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“I think I saw a wet one already,” he shouted, pointing into the herd, which now was moving uneasily away. “You stay back by your car.”

Wet one?

Chee thought. He’d been raised with sheep, not cows. But “wet” must be what you called a cow with a painfully full udder. A cow whose nursing calf was missing. Finch had been right about cow memories. Their memory connected men on foot with being roped, bulldogged, and branded. They were scattering away from Finch. So the question was, how was Finch going to locate five such cows in that milling herd and know he hadn’t just counted the same cow five times?

Finch picked himself a spot free of cow manure, dropped to his knees, and rolled over on his back. He folded his arms under his head and lay motionless. The cows, which had shied fearfully away from him, stopped their nervous milling. They stared at Finch.

He yawned, squirmed into a more comfortable position. A heifer, head and ears stretched forward, moved a cautious step toward him. Others followed, noses pointed, ears forward. The calves, with no memory of branding to inhibit them, were first. By eleven minutes after nine, Finch was surrounded by a ring of Angus cattle, sniffing and staring.

As for Finch, only his head was moving, and he made an udder inspection. He arose, creating a panic, and walked through the scattering herd, already dialing his portable telephone, talking into it as he climbed the fence. He closed it, walked up to Chee’s window.

“Five wet ones,” he said. “They’re going to bring the calves right out. I’m going to videotape it, but it’d help if you’d stick around so you can testify. You know, tell the jury that the calves ran right up to their mamas and started nursing, and their mamas let ’em do it.”

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“That was pretty damn clever,” Chee said.

“I told you about cows being curious,” Finch said. “They’re scared of a man standing up. Lay down and they say, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ and come on over to take a look.” He brushed off his jeans. “Drawback is you’re likely to get manure all over yourself.”

“Well, it’s a lot quicker than chasing them all over the pasture, trying to get a look.” Finch was enjoying this approval.

“You know where I learned that trick? I was in the dentist’s office at Farmington waiting to get a root canal. Picked up a New Yorker

magazine and there was an article in there about a Nevada brand inspector name of Chris Collis. It was a trick he used. I called him and asked him if it really worked. He said sure.”

Finch fished his video camera out of the truck cab, fiddled with it. Chee radioed his office, reported his location, collected his messages. One was from Joe Leaphorn. It was brief.

A truck from the feedlot arrived bearing two men and five terrified Angus calves. Each was ear-tagged with its number and released into the pasture. Each ran, bawling, in search of its mother, found her, underwent a maternal inspection, was approved and allowed to nurse while Finch videotaped the happy reunions.

But Chee wasn’t paying as much attention as he might have been. While Finch was counting turgid udders, Chee had checked with his office. Leaphorn wanted to talk to him again about the Fallen Man. He said he was working for the Breedlove family now.

14

THE QUESTION NAGGING AT JIM CHEE

wasn’t the sort he wanted to explore on the Tribal Police radio band. He stopped at the Hogback trading post, dropped a quarter in the pay phone, and called the number Leaphorn had left. It proved to be the Anasazi Inn in Farmington, but the front desk said Leaphorn had checked out. Chee dropped in another quarter and called his own office. Jenifer answered. Yes, Leaphorn had called again. He said he was on his way back from Farmington to Window Rock and he would drop by and try to catch Chee at his office.

Chee got there about five minutes faster than the speed limit allowed. Leaphorn’s car was in the parking lot. The man himself was perched, ramrod straight, on a chair in the waiting room, reading yesterday’s copy of Navajo Times.

“If you have a couple of minutes, I want to pass on some information,” Leaphorn said. “Otherwise, I can catch you when you have some time.”

“I have time,” Chee said, and ushered him into his office.

Leaphorn sat. “I’ll be brief. I’ve taken a retainer from the Breedlove Corporation. Actually, it’s really the family, I guess. They want me to sort of reinvestigate the disappearance of Hal Breedlove.” He paused, awaited a reaction. If he was reading Chee’s studiously blank expression properly, the young man didn’t like the arrangement.

“So it’s official business for you now,” Chee said. “At least unofficially official.”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “I wanted you to know that because I may be bothering you now and then. With questions.” He paused again.

“Is that it?” Chee asked. If it was, he had some questions of his own.

“There’s something else I wanted to tell you. I think it’s pretty clear the family thinks Hal was murdered. If they have any evidence of that they’re not telling me. Maybe it’s just that they want it to be murder. And they want to be able to prove it. They want to regain title to the ranch.”

“Oh,” Chee said. “Did they tell you that?”

Leaphorn hesitated, his expression quizzical. What the devil was bothering Chee? “I was thinking that would be the most likely motive,” he said. “What do you think?”

Chee nodded noncommittally.

“Can you tell me who you made the deal with?” he asked.

“You mean the individual?” Leaphorn said. “I think private detectives are supposed to have a thing about client confidentiality, but I haven’t learned to think like a private eye. Never will. This is my one and only venture. George Shaw handed me my check.” He laughed, and told Chee how he’d outsmarted himself, trying to learn how big a deal this was for the Breedlove Corporation.

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“McDermott,” Leaphorn said. “John McDermott. He’s the lawyer handling it. He called me and arranged the meeting. Works for a Washington firm, but I think he used to have an office in Albuquerque. And—” He stopped, aware of Chee’s expression. “You know this guy?”

“Indirectly,” Chee said. “He was sort of an Indian affairs specialist for an Albuquerque firm. I think he represented Peabody Coal when they were negotiating one of the coal contracts with us, and a couple of pipeline companies dealing with the Jicarillas. Then he moved to Washington and is doing the same thing on that level. I think it’s with the same law firm.” Leaphorn looked surprised. “You know a lot more about him than I do,” he said. “How’s his reputation? It okay?”

“As a lawyer? I guess so. He used to be a professor.”

“He struck me as arrogant. Is that your impression?”

Chee shrugged. “I don’t know him. I just know a little about him.”

“Well, he didn’t make a good first impression.”

“Could you tell me when he called you? I mean made the first contact.” The question obviously surprised Leaphorn. “Let’s see,” he said. “Two or three days ago.”

“Was it last Tuesday?”

“Tuesday? Let’s see. Yeah. It was a call on my answering machine. I returned it.”

“Morning or afternoon?”

“I don’t know. It could have been either one. But it’s still on the recording. I think I could find out.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Chee said.

“Will do,” Leaphorn said, and paused. “I’m trying to place the date. That would have been about the day after you got the skeleton identified. Right?”

Chee sighed. “Lieutenant Leaphorn,” he said, “you already know just what I’m thinking, don’t you?”

“Well, I’d guess you’re wondering how that lawyer found out so quickly that the skeleton had turned out to be somebody so important to his client. No announcement had been made. Nothing in the papers until a day or so later and I don’t think it ever made the national news. Just a little story around here, and about three paragraphs in the Albuquerque Journal, and a little bit more in the Rocky Mountain News.”

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

“But you’re ahead of me on something else. I don’t know why it’s important.”

“You couldn’t guess,” Chee said. “It’s something personal.”

“Oh,” Leaphorn said. He ducked his head, shook it, and said, “Oh,” again. Sad, now. And then he looked up. “You know, they could have had this thing staked out, though. An important client. Maybe they had some law firm out here retained to tip them off if anything turned up that would bear in any way at all on this son-and-heir being missing. They knew he was a mountain climber. So when an unidentified body turns up . . . “ He shrugged. “Who knows how law firms operate?” he said, not believing it himself.

“Sure,” Chee said. “Anything’s possible.”

Leaphorn was leaving, hat in hand, but he stopped in the doorway and turned.

“One other thing that might bear on all this,” he said. He told Chee of Sergeant Deke’s account of the man with the binoculars and the rifle on the canyon rim. “Deke said he’s going up the canyon and warn Nez that somebody may still be trying to kill him. I hope we can figure this out before they do it.”

Chee sat for a moment looking at the closed door, thinking of Leaphorn, thinking of Janet Pete, of John McDermott back in New Mexico. Was he back in her life? Apparently he was. For the first time, the Fallen Man became more than an abstract tragedy in Chee’s mind. He buzzed Jenifer.

“I’m taking off now for Gallup,” he said. “If Largo needs me—if anybody calls—tell them I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Hey,” Jenifer said, “you have two meetings on the calendar for this afternoon. The security man from the community college and Captain Largo was—”

“Call them and tell them I had to cancel,” Chee said, forgetting to say please, and forgetting to say thanks when he hung up. Captain Largo wouldn’t like this. But then he didn’t particularly like Captain Largo and he sure as hell didn’t like being an acting lieutenant.

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15

LOUISE GUARD’S FORD ESCORT

was not in the driveway of the little house she shared with Janet Pete in Gallup. Good news, but not as good as it would have seemed when Jim Chee was feeling better about life. This evening his mood had been swinging back and forth between a sort of grim anger at the world that Janet occupied and self-contempt for his own immature attitude. It hadn’t taken long for Chee, who was good at self-analysis, to determine that his problem was mostly jealousy. Maybe it was 90 percent jealousy. But even so, that left 10

percent or so that seemed legitimate.

He gave the door of his pickup the hard slam required to shut it and walked up the pathway with the videotape of the traditional wedding clutched in one hand and the other holding a pot of some sort of autumn-blooming flowers he’d bought for her at Gallup Best Blossoms. It wasn’t a very impressive floral display, but what could you expect in November?

“Ah, Jim,” Janet said, and greeted him with such a huge and enthusiastic hug that it left him helpless—tape in one hand and flowerpot in the other. It also left him feeling guilty. What the devil was wrong with him? Janet was beautiful. Janet was sweet. She loved him. She was wearing a set of designer jeans that fit her perfectly and a blouse of something that shimmered. Her black hair was done in a new fashion he’d been observing on the nighttime soap opera shows. It made her look young and jaunty and like someone the muscular actor in the tank top would be laughing with at the fancy party in a Coca-Cola commercial.

“I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you are,” Chee said. “Just back from Washington, you should be looking tired.” Janet was in the kitchen by then, watering whatever it was he’d brought her, opening the refrigerator and fixing something for them.

“It wasn’t tiresome,” she shouted. “It was lots of fun. The people in the BIA were on their very best behavior, and the people over at Justice were reasonable for a change. And there was time to see a show some German artist had going in the National Gallery. It was really interesting stuff. Partly sculpture and partly drawings. And then there was the concert I told you about. The one in the Library of Congress hall. It was partly Mozart. Really great.”

Yes. The concert. He’d thought about that before. Maybe too much. In Washington and at the Library of Congress it wouldn’t be a public event. It would be exclusive. Some sort of high-society fund-raiser. Shaking down the social set for some worthy literacy cause, probably. Almost certainly it would be by invitation only. Or just members and guests for the big-money patrons of library projects. She’d mentioned some ambassador being there. He had thought, once, that John McDermott might have taken her. But that was crazy. She detested the man. He had taken advantage of the leverage a distinguished professor has over his students. He’d seduced Janet. He’d taken her to Albuquerque as his live-in intern, had taken her to Washington as his token Indian. She had come back to New Mexico ashamed and brokenhearted when she realized what he was doing. There were a dozen ways McDermott could have learned the Fallen Man had been identified. Leaphorn, as usual, was right. McDermott’s firm probably had connections with lawyers in New Mexico. Of course they would. They would be working with Arizona and New Mexico law firms on Indian business. Anyway, he damn sure wasn’t going to bring it up. It would be insulting.

From the kitchen the sound of something clattering, the smell of coffee. Chee inspected the room around him. Nothing different that he could see except for something or other on the mantle over the gas-log fireplace. It was made of thin stainless steel tubing combined with shaped Plexiglas in three or four colors held together by what seemed to be a mixture of aluminum wiring and thread. Most peculiar. In fact, weird. Chee grinned at it. Something Louise had found somewhere. A conversation piece. Louise haunted garage sales, and in Gallup, garage sales were always offering odd harvests.

Janet emerged with a cup of coffee for him—fragile china on a thin-as-paper saucer—and a crystal goblet of wine for herself. She snuggled onto the sofa beside him, clicked glass against cup, smiled at him, and said, “To your capture of a whole squadron of cattle rustlers, your promotion to commander in chief of the Navajo police, chief honcho of the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude, and international boss of Interpol.”

“You forgot my busting up the Shiprock graffiti vandals and election as sheriff of San Juan County and bureaucrat in chief of the Drug Enforcement Agency.”

“All that, too,” Janet said, raised her glass again, and sipped. She picked up the videocassette and inspected it. “What’s this?”

“Remember?” Chee said. “My paternal uncle’s niece was having a traditional wedding at their place north of Little Water. I got him to get me a copy of the videotape they had made.”

Janet turned it over and inspected the back, which was just as black and blank as the other side. “You want me to look at it?”

“Sure,” Chee said, his good feelings fading fast. “Remember? We talked about that.” They had argued a little, actually. About cultures, and traditions, and all that. It wasn’t that Janet was opposed, but her mother wanted a huge ceremony in an Episcopal cathedral in Baltimore. And Janet had agreed, or so he thought, that they would do both. “You said you had never been to a regular Navajo wedding with a shaman and the entire ceremony. I thought you’d be interested.”

“Louise described it to me,” Janet said, and put the videotape on the coffee table in a way that made Chee want to change the subject. Suddenly Louise’s peculiar purchase seemed useful.

“I see Louise has been sailing the garage sales again. Quite an acquisition there,” he said, nodding toward the thing. He laughed.

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Janet had no comment.

Chee said: “What’s it for?” And waited, and belatedly understood that he should have kept his stupid mouth shut.

“It’s called ‘Technic Inversion Number Three, Side View,’” Janet said.

“Remarkable,” Chee said. “Very interesting.”

“I found it in the Kremont Gallery,” Janet said, glum. “The artist is a man named Egon Kuzluzski. The critic at the Washington Post called him the most innovative sculptor of the decade. An artist who finds beauty and meaning in the technology which is submerging modern culture.”

“Very complex,” Chee said. “And the colors . . . “ He couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence.

“I really thought you would like it,” Janet said. “I’m sorry you don’t.”

“I do,” Chee said, but he knew it was too late for that. “Well, not really. But I think it takes time to understand something that’s so innovative. And then tastes vary, of course.”

Janet didn’t respond to that.

“It’s the reason they have horse races,” Chee said, and attempted a chuckle. “Differences of opinion, you know.”

“I ran into something interesting in Washington,” Janet said, in a fairly obvious effort to cut off this discussion. “I think it was why everybody was so cooperative with our proposals. Crime on Indian reservations has become very chic inside the Beltway.

Everybody had read up on narcotics invading Indian territory, and Indian gang problems, Indian graffiti, Indian homicides, child abuse, the whole schmear. All very popular with the Beltway intelligentsia. We have finally made it into the halls of the mighty.”

“I guess that would fall into the bad news, good news category,” Chee said, grinning with relief at being let off the hook.

“Whatever you call it, it means everybody is looking for our expertise these days.” Chee’s grin faded. “You got a job offer?”

“I didn’t mean me. But one of the top assistants in BIA Law and Order wanted to let me know they’re recruiting experienced reservation cops with the right kind of credentials for Civil Service, and I heard the same thing over at Justice.” She smiled at him.

“At Justice they actually asked me to be a talent scout for them, and when they told me what they wanted it sounded like they were describing you.” She patted him on the leg. “I told ’em I’d already signed you up.”

“Thank God for that,” Chee said. “I did time in Washington a couple of times, remember? At the FBI academy for their training course, and once on an investigation.” He shuddered, remembering. At the academy he had been the tolerated rube, one of “them.” But they would, naturally, look on Janet as one of “us.” It was a fact he’d have to find a way to deal with.

Janet removed her hand.

“Really, Jim, Washington’s a nice place. It’s cleaner than most cities, and something beautiful every place you look and there’s always—”

“Beautiful what? Buildings? Monuments? There’s too much smog, too much noise, too much traffic, too damn many people everywhere. You can’t see the stars at night. Too cloudy to see the sunset.” He shook his head.

“There’s the breeze coming in off the Potomac,” Janet said. “And the clean salty smell of the bay, and seafood fresh from the ocean and good wine. In April, the cherry blossoms, and the green, green hills, and the great art galleries, and theater, and music.” She paused, waved her hands, overcome by the enormous glories of Washington’s culture. “And the pay scales are about double what either one of us can make here—especially in the Justice Department.”

“Working in the J. Edgar Hoover Building,” Chee said. “That’d be a real kick. That old blackmailer should have been doing about twenty years for misuse of public records, but they named the building after him. At least it’s an appropriately ugly building.” Janet let that one lie, sipped her wine, reminded Chee his coffee was getting cold. He tested it. She was right.

“Jim,” she said, “that concert was absolutely thrilling. It was the Philadelphia Orchestra. The annual Founders Society affair. The First Lady was there, and all sorts of diplomats—all white tie and the best jewels dug out of the safety-deposit boxes. And Mozart.

You like Mozart.”

“I like a lot of Mozart,” Chee said.

He took a deep breath. “It was one of those members-only things, I guess,” he said. “Members and guests.”

“Right,” she said, smiling at him. “I was mingling with the crème de la crème.”

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“You betcha,” Janet said, still smiling. Then she realized where Chee was headed. The smile went away.

“You’re going to ask me who took me,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

“I was a guest of John McDermott,” she said.

Chee sat silent and motionless. He had known it, but he still didn’t want to believe it.

“Does that bother you?”

“No,” Chee said. “I guess not. Should it?”

“It shouldn’t,” she said. “After all, we go way back. He was my teacher. And then I worked with him.” He was looking at her. Wondering what to say. She flushed. “What are you thinking?” she said.

“I’m thinking I had it all wrong. I thought you detested the man for the way he treated you. The way he used you.” She looked away. “I did for a while. I was angry.”

“But not now? No longer angry?”

“The Navajo way,” she said. “You’re supposed to get yourself back into harmony with the way the world is.”

“Did you know he’s out here again?”

She nodded.

“Did you know he’s hired Joe Leaphorn to look into that Fallen Man business?”

“He told me he was going to try,” she said.

“I wondered how he learned about the skeleton being identified as Harold Breedlove,” Chee said. “It wasn’t the sort of story that would have hit the Washington Post.”

“No,” she said.

“Did you tell him?”

“Why not?” she said, staring at him. “Why the hell not?”

“Well, I don’t know. The man you’re going to marry is on the telephone reminding you he loves you. And you ask him about a case he’s working on, and so he sort of violates police protocol and tells you the skeleton has been identified.” He stopped. This wasn’t fair. He’d held this anger in for too many hours. He had heard his voice, thick with emotion.

She was still staring at him, face grim, waiting for him to continue.

“So?” she said. “Go on.”

“So I’m not exactly sure what happened next. Did you call him right away and tell him what you’d learned?” She didn’t respond to that. But she edged a bit away from him on the sofa.

“One more question and then I’ll drop it. Did that son of a bitch ask you to get that information out of me? In other words, I want to know whether he—”

Janet was on her feet.

“I think you’d better go now,” she said.

He got up. His anger had drained away now. He simply felt tired and sick.

“Just one more thing I’d like to know,” he said. “It would tell me something about just how important this business is to the Breedlove Corporation. In other words if you’d told him about the skeleton being found up there when you first got to Washington, it might naturally have reminded McDermott of Hal Breedlove disappearing. And he’d want to know who the skeleton belonged to.

