The Fallen Man

TheFallenMan

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The Fallen Man

TONY

HILLERMAN

This book is dedicated to members of the Dick Pfaff Philosophical Group, which for the past quarter-century has gathered each Tuesday evening to test the laws of probability and sometimes, alas, the Chaos Theory.

Contents

PerfectBound e-book exclusive extras:

Leaphorn, Chee, and the Navajo Way

The Novels, As Annotated by T.H.

Tony Hillerman on...

Skinwalkers Becomes a MYSTERY!

Profile of the Navajo Nation

Chapters:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by Tony Hillerman

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

FROM WHERE BAI BUCHANAN SAT

with his back resting against the rough breccia, he could see the side of Whiteside’s head, about three feet away. When John leaned back, Buchanan could see the snowcapped top of Mount Taylor looming over Grants, New Mexico, about eighty miles to the east.

Now John was leaning forward, talking.

“This climbing down to climb back up, and climbing up so you can climb back down again,” Whiteside said. “That seems like a poor way to get the job done. Maybe it’s the only way to get to the summit, but I’ll bet we could find a faster way down.”

“Relax,” Buchanan said. “Be calm. We’re supposed to be resting.” They were perched on one of the few relatively flat outcrops of basalt in what climbers of Ship Rock call Rappel Gully. On the way up, it was the launching point for the final hard climb to the summit, a slightly tilted but flat surface of basalt about the size of a desktop and 1,721 feet above the prairie below. If you were going down, it was where you began a shorter but even harder almost vertical climb to reach the slope that led you downward with a fair chance of not killing yourself.

Buchanan, Whiteside, and Jim Stapp had just been to the summit. They had opened the army surplus ammo box that held the Ship Rock climbers’ register and signed it, certifying their conquest of one of North America’s hard ones. Buchanan was tired. He was thinking that he was getting too old for this.

Whiteside was removing his climbing harness, laying aside the nylon belt and the assortment of pitons, jumars, etriers, and carabiners that make reaching such mountaintops possible.

He did a deep knee bend, touched his toes, and stretched. Buchanan watched, uneasy.

“What are you doing?”

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“Nothing,” Whiteside said. “Actually, I’m following the instructions of that rock climber’s guide you’re always threatening to write.

I am getting rid of all nonessential weight before making an unprotected traverse.” Buchanan sat up. He played in a poker game in which Whiteside was called “Two-Dollar John” because of his unshakable faith that the dealer would give him the fifth heart if he needed one. Whiteside enjoyed taking risks.

“Traversing what?” Buchanan asked.

“I’m just going to ease over there and take a look.” He pointed along the face of the cliff. “Get out there maybe a hundred feet and you can see down under the overhang and into the honeycomb formations. I can’t believe there’s not some way to rappel right on down.”

“You’re looking for some way to kill yourself,” Buchanan said. “If you’re in such a damn hurry to get down, get yourself a parachute.”

“Rappelling down is easier than up,” Whiteside said. He pointed across the little basin to where Stapp was preparing to begin hauling himself up the basalt wall behind them. “I’ll just be a few minutes.” He began moving with gingerly care out onto the cliff face.

Buchanan was on his feet. “Come on, John! That’s too damn risky.”

“Not really,” Whiteside said. “I’m just going out far enough to see past the overhang. Just a peek at what it looks like. Is it all this broken-up breccia or is there, maybe, a big old finger of basalt sticking up that we could scramble right on down?” Buchanan slid along the wall, getting closer, admiring Whiteside’s technique if not his judgment. The man was moving slowly along the cliff, body almost perfectly vertical, his toes holding his weight on perhaps an inch of sloping stone, his fingers finding the cracks, crevices, and rough spots that would help him keep his balance if the wind gusted. He was doing the traverse perfectly.

Beautiful to watch. Even the body was perfect for the purpose. A little smaller and slimmer than Buchanan’s. Just bone, sinew, and muscle, without an ounce of surplus weight, moving like an insect against the cracked basalt wall.

And a thousand feet below him—no, a quarter of a mile below him lay what Stapp liked to call “the surface of the world.” Buchanan looked out at it. Almost directly below, two Navajos on horseback were riding along the base of the monolith—tiny figures that put the risk of what Whiteside was doing into terrifying perspective. If he slipped, Whiteside would die, but not for a while. It would take time for a body to drop six hundred feet, then to bounce from an outcrop, and fall again, and bounce and fall, until it finally rested among the boulders at the bottom of this strange old volcanic core.

Buchanan looked away from the riders and from the thought. It was early afternoon, but the autumn sun was far to the north and the shadow of Ship Rock already stretched southeastward for miles across the tan prairie. Winter would soon end the climbing season.

The sun was already so low that it reflected only from the very tip of Mount Taylor. Eighty miles to the north early snows had already packed the higher peaks in Colorado’s San Juans. Not a cloud anywhere. The sky was a deep dry-country blue; the air was cool and, a rarity at this altitude, utterly still.

The silence was so absolute that Buchanan could hear the faint sibilance of Whiteside’s soft rubber shoe sole as he shifted a foot along the stone. A couple of hundred feet below him, a red-tailed hawk drifted along, riding an updraft of air along the cliff face.

From behind him came the click of Stapp fastening his rappelling gear.

This is why I climb, Buchanan thought. To get so far away from Stapp’s “surface of the earth” that I can’t even hear it. But Whiteside climbs for the thrill of challenging death. And now he’s out about thirty yards. It’s just too damn risky.

“That’s far enough, John,” Buchanan said. “Don’t press your luck.”

“Two more feet to a handhold,” Whiteside said. “Then I can take a look.” He moved. And stopped. And looked down.

“There’s more of that honeycomb breccia under the overhang,” he said, and shifted his weight to allow a better head position. “Lot of those little erosion cavities, and it looks like some pretty good cracking where you can see the basalt.” He shifted again. “And a pretty good shelf down about—”

Silence. Then Whiteside said, “I think I see a helmet.”

“What?”

“My God!” Whiteside said. “There’s a skull in it.”

2

THE WHITE PORSCHE LOOMING

in the rearview mirror of his pickup distracted Jim Chee from his gloomy thoughts. Chee had been rolling southward down Highway 666 toward Salt Creek Wash at about sixty-five miles per hour, which was somewhat more than the law he was paid to uphold 2 of 102

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allowed. But Navajo Tribal Police protocol this season was permitting speeders about that much margin of error. Besides, traffic was very light, it was past quitting time (the mid-November sunset was turning the clouds over the Carrizo Mountains a gaudy pink), and he saved both gasoline and wear on the pickup’s tired old engine by letting it accelerate downhill, thereby gathering momentum for the long climb over the hump between the wash and Shiprock.

But the driver of the Porsche was making a lot more than a tolerable mistake. He was doing about ninety-five. Chee picked the portable blinker light off the passenger-side floorboard, switched it on, rolled down the window, and slapped its magnets against the pickup roof. Just as the Porsche whipped past.

He was instantly engulfed in cold air and road dust. He rolled up the window and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The speedometer needle reached 70 as he crossed Salt Creek Wash, crept up to almost 75, and then wavered back to 72 as the upslope gravity and engine fatigue took their toll. The Porsche was almost a mile up the hill by now. Chee reached for the mike, clicked it on, and got the Shiprock dispatcher.

“Shiprock,” the voice said. “Go ahead, Jim.”

This would be Alice Notabah, the veteran. The other dispatcher, who was young and almost as new on the job as was Chee, always called him Lieutenant.

“Go ahead,” Alice repeated, sounding slightly impatient.

“Just a speeder,” Chee said. “White Porsche Targa, Utah tags, south on triple six into Shiprock. No big deal.” The driver probably hadn’t seen his blinker. No reason to look in your rearview when you pass a rusty pickup. Still, it added another minor frustration to the day’s harvest. Trying to chase the sports car would have been simply humiliating.

“Ten four,” Alice said. “You coming in?”

“Going home,” Chee said.

“Lieutenant Leaphorn was in looking for you,” Alice said.

“What’d he want?” It was actually former lieutenant Leaphorn now. The old man had retired last summer. Finally. After about a century. Still, retired or not, hearing that Leaphorn was looking for him made Chee feel uneasy and begin examining his conscience.

He’d spent too many years working for the man.

“He just said he’d catch you later,” Alice said. “You sound like you had a bad day.”

“Just a total blank,” Chee agreed. But that wasn’t accurate. It was worse than blank. First there had been the episode with the kid in the Ute Mountain Tribal Police uniform (Chee balked at thinking of him as a policeman), and then there was Mrs. Twosalt.

Cocky kid. Chee had been parked high on the slope below Popping Rock where his truck was screened from view by brush and he had a long view of the oil field roads below. He’d been watching a mud-spattered blue two-ton GMC pickup parked at a cattle guard about a mile below him. Chee had dug out his binoculars and focused them, and was trying to determine why the driver had parked there and if anyone was sitting on the passenger’s side. All he was seeing was dirt on the windshield.

About then the kid had said “Hey!”

in a loud voice, and when Chee had turned, there he was, about six feet away, staring at him through dark and shiny sunglasses.

“What’s you doing?” the kid had asked, and Chee had recognized that he was wearing what looked like a brand-new Ute Mountain Tribal Police uniform.

“I’m watching birds,” Chee said, and tapped the binoculars.

Which the kid hadn’t found amusing.

“Let’s see some identification,” he’d said. That was all right with Chee. It was proper procedure when you run across something that maybe looks suspicious. He’d fished out his Navajo Tribal Police identification folder, wishing he hadn’t made the smart-aleck remark about bird-watching. It was just the sort of wisecrack cops heard every day and resented. He wouldn’t have done it, he thought, if the kid hadn’t sneaked up on him so efficiently. That was embarrassing.

The kid looked at the folder, from Chee’s photograph to Chee’s face. Neither seemed to please him.

“Navajo police?” he’d said. “What’s you doing out here on the Ute reservation?” And then Chee politely explained to the kid that they weren’t on the Ute reservation. They were on Navajo land, the border being maybe a half mile or so east of them. And the kid had sort of smirked and said Chee was lost, the border was at least a mile the other way, and he’d pointed down the slope. The argument that might have started would have been totally pointless, so Chee had said good-bye and climbed back into his truck. He had driven away, thoroughly pissed off, remembering that the Utes were the enemy in a lot of Navajo mythology and understanding why. He was also thinking he had handled that encounter very poorly for an acting lieutenant, which he had been now for almost three weeks. And that led him to think of Janet Pete, who was why he’d worked for this promotion. Thinking of Janet always cheered him up a little. The day would surely get better.

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It didn’t. Next came Old Lady Twosalt.

Just like the Ute cop, she’d walked right up behind him without him hearing a thing. She caught him standing in the door of the school bus parked beside the Twosalt hogan, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do but continue standing there, stammering and stuttering, explaining that he’d honked his horn, and waited around and hollered, and did all the polite things one does to protect another’s privacy when one visits a house in mostly empty country. And then he’d finally decided that nobody was home. Finally, too, he stopped talking.

Mrs. Twosalt had just stood there, looking politely away from him while he talked instead of looking into his eyes—which is the traditional Navajo way of suggesting disbelief. And when he’d finally finished, she went right to the heart of it.

“I was out looking after the goats,” she said. “But what are you looking for in my school bus? You think you lost something in there, or what?”

What Chee was looking for in the school bus was some trace of cow manure, or cow hair, or wool, or any other evidence that the vehicle had been used to haul animals other than schoolkids. It involved the same problem that had him peering through his binoculars at the big pickup over by Popping Rock. Cattle were disappearing from grazing land in the jurisdiction of the Shiprock agency, and Captain Largo had made stopping this thievery the first priority of Chee’s criminal investigation division. He put it ahead of dope dealing at the junior college, a gang shooting, bootlegging, and other crimes that Chee felt were more interesting.

He’d rolled out of the cot in his trailer house in the cold dawn this morning, put on his jeans and work jacket, and fired up the old truck intending to spend the day incognito, just prowling around looking for the kind of vehicles into which those cattle might be disappearing.

The GMC pickup was a natural. It was a fifth-wheel model designed to pull heavy trailers and known to be favored by serious rustlers who like to do their stealing in wholesale, trailer-load lots. But he’d just happened to notice the school bus while jolting down the trail from Popping Rock, and just happened to remember the Twosalt outfit not only raised cattle but had a shaky reputation, and just happened to wonder what they would want with an old school bus anyway. None of that helped him come up with the answer for which Mrs. Twosalt had stood there waiting.

“I was just curious,” Chee said. “I used to ride one of these things to school when I was a kid. I was wondering if they’d changed them any.” He produced a weak laugh.

Mrs. Twosalt hadn’t seemed to share his amusement. She waited, looked at him, waited some more—giving him a chance to change his story and to offer a more plausible explanation for this visit.

In default of a better idea, Chee had fished out his identification folder. He’d said he’d come by to learn if the Twosalts were missing any cattle or sheep or had seen anything suspicious. Mrs. Twosalt said she kept good track of all their animals. Nothing was missing. And that had been the end of that except for the lingering embarrassment.

It was almost dark as he topped the hill and looked down at the scattering of lights of Shiprock town. No sign of the Porsche. Chee yawned. What a day! He turned off the pavement onto the gravel road, which led to the dirt road, which led to the weedy track down to his trailer under the cottonwoods beside the San Juan River. He rubbed his eyes, yawned again. He’d warm up what was left of his breakfast coffee, open a can of chili, and hit the sack early. A bad day, but now it was over.

No, it wasn’t. His headlights reflected off a windshield, off a dusty car parked just past his trailer. Chee recognized it. Former lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, as promised, had caught him later.

3

CHEE’S TRAILER HAD BEEN CHILLY

when he left it at dawn. Now it was frigid, having leaked what little warmth it had retained into the chill that settled along the San Juan River. Chee lit the propane heater and started the coffee.

Joe Leaphorn was sitting stiff and straight on the bench behind the table. He put his hat on the Formica tabletop and rubbed his hand through his old-fashioned crew cut, which had become appropriately gray. Then he replaced the hat, looked uneasy, and took it off again. To Chee the hat looked as weatherworn as its owner.

“I hate to bother you like this,” Leaphorn said, and paused. “By the way, congratulations on the promotion.”

“Thanks,” Chee said. He glanced around from the coffeepot, where the hot water was still dripping through the grounds, and hesitated. But what the hell. It had not seemed plausible when he’d heard it, but why not find out?

“People tell me you recommended me for it.”

If Leaphorn heard that, it didn’t show on his face. He was watching his folded hands, the thumbs of which he had engaged in circling each other.

“It gets you lots of work and worry,” Leaphorn said, “and not much pay goes with the job.” 4 of 102

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Chee extracted two mugs from the cabinet, put the one advertising the Farmington Times in front of Leaphorn, and looked for the sugar bowl.

“How you enjoying your retirement?” Chee asked. Which was a sort of oblique way of getting the man to the point of this visit. This wouldn’t be a social call. No way. Leaphorn had always been the boss and Chee had been the gofer. One way or another this visit would involve law enforcement and something Leaphorn wanted Chee to do about it.

“Well, being retired there’s a lot less aggravation,” Leaphorn said. “You don’t have to put up with—” He shrugged and chuckled.

Chee laughed, but it was forced. He wasn’t used to this strange new version of Leaphorn. This Leaphorn, come to ask him for something, hesitant and diffident, wasn’t the Lieutenant Leaphorn he remembered with a mixture of puzzlement, irritation, and admiration. Seeing the man as a supplicant made him uneasy. He’d put a stop to that.

“I remember when you told me you were retiring, you said if I ever needed to pick your brains for anything, to feel free to ask,” Chee said. “So I’m going to ask you what you know about the cattle-rustling business.” Leaphorn considered, thumbs still circling. “Well,” he said, “I know there’s always some of it going on. And I know your boss and his family have been in the cow business for about three generations. So he probably doesn’t care much for cow thieves.” He stopped watching his thumbs and looked up at Chee. “You having a run of it up here? Anything big?”

“Nothing very big. The Conroy ranch lost eight heifers last month. That was the worst. Had six or seven other complaints in the past two months. Mostly one or two missing, and some of them probably just strayed off. But Captain Largo tells me it’s worse than usual.”

“Enough to get Largo stirred up,” Leaphorn said. “His family has grazing leases scattered around over on the Checkerboard.” Chee grinned.

“I’ll bet you already knew that,” Leaphorn said, and chuckled.

“I did,” Chee said, and poured the coffee.

Leaphorn sipped.

“I don’t think I know anything about catching rustlers that Captain Largo hasn’t already told you,” Leaphorn said. “Now we have the Navajo Rangers, and since cattle are a tribal resource and their job is protecting tribal resources, it’s really their worry. But the rangers are a real small group and they tend to be tied up with game poachers and people vandalizing the parks, or stealing timber, or draining off drip gasoline. That sort of thing. Not enough rangers to go around, so you work with whoever the New Mexico Cattle Sanitary Board has covering this district, and the Arizona Brand Inspection Office, and the Colorado people. And you keep an eye out for strange trucks and horse trailers.” Leaphorn looked up and shrugged. “Not much you can do. I never had much luck catching

’em, and the few times I did, we could never get a conviction.”

“I don’t think I’m going to get much return on the time I’ve been investing in it either,” Chee said.

“I bet you’re already doing everything I suggested.” Leaphorn added sugar to his coffee, sipped, looked at Chee over the rim. “And then, of course, you’re getting into the ceremonial season, and you know how that works. Somebody’s having a sing. They need to feed all those kinfolks and friends who come to help with the cure. Lots of hungry people and maybe you have them for a whole week if it’s a full-fledged ceremony. You know what they say in New Mexico: nobody eats his own beef.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Looking through the reports for the past years I noticed the little one or two animal thefts go up when the thunderstorms stop and the sings begin.”

“I used to just snoop around a little. Maybe I’d find some fresh hides with the wrong brands on ’em. But you know there’s not much use arresting anybody for that. I’d just say a word or two to let ’em know we’d caught ’em, and then I’d tell the owner. And if he was Navajo, he’d figure that he should have known they needed a little help and butchered something for them and saved ’em the trouble of stealing it.”

Leaphorn stopped, knowing he was wasting time.

“Good ideas,” Chee said, knowing he wasn’t fooling Leaphorn. “Anything I can do for you?”

“It’s nothing important,” Leaphorn said. “Just something that’s been sort of sticking in my mind for years. Just curiosity really.” Chee tried his own coffee and found it absolutely delicious. He waited for Leaphorn to decide how he wanted to ask this favor.

“It was eleven years this fall,” Leaphorn said. “I was assigned to the Chinle office then and we had a young man disappear from the lodge at Canyon de Chelly. Fellow named Harold Breedlove. He and his wife were there celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary.

His birthday, too. The way his wife told it, he got a telephone call. He tells her he has to meet someone about a business deal. He says he’ll be right back and he drives off in their car. He doesn’t come back. Next morning she calls the Arizona Highway Patrol.

They call us.”

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Leaphorn paused, understanding that such a strong reaction to what seemed like nothing more sinister than a man taking a vacation from his wife needed an explanation. “They’re a big ranching family. The Breedloves. The Lazy B ranch up in Colorado, leases in New Mexico and Arizona, all sorts of mining interests, and so forth. The old man ran for Congress once. Anyway, we put out a description of the car. It was a new green Land Rover. Easy to spot out here. And about a week later an officer spots it. It had been left up an arroyo beside that road that runs from 191 over to the Sweetwater chapter house.”

