The Wailing Wind

"You're pretty thorough," Price said.

"I read a book by Raymond Chandler a long time ago. The crime scene crew had finished searching the hotel room, the victim, gone through everything. When the police were gone, Chandler had his detective take a look under the victim's toupee."

"Never read it," Price said.

Chapter Sixteen

« ^ »

Leaphorn had been trying to explain to Professor Louisa Bourbonette the confusing business of the maps.

"I might have known," said Louisa, "that if you got yourself mixed up in this it would involve maps."

For once Louisa had no other commitments, no academic duties at Northern Arizona U., and no reason not to take a ride with Leaphorn. This one was to a coffee shop in Shiprock and an appointment with Sergeant Jim Chee.

"Aside from that," Leaphorn said, "can you think of a reason Denton would want to lie to me about it?"

"Maybe he didn't," Louisa said. "Maybe McKay had two maps in that briefcase. He showed Denton the one Denton told you about. Denton kept it. And after he shot McKay, Denton hid it away somewhere before police arrived."

They both thought about that for a moment.

"That's possible," Leaphorn said.

"But not likely," she said. "Can you think of a reason he'd bring along two maps? You might bring two maps yourself. In fact, you probably have two maps with you right now."

Leaphorn laughed. "Actually, I have three today." He extracted an American Automobile Association Indian Country map from the door pocket, and two pages copied from the U.S.G.S. quadrangle maps book from the glove compartment.

They hadn't settled the puzzle of Denton's wrong map, nor why Denton had lied about McKay's jacket, if indeed he had, or any of the several other things that had been bothering Leaphorn. But Louisa had firmly and emphatically resolved the Linda-Wiley relationship. Yes, Wiley was in love with Linda, and vice versa. Louisa had no doubt at all.

Sergeant Chee's patrol car was parked at the café, and Chee was inside holding a corner table. He stood to greet them.

"I owe you a big favor if you ever need one," he told Leaphorn. "Osborne didn't seem to have anything to complain about."

Leaphorn nodded.

"Is this something I'm not supposed to know about?" Louisa asked.

"Just avoiding some bureaucratic red tape," Leaphorn said.

"How about you, Sergeant Chee? Are you willing to tell me?"

"A piece of evidence got misplaced," Chee said. "I wasn't sure how to deal with it, and I asked Lieutenant Leaphorn for advice. He handled it for me."

Louisa laughed. "No rules broken either, not so anyone would notice it. Right?"

"Let's just say no harm was done," Leaphorn said.

Officer Bernadette Manuelito was hurrying up to the table, looking flustered, saying she was sorry to be late. Leaphorn pulled back a chair for her, introduced her to Louisa, told her he was glad she could join them.

"Sergeant Chee asked me to come," Bernie said. "He said you were interested in the Doherty homicide."

"I think we were just talking about that," Louisa said. "Something that got Joe involved in it."

Professor Bourbonette had been around long enough, attended enough meetings with touchy faculty prima donnas, to sense instantly that she would have been better off to have restricted herself to smiles and nods.

Officer Manuelito's face expressed unnaturally intense interest. Leaphorn and Chee looked merely embarrassed.

"But I gather no harm was done," the professor added.

"I was just simplifying matters," Sergeant Chee said.

"An item that might be useful as evidence was involved," said Leaphorn, in an effort at damage control. "Jim wanted to get it back in place without involving a lot of needless paperwork."

"Oh," said Louisa. "Okay." And noticed that Officer Manuelito was leaning forward, her face flushed, and that Jim Chee was looking remarkably tense, and that it was time to change the subject.

"By the way," she said, "one of our history professors specializes in American frontier, nineteenth century, and I made the mistake of asking him if he'd heard of the Golden Calf gold legend and that touched off a standard academic fifty-minute lecture."

"Hey," said Chee, "I'd like to hear about that."

"As I understand it, the recorded facts are that a civilian quartermaster employee at Fort Wingate, a man named Theodore Mott, was sent with four soldiers to deliver some supplies to the camp where they were building Fort Defiance. The soldiers were detached to join the cavalry unit at Defiance. Mott came back alone and resigned from his job. There's paperwork for that much in the army records. The interesting part is just talk about him finding a gold deposit on his trip."

Louisa paused. Bernie leaned forward again. Chee said: "Go ahead. This is going to be the interesting part."

"The legend is that Mott came back with a sack of placer gold. Several thousand dollars worth of it, very big money those days. He's supposed to have told a tale of having to detour going to Fort Defiance to avoid a band of Navajos who looked hostile. It was early summer after a wet winter—and the snowy winter is also recorded. They did an overnight camp in a canyon carrying runoff water. Mott did some placer mining with a frying pan and liked what he saw in the sand. On the way back, alone now, he stopped again and—the way he told it—collected the sack of gold between sundown and dark and the higher he got up the canyon, the richer the sand. When he awakened the next morning, six Navajos were standing around him. He said their leader was a shaman and while none of the Navajos could speak English, he knew enough Navajo words to know the shaman was telling him this canyon was a sacred place and being there for him was taboo, and if he came back again they would kill him."

The waiter was hovering, waiting to hand them their menus and to take their drink orders. Louisa paused while the group did their duty.

Bernie leaned forward, opened her mouth, said: "I'd like to know—"

"Yes," said Chee. "What happened next? Did he leave?"

"There's a sort of vague reference in Fort Wingate military records of Mott asking a military escort for a project, and the request being denied. But apparently he got three other men to join him and they left with pack animals, telling people they were going to be prospecting down in the Zuñi Mountains. Later one of the men came back to Wingate. He left a bunch of letters Mott had written to people at the fort to be mailed, and, according to the story, he turned in a substantial amount of placer gold at the assayer's office, and bought supplies, and headed out again." She threw up her hands. "That's the end of it. No one ever saw Mott or any of his partners again."

"Sounds a little like the story about the Lost Adams diggings," Leaphorn said.

"Killed by us savages," Chee said.

Bernie said: "I'd like to hear more about that tobacco tin."

Chee said: "Ah, well…"

Silence ensued.

Leaphorn cleared his throat.

"It seems a tobacco tin had been taken from the site where Mr. Doherty's body was found," said Leaphorn. "Later the officer in charge discovered the sand in this can contained a bit of placer gold and reported it. Sergeant Chee asked me to help devise a way to get it back where it had been and make sure the Federal Bureau of Investigation folks would find it there." He paused, glanced nervously at Bernie, cleared his throat. "That was accomplished. No harm done. No big deal."

Silence descended again on the table.

"I've always enjoyed this drive up here from Gallup," Louisa said. "When we pass that old volcanic throat east of the highway, Joe always tells me stories about it being a meeting place for skinwalkers. Where they held their initiation ceremonies."

"She's a very patient lady," Leaphorn said, nodding to Louisa. "I think she should have those tales memorized by now."

"I've heard a few of them myself," said Chee, happy to join the rush away from the tobacco-can debacle. "In fact, I may have made up a few of my own."

The waiter appeared and delivered four coffees, then took their food orders.

"Well, Lieutenant," said Chee, rushing in to keep the conversation away from tobacco tins and bruised feelings, "you said you're trying to find if there's a connection between the Doherty case and McKay. I can think of the placer gold link. And then Doherty having Denton's unlisted telephone number. But I think you were aware of both of those."

"I'd heard," Leaphorn said. "I guess that's what got me interested to start with. And now I should let you know where I stand. Denton asked me to do some work for him. He wants me to see if I can find out what happened to his wife. Find her, if she's findable."

Chee looked surprised. "You think that's possible? After all this time? I've heard two theories about Mrs. Denton. One is she's dead, and the other is she doesn't want to be found."

"I couldn't give him any hope. And I told him I wouldn't even try if he didn't lay everything out for me. But I've always wondered what happened to that woman."

"Has he 'laid everything out'?"

Leaphorn laughed. "Well, no. He seems to have misled me about what McKay was trying to sell him, for one thing. And he seems to have been lying a little about what was going on when he shot the man."

"Like how?"

"About the sale deal? Well—" Leaphorn reached into his inside jacket pocket and extracted a roll of paper and unrolled it on the table, exposing two maps.

"Maps," Chee said, grinning. "Why am I not the least bit surprised?"

"Well," said Leaphorn, sounding slightly defensive, "this whole business has been about maps, hasn't it?"