But if it was already on his mind even before that, if he brought it up instead of you, then it would mean a higher level of—it would mean they already—”

“Go away,” Janet said. She handed him the videotape. “And take this with you.” 47 of 102

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He took the tape.

“Janet,” he said. “Did you recommend that he hire Leaphorn to work for him?” He asked that before he noticed the angry tears in Janet’s eyes. She didn’t answer and he didn’t expect her to.

16

DECEMBER CAME TO THE FOUR CORNERS

but winter lingered up in the Utah mountains. It had buried the Wasatch Range under three feet and ventured far enough south to give Colorado’s San Juans a snowcap. But the brief post-Halloween storm that had whitened the slopes of Ship Rock and the Chuskas proved to be a false threat. It was dry again across the Navajo Nation—skies dark blue, mornings cool, sun dazzling. The south end of the Colorado Plateau was enjoying that typically beautiful autumn weather that makes the inevitable first blizzard such a dangerous surprise.

Beautiful or not, Jim Chee was keeping himself far too busy to enjoy it—even if his glum mood would have allowed it. He had learned that he could handle administrative duties if he tried hard enough, and that he would never, ever enjoy them. For the first time in his life, he felt no sense of pleasure as he went to work. But the work got done. He made progress. The vacation schedules were established in a way that produced no serious discontent among the officers who worked with him. A system had been devised whereby whatever policemen who happened to be in the Hogback neighborhood would drop in on Diamonte’s establishment for a friendly chat. This happened several times a week, thus keeping Diamonte careful and his customers uneasy without giving him any solid grounds for complaint. As a by-product, it had also produced a couple of arrests of young fellows who had been ignoring fugitive warrants.

On top of that, his budget for next year was about half finished and a plan had been drafted for keeping better track of gasoline usage and patrol car maintenance. This had produced an unusual (indeed, unprecedented in the experience of Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee) smile on the face of Captain Largo. Even Officer Bernadette Manuelito seemed to be responding to this new efficiency in Chee’s criminal investigation domain.

This came about after the word reached the ear of Captain Largo (and very shortly thereafter the ear of Acting Lieutenant Chee) that Mr. Finch had nailed a pair of cattle-stealing brothers so thoroughly that they had actually admitted not just rustling five unweaned calves but also about six or seven other such larcenies from the New Mexico side of Chee’s jurisdiction. So overwhelming was the evidence, the captain said, that they had plea-bargained themselves into jail at Aztec.

“Well, good,” Chee had said.

“Well, goddammit,” Largo replied, “why can’t we nail some of those bastards ourselves?” Largo’s imperial “we” had actually meant him, Chee realized. He also realized, before this uncomfortable conversation ended, that Finch had revealed to Largo not only Chee’s ignorance of heifer curiosity but how he and Officer Manuelito had screwed up Finch’s trap out by Ship Rock. Chee had walked down the hall away from this meeting with several resolutions strongly formed. He would catch Finch’s favorite cow thief before Finch could get his hands on him. Having beaten Finch at Finch’s game, he would resign his role as acting lieutenant and go back to being a real policeman. There would be no more trying to be a bureaucrat to impress Janet.

And to accomplish the first phase of this program he would shift Manuelito over to work on rustler cases—she and Largo being the only ones in the Shiprock District who took it seriously.

Officer Bernadette Manuelito responded to this shift in duties by withdrawing her request for a transfer. At least, that was Jim Chee’s presumption. Jenifer had another notion. She had noticed that the frequent calls between the lady lawyer in Window Rock and the acting lieutenant in Shiprock had abruptly ceased. Jenifer was very good at keeping the Shiprock District criminal investigation office running smoothly because she made it her business to know what the hell was going on. She made a couple of calls to old friends in the small world of law enforcement down at Window Rock. Yes, indeed. The pretty lawyer had been observed shedding tears while in conversation with a lady friend in her car. She had also been seen having dinner at the Navajo Inn with that good-looking lawyer from Washington. Things, it seemed, were in flux. Having learned this, it was Jenifer’s theory that Officer Manuelito would learn of it, too—not as directly perhaps, or as fast, but she would learn of it.

Whatever her motives, Manuelito seemed to like her new duties. She stood in front of Chee’s desk, looking excited, but not about rustling.

“That’s what I said,” she said. “They showed up at old Mr. Maryboy’s place last night. They told him they wanted trespass permission on his grazing lease. They wanted to climb Ship Rock.”

“And it was George Shaw and John McDermott?” Chee said.

“Yes, sir,” Officer Manuelito said. “That’s what they told him. They paid him a hundred dollars and said if they did any damage they’d pay him for that.”

“My God,” Chee said. “You mean those two lawyers are going to climb Ship Rock?”

“Old man Maryboy said the little one had climbed it before. Years ago. He said most of the white people just sneaked in and climbed it, but George Shaw had come to his house to get permission. He remembered that. How polite Shaw had been. But this 48 of 102

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time Shaw said they were bringing a team of climbers.”

“So the tall one with the mustache probably isn’t going up,” Chee said, wondering if he sounded disappointed. But should he be disappointed? Would having McDermott fall off a cliff solve his problem with Janet? He didn’t think so.

“They didn’t say why they were going up there, I guess,” Chee said.

“No, sir. I asked him about that. Mr. Maryboy said they didn’t tell him why.” She laughed, showing very pretty white teeth. “He said why do white men do anything? He said he knew a white fellow once who was trying to get a patent on a cordless bungee jumper.”

Chee rewarded that with a chuckle. The way he’d heard it, it was a stringless yo-yo, but Maryboy had revised it to fit mountain climbers.

“But what I wanted to tell you about was business,” Officer Manuelito said. “Mr. Maryboy told me he was missing four steers.”

“Maryboy,” Chee said. “Let’s see. He has—”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “That’s his lease where we found the loose fence posts. Where somebody was throwing the hay over the fence. I went by his place to tell him about that. I was going to give him a notebook and ask him to keep track of strange trucks and trailers.

He said I was a little late, but he took the notebook and said he’d help.”

“Did he say how late?” Maryboy hadn’t reported a cattle theft. Chee was sure of that. He checked on everything involving rustling every day. “Did he say why he hadn’t reported the loss?”

“He said he missed ’em sometime last spring. He was selling off steers and came up short. And he said he didn’t report it because he didn’t think it would do any good. He said when it happened before, a couple of times, he went in and told us about it but he never did get his animals back.”

That was one of the frustrations Chee had been learning to live with in dealing with rustling. People didn’t keep track of their cattle.

They turned them out to graze, and if they had a big grazing lease and reliable water maybe they’d only see them three or four times a year. Maybe only at calving time and branding time. And if you did see them, maybe you wouldn’t notice if you were short a couple. Chee had spent his boyhood with sheep. He could tell an Angus from a Hereford but beyond that one cow looked a lot like every other cow. He could understand how you wouldn’t miss a couple, and if you did, what could you do about it? Maybe the coyotes had got ’em, or maybe it was the little green men coming down in flying saucers. Whatever, you weren’t going to get ’em back.

“So we put an X on our map and mark it ‘unreported,’” Chee said, “which doesn’t help much.”

“It might,” Officer Manuelito said. “Later on.”

Chee was extracting their map from his desk drawer. He kept it out of sight on the theory that everyone in the office except Manuelito would think this project was silly. Or, worse, they would think he was trying to copy Joe Leaphorn’s famous map.

Everybody in the Tribal Police seemed to know about that and the Legendary Lieutenant’s use of it to exercise his theory that everything fell into a pattern, every effect had its cause, and so forth.

The map was a U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle chart large enough in scale to show every arroyo, hogan, windmill, and culvert.

Chee pushed his in basket aside, rolled it out and penned a tiny blue ? on the Maryboy grazing lease with a tiny 3 beside it. Beside that he marked in the date the loss had been discovered.

Officer Manuelito looked at it and said: “A blue three?”

“Signifies unreported possible thefts,” Chee said. “Three of them.” He waved his hand around the map, indicating a scattering of such designations. “I’ve been adding them as we learn about them.”

“Good idea,” Manuelito said. “And add an X

there, too. Maryboy is going to be a lookout for us.” She pulled up a chair, sat, leaned her elbows on the desk, and studied the chart.

Chee added the X. The map now had maybe a score of those, each marking the home of a volunteer equipped with a notebook and ballpoint pen. Chee had bought the supplies with his own money, preferring that to trying to explain this system to Largo. If it worked, which today didn’t seem likely to Chee, he would decide whether to ask for a reimbursement of his twenty-seven-dollar outlay.

“Funny how this is already working out,” Manuelito said. “I thought it would take months.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the patterns you talked about,” she said. “How those single-animal thefts tend to fall around the middle of the month.” Chee looked. Indeed, most of the 1 s that marked single-theft sites were followed by mid-month dates. And a high percentage of those midmonth dates were clustered along the reservation border. But what did that signify? He said: “Yeah.” 49 of 102

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“I don’t think we should concentrate on those,” she said, still staring thoughtfully at the map. “But if you want me to, I could check with the bars and liquor stores around Farmington and try to work up a list of guys who come in about the middle of the month with a fresh supply of money.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t prove anything, but it would give us a list of people to look out for.” About halfway through this monologue, Chee’s brain caught up with Manuelito’s thinking. The Navajo Nation relief checks arrived about the first of the month. Every reservation cop knew that the heavy workload produced by the need to arrest drunks tended to ease off in the second week when the liquor addicts had used up their cash. He visualized a dried-out drunk driving past a pasture and seeing a five-hundred-dollar cow staring through the fence at him. How could the man resist? And why hadn’t he thought of that?

He thought of it now. Weeks compiling the list, weeks spent cross-checking, sorting, coming up finally with four or five cases, getting maybe two convictions resulting in hundred-dollar fines, which would be suspended, and thirty-day sentences, which would be converted to probation. Meanwhile, serious crime would continue to flourish.

“I think instead we’ll sort those out and set them aside. Let’s concentrate on solving the multiple thefts,” Chee said.

“There’s a pattern there, too, I think,” Officer Manuelito said. “Am I right?” Chee had noticed this one himself. The multiple thefts tended to show up in empty country—from grazing leases like Maryboy’s where the owner might not see his herd for a month or so. They talked about that, which led them back to their growing list of rustler-watchers, which led them back to Lucy Sam.

“You looked through her telescope,” Manuelito said. “Did you notice she could see that place where the fence posts were loose?” Chee shook his head. He had been looking at the mountain. Thinking of the Fallen Man stranded on the cliff up there, calling for help.

“You could,” Manuelito said. “I looked.”

“I think I should go talk to her,” Chee said. But he wasn’t thinking of rustling when he said it. He was wondering what Lucy Sam’s father might have seen all those years ago when Hal Breedlove had huddled on that little shelf waiting to die.

17

THE SOUND OF BANG, BANG, BANG, thud, thud

stopped Joe Leaphorn in his tracks. It came from somewhere up Cache Creek, nearby, just around the bend and beyond a stream-side stand of aspens. But it stopped him just for a moment. He smiled, thinking he’d spent too many years as a cop with a pistol on his hip, and moved up the path. The aspen trunks were wearing their winter white now, their leaves forming a yellow blanket on the ground around them. And through the barren branches Leaphorn could see Eldon Demott, bending over something, back muscles straining.

Doing what? Leaphorn stopped again and watched. Demott was stretching barbed wire over what seemed to be a section of aspen trunk. And now, with more banging, stapling the wire to the wood.

Something to do with a fence, he guessed. Here a cable had been stretched between ponderosas on opposite sides of the stream, and the fence seemed to be suspended from that. Leaphorn shouted, “Hello!” It took Demott just a moment to recognize him but he did even before Leaphorn reminded him.

“Yeah,” Demott said. “I remember. But no uniform now. Are you still with the Tribal Police?”

“They put me out to pasture,” Leaphorn said. “I retired at the end of June.”

“Well, what brings you all this way up the Cache? It wouldn’t have something to do with finally finding Hal, would it? After all these years?”

“That’s a good guess,” Leaphorn said. “Breedlove’s family hired me to go over the whole business again. They want me to see if I overlooked anything. See if I could find out where he went when he left your sister at Canyon de Chelly. See if anything new turned up the past ten years or so.”

“That’s interesting,” Demott said. He retrieved his hammer. “Let me get done with this.” He secured the wire with two more staples, straightened his back, and stretched.

“I’m trying to rig up something to solve a problem here,” he explained. “The damned cows come to drink here, and then they move downstream a little ways—or their calves do—and they come out on the wrong side of the fence. We call it a water gap. Is that the term you use?”

“We don’t get enough water down in the low country where I was raised to need ’em much,” Leaphorn said.

“In the mountains, it’s the snowmelt. The creek gets up, washes the brush down, it catches on the fence and builds up until it makes a dam out of it, and the dam backs up the water until the pressure tears out the fence,” Demott said. “It’s the same story every spring.

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And then you got cattle up and down the creek, ruining the stream banks, getting erosion started and everything silted up.” It was cool up here, probably a mile and a half above sea level, but Demott was sweating. He wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve.

“The way it’s supposed to work, it’s kinda like a drawbridge. You make a section of fence across the creek and just hang it from that cable with a dry log holding the bottom down. When the flood comes down, the log floats. That lifts the wire, the brush sails right by under it, and when the runoff season’s over, the log drops back into place and you’ve got a fence again.”

“It sounds pretty foolproof,” Leaphorn said, thinking that it might work with snowmelt, but runoff from a male rain roaring down the side of a mesa would knock it into the next county and take the cable with it, and the trees, too. “Or maybe I should say cowproof.”

Demott looked skeptical. “Actually, it just works until too much stuff catches on the log,” he said. “Anyway, it’s worth trying.” He sat on a boulder, wiped his face again.

“What can I tell you?”

“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “But we wrote off this thing with your brother-in-law almost eleven years ago. It was just another adult missing person case. Another skip-out without a clue to where or why. So there’s been a lot of time for you to get a letter, or hear some gossip, or find out that somebody who knew him had seen him playing the slots in Las Vegas. Something like that.

There’s no crime involved, so you wouldn’t have had any reason to tell us about it.” Demott was wiping mud off the side of his hand on his pant leg. “I can tell you why they hired you,” he said.

Leaphorn waited.

“They want this place back.”

“I thought they might,” Leaphorn said. “I couldn’t think of another reason.”

“The sons-a-bitches,” Demott said. “They want to lease out the mineral rights. Or more likely, just sell the whole outfit to a mining company and let ’em wreck it all.”

“That’s the idea I got from the bank lady at Mancos.”

“Did she tell the plan? They’d do an open pit operation on the molybdenum deposits up there.” Demott pointed up Cache Creek, past the clusters of white-barked aspens, past the stately forest of ponderosa, into the dark green wilderness of firs. “Rip it all out,” he said, “and then . . . “

The emotion in Demott’s voice stopped him. He took a deep breath and sat for a moment, looking down at his hands.

Leaphorn waited. Demott had more than this to say. He wanted to hear it.

Demott gave Leaphorn a sidewise glance. “Have you seen the Red River canyon in New Mexico? Up north of Taos?”

“I’ve seen it,” Leaphorn said.

“You seen it before and after?”

“I haven’t been there for years,” Leaphorn said. “I remember a beautiful trout stream, maybe a little bigger than your creek here, winding through a narrow valley. Steeper than this one. High mountains on both sides. Beautiful place.”

“They ripped the top right off of one of those mountains,” Demott said. “Left a great whitish heap of crushed stone miles long. And the holding ponds they built to catch the effluent spill over and that nasty stuff pours down into Red River. They use cyanide in some sort of solution to free up the metal and that kills trout and everything else.”

“I haven’t been up there for years,” Leaphorn said.

“Cyanide,” Demott repeated. “Mixed with sludge. That’s what we’d have pouring down Cache Creek if the Breedlove Corporation had its way. That slimy white silt brewed with cyanide.”

Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. He spent a few minutes letting Demott get used to him being there, listening to the music of Cache Creek bubbling over its rocky floor, watching a puffy white cloud just barely making it over the ridge upstream. It was dragging its bottom through the tips of the fir trees, leaving rags of mist behind. A beautiful day, a beautiful place. A cedar waxwing flew by. It perched in the aspens across the creek and watched them, chirping bird comments.

Demott was watching him, too, still absently picking at the resin and dirt on his left hand. “Well, enough of that,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I got no letters and neither did Elisa. If she had, I would have known it. We’re a family that don’t keep secrets, not from one another. And we didn’t hear anything, either. Nothing.”

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“I do,” Demott said. “I thought it was strange, too. I’m sure there must have been a lot of talk about it up at Mancos and around. Hal disappearing was the most exciting thing that happened around here in years. I’m sure some people would say Elisa killed her husband so she could get the ranch, or she had a secret boyfriend do it, or I killed him so the ranch would come back into the Demott family.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “I’d think that would be the natural kind of speculation, considering the circumstances. But you didn’t hear any of that kind of talk?”

Demott looked shocked. “Why, they wouldn’t say things like that around me. Or Elisa either, of course. And you know, the funny thing was Elisa loved Hal, and I think folks around here understood that.”

“How about you? What did you think of him?”

“Oh, I got pretty sick of Hal,” Demott said. “I won’t lie about it. He was a pain in the butt. But you know in a lot of ways I liked him. He had a good heart, and he was good for Elisa. Treated her like a quality lady, and that’s what she is. And it made you feel sad, you know. I think he could have amounted to something if he’d been raised right.” Demott despaired of getting the hand suitably clean by rubbing at it. He got up, squatted by the stream, and washed it.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Leaphorn said. “What went wrong?” Finished with his ablutions, Demott resumed his seat and thought about how to tell this.

“Hard to put it exactly,” he said. “But when he was just a kid his folks would send him out here and we’d get him on a horse, and he’d do his share of work just like everybody else. Made a good enough hand, for a youngster. When we was baling hay, or moving the cows or anything, he’d do the twelve-hour day right along with us. And when the work was laid by, he’d go rock climbing with me and Elisa. In fact he got good at it before she did.” Demott exhaled hugely, shook his head.

No mention of Tommy Castro. “Just the three of you?” Leaphorn asked.

Demott hesitated. “Pretty much.”

“Tommy Castro didn’t go along?”

Demott flushed. “Where’d you hear about him?”

Leaphorn shrugged.

Demott drew in a deep breath. “Castro and I were friends in high school and, yeah, he and I climbed together some. But then when Elisa got big enough to learn and she’d come along, Tommy began to make a move on her. I told him she was way too young and to knock it off. I put a stop to that.”

“He still climb?”

“I have no idea,” Demott said. “I stay away from him. He stays away from me.”

“No problem with Hal, though.”

“He was more her age and more her type, even though he was citified and born with the old silver spoon.” Demott thought about that. “You know,” he said, “I think he really did love this place as much as we did. He’d talk about getting his family to leave it to him as his part of the estate. Had it all figured out on paper. It wasn’t worth near as much as the share he’d get otherwise, but it was what he wanted. That’s what he’d say. Prettiest place on earth, and he’d make it better. Improve the stream where it was eroding.

Plant out some ponderosa seedlings where we had a fire kill. Keep the herd down to where there wouldn’t be any more overgrazing.”

“I didn’t see much sign of overgrazing now,” Leaphorn said.

“Not now, you don’t. But before Hal’s daddy died he always wanted this place to carry a lot more livestock than the grass could stand. He was always putting the pressure on my dad, and after dad passed away, putting it on me. As a matter of fact he was threatening to fire me if I didn’t get the income up to where he thought it ought to be.”