“I’m sort of remembering that case now,” Chee said. “But very dimly. I was new then, working way over at Crownpoint.” And, Chee thought, having absolutely nothing to do with the Breedlove case. So where could this conversation possibly be leading?

“No sign of violence at the car, that right?” Chee asked. “No blood. No weapon. No note. No nothing.”

“Not even tracks,” Leaphorn said. “A week of wind took care of that.”

“And nothing stolen out of the car, if I remember it right,” Chee said. “Seems like I remember somebody saying it still had an expensive audio system in it, spare tire, everything still there.” Leaphorn sipped his coffee, thinking. Then he said, “So it seemed then. Now I don’t know. Maybe some mountain climbing equipment was stolen.”

“Ah,” Chee said. He put down the coffee cup. Now he understood where Leaphorn was heading.

“That skeleton up on Ship Rock,” Leaphorn said. “All I know about it is what I read in the Gallup Independent. Do you have any identification yet?”

“Not that I know of,” Chee said. “There’s no evidence of foul play, but Captain Largo got the FBI laboratory people to take a look at everything. Last I heard, they hadn’t come up with anything.”

“Nothing much but bare bones to work with, I heard,” Leaphorn said. “And what was left of the clothing. I guess people who climb mountains don’t take along their billfolds.”

“Or engraved jewelry,” Chee added. “Or anything else they’re not using. At least this guy didn’t.”

“You get an estimate on his age?”

“The pathologist said between thirty and thirty-five. No sign of any health problems which affected bone development. I guess you don’t expect health problems in people who climb mountains. And he probably grew up someplace with lots of fluoride in the drinking water.”

Leaphorn chuckled. “Which means no fillings in his teeth and no help from any dental charts.”

“We had lots of that kind of luck on this one,” Chee said.

Leaphorn drained his cup, put it down. “How was he dressed?”

Chee frowned. It was an odd question. “Like a mountain climber,” he said. “You know. Special boots with those soft rubber soles, all the gear hanging off of him.”

“I was thinking about the season,” Leaphorn said. “Black as that Ship Rock is, the sun gets it hot in the summer—even up there a mile and a half above sea level. And in the winter, it gets coated with ice. The snow packs in where it’s shaded. Layers of ice form.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Well, this guy wasn’t wearing cold-weather gear. Just pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Maybe some sort of thermal underwear, though. He was on a sort of shelf a couple of hundred feet below the peak. Way too high for the coyotes to get to him, but the buzzards and ravens had been there.”

“Did the rescue team bring everything down? Was there anything that you’d expect to find that wasn’t there? I mean, you’d expect to find if you knew anything about the gear climbers carry.”

“As far as I know nothing was missing,” Chee said. “Of course, stuff may have fallen down into cracks. The birds would have scattered things around.”

“A lot of rope, I guess,” Leaphorn said.

“Quite a bit,” Chee said. “I don’t know how much would be normal. I know climbing rope stretches a lot. Largo sent it to the FBI lab to see if they could tell if a knot slipped, or it broke, or what.”

“Did they bring down the other end?”

“Other end?”

Leaphorn nodded. “If it broke, there’d be the other end. He would have had it secured someplace. A piton driven in or tied to something secure. In case he slipped.”

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“Oh,” Chee said. “The climbers who went up for the bones didn’t find it. I doubt if they looked. Largo asked them to go up and bring down the body. And I remember they thought there’d have to be two bodies. Nobody would be crazy enough to climb Ship Rock alone. But they didn’t find another one. I guess our fallen man was that crazy.”

“Sounds like it,” Leaphorn said.

Chee poured them both some more coffee, looked at Leaphorn and said, “I guess this Harold Breedlove was a mountain climber. Am I right?”

“He was,” Leaphorn said. “But if he’s your fallen man, he wasn’t a very smart one.”

“You mean climbing up there alone.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “Or if he wasn’t alone, climbing with someone who’d go off and leave him.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Chee said. “The rescue crew said he’d either climbed up to the ledge, which they didn’t think would be possible without help, or tried to rappel down from above. But the skeleton was intact. Nothing broken.” Chee shook his head.

“If someone was with him, why didn’t they report it? Get help? Bring down the body? You have any thoughts about that?”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Makes no sense either way.”

Leaphorn sipped coffee. Considered.

“I’d like to know more about this climbing gear you said was stolen out of Breedlove’s car,” Chee said.

“I said it might have been stolen, and maybe from the car,” Leaphorn said.

Chee waited.

“About a month after the guy vanished, we caught a kid from Many Farms breaking into a tourist’s car parked at one of the Canyon de Chelly overlooks. He had a bunch of other stolen stuff at his place, car radios, mobile phones, tape decks, so forth, including some mountain climbing gear. Rope, pitons, whatever they call those gadgets. By then we’d been looking for Breedlove long enough to know he was a climber. The boy claimed he found the stuff where runoff had uncovered it in an arroyo bottom. We had him take us out and show us. It was about five hundred yards upstream from where we’d found Breedlove’s car.” Chee considered this.

“Did you say the car hadn’t been broken into?”

“It wasn’t locked when we found it. The stuff kids usually take was still there.” Chee made a wry face. “You have any idea why he’d just take the climbing gear?”

“And leave the stuff he could sell? I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. He picked up his cup, noticed it was empty, put it down again.

“I heard you’re getting married,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. You want a refill?”

“A very pretty lady,” Leaphorn said. “And smart. A good lawyer.” He held out his cup.

Chee laughed. “I never heard you use that adjective talking about a lawyer before. Anyway, not about a defense lawyer.” Janet Pete worked for Dinebeiina Nahiilna be Agaditahe, which translates more or less literally as “People who talk fast and help people” and was more likely to be called DNA, or public defenders, or with less polite language by Navajo Police.

“Has to be a first time for everything,” Leaphorn said. “And Miss Pete—” Leaphorn couldn’t think of a way to finish that sentence.

Chee took his cup and refilled it.

“I hope you’ll let me know if anything interesting turns up on your fallen man.” That surprised Chee. Wasn’t it finished now? Leaphorn had found his missing man. Largo’s fallen man was identified. Case closed.

What else interesting would there be?

“You mean if we check out the Breedlove identification and the skeleton turns out to be the wrong size, or wrong race, or Breedlove had false teeth? Or what?”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. But he still sat there, holding his replenished coffee cup. This conversation wasn’t finished. Chee waited, trying to deduce the way it would be going.

“Did you have a suspect? I guess the widow would be one?”

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“There seemed to be a good reason for it in this case. But that didn’t pan out. Then there was a cousin. A Washington lawyer named George Shaw. Who just happened to also be a mountain climber, and just happened to be out here and looked just perfect as the odd man in a love triangle if you wanted one. He said he’d come out to talk to Breedlove about some sort of mineral lease proposal on the Lazy B ranch. That seemed to be true from what I could find out. Shaw was representing the family’s business interests and a mining company was dickering for a lease.”

“With Harold? Did he own the place?”

Leaphorn laughed. “He’d just inherited it. Three days before he disappeared.”

“Well, now,” Chee said, and thought about it while Leaphorn sipped his coffee.

“Did you see the report on the shooting over at Canyon de Chelly the other day?” Leaphorn asked. “An old man named Amos Nez shot apparently by somebody up on the rim?”

“I saw it,” Chee said. It was an odd piece of business. Nez had been hit in the side. He’d fallen off his horse still holding the reins.

The next shot hit the horse in the head. It had fallen partly across Nez and then four more shots had been fired. One hit Nez in the forearm and then he had pulled himself into cover behind the animal. The last Chee’d seen on it, six empty 30.06 cartridges had been recovered among the boulders up on the rim. As far as Chee knew that’s where the trail in this case ended. No suspects. No motive. Nez was listed in fair condition at the Chinle hospital—well enough to say he had no idea why anyone would want to shoot him.

“That’s what stirred me up,” Leaphorn said. “Old Hosteen Nez was one of the last people to see this Hal Breedlove before he disappeared.”

“Quite a coincidence,” Chee said. When he’d worked for Leaphorn at Window Rock, Leaphorn had told him never to believe in coincidences. Told him that often. It was one of the man’s cardinal rules. Every effect had its cause. If it seemed to be connected and you couldn’t find the link it just meant you weren’t trying hard enough. But this sounded like an awfully strained coincidence.

“Nez was their guide in the canyon,” Leaphorn said. “When the Breedloves were staying at the lodge he was one of the crew there.

The Breedloves hired him to take them all the way up Canyon del Muerto one day, and the main canyon the next. I talked to him three times.”

That seemed to Leaphorn to require some explanation.

“You know,” he said. “Rich guy with a pretty young wife disappears for no reason. You ask questions. But Nez told me they seemed to like each other a lot. Having lots of fun. He said one time he’d been up one of the side canyons to relieve himself and when he came back it looked like she was crying and Breedlove was comforting her. So he waited a little before showing up and then everything was all right.”

Chee considered. “What do you think? It could have been anything?”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said, and sipped coffee. “Did I mention they were celebrating Breedlove’s birthday? We found out that he’d turned thirty just the previous week, and when he turned thirty he inherited. His daddy left him the ranch but he put it into a family trust. It had a provision that the trustee controlled it until Breedlove got to be thirty years old. Then it was all his.” Chee considered again. “And the widow inherited from him?”

“That’s what we found out. So she had a motive and we had the logical suspect.”

“But no evidence,” Chee guessed.

“None. Not only that. Just before Breedlove drove away, our Mr. Nez arrived to take them on another junket up the canyon. He remembered Breedlove apologized for missing out, paid him in advance, and gave him a fifty-dollar tip. Then Mrs. Breedlove and Nez took off. They spent the day sight-seeing. Nez remembered she was in a hurry when it was getting dark because she was supposed to meet Breedlove and another couple for dinner. But when they got back to the lodge, no car. That’s the last Nez saw of her.”

Leaphorn paused, looked at Chee, and added, “Or so he says.”

“Oh?” Chee said.

“Well, I didn’t mean he’d seen her again. It’s just that I always had a feeling that Nez knew something he wasn’t telling me. That’s one reason I kept going back to talk to him.”

“You think he had something to do with the disappearance. Maybe the two of them weren’t up the canyon when Breedlove was supposed to be driving away?”

“Well, no,” Leaphorn said. “People staying at the lodge saw them coming out of the canyon in Nez’s truck about seven P.M. Then a little after seven, she went over to the lodge and asked if Breedlove had called in. About seven-thirty she’s having dinner with the other couple. They remembered her being irritated about him being so late, mixed with a little bit of worry.” 8 of 102

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“I guess that’s what they call an airtight alibi,” Chee said. “So how long did it take her to get old Hal declared legally dead so she could marry her coconspirator? And would I be wrong if I guessed that would be George Shaw?”

“She’s still a widow, last I heard,” Leaphorn said. “She offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward and after a while upped it to twenty thousand and didn’t petition to get her husband declared legally dead until five years later. She lives up near Mancos, Colorado. She and her brother run the Lazy B now.”

“You know what?” Chee said. “I think I know those people. Is the brother Eldon Demott?”

“That’s him.”

“He’s one of our customers,” Chee said. “The ranch still has those public land leases you mentioned on the Checkerboard Reservation and they’ve been losing Angus calves. He thinks maybe some of us Navajos might be stealing them.”

“Eldon is Elisa Breedlove’s older brother,” Leaphorn said. “Their daddy was old man Breedlove’s foreman, and when their daddy died, I think Eldon just sort of inherited the job. Anyway, the Demott family lived on the ranch. I guess that’s how Elisa and the Breedlove boy got together.”

Chee stifled a yawn. It had been a long and tiring day and this session with Leaphorn, helpful as it had been, didn’t qualify as relaxation. He had accumulated too many memories of tense times trying to live up to the man’s high expectations. It would be a while before he could relax in Leaphorn’s presence. Maybe another twenty years would do it.

“Well,” Chee said. “I guess that takes care of the fallen man. I’ve got a probable identification of our skeleton. You’ve located your missing Hal Breedlove. I’ll call you when we get it confirmed.”

Leaphorn drained his cup, got up, adjusted his hat.

“I thank you for the help,” he said.

“And you for yours.”

Leaphorn opened the door, admitting a rush of cold air, the rich perfume of autumn, and a reminder that winter was out there somewhere, like the coyote, just waiting.

“All we need to do now—” he said, and stopped, looking embarrassed. “All that needs to be done,” he amended, “is find out if your bones really are my Breedlove, and then find out how the hell he got from that abandoned Land Rover about a hundred fifty miles west, and way up there to where he could fall off of Ship Rock.”

“And why,” Chee said. “And how he did it all by himself.”

“If he did,” Leaphorn said.

4

THE STRANGE TRUCK PARKED

in one of the Official Visitor slots at the Shiprock headquarters of the Navajo Tribal Police wore a New Jersey license and looked to Jim Chee anything but official. It had dual back wheels and carried a cumbersome camper, its windows covered by decals that certified visitation at tourist traps from Key West to Vancouver Island. Other stickers plastered across the rear announced that A BAD DAY FISHING IS BETTER THAN A GOOD DAY AT WORK, and declared the camper-truck to be OUR CHILDREN’S

INHERITANCE. Bumper decals exhorted viewers to VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS and to TRY RANDOM ACTS OF

KINDNESS, and endorsed the National Rifle Association. A broad band of silver duct tape circled the camper’s rear panel, sealing the dust out of the joint and giving the camper a ramshackle, homemade look.

Chee stuck his head into Alice Notabah’s dispatcher office and indicated the truck with a nod: “Who’s the Official Visitor?” Notabah nodded toward Largo’s office. “In with the captain,” she said. “And he wants to see you.” The man who drove the truck was sitting in the comfortable chair Captain Largo kept for important visitors. He held a battered black hat with a silver concha band in his lap and looked relaxed and comfortable.

“I’ll catch you later,” Chee said, but Largo waved him in.

“I want you to meet Dick Finch,” Largo said. “He’s the New Mexico brand inspector working the Four Corners, and he’s been getting some complaints.”

Chee and Finch shook hands. “Complaints?” Chee said. “Like what?”

“’Bout what you’d expect for a brand inspector to get,” Finch said, “People missing their cattle. Thinking maybe somebody’s stealing ’em.”

Finch grinned when he said it, eliminating some of the sting from the sarcasm.

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“Yeah,” Chee said, “we’ve been hearing some of that, too.”

Finch shrugged. “Folks always say that nobody likes to eat his own beef. But it’s got a little beyond that, I think. With bred heifers going at sixty dollars a hundred pounds, it just takes three of ’em to make you a grand larceny.” Captain Largo was looking sour. “Sixty dollars a hundred, like hell,” he said. “More like a thousand dollars a head for me. I’ve been trying to raise purebred stock.” He nodded in Chee’s direction. “Jim here is running our criminal investigation division. He’s been working on it.”

Largo waited. So did Finch.

“I’m here on something else now,” Chee said finally. “I think we may have an identification on that skeleton that was found up on Ship Rock.”

“Well, now,” Largo said. “Where’d that come from?”

“Joe Leaphorn remembered a missing person case he had eleven years ago. The man disappeared from Canyon de Chelly but he was a mountain climber.”

“Leaphorn,” Largo said. “I thought old Joe was supposed to be retired.”

“He is,” Chee said.

“Eleven years is a hell of a long time to remember a missing person case,” Largo said. “How many of those do we get in an average month?”

“Several,” Chee said. “But most of ’em don’t stay missing long.” Largo nodded. “So who’s the man?”

“Harold Breedlove was the missing man. He used to own the Lazy B ranch south of Mancos. Or his family owned it.”

“Fella named Eldon Demott owns it now,” Finch said. “Runs a lot of Herefords down in San Juan County. Has some deeded land and some BLM leases and a big home place up in Colorado.”

“What have you got beyond this Breedlove fella’s been missing long enough to become a skeleton and him being a climber?” Largo asked.

Chee explained what Leaphorn had told him.

“Just that?” Largo asked, and thought a moment. “Well, it could be right. It sounds like it is and Joe Leaphorn never was much for being wrong. Did Joe have any notion why this guy left his wife at the canyon? Or why he’d be climbing Ship Rock all by himself?”

“He didn’t say, but I think he figures maybe Breedlove wasn’t alone up there. And maybe the widow knew more than she was telling him at the time.”

“And what’s that about Amos Nez getting shot last week down at Canyon de Chelly? You lost me on that connection.”

“It was sort of thin,” Chee said. “Nez happened to be one of the witnesses in the disappearance case. Leaphorn said he was the last person known to have seen Breedlove alive. Except for the widow.” Largo considered. Grinned. “And she was Joe’s suspect, of course,” he said. And shook his head. “Joe never could believe in coincidences.”

“They still had that mountain climbing gear in the evidence room at Window Rock and I had them send it up,” Chee said. “It looks to me a lot like the gear they found on our Fallen Man, so I called Mrs. Breedlove up at Mancos.”

“What’d she say?”

“She’d gone into town for something. The housekeeper said she’d be back in a couple of hours. I left word that I was coming up this afternoon to show her some stuff that might bear on her missing husband.” Finch cleared his throat, glanced up at Chee. “While you’re there why not just kind of keep your eyes open? Tell ’em you’ve heard good things about the way they run their place. Look around. You know?” Finch looked to Chee to be about fifty. He had a hollowed scar high on his right cheek (resulting, Chee guessed, from some sort of surgery), small, bright blue eyes, and a complexion burned and cracked by the Four Corners weather. He was waiting now for Chee’s response to this suggestion.

“You think Demott’s sort of augmenting his herd with some strangers?” Chee asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Finch said, and shrugged. “But who knows? People losing their cattle. Maybe the coyotes are getting ’em.

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Maybe Demott’s got fifteen or twenty head he’s shipping off to the feedlot and he thinks it would be nice to round it off at twenty or twenty-five. No harm in looking. Seeing what you can see.”

“I’ll do that,” Chee said. “But were you telling me you don’t have anything specific against Demott?” Finch was studying Chee, looking quizzical. He’s trying to decide, Chee thought, how stupid I am.

“Nothing I could take in to a judge and get a search warrant with. But you hear things.” With that, Finch broke into a chuckle. “Hell, you hear things about everybody.” He jerked a thumb at Largo. “I’ve even been told that your captain here has some peculiar-looking brands on some of his stock. That right, Captain?”

“I’ve heard that myself,” Largo said, grinning. “We have a barbecue over at the place, all the neighbors want to go out and take a look at the cowhides.”

“Well, it’s a lot cheaper than buying beef at the butcher shop. So maybe somebody’s eating Demott’s sirloin and the Demotts are eating theirs.”

“Or mutton,” added Largo, who was missing some ewes as well as a calf or two.

“How about me going along for the ride?” Finch said. “I mean up to the Lazy B?”

“Why not?” Chee said.

“You wouldn’t have to introduce me, you know. I’ll just sort of get out and stretch my legs. Look around a little bit. You never know what you might see.”

5

THEY CAME INTO VIEW OF THE HEADQUARTERS

of the Lazy B with the autumn sun low over Mesa Verde, producing shadow patterns on Bridge Timber Mountain. Chee had been thinking more of home sites lately and he thought now that this little valley would be a beautiful place for Janet and him. The house in the cluster of cottonwoods below them would be far, far too large for him to feel comfortable in. But Janet would love it.