"Right," Chee said. "Sorry."

"McKay told Denton the location of this so-called Golden Calf dig was on this map—about here." With his fork, Leaphorn indicated a place on the southeast slope of the Zuñi Mountains.

"Denton told me he knew it couldn't possibly be there. Said he personally knows the geology of that area. Had walked all over it. So he ordered McKay out. They quarreled, McKay pulled a pistol out of his jacket pocket, picked up his briefcase and the bag of money Denton had ready to pay him, and said he was leaving with both. As this was happening Denton got his own pistol out of his desk drawer and shot McKay. That's Denton's story."

Chee nodded. "That sounds like what came out of the sentencing hearing."

"Right," Leaphorn said. "But that's not the map McKay had locked in his briefcase when the cops came to look at his body. And the part about McKay pulling the pistol out of his jacket pocket doesn't work. Big, fat revolver, little jacket pockets. And he didn't have the jacket on when Denton shot him. No holes in it, no blood, and it was hanging over the back of a chair."

Leaphorn expanded his summary with the details of his exploration of the evidence basket and his conversation with Price. During all this, Officer Manuelito was leaning forward, studying the second of Leaphorn's maps. Leaphorn caught her eye.

"I believe this is where Mr. Doherty was shot," she said. "I think this is where the gold came from that was in that Prince Albert tin."

"I think you're right," Leaphorn said. "At least about the first part. But maybe McKay had collected it there. Not Doherty."

Bernie was looking at Chee, her expression odd, but for Leaphorn unreadable.

"Do you know which deputy found it?" Bernie asked.

"Price didn't say," Leaphorn said.

Chee, who had been studying the Mesa de los Lobos map, felt an urge to get off the tobacco-tin subject fast.

"Speaking of that McKay evidence basket," Chee said, "Osborne told me that Doherty may have also taken a business card out of it with a number written on it. He asked me if that number had any meaning to me. It didn't, except maybe the 'D' referred to Denton. How about the rest of you? It was 'D2187.'"

"End of the Denton telephone number, license plate, Social Security number?" said Bernie.

No one else had a suggestion.

"Much more important," Chee said: "Officer Manuelito here"—he acknowledged Bernie with a smile—"has pretty well established that this Coyote Canyon drainage off Mesa de los Lobos is where Doherty was shot. Doherty had worked that fire in there during that bad season a couple of years ago—part of one of the blm fire crews. The fire burned out the brush and uncovered an old mining sluice. Bernie found his tracks in there and a place where he seems to have dug some sand out of the sluice. And while she was in there, somebody shot at her."

"Shot at you?" said Leaphorn.

"Oh! Oh!" said Professor Bourbonette. "Tried to shoot you!"

Bernie, looking flustered, said: "Well, anyway, they missed."

"And," continued Chee, "the fbi got its team in there and found the slug. They're checking it against a thirty-thirty owned by Hostiin Peshlakai. An old fellow who lives near the mouth of the canyon."

"I've heard of him," Leaphorn said. "He did a Night Chant years ago for one of Emma's aunts. Is he their suspect in the Doherty killing, too?"

"Probably. Osborne's interpreter is a little weak on traditional Navajo, so they had me interview him." Chee laughed. "Osborne was in a hurry. He wanted yes or no answers, and you can guess how that went. Anyway, he finally said he didn't try to kill Bernie."

Leaphorn digested that a moment.

"Didn't try to kill her," Leaphorn said. "Did he deny he tried to scare her away?"

"I didn't ask him that," Chee said.

Leaphorn drank what was left of his coffee, looking at Chee over the cup. "What are you thinking?"

Chee shrugged. "Not much mystery there. Peshlakai says a place up the canyon is a unique source of some of the minerals and herbs hataali need for some ceremonies. Like the Yeibichai. He performs that one. I think he's trying to keep belagaani from destroying the sacred place. Bernie heard the interview. She agrees."

Chee provided some of the mythical and theological details of Peshlakai's statement, which were discussed. Bernie mentioned the artificial owl guarding the canyon from a tree. Louisa added a bit of her anthropological/sociological information about the role of owls as harbingers of death and disaster among southwestern tribes. Their orders arrived.

Over the coffee refills, Leaphorn got to the questions he'd come to ask.

"I may be getting myself in a sort of funny position," he said. "I mean, if I do some really serious digging for Denton while I'm hunting his wife, I'm going to need to know if the fbi decides he's a primary suspect in the Doherty homicide. I don't want to get in the way. Mess anything up. What do you think?"

"They don't tell me everything," Chee said. "They'd have to be interested. Doherty had Denton's telephone number with him. He'd taken that tin can out of the evidence file in the McKay case, and from what I hear, he seemed to be following McKay's tracks. Interested in the same old mine legend. But as far as I know they have absolutely nothing except some circumstantial evidence."

"Would you mind if I call you now and then and ask you if anything criminal is brewing about Denton?"

"Lieutenant," said Chee, "you didn't need to ask me that. Of course I won't mind. If I know anything, I'll tell you. Trouble is, I may not know. How about reversing it. If you learn something, you tell me."

"One more question. Do you think that Golden Calf dig, or whatever it was, is up Coyote Canyon?"

"I don't believe in these legendary mines," Chee said. "When I was a kid I used to think I'd go out someday and find the Lost Adams diggings, or maybe the Lost Dutchman's Mine, and when I was poking around on arroyo bottoms, sometimes I'd dig in the wet sand and pretend I was looking for placer gold. But no. I grew up. Peshlakai said there's some quartzite deposits up there somewhere, probably a little gold dust washes downstream if we ever have a wet summer. One wet year, maybe enough washed down to start the legend."

"So you're not out looking for it?"

Chee laughed. "Gold causes trouble. I don't look for that."

Chapter Seventeen

« ^ »

Unfortunately for Joe Leaphorn, Denton had spent a lot of money on his telephone taping system. It was modern stuff, installed by a technician, and thus it had all the high-tech bells and whistles and a twenty-four-page instruction book written in the opaque language that the specialists use to exclude laymen from their science. Leaphorn had stacked the accumulated answering machine tapes in neat reverse chronological order, wasted fifteen minutes trying to get the first one to play, and finally called in Mrs. Mendoza. She showed him how to get the tape properly located in the proper slot, which buttons to push to reverse, repeat, adjust sound, and so forth. With that, Leaphorn put on the earphones and immersed himself in the weird world of those who read the personal ads: of the lost, lonely, lovelorn, the angry, the wanna-be-helpfuls, and the predators. The first caller to speak into his ear was one of the latter.

"I read your advertisment in the Arizona Republic," the man said. "I think I know where your woman is. I was eating lunch at Denny's, and there was this woman at the next table. Pretty girl but looking, you know, really strung out and stressed, talking to someone on a cellphone. Crying now and then. She mentioned running away from a man named Wiley. Whoever she was talking to, she told them she wanted to go back but was afraid this Wiley wouldn't want her, and she mentioned where she was staying. A place here in Phoenix. Using another name, she said. I got that written down, that address, along with the last name she was using along with Linda. I'd just tell it to you now, but I'm tapped out for cash, and I need a little financial help for this. I'll give you this number to call me at. Call right at three any day this week."

He followed that with a number, and hung up.

Leaphorn checked the first item in the ledger Denton kept beside the telephone.

Call 1. Haley finds number of phone booth at the Phoenix Convention Center. Answered right at three on second ring. Told me he knew exactly where Linda was. Said if I would mail thousand to his P.O. box, he'll call me back, provide her address, keep eye on her until I arrive. Description not Linda. Haley says a man showed up ten minutes before I called. Waited, took call, left. Followed him to trailer park on the highway south. Haley checked Phoenix PD sources. Parolee.

Leaphorn laid aside the headphones and went looking for Wiley Denton. Instead he found Mrs. Mendoza mixing something in the kitchen. She thought Denton was "off somewhere." He'd left a few minutes ago in his car. Did Mrs. Mendoza know anything about the tape machine and Denton's call ledger? Not much, Mrs. Mendoza said, but she rinsed her hands, dried them, and followed him into the empty bedroom where the listening equipment was installed.

"He started this when he was in the prison," she explained. "He got us to take the tapes in to the prison. He had a player there, and he'd make these notes and tell George what he wanted done about them."

"Who is this Haley he mentions in the first entry?"