“You think he would have done it?”

“We never will know,” Demott said. “I wasn’t going to overgraze this place, that’s for damn sure. But just in time Breedlove had his big heart attack and passed away.” He chuckled. “Elisa credited it to the power of my prayers.” Leaphorn waited. And waited. But Demott was in no hurry to interrupt his memories. A breeze came down the stream, cool and fresh, rustling the leaves behind Leaphorn and humming the little song that breezes sing in the firs.

“It’s a mighty pretty day,” Demott said finally. “But blink your eyes twice and winter will be coming over the mountain.” 52 of 102

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“You were going to tell me what went wrong with Hal,” Leaphorn said.

“I got no license to practice psychiatry,” Demott said. He hesitated just a moment, but Leaphorn knew it was coming. It was something Demott wanted to talk about—and probably had for a long, long time.

“Or theology, either,” he continued. “If that’s the word for it. Anyway, you know how the story goes in our Genesis. God created Adam and gave him absolutely everything he could want, to see if he could handle it and still be obedient and do the right thing. He couldn’t. So he fell from grace.”

Demott glanced at Leaphorn to see if he was following.

“Got kicked out of paradise,” Demott said.

“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “I remember it.” It wasn’t quite the way he’d always heard it, but he could see the point Demott might make with his version.

“Old Breedlove put Hal in paradise,” Demott said. “Gave him everything. Prep school with the other rich kids, Dartmouth with the children of the ruling class—absolutely the very goddamn best that you can buy with money. If I was a preacher I’d say Hal’s daddy spent a ton of money teaching his boy to worship Mammon—however you pronounce that. Anyway, it means making a god out of things you can buy.” He paused, gave Leaphorn a questioning glance.

“We have some of the same philosophy in our own Genesis story,” Leaphorn said. “First Man calls evil ‘the way to make money.’

Besides, I took a comparative religion course when I was a student at Arizona State. Made an A in it.”

“Okay,” Demott said. “Sorry. Anyway, when Hal was about a senior or so he flew into Mancos one summer in his own little airplane. Wanted us to grade out a landing strip for it near the house. I figured out how much it would cost, but his daddy wouldn’t come up with the money. They got into a big argument over it. Hal had already been arguing with him about taking better care of this place, putting money in instead of taking it all out. I think it was about then that the old man got pissed off. He decided he’d give Hal the ranch and nothing else and let him see if he could live off it.”

“Figuring he couldn’t?”

“Yep,” Hal said. “And of course the old man was right. Anyhow Breedlove eased up on the pressure for profits some and I got to put in a lot of fencing we needed to protect a couple of the sensitive pastures and get some equipment in there for some erosion control along the Cache. Elisa and Hal got married after that. Everything going smooth. But that didn’t last long. Hal took Elisa to Europe. Decided he just had to have himself a Ferrari. Great car for our kind of roads. But he bought it. And other stuff. Borrowed money. Before long we weren’t bringing in enough from selling our surplus hay and the beef to cover his expenses. So he went to see the old man.”

At this point Demott’s voice was thickening. He paused, rubbed his shirtsleeve across his forehead. “Warm for this time of year,” he said.

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said, thinking it was a cool, dry sixty degrees or so even with the breeze gone.

“Anyway, he came back empty. Hal didn’t have much to say but I believe they must have had a big family fight. I know for sure he tried to borrow from George—that’s George Shaw, his cousin who used to come out and climb with us—and George must have turned him down, too. I think the family must have told him they were going ahead with the moly strip mine deal, and to hell with him.”

“But they didn’t,” Leaphorn said. “Why not?”

“I think it was because the old man had his heart attack a little bit after that. When he passed away it hung everything up in probate court for a while. This ranch was in trust for Hal. He didn’t get it until he turned thirty, but of course the family didn’t control it anymore. That’s sort of where it stood for a while.”

Demott paused. He inspected his newly washed hand. Leaphorn was thinking, too, about this friction between Hal and his family and what it might imply.

“When I had my visit with Mrs. Rivera at the bank,” Leaphorn said, “she told me things were starting to brew on the moly mine development again just before Hal disappeared. But this time she thought it was going to be a deal with a different mining company.

She didn’t think the family corporation was involved.”

Demott lost interest in his hand.

“She tell you that?”

“That’s what she said. She said a Denver bank was involved in the deal somehow. It was way too big an operation for her little bank to handle the money end of it.”

“With Mrs. Rivera in business we don’t really need a newspaper around here,” Demott said.

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“So I was thinking that if the family told Hal they were going to run right over him, maybe he decided he’d screw them instead.

He’d make his own deal and cut them out.”

“I think that’s probably about the way it was,” Demott said. “I know his lawyer told him all he had to do was slow things down in court long enough to get to his birthday. Then he’d have clear title and he could do what he wanted. That’s what Elisa wanted him to do. But Hal was a fella who just could not wait. There were things he wanted to buy. Things he wanted to do. Places he hadn’t seen yet. And he’d borrowed a lot of money he had to pay back.”

Demott produced a bitter-sounding laugh. “Elisa didn’t know about that. She didn’t know he could use the ranch as collateral when he didn’t own it yet. Came as quite a shock. But he had his lawyer work out some sort of deal which put up some sort of overriding interest in the place as a guarantee.”

“Lot of money?”

“Quite a bit. He’d gotten rid of that little plane he had and made a down payment on a bigger one. After he disappeared we let them take the plane back but we had to pay back the loan.”

With that, Demott rose and collected his tools. “Back to work,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t know anything that would help you.”

“One more question. Or maybe two,” Leaphorn said. “Are you still climbing?”

“Too old for it,” he said. “What’s that in the Bible about it? About when you get to be a man you put aside the ways of the boy.

Something like that.”

“How good was Hal?”

“He was pretty good but he was reckless. He took more chances than I like. But he had all the skills. If he’d put his mind to it he could have been a dandy.”

“Could he have climbed Ship Rock alone?”

Demott looked thoughtful. “I thought about that a lot ever since Elisa identified his skeleton. I didn’t think so at first, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t even try it myself. But Hal . . . “ He shook his head. “If he wanted something, he just had to have it.”

“George Shaw went out to the Maryboy place the other day and got permission for a climb,” Leaphorn said. “Next day or two. Any idea what he thinks might be found up there?”

“George is going to climb it?” Demott’s tone was incredulous and his expression shocked. “Where’d you hear that?”

“All I know is that he told me he paid Maryboy a hundred dollars for trespass rights. Maybe he’ll get somebody to climb it but I think he meant he was going up himself.”

“What the hell for?”

Leaphorn didn’t answer that. He gave Demott some time to answer it himself.

“Oh,” Demott said. “The son of a bitch.”

“I would imagine he thinks maybe somebody gave Hal a little push.”

“Yeah,” Demott said. “Either he thinks I did it, and I left something behind that would prove it—and he could use that to void Elisa’s inheritance—or he did it himself and he remembers that he left something up there that would nail him and he wants to go get it.”

Leaphorn shrugged. “As good a guess as any.”

Demott put down his tools.

“When Elisa came back from having the bones cremated she told me none of them had been broken,” he said. “Some of them were disconnected, you know. That could have been done in a fall, or maybe the turkey vultures pulled ’em apart. They’re strong enough to do that, I guess. Anyway, I hope it was a fall, and he didn’t just get hung up there to starve to death for water. He could have been a damn good man.”

“I never knew him,” Leaphorn said. “To me he was just somebody to hunt for and never find.”

“Well, he was a good, kind boy,” Demott said. “Big-hearted.” He picked up his tools again. “You know, when the cop came up to show Elisa Hal’s stuff I saw that folder he had with him. He had it labeled ‘Fallen Man.’ I thought, Yes, that described Hal. The old man gave him paradise and it wasn’t enough for him.”

18

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LUCY SAM HAD SEEMED GLAD TO SEE CHEE.

“I think they’re going to be climbing up Tse´ Bitáíágain,” she told Chee. “I saw a big car drive down the road toward Hosteen Maryboy’s place two days ago, and it stayed a long time, and when I saw it coming back from there, I drove over there to see how he was doing and he told me about it.”

“I heard about it, too,” Chee said, thinking how hard it was to keep secrets in empty country.

“The man paid Hosteen Maryboy a hundred dollars,” she said, and shook her head. “I don’t think we should let them climb up there, even for a thousand dollars.”

“I don’t think so either,” Chee said. “They have plenty of their own mountains to play around on.”

“The one who lived here before,” Lucy Sam said, using the Navajo circumlocution to avoid saying the name of the dead, “he’d say that it would be like us Navajos climbing all over that big church in Rome, or getting up on top of the Wailing Wall, or crawling all over that place where the Islamic prophet went up to heaven.”

“It’s disrespectful,” Chee agreed, and with that subject out of the way he shifted the conversation to cattle theft.

Had Hosteen Maryboy mentioned to her that he’d lost some more cattle? He had, and he was angry about it. There would have been enough money in those cows to make the last payments on his pickup truck.

Had Ms. Sam seen anything suspicious since the last time he’d been here? She didn’t think so.

Could he look at the ledger where she kept her notes? Certainly. She would get it for him.

Lucy Sam extracted the book from its desk drawer and handed it to Chee.

“I kept it just the same way,” she said, tapping the page. “I put down the date and the time right here at the edge and then I write down what I see.”

As he leafed backward through the ledger, Chee saw that Lucy Sam wrote down a lot more than that. She made a sort of daily journal out of it, much as her father had done. And she had not just copied her father’s system, she also followed his Franciscan padres’ writing style—small, neat lettering in small, neat lines—which had become sort of a trademark of generations of those Navajos educated at St. Michael’s School west of Window Rock. It was easily legible and wasted neither paper nor ink. But readable or not, Chee found nothing in it very helpful.

He skipped back to the date when he and Officer Manuelito had visited the site of the loose fence posts. They had rated an entry, right after Lucy Sam’s notation that, “Yazzie came. Said he would bring some firewood” and just before, “Turkey buzzards are back.” Between those Lucy had written, “Police car stuck on road under Tse´ Bitáí´. Truck driver helps.” Then, down the page a bit: “Tow truck gets police car.” The last entry before the tow truck note reported, “That camper truck stopped. Driver looked around.”

That camper truck? Chee felt his face flush with remembered embarrassment. That would have been Finch checking to see how thoroughly they had sprung his Zorro trap. He worked his way forward through the pages, learning more about kestrels, migrating grosbeaks, a local family of coyotes, and other Colorado Plateau fauna than he wanted to know. He also gained some insights into Lucy Sam’s loneliness, but nothing that he could see would be useful to Acting Lieutenant Chee in his role as rustler hunter. If Zorro had come back to collect a load of Maryboy’s cows from the place he’d left the hay, he’d done it when Lucy Sam wasn’t looking.

But she was looking quite a lot. There was a mention of a “very muddy” white pickup towing a horse trailer on the dirt road that skirted Ship Rock, but no mention of it stopping. Chee made a mental note to check on that. About a dozen other vehicles had come in view of Lucy Sam’s spotting scope, none of them potential rustlers. They included a Federal Express delivery truck, which must have been lost, another mention of Finch’s camper truck, and three pickups that she had identified with the names of local-area owners.

So what was useful about that? It told him that if Manuelito’s network of watchers would pay off at all, it would require patience, and probably years, to establish suspicious-looking patterns. And it told him that Mr. Finch looked upon him as a competitor in his hunt for the so-called Zorro. Finch wanted him to write off Maryboy’s loose-fence-posts location, but Finch hadn’t written it off himself. He was keeping his eye on the spot. That produced another thought. Maryboy had been losing cattle before. Had either Lucy Sam or her father noticed anything interesting in the past? Specifically, had they ever previously noticed that white truck pulling its horse trailer? He would page back through the book and check on that when he had time. And he would also look through the back pages for school buses. He’d noticed a Lucy Sam mention of a school bus stuck on that same dirt road, and the road wasn’t on a bus route. She had also mentioned “that camper truck” being parked almost all day at the base of the mountain the year before.

Her note said “Climbing our mountain?”

Chee put down the ledger. Lucy Sam had gone out to feed her chickens and he could see her now in her sheep pen inspecting a young goat that had managed to entangle itself in her fence. He found himself imagining Janet Pete in that role and himself in old man Sam’s wheelchair. It didn’t scan. The white Porsche roared in and rescued her. But that wasn’t fair. He was being racist. He had been thinking like a racist ever since he’d met Janet and fallen in love with her. He had been thinking that because her name was 55 of 102

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Pete, because her father was Navajo, her blood somehow would have taught her the ways of the Dine? and made her one of them.

But only your culture taught you values, and the culture that had formed Janet was blue-blooded, white, Ivy League, chic, irreligious, old-rich Maryland. And that made it just about as opposite as it could get from the traditional values of his people, which made wealth a symbol for selfishness, and had caused a friend of his to deliberately stop winning rodeo competitions because he was getting unhealthily famous and therefore out of harmony.

Well, to hell with that. He got up, refocused the spotting scope, and found the place where the posts had been loosened. That road probably carried no more than a dozen vehicles a week— none at all when the weather was wet. It was empty today, and there was no sign of anything around Mr. Finch’s Zorro trap. Beyond it in the pasture he counted eighteen cows and calves, a mixture of Herefords and Angus, and three horses. He scanned across the Maryboy grassland to the base of Ship Rock and focused on the place where Lucy Sam had told him the climbing parties liked to launch their great adventures. Nothing there now but sage, chamisa, and a redtailed hawk looking for her lunch.

Chee sat down again and picked up the oldest ledger. On his last visit he’d checked the entries on the days following Breedlove’s disappearance but only with a casual glance. This time he’d be thorough.

Lucy Sam came in, washed her hands, and looked at him while she dried them.

“Something wrong?”

“Disappointed,” Chee said. “So many details. This will take forever.”

“He didn’t have anything else to do,” Lucy Sam said, voice apologetic. “After he got that sickness with his nerves, all he could do after that was get himself into his wheelchair. He couldn’t go anyplace, he’d just sit there in the chair and sometimes he would read, or listen to the radio. And then he would watch through his telescope and keep his notes.” And he kept them very well, Chee noticed. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to include what he wanted to find.

The date Hal Breedlove vanished came about midpoint in the old ledger. In Hosteen Sam’s eyes it had been a windy day, cool, crows beginning to gather as they did when summer ended, flying in great, disorganized twilight flocks past Ship Rock to their roosting places in the San Juan River woods. Three oil field service trucks came down the road toward Red Rock and turned toward the Rattlesnake field. Some high clouds appeared but there had been no promise of rain.

The next day’s entry was longer, devoted largely to the antics of four yearling coyotes who seemed to be trying to learn how to hunt in the prairie dog town down the slope. Interesting, but not what Chee was hoping for.

An hour and dozens of pages later, he closed the ledger, rubbed his eyes, and sighed.

“You want some lunch?” Lucy Sam asked, which was just the question Chee had been hoping to hear. Lucy had been there at the stove across the kitchen from him, cutting up onions, stirring, answering his questions about abbreviations he couldn’t read or points he didn’t understand, and the smell of mutton stew had gradually permeated the room and his senses—making this foolish search seem far less important than his hunger.

“Please,” he said. “That smells just like the stew my mother used to make.”

“Probably is the same,” Lucy said. “Everybody has to use the same stuff—mutton, onions, potatoes, can of tomatoes, salt, pepper.” She shrugged.

Like his mother’s stew, it was delicious. He told Lucy what he was looking for—about the disappearance of Hal Breedlove and then his skeleton turning up on the mountain. He was looking for some idea of when Hal Breedlove returned to make his fatal climb.

“You find anything?”

“I think I learned that the man didn’t come right back here after running away from his wife in Canyon de Chelly. At least there was no mention of anybody climbing.”

“There would have been,” she said. “How far did you get?”

“Just through the first eight weeks after he disappeared. It’s going to take forever.”

“You know, they always do it the same way. They start climbing just at dawn, maybe before. That’s because they want to get down before dark, and because there’s some places where that black rock gets terribly hot when the afternoon sun shines on it. So all you got to do is take a look at the first thing written down each day. He would always do the same every morning. He would get up at dawn and roll his wheelchair to the door. Then he would sing the song to Dawn Boy and bless the morning with his pollen. Next he would take a look at his mountain. If there was anything parked there where the climbers always left their cars, it would be the first thing he wrote down.”

“I’ll try that, then,” he said.

On the page at which Chee reopened the ledger the first entry was marked 9/15/85, which was several pages and eight days too early. He glanced at the first line. Something about a kestrel catching a meadowlark. He paged forward, checking Lucy’s advice by 56 of 102

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scanning down the first notes after dates.

Now he was at 9/18/85—halfway down the page. The first line read, “Climbers. Funny looking green van where climbers park.

Three people going up. If Lucy gets back from Albuquerque I will get her to go into Shiprock and tell the police.” Chee checked the date again. September 18, 1985. That would be five days before Hal Breedlove disappeared from the Canyon de Chelly. He scanned quickly down the page, looking for other mentions of the climbers. He found two more on the same day.

The first said: “They are more than half way up now, creeping along under a cliff—like bugs on a wall.” And the second: “The headlights turned on on the fancy green car, and the inside lights. I see them putting away their gear. Gone now, and the police did not come. I told Maryboy he should not let anyone climb Tse´ Bitáí´ but he did not listen to me.” Lucy was washing dishes in a pan of water on the table by the stove, watching him while she worked. He took the ledger to her, pointed to the entry.

“Do you remember this?” Chee asked. “It would have been about eleven years ago. Three people came to climb Ship Rock in some sort of green van. Your father wanted you to go tell the police but you had gone to Albuquerque.” Lucy Sam put on her glasses and read.

“Now why did I take the bus to Albuquerque?” she asked herself. “Yes,” she answered. “Irma was having her baby there. Little Alice. Now she’s eleven. And when I came home he was excited about those climbers. And angry. He wanted me to take him to see Hosteen Maryboy about it. And I took him over there, and they argued about it. I remember that.”

“Did he say anything about the climbers?”

“He said they were a little bit slow. It was after dark when they got back to the car.”

“Anything about the car?”

“The car?” She looked thoughtful. “I remember he hadn’t seen one like it before. He said it was ugly, clumsy looking, square like a box. It was green and it had a ski rack on top.”

Chee closed the ledger and handed it to Lucy, trying to remember how Joe Leaphorn had described the car Hal Breedlove had abandoned after he had abandoned his wife. It was a recreational vehicle, green, something foreign-made. Yes. A Land-Rover. That would fit old man Sam’s description of square and ugly.

“Thank you,” he said to Lucy Sam. “I have to go now and see what Hosteen Maryboy can remember.” 19

THE SUNSET HAD FLARED OUT

behind Beautiful Mountain when Chee’s patrol car bounced over Lucy Sam’s cattle guard and gained the pavement. In the darkening twilight his headlights did little good and Chee almost missed the unmarked turnoff. That put him on the dirt track that led southward toward Rol Hai Rock, Table Mesa, and the infinity of empty country between these massive old buttes and the Chuska range.

Lucy Sam had told him: “Watch your odometer and in about eight miles from the turnoff place you come to the top of a ridge and you can see Maryboy’s place off to the left maybe a mile.”

“It’ll be dark,” Chee said. “Is the turnoff marked?”

