chandler. And that was the way it wasn’t. Not yet.

“Diamonds?” Chandler said. “You don’t expect diamonds in that part of the world. Where did they come from?”

“Mr. Chandler.” The old man’s tone was impatient now. “You haven’t been paying attention. My interest is in one diamond. If I knew where it came from, you wouldn’t be sitting in the shade here ogling one of my women.”

The old man was Dan Plymale, sitting in a recliner chair and sharing the shade of a huge beach umbrella just to Brad Chandler’s left, taking off his sunglasses now and staring at Chandler, his broad, tanned face stern, his hair and his eyebrows dead white, his eyes a pale and icy blue. Reminding Chandler of his deceased father. Bradford Churchill Chandler Sr. Plymale was another of their kind of people. Part of the Anglo-Saxon, Nordic ruling class. Or “we predator people,” as his dad would have proudly put it.

Chandler Senior had been deceased nine years now. But, alas, not deceased soon enough. He’d found time to change his will and cut Chandler out of it before he died.

“I just told you I need to know where that diamond came from,” Plymale was saying. “I’m ready to talk business now. Are you ready to listen?”

Chandler could not remember anyone ever speaking to him in that tone. He’d overheard it in a hundred luxury hotel lobbies, in the first-class sections of aircraft, and had used it himself sometimes, understanding it reflected the low regard of the luxury class for those below them. But he had never heard it directed at him.

“I was listening,” he said. “But you already told me you know where that particular diamond is. It’s being held as evidence by the cops in some dinky town in New Mexico. Right?”

“Wrong,” Plymale said. “I wasn’t asking where it is. I want to know where it came from.” Plymale sighed, took a sip from whatever he was drinking. Something iced. Slightly green. Certainly too expensive to be Chandler’s normal beverage these days. He loved the taste of such luxury on his tongue.

Plymale moved his bony old man’s hand over to a buzzer button on the table between them. Pressed it.

“Bring me another one, and one of whatever my guest is drinking.”

Then he leaned back, slipped a folder out of the briefcase on the table, and began leafing through its contents, glancing over at Chandler now and then, sometimes frowning. The drinks arrived on a tray carried by a pretty young woman. No “thank you” came from Plymale, Chandler noticed. He didn’t even waste a receptive nod. The very model of Brad Chandler Sr.

“Time for business now. Time to tell you what you need to know. But first we’ll give a few minutes to this résumé of yours.”

“Résumé?” Chandler said. “I didn’t send you—”

“Of course not,” Plymale said, looking at Brad quizzically. “That’s not the way anyone intelligent collects a résumé. You get it from people who know the subject. People you can trust.”

“Oh,” said Chandler.

“Like this,” Plymale said. “Right here it says—Well, I won’t read that. About you getting arrested at a ski resort in Switzerland. Drunk, disorderly, and physical assault on a security type.” He looked up from the page, eyebrows raised. “Would you have put that in?”

“No.”

“It says, ‘Chandler bought out of that.’ That right?”

“Right.”

“Which Chandler? Is that you or your daddy?”

“Well, I handled it,” Chandler said.

“How much did it cost?”

“Let’s see. I think it was ten thousand Swiss francs to the guy I hit. And then something to the guy who arranged the payoff.”

“Your daddy’s money?”

“Sure,” Chandler said. He was beginning to resent this.

Plymale switched to another page.

“Bennington,” Plymale said. “Three years there. Looks like you made good connections.” He read some more. “Looks like some really good connections.” He chuckled. “But not good grades. Not wasting your time on the books. The smart boys know why Dad’s getting them into those exclusive ruling-class places. Gets ’em connected with the important money. If they like to read books, they can read lots of books later.”

“Yeah,” Chandler said. Cool now. Smiling at Plymale.

“Didn’t work out too well for you, though, did it?”

“Who knows,” Chandler said. “It may.”

Plymale was on another page now.

“Skippers Incorporated,” he said. “Why call it that?”

“They’re our business. Hunting down the bail bond skippers, the white-collar thieves. Losers like that. Finding them. Bringing ’em in. Collecting the reward. The bounty.”

Plymale indicated what he’d been reading with his finger. “This how you made the connection with Skippers? This affair here where the judge in Portland set your bond at a hundred thousand on that criminal assault charge? Did you skip out on that? It’s not clear about that.”

“I didn’t skip,” Chandler said, suddenly nervous and noticing it must have sounded in his voice. He canceled it with a laugh. It was clear enough now, as he’d always suspected, that Plymale hadn’t picked him for his good citizenship. He’d been hoping that whoever Plymale had hired to put together this probe into his life wouldn’t look too closely into that Portland incident. There was a homicide detective there who had been very interested in that affair. Sort of obsessive, in fact. Kept probing into it. Chandler shook his head. Forget that. But Plymale was staring at him, awaiting an explanation.

“I paid my ten-thousand fee for the bail bond,” he said. “I showed up for trial on time. I got the charges dismissed for lack of evidence. Skippers kept my ten-grand fee and didn’t get their bond forfeited. All concerned happy.”

Plymale was frowning. “Lack of evidence? It says here the victim suffered broken jaw, broken arm, broken ribs, multiple abrasions. That sounds like a lot of evidence.”

“He didn’t show up in court.”

“Why not?”

Chandler shrugged, glanced at Plymale.

The old man was waiting, wanting an answer.

“I heard his health failed him,” Chandler said.

He waited for the next question, staring out at the surf, dealing with the tension. Plymale probably already knew why the bastard hadn’t shown up in court. Already knew Chandler was suspected of making sure he couldn’t. Making sure the body would never be found. Plymale would ask him, just to see what he’d say. He had an answer ready, but that question didn’t come.

“That’s when you went to work for Skippers?”

“That’s correct,” Chandler said, relaxing a little.

“They seem to like the way you go about your job.”

“They should. I’m good at it.”

“Unusual career, isn’t it? I mean for a prep-school boy—Exeter, wasn’t it? Who went on to Bennington. Aren’t you supposed to get yourself a bride out of the debutante class, a Wall Street job, put on somebody’s board of directors? Something that wouldn’t involve you in assault charges?”

Chandler produced a yawn, covered it, said, “I guess so.” Sounding slightly bored. Feeling the tension easing.

“You like this work?”

“Yep,” Chandler said. “Not many dull moments finding these bond skippers. It gives you a chance to exercise your wits. Most of them don’t want to be found.”

“I noticed that,” Plymale said. “I noticed two cases in here involving some shooting.”

“Yeah,” Chandler said, confident now that this must have been what made him attractive to Plymale. “They shoot and miss, and you shoot and hit,” he said. “Otherwise the system isn’t efficient.”

He glanced at Plymale and found him staring back at him.

“And, both times, the police cleared you.”

“Of course,” Chandler said. “That’s the way it works. You get yourself deputized where you can. Anyway, you’re working as a law enforcer, and it’s self-defense, and the cops know you just saved them a lot of work and the cost of the trial by shooting the guy. You’re doing their job for them. Working off one of their undelivered warrants.”

“Well,” Plymale said, and put the résumé back into its folder and the folder back into the briefcase. “Time now to tell you what you’d be dealing with here. But first let’s enjoy the beach a little. Trot on out there in the surf a ways. Take a few minutes to take a swim and cool off.”

Chandler got up, grinning at Plymale. “You’d like me to trot out deep enough to get these swimming trunks soaked, just in case I have one of those high-tech recorder devices wired under them.”

Plymale smiled. “Good to be cool, too,” he said.

And it was good, Chandler noticed a little later as he sat in his wet trunks listening to Plymale’s explanation of the situation. Plymale’s law firm, he said, was representing a foundation that was the heir of the Clarke estate. Unfortunately, Clarke had provided in his will that if his sole offspring survived him, or produced any direct descendants who survived, then he, or they, would inherit instead of the foundation.

“No widow?”

“She was long dead,” Plymale said. “And as it happened, this ‘sole offspring’ was John Clarke. When his daddy heard John was missing in that plane crash, he had a stroke. Died while they were hunting for survivors. No known Clarke offsprings, so our foundation inherited a hell of a lot of wealth. Actually billions, counting real estate and securities.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Chandler said.

“It was. But it didn’t stay simple. A woman turns up, files a civil suit claiming she is the common-law wife of the old man’s son, and she’s pregnant, and her baby is going to be Clarke’s direct descendant. Claims this baby will be old Clarke’s grandchild. She wants the fortune for her kid. You with me so far?”

“I think so,” Chandler said. “But I don’t think I’d want to be her lawyer. And how does this diamond you mentioned come into it?”

Plymale sipped his drink. “If you want to hear this, be patient. Otherwise I call my driver and give you a ride back to my plane. What’s your choice?”

“Sorry,” Chandler said.

“This woman had a bundle of love letters from Old Man Clarke’s kid. The handwriting matched John Clarke’s, according to the experts. All are addressed to the claimant. They express joy at their impending marriage, and make some undisguised reference to their previous sexual encounters. In the last of those letters, he says he’ll be flying home from Los Angeles the next day and he’s bringing her a wonderful diamond engagement ring, and they’ll have a fancy wedding. Get married before the kid arrives.”

Plymale took another sip.

Chandler raised his eyebrows.

“He knew he had a kid coming, it seems,” Plymale said. “He was going to make it legitimate. Luckily for our Plymale law firm, he just waited too long. Then he got on the wrong airplane.”

“So they didn’t make the fornication legal, did they? Or you wouldn’t need me to find that wonderful diamond. Am I right?”

“Partly right. John Clarke got on Trans World Airlines Flight 2 at Los Angeles International Airport. Flight 2 took off at nine A.M. en route to Kansas City, then on to New York. The potential bride claims that she waited for him at the airport. Waited and waited and waited, with a roomful of other nervous people. Finally, the TWA folks announced the plane was missing. Advised them to leave a telephone number at the desk and go home and wait in comfort. Promised to call when the plane was located.”

“Let’s see,” Chandler said. “Was that about when hijacking airplanes was very popular? Did the plane turn up in Cuba?”

“The crash was in June 1956. Way too early for Castro and all that.”

“Oh.”

“It was a Lockheed Super Constellation. You old enough to remember them? Four prop engines and a tail with three rudders sticking up. A day later they spotted that funny-looking tail in Arizona, down in the Grand Canyon, and what was left of the cabin upstream a quarter mile or so. And the rest of it scattered here and there up and down the cliffs.”

“So you’re telling me Clarke was killed then, I guess, but the diamond not found on his body? Is that it? What happened to the Constellation? Struck by lightning or what?”

“Struck by a United Airlines Douglas DC7. That one had left Los Angeles about five minutes earlier, both of them flying at about twenty-one thousand feet, both headed to the East Coast. Storms all around. Nobody knows how it happened, but the investigators guess one of the pilots, maybe both of them, swerved to give the passengers a better look at the canyon. Anyway, a hundred twenty-eight people were killed. Everybody aboard the planes. Worst airline disaster in history up to that time. Bodies scattered up and down the cliffs, all torn up, some of them burned. The planes weren’t located until the next day. Then they couldn’t get the old-fashioned copters they had then into the canyon due to the canyon winds. Some medics were parachuted down, I’m told, and then they got some mountain climbers to help.”

Plymale stopped, peered at Chandler. “You never heard about this?”

“It was old news before I was born.”

“Well, back then it was the biggest story of the year.” Plymale chuckled. “Quite a show. Not many people flew those days. Took trains. And flying was expensive. One of the planes was mostly hauling serious big shots. A vice president of General Motors, for example, an ex-ambassador, CEO of another Fortune Five Hundred corporation, top level of the social class. Not just the tourist-ticket trash you see now. Very important families involved. One of them even hired some Swiss mountain climbers and had them flown over to see if his daughter’s body could be found. A week later they were still hunting pieces of the planes and trying to match body chunks. Hauled them out in bags, in bits and pieces.”

Plymale sipped. Chandler waited. Now the old bastard would finally get to the diamond. Probably he wasn’t going to ask any more about that homicidal mistake Chandler had made in Portland. Probably it was forgotten now. Even by that homicide detective. A cold, cold case. He sipped his drink. Enjoyed the breeze. Someday he’d be able to afford this lifestyle without putting up with this arrogant treatment.

“Luggage raining down, too,” Plymale said. “Suitcases, handbags, those little pet-carrier cages. They found one with a bulldog in it. One with a parrot. Scattering down like a sort of weird hailstorm.”

Plymale laughed, enjoying this. “Imagine that. I’d like to have seen it.”

“Clarke, too?”

“What?”

“Did John Clarke fall, too?”

“Now, that’s a dumb question,” Plymale said. “Everybody fell. Pilots, copilots, stewardesses, men, women, children, at least two babies. Some still in the planes, some doing a free fall.”

“Did he have the diamond he was bringing for his bride?”

“Probably. He said he was bringing it. He was on the plane when it left LAX. No way to get off.” He rattled what was left of the ice in his drink, looked at the glass, shook his head.

The old bastard is teasing me, Chandler thought. To hell with him. To hell with this.

“Look,” Chandler said. “I want to know about this job you brought me down here to tell me about. I guess you want me to find something. Maybe John Clarke is still alive. Maybe he didn’t get on that plane. Maybe you want me to find what’s left of his body if he was on it. Or am I looking for that remarkable diamond he was bringing his lady?”

“You’re not very good at guessing,” Plymale said. “Nor sitting still and listening.”

“Nor playing games, either,” Chandler said. “What do you want me to do? And what do I get out of it?”

“I want you to find John Clarke’s left arm,” Plymale said, and laughed. “How about that? And if you don’t find it, I want you to make damn sure nobody else finds it.”

Chandler considered this. He glanced at Plymale, who was grinning at him. He finished his drink, put on his sandals, pushed himself out of the chair, and looked down at Plymale.

Plymale’s grin went away. “If you walk off now, you’ll have been wasting my time and my money,” the old man said. “I’ll have to find somebody else to do this. You’ll be back doing your nickel-and-dime skip-tracing jobs. Chasing after the bond jumpers. And you’ll be wondering what you missed.”

“Okay,” Chandler said. “Then tell me.”

“Clarke’s left arm seems to have been torn off. The wing of one of those planes cut through the passenger section of the other one. Maybe that did it. Or maybe when he was thrown out of the plane in the collision. Maybe when his body tumbled down a cliff.” Plymale shrugged. “Doesn’t matter how. What matters is that it was his left arm, because Clarke had one of those security cases attached to his left wrist. Handcuffed, sort of. Like the devices State Department couriers used to carry secret stuff. Jewelry dealers and some big-currency brokers used to use ’em, too. Lock them on, lock the case, nobody would have the second key but the person who was getting the delivery.”

“Sure,” Chandler said.

“Anyway, sometime after the disaster, a fellow working at the canyon bottom saw part of the arm—hand, wrist, forearm, pretty much all of it, I think it was. It was sticking out of a pile of driftwood and trash at one of those Colorado River waterfalls. He saw the forearm with the handcuff on it and the box attached to a chain. He even saw a tattoo on the bicep. Claimed he did, anyway. But he couldn’t get to it. Went back to the place the next day with some help, but the river had risen and swept away the flotsam. And the arm with it, or so we presume. Who knows? Could be somebody else came along and fished it out.”

“And got the diamond case?”

Plymale shook his head. “Maybe. Anyway, that’s the end of that phase of the story.”

“Why the security case?” Chandler asked. “He could have carried that diamond ring for his bride in his pocket.”

“Clarke was managing part of his old man’s jewelry business. He’d gone to the coast to bring back a shipment of ‘special-cut’ diamonds for the rich end of his trade. They were the very best, blue-white, perfect gems, specially cut for the cream of the elite. I think there was seventy-something of them listed in the claim, all at least two and a half carats. The airline insurance company paid its hundred-thousand maximum limit for the loss. People in the business guess they’d have been worth a hundred times that, even at prices then. Today, who knows. Smallest one would probably sell for more than twenty thousand. Say double that for an average, and then multiply it by about seventy-five. Many multiple millions.”

Chandler was no longer bored. Or tired.

“And they were never recovered?”

“Not legally, anyway. Not reported and returned to owner. That’s the problem,” Plymale said. “Maybe they have been. Maybe we’re trying to find who has them now.”

That didn’t make sense to Chandler. This old man was not going to be somebody he could trust, he thought. Ironic, he thought. Neither was he.

“It seems to me if somebody had found them, they’d have been cashed in by now,” Chandler said. “Don’t you think?”

“If they had been put on the market, we’d know about it. The Clarke family and the insurance company had the alert out to jewelry dealers. Here and in Europe and everywhere else. The DeBeers monopoly keeps an eye out, too, and those stones were rare enough at their price and that special cut so they’d have been noticed. And they haven’t been,” Plymale said.

He checked his empty glass, put it down, looked at Chandler. “Not until this one showed up in that robbery in New Mexico.”

“Oh? You going to tell me about that? Now we’re getting to the bottom line.” Chandler had been imagining finding that jewel container. Leather maybe, or some tough plastic. Zipper would be locked. He’d cut it open. Pour them out into his palm. One by one. Examine them. Estimate their worth.