"Mr. Denton's lawyer made some sort of arrangement with a security company. Haley Security and Investigations. Whoever the company had checking for him, Mr. Denton calls 'em Haley."

"Must have cost him a ton of money," Leaphorn said.

"Money." She made a sound of contempt, shook her head, and skipped through the ledger, explaining Denton's dating system, code, and shorthand. Leaphorn thanked her and went back to work.

The next call was a complaint that the reward offered in the Boston Herald was too small and left a number to call if Denton would double it. That was followed by a woman motivated by hatred instead of avarice. She didn't know where Linda was, but she knew she would never come back. She had fled because her husband had abused her. Now she was free, happy at last.

Leaphorn skipped the last of that one and began listening to a fellow who was certain Linda had been whisked away by space aliens. He then adopted a time-saving policy of making a quick judgment of whether the caller had anything enlightening to say.

After about two hours of this he had concluded that the idea had been a mistake. All he was learning was the peculiar nature of that segment of the population that responds to personal advertisements. A very few expressed sympathy for a man who had somehow lost the woman he treasured. But most of the responses had been triggered by greed, some sort of fantasy delusion, whimsy, or malice.

Then came another sort of call. A woman's voice, sounding both nervous and sad:

"You must be Wiley Denton," the woman said, "and I wish I could help you find Linda, but I can't. I just wanted you not to think she did you wrong. I've heard that gossip—that she was in cahoots with Marvin—but she wasn't. Not at all. I know for sure. I used to talk with her down where she worked before she married you. Just a sweet young girl. I'm praying that you find her."

Leaphorn listened to that again. And again. And then he took off the headset. He would listen to more of the calls later. Maybe all of them. But now he wanted to find this sad-sounding woman.

Chapter Eighteen

« ^ »

Wiley denton was home now from wherever he'd been, but Denton was not much help.

"Who?" he asked, and when Leaphorn explained, he snorted, said: "Oh, yeah. Her. I guess she was McKay's lady friend, but she didn't know anything. Or wouldn't admit it if she did."

"You found her and talked to her?"

Denton was not in a good mood. "I was still in lockup then, remember? But I got my lawyer to go out and see her. At least he billed me for it, but all she would tell him was that Marvin was a good man at heart, just liked to get his money the easy way, and he wasn't chasing after Linda."

"You still have her address?"

"It's in the file, I guess. But, hell, if this is the most interesting thing you've found so far, I'd say you're wasting your time."

But Denton provided the address and her name. It was Peggy McKay, and the address was one of a row of very small concrete block houses built in the 1920s when Gallup was a booming railroad and coal center. "Maybe she still lives there," Denton said. "But I doubt it. Her type moves around a lot."

The woman who came to the door to answer his knock was younger than Leaphorn had expected, causing him to think Denton might be right. She smiled at him, and said: "Yes. What can I do for you?"

"My name's Joe Leaphorn," Leaphorn said. "And I am trying to find Mrs. Linda Denton."

The smile went away, and suddenly she looked every bit old enough to be Marvin McKay's widow. She moved a half step back from the doorway and said: "Oh. Oh. Linda Denton. But I don't know anything to help you about that."

"I heard what you told Mr. Denton when you called him. That was good of you to call, and he feels the same way about it that you do. That nothing was going on between her and Mr. McKay. But he can't give up the idea of somehow finding her. And he asked me to help him, and I said I'd do what I could. Now I'm trying to make sure I understand what happened that day."

She held a hand up to her face. "Oh, yes. I wish I could understand it."

"Could I ask you a few questions? Just about that day?"

She nodded, motioned him to come in, invited him to take a seat on a dusty, overstuffed chair by the television, asked him if he'd like a glass of water, and then sat herself on the sofa, hands twisting in her lap, looking at Leaphorn and waiting.

"I'm a retired policeman," Leaphorn said. "I guess I still sort of think like one. What I hope I can do is get you to remember that day and sort of re-create it for me."

Mrs. McKay looked away from Leaphorn, examined the room. "Everything is in a mess," she said. "I just got home from the hospital."

Everything was indeed a mess. Every flat surface was covered with disorderly piles. The worn places in the carpet were more or less camouflaged by discolorations that Leaphorn diagnosed as coffee stains, ground-in crumbs, and assorted bits and pieces of this and that; and the corner beside the sofa housed a deep pile of old newspapers, magazines, sales brochures, etc. "The hospital?" Leaphorn said. "Do you have someone sick?"

"I work there," she said. "I'm a medical secretary. Keep the record files, type up reports. I was working that day. I was trying…" She brushed away a strand of black hair, put her hands over her face, took a deep, shuddering breath.

"Excuse me," she said.

"I'm sorry," Leaphorn said.

"No," she said, "I was just remembering. That day I was trying to get caught up on everything because we were going to have a weekend in San Diego. Marvin was planning to close on a deal he was working on with Mr. Denton, get the money Denton was paying him, and we had reservations on Amtrak for the next afternoon. We'd go swimming, visit Sea World or whatever they call it—and I think most of all I was looking forward to the train ride."

She gave Leaphorn a shy smile. "Old as I am, I'd never been on a train. You see them go by every day here in Gallup, of course, and when we got stopped at the crossing barrier to let one pass, I'd wave at the people in the observation cars and Marvin would say, 'Peggy, when I get this deal closed, we'll take an Amtrak vacation.' The evening before when he came in, he told me he thought this would be the day. He had all the items he needed, and Mr. Denton was agreeable. So I arranged to take some of my vacation time."

With that, she paused. Remembering those plans, Leaphorn guessed, organizing her thoughts. She sighed, shook her head.

"He called me about the middle of the morning, I think it was. He said he couldn't make it into town for lunch. He said he was wrapping up some loose ends. He sounded very happy. Exuberant. He said he'd just talked to Denton, and that Denton had the payment money at his house and he was going out to get it."

"Did he say where he was calling from?"

"He didn't say. But I remember he said he had to make a run out to Fort Wingate."

"Did he say what he was going to do there?"

She shook her head.

"Did he mention having anyone with him?"

"No."

"Can you remember anything else he told you in those calls?"

She frowned, thinking. "Well, in the first one he said Denton had asked him a lot of questions. He wanted Marvin to tell him just about everything about where the gold deposit was located, and Marvin said no way. Not until they had sealed the deal. He said then Denton said he wanted to know just the general area. What direction it was from Fort Wingate. Things like that. Marvin said he told him it was north. And Denton said, 'North of Interstate Forty?' And Marvin said he told him it was. He said he told Denton when he came he'd give him all the details, even show him some photographs of the sluice for placer mining in the bottom of the canyon."

"Photographs," Leaphorn said. "Had you seen them?"

She nodded. "They weren't very good," she said. "Didn't show much. Just some old rotted logs half buried in the sand and a bunch of trees in the background. Marvin wasn't much of a photographer."

"Did your husband ever tell you just where this lost mine was located?" Leaphorn asked.

"I guess he did in a general way," she said. "Once when I asked him about it, he asked me if I remembered when we went to the Crownpoint rug auction and had driven down that road that runs east from Highway Six Sixty-Six to Crownpoint, and I said I remembered. And he said it's off in that high country to the right when you're about halfway there."

"Driving east on Navajo Route Nine?"

"Yeah, I think that's the road. If we had a map I could tell you for sure."

For once, Leaphorn didn't have a map. But he didn't need one.

"Did Mr. McKay have those pictures with him when he went to see Denton?"

"I think so. He put a whole bunch of things in his briefcase before he left that morning. And—" She stopped, looked down, rubbed her hand across her face. "And after I got the word about what happened, and the sheriff came to talk to me about it, I looked through his things and the pictures weren't there."

"What did he tell you on the second call?"

"Well, he said he might be a little late." She forced a smile for Leaphorn. "Pretty ironic, isn't that? Then he said he was a little bit troubled by those questions Denton asked. Like Denton was trying to get the information he wanted without paying for it. He said just in case Denton was going to pull a fast one—something sneaky—he was arranging something himself. He said not to hold dinner for him. If he was late, we'd go out to eat."

"Did he say what he was arranging?"

She shook her head. "I think he called it 'some just-in-case, backup insurance.'"

"No details?"

"No. He said he had to run."

Leaphorn chose to let the silence linger. Navajos are conditioned to polite silences, but he had learned long ago that they put pressure on most belagaana. It had that effect on Peggy McKay.

