Skeleton Man

Destiny, however, did not allow her a full five minutes. Just as she turned the ignition key to start the engine to drive down to Tuve’s house, to complete this phase of her project, another car emerged over the rim, a white sedan moving fast. Joanna decided she would wait another minute to allow it to pass. It didn’t. It slowed, turned down the track to the Tuve house, stopped there. A man emerged, a big man. Billy Tuve appeared at the front door. They met in the doorway and talked. To Joanna, her binoculars focused, they appeared to be arguing. Billy made a negative gesture. The argument resumed. Billy disappeared inside. The man waited on the doorstep. And waited. Joanna glanced at her watch. Two minutes passed. Four minutes. The man leaned against the door frame, shifted his hat to shade his face from the sun.

Joanna suddenly felt sick. She knew who this man must be. He would be a man named Sherman. The man who had been at the Park Service Center just before her, asking questions about where victims of that plane crash were buried, and then asking about who had been handing out the sheets offering a reward for information about them.

“You just missed him,” the clerk had told her. “He was really curious about your reward offer. He said his name was Sherman and he needed to find you. I asked him if he knew anything about the diamonds and he just laughed.”

The name Sherman might be phony, Joanna thought, but whatever it was, it might as well be Plymale. He’d be bought and paid by that lawyer, just one of the tentacles answering to Dan Plymale. Which meant Plymale had got to Billy Tuve before her.

As she thought that, Billy Tuve reappeared in the doorway. He was carrying a zippered bag of blue canvas which seemed fairly heavy as he swung it into the back seat of Sherman’s car. They drove away down the mesa road and over the rim.

Joanna, feeling sick and shaken, followed. Following was easier this time because she was almost sure she knew where they were going and the vehicle was an easy-to-spot white sedan. But what would she have to do when they got there? She pulled her purse over beside her, snapped it open, reached inside, extracted a pistol, and steeled herself for what lay ahead.

The pistol, like most everything she was doing, as well as her fierce malice, her nightmare dreams, dated back to the letter her mother had left her. She could remember it, word for word.

Dearest Joanna:

I have lied to you all these years because I didn’t want you to inherit the pain I have lived through since your father died. But I believe you must know. Lieutenant David Shaw, killed in Vietnam after your conception, was a lie. He didn’t exist. He was my cover story. Your father was John Clarke Jr., killed in that awful airliner collision in Arizona about six months before your birth. He was flying home for our wedding. His father (your grandfather, although he never would have admitted it) was a widower. He had already told John, his only child, that he would not attend the ceremony. He told me in a letter that I was “gold-digging white trash, in no way fit for his family.”

Much of the rest of that first page recounted other such insults. It told how the elder Clarke, already the victim of two heart attacks, had suffered a stroke during those days when the hunt was on for the bodies of airline crash victims. He died without recovering from the coma and his affairs were taken over by his law firm, the Plymale firm, which represented a tax-exempt foundation the old man had started.

The law firm was Plymale, Stevens, Ebersten, and Daly, and one of its junior members was Dan Plymale Jr., son of the senior partner. The firm seemed to have suspected that Joanna’s mother had conceived young Clarke’s child. The senior Plymale contacted her, told her she had no claim to any share of the estate, but offered her ten thousand dollars to sign a legal disclaimer. She had discussed this with Hal Simmons, who told her that the senior Clarke’s will left the bulk of his estate to John, or descendants of John if John preceded him in death. If no such descendants existed, the bulk of the estate went to the foundation he had initiated with the guidance of Dan Plymale. The executor of the estate, and the director of the charity foundation, was to be Plymale’s law firm.

She had given Hal Simmons copies of the love letters John had written her, including those discussing her pregnancy, along with the final letter. In that, Clarke said he would be “home tomorrow to hold you in my arms, and take you down to the church and thereby make that little child we have conceived legal and respectable—and to hell with what Daddy Clarke thinks of it.”

Simmons met with the Plymales, father and son. He showed them the letters and proposed a negotiated settlement. The Plymales refused, saying the letters were not sufficient evidence. However, in view of the pregnancy, they offered to increase the ten-thousand-dollar settlement offer to thirty thousand dollars, providing that the fetus would be aborted, and proof of the abortion provided.

Joanna remembered precisely what her mother had written: “Remember, Joanna, the twenty thousand dollars they added to the offer. That was the value they put on your life. Twenty thousand dollars the fee for killing you in my womb.”

Twenty thousand dollars! When she heard that was the estimated value of her father’s diamond, the diamond poor Billy Tuve had tried to pawn for twenty dollars, the irony struck deep. She had laughed and then she’d cried, and then she’d wondered if that had been the very diamond her father had been bringing home to her mother as a wedding gift, and then she had cried again. And now it turned out to be that this diamond, or another one just like it, was leading her to her destiny.

Simmons told her mother that the Plymales probably had the right reading of the laws. They would need more evidence to prove that her unborn child was the product of Clarke’s seed. With some of the money her mother had inherited from her husband’s estate and perhaps the promise of a generous contingency agreement, Simmons retained a national private investigation firm to learn everything possible about John Clarke, his jewelry business, the last months of his life, and the circumstances of his death.

The information had come in slowly. First the knowledge that her father had been bringing a package of specially cut diamonds back to New York from Los Angeles. That information had come from a dealer in Manhattan’s diamond district who had been awaiting them. Seventy-four stones, ranging in weight from 3.7 carats to 7.2, all of them perfect blue-whites, one specially cut for her mother—just as John Clarke had told her in his terminal letter. And in that final letter, her father had drawn a neat little sketch of the gem, showing how the cutter had shaped it for her.

From airline employees in Los Angeles, the agency collected statements confirming that Clarke had boarded the aircraft with the diamond case locked to his left wrist, and that he had fended off security people who wanted to open it for inspection, explaining that those carrying diamonds—like security messengers—couldn’t unlock such cases. The key to do that had been delivered by another messenger to the person who would receive them, count them, weigh them, and sign receipts for them.

From National Park Service employees, guides who worked in the canyon, from Arizona police, from a half-dozen Havasupai citizens who had been involved in recovering bodies and parts of the shattered aircraft, the agency learned that Clarke’s body had not been recovered for identification. They also learned that one of a party of tourists who had been on a guided raft float down the Colorado eleven days after the disaster had seen a body part, a forearm, in driftwood debris below one of the rapids. He had not been able to reach the driftwood through the current but had taken photographs from a nearby outcrop. When a party of guides managed to be back there two weeks later to recover the arm, it was gone, as was part of the collected flotsam the man had seen with it. A search downstream proved fruitless.

The agency reported that the man who shot the photographs was now dead but his family had kept prints and negatives as a sort of macabre souvenir of what had been, at the time, the worst airline disaster in history. Copies were made and provided to Simmons and her mother, and now Joanna kept copies in her purse. They were the only photographs she had of her father. The Clarke family relatives had refused her requests for old family pictures.

In the final report, the agency provided a collection of interviews with a number of people—mostly Havasupai, some Grand Canyon National Park employees, some professional guides, some tourists passing through—who spoke of reports about a man, described generally as having long gray or white hair, being slender, wearing worn or ragged clothing, having claimed to have found a severed arm in the Colorado River, or recovered it from a drift of flotsam. While these stories varied in many details, most of those interviewed agreed that the man had been on what is called the “south side” of the river—below the most tourist-popular South Rim—and downstream from where the Little Colorado River Canyon connects to the Grand Canyon. They also seemed in various ways to suggest that he was a hermit, some sort of eccentric, perhaps a religious fanatic. Two of these proposed that he was a Havasupai shaman who had disappeared about twenty years earlier and was remembered as a visionary with a talent for finding lost children, missing animals, anything lost.

The way Joanna saw it, an important element of these fragmentary “hermit reports” was the mention in three of them that this strange fellow had considered himself either a priest or the guardian of a shrine. One report included his description of what happened when sunlight reached this shrine: “He said when this happened it ‘responded to the Father Sun with a dazzling light,’ but he said this occurred only late in the morning with the sun almost overhead.”

To Joanna, “dazzling light” suggested the sun striking diamonds, which perhaps decorated this odd man’s shrine. But more important was the dating of these third-hand reports. In one the person being interviewed said he had met this hermit only three years earlier. Another had placed his conversation with the man “probably about July, two years back.”

Thus it was reasonable to think he was still alive. And the man who could help her find this hermit was just ahead. The white sedan was slowing, turning down tracks that led to the rim of the mesa, led to the edge of the long, long drop down into the canyon. Probably led to the starting point of the Hopi trail that headed down to the Salt Shrine.

Joanna stopped at the turnoff point, watched and waited until the white sedan disappeared behind a screen of junipers. Then she followed slowly. Give them just enough time to get their bottom-of-the-canyon gear out of the car. Her plan was to get there just before they started their descent. What then? She would decide when she had to.

But there was the white sedan, parked. The two men still in it. The passenger-side door opened, was jerked closed again. Joanna parked, snatched up her binoculars, and stared. Some sort of struggle seemed to be going on. Then it ended. She could make out what must be Tuve’s head against the passenger-side window, and part of the driver’s face. He was talking.

Joanna got out, holding her pistol behind her. She walked slowly to the rear of the white sedan, keeping to the driver’s side, keeping out of the line of sight of the man she presumed was Sherman, glad for the silence of the hiking shoes she was wearing. She could hear his voice now through the open car window, loud and angry. She slid along against the side of the sedan now, seeing Billy Tuve huddled against the opposite door, face down.

Sherman was moving his right hand up and down, a gesture of some sort. He was staring at Tuve, still talking. The right hand held a pistol. Joanna looked down at her own pistol, smaller than the police model Sherman was waving. She cocked it, made certain the safety was off. Very quietly she took the required two more steps, stood at the open car window, thrust her pistol through it, pressed the muzzle against Sherman’s neck, said, “Mr. Sherman, drop that pistol on your lap.”

“What?” Sherman said, in a strangled voice. He tried to turn his head.

Joanna jammed her pistol under his ear, said, “Drop it. Now. Or die.”

Sherman dropped his pistol. Said, “I’m police. Who the hell are you? Let me get my badge out.”

“Take that pistol of yours by the end of the barrel with your left hand,” Joanna said, keeping the pressure of her gun against his ear. “Then reach around and hand it to me. Butt first. Otherwise I pull the trigger and you’ve got a bullet in your head.”

“Be cool,” Sherman said. “Be easy.” He reached over with his left hand, took the pistol barrel between thumb and first finger, and handed it back to her—butt first.

Joanna had reached her own left hand into her jacket pocket and extracted a dainty little handkerchief. With that she accepted Sherman’s pistol, glanced at it, noticed it wasn’t cocked.

“I know who you are,” Sherman said. “You’re that woman who’s trying to get her hands on that big Clarke estate,” he said. “Or maybe you’re someone working for her.”

“And you are a private eye named Sherman,” Joanna said. “What are you doing here?”

“He was going to kill me,” Billy Tuve said. He had turned and sat facing her, back pressed against his door. “He said if I didn’t take him down our Salt Trail, he’d shoot me and throw me over the edge and let the coyotes eat me.”

“Little bastard’s lying,” Sherman said. “He promised me. I wasn’t going to shoot him.”

“Tell me who you’re working for,” Joanna said. “I already know, but I want to confirm it. So don’t lie.”

Sherman was facing her now, looking into the muzzle of her pistol, held just too far from him to reach if he decided to try.

“His name’s Chandler,” the man said. “Bradford Chandler. Runs Skippers Agency, I think it is.” Joanna considered this. “Chandler hired you,” she said. “Who hired him? And what’s he supposed to do?”

Sherman made a face, bit his lower lip, considered. “You probably already know about the lost jewelry,” he said.

“Keep talking.”

“Chandler wants it.”

Joanna nodded. Said, “And…”

Sherman shrugged. “You think there’s more to it than that?”

“I know there’s more to it than that. You already mentioned the estate. But you haven’t told me who hired this Bradford Chandler.”

“Look,” Sherman said, his voice sounding angry now. “I’m an officer of the law. Who the hell do you—”

Joanna jammed the pistol against his left eye socket.

“All right, all right,” Sherman squeaked. “Chandler was pretty coy about it. I think it’s a law firm.”

“Name,” Joanna said.

“Probably Plymale,” Sherman said. “I think that’s it. And it’s involved with some foundation he’s running.”

The pistol muzzle was still uncomfortably in Sherman’s eye socket. She had released the pressure, but now she restored it.

“I hope you don’t want me to believe that old man is just after the diamonds,” she said.

Sherman’s head was pressed back against the car seat. “No. No,” he said. “Somebody else is after the diamonds, but mostly they’re after some bones. Want to get the bones for the DNA. For proof in some lawsuit. Hell of a lot of money involved. And some woman is after the bones, too, and this Indian here with me, he’s supposed to know where to find them. He was—”

“What’s the name of the woman?” Joanna asked.

“Craig,” Sherman said. “Joanna Craig, I think.”

Joanna removed her pistol from Sherman’s face, cocked Sherman’s pistol, carefully keeping her handkerchief over the hammer.

“Anything else you can tell me?”

“That’s it,” Sherman said. “But I can sure as hell tell you you’re not going to get away with this. Treating an officer—”

But by then Joanna had thrust Sherman’s heavy pistol through the window, jammed it against his rib cage, and pulled the trigger.

14

Bradford Chandler had done all the things he needed to do at the South Rim entrance to the Grand Canyon. He’d checked into a very comfortable suite in the Grand Hotel, made a just-in-case visit to the Grand Canyon airport to check on the availability of charter fliers, reserved a jeep for a guided tour, filled out all the required U.S. Park Service paperwork for touring down into the depths, and collected a little information about the do’s and don’ts of canyon tripping. One of the do’s was a reminder that this was the “monsoon season” in the mountain west, a season of thunderstorms, and that these tended to produce quick, brief, and dangerous flash floods sweeping down the subsidiary canyons leading down to the Colorado River.

As was his custom, he had picked the most attractive young female Park Service employee there as his source of information, quickly noted from her ID tag that her name was Mela, and turned on his prep-school charm. He was supposed to meet his aunt here, he told this young lady. She was Mrs. Joanna Craig. But, alas, he was late. Could she tell him if Mrs. Craig had already checked in to get the required permits and some advice? The young lady, trained to be helpful to tourists, probably didn’t need the encouragement of the Chandler charm. She checked.

Yes, Mela said, a Ms. Joanna Craig had indeed checked in for a visit down into the canyon.

“It was yesterday,” she said, returning Chandler’s smile. “You’re even later than you thought.”

“Maybe I can still catch her,” he said. “Is she staying at that big hotel?” He dug his notebook from his jacket pocket, flipped through pages long enough to suggest a search. “We’re planning to go down the Hopi Salt Shrine Trail. Did she say anything about that? Did she say which trail she would be taking?”

Chandler left with a no to both questions and a warning from the Park Service aide that going down the Salt Trail would require dealing with the Hopi authorities. It was restricted for Hopi religious use and it probably would not be possible for him to go down there. His next stop was the hotel. Yes, a Ms. Joanna Craig was registered. He dialed her room number from the house phone. No answer. No need for his “Sorry, wrong number” excuse. That accomplished, he drove to a tourist parking lot and found himself a place to sit with shade and a view. There he waited for his cell phone to ring and get the word from Sherman that would begin the final phase of this project.

Sherman had called earlier, reporting success. He had located the home of Tuve’s mother, found Tuve there, identified himself as a deputy sheriff sent to take Tuve back to Gallup to clear up some problem about bonding him out. Then Sherman said he’d told Tuve that he didn’t believe he’d killed the man at the Zuni shop, that he wanted to help Tuve find the old man who had swapped him the diamond and thereby prove his innocence.

“Cut it short,” Chandler had said. “Where is he now?”

“Out taking a leak,” Sherman said. “We can talk?”

“Well, make it quick. Where do we meet?”

Sherman had said he didn’t know yet. “He says he has to go down something they call the Salt Trail to get close to the place he met this bird, but he says nobody can go down without doing the proper religious things. You need to understand I’m having trouble talking him into it. So far, the best he’ll agree to is to show me the place on the rim where the trail starts. He says he’ll do the blessing thing with us, give us some pollen and prayer sticks to use to protect us from the spirits, but he won’t go down with us.”