“Arm hasn’t been found, either,” Plymale said.

Chandler laughed. “Who cares about that damned arm?”

“I do. A lot. And I think you will, too, if you want this job,” Plymale said. He studied Chandler, waiting for Chandler to ask him why.

“Why?”

“Those diamonds are just a chance to make some walking-around money on the side,” Plymale said. “Just peanuts. But the arm is what’s important.”

Chandler’s expression was puzzled. No need to fake it.

“This woman Clarke was coming home to marry, her daughter is into that psychic stuff. Or claims she is. Crystal gazing, pyramid power, all that flaky stuff. At least that’s what we hear. Her name’s Joanna Craig. Lives in New York. She’s been running some little ads out in Grand Canyon country, spreading the word among National Park guides, tour directors, so forth, that there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for that arm.”

“Well, now,” Chandler said. “Do you know why?”

“We are told that she claims she has received a psychic message from young Clarke from beyond the grave. In this dream she claims this Clarke ghost tells her his missing arm is hurting him. He tells her she’s his daughter and she must find that arm of his and get it buried with the rest of him.”

Chandler noticed he was smiling.

“That’s her story,” Plymale said. “Trouble is most of those bodies were so torn up that they couldn’t be collected and put back together. Some burned to ashes, some eaten by the coyotes before they were found, a lot of the bits and pieces buried together in common graves. How would you like to go into court with that sort of evidence?”

Chandler grinned. “So we dig us up another set of left-arm bones and collect the reward. But I bet you already thought of that.”

“Of course,” Plymale said. “You’re not as slow as you’ve been acting. Of course, it wouldn’t work. According to the ad she ran, he had a fracture of that forearm set a few years earlier. X-rays and so forth. Had to be pinned together. You couldn’t get away with it.”

“Oh, well,” Chandler said, thinking of the diamonds again. “Just tell me what you’re after. And what you want me to do. And what’s in it for Bradford Chandler.”

“Were you paying attention when I mentioned that civil law suit? Well, pay attention now. This gets complicated. Old Man Clarke was a widower. No near kin except his son, John. In the suit Joanna’s mother filed way back then, she claimed this Joanna was the baby John Clarke got her pregnant with. That makes Joanna Craig a granddaughter of John Clarke’s daddy. That makes her the ‘direct descendant’ who inherits the family fortune.”

Chandler looked at Plymale, said, “Light begins to dawn. Need I ask who has all that Clarke fortune now?”

“The way the will was written, if there weren’t any of those direct descendants, then the money went to this nonprofit charity foundation we helped him set up. I think I explained that.”

“Ah,” Chandler said. “And you were the executor of his estate?”

Plymale ignored the question. “Joanna Craig’s mother-to-be got herself a lawyer, but the only evidence she had was a bundle of old letters. It was too weak to back up a court claim. We tried to make a settlement with her. She turned that down and that looked like the end of it.”

“She sounds crazy,” Chandler said.

“She was crazy. Old Man Clarke said she was schizophrenic-paranoid. Seemed sane enough when she was taking whatever medicine the shrinks give ’em for that. But crazy, anyway.”

Plymale paused, signaled for another drink. Waited. Chandler looked out across the beach at the surf coming in, at the girl in the string bikini, who was coming back now, accompanied by another bikini-clad girl. They were looking his way, laughing.

The drink arrived. Plymale took a sip. Poked Chandler’s arm. “Pay attention now,” he said. “Here’s why we give a damn about finding that arm. Those damned scientists now claim they can recover DNA evidence from old bones. Even awful old bones, like in the Egyptian pyramids. You know what that means?”

Chandler nodded, but Plymale told him anyway. It meant that John Clarke’s lost left-arm bones with the old fracture x-rays and maybe even with the diamond case still handcuffed to the wrist could prove that Joanna Craig actually was the man’s daughter.

And, Chandler was thinking, that would mean that old man Plymale would lose control of a huge amount of money. Maybe there would be an outcome even worse than that for Plymale. The court might order Plymale to account for what his “nonprofit charity” had been doing with that mountain of money all the years he had controlled it.

Chandler was staring at the two girls in the bikinis, but his mind was focused on that mountain of wealth.

5

Within minutes after getting home from his meeting with Pinto, Leaphorn knew this worrying about diamonds wouldn’t just go away. The light on his answering machine was blinking and the second call was from Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee. With a diamond on his mind.

The first one was from Professor Louisa Bourbonette, sounding happy. The old woman she’d gone to see at Bitter Springs had been a treasury of Havasupai legendary stuff. Tomorrow the old lady would take Louisa to see an even more elderly uncle who was full of lore about the Paiute people.

“I’m going to stay down here tonight. Tomorrow I’ll find this fellow and see what I can get on tape. I’ll call you again tomorrow and let you know when to expect me. I think it’s going to link the Havasupai origin story with the Hopi’s. Wish you were down here with me. You’d be interested in these legends. And don’t forget tomorrow is garbage pickup day on your street.”

Joe hadn’t forgotten. He’d already wheeled the can out to the curb for the Window Rock Trash Co. truck.

The second call was the sort that retired people learn to expect.

“Lieutenant,” Dashee said, “two of your former hired hands have set themselves a getting-married date. It’s going to be two weeks from Monday, at Bernie Manuelito’s mother’s place, south of Shiprock. You’re invited. I get to be best man. In case you haven’t guessed, Bernie’s chosen one is finally, at long last, Jim Chee.”

Then came Cowboy Dashee’s chuckle, followed by a short pause, and then it was time for what retired people know follows friendly introductory statements:

“And, Lieutenant, I’ve got a problem. Like to talk to you about it. Maybe get some advice. This man they’re holding in that Zuni robbery-homicide thing, well, he’s my cousin. That diamond he was trying to pawn, well, he says he’s had that thing for years. He didn’t do that robbery. I’d like to get your help on that.”

Dashee paused. He cleared his throat. Leaphorn sighed.

“Ah,” said Dashee, “Sergeant Chee suggested I ask you about this. Get some advice. He told me something about that old trading post operator way up there at Short Mountain, between Tuba City and Page—McGinnis, I think it is. Anyway, Chee said that in one of your old burglary cases, McGinnis reported having a big diamond stolen from his store. Could you let me know if you have any time to fill me in on that?” Another pause. “Well, thank you, sir.”

Did he have any time? Did he have anything else? Leaphorn dialed the number Dashee left, got Dashee’s answering machine, left a message saying he had time. Plenty of time. Nothing but time. Besides, this diamond thing was different enough to be interesting. He looked in the refrigerator, saw nothing appealing, put on his hat, and went out to his pickup. He’d get a sandwich down at the Navajo Inn and then he’d—He’d what? Watch people playing golf on afternoon television? Play the Free Cell solitary game on the computer? Listen to all those lonely little sounds a house makes when it’s empty? To hell with that. He dialed the Dashee number again.

“Turns out I’ll be going over into your territory today,” he told the answering machine. “I’ll stop at the Hopi Cultural Center for some late lunch. You could meet me there if it’s handy. Otherwise, I’m going on to that old Short Mountain Trading Post. Maybe you could catch me there.”

That done, he wrote a note to Louisa telling her he was taking care of business north of Tuba City and would call her. He climbed into his truck, thinking about Sergeant Chee finally getting wise enough to realize that Bernie loved him. That led him to consider whether he should, once again, suggest to Professor Louisa Bourbonette that they get married. He’d proposed that once, when they decided she would use his Window Rock house as the northern base of her endless research on the mythology of Navajo, Ute, Paiute, Zuni, Hopi, and any other tribes she could persuade to talk into her tape recorder. The first time he’d asked her, the answer had been brief and determined.

“Joe,” she had said, “I tried that once and I didn’t like it.”

The next time he brought it up, she reminded him that he was still in love with Emma, which was still true even though ten years had passed since Emma had left him a lonely widower. Louisa said she would give him another ten years to think about it.

Leaphorn sighed, decided to leave well enough alone again, and made the westward turn onto U.S. 264. He paused at Ganado to top off his gas tank, and spent the next hour trying to decide how to tell Dashee he had not the slightest idea what he could do to help his cousin. No profit in that thought. He shifted to trying to restore his usual Navajo harmony with the world around him—a world in which too many of his old friends seemed to be dying. Even Shorty McGinnis, hard as that was for him to realize.

The Bureau of Land Management pickup he’d last seen Dashee driving wasn’t among the four vehicles in the Hopi Cultural Center parking lot, a disappointment. But the pretty Hopi receptionist in the center’s café recognized him (the first bright spot in the day) and gave him a huge smile. Of course she knew Dashee. He hadn’t been in, but she’d tell him Lieutenant Leaphorn had been there and was driving on to Short Mountain. Leaphorn drank two cups of coffee, ate the Hopi cook’s version of the taco, and headed for Tuba City and the great emptiness of the multicolored cliffs and canyons that lay beyond it.

He paused in Tuba looking for friends he’d made there a lifetime ago as a green rookie cop. It would be good, he thought, to catch them before they cashed in and went off on that Last Great Adventure with the Holy People. He found three, one too busy to do much visiting, one nursing a bad bout with arthritis, and his former Tuba City district sergeant, who was all too happy to remind him of the mistakes he used to make. That took time.

He headed north out of Tuba City, driving faster than he should, but when he made the left turn onto the wash-board gravel of Navajo Route 6130, the westering sun was low enough to be blinding.

That discomfort was more than offset in the eyes of Leaphorn (with his Navajo conditioning to apply value to beauty, and economic importance to the weather) by the great ranks of towering clouds rising like white castles to the north and west. The usual late-summer “monsoon” was late. Maybe much-needed rain was finally arriving.

He bumped across Big Dry Wash (the sometimes site of roaring runoff floods) and over the ridge into Bikahatsu Wash and onto the Blue Moon Bench.

There the only buildings were the Short Mountain Trading Post, a big slab-sided barn with its pole-fenced pen for sheep connected to a smaller one for other animals, and the store itself, with two gasoline pumps standing beside it. The only vehicle in the packed earth of the parking space was a rusty and windowless old Ford sedan. Its wheels were missing. It rested on blocks with a collection of tumbleweeds trapped beneath it.

Leaphorn parked beside it, turned off his ignition, and sat studying the scene, checking it against his memories, looking with fading hopes for some sign of life. The long wooden bench was still on the porch, but the customers who sat there exchanging gossip and drinking the cold soda pop McGinnis provided them were absent. The livestock pens were empty. If any hay bales were stacked in the barn, he couldn’t see them. And except for a mild breeze, now pushing a tumbleweed along to add to the old car’s collection, the silence was absolute.

Leaphorn glanced at his watch. Plenty of time had passed for McGinnis to have opened the door, peered out, and waved him in. But the door hadn’t opened. Now he was forced to face what Captain Pinto had told him. John McGinnis had died, was dead, gone forever, Pinto had it right. Leaphorn had simply doubted because he hadn’t wanted to believe. He faced it now, admitted to himself that he had made this long drive hoping to find that Pinto was wrong, or someone to tell him how it had happened. Somebody said it was a heart attack. More likely a stroke. McGinnis would never have gone to a hospital willingly to die among strangers. Leaphorn had expected to find someone here to reassure him about that. Someone with whom he could trade memories. But he’d found only empty, dusty silence.

He got out of the truck, trying to decide what to do, thought of nothing useful, and let habit guide him. He mounted the steps to the porch floor and knocked, and knocked again. No answer. None expected. The sign was still beside the door, telling all who came: THIS ESTABLISHMENT FOR SALE INQUIRE WITHIN. Had a new owner bought it? Highly unlikely. Leaphorn knocked again. No response. He walked down the porch to the nearest window, brushed away the dust, put his forehead against the glass, shaded his eyes, and looked in.

Rows of mostly empty shelves, the old man’s desk at the end of a long counter, to Leaphorn’s right, a blinking light. A blinking light? He focused on it through the dirty glass. A television set showing what seemed to be a beer commercial in black and white. In front of the set, the back of what seemed to be a rocking chair, and the back of the head of someone sitting in the chair. White hair.

Leaphorn sucked in a deep breath, went back to the door, knocked again, and tried the door handle. Unlocked. He pulled the door open and stood staring into the room.

“Mr. McGinnis,” he shouted. “Shorty?” And he hurried in.

It was McGinnis and he was alive, but Leaphorn wasn’t sure of that until he was almost close enough to touch him. Then McGinnis lifted his left hand to adjust the gadget that was holding an audio device over his ears. While doing that he noticed Leaphorn and turned in the rocking chair.

“You born in a barn?” McGinnis asked. “Nobody ever teach you about knocking before you come walking right in?”

Leaphorn found himself not knowing what to say. He watched McGinnis pushing himself awkwardly out of the rocking chair and taking off the earphones he’d been using.

“Back in Window Rock they think you’re dead,” Leaphorn said. “That’s what I was told.”

“Speak up,” McGinnis said. “My hearing ain’t what it was, and I can’t make it out when you’re mumbling. But I’m supposed to be dead, huh?”

“Dead and gone.”

McGinnis had put on his spectacles and was leaning on the back of his chair, peering at Leaphorn.

“Let’s see now,” he said. “You’re that Navajo policeman. Used to come out here years ago and drink my soda pop and get me to tell you where to find people. That right? You were out here a lot when Old Man Tso got murdered, I remember that. And I believe your granddaddy was that old fella they called Horse Kicker. Am I right? And your mother was a Gorman. One of the Slow Talking Dinee.”

“My grandfather was Hosteen Klee, and nobody ever called him Horse Kicker but you,” Leaphorn said. “And Mr. McGinnis, I want to say I’m glad they’re wrong about you being dead.”

“If you thought I was dead, what the devil brought you way out here? What are you after? You don’t come here not wanting something.”

Before Leaphorn could answer, McGinnis was hobbling back through the store toward the doorway that led to his living quarters.

“I’m going to make you some coffee,” he said. “Unless you broke that habit you had of not drinking whiskey.”

“I’ll take coffee,” said Leaphorn, following McGinnis. But he grimaced as he said it. After all these years he could still remember the awful acidic flavor of the old man’s brew.

McGinnis lit the propane stove on what passed as his kitchen work space, took a chipped cup and a Coca-Cola glass out of the cabinet above. He put his coffeepot over the burner and took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s out of a drawer. He opened that and carefully poured until the glass was filled up to the bottom of the red trademark C.

“Have a seat,” he said. “I’ll take a sip or two of this while your coffee gets made and you can tell me what you want me to do for you. Tell me what sort of favor you’re after this time.”

“Well, first I want to know how you’re doing. Looks like you’re still in business. Still grouchy as ever.”

McGinnis snorted, sipped his bourbon, sipped again. He held the glass up close to his eyes, studied it, picked up the bourbon bottle, and dribbled in enough to restore the liquid level up to the bottom of the C.

“Business?” he said. “Just barely. Customers all starved out, or they drive over to Page and do their buying there. Once in a while somebody comes in. Usually it’s just to offer to trade me something. That’s sort of what I’m doing now. Just getting rid of what I’ve got left. The giant oil company folks, they already quit bringing the gasoline supply truck out here. Said I didn’t buy as much as they burned driving the delivery truck out.”

They talked awhile about that, about how Old Lady Nez came by with her daughter every once in a while and baked him some bread and did some other cooking for him in exchange for some of the canned goods he still had on his shelves.

“Except for that, I don’t see many people anymore. And now we’ve got that covered, you’re going to ask me what you want to know.”

“All right,” Leaphorn said. “I want to know about that robbery you had.”

“Wasn’t a robbery. Robbery they point a gun at you and take your stuff. Cop like you ought to know the difference. This was a burglary. Broke in after I was sleeping, took a box of canned meat, sugar, stuff like that, and the money I had in my cash box. Mostly food, though. That what you want to know? I can’t tell you much. It didn’t wake me up.”

He gave Leaphorn a slightly sheepish smile and held up the bourbon bottle.

“I’d been watching that damned TV set and sipping a little more than I should. Didn’t even hear the son of a bitch. Didn’t know he’d been there until I noticed stuff gone from the grocery shelves.”

“Just grocery? They take anything else?”

“Took the blanket I had hanging on a rack in there, and some ketchup, and…” he frowned, straining to remember. “I believe I was missing a box of thirty-thirty ammunition. But mostly food.”

“None of it ever recovered?”

McGinnis laughed. “’Course not,” he said. “If the burglar didn’t eat it, you cops would have done that if you caught him.”

“You didn’t mention a diamond. How about that?”

“Diamond?”

“Diamond worth about ten thousand dollars.”

McGinnis frowned. Took another tiny sip. Looked up at Leaphorn.

“Oh,” McGinnis said. “That diamond.”

“The one you mentioned on the insurance claim report. You listed it as a ten-thousand-dollar diamond.”

“Oh, yeah,” McGinnis said, and took another sip of his bourbon.

“Did you get it back?”

“No.”

“Did you get your insurance money for it?”

McGinnis peered at Leaphorn, blinked his watery blue eyes, rubbed his hands across them, put down his glass, and sighed.