"And he said he'd be seeing me in a few hours. And he loved me."

Leaphorn nodded.

"I know everybody thinks Marvin was a crook, and I guess the way the laws are written, sometimes he was. But it was just his way of making a living, and he always did it in ways that wouldn't really hurt people."

"Do you think that he was selling Mr. Denton what Denton wanted to buy?"

"You mean the location of that Golden Calf Mine—or whatever you call it?"

"Yes."

"I never much believed in those treasure stories myself," Peggy McKay said. "But, yes. Marvin had done a lot of work on this Golden Calf thing. For more than a year. I think he was selling Mr. Denton everything you could possibly get to find that place. Whatever it was. I do."

"Do you think he pulled a gun on Denton?"

"No. Denton made that up."

"The police found the gun."

"Marvin didn't have a gun. He never did have one. He didn't like them. He said anyone who did the kind of work he did was crazy to have a gun."

"You told the officers that?"

"Of course," she said. "They seemed to think that's what a wife would be expected to say. And later when the sentencing came up, I told the district attorney. He said that pistol hadn't been recorded anywhere, and they hadn't been able to trace it."

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "That's often the case."

"It was like they took for granted I was lying. It was finished. Marvin had a criminal record. He was dead. And Mr. Denton admitted shooting him. Why worry."

Leaphorn thought she had probably summed the situation up very well. But he just nodded. He was putting together what Peggy McKay had told him. He was thinking that the death of Marvin McKay looked an awful lot like a carefully planned and premeditated murder. And that left him two puzzles to solve. The one he had brought with him: Linda Denton was still missing with no reason why. And a new one. He couldn't think of a reason, short of insanity, why Denton would have wanted to kill Marvin McKay.

Chapter Nineteen

« ^ »

I know you've never had much use for academic methods," Louisa told Leaphorn, "but for heaven's sake, doesn't it make sense, when you're trying to solve a problem, to collect all the information available?"

His inability to find a good answer to that had led Joe Leaphorn to call Jim Chee at Chee's Shiprock office. Chee was en route to a meeting at ntp headquarters in Window Rock, the secretary said, but she'd have the dispatcher contact him and ask him to call Leaphorn. That happened. Leaphorn told Chee he was developing serious doubts about Wiley Denton's role in the McKay homicide. He asked Chee if he knew anything new that might strengthen the notion of a connection between the McKay and Doherty cases.

"Not me," Chee said. "But I think Osborne may have been putting some pieces together. And we may be about to make a mistake. Could we get together and talk?"

"What mistake?"

"The Bureau is getting a search warrant for Peshlakai's place."

"Bad idea?"

"I can't see Peshlakai killing anyone," Chee said. "But when you invest too much time in a suspect, you're inclined to get stuck with him. I'm early anyway. Okay if I stop by your place before checking in with the office?"

"I'll have the coffee on."

"Lay out a cup for Officer Manuelito, too," Chee said. "This Doherty homicide is her case." He laughed. "In my opinion, that is. We'll be there in about forty-five minutes."

"Officer Manuelito is with you?"

"Yes," Chee said, with no explanation.

For Leaphorn, with half his lifetime spent with the Navajo Tribal Police and thus battle-scarred by years of dealing with various federal law enforcement agencies, no explanation was needed. Officer Manuelito had been chosen by the Federals as their designated scapegoat in the difficult Doherty homicide. The fact that she had screwed up the supposed crime site had not been erased by her discovery of the genuine crime site. The meeting to which Chee had been summoned probably had been instigated by a Bureau of Indian Affairs law-and-order bureaucrat, and would involve the criminal investigator assigned by the bia, someone from the fbi, someone in the top ranks of the Navajo Nation's justice department, and assorted others, and Chee had brought Bernie along to defend herself and explain how she had found where the victim had apparently actually been shot.

By the time Chee's car parked in Leaphorn's driveway, Louisa had the kitchen's dining table set for four.

Leaphorn's old mugs had been put back on the shelf and replaced by cups and saucers—and each of the four places she had set was equipped with napkin, spoon, and a plate for cookies.

Louisa had stopped by en route to Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Indian Reservation where she hoped to locate an elderly Ute purported to have an account from his maternal great-grandfather of Ute warfare with Comanche raiders in the 1840s.

"But that can wait," Louisa said. "If you don't mind, I'll hang around and find out what's going on with this mysterious murder of yours."

"It's not my murder," Leaphorn had said. But he couldn't think of a way to tell her that maybe it would be better if she went about her academic business and left homicide to the cops. Then, too, he wasn't actually a cop himself any longer.

When the real cops arrived, they didn't seem to care, either. In fact, Bernadette seemed pleased. She and Louisa had gotten along well, and Bernie was greeted with a hug. But Chee had a meeting to attend. He looked at his watch, then at Leaphorn.

"I talked to Mrs. Marvin McKay," Leaphorn said, getting right to the point, "and she said several things of interest. One. She said McKay didn't have a gun. Had never had a gun. Always said that carrying a gun was insane."

Chee nodded. Waiting. Knowing that Leaphorn knew he'd be skeptical.

"The gun the police found on the floor by McKay's body was a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. A heavy old Colt model with a medium-length barrel. Too big to go into his pants' pockets. I put it in the pocket of McKay's jacket—an expensive leather job. I could hardly force it in. Hard to get it out. Denton told me McKay pulled the pistol out of his jacket pocket as he was preparing to leave, carrying Denton's case with the money in it, and his own case. That would be hard to do, but possible, I guess."

He glanced at Chee, found him looking more interested and less skeptical.

"So we go to item two. No holes in the jacket. No blood on it. And no jacket on McKay's body when the law arrived. It was hanging on the back of a chair. It makes it seem sort of obvious that the shooting didn't happen while McKay was leaving."

He looked at Chee again, and at Bernie. Both nodded.

"So I'm left wondering why Denton lied to me about it. Which brings us to some other things." He described what Mrs. McKay had told him about the call from her husband, about Denton questioning McKay about the whereabouts of the mine and McKay giving him only a rough description. That led Leaphorn to the peculiar question of the two maps.

"If we believe Mrs. McKay, her husband told Denton he was selling him a map of a mine site on Mesa de los Lobos. But Denton told me McKay tried to sell him a location in the southeastern end of the Zuñi Mountains. I can't think of a reason she would have to lie about it. How about Denton? Any thoughts about why he'd want to mislead me about that?" Leaphorn asked. "Any ideas about that? Or any of this?"

Chee broke the extended silence.

"If we make this McKay homicide a premeditated murder, it looks to me like it makes connecting it with Doherty a lot more plausible. Or does it?"

"It might," said Bernie, "if we could find the motive for either one of them."

"Who owns the land?" Louisa asked. She rose and walked to the coffeepot.

"Have you run into anything at all," Chee asked, "that connects Doherty and McKay in the past? Anything that would have got him looking into the McKay stuff down at the sheriffs office beyond this Golden Calf business?"

"Not that I know of," Leaphorn said. "To tell the truth I haven't been thinking much about the Doherty homicide until now. Until wondering if it might help explain this funny business with Denton and the damned maps."

Louisa was back with Leaphorn's coffeepot. She poured them each a cup. "Have any of you checked into who owns the land all this map business is about?"

"I guess it could be owned by about anybody," Leaphorn said. "It's part of Checkerboard. Partly land reserved for the Navajo tribe that could be leased out. And some of it was granted to the railroad and then sold off into various ownerships. Part of it is Bureau of Land Management property, and that's probably leased for ranching. Maybe a little of it might be U.S. Forest Service, but I doubt that."

"You know," said Bernie, "I think Professor Bourbonette is asking a good question."

"Yes," said Leaphorn. "It might tell us something."

"I'll find out," Louisa said.

Leaphorn chuckled. "Louisa used to be a real estate operator. For a little while when she was in school," he said.

Louisa's expression suggested she did not like the tone of that. "When I was a student, and a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and an assistant professor," she said. "Doing what you do to make a halfway decent living in the academic world. I was in charge of checking titles, looking into credit, and some price estimating. So, yes, I know how to find out who owns property."

"Great," Chee said. "It wouldn't hurt to know that."

"Another question I want to bring up. See if you have any suggestions," said Leaphorn, who was eager to change the subject.