“There’s a little wash there, and a big cottonwood where you turn,” she said. “It’s the only tree out there, and Maryboy keeps a ghost light burning at his hogan. You can’t miss it.”

“Okay,” Chee said, wishing she hadn’t added that ‘can’t miss it’ phrase. Those were the landmarks he always missed.

“There’s a couple of places with deep sand where you cross arroyos. If you’re going too slow, you might get stuck. But it’s a pretty good road in dry weather.”

Chee had been over this track a time or two when duty called, and did not consider it pretty good. It was bad. Too bad to warrant even one of those dim lines that were drawn on the official road map with an “unimproved” label and a footnoted warning. But Chee drove it a little faster than common sense dictated. He was excited. That boxy green vehicle must have been Hal Breedlove’s boxy green Land-Rover—the same car he’d seen at the Lazy B. One of those three men who climbed out of it must have been Breedlove.

Why not suspect that one of the other two was the man who had called Breedlove at the Thunderbird Lodge three or four days later and lured him away from his wife to oblivion? He would get a description from Maryboy if the old man could provide one. And he might be able to because those who live lonely lives where fellow humans are scarce tend to remember strangers—especially those on the strange mission of risking their lives on Ship Rock. Whatever, he would learn all he could and then he would call Leaphorn.

For a reason he didn’t even try to understand, sitting across a table from the Legendary Lieutenant and telling him all this seemed extremely important to Chee. He had thought he was angry at Leaphorn for signing up with John McDermott. But Leaphorn’s clear 57 of 102

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black eyes would study him with approval. Leaphorn’s dour expression would soften into a smile. Leaphorn would think awhile and then Leaphorn would tell him how this bit of information had solved a terrible puzzle.

The odometer had clicked off almost exactly the eight prescribed miles from the turnoff and the track was topping the ridge. The moon was not yet up, but the ragged black shape of the Chuskas to the right and the flat-topped bulk of Table Mesa to the left were outlined against a sky a-dazzle with stars. Ahead an ocean of darkness stretched toward the horizon. Then the track curved past a hummock of Mormon tea, and there shone the Maryboy ghost light, punctuating the night with a bright yellow spot.

Chee made the left turn past the cottonwood Lucy Sam had described into two sandy ruts separated by a grassy ridge. They led him along a shallow wash toward the light. The track dipped down a slope and the bright spot became just a glow. He heard a thud from somewhere a long ways off. More like a sudden clapping sound. But he was too busy driving for the moment to wonder what caused it. The track had veered down the bank of the wash, tilting his police car. It entered a dense tangle of chaparral, converted by his headlights into a tunnel of brightness. He emerged from that.

The ghost light was gone.

Chee frowned, puzzled. He decided it must be just out of sight behind the screen of brush he was driving past. The track emerged from the brush into flat grassland where nothing grew higher than the sage. Still no ghost light. Why not? Maryboy had turned it off, what else? Or the bulb had burned out. Out here, Maryboy wouldn’t be on a Rural Electrification Administration power line. He’d be running a windmill generator and battery system. Perhaps the batteries had gone dead. Nonsense. And yet the only reason one puts out a ghost light is because, for some reason, he believes he is threatened by the spirits of the dead. And if he believes that, why would he turn it off before Dawn Boy has restored harmony to the world? And why would he turn it off when he’d seen he had a visitor coming? Had Maryboy been expecting someone he would want to hide from?

Chee covered the last quarter mile slower than he would have had the light still been burning. His patrol car rolled past a plank stock pen with a loading ramp for cattle. His headlights reflected from the aluminum siding of a mobile home. Beyond it he could see the remains of a truck with its back wheels removed. Beyond that a fairly new pickup stood, and behind that, a small hogan, a small goat pen, a brush arbor, and two sheds. He parked a little further from the house than he would have normally and left the motor running a bit longer. And when he turned off the ignition he rolled down the window beside him and sat listening.

There was no light in the mobile home. Cold, dry December air poured through the truck window. It brought with it the smell of sage and dust, of dead leaves, of the goat pen. It brought the dead silence of a windless winter night. A dog emerged from one of the sheds, looking old, ragged, and tired. It limped toward his truck and stopped, the glare of his headlights reflecting from its eyes.

Chee leaned out of the window toward it. “Anybody home?” he asked. The dog turned and limped back into the shed. Chee switched off the car lights and waited, uneasy, for some sign of life from the house. Tapped his fingers on the steering wheel.

Listened. From somewhere far away he heard the call of a burrowing owl hunting its prey. He thought. Someone turned off that damned ghost light. Therefore someone is here. I am absolutely not going back home and admit I came out here to talk to Maryboy and was too afraid of the dark to get out of the car.

Chee muttered an expletive, made sure that his official .38-caliber pistol was securely in its holster, took the flashlight from its rack, opened the car door, and got out—thankful for the policy that eliminated those dome lights that went on when the door opened. He stood beside the car, glad of the darkness, and shouted, “Hosteen Maryboy,” and a greeting in Navajo. He identified himself by clan and family. He waited.

Only silence. But the sound of his own voice, loud and clear, had burst the bubble of his nervousness. He waited as long as politeness required, walked up to the entrance, climbed the two concrete block steps that led to the door, and tapped on the screen.

Nothing. He tapped again, harder this time. Again, no response. He tried the screen, swung it open. Tried the door. The knob turned easily in his hand.

“Hosteen Maryboy,” Chee shouted. “You’ve got company.” He listened. Nothing. And opened the door to total darkness. Flicked on his flash.

If time is measurable in such circumstances, it might have taken a few nanoseconds for Chee’s flashlight beam to traverse this tiny room from end to end and find it unoccupied. But even while this was happening, his peripheral vision was telling him otherwise.

He turned the flashlight downward.

The body lay on its back, feet toward the door, as if the man had come to answer a visitor’s summons and then had been knocked directly backward.

In the moment that elapsed before Chee snapped off the flash and jumped into the darkness of the house he had reached several conclusions. The man had been shot near the center of the chest. He was probably, but not certainly, Mr. Maryboy. The claplike sound he had heard had been the fatal shot. Thus the shooter must be nearby. Having shot Maryboy, and seen Chee’s headlights, he had switched off the ghost light. And, more to the immediate point, Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee was likely to get shot himself. He leaned against the wall beside the door, drew the pistol, cocked it, and made sure the safety was off.

Chee spent the next few minutes listening to the silence and thinking his situation through. Among the aromas that came from Hosteen Maryboy’s kitchen he had picked up the acrid smell of burned gunpowder, confirming his guess that Maryboy had been shot only a few minutes ago. A frightening conclusion, it reinforced the evidence offered by the doused ghost light. The killer had 58 of 102

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not driven away. Chee would have met him on the access track. That he had walked away was possible but not likely. It would have meant abandoning his vehicle. Was it the pickup he’d noticed? Perhaps. But that was most likely Maryboy’s. The killer, having seen him coming, would have had plenty of time to move his car but no way to drive out without meeting Chee on the track.

So what options did he have?

Chee squatted beside the body, felt for a pulse, and found none. The man was dead. That reduced the urgency a little. He could wait for daylight, which would even the odds. As it now stood the killer knew exactly where he was and he didn’t have a clue. But waiting had a downside, too. It would occur to the killer sooner or later to fire a shot into the patrol car gas tank—or do something else to disable it. Then he could drive away unpursued. Or he might drain out some gasoline from any one of the vehicles, set this mobile home ablaze, and shoot Chee as he came out.

By now his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Chee could easily see the windows. The starlight that came through them—dim as it was—allowed him to make out a chair, a couch, a table, and the door that led into the kitchen.

Could the killer be there? Or in the bedroom beyond it? Not likely. He sat against the wall, holding his breath, focusing every instinct on listening. He heard nothing. Still, he dreaded the thought of being shot in the back.

Chee picked up the flash, held it far from his body, pointed both his pistol and the flash at the kitchen doorway, and flicked it on.

Nothing moved in the part of the room visible to him. He edged to the door, keeping the flash away from him. The kitchen was empty. And so, when he repeated that process, were the bedroom and the tiny bath behind it.

Back in the living room, Chee sat on the couch and made himself as comfortable as the circumstances permitted. He weighed the options, found no new ones, imagined dawn coming, imagined the sun rising, imagined waiting and waiting, imagined finally saying to hell with it and walking out to the patrol car. Then he would either be shot, or he wouldn’t be. If he wasn’t shot, he would have to get on the radio and report this affair to Captain Largo.

“When did this happen?” the captain would ask, and then, “Why did you wait all night to report it?” and then, “Are you telling me that you sat in the house all night because you were afraid to come out?” And the only answer to that would be, “Yes, sir, that’s what I did.” And then, a little later, Janet Pete would be asking why he was being dismissed from the Navajo Tribal Police, and he would say— But would Janet care enough to ask? And did it matter anyway?

Something mattered. Chee got up, stood beside the door, looking and listening—impressed with how bright the night now seemed outside the lightless living room. But he saw nothing, and heard nothing. He pushed open the screen and, pistol in hand, dashed to the patrol car, pulled open the door and slid in—crouched low in the seat, grabbed the mike, started the engine.

The night dispatcher responded almost instantly. “Have a homicide at the Maryboy place,” Chee said, “with the perpetrator still in the area. I need—”

The dispatcher remembered hearing the sound of two shots, closely spaced, and of breaking glass, and something she described as

“scratching, squeaking, and thumping.” That was the end of the message from Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee.

20

AT FIRST CHEE WAS CONSCIOUS

only of something uncomfortable covering much of his head and his left eye. Then the general numbness of the left side of his face registered on his consciousness and finally some fairly serious discomfort involving his left ribs. Then he heard two voices, both female, one belonging to Janet Pete. He managed to get his right eye in focus and there she was, holding his hand and saying something he couldn’t understand. Thinking about it later, he thought it might have been “I told you so,” or something to that effect.

When he awoke again, the only one in the room was Captain Largo, who was looking at him with a puzzled expression.

“What the hell happened out there?” Largo said. “What was going on?” And then, as if touched by some rare sentiment, he said,

“How you feeling, Jim? The doctor tells us he thinks you’re going to be all right.” Chee was awake enough to doubt that Largo expected an answer and gave himself a few moments to get oriented. He was in a hospital, obviously. Probably the Indian Health Service hospital at Gallup, but maybe Farmington. Obviously something bad had happened to him, but he didn’t know what. Obviously again, it had something to do with his ribs, which were hurting now, and his face, which would be hurting when the numbness wore off. The captain could bring him up to date. And what day was it, anyway?

“What the hell happened?” Chee asked. “Car wreck?”

“Somebody shot you, goddammit,” Largo said. “Do you know who it was?”

“Shot me? Why would somebody do that?” But even before he finished the sentence he began to remember. Hosteen Maryboy dead on the floor. Getting back into the patrol car. But it was very vague and dreamlike.

“They shot you twice through the door of the patrol car,” Largo said. “It looked to Teddy Begayaye like you were driving away from the Maryboy place and the perpetrator fired two shots through the driver’s-side door. Teddy found the empties. Thirty-eights by the looks of them, and of what they took out of you. But you had the window rolled down, so the slugs had to get through that 59 of 102

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shatterproof glass after they punched through the metal. The doc said that probably saved you.” Chee was more or less awake now and didn’t feel like anything had saved him. He felt terrible. He said, “Oh, yeah. I remember some of it now.”

“You remember enough to tell me who shot you? And what the hell you were doing out at the Maryboy place in the middle of the night? And who shot Maryboy? And why they shot him? Could you give us a descri ption? Let us know what the hell we’re looking for—man, woman, or child?”

Chee got most of the way through answering most of those questions before whatever painkillers they had shot into him in the ambulance, and the emergency room, and the operating room, and since then cut in again and he started fading away. The nurse came in and was trying to shoo Largo out. But Chee was just awake enough to interrupt their argument. “Captain,” he said, hearing his voice come out soft and slurry and about a half mile away. “I think this Maryboy homicide goes all the way back to that Hal Breedlove case Joe Leaphorn was working on eleven years ago. That Fallen Man business. That skeleton up on Ship Rock. I need to talk to Leaphorn about . . . “

The next time he rejoined the world of the living he did so more or less completely. The pain was real, but tolerable. A nurse was doing something with the flexible tubing to which he was connected. A handsome, middle-aged woman whose name tag said SANCHEZ, she smiled at him, asked him how he was doing and if there was anything she could do for him.

“How about a damage assessment?” Chee said. “A prognosis. A condition report. The captain said he thought I might live, but how about this left eye? And what’s with the ribs?”

“The doctor will be in to see you pretty soon,” the nurse said. “He’s supposed to be the one to give the patient that sort of information.”

“Why don’t you do it?” Chee said. “I’m very, very interested.”

“Oh, why not?” she said. She picked up the chart at the foot of his bed and scanned it. She frowned, made a disapproving clicking sound with her tongue.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Chee said. “They’re not going to decide I’m too banged up to be worth repairing?”

“We’ve got two misspelled words in this,” she said. “They quit teaching doctors how to spell. But, no, I just wish I was as healthy as you are,” she said. “I guess a body shop estimator would rate you as a moderately serious fender bender. Not bad enough to total you out, and just barely bad enough to cause the insurance company to send in its inspector and raise your premium rates.”

“How about the eye?” Chee said. “It has a bandage over it.”

“Because of”—she glanced down at the chart and read—“’multiple superficial lacerations caused by glass fragments.’ But from the looks of this, no damage was done where it might affect your vision. Maybe you’ll have some bumpy shaving on that cheek for a while, and need to grow yourself about an inch of new eyebrow. But apparently no sight impairment.”

“That’s good to hear,” Chee said. “How about the rest of me?”

She looked down at him sternly. “Now when the doctor comes in, you’ve got to act surprised. All right? Everything he tells you is news to you. And for God’s sake don’t argue with him. Don’t be saying: ‘That ain’t what Florence Nightingale told me.’ You understand?”

Chee understood. He listened. Two bullets involved. One apparently had struck the thick bone at the back of the skull a glancing blow, causing a scalp wound, heavy bleeding, and concussion. The other, apparently fired after he had fallen forward, came through the door. While the left side of his face was sprayed with debris, the slug was deflected into his left side, where it penetrated the muscles and cracked two ribs.

“I’d say you were pretty lucky,” the nurse said, looking at him over the chart. “Except maybe in your choice of friends.”

“Yeah,” Chee said, wincing. “Does that chart show who sent me those flowers?” There were two bunches of them, one a dazzling pot of some sort of fancy chrysanthemum and the other a bouquet of mixed blossoms.

The nurse extracted the card from the bouquet. “Want me to read it to you?”

“Please,” Chee said.

“It says, ‘Learn to duck,’ and it’s signed, ‘Your Shiprock Rat Terriers.’”

“Be damned,” Chee said, and felt himself flushing with pleasure.

“Friends of yours?”

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“Yes, indeed,” Chee said. “They really are.”

“And the other card reads ‘Get well quick, be more careful and we have to talk,’ and it’s signed ‘Love, Janet.’” With that Nurse Sanchez left him to think about what it might mean.

The next visitor was a well-dressed young man named Elliott Lewis, whose tidy business suit and necktie proclaimed him a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nevertheless, he displayed his identification to Chee. His interest was in the wrongful death of Austin Maryboy, such felonious events on a federal reservation being under the jurisdiction of the Bureau. Chee told him what he knew, but not what he guessed. Lewis, in the best FBI tradition, told Chee absolutely nothing.

“This thing must have made some sort of splash in the papers,” Chee said. “Am I right about that?” Lewis was restoring his notebook and tape recorder to his briefcase. “Why you say that?”

“Because the FBI got here early.”

Lewis looked up from the housekeeping duties in his briefcase. He suppressed a grin and nodded. “It made the front page in the Phoenix Gazette, and the Albuquerque Journal, and the Deseret News,” he said. “And I guess you could add the Gallup Independent, Navajo Times, Farmington Times, and the rest of ’em.”

“How long you been assigned out here?” Chee asked.

“This is week three,” Lewis said. “I’m fresh out of the academy but I’ve heard about our reputation for chasing the headlines. And you’ll notice I’ve already got the names of the pertinent papers memorized.” Which left Chee regretting the barb. What was Lewis but another young cop trying to get along? Maybe the Bureau would teach him its famous arrogance. But it hadn’t yet, and maybe with the old J. Edgar Hoover gang fading away, it was dropping the superman pose. Chee had worked with both kinds.

Lewis was also efficient. He asked the pertinent questions, which made it apparent that the theory of the crime appealing to the Bureau was a motive involving cattle theft—of which Maryboy was known to be a victim. Chee considered introducing mountain climbing into the conversation but decided against it. His head ached. Life was already too complicated. And how the devil could he explain it anyway? Lewis closed his notebook, switched off his tape recorder, and departed.

Chee turned his thoughts to the note Janet had signed. Remembering earlier notes, it sounded cool, considering the circumstances.

Or was that his imagination? And there she was now, standing in the doorway, smiling at him, looking beautiful.

“You want a visitor?” she said. “They gave the fed first priority. I had to wait.”

“Come in,” he said, “and sit and talk to me.”

She did. But en route to the chair, she bent over, found an unbandaged place, and kissed him thoroughly.

“Now I have two reasons to be mad at you,” she said.

He waited.

“You almost got yourself killed,” she said. “That’s the worst thing. Lieutenants are supposed to send their troops out to get shot at.

They’re not supposed to get shot themselves.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ve got to work on it.”

“And you insulted me,” she added. “Are you recovered enough to talk about that?” No more banter now. The smile was gone.

“Did I?” Chee said.

“Don’t you think so? You implied that I had tricked you. You pretty well said that I had used you to get information to pass along to John.”

Chee didn’t respond to that. “John,” he was thinking. Not “McDermott,” or “Mr. McDermott,” but “John.” He shrugged. “I apologize, then,” he said. “I think I misunderstood things. I had the impression the son of a bitch was your enemy.

Everything I know about the man is what you told me. About how he had used you, taken advantage of his position. You the student and the hired hand. Him the famous professor and the boss. That made him your enemy, and anyone who treats you like that is my enemy.”

She sat very still, hands folded in her lap, while he said all that. “Jim,” she began, and then stopped, her lower lip between her teeth.

“I guess it shocked me,” he said. “There I was, the naive romantic, thinking of myself as Sir Galahad saving the damsel from the dragon, and I find out the damsel is out partying with the dragon.” Janet Pete’s complexion had become slightly pink.

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“I agree with some of that,” she said. “The part about you being naive. But I think we’d better talk about this later. When you’re better. I shouldn’t have brought it up now. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry. I want you to hurry up and get well, and this isn’t good for you.”

“Okay,” Chee said. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”

She stopped at the door. “I hope one really good thing will come out of this,” she said. “I hope this being almost killed will cure you of being a policeman.”

“What do you mean?” Chee said, knowing full well what she meant.

“I mean you could stay in law enforcement without carrying that damned gun, and doing that sort of work. You could take your pick of half a dozen jobs in—”

“In Washington,” Chee said.

“Or elsewhere. There are dozens of offices. Dozens of agencies. In the BIA, the Justice Department. I heard of a wonderful opening in Miami. Something involving the Seminole agency.”

Chee’s head ached. He didn’t feel well. He said, “Thanks for coming, Janet. Thanks for the flowers.” And then she was gone.