“I remember that time, years ago, you came in here trying to find a shaman. Margaret Cigaret, I believe it was—a Listener, as I recall her. And I told you who her clan was, and about a Kinaalda being held for one of the little girls in her clan, and you was smart enough to know Old Woman Cigaret would likely be out where they was holding that ceremonial and we sort of got acquainted.”

Having finished that statement to remind Leaphorn of his good deed, McGinnis nodded, signaling Leaphorn that he could comment on his helpfulness without violating the polite Navajo ban against interrupting.

“I remember,” Leaphorn said. “You also told me you knew my grandfather. You claimed they used to call Hosteen Klee Horse Kicker. It made my mother mad at you when I told her that. She said only a liar would say something like that.”

“Boys shouldn’t tell their mothers such things. Insulting your grandfather,” McGinnis said, choosing to ignore the implication. “Anyway, that day it got to be more like two friends talking. You and me. Not like you was a lawman.” He peered at Leaphorn, quizzically.

Leaphorn nodded.

“You still thinking that way?”

Leaphorn considered that. “When Captain Pinto told me you died, that didn’t seem right to me. I didn’t want to believe it. Too many old friends are dying. I didn’t really think I could learn anything about that diamond out here. I just wanted to see if I could bring back some old memories about when I was really a policeman. Maybe it would help me get into harmony with living with so many of my friends gone.”

McGinnis picked up his glass, made a sort of semi-toasting gesture with it and took a sip, hoisted himself from the rocker, and shuffled off through the doorway into his bedroom.

Leaphorn sipped his coffee. His memory of the chemical taste proved accurate. He put down the cup, grimaced, watched the dust float through the shaft of sunlight slanting through the window, remembering how this place (and his own life) had been when he’d been a young cop working out of Tuba City, learning the trade.

McGinnis emerged, lowered himself into the rocker, put the pouch on his lap, and looked at Leaphorn, expression stern.

“Now it’s time for you to tell me what kind of information you want to get from me.”

“Fair enough,” Leaphorn said. “You may have read about that robbery at Zuni a while back. It was in the papers. On TV. On the radio.”

“Fella killed one of them tourist-trap operators, wasn’t it?” McGinnis said. “One of those places where tourists buy all that Indian junk. Heard it on the radio. Fella got off with some money and a bunch of other stuff.”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “Well, now they have a suspect in jail at Gallup. A Hopi who tried to pawn a diamond worth maybe twenty thousand and he wanted only twenty dollars in pawn. FBI thinks he must have gotten it in the robbery. But he claims a man gave it to him down in the Grand Canyon years ago. This Hopi’s name is Billy Tuve and he’s a cousin of Cowboy Dashee. You remember Cowboy?”

McGinnis nodded.

“Dashee says Tuve’s not guilty. Captain Pinto saw the reference to the diamond in that insurance stuff added to your burglary. Diamonds aren’t common out here. So I wondered if you knew anything useful.”

“Well, then,” McGinnis said. “That’s interesting. This Tuve, he claims he got it from a man down in the bottom of Grand Canyon, did he?”

He hoisted himself out of the rocker, shuffled down the store’s aisle, and disappeared again through the doorway into the living quarters.

Leaphorn sat thinking his thoughts. How much the man had aged. How McGinnis and his store seemed to be dying together. He resumed his study of the dust particles drifting through a beam of light from the lowering sun.

McGinnis came down the aisle with a small pouch of what seemed to be deer skin hanging from his right hand. He reseated himself in the rocker, looked at Leaphorn.

“I’ll tell you a story. You decide if it helps any. Probably won’t.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“Years ago. Winter, I remember. One of the cold ones. Lots of snow. A fellow came in here, said his name was Reno, probably middle thirties, riding a horse and all bundled up. Wearing a felt hat tied on with a strip of blanket holding the brim down over his ears. He said he needed some food and to use my telephone. My line was down, so I told him he could get to one at that store at Bitter Springs, and if that one wasn’t working, he’d have to get all the way to Page. He got some stuff off the shelf and I heated up a can of pork and beans for him. Then he said he didn’t have any money but he would leave me his horse and saddle for some more food and for me giving him a ride into Page.”

McGinnis chuckled at the memory, located his Coca-Cola glass, poured a trickle of bourbon into it, took a sip, and shook his head.

“It was a little roan mare and pretty used up. Limping on its back leg. Fairly good saddle, though. I put the horse in the barn with some hay, thinking I wasn’t going to make anything out of the deal, but if I didn’t take the horse, I’d probably be stuck with the cowboy, too. I asked him where he was coming from. And now we come to the funny part. He said he been down in the canyon with a bunch of hippies and got lost from that crowd and was trying to find a way out of there. Said he ran into an old Indian while he was trying to climb up a side canyon. The old man told him that slot he was going up was a dead end, and showed him how to get to a trail the horse could manage, and asked him if he had a good knife or a hatchet he’d be willing to part with. So Reno said he showed the fella his knife and said he’d take ten dollars for it. The Indian didn’t have any money but he offered a trade.”

Having said that, McGinnis took another sip, picked the leather pouch off his lap, and started trying to untie the thong that held it closed.

McGinnis looked up from his labor. “You’ve seen ’em like this afore,” he said.

“Looks like a pouch to hold his ceremonial pollen,” Leaphorn said. “Or carry the cornmeal to use for a blessing. But I don’t recognize that figure stitched into the leather. It looks a little like a baseball umpire with his chest protector. What kind of Indian was he? Hopi? Havasupai? Hualapai? Yuman? Could even be one of the Apache tribes. They all use medicine pouches.”

“This cowboy, this Reno, said he didn’t know much about Indians. But he said this old fellow talked a lot about Masaw, or however you pronounce that kachina. Anyway, the Hopis know about him, and I think some of the Yuman people down in the canyon, too. And the Supai folks. Some of them call him Skeleton Man. Supposed to be the Guardian of the Underworld, and the spirit who greeted the first Hopis when they came up from the dark world they been living in. This spirit told them how to make their religious migrations and where to live when they finished doing that. And the big thing about him for the Hopis, this spirit taught them not to be afraid of death.”

McGinnis paused, took another sip.

“Getting hoarse,” he said. “That’s the most I’ve talked in a while. But anyway, he’s supposed to have let a bunch of Hopi elders look down into the underground and see where people who died were living comfortable and having a good time.”

McGinnis stopped, examined the whiskey level in his glass. “What was that you asked me about?”

“What was in the little pouch?”

“Well, it wasn’t pollen. There was nothing blessed in this medicine pouch,” McGinnis said. He poured the contents out into his palm.

A small round metal box emerged, worn-looking and with the legend Truly Sweet in red on its side. A snuff box, Leaphorn thought. Not much of that used on the reservation these days.

McGinnis twisted off the lid and extracted a clear blue-white stone, marble-sized but not marble shape. He held it out between thumb and forefinger, rotating it in a beam of sunlight. The sunlight flashed through it, touching off glittering bursts of light.

“When you pour your pollen out of your pouch,” McGinnis said, “then you’re pouring out a blessing. That’s the symbol of regerminating life. Of everything good and healthy and natural. Pour this little bastard out and you got the symbol of greed. It’s the sign of what folks cheat and steal and kill for. White women like to wear them to show other folks how rich they are.”

He held it out in a beam of sunlight, admired it. “Pretty, ain’t it?”

“Ah,” Leaphorn said, and smiled. “Mr. McGinnis, you’re starting to sound like an old-fashioned traditional Navajo.”

“Not quite,” McGinnis said. “But remember, when that First Man spirit fella of yours, when he was talking about the witchcraft evil stuff he had in his medicine bundle, he called it ‘the way to make money.’ Always did think that was a good point we whites overlooked. I mean, when a fella had more stuff than he needed and was stacking more of it up with the people all around him hungry, that was a pretty good clue he had some of that greed sickness, and they collect these things to prove they’re better at being greedy than their friends.”

With that, McGinnis produced a creaky old man’s chuckle and put the diamond back into the tin and the tin into the medicine pouch.

“Somebody said money was the root of all evil,” McGinnis said. “Myself, I never did well enough here to get much of it.”

“How about the diamond? Sounds like you wanted to make that work for you.”

McGinnis reached out and dropped the pouch into Leaphorn’s hand, changing the subject. “Take another look at it. Up close. It’s pretty, all right. But nothing to go to jail for.”

Leaphorn extracted the snuff can from the pouch, took out the diamond, and let the sunlight shine through it. He turned it, examined it.

“Seems to have been shaped to fit into some sort of necklace. A pendant. You just gave him some groceries for it and got you his horse, too? I’d say you struck a pretty hard bargain,” he said. “Sounds to me like you were trying to practice ‘the way to make money.’”

McGinnis looked defensive. “You’re making it sound worse than it was. My pickup was still running then. I gave him a ride into Page. Figured it was a fake, anyway. So did Reno.”

Leaphorn looked surprised. “Well, now. Is that right? Then how come you estimated it at ten thousand dollars when that burglar stole it?”

McGinnis laughed, peered at Leaphorn, raised his eyebrows. “Are we still having a friendly conversation here? Or are you back to being a cop?”

“Let’s keep it friendly.”

“Well, then. I told this young fella I wasn’t born yesterday and I knew all about those artificial diamonds. Zircons, I think they are. Did he really think I’d believe he was giving me a genuine diamond for a little food and a ride through the snowstorm? And he said, to tell the truth, he’d have been disappointed in me if I did. He said he always figured it was artificial.”

“You say he admitted it was a fake?”

McGinnis nodded. “Yeah. Reno said he figured that old fellow who gave it to him was either sort of crazy or a religious nut. Thought he might be trying to organize some sort of cult to the Skeleton Man down there.”

“But you listed it as an expensive diamond in the burglary report. If I hadn’t known you so long, that would surprise me.”

“Well, after the burglary I got to thinking about it, and I thought maybe I was just getting too cynical about things. Probably it really was a real diamond.” McGinnis peered at Leaphorn, nodded. “Yes,” he said. “A real perfect stone, too.”

“What’s the rest of the story?” Leaphorn asked. “You found it again after you filed the burglary report? Or the burglar really took it but brought it back?”

“Take your pick,” McGinnis said. “The insurance company cut my claim way down, anyway.”

“How about an address for this Reno?”

McGinnis laughed. “I said, ‘Where you from, son?’ and he said, ‘Reno. That’s why they call me that.’”

Leaphorn examined the stone again. “I’ve seen zircon stones. This looks like a diamond.”

“I think it is,” McGinnis said. “This cowboy, or whatever he was, said, ‘How could an old Indian down in the canyon get one of those?’ Laughed at the idea.” He pointed to the pouch in Leaphorn’s hand.

“Take a look at that, Joe,” he said. “I guess that’s some sort of lizard stitched there into the leather. But I never saw one like it. And that fierce-looking insect on the other side—you reckon that’s got something to do with that fella’s religion?”

“I’ll show it to Louisa,” Leaphorn said. “She’s down in the canyon now collecting oral-history stuff from the Havasupai people down there.”

“Keep it, then,” McGinnis said. “You want to hear the story he told me?”

“I think that’s what I came for,” Leaphorn said. “Remember, Cowboy Dashee’s cousin claims he got his diamond from an old man down in the canyon.”

“I already told you some of this,” McGinnis said.

“I’d like to hear it again. See if you tell it the same.”

McGinnis nodded. “Maybe I left something out. Well, anyway, this Reno says it was raining and sleeting and he was leading his horse up one of those narrow slots runoff waters cut in the canyon cliffs, thinking maybe he could follow it all the way out to the surface. Up there a little ways he passed the mouth of one of those washes that drains into the canyon, and this old man was standing in it out of the weather. My cowboy rolls himself a cigarette, and one for the old man. The old man asks if he’s got a knife or a hatchet he’d be willing to swap for something. Reno shows him one of those big folding knives he was carrying in one of those belt holsters. The old man admires it. He goes back into his cave, and when he comes out again, he has a sort of fancy flat box. Looked like one a peddler might carry and it has a whole bunch of little snuff cans in it. He opens one of them and takes out a little gem and holds it out like he’s offering it to swap. Reno says no. The old man gets out a bigger one. Then Reno says he decided it might be worth as much as his old knife, and his girlfriend would go for that. So he makes the trade.”

McGinnis shrugged, took another sip.

“That’s it?”

“End of story,” McGinnis said.

“This Reno saw several diamonds in that box?”

McGinnis pondered. “I guess so. Actually, I think he saw several of those little cans. He said something about a bunch of those little snuff cans. He said he guessed the old man used them to keep the diamonds safe.”

“Where did this fancy box come from?”

“Reno said he asked the old man that. The Indian fellow couldn’t speak English but he made airplane gestures, and sort of simulated a plane crash and everything falling down. And then a big fire.”

Leaphorn considered this, with McGinnis watching.

“Mr. McGinnis,” Leaphorn said. “Were you living here in, let’s see, 1956 I think it was?”

McGinnis laughed. “I was waiting to see if you’re still as smart as you used to be,” he said. “You passed the test. It was summer, June, before the rains start. Up to then, it was the worst airline disaster in history. Couple of those big airlines collided.”

“And it happened just about there,” Leaphorn said, pointing out the window toward the rim of Marble Canyon—not visible from here but no more than twenty miles away.

McGinnis was grinning. “I got a bunch of clippings about that back with my stuff,” he said. “It was old news by the time I got out here, but people still talked about it. Two of the biggest airlines of the time ran together, tore the end off of one of them and the wing off the other one, and everything was all torn up and falling into the canyon. Bodies of a hundred and twenty-eight people showering down the cliffs. Most exciting thing that ever happened around here.”

“And all their luggage, too,” Leaphorn said.

“And you’re thinking that might have included a leather-covered peddler’s case with a lot of jewelry in it.”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” Leaphorn said.

“Tell the truth, that same thought did occur to me, too,” McGinnis said. “And I didn’t think a jewelry drummer would be carrying zircons in such a fancy case.”

6

Almost everyone liked Bernadette Manuelito. Always had. Her teammates on the Shiprock High girls’ basketball team liked her. She was popular with her fellow botany students when she worked as an assistant in the university biology lab. Other recruits in the Navajo Police Department training program approved of her—and so did those she worked with during her short stint with the U.S. Border Patrol. Ask any of them why and they’d tell you Bernie was always cheerful, happy, laughing, brimming with good nature.

But not today.

Today, as she drove her old blue Toyota pickup west on U.S. 64 toward Shiprock en route to a dutiful call upon Hosteen Peshlakai, she was feeling anything but cheerful. Her mother had been difficult, full of those personal questions that are tough to answer. Was she absolutely sure about Jim Chee? Hadn’t she heard that his Slow Talking Dinee clan produced unreliable husbands? Did Chee still intend to become a medicine man, a singer? Shouldn’t she see about finding another job before getting married? Why was it Chee was still just a sergeant? And so forth. Finally, where were they going to live? Didn’t Bernie respect the traditions of the Dineh? Chee would—at least he should—be joining their family; Bernie wouldn’t be joining his. He should be coming to live with Bernie. Had she found them a place? So it went—a very stressful visit that dragged on until she agreed to drive down and have a talk with Hosteen Peshlakai, who as her mother’s elder brother was Bernie’s clan father. It was a promise Bernie had been happy to make, and not just to break off the maternal interrogation. She admired Peshlakai, loved him, too. A wonderful man.

Wonderful late-summer morning, too, with a great white many-turreted castle of cumulus cloud building over the Carrizo Mountains and another potential rainstorm brewing over the Chuskas. Usually such dramatic beauty and the promise of blessed rain would have had Bernie happily humming one of her many memorized tunes. Today they merely reminded her of the drought-stricken look of the slopes where Towering House clan sheep herds grazed, and that the summer monsoon rains were too late to do much good, and that even these promising-looking clouds would probably drift in the wrong direction.

She could blame this unusually negative mood on all those probing maternal inquiries, but it was the “missed call” message on her cell phone when she returned to the truck that made her start thinking hard, and painfully, about her mother’s questions.

The caller was Jim Chee. The tone was strictly official—Sergeant Chee speaking with no hint of sentimental affection.

“Bernie, I won’t be getting to your place today.” Then came a terse explanation about having to help Cowboy Dashee help Dashee’s cousin, which required going down into the Hopi Salt Shrine area in the Grand Canyon, where he “might have to spend a day or two.”

At least, Bernie was thinking, he didn’t address me as Officer Manuelito. But there certainly was some wisdom in some of her mother’s questions. Would she, as her mother had wondered, be continuing her role as underling to a master by marrying her sergeant? Maybe mothers did know best. Bernie didn’t think so. Probably not. She wished that telephone call had included at least some hint of regret. Or of intimacy. And why didn’t he at least suggest she might want to come along?

Perhaps Chee didn’t remember her chattering away one day about how exciting it was when the science teacher took her sixth-grade class on a field trip into the Canyon. Taught them about its geology and biology, the different kind of frogs, etc., how the heat reflected off south-facing cliffs made different species of plants grow, etc., how thrilling it had been. Forgetting that conversation would be some sort of an excuse for him not inviting her to go along. But that would mean he didn’t pay attention when she talked. That was just as bad. Maybe worse.