Finch had been doing the talking on the drive up from Shiprock. After the first fifty miles of that, Chee began listening just enough to nod or grunt at the proper intervals. Mostly he was thinking about Janet Pete and the differences between what they liked and what they didn’t. This house, for example. Women usually had most to say about living places, but if he retained veto power, theirs certainly wouldn’t be anything as huge as the fieldstone, timber, and slate mansion the Breedlove family had built for itself. Even if they could afford it, which they certainly never would.

That reminded Chee of the white Porsche that had zipped past him yesterday. Why did he connect it to Janet? Because it had class, as did she. And was beautiful. And, sure, she’d like it. Who wouldn’t? So why did he resent it? Was it because it was a part of the world she came from in which he would never be comfortable? Or understand? Maybe.

But now he was about to walk in and see if he could get a widow to identify a bunch of stuff that would tell her that her husband was truly dead. Tell her, that is, unless she already knew—having killed him herself. Or arranged it. He’d worry about the Porsche later. The Breedlove mansion was now just across the fence.

According to Finch, old Edgar Breedlove had built it as a second home—his first one being in Denver, from which he ran his mining operations. But he’d never lived in it. He’d bought the ranch because his prospectors had found a molybdenum deposit on the high end of the property. But the ore price fell after the war and somehow or other the place got left to a grandson, Harold. Hal had adopted his granddad’s policy of overgrazing it and letting it run down.

“That ain’t happening now,” Finch had told him. “This place ain’t going to go to hell while Demott’s running it. He’s sort of a tree-hugger. That’s what people say. Say he never got married ’cause he’s in love with this place.” Chee parked under a tree a polite distance from the front entrance, turned off the ignition, and sat, killing the time needed by hosts to get decent before welcoming guests. Finch, another empty-country man, seemed to understand that. He yawned, stretched, and examined the half dozen cows in the feedlot beside the barn with a professional eye.

“How do you know all this about the Breedlove ranch, and Demott and everything?” Chee asked. “This is Colorado. It’s not your territory.”

“Ranching—and stealing cows off of ranches—don’t pay much attention to state lines,” Finch said, not taking his eyes off the cows.

“The Lazy B has leases in New Mexico. Makes ’em my business.”

Finch extracted a twenty-stick pack of chewing gum from his jacket pocket, offered it to Chee, extracted two sticks for himself, and started chewing them. “Besides,” he said, “you got to have something going to make the job interesting. I got one particular guy I keep looking for. Most of these cow thieves are ‘hungries.’ Folks run out of eating money, or got a payment due, and they go out and get themselves a cow or two to sell. Or, on the reservation, maybe they got somebody sick in the family, and they’re having a sing for the patient, and they need a steer to feed all the kinfolks coming in. I never worried too much about them. If they keep doing 11 of 102

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it, they get careless and they get caught and the neighbors talk to them about it. Get it straightened out. But then there’s some others who are in it for business. It’s easy money and it beats working.”

“Who’s this one you’re specially after?”

Finch laughed. “If I knew that, we wouldn’t be talking about it, now would we?”

“I guess not,” Chee said, impressed with how insulting Finch could be even when he was acting friendly.

“We’d just go out and get him then, wouldn’t we?” Finch concluded. “But all I know about him is the way he operates. Modus operandi, if you know your Latin. He always picks the spread-out ranches where a few head won’t be missed for a while. He always takes something that he can sell quick. No little calves that you have to wean, no big, expensive, easy-to-trace breeding bulls. Never messes with horses, ’cause some people get attached to a nag and go out looking for it. Has some other tricks, too. Like he finds a good place beside a back road where there wouldn’t be any traffic to bother him and he’ll put out feed. Usually good alfalfa hay. Do it several times so the cattle get in the habit of coming up and looking for it when they see his truck parking.” Finch stopped, looked at Chee, waited for a comment.

“Pretty smart,” Chee said.

“Yes, sir,” Finch agreed. “So far, he’s been smarter than me.”

Chee had no comment on that. He glanced at his watch. Another three minutes and he’d go ring the doorbell and get this job over with.

“Then I’ve found a place or two where he fixed up the fence so he could get ’em through it fast.” He paused again, seeing if Chee understood this. Chee did, but to hell with Finch.

“You could cut the wire, of course,” Finch explained, “but then the herd gets out on the road and somebody notices it right away and they do a head count and know some are missing.”

Chee said, “Really?”

“Yeah,” Finch said. “Anyway, I’ve been after this son of a bitch for years now. Every time I take off from home to come out this way, he’s the one I’m thinking of.”

Chee didn’t comment.

“Zorro,” Finch said. “That’s what I call him. And this time I think I’ll finally get him.”

“How?”

Silence, unusual for Finch, followed. Then he said, “Well, now, that’s sort of complicated.”

“You think it might be Demott?”

“Why you say that?”

“Well, you wanted to come up here. And you’ve collected all that information about him.”

“If you’re a brand inspector you learn to pick up on all the gossip you can hear if you want to get your job done. And there was some talk that Demott paid off a mortgage by selling a bunch of calves nobody knew he owned.”

“So what’s the gossip about the widow Breedlove?” Chee asked. “Who was the lover who helped her kill her husband? What do the neighbors say about that?”

Finch was wearing a broad smile. “People I know up in Mancos have her down as the brokenhearted, wronged, abandoned bride.

The majority of them, that is. They figured Hal ran off with some bimbo.”

“How about the minority?”

“They think she had herself a local boyfriend. Somebody to keep her happy when Hal was off in New York, or climbing his mountains or playing his games.”

“They have a name for him?”

“Not that I ever heard,” Finch said.

“Which bunch you think is right?”

“About her? I never thought about it,” Finch said. “None of my business, that part of it wasn’t. Talk like that just means that folks around here didn’t like Hal.”

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“What’d he do?”

“Well, for starters he got born in the East,” Finch said. “That’s two strikes on you right there. And he was raised there. Citified.

Preppy type. Papa’s boy. Ivy Leaguer. He didn’t get any bones broke falling off horses, lose a finger in a hay baler. Didn’t pay his dues, you know. You don’t have to actually do anything to have folks down on you.”

“How about the widow? You hear anything specific about her?”

“Don’t hear nothing about her, except some fellas guessing. And she’s a real pretty woman, so that was probably just them wishing,” Finch said. He was grinning at Chee. “You know how it works. If you’re behaving yourself it’s not interesting.” The front door of the Breedlove house opened and Chee could see someone standing behind the screen looking out at them. He picked up his evidence satchel and stepped out of the vehicle.

“I’ll wait here for you,” Finch said, “and maybe scout around a little if I get too stiff from sitting.” Mrs. Elisa Breedlove was indeed a real pretty woman. She seemed excited and nervous, which was what Chee had expected. Her handshake grip was hard, and so was the hand. She led him into a huge living room, dark and cluttered with heavy, old-fashioned furniture. She motioned him into a chair, explaining that she’d had to run into Mancos “to get some stuff.”

“I got back just before you drove up and Ramona told me you’d called and were coming.”

“I hope I’m not—” Chee began, but she cut him off.

“No. No,” she said. “I appreciate this. Ramona said you’d found Hal. Or think so. But she didn’t know anything else.”

“Well,” Chee said, and paused. “What we found was merely bones. We thought they might be Mr. Breedlove.” He sat on the edge of the sofa, watching her.

“Bones,” she said. “Just a skeleton? Was that the skeleton they found about Halloween up on Ship Rock?”

“Yes, ma’am. We wanted to ask you to look at the clothing and equipment he was wearing and see if—tell us if it was the right size, and if you thought it was your husband’s stuff.”

“Equipment?” She was standing beside a table, her hand on it. The light slanting through windows on each side of the fireplace illuminated her face. It was a small, narrow face framed by light brown hair, the jaw muscles tight, the expression tense. Middle thirties, Chee guessed. Slender, perfectly built, luminous green eyes, the sort of classic beauty that survived sun, wind, and hard winters and didn’t seem to require the disguise of makeup. But today she looked tired. He thought of a description Finch had applied to a woman they both knew: “Been rode hard and put up wet.”

Mrs. Breedlove was waiting for an answer, her green eyes fixed on his face.

“Mountain climbing equipment,” Chee said. “I understand the skeleton was in a cleft down the face of a cliff. Presumably, the man had fallen.”

Mrs. Breedlove closed her eyes and bent slightly forward with her hips against the table.

Chee rose. “Are you all right?”

“All right,” she said, but she put a hand against the table to support herself.

“Would you like to sit down? A drink of water?”

“Why do you think it’s Hal?” Her eyes were still closed.

“He’s been missing for eleven years. And we’re told he was a mountain climber. Is that correct?”

“He was. He loved the mountains.”

“This man was about five feet nine inches tall,” Chee said. “The coroner estimated he would have weighed about one hundred and fifty pounds. He had perfect teeth. He had rather long fingers and—”

“Hal was about five eight, I’d say. He was slender, muscular. An athlete. I think he weighed about a hundred and sixty. He was worried about gaining weight.” She produced a weak smile. “Around the belt line. Before we went on that trip, I let out his suit pants to give him another inch.”

“He’d had a broken nose,” Chee continued. “Healed. The doctor said it probably happened when he was an adolescent. And a broken wrist. He said that was more recent.”

Mrs. Breedlove sighed. “The nose was from playing fraternity football, or whatever the boys play at Dartmouth. And the wrist when a horse threw him after we were married.”

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Chee opened the satchel, extracted the climbing equipment, and stacked it on the coffee table. There wasn’t much: a nylon belt harness, the ragged remains of a nylon jacket, even more fragmentary remains of trousers and shirt, a pair of narrow shoes with soles of soft, smooth rubber, a little rock hammer, three pitons, and a couple of steel gadgets that Chee presumed were used somehow for controlling rope slippage.

When he glanced up, Mrs. Breedlove was staring at them, her face white. She turned away, facing the window but looking at nothing except some memory.

“I thought about Hal when I saw the piece the paper had on the skeleton,” she said. “Eldon and I talked about it at supper that night.

He thought the same thing I did. We decided it couldn’t be Hal.” She attempted a smile. “He was always into derring-do stuff. But he wouldn’t try to climb Ship Rock alone. Nobody would. That would be insane. Two great rock men were killed on it, and they were climbing with teams of experienced experts.”

She paused. Listening. The sound of a car engine came through the window. “That was before the Navajos banned climbing,” she added.

“Are you a climber?”

“When I was younger,” she said. “When Hal used to come out, Eldon started teaching him to climb. Hal and his cousin George.

Sometimes I would go along and they taught me.”

“How about Ship Rock?” Chee asked. “Did you ever climb it?”

She studied him. “The tribe prohibited that a long time ago. Before I was big enough to climb anything.” Chee smiled. “But some people still climbed it. Quite a few, from what I hear. And there’s not actually a tribal ordinance against it.

It’s just that the tribe stopped issuing those ‘back country’ permits. You know, to allow non-Navajos the right to trespass.” Mrs. Breedlove looked thoughtful. Through the window came the sound of a car door slamming.

“To make it perfectly legal, you’d go see one of the local people who had a grazing permit running up to the base and get him to give you permission to be on the land,” Chee added. “But most people even don’t bother to do that.” Mrs. Breedlove considered this. Nodded. “We always got permission. I climbed it once. It was terrifying. With Eldon, Hal, and George. I still have nightmares.”

“About falling?”

She shuddered. “I’m up there looking all around. Looking at Ute Mountain up in Colorado, and seeing the shape of Case del Eco Mesa in Utah, and the Carrizos in Arizona, and Mount Taylor, and I have this dreadful feeling that Ship Rock is getting higher and higher and then I know I can never get down.” She laughed. “Fear of falling, I guess. Or fear of flying away and being lost forever.”

“I guess you’ve heard our name for it,” Chee said. “Tse´ Bitáí´—the Rock with Wings. According to the legend it flew here from the north bringing the first Navajos on its back. Maybe it was flying again in your dream.” A voice from somewhere back in the house shouted: “Hey, Sis! Where are you? What’s that Navajo police car doing parked out there?”

“We’ve got company,” Mrs. Breedlove said, barely raising her voice. “In here.” Chee stood. A man wearing dusty jeans, a faded jean jacket with a torn sleeve, and well-worn boots walked into the room. He held a battered gray felt hat in his right hand.

“Mr. Chee,” said Mrs. Breedlove, “this is my brother Eldon. Eldon Demott.”

“Oh,” Demott said. “Hello.” He shifted his hat to his left hand and offered Chee the right one. His grip was like his sister’s and his expression was a mixture of curiosity, worry, and fatigue.

“They think they’ve found Hal,” Elisa Breedlove said. “You remember talking about that skeleton on Ship Rock. The Navajo police think it must be him.”

Demott was eyeing the little stack of climbing equipment on the table. He sighed, slapped the hat against his leg. “I was wrong then, if it really is Hal,” he said. “That makes him a better climber than I gave him credit for, climbing that sucker by himself and getting that high.” He snorted. “And a hell of a lot crazier, too.”

“Do you recognize any of this?” Chee asked, indicating the equipment.

Demott picked up the nylon belt and examined it. He was a small man. Wiry. A man built of sun-scorched leather, bone, and gristle, with a strong jaw and a receding hairline that made him look older than he probably was.

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and sympathy. “Hal’s was red, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” she said.

“You all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “And how about this jumar? Didn’t you fix one for Hal once?”

“By God,” Demott said, and picked it up. It reminded Chee of an oversized steel pretzel with a sort of ratchet device connected.

Chee had wondered about it and concluded that the ratchet would allow a rope to slip in one direction and not the other. Thus, it must be used to allow a climber to pull himself up a cliff. Demott obviously knew what it was for. He was examining the place where the ratchet had been welded to the steel.

“I remember I couldn’t fix it. Hal and you took it into Mancos and had Gus weld it,” Demott said to Elisa. “It sure looks like the same one.”

“I guess we can close this up then,” Chee said. “I don’t see any reason for you going down to Shiprock to look at the bones. Unless you want to.”

Demott was inspecting one of the climbing shoes. “The soles must be all the same,” he said. “At least all I ever saw was just soft, smooth rubber like this. And his were white. And he had little feet, too.” He glanced at Elisa. “How about the clothing? That look like Hal’s?”

“The jacket, yes,” she said. “I think that’s Hal’s jacket.”

Something in her tone caused Chee to glance back at her. She held her lips pressed together, face tense, determined somehow not to cry. Her brother didn’t see that. He was studying the artifacts on the table.

“It’s pretty tore up,” Demott said, poking the clothing with a finger. “You think coyotes? But from what the paper said, it would be too high for them.”

“Way too high,” Chee said.

“Birds, then,” Demott said. “Ravens. Vultures and—” He cut that off, with a repentant glance at Elisa.

Chee picked up the evidence valise and stuffed the tattered clothing into it, getting it out of Elisa’s sight.

“I think I should go to Shiprock,” Elisa said. She looked away from Chee and out the window. “To take care of things. Hal would have wanted to be cremated, I think. And his ashes scattered in the San Juan Mountains.”

“Yeah,” Demott said. “Over in the La Plata range. On Mount Hesperus. That was his very favorite.”

“We call it Dibe Nitsaa,” Chee said. He thought of a dead man’s ashes drifting down on serene slopes that the spirit called First Man had built to protect the Navajos from evil. First Man had decorated the mountain with jet-black jewelry to fend off all bad things.

But what could protect it from the invincible ignorance of this white culture? These were good, kind people, he thought, who wouldn’t knowingly use corpse powder, the Navajo symbol for the ultimate evil, to desecrate a holy place. But then climbing Ship Rock to prove that man was the dominating master of the universe was also a desecration.

“It’s our Sacred Mountain of the North,” Chee said. “Was that what Mr. Breedlove was trying to do? Put his feet on top of all our sacred places?” Having said it, Chee instantly regretted it. This was not the time or place to show his resentment.

He glanced at Demott, who was looking at him, surprised. But Elisa Breedlove was still staring out the window.

“Hal wasn’t like that,” she said. “He was just trying to find some happiness,” she said. “Nobody had ever taught him anything about sacred things. The only god the Breedloves ever worshiped was cast out of gold.”

“I don’t think Hal knew anything about your mythology,” Demott agreed. “It’s just that Hesperus is over thirteen thousand feet and an easy climb. I like them high and easy and I guess Hal did, too.” Chee considered that. “Why Ship Rock, then? I know it’s killed some people. I’ve heard it’s one of the hardest climbs.”

“Yeah,” Demott said. “Why Ship Rock? And why by himself? And if he wasn’t by himself, how come his friends just left him there? Didn’t even report it.”

Chee didn’t comment on that. Elisa was still staring blindly out the window.

“How high did he get?” Demott asked.

Chee shrugged. “Close to the top, I think. I think the rescue party said the skeleton was just a couple hundred feet down from the crest.”

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hardest parts.”

“He’d always wanted to climb Ship Rock,” Elisa said. “Remember?”

“I guess so,” Demott said thoughtfully. “I remember him talking about climbing El Diente and Lizard’s Head. I thought they were next on his agenda.” He turned to Chee, frowning. “Have you fellows looked into who else he might have climbed with? I have trouble believing he did that alone. I guess he could have and he was reckless enough to try it. But it damn sure wouldn’t be easy.

Not getting that high.”

“It’s not a criminal case,” Chee said. “We’re just trying to close up an old missing person file.”

“But who the hell would go off and leave a fallen man like that? Not even report so the rescue people could go get him? You think they was afraid you Navajos would arrest ’em for trespassing?” He shook his head. “Or the way things are now, maybe they thought they’d get sued.” He laughed, put on his hat. “But I got to get moving. Good to meet you, Mr. Chee,” he said, and was gone.

“I’ve got to be going, too,” Chee said. He dumped the rest of the equipment in the valise.

She walked with him to the door, opened it for him. He pulled at the valise zipper, then stopped. He should really leave this stuff with her. She was the widow. It was her property.

“Mr. Chee,” she said. “The skeleton. Were the bones all broken up?”

“No,” Chee said. “Nothing broken. And all the joints were still articulated.” From Elisa’s expression he first thought she didn’t understand that anthropology jargon. “I mean, the skeleton was all together in one piece. And nothing was broken.”

“Nothing was broken?” she repeated. “Nothing.” And then he realized the expression reflected disbelief. And shock.

Why shock? Had Mrs. Breedlove expected her husband’s body to be broken apart? Why would she? If he asked her why, she’d say it must have been a long fall.

He zipped the valise closed. He’d keep these artifacts from the Fallen Man, at least for a while.

6

HE MET JANET AT THE CARRIAGE INN

in Farmington, halfway between his trailer at Shiprock and the San Juan County courthouse at Aztec where she had been defending a Checkerboard Reservation Navajo on a grand theft charge. He arrived late—but not very late—and her kidding about his watch being on Navajo time lacked its usual vigor. She looked absolutely used up, he thought. Beautiful but tired, and maybe the fatigue explained the diminution of the usual spark, of the delight he usually sensed in her when she first saw him. Or maybe it was because he was weary himself. Anyway, just being with her, seeing her across the table, cheered him. He took her hand.

“Janet, you work too hard,” Chee said. “You should marry me and let me take you away from all this.”

“I intend to marry you,” she said, rewarding him with a weary smile. “You keep forgetting that. But all you do is keep making more work for me. Arresting these poor innocent people.”

“That sounds to me like you won today,” Chee said. “Charmed the jury again?”

“It didn’t take any charm. This time it wouldn’t have been reasonable to have even a reasonable doubt. His brother-in-law did it and the state cops totally screwed up the investigation.”