Chee drifted into a shallow sleep punctuated by uneasy dreams. He was awakened to take antibiotics and to have his temperature and vital signs checked. He dozed again, and was aroused to eat a bowl of lukewarm cream of mushroom soup, a portion of cherry Jell-O, and some banana-flavored yogurt. He was reminded that he was supposed to rise from his bed now and walk around the room for a while to get everything working properly. While dutifully doing that, he sensed a presence behind him.

Joe Leaphorn was standing in the doorway, his face wearing that expression of disapproval that Chee had learned to dread when he was the Legendary Lieutenant’s assistant and gofer.

21

“AREN’T YOU SUPPOSED TO BE IN BED?” Leaphorn asked. He was wearing a plaid shirt and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap, but even that didn’t minimize the effect. He still looked to Chee like the Legendary Lieutenant.

“I’m just doing what the doc told me to do,” Chee said. “I’m getting used to walking so these ribs don’t hurt.” He was also getting used to looking at the image of himself in the mirror with one eye bandaged and the other one hideously black. But he wasn’t admitting that to Leaphorn. In fact, he was disgusted with himself for explaining his conduct to Leaphorn. He should have told him to bug off. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “Yes, sir. I’m being the model patient so they’ll give me time off for good behavior.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s not as bad as I first heard it was,” Leaphorn said, and helped himself to a chair. “I’d heard he almost killed you.” They dealt with all the facts of the incident then, quickly and efficiently—became two professionals talking about a crime. Chee eased himself back onto the bed. Leaphorn sat, holding his cap. His bristly short haircut was even grayer now than Chee had remembered.

“I’m not going to stay long,” Leaphorn said. “They told me you’re supposed to be resting. But I have something I wanted to tell you.”

“I’m listening,” Chee said, thinking, You also have something you want to ask me. But so what? That was the tried-and-true Leaphorn strategy. There was nothing underhanded about it.

Leaphorn cleared his throat. “You sure you don’t want to get some rest?”

“To hell with resting,” Chee said. “I want out of here and I think they may let me go this evening. The doc wants to change the bandages again and check everything.”

“The quicker the better,” Leaphorn said. “Hospitals are dangerous places.” Chee cut off his laugh just as it started. Leaphorn’s wife had died in this very hospital, he remembered. A brain tumor removed.

Everything went perfectly. The tumor was benign. But the staph infection that followed was lethal.

“Yes,” he said. “I want to go home.”

“I’ve done a little checking,” Leaphorn said. He made an abashed gesture. “When you’ve been in the NTP as long as I was—and out of it just a little bit—then it seems people have trouble remembering you’re just a civilian. That you’re no longer official.”

“Lieutenant,” Chee said, and laughed. “I’m afraid you’re always going to seem official to a lot of people. Including me.” Leaphorn looked vaguely embarrassed by that. “Well, anyway, things are going about the way you’d expect. It was a slim day for 62 of 102

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news, and the papers made a pretty big thing out of it. That brings the feds hurrying right in. You’ve seen the newspapers, I guess?”

“No,” Chee said, and pointed to his left eye. “I haven’t been in very sharp focus until today. But I’ve seen the fed.”

“Well, you can’t be surprised they’re on it. Big headlines. Slayer shoots policeman at the scene of the murder. No suspect. No motive. Big mystery. Big headlines. So the Bureau moves in right away without requiring the usual prodding. They found out that Maryboy had been having some livestock stolen. They found out you’d gone out there to check on rustling. So they’re working that angle some . . .” Leaphorn paused, gave Chee a wry grin. “You know what I mean?” Chee laughed. “Unless they’ve reformed since day before yesterday it means they’re having my friends in the NTP at Shiprock working on it, and the Arizona Highway Patrol, and the New Mexico State Police, and the San Juan and McKinley County sheriff’s deputies.”

Leaphorn didn’t object to that analysis. “And then they think maybe there might be a drug angle, or a gang angle. All those good things,” he added.

“No other theories?”

“Not from what I’m hearing.”

“You’re telling me something right now,” Chee said, unable to suppress a grin, even though it hurt. “I think you’re telling me that neither the feds nor anyone else has shown any interest in trying to tie an eleven-year-old runaway-husband case into this felony homicide. Am I right?”

Leaphorn was never very much a man for laughing, but his amusement showed. “That is correct,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to visualize that,” Chee said. “You’ve known Captain Largo longer than I have. But can you visualize him trying to explain to some special agent that I had actually gone out to interview Maryboy to see if he could identify who had climbed Ship Rock eleven years ago, because we were still working on a 1985 missing person case? Can you imagine Largo doing it? Trying to get the guy’s attention, especially when Largo doesn’t understand it himself.” The amusement had left Leaphorn’s face.

“I guessed that’s why you were out there,” he said. “What’d you find out?” Chee couldn’t pass up this opportunity to needle the Legendary Lieutenant. Besides, Leaphorn was working for McDermott. So Chee said, “Nothing. Maryboy was dead when I got there.”

“No. No.” Leaphorn let his impatience show. “I meant what had you learned that caused you to go out there? In the night?” The moment had come:

“I learned that on the morning of September 18, 1985, a dark green, square, ugly recreational vehicle with a ski rack on its roof was driven to the usual climbers’ launch site on Maryboy’s grazing lease. Three men got out and climbed Ship Rock. Maryboy had given them trespass permission. Now, to bring things up to date, I learned yesterday that John McDermott hands this same Hosteen Maryboy one hundred dollars for trespass rights for another climb. I presume that George Shaw and others intend to climb the mountain, probably just as quickly as they can get a party organized. So, I went out to learn if Hosteen Maryboy remembered who had paid him for climbing trespass rights back in 1985.”

Chee recited this slowly, watching Leaphorn’s face. It became absolutely still. Breathing stopped. The green vehicle was instantly translated into Breedlove’s status truck, the date into a week before Hal had begun his vanishing act, and two days before his all-important thirtieth birthday. All that, and all the complex implications suggested, had been processed by the time Chee finished his speech. Leaphorn’s first question, Chee knew, would be how he had learned this. Whether the source of this information was reliable. Well, let him ask it. Chee was ready.

Leaphorn sighed.

“I wonder how many people knew that George Shaw was looking for a team to climb that mountain with him,” Leaphorn said.

Chee looked at the ceiling, clicked his tongue against his teeth, and said, “I have no idea.” Why did he continue trying to guess how the Legendary Lieutenant’s mind worked? It was miles and miles beyond him.

Leaphorn abruptly clapped his hands together.

“Now you’ve given us the link that can fit the pattern together,” Leaphorn said, with rare exuberance. “Finally something to work with. I spent most of my time for months trying to think this case through and I didn’t come up with this. Emma was still healthy then, and she thought about it, too. And I’ve spent a lot of thought on it since then, even though we officially gave up. And in—how many days was it?—less than ten, you come up with the link.”

Chee found himself baffled. But Leaphorn was beaming at him, full of pride. That made it both better and worse.

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“But we still don’t know who killed Hosteen Maryboy,” Chee said, thinking at least he didn’t know.

“But now we have something to work on,” Leaphorn said. “Another part of the pattern takes shape.” Chee said, “Umm,” and tried to look thoughtful instead of confused.

“Breedlove’s skeleton is found on Ship Rock,” Leaphorn said, holding up a blunt trigger finger. “Amos Nez is promptly shot.” Leaphorn added a second finger. “Now, shortly thereafter, just as arrangements are being made for another climb of Ship Rock, one of the last people to see Breedlove is shot.” He added a third finger.

“Yes,” Chee said. “If we have all the pertinent facts it makes for a short list of suspects.”

“I can add a little light to that,” Leaphorn said. “Actually, it’s what I came in to tell you. Eldon Demott told me some interesting things about Hal. The key one was that he’d quarreled with his father, and his family. He had decided to cut the family corporation out of the mining lease as soon as he inherited the ranch.”

“Did the family know that?”

“Demott presumed they did. So do I. He probably told them himself. Demott understood Hal had tried to get money out of his father, and got turned down, and came home defiant. But even if he tried to keep it secret, the money people seemed to have known about it. Hal was in debt. Borrowing money. And if the money people knew, I’m sure the word got back to the Breedlove Corporation.”

“Ah,” Chee said. “So we add George Shaw to the list of people who would be happy if Hal Breedlove died before he celebrated the pertinent birthday.”

“Or even happier to prove that Hal Breedlove was murdered by his wife, which would mean she couldn’t inherit. I would guess that would put the ranch back into probate. And the Breedlove family would be the heir.” They sat for a while, thinking about it.

“If you want a little bit more confusion, I turned up a possible boyfriend for Elisa,” Leaphorn said. “It turns out their climbing team was once a foursome.” He explained to Chee what Mrs. Rivera had told him of Tommy Castro and what Demott had added to it.

“Another rock climber,” Chee said. “You think he killed Hal to gain access to the widow? Or the widow and Castro conspired to get Hal out of the way?”

“If so, they didn’t do much about it. As far as we know, that is.”

“How about Shaw as the man who left Breedlove dying on the ledge? Or maybe gave him a shove?” Leaphorn shrugged. “I think I like one of the Demotts a little better.”

“How about the shootings?”

“About the same,” Leaphorn said.

They thought about it some more, and Chee felt himself being engulfed with nostalgia. Remembering the days he’d worked for Leaphorn, sat across the desk in the lieutenant’s cramped second-floor office in Window Rock trying to put the pieces of something or other together in order to understand a crime. Stressful as it had been, demanding as Leaphorn tended to be, it had been a joyful time. And damn little paperwork.

“Do you still have your map?” Chee asked.

If Leaphorn heard the question he didn’t show it. He said, “The problem here is time.” Lost again, Chee said, “Time?”

“Think how different things would be if Hal Breedlove’s thirtieth birthday had been a week after he disappeared, instead of a week before,” Leaphorn said.

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Wouldn’t that have simplified things?”

“Then the presumption that went with his disappearance would have been foul play. A homicide to prevent the inheritance.”

“Right,” Chee said.

Leaphorn rose, recovered his Cubs cap from Chee’s table.

“Do you think you can get Largo to make Ship Rock off limits to climbers for a few days?”

“Do I tell him why?” Chee asked.

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“Tell him that mountain climbers have this tradition of leaving a record behind when they reach a difficult peak. Ship Rock is one of those. On top of it, there’s a metal box—one of those canisters the army uses to hold belted machine gun ammunition. It’s waterproof, of course, and there’s a book in it that climbers sign. They jot down the time and the date and any note they’d like to leave to those who come later.”

“Shaw told you that?”

“No. I’ve been asking around. But Shaw would certainly know it.”

“You want to keep Shaw from going up and getting it,” Chee said. “Didn’t you tell me you were working for him?”

“He retained me to find out everything I could about what happened to Hal Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “How can I learn anything I can depend on from that book if Mr. Shaw gets it first?”

“Oh,” Chee said.

“I want to know who was in that party of three who made the climb before Hal disappeared. Was one of them Hal, or Shaw, or Demott, or maybe even Castro? Three men, Hosteen Sam said. But how could he be sure of gender through a spotting scope miles away? Climbers wear helmets and they don’t wear skirts. Was one of the three Mrs. Breedlove? If Hal was one of them and he got to the top, his name will be in the book. If it isn’t, that might help explain why he went back after he vanished from Canyon de Chelly: to try again. If he got to the top that time, his name and the date will be there. I want to know when he made the climb that killed him.”

“It wasn’t in the first forty-three days after he disappeared,” Chee said.

“What?” Leaphorn said, startled. “How do you know that?”

Chee described Hosteen Sam’s ledger, his habit of rolling his wheelchair to the window each day after his dawn prayers and looking at the mountain. He described Sam’s meticulous entry system. “But there was no mention of a climbing party from September eighteenth, when he watched the three climb it and then complained to Maryboy about it, through the first week of November. So if Hal climbed it in that period he had to somehow sneak in without old Sam seeing him. I doubt if that’s possible, even if he knew Sam would be watching—which he wouldn’t—or had some reason to be sneaky. I’m told that that’s the starting point for the only way up.”

“I think we need to keep that ledger somewhere safe,” Leaphorn said. “It seems to be telling us that Breedlove was alive a lot longer than I’d been thinking.”

“I’ll call Largo and get him to stall off climbing for a while,” Chee said. “And I’ll call my office. Manuelito knows Lucy Sam. She can go out and take custody of that ledger for a little while.”

“You take care of yourself,” Leaphorn said, and headed for the door.

“Wait a second. If we get the climbing stopped, how are you going to get someone up there to look at the register?”

“I’m going to rent a helicopter,” Leaphorn said. “I know a lawyer in Gallup. A rock climber who’s been up Ship Rock himself. I think he’d be willing to go up with me and the pilot, and we put him down on the top, and he takes a look.”

“And brings down the book.”

“I didn’t want to do that. I’m a civilian now. I don’t want to tamper with evidence. We’ll take along a camera.”

“And make some photocopies?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s going to cost a lot of money, isn’t it?”

“The Breedlove Corporation is paying for it,” Leaphorn said. “I’ve got their twenty thousand dollars in the bank.” 22

THE KOAT-TV WEATHER MAP

the previous night had shown a massive curve of bitterly cold air bulging down the Rocky Mountains out of Canada, sliding southward. The morning news reported snow across Idaho and northern Utah, with livestock warnings out. The weather lady called it a “blue norther” and told the Four Corners to brace for it tomorrow. But at the moment it was a beautiful morning for a helicopter ride, if you enjoyed such things, which Leaphorn didn’t.

The last time he’d ridden in one of these ugly beasts he was being rushed to a hospital to have a variety of injuries treated. It was better to go when one was healthy, he thought, but not much.

However, Bob Rosebrough seemed to be enjoying it, which was good because Rosebrough had volunteered to climb down the 65 of 102

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copter’s ladder to the tip of Ship Rock, photograph the documents in the box there, and climb back up.

“No problem, Joe,” he’d said. “Climbing down a cliff can be harder than climbing up it, but ladders are different. And I sort of like the idea of being the first guy to climb down onto the top of Ship Rock.” Liking the idea meant he wouldn’t accept any payment for taking the day off from his Gallup law practice. That appealed to Leaphorn. The copter rental was taking eight hundred dollars out of the Breedlove Corporation’s twenty thousand retainer, and Leaphorn was beginning to have some ethical qualms about how he was using that fee.

The view now was spectacular. They were flying south from the Farmington Airport and if Leaphorn had cared to look straight down, which he didn’t, he would have been staring into row after row of dragon’s teeth that erosion had formed on the east side of the uplift known as the Hogback. The rising sun outlined the teeth with shadows, making them look like a grotesquely oversized tank trap—even less hospitable than they appeared from the ground. The slanting light was also creating a silver mirror of the surface of Morgan Lake to the north and converting the long plume of steam from the stacks of the Four Corners Power Plant into a great white feather. The scale of it made even Leaphorn, a desert rat raised in the vastness of the Four Corners, conscious of its immensity.

The pilot was pointing down.

“How about having to land in those shark’s teeth?” he asked. “Or worse, parachuting down into it. Just think about that. It makes your crotch hurt.”

Leaphorn preferred to think of something else, which in its way was equally unpleasant. He thought about the oddity of murder in general, and of this murder in particular. Hal Breedlove disappears. Ten quiet years follow. Then, rapidly, in a matter of days, an unidentified skeleton is found on the mountain, apparently a man who has fallen to his death in a climbing accident. Then Amos Nez is shot. Next the bones are identified as the remains of Hal Breedlove. Then Hosteen Maryboy is murdered. Cause and effect, cause and effect. The pattern was there if he could find the missing part—the part that would bring it into focus. At the center of it, he was certain, was the great dark volcanic monolith that was now looming ahead of them like the ruins of a Gothic cathedral built for giants. On top of it a metal box was cached. In the box would be another piece to fit into the puzzle of Hal Breedlove.

“The spire on the left is it,” Rosebrough said, his voice sounding metallic through the earphones they were wearing. “They look about the same height from this vantage, but the one on the left is the one you have to stand on top of if you want to say you’ve climbed Ship Rock.”

“I’m going to circle around it a little first,” the pilot said. “I want to get a feeling for wind, updrafts, downdrafts, that sort of thing.

Air currents can be tricky around something like this. Even on a calm, cool morning.” They circled. Leaphorn had been warned about what looking down while a copter is spiraling does to one’s stomach. He folded his hands across his safety belt and studied his knuckles.

“Okay,” Rosebrough said. “That’s it just below us.”

“It doesn’t look very flat,” the pilot said, sounding doubtful. “And how big is it?”

“Not very,” Rosebrough said. “About the size of a desktop. The box is on that larger flattish area just below. I’ll have to climb down to get it.”

“You have twenty feet of ladder, but I guess I could get close enough for you to just jump down,” the pilot said.

Rosebrough laughed. “I’ll take the ladder,” he said.

And he did.

Leaphorn looked. Rosebrough was on the mountain, standing on the tiny sloping slab that formed the summit, then climbing down to the flatter area. He removed an olive drab U.S. Army ammunition box from the crack, opened it, removed the ledger, and tried to protect it from the wind produced by the copter blades. He waved them away. Leaphorn, stomach churning, resumed the study of his knuckles.

“You all right?” the pilot asked.

“Fine,” Leaphorn said, and swallowed.

“There’s a barf bag there if you need it.”

“Fine,” Leaphorn said.

“He’s taking the pictures now,” the pilot said. “Photographing one of the pages.”

“Okay,” Leaphorn said.

“It’ll just be a minute.”

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Leaphorn, busy now with the bag, didn’t respond. But by the time the rhetorical minute had dragged itself past and Rosebrough was climbing back into the copter, he was feeling a little better.

“I took a bunch of different exposures so we’ll have some good ones,” he said, settling himself in his seat and fastening his safety belt. “And I shot the five or six pages before and after. That what you wanted?”

“Fine,” Leaphorn said, his mind working again, buzzing with the questions that had brought them up here. “Did you find Breedlove’s name? And who else—” He stopped. He was breaking his own rule. Much better to let Rosebrough tell what he had found without intervention.

“He signed it,” Rosebrough said, “and wrote ‘vita brevis.’”

He didn’t explain to Leaphorn that the inscription was Latin and provide the translation—which was one of the reasons Leaphorn liked the man. Why would Breedlove have bothered to leave that epigram? “Life is short.” Was it to explain why he’d taken the dangerous way down in case he didn’t make it? He’d worry about that later.

“Funny thing,” Rosebrough said. “No one else signed it on that date. I told you I didn’t think he could possibly climb it alone. But it looks like maybe I was wrong.”

“Maybe the people with him had climbed it before,” Leaphorn said.

“That wouldn’t matter. You’d still want to have it on the record that you’d done it again. It’s a hell of a hard climb.”

“Anything else?”

“He said he made it up at eleven twenty-seven A.M.

and under that he wrote, ‘Four hours, twenty-nine minutes up. Now, I’m going down the fast way.’”

“Looks like he tried,” the pilot said. “But it took him about eleven years to make it all the way to the bottom.”

“Could he have climbed it that fast alone?” Leaphorn asked. “Is that time reasonable?” Rosebrough nodded. “These days the route is so well mapped, a good, experienced crew figures about four hours up and three hours down.”

“How about the fast way down?” Leaphorn asked. To him it sounded a little like a suicide note. “What do you think he meant by that?”

Rosebrough shook his head. “It took teams of good climbers years to find the way you can get from the bottom to the top. Even that’s no cinch. It involves doing a lot of exposed climbing, with a rope to save you if you slip. Then you have to climb down a declivity to reach the face where you can go up again. That’s the way everybody who’s ever got to the top of Ship Rock got there.