“The hell he won’t! What’s wrong with you, Sherman? I understood you know how to get reluctant people to do what they don’t want to do.”

“He says it’s not his fault. Says their Guardian Spirits keep people who aren’t supposed to be there from using that trail.” Sherman chuckled. “He says these spirits are sort of like us humans, except they have two hearts, still talk to the animals, have all sorts of powers. And they’ll make us fall over the edge, rocks drop on us, snakes biting us, that sort of thing. Says he’ll help us but he won’t go down with us. Anyway, he’s going to guide me to a parking place at the rim now, where the climb down starts, and when I get there, I’ll let you know. It can’t be very far from the South Rim entrance. You want me to wait for you there? What’s the plan?”

“Look, Sherman. It won’t do a damn bit of good to climb down there if he’s not going down with us. We have to have him there to be our guide.”

“I told him that. Then he said it would be easy for us, and he told me exactly how to get from the end of the trail to the place he was sitting when the man showed up with the diamond, and the other directions we’ll need.”

“Let’s hear ’em,” Chandler said.

Sherman explained the directions—the number of feet from water’s edge, number of paces down the river, number of paces around a corner of the cliff to the mouth of a drainage slough where he thinks the old man lives, number of minutes Tuve said it took the man to return.

“I think we could do it without him,” he said.

“Maybe we could,” Chandler said, “but there’s too much money riding on this for us to settle for maybe.”

“I wasn’t intending to settle for any maybe, either,” Sherman said. “He’ll take us down.”

Chandler said, “Yeah?” Emphasis on the skeptical sound.

“Come on, Chandler,” Sherman said. “You already reminded me I had a rep for getting people to do what they didn’t want to do. You need to remember I ran a police department criminal investigation unit. I haven’t forgotten the old tricks. I learned what would get cooperation out of all sorts of people. People a lot tougher than this dumb little Indian.”

Hearing Sherman say that restored a lot of Chandler’s confidence. The man did have a reputation, a bad one in some circles, for his skill at getting reluctant suspects to reveal where bodies had been hidden, the identities of cohorts, and other crucial information—facts that helped the cause of law enforcement far more than the prospects of the persons accused.

“All right, then,” Chandler had said. “How about the other stuff on that list I gave you. What did you find out about the woman who bonded Tuve out?”

“She’s interesting,” Sherman said. “Her name—the one she’s using, anyway—is Joanna Craig, from New York, and from what I’ve been hearing from various people in the law-and-order business, she was out here a couple of times earlier trying to find her father’s grave.”

Sherman waited a response to that. Got none.

“Probably the woman you told me about,” he added.

“Go on,” Chandler said.

“Doesn’t that surprise you?”

“Not much,” Chandler said.

“It surprised me,” Sherman said. “It makes me uneasy when I don’t know what I’m poking into.”

“Well, the man we’re working for told me there’s a lawsuit involved in this somehow. An old inheritance dispute. Nothing we need to know about. Just tell me more about the woman.”

“Well, she said her dad’s name was Clarke and he was killed in that collision of the two airlines that killed so many people back in the 1950s. She told people she was looking for where her daddy was buried. Wanted to visit the grave.”

“But she didn’t find it?”

“Guess not,” Sherman said. “I think that collision, and the fires that followed it, left a real mess. Had to gather up body parts in bags. And a lot of them burned.”

Remembering Sherman’s attitude brightened Chandler’s mood. He relaxed, enjoying the cool shade, enjoying the amazing, incredible view. Like every other adult American, he had seen so many dazzling photographs of this canyon that it had become a cliché. But Chandler was thinking those photographs had never captured what he was seeing now. He was struck by the mind-boggling immensity of this hole worn out of the earth crust, officially 277 miles of it on the guide book map he had bought, from the Glen Canyon Dam to Lake Mead, not just one canyon but hundreds of them, cutting through layers and layers and layers of stone and other minerals, lava flow and ocean-bottom sediment being hurried into the Colorado River and onward toward the Pacific by the inexorable force of gravity and running water. He was thinking suddenly of his terminal year as a college student, just before his macho appetite for sexual adventures got him arrested and then expelled, thinking of the geology class, of old Dr. Delbert projecting color slides of these same cliffs on the screen and trying to lead them upward from the pale yellow strata near the bottom he called Tapeats Sandstone. “Over that,” he said, “is Bright Angel Shale. That gray on top of that is Muav Limestone.” And upward, through other layers, colors, ages, with Dr. Delbert jabbing the screen with his pointer, until they finally reached the dark strip of Hermit Shale, and into the Coconino Sandstone and the Toroweap Formation.

And thus it would go, with Delbert’s creaky old voice stripping off the layers of the Colorado Plateau from the core of a newly formed planet to the last volcanic age, hardly a millennium past. It was the only class that Chandler had really enjoyed. The only class that had seriously interrupted his preoccupation with the seduction of the daughters of the super-rich. They were always there, all around him, nodding and giggling through these lectures. He thought now he should have become a geologist.

He was considering that when another cloud formation made its way across the canyon, changing the light pattern, reminding him that time was passing, that Sherman still hadn’t called. Why not?

Chandler dug his cell phone out of its belt holster and punched in the number Sherman had given him. It rang, and rang, and rang, and rang. He checked the number. It was correct and it was still ringing. Suddenly a voice.

“Yes.”

“Sherman?”

No answer. Then: “Who is this calling?”

Odd, Chandler thought, but it sounded like Sherman. Sort of. Had that no-nonsense “cop talking” ring to it.

“It’s Chandler, dammit. Who were you expecting? And where the hell are you? We’re wasting too much time. Is Tuve cooperating?”

“What is your business with Mr. Sherman?” the voice said. “Identify yourself.”

“Just a moment,” Chandler said. “Can you hear me all right? I can barely hear you.” He rechecked the number he’d punched. It was Sherman’s. But he was, almost certainly, talking to a cop. Which meant something had gone very wrong.

“Can you hear me now?” Chandler asked.

“Perfectly,” the voice said.

“Well, I’m very curious about this. You seem to have Sherman’s phone. Where’s Sherman?”

“You were going to tell me who you are. And where you’re calling from.”

“Oh, yes,” Chandler said. “I’m Jim Belshaw. And I’m calling from the Best Western at Flagstaff. Sherman was supposed to come and meet me here. How come you have his telephone?”

“How come you have his number?”

Chandler thought for a moment about how to make his voice sound angry. “Well, you just better ask him that. But let me talk to him. What the hell’s going on? He was supposed to be here an hour ago. Is he all right?”

“You a friend?”

“Yes. Yes I am. Has something happened to him?”

“I’m Officer J. D. Moya, Arizona State Police. And Mr. Belshaw, I want you to stay right where you are until I can get someone there to talk to you.”

“Sure. I’ll be here at the Best Western. Did something happen to him? Can I do something to help?”

“I hate to tell you this,” Officer Moya said, “but the man in the car is in critical condition.”

“Critical condition?” Chandler said. “Car accident? Or what?”

“Shot,” Moya said. “Do you know why he carried a gun?”

That left Chandler speechless. But only for a moment.

“Somebody shot him? Carjacking, was it? Or maybe an accident. But I didn’t even know he had a gun.”

Moya didn’t respond to that. He said, “What was he doing parked out by the rim of the Grand Canyon?”

“I have no idea,” Chandler said. “Was he alone? Have you caught whoever shot him? I’d be surprised if he’d be picking up a hitchhiker. Or does it look like he shot himself?”

“This investigation has just started, Mr. Belshaw. I’m not in a position to release any information.”

Chandler considered this for a moment. How long would it take Arizona State Police to discover there was no Jim Belshaw at the Flagstaff Best Western? Probably just a few minutes. Moya would radio the state cop office in Flagstaff, tell them to send someone over. Then what? When the crime scene crew arrived, and a regular criminal investigator got there, they’d be looking at that little notebook Sherman carried. Would they find Brad Chandler’s name written in it? Would they find Chandler’s cell phone number? An awfully good chance of that. And maybe the Grand Hotel number.

“Officer Moya,” Chandler said. “If somebody shot Sherman, I want to see him punished. I probably don’t know anything that would help, but if I knew more about what you found, maybe that would trigger a memory. For example, I think he was planning to take a hike down into the canyon. Was there any hiking stuff in his vehicle? For example, he told me once he knew an Indian who he was going to hire as a guide if he went. So if he was doing that, maybe there would be two sets of camping stuff, or hiking stuff, in the car.”

This caused a moment of silence on the Moya end of the conversation.

“Well, thank you for the offer, Mr. Belshaw. But you were wrong about that. I saw what seemed to be just one backpack in the car. But then we don’t mess around with the scene of a violent crime like this until the crime scene crew gets here with all its stuff. I just reached in to get a look at his billfold for an identification, and noticed the blood and that big pistol down on the floor. That’s about all. Hold on just a minute.”

Chandler held on, nervously, hearing the sounds of Moya using his radio.

“Mr. Belshaw, you sure you gave me that Flagstaff hotel right? We radioed in. Our Flagstaff office said Best Western doesn’t have any Belshaw registered.”

Chandler managed a laugh. “That because I just pulled into the front entrance here, decided to call Sherman before I checked in, and got all this bad news. I’ll go in now and see if they’re still holding my reservation. I’ll check in and wait. But with Sherman in bad shape, I may not want to stay here in Flagstaff.”

“Hey,” Moya said. “Stay there. We need to talk to you.”

“We’re breaking up on this damn cell phone now,” Chandler said. “I can’t hear you. Just static. Can you read me? Hello? Hello? Officer Moya. Hello? Well, if you can still hear me, I’ll check in here. I want to find out what happened to Sherman.”

With that, Chandler just listened. Heard Moya yelling at him. Heard Moya cursing. Finally heard Moya give up and break the connection. Then he shut off his own cell phone, shook his head, and started working on the problems this had left him.

The worst one was that notebook Sherman carried in his jacket pocket. There might be some chance Sherman hadn’t jotted his name in his book. An awfully good chance he’d noted his telephone number at the Grand Hotel. It wouldn’t take much detective work to send them after the man who had called Sherman’s cell phone number. But there was nothing he could do about that now.

What he had to do now was find out what happened to Billy Tuve. Had Tuve shot Sherman? Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. If not, who had? Probably one of those other people Plymale had warned him were trying to find the diamonds. Or, as Plymale wanted him to believe, to find the bones. And his job for Plymale was just to keep that from happening. He could probably have accomplished that simply and easily by erasing Tuve from the game. But he had never trusted Plymale. Killing Tuve would have wiped out his chance for his big payoff—a satchel full of prime diamonds.

And now where was Billy Tuve? The competitive team Plymale had described seemed to have eliminated Sherman. From what little he had learned from that damned Arizona state cop, Tuve’s stuff hadn’t been left behind in Sherman’s car. From that, Chandler’s logical mind developed the only logical conclusion. The bad guys had come for Tuve. Sherman had resisted. They shot Sherman. They took Tuve away with them, and the only possible use they had for him was identical to Chandler’s own. They’d take him to the canyon bottom and use him to find the diamonds. But where? Somewhere very close to the termination of the Hopi Salt Trail, near where the Hopis harvested their ceremonial salt. The jeep-driver guide he had hired to take him to the bottom tomorrow had been full of information about sacred places in the canyon, and the Salt Shrine was near the point where the Little Colorado Canyon dumped its water into the Colorado River. No jeep trail would take them anywhere near that, the driver said, but he could drop them at the head of a trail he’d noticed in his Hiking the Grand Canyon book that ended at the river, just an easy walk upstream to the shrine.

Back at his car, Chandler opened the trunk and took out a small aluminum valise. He unlocked it on the front seat and extracted two cans—one a Burma Shave shaving cream dispenser, the other a can of Always Fresh deodorant, both of which had been reengineered by some previous owner so that their tops screwed off, and both of which had been slipped out of an old evidence locker. Chandler presumed they’d previously been used to carry purchase-size packs of crack cocaine. He imagined them tucked in a grocery store sack with bread, soup cans, etc., offering a relatively safe way for the dope dealer to smuggle the stuff to the user. For him, they offered a simple way to get his pet little .25-caliber pistol past airport security x-ray machines.

Now he screwed off the tops, extracted pistol barrel, working parts, magazine, etc., wiped off the thick deposit of shaving cream covering the parts, blew the cream out of the barrel, cleaned it with a rod he kept in the can for that purpose, and reassembled the weapon. He’d had it made at a specialty machine shop in Switzerland on one of his skiing trips there, and it worked with typical Swiss efficiency. He clicked a round into the chamber, ejected it into his hand, and put it back into the chamber.

It worked perfectly. When Ms. Joanna Craig arrived with Tuve at the Hopi shrine tomorrow, he’d be down there waiting.

15

Joe Leaphorn found he had a way to get in touch with Sergeant Chee after all. He found Chee’s cell phone number where he had jotted it on the margin of his desk calendar. And now that cell phone began ringing in Chee’s jacket pocket. Chee was standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, watching Cowboy Dashee planting some painted prayer sticks at an odd-looking rock formation.

Chee snorted out a Navajo version of an expletive, extracted the phone, clicked it on, and said, “Chee.”

“Joe Leaphorn,” Leaphorn said. “Are you still interested in that Billy Tuve business?”

“Sure,” Chee said.

“I mean, trying to find where he got that diamond? If you are, I’ve heard some things that might be useful.”

“Still very interested,” Chee said. “Not that any of us have much hope of finding anything.”

That produced a silence. “But I’ll bet you’re going anyway, though. Right?”

Chee glanced around him. Cowboy was standing beside his car, helping Bernie with something. “Lieutenant,” he said. “This Billy Tuve is Cowboy’s cousin. Brain-damaged guy. And Cowboy has always been there for me when I needed a hand. From way back in high-school days. I think Cowboy’s going to climb down and make this search even if there isn’t any real hope. We’re sort of trying to decide that now.”

“You said ‘any of us.’ You and Cowboy and Tuve?”

“Cowboy and me and Bernie Manuelito. Tuve was supposed to come, but when Cowboy went to get him, he was gone. Somebody showed up at his mother’s house and he went off with them. That makes finding anything even more doubtful.”

“Probably the sheriff’s office came and got him. Sounds like the bond deal went sour. Why is Bernie going?”

“It wasn’t the sheriff’s office,” Chee said. “Maybe it was the woman who bailed him out.”

“Odd,” Leaphorn said. “But why is Bernie going? That’s a hell of a tough climb.”

“I don’t know why she’s going.”

Leaphorn laughed. “Want me to make a guess?”

“Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me what you called for,” Chee said, sounding unhappy. Bernie was standing beside him now, holding a backpack, asking Who? with a hand gesture.

Chee let her wait while Leaphorn related what Louisa had told him about the reward for the arm bones, about the rumors growing out of the airline disaster she’d been hearing among the canyon-bottom tribes. “You think any of that will help?”

Chee sighed. “Enough to tip the scales, maybe. Sounds like that hander-out-of-diamonds might still be alive, anyway.”

“Who is it?” Bernie asked. “Is that Billy Tuve?”

“Lieutenant Leaphorn,” Chee said, “Bernie is here now. Why don’t you ask her why she wants to climb down there?” And he handed Bernie the cell phone.

“Lieutenant,” Bernie said, grinning at Chee, “it’s just like I told Jim. I think it would be fun. And he and Cowboy need somebody to look after them.”

“Be careful,” Leaphorn said.

“I will,” Bernie said. “You know where I live. I’m good at climbing up and down rocks.”

“I didn’t mean just that, Bernie,” Leaphorn said. “I guess you know that the FBI has been pulled into this. Got Captain Pinto to work on it. The federals wanted him to find out everything possible about a diamond that Shorty McGinnis was supposed to have. That means Washington got interested in it, and that means it’s a big deal for somebody or other.”

“Sergeant Chee told me a little about it,” Bernie said.

“He probably doesn’t know much more than I do,” Leaphorn said. “I hope he told you he and Cowboy weren’t the only ones after those diamonds.”

“I don’t think he did,” Bernie said.

“Plus, there’s an offer of big money for the bones of one of the victims. For burial.”

“Is there more to it than just that?”

“Who knows for sure? But anyway, young lady, remember if Washington is involved, it means very influential people are interested, and that usually means a lot of money is in the balance. That can make it dangerous. So be careful. And try to keep in touch. Just in case you need some help keeping them out of trouble, let me know when you get down to the river if there’s a way to call from there.”