“Do you have to go right back to Window Rock tomorrow? Why not take a day oft? Tell ’em you are doing the post-trial paperwork. Maybe preparing a false arrest suit or something.”

“Ah, Jim,” she said. “I have to drive down there tonight.”

“Tonight! That’s crazy. That’s more than two hours on a dangerous road,” he said. “You’re tired. Get some sleep. What’s the hurry?”

She looked apologetic. Shrugged. “No choice, Jim. I’d love to stay over. Can’t do it. Duty calls.”

“Ah, come on,” Chee said. “Duty can wait.”

Janet squeezed his hand. “Really,” she said. “I have to go to Washington. On a bunch of legal stuff with Justice and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I have to be there day after tomorrow ready to argue.” She shrugged, made a wry face. “So I have to pack tonight and drive to Albuquerque tomorrow to catch my plane.”

Chee picked up the menu, said, “Like I’ve been telling you, you work way too hard.” He tried to keep it out, but the disappointment again showed in his voice.

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“And as I told you, it’s the fault of you policemen,” she said, smiling her tired smile. “Arresting too many innocent people.”

“I haven’t had much luck at arresting people lately,” he said. “I can’t even catch any guilty ones.” The Carriage Inn had printed a handsome menu on which nothing changed but the prices. Variety was provided by the cooks, who came and went. Chee decided to presume that the current one was adept at preparing Mexican foods.

“Why not try the chile relleños?”

Janet grimaced. “That’s what you said last time. This time I’m trying the fish.”

“Too far from the ocean for fish,” Chee said. But now he remembered that his last time here the cook had converted the relleños to something like leather. Maybe he’d order the chicken-fried steak.

“It’s trout,” Janet said. “A local fish. The waiter told me they steal ’em out of the fish hatchery ponds.”

“Okay then,” Chee said. “Trout for me, too.”

“You look totally worn-out,” she said. “Is Captain Largo getting to be too much for you?”

“I spent the day with a redneck New Mexico brand inspector,” Chee said. “We drove all the way up to Mancos with him talking every inch of the way. Then back again, him still talking.”

“About what? Cows?”

“People. Mr. Finch works on the theory that you catch cattle rustlers by knowing everything about everybody who owns cattle. I guess it’s a pretty good system, but then he passed all that information along to me. You want to know anything about anybody who raises cows in the Four Corners area? Or hauls them? Or runs feedlots? Just ask me.”

“Finch?” she said. “I’ve run into him twice in court.” She shook her head, smiling.

“Who won?”

“He did. Both times.”

“Oh, well,” Chee said. “It’s too bad, but sometimes justice triumphs over you public defenders. Were your clients guilty?”

“Probably. They said they weren’t. But this Finch guy is smart.” Chee did not want to talk about Finch.

“You know, Janet,” he said. “Sometime we need to talk about . . . “ She put down the menu and looked at him over her glasses. “Sometime, but not tonight. What took you and Mr. Finch to Mancos?” No. Not tonight, Chee thought. They would just go over the same ground. She’d say that if the police were doing their jobs properly there really wasn’t a conflict of interest if a public defender was the wife of a cop. And he’d say, yeah, but what if the cop had arrested the very guy she was defending and was a witness? What if she were cross-examining her own husband as a hostile witness? And she’d fall back on her Stanford Law School lecture notes and tell him that all she wanted to extract from anyone was the exact truth. And he’d say, but sometimes the lawyer isn’t after quite 100 percent of the truth, and she’d say that some evidence can’t be admitted, and he’d say, as an attorney it would be easy for her to get a job with a private firm, and she’d remind him he’d turned down an offer from the Arizona Department of Public Safety and was a cinch for a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs law-and-order division if he would take it. And he’d say, that would mean leaving the reservation, and she’d say, why not? Did he want to spend his life here? And that would open a new can of worms. No. Tonight he’d let her change the subject.

The waiter came. Janet ordered a glass of white wine. Chee had coffee.

“I went to Mancos to tell a widow that we’d found her husband’s skeleton,” Chee said. “Mr. Finch went along because it gave him an excuse to contemplate the cows in the lady’s feedlot.”

“All you found were dry bones? Her husband must have been away a lot. I’ll bet he was a policeman,” she said, and laughed.

Chee let that pass.

“Was it the skeleton they spotted up on Ship Rock about Halloween?” she asked, sounding mildly repentant.

Chee nodded. “He turned out to be a guy named Harold Breedlove. He owned a big ranch near Mancos.”

“Breedlove,” Janet said. “That sounds familiar.” The waiter came—a lanky, rawboned Navajo who listened attentively to Janet’s questions about the wine and seemed to understand them no better than did Chee. He would ask the cook. About the trout he was on familiar ground. “Very fresh,” he said, and hurried off.

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Janet was looking thoughtful. “Breedlove,” she said, and shook her head. “I remember the paper said there was no identification on him. So how’d you get him identified? Dental chart?”

“Joe Leaphorn had a hunch,” Chee said.

“The legend-in-his-own-time lieutenant? I thought he’d retired.”

“He did,” Chee said. “But he remembered a missing person case he’d worked on way back. This guy who disappeared was a mountain climber and an inheritance was involved, and—”

“Hey,” Janet said. “Breedlove. I remember now.”

Remember what? Chee thought. And why? This had happened long before Janet had joined the DNA, and become a resident reservation Navajo instead of one in name only, and entered his life, and made him happy. His expression had a question in it.

“From when I was with Granger-hyphen-Smith in Albuquerque. Just out of law school,” she said. “The firm represented the Breedlove family. They had public land grazing leases, some mineral rights deals with the Jicarilla Apaches, some water rights arrangements with the Utes.” She threw out her hands to signify an endless variety of concerns. “There were some dealings with the Navajo Nation, too. Anyway, I remember the widow was having the husband declared legally dead so she could inherit from him.

The family wanted that looked into.”

She stopped, looking slightly abashed. Picked up the menu again. “I’ll definitely have the trout,” she said.

“Were they suspicious?” Chee asked.

“I presume so,” she said, still looking at the menu. “I remember it did look funny. The guy inherits a trust and two or three days later he vanishes. Vanishes under what you’d have to consider unusual circumstances.” The waiter came. Chee watched Janet order trout, watched the waiter admire her. A classy lady, Janet. From what Chee had learned about law firms as a cop, lawyers didn’t chat about their clients’ business to rookie interns. It was unethical. Or at least unprofessional.

He knew the answer but he asked it anyway. “Did you work on it? The looking into it?”

“Not directly,” Janet said. She sipped her water.

Chee looked at her.

She flushed slightly. “The Breedlove Corporation was John McDermott’s client. His job,” she said. “I guess because he handled all things Indian for the firm. And the Breedlove family had all these tribal connections.”

“Did you find anything?”

“I guess not,” Janet said. “I don’t remember the family having us intervene in the case.”

“The family?” Chee said. “Do you remember who, specifically?”

“I don’t,” she said. “John was dealing with an attorney in New York. I guess he was representing the rest of the Breedloves. Or maybe the family corporation. Or whatever.” She shrugged. “What did you think of Finch, aside from him being so talkative?” John, Chee thought. John. Professor John McDermott. Her old mentor at Stanford. The man who had hired her at Albuquerque when he went into private practice there, and took her to Washington when he transferred, and made her his mistress, used her, and broke her heart.

“I wonder what made them suspicious?” Chee said. “Aside from the circumstances.”

“I don’t know,” Janet said.

Their trout arrived. Rainbows, neatly split, neatly placed on a bed of wild rice. Flanked by small carrots and boiled new potatoes.

Janet broke off a tiny piece of trout and ate it.

Beautiful, Chee thought. The perfect skin, the oval face, the dark eyes that expressed so much. He found himself wishing he was a poet, a singer of ballads. Chee knew a lot of songs but they were the chants the shaman sings at the curing ceremonials, recounting the deeds of the spirits. No one had taught him how to sing to someone as beautiful as this.

He ate a bite of trout.

“If I had been driving a patrol car yesterday instead of my old pickup,” he said, “I could have given a speeding ticket to a guy driving a white Porsche convertible. Really flying. But I was driving my truck.”

“Wow,” Janet said, looking delighted. “My favorite car. I have a fantasy about tooling around Paris in one of those. With the top down.”

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Maybe she looked happy because he was changing the subject. Moving away from unhappy ground. But to Chee the trout now seemed to have no taste at all.

7

JOE LEAPHORN, UNEASILY CONSCIOUS

that he was now a mere civilian, had given himself three excuses for calling on Hosteen Nez and thereby butting into police business.

First, he’d come to like the old man way back when he was picking his brain in the Breedlove missing person case. Thus going to see him while Nez was recuperating from being shot was a friendly thing to do. Second, Canyon de Chelly wasn’t much out of his way, since he was going to Flagstaff anyway. Third, a trip into the canyon never failed to lift Joe Leaphorn’s spirits.

Lately they had needed a lift. Most of the things he’d yearned to do when retirement allowed it had now been done—at least once.

He was bored. He was lonely. The little house he and Emma had shared so many years had never recovered from the emptiness her death had left in every room. That was worse now without the job to distract him. Maybe he was oversensitive, but he felt like an intruder down at the police headquarters. When he dropped in to chat with old friends he often found them busy. Just as he had always been. And he was a mere civilian now, no longer one of the little band of brothers.

Good excuses or not, Leaphorn had been a policeman too long to go unprepared. He took his GMC Jimmy with the four-wheel drive required in the canyon both by National Park Service rules and by the uncertain bottom up Chinle Wash. He had stopped at the grocery in Ganado and bought a case of assorted soda pop flavors, two pounds of bacon, a pound of coffee, a large can of peaches, and a loaf of bread. Only then did he head for Chinle.

Once there, he made another stop at the district Tribal Police office to make sure his visit wouldn’t tread on the toes of the investigating officer. He found Sergeant Addison Deke at his desk. They chatted about family matters and mutual friends and finally got around to the shooting of Amos Nez.

Deke shook his head, produced a wry grin. “The people around here have that one all solved for us,” he said. “They say old Nez was tipping us off about who was breaking into tourists’ cars up on the canyon lookout points. So the burglars got mad at him and shot him.”

“That makes sense,” Leaphorn said. Which it did, even though he could tell from Deke’s face that it wasn’t true.

“Nez hadn’t told us a damn thing, of course,” Deke said. “And when we asked him about the rumor, it pissed him off. He was insulted that his neighbors would even think such a thing.”

Leaphorn chuckled. Car break-ins at several of the Navajo Nation’s more popular tourist attractions were a chronic headache for the Tribal Police. They usually involved one or two hard-up families whose boys considered the salable items left in tourist cars a legitimate harvest—like wild asparagus, rabbits, and sand plums. Their neighbors disapproved, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one would get a boy in trouble over.

Leaphorn’s next stop was seven-tenths of a mile up the rim road from the White House Ruins overlook—the point from which the sniper had shot Nez. Leaphorn pulled his Jimmy off into the grass at the spot where Deke had told him they’d found six newly fired 30.06 cartridges. Here the layer of tough igneous rock had broken into a jumble of room-sized boulders, giving the sniper a place to watch and wait out of sight from the road. He looked directly down and across the canyon floor. Nez would have been riding his horse along the track across the sandy bottom of the wash. Not a difficult shot in terms of distance for one who knew how to use a rifle, but shooting down at that angle would require some careful adjustment of the sights to avoid an overshot. Whoever shot Nez knew what he was doing.

The next stop was at the Canyon de Chelly park office on the way in. He chatted with the rangers there and picked up the local gossip. Relative to Hosteen Nez, the speculation was exactly what Leaphorn had heard from Deke. The old man had been shot because he was tipping the cops on the car break-ins. How about enemies? No one could imagine that, and they knew him well. Nez was a kindly man, a traditional who helped his family and was generous with his neighbors. He loved jokes. Always in good humor.

Everybody liked him. He’d guided in the canyon for years and he could even handle the tourists who wanted to get drunk without making them angry. Always contributed something to help out with the ceremonials when somebody was having a curing sing.

How about eccentricities? Gambling? Grazing rights problems? Any odd behavior? Well, yes. Nez’s mother-in-law lived with him, which was a direct violation of the taboo against such conduct. But Nez rationalized that. He said he and old lady Benally had been good friends for years before he’d met her daughter. They’d talked it over and decided that when the Holy People taught that a son-in-law seeing his mother-in-law caused insanity, blindness, and other maladies, they meant that this happened when the two didn’t like each other. Anyway, old lady Benally was still going strong in her nineties and Nez was not blind and didn’t seem to be any crazier than anyone else.

Indeed, Nez seemed to be feeling pretty good when Leaphorn found him.

“Pretty good,” he said, “considering the shape I’m in.” And when Leaphorn laughed at that, he added, “But if I’d known I was going to live so damn long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

Nez was sprawled in a wired-together overstuffed recliner, his head almost against the red sandstone wall of a cul-de-sac behind his 19 of 102

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hogan. The early afternoon sun beat down upon him. Warmth radiated from the cliff behind him, the sky overhead was almost navy blue, and the air was cool and fresh, and smelled of autumn’s last cutting of alfalfa hay from a field up the canyon. Nothing in the scene, except for the cast on the Nez legs and the bandages on his neck and chest, reminded Leaphorn of a hospital room.

Leaphorn had introduced himself in the traditional Navajo fashion, identifying his parents and their clans. “I wonder if you remember me,” he said. “I’m the policeman who talked to you three times a long time ago when the man you’d been guiding disappeared.”

“Sure,” Nez said. “You kept coming back. Acting like you’d forgot something to ask me, and then asking me everything all over again.”

“Well, I was pretty forgetful.”

“Glad to hear that,” Nez said. “I thought you figured I was maybe lying to you a little bit and if you asked me often enough I’d forget and tell the truth.”

This notion didn’t seem to bother Nez. He motioned Leaphorn to sit on the boulder beside his chair.

“Now you want to talk to me about who’d want to shoot me. I tell you one thing right now. It wasn’t no car burglars. That’s a lot of lies they’re saying about me.”

Leaphorn nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “The police at Chinle told me you weren’t helping them catch those people.” Nez seemed pleased at that. He nodded.

“But you know, maybe the car burglars don’t know that,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe they think you’re telling on ’em.” Nez shook his head. “No,” he said. “They know better. They’re my kinfolks.”

“You picked a good place to get some sunshine here,” Leaphorn said. “Lots of heat off the cliff. Out of the wind. And—” Nez laughed. “And nobody can get a shot at me here. Not from the rim anyway.”

“I noticed that,” Leaphorn said.

“I figured you had.”

“I read the police report,” Leaphorn said, and recited it to Nez. “That about right?”

“That’s it,” Nez said. “The son of a bitch just kept shooting. After I sort of crawled under the horse, he hit the horse twice more.” Nez whacked his hand against the cast. “Thump. Thump.”

“Sounds like he wanted to kill you,” Leaphorn said.

“I thought maybe he just didn’t like my horse,” Nez said. “He was a pretty sorry horse. Liked to bite people.”

“The last time I came to see you it was also bad news,” Leaphorn said. “You think there could be any connection?”

“Connection?” Nez said. He looked genuinely surprised. “No. I didn’t think of that.” But he thought now, staring at Leaphorn, frowning. “Connection,” he repeated. “How could there be? What for?” Leaphorn shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just a thought. Did anybody tell you our missing man from way back then has turned up?”

“No,” Nez said, looking delighted. “I didn’t know that. After a month or so I figured he must be dead. Didn’t make any sense to leave that pretty woman that way.”

“You were right. He was dead. We just found his bones,” Leaphorn said, and watched Nez, waiting for the question. But no question came.

“I thought so,” Nez said. “Been dead a long time, too, I bet.”

“Probably more than ten years,” Leaphorn said.

“Yeah,” Nez said. He shook his head, said, “Crazy bastard,” and looked sad.

Leaphorn waited.

“I liked him,” Nez said. “He was a good man. Funny. Lots of jokes.”

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“I don’t tell on people,” Nez said. “There’s already plenty of trouble without that.”

“There won’t be any more trouble for Harold Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “But from the look of all those bandages, there’s been some trouble for you.”

Nez considered that. Then he considered Leaphorn.

“Tell me if you found him on Ship Rock,” Nez said. “Was he climbing Tse´ Bitáí´?” Absolutely nothing Amos Nez could have said would have surprised Leaphorn more than that. He spent a few moments re-collecting his wits.

“That’s right,” he said finally. “Somebody spotted his skeleton down below the peak. How the hell did you know?” Nez shrugged.

“Did Breedlove tell you he was going there?”

“He told me.”

“When?”

Nez hesitated again. “He’s dead?”

“Dead.”

“When I was guiding them,” Nez said. “We were way up Canyon del Muerto. His woman, Mrs. Breedlove, she’d gone up a little ways around the corner. To urinate, I guess it was. Breedlove, he’d been talking about climbing the cliff there.” He gestured upward.

“You been up there. It’s straight up. Worse than that. Some places the top hangs over. I said nobody could do it. He said he could.

He told me some places he’d climbed up in Colorado. He started talking then about all the things he wanted to do while he was still young and now he was already thirty years old and he hadn’t done them. And then he said—” Nez cut it off, looking at Leaphorn.

“I’m not a policeman anymore,” he said. “I’m retired, like you. I just want to know what the hell happened to the man.”

“Maybe I should have told you then,” Nez said.

“Yeah. Maybe you should have,” Leaphorn said. “Why didn’t you?”

“Wasn’t any reason to,” Nez said. “He said he wasn’t going to do it until spring came. Said now it was too close to winter. He said not to talk about it because his wife wanted him to stop climbing.”

“Did Mrs. Breedlove hear him?”

“She was off taking a leak,” Nez said. “He said he thought maybe he’d do it all by himself. Said nobody had ever done that.”

“Did you think he meant it? Did he sound serious?”

“Sounded serious, yes. But I thought he was just bragging. White men do that a lot.”

“He didn’t say where he was going?”

“His wife came back then. He shut up about it.”

“No, I mean did he say anything about where he was going to go that evening? After you came in out of the canyon.”

“I remember they had some friends coming to see them. They were going to eat together.”

“Not drinking, was he?”

“Not drinking,” Nez said. “I don’t let my tourists drink. It’s against the law.”

“So he said he was going to climb Tse´ Bitáí´ the following spring,” Leaphorn said. “Is that the way you remember it?”

“That’s what he said.”

They sat a while, engulfed by sunlight, cool air, and silence. A raven planed down from the rim, circled around a cottonwood, landed on a Russian olive across the canyon floor, and perched, waiting for them to die.

Nez extracted a pack of cigarettes from his shirt, offered one to Leaphorn, and lit one for himself.

“Like to smoke while I’m thinking,” he said.

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“I used to do that, too,” Leaphorn said. “But my wife talked me into quitting.”

“They’ll do that if you’re not careful,” Nez said.

“Thinking about what?”

“Thinking about why he told me that. You know, maybe he figured I’d say something and his woman would hear it and stop him.” Nez exhaled a cloud of blue smoke. “And he wanted somebody to stop him. Or when spring came and he slipped off to climb it by himself, he thought maybe he’d fall off and get killed and if nobody knew where he was nobody would find his body. And he didn’t want to be up there dead and all alone.”

“And you think he figured you’d hear about him disappearing and you’d tell people where to find him?” Leaphorn asked.

“Maybe,” Nez said, and shrugged.

“It didn’t work.”

“Because he was already missing,” Nez said. “Where was he all those months between when he goes away from his wife here, and when he climbed our Rock with Wings?”