"Mrs. McKay said her husband told her he had what he called'some just-in-case backup insurance,' in case Denton was intending to cheat him. Anyone have any ideas about that?"

They discussed that while they drank their coffee. But no one came up with anything that seemed plausible to Leaphorn.

"And finally, how about this one. How did whoever killed Doherty get home again? I doubt if old Hostiin Peshlakai could have walked all the way from the Arizona border back to his hogan. And I doubt if Wiley Denton was much of a walker. If you agree with that, who was the accomplice and how did it work?" He gazed at Chee. "If Agent Osborne is about to make Peshlakai the official suspect, how did he solve that puzzle?"

Chee laughed. "I've been wondering about that myself. If the Feds have an answer, they haven't told me."

"Hostiin Peshlakai had a cellphone," Bernie said.

"What!" said Chee. "How do you know?"

"It was in a boot box on a shelf with some of his ceremonial things," Bernie said.

Chee looked abashed, shook his head. "I noticed that box," he said. "His pollen containers, his medicine bundle, other things. But I guess I didn't really look at it."

"Well," said Leaphorn, "that might solve the riddle for Peshlakai. Maybe he walked a mile or two from the truck and then called a friend to come and pick him up." He thought about that idea. "Or something like that."

"But I wonder how many of Peshlakai's friends have telephones," Bernie said.

"If you turn it around, Denton uses his cell phone to call George Billie, that man who works for him," Chee said.

"Or," said Leaphorn, and laughed, "maybe Denton uses it to call Peshlakai to set everything up. How about that for linking your two homicides?"

"That would work fine," said Bernie. "Then all you'd need to go with that is a motive that fits both a superrich white oil-lease magnate and a dirt-poor Navajo shaman."

Chapter Twenty

« ^ »

Technically, it was not Sergeant Chee's day off, but he had logged it as off-duty time because he didn't want someone in authority demanding that he explain what he'd done with it. He had intended to use it to eliminate any doubts he might have of Hostiin Peshlakai's innocence. His instincts as a traditional Navajo told him Peshlakai was not guilty of shooting Thomas Doherty or anyone else. However, his instincts as a policeman were at war with that. He wanted to resolve this problem, and he had thought of a way to do it. His reasoning went like this.

If Peshlakai was—as Chee was almost certain—a well-schooled and believing Navajo medicine person, then Peshlakai would avoid violence. But if circumstances had driven him to it, if he had killed anyone, he would be beset by guilt, by knowledge that he had violated the rules laid down by various Holy People. Thus, he would seek a cure for the sickness brought on by these broken taboos. Shamans cannot cure themselves.

The first step, Chee decided, would be to ask Peshlakai himself about it. He called the fbi office in Gallup, asked for Osborne, and asked Osborne if he'd noticed that Peshlakai had a cellphone in his hogan. Osborne had noticed. Had he gotten the number, checked calls Peshlakai had been making? That was being done. Chee asked for the number.

"You want to call him?" Osborne asked. "About what?"

"It's a medical question," Chee said. "I want to ask him which curing ceremonial he'd recommend for me. You know, for being involved in this murder case."

A moment of silence followed as Osborne digested this. "I'm still new here," he said. "Do you have a special treatment for things like that? As if it was a heart attack or something?"

"I think you could relate it better to psychiatric treatment. The point is that stressful happenings get a person out of harmony with his environment," Chee said, wishing he hadn't gotten into this. He cleared his throat. "For example, if you have—"

"Okay, okay," Osborne said. "I'll ask you about it later." And he gave Chee the telephone number.

Chee called it, got no answer, decided asking Peshlakai was not such a good idea anyway. He'd take a less direct approach. He called two well-regarded singers—one with the Navajo Traditional Medicine Association and the other a traditionalist who considered the ntma too liberal/modern. Both had listed a version of the Red Ant Way, the Big Star Way, and the Upward Reaching Way as their top choices if the exposure was to violent death or to the corpse of a homicide victim. That matched what Chee had learned in his own efforts to become a singer. The next step was to find a hataali who still performed these sings—ceremonies that involved dealings with those yei who had left the Earth Surface World and returned to the existence before humanity had been fully formed.

A sequence of telephone calls to old-timers produced the names of four shamans who performed one or more of these rarely used cures. One was Peshlakai himself, who sometimes conducted the Big Star Way. Another was Frank Sam Nakai, who had been Chee's maternal uncle, who had tutored Chee as a would-be hataali and had recently died of cancer. One of the remaining two, Ashton Hoski, seemed to Chee the man Peshlakai would have chosen. Like Peshlakai, this hataali was too traditional to remain in the Medicine Man Association. He knew both the Upward Reaching Way and the Big Star Way, and he lived near Nakaibito, not fifty miles west of Peshlakai's place. The remaining prospect lived far, far to the west near Rose Well on the wrong side of the Coconino Plateau. Unlikely Peshlakai would know him.

So Chee set forth for Nakaibito to find Hostiin Ashton Hoski and confirm the innocence of Hostiin James Peshlakai. He'd used up the morning on the telephone phase and skipped lunch. In the Nakaibito Trading Post he got a ham-and-cheese sandwich from the cooler, took it to the cash register, and paid.

"I'm trying to find Ashton Hoski," Chee said. "They say he is a hataali."

The man at the register handed Chee his change. Old Man Hoski, he explained, probably wouldn't be home today. He guessed he'd be looking after some of his sheep grazing up near the Forest Service Tho-Ni-Tsa fire lookout tower.

A good guess. The old Dodge pickup described for Chee at the trading post was pulled into the shade of a cluster of pines beside the track. No one was in it, but a thermos and what might be a lunch sack were on the seat. Chee found a comfortable and well-shaded rock and sat down to wait and to do some thinking.

On the climb up the Chuska Mountains slope into the spruce and aspen altitude, he found himself feeling twinges of self-doubt mixed with a small measure of guilt. That had produced a sneaky hope that Hostiin Hoski wouldn't be findable and that he therefore would be spared the sort of disreputable role of testing his faith in one shaman by more or less lying to another one. He worried those notions a few minutes, found no relief in that, and turned his thoughts to more pleasant territory. Namely Bernadette Manuelito. Bernie had touched his arm yesterday as they were leaving Leaphorn's place.

"Sergeant Chee," she'd said, and stopped, and he'd stood there, hand on the handle of the car door, looking at her face and wondering what her expression meant and what she was preparing to say to him. She looked down, drew in a breath, looked up at him again.

"I want to thank you for what you did," Bernie said. "I mean about the tobacco can. You didn't need to do that for me, and I could have gotten you into real trouble."

Chee remembered feeling embarrassed, even blushing, and he'd shrugged, and said, "Well, I didn't want you to be suspended. And, anyway Lieutenant Leaphorn was the one who got the can back to the crime scene. Not me."

"I guess I should apologize, too," Bernie had said. "I took for granted that you'd just taken the can back to Agent Osborne and explained it to him. Which was exactly what it was your duty to do, but duty or not, I was sort of hurt by it. I just didn't give you enough credit. It was sweet of you to do that for me."

And while she was saying that, she was rewarding Jim Chee with just about the warmest, most affectionate smile he could ever remember receiving. He'd said something dumb, probably, "Oh, well," and opened the car door for her, and that ended that.

Except it didn't end it. Not at all. As they were driving over to the fbi offices on Gallup's Coal Avenue, he had been remembering the first time a woman had called him "sweet." It had been Mary Landon, pale, blue-eyed, with hair like golden silk. He had been pretty sure Mary loved him while she had her adventure as a just-out-of-college schoolteacher at Crownpoint Middle School. But not as long as he remained a Navajo, not as the father of her Wisconsin children. Mary had been the first, and Janet Pete the last. And that had been way back when they were talking wedding plans and before he had finally, finally, reluctantly faced the fact that Janet saw him as he would be when she had remade him into a match of herself—another of the beautiful people Maryland/Virginia beltway elite. Janet had seen him as a rough diamond she'd found in the West who would become a gem in her urbane, Ivy League East after a little polishing.

And now Bernadette Manuelito had said what seemed to have become for Chee the magic word. He thought about her. The landscape spread below the Tho-Ni-Tsa fire lookout on this cool late summer day almost extended forever. The vivid greens of high-country aspen, fir, and spruce turned into the darker shades of lower elevations where juniper and piñon dominated. That quickly faded into the pale-tan immensity of the grazing country. Shadows formed along the serrated cliffs of Chaco Mesa, and to the south the blue shape of the San Mateo rose, capped by the spire of Tsoodzil, the sacred Turquoise Mountain guarding the south boundary of Dine' Bike'yah.