Getting down to the river took almost six hours, which Dashee thought wasn’t too bad, even though he had done it in his late teens in something under five. He’d taken a little extra care at the points where the faithful left little pollen offerings to the Salt Trail’s protective spirits and choked off his habit of exchanging barbs with Chee.

Dashee’s uneasy silence was not just nervousness caused by worry about what the reaction might be among the spirits that oversaw Hopi behavior. He was also worried about the reaction of the elders in his own clan and kiva if they learned he had escorted two Navajos down this sacred pathway. To strictly traditional Hopis, the Dinee were still remembered as “head breakers”—barbarians so uncivil that they slew enemies with the old “rock on the skull” technique.

For Bernie, standing on the sand catching her breath, this descent was already a sort of dream, part of a thrilling close-up look at the nature she loved at its rawest beauty. And it had been a nerve-racking experience as well, where a wrong step on a loose stone could have sent her plunging down five hundred feet, to bounce off a ledge, and fall again, and bounce again, until the journey terminated with her as a pile of broken bones beside the Colorado River.

On the way down, to believe what she was seeing, Bernie found herself recalling the reading she’d done to prepare herself for this. That wavering streak of almost-white between the salmon-colored cliffs catching the sun would be Mesozoic era sandstone, reminders of sand dunes buried when the planet was young, and the bloody red in the strata above that would be staining from dissolved iron ore, and the name for that, required on Professor Elrod’s geology exam, was hematite, and that thought would be jarred away by an inadvertent downward glance which showed her death. Death just as many seconds away as were required for her to fall, and fall, and fall, until the body of Bernadette Manuelito, more formally known for Navajo ceremonial purposes as Girl Who Laughs, smashed into the riverbank below and became nothing more than a bunch of broken, loosely connected body parts.

Now this journey into her imagination was interrupted by Cowboy Dashee.

“Bernie, what’s your idea about that?”

“About what?”

“About what we’ve been talking about,” Dashee said, sounding slightly impatient. “Here we are, right where we were going, and Billy’s not here. So what’s next? How do we start conducting this search?”

Having no useful idea, Bernie shrugged. “Maybe Billy got here before we did and got tired of waiting for us. How about looking around for him?”

Bernie was looking around herself when she said that, seeing a vast wilderness of cliffs in almost every direction, hearing the roar of water tearing over the rapids and above the thunder of the river, the chorus of whistles, trills, and bong sounds that must have been caused by the various species of frogs that inhabited the canyon. Combined, it made her suggestion sound silly.

“Well, at least we could try,” she added.

“I guess that’s about all we can do now,” Chee said. “Somebody should wait here, where they could see him if he’s still coming down the trail, or if he’s already down, meet him if he comes back looking for us.”

He looked at Dashee. Dashee nodded. He looked at Bernie. “Bernie, you wait here. If Tuve shows up, keep him here until Cowboy and I get back.”

“Sergeant Chee,” Bernie said, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the river and the clamor of the mating-season frogs, and maybe even a little louder than that, “I want to remind you that I am no longer Officer B. Manuelito of your Navajo Tribal Police squad. I am a private regular citizen.”

“Sorry,” Chee said, sounding suitably repentant. “I just thought—”

“Okay. I’ll stay here,” Bernie said. Dashee was grinning at her.

“Thanks,” Chee said. “I’m going to suggest that I work my way downstream looking for that sort of side canyon Tuve mentioned, and get back here in…let’s say ninety minutes or so. Quicker if we’ve found something. And Cowboy, would you do the same upstream? Up to the confluence where the Little Colorado runs in to the big river and—”

“Got it,” Dashee said.

Bernie leaned her weary self against a convenient boulder, let her body slip slowly down it until she was sitting comfortably on a sandstone slab. She watched Cowboy working his way along the cluster of boulders upstream until he disappeared behind the curve of the cliff. She watched Chee moving downstream along the very edge of water, keeping his eyes on the ground. She found herself wishing he would look back, at least a glance, but he didn’t. Found herself wishing she hadn’t sounded so grouchy. Hadn’t been so grouchy. When he got back, she would tell him she was sorry. Tell him she was tired. Which was true. And now she would just wait. Maybe find one of those noisy frogs. Tree frogs probably, or maybe red-spotted toads. Take a look at the algae on those damp rocks at water’s edge. Think her thoughts. Wish it hadn’t taken Jim Chee so long to realize that he had fallen in love with her. Wish she had recognized his hang-ups and made her interest in him a little more obvious. Even a lot more obvious.

And after a lot of that, the shadows would be working up the canyon walls, and Jim and Cowboy would be back, and they would make a little fire, probably, and eat some of the stuff they had brought, and talk a lot and roll out their sleeping bags, and Jim would probably want to put theirs close together and a distance from Dashee’s, and she would have to deal with that. Her clan taught its daughters that too much intimacy before nuptial promises were officially and ceremonially confirmed before both clans and both families tended to have very bad effects in the married years to come. Therefore, as her mother had put it, “some sand should be kept between you and your police sergeant” until that had happened.

So she would sit here and watch the changing light change the colors on the cliffs, and wait, and think about how good it would be when all this indecision was behind her. But that sort of happy thinking kept drifting away into questions. Was Jim really the man she thought he was, that he seemed to be? Or was he the hard-voiced sergeant who would never, ever really be her man? Was what she was doing at this very moment—following his orders, waiting for the next instructions, waiting to be told what was going on—indicative of what she was getting into? She didn’t think so. In fact, she didn’t even want to think about it. She wanted to think about where she was—at the very middle of the stupefying grandeur of this canyon, surrounded by all its weird variations of the natural world she knew from the Earth Surface World a mile above her head.

About then the changing light must have touched off some sort of signal to the biology about her. Suddenly the violet-green swallows were out, doing their acrobatic dives, skimming the water for rising insects. Somewhere behind her an owl was out early, making some sort of call that only her oldest uncle could translate, and the spotted toads were adding their grunts to the general birdsong symphony.

Why was she just sitting here? Bernie asked herself. She zipped open the top of her backpack, got out her water bottle, hung her bird-watcher binoculars over her shoulder, then dipped back into the pack for her birder’s notebook. She tore out a blank back page, took out her pen, and started writing.

MR. TUVE—I AM WALKING UP RIVER A WAY. BACK SOON. WAIT HERE FOR US.

Bernie

She left the note on the boulder where she had been sitting, put another rock at a corner to hold it down, and started walking—first over to the cliff-side tamarisk trees to investigate a bird nest she’d noticed there, and then down toward an outcropping that a long time ago (probably a few billion years ago) had formed a lava flow obstruction and a noisy little rapid in the Colorado.

The flotsam kicked out at the rapid revealed nothing she hadn’t expected, being mostly debris washed down one or another of the little streams that flowed in from the cooler, wetter mesa tops a mile above. She identified the hulls of piñon nuts, Ponderosa needles, twigs from Utah junipers, and a variety of grass samples, many probably blown in but some local needle grass which thrived in this hot, dry bottom. Nothing here she hadn’t expected.

Through her binoculars, she checked the place where Jim and Dashee had left her. No sign of them or of Tuve, nor did she spot anyone on the few points high up in the cliffs of the Salt Trail where she thought he might be descending. She focused in as sharply as she could on the boulder where she had left her note. She couldn’t see that, either. That either meant that one of the men had come back, found it, and was now (she hoped) awaiting her, or that Tuve had arrived, taken it, and went on his way. Or it meant that these lenses were just not potent enough for her to make it out from where she was standing.

She focused down the cliffs. The angle of the sunlight now made it clear why one of the early explorers she had read—John Wesley Powell, she thought it was—had described them as “parapets.” They formed a seemingly infinite row of light and shadow, sort of like looking down a picket fence, with each shadowed space representing a place where drainage from the mesa top had—down through a million or so years of draining off snowmelt and rainwater—eroded itself its own little canyon in its race to get to the Colorado and on to the Pacific Ocean.

Those canyons would be more interesting than the scene at the riverside. And a side canyon was what both Jim and Cowboy were looking for. An undercut place where their fantastical dispenser of diamonds was living, or had been living. Presuming he had ever existed, which had always seemed doubtful to Bernie.

She skirted past the rapids outcrop and walked downstream. The first opening in the cliff was a dead end for her purposes, blocked with brush and a jumble of boulders swept down by some long-past flash flood. She pushed her way through the barrier far enough to see it offered not much possibility of a cave large enough for occupation.

More walking, with brief checks into four other drain-off cuts in the cliffs, brought her to a more promising-looking drainage mouth. She had been noticing now and then the tracks left by Jim’s boots, mostly in the damp sand very close to the putty-toned water of the Colorado. Now she saw them again. They led across the blow sand leading into the mouth of the same opening that attracted her. They went in, out again, then back toward the river, and on downstream.

Ah, well, Bernie thought, he’d be coming back after a while, and when the shadows were longer, the temperature would drop. Her schoolgirl trip into the canyon had been made in the cooler days of late autumn. She’d read that summer heat at the canyon bottom sometimes soared as much as twenty degrees above the temperature on the mesa a mile above. Now she believed it. Even in the shade, it seemed dangerously torrid. She walked up the slot far enough to find a spot where the interior cliffs hadn’t been cooking all day under the Southwestern sun. She’d rest awhile and cool off.

Typical of Bernadette Manuelito, the rest period was brief. She noticed tracks of Chee’s boots again, scuffing across the thin layer of blow sand near the opposite wall. She’d test the tracking skills she’d been taught in her tour with the Border Patrol.

The tracks disappeared in a tangle of dead, dry tumbleweeds and assorted other sticks and stems, then showed up again where the most recent runoff had left the stone floor bare and subject to scuffing marks. It was, of course, a strictly up-slope walk, and it soon came to a junction where a smaller post-rainstorm stream joined the major flow. She was able to find Chee’s tracks only a few yards up the narrower canyon, and then they resumed their climb up the bigger one and came to another junction, this one through a very narrow cut in the cliffs, at which point there was another very short side trip of boots marks.

From this, a comparatively cool downdraft flowed, bringing with it the aroma of the high-country flora—piñon resin, cliffrose, and the slightly acid smell of claretcup cactus. It was comfortable and pleasant here. The bedrock under her feet was damp with a minuscule trickle of water from a narrow horizonal seepage between layers of stone on the opposite wall. A swarm of midges was dining on a growth of moss there, and below them squatted one of the spotted toads common to the deep canyon. He sat so utterly motionless that Bernie wondered for a moment if he was alive. He answered that question with a sudden leap, and scuttled across the stony floor.

Why? Bernie quickly saw the answer. The head of a small snake emerged from under a fallen slab, slithered onto the bedrock floor after the toad. It stopped. Coiled. Swiveled its head and its tongue emerged, testing the air for the strange odor of Bernie, a new species of intruder in the snake’s hunting ground.

Bernie had been conditioned from toddling years to look upon everything alive as fellow citizens of a tough and unforgiving natural cosmos. Each and all, be they schoolgirl, scorpion, bobcat, or vulture, had a role to play and was endowed with the good sense to survive—provided good sense was used. Thus Bernie was not afraid of snakes. Even rattlesnakes, which this one obviously was, because after coiling he had raised his terminal tip and sent his species’ nameplate warning signal.

But this one was pink, which brought a huge smile to Bernie’s face and the immediate thought of Dr. William Degenhardt, her favorite professor at the University of New Mexico. Degenhardt, an internationally acclaimed herpetologist, was an authority on snakes, salamanders, and other such cold-blooded beasts, and was known, in fact, as their friend, with a huge portrait of a coiled rattler on his living room wall. Bernie remembered his lectures fondly, and in one the Pink Grand Canyon Rattlesnake was the subject—not just because it was rare but because it was such a wonderful demonstration of how a species could adapt itself in size, color, and hunting techniques to the weird environment the Grand Canyon offered.

Bernie found herself wishing she had a camera. She could hardly wait to tell Degenhardt about this. Maybe she could catch the thing and take it back to him. But the professor would never approve of such a disruption of nature. Besides, she couldn’t keep it alive in her backpack. So she simply stared at it, shifting her memory into the Save mode, and recorded every variation in color, shade, and tone, size and number of rattles, shape of head, and so forth—all of the features the professor would want to compare with the illustrations in his textbook on such beasts. But the snake tired eventually of this scrutiny, thrust out his tongue to test the air a final time, and slithered away to hide himself again back under a stone slab.

The cry of a peregrine falcon snapped Bernie out of thinking about snakes and professors, and back into the duty to which Sergeant Chee had assigned her. It was time to climb out of this slot and find a place from which she could see if Tuve had climbed down the Salt Trail to join this expedition. Or if Chee, or Dashee, or both were awaiting her down at the Salt Woman Shrine.

Reaching the spot that looked most promising as a lookout post involved scrambling up a broken section of the opposing wall of the canyon she had followed up from the river. It was a tough climb, made even slower because the Pink Rattler had reminded Bernie that snakes like hanging out in hidden little spaces under rocks. She was very, very careful where she put her hands while pulling herself up to the shelf she had chosen.

It was a good choice. From that vantage point, her binoculars could scan down into a substantial stretch of the Colorado River, and two small waterfalls flowing out of cliff-side drainage across the river. Upriver her view took in the stream flowing in from the Little Colorado, forming the deep, cool pool of bluish water near the Salt Woman Shrine and lightening the muddy tone of the Colorado.

More important, she could see the spot where Sergeant Chee had commanded her to await his return. Well, the sergeant hadn’t returned from his hunt downriver. Nor did Cowboy Dashee seem to be back from his excursion up the river. No sign of Tuve, either. Unless he had come and gone again. For that matter, maybe Chee and Dashee had been back and were off again hunting for her.

Bernie felt a touch of uneasy guilt. Jim really hadn’t asked much of her. Just to help out a little on their mission of mercy for Billy Tuve. She could have postponed her botanical research project. Jim’s opinion of her would be dented some if he returned and found her missing.

But that twinge of guilt was quickly submerged under another thought. Unlikely as it seemed, maybe they had actually found what they were looking for—the haunt of this fellow who had, so they believed, dished out diamonds to passersby. Perhaps they had reached their goal and just hadn’t bothered to come and invite her to join in the excitement of the discovery. Or maybe Chee had broken a leg climbing the rocks. Or Dashee had been hurt and Chee had gone to help him. Or maybe they were just looking longer, and being slower, than she had expected.

Bernie had found her bird-watching binoculars in a military surplus store in Albuquerque, and they had been designed for a more serious purpose, being much more optically powerful than normal bird-watchers need, and much heavier than anything they would want to lug around on their walks. She lowered them. Wiped the perspiration from her eyebrows, relaxed her wrists for a moment, and then raised them again for another look.

A man walked right into her circle of view. He took a water bottle out of the pocket on the side of his trouser leg, pushed off his hat, and took a drink. The man was big and blond and looked young. He was also barefoot. Bernie watched him walk gingerly through the hot sand to the boulder where she had rested. He sat on it, reached into the shade behind it, and extracted a pair of hiking boots. He pulled the socks out of the boots, massaged each foot carefully, and then reshod himself.

Who could he be? Probably just another tourist. But maybe not. River runners boating down the Colorado were not allowed to drop people off here, out of deference to the Hopi religious sites. He could have walked down, of course. He was still massaging his feet and that suggested that he might have. But the Salt Trail was the only fairly easy access and it, too, was forbidden to him without Hopi permission and an escort.

Bernie left him caring for his feet and rescanned the scene around her. Still no sign of Jim, Cowboy, Billy Tuve, or anyone else. The only sign of life she detected was a herd of four horses taking their leisure under the shade of what seemed to be Russian olive trees across the river. She switched her binoculars back to the blond man. He had his hat on now and a pair of binoculars—even larger than hers—to his eyes. He seemed to be slowly and methodically scanning the slopes around him. Back and forth, up and down, looking for something. For what?

Bernie had a sudden and alarming thought that he might be looking for her. That he might have already spotted her. That he might be someone who had seen one of those posters Chee and Dashee had talked about, offering the reward for recovering the bones. That he might be somebody involved in whatever had caused Washington to nudge the FBI into this. That he might be dangerous.

Bernie got up, took another look at the place where Chee had abandoned her near the Salt Woman Shrine. Cautious now, barely peeking over the edge of the stone shelf.