Leaphorn grinned. “That’s what I was hoping you’d know something about. Did he say anything that gave you ideas about where he was going after he left here? Who he was meeting?”

Nez shook his head. “That’s a long time to stay away from that good woman,” Nez said. “Way too long, I think. I guess you policemen haven’t found out where he was?”

“No,” Leaphorn said. “We don’t have the slightest idea.”

8

A MILD PRELUDE TO WINTER

had come quietly during the night, slipping across the Arizona border, covering Chee’s house trailer with about five inches of wet whiteness. It caused him to shift his pickup into four-wheel drive to make the climb from his site under the San Juan River cottonwoods up the slope to the highway. But the first snow of winter is a cheering sight for natives of the high, dry Four Corners country. It’s especially cheering for those doing Chee’s criminal investigation division’s job. The snow was making extra work for the troopers out on the highways, but for the detectives it dampened down the crime rate.

Lieutenant Jim Chee’s good humor even survived the sight of the stack of folders Jenifer had dumped on his desk. The note atop them said: “Cap. Largo wants to talk to you right away about the one on top but I don’t think he’ll be in before noon because with this snow he’ll have to get some feed out to his cows.”

On the table of organization, Jenifer was Chee’s employee, the secretary of his criminal investigation unit. But Jenifer had been hired by Captain Largo a long time ago and had seen lieutenants come and go. Chee understood that as far as Jenifer was concerned he was still on probation. But the friendly tone of the note suggested she was thinking he might meet her standards.

“Hah!” he said, grinning. But that faded away before he finished working through the folders. The top one concerned the theft of two more Angus calves from a woman named Roanhorse who had a grazing lease west of Red Rock. The ones in the middle involved a drunken brawl at a girl dance at the Lukachukai chapter house, in which shots were fired and the shooter fled in a pickup, not his own; a request for a transfer from this office by Officer Bernadette (Bernie) Manuelito, the rookie trainee Chee had inherited with the job; a report of drug use and purported gang activity around Hogback, and so forth. Plus, of course, forms to be filled out on mileage, maintenance, and gasoline usage by patrol vehicles, and a reminder that he hadn’t submitted vacation schedules for his office.

The final folder held a citizen’s complaint that he was being harassed by Officer Manuelito. What remained of Chee’s high spirits evaporated as he read it.

The form was signed by Roderick Diamonte. Mr. Diamonte alleged that Officer Manuelito was parking her Tribal Police car at the access road to his place of business at Hogback, stopping his customers on trumped-up traffic violations, and using what Diamonte called “various sneaky tricks” in an effort to violate their constitutional protection against illegal searches. He asked that Officer Manuelito be ordered to desist from this harassment and be reprimanded.

Diamonte? Yes, indeed. Chee remembered the name from the days when he had been a patrolman assigned here. Diamonte operated a bar on the margin of reservation land and was one of the first people to come to mind when something lucrative and illegal was going on. Still, he had his rights.

Chee buzzed Jenifer and asked if Manuelito was in. She was out on patrol.

“Would you call her? Tell her I want to talk to her when she comes in. Please.” Chee had learned early on that Jenifer’s response time shortened when an order became a request.

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“Right,” Jenifer said. “I thought you’d want to talk to her. I guess you know who that Diamonte is, don’t you?”

“I remember him,” Chee said.

“And you had a call,” Jenifer said. “From Janet Pete in Washington. She left a number.” Someday when he was better established Chee intended to talk to his secretary about her practice of deciding which calls to tell him about when. Calls from Janet tended to get low priority. Maybe that was because Jenifer had the typical cop attitude about defense lawyers. Or maybe not.

He called the number.

“Jim,” she said. “Ah, Jim. It’s good to hear your voice.”

“And yours,” he said. “You called to tell me you’re headed out to National Airport. Flying home. You want me to pick you up at the Farmington Airport?”

“Don’t I wish,” she said. “But I’m stuck here a little longer. How about you? The job getting any easier? And did you get a snowstorm? The weather girl always stands in front of the Four Corners when she’s giving us the news, but it looked like a front was pushing across from the west.”

They talked about the weather for a moment, talked about love, talked about wedding plans. Chee didn’t ask her about the Justice Department and Bureau of Indian Affairs business that had called her away. It was one of several little zones of silence that develop when a cop and a defense lawyer are dating.

And then Janet said: “Anything new developing on the Fallen Man business?”

“Fallen Man?” Chee hadn’t been giving that any thought. It was a closed case. A missing person found. A corpse identified.

Officially an accidental death. Officially none of his business. A curious affair, true, but the world of a police lieutenant was full of such oddities and he had too much pressing stuff on his desk to give it any time.

“No. Nothing new.” Chee wanted to say, “He’s in the dead file,” but he was a little too traditional for that. Death is not a subject for Navajo humor.

“Do you know if anyone ever climbed up there—I mean after the rescue party brought the bones down—to see if they could find any evidence of funny stuff?”

Chee thought about that. And about Janet’s interest in it.

“You know,” she continued, talking into his silence. “Was there any suggestion that it might not have been an accident? Or that somebody was up there with him and just didn’t report it?”

“No,” Chee said. “Anyway, we didn’t send anyone up.” He found himself feeling defensive. “The only apparent motive would be the widow wanting his money, and she waited five years before getting him declared legally dead. And had an ironclad alibi.

And—” But Chee stopped. Irked. Why explain all this? She already knew it. They’d talked about it the last time he’d seen her. At dinner in Farmington.

“Why—” he began, but she was already talking. A new subject. She’d gone to a dinner concert at the Library of Congress last night, some fifteenth-century music played on the fifteenth-century instruments. Very interesting. The French ambassador was there—and his wife. You should have seen her dress. Wow. And so it went.

When the call was over, Chee picked up the Manuelito file again. But he held it unopened while he thought about Janet’s interest in the Fallen Man. And about how a dinner concert at the Library of Congress must have been by invitation only. Or restricted to major donors to some fund or other. Super exclusive. In fact he had no idea the Library of Congress even produced such events, no idea how he could wangle an invitation if he’d wanted to go, no idea how Janet had come to be there.

Well, yes, he did have an idea about that. Of course. Janet had friends in Washington. From those days when she had worked there as what she called “the House Indian” of Dalman, MacArthur, White and Hertzog, Attorneys at Law. One of those friends had been John McDermott. Her ex-lover and exploiter. From whom Janet had fled.

Chee escaped from that unhappy thought into the problem presented by Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

The Navajo culture that had produced Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee had taught him the power of words and of thought. Western metaphysicians might argue that language and imagination are products of reality. But in their own migrations out of Mongolia and over the icy Bering Strait, the Navajos brought with them a much older Asian philosophy. Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual’s reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it. He would think of his duties instead of his love.

Chee flipped open the Manuelito folder. He read through it, wondering why he could have ever believed he wanted an administrative post. That brought him back to Janet. He’d wanted the promotion to impress her, to make himself eligible, to narrow the gap between the child of the urban privileged class and the child of the isolated sheep camp. Thus he had made a thoroughly 23 of 102

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non-Navajo decision based on an utterly non-Navajo way of thinking. He put down the Manuelito file and buzzed Jenifer.

Officer Manuelito, it seemed, had come in early, and called in about nine saying she was working on the cattle-rustling problem.

Chee allowed himself a rare expletive. What the hell was she doing about cattle theft? She was supposed to be finding witnesses to a homicide at a wild party.

“Would you ask the dispatcher to contact her, please, and ask her to come in?” Chee said.

“Want ’em to tell her why?” Jenifer asked.

“Just tell her I want to talk to her,” Chee said, forgetting to say please.

But what would he say to Officer Manuelito? He’d have time to decide that by the time she got to the office. It would keep him from thinking about what might have provoked Janet’s curiosity about Harold Breedlove, late of the Breedlove family that had been a client of John McDermott.

9

AS IT HAPPENED, OFFICER MANUELITO didn’t get to the office.

“She says she’s stuck,” Jenifer reported. “She went out Route 5010 south of Rattlesnake and turned off on that dirt track that skirts around the west side of Ship Rock. Then she slid off into a ditch.” This amused Jenifer, who chuckled. “I’ll see if I can get somebody to go pull her out.”

“I think I’ll just take care of it myself,” Chee said. “But thanks anyway.” He pulled on his jacket. What the devil was Manuelito doing out in that empty landscape by the Rock with Wings? He’d told her to work her way down a list of people who might be willing to talk about gang membership at Shiprock High School, not practicing her skill at driving in mud.

Just getting out of the parking lot demonstrated to Chee how Manuelito could manage to get stuck. The overnight storm had drifted eastward, leaving the town of Shiprock under a cloudless sky. The temperature was already well above freezing and the sun was making short work of the snow. But even after he shifted into four-wheel drive, Chee’s truck did some wheel-spinning. The ditches beside the highway were already carrying runoff water and a cloud of white steam swirled over the asphalt where the moisture was evaporating.

Navajo Route 5010, according to the road map, was “improved.” Which meant it was graded now and then and in theory at least had a gravel surface. On a busy day, probably six or eight vehicles would use it. This morning, Officer Manuelito’s patrol car had been the first to leave its tracks in the snow and Chee’s pickup was number two. Chee noted approvingly that she had made a slow and careful left turn off of 5010 onto an unnumbered access road that led toward Ship Rock—thereby leaving no skid marks. He made the same turn, felt his rear wheels slipping, corrected, and eased the truck gingerly down the road.

All muscles were tense, all senses alert. He was enjoying testing his skill against the slick road surface. Enjoying the clean, cold air in his lungs, the gray-and-white patterns of soft snow on sage and salt bush and chamisa, enjoying the beauty, the vast emptiness, and a silence broken only by the sound of his truck’s engine and its tires in the mud. The immense basalt monolith of Ship Rock towered beside him, its west face still untouched by the warming sun and thus still coated with its whitewash of snow. The Fallen Man must have prayed for that sort of moisture before his thirst killed him on that lonely ledge.

Then the truck topped a hillock, and there was Officer Bernadette Manuelito, a tiny figure standing beside her stuck patrol car, representing an unsolved administrative problem, the end of joy, and a reminder of how good life had been when he was just a patrolman. Ah, well, there was a bright side. Even from here he could see that Manuelito had stuck her car so thoroughly that there would be no hope of towing it out with his vehicle. He’d simply give her a ride back to the office and send out a tow truck.

Officer Manuelito had seemed to Lieutenant Jim Chee to be both unusually pretty and unusually young to be wearing a Navajo Tribal Police uniform. This morning she wouldn’t have made that impression. She looked tired and disheveled and at least her age, which Chee knew from her personnel records was twenty-six years. She also looked surly. He leaned across the pickup seat and opened the door for her.

“Tough luck,” he said. “Get your stuff out of it, and the weapons, and lock it up. We’ll send out a tow truck to get it when the mud dries.”

Officer Manuelito had prepared an explanation of how this happened and would not be deterred.

“The snow covered up a little wash, there. Drifted it full so you couldn’t see it. And . . . “

“It could happen to anybody,” Chee said. “Let’s go.”

“You didn’t bring a tow chain?”

“I did bring a tow chain,” Chee said. “But look at it. There’s no traction now. It’s clay and it’s too soft.” 24 of 102

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“You have four-wheel drive,” she said.

“I know,” Chee said, feeling in no mood to debate this. “But that just means you dig yourself in by spinning four wheels instead of two. I couldn’t budge it. Get your stuff and get in.”

Officer Manuelito brushed a lock of hair off her forehead, leaving a streak of gray mud. Her lips parted with a response, then closed.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

That was all she said. Chee backed the pickup to a rocky place, turned it, and slipped and slid his way back to 5010 in leaden silence. Back on the gravel, he said:

“Did you know that Diamonte filed a complaint against you? Charged you with harassment.” Officer Manuelito was staring out the windshield. “No,” she said. “But I knew he said he was going to.”

“Yep,” Chee said. “He did. Said you were hanging around. Bothering his customers.”

“His dope buyers.”

“Some of them, probably,” Chee said.

Manuelito stared relentlessly out of the windshield.

“What were you doing?” Chee asked.

“You mean besides harassing his customers?”

“Besides that,” Chee said, thinking that the very first thing he would do when they got back to the office was approve this woman’s transfer to anywhere. Preferably to Tuba City, which was about as far as he could get her from Shiprock. He glanced at her, waiting for a reply. She was still focused on the windshield.

“You know what he runs out there?” she said.

“I know what he used to do when I was assigned here before,” Chee said. “In those days he wholesaled booze to the reservation bootleggers, fenced stolen property, handled some marijuana. Things like that. Now I understand he’s branched out into more serious dope.”

“That’s right,” she said. “He still supplies the creeps who push pot and now he’s selling the worse stuff, too.”

“That’s what I always heard,” Chee said. “And most recently from Teddy Begayaye. The kid Begayaye picked up at the community college last week named Diamonte as his source for coke. But then he changed his mind and decided he just couldn’t remember where he got it.”

“I know Diamonte’s selling it.”

“So you bring in your evidence. We take it to the captain, he takes it to the federal prosecutors, or maybe the San Juan County cops, and we put the bastard in jail.”

“Sure,” Manuelito said.

“But we don’t go out there, with no evidence, and harass his customers. There’s a law against it.” Chee sensed that she was no longer staring at the windshield. She was looking at him.

“I heard that you did,” she said. “When you were a cop here before.” Chee felt his face flushing. “Who told you that?”

“Captain Largo told us when we were in recruit training.”

The son of a bitch, Chee thought.

“Largo was using me as a bad example?”

“He didn’t say who did it. But I asked around. People said it was you.”

“It just about got me kicked out of the police,” Chee said. “The same thing could happen to you.”

“I heard it got the place shut down, too,” Manuelito said.

“Yeah, and about the time I got off suspension, he was going full blast again.” 25 of 102

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“Still . . . “ Manuelito said. And let the thought trail off.

“Don’t say ‘still.’ You stay away from there. It’s Begayaye’s job, looking into the dope situation. If you run across anything useful, tell Teddy. Or tell me. Don’t go freelancing around.”

“Yes, sir,” Manuelito said, sounding very formal.

“I mean it,” Chee said. “I’ll put a letter in your file reporting these instructions.”

“Yes, sir,” Manuelito said.

“Now. What’s this transfer request about? What’s wrong with Shiprock? And where do you want to go?”

“I don’t care. Anywhere.”

That surprised Chee. He’d guessed Manuelito wanted to be closer to a boyfriend somewhere. Or that her mother was sick.

Something like that. But now he remembered that she was from Red Rock. By Big Rez standards, Shiprock was conveniently close to her family.

“Is there something about Shiprock you don’t like?”

That question produced a long silence, and finally:

“I just want to get away from here.”

“Why?”

“It’s a personal reason,” she said. “I don’t have to say why, do I? It’s not in the personnel rules.”

“I guess not,” Chee said. “Anyway, I’ll approve it.”

“Thank you,” Manuelito said.

“That’s no guarantee you’ll get it, though. You know how it works. Largo may kill it. And there has to be the right kind of opening somewhere. You’ll have to be patient.”

Officer Manuelito was pointing out the window. “Did you notice that?” she asked.

All Chee saw was the grassland rolling away toward the great dark shape of Ship Rock.

“I mean the fence,” she said. “There where that wash runs down into the borrow ditch. Notice the posts.” Chee noticed the posts, two of which were leaning sharply. He stopped the pickup.

“Somebody dug at the base of the posts,” she said. “Loosened them so you could pull them up.”

“And lay the fence down?”

“More likely raise it up,” she said. “Then you could drive cows down the wash and right under it.”

“Do you know whose grazing lease this is?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “A man named Maryboy has it.”

“Has he lost any cattle?”

“I don’t know. Not lately, anyway. At least I haven’t seen a report on it.” Chee climbed out of the truck, plodded through the snow, and tried the posts. They lifted easily but the snow made it impossible to determine exactly why. He thought about Zorro, Mr. Finch’s favorite cow thief.

Manuelito was standing beside him.

“See?” she said.

“When did you notice this?”

“I don’t know,” Officer Manuelito said. “Just a few days ago.”

“If I remember right, just a few days ago—and today, too—you were supposed to be running down that list of people at that dance.

Looking for anyone willing to tell us about gang membership. About what they saw. Who’d tell us who had the gun. Who shot it.

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“Yes, sir,” Officer Manuelito said, proving she could sound meek if she wanted to. She was looking down at her hands.

“Do any of those possible witnesses live out here?”

“Well, not exactly. The Roanhorse couple is on the list. They live over near Burnham.”

“Near Burnham?” The Burnham trading post was way to hell south of here. Down Highway 666.

“I sort of detoured over this way,” Manuelito explained uneasily. “We had that report that Lucy Sam had lost some cattle, and I knew the captain was after you about catching somebody and putting a stop to that and—”

“How did you know that?”

Now Manuelito’s face was a little flushed. “Well,” she said. “You know how people talk about things.” Yes, Chee knew about that.

“Are you telling me you just drove out here blind? What were you looking for?”

“Well,” she said. “I was just sort of looking.”

Chee waited. “Just sort of looking?”

“Well,” she said. “I remembered my grandfather telling me about Hosteen Sam. That was Lucy’s father. About him hating it when white people came out here to climb Ship Rock. They would park out there, over that little rise there by the foot of the cliff. He would write down their license number or what the car looked like and when he went into town he would go by the police station and try to get the police to arrest them for trespassing. So when I was assigned here, and one of the problems worrying the captain was people stealing cattle, I came out here to ask Hosteen Sam if he would keep track of strange pickups and trucks for us.”

“Pretty good idea,” Chee said. “What did he say?”

“He was dead. Died last year. But his daughter said she would do it for me and I gave her a little notebook for it, but she said she had the one her father had used. So, anyway, I thought I would just make a little detour by there and see if she had written down anything for us.”

“Quite a little detour,” Chee said. “I’d say about sixty miles or so. Had she?”

“I don’t know. I noticed some other posts leaning over and I decided to pull off and see if they had been cut off or dug up or anything else funny. And then I got stuck.”

It was a clever idea, Chee was thinking. He should have thought of it himself. He’d see if he could find some people to keep a similar eye on things up near the Ute reservation, and over on the Checkerboard. Wherever people were losing cattle. Who could he get? But he was distracted from that thought. His feet, buried to the ankles in the melting snow, were complaining about the cold.

And the sun had now risen far enough to illuminate a different set of snowfields high above them on Ship Rock. They reflected a dazzling white light.

Officer Manuelito was watching him. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “Tse´ Bitáí´. It never seems to look the same.”

“I remember noticing that when I was a little boy and I was staying for a while with an aunt over near Toadlena,” Chee said. “I thought it was alive.”

Officer Manuelito was staring at it. “Beautiful,” she said, and shuddered. “I wonder what he was doing up there. All alone.”

“The Fallen Man?”

“Deejay doesn’t think he fell. He said no bones were broken and if you’d fallen down that cliff it would break something. Deejay thinks he was climbing with somebody and they just stranded him there.”

“Who knows?” Chee said. “Anyway, it’s not in the books as anything but an accidental death. No evidence of foul play. We don’t have to worry about it.” Chee’s feet were telling him that his boots were leaking. Leaking ice water. “Let’s go,” he said, heading back for his truck.

Officer Manuelito was still standing there, staring up at the cliffs towering above her.

“They say Monster Slayer couldn’t get down either. When he climbed up to the top and killed the Winged Monster he couldn’t get down.”