At Shiprock, Bernie turned south onto old Highway 666, decided Peshlakai could wait. She would waste a minute, drive up the road along the San Juan and see if Chee’s car was parked by his mobile home by the riverbank. It probably wouldn’t be on this working day, but if he wasn’t home it would give her a chance to take a private look at his place.

She parked where Chee’s car would have been, got out, leaned against the door, and studied the place. The trailer looked as dented, grimy, and decrepit as she remembered. But the windows were clean, she noticed, and she credited Jim with that since he was the only occupant. The axles, where the wheels would be replaced when time came to move, were covered with canvas to protect them from rain, rust, or whatever would damage such machinery. The little “pet flap” Chee had installed on the bottom of the entry door was still there even though the cat was long since gone.

The flap revived a memory of how Chee’s mind worked. The cat, pregnant and abandoned by a tourist, had been chased up one of the trees shading his trailer. Chee had rescued it. While refusing to adopt it as a pet (which would violate nature’s sacred relationship between human and feline), he had arranged a feeding and watering place near his door, giving her some chance to survive until she learned rural ways while respecting her right to be a free and independent cat—and not a slave to his human species. After Cat, as Chee named it, barely escaped another coyote attack, he cut the hole in his door, attached the flap, and kept it open with the feeding dish just inside until Cat established her habit of coming in to eat, drink, or elude coyotes. But the arrangement remained strictly formal.

About ten feet down aluminum-siding from the door, a metal patch had been taped to the wall, covering a hole. A deranged woman, thinking Chee was a Skinwalker and had witched her, had blasted the hole (just over the cot where Chee slept) with her shotgun. Cat, ears attuned to stalking coyotes, heard the intruder coming and dived under the flap, awakening Chee and—as Chee told the story—saving his life.

Remembering Chee telling his version of Cat’s heroism caused Bernadette Manuelito to produce her first smile of the day. She walked around the trailer, trotted up the four steps to the plank patio he’d attached to the river side of it, sat in his deck chair, and considered the view.

The sound of the San Juan, flowing almost directly below, would be tamed to just a murmur by autumn. It had been a light-snow winter in the Southern Rockies. Thus the contribution being made by the Animas River upstream was minimal this season. The San Juan itself was still providing its final flow into the diversion channels of the Navajo Irrigation Project. The San Juan here—alas, all of this portion of the great Colorado Plateau—was thirstily awaiting the storms of winter. Or, even better, arrival of the rains of the summer’s already-tardy monsoon season.

Well, maybe they were coming now. Last night’s TV weather forecast had suggested that the great bubble of high pressure over the high desert was finally breaking up. Bernie found herself relaxing, her normal optimism restoring itself, discounting her mother’s concerns about whether Jim Chee would be incurably a sergeant, remembering his smile, his tendency to break the white-man rules in favor of Navajo kindness, remembering his arm around her, his kiss. Ah, well, Bernie thought, she would continue her drive down to Coyote Canyon and up the canyon to Hosteen Peshlakai’s hogan. She was pretty sure that Peshlakai would tell her what she was hoping to hear—his wise Navajo version of “love conquers all.”

And the clouds were building up in the west. That was always a reason for optimism.

7

Joanna Craig was determined not to let her impatience show. This was far too important. This was the only really important thing in her life. Ever. She couldn’t risk alienating this tough-looking little Indian sitting there by the window, examining the back of his hand to keep from looking at her. She had to suppress her impatience. And the anger she had been suppressing for much of her life. She had always managed that before. She would manage it now.

And somehow the irony of all of it seemed to make where this was leading foredoomed and inevitable. Even this room. The way it was decorated for another generation. As if designed to take her back to the day when her father was killed, to make her remember that. Not that she didn’t always remember it, what she had read about it in that thick bundle of newspaper clippings she had found in the closet after her mother’s death. The sad stories, the dramatic news photos of the wreckage of the two planes made it seem that she had actually seen it. Now the scenes her imagination had created had a reality of their own. Her father in his first-class seat, eager to be reunited with her mother, loving her, thinking of the honeymoon they would take, looking down into the vast colorscape of the canyon’s cliffs, and then seeing that other airliner emerging from a cloud, imagining him knowing a terrible death was just a second away. Then Joanna had always fled from that thought to the way life might have been. Should have been.

Billy Tuve was still studying the back of his hand, ignoring what she had just said to him about the wealth those diamonds could bring to him. Wealth seemed to be something that didn’t interest him. He wanted to talk about his mother being worried, about how good it was that this cousin of his, this deputy sheriff, was trying to help him.

“Mr. Tuve,” Joanna said. “I guess I didn’t really explain why I came out here to put up the money to get you out of jail. I just made it sound like I was doing it because I knew you didn’t kill that man for his diamond. Just because I wanted to see you treated justly. I can see why you wouldn’t believe that, and I don’t think you did.”

Billy Tuve looked up, produced a faint smile.

“No,” he said. “I have known quite a few white people. There’s always something they’re after.”

“So you know I have my own reason. I want to tell you what that is and ask you if you can help me.”

Tuve stared at her, nodded.

Now he was interested. At least curious.

“That diamond you got from that man in the Canyon, that diamond they accuse you of stealing from the storekeeper, that diamond used to belong to my father. His name was John Clarke. Mama called him Johnnie, and he was on one of those airplanes that ran together over the canyon all those years ago. Before either one of us was born. That was John’s business. Diamonds. He was bringing a case full of them back to New York, and one of them was for my mother. They were getting married as soon as he got home. That diamond was going to be her present.”

Tuve considered that. “Oh?”

“But he got killed,” Joanna said. “She didn’t get it.”

Tuve just looked at her, thinking about that. Nodded, with that expression that said he understood.

“Well,” Joanna said. “They’d got together when they got engaged. She was already pregnant.”

Tuve shrugged.

“They had a big wedding planned. Dress fitted. Invitations sent out. Lots of—” She stopped, trying to imagine a Hopi wedding, knowing she didn’t have a clue about that.

“Anyway, after my father died, his family wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Wouldn’t have anything to do with me, either.” She stopped. Why would Tuve care about any of this? But he seemed to. Seemed eager to hear more. His face was slightly lopsided, as if his right cheekbone had been smashed or something. It made his expression a little hard to read, but now he looked sympathetic. He shook his head again.

“Not even your grandparents,” Tuve said. “That’s too bad.”

“They lived a long ways off,” she said, and suddenly she realized she really, really wanted to tell this homely little man everything. He was obviously mentally retarded. But he’d been hurt, too. He could understand that.

“Yes,” Tuve was saying. “My grandmother taught me a lot of things. My grandfather taught me how to ride, how to hunt rabbits. When I was in the hospital, they both came. And they always brought me things.”

And so Joanna kept talking. Talking about how, when she had reached puberty, her mother told her the whole story, of her love affair with John Clarke, about their wedding plans, about going to the Clarke family’s huge house after John’s death and knowing right away that she wasn’t welcome. About how coldly they had treated her—especially John’s father. How she had left with nobody saying good-bye.

“Nobody even told her good-bye?” Tuve asked. That seemed to touch a memory.

Joanna had ordered lunch from room service. She talked on and on while they waited for it, about becoming a nurse, the death of the elderly engineering professor she had married, and about how after she had buried him, she’d come to the Grand Canyon to see if she could find the grave of her own father.

“I went to the cemetery they established at Northern Arizona University, but that was for all those killed in one of the airplanes—a great granite headstone with all the names on it was there, but my father was on the other plane and his name wasn’t there. So I came to the Grand Canyon, to the National Park Service Center. They have the names of those on his plane there at the Shrine of the Ages monument, where they buried body parts they couldn’t identify. An old man there told me that the plane my father was on had flown right into the wall of the cliff and sort of splattered, and then burned, but some of the bodies were thrown out, all torn up. I told him that my father told my mother he was bringing home a whole container full of diamonds for his company in New York, and the best one of them would be for her ring, and that he had the case all those diamonds were in handcuffed to his arm so nobody could steal it.”

With that, Joanna paused, wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. It was the ideal place for weeping to impress Tuve, but she hadn’t consciously planned it. The tears had been spontaneous. Since her childhood she had loved this man whom she was doomed never to see. And cried for him. Or perhaps it was for what his death had cost her.

“Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, the man told me that a lot of the bodies were all torn up, or burned up, and just put in mass graves. And he said people used to talk about one of the Grand Canyon people seeing an arm caught in a brush pile below one of the rapids that had a case of some sort handcuffed to it, but before it could be retrieved, it washed away.” She paused again, studying Tuve. His expression was blank.

“Do you see what I’m getting at?”

Tuve was silent a moment. Then: “No.”

“The man who you got the diamond from must have found that arm, and that case locked to it.”

“Yeah,” Tuve said, smiling. “You want me to help you find that man so you can find the diamonds. The ones that would make you rich.”

“I want to find the man so I can find the arm,” Joanna said. “I want to give it back to my father. Bury it where he is buried at the Shrine of the Ages. But if we find the arm, we will also find the diamonds, and that will prove you told the truth to the police and you didn’t steal it.”

That provoked another thoughtful silence. “Yes,” he said. “But about what you told me about burying that arm bone. Do you think that would make a difference?”

“I have dreams about it,” Joanna said. “I don’t see my father in them. I have never seen him. But I hear him. And he is crying for that arm. So it will quit hurting. So the pain will go away. So he can sleep in peace.”

Tuve considered. “You dream that a lot?”

“All the time,” Joanna said.

“Yes,” Tuve said. “Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep. The dreams scare me.”

“I know. I woke up once just cold and shaking. In the dream I had been sleeping under a bridge, and I couldn’t find my purse, and I didn’t know anyplace to go where I could wash, or get warm.” She looked up at Tuve.

He seemed fascinated.

“And the rats were all around me,” she said.

“Sometimes it’s terrible,” Tuve said. “Once I dreamed I was under the horse and I couldn’t get out, and my head, well, it was almost flat, like a plate. And my eyeballs were out and there was no place I could put them.”

Joanna shuddered at that. “That’s worse than any I can remember. I think you understand why I think you and I should help each other.”

Someone was tapping on the door. Room service, Joanna thought. She glanced at Tuve. “Should I let them in?”

“It’s all right,” Tuve said. “I understand.”

8

The thunderstorm that had been moving steadily toward Gallup from the southwest produced a dazzling flash of lightning just as Navajo County Deputy Sheriff Cowboy Dashee and Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police climbed out of Chee’s car in the parking lot. A sharp clap of thunder came two seconds later, the characteristic ozone scent generated by electrically charged air, and then a gust of dusty wind that made the jail door hard to open and blew Chee’s hat into the room ahead of him.

“Well, now,” said the woman behind the desk. “Look what the wind blew in. I was hoping we’d finally get some rain.”

Dashee said, “It’s coming. Today’s the day the Zunis are having their rodeo. They did their rain dance last night.”

Chee rescued his cap, said, “Hello, Mrs. Sosi.”

Mrs. Sosi was laughing. “I asked one of them about that last year when they got rained out again. Told him they should do the dance after the rodeo. He said the rain-outs kept the cowboys from getting hurt. Cut down the medical bills. Did you two come in to get out of the weather?”

“I want to talk to one of your tenants,” Dashee said. “Billy Tuve. He’s my cousin.”

“Tuve?” Sosi said, frowning. She checked the roster on the desk in front of her. “Mr. Tuve is a popular man today. But you’re too late. He bonded out about an hour ago.”

“He what?! Wasn’t that bond set at fifty thousand dollars? Was it lowered? Tuve couldn’t have come up with any property valuable enough to cover that. And I guarantee he didn’t have the five thousand he’d have needed to cover the bond company fee.”

Mrs. Sosi looked down at her records, then looked up with an expression that registered amazed disbelief. “And it was a cash bond,” she said.

“Cash? Fifty thousand in cash?”

“Same as cash. Registered, certified cashier’s check,” Mrs. Sosi said. “Bank of America.”

Dashee’s reaction to all this was shock.

“Who did it?” Chee asked.

“A woman. Just about middle-aged. Nice looking. I never saw her before.” She glanced at the record book. “Ms. Joanna Craig. That mean anything to you?”

“Not to me,” Dashee said.

“She wasn’t local? Where was she from?”

“Well, she used a New York City bank account. She said she was representing Mr. Tuve, and I think maybe there was a lawyer with her.”

Dashee was looking baffled.

“Did Tuve know her?” Chee asked.

“He seemed as surprised as you do,” Mrs. Sosi said. “But he walked right out with her. Climbed into the car she was driving.”

“What kind of car?” Chee asked. “Going where?”

“She said she was staying at the El Rancho Hotel. The car? It looked like one of those Ford sedans Avis rents out at the airport.”

“I can’t believe this,” Dashee said. “I think we better go find him.”

Chee held up his hand. “This lawyer with her. Was he in the car, too?”

“Just her and Tuve. And this other fella, I don’t know he was a lawyer. He just came in earlier. Big blond guy and he said he came from Tuve’s family, but he sure wasn’t no Hopi. Just said he wanted to talk to Tuve about getting money put up for his bond. The deputy took him back there awhile, and pretty soon he came out and said thank you, and went on out. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“But he was with the woman?”

She shook her head and laughed. “We don’t get an awful lot of out-of-town traffic in here, so I just connected them. Both interested in getting Tuve out. But I don’t know,” Mrs. Sosi said. “Now I sort of doubt it. He was gone before she got here. I never saw them together.”

“Let’s go,” Dashee said. “Come on. Let’s go talk to Tuve. Find out what this is all about.”

The ride up Railroad Avenue to the El Rancho was a splash through a rain mixed with occasional flurries of popcorn-size hail.

“What do you think, Jim?” Dashee said. “What sort of mess has the silly bastard got himself into? I can’t think of a thing he could do that would make him worth that much money to anyone.”

“You think maybe he actually did shoot that tourist shop operator?” But Chee answered his own question with a negative head shake. “No. That wouldn’t add up. Wouldn’t make somebody in New York come out here to buy him out for that much money.” He shook his head, thinking. “I was wondering who that man was. You have any ideas about that?”

“I don’t. Billy didn’t shoot anybody,” Dashee said. “Billy was a good kid. Not the brightest bulb in the house after he got his head hurt. But he never quit being nice. He used to ride in that rodeo for kids. Did calf roping. Then his horse fell on him when he was twelve or so. Rolled over his head. Skull fracture. Longtime coma. The whole thing. And when he finally got out of the hospital, he wasn’t quite right anymore. To tell the truth, he was sort of retarded even before that. But he was always a good boy.”

“Didn’t change his personality?”

“Seemed like it made him even better. He did things for everybody. Kept firewood cut for his neighbors. Didn’t make trouble even when he was drinking. And I think he might have quit that drinking.”

“Remember what we got together to talk to him about?” Chee said. “About that expensive jewel. I think all this must have something to do with that damned diamond.”

“Probably,” Dashee said, and produced a dour chuckle. “And Tuve told me that thing was a phony. He said he knew everybody thought he was dumb, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think that was a real diamond.”

The El Rancho Hotel had been built in the long-gone golden days of Hollywood movie studios. One of the big names in the industry had financed it to house the stars and production crews making the cowboy-and-Indian films that filled the theaters in the 1930s and ’40s. Despite some refurbishing, it showed its heritage. Its walls were still lined with autographed publicity photographs of the Hoot Gibson/Roy Rogers generations, and its atmosphere was rich with old and dusty glamour.

“Yes,” the desk clerk told Dashee. “A Ms. Joanna Craig. She has 201. We call that the Clark Gable Suite. You want me to ring her for you?”

“Please,” Dashee said.

“No, wait,” Chee said. “You know how Joanna loves surprises. What’s the suite number again? We’ll just go up and knock.”

Dashee was looking puzzled as they went up the stairs.

“What was that all about?”

“I’m just being cynical,” Chee said. “Thought we’d surprise her. Who is this woman, anyway?”

Suite 201 was on the second floor, on the corridor overlooking the hotel lobby. Through the door came the faint sound of conversation. Chee knocked. Waited. The door opened. A small blond woman in a trim dark blue suit stood looking at him, then past him at Dashee, expression stern.

“I thought you were room service,” she said. “Who are you?”

Chee was reaching for his identification. “And I presume you are Ms. Joanna Craig,” he said.

“You’re a policeman,” she said.

“I am Sergeant Jim Chee,” Chee said, and showed her his identification folder.

“And I’m a cousin of Mr. Tuve,” Cowboy said. He waved at the young man sitting slumped in an overstuffed chair by the window and said, “Good to see you, Billy. How you doing?”

The man returned the gesture, with a happy grin of recognition.

“I would ask you in,” Joanna Craig said, “but Mr. Tuve and I are engaged in a conversation. It’s business.”

“We have business, too,” Chee said. “Police business.”

“I don’t understand this,” she said, looking sterner than ever. “I am legally representing Mr. Tuve. And he is free on bond. Free as a bird until he is called in to testify, or this ridiculous charge is dropped.”