"Our heartland," Bernie had called it. "Our Holy Land. Our Dine'tah." He'd always remembered that.

That had been another summer day like this, with squadrons of cumulus clouds drifting across the sky and dragging their shadows across the valley. Bernie was brand new in the npd, and he was taking her around—showing her where a Toadlena bootlegger lived, the locale of a family suspected of stealing cattle, and some of the places where terrain caused communication blind spots, and the good places where even their old radios would reach Shiprock or Window Rock. He'd stopped beside the dirt road up Chuska Peak to check in. Bernie had got out to collect another of those seedpods that attracted her. He'd joined her, stretching his legs and his cramped back muscles, thinking that he wasn't quite as young as he had been, thinking Janet Pete had court duty in Farmington that day and they had a dinner date that night. And then finding himself comparing Bernie's delight with a landscape that offered nothing but beauty and poverty with how Janet would have reacted.

Thinking about it now, he realized that might have been the moment when he first wondered if the bright young lawyer's beauty and style would be enough to let them bridge the cultural chasm between them.

He was pondering that when he heard the tinkle of sheep bells, and the flock began flowing past the spruce thicket above him. A slender, gray-haired man and a shepherd dog emerged a moment later. The man walked toward Chee while the dog raced past the flock, directing it toward a down-slope meadow.

Chee stood, identified himself by clan and kinfolk, and waited while the gray-haired man identified himself as Ashton Hoski.

"They say that you are a hataali and can conduct the Upward Reaching Way, and also the Big Star Way," Chee said.

"That is true," Hostiin Hoski said, and he laughed. "Years pass and there is never a need for either one. I start thinking that the Dineh have learned not to be violent. That I can forget those sings. But now I get patients again. Do you need to have the ceremony done for someone? For yourself?"

"It might be necessary," Chee said. "Do you already have a patient you are preparing for?"

Hoski nodded. "Yes," he said. "Probably in October. As soon as the thunder sleeps."

Chee felt a sick premonition. He hesitated.

"I know who you are," Hoski said. "You are a policeman. I have seen you on the TV news. At the court trial of that man who killed his brother-in-law, and then last week at that head-on collision out on Highway Six Sixty-Six. I'll bet you have the same ghost sickness—the very same ghost—as the man I will be singing for."

"Yes," Chee said. "It is a job that causes you to be around too much death."

"Were you around the corpse of this man who was shot up in the Coyote Canyon country? That would make it very easy. That was the same man."

Chee swallowed. He didn't want to ask this question. He was almost certain he didn't want to know the answer. Or what to do with it if it was what he expected.

"Who is your other patient?" Chee asked.

"I think you might know of him," Hoski said. "Hostiin James Peshlakai."

Chapter Twenty-One

« ^ »

Sergeant jim chee usually enjoyed driving, but the journey from Hostiin Hoski's high-country sheep meadow to Gallup's Gold Avenue offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been totally glum. He had made Osborne very aware of his opinion that Hostiin James Peshlakai was not a promising suspect in the Doherty homicide. Now his sense of duty, or honor, or whatever he could call it, required him to reverse that. Not that he thought Osborne had lent much weight to his opinion or, for that matter, would lend any weight at all to Peshlakai's arranging a Big Star Way for himself. However, Chee was an officer of the law. Duty required it. Why hadn't he been smart enough to leave well enough alone?

He could deal with that, of course. He'd simply tell Osborne what he had found, try to explain the implications, try not to notice that Osborne's interest, if he showed any at all, was simply polite, and then forget it—just as Osborne would.

But another problem that had surfaced on this trip wouldn't go away. He was finally facing the fact that he was falling in love with Officer Bernadette Manuelito.

That, too, was a matter of honor. He was Bernie's supervisor, and that, under Chee's ethical code, made her off limits and out of bounds. Besides he didn't know whether Bernie shared his feelings. She liked him, or at least pretended to as employees sometimes do. She had referred to him as "sweet" with a tone and a look that was obviously sincere even by Chee's uncertain judgment. But what he had done for her had been a bit risky, even after Leaphorn's assistance took most of the risk away. Therefore, it was only natural that a well-raised woman would express her thanks. So how could he find out where he stood? By romancing her, or trying to. But how could he do that as long as he was the fellow ordering her around every day? He couldn't think of a good way. And what would happen if he did?

Chee parked just down the street from the fbi offices, pushed the buzzer, identified himself, and was clicked in. He made his way through the metal detector and past the row of cubicles where agents did their paperwork, then found Osborne awaiting him in a hearing room. They exchanged the usual greetings.

"Well," said Osborne, "what's new?"

"I've had to change my thinking about James Peshlakai," Chee said. "I think you'll want to take a close look at him."

"Why? Something happen?"

"Remember what I started telling you about a curing ceremony that traditionals have after being involved with death, or corpses, or violence? Well, I checked on that. Peshlakai has arranged one."

Osborne was sitting behind his desk, studying Chee. He nodded.

"He contacted a singer and arranged it the same day Doherty's body was found. In the morning."

Osborne's expression was inscrutable. "Was it something called a Big Star Way?" he asked. "Is that it?"

Short silence while Chee digested this. "Well, yes," he said. "That's the one."

"He told us he had to be out of jail in October to have that done."

"Out? You picked him up?"

"We got a warrant. Searched his place and his truck. The truck seems to be clean, so far anyway, but there was dried blood on a shirt. He'd tried to wash it, but getting blood out isn't easy. Blood on a pair of pants, too. It's not Peshlakai's blood type, but it matches Doherty's. The forensic people are doing DNA checks now."

Chee had taken a chair across from Osborne. He got up now, hesitated. Sat down again. He felt like a fool. And yet something still seemed wrong about this. One thing, specifically: No one is more conditioned against violence than those who spend years and years learning the curing ways of the Dineh.

"I guess he's held in the county jail?" Chee said. "I'd like to talk to him."

"Why not," Osborne said. "I hope you have better luck than we did."

"Did he say he wanted a lawyer?"

"We told him the court would appoint him a public defender. All he said was something like it being a bad business. It wasn't good to talk about."

"That's it?"

"Pretty much. Except we've found another slug in the sand out at that old placer site. It's the right caliber to match Peshlakai's rifle, but we don't have a report from the laboratory yet. And then he told us he had to be released in time for the sing, or whatever you call it."

"The slug could have been shot at anything," Chee said.

"Obviously," Osborne said. "They're looking for traces of blood, or bone, or fabric on it."

"Have you learned anything about the cellphone?"

Osborne considered that a moment. He opened his desk drawer, extracted a pencil, tapped it on the desk, and said: "Cellphone? Like what?"

"Like I was surprised he had one. Do you know where he got it? Or why?"

"The why looks obvious to me," Osborne said. "No telephone lines in there."

"I meant, who would he be calling? Who would he know who'd have a telephone number. That sort of thing. I presume you checked his calling log."

Osborne tapped with the pencil again, looking thoughtful.

Chee grinned. "Let me guess what you're thinking. You're remembering that when you checked in here, you were warned that one of your predecessors got in trouble for saying some things that maybe he shouldn't have said to me, and it was generally believed I had unethically and illegally taped that call—or at very least had caused people to believe I had taped it. Therefore, you're being careful. I don't blame you. Part of that is true, or partly true. But we have a different situation here. We're on the same side of this one, in the first place. Besides, I don't have any way to tape this."

Osborne was grinning, too.

"Since you're not wired, I'll admit I heard about that business, and I also heard it turned out you were right. We had the wrong guy in that one. But this time it looks like we have the right one. And if we don't, if the dna turns out wrong or we don't find other evidence, then he's free as a bird."

He reopened the drawer, put the pencil away. "So what are you asking me?"

"Who Peshlakai was calling on that cellphone."

"Not much of anybody," Osborne said. "He had it a couple of years and only thirty-seven calls were logged in that time. Most of them to his daughter over at Keams Canyon. A couple of other kinfolks, a doctor in Gallup."

"How about any calls to Wiley Denton?"

Osborne looked thoughtful. "Denton?" he said. "Now, why would Mr. Peshlakai be calling Mr. Denton?"