“Come on,” Chee said. He climbed into the truck and started the engine, thinking that you’d have a better chance if you were a spirit like Monster Slayer. When spirits scream for help other spirits hear them. Spider Woman had heard and came to the rescue. But Harold Breedlove could have called forever with nothing but the ravens to hear him. The stuff of bad dreams.

They drove in silence.

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Then Officer Manuelito said, “To be trapped up there. I try not to even think about it. It would give me nightmares.”

“What?” Chee said, who hadn’t been listening because by then he was working his way around a nightmare of his own. He was trying to think of another reason Janet Pete might have asked him about the Fallen Man affair. He wanted to find a reason that didn’t involve John McDermott and his law firm representing the Breedlove family. Maybe it was the oddity of the skeleton on the mountain that provoked her question. He always came back to that. But then he’d find himself speculating on who had taken Janet to that concert and he’d think of John McDermott again.

10

THE FIRST THING JOE LEAPHORN NOTICED

when he came through the door was his breakfast dishes awaiting attention in the sink. It was a bad habit and it demanded correction. No more of this sinking into slipshod widower ways. Then he noticed the red light blinking atop his telephone answering machine. The indicator declared he’d received two calls today—pretty close to a post-retirement record. He took a step toward the telephone.

But no. First things first. He detoured into the kitchen, washed his cereal bowl, saucer, and spoon, dried them, and put them in their place on the dish rack. Then he sat in his recliner, put his boots on the footstool, picked up the telephone, and pushed the button.

The first call was from his auto insurance dealer, informing him that if he’d take a defensive driving course he could get a discount on his liability rates. He punched the button again.

“Mr. Leaphorn,” the voice said. “This is John McDermott. I am an attorney and our firm has represented the interests of the Edgar Breedlove family for many years. I remember that you investigated the disappearance of Harold Breedlove several years ago when you were a member of the Navajo Tribal Police. Would you be kind enough to call me, collect, and discuss whether you might be willing to help the family complete its own investigation of his death?” McDermott had left an Albuquerque number. Leaphorn dialed it.

“Oh, yes,” the secretary said. “He was hoping you’d call.”

After the “thank you for calling,” McDermott didn’t linger long over formalities.

“We would like you to get right onto this for us,” he said. “If you’re available, our usual rate is twenty-five dollars an hour, plus your expenses.”

“You mentioned completing the investigation,” Leaphorn said. “Does that mean you have some question about the identification of the skeleton?”

“There is a question concerning just about everything,” McDermott said. “It is a very peculiar case.”

“Could you be more specific? I need a better idea of what you’d like to find out.”

“This isn’t the sort of thing we can discuss over the telephone,” McDermott said. “Nor is it the sort of thing I can talk about until I know whether you will accept a retainer.” He produced a chuckle. “Family business, you know.” Leaphorn discovered he was allowing himself to be irritated by the tone of this—not a weakness he tolerated. And he was curious.

He produced a chuckle of his own.

“From what I remember of the Breedlove disappearance, I don’t see how I could help you. Would you like me to recommend someone?”

“No. No,” McDermott said. “We’d like to use you.”

“But what sort of information would I be looking for?” Leaphorn asked. “I was trying to find out what happened to the man. Why he didn’t come back to Canyon de Chelly that evening. Where he went. What happened to him. And of course the important thing was what happened to him. We know that now, if the identification of the skeleton is correct. The rest of it doesn’t seem to matter.” McDermott spent a few moments deciding how to respond.

“The family would like to establish who was up there with him,” he said.

Now this was getting a bit more interesting. “They’ve learned someone was up there when he fell? How did they learn that?”

“A mere physical fact. We’ve talked to rock climbers who know that mountain. They say you couldn’t do it alone, not to the point where they found the skeleton. They say Harold Breedlove didn’t have the skills, the experience, to have done it.” Leaphorn waited but McDermott had nothing to add.

“The implication, then, is that someone went up with him. When he fell, they abandoned him and didn’t report it. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

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“And why would they do that?” McDermott asked.

Leaphorn found himself grinning. Lawyers! The man didn’t want to say it himself. Let the witness say it.

“Well, let’s see then. They might do it if, for example, they had pushed him over. Given him a fatal shove. Watched him fall. Then they might forget to report it.”

“Well, yes.”

“And you’re suggesting the family has some lead to who this forgetful person might be.”

“No, I’m not suggesting anything.”

“The only lead, then, is the list of those who might be motivated. If I can rely on my memory, the only one I knew of was the widow. The lady who would inherit. I presume she did inherit, didn’t she? But perhaps there’s a lot I didn’t know. We didn’t have a criminal case to work on, you know. We didn’t—and still don’t—have a felony to interest the Navajo Police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Just a missing person then. Now we have what is presumed to be an accidental death. There was never any proof that he hadn’t simply—” Leaphorn paused, looked for a better way to phrase it, found none, and concluded, “Simply run away from wife and home.”

“Greed is often the motivation in murder,” McDermott said.

Murder, Leaphorn thought. It was the first time that word had been used.

“That’s true. But if I am remembering what I was told at the time, there wasn’t much to inherit except the ranch, and it was losing money. Unless there was some sort of nuptial agreement, she would have owned half of it anyway. Colorado law. The wife’s community property. And if I remember what I learned then, Breedlove had already mortgaged it. Was there a motive beyond greed?”

McDermott let the question hang. “If you’ll work with this, I’ll discuss it with you in person.”

“I always wondered if there was a nuptial agreement. But now I’ve heard that she owns the ranch.”

“No nuptial agreement,” McDermott said, reluctantly. “What do you think? If you don’t like the hourly arrangement, we could make it a weekly rate. Multiply the twenty-five dollars by forty hours and make it a thousand a week.” A thousand a week, Leaphorn thought. A lot of money for a retired cop. And what would McDermott be charging his client?

“I tell you what I’ll do,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll give it some thought. But I’ll have to have some more specific information.”

“Sleep on it, then,” McDermott said. “I’m coming to Window Rock tomorrow anyway. Why don’t we meet for lunch?” Joe Leaphorn couldn’t think of any reason not to do that. He wasn’t doing anything else tomorrow. Or for the rest of the week, for that matter.

They set the date for one P.M.

at the Navajo Inn. That allowed time for the lunch-hour crowd to thin and for McDermott to make the two-hundred-mile drive from Albuquerque. It also gave Leaphorn the morning hours to collect information on the telephone, talking to friends in the ranching business, a Denver banker, a cattle broker, learning all he could about the Lazy B ranch and the past history of the Breedloves.

That done, he drove down to the Inn and waited in the office lobby. A white Lexus pulled into the parking area and two men emerged: one tall and slender with graying blond hair, the other six inches shorter, dark-haired, sun-browned, with the heavy-shouldered, slim-waisted build of one who lifts weights and plays handball. Ten minutes early, but it was probably McDermott and who? An assistant, perhaps.

Leaphorn met them at the entrance, went through the introductions, and ushered them in to the quiet corner table he’d arranged to hold.

“Shaw,” Leaphorn said. “George Shaw? Is that correct?”

“Right,” the dark man said. “Hal Breedlove was my cousin. My best friend, too, for that matter. I was the executor of the estate when Elisa had him declared legally dead.”

“A sad situation,” Leaphorn said.

“Yes,” Shaw said. “And strange.”

“Why do you say that?” Leaphorn could think of a dozen ways Breedlove’s death was strange. But which one would Mr. Shaw pick?

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“You don’t think he made the climb alone?”

“Of course not. He couldn’t have,” Shaw said. “I couldn’t do it, and I was a grade or two better at rock climbing than Hal. Nobody could.”

Leaphorn recommended the chicken enchilada, and they all ordered it. McDermott inquired whether Leaphorn had considered their offer. Leaphorn said he had. Would he accept, then? They’d like to get moving on it right away. Leaphorn said he needed some more information. Their orders arrived. Delicious, thought Leaphorn, who had been dining mostly on his own cooking. McDermott ate thoughtfully. Shaw took a large bite, rich with green chile, and frowned at his fork.

“What sort of information?” McDermott asked.

“What am I looking for?” Leaphorn said.

“As I told you,” McDermott said, “we can’t be too specific. We just want to know that we have every bit of information that’s available. We’d like to know why Harold Breedlove left Canyon de Chelly, and precisely when, and who he met and where they went. Anything that might concern his widow and her affairs at that time. We want to know everything that might cast light on this business.” McDermott gave Leaphorn a small, deprecatory smile. “Everything,” he said.

“My first question was what I would be looking for,” Leaphorn said. “My second one is why? This must be expensive, if Mr. Shaw here is willing to pay me a thousand a week through your law firm, you will be charging him, what? The rate for an Albuquerque lawyer I know about used to be a hundred and ten dollars an hour. But that was long ago, and that was Albuquerque. Double it for a Washington firm? Would that be about right?”

“It isn’t cheap,” McDermott said.

“And maybe I find nothing useful at all. Probably you learn nothing. Tracks are cold after eleven years. But let us say that you learn the widow conspired to do away with her husband. I don’t know for sure but I’d guess then she couldn’t inherit. So the family gets the ranch back. What’s it worth? Wonderful house, I hear, if someone rich wants to live in it way out there. Maybe a hundred head of cattle. I’m told there’s still an old mortgage Harold’s widow took out six years ago to pay off her husband’s debts. How much could you get for that ranch?”

“It’s a matter of justice,” McDermott said. “I am not privy to the family’s motives, but I presume they want some equity for Harold’s death.”

Leaphorn smiled.

Shaw had been sipping his coffee. He drained the cup and slammed it into the saucer with a clatter.

“We want to see Harold’s killer hanged,” he said. “Isn’t that what they do out here? Hang ’em?”

“Not lately,” Leaphorn said. “The mountain is on the New Mexico side of the reservation and New Mexico uses the gas chamber.

But it would probably be federal jurisdiction. We Navajos don’t have a death penalty and the federal government doesn’t hang people.” He signaled the waiter, had their coffee replenished, sipped his own, and put down the cup.

“If I take this job I don’t want to be wasting my time,” he said. “I would look for motives. An obvious one is inheritance of the ranch. That gives you two obvious suspects—the widow and her brother. But neither of them could have done it—at least not in the period right after Harold disappeared. The next possibility would be the widow’s boyfriend, if she had one. So I would examine all that. Premeditated murder usually involves a lot of trouble and risk. I never knew of one that didn’t grow out of a strong motivation.”

Neither Shaw nor Breedlove responded to that.

“Usually greed,” Leaphorn said.

“Love,” said Shaw. “Or lust.”

“Which does not seem to have been consummated, from what I know now,” Leaphorn said. “The widow remained single. When I was investigating the disappearance years ago I snooped around a little looking for a boyfriend. I couldn’t pick up any gossip that suggested a love triangle was involved.”

“Easy enough to keep that quiet,” Shaw said.

“Not out here it isn’t,” Leaphorn said. “I would be more interested in an economic motive.” He looked at Shaw. “If this is a crime it’s a white man’s crime. No Navajo would kill anyone on that sacred mountain. I doubt if a Navajo would be disrespectful enough even to climb it. Among my people, murder tends to be motivated by whiskey or sexual jealousy. Among white people, I’ve noticed crime is more likely to be motivated by money. So if I take the job, I’d be turning on my computer and tapping into the metal market statistics and price trends.”

Shaw gave McDermott a sidewise glance, which McDermott didn’t notice. He was staring at Leaphorn.

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“Why?”

“Because the gossipers around Mancos say Edgar Breedlove bought the ranch more because his prospectors had found molybdenum deposits on it than for its grazing. They say the price of moly ore rose enough about ten or fifteen years ago to make development profitable. They say Harold, or the Breedlove family, or somebody, was negotiating for a mineral lease and the Mancos Chamber of Commerce had high hopes of a big mining payroll. But then Harold disappeared and before you know it the price was down again.

I’d want to find out if any of that was true.”

“I see,” McDermott said. “Yes, it would have made the ranch more valuable and made the motive stronger.”

“What the hell,” Shaw said. “We were keeping quiet about it because news like that leaks out, it causes problems. With local politicians, with the tree-huggers, with everybody else.”

“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “I guess if I take this job, then I’m safe in figuring the ranch is worth a lot more than the grass growing on it.”

“What do you say?” Shaw said, his voice impatient. “Can we count on you to do some digging for us?”

“I’ll think about it,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll call your office.”

“We’ll be here a day or two,” Shaw said. “And we’re in a hurry. Why not a decision right now?” A hurry, Leaphorn thought. After all these years. “I’ll let you know tomorrow,” he said. “But you haven’t answered my question about the value of the ranch.”

McDermott looked grim. “You’d be safe to assume it was worth killing for.” 11

“TWISTING THE TAIL OF A COW

will encourage her to move forward,” the text declared. “If the tail is held up over the back, it serves as a mild restraint. In both cases, the handler should hold the tail close to the base to avoid breaking it, and stand to the side to avoid being kicked.” The paragraph was at the top of the fourth-from-final page of a training manual supplied by the Navajo Nation for training brand inspectors of its Resource Enforcement Agency. Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee read it, put down the manual, and rubbed his eyes. He was not on the payroll of the tribe’s REA. But since Captain Largo was forcing him to do its job he’d borrowed an REA brand inspector manual and was plowing his way through it. He’d covered the legal sections relating to grazing rights, trespass, brand registration, bills of sale, when and how livestock could be moved over the reservation boundary, and disease quarantine rules, and was now into advice about handling livestock without getting hurt. To Chee, who had been kicked by several horses but never by a cow, the advice seemed sound. Besides, it diverted him from the paperwork—vacation schedules, justifications for overtime pay, patrol car mileage reports, and so forth—that was awaiting action on his cluttered desk. He picked up the manual.

“The ear twitch can be used to divert attention from other parts of the body,” the next paragraph began. “It should be used with care to avoid damage to the ear cartilage. To make the twitch, fasten a loop of cord or rope around the base of the horns. The rope is then carried around the ear and a half-hitch formed. The end of the rope is pulled to apply restraint.” Chee studied the adjoining illustration of a sleepy-looking cow wearing an ear twitch. Chee’s childhood experience had been with sheep, on which an ear twitch wouldn’t be needed. Still, he figured he could make one easily enough.

The next paragraph concerned a “rope casting harness” with which a person working alone could tie up a mature cow or bull without the risk of strangulation that was involved with usual bulldogging techniques. It looked easy, too, but required a lot of rope.

Two pages to go and he’d be finished with this.

Then the telephone rang.

The voice on the telephone belonged to Officer Manuelito.

“Lieutenant,” she said, “I’ve found something I think you should know about.”

“Tell me,” Chee said.

“Out near Ship Rock, that place where the fence posts had been dug out. You remember?”

“I remember.”

“Well, the snow is gone now and you can see where before it snowed somebody had thrown out a bunch of hay.”

“Ah,” Chee said.

“Like they wanted to attract the cattle. Make them easy to get a rope on. To get ’em into a chute. Into your trailer.” 31 of 102

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“Manuelito,” Chee said. “Have you finished interviewing that list of possible witnesses in that shooting business?” Silence. Finally, “Most of them. Some of them I’m still looking for.”

“Do they live out near Ship Rock?”

“Well, no. But—”

“Don’t say but,” Chee said. He shifted his weight in his chair, aware that his back hurt from too much sitting, aware that out in the natural world the sun was bright, the sky a dark blue, the chamisa had turned gold and the snakeweed a brilliant yellow. He sighed.

“Manuelito,” he said. “Have you gone out to talk to the Sam woman about whether she’s seen anything suspicious?”

“No, sir,” Officer Manuelito said, sounding surprised. “You told me to—”

“Where are you calling from?”

“The Burnham trading post,” she said. “The people there said they hadn’t seen anything at the girl dance. But I think they did.”

“Probably,” Chee said. “They just didn’t want to get the shooter into trouble. So come on in now, and buzz me when you get here, and we’ll go out and see if Lucy Sam has seen anything interesting.”

“Yes, sir,” Officer Manuelito said, and she sounded like she thought that was a good idea. It seemed like a good idea to Chee, too.

The tossing hay over the fence business sounded like Zorro’s trademark as described by Finch, and that sounded like an opportunity to beat that arrogant bastard at his own game.

Officer Manuelito looked better today. Her uniform was tidy, hair black as a raven’s wing and neatly combed, and no mud on her face. But she still displayed a slight tendency toward bossiness.

“Turn up there,” she ordered, pointing to the road that led toward Ship Rock, “and I’ll show you the hay.” Chee remembered very well the location of the loosened fence posts, but the beauty of the morning had turned him amiable. With Manuelito, he would work on correcting one fault at a time, leaving this one for a rainy day. He turned as ordered, parked when told to park, and followed her over to the fence. With the snow cover now evaporated, it was easy to see that the dirt had been dug away from the posts. It was also easy to see, scattered among the sage, juniper, and rabbit brush, what was left of several bales of alfalfa after the cattle had dined.

“Did you tell Delmar Yazzie about this?” Chee asked.

Officer Manuelito looked puzzled. “Yazzie?”

“Yazzie,” Chee said. “The resource-enforcement ranger who works out of Shiprock. Mr. Yazzie is the man responsible for keeping people from stealing cattle.”

Officer Manuelito looked flustered. “No, sir,” she said. “I thought we could sort of stake this place out. Keep an eye on it, you know. Whoever is putting out this hay bait will be back and once he gets the cows used to coming here, he’ll—”

“He’ll rig himself up a sort of chute,” Chee said, “and back his trailer in here, and drive a few of ’em on it, and . . . “ Chee paused. Her flustered look had been replaced by the smile of youthful enthusiasm. But now Chee’s impatient tone had caused the smile to go away.

Acting Lieutenant Chee had intended to tell Officer Manuelito some of what he’d learned in digesting the brand inspector training manual. If they did indeed catch the cattle thief and managed to get a conviction, the absolute maximum penalty for his crime would be a fine “not to exceed $100” and a jail term “not to exceed six months.” That’s what it said in section 1356 of subchapter six of chapter seven of the Livestock Inspection and Control Manual. Reading that section just after Manuelito’s call had fueled Chee’s urge to get out of the office and into the sunlight. But why was he venting his bad mood on this rookie cop? Even interrupting her to do it—an inexcusable rudeness for any Navajo. It wasn’t her fault, it was Captain Largo’s. And besides, Finch had hurt his pride. He wanted to deflate that pompous jerk by catching Finch’s Zorro before Finch got him. Manuelito looked like a valuable help in that project.

Chee swallowed, cleared his throat. “. . . and then we’d have an easy conviction,” he concluded.

Officer Manuelito’s expression had become unreadable. A hard lady to mislead.

“And put a stop to one cow thief,” he added, conscious of how lame it sounded. “Well, let’s go. Let’s see if anyone’s at home at the Sam place.”

The Rural Electrification Administration had run a power line across the empty landscape off in the direction of the Chuska Mountains, which took it within a few miles of the Sam place, and the Navajo Communication Company had followed by linking such inhabited spots as Rattlesnake and Red Rock to the world with its own telephone lines. But the Sam outfit had either been too 32 of 102

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far off the route to make a connection feasible, or the Sam family had opted to preserve its privacy. Thus the fence posts that lined the dirt track leading to the Sam hogan were not draped with telephone wire, and thus there had been no way for Jim Chee to warn Ms. Sam of the impending visit.

But as he geared down into low to creep over the cattle guard and onto the track leading into the Sam grazing lease, he noticed the old boot hanging on the gate post was right side up. Someone must be home.

“I hope someone’s here,” Officer Manuelito said.