And as far as I know, that’s the way everybody always got down.”

“So there isn’t any ‘fast way down’?”

Rosebrough gave that some thought. “There has been some speculation of a shortcut. But it would involve a lot of rappelling, and I never heard of anyone actually trying it. I think it’s way too dangerous.” They were moving away from Ship Rock now, making the long slide down toward the Farmington Airport. Leaphorn was feeling better. He was thinking that whatever Breedlove had meant by the fast way down, he had certainly done something dangerous.

“I’m thinking about that rappel route,” Rosebrough said. “If he tried that by himself, that would help explain where they found the skeleton.” He was looking at Leaphorn quizzically. “You’re awfully quiet, Joe. Are you okay? You’re looking pale.”

“I’m feeling pale,” Leaphorn said, “but I’m quiet because I’m thinking about the other two people who made the climb with him that day. Didn’t they get all the way up? Or what?”

“Who were they?” Rosebrough asked. “I know most of the serious rock climbers in this part of the world.”

“We don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “All we have are the notes of an old mountain watcher. Sort of shorthand, too. He just jotted down nine slash eighteen slash eighty-five and said three men had parked at the jump-off site and were climbing the—”

“Wait a minute,” Rosebrough said. “You said nine eighteen eighty-five? That’s not the date Breedlove wrote. He put down nine thirty eighty-five.”

Leaphorn digested that. No thought of nausea now. “You’re sure?” he asked. “Breedlove dated his climb September thirty. Not September eighteen.”

“I’m dead certain,” Rosebrough said. “That’s what the photo is going to show. Was I confused or something?”

“No,” Leaphorn said. “I was the one who was confused.”

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“You sure you feel all right?”

“I feel fine,” Leaphorn said. Actually he was feeling embarrassed. He had been conned, and it had taken him eleven years to get his first solid inkling of how they had fooled him.

23

CHEE HAD DECIDED THE GREASE

in the frying pan was hot enough and was pulling the easy-open lid off the can of Vienna sausages when the headlight beam flashed across his window. He flicked off his house trailer’s overhead light—something he wouldn’t have considered doing a few days ago.

But his cracked ribs still ached, and the person who had caused that was still out there somewhere. Possibly in the car that was now rolling to a stop under the cottonwood outside.

Whoever had driven it got out and walked into the headlights where Chee could see him. It was Joe Leaphorn, the Legendary Lieutenant, again. Chee groaned, said, “Oh, shit!” and switched on the light.

Leaphorn entered hat in hand. “It’s getting cold,” he said. “The TV forecaster said there’s a snow warning out for the Four Corners.

Livestock warning. All that.”

“It’s just about time for that first bad one,” Chee said. “Can I take your hat?” Which got Leaphorn’s mind off the weather. “No. No,” he said, looking apologetic. He regretted the intrusion, the lateness of the hour, the interruption of Chee’s supper. He would only take a moment. He wanted Chee to see what they’d found in the ammunition box on top of Ship Rock. He extracted a sheaf of photographs from the big folder he’d been carrying and handed them to Chee.

Chee spread them on the table.

“Note the date of the signature,” Leaphorn said. “It’s the week after Breedlove disappeared from Canyon de Chelly.” Chee considered that. “Wow,” he said. And considered it again. He studied the photograph. “Is this it? No one else signed the book that day?”

“Only Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “And I’m told that it’s traditional for everyone in the climbing party to sign if they get to the top.”

“Well, now,” Chee said. He tapped the inscription. “It looks like Latin. Do you know what it means?” Leaphorn told him the translation. “But what did he mean by it? Your guess is as good as mine.” He explained to Chee what Rosebrough had told him about the ‘fast way down’ remark—that if Hal had tried this dangerous rappelling route it might explain how his body came to be on the ledge where it was found.

They stood at the table, Chee staring at the photograph and Leaphorn watching Chee. The aroma of extremely hot grease forced itself into Leaphorn’s consciousness, along with the haze of blue smoke that accompanied it. He cleared his throat.

“Jim,” he said. “I think I interrupted your cooking.”

“Oh,” Chee said. He dropped the photograph, snatched the smoking pan off the propane burner, and deposited it outside on the doorstep. “I was going to scramble some eggs and mix in these sausages,” he said. “If you haven’t eaten I can dump in a few more.”

“Fine,” said Leaphorn, who had deposited his breakfast in the barf bag, had been suffering too much residual queasiness for lunch, and had been too busy since to stop for dinner. In his current condition, even the smell of burning grease aroused his hunger.

They replaced the photos with plates, retrieved the frying pan, replenished the incinerated grease with a chunk of margarine, put on the coffeepot, performed those other duties required to prepare dinner in a very restricted space, and dined. Leaphorn had always tried to avoid Vienna sausages even as emergency rations but now he found the mixture remarkably palatable. While he attacked his second helping, Chee picked up the crucial photograph and resumed his study.

“I hesitate to mention it,” Chee said, “but what do you think of the date?”

“You mean being a date when the keen eye of Hosteen Sam saw no one climbing Ship Rock?”

“Exactly,” Chee said.

“I’ve reached no precise conclusion,” Leaphorn said. “What do you think?”

“About the same,” Chee said. “And how about nobody at all signing the book twelve days earlier? What do you think about that?

I’m thinking that the three people who old man Sam saw climbing up there must not have made it to the top. Either that, or they were too modest to take credit for it. Or, if his ledger hadn’t told me how exactly precise Sam was, I’d think he got his dates wrong.” Leaphorn was studying him. “You think there’s no chance of that, then?”

“I’d say none. Zero. You should see the way he kept that ledger. That’s not the explanation. Forget it.” 68 of 102

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Leaphorn nodded. “Okay, I will.”

The entry signed by Breedlove was near the center of the page. Above it the register had been signed by four men, none with names familiar to Chee, and dated April 4, 1983. Below it, a three-climber party—two with Japanese names—had registered their conquest of the Rock with Wings on April 28, 1988.

“Skip back to September eighteenth,” Leaphorn said. “Let’s say that Hal was one of the three Hosteen Sam saw climbing. It sounds like the car they climbed out of was that silly British recreation vehicle he drove. And then let’s say they didn’t make it to the top because Hal screwed up. So Hal broods about it. He gets the call at Canyon de Chelly from one of his climbing buddies. He decides to go back and try again.”

“All right,” Chee said. “Then we’ll suppose the climbing buddy went with him, they tried the dangerous way down. This time the climbing buddy—and let’s call him George Shaw—well, George screws up and drops Hal down the cliff. He feels guilty and he figures Hal’s dead anyway, so slips away and tells no one.”

“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “I thought about that. Trouble is, why hadn’t the climbing buddy signed the register before they started down?”

Chee shook his head, dealt Leaphorn some more of the Vienna-and-eggs mixture, and put down the pan.

“Modesty, you think?” Leaphorn said. “He didn’t want to take the credit?”

“The only reason I can think of involves first-degree murder,” Chee said. “The premeditated kind.”

“Right,” Leaphorn said. “Now, how about a motive?”

“Easy,” Chee said. “It would have something to do with the ranch, and with that moly mine deal.” Leaphorn nodded.

“Now Hal has inherited. It’s his. So let’s say George Shaw figures Hal’s going to keep his threat and do his own deal on the mineral lease, cutting out Shaw and the rest of the family. So Shaw drops him.”

“Maybe,” Leaphorn said. “One problem with that, though.”

“Or maybe Demott’s the climbing buddy. He knows Hal’s going for the open strip mine, so he knocks him off to save his ranch. But what’s the problem with the first idea?”

“Elisa inherits from Hal. Shaw would have to deal with her.”

“Maybe he thought he could?”

“He says he couldn’t. He told me this afternoon that Elisa was just as fanatical about the ranch as her brother. Said she told him there wouldn’t be any strip-mining on it as long as she was alive.”

“You saw Shaw today?” Chee sounded as much shocked as surprised.

“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “I showed him the photographs. After all, I spent his money getting them.”

“What’d he think?”

“He acted disappointed. Probably was. He’d like to be able to prove that Hal was dead about a week or so before he signed that register.”

Chee nodded.

“There’s a problem with your second theory, too.”

“What?”

“I was talking with Demott on the telephone September twenty-fourth. Twice, in fact.”

“You remember that? After eleven years?”

“No. I keep a case diary. I looked it up.”

“Mobile phone, maybe?”

“No. I called him at the ranch. Elisa didn’t remember the license number on the Land-Rover. I called him about the middle of the morning and he gave me the number. Then I called him again in the afternoon to make sure Breedlove hadn’t checked in. And to find out if he’d had any other calls. Anything worthwhile.”

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“Well, hell,” Chee said. “Then I guess we’re left with Breedlove climbing up there alone, or with Shaw, and then taking the suicidal shortcut down.”

Leaphorn’s expression suggested he didn’t agree with that conclusion, but he didn’t comment on it directly.

“It also means I’m going to have to run down all these people who climbed up there in the next ten years and find out if any of them got off with a long piece of that climbing rope.”

“Not necessarily,” Leaphorn said. “You’re forgetting our Fallen Man business is still not a crime. It’s a missing person case solved by the discovery of an accidental death.”

“Yeah,” Chee said, doubtful.

“It makes me glad I’m a civilian these days.”

The wind gusted, rattling sand against the aluminum side of Chee’s home, whistling around its aluminum cracks and corners.

“So does the weather,” Leaphorn said. “Everybody in uniform is going to be working overtime and getting frostbite this week.” Chee pointed to Leaphorn’s plate. “Want some more?”

“I’m full. Probably ate too much. And I took too much of your time.” He got up, retrieved his hat.

“I’m going to leave you these pictures,” he said. “Rosebrough has the negatives. He’s a lawyer. An agent of the court. They’ll stand up as evidence if it comes to that.”

“You mean if anyone gets up there and steals the ledger?”

“It’s a thought,” Leaphorn said. “What are you going to do tomorrow?” Chee had worked for Leaphorn long enough for this question to produce a familiar uneasy feeling. “Why?”

“If I go up to the ranch tomorrow and show Demott and Elisa these pictures and ask her what she thinks about them, and ask her who was trying to climb that mountain on that September eighteenth date, then I think I could be accused of tampering with a witness.”

“Witness to what? Officially there’s no crime yet,” Chee reminded him.

“Don’t you think there will be one? Presuming we’re smart enough to get this sorted out.”

“You mean not counting Maryboy and me? Yeah. I guess so. But you could probably get away with talking to Elisa until the official connection is made. Now you’re just a representative of the family lawyer. Perfectly legit.”

“But why would Demott or the widow want to talk to a representative of the family’s lawyer?” Chee nodded, conceding the point.

“And I think there’s something else I should be doing.”

Chee let his stare ask the question.

“Old Amos Nez trusts me,” Leaphorn said, and paused to consider it. “Well, more or less. I want to show him this evidence that Hal climbed Ship Rock just one week after he left the canyon and tell him about Maryboy being murdered, and ask him if Hal said anything about trying to climb Ship Rock just before he came to the canyon. Things like that.”

“That could wait,” Chee said, thinking of his aching ribs and the long painful drive up into Colorado.

“Maybe it could wait,” Leaphorn said. “But you know the other afternoon you decided Hosteen Maryboy couldn’t wait and you rushed right out there to see if he could identify those climbers for you. And you were right. Turned out it couldn’t wait.”

“Ah,” Chee said. “But I’m not clear on what makes Amos Nez so important. You think Breedlove might have told him something?”

“Let’s try another theory,” Leaphorn said. “Let’s say that Hal Breedlove didn’t live until his thirtieth birthday. Let’s say those people Hosteen Sam saw climbing on September eighteenth got to the top, or at least two of them did. One of the two was Hal. The other one—or maybe two—push him off. Or, more likely he just falls. Now he’s dead and he’s dead two days too soon. He’s still twenty-nine years old. So the climber’s register is falsified to show he was alive after his birthday.” Chee held up his hand, grinning. “Huge hole in that one,” he said. “Remember Hal was prowling around the canyon with his wife and Amos Nez until the twenty-third of . . . “ Chee’s voice trailed off into silence. And then he said, “Oh!” and stared at Leaphorn.

Leaphorn was making a wry face, shaking his head. “It sure took me long enough to see that possibility,” he said. “I never could have if you hadn’t got into old man Sam’s register.”

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“My God,” Chee said. “If that’s the way it worked, I can see why they have to kill Nez. And if they’re smart, the sooner the better.”

“I’m going to ask you to call the Lazy B and find out if Demott and the widow are there and then arrange to drive up tomorrow and talk to them about what we found on top of the mountain.”

“What if they’re not at home?”

“Then I think we ought to be doing a little more to keep Amos Nez safe,” Leaphorn said. And he opened the door and stepped out into the icy wind.

24

ELISA BREEDLOVE HAD ANSWERED

the telephone. And, yes, Eldon was home and they’d be glad to talk to him. How about sometime tomorrow afternoon?

So Acting Lieutenant Chee showed up at his office in Shiprock early to get his desk cleared and make the needed arrangements. He arrived with tape plastered over the stitches around his left eye and a noticeable shiner visible behind them. He lowered himself carefully into the chair behind the desk to avoid jarring his ribs and gave Officers Teddy Begayaye, Deejay Hondo, Edison Bai, and Bernadette Manuelito a few moments to inspect the damage. In Begayaye and Bai it seemed to provoke a mixture of admiration and amusement, well suppressed. Hondo didn’t seem interested and Officer Bernie Manuelito’s face reflected a sort of shocked sympathy.

With that out of the way, he satisfied their curiosity with a personal briefing of what actually happened at the Maryboy place, supplementing the official one they would have already received. Then down to business.

He instructed Bai to try to find out where a .38-caliber pistol confiscated from a Shiprock High School boy had come from. He suggested to Officer Manuelito that she continue her efforts to locate a fellow named Adolph Deer, who had jumped bond after a robbery conviction but was reportedly “frequently being seen around the Two Gray Hills trading post.” He told Hondo to finish the paperwork on a burglary case that was about to go to the grand jury. Then it was Teddy Begayaye’s turn.

“I hate to tell you, Teddy, but you’re going to have to be taxi driver today,” Chee said. “I have to go up to the Lazy B ranch on this Maryboy shooting thing. I thought I could handle it myself, but”—he lifted his left arm, flinched, and grimaced—“the old ribs aren’t quite as good as I thought they were.”

“You shouldn’t be riding around in a car,” Officer Manuelito said. “You should be in bed, healing up. They shouldn’t have let you out of the hospital.”

“Hospitals are dangerous,” Chee said. “People die in them.”

Edison Bai grinned at that, but Officer Manuelito didn’t think it was funny.

“Something goes wrong with broken ribs and you have a punctured lung,” she said.

“They’re just cracked,” Chee said. “Just a bruise.” With that subject closed, he kept Bai behind for a fill-in about the pistol-carrying student. Typically, Bai provided far more details than Chee needed. The boy had been involved in a joyride car theft during the summer. He was born to the Streams Come Together people, his mother’s clan, and for the Salt clan, for his paternal people, but his father was also part Hopi. He was believed to be involved in the smaller and rougher of Shiprock’s juvenile gangs. He was meanness on the hoof. People weren’t raising their kids the way they used to. Chee agreed, put on his hat and hurried stiffly out the door into the parking lot. It had been chilly and clouding up when he came to work. Now there was solid overcast and an icy northwest wind swept dust and leaves past his ankles.

The gale was blowing Begayaye back toward him.

“Jim,” he said. “I forgot. The wife made a dental appointment for me today. How about me switching assignments with Bernie? That Deer kid isn’t going anywhere.”

“Well,” Chee said. Across the parking lot he saw Bernie Manuelito standing on the sheltered side of his patrol car, watching them.

“Is it okay with Manuelito?”

“Yes, sir,” Begayaye said. “She don’t mind.”

“By the way,” Chee said, “I forgot to thank you guys for sending me those flowers.” Begayaye looked puzzled. “Flowers? What flowers?”

Thus it was that Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee headed north toward the Colorado border leaning his good shoulder against the passenger-side door with Officer Bernadette Manuelito behind the wheel. Chee, being a detective, had figured out who had sent him the flowers. Begayaye hadn’t done it, and Bai would never think of doing such a thing even if he was fond of Chee—which Chee was pretty sure he wasn’t. That left Deejay Hondo and Bernie. Which clearly meant Bernie had sent them and made it look like everybody did it so he wouldn’t think she was buttering him up. That probably meant she liked him. Thinking back, he could 71 of 102

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remember a couple of other signs that pointed to that conclusion.

All things considered, he liked her, too. She was really smart, she was sweet to everybody around the office, and she was always using her days off to take care of an apparently inexhaustible supply of ailing and indigent kinfolks, which gave her a high score on the Navajo value scale. When the time came he would have to give her a good efficiency rating. He gave her a sidewise glance, saw her staring unblinkingly through the windshield at the worn pavement of infamous U.S. Highway 666. A very slight smile curved the corner of her lip, making her look happy, as she usually was. No doubt about it, she really was an awfully pretty young woman.

That wasn’t the way he should be thinking about Officer Bernadette Manuelito. Not only was he her superior officer and supervisor, he was more or less engaged to marry another woman. And he was thinking that way, most likely, because he was having a very confusing problem with that other woman. He was beginning to suspect that she didn’t really want to marry him. Or, at least, he wasn’t sure she was willing to marry Jim Chee as he currently existed—a just-plain cop and a genuine sheep-camp Navajo as opposed to the more romantic and politically correct Indigenous Person. Making it worse, he didn’t know what the hell to do about it. Or whether he should do anything. It was a sad, sad situation.

Chee sighed, decided the ribs would feel better if he shifted his weight. He did it, sucked in his breath, and grimaced.

“You all right?” Bernie asked, giving him a worried look.

“Okay,” Chee said.

“I have some aspirin in my stuff.”

“No problem,” Chee said.

Bernie drove in silence for a while.

“Lieutenant,” she said. “Do you remember telling us how Lieutenant Leaphorn was always trying to get you to look for patterns? I mean when you had something going on that was hard to figure out.”

“Yeah,” Chee said.

“And that’s what you wanted me to try to find in this cattle-stealing business?” Chee grunted, trying to remember if he had made any such suggestion.

“Well, I got Lucy Sam to let me take that ledger to that Quik-Copy place in Farmington and I got copies made of the pages back for several years so I’d have them. And then I went through our complaint records and copied down the dates of all the cattle-theft reports for the same years.”

“Good Lord,” Chee said, visualizing the time that would take. “Who was doing your regular work for you?”

“Just the multiple-head thefts,” Officer Manuelito said, defensively. “The ones which look sort of professional. And I did it in the evenings.”

“Oh,” Chee said, embarrassed.

“Anyway, I started comparing the dates. You know, when Mr. Sam would write down something about a certain sort of truck, and when there would be a cattle theft reported in our part of the reservation.” Officer Manuelito had been reciting this very carefully, as if she had rehearsed it. Now she stopped.

“What’d you notice?”

She produced a deprecatory laugh. “I think this is probably really silly,” she said.

“I doubt it,” Chee said, thinking he would like to get his mind off of Janet Pete and quit trying to find a way to turn back the clock and make things the way they used to be. “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me about it.”