"How about like you'd call a taxi," Chee said, swallowing a twinge of resentment at this game playing. "Perhaps he wanted a ride home."

"From where?"

"How about from where he'd parked Mr. Doherty's body in Mr. Doherty's pickup truck?"

Osborne laughed. "I guess that would play," he said. "Why do all cops think so much alike?"

"Why don't you just tell me?"

"I don't know," Osborne said. "Yes, Peshlakai called Mr. Denton a total of thirteen times. Two of them were the first calls charged to the telephone and calls twelve and thirteen were recorded the day Doherty was killed."

Chee considered this, remembering the conversation with Bernie, Leaphorn, and Professor Bourbonette at Leaphorn's home. He shook his head. As Bernie had said, now all they needed was a motive that fit a traditionalist shaman and a wealthy white man with a missing wife and an obsession with finding a legendary gold mine.

They knew Chee at the McKinley County Detention Center, of course, but that didn't help. The bureaucratic machinery had worked faster than usual. Someone named Eleanor Knoblock seemed to have been assigned as Hostiin Peshlakai's public defender, and Ms. Knoblock had signed an order providing that no one be allowed to interview her client without arranging it with her and speaking to Peshlakai in her presence. Chee jotted down her telephone number, but he decided to let things rest for the day. He'd already made his full quota of mistakes and had enough problems to worry about.

Chapter Twenty-Two

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When his telephone rang, Joe Leaphorn usually dropped whatever he was doing and hurried over to answer it—a habit he suspected was probably common with lonely widowers whose only conversation tends to be talking back to the television set. Having Professor Louisa Bourbonette adopt his guest room as her base of operations for her oral history research had taken some of the edge off that problem, and this morning he wanted to think instead of talk. The solution to the riddle of Linda Denton and the odd and illogical business with Wiley Denton's affairs with gold-mine maps hung just at the edge of his vision—almost in sight, but always dancing away.

The phone rang again, and again. It occurred to Leaphorn that Louisa had taken her tape recorder up to Mexican Hat yesterday to capture the recollections of an elderly Mormon rancher. She'd returned long after he'd retired for the night, and this damned telephone was certain to awaken her. He picked it up, said a grumpy-sounding "Hello."

"It's Jim Chee, Lieutenant. Do you have time to listen to a report?"

"It's Mr. Leaphorn now, Jim," Leaphorn said. "Or just Joe." He'd told Chee that a hundred times, but it didn't seem to stick. "But go ahead."

"I guess the bottom line is they've arrested Hostiin Peshlakai in the Doherty homicide. Found blood on his clothing that matched Doherty's type, and they're checking for a dna match. They also found another slug at the placer site that matches his caliber. Checking that for everything, too."

"Be damned," Leaphorn said. "What does Peshlakai say?"

"He says he doesn't want to talk about it. Didn't ask for a lawyer, but they assigned him a public defender named Knoblock. A woman. Do you know her?"

"I've met her," Leaphorn said. "Long time ago. She's tough."

"I couldn't get in to talk to Peshlakai," Chee said.

Leaphorn chuckled. "That doesn't surprise me. What do you think he'd tell you?"

"Probably not much. Also, the morning Doherty's body was found—I think before Bernie found it—Peshlakai contacted a singer and arranged to have a Big Star Way done for him."

"Well, now," Leaphorn said. "That sounds a little like a confession, doesn't it?" He chuckled. "But can you imagine the U.S. district attorney trying to understand that, and then trying to explain it to a jury in Albuquerque?"

"Not a confession, more like an implication. Now I'm getting to the part of this that will interest you. Remember that cellphone Bernie noticed in his hogan? Well, he called Wiley Denton on it twice the day Doherty was shot."

That surprised Leaphorn. He said, "Well, now."

"Two calls. The first one was eleven minutes long. The second one, less than three minutes."

Leaphorn sighed and waited. There would be more.

"Another interesting thing. He'd had the phone a couple of years. Made only thirty-seven calls. The first two he made after he got the phone were also to Wiley Denton."

"Sounds like Wiley might have bought it for him, you think?"

"Yeah," Chee said. "But why?"

"I'll hand that one back to you, Jim. You met the man. Talked to him at his hogan. You think he could be on Denton's payroll for some reason or other?"

"Maybe," Chee said. "But, no, I don't think so. How about you? Do you think the two of them are involved in some sort of weird conspiracy?"

"Denton using the old man as a watchman? Maybe I've got to think about this."

"Well," said Chee, "if you have any constructive ideas, I hope you'll tell me about them. I'm going to make another effort to talk to Peshlakai."

"Good idea," Leaphorn said. "I think I'll go have another visit with Wiley Denton."

But Denton's housekeeper said Mr. Denton was not home, and, no, he probably wouldn't be back very soon because he had gone over to the Jicarilla Reservation to look at one of the pump jacks he had on a well over there.

Leaphorn left a message asking Denton to call, that he needed to talk to him. Then he got out his notebook and the map he'd been sketching out of this complicated affair and went over the way his thinking had developed. At the end of the notes he'd jotted after his talk with the Garcias, he found "Deputy Lorenzo Perez. Maybe he took wailing seriously. Is he the Perez I know?"

The woman who answered the telephone at the sheriffs office said Deputy Perez had retired a couple of years before. But, yes, Ozzie Price was in.

"You again, Joe?" Ozzie said. "What now?"

"I'm looking for Lorenzo Perez," Leaphorn said. "Didn't he used to be undersheriff?"

"That's him," Ozzie said. "But that was under a different sheriff, and that was before his wife left him and he got into heavy drinking."

"He's still in Gallup?"

"Oh, yeah," Ozzie said. "You want to talk to him?"

Leaphorn said he did, and waited. In a long minute, Ozzie provided three numbers. One was a street address, one was Perez's phone number there, and the third was the number of the Old 66 Tavern. "Try that last one most evenings," Ozzie said.

"Was he sent out on that Halloween call to Fort Wingate? The one we were talking about the other day?"

"He was," Ozzie said. "And he got all wrapped up in it. I think that was when he was having wife troubles, and maybe it gave him something else to think about. Anyway, he kept nagging at the sheriff to look into it more. He thought Denton had killed his wife out there. Kept thinking it even after it was so damned obvious Denton couldn't have done it." Ozzie laughed. "Denton was busy at home killing McKay."

Now Leaphorn's phone call found Lorenzo Perez at home, and Perez remembered Lieutenant Leaphorn.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, now. Talking to you takes me back a ways. You remember that time we caught that rustler that had rebuilt his house trailer so he could drive calves into it?"

Leaphorn remembered it, but he managed to steer Perez into the Halloween call. "They say you took the call on that one. It always seemed funny to me. Like more than a prank."

This produced a silence. Leaphorn cleared his throat. "Lorenzo. You still there?"

"I hope you're not just joking me," Perez said, sounding grim. "I've had enough of that."

"I'm not. I think something serious was going on out there that night."

"Well, I got joked about it, and made fun of, until I got just damn sick of it," Perez said. "I kept looking into it when I could. Kept trying to get the sheriff to get the army to do some sort of a general search. We didn't have the manpower to do it, of course, hundred and something thousand acres, lots of old empty buildings and damn near a thousand of those huge old bunkers. But the army could have done it. Would have, I'll bet you, if the sheriff had just got serious about it and made some sort of demand. But he just laughed. Said they didn't even have a missing person report. Nothing at all to go on."

"I'd like to talk to you about it," Leaphorn said.

They met at the coffee shop in the Gallup Mall.

Perez was one of those New Mexico Hispanics whose face suggests Castile and the Conquistadores more than Mexico. His gray hair was cut bristle-short, as was his mustache, and his very dark eyes examined Leaphorn as if looking for some sort of understanding.

"Driving over," he said, "I was thinking I don't know what I can tell you that's going to help whatever you're doing. I just talked to the kids that night, talked to them several other times, in fact, and kept going out there and nosing around. But I don't know how I can convince you that we had a murder, or something like it, committed out there that night."

Having said that, he picked up his menu, glanced at it, put it down, and shook his head. "I hate things I can't understand," he said.

"Me, too," Leaphorn said. He told Perez of his arrangement with Wiley Denton, of what the students he'd talked to had told him, and of his own hunch that Linda Denton might have been the wailing woman.