“They are,” Chee said. He nodded toward the boot.

Officer Manuelito frowned, not understanding.

“The boot’s turned up,” Chee said. “When you’re leaving, and nobody’s going to be home, you turn the boot upside down. Empty.

Nobody home. That saves your visitor from driving all the way up to the hogan.”

“Oh,” Manuelito said. “I didn’t know that. We lived over near Keams Canyon before Mom moved to Red Rock.” She sounded impressed. Chee became aware that he was showing off. And enjoying it. He nodded, said: “Yep. You probably had a different signal over there.” And thought it would be embarrassing now if nobody was home. The trouble with cattle guard signaling was that people forgot to stop and change the boot.

But Lucy Sam’s pickup was resting in front of her double-wide mobile home and Lucy Sam was peering out of the screen door at them. Chee let the patrol car roll to a stop amid a flock of startled chickens. They waited, giving Ms. Sam the time required to prepare herself for receiving visitors. It also gave Chee time to inspect the place.

The mobile home was one of the flimsier models but it had been placed solidly on a base of concrete blocks to keep the wind from blowing under it. A small satellite dish sat on its roof, helping a row of old tires hold down the aluminum panels as well as bringing in a television signal. Beside this insubstantial residence stood the Sam hogan, solidly built of sandstone slabs with its door facing properly eastward. Chee’s practiced eyes could tell that it had been built to the specifications prescribed for the People by Changing Woman, their giver of laws. Beyond the hogan was a hay shed with a plank holding pen for cattle, a windmill with attendant water tank, and, on top of the shed, a small wind generator, its fan blades spinning in the morning breeze. Down the slope a rusty and long-deceased Ford F100 pickup rested on blocks with its wheels missing. Farther down stood an outhouse. Beyond this untidy clutter of rural living, the view stretched away forever.

It reminded Chee of a professor he’d had once at the University of New Mexico who had done a research project on how Navajos place their hogans. The answer seemed to Chee glaringly obvious. A Navajo, like a rancher anywhere, would need access to water, to grazing, to a road, and above all a soul-healing view of—in the words of one of the curing chants—“beauty all around you.” The Sam family had put beauty first. They had picked the very crest of the high grassy ridge between Red Wash and Little Ship Rock Wash. To the west the morning sun lit the pink and orange wilderness of erosion that gave the Red Rock community its name.

Beyond that the blue-green mass of the Carrizo Mountains rose. Far to the north in Colorado, the Roman nose shape of Sleeping Ute Mountain dominated, and west of that was the always-changing pattern of lights and shadows that marked the edge of Utah’s canyon country. But look eastward, and all of this was overpowered by the dark monolith of the Rock with Wings towering over the rolling grassland. Only five or six million years old, the geologists said, but in Chee’s mythology it had been there since God created time or, depending on the version one preferred, had flown in fairly recently carrying the first Navajo clans down from the north.

Lucy Sam reappeared at her doorway, the signal that she was ready to receive her visitors. She had started a coffeepot brewing on her propane stove, put on a blouse of dark blue velveteen, and donned her silver and turquoise jewelry in their honor. Now they went through the polite formalities of traditional Navajo greetings, seated themselves beside the Sam table, and waited while Ms.

Sam extracted what she called her “rustler book” from a cabinet stacked with magazines and papers.

Chee considered himself fairly adept at guessing the ages of males and fairly poor with females. Ms. Sam he thought must be in her late sixties—give or take five or ten years. She did her hair bound up in the traditional style, wore the voluminous long skirt demanded by traditional modesty, and had a television set on a corner table tuned to a morning talk show. It was one of the sleazier ones—a handsome young woman named Ricki something or other probing into the sexual misconduct, misfortune, hatreds, and misery of a row of retarded-looking guests, to the amusement of the studio audience. But Chee was distracted from this spectacle by what was sharing table space with the television set.

It was a telescope mounted on a short tripod and aimed through the window at the world outside. Chee recognized it as a spotting scope—the sort the marksmanship instructor had peered through on the police recruit firing range to tell him how far he’d missed the bull’s-eye. This one looked like an older, bulkier model, probably an artillery observer’s range-finding scope and probably bought in an army surplus store.

Ms. Sam had placed her book, a black ledger that looked even older than the scope, on the table. She settled a pair of bifocals on her nose and opened it.

“I haven’t seen much since you asked me to be watching,” she said to Officer Manuelito. “I mean I haven’t seen much that you’d want to arrest somebody for.” She looked over the bifocals at Chee, grinning. “Not unless you want to arrest that lady that used to work at the Red Rock trading post for fooling with somebody else’s husband.” 33 of 102

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Officer Manuelito was grinning, too. Chee apparently looked blank, because Ms. Sam pointed past the telescope and out the window.

“Way over there toward Rock with Wings,” she explained. “There’s a nice little place down there. Live spring there and cottonwood trees. I was sort of looking around through the telescope to see if any trucks were parked anywhere and I see the lady’s little red car just driving up toward the trees. And then in a minute, here comes Bennie Smiley’s pickup truck. Then, quite a little bit later, the truck comes out over the hill again, and then four or five minutes, here comes the little red car.” She nodded to Chee, decided he was hopeless, and looked at Manuelito. “It was about an hour,” she added, which caused Officer Manuelito’s smile to widen.

“Bennie,” she said. “I’ll be darned.”

“Yes,” Ms. Sam said.

“I know Bennie,” Officer Manuelito said. “He used to be my oldest sister’s boyfriend. She liked him but then she found out he was born to the Streams Come Together clan. That’s too close to our ‘born to’ clan for us.” Ms. Sam shook her head, made a disapproving sound. But she was still smiling.

“That lady with the red car,” Manuelito said. “I wonder if I know her, too. Is that Mrs.—” Chee cleared his throat.

“I wonder if you noticed any pickups, anything you could haul a load of hay in, stopped over there on the road past the Rattlesnake pumping station. Probably a day or so before the snow.” He glanced at Officer Manuelito, tried to read her expression, decided she was either slightly abashed for gossiping instead of tending to police business, or irritated because he’d interrupted her. Probably the latter.

Ms. Sam was thumbing through the ledger, saying, “Let’s see now. Wasn’t it Monday night it started snowing?” She thumbed past another page, tapped the paper with a finger. “Big fifth-wheel truck parked there beside Route 33. Dark blue, and the trailer he was pulling was partly red and partly white, like somebody was painting it and didn’t get it finished. Had Arizona plates. But that was eight days before it snowed.”

“That sounds like my uncle’s truck,” Manuelito said. “He lives over there at Sanostee.” Ms. Sam said she thought it had looked familiar. And, no, she hadn’t noticed any strange trucks the days just before the storm, but then she’d gone into Farmington to buy groceries and was gone one day. She read off the four other entries she’d made since getting Manuelito’s request. One sounded like Dick Finch’s truck with its bulky camper. None of the others would mean anything unless and until some sort of pattern developed. Pattern! That made him think of the days he’d worked for Leaphorn. Leaphorn was always looking for patterns.

“How did you know it was an Arizona license?” Chee asked. “The telescope?”

“Take a look,” Ms. Sam said, and waved at the scope.

Chee did, twiddling the adjustment dial. The mountain jumped at him. Huge. He focused on a slab of basalt fringed with mountain oak. “Wow,” Chee said. “Quite a scope.”

He turned it, brought in the point where Navajo Route 33 cuts through the Chinese Wall of stone that wanders southward from the volcano. A school bus was rolling down the asphalt, heading for Red Rock after taking kids on their fifty-mile ride into high school at Shiprock.

“We bought it for him, long time ago when he started getting sick,” Ms. Sam said—using the Navajo words that avoided alluding directly to the name of the dead. “I saw it in that big pawnshop on Railroad Avenue in Gallup. Then he could sit there and watch the world and keep track of his mountain.”

She produced a deprecatory chuckle, as if Chee might think this odd. “Every day he’d write down what he saw. You know. Like which pairs of kestrels were coming back to the same nests. And where the red-tailed hawks were hunting. Which kids were spray-painting stuff on that old water tank down there, or climbing the windmill. That sort of thing.” She sighed, gestured at the talk show. “Better than this stuff. He loved his mountain. Watching it kept him happy.”

“I heard he used to come down to Shiprock, to the police station, and report people trespassing and climbing Tse´ Bitáí´,” Chee said. “Is that right?”

“He wanted them arrested,” she said. “He said it was wrong, those white people climbing a mountain that was sacred. He said if he was younger and had some money he would go back East and climb up the front of that big cathedral in New York.” Ms. Sam laughed. “See how they liked that.”

“What sort of things did he write in the book?” Chee asked, thinking of Lieutenant Leaphorn and feeling a twinge of excitement.

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“Could I see it?”

“All sorts of things,” she said, and handed it to him. “He was in the marines. One of the code talkers, and he liked to do things the way they did in the marines.”

The entries were dated with the numbers of day, month, and year, and the first one was 25/7/89. After the date Hosteen Sam had written in a tiny, neat missionary-school hand that he had gone into Farmington that day and bought this book to replace the old one, which was full. The next entry was dated 26/7/89. After that Sam had written: “Redtail hawks nesting. Sold two rams to D. Nez.” Chee closed the book. What was the date Breedlove had vanished? Oh, yes.

He handed Ms. Sam the ledger.

“Do you have an earlier book?”

“Two of them,” she said. “He started writing more after he got really sick. Had more time then.” She took two ledgers down from the top of the cabinet where she stored canned goods and handed them to Chee. “It was something that kills the nerves. Sometimes he would feel pretty good but he was getting paralyzed.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Manuelito said. “They say there’s no cure.”

“We had a sing for him,” Ms. Sam said. “A Yeibichai. He got better for a little while.” Chee found the page with the day of Hal Breedlove’s disappearance and scanned the dates that followed. He found crows migrating, news of a coyote family, mention of an oil field service truck, but absolutely nothing to indicate that Breedlove or anyone else had come to climb Hosteen Sam’s sacred mountain.

Disappointing. Well, anyway, he would think about this. And he’d tell Lieutenant Leaphorn about the book. That thought surprised him. Why tell Leaphorn? The man was a civilian now. It was none of his business. He didn’t exactly like Leaphorn. Or he hadn’t thought he did. Was it respect? The man was smarter than anybody Chee had ever met. Damn sure smarter than Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee. And maybe that was why he didn’t exactly like him.

12

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE

that metaphor whites use about money burning a hole in your pocket had taken on meaning for Joe Leaphorn. The heat had been caused by a check for twenty thousand dollars made out to him against an account of the Breedlove Corporation. Leaphorn had endorsed it and exchanged it for a deposit slip to an account in his name in the Mancos Security Bank. Now the deposit slip resided uneasily in his wallet as he waited for Mrs. Cecilia Rivera to finish dealing with a customer and talk to him. Which she did, right now.

Leaphorn rose, pulled back a chair for her at the lobby table where she had deposited him earlier. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to keep a new customer waiting.” She sat, examined him briefly, and got right to the point. “What did you want to ask me about?”

“First,” Leaphorn said, “I want to tell you what I’m doing here. Opening this account and all.”

“I wondered about that,” Mrs. Rivera said. “I noticed your address was Window Rock, Arizona. I thought maybe you were going into some line of business up here.” That came out as a question.

“Did you notice who the check was drawn against?” Leaphorn asked. Of course she would have. It was a very small bank in a very small town. The Breedlove name would be famous here, and Leaphorn had seen the teller discussing the deposit with Mrs. Rivera.

But he wanted to make sure.

“The Breedloves,” Mrs. Rivera said, studying his face. “It’s been a few years since we’ve seen a Breedlove check but I never heard of one bouncing. Hal’s widow banked here for a little while after he—after he disappeared. But then she quit us.” Mrs. Rivera was in her mid-seventies, Leaphorn guessed, thin and sun-wrinkled. Her bright black eyes examined him through the top half of her bifocals with frank curiosity.

“I’m working for them now,” Leaphorn said. “For the Breedloves.” He waited.

Mrs. Rivera drew in a long breath. “Doing what?” she asked. “Would it be something to do with that moly mine project?”

“It may be that,” Leaphorn said. “To tell the truth, I don’t know. I’m a retired policeman.” He extracted his identification case and showed it to her. “Years ago when Hal Breedlove disappeared, I was the detective working that case.” He produced a deprecatory expression. “Obviously I didn’t have much success with it, because it took about eleven years to find him, and then it was by accident. But anyway, the family seems to have remembered.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Young Hal did like to climb up onto the mountains.” A dim smile appeared. “From what I read in the Farmington Times, I guess he needed more studying on how to climb down off of them.” 35 of 102

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Leaphorn rewarded this with a chuckle.

“In my experience,” he said, “bankers are like doctors and lawyers and ministers. Their business depends a lot on keeping confidences.” He looked at her, awaiting confirmation of this bit of misinformation. Leaphorn had always found bankers wonderful sources of information.

“Well, yes,” she said. “Lot of business secrets come floating around when you’re negotiating loans.”

“Are you willing to handle another one?”

“Another secret?” Mrs. Rivera’s expression became avid. She nodded.

And so Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, laid his cards on the table. More or less. It was a tactic he’d used for years—based on his theory that most humans prefer exchanging information to giving it away. He’d tried to teach Jim Chee that rule, which was: Tell somebody something interesting and they’ll try to top it. So now he was going to tell Mrs. Rivera everything he knew about the affair of Hal Breedlove, who had been by Four Corners standards her former neighbor and was her onetime customer. In return he expected Mrs. Rivera to tell him something she knew about Hal Breedlove, and his ranch, and his business. Which was why he had opened this account here. Which was what he had decided to do yesterday when, after long seconds of hesitation, he had accepted the check he had never expected to receive.

They had met again yesterday at the Navajo Inn—Leaphorn, McDermott, and George Shaw.

“If I take this job,” Leaphorn had said, “I will require a substantial retainer.” He kept his eyes on Shaw’s face.

“Substantial?” said McDermott. “How sub—”

“How much?” asked Shaw.

How much, indeed, Leaphorn thought. He had decided he would mention a price too large for them to pay, but not ludicrously overdone. Twenty thousand dollars, he had decided. They would make a counteroffer. Perhaps two thousand. Two weeks pay in advance. He would drop finally to, say, ten thousand. They would counter. And finally he would establish how important this affair was to Shaw.

“Twenty thousand dollars,” Leaphorn said.

McDermott had snorted, said, “Be serious. We can’t—”

But George Shaw had reached into his inside coat pocket and extracted a checkbook and a pen.

“From what I’ve heard about you we won’t need to lawyer this,” he said. “The twenty thousand will be payment in full, including any expenses you incur, for twenty weeks of your time or until you develop the information we need to settle this business. Is that acceptable?”

Leaphorn hadn’t intended to accept anything—certainly not to associate himself with these two men. He didn’t need money. Or want it. But Shaw was writing the check now, face grim and intent. Which told Leaphorn there was much more involved here than he’d expected.

Shaw had torn out the check, handed it to him. A little piece of the puzzle that had stuck in Leaphorn’s mind for eleven years—that had been revived by the shooting of Hosteen Nez—had clicked into place. Unreadable yet, but it shed a dim light on the effort to kill Nez. If twenty thousand dollars could be tossed away like this, millions more than that must be somehow involved. That told him hardly anything. Just a hint that Nez might still be, to use that white expression, “worth killing.” Or for Shaw, perhaps worth keeping alive.

He had held the check a moment, a little embarrassed, trying to think of what to say as he returned it. He knew now that he would try again to find a way to solve this old puzzle, but for himself and not for these men. He extended the check to Shaw, said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think—”

Then he had seen how useful that check could be. It would give him a Breedlove connection. He wasn’t a policeman any longer.

This would give him the key he’d need to unlock doors.

And this morning, in this small, old-fashioned bank lobby, Leaphorn was using it.

“This is sort of hard to explain,” he told Mrs. Rivera. “What I’m trying to do for the Breedlove family is vague. They want me to find out everything about the disappearance of Hal Breedlove and about his death on Ship Rock.” Mrs. Rivera leaned forward. “They don’t think it was an accident?”

“They don’t exactly say that. But it was a pretty peculiar business. You remember it?”

“I remember it very well,” Mrs. Rivera said, with a wry laugh. “The Breedlove boy did his banking here—like the ranch always had.

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you know, he’s vanished.”

Mrs. Rivera laughed. “That’s the sort of thing a banker remembers a long, long time.”

“How was it secured? I understand he didn’t get title to the ranch until his birthday—just before he disappeared.” Mrs. Rivera leaned back now and folded her arms. “Well, now,” she said. “I don’t think we want to get into that. That’s private business.”

“No harm me asking, though,” Leaphorn said. “It’s a habit policemen get into. Let me tell you what I know, and then you decide if you know anything you would be free to add that might be helpful.”

“That sounds fair enough,” she said. “You talk. I’ll listen.”

And she did. Nodding now and then, sometimes indicating surprise, enjoying being an insider on an investigation. Sometimes indicating agreement as Leaphorn explained a theory, shaking her head in disapproval when he told her how little information Shaw and McDermott had given him to work on. As Leaphorn had hoped, Mrs. Rivera had become a partner.

“But you know how lawyers are,” he said. “And Shaw’s a lawyer, too. I checked on it. He specializes in corporate tax cases.

Anyway, they sure didn’t give me much to work with.”

“I don’t know what I can add,” she said. “Hal was a spendthrift, I know that. Always buying expensive toys. Snowmobiles, fancy cars. He’d bought himself a—can’t think of the name—one of those handmade Italian cars, for example. A Ferrari, however you pronounce that. Cost a fortune and then he drove it over these old back roads and tore it up. He’d worked out some sort of deal with the trust and got a mortgage on the ranch. But then when they sold cattle in the fall and the money went into the ranch account he’d spend it right out of there instead of paying his debts.”

She paused, searching for something to add. “Hal always had Sally get him first-class tickets when he flew—Sally has Mancos Travel—and first class costs an arm and a leg.”

“And coach class gets there almost as quick,” Leaphorn said.

Mrs. Rivera nodded. “Even when they went places together Sally had her instructions to put Hal into first class and Demott in coach. Now what do you think of that?”

Leaphorn shook his head.

“Well, I think it’s insulting,” Mrs. Rivera said.

“Could have been Demott’s idea,” Leaphorn said.

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Sally told—” She cut that off.

“I talked to Demott when I was investigating Breedlove’s disappearance,” Leaphorn said. “He seemed like a solid citizen.”

“Well, yes. I guess so. But he’s a strange one, too.” She chuckled. “I guess maybe we all get a little odd. Living up here with mountains all around us, you know.”

“Strange,” Leaphorn said. “How?”

Mrs. Rivera looked slightly embarrassed. She shrugged. “Well, he’s a bachelor for one thing. But I guess there’s a lot of bachelors around here. And he’s sort of a halfway tree-hugger. Or so people say. We have some of those around here, too, but they’re mostly move-ins from California or back East. Not the kind of people who ever had to worry about feeding kids or working for a living.”

“Tree-hugger? How’d he get that reputation?” Leaphorn was thinking of a favorite nephew, a tree-hugger who’d gotten himself arrested leading a noisy protest at a tribal council meeting, trying to stop a logging operation in the Chuskas. In Leaphorn’s opinion his nephew had been on the right side of that controversy.

“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Rivera said. “But they say Eldon was why they didn’t do that moly operation. Up there in the edge of the San Juan National Forest.”

Leaphorn said, “Oh. What happened?”