The big blond man had his back turned toward her now, looking the other way, apparently studying the higher reaches of the Salt Trail. Waiting for Tuve, she guessed. And that thought reminded her of Waiting for Godot, and the time they had wasted in her Literature 411 class discussing whether Godot would ever arrive, and what difference it would make if he did. And now wasn’t she sort of a perfect match for Beckett’s ridiculous characters?

To hell with it. She would find Chee and tell him she was going home. Or wherever she could get from here. Or maybe just turn this into a sort of botanical field trip and let the sergeant and the deputy sheriff chase their mythological diamond dispenser on their own.

Climbing down the rock slide from her high perch was easier than ascending it, but trickier. And when she reached the bottom, she found a woman standing there, watching her and waiting.

16

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

Which left Bernie wordless for a moment. She mumbled the Navajo “Ye eeh teh” greeting, produced a sort of hesitant smile, dusted off her jeans, examined the hand she had scraped on the climb down, and glanced up. The woman was small and elderly, with a dark, weatherworn face and long white hair. She wore a long skirt of much-bleached denim, a long blue shirt, and carried a canvas bag on a strap over her shoulder. A Hopi, maybe, or one of the Supai from across the river, or perhaps from another of the Pueblo people.

Bernie held out her hand. “I am Bernadette Manuelito,” she said. “But why is it dangerous?”

“People who don’t know Hopi talk, they call me Mary,” the woman said. “But you are a Navajo, I think. Not just a tourist. I saw you near the Salt Woman Shrine by the blue pool. That is a place for the Hopi holy people. Not for…Not for people not initiated into a kiva.”

Bernie was embarrassed. “But I came there with a Hopi. A Hopi who belongs to one of the kivas that come down the trail to collect salt and colored clay for its ceremonials. He said it was all right.”

The woman considered that, her expression stern, but her eyes were on Bernie’s injured hand.

“It bleeds,” she said. “Where did you cut it?”

“I slipped climbing down,” Bernie said. “I tried to catch myself. Cut it on a rock.”

“I have a salve for that at home,” the woman said. “I sold it where I worked at Peach Springs and it heals cuts very quickly.” She smiled a wry smile. “Long time ago. I got tired of talking to tourists all the time.”

Bernie opened her backpack and took out her half-empty water bottle. “You think I should wash it off?” she asked. “Get the dirt out of it?”

“Is that all the drinking water you have?”

Bernie nodded. “I’ve been walking a lot. I guess I should have saved more.”

“Up that little canyon there”—the woman pointed—“is a little spring where the water seeps out. It is bitter with what it washes out of the rock. It makes you sick if you drink it. But it would be good for washing that cut.”

“I’ll do that,” Bernie said.

The woman pointed at the bottle. “That’s all you have to drink? For how long is that?”

“I’m not sure. Someone is supposed to come and meet me up there near the Salt Woman Shrine. I hope pretty soon.”

“Was he a man? He’s already there.”

Jim had come back! Bernie felt a wave of relief. Followed immediately by apprehension. “A handsome young Navajo policeman? But not wearing his uniform?”

The old woman laughed. “Not any Navajo policeman,” she said. “Not unless you have big white-haired Navajo men with blue eyes. But he had a gun like a policeman.”

“You saw a gun?”

“A pistol. He was looking at it. Then putting it back under his belt.”

“Oh,” Bernie said. She looked at the old woman, and the old woman looked at her. Nodded.

“Some sort of trouble?” the woman said. “Maybe man trouble. That’s usually it. So you don’t want to go up there right now, is that right? Until the right man comes to meet you.”

“Something like that,” Bernie said.

The woman smiled. “Then I should give you some more drinking water, daughter. Give you some more time to wait before you dry up. But you should go back down to the big river to wait for your Navajo policeman. Up here it is dangerous.”

Bernie nodded.

The woman swung the bag off her shoulder. It was one of those canvas canteens that dry-country cowboys and sheep herders hang from their saddles. She pointed to Bernie’s bottle, said, “I will share with you.”

“Thank you, Mary,” Bernie said. “Do you have enough?”

The woman laughed. “I’m not waiting for a man,” she said. “I’m going home. You should be doing that. Not staying so close to where the danger is.”

Bernie held out her bottle. Thinking while the woman filled it about the pistol she had seen, and about what she, Bernie, seemed to be getting into here.

“This danger,” Bernie said. “Could you tell me what it is?”

Mary considered this. “Have you heard about the Hopi? How we came to be on this Earth Surface World? About our kachinas? Any of that?”

“Some of it,” Bernie said. “My mother’s father told me something, and my uncle knew something about it. He’s a hatalii. A singer.”

Mary looked skeptical.

“I guess it was just what they had heard from friends,” Bernie said. “Nothing secret.”

“You know about Masaw? The one some people call the Skeleton Man?”

“I heard he was the Guardian Spirit of the Hopis on this Earth Surface World.”

Mary nodded. “This Glittering World,” she said.

“Wasn’t he the spirit who greeted the Hopi people when they emerged out of the dark worlds into this one? The one who told you to make migrations to the four directions and then you would find the Center Place of the World? And you should live there? Up on the Hopi Mesas?”

Mary was smiling. “Well,” she said. “I guess that’s a version of a little bit of it. The way people in the Bear Clan tell it, anyway. What else have you heard?”

“I read in the book Frank Waters wrote that when Masaw met the people emerging from the underworld, his face was all bloody. That he was a fearsome-looking kachina. And that he taught you not to be afraid to die. I think you called him the Death Kachina.”

Mary nodded. “Or sometimes the Skeleton Man. And some of the old people tell us that in another way,” she said. “In those dark first three worlds we were forced out because of horrible crowding. People kept making babies but nobody ever died. We were jammed in together so tight, they say, that you couldn’t spit without spitting on somebody else. Could hardly move. People just kept creating more people. Twin brothers were leaders of the people then. They found a way to grow a reed through the roof of the first dark world for us to the second one, and then, when it got too crowded, on into the third one, and finally into this one. But still nobody ever died until Masaw taught people not to be afraid of death.”

Bernie had heard something like this in one of her anthropology classes, but not this version.

“How did he do that?” she asked.

“One of the clan leaders had a beautiful daughter who was killed by another little girl. Out of jealousy. And that caused trouble between families. So Masaw opened the earth so the clan leader could see his daughter in the world beyond this one. She was laughing, happy, playing, singing her prayers.”

“That sounds like the Christian heaven,” Bernie said. “Our Navajo beliefs—most of them, anyway—aren’t so specific. But you were going to tell me why it’s dangerous for me here.”

“Because up there…” She paused, shook her head, pointed up the canyon. “Up there, they say, is where the Skeleton Man lives. Up there in the biggest canyon that runs into this one. Comes in from the left. They say he painted a symbol on the cliff where it enters. The symbol for the Skeleton Man.” Mary knelt, drew in the sand with her finger. The shape she formed meant nothing to Bernie.

“Is the danger because that place is where Masaw, or the Skeleton Man, is living?” Bernie asked, feeling uneasy. “Is that spirit dangerous to people like me?”

Mary shook her head, looking troubled. “Everything gets so mixed up,” she said. “The Supai people have their ideas, and the Paiutes come in here with different ideas, and the priests and the preachers and even the Peyote People tell us things. But I’ve been hearing that it might be some man, even older than me now. Nobody knew who his parents were. He used to come to Peach Springs and kept telling stories about how Masaw was the one who caused all those bodies to come falling down here into the canyon. Said Masaw made those planes run together. And this man was trying to get people to change their religions around and believe like him. I think he’s the one who started calling Masaw the Skeleton Man.”

Mary stopped, shook her head, laughed. “When I was just a young woman, he came around to the village and showed us tricks. He had this little deer-skin pollen bag he’d hold up in the sunlight. Like this.” She held her right hand high above her head and pinched her thumb and fingers together. “He told us to notice how ugly and brown the pollen pouch looked. That’s how this life is, he’d say, but look what you get if you’re willing to get rid of this life. To get out of it. And then the pollen sack would turn into this glittering thing sitting on the end of his fingers.”

She stared at Bernie, her expression questioning, looking for Bernie’s reaction.

“Amazing,” Bernie said. She was thinking how the trick might have been done—the thumb and forefinger squeezing the diamond out of the pouch, the pouch disappearing into the palm.

“I saw it myself,” Mary said. “That sack just glittered and glittered as he turned it in the sunlight.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t remember exactly. But in a little while, he was holding the pollen pouch again, and it didn’t glitter anymore.”

“Fascinating,” Bernie said.

“My uncle told me he thought it was some sort of trick, but this man said the Skeleton Man gave it to him to prove to people they should be willing to die. The ugly brown pollen pouch was like the life they were living now. After they died, it would be bright and shiny.”

“Where did this man come from? Does what he was telling you fit in with what they teach in your kiva?”

“I don’t remember as much about the old times as I should,” Mary said, looking sad. “I know I was taught them when I was little, but all those years up at Peach Springs talking with all kinds of other people, I forget them. And they got mixed in with other stuff. But I know that even though Masaw looked horrible—they say his face was all covered with blood—he was a friend of the people in some ways.”

“Like teaching them not to be afraid to die?”

“Like that,” Mary said, smiling. “I remember my mother used to tell that to me. That just two things we know for certain. That we’re born and in a little while we die. It’s what we do in the time between that matters. That’s what the One Who Made Us thinks about when he decides what happens to us next.”

Bernie considered that. Nodded. “I think all of us are pretty much alike, whatever our tribe and whatever color we are,” she said.

“Everybody also has sense enough to stay away from places that are dangerous,” Mary said, staring at Bernie. “Like not poking at a coiled snake with your hand.”

Bernie nodded.

“Like not trying to go up where the Skeleton Man lives,” Mary added.

“Unless you really need to go. To see if you can save a man who will get locked up in prison if you don’t find something there,” Bernie said.

Mary took a very deep breath, exhaled it. “So you’ll go up that canyon anyway?”

“I have to.”

Mary pointed up the canyon. “There’s a narrow slot in the cliff wall to your left around that corner. Then on the right, farther up, you’ll find another slot, a little wider, and a trickle of water sometimes is flowing out of it. But it’s blocked with rocks where part of the cliff fell down, and around those rocks there’s the thick brush of the cat’s claw bushes. You can’t get through that without getting all bloody.”

Bernie nodded.

“Girl,” Mary said. “You should not go. But be very careful. If you need help, no one would ever find you.”

17

Joanna Craig sat on a shelf of some sort of smooth, pale pink stone about two thousand feet above what she guessed must be the Colorado River. It was putty-colored, not the clear blue she had always imagined, and the cliffs across it (and behind her, and everywhere else) soared upward to a dark blue sky, partly crowded with towering clouds—dark on the bottom. Joanna’s mood was also at its bottom at the moment, and like the clouds, dark blue.

Joanna was admitting to herself that she had screwed up. She was facing the fact that Billy Tuve, while brain-damaged, had outwitted her. He was gone. She was alone. Worse, due to her own foolishness, she seemed to be walking into a trap. She was leaning forward, elbows on knees, head down, resting everything but her mind, ticking off the mistakes she had been making and looking for solutions.

Maybe the first mistake had been even coming here. But that was no mistake. It was something she had to do. Something, call it her destiny, had caused that damned diamond to appear out of the distant past. Maybe her prayers had caused it. Too many years of praying for a way to get revenge. To see justice done. And finally the diamond had appeared, had been given to a childlike Hopi, had set off a chain of events, led to her lawyer, and had drawn her here, two thousand miles from home, to sit, exhausted, two thousand feet above a dirty river, not knowing what to do.

Of course, she should have kept pressing Tuve about the man who came to talk to him in jail just an hour or two before she had arrived and bonded him out. Who was he? Lawyer, Tuve said. Said his name was Jim Belshaw. Said he would represent Billy, get him out of jail, but Billy had to tell him where he had gotten the diamond. What had he looked like? Big white man, hair almost white, face sort of reddish. Eyes blue. And what had he told this Jim Belshaw about where the diamond had come from? That he didn’t know. That this diamond man had just walked a little ways down the river from the blue pool near the Salt Woman Shrine and came back with it. What else? Tuve had just shaken his head. He was finished talking about it. And she had allowed him to get away with that.

Then the narrow little trail bent around a corner of the cliff, and Tuve had pointed downward. Through the binoculars she had seen where the clearer stream from the Little Colorado Canyon poured into the muddy Colorado, and beyond that the blue oblong shape of a pool, which must have been supplied with water by a spring. Down there, she thought, must be the site of the Salt Woman Shrine.

Tuve had been standing behind her. “Ah,” he said, and something else. And pointed. She noticed motion. A figure walking along the bank of the pool, disappearing behind the brush trees, reappearing, bending to examine something on the ground. It was a man, apparently, but he was too far below them to tell much else.

“Is that this lawyer?” she had asked. “Is this the Belshaw who came to see you?”

Tuve didn’t answer.

“It could be him,” Joanna had said. “It’s a big man, like you said he was. Right?” She stared through the binoculars, shifted her position as the man moved to where a tamarisk partly shielded him from her view. “Tall,” she said. “Looks like he’s well dressed for hiking. But with his hat on I can’t tell from here if he’s blond. Does he look like—”

But Billy Tuve was no longer with her. Not standing behind her on the track. Not anywhere that she could see. Perhaps he had gone back up the trail, around that bend up twenty yards or so. Maybe ducking back into the brush to relieve himself. Joanna stopped thinking and started running.

“Billy!” she shouted. “Mr. Tuve!” But he wasn’t at the bend in the trail, or around it. Not as far as she could see. She hadn’t realized how tired her legs had become on the long and tricky walk down. She stopped, catching her breath, shaking, trying to see a place up the trail where he might be hiding. There were several. More than she had the energy left to check. But why would he be hiding? Why leave her like this?

Then Joanna had slumped against the cliff wall, sliding down the rough stone, and sitting, back against it, legs drawn up, forehead resting between her knees. The warm, dusty fabric of her jeans reminding her of how thirsty she was. Of how little water was left in her bottle. Trying to fend off despair. Trying to think.

Had Billy Tuve betrayed her? Well, why shouldn’t he? He seemed slow and innocent, but he had been smart enough to see she was using him. Yet he had been willing enough to help her—and help her to help him. So why had he abandoned her now? He’d been cooperative, even sympathetic, until he had seen that man down below. Perhaps he had recognized him as the man who had come to the jail. Probably he had. Perhaps he and the blond man had made some sort of deal. Perhaps the man was waiting at the bottom of the trail just to meet Tuve. For Tuve to lead him to the diamonds. This blond would be Plymale’s lieutenant. This man she shot was working for him, had called him Bradford Chandler, said he was working for some lawyer named Plymale.

But if Tuve had made a deal with this Chandler, why hadn’t he gone on down the trail to meet him? Why had he gone the other way? Was Tuve afraid of the man? If he worked for Plymale, she had a better reason herself to be afraid.

And then she noticed Tuve’s canteen.

It was propped neatly on a narrow shelf jutting from the cliff, almost as if she was supposed to notice it. As if Billy Tuve had left it for her to use. She pushed herself up, painfully stiff from the brief rest, and got the canteen. It was heavy and the leather cover was soaked and cool.

She sat again, leaning against the stone, unscrewed the cap, touched liquid with the tip of her tongue. The taste was stale, but it was water. She took a sip, holding it, enjoying it. Modifying the grim and depressing thought that Tuve, whom she had come to like, had abandoned her to die of dehydration with the knowledge that he’d left her enough water to get herself to safety. She had heard that the Hopis, and others, left hidden caches of water containers along some of the trails for emergencies. Tuve would have known where to find such a cache if he needed water. Still, even if this didn’t represent a life-endangering sacrifice for him, it was a kind thing to do—curing her despair as well as her thirst.

It also brought her to a decision. She would climb down the Salt Trail to the bottom. She would keep out of sight. Tuve had probably told his jail visitor as much as he’d told her. Maybe he had told him more. If this jail visitor had abandoned his wait for Tuve, perhaps he would begin his hunt for the diamond dispenser on his own. She would follow him wherever it took her.