“There was a correlation between multiple-theft reports and Mr. Sam seeing a big banged-up dirty white camper truck in the neighborhood,” Manuelito said, looking fixedly at the highway center stripe. “Not all the time,” she added. “But often enough so it made you begin to wonder about it.”

Chee digested this. “The trailer like Mr. Finch’s rig?” he said. “The New Mexico brand inspector’s camper?”

“Yes, sir.” She laughed again. “I said it was probably silly.”

“Well, I guess our theft reports would be passed along to him. Then he’d come out here to see about it.” Officer Manuelito kept her eyes on the road, her lips opened as if she were about to say something. But she didn’t. She simply looked disappointed.

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“Wait a minute,” Chee said, as understanding belatedly dawned. “Was Hosteen Sam seeing Finch’s trailer after the thefts were reported? Or—”

“Usually before,” Bernie said. “Sometimes both, but usually before. But you know how that is. Sometimes the cattle are gone for a while before the owner notices they’re missing.”

Bernie drove, looking very tense. Chee digested what she’d told him. Suddenly he slammed his right hand against his leg. “How about that?” he said. “That wily old devil.”

Officer Manuelito relaxed, grinned. “You think so? You think that might be right?”

“I’d bet on it,” Chee said. “He’d have everything going for him. All the proper legal forms for moving cattle. All the brand information. All the reasons for being where the cattle are. And all cops would know him as one of them. Perfect.” Bernie was grinning even wider, delighted. “Yes,” she said. “That’s sort of what I was thinking.”

“Now we need to find out how he markets them. And how he gets them from the pasture to the feedlots.”

“I think it’s in the trailer,” Bernie said.

“The trailer? You mean he hauls cattle in his house trailer?”

Chee’s incredulous tone caused Bernie to flush slightly. “I think so,” she said. “I couldn’t prove it.” A few moments ago Acting Lieutenant Chee might have scoffed at this remarkable idea. But not now. “Tell me,” he said. “How does he get them through the door?”

“It took me a long time to get the idea,” she said. “I think it was noticing that now and then I’d see that trailer parked at the Anasazi Inn at Farmington, and I’d think it was funny that you’d drive that big clumsy camper trailer around if you didn’t want to sleep in it.

I thought, you know, well, maybe he just wants a hot bath, or something like that. But it stuck in my mind.” She laughed. “I’m always trying to understand white people.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “Me too.”

“So the other day when he parked the trailer in the lot at the station, when I walked past it I noticed how it smelled.”

“A little whiff of cow manure,” said Chee, who had walked behind it, too. “I just thought, you know, he’s around feedlots all the time. Stepping in the stuff. Probably gets used to it. Doesn’t clean his boots.”

“That occurred to me, too,” Bernie said. “But it was pretty strong. Maybe women are more sensitive to smells.” Or smarter, Chee thought. “Did you look inside?”

“He’s got all the windows all stuck full of those tourist stickers, and they’re high windows. I tried to take a peek but I didn’t want him to see me snooping.”

“I guess we could get a search warrant,” Chee said. “What would you put on the petition? Something about the brand inspector’s camper smelling like cow manure, to which the judge would say ‘Naturally,’ and about Finch not liking to sleep in it, which would cause the judge to say ‘Not if it smells like cow manure.’”

“I thought about the search warrant,” Bernie said. “Of course there’s no law against hauling cows in your camper if you want to.”

“True,” Chee said. “Might be able to get him committed for being crazy.”

“Anyway,” Bernie said. “I called his office and I—”

“You what!”

“I just wanted to know where he was. If he answered I was going to hang up. If he didn’t, I’d ask ’em where I could find him. He wasn’t there, and the secretary said he’d called in from the Davis and Sons cattle-auction place over by Iyanbito. So I drove over there and his camper truck was parked by the barn and he was out in back with some people loading up steers. So I got a closer look.”

“You didn’t break in?” Chee asked, thinking she’d probably say she had. Nothing this woman did was going to surprise him anymore.

She glanced at him, looking hurt, and ignored the question.

“Maybe you noticed that camper has just a straight-up flat back. There’s no door in it and no window. Well, all around that back panel it’s sealed up with silvery duct tape. Like you’d maybe put on to keep the dust out. But when you get down and look under you can see a row of big, heavy-duty hinges.”

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Chee was into this now. “So you back your trailer up to the fence, pull off the duct tape, lower the back down, and that makes a loading ramp out of it. He probably has it rigged up with stalls to keep ’em from moving around.”

“I guessed it would handle about six,” Bernie said. “Two rows of cows, three abreast.”

“Bernie,” Chee said. “If my ribs weren’t so sore, and it wasn’t going to get me charged with sexual harassment and cause us to run off the road, I would reach over there and give you a huge congratulatory hug.” Bernie looked both pleased and embarrassed.

“You put a lot of work into this,” he said. “And a lot of thought, too. Way beyond the call of duty.”

“Well, I’m trying to learn to be a detective. And it got sort of personal, too,” she said. “I don’t like that man.”

“I don’t much either,” Chee said. “He’s arrogant.”

“He sort of made a move on me,” she said. “Maybe not. Not exactly.”

“Like what?”

“Well, he gives you that ‘doll’ and ‘cute’ stuff, you know. Then he said how would I like to get assigned to work with him. But of course he said ‘under’ him. He said I could be Tonto to his Lone Ranger.”

“Tonto?” Chee said. “Well, now. Here’s what we do. We keep an eye on him. And when he’s on the road with a load, we nail him.

And when we do, you’re the one who gets to put the handcuffs on him.” 25

WHEN OFFICER BERNADETTE MANUELITO

parked Chee’s patrol car at the Lazy B ranch Elisa Breedlove was standing in the doorway awaiting them—hugging herself against the cold wind. Or was it, Chee thought, against the news he might be bringing?

“Four Corners weather,” she said. “Yesterday it was sunny, mild autumn. Today it’s winter.” She ushered them into the living room, exchanged introductions gracefully with Bernie, expressed the proper dismay at Chee’s condition, wished him a quick recovery, and invited them to be seated.

“I saw the story about you being shot on television,” she said. “Bad as you look, they made it sound even worse.”

“Just some cracked ribs,” Chee said.

“And old Mr. Maryboy being killed. I only met him once, but he was very nice to us. He invited us in and offered to make coffee.”

“When was that?”

“Way back in the dark ages,” she said. “When Hal and George would come out for the summer and Eldon and I would go climbing with them.”

“Is your brother here now?” Chee asked. “I was hoping to talk to you both.”

“He was here earlier, but one of the mares got herself tangled up in a fence. He went out to see about her. There’s supposed to be a snowstorm moving in and he wanted to get her into the barn.”

“Do you expect him back soon?”

“She’s up in the north pasture,” Elisa said. “But he shouldn’t be long unless she’s cut so badly he had to go into Mancos and get the vet. Would you two care for something to drink? It’s a long drive up here from Shiprock.” She served them both coffee but poured none for herself. Chee sipped and watched her over the rim, twisting her hands. If she had been one of the three climbers that day, if she had reached the top, she should know what was coming now. He took out the folder of photographs and handed Elisa the one signed with her husband’s name.

“Thanks,” she said, and looked at it. Officer Manuelito was watching her, sitting primly on the edge of her chair, cup in saucer, uncharacteristically quiet. It occurred to Chee that she looked like a pretty girl pretending to be a cop.

Elisa was frowning at the photograph. “It’s a picture of the page from the climbers’ ledger,” she said slowly. “But where—” She dropped the picture on the coffee table, said, “Oh, God,” in a strangled voice, and covered her face with her hands.

Officer Manuelito leaned forward, lips apart. Chee shook his head, signaled silence.

Elisa picked up the picture again, stared at it, dropped it to the floor and sat rigid, her face white.

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“Mrs. Breedlove,” Chee said. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head. Shuddered. Composed herself, looked at Chee.

“This photograph. That’s all there was on the page?”

“Just what you saw.”

She bent, picked up the print, looked at it again. “And the date. The date. That’s what was written?”

“Just as you see it,” Chee said.

“But of course it was.” She produced a laugh on the razor edge of hysteria. “A silly question. But it’s wrong, you know. It should have been—but why—” She put her hand over her mouth, dropped her head.

The noise the wind was making—rattles, whistles, and howls—filtered through windows and walls and filled the dark room with the sounds of winter.

“I know the date’s wrong,” Chee said. “The entry is dated September thirty. That’s a week after your husband disappeared from Canyon de Chelly. What should—” He stopped. Elisa wasn’t listening to him. She was lost in her own memory. And that, combined with what the picture had told her, was drawing her to some ghastly conclusion.

“The handwriting,” she said. “Have you—” But she cut that off, too, pressed her lips together as if to keep them from completing the question.

But not soon enough, of course. So she hadn’t known what had happened on the summit of Ship Rock. Not until moments ago when the forgery of her husband’s signature told her. Told her exactly what? That her husband had died before he’d had a chance to sign.

That her husband’s death, therefore, must have been preplanned as well as postdated. The pattern Leaphorn had taught him to look for took its almost final dismal shape. And filled Jim Chee with pity.

Officer Manuelito was on her feet.

“Mrs. Breedlove, you need to lie down,” she said. “You’re sick. Let me get you something. Some water.” Elisa sagged forward, leaned her forehead against the table. Officer Manuelito hurried into the kitchen.

“We haven’t checked the handwriting yet,” Chee said. “Can you tell us what that will show?” Elisa was sobbing now. Bernie emerged from the kitchen, glass of water in one hand, cloth in the other. She gave Chee a “How could you do this?” look and sat next to Elisa, patting her shoulder.

“Take a sip of water,” Bernie said. “And you should lie down until you feel better. We can finish this later.” Ramona appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a padded coat, her face red with cold. She watched them anxiously. “What are you doing to her?” she said. “Go away now and let her rest.”

“Oh, God,” Elisa said, her voice muffled by the table. “Why did he think he had to do it?”

“Where can I find Eldon?” Chee asked.

Elisa shook her head.

“Does he have a rifle?” But of course he would have a rifle. Every male over about twelve in the Rocky Mountain West had a rifle.

“Where does he keep it?”

Elisa didn’t respond. Chee motioned to Bernie. She left in search of it.

Elisa raised her head, wiped her eyes, looked at Chee. “It was an accident, you know. Hal was always reckless. He wanted to rappel down the cliff. I thought I had talked him out of it. But I guess I hadn’t.”

“Did you see it happen?”

“I didn’t get all the way to the top. I was below. Waiting for them to come down.” Chee hesitated. The next question would be crucial, but should he ask it now, with this woman overcome by shock and grief? Any lawyer would tell her not to talk about any of this. But she wouldn’t be the one on trial.

Bernie reappeared at the doorway, Ramona behind her. “There’s a triple gun rack in the office,” she said. “A twelve-gauge pump shotgun in the bottom rack and the top two empty.”

“Okay,” Chee said.

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“And in the wastebasket beside the desk, there’s a thirty-ought-six ammunition box. The top’s torn off and it’s empty.” Chee nodded and came to his decision.

“Mrs. Breedlove. No one climbed the mountain on the date by your husband’s name. But on September eighteenth three people were seen climbing it. Hal was one of them. You were one. Who was the third?”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” Elisa said. “I want you to go.”

“You don’t have to tell us anything,” Chee said. “You have the right to remain silent, and to call your lawyer if you think you need one. I don’t think you’ve done anything you could be charged with, but you never really know what a prosecuting attorney will decide.”

Officer Manuelito cleared her throat. “And anything you say can be used against you. Remember that.”

“I don’t want to say any more.”

“That’s okay,” Chee said. “But I should tell you this. Eldon isn’t here and neither is his rifle and it looks like he just reloaded it. If we have this figured out right, Eldon is going to know there is just one man left alive who could ruin this for him.” Chee paused, waiting for a response. It didn’t come. Elisa sat as if frozen, staring at him.

“It’s a man named Amos Nez. Remember him? He was your guide in Canyon de Chelly. Right after Hal’s skeleton was found on Ship Rock last Halloween, Mr. Nez was riding his horse up the canyon. Someone up on the rim shot him. He wasn’t killed, just badly hurt.”

Elisa sagged a little with that, looked down at her hands, and said, “I didn’t know that.”

“With a thirty-ought-six rifle,” Chee added.

“What day was it?”

Chee told her.

She thought a moment. Remembering. Slumped a little more.

“If anyone kills Mr. Nez the charge will be the premeditated murder of a witness. That carries the death penalty.”

“He’s my brother,” Elisa said. “Hal’s death was an accident. Sometimes he acted almost like he wanted to die. No thrills, he said, if you didn’t take a chance. He fell. When Eldon climbed down to where I was waiting, he looked like he was almost dead himself. He was devastated. He was so shaken he could hardly tell me about it.” She stopped, looking at Chee, at Bernie, back at Chee.

Waiting for our reaction, Chee thought. Waiting for us to give her absolution? No, waiting for us to say we believe what she is telling us, so that she can believe it again herself.

“I think you were driving that Land-Rover,” Chee said. “When police found it abandoned up an arroyo north of Many Farms they said there was a telephone in it.”

“But what good would it have done to call for help?” Elisa asked, her voice rising. “Hal was dead. He was all broken to pieces on that little ledge. Nobody could bring him back to life again. He was dead!”

“Was he?”

“Yes,” she shouted. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

And now Chee understood why Elisa had been so shocked when she learned the skeleton was intact—with not a bone broken. She didn’t want to believe it. Refused to believe it still. That made the next question harder to ask. What had Eldon told her of the scene at the top? Had he explained why Hal had started his descent before he signed the book? Why he falsified the register? Had he—

Ramona rushed into the room, sat beside Elisa, hugged the woman to her. She glared at Chee. “I said go away now,” she said. “Get out. No more. No more. She has suffered too much.”

“It’s all right,” Elisa said. “Ramona, when you came in did you see the Land-Rover in the garage?”

“No,” Ramona said. “Just Eldon’s pickup truck.”

Elisa looked at Chee, sighed, and said, “Then I guess he didn’t go up to see about the mare. He would have taken his truck.” Chee picked up his hat and the photographs. He thanked Mrs. Breedlove for the cooperation, apologized for bringing her bad news, and hurried out, with Bernie trotting along behind him. The wind was bitter now, and carrying those dry-as-dust first snowflakes that were the forerunners of a storm.

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“I want to get Leaphorn on the radio,” he said, as Bernie started the engine, “and maybe we’ll have to make a fast trip to Canyon de Chelly.”

Bernie was looking back at the house. “Do you think she will be all right?”

“I think so,” Chee said. “Ramona will take good care of her.”

“Ramona’s pretty shaken up, too,” Bernie said. “She was crying when she helped me look for the rifle. She said it was always the wrong men with Elisa—always having to take care of them. That Hal was a spoiled baby and Eldon was a bully. She said if it wasn’t for Eldon she’d be married to a good man who wanted to take care of her.”

“She say who?”

“I think it was Tommy Castro. Or maybe Kaster. Something like that. She was crying.” Bernie was staring back at the house, looking worried.

“Bernie,” Chee said. “It’s starting to snow. It’s probably going to be a bad one. Start the car. Go. Go. Go.”

“You’re worried about Amos Nez,” Bernie said, starting the engine. “We can just call the station at Chinle and have them stop any Land-Rover driving in. Bet Mr. Leaphorn already did that.”

“He said he would,” Chee said. “But I want to get a message to him about Demott taking off with his thirty-ought-six loaded. Maybe Eldon won’t be driving in. If you can climb seventeen hundred feet up Ship Rock, maybe you can climb down a six-hundred-foot cliff.”

26

THEY DROVE INTO THE FULL BRUNT

of the storm halfway between Mancos and Cortez, the wind buffeting the car and driving a blinding sheet of tiny dry snowflakes horizontally past their windshield.

“At least it’s sweeping the pavement clear,” Bernie said, sounding cheerful.

Chee glanced at her. She seemed to be enjoying the adventure. He wasn’t. His ribs hurt, so did the abrasions around his eye, and he was not in the mood for cheer.

“That won’t last long,” he said.

It didn’t. In Cortez, snow was driving over the curbs and the pavement was beginning to pack, and the broadcasts on the emergency channel didn’t sound promising. A last gasp of the Pacific hurricane system was pushing across Baja California into Arizona. There it met the first blast of Arctic air, pressing down the east slope of the Rockies from Canada. Interstate 40 at Flagstaff, where the two fronts had collided, was already closed by snow. So were highways through the Wasatch Range in Utah. Autumn was emphatically over on the Colorado Plateau.

They turned onto U.S. 666 to make the forty-mile run almost due south to Shiprock. With the icy wind pursuing them, the highway emptied of traffic by storm warnings, and speed limits ignored, Bernie outran the Canadian contribution to the storm. The sky lightened now. Far ahead, they could see where the Pacific half of the blizzard had reached the Chuska range. Its cold, wet air met the dry, warmer air on the New Mexico side at the ridgeline. The collision produced a towering wall of white fog, which poured down the slopes like a silent slow-motion Niagara.

“Wow,” Bernie said. “I never saw anything quite like that before.”

“The heavy cold air forces itself under the warmer stuff,” said Chee, unable to avoid a little showing off. “I’ll bet it’s twenty degrees colder at Lukachukai than it is at Red Rock—and they’re less than twenty miles apart.” They crossed the western corner of the Ute reservation, then roared into New Mexico and across the mesa high above Malpais Arroyo.

“Wow,” Bernie said again. “Look at that.”

Instead Chee glanced at the speedometer and flinched.

“You drive,” he said. “I’ll check the scenery for both of us.” It was worth checking. They looked down into the vast San Juan River basin—dark with storm to the right, dappled with sunlight to the left. Ship Rock stood just at the edge of the shadow line, a grotesque sunlit thumb thrust into the sky, but through some quirk of wind and air pressure, the long bulge of the Hogback formation was already mostly dark with cloud shadow.

“I think we’re going to get home before the snow,” Bernie said.

They almost did. It caught them when Bernie pulled into the parking lot at the station—but the flakes blowing against Chee as he hurried into the building were still small and dry. The Canadian cold front was still dominating the Pacific storm.

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“You look terrible,” Jenifer said. “How do you feel?”

“I’d say well below average,” Chee said. “Did Leaphorn call?”

“Indirectly,” Jenifer said, and handed Chee three message slips and an envelope.

It was on top—a call from Sergeant Deke at the Chinle station confirming that Leaphorn had received Chee’s message about Demott leaving his ranch with his rifle. Leaphorn had gone up the canyon to the Nez place and would either bring Nez out with him or stay, depending on the weather, which was terrible.

Chee glanced at the other messages. Routine business. The envelope bore the word “Jim” in Janet’s hand. He tapped it against the back of his hand. Put it down. Called Deke.

“I’ve seen worse,” Deke said. “But it’s a bad one for this time of year. Still above zero but it won’t be for long. Blowing snow. We have Navajo 12 closed at Upper Wheatfields, and 191 between here and Ganado, and 59 north of Red Rock, and—well, hell of a night to be driving. How about there?”

“I think we’re just getting the edge of it,” Chee said. “Did Leaphorn get my message?”

“Yep. He said not to worry.”

“What do you think? Demott’s a rock climber. Is Nez going to be safe enough?”

“Except for maybe frostbite,” Deke said. “Nobody’s going to be climbing those cliffs tonight.” And so Chee opened the envelope and extracted the note.