“I’m not here on police business,” Dashee said. “I’m doing family business. Billy Tuve’s mother and my mother are sisters. We’re kinfolks. Cousins. I need to talk to my cousin Billy.”

“Hey, Cowboy,” Tuve said. “You’re looking good. Did Mama send you?”

Ms. Craig considered this. Looked at Chee. “It could be that we have a shared interest? I want to clear Mr. Tuve of this homicide-robbery charge. You, too?”

“Yes, exactly,” Chee said.

Craig was looking past him now at the arriving room service cart. She stood aside, motioned it in, and extended the same gesture to Chee and Dashee.

“Would you care to join us? Have some coffee, or tea, or whatever. We’ll just tell the man to bring it up.”

“No, thanks,” Chee said. “We’d just like to ask Mr. Tuve for some information.”

“Make yourselves at home,” she said. “Mr. Tuve and I will have our lunch, but go ahead with your questions.”

Chee and Dashee looked at each other. Dashee shrugged.

“The trouble is what we want to discuss with Mr. Tuve is police business. It’s confidential.”

Craig smiled. “Confidential. Of course. No one will hear it except the four of us. You two, Mr. Tuve, and”—she tapped herself on her shirtfront—“myself. His legal representative.”

Chee looked skeptical, glanced at Tuve. Tuve, he thought, had the look of an athlete—short like many Hopis, hard muscles, built like a wrestler.

“Mr. Tuve. Did you retain Ms. Craig as your attorney?”

Tuve looked puzzled. “I don’t think so. I don’t have any money.”

“My work is related to the interests of a tax-exempt public charity foundation,” Craig said, her face slightly flushed. “My interest is in protecting Mr. Tuve from unjust prosecution.” She turned toward Tuve. “Mr. Tuve, do you wish to talk to these gentlemen?”

Tuve shrugged. “Sure. Why not? Looking good, Cowboy. How’d you hear about this trouble? I’ll bet my mother sent you over here to get me.”

Chee sighed, defeated. “Okay,” he said. “Ms. Craig, this is Deputy Dashee, with the Navajo County Sheriff’s Department.” Craig, he guessed, would not know Navajo County was across the border in Arizona, devoid of any jurisdiction here. “I presume you know that the only material evidence the state has to connect Mr. Tuve with the robbery-homicide at Zuni is a diamond he attempted to pawn. We are hoping to find concrete evidence that Mr. Tuve got that diamond exactly as he claims. To check it out, we want to get some more details from him about the circumstances.”

Craig considered this. Nodded. “Have a seat,” she said. “Or join us at the table.” She moved her purse off a chair and put it on a closet shelf. The purse was a large and fashionable leather affair and it seemed to Chee remarkably heavy, even for its size.

The Clark Gable Suite offered numerous comfortable choices for seating—a richly covered sofa, three overstuffed chairs, an ottoman, and four standard dining room chairs around the table. The windows offered a view to the east and north of the mainline railroad tracks, now carrying a seemingly endless line of freight cars toward California, the traffic flowing by on Interstate Highway 40, and beyond all that the spectacular red cliffs that had attracted Hollywood here to produce its horse operas so common through the middle years of the century. Through a double doorway Chee could see into the suite’s handsome bedroom.

He selected an overstuffed chair and seated himself. Dashee, wearing a “what the hell” expression, chose the sofa.

“We’re going to ask Mr. Tuve some questions, then,” Chee said. “And it appears we have a mutual interest in the answers. But first we’d like to know why the organization you represent has a fifty-thousand-dollar interest in this.”

Joanna Craig pondered this a moment, studying Chee. “What organization is that?” she asked.

“The one you just mentioned that sent you here to protect Mr. Tuve. The one that gave you the check to pay for bonding Mr. Tuve out of jail.”

“Its identity is confidential.”

“The check you provided to pay for the bond was written on a Bank of America account. It had your name on it.”

Joanna Craig sighed, shrugged, nodded.

“Why did your employers send you here?” Chee asked. “Why do they have a fifty-thousand-dollar interest in Mr. Tuve?”

“You’ll have to ask them.” She smiled at him.

“I will,” Chee said. “Give me the name and address.”

She considered that awhile, shook her head.

“I would, but they’d just tell you it’s none of your business. Just waste your time.”

For a while the room was silent. Through the windows came the diminishing sound of thunder, already dim and distant, the jumbled noise of truck traffic on Interstate 40, and the nearer sound of cars on Railroad Avenue. Inside the room only Cowboy Dashee chuckling, and the click of his spoon as Tuve stirred sugar into his cup of coffee.

“Well, then,” Chee said. “I guess we might as well just get down to business. Mr. Tuve, would you please tell us how you got that diamond.”

“Like I already told the sheriff and that FBI man, an old man gave it to me,” Tuve said. “Didn’t look like a Hopi. Old. Had a lot of long white hair. Looked Indian, though, but maybe not. Maybe a Havasupai. They live down there in the bottom of the canyon, across the river, but they ought not be around our Salt Shrine. That’s just for Bear Clan people.”

Billy Tuve took a sip of his coffee, glowering over the rim of the cup at the thought of that.

“Let’s skip back, then,” Chee said. “Start from what you were doing down in the canyon, where you said it happened, and take it from there.”

“Some of it I can’t talk about. It’s kiva business. Secret.”

“Then when you come to the secret part, just tell it to Dashee. In Hopi. That will keep it confidential.”

“We’re both in the Bear Clan but we didn’t get initiated into the same kiva,” Tuve said. “There’s some of it I couldn’t tell him, either.”

“Well, just do what your conscience lets you do, then.”

Joanna Craig frowned.

Tuve nodded and began his account, Hopi fashion, from the beginning.

Chee slumped back into his chair, relaxing, getting comfortable, preparing for a long, long session. He’d listen carefully when Tuve got through the religious preamble and began to discuss receipt of the diamond. Until then he’d consider whether Craig was actually a lawyer. Anyone could have posted Tuve’s bond. He’d ponder what she was doing here. If the opportunity arose, he’d try to find out what caused her purse to seem so heavy, even for its size. A tape recorder? A pistol? Meanwhile, he’d enjoy himself. He concentrated on thinking about Bernadette Manuelito. Happy, happy thoughts. About fixing up his place on the San Juan with her. They’d have to move in a double bed. Couldn’t use those little narrow foldout bunks after you’re a married couple. Have to get some curtains on the windows. Things like that.

Tuve was talking now of having to go to a meeting in the kiva of the Hopi religious society to which he belonged. He was being considered for membership in an ancient organization that non-Hopis called the Bow Society, which wasn’t its real name. Anyway, he was going to take part in an initiation. That involved a pilgrimage by potential members from their village on Second Mesa all the way to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. From there they made the perilous climb down the cliffs—a descent of more than four thousand feet—to the bottom near where the Little Colorado pours into the Colorado River. But first Billy Tuve had to deal with the ceremonial eagle, tell Miss Craig how it had been collected from one of the nests guarded by his society, how a shaman brought it in, prayers were said, the proper herbs were smoked. Then the eagle was smothered, plucked, sprinkled with blessed cornmeal, and, as Tuve expressed it, “sent home to join his own spirits with our prayers to help him lead us on a safe journey.”

Chee let his attention drift and his gaze shift from Ms. Craig’s face to the window behind her. The rainstorm had drifted east, and the red cliffs that formed their walls north of Gallup were streaked now with sunlight and shadow, varying from dark crimson where the rain had soaked them to pale pink where it hadn’t, leaving a dozen shades in between. And above them another great tower of white was climbing, with the west wind blowing mist from it, forming an anvil shape at its top and producing a thin screen of ice crystals against the dark blue sky. Some other parts of the Navajo Nation would be getting rain.

Chee was remembering a chant a Zuni girlfriend had taught him from a prayer of her tribe’s A’shiwannis religious order:

Send out your cloud towers to live with us,

stretch out your watery hands of mist.

Let us embrace one another.

This had been before Chee met Bernadette Manuelito, and fallen in love with her, so that now even rain clouds caused him to think of her. Thinking now of embracing Bernie, instead of listening to Tuve, who was still talking, but not talking about diamonds. Who needed diamonds with ice crystals glittering against the blue, blue sky. With Bernie willing to marry him. With the time for that already established.

Behind him Tuve was now droning through the required ceremonialism of the Salt Trail, talking about feathers and prayer sticks being properly painted to be used as required at the springs, shrines, and sacred places they would be passing. And for Billy Tuve, conditioned as he was to getting the details of Hopi ceremonialism precisely correct, this took patient listening. And more time was taken because he often nodded apologetically to Chee and Ms. Craig, and shifted into Hopi to speak directly to Dashee, thus preserving the secrets of the tribe’s religions. When special affairs of his own kiva became involved, Tuve simply showed Dashee the palms of his hands and went silent.

Getting this ceremonial procession from Tuve’s village on Second Mesa to the canyon rim and then to the riverbank involved describing several more stops for prayers and offerings, the placing of painted feathers in the proper places with the proper songs, and putting prayer sticks where the proper spirits traditionally visited. By the time Tuve had brought them to the Hopi shrines at the tribe’s cliff-bottom salt deposits, Joanna Craig had looked at her watch three times that Chee had noticed. Navajo fashion, he hadn’t glanced at his own. Tuve would finish when he finished.

And, at last, Tuve finished. He spent less than a minute on the ceremony itself, declared that the group had collected the necessary salt at the Salt Shrine and clays of various colors along the cliff walls needed for various undescribed purposes.

“Then I met the man who gave me the diamond,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and looked at each of them. Now it was their turn to talk.

Dashee looked at Chee, waited.

Chee frowned, considering.

Miss Craig said, “You told me you didn’t know this man. Is that right?”

Tuve nodded. “He didn’t say his name.”

“Describe him.”

Tuve made an uncertain face. “Long time ago,” he said. “Grandfather probably. Maybe even a great-grandfather. Old, I mean. Lots of white hair. Skinny. Sort of bent over. About as tall as Sergeant Chee there. Not a Hopi, I think. Some other kind of Indian. He had on worn-out blue jeans and a blue shirt and a raggedy jacket, and a gray felt hat. And he had a big wide leather belt with silver-looking conchas on it.”

“How did you happen to meet him?”

Tuve scratched his ear, looked thoughtful. “I was digging out some of that blue clay. Chopping it out with a little thing I got to chop roots with.” He looked at Craig, wondering if she’d understand. “Like that little shovel they use in the army. Short handle.” He illustrated with his hands. “And the shovel part then can fold down.” Another illustration, of folding and chopping. “Got it at one of those military surplus stores, and sharpened it up. Works good. Really cuts roots.”

Tuve looked at Craig, awaiting approval. Didn’t get it. Craig was looking at her watch again.

“And he walked up, or what?”

“He said something, and I looked over and he was standing there watching me dig clay. So I said something friendly. And he came up and wanted to see my digging tool. And I handed it to him and in a minute he said he would trade something to me for it. I said what, and he got a folding knife out of his pocket and showed me that. I said no. He said for me to wait and then he came back with that diamond in a little pouch. And we traded.”

That said, Tuve nodded, looked down at his folded hands. End of story.

“All this talking with this old man,” Craig said. “That was in English, or Hopi, or what?”

Tuve laughed. “I couldn’t understand his words. So it went like this.” He demonstrated with his hand and facial expressions.

“And where did he go after you swapped your shovel for his diamond?” Chee asked.

Tuve shrugged. “Down the canyon a little way, and then around the corner.” He shrugged again.

Craig sighed, shook her head.

Chee cleared his throat, looked at Craig, saw no sign she had another question to ask.

“Do you remember where this happened?” he asked. “I mean, exactly where you were digging the clay?”

“Sure,” Tuve said. “It’s real close to the place we leave prayer sticks and do our prayers for the Salt Mother. Down the river a little ways. Where we always dig that yellow clay for painting.”

“Can you remember how long he was gone before he came back with the diamond?”

Tuve pondered. “It was just a little while.”

“Can you tell us like how many minutes?”

Tuve looked baffled by that.

“Maybe long enough to smoke a cigarette?” Chee suggested. “Or a lot longer than that?”

“Didn’t have any cigarettes,” Tuve said.

“Okay, then,” Chee said. “What did you get done while you waited? How much clay did you dig, for example.”

“Didn’t dig. I got out my water bottle, and I sat down on a sort of rocky shelf there and took a drink, and got my boot off and shook out the sand that got into it and put the boot back on, and then I sort of asked myself why I was sitting there waiting for this old fella when I didn’t really want to trade my digging tool anyway, and got up to go and then he was back.”

“Less than an hour?”

“Lot less than an hour. Maybe fifteen minutes.”

“From what I know about you Hopis,” Chee said, “you have your own special ceremonial trail down to those salt deposits. Is that the one you climbed down on that day?”

Tuve said something in Hopi to Dashee. Dashee nodded, said, “Yes. That’s the one I was telling you about.”

Craig was listening to all this, looking thoughtful.

“Mr. Tuve,” she said. “I want you to take me down there. We have to find that man.”

“Can’t do that,” Tuve said. He laughed. “Not unless you can get into the women’s kiva. Have to be initiated, and that’s after you know all the rules.”

“What are they?”

“Women rules. They don’t tell men.”

“Well, can you tell me a way to get down there? It’s the way to keep you out of jail,” she said. “To find the man who gave you the diamond. We need to get him so he can testify he gave you that.”

Tuve was shaking his head. “Can’t do that,” he said, still smiling. “Against the rules of the kiva.”

“Can’t you just explain it to the bishop, or whatever you call him? He’d understand.”

Tuve’s smile had faded away. He looked extremely serious, thinking. “No,” he said. “Not unless it would be for something the spirits would like.”

Craig stared at him. Checked Chee for comment. Got none. Glanced at Dashee. There was the mutter of thunder, very distant now. Their rainstorm was still drifting eastward.

“Something the spirits would like,” Craig said. “Like helping somebody who has been hurt very bad. Somebody who really needs help. Would they like that?”

Tuve stared at her, looked at Dashee, a question on his face.

Dashee said, “We don’t do it. Don’t take white people down that trail. They are not initiated. They don’t know the prayers to say, don’t know what Masaw told us to do. If they go down for the wrong reason, with the wrong spirit, a Two Heart will make them fall.”

Craig looked surprised, then interested. “Masaw? Who’s that?”

Tuve ignored the question.

Dashee looked at Chee.

Chee shrugged. “I’m not a Hopi, you know, but we Navajos understand that Masaw is their Guardian Spirit of the Underworld. Sometimes he’s called Skeleton Man or Death Man because he taught the Hopis not to be afraid to die. Anyway, after the Hopis came up to the Earth Surface World, they say God made him sort of their guardian if I’ve got it right. And the Two Hearts are the sort of people who didn’t quite make the transition from what they were in the underworld into the human form. Didn’t get rid of the evil. Still have an extra animal heart. Sort of like the witches you white people talk about.”

“Or like the witches Navajos call Skinwalkers,” Dashee said, with a sardonic glance at Chee.

“Actually, we call them Long Lookers,” Chee said, looking slightly apologetic. “And we have several versions of them.”

“I think the rain’s finished here for now,” Dashee said, trying to change the subject. “Moving over to the Checkerboard Reservation.”

“One more question,” Chee said. “Mr. Tuve, who was that man who came to see you this morning?”

“I don’t know him. He said his name was Jim Belshaw, and he said he wanted to know about getting me out of jail. And he wanted to talk to me about the diamond. He said he would come back later to get me out.”

Tuve nodded toward Craig, who was watching this exchange. “I thought maybe this lady here sent him. She could tell you about him.”

“I didn’t send him,” Craig said, looking startled and flustered. She glanced at Chee, a questioning look.

“Oh,” Tuve said. “That seems funny.”

She looked at Chee. “One of your people?”

“Not us,” Chee said. “I don’t know who he was. Neither did the court clerk.”

“Well, anyway, then,” Craig said to Tuve. “If you can’t take me down the Salt Trail—and I really don’t want to bother your Two Hearts—then we’ll just get down there another way.”

Chee noticed that she was smiling at Tuve as she said it.

9

The thunderstorm was gone from Gallup now, drifting away to bestow its blessing wherever the wind or Pueblo rain dances took it. One of Billy Tuve’s numerous uncles had arrived to give him a ride back to Shungopovi on Second Mesa. Chee watched Joanna Craig chatting with Tuve, a conversation he didn’t manage to overhear, and then giving him his instructions on the requirements of those free on bond. Chee gave Craig his police card and a request that she stay in touch. Then Dashee led the way out into the hotel parking lot to Chee’s car.

“Look at it,” Dashee said. “Clean. Didn’t recognize it. I never saw it like that before. You can even make out that Navajo Nation symbol on the door.”

“Get in, Cowboy,” Chee said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

“And decide what to do,” Dashee said. “What’d you think of that Craig woman?”

“How about you?” Chee said. “I noticed you were being uncharacteristically polite. I mean, hopping up and rushing over to get her purse and hand it to her.”

“It was heavy,” Dashee said.

“Yeah,” Chee said. “I thought it would be. The way it looked.”