Joanna rose, dusted off her jeans, poured what was left in her own water bottle into Tuve’s canteen, and resumed her descent. Not much hope, really. But she still had her little pistol if it was needed. And what else could she do? The opportunity she had prayed for ever since her mother’s death had finally come. A chance to attain justice. And revenge. And maybe, finally, some peace and some happiness. She had to follow where this was leading her. Even if it killed her. As Tuve had told her when they started down the trail, the Hopis had a kachina spirit who once opened a door marked death and showed them a happy life beyond it.

Thinking of that caused her to think of Sherman. Had she killed him? She’d intended to when she pulled the trigger. But maybe he’d lived. Now she found herself hoping he had. Not wanting to have been his executioner.

Joanna produced what might be called a laugh. Whatever lay behind that door, it wouldn’t have to be much to be better than the life she’d return to if she didn’t complete this search. Whatever was down there in this dreadful canyon, it was her destiny to find it.

18

Bradford Chandler had come to a series of conclusions. The first one was that he was wasting his time waiting for Billy Tuve here at the bottom end of the Hopi Salt Trail. He had found the note signed by someone named “Bernie,” which told him that others—at least Bernie and friends—were also expecting Tuve here. That offered interesting implications. Probably they had seen those posters offering the reward. But whatever it meant, he’d wait.

He put the note back exactly where he’d found it, settled into a comfortable place screened by vegetation. He’d stay and see what would happen.

Coming here to meet Tuve had seemed the only choice—despite the outrageous fee the copter pilot had charged to bring him. After all, he could charge that to Plymale, including the fine the pilot would have to pay for violating the National Park Service’s no-fly zone. But now he suspected he might be just wasting his time and Plymale’s money. He had landed himself in a complicated situation that he didn’t understand.

He’d checked around and confirmed that this place met the description Tuve had given him of the trail’s terminus—precisely the site where Tuve claimed he’d traded his folding shovel for the diamond. Then Chandler had scanned the cliffs above and upriver, looking for places where he could see portions of the trail’s route. His theory was that Tuve would be coming down either in the custody of whoever had shot Sherman or, if Tuve had himself shot Sherman, alone. He’d come because while Tuve was childlike, he was smart enough to know that if he found that cache of diamonds, it would clear him of the robbery/murder charge that confronted him.

From this spot Chandler had located three places where anyone making their way down the trail would be visible through his binoculars. He saw no sign of movement at any of them, lowered the heavy binoculars, rubbed his eyes, and checked around him again. From what Tuve had told him, the diamond dispenser had walked downriver and returned in just a few minutes with the stone he gave to Tuve. Chandler picked up the glasses again and did some scanning downstream.

He saw miles of cliffs, towering clouds now alternating with the dark blue sky in several places. He noticed five or six horses grazing in a small field across the river, more ragged cliffs on his side, and then, abruptly, a flash of light just as his vision moved past it. Chandler swung the binoculars back, saw the flash again, focused in. It came from the top of a relatively low ridge rimmed with brushy dry-country vegetation, with a much higher cliff soaring behind and beyond it.

Amid that vegetation, someone was standing looking at him, or at least looking toward him, through their own set of binoculars. Sunlight reflecting from the lenses must have produced the flashes he’d seen. As much as he could tell at this range, this watcher was wearing a blue shirt and a gray hat. Then the watcher turned, stepped away, and down, and was abruptly out of sight. It was a woman, a small woman. Could it be the Bernie who had left the note?

He stared at the site on the ridge, and the area around it, until his eyes ached, and saw nothing more.

He spent a moment resting his eyes and considering what this must mean. Perhaps a tourist engaged in wandering around? That didn’t seem likely in such an unlovely and inhospitable-looking site as that ridge. Why would anyone without a specific interest be making that climb?

Could the woman be Joanna Craig? That ridge seemed to him to be just about where following Tuve’s description would take him. And she, too, would have heard the same Tuve story, and perhaps much more. He considered that a moment, then he shifted his gaze to the opposite direction and began another study of the segments of the Salt Trail visible to him above and upriver.

No movement on the highest segment. The second segment was also devoid of any sign of activity. At the lowest level he found what he had hoped to see. He focused on two figures—apparently male and female. An agile one, whom Chandler decided must be Billy Tuve, was leading the way for the fearful and very careful form whom Chandler presumed was none other than Joanna Craig, Plymale’s enemy. Ah!

But who, then, was the woman with the binoculars who had been watching him from the ridge down the river? And what was the connection between this Bernie and her friends and Tuve? Chandler considered that question, decided the only answer available to him was through guesswork, and decided it might have something to do with Park Service security. No way of knowing.

He would operate on his original surmise—that Joanna Craig had shot Sherman in his car on the canyon rim at the head of the trail. She had taken custody of Tuve and Tuve was now guiding her on the Salt Trail’s winding three thousand-foot plunge toward the Colorado River. Once there, Tuve would lead her to the lair of the diamond dispenser. Her goal was the same as his own. He would simply join the party, help her to use Tuve to lead them both to those diamonds.

Thinking about the possibilities this situation offered caused Chandler to smile—his first of the day.

Forget the diamonds for now. Maybe his first step should be the elimination of Craig from the problem. He would take her identification to prove to Plymale that his task had been accomplished and collect the payment for that. That would simplify things. Then if Tuve actually guided him to the diamonds, he would have them as a bonus.

Chandler sat on what he thought might be the same boulder that Tuve described sitting on when the diamond dispenser had appeared years ago. Better not shoot her, though. Why invite a murder investigation? Better a fatal blow to the head with a rock. Then stuff some rocks in her clothing to weigh her down? Or let her float away? Probably let her float. Make it seem she had fallen, banged her head, landed in the river. How about Tuve? He’d need him to find the diamonds. But why leave a witness? But Bernie and friends were also expecting Tuve. He’d have to wait and see what developed.

Whereupon Bradford Chandler slipped his binoculars back into their case and set about finding the best place to confront Ms. Craig (and Tuve) when she reached the bottom.

And decide exactly what to say to her.

19

Sergeant Jim Chee was standing on the rocky shelf overlooking the up-canyon trail, looking down upon Cowboy Dashee, trying to calculate what Dashee was doing. At first glance Cowboy seemed to be taking off his left boot. But at second glance, Cowboy seemed to have abandoned that project and was attempting to cut off the bottom of his left pant leg with his pocket knife. Chee gave up.

“Cowboy!” he shouted. “What are you doing?”

Dashee dropped the knife and looked up, scowling. “Where the hell have you been?” he said. “You gone deaf, or what? I was hollering until I just about lost my voice.”

“You’re hurt,” Chee said, and began scrambling down the slope. “I’ve been looking for you. What happened?”

Dashee leaned back, released a huge sigh of relief. “Glad you finally found me,” he said. He shook his head. “I slipped. Tried to stop the fall. Left foot caught. Did something to my ankle.”

Chee was squatting beside him now, inspecting the offending foot.

“Sprained it?”

“I hope that’s it,” Dashee said.

“Broke, you think?”

“I guess,” Dashee said. “It feels like it. Or maybe it pulled the tendon loose. I was trying to get the boot off before it got too swollen.”

Chee rescued Dashee’s pocket knife. Gently as possible he cut the remaining strings, eased the boot off, and inspected the ankle.

“Already swollen,” he said. “When did it happen?”

“About an hour ago, I guess,” he said through gritted teeth. “I was checking on a little side canyon up there.”

“How far?” Chee asked.

Dashee managed a strained-sounding laugh. “What difference does that make? But I’d say about an hour’s downhill crawl, with a few stops to feel sorry for myself and yell for help.”

“Tell you what,” Chee said. “I’ll carry you down to that deep little pool by the Salt Shrine. That water’s cold. You can soak it, and I’ll see what I can do about finding some help.”

They discussed that suggestion, with Dashee expressing his doubts that Chee could carry him down the narrow and obstacle-rich trail without dropping him (or more likely, both of them) on the ragged boulders. He pressed for an alternate solution in which Dashee’s already-slit pants leg would be converted into bandage material, the ankle would be securely bound, and the trip would be made with Dashee hopping along on his good leg and Chee supporting his damaged side.

While the proposed bandaging was being done, they delivered their reports. Dashee had checked out two promising-looking connecting gulches, finding tracks and some interesting petroglyphs from Anasazi days, and was giving up on the second of these when he took his fall. Chee reported that he had taken looks at some undercuts which might have been cave sites—one with some signs it had been lived in long ago. He had made an extensive exploration of a fairly major drainage canyon, finding old tracks, both horse and human, but nothing very promising to suggest it was the home of the diamond dispenser. Then he returned to the place they had left Bernie to await Billy Tuve.

“What did she have to say?”

“She wasn’t there,” Chee said.

Dashee quit grimacing long enough to look surprised. And then alarmed. “She wasn’t? What happened?”

“She left a note on that big flat rock there. She told Tuve she was going to walk up the river awhile, and if he showed up before she got back, then wait for her. And if we showed up, the same for us. Our turn to wait.”

Dashee managed a grin. “Sounds like Bernie,” he said.

“Yeah,” Chee said, looking less happy about it. “Anyway, I waited awhile. Looked around. Found some other tracks there, too. Made by new men’s hiking boots. About size eleven or twelve, I’d say. But no sign of anyone there. Then I thought maybe you’d found the diamond man’s cave and come back to get her and she’d left with you for a look at it. So I headed up this way and heard you hollering.”

Dashee considered that, didn’t like the sound of it.

“Hey,” he said. “I wonder what happened to her.”

“I thought she’d be here with you. Now I’m getting a little worried.”

“Maybe another broken ankle,” Dashee said. “Hope it’s nothing worse. Hope she wasn’t hauled away by the size-twelve hiking boots.”

“I checked on that. They seemed to be a lot fresher than her tracks. And when her tracks went upriver, they didn’t follow.”

“Still, it makes you uneasy,” Dashee said.

“Let’s get you down to the river,” Chee said. “I think we can get a call out from there for the National Park rescue people to come and get you. I want to go find her.”

20

Successful skip tracers develop through endless practice the craft of concealment. One does not capture the wanted man nor repossess the overdue auto if the culprit sees you first. Almost anywhere in its meandering official 277 miles, the Grand Canyon offers a fine assortment of hiding places. The bottom end of the Hopi Salt Trail was no exception. Bradford Chandler selected a niche in the nearby cliff. It offered shade, a comfortable place to sit, the cover of a growth of tamarisk bushes, and a good view of the final hundred yards of the trail down which Joanna Craig would be coming. While he sat there waiting, he developed and refined his tactics for dealing with the woman.

Since she probably had shot Sherman, she probably had a pistol, and seemed to have no hesitation about shooting it. If she was carrying it in her hand, which he thought unlikely, he would simply shoot her. Why take the risk? More likely it would be tucked away. Perhaps even disposed of, since she would logically expect the police to be looking for her. Anyway, if the pistol was not displayed, he would assume the role of a businessman proposing a deal, which should, if his lies were well told, seem persuasive.

He stretched his legs, took another drink from his water bottle, and went over it again. He’d hardly started that when she appeared, alone, trudging wearily down the final rough segment of the trail, looking dusty, disheveled, and exhausted.

He stood. She stopped at the trail end, studied the area for a minute, then walked past him, not more than a dozen yards beyond the bush he was behind. Then Chandler stepped out behind her.

“Ms. Craig,” he said, in a voice just loud enough for her to hear. “I’d like to introduce myself and talk to you for a few minutes.”

Joanna Craig issued a sort of semi-shriek and spun around staring at Chandler, face white, eyes wide, looking terrified.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Who—” She took a deep breath. “You startled me.”

“I’m sorry,” Chandler said. “I beg your pardon. You look tired. And it’s so hot down here. You should sit down for a moment. Get a little rest. Could I offer you a drink of water?”

“But who are you? How did you know my—” She cut off that question, which told Chandler that she might already know the answer.

“I’m Jim Belshaw,” he said. “A sort of private investigator by trade. And I think we have something in common. I’d like to explain myself to you and see if we can work out some sort of partnership.”

“Oh,” Joanna said. She wiped her hand across her forehead. Studied him.

Chandler pulled back a limb of the bush and pointed to the shady shelf where he’d been sitting.

“No cushions. But it’s comfortable.” He extracted his water bottle from its pocket and handed it her. “It’s warm and I’m afraid I can’t offer you a glass.”

Joanna held up a hand, rejecting it, studying him. “What are you doing down here? And…and…who did you say you were?”

“I’m Jim Belshaw. I work for Corporate Investigations in Los Angeles.” He smiled at her, then chuckled. Awaited a response, and added, “But here in the Grand Canyon today, I’m on my own time. And I’ll bet you can guess what I’m doing here.”

“Well,” Joanna said. She sat on the shelf, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Why don’t you just tell me.”

“Actually, I was here waiting for a Hopi named Billy Tuve to show up. I watched the two of you coming down the Salt Trail, or whatever they call it. Now you’re here but I’m still waiting for Tuve. Is he coming along?”

“Why? What do you want?”

“Why? Because I am looking for a bunch of diamonds,” Chandler said. “I think you are, too.”

Joanna took a moment to respond to that. The only reason this big, athletic-looking man would know her name, would know about the diamonds connected with it, would be that he was working for Plymale. And if he was working for Plymale, there was a good chance he could accomplish the job the lawyer must have given him by killing her. He was big enough to do it barehanded. And her little pistol was tucked away in her backpack. She looked up at him, trying to read something in the face smiling down at her.

“What makes you think that I’m looking for diamonds?”

“Because they used to belong to your father,” Chandler said.

“Oh,” Joanna said. No doubt now he was working for Plymale, but then why were they having this conversation? She rubbed her hands down her legs, so tired the muscles were cramping. She looked up again, saw this big young man still staring down at her, awaiting an answer. Let him wait. She needed time to think about this.

“And also because if justice was done, they would be your diamonds now.”

He waited again.

“That’s correct, isn’t it?”

“I think it is,” Joanna said. “And I also think you’re working for the man who cheated my mother. Took everything away from her. How else could you know all this about me? About my business?”

“I don’t know it for sure. It’s what Old Man Plymale told me. What do you think? Should I trust him? He seemed to me to be a pretty slippery fellow. And I’m in a profession that has to learn how to spot the unreliable types.”

“I think he’s a thief. A crook. A totally unscrupulous man,” Joanna said. “So why are you working for him? And what is he paying you to do?”

Chandler chuckled. “I think you already know that. He wants me to make sure you don’t get the evidence you need to prove you are the direct descendant of Old Man Clarke, thereby recovering for you the estate your father would have inherited, and thereby depriving Mr. Plymale of his ill-gotten charity scam and, much, much worse, thereby subjecting him to a court-ordered audit of what he’s done with all that tax-exempt cash. That would probably land him in a federal prison.”

Again Chandler waited for a response. Got none.

“It would be a comfy white-collar prison, of course, but he wouldn’t like it,” he added.

Joanna got up, took a few steps, sat down again, and massaged her leg muscles.

“They say walking downhill, steep ones anyway, is harder on your leg muscles than going up,” she said. “Now I believe them.”

Chandler nodded. “It’s true,” he said.

“Why have you been telling me all this? The only reason I can think of is that you want me to cheat Plymale somehow. You want the diamonds.”

“Good thinking,” Chandler said. “I want to offer you a deal. A partnership. We both hunt the place where this fellow who gave Tuve his diamond lived down here. Little Billy gave me some information to help with the hunt. I have a notion he gave you some, too. Maybe it’s the same stuff. How long it took him to go back to his cave, or whatever it was, and come back with the stone. Information like that. But maybe I got some details he forgot to tell you, and you got some he didn’t tell me. So my idea is we work together. Improve our chances. Then when we find the cave—and that’s what Tuve called it—you find what you want. Your daddy’s arm bone with the DNA. Evidence that proves you’re his daughter. And we find the diamonds, which we split fifty-fifty.”

“Even though they’re mine?” Joanna said.

“Insurance company paid for them,” Chandler said. “Remember that.”

“Paid a hundred thousand dollars.”

“But anyway, legally as of now, they belong to the estate, and the estate belongs to that phony charity Plymale controls.”

Joanna nodded. Massaging her legs, trying to think of a way she could get into her backpack without making him suspicious. How to get out the pistol.

“I need a drink,” she said. If she could reach around, unzip it, and get out her canteen, maybe she could also slip out the gun. Put it in her jacket pocket. She’d feel safer then. She turned, reached for the backpack.