“It was years ago. I think the spring after Hal went missing. We weren’t in on the deal, of course. This bank is way too little for the multimillion-dollar things like that. A bank up in Denver was involved I think. And I think the mining company was MCA, the Moly Corp. Anyway, the way it was told around here, there was some sort of contract drawn up, a mineral lease involving Breedlove land up the canyon, and then at first the widow was going to handle it, but Hal legally was still alive and she didn’t want to file the necessary papers to have the courts say he was dead. So that tied it up. People say she stalled on that because Demott was against it. Demott’s her brother, you know. But to tell the truth, I think it was her own idea. She’s loved that place since she was a tot. Grew up on it, you know.”

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“I don’t know much about their background,” Leaphorn said.

“Well, it used to be the Double D ranch. Demott’s daddy owned it. The price of beef was way down in the thirties. Lot of ranches around here went at sheriff’s auction, including that one. Old Edgar Breedlove bought it, and he kept the old man on as foreman.

Old Breedlove didn’t care a thing about ranching. One of his prospectors had found the moly deposit up the headwaters of Cache Creek and that’s what he wanted. But anyway, Eldon and Elisa grew up on the place.”

“Why didn’t he mine the molybdenum?” Leaphorn asked.

“War broke out and I guess he couldn’t get the right kind of priority to get the manpower or the equipment.” She laughed. “Then when the war ended, the price of the ore fell. Stayed down for years and then went shooting up. Then Hal got himself lost and that tied it all up once again.”

“And by the time she had Breedlove declared dead, the price of ore had gone down. Is that right?”

“Right,” Mrs. Rivera said. And looked thoughtful.

“And now it’s up again,” Leaphorn said.

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

“You think that might be why the Breedlove Corporation would pay me the twenty thousand?” She looked over her glasses at him. “That’s an unkind thought,” she said, “but I confess it occurred to me.”

“Even though Hal’s widow owns the place now?”

“She owns it, unless they can prove she had something to do with killing him. We had our lawyer look into that. She wanted to extend a mortgage on the place.” She looked mildly apologetic. “Can’t take chances, you know, with your investors’ money.”

“Did you extend the mortgage?”

Mrs. Rivera folded her arms again. But finally she said, “Well, yes, we did.” Leaphorn grinned. “Could I guess then that you don’t think she had anything to do with killing Breedlove? Or anyway, nobody is ever going to prove it?”

“I just own a piece of this bank,” Mrs. Rivera said. “There’s people I’m responsible to. So I’d have to agree with you. I thought the loan was safe enough.”

“Still do?”

She nodded, remembering. Then shook her head.

“When it happened, I mean when he just disappeared like that, I had my doubts. I always thought Elisa was a fine young lady. Good family. Raised right. She used to help take care of her grandmother when the old lady had the cancer. But you know, it sure did look suspicious. Hal inherits the Lazy B and then the very same week—or pretty close to that, anyway—he’s gone. So you start thinking she might of had herself another man somewhere and—well, you know.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Leaphorn said. “What do you think now?”

“I was wrong,” she said.

“You sound certain,” Leaphorn said.

“You live in Window Rock,” she said. “That’s a little town like Mancos. You think some widow woman there with a rich husband lost somewhere could have something going with a boyfriend and everybody wouldn’t know about it?” Leaphorn laughed. “I’m a widower,” he said. “And I met this nice lady from Flagstaff on some police work I was doing. The very first time I had lunch with her, when I got back to the office they were planning my wedding.”

“It’s the same way out here,” Mrs. Rivera said. “About the time everybody around here decided that Hal was gone for good, they started marrying Elisa off to the Castro boy.”

Leaphorn smiled. “You know,” he said, “we cops tend to get too high an opinion of ourselves. When I was up here asking around after Hal disappeared I went away thinking there wasn’t a boyfriend in the background.”

“You got here too quick,” Mrs. Rivera said. “Here at Mancos we let the body get cold before the talking starts.”

“I guess nothing came of that romance,” Leaphorn said. “At least she’s still a widow.”

“From what I heard, it wasn’t from lack of Tommy Castro’s trying. About the time she got out of high school everybody took for 38 of 102

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granted they were a pair. Then Hal showed up.” Mrs. Rivera shrugged, expression rueful. “They made a kind of foursome for a while.”

“Four?”

“Well, sometimes it was five of ’em. This George Shaw, he’d come out with Hal sometimes and Eldon would go. He and Castro were the old heads, the coaches. They’d go elk hunting together. Camping. Rock climbing. Growing up with her dad raising her, and then her big brother, Elisa was quite a tomboy.”

“What broke up the group? Was it the country boy couldn’t compete with the big-city glamour?”

“Oh, I guess that was some of it,” she said. “But Eldon had a falling-out with Tommy. They’re too much alike. Both bull-headed.” Leaphorn digested that. Emma’s big brother hadn’t liked him, either, but that hadn’t bothered Emma. “Do you know what happened?”

“I heard Eldon thought Tommy was out of line making a play for his little sister. She was just out of high school. Eight or ten years between ’em, I guess.”

“So Elisa was willing to let big brother monitor her love life,” Leaphorn said. “I don’t hear about that happening much these days.”

“Me neither,” Mrs. Rivera said, and laughed. “But you know,” she said, suddenly dead serious, “Elisa is an unusual person. Her mother died when she was about in the second grade, but Elisa takes after her. Has a heart big as a pumpkin and a cast-iron backbone, just like her mother. When old man Demott was losing the ranch it was Elisa’s mama who held everything together. Got her husband out of the bars, and out of jail a time or two. One of those people who are aways there in the background looking out for other people. You know?”

Mrs. Rivera paused at this to see what Leaphorn thought of it. Leaphorn, not sure of where this was leading, just nodded.

“So there Elisa was after Hal was out of the picture. Tommy was beginning to court her again, and Eldon wanted to run him off.

They even got into a yelling match down at the High Country Inn. So there’s Elisa with two men to take care of—and knowing how she is I have a theory about that.” She paused again. “It’s just a theory.”

“I’d like to hear it,” Leaphorn said.

“I think she loved them both,” Mrs. Rivera said. “But if she married the Castro boy, what in the wide world was Eldon going to do?

It was her ranch now. Eldon loved it but he wouldn’t stay around and work for Tommy, and Tommy wouldn’t want him to.” She sighed. “If we had a Shakespeare around here, they could have made a tragedy out of it.”

“So this Castro was a rock climber, too,” Leaphorn said. “Does he still live here?”

“If you got gas down at the Texaco station you might have seen him. That’s his garage.”

“What do you think? Did this affection for Castro linger on after she married Hal?”

“If it did, she didn’t let it show.” She thought about that awhile, looked sad, shook her head. “Far as you could tell being an outsider, she was the loyal wife. I couldn’t see much to love in Hal myself but every woman’s different about that and Elisa was the sort who—the more that was wrong with a man, the more she’d stand behind him. She mourned for him. Matter of fact, I think she still does. You hardly ever see her looking happy.”

“How about her brother, then? You said he was sort of strange.”

She shrugged. “Well, he liked to climb up cliffs. To me, that’s strange.”

“Somebody said he taught Hal the sport.”

“That’s not quite the way it was. After old Edgar got the place away from Demott’s daddy, Hal and Shaw would come out in the summers. Shaw had been climbing already. So he didn’t need much teaching. And Demott and Castro were already into climbing some when they had time. Eldon was about six or eight years older than Hal and more of an athlete. From what I heard he was the best of the bunch.”

A customer came in and the cool smell of autumn and the sound of laughter followed him through the doorway from the street.

Leaphorn could think of just one more pertinent question.

“You mentioned Hal Breedlove had overdue note payments when he disappeared. How’d that get paid off?” It was the sort of bank business question he wasn’t sure she would answer. Neither was she. But finally she shook her head and laughed.

“Well, you sort of guessed right about not having it secured the way we should have. Old family, and all. So we weren’t pressing.

But we’d sold off another loan to a Denver bank. Made it to a feedlot operator who liked to go off to Vegas and try to beat the 39 of 102

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blackjack tables. With people like that you make sure you have it secured. Wrote it on sixty-two head of bred heifers he had grazing up in a Forest Service lease. The Denver people foreclosed on it and they called us for help on claiming the property.” She laughed. “Those Denver people had sixty-two head of cows out in the mountains grazing on a Forest Service lease and not an idea in the world about what to do with them. So I told ’em Eldon Demott might round them up for ’em and truck them over to Durango to the auction barn. And he did.”

“He got paid enough for that to pay off Breedlove’s note?”

She laughed again. “Not directly. But I mentioned we made the loan on bred heifers. So we sold the Denver bank a mortgage on sixty-two head, but when Demott went to get ’em, they weren’t pregnant anymore. They were mama cows.” She paused, wanting to see if Leaphorn understood the implications of this. Leaphorn said: “Ah, yes. He didn’t get back from Las Vegas to brand ’em.”

“Ah, yes, is right,” Mrs. Rivera said. “In fact he didn’t get back at all. The sheriff has a warrant out for him. So there was Eldon with sixty-two cows loaded up and all those calves left over. They were all still slicks. Not any of ’em branded yet. Nobody in the world had title to ’em. Nobody owned ’em but the Lord in heaven.”

“Enough to pay off the note?”

“He might’ve had a little bit left over,” she said, and looked at Leaphorn over her glasses. “Wait a minute now,” she said. “Don’t you get any wrong ideas. I don’t actually know what in the world happened to those calves. And I’ve been talking way too much and it’s time to get some work done.”

Back at his car, Leaphorn fished his cellular telephone from the glove compartment, dialed his Window Rock number, and punched in the proper code to retrieve any messages accumulated by his answering machine. The first call was from George Shaw, asking if he had anything to report and saying he could be reached at room 23, Navajo Inn. The second call was from Sergeant Addison Deke at the Chinle police station.

“Better give me a call, Joe,” Deke said. “It probably doesn’t amount to anything but you asked me to sort of keep an eye on Amos Nez and you might like to hear about this.”

Leaphorn didn’t check on whether there was a third call. He dialed the Arizona area code and Chinle police department number.

Yes, Sergeant Deke was in.

He sounded apologetic. “Probably nothing, Joe,” he said. “Probably wasting your time. But after we talked, I told the boys to keep it in their minds that whoever shot Nez might try it again. You know, keep an eye out. Be looking.” Deke hesitated.

Leaphorn, who almost never allowed impatience to show, said, “What did they see?”

“Nothing, actually. But Tazbah Lovejoy came in this morning—I don’t think you know him. He’s a young fellow out of recruit training two years ago. Anyway Tazbah told me he’d run into one of those Resource Enforcement Agency rangers having coffee, and this guy was telling him about seeing a poacher up on the rim of Canyon del Muerto yesterday.” Sergeant Deke hesitated again. This time Leaphorn gave him a moment to organize his thoughts.

“The ranger told Tazbah he was checking on some illegal firewood cutting, and he stopped at that turnout overlook down into del Muerto. Wanted to take a leak. He was getting that done, standing there, looking out across the canyon, and he kept seeing reflections off something or other across the canyon. No road over there, you know, and he wondered about it. So he went to his truck and got his binoculars to see what he could see. There was a fellow over there with binoculars. The reflections turned out to be coming off the lenses, I guess. Anyway, he had a rifle, too.”

“Deer hunter, maybe,” Leaphorn said.

Deke laughed. “Joe,” he said. “How long’s it been since you’ve been deer hunting? That’d be out on that tongue of the plateau between del Muerto and Black Rock Canyon. Nobody’s seen a deer over there since God knows when.”

“Maybe it was an Anglo deer hunter then. Did he get a good look at him?”

“I don’t think so. The ranger thought it was funny. Hunter over there and nothing to hunt. But I guess he was going to call it attempted poaching, or conspiracy to poach. So he drove back up to Wheatfields campground and tried to get back in there as far as he could on that old washed-out track. But he gave up on it.”

“Did he get a good enough look to say man or woman?”

“I asked Tazbah and he said the ranger didn’t know for sure. He said they were thinking man, on grounds a woman wouldn’t be stupid enough to go hunting where there wasn’t anything to shoot at. I thought you’d like to know about it because it was just up the canyon a half mile or so from where that sniper shot old Amos.”

“Which would put it just about right over the Nez place,” Leaphorn said.

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“Exactly,” Deke said. “You could jump right down on his roof.”

13

ACTING LIEUTENANT JIM CHEE

was parked at sunrise on the access road to Beclabito Day School because he wanted to talk to Officer Teddy Begayaye at a private place. Officer Begayaye would be driving to the office from his home at Tec Nos Pos. Chee wanted to tell him that vacation schedules were being posted today, that he was getting the Thanksgiving week vacation time he had asked for. He wanted Begayaye to provide him some sort of justification (beyond his twelve years of seniority) for approving it. Another member of Chee’s criminal investigation squad wanted the same days off, namely, Officer Manuelito. She had applied for them first, and Chee wanted to give her some reason (beyond her total lack of seniority) why she didn’t get it—thereby avoiding friction in the department. Thus Chee had parked where Begayaye could see him instead of hiding his patrol car behind the day school sign in hope of nabbing a speeder.

But now Chee wasn’t thinking of vacation schedules. He was thinking of the date he had tonight with Janet Pete, back from whatever law business had taken her to Washington. Janet shared an apartment at Gallup with Louise Guard, another of the DNA lawyers. Chee had hopes that Louise, as much as he liked her, would be away somewhere for the evening (or, better, had found herself another apartment). He wanted to show Janet a videotape he’d borrowed of a traditional Navajo wedding. She had more or less agreed, with qualifications, that they would do the ceremony the Navajo way and that he could pick the haatalii to perform it.

But she clearly had her doubts about it. Janet’s mother had something more socially correct in mind. However, if he lucked out and Ms. Guard actually had shoved off for somewhere, he would hold the videotape for another evening. He and Janet hadn’t seen each other for a week and there were better ways to occupy the evening.

The vehicle rolling down U.S. 64 toward him was a camper truck, dirty and plastered with tourist stickers. Dick Finch’s vehicle. It slowed to a crawl, with Finch making a series of hand signals. Most of them were meaningless to Chee, but one of them said “follow me.”

Chee started his engine and followed, driving eastward on 64 with Finch speeding. Chee topped the ridge. Finch’s truck had already disappeared, but a plume of dust hanging over the dirt road that led past the Rattlesnake pump station betrayed it. Chee made the left turn into the dust—thinking how quickly this arid climate could replace wet snow with blowable dirt. Just out of sight of the highway the camper was parked, with Finch standing beside it.

Finch walked over, smiling that smile of his. Lots of white teeth.

“Good morning,” Chee said.

“Captain Largo wants us to work together,” Finch said. “So do my people. Get along with the Navajos, they tell me. And the Utes and the Zunis, Arizona State Police, the county mounties, and everybody. Good policy, don’t you think?”

“Why not?” Chee said.

“Well, there might be a reason why not,” Finch said, still smiling, waiting for Chee to say, “Like what?” Chee just looked at him until Finch tired of the game.

“For example, somebody’s been taking a little load of heifers now and then off that grazing lease west of your Ship Rock mountain.

They’re owned by an old codger who lives over near Toadlena. He rents grass from a fella named Maryboy, and his livestock is all mixed up with Maryboy’s and nobody keeps track of the cattle.”

Finch waited again. So did Chee. What Finch was telling him so far was common enough. People who had grazing leases let other people use them for a fee. One of the problems of catching cattle thieves was the animals might be gone a month before anyone noticed. Finally Chee said: “What’s your point?”

“Point is, as we say, I’ve got reason to believe that the fella picking up these animals is this fella I’ve been trying to nail. He comes back to the mountain about every six months or so and picks up a load. Does the same thing over around Bloomfield, and Whitehorse Lake, and Burnham, and other places. When I catch him, a lot of this stealing stops. My job gets easier. So a couple of months ago, I found where he got the last ones he took from that Ship Rock pasture. The son of a bitch was throwing hay over a fence at a place where he could back his truck in. Chumming them up like he was a fisherman. I imagine he’d blow his horn when he threw the hay over. Cows are curious. Worse than cats. They’d come to see about it. And they’ve got good memories. Do it about twice, and when they hear a horn they think of good alfalfa hay. Come running.” Finch laughed. Chee knew exactly where this was leading.

“Manuelito spotted that hay, too,” Chee said. “She noticed how the fence posts had been dug up there, loosened so they can be pulled up. She took me out to show me.”

“I saw you,” Finch said. “Watched you through my binoculars from about two miles away. Trouble is, our cow thief was probably watching, too. He’s baited that place three times now. No use wasting any more hay. It’s time to collect his cows.” Finch stared at Chee, his smile still genial. Chee felt his face flushing, which seemed to be the reaction Finch was awaiting.

“But he ain’t going to do it now, is he? You can bet your ass he’s got a set of binoculars every bit as good as mine, and he’s careful.

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He sees a police car parked there. Sees a couple of cops tromping around. He’s gone and he won’t be back and a lot of my hard work is down the goddamn tube.”

“This suggests something to me,” Chee said.

“I hoped it would. I hoped it would make you want to learn a little more about this business before you start practicing it.”

“Actually it suggests that you screwed up. You had about four hours of talking to me on that ride up to Mancos, with me listening all the way. You told me about this Zorro you’re trying to catch—and I guess this is him. But you totally forgot to tell me about this trap you were going to spring so we could coordinate. How could you forget something like that?” Finch’s face had also become a little redder through its windburn. The smile had gone away. He stared at Chee. Looked down at his boots. When he looked up he was grinning.

“Touché! I got a bad habit of underestimating folks. You say that woman cop with you noticed the fence posts had been dug loose. I missed that. Good-looking lady, too. You give her my congratulations, will you. Tell her any old time she wants to work alongside of me, or under me either, she’s more than welcome.”

Chee nodded, started his engine.

“Hold it just a minute,” Finch said, his smile looking slightly more genuine. “I didn’t stop you just to start an argument. Wondered if I could get you to be a witness for something.”

Chee left the motor running. “For what?”

“There’s five Angus calves at a feedlot over by Kirtland. Looks like they were branded through a wet gunnysack, like the wise guys do it, but they’re still so fresh they haven’t even scabbed over yet. And the fellow that signed the bill of sale hasn’t got any mother cows. He claimed he sold ’em off—which we can check on. On the other hand, a fellow named Bramlett is short five Angus calves off some leased pasture. I’m going over and see if there’s five wet cows there. If there is I call the feedlot and they bring the calves over and I turn on my video camera and get a tape of the mama cows saying hello to their missing calves. Letting ’em nurse, all that.”

“So what do you need me for?”

“It’d be a mostly Navajo jury, and the cow thief—he’s a Navajo,” Finch said. “Be good to have a Navajo cop on the witness stand.” Chee looked at his watch. By now Teddy Begayaye would be at the office celebrating getting his requested vacation time, and Manuelito would be sore about it. Too late for any preventive medicine there. But he had, after all, ruined Finch’s trap. Besides, it would give him another hour away from the office and something positive for a change to report to Captain Largo on the cow-theft front.

“I’ll follow you,” Chee said, “and if you speed, you get a ticket.” Finch sped, but kept it within the Navajo Tribal Police tolerance zone. He parked beside the fence at the holding pasture at just about nine A.M.

It was bottomland here, a pasture irrigated by a ditch from the San Juan River, and it held maybe two hundred head of Angus—young cows and their calves—last spring’s crop but still nursing. Chee parked as Finch was climbing the fence, snagging his jeans on the barbed wire.