“Maybe she’s carrying a super makeup outfit, or a really old-fashioned cell telephone, or”—Dashee gave Chee a sidewise look—“maybe a pistol?”

“The pistol occurred to me,” Chee said. “She’s from the East, you know. A lot of Easterners worry about you Indians.”

“Hey!” Dashee said. “We Hopis are the peaceful ones. You Navajos were the hostiles. And you were showing it again today.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You wouldn’t let us eat lunch with Ms. Craig there at the hotel. So we just sat there in the chair and watched them eat.”

“Good point,” Chee said. “That wasn’t very smart.” He turned his clean, rain-washed car into the Bob’s Diner parking lot.

While they dined they agreed on several other points.

For one, Tuve would win no prizes for intellectual brilliance. His story about swapping his shovel for the diamond was not going to sound likely to a jury.

They weren’t convinced themselves.

However, the prosecution seemed to have little genuine evidence against Tuve. The fingerprints he’d left in the store proved only that he’d been there on the fatal day, and the witnesses could prove little more than the same thing.

Their chances of finding Tuve’s diamond donor, if he had ever existed, were minuscule.

“I guess we’re agreed, then,” Dashee said. “We’ll hope Ms. Craig finds herself a good canyon-bottom guide and turns up the diamond donor. And we’ll keep our eyes open for some sensible way to help Cousin Billy. And unless the FBI comes up with some sort of material evidence, we sort of doubt he’ll need help, anyway.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Chee said. “I’ll bet they have something substantial.”

Dashee grinned. “When in doubt, get some Hopis on the jury. We’re a kind-hearted tribe.”

“Generous, too,” Chee said, handing Dashee the lunch check and pushing back from the table. “I’ve got to get back to Shiprock now. Bernie wants me to go look at a couple of places she thinks might be right for us to live in.”

“What’s wrong with your trailer?” Dashee asked, trying to suppress a grin. “It’s really handy for you there. Right next to the Shiprock garbage dump, for example.”

“And right next to the San Juan River flowing by,” Chee said. “I think it’s a pretty place. I’m going to talk her into it. But first I’ve got to look at what’s she’s looking at.”

But when Chee parked under the cottonwood shading his front door from the setting sun, the old trailer looked shabby and disreputable, putting a dent in his cheerful mood.

The mood improved when he saw the light blinking on his answering machine. It would be Bernie. Just hearing her voice brightened the day. Alas, it wasn’t Bernie. It was the familiar voice of Joe Leaphorn, the legendary lieutenant, formally identifying himself as if he hadn’t known Chee about forever.

“I hear from some sheriff’s office people that you’re trying to help Cowboy Dashee’s cousin. If that’s true, you might want to call me. It turns out that Shorty McGinnis—You remember him. Grouchy old fellow. Ran Short Mountain Trading Post. Well, he has a diamond story a lot like the one your Billy Tuve tells. It might be helpful, if you’re interested.”

As usual, Leaphorn was right. Chee was interested. He glowered at the telephone, dealing with memories of other interesting calls from the legendary lieutenant. Most of them had come while he was working as Leaphorn’s gofer in his Criminal Investigation Office. They had tended to lead to trouble and always meant a lot of hard work. Some of it, admittedly, proved interesting and fruitful, but this was not the time for that. This was time to be with Bernie.

Chee walked away from the telephone, out into the shady side of the trailer to a favorite place of his—the remains of a fallen cottonwood tree the trunk of which had long since lost its bark and had been worn smooth by years of being sat upon. Chee sat upon it again and looked down at the San Juan flowing below. A coyote was out early, stalking something on the river’s opposite bank. He thought about Bernie and his future with her. A pair of mallards feeding in the shallows spotted the coyote and squawked into flight. But the coyote wasn’t hunting them. It continued its furtive way into a brushy growth of Russian olive. Stalking a rabbit, Chee guessed, or perhaps someone’s pet dog or a feral cat. That thought reminded him of the cat that had moved in with him once, in another time, when he’d sat on this old log and considered whether he should accept what amounted to a counteroffer from Mary Landon. Yes, she had said, she would marry him. She had already planned on that. She’d already rejected the contract renewal she’d been offered at the Crownpoint Elementary School and was preparing to move back to Wisconsin. He could accept that job offer he’d had from the FBI and they would raise their children wherever they put him until they could arrange a transfer to the Milwaukee office. About his dream of becoming a shaman, a medicine person among the Navajos? Surely he’d already outgrown that idea, hadn’t he?

The coyote was no longer visible to Chee. But there was a sudden flurry of activity in the brush and a dirty tabby cat scurried out of it and up an adjoining tree to safety. The coyote gave up the pursuit. Coyotes were too wise to engage in hopeless competitions.

And so are Navajos, Chee thought. Instead we endure, and we survive. But now Chee was thinking of another cat.

This one, skinny and ragged, had shown up around his trailer one autumn, attracted by food scraps he’d left out for squirrels. It wore a pretty collar—an animal raised as a pet, then abandoned with no survival skills and handicapped by pregnancy. He had put out food for the terrified beast and it quickly became a regular visitor. Then one of the neighborhood coyotes scented cat and began hunting it. Chee cut a cat-sized entry in his door and lured the animal through it with sardines. Soon the door flap became its emergency route to safety when a coyote prowled. Only when winter froze the San Juan and the snow began did it move in to spend the nights, still keeping a cautious distance from Chee. Thus they lived together, Chee serving as food provider, Cat operating as feline watchdog, bolting in with a clatter when a coyote (or any visitor) approached the trailer. Otherwise they ignored each other.

The relationship perfectly fit Chee Navajo traditionalism. Natural harmony required all species, be they human, hamster, hummingbird, snake, or scorpion, to respect each other’s roles in the natural world. He saw no more justification in pretending to own a “pet” than he did in human slavery. Both violated the harmony of the system and thus were immoral. However, this cat presented a problem. It had been spoiled for a career as a naturally feral cat, not having been taught to hunt its food by its mother or how to evade other predators. Worse, it had been declawed—a cruel and barbarious custom. It could no longer adjust to the world into which it had been left. Chee understood that. That, too, was natural. He could not adjust to the world of Wisconsin dairy farming which Mary Landon planned for him. And Mary could not imagine raising her blond, blue-eyed children in his world. And so when her letters began arriving from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, beginning “Dear Jim” instead of “Darling,” Chee put Cat in an airline-approved pet cage and sent it to her—out of the landscape of claw and fang, into a world in which animals were transformed from independent fellows into pets of their masters. With her Christmas card, Mary had sent him a picture of Cat on a sofa with her and her Wisconsin husband. Cat was now named Alice, and Mary was still so beautiful that he knew he would never quite forget her.

Chee rose from the log, went into his trailer, and retrieved the photograph from his desk drawer. He studied it, confirming his memory. Another moment of sorting produced a photograph of Janet Pete. Another sort of beauty. Not the soft, warm, sensual, farm-girl karma of Mary here. Janet was high-fashion, Ivy League law school chic. The word now was cool, in the sophisticated sense. She had been the court-appointed public defender of a murder suspect when he met her, an honor grad of a noted law school who had a yen for a seat someday on the Supreme Court. Her Navajo father had provided her the Pete name, her perfect complexion and classic bone structure. But her New England socialite mother had formed the Janet he knew, formed her in a world of high fashion, very important people, and a layered, sophisticated ruling class.

Janet smiled at him now out of the photograph, dark eyes, dark hair beautifully framing a perfect face, slender, an image of grace. Chee dropped both photographs back into the drawer and closed it, remembering how long it had taken him to understand Janet, to realize how smart she was, to realize how he fitted into her plans. Like Mary, she had (more or less) said yes. He had obtained a videotape of a traditional Navajo wedding and took it to her apartment to explain it to her. Instead he learned the nuptials would be in a Washington cathedral with full pomp and ceremony. She had arranged to have the proper strings pulled to have herself transferred to a Justice Department job in Maryland. She had learned the U.S. Marshals Service had an opening there that exactly fit him. She was surprised that he was surprised.

The telephone rang.

Bernie, Chee thought. He picked it up. “Bernie,” he said, “I’ve been—”

“It’s Joe Leaphorn,” the voice said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

Chee exhaled. Said, “Oh, okay. I got your message. I was just going to call you. Tell me what McGinnis told you about the diamond.”

“I will,” Leaphorn said. “If you’re still interested in that charge against Billy Tuve, I guess it’s sort of good news. But now I’ve also got some bad news. I’ll give you that first.”

“Sure,” Chee said.

“Sheriff Tomas Perez—you remember him, retired now. Anyway, I saw him down at the Navajo Inn at lunch. He told me he heard from his old undersheriff that they’ve got some more evidence against Tuve. Seems a former employee at that Zuni store reported that the manager there actually did have a big, valuable diamond in his stock. He said the boss had shown it to him several times. Was very proud of it.”

“Oh,” Chee said, thinking, Good-bye, Tuve.

Leaphorn awaited further comment. Got none.

“So it won’t surprise you to hear that the victim’s widow is claiming the diamond. The D.A. said she’d have to wait until after the trial and he’d need her to testify about it.”

“Did she say she’d seen it, too?”

“Perez seemed to have that impression. But you know how it is. He’s been out of the sheriff’s job for three years now. Passing along third-hand stuff.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Do you know if Dashee knows about this?”

“Probably,” Leaphorn said. “You know how that is, too. Bad news travels fast.”

“Yep. It does.”

“However, what Shorty told me makes it sound like Billy Tuve might actually have gotten that diamond down in the canyon. Shorty told me he got his own diamond—”

“Wait,” Chee said. “Pardon the interruption. His own diamond? What does that mean?”

“Remember that Short Mountain burglary? Years ago? Shorty listed the diamond as part of the loss. He says he got it from a cowboy, a guy named Reno, who drifted through, gave it to him in exchange for some groceries and a ride into Page. This Reno told Shorty he’d traded one of those scabbard knives for it to an old man down in the Grand Canyon.”

“About where in the canyon?”

“He said just down from the Little Colorado confluence.”

“Well, now,” Chee said. “That’s interesting. That’s the right general area.”

“Must be very close to the place Tuve claims to have swapped off his folding shovel, right?”

“Right,” Chee said. “I’ll tell Dashee about this. Thanks.”

“The even better news is you finally got wise enough to ask Bernadette to marry you. That correct?”

“It is.”

Leaphorn chuckled. “They say third time’s the charm. It is the third time, isn’t it? First we heard you and that pretty blond girl teaching over at Crownpoint were getting married. And then we heard it was going to be the U.S. lawyer, Janet Pete. Both of those deals fell through. I hope you’re not going to let Bernadette back out.”

“Not if I can prevent it,” Chee said.

“Well, I’m glad for you. Glad for both of you. She’s a prize. It took you way too long to realize it.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t realize it. It was just—Just—Well, I don’t know how to explain it.”

“How about telling me it’s none of my business. Or saying twice burned makes you triple careful. Anyway, congratulations. And tell Bernie everybody is happy for both of you.”

“Well, thanks, Lieutenant. She’s a great lady.”

“You’re going hunting, then? You think there’s any hope of finding the diamond man? After all these years?”

“Not much, I guess. But what else can you do? Dashee and I talked about it, agreed it seemed hopeless, but if he’s heard what you’ve just told me, I’m dead certain he’s going to go hunting, and just as certain he’ll want me to help—even though he probably won’t ask me.”

“I see your point,” Leaphorn said. “Shorty told me a couple of other things that might be helpful.” He told Chee what Reno had said about meeting his diamond man at the mouth of a cave up one of those narrow little slots that drain runoff water down the cliffs into the Colorado River, about the diamond being in a snuff can, and the case from which the old man took it, containing several such cans.

“That’s odd,” Chee said.

“I thought so, too. But this old fellow had taken a smaller diamond out of a different snuff can. So maybe they’re his storage units. And the can he gave Reno was in a leather pouch. Sort of like a medicine pouch.”

“He was an Indian? What kind?”

“Shorty said Reno didn’t know. But he didn’t speak much English. And gave some hand signals saying the diamonds came out of an airplane crash.”

“The pouch. Was that like one of ours?”

“About the same. But it had a sort of Anasazi-looking symbol stitched into it. Big figure with a tiny head, very broad upper torso, tiny stick legs.”

“Any ideas about that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a clan totem, or a symbol of one of his tribe’s spirits.”

“Didn’t look like any of the tribal figures you’d recognize, then?”

“No, but I’ve never had much contact with any of those tribes that far down the Colorado.” Leaphorn chuckled. “I sort of neglected to give the pouch back to Shorty when I returned his diamond. Thought I’d show it to Louisa when she gets back. She’s down in the canyon now, collecting her oral histories from the Havasupais.”

“Well, thanks again,” Chee said. “I guess I’ll have to actually find that guy and ask him about it. And if something comes up and you need to find me, you have my cell phone number.”

“Ah. Yeah. I think I wrote it down.”

That concluded the conversation and left Chee to decide what to do about it. He’d call Dashee, of course. Discuss it with him. Find out what he wanted to do. But first he had to call Bernie.

He dialed her number. Thinking what he could have told Leaphorn if he wanted to confess the truth. He could have said he hadn’t told Bernie he loved her a long time ago because he was afraid. Cowardice prevented it. It hurt when he learned that Mary Landon didn’t want him. She wanted the dairy farmer she could make out of him. Lonely again after that. It hurt even more when he finally understood that he was just the token Navajo to Janet, someone to be taken back to Washington and civilized. Even lonelier than before. And when he found Bernie, right under his nose, he knew here was his chance. The really right one. He loved everything about her. But he was too damned scared to make the move. What if she rejected him? Mary and Janet, they’d found him someone they could mold into what they wanted. But he had found Bernie. And if she turned him down, he’d never find anyone like her. He’d never have a wife. He’d always be lonely, all the rest of his life.

He listened to Bernie’s number ring nine times before he decided she wasn’t home. And then he called Dashee. Told him the good news first, and then the bad news.

“I know,” Dashee said. “I think that clerk and that widow are both lying, with the widow telling the clerk what to say. But the sheriff doesn’t. And I don’t think old Shorty McGinnis’s story is going to change his mind.”

“Afraid you’re right,” Chee said.

Dashee sighed. “You know, Jim, I gotta go down there, anyway. Down to that canyon bottom and see if I can find that old man. Or somebody who knows about him. Or something. Billy’s had too much tough luck. And nobody to help him.”

Chee said nothing to that. He’d foreseen it. He knew Cowboy too well to expect any less of him. He took a deep breath.

“Do you think you’re going to need some help?”

“Well, I was hoping you’d ask.”

“When are you going down there? And how you going? And here’s a harder question: How you going to go about this business? Finding a maybe imaginary old man that trades diamonds for things?”

“Sooner the better, is the first answer. And I’m going to make Billy Tuve come along and show me just exactly where he made that trade and try to retrace where the old man he dealt with might have gone in that little bit of time he was gone. What do you think?”

“How many years ago did that happen? Many, many, wasn’t it?”

“Billy’s always been very vague about chronology. Ever since that horse fell on him.”

“So maybe it was ten years, or twenty. Or maybe the old man was out of sight thirty minutes, or thirty hours, or several days?”

“It’s not that bad,” Dashee said. “He tries.”

“So what’s plan number two?”

“While Billy and I are looking for the diamond man along the river, I thought you might be mingling among the old folks in the Havasupai settlement. You’ve had a couple of cases down there. Know some people, don’t you? Know a little of their language?”

“Damn little,” Chee said. “And all I was doing was looking for stolen property. You don’t make friends doing that.”

Dashee made a sort of dismissive sound. Or was it just frustration?

“Hell, Jim,” he said. “I know it’s a long shot. But what am I going to do? Billy’s my cousin. It’s family. I’m a religious sort of man, you know. So are you. Sometimes we have to just make ourselves an opportunity to get some outside help from the Higher Power. Call it luck, or whatever.”

Chee considered that for a while. “How soon you want to do this?”

“Right away, I think. The sheriff sounded like they might be revoking the bond, with that new story they have about the diamond. I thought I’d drive over to Second Mesa in the morning and pick him up before they get the revocation order.”

“I’ll have to call you back, Cowboy. I’m supposed to get with Bernie tomorrow. You know how it is before a wedding. All sorts of planning stuff.”

“So I can’t exactly count on you?”

“Well, you probably can. I’ll call you.”

The telephone rang just after he ended that call. It was Bernie. She’d noticed his number on her “missed calls” tattletale. “What’s up?” she said.

“Well,” Chee said, “how do I start?”

“You start by telling me you miss me and just wanted to hear the sound of my voice.”

“All true, but I also wanted to know what you have planned for us. You were telling me we need to get together. To do some planning.” He paused. “And maybe some other things.”

Bernie laughed. “Other things are more fun,” she said. “But we do have to find a place to live. Unless you’re going to change your mind and make that trailer of yours our bridal suite. I hope that wasn’t what you were calling to tell me.”

“No,” Chee said. “But now I’ve got something else on my mind. Remember Cowboy Dashee’s problem?”

“Sort of,” Bernie said. “His cousin accused of shooting that store operator at Zuni, and trying to pawn that big diamond?”