“Here,” Chandler said. “Let me get it for you.”

He pulled it off her shoulders, out of her reach, unzipped it, got out the canteen, handed it to her. Got out her pistol, turned it over in his hand, looked at it, checked the chamber and the magazine. Put the muzzle to his nose and sniffed.

“It’s still fully loaded,” he said. “No burned-powder smell. Is this what you shot Mr. Sherman with?” he asked.

“No,” Joanna said, thinking, How could he possibly know about that?

“Well, you won’t need it now,” he said, and put it in his hip pocket. “And while you’re resting a little while, let’s compare notes on what Tuve told us. And then we’ll go find your bones.”

Chandler was laughing now, looking delighted. “And then we’ll count out our diamonds and divide ’em up.”

21

Bernie Manuelito was still not at the Salt Woman Shrine locale where Sergeant Jim Chee had instructed her to wait. Neither was anyone else. So what was he to do? Chee had not a clue. He had made Cowboy as comfortable as possible for a fellow with a broken and badly swollen leg. He had finally managed to get a call through on his satellite phone to Grand Canyon Park’s rescue service and had been assured that either a copter or some other rescue craft would be on hand “as soon as possible.”

“You’ll just have to wait,” Chee told Dashee. “I think I should be going to see if I can find Bernie.”

“Good riddance,” Dashee said. “It makes me nervous watching you pacing back and forth, biting your fingernails.” He groaned, shifted to a more comfortable position on the sand.

“You sure you didn’t see any trace of her up around where you were? After all, there’s just two ways she could have gone, upriver or downriver, and I didn’t see her upriver.”

“I am sure,” Dashee said. “Absolutely certain. Quit worrying. She’ll be back. But you might start worrying about the weather.”

Dashee pointed downriver at the towering cumulus cloud, its highest level being blown by stratospheric winds into the flat-topped anvil shape. “That’s going to produce what you Navajos call male rains,” he said. “Produce lightning, soil erosion, arroyos, floods, and noise. Us Hopis, we like female rains. They produce corn crops and grass. And down here, by the way, you better not let the runoff from one of those catch you in a narrow little canyon.”

“I’ll worry about the weather, too,” Chee said. “But how about if something happened to her?” He pointed at Dashee’s ankle. “Something like that. She’s smarter than you are, and not so clumsy, but bad things can happen.”

“Or how about something even worse happening to you? Like Bernie seeing some nice-looking, polite young tourist guy with one of those float trips coming down the Colorado. She’d realize she could do a lot better than a homely Navajo Tribal Police sergeant with bad manners.”

“Bad manners? What do you mean?”

“I’m remembering your tone when you ordered her to wait for you. ‘You wait here, Bernie.’” Dashee mimicked Chee’s official tone almost exactly.

“Okay,” Chee said. “You wait here, Mr. Dashee, and don’t hurt yourself again. Have you got enough water?”

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about going thirsty for long,” Dashee said, and a rumble of thunder punctuated the remark. With that Chee did the only thing he could think of doing: He headed downstream, keeping his eyes and his mind focused on finding the sort of tracks Bernie’s little waffle-soled sneakers might have left.

Chee first found Bernie’s tracks in the damp sand down by the river. When he couldn’t see any more of them there, he headed for any unusual-looking sort of flora along the cliffs and eventually found them again, along with the evidence that Bernie had yielded to her temptation to collect seed pods from whatever plant she considered interesting. His irritation at having to go hunting for her was flooded away by a variety of memories of Bernie—how sweet she looked when deep in thought, when she smiled at him, when she was rapt in admiration of a cloud formation, or a sunset, or the shape of a walnut shell, or the shadows spreading out across the sagebrush slopes when the sun was low. If she was with him now, he thought, she would be admiring the thunderstorm looming above them.

For a while Chee focused on revisiting memories of those times with Bernie, but then the pleasure was interrupted. He began finding other tracks.

Tracks of two people. One wearing hiking boots. Big boots. Size eleven he guessed. The other small, narrow, probably women’s casual sportswear. The man was usually walking in front, the woman sometimes stepping on his tracks. The two usually close together. A couple of tourists, he thought, nothing to concern him. Yet they did seem to share Bernie’s interest in various growths of canyon-bottom plants.

He sat on a slab of fallen stone at the canyon mouth, taking a sip from his canteen, considering what those tracks meant. A pair of tourists might naturally be curious about the oddity of Grand Canyon botany. Possibly they had no interest in Bernie. Or merely wondered what she was doing.

He recapped his canteen and resumed his tracking, moving a little faster now and enjoying it less, remembering what Lieutenant Leaphorn had so often said about never believing in coincidences.

At the mouth of the next canyon draining into the Colorado, he found Bernie’s tracks going in perhaps a hundred yards and the paired tracks following her in and out. Still, he thought, maybe nothing to worry about.

But it did worry him. And he hurried.

Around the next bend in the Colorado’s south-side cliff, he came to a wider canyon mouth. Bernie had gone in. The paired tracks had come along after her. Someone wearing small moccasins had also been up this canyon recently. These tracks were faint and Chee spent several minutes seeing what he could learn from them.

Bernie’s shoe soles blurred some of them. And some of them, on the way out, had blurred Bernie’s tracks. Thus the moccasins had come out after Bernie went in. Interesting but not alarming.

What was alarming was the lack of a sign that either Bernie or the two producing the paired tracks had come out. Chee lost interest in the moccasin tracks and hurried up the side canyon.

The first couple of hundred yards were easy tracking. Both Bernie and the pair following her had walked right up the middle of the smooth stone floor, leaving their prints in the accumulated dust and debris. Then Bernie’s disappeared, and it took him a while to discover where she had climbed up a slope where fallen slabs and boulders were piled. Chee climbed it. He found tracks where she had walked around, and the place where she had climbed back down, causing a little avalanche of her own in the process. Under the slope her tracks resumed, as did the paired tracks and multiple traces of the little moccasins.

Bernie’s tracks resumed their travels up the canyon floor with the paired tracks following her. But the moccasin tracks didn’t.

Why not? Chee had no idea. Nor interest. He cared about Bernie and the big man and little woman so relentlessly trailing her. These three sets of tracks were easy to follow, and Chee followed them at something close to a run. The canyon now boomed with echoing thunder, and the formidable cloud he’d seen before he turned into this side canyon had drifted overhead, darkening his narrow world with its shadow, causing the temperature to drop, and bringing with it a cool breeze.

Chee’s running stopped just ahead. On the left side of the canyon was another runoff gorge. It was a narrow slot with its entrance choked by a dense growth of cat’s claw acacias—the vegetation detested by cattlemen and sheep herders all across the arid West. The big man’s and little woman’s shoe prints were there, too, often blurring Bernie’s own shoe prints. Bernie was looking for a way in, he guessed, and not finding it.

He paused a moment, thinking, inhaling the suddenly cool, fresh air. A flash of lightning lit the canyon, and just a second behind it came the explosive crack it caused, and the rolling boom of thunder. No time to waste here. He was rushing up the floor of the main canyon, running now because the thunder was becoming almost constant and a shower of popcorn hail had started, the little white balls bouncing off rocks and his hat brim. He had seen her tracks easily until now. But when the real rain started they’d be erased fast.

But there were no more tracks up the canyon. None. No sign of those little waffle soles anywhere, not on the still-dusty smooth stone of the stream bottom, not along the banks, not in any of the places where interesting-looking seed pods might have lured her. Nor were there any signs of the big man’s boot prints, which had always been easy to spot.

Which meant what? Bernie hadn’t turned back. He wouldn’t have missed downhill tracks. She must have found a way through that mass of acacia brush. She must be up in that narrow little slot. And the big man and little woman must be up there with her.

22

When she had first found her way into it, what seemed to her now like hours and hours ago, Bernie had thought of this dark and musty place as a cave. But of course it wasn’t. It was a slot, like all of the hundreds of routes rainwater had cut through eons of time in draining runoff from the plateau surfaces a mile above into the Colorado River. Thus its top was open to the sky through a narrow slit. Ahead of her Bernie could see nothing but gloomy semi-darkness. But by bending her head back and looking almost straight up, she could see a narrow strip of open sky. It was bright, sunny blue in spots, and obscured by the dark bottoms of clouds in others.

Bernie had clung to this cheerful overhead glimpse of the happy outside world until her neck muscles ached. She urgently yearned to be up there, out there in the clear and bright light and away from here. And she didn’t want to look again at what she had just discovered. At least not until her stomach had settled and her heartbeat slowed. But she took a deep, shuddering breath, switched her little flashlight back on, and looked again.

The body she had almost stumbled over was sprawled on a deposit of sand beside the wall of the slot. The base of wall was pink, the color typical of Navajo sandstone. Just above it a shelf of blue-black basalt jutted. On this, a disheveled pile of blankets seemed to have been used as a sort of a bed. Bernie guessed the man had fallen from that bed and rolled down the sloping sand to rest at the edge of the smooth stone floor. Obviously, a long time ago—or at least long enough to cause the dehydrating flesh to shrink and the skin to look like dried leather. He wore neither shoes nor socks, old denim trousers with ragged bottoms, and an unbuttoned long-sleeved denim shirt. His head was turned to the side, revealing just enough of his face to show, before she looked away, the shape of his skull and one empty eye socket.

Bernie sucked in her breath and snapped off the flash. She needed to save her battery. She had to do some exploring. Do it now. Do it fast and get out of here. She had to find Jim Chee and Cowboy Dashee. Tell them about this. That she had found the man who had given Tuve the diamond. Probably this was the man they had been looking for. Anyway, she had found some sort of hermit. At least something that seemed very strange.

Bernie leaned against the cold stone of the wall, recognizing how shaky her legs were, how exhausted she’d become. And she still had, as Robert Frost had put it, promises to keep and miles to go before she’d sleep.

Miles to go back to the Salt Trail, and then miles to bring Chee and Dashee back here. They’d never find the way in here—through that dreadful tangle of cat’s claw acacia brush—without her showing them. She’d almost given up herself, after snagging herself a half-dozen times on those awful thorns.

The acacias had closed over the bed of the runoff stream that ran—whenever a rainstorm produced some drainage—out of the slot. It had finally occurred to Bernie that the heat from those sun-facing slot walls would discourage the acacias right against the cliff. There she had managed to slip through with only a torn sleeve. And while doing it she had noticed the old pruning that someone had done years ago to keep that narrow path open. That seemed to prove that someone had once occupied this slot, whether or not it was Billy Tuve’s dispenser of diamonds.

When she snapped on the light again and turned it up the slot, what she saw seemed to make that certain. In the gloom ahead the flashlight beam touched off an odd glittering.

Bernie walked slowly toward it. Two vertical lines, perhaps two feet apart and maybe four feet high, flashed back at the flashlight beam. They were arranged on a basalt shelf, probably an extension of the one holding the blankets. But since the slot floor slanted upward, here the shelf was only about knee high over floor level. The glittering spots of light seemed to be coming from the sandstone wall above the basalt level. Now that she was close, she could see that something stood between the lines of flashing dots. It looked like a white bone.

She stepped closer, stopped and stared. It was a human arm bone. Elbow to wrist, with the bones of the hand still attached by tendons and gristle. Before she had resigned her job with the Navajo Tribal Police, Bernie had spent a few unpleasant duty hours in morgue and autopsy rooms. That had partly accustomed her to dismembered human body parts. But not totally, and the setting here made it worse than usual.

Strange indeed. The spots of glittering light were coming from little round tins that seemed to be attached somehow to the sandstone. She counted twenty such tins in each row, each containing a diamond, which glittered in the light. The forearm bone was still connected at the elbow to the upper arm bone, most of that buried under packed sand. On the sand around it, neat circles of diamonds were arrayed, each perched on a little grayish pad of leather in a small round tin.

Bernie reached for one, hesitated, then picked it up. The pad was formed of the soft folded leather of a pollen pouch. The container was a tin can that, according to the faded red legend on its side, once contained Truly Sweet. A smaller line below that declared that to be “The World’s Mildest Dipping Snuff.” That was exactly the way Lieutenant Leaphorn had described the container that had held the Shorty McGinnis diamond.

She unfolded the pouch, put the diamond in it, stuck it back in the snuff can, and put it in the pocket of her jeans.

Bernie was feeling exuberant. Now she would get out of this dismal place. She would go find Jim and Cowboy. She’d tell them the mission was complete. She had found the diamonds and the body of the dispenser of diamonds. She had found the evidence that would clear poor Billy Tuve of the murder charge. And the robbery charge. And any doubts that Sergeant Jim Chee might have entertained about Officer Bernadette Manuelito would be forever erased.

She started down the smooth stone floor of the slot, pausing here and there to inspect a rock shelf where the hermit had stored his food supplies in cans and sacks and his drinking water in five-gallon tins. Nearby she located his water source, a dripping, moss-grown trickle originating from a spring back in a crack in the slot wall. She let it drip into her palm and cautiously tasted it. It didn’t seem poisonous. Probably hadn’t run through any rock layers contaminated by chemicals and metallic ores.

She turned off her flashlight. The light reflecting through the slot above was dimmer now, but there was still enough reflected to guide her. It was getting close to sundown, though, and she hurried down the slanting floor to get to the mouth of this slot, and back down the canyon to the Colorado River, while she still had some daylight. It was then that she heard a woman’s voice, coming from down the slot, echoing as every sound did in this otherwise silent place. And then a man’s voice—close enough so she could understand it. The man said, “Ms. Craig. Keep your voice down. Let’s keep it very quiet. She might be dangerous.”

23

“I wasn’t raising my voice,” Joanna Craig said, in something close to an indignant whisper. “And why dangerous? It’s either a smallish woman or a tiny little man,” she said. “Judging from the size of their shoes.”

Brad Chandler didn’t respond to that. Instead he put his finger to his lips, put a hand behind an ear, signaling to Joanna that they should listen. She did, and heard nothing but the tinkling sound of water dripping from the gloomy passageway far ahead up the slot and the occasional faint sigh of the wind blowing past the slot’s open roof far overhead.

“We’ll go in a little farther,” Chandler whispered. “If all remains quiet and we see no sign of anyone, then I’ll give us a little better light. We want to pick up that woman’s track again. She must have some reason for being in here.”

“Sure,” Joanna said.

“And you have to take for granted it’s dangerous. There’s a lot of money involved in this, and where there’s money, there are dangerous people.”

“Okay,” Joanna said. “I understand.”

He made a sort of chuckling sound. “And maybe she’s a little woman, but you’re not so big yourself. And even little women can be packing pistols. Remember?”

“I remember you forgot to return mine,” Joanna said. “If it’s dangerous in here, I’d feel a lot safer with it. Didn’t you say we’re partners?”

“Right,” Chandler said. “But don’t let it worry you. I always look after my partners.”

He snapped on his heavy police-model flashlight, directing its beam back and forth across the smooth stone floor.

“There,” Joanna said, pointing. On the dusty stone were the faint tracks left by Bernie’s waffle soles.

As far as the light reached through the gloom, the tracks seemed to continue in an irregular line along the right edge of the floor.

“Let’s hope it stays this easy,” Chandler said.

“Take a look up,” Joanna said. “At the sky almost straight overhead.”

Chandler glanced at Joanna, suspicious.

“I saw a flash of lightning,” she said.

A boom of thunder punctuated her statement, producing a deafening battery of echoes from the cliffs.

“Guess it’s going to rain,” Chandler said, looking up now. “We’ll be dry in here. And if it keeps doing that, you can talk as loud as you like.”

“Yes,” she began, intending to tell this big, obnoxious man what she had read about the effects of rainstorms above the canyon. And what one of the people at the Park Service Center had told her of the sudden flash floods roaring down the little washes that drained the mesa tops. But no. Maybe that knowledge, and his ignorance, might be useful if she had any luck. And Joanna Craig had no doubt that she was going to need a lot of luck to get out of this situation.

He shifted the light beam, revealing nothing but the uneven layers of stone of the slot cliffs to the left, then he directed it up the cliffs, then across the slot. The light produced a brief burst of glitter as it passed the diamonds and then illuminated the cliffs to the right.

“There!” Chandler said, keeping the beam focused on the high shelf where Bernie had seen the diamond man’s bed. “See the cloth? I think we’ve found something.”

“Didn’t you notice something shining?” Joanna asked. She pointed. “Back that way.”