“Jim. Sorry I missed you. Going to get a bite to eat and will come by your place—Janet.” Her car wasn’t there when he drove up, which was just as well, he thought. It would give him a little time to get the place a little warmer. He fired up the propane heater, put on the coffee, and gave the place a critical inspection. He rarely did. His trailer was simply where he lived. Sometimes it was hot, sometimes it was cold. But otherwise it was not something he gave any thought to. It looked cramped, crowded, slightly dirty, and altogether dismal. Ah, well, nothing to do about it now. He checked the refrigerator for something to offer her. Nothing much there in the snack line, but he extracted a slab of cheese and pulled a box of crackers and a bowl with a few Oreos in it off the shelf over the stove. Then he sat on the edge of the bunk, slumped, listening to the icy wind buffeting the trailer, too tired to think about what might be about to happen.

Chee must have dozed. He didn’t hear the car coming down the slope, or see the lights. A tapping at the door awakened him, and he found her standing on the step looking up at him.

“It’s freezing,” she said as he ushered her in.

“Hot coffee,” he said. Poured a cup, handed it to her, and offered her the folding chair beside the fold-out table. But she stood a moment, hugging herself and shivering, looking undecided.

“Janet,” he said. “Sit down. Relax.”

“I just need to tell you something,” she said. “I can’t stay. I need to get back to Gallup before the weather gets worse.” But she sat.

“Drink your coffee,” he said. “Warm up.”

She was looking at him over the cup. “You look awful,” she said. “They told me you’d gone up to Mancos. To see the Breedlove widow. You shouldn’t be back at work yet. You should be in bed.”

“I’m all right,” he said. And waited. Would she ask him why he’d gone to Mancos? What he’d learned?

“Why couldn’t somebody else do it?” she said. “Somebody without broken ribs.”

“Just cracked,” Chee said.

She put down her cup. He reached for it. She intercepted his hand, held it.

“Jim,” she said. “I’m going away for a while. I’m taking my accrued leave time, and my vacation, and I’m going home.”

“Home?” Chee said. “For a while. How long is that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to get my head together. Look forward and backwards.” She tried to smile but it didn’t come off well. She shrugged. “And just think.”

It occurred to Chee that he hadn’t poured himself any coffee. Oddly, he didn’t want any. It occurred to him that she wasn’t burning her bridges.

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“Think?” he said. “About us?”

“Of course.” This time the smile worked a little better.

But her hand was cold. He squeezed it. “I thought we were through that phase.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said. “You never really stopped thinking about whether we’d be compatible. Whether we really fit.”

“Don’t we?”

“We did in this fantasy I had,” she said, and waved her hands, mocking herself. “Big, good-looking guy. Sweet and smart and as far as I could tell you really cared about me. Fun on the Big Rez for a while, then a big job for you in someplace interesting.

Washington. San Francisco. New York. Boston. And the big job for me in Justice, or maybe a law firm. You and I together.

Everything perfect.”

Chee said nothing to that.

“Everything perfect,” she repeated. “The best of both worlds.” She looked at him, trying to hold the grin and not quite making it.

“With twin Porsches in the triple garage,” Chee said. “But when you got to know me, I didn’t fit the fantasy.”

“Almost,” she said. “Maybe you do, really.” Suddenly Janet’s eyes went damp. She looked away. “Or maybe I change the fantasy.” He extracted his handkerchief, frowned at it, reached into the storage drawer behind him, extracted paper napkins, and handed them to Janet. She said, “Sorry,” and wiped her eyes.

He wanted to hold her, very close. But he said, “A cold wind does that.”

“So I thought maybe as time goes by everything changes a little. I change and so do you.” He could think of nothing honest to say to that.

“But after the other evening in Gallup, when you were so angry with me, I began to understand,” she said.

“Remember once a long time ago you asked me about a schoolteacher I used to date? Somebody told you about her. From Wisconsin. Just out of college. Blonde, blue eyes, taught second grade at Crownpoint when I was a brand-new cop and stationed there. Well, it wasn’t that there was anything much wrong with me, but for her kids she wanted the good old American dream. She saw no hope for that in Navajo country. So she went away.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Janet said. “She wasn’t a Navajo.”

“But I am,” he said. “So I thought, what’s the difference? I’m darker. Rarely sunburn. Small hips. Wide shoulders. That’s racial, right? Does that matter? I think not much. So what makes me a Navajo?”

“You’re going to say culture,” Janet said. “I studied social anthropology, too.”

“I grew up knowing it’s wrong to have more than you need. It means you’re not taking care of your people. Win three races in a row, you better slow down a little. Let somebody else win. Or somebody gets drunk and runs into your car and tears you all up, you don’t sue him, you want to have a sing for him to cure him of alcoholism.”

“That doesn’t get you admitted into law school,” Janet said. “Or pull you out of poverty.”

“Depends on how you define poverty.”

“It’s defined in the law books,” Janet said. “A family of x members with an annual income of under y.”

“I met a middle-aged man at a Yeibichai sing a few years ago. He ran an accounting firm in Flagstaff and came out to Burnt Water because his mother had a stroke and they were doing the cure for her. I said something about it looking like he was doing very well.

And he said, ‘No, I will be a poor man all my life.’ And I asked him what he meant, and he said, ‘Nobody ever taught me any songs.’”

“Ah, Jim,” she said. She rose, took the two steps required to reach the bunk where he was sitting, put her arms carefully around him and kissed him. Then she pressed the undamaged side of his face against her breast.

“I know having a Navajo dad didn’t make me a Navajo,” she said. “My culture is Stanford sorority girl, Maryland cocktail circuit, Mozart, and tickets to the Met. So maybe I have to learn not to think that being ragged, and not having indoor plumbing, and walking miles to see the dentist means poverty. I’m working on it.” Chee, engulfed in Janet’s sweater, her perfume, her softness, said something like “Ummmm.”

“But I’m not there yet,” she added, and released him.

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“I guess I should work on it from the other end, too,” he said. “I could get used to being a lieutenant, trying to work my way up.

Trying to put some value on things like—” He let that trail off.

“One thing I want you to know,” she said. “I didn’t use you.”

“You mean—”

“I mean deliberately getting information out of you so I could tell John.”

“I guess I always knew that,” he said. “I was just being jealous. I had the wrong idea about that.”

“I did tell him you’d found Breedlove’s body. He invited Claire and me to the concert. Claire and I go all the way back to high school. And we were remembering old times and, you know, it just came out. It was just something interesting to tell him.”

“Sure,” Chee said. “I understand.”

“I have to go now,” she said. “Before you guys close the highway. But I wanted you to know that. Breedlove had been his project when the widow filed to get the death certified. It looked so peculiar. And finally, now, I guess it’s all over.” Her tone made that a question.

She was zipping up her jacket, glancing at him.

“Lieutenant Leaphorn gave Mr. Shaw that photograph of the climber’s ledger,” she said.

“Yeah,” Chee said. The wind buffeted the trailer, made its stormy sounds, moved a cold draft against his neck.

“She must have thought that terribly odd—for him to just leave her at the canyon, and then abandon their car, and go back to Ship Rock to climb it like that.”

Chee nodded.

“Surely she must have had some sort of theory. I know I would have had if you’d done something crazy like that to me.”

“She cried a lot,” Chee said. “She could hardly believe it.”

And in a minute Janet was gone. The goodbye kiss, the promises to write, the invitation to come and join her. Then holding the car door open for her, commenting on how it always got colder when the snowing stopped, and watching the headlights vanish at the top of the slope.

He sat on the bunk again then, felt the bandages around his eye, and decided the soreness there was abating. He probed the padding over his ribs, flinched, and decided the healing there was slower. He noticed the coffeepot was still on, got up, and unplugged it. He switched on the radio, thinking he would get some weather news. Then switched it off again and sat on the bed.

The telephone rang. Chee stared at it. It rang again. And again. He picked it up.

“Guess what?” It was Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

“What?”

“Begayaye just told me,” she said. “He detoured past Ship Rock today. The cattle were crowded around our loose-fence-post place, eating some fresh hay.”

“Well,” Chee said, and gave himself a moment to make the mental transition from Janet Pete to the Lone Ranger competition. “I’d say this would be a perfect time for Mr. Finch to supplement his income. The cops all away working weather problems, and everybody staying home by the fire.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said.

“I’ll meet you there a little before daylight. When’s sunup these days?”

“About seven.”

“I’ll meet you at the office at five. Okay?”

“Hey,” Bernie said. “I like it.”

27

“I’M GOING TO SHOW YOU SOME PICTURES,” Leaphorn said to Amos Nez, and he dug a folder out of his briefcase.

“Pretty women in bikinis,” old man Nez said, grinning at his mother-in-law. Mrs. Benally, who didn’t much understand English, 80 of 102

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grinned back.

“Pictures which I should have showed you eleven years ago,” Leaphorn said, and put a photograph on the arm of the old sofa where Nez was sitting. The old iron stove that served for heating and cooking in the Nez hogan was glowing red from the wood fire within it. Cold was in the canyon outside; Leaphorn was sweating. But Nez had kept his sweater on and Mrs. Benally had her shawl draped over her shoulders.

Nez adjusted his glasses on his nose. Looked. He smiled at Leaphorn, handed him back the print. “That’s her,” he said. “Mrs.

Breedlove.”

“Who’s the man with her?”

Nez retrieved the print, studied it again. He shook his head. “I don’t know him.”

“That’s Harold Breedlove,” Leaphorn said. “You’re looking at a photograph the Breedloves had taken at a studio in Farmington on their wedding anniversary—the summer before they came out here and got you to guide them.” Nez stared at the photograph. “Well, now,” he said. “It sure is funny what white people will do. Who is that man she was here with?”

“You tell me,” Leaphorn said. He handed Nez two more photographs. One was a photocopy he’d obtained, by imposing on an old friend in the Indian Service’s Washington office, of George Shaw’s portrait from the Georgetown University School of Law alumni magazine. The others had been obtained from the photo files of the Mancos Weekly Citizen—mug shots of young Eldon Demott and Tommy Castro wearing Marine Corps hats.

“I don’t know this fella here,” Nez said, and handed Leaphorn the Shaw photo.

“I didn’t think you would,” Leaphorn said. “I was just making sure.” Nez studied the other photo. “Well, now,” he said. “Here’s my friend Hal Breedlove.” He handed Leaphorn the picture of Eldon Demott.

“Not your friend now,” Leaphorn said, and tapped Nez’s leg cast. “He’s the guy that tried to kill you.” Nez retrieved the photo, looked at it, and shook his head. “Why did he do—” he began, and stopped, thinking about it.

Leaphorn explained about ownership of the ranch depending on the date of Breedlove’s death, and now depending upon continuing the deception. “There were just two people who knew something that could screw this up. One of them knew the date Hal Breedlove and Demott climbed Ship Rock—a man named Maryboy who gave them permission to climb. Demott shot him the other day. That leaves you.”

“Well, now,” Nez said, and made a wry face.

“A policeman who is looking into all this sent me a message that Demott loaded up his rifle this morning and headed out. I guess he’d be coming out here to see if he could get another shot at you.”

“Why don’t they arrest him?”

“They have to catch him first,” Leaphorn said, not wanting to get into the complicated explanation of legalities—and the total lack of any concrete evidence that there was any reason to arrest Demott. “My idea was to take you and Mrs. Benally into Chinle and check you into the motel there. The police can keep an eye on you until they get Demott locked up.” Nez gave himself some time to think this over. “No,” he said. “I’ll just stay here.” He pointed to the shotgun in the rack on the opposite wall. “You just take old lady Benally there. Look after her.” Mrs. Benally may not have been able to translate “bikini” into Navajo, but she had no trouble with “motel.”

“I’m not going into any motel,” she said.

For practical purposes, that ended the argument. Nobody was moving.

Leaphorn wasn’t unprepared for that. Before he’d parked at the Nez hogan, he had scouted up Canyon del Muerto, examining the south-side cliff walls below the place where the ranger had reported seeing the man with the rifle. Sergeant Deke had said it was just five or six hundred yards up-canyon from the Nez place. Leaphorn had seen no location within rifle range where the top of the south cliff offered a fair shot at the Nez hogan. But about a quarter mile up-canyon a huge slab of sandstone had given way to the erosion undercutting it.

The cliff had split here. The slab had separated from the wall. He’d studied it. Someone who knew rock climbing, had the equipment, and didn’t mind risking falling off a forty-story building could get down here. This must have been what Demott had been doing here—if it was Demott. He was looking for a way in and out that avoided the bottleneck entrance.

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It was certainly conveniently close for a climber. Or a bird. Being neither meant Leaphorn would have to drive about fifteen miles down Canyon del Muerto to its junction with Canyon de Chelly, then another five or six to the canyon mouth to reach the pavement of Navajo Route 64. Then he’d have to reverse directions and drive twenty-four miles northeastward along the north rim of del Muerto, turn southwestward maybe four miles toward Tsaile, then complete the circle down the brushy dirt-and-boulder track that took those foolhardy enough to use it down that finger of mesa separating the canyons. The last six or seven miles on that circuit would take about as long as the first fifty.

Leaphorn hurried. He wanted enough daylight left to check the place carefully—to either confirm or refute his suspicions. More important, if Demott was coming Leaphorn wanted to be there waiting for him.

He seemed to have managed that. He stopped across the cattle guard where the unmarked track connected with the highway, climbed out, and made a careful inspection. The last vehicle to leave its tracks here had been coming out, and that had been shortly after the snowfall began. Eight or nine jolting miles later, he pulled his car off the track and left it concealed behind a cluster of junipers. The wind was bitter now, but the snow had diminished to occasional dry flakes.

The west rim of Canyon del Muerto was less than fifty yards away over mostly bare sandstone. If he had calculated properly, he was just about above the Nez home site. In fact, he was perhaps a hundred yards below it. He stood a foot or two back from the edge looking down, confirming that the Nez hogan was too protected by the overhang to offer a shot from here. He could see the track where Nez drove in his truck, but the hogan itself and all of its outbuildings except a goat pen were hidden below the wall. But he could see from here the great split-off sandstone slab, and he walked along the rim toward it. He was almost there when he heard an engine whining in low gear.

Along the cliff here finding concealment was no problem. Leaphorn moved behind a great block of sandstone surrounded by piñons.

He checked his pistol and waited.

The vehicle approaching was a dirty, battered, dark green Land-Rover. It came almost directly toward him. Stopped not fifty feet away. The engine died. The door opened. Eldon Demott stepped out. He reached behind him into the vehicle and took out a rifle, which he laid across the hood. Then he extracted a roll of thin, pale yellow rope and a cardboard box. These two also went onto the hood. From the box he took a web belt and harness, a helmet, and a pair of small black shoes. He leaned against the fender, removed a boot, replaced it with a shoe, and repeated the process. Then he put on the belt and the climbing harness. He looked at his watch, glanced at the sky, stretched, and looked around him.

He looked directly at Joe Leaphorn, sighed, and reached for the rifle.

“Leave it where it is,” Leaphorn said, and showed Demott his .38 revolver.

Demott took his hand away from the rifle, dropped it to his side.

“I might want to shoot something,” he said.

“Hunting season is over,” Leaphorn said.

Demott sighed and leaned against the fender. “It looks like it is.”

“No doubt about it. Even if I get careless and you shoot me, you can’t get out of here anyway. Two police cars are on their way in after you. And if you climb down, well, that’s hopeless.”

“You going to arrest me? How do you do that? You’re retired. Or is it a citizen’s arrest?”

“Regular arrest,” Leaphorn said. “I’m still deputized by the sheriff in this county. I didn’t get around to turning in the commission.”

“What do you charge me with—trespass?”

“Well, I think more likely it will start out being attempted homicide of Amos Nez, and then after the FBI gets its work done, the murder of Hosteen Maryboy.”

Demott was staring at him, frowning. “That’s it?”

“I think that would do it,” Leaphorn said.

“Nothing about Hal.”

“Nothing so far. Except that Amos Nez thinks you’re him.”

Demott considered that. “I’m getting cold,” he said, and reopened the car door. “Going to get out of the wind.”

“No,” Leaphorn said, and shifted the pistol barrel before him.

Demott stopped, shut the door. He smiled at Leaphorn, shook his head. “Another weapon in there, you think?” Leaphorn returned the smile. “Why take chances?” he said.

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“Nothing about Hal,” he said. “Well, I’m glad of that.”

“Why?”

Demott shrugged. “Because of Elisa,” he said. “The other cop, Jim Chee I think it was, he was coming up to see us. He said you had looked at the climber register. What did Elisa say about that?”

“I wasn’t there. Chee showed her the page with Hal’s name on it, and the date. He said she sort of went to pieces. Cried.” Leaphorn shrugged. “About what you’d expect, I guess.”

Demott slumped against the fender. “Ah, hell,” he said, and slammed his fist against the hood. “Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!”

“It made it look premeditated, of course,” Leaphorn said.

“Of course,” Demott said. “And it wasn’t.”

“An accident. If it wasn’t, it may be hard to keep her out of it.”

“She was still in love with the bastard. Didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

“I’m not surprised,” Leaphorn said. “But considering what’s involved, the Breedloves will probably hire a special prosecutor and they’ll be aimed at getting the ranch back. Voiding the inheritance.”

“Voiding the inheritance? What do you mean? Wouldn’t that sort of be automatic? I mean, with what you said about Nez knowing

. . . You know, Hal didn’t inherit until he was thirty. The way the proviso read, if he didn’t reach that birthday, everything was voided.”

“Nez thinking you were Hal isn’t the only evidence that he lived past that birthday,” Leaphorn said. “There’s his signature in the climbers’ register. That’s dated September thirty. You know of any evidence that he died before that?” Demott was staring at Leaphorn, mouth partly open. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Wait. What are you saying?”

“I guess I’m saying that I think there’s sometimes a difference between the law and justice. If there’s justice here, you’re going to spend life in prison for the premeditated murder of Mr. Maryboy, with maybe an add-on twenty years or so for the attempted murder of Amos Nez. I think that would be about right. But it probably won’t work quite like that. Your sister’s probably going to be charged with accessory to murder—maybe as a conspirator and certainly as an accessory after the fact. And the Breedloves will get her ranch.”

Demott inhaled a deep breath. He looked down at his hands, rubbed at his thumb.

“And Cache Creek will be running water gray with cyanide and mining effluent.”

“Yeah,” Demott said. “I really screwed it up. Year after year you’re nervous about it. Sunny day you think you’re clear. Nothing to worry about. Then you wake up with a nightmare.”

“What happened up there?” Leaphorn said.

Demott gave him a questioning look. “You asking for a confession?”

“You’re not under arrest. If you were, I’d have to tell you about your rights not to say anything until you get your lawyer. Elisa told Chee she didn’t get all the way to the top. Is that right?”

“She didn’t,” Demott said. “She was getting scared.” He snorted. “I should say sensible.” Leaphorn nodded.

“This birthday was a big deal for Hal,” Demott said. “He’d say, Lord God Almighty, I’ll be free at last, and get all excited thinking about it. And he’d invited this guy he’d known at Dartmouth to bring his girlfriend to see Canyon de Chelly and Navajo National Monument, the Grand Canyon, all that. Meet him and Elisa at the canyon for a birthday party for starters. But first he wanted to climb Ship Rock before he was thirty. That proved something to him. So we climbed it. Or almost.” Demott looked away. Deciding how much of this he wants to tell me, Leaphorn thought. Or maybe just remembering.