“Well, now it’s worse. The store owner’s widow and a former clerk at the store are claiming the homicide victim owned the diamond. Dashee thinks the sheriff is going to have the bond revoked, put Tuve back in lockup. Dashee’s going down into the canyon. Try to find the old man he claims gave Tuve the diamond. He wants me to go along.”

“When?”

“Right away. Like tomorrow.”

“Hey,” Bernie said. “That sounds like fun. I haven’t been down there since I was a teenager.”

Chee looked away from the telephone, through the window, at the cloud building over the mountains. Would Bernie ever stop being unpredictable?

“That sounds like you want to go along?”

“Yes, indeed,” Bernie said.

“Bernie, going down on a school bus with a bunch of kids won’t be anything like this. That must’ve been some sort of campground with a road to it. No roads this time. This is going all the way to the bottom. Climbing down several thousand feet or so. Rough going. And then we may get stuck down there a day or two, depending on what luck we have finding anything. It’s going to be tough.”

That produced an extended silence.

Chee said, “Bernie?”

Bernie said, “Jim. I want you to remember. I’m not Officer Bernadette Manuelito, rookie cop, anymore. I resigned from your squad. Now I’m on leave from the U.S. Border Patrol. So I’m not talking to you as Sergeant Chee now. Okay? Now, tell me what makes you think you’re any better at climbing down into canyons than I am.”

“On leave! I thought you’d resigned.”

“Well, I sort of did. But they put me on some sort of medical leave. Sort of let me know I could get my job back if I wanted it.”

This was making Jim Chee very nervous.

“Bernie,” he said. “I thought…”

Bernie was laughing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just sort of kidding you, Jim. I’m bad about that. Kidding people. Actually, the only way I’d go back to the Border Patrol would be if I could take you along. And you could be boss, too, since the one I was working for got fired. But first I’ve got to marry you.”

“Sooner the better,” Chee said.

“Anyway, I want to go with you. I’ll get all packed, sleeping bag and all. Where are you meeting Cowboy, and when? And do I need to come there, or will you pick me up? I know you have to carry drinking water into the canyon. Should I bring any food?”

Chee sighed. “I guess so,” he said, recognizing a lost argument, probably the first of many. But Bernie was right. It would be fun.

10

Brad Chandler had pulled his rental Land Rover into the arriving passengers’ parking zone of the Flagstaff airport, scanned those hurrying past to the shuttle buses, and spotted the man who must be the one he had come for. His name was Fred Sherman, a bulky man carrying a bulging briefcase, wearing a sweat-stained cowboy hat, and looking like a middle-aged retired policeman—which was exactly what he was. Chandler lowered the passenger-side window, waved, shouted.

“Hey, Sherman! Over here.”

Fred Sherman came to the car, not hurrying. He leaned on the windowsill. “Yo, Chandler,” he said. “Long time since I’ve dealt with you.”

Chandler motioned Sherman into the car. “Let’s go talk business.”

Sherman settled himself in the front seat. “Pretty fancy truck for a skip tracer to be driving,” he said, studying Chandler. “I been wondering what you looked like ever since you got me to help grab that Phoenix bond jumper a while back. You sounded like a kid on the telephone.” He chuckled. “Come to think of it, you still did when you called me last week.”

“You sounded like some old fart in a nursing home,” Chandler said, “but you look healthy enough. What kind of information have you got for me?”

“First I got a question. What’s my split on this?”

“No split,” Chandler said. “If we bomb out, we pay you your expenses plus your regular hourly rate. If we get the deal done, you get that plus a twenty-thousand bonus.”

Sherman digested that. Looked at Chandler. “This don’t sound a bit like a bail bond case.”

“I already told you that,” Chandler said. “I told you I want you to find out everything you can about that robbery-homicide they were holding a Hopi Indian named Billy Tuve for doing. Everything about that big diamond he had that got him arrested. Everything about who has just bonded him out. And why they put up the money. This Tuve hasn’t jumped bond. But I want to know where he’s living now. Probably he’s at his home on the Hopi Reservation. But I want to know for sure. And what’s he doing? What’s going on? Has he just gone home and rested? Or what?”

It occurred to Chandler as he finished that string of bad-tempered questions that he had adopted exactly the same arrogant tone that Plymale had used with him. Sherman was staring at him now, eyes squinted, an expression that suggested he, Sherman, hadn’t liked it any better than Chandler had. But Sherman merely shrugged.

“Well, now,” he said. “First I have another question. Where are you taking me now?”

“I’m going to get someplace where those airport security rent-a-cops won’t be hassling us to move along. We’re going to circle like we’re waiting to pick up a passenger. Then when we get our talking done, I’ll drop you off at the cabstand.”

“It would be quicker to just go into Flagstaff, stop at my hotel, and do our talking in air-conditioned comfort,” Sherman said. “Maybe in the bar with a Scotch-and-water in hand.”

Chandler ignored that.

Sherman studied him. “I’d guess you have some reason that I can’t think of right now not to want somebody or other to see you and me together at the hotel. Does that sound like a sensible guess?”

“Possibly,” Chandler said.

“Well, then, let’s see if I can answer some of those questions you were asking.”

Sherman extracted a slim little notebook from a shirt pocket.

“The bond for Billy Tuve was fifty thou,” Sherman began, and recited what else he’d learned at the clerk’s office, down to Tuve leaving the place with Joanna Craig.

“Going where?” Chandler asked.

“Be cool,” Sherman said. “The hotel where she was staying in Gallup was the El Rancho,” he reported, and then rattled off what and who he’d seen there, down to the ordering of room service. “Then…”

Sherman paused, peered at Chandler. “I understand this right, don’t I? You’re paying the expenses.”

Chandler nodded.

“I mention it because this cost me twenty bucks. The clerk was getting tired of talking to me. Anyway, then a big, tall Navajo, looked like an athlete, showed up with a Hopi deputy sheriff, asking about Joanna Craig. They went up to her room. A while later another Indian came in. He said he was supposed to come to the hotel and pick up Billy Tuve. Said he was his uncle giving him a ride back out to Second Mesa, wherever that is. Sounded like he was taking him home. So the clerk called Ms. Craig’s room, and they all came out and left.”

“All? Tuve left with them? And were they all together? Or how?”

“Tuve left with the man who claimed to be his uncle. Then the other two men left. Don’t know about Ms. Craig because I left myself.”

“How about why she put up Tuve’s bond?”

Sherman responded to that with an incredulous stare.

“Well? What’s the answer?”

“If I had been dumb enough to ask her, her answer would have been it was none of my damn business. And who was I, and who was I working for, and so forth,” Sherman said. “But I’d guess it’s something to do with that lawsuit you were telling me about on the telephone. You didn’t tell me much, but you did say we’d be working for one side of some sort of big-money court case.”

“How about the diamond? Where it came from?”

“Tuve told the cops an old man swapped it with him for his shovel. Down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.” Sherman laughed. “My connections in the district attorney’s office weren’t taking that very seriously when I first asked ’em about the case, but I have something new on that. I got a call back from my man there, and he told me—”

“Hold it,” Chandler said, and pulled the Land Rover into a tree-shaded turn bay, and stopped. “Told you what?”

“Told me another diamond had turned up. Or at least another diamond story. Come to think of it, two new diamond stories. Both pretty doubtful.”

“Go on,” Chandler said.

“This first one sounds like what you call a groundless rumor. My man heard from a cop he knows in the New Mexico State Police, got it from somebody in the Navajo County Sheriff’s Department, who picked it up in Window Rock. Probably from Navajo Tribal Police, who—”

“Come on,” said Chandler. “Cut down on the BS. What’s the story?”

Sherman said nothing.

Chandler glanced at him, noticed his expression. Said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so impatient.”

“The story is that a little trading post at Short Mountain, way up in the northwest corner of the Navajo Reservation, got burglarized some years back. Owner gave the cops a list of missing stuff, including a very expensive diamond. When this robbery-homicide Tuve pulled off came up, with Tuve trying to pawn a big diamond, the old Navajo cop who had worked the Short Mountain case checked on it. The trader claimed a cowboy had come in out of a snowstorm and traded it to him for some groceries and a ride into Page. This cowboy said he was down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and an old man came along and swapped him the diamond for a fancy jackknife he had.”

Chandler considered this without comment.

“End of story,” Sherman said. “You ready to have me hurry through the other one?”

“You have the name of the Navajo cop who checked into this? Or the trading post owner? Or whether this diamond swap was in the same part of the canyon? That damned Grand Canyon is two hundred and seventy-seven miles long and more than ten miles wide.”

“It couldn’t be as long as that,” Sherman said. “And I don’t know where he got the diamond. Don’t know the names, either. But I guess I can get them.”

“I’ll want them,” Chandler said. “Now, what’s the other story?”

“Exactly what you’d expect. The widow of the guy killed in that curio store robbery claims Tuve lied in his story about where he got that stone. She said her husband had that big diamond for years and she wanted to make damn sure the law took good care of it and gave it back to her when the trial was over.”

Chandler laughed.

Sherman grinned at him. “I didn’t really think that would surprise you.”

“It doesn’t,” Chandler said. “I think I may have gotten myself involved in a situation in which diamonds have punched the avarice button on two greedy women.”

“Two? Who’s the other one? You mean that Craig woman? How does she fit in?”

Sherman was leaning back against the passenger-side door, studying Chandler, watching a driver who had hoped to use the turnout lane creeping cautiously past.

Chandler ignored the question.

“I think you need to tell me what this is all about,” Sherman said. “Otherwise I might run across something useful and not even know it.”

“Like what?”

“Well, hell. Like who we’re trying to find. He might walk right past me.”

Chandler laughed. “I don’t think that’s likely. This guy who is being looked for is dead.”

“Dead?”

“And we’re not trying to find him. Or if we do, we’ll never admit it. We’ll just hide him again.”

Sherman, not enjoying this, said, “I don’t like playing children’s guessing games. What are you paying me to do?”

Chandler took a folded envelope out of his shirt pocket.

“There’s a list of stuff in here. Where you can find me, phone number, all that. And a list of instructions. Information I need. Names. All that. Then I want you to locate Tuve, find that woman who posted bond for him. If she went back to where she came from, find her address and what she does there. If she stayed out here, find out where and what she’s doing. Who she’s talking to, all that.”

Sherman took the envelope, extracted the note inside, read it, stared at Chandler.

“I’ll still say I could be a lot more useful, and quicker, if I know what our goal is in all this.”

Chandler nodded. He gave Sherman a quick summary starting with the airlines colliding, then moving on to the diamond case padlocked to the arm. But how much of this did he want Sherman to know?

“It was a man named Clarke,” he continued. “Like most of the victims, his body was never recovered.”

Sherman was frowning. “You going to tell me we’re looking for this Clarke bird? Dead for how many years?”

“No. I was going to tell you that a daughter of his old girlfriend got a psychic message through some spiritualist that Clarke had his arm torn off in the crash, and he sent her psychic orders to find it and bury it properly with the rest of his corpse so it would quit hurting him in the spirit world.”

“Come on,” Sherman said. “Get serious.” He laughed.

“The one she wants is the arm that had the case of diamonds handcuffed to it.”

Sherman considered that for a moment, said, “Oh, I guess I get the picture.”

“I’m not quite certain I get it myself. But it seems like the interests you and me are representing here are the foundation which inherited all that Clarke fortune. And probably the insurance, which paid out its hundred thousand dollars maximum airline flight fee for the jewels, and somebody interested in patching Clarke’s body back together.”

“And you figure that burial sentiment is actually based on trying to get those diamonds, right?”

“Well, a civil suit is now hung up in court. A woman is claiming to be an out-of-wedlock granddaughter of Old Man Clarke and therefore the valid heiress to the Clarke billions. And that lawsuit was months after the news that even old bones can yield DNA evidence to prove family lineage.”

“I’ve heard about that crash, I think,” Sherman said. “Long, long time ago, wasn’t it? And we’re trying to find the bones of that guy carrying the diamonds.” He shook his head, laughed. “You serious?”

“Well, actually it’s not that simple. Here we have one side of a two-sided game. People on the other side are trying to find those bones and use them to capture the Clarke fortune,” Chandler said. “Our job is to make sure that poor fellow’s bones stay lost and never get dragged into a courtroom.”

Sherman considered that, face solemn. Then he smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds like a worthy cause with righteous purposes. And I can see how that would be a lot easier.”

Chandler nodded.

“Finding old bones down in that canyon is worse than hunting the needle in the haystack. It’s like hunting the needle in a whole farm full of haystacks. And not even knowing which farm it’s on. So maybe we could just be happy with keeping anyone else from finding them.”

“Yes,” Chandler said. “Easier to find the hunter than the needle.”

“You sound like maybe you have a plan,” Sherman said. “I’d like to hear it. You know, it helps me if I understand what you’re trying to do.”

“You’re getting the idea now,” Chandler said. “First, we understand our goal. Our goal is not—underline that, not—not to find the bones. Our goal is to keep somebody else from finding them. We want to find ’em, that’s good, but only because then we can make sure the other folks don’t get their hands on them. You understand that?”

“Sure,” Sherman said, looking slightly resentful. “I already said I understood it.”

“That’s the first thing to understand. Now, the second thing is this. We know that case full of diamonds was handcuffed to the owner’s arm. To the bones in question. We have to presume that the Tuve diamond, and that trading post burglary diamond, came from that package. Thus they are the only clues to where those bones might be. The other side, the bad guys, know as much about that as we do. Maybe more. So our goal is to get there first. Got it?”

“Of course,” he said, and then thought about it awhile. “Then do what? My impression is that your paycheck depends on the other side never getting hold of those bones. At least not long enough to get them into court. Right? So what do we do if the other side gets there first?”

“I guess that would depend on how much you wanted to earn that big bonus,” Chandler said. “I guess you’d do whatever the situation demanded. You know. To get those bones away from the bad guys.”

Sherman spent another moment thinking.

“Arizona is a death penalty state,” he said. “For murder done in commission of a felony, anyway. But I’ll bet you already knew that.”

“I did,” Chandler agreed. “I also know the bottom of that canyon is loaded with dangerous places. Falling rocks. Folks swept away in the river rapids. Drowning. People slipping and tumbling down the cliffs.”

Sherman nodded. Grinned at Chandler. “Wouldn’t you hate to be the district attorney trying to prove somebody was pushed instead of just slipped? I mean, when nobody saw what happened?”

“Sounds like a case of reasonable doubt to me,” Chandler said. “Okay, then. Here’s what I want you to do. And the very first thing, right now, today, is locate Billy Tuve.”

“Any idea where?”

“He lives on Second Mesa. You heard his uncle saying he’d come to take him home. He lives with his mama in a little village. Kykotsmovi, however you pronounce it. Shouldn’t be hard to find it.”

“Find him and what?”

“Find him and bring him to me.”

“Then what?”

“Then we take him down to the bottom of the canyon, to the area where he got the diamond. Then he shows us how to find where the man he got it from came from. When we find that man, then we find the left arm bones of this Clarke guy and what’s left of the diamonds he was carrying.”

“And split them?”

“Well, I presume the man who’s hiring us would want them himself. But I don’t think he has them counted.”

Sherman laughed. “He wouldn’t miss a few of ’em.”

11

The plan, carefully drawn up by Sergeant Jim Chee, involved having Bernie spend the evening with him at his Shiprock trailer, during which they would enjoy themselves and pack up the assorted stuff they needed for the junket into the depth of the Grand Canyon. Then they would head westward to Tuba City. Meanwhile, Cowboy Dashee would have gone to Kykotsmovi on the Hopi Second Mesa and picked up Billy Tuve at his family home there. That done, Dashee would bring Tuve to the grocery store/service station at Tuba, where they’d meet Chee and Bernie. From there, Cowboy would lead the way on a back-road shortcut to Moenkopi, thence westward via an unimproved and unnamed dirt road to a place on the East Rim just north of the Little Colorado Canyon gorge. They would park there. Dashee and Tuve, both members of the prestigious Hopi Bear Clan and thus both Salt Trail initiates, would lead them down, down, down into the depths. Once at the bottom, Tuve would show them exactly where he had traded his folding shovel for the diamond, and the direction he’d seen the owner of gem take to retrieve it.

As such careful and detailed plans tend to do, this one began falling apart in phase one.

“I’m not going to drive all the way to Shiprock this afternoon to spend the night with you, Mr. Chee, in that old trailer,” said Bernadette Manuelito. “I have to get my stuff together. Get my boots, and hiking stuff, sleeping bag, all that. You have to meet Dashee anyway. Can’t you pick me up on the way? I’ll meet you over at Yah-ta-hey. At the trading post.”

Chee sighed. “We’re meeting Dashee at Tuba City at five A.M.,” he said. “So I guess we could meet at Yah-ta-hey. But we’d have to leave Yah-ta-hey about three A.M., I’d say. Can you handle getting up that early?”

“Hey, man,” Bernie said. “You’re forgetting I’ve been a Border Patrolman.”