Chandler ignored her. Walked toward the shelf.

“Somebody had a bed roll up there,” he said. “This must be where the man with the diamonds lived.”

And as he said that, the beam of the flash struck the corpse.

Joanna sucked in her breath.

“Yes,” Chandler said. “I see him now. Or what’s left of him.”

He focused the light on the body. “Looks like somebody got here first,” he said, and switched the flashlight into his left hand and used his right to take out his pistol.

“You’re not going to need that gun,” Joanna said. “He’s already dead. A long time dead, the way he looks.”

“I can see that, dammit,” Chandler said. “But who killed him?”

“Look at him,” Joanna said. “Maybe it was time. Old age. Anyway, it certainly wasn’t very recently. He’s practically a mummy.”

“I see it now,” Chandler said. “And look, here’s some more of those footprints. All around here. She’s probably close. Anyway, I’ll keep this pistol handy.” He shined the light directly into Joanna’s face. “Might need it,” he said, grinning at her.

Joanna turned away from the flashlight, held out her hand. “Then give me mine. Maybe I’ll need it.”

He ignored that, swinging the flashlight beam past the body.

“And there,” he said. “Wow. Just look at that. Those must be my diamonds.”

“Arranged in two rows,” Joanna said. But she was staring at the white shape standing between the glittering columns. And thinking, My father’s arm. And noticing this man had said “my diamonds.” Not that she had ever believed he would share them with her. Or that she cared about the diamonds anyway, for that matter. The bone was what she wanted.

24

Bernie had reacted fast at the first sound of the voices. Strange voices. The man’s voice had an East Coast urban sound. Not Jim and not Cowboy, and it certainly didn’t sound like what she’d expect Billy Tuve to sound like. Who were they? What were they doing here? And why were they following her?

Lieutenant Leaphorn believed these diamonds were involved in a legal battle so big it had attracted FBI interest. Both of these people were armed. Park Service rules prohibited firearms in the canyon, so they weren’t merely tourists. If they thought she was dangerous to them, they might be dangerous to her. She ran up the slanting floor as fast and as quietly as the rock-cluttered pathway allowed. She wanted to find a place as far from the voices as she could get. A place where she could conceal herself until she could locate a way out of this slot.

Instead she ran almost immediately into a dead end. Part of one of the cliff walls had collapsed into a towering dam of chunks, slabs, and boulders blocking the floor and partially the slot. She climbed. A chunk of sandstone slid under her weight and dislodged smaller stones, bruising Bernie’s knee and starting a rattling little landslide that touched off a chorus of echoes. Surely they would have heard that. She moved cautiously toward the wall, slid under a tilted slab leaning against it, and sat down.

Time to subdue panic. Time to rest. Time to think. Time to make a plan.

Thinking came first. Remembering everything she had heard from Chee about the genesis of this crazy business. Then remembering (now she could hardly believe this) her voluntarily tagging along uninvited and unwanted.

Why? Out of a sense of adventure? Out of a yen to get a close look at the botanical/geological magic of this incredible canyon? Well, that was her excuse and it was partly true. But mostly it was to be with Jim Chee. She loved Jim Chee. Or thought she did. But where was Sergeant Chee now, when she really needed him?

Bernie slid a little deeper under the slab, trying to get more comfortable, realizing this line of thought was utterly unproductive. She had to remember what else she knew, things that might tell her something about this couple she was hiding from. Everything she knew about that might bear on what she must do now. Just what Chee had heard from Lieutenant Leaphorn, who had harvested it from his lifelong and nationwide Cop Good Old Boy Network.

The FBI was interested in a Gallup pawnshop arrest, which had to mean somebody big in the Washington bureaucracy was interested, which according to the inter-cop psychic vibration connected it to an old legal battle over a plutocrat’s estate, the outcome of which had left a nonprofit foundation with the money and a woman who thought she should have inherited it determined to get it back. A great pile of money was involved and—as she had overheard the man telling the woman—you have to connect piles of money with dangerous people trying to get it.

Probably true in the white man’s world, Bernie thought, and in this canyon, too. Both of them had arrived with guns, which made them fit Bernie’s notion of dangerous people. And now the man had the woman’s gun, and the woman wanted it back, and he wouldn’t give it to her. That, and the tone of the conversation, suggested they were not really partners in whatever they were doing here. She guessed the woman was the one who thought she had been cheated out of her inheritance. The one who had put up the money to bail Tuve out of jail. Because he had one of the diamonds. If she remembered what she’d heard from Chee, this woman believed the man carrying the case of diamonds was her father and that the foundation’s lawyer had cheated her out of her inheritance.

Bernie groaned. Not enough data to figure out anything useful in this situation. Wishing she had really paid attention to what Chee had been saying. At the time it had seemed like another fairy tale. Sort of like the Havasupai version of how a shaman had forced the Grand Canyon cliffs to stop clapping themselves together to kill people by walking across the river with a tree log on his head.

The man? Was he someone she had brought along to help her until their deal went sour? Or maybe someone representing the foundation, here to protect its interests?

Bernie had no way to decide that, but she knew that if she stayed half hidden here, they would find her if they wanted to. She had to have a plan.

A flash of lightning erased the gloom down the slot below where she sat, giving her a momentary glimpse of the place the diamond dispenser had lived and died, and of a small woman and a big man standing near it. The following crash of thunder started echoes bouncing around the slot. Another flash illuminated the scene. The man, she now saw, was holding a white stick in his hand, waving it. Probably the arm bone of the skeleton man.

She had to stop wasting time. She had to have a plan.

25

“Put it down,” Joanna Craig said.

Chandler laughed. “I’m just enjoying the thought of walking up to Mr. Plymale and waving this in the old bastard’s face,” he said. “I’d say, ‘Okay, you old bastard, here it is. How much will you offer me for it?’”

“Give it to me,” Joanna said. “It’s mine. It’s my father’s arm.”

“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” Chandler said. “So let’s talk business. You can take custody of your daddy’s bone. I’ll take the diamonds.”

Joanna nodded.

“I mean all the diamonds. Each and every one.”

“I don’t care about the damned diamonds,” Joanna said. “Give me my father’s bone.”

Chandler stared at her. Looked thoughtful. Nodded.

“Why not?” he said. “But how about that woman we followed in here. She must have known about this place. I’m sort of uneasy about her. I want you to go on up there and see if you can find her.”

Joanna considered this, held out her hand.

“Okay,” she said. “You said she was dangerous. Give me my pistol.”

Chandler laughed. “If you have that pistol, then you might be dangerous. I don’t think you’ll need it, anyway. Those little footprints said either a little woman or a small boy. Right? And the Park Service doesn’t allow people to carry guns down here.”

He got out his own pistol, grinned, pointed it at Joanna.

“Get along now. Find that woman and bring her down here.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll give you ten minutes and then I’ll come after you.”

Joanna started up the sloping floor. Stopped. Turned to look back at Chandler.

“What now?” Chandler said. “Get going.”

Joanna pointed at a figure walking down the slope toward her out of the gloom. “This must be her,” she said.

Chandler swung his flashlight around. “How about that,” he said. “I guess we have company.”

26

The flashlight blinded Bernie.

“Turn it off,” she said, snapping on her own flashlight. “Turn it off.” She shaded her eyes, turned her own light on Chandler.

“I said turn it off now.”

Chandler lowered the light. “Who are you?” he asked.

“What are you people doing in here?” Bernie asked. “And did I hear something about a pistol? This is a National Park with no firearms permitted. If you have one, hand it over.”

Joanna nodded toward Chandler, said, “He has—” Then stopped.

“And I’ll need to see your visitors’ permits,” Bernie said. “The form they gave you when you checked in and got permission to come down here without an authorized Park Service guide.”

Chandler had been studying Bernie, motionless and wordless. Now he shook his head, laughed. “I’ll have to see your credentials.”

“First I’ll take the pistol,” Bernie said. “I heard this lady say you had it.”

“You don’t look like a Park Service ranger to me,” Chandler said. “Where’s the uniform? Where’s the official Park Service shoulder patch? All I see is a little woman in dusty blue jeans and a torn shirt and one of those New York Giants ball caps.”

“Turn over the pistol,” Bernie said. “Just having a firearm down here is a federal offense. You add a citation of refusing to obey a federal officer to that charge, and you’re going to be facing a federal felony indictment.”

“Oh well,” Chandler said. “Why argue about it.”

He extracted a pistol from a jacket pocket, extended it toward Bernie, muzzle forward. And not, she noticed, extended far enough so she could take it without getting within his easy reach. It looked like one of the Glock automatic models used by a lot of police forces.

“Turn it around butt first and toss it to me,” Bernie ordered.

“All right,” Chandler said.

He raised the pistol, pointed it at Bernie.

“Now,” he said, “let’s quit wasting time. Get out your Park Service credentials and show me. Or your badge, or whatever you carry. And if you’ve got a gun on you, which I don’t see, we’ll want that, too.”

“I don’t have my badge with me. This is an undercover assignment. We’re checking into a report we’ve had.”

“Oh, really!” Chandler said.

“My partner will be in here anytime joining me. If he sees you holding that gun on me, he’ll shoot first and then ask what you’re doing. Better give it to me.”

“Put your arms straight out from your sides,” he said. “Miss Craig here is going to pat you down. See if you have a weapon. You would have, even if you are doing something undercover.”

“You’re getting into serious trouble. Both of you.”

“Go pat her down,” Chandler said, nodding to Joanna. “Make sure she doesn’t have a weapon.”

“No. No,” Joanna said. “I’m not having anything to do with this.”

Chandler stared at her, expression grim.

“I see,” he said. Then, to Bernie: “Turn around, little lady, arms straight out, hands open.” He took a step forward, checked for a shoulder holster, checked her belt line, patted her on the back. Nodded.

“Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll show you my credentials.” He took out his billfold, opened it, thrust it at Bernie’s face. “There you see my own badge as a Los Angeles County, California, deputy sheriff. And here”—he took a card from his billfold—“is my authorization as a criminal investigator for the same county. I am here to continue an investigation of a cold case, an old homicide in California, the investigation of which has led us all the way out here.”

Bernie nodded, very aware that Chandler had jerked both the badge and the certification card away before she had a chance to read them. The man was lying, but perhaps he was a private investigator with some sort of credentials. The world seemed to be full of them.

The thunder was booming again. The sharp crack of a lightning strike on the mesa top near the slot echoed around them. Bernie noticed the dusty stone streambed was no longer dusty. It was carrying a thin sheet of water. And as she watched, it repeated something she’d seen untold times after the “male rains” of summer in desert mesa country—another wave of runoff raced down the floor and left the thin sheet an inch or so deeper. She felt a sense of urgency. Another such wave would be coming, and another, and another. As gravity rushed the runoff water down, the stream would became a flood.

“Well, then,” she said, “what can I do to assist you?”

“Just take a seat somewhere and stay out of the way,” Chandler said. “We want to get our evidence collected and get out of here before this storm turns into something serious.”

He picked up the strap of his backpack, pulled it away from the stream floor, and zipped it open. Bernie watched as he sorted through its contents, moving a shirt out of the way, pushing aside underwear, shoving a small pistol under the shirt, finally taking out a pair of heavy wool socks. He inspected them and looked at his companion.

“Joanna,” he said. “You got any sort of sack in your pack?”

“For what?” she said.

“For what we came for,” he said, and pointed to the double line of diamonds.

She shook her head.

“Hell with it, then,” Chandler said. He tucked one of the socks under his belt, went to the shelf where the bone had been erected, and began picking snuff tins off the sand there, dropping the diamonds into the other sock and tossing aside the empty containers. It took longer than it might have because he was keeping his pistol ready.

Diamond after diamond clicked into the sock. Bernie watched and counted, conscious of the time, aware that the runoff stream was widening fast, thinking of how much water that dam of fallen stones up the slot must be holding back. What was flowing past now was merely what was running under the slab where she had been sitting. If it came over the dam, if the dam washed out, everything here would be swept down the slot canyon.

Chandler stopped. All the tins on the sand were emptied now and the foot of the sock, from heel to toe, bulged with diamonds. He tucked the pistol in his belt, knotted the sock at the ankle, and began extracting diamonds from the tins fastened to the sandstone wall, dropping them into the second sock, knotting it above the diamonds, tying the two socks into a single strand with each end a bulging knot of diamonds.

Job done, he faced the women.

“Here we have a big bunch of diamonds,” he said, gripping the combined socks where they were knotted, and swinging the bulges back and forth and laughing. “Big diamonds. Perfect blue-whites with expensive cuts. About thirty or so in this sock and”—he pointed—“maybe forty or so in this one. Call it seventy, and multiply that by maybe twenty thousand dollars on the average, and I have let’s say a million and a half dollars.”

Thunder drowned out what else Chandler was telling them. The storm now must have moved directly overhead. Water was dripping down from the rim of the slot above. The light popcorn hail was peppering directly on them now. The flow down the slot floor was widening fast.

Bernie made a “wait” gesture to Chandler with an open palm, rushed to his backpack, and pulled it away from the spreading water. She reached under the shirt, extracted Joanna’s little pistol, slipped it into her pocket, zipped the pack shut, picked it up, and deposited it on high ground well away from the flood. Then she exhaled. The man hadn’t noticed, so he hadn’t shot her. Not yet. She glanced at him. He was grinning at her.

“Thanks,” he said.

“It would have washed away,” she said. “There’s sort of a dam up there where rocks fell down. If the runoff sweeps that out, everything is going to wash away. We better get out of here.”

“Nice of you to warn me,” Chandler said. “And thank you for saving Joanna’s little pistol from getting wet.”

“Oh,” Bernie said.

“In return for your kindness, I guess I should tell you that when you get a chance to shoot me, and try to do it, just don’t try. It won’t work. I unloaded Joanna’s pistol, just in case she got careless with it.”

He laughed. “However, if you try to shoot me anyway, then I want you to know that I will shoot you. Probably several times. And”—he pointed to the shriveled body of the Skeleton Man—“leave your body here with our deceased friend.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Bernie said.

While she was saying it, lightning flashed again, followed a moment later by the crack of a nearby strike, and booming echoes of thunder. And as that faded, another sound emerged.

“Oooh!” said Joanna, in something between a shout and a shriek. It was a rumbling, creaking, crashing sound of boulders being swept along by the overpowering surge of flash waters rushing down-slope. With the sound came the sight of the slot-bottom stream abruptly rising, spreading, sweeping along with it the variety of leaves, twigs, assorted debris the bottom had collected in the years since the last “male rain” downpour had settled over this section of the Coconino Plateau and sent untold tons of water pouring off the rocky surface into the canyon.

Bernie had expected this, but in a more gradual and less violent form, and had decided what she had to do when it happened.

Chandler had not waited for a plan to reveal itself. He was running down the slot, splashing along the edge of the stream against the cliff. Looking for a place to climb, she guessed, or hoping to reach the exit where the slot would pour its water into the canyon. He was clutching his diamond-filled socks as he ran.

Bernie grabbed Joanna Craig’s arm. “Come on!” she shouted. “I know a place we’ll be safe.”

Saying it, Bernie was wishing she felt as confident as she tried to sound. The place she had in mind was the basalt shelf where the Skeleton Man had made his bed. He must have known the canyon, perched there to be safe from such flash floods. And coming in here, she had noticed on the walls of the slot how high flood debris had been deposited by previous floods. Maybe the Skeleton Man’s shelf wasn’t totally safe, but it would be safer than here.

And Joanna Craig seemed to trust her. She was following, splashing along with the rushing water. Knee-deep now, it was pushing them along, hurrying them, trying to sweep their feet off the bottom. And then they were at the edge of the sloping shelf.

Bernie pulled herself onto it, feeling as she did the water sweeping her feet out of its way, helping Joanna pull herself up, then helping her hoist the man’s bright yellow backpack up with her.

They sat for a moment, regaining their breath.

“Why did you save that?” Bernie asked, tapping the wet backpack.

Joanna Craig unzipped it, reached in, extracted the arm bone, showed it to Bernie. Smiling.

“This is what I came here for,” she said, and Bernie could tell she was crying. “Now I can prove I’m my father’s daughter.”