"About the only thing I can tell you that you might not know is that Wiley Denton told me he'd given Linda an expensive little disk player. One of those things with headphones that you carry around with you. When she left that morning to go to a lunch with some women friends, she took it with her."

"No," Perez said. "I didn't know that. The kids thought they heard music. At least Gracella Garcia did."

"And Mrs. Hano out at the Fort Wingate archives office told me McKay was out there that morning checking on something or other and that he had a woman in the car with him."

"Hey," said Perez, leaning forward. "Mrs. Denton?"

"She said she didn't know who it was. She just noticed a woman seemed to be sleeping in the car, and that McKay told her it was his wife."

"Did you check on that?"

"It wasn't McKay's wife," Leaphorn said. "She was at work in Gallup. McKay called her there."

"So he was lying to Mrs. Hano."

"So it would seem," Leaphorn said.

"Gracella was the one who seemed so certain about hearing music," Perez said. "A couple of the others thought it might have been the wind whistling, or maybe their imagination."

"I noticed that," Leaphorn said.

"She seemed like a pretty level-headed—" Perez stopped. "Wait a minute. When did Mrs. Hano talk to McKay? See the woman sleeping in his car?"

"About noon, I think," Leaphorn said. "I've got it in my notes."

"Gracella told me she'd noticed a car out there middle of the afternoon. She said they see army vehicles and trucks out there now and then, but this was a light-colored civilian sedan. What color was McKay's car?"

"I have no idea," Leaphorn said. "But I'll see if I can find out."

Chapter Twenty-Three

« ^ »

Learning the color of Marvin McKay's sedan proved to be so easy that Leaphorn found his whole attitude toward this dismal affair with Denton brightening. Deputy Price had told him no one had claimed McKay's few personal belongings. Not surprising since, aside from the few dollars in his wallet, they had little if any value. And then Price had described Peggy McKay as a common-law wife—which meant that, sans any proof of her relationship, getting personal items back would be complicated. But the car was another matter.

It had been parked at Denton's place, and it almost certainly remained parked there for days since this homicide wasn't one that received any normal criminal investigation. McKay wasn't charged with anything. His role was victim. Who cared about his car? Sooner or later, George Billie might have gotten tired of looking at it, called the sheriff, and had it towed away. Or maybe wired the ignition, drove it away himself, and sold it to the car strippers.

Leaphorn made another call to Denton's place.

"No," said Mrs. Mendoza, "he's still not home. Like I told you."

"Maybe you could help me, then," Leaphorn said. "Do you remember the car Mr. McKay drove? What color it was?"

"I don't pay much attention to cars," said Mrs.Mendoza, sounding out of patience.

"I just thought you might have remembered what color it was."

"Why don't you ask his lady about that car? I think she has it. Anyway, she came up here and drove it off."

"Well, thank you," Leaphorn said. "I will." And he put down the phone and sat a moment feeling stupid. Of course. There would be no reason for the police to impound that vehicle. Judging from what he knew about McKay, the car was probably owned by Peggy. And judging from what he knew about public officials in general, there was no reason to believe anyone would have taken on the authority of having it towed into storage.

Peggy McKay answered the telephone on the first ring. Yes, she remembered Leaphorn, and yes, she had gotten a friend to drive her out to Denton's place to recover her car. What kind of car was it? A pale-blue Ford Escort. Yes, she still had it.

Leaphorn thought of the remarkable messiness of Mrs. McKay's house. "Do you know if the car has been through a car wash since your husband's death?"

Hesitation now, while Peggy McKay considered that.

"Not really," she said. "I hosed it off myself last spring after a muddy spell."

"I'd like to come over and take a look at it, if that's all right with you," Leaphorn said.

"Sure. Why not? I'll be home all day."

Just out of the driveway, he saw Louisa's car rolling up the street and stopped. So did she, and rolled down her window.

I'm going into Gallup to talk to Mrs. McKay again," he shouted. "Then maybe if he's home, I'll go see Denton."

"Why?"

"I want to tell him he's a liar and I don't want anything to do with him," Leaphorn said.

"Good for you," said Louisa. "And when you get back I've got some information for you."

"Like what?" Leaphorn said. But she had closed the window and was parking her car under her favorite tree across the street.

Peggy McKay hadn't bothered to park her Ford Escort in the shade. It sat in her drive, with its windows rolled down and its grimy pale-blue finish bearing evidence that it hadn't been through a car wash since its hosing last spring. Mrs. McKay appeared in her doorway as Leaphorn got out of his pickup.

"Feel free," she said, pointing to the car and laughing, "but don't get it dirty."

"Thanks," Leaphorn said.

"Have you had any luck? I mean, finding Mrs. Denton?"

"Not yet," Leaphorn said. He opened the passenger's-side door of the Escort. The interior reminded him of Mrs. McKay's living room.

"I'm not sure whether I told you," she said, coming down from the porch into her driveway. "I think Denton got off way too easy for shooting Marvin. I think it was a plain premeditated murder."

She was staring at Leaphorn, awaiting a response.

"The whole thing left a lot of unanswered questions," he said. And, when that didn't seem adequate, added: "Some pieces left out of the puzzle."

"What are you looking for in my car?"

"I guess you could say I'm just hoping to find one of the missing pieces."

"To find Linda Denton?"

"Yes," Leaphorn said.

"Not in that car, you won't," Mrs. McKay said. She walked back into her house and shut the door.

Leaphorn made another quick inspection of the front-seat area, looked into the back-seat space, opened the trunk of his own car and extracted the cardboard box he kept there to stash his grocery purchases and prevent them from rattling around. He put the box on the driveway and began extracting odds and ends from Mrs. McKay's floorboards—starting with a Baby Ruth wrapper, a crumpled tissue, a paper cup, a wrapper from a McDonald's hamburger, and a cigarette butt. Leaphorn inspected each item, at least with a glance, before adding it to his pile. By the time he had completed his search of both sides of the front seat and moved to the back, his box was almost half filled with wildly assorted trash, evidence that Mrs. McKay was a regular customer of various fast-food establishments and a person who saved Wal-Mart advertising sections, discount coupons, empty cigarette packages, and even the high heel from a black slipper.

The only thing he found under the floor mats was a torn section from an Arizona road map, and it seemed to have no relevance.

Some of the stuff he set aside on a handkerchief he'd spread on the front seat—but very little. That included the quarter and dime he'd extracted from behind the passenger's-side seat, an assortment of long blonde hairs he'd carefully picked from under the passenger's-side headrest, a set of pliers he'd extracted from the glovebox, and a Chase Hardware sack and the sales slip he'd found crumpled inside it.

Leaphorn took time now to inspect the pliers and the slip. The slip had been issued the day before McKay was killed and covered the pliers (an expensive $24.95 set), a crowbar, and a roll of plumber's tape. He had found neither the tape nor the crowbar in the car. Leaphorn found himself imagining Linda Denton being hit on the head with one and bound with the other, and he made a mental note to ask Mrs. McKay about the purchases.

With the larger trash items out of the way, he removed the rear seat. Under it he found more trash, but nothing more interesting than an advertising flier for last year's Navajo Tribal Fair. Then he borrowed the flashlight from the glovebox, slid belly down onto the front floorboards, and pursued a close-up search there. The light and his probing hand harvested three business cards he'd missed (all from a State Farm Insurance salesman), a sock, another lost dime, what seemed to be a white marble but was actually a gum ball, a bright-red bead, and a small disk of clear glass that Leaphorn presumed at first was the lost face of a cheap watch.

He was wrong about that. When he held it up for in spection, he saw it was a lens. In fact, it was a progressive-focus lens prescribed and ground for those who need one focal length for reading, another for driving and other distances. Leaphorn slipped it into an envelope he saved from the trash, added the strands of hair, and sat awhile thinking. He was remembering one of the photographs on Wiley Denton's wall. Beautiful young Linda, her long blonde hair disheveled by the breeze, smiling at the photographer, wearing silver-rimmed glasses.

Chapter Twenty-Four

« ^ »

Leaphorn gave Mrs. McKay the coins, showed her the lens he'd found, asked her if she or any of her friends wore such glasses, and when she could think of none, he avoided her obvious question by refusing to speculate and saying he'd try to find out. Then he showed her the sales slip from the hardware store.

"Any idea what these were for?"

"What's this," Mrs. McKay said, peering at the slip. "Is that 'crowbar'