Indeed, Bernie seemed wide awake as well as loaded with water bottles, foodstuff, and luggage when he pulled up at Yah-ta-hey. However, after a hundred miles and a lot of talking of wedding plans, snuggling, and so forth, they saw no sign of Dashee or Billy Tuve at their Tuba City meeting place. Chee looked at his watch and grumbled. “When I’m late, Cowboy always gives me that ‘Navajo time’ complaint,” he said. “As if the Hopis were perfect.”

“If I were you I’d just call him. Find out what happened.”

Chee extracted his cell phone, dialed Dashee’s cell number, let it ring, heard Dashee’s voice.

“Is this Chee?” Dashee said. “I was just going to call you. Tuve’s gone.”

It wasn’t a good connection.

“Tuve’s what? Gone where?”

“When I got to his place, his mother was there. She said a car drove up yesterday about suppertime. She was out seeing about the sheep, but she saw Billy out in front talking to somebody. When she got back to the house, the car was driving away. She went on in, looking for Billy, but he was gone.”

Chee considered that. Said, “What do you think?”

“Now I don’t know what to think,” Dashee said. “But then I told Billy’s mother maybe the sheriff had come to get him. Needed some more information from him. Or maybe the bail bond business had been canceled.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Chee said.

“Sure does, but it wasn’t. On the way down off Second Mesa I met a McKinley County Sheriff’s car going up the slope. Flagged him down. He said he was going out to Tuve’s place to pick him up. Said more evidence had come in and Tuve’s bail had been revoked.”

“This is interesting,” Chee said. “So what do you think happened to him?”

“I don’t have a clue. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. But I’ve got an idea.”

Bernie tapped Chee on the arm, said, “What’s interesting, and who is the ‘him’ that something happened to? Was it Billy Tuve?”

Cowboy was talking into Chee’s other ear.

“Hold it a second, Cowboy. I’ll bring Bernie up to date on this.”

“My idea,” said Cowboy, “is that Craig woman who bailed him out came and got him. Remember, she wanted him to take her down into the canyon. Show her where he got the diamond.”

“I remember,” Chee said. “But I also remember he told her he wouldn’t do it. And then she said, well, she’d go anyway. Or something like that.”

“What’s he telling you?” Bernie asked.

“Shut up a minute, will you, Cowboy?” Chee said. He put the phone on his lap, told Bernie what Cowboy had told him, and reclaimed the telephone.

“Well, anyway, I don’t have any better ideas. Where are you? And what do we do now?”

Cowboy, it developed, was just rolling over the hump on 264 and dropping down into the Moenkopi draw. “I’ll be with you there in Tuba in about twenty minutes.”

And he was. As Chee had suggested, he parked his pickup in the Tuba City police station lot. Then he climbed out, took off his hat, nodded to Bernie and Chee.

“Well,” he said. “As Jim was just asking us, what do we do now?”

12

Joe Leaphorn was listening to the coffee perking and deciding whether he would double his fried egg ration this morning and cut back on other food later in the day. His rationale for that indulgence was having slept later than usual this morning, having been up past eleven the night before on the phone with Louisa. It had been a long conversation, starting with her report on her interview with the old lady at the Havasupai settlement. He had responded with his own report on his Shorty McGinnis encounter, and McGinnis’s tale of trading the cowboy for a diamond. That had triggered a bunch of questions, most of which he couldn’t answer, and that had led backward into the whole business of Cowboy Dashee’s cousin Billy Tuve, the problem he’d brought crashing down on himself by trying to pawn such a diamond, and Jim Chee’s involvement in the whole Billy Tuve mess.

“When did Tuve get it?” Louisa had asked.

“Several years ago is about the best I can tell you. Tuve’s very vague on chronology. He did some rodeo riding, and his horse fell on him, and he suffered some brain damage.”

“I’ve always thought rodeo riders are brain damaged before they get on the horse,” Louisa said. “But how about the other man? I mean McGinnis’s cowboy. The one who swapped his folding shovel for the diamond. Do you have any specific date when that happened?”

“Well, the burglary in which Shorty claimed the thing was stolen was twelve years ago, but Shorty said he couldn’t remember how many years he’d had the diamond before that. I think he said ‘several.’ I guess it would be about the same with Billy Tuve.”

“Except with Tuve, I guess we could find out the year he went down that Hopi Salt Trail for his Bear Clan initiation rite.”

“Good idea,” Leaphorn said. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Probably because he was retired. It was none of his business. “But why is the timing important?”

“Well, it probably isn’t,” Louisa said. “But it helps me understand what I’ve been hearing down here in the canyon. Both of these old people I’ve been trying to collect origin stories from are full of tales of some huge airplane disaster that happened when they were young. Bodies falling out of the sky. Fires in the canyons. All sort of stuff raining down. Clothing. Suitcases. Dishes. Everything. The Park Service people here tell me it happened in 1956, two airlines collided over the canyon. Everybody killed.”

“Does seem to be the sort of thing that might produce some new legends,” Leaphorn said.

“Or get mixed in with the original ones,” Louisa said. “That’s my worry. I’m already noticing a mixing of the stories of the various Yuman tribes you have around here with what must have been seen in that disaster. Mixing was already a problem. The Hualapai, the Supai, and some Mohave branches, and even Paiutes—even the Utes and the Piautes are borrowing bits and pieces of legends from each other. Now we find them mixing in stories about stuff being found.”

Leaphorn’s interest abruptly sharpened. “Are you hearing things about diamonds?”

“Not specifically, but lots about the stuff found when people were out helping the rescue crews locate missing parts of bodies and airplane parts. And there’s one about a Hualapai man from Peach Springs who came down to the river to see what was going on and saw something that might be diamond-connected. The way the most common version of that story goes, he saw some clothing items, or something, caught in a drift of debris, and in this pile of jetsam he saw a human arm.” Louisa paused a moment for Leaphorn’s reaction to that. Got none. “Is there some reason that doesn’t surprise you?”

“Couple of reasons,” Leaphorn said. “Body parts were scattered all over in that crash—across the mesa top, down the canyon walls, down into the river itself. Rescue crews were collecting body bits in bags. And besides, I heard the arm story before.”

“Did the arm you’re hearing about have some sort of attaché case connected to it? Maybe with a chain and a handcuff?”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said. “That’s the one. But the man who spotted it in my story couldn’t reach it without drowning. When he got back with some helpers, the river had swept it away. Long ago, of course. I would have thought it would be pretty well forgotten by now.”

Louisa laughed. “Joe! Who’s going to forget seeing an arm sticking out of debris in their river? That’s good enough to make a Greek myth. It’s one of the problems for us seekers of undiluted, genuine legends, ancient and uninfected by our unromantic modern times.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Besides, if that arm with the case chained to it had been forgotten, somebody has stirred it up again.”

“How?” Leaphorn asked. “And who? And why would they?”

“They printed a sheet offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for just such a set of arm bones. Someone distributed them at the Grand Canyon Hotel, the private one, and at the National Park Service hotel, and visitor centers, and got them spread around among the professional guide and float trip outfits, and at Peach Springs. There’s a number to call—I think it’s in Flagstaff—if you find the arm and want to collect.” Louisa laughed. “I should have saved one for you.”

“Get one for me if you can, Louisa. What did it say?”

“Well, a big headline across the top said ‘Ten-Thousand-Dollar Reward.’ And under that—in smaller type—it said something like ‘Family of 1956 airline crash victim seeks bones of the left arm of John Clarke, so that they can be placed with his body in the family’s burial crypt.’ And then it went on to explain the arm had been torn from his body when those two airlines collided over the Canyon and had never been recovered. It said the bones could be identified because the forearm had been broken previously and repaired with a surgical pin when this Clarke was young, or the forearm might still be attached by a metal and cuff to which a leather case was secured.”

“I’d really like to have a couple of those flyers,” Leaphorn said. “One for Jim Chee. I think he and Dashee are going to take Tuve down in the Canyon and try to find the man he got the diamond from.”

That produced a long pause.

“After God knows how many years?” Louisa said. “How in the world are they going to find him? No name or anything. That sounds impossible.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “All they know is where the swap was made and that the old fellow with the diamonds was an Indian, but not a Hopi or Navajo, and after the swap deal was agreed on, he had to go down the canyon maybe a half-mile to get the stone. Their guess is he must have been some sort of hermit—maybe a Havasupai shaman—who had the diamonds cached in a cave.”

“What’s your guess?”

“My guess is they won’t find anyone, but you know them both. Jim will feel better because he did what he could to help his old friend, and Cowboy will rest easier because he did his duty to his family and his fellow Bear Clan member.”

Louisa sighed. “Sure,” she said. “You’d do the same thing, wouldn’t you?”

Before he could think of an honest answer to that, Louisa had something to add.

“Hermit, you said. That old woman I talked to yesterday was telling about the last shaman they had—he died back in the 1960s, I think it was—and how a man from the Kaibab Paiute Reservation was a friend of the shaman and was always hanging around Peach Springs. From what she told me, he was living on a sort of part-time basis with a Havasupai woman. She said he was a ‘far-looking man,’ the Supai name for people who can see into the future, find things, all that. Sort of like your Navajo crystal-gazer shaman. Anyway, he got into some sort of trouble and left Peach Springs and went away somewhere and disappeared. Supposed to have made himself some sort of nest in one of those undercut places up a side canyon and was living off crawdads, frogs, and stuff he could get off of the tourist rafters who are always floating down the river through there. She said people sometimes crossed the river there to learn things from him. Get him to take a peek into the distant future for them.”

“Hmmm,” Leaphorn said.

Louisa laughed. “Too bad they didn’t ask him how to find those diamonds you and Chee seem so interested in. My source at Peach Springs said he seemed to do a lot of business with people after that airplane disaster. Lots of lost things to be found.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Such as friends and relatives. And including a torn-off left arm with a package of diamonds attached.”

“I could bring you a couple copies of that flier,” Louisa said. “But if you need it faster, I heard whoever did it ran the same message as little advertisements in the Navajo News, and the Flagstaff paper, and other papers around there. Easy to find out and easy to get a copy.”

“Really?” Leaphorn said. He was thinking of how much it must have cost to get all this printing and advertising done, thinking about what Captain Pinto had said, of Pinto’s speculation about the importance Washington was putting on the federal part of this peculiar situation. He was thinking this was getting much more interesting.

“Joe? You still there?”

“Can you do me a favor, Louisa? Could you find out everything you can learn about this possible hermit? His name? Is he still alive? Did he stay on the Peach Springs side of the river? Does anyone know where he might be? Anyway, just let me know anything you can find out about him.”

“Okay, Joe. But if I do, you’re going to have to promise me you’ll keep me informed. I don’t want to read about something spectacular in the Farmington Times or the Gallup Independent.”

“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “I promise.”

“One other thing you might be interested in. Among the various new legends and revisions of old ones that disaster spread around is a renewed interest in Masaw. You remember him?”

“The Hopi kachina spirit who is a sort of guardian of this world. The one who greeted them when they came up out of the fourth world, and told them where to live, and not to be afraid of death. Masaw, or Skeleton Man, or Maasau’u, or—”

“Or two or three other names,” Louisa said. “Anyway some old man, maybe that hermit I mentioned, was supposed to be trying to start a sort of Skeleton Man sect. To get people to quit being so obsessed with having those one hundred and twenty-seven bodies showering down on them.”

“Sort of like all that therapy business in Colorado after all those kids got shot at the school, I guess,” Leaphorn said.

“Sort of,” Louisa agreed. “And listen, if Chee and Officer Dashee are coming down here, let me know where I can find them. Cell phones are pretty chancy, but sometimes they work. I’m talking to you on mine right now.”

“Fair enough,” Leaphorn said. “And when you’re back here, I want to show you the little leather pollen pouch that the diamond Shorty McGinnis showed me had been kept in. It has an animal-looking symbol sewed into it. New to me but I thought you might recognize it.”

“These days it would probably be something out of a Disney movie,” Louisa said.

After they clicked off, it occurred to him that he hadn’t told Louisa where to find Chee or Dashee. In fact, he didn’t know himself.

Where had he jotted down that cell phone number? Back of an envelope maybe. He’d sort through his waste-basket. Hope to get lucky. Or call the NTP office at Shiprock. Maybe someone there would have it.

13

Joanna Craig had followed Tuve on his homeward trip. His uncle had put him into a very dusty and much-dented pickup. Pickup trucks in Indian country are as common as taxicabs in Manhattan, but this one helped Joanna’s cause by carrying in its bed a huge box, big enough to house a king-sized refrigerator, with a gaudy red Kitchen Aide label.

A couple of times she’d needed the help. Tuve’s uncle had ducked into a service station at Ganado, and she would have lost him had she not seen the big box sticking up as she rolled past on the highway. She would have lost him again just past the Polacca settlement when he made a turn she hadn’t anticipated, and then been lured into following another pickup, same shade of blue, same degree of dustiness. But she had again spotted the Kitchen Aide advertisement, did an illegal U-turn across the highway, and followed the box up a narrow road that struggled up the slopes of First Mesa to serve the little stone villages of Walpi, Hano, and Sichomovi and whatever lay beyond them.

And now there it was, box and truck, parked down a short stretch of weedy track that led to a flat stone house and its supporting storage shed, sheep pen, outhouse, and the rusty remains of an earlier pickup. She saw no sign of Tuve, his uncle, or anyone else, and drove past. She found a cluster of junipers where she could park mostly out of sight and watch the house. She would wait, and worry, and reconsider her strategy for doing what she absolutely had to do, must do, was destined to do. Usually she thought of it as getting justice. When she was angry, she admitted her goal was revenge, but now that she was here, she knew it was fate. Fate had moved her along. This was the only way she could destroy Dan Plymale. And that was her dream and her destiny.

No need for the car’s air conditioner in the cool, dry air of the Hopi Mesa. She rolled down the window, got her binoculars out of the glove box, and focused on the Tuve home place. The truck was empty. Nothing stirred but a faint plume of smoke that came from the horno oven behind the house. She had already considered and rejected the idea of simply knocking on the door, introducing herself, and explaining to Tuve’s mother and uncle why she had put up bail for Billy Tuve and why she desperately needed his help. She was certain she could sway Billy—had seen the sympathy showing in his face in her hotel room. But mother and uncle were older, would be skeptical, would be more religious, would be impossible to persuade that the Salt Trail rules could be bent. She’d have to wait for an opportunity to get Billy alone. At least wait until after his uncle had left. Without someone there to interrupt her, Joanna was sure she could use that combination of his own self-interest and his sympathy for her own plight to persuade him. And probably his mother, too.

Whether Tuve could find the man who supplied him his trouble-making gem seemed less likely, and even if he did, whether that would lead her to her father’s bones was another unanswerable question. But she would recover those bones. And they would prove she was heir to the Clarke fortune and bring Dan Plymale and his phony, greed-driven Eternal Peace Foundation crashing down in bankrupt ruins.

Someone had emerged from the rear of the Tuve house. She shifted to the passenger window, getting a clearer view, and focused on a woman, plump, walking slowly, carrying a basket to a clothesline strung between the storage shed and a nearby tree, hanging out a shirt, a pair of denims, socks, underwear. Probably what Tuve had been wearing when he was taken to jail.

Joanna dropped the binoculars on the seat and squirmed into a more comfortable position. Ready for more waiting, more planning, more remembering. And for reinforcing the absolute confidence she must have to finish this job. She would because she must. Because it was her fate. Fate had been painfully slow, but it had finally led her here, and it would take her to those bones, and they would give her—finally—the peace of knowing she had done her duty. The peace of taking on her own name, of having it legally changed to Joanna Clarke. Having finally revenged her mother. And her father. And herself.

Revenge had been her purpose since she was in high school, living with her mother and her mother’s elderly husband in his lavish summer home in the Montana mountains, and finally learning that Craig was a fiction and that her father was John Clarke.

The elderly husband had been dying of some variation of cancer, probably had been dying when her mother, just thirty at the time, married him, an old gray man with a chauffeur-driven car. Joanna had been a flower girl at the wedding, only nine but old enough even then to wonder why her mother was the bride of a frail-looking grandfather. It wasn’t until her mother’s death the year after she’d graduated from the University of Montana that she knew the rest of the story. Or knew her real name.

Her mother’s lawyer had given her the letter—a thick envelope with a stamped wax seal. On it her mother had written: “To be given to my daughter, Joanna Clarke, in the event of my death.”

A man emerged from the front door of the Tuve house. Joanna refocused the binoculars. Tuve’s uncle, with Tuve standing in the open door saying something to him. Uncle climbed into the pickup, the motor started, the truck backed down the track, turned on to the road, and headed slowly down the way they had come. Billy Tuve disappeared from the doorway, closed the door. Joanna switched her view to the back of the house, located Tuve’s mother at the sheep pen, the gate open now, the sheep emerging. Joanna turned her view to the pickup, disappearing now over the mesa rim. Back to Tuve’s mother. She was following the sheep, presumably to where they would be grazing. The front door was still closed. She would wait about five minutes. Then she would call on Billy Tuve, and persuade him, and take him to the top of the Salt Trail, and down it to realize her destiny.