27

The first time he had been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Jim Chee had thought of the Colorado River system as a sort of reverse copy of a human vascular arrangement, with the Colorado being the artery and the scores of smaller canyons leading down into it the capillaries. Gravity made it all work backward, of course. The little gullies and arroyos collected water from all over the Kaibab and Coconino plateaus to feed their area streams across the immense Colorado Plateau. Then these creeks and rivers poured it down into the Colorado a mile or more below. Having seen the velocity that gravity gave the torrents coming off the lava mesas in northern New Mexico, he guessed he’d find runoff into the Grand Canyon (with ten times more gravity behind it) absolutely spectacular.

He was right.

Chee was huddled into a modest overhang at the cliff where the canyon he’d followed from the big river was joined by runoff pouring out of a small slot. He was wet to the skin from the pounding rain—mixed now and then with bits of hail. He was also scratched and bruised from a futile attempt to buck the runoff from the smaller stream. The racing water had knocked him out of the way and deposited him, half drowned, beside the cliff where he now stood. And that stream was puny compared to the roaring runoff it was joining.

He was as certain as the situation allowed that the slot he’d tried to enter was the one into which Bernie had disappeared. She and whoever she was with must be in that slot now. Maybe they were already drowning. If they drowned, they would wash out here. He had already seen part of a wooden bucket flash by on the flood.

Now came what looked like some sort of cloth and what might have been a soggy hat. Behind that, bobbing and turning, came what seemed to be a dried and terribly emaciated corpse. It was clad in a torn blue shirt and ragged denim pants. The hair plastered to the skull was white and the body was so wasted that the bones pressed against the skin. The torrent quickly swept it past to disappear in the foam where the stream pouring out of the slot joined the much larger main canyon flood.

“Skeleton Man,” Chee said. Well, they had finally found him. Or Bernie had found him. And all he could do about her being up there in the slot, and in danger, was wait and worry until the flood subsided.

The water pouring out of the slot, and the flood racing down the canyon, produced a roaring bedlam made even more deafening by the echoes bouncing off the cliffs. But suddenly Chee heard what seemed to be a yell. Brief, and suddenly choked off.

A moment later a man shot out of the slot, head out of the water, trying to swim.

Chee jumped to his feet, scrambled away from the wall and down the slope toward the flood.

The man grabbed at the branches of cat’s claw acacia he was being swept past, managed to catch a branch, held on. The force of the water swept his legs downstream. He was on his back now, seeing Chee.

“Help!” he screamed. “Help me!”

“Coming,” Chee shouted. “Hold on.”

The man was holding on only with his left hand, clutching what seemed to be a sort of rope in the other.

“Use both hands!” Chee yelled. “I’ll wade in as far as I can. When I get close enough, you push off and I’ll try to catch you.”

The man looked at Chee, expression desperate, tried to say something, couldn’t. Then he swung his right arm, trying for a hold on another limb. The rope he was holding swung upward, caught in the brambles. The man grabbed at it.

Trying to pull himself up, Chee thought. Impossible. The brush wouldn’t hold his weight. Chee took another step into the water, almost to his knees now, struggling to keep a foothold on the rock below, leaning against the pressure of the water.

The man was frantically jerking at the rope.

“For God’s sake, don’t jerk it loose,” Chee told him, “Just get yourself braced and push off and try to swim toward me. Hey, stop jerking!”

The rope tore free, bringing a piece of cat’s claw limb with it. The man went under, bobbed up, turned sideways to the force of the flow. It swept him past Chee’s hands, beyond any hope of Chee’s reaching him.

Chee staggered back into shallow water, turned to look.

The torrent was rolling the man now. He disappeared under it for a second or two, then bobbed up with his hand still clutching the rope. Then the torrent from the slot reached the flood roaring down the canyon. In the foam and confusion, the man disappeared.

Chee leaned against the cliff, regaining his breath. No sign of the man now. He imagined what would be happening to him. The big flood in the canyon was rolling boulders along with it. He could hear the crashing and banging they produced as they knocked away impediments. He might be floating high enough to escape that kind of death. At least for a while. Chee remembered the big dropoff a mile or so down the canyon. That would be a violent waterfall by now. The current would sweep the man to its bottom there, churn him around with those rolling boulders, and spit out what was left of him to continue the trip down to the next waterfall, and the next one, and through the various rapids, and on to the canyon’s confluence with the Colorado. Unless some rafters saw what was left of him caught in the flotsam at the foot of a rapids somewhere, he’d make it all the way down to Boulder Dam.

But the rain had almost finished drenching this part of the Grand Canyon and was drifting northeastward, leaving the Coconino Plateau to dump its tons of water across the Colorado on the Kaibab Plateau. Now the canyons draining the other rim of the great river would be roaring with flood.

Chee took a hard look at the torrent pouring out of the slot. In a few minutes he could buck it. In a few hours it would be a mere trickle. In a few days the stone floor of the slot would be dry again, collecting dust, waiting for the next male rain to flush it clean.

Ten minutes later, Chee was splashing wearily upstream against the diminishing flow. Calling for Bernie.

28

“I think it would be safe enough,” Bernie said. “The water’s not so deep now. Not running so fast. Let’s climb down and get out of here.”

Joanna Craig looked doubtful. “How about that man?” she asked. “He’s down there somewhere. And he has his pistol.”

“I think he’s gone,” Bernie said. “Gone forever. And we have your pistol, too.”

“I don’t know, though. What if he comes back?”

“If he comes back, we shoot him,” Bernie said. “Let’s get out of here before there’s more rain and it gets worse again.”

“He said he unloaded the pistol.”

“He said it, but he didn’t do it. I checked. It’s still loaded.”

“Do you know how to shoot it?”

“I’m a policewoman,” Bernie said, and was surprised to hear the pride in her voice. Noticing she hadn’t said “former policewoman.” She’d thought she’d gotten over that.

They eased their way down off the platform into the water flow. Not much more than ankle-deep now, but cold. No matter how hot the summer day, these male rains in the high country were always icy. If Jim was here to hear her, she’d be tempted to say “cold as a police sergeant’s heart.”

Even as she thought that, she heard his voice, and her name. The echoes off the slot’s cliffs were repeating it: “Bernie, Bernie, Bern, Ber…” But even in the echoes she recognized Jim’s voice.

“Jim!” she shouted. “We’re up here. We’re coming down the wash.”

That, too, immediately translated itself into a clamor of echoes. But he would have understood enough of it.

“Come on,” Bernie said, leading Joanna on a splashing run down the stream. With Bernie thinking she didn’t really know whether the blond man with the gun was actually gone forever. Thinking she should have warned Jim. Thinking it was too late for that now. Stopping to get Joanna’s pistol out of her pocket, just in case.

And when they started running again there was Jim Chee, splashing toward them.

“Bernie!” he shouted, still running. “Thank God.”

“Jim,” she said, gesturing toward Joanna, “this is Joanna Craig and—”

Their reunion was too violent for that sentence to be completed. He splashed into Bernie, partly due to enthusiasm, partly because he had lost his balance. The impact of a soggy man with a fairly dry woman was forceful enough to send out a spray. Then they were hugging each other with force and enthusiasm.

“Jim,” Bernie said, when she had recovered enough breath to say it. “Where have you been? I was afraid you—”

“I thought I had lost you, Bernie,” Chee blurted out. And, alas, added: “Why didn’t you wait for me? I thought I told you—” He was smart enough to end it there.

Bernie backed away a little. “Ms. Craig,” she said, “this is Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. He used to be my boss. Sometimes he thinks he still is.”

“How do you do,” Chee said to Joanna. “And we’re going to be married right away,” and he hugged Bernie again.

Bernie found herself talking directly into his left ear. “Jim, there’s a man in here. With a pistol. Claims to be a deputy from California. Big blond man.”

“He’s gone,” Chee said, still hugging Bernie. “Washed down the canyon out there, and on down into the Colorado.”

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Chee,” Joanna said. “But if it’s safe now, we should get out of this water. Get someplace out in the open air.”

They started down the runoff flow, which was diminishing quickly, with Bernie talking fast about how she had gotten here, about the diamonds, about the arrival of Joanna and Chandler, about the dried, emaciated corpse, about Chandler taking the diamonds.

“That body washed by me,” Chee said. “And so did the blond man, carrying some sort of rope knotted on the ends. In fact, I think I might have been able to save him, but the rope got caught in that cat’s claw brush at the mouth of this slot. Instead of trying to get to where I could pull him to the bank, he was trying to jerk it loose.”

“That rope had all those diamonds in it,” Bernie said, and explained how Chandler had rigged two long wool hiker’s socks together to carry them.

“Well, they’re gone now,” Chee said. “Maybe they’ll sink to the bottom of the Colorado River, or wash all the way down to Lake Mead.”

“They were Ms. Craig’s diamonds,” Bernie said. “Or would have been. I saved one of them for Billy Tuve to use as evidence—if he needs it.”

She took the snuff can from her pocket, handed it to Chee. “Be careful, Jim. Don’t you drop it.”

Chee grinned at her. “Now, Bernie, you’re not supposed to talk to me like that until after I’m your husband.”

But he was careful with it, taking out the folder pouch, putting diamond in pouch, pouch in can, and can in his pocket.

The early twilight of the world outside the slot greeted them now. They ducked under the cat’s claw brush and walked out of the now-shallow flow to the cliff-side bank where Chee had waited.

“Free at last,” Bernie said, and they began their trek down the canyon to its confluence with the Colorado. The big canyon flow was also sharply diminished now. Chee finished his account of Dashee’s misfortune just as they reached the big river. There they heard a helicopter over the rim.

“That will be the one coming for Dashee,” Chee said. “I hope he’s smart enough to get them to wait a little while in case we show up.”

He was. On the flight back to the Park Service landing pad, Chee presented Dashee with the snuff can, pouch, and diamond, Billy Tuve’s evidence to get the charges against him dismissed.

“And don’t forget to tell Tuve to get the diamond he actually owns out of the court’s evidence room,” Chee said. “And after he uses the one Bernie salvaged from the Skeleton Man shrine as evidence to get his charge dropped, tell the sheriff to start looking for another suspect in that Zuni homicide, and then I guess he should give that diamond to Miss Craig, here.”

“Or maybe the insurance company will claim it,” Joanna said. “I’ll get my attorney, to decide how to handle that.”

“One more thing,” Chee said. “Tell Tuve not to try to pawn that twenty-thousand-buck diamond of his for twenty dollars again. It makes pawnshops suspicious.”

“And causes way too much trouble,” Bernie said.

“Well, I can think of one good thing that came out of all this,” Chee said. “Old Joe Leaphorn’s been retired long enough so those tales he likes to tell at those little Navajo Inn coffee meetings are getting awful stale. When he hears all the details, this one’s going to give him ammunition for another couple of years.”

At Park Service headquarters the party broke up. After much handshaking and good-byes, Joanna went off to the Grand Hotel for a hot bath and a long sleep. Cowboy was hauled away to the hospital for an ankle x-ray and a cast. And Chee arranged for a ride for Bernie and himself back to where his car was parked near the Salt Trail terminus on the Grand Canyon rim.

Total exhaustion won its battle over Bernie’s postadventure excitement very early on her drive homeward with Chee, but not before some loose ends had been dealt with. Chee had told her that if she was willing, he would pick her up tomorrow and they could scout for a house to buy, or a building lot if that seemed a better idea.

“You know, Jim,” said Bernie, “I went back to your mobile-home place yesterday—or was it the day before yesterday, I’m too tired to remember—and I think you’re right. I think we should live there at first. Then if we don’t like it, we can do something else.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Chee said.

“Well, I went by there and you weren’t home, so I walked around it. Sort of inspected. And it could be fixed up some.”

“You’re just saying this because you’re tired, and damp, and so sleepy you can hardly keep your eyes open. You just don’t feel up to renewing our old argument.”

Bernie laughed, sort of feebly. “No. It’s because I sat there on that log you like to sit on, and I watched the river go by, and the breeze blowing in the cottonwoods, and listened to all the birds that hang around there. And I just felt comfortable with it.”

“Well, how about that,” Chee said. And that was followed by a period of meditation.

“Bernie, I was just going to tell you that I’ve had a big ‘For Sale’ sign painted. Already have it put up on the highway, with an arrow pointing toward my place. And I called in a want ad to the advertising people at the Gallup Independent and the Farmington Times, giving my telephone number and—”

Bernie broke the Navajo “don’t interrupt” code.

“How did you describe it?”

“Well, I said, ‘Beautiful shady site overlooking San Juan River on the west edge of Shiprock with roomy, attractive, and comfortable mobile home trailer. Electric and phone lines installed.’”

Bernie laughed and reached over and hugged him.

“You didn’t mention water.”

“Well, it’s no big deal to haul your water in. There’s that storage tank there by the trailer, and the hose runs into the kitchen, and—”

“Another hose into the bathroom. Right?”

“Well, I didn’t mention the bathroom problem.”

Bernie didn’t answer that.

“I thought about trying to explain that arrangement, but they charge by the word. And I was afraid that might sort of, you know, diminish the appeal. What do you think?”

“I think it would diminish the appeal,” Bernie said, and yawned.

“I’ll try to work out a brief way to put it,” Chee said. “Do you have any suggestions?”

But, alas, Bernie was already asleep.

29

Captain Pinto returned to the table the Navajo Inn diner had come to reserve for Leaphorn and friends’ coffee chats. He carried a tray of doughnuts, one for each participant. He took the chocolate one for himself, said, “Pick the one you like,” and sat down.

“Joe,” he said. “You were going to tell us how that slow-moving love affair between Sergeant Chee and Bernie Manuelito came out of this. Did I miss anything?”

“Nothing interesting,” Captain Largo said.

“Well, I think you all know the happy ending,” Leaphorn said. “They had a fine traditional wedding at her mother’s place. But…”

“But what?” Pinto asked.

“Well, apparently Chee’s performance down in the canyon made such an impression on Bernie that she gave in, and they’re living in that little old house trailer Jim calls home.”

“I’ll bet that won’t last long,” Largo said. “That Manuelito girl, she’s something else.”

They tried their doughnuts, sipped coffee.

“Bernie heard from that Joanna Craig woman,” Leaphorn announced. “The one who was trying to recover her daddy’s arm bone. She said they’ve done the DNA test, and they have a perfect match. She told Bernie the lawyer who got control of the estate involved in this, he called her lawyer and was offering some sort of deal. And Joanna said she’d rather burn in hell than make a deal with that man.”

“Another thing,” Pinto said. “I heard Tuve told the Arizona State Police that Ms. Craig shot that private eye, that Sherman. How’d she get out of that?”

“The way I heard it, Sherman was maybe a little embarrassed getting shot by a woman with his own pistol, or maybe it was he didn’t want a lot of digging into what he was doing out there. Anyway, he insisted that it was an accident. Claimed he was fooling with the pistol and it went off.”

“What’s that all about?” said Largo. “I wasn’t in on that.”

“Don’t ask,” Pinto said. “It’s way too complicated to understand.”

“Well, how about the diamonds, then?” Largo said.

“Chee told me the Park Service and the Arizona people recovered the body of that Chandler fella. The Colorado River had washed him all the way down to the shallow end of Lake Mead. But no diamonds on him. Found the body of the Skeleton Man, too. But no identification. No more chance of doing that than they have of finding the diamonds.”

Joe Leaphorn, the legendary lieutenant, was smiling. “Just think. Million of dollars’ worth of diamonds on the riverbottom. Or Lake Mead. Maybe the pumps will suck some of them up. Maybe we’ll be hearing of diamonds being sprayed out of those wonderful Las Vegas fountains. Just think of the new set of legends this is going to produce.”

About the Author

Tony Hillerman is a former president of the Mystery Writers of America and has received its Edgar and Grand Master Awards. His other honors include the Center for the American Indian’s Ambassador Award, the Silver Spur Award for the best novel set in the West, and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friend Award. He lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Also by Tony Hillerman Fiction

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The Dark Wind

People of Darkness

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The Fly on the Wall

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The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (for children)

Buster Misquite’s Cowboy Bond (for children) Nonfiction

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The Spell of New Mexico

Indian Country

Talking Mysteries (with Ernie Bulous)

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The Best American Detective Stories of the Century

Credits

Cover design and illustration by Peter Thorpe

SKELETON MAN. Copyright © 2004 by Tony Hillerman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

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Microsoft Reader November 2004 eISBN 0-06-079692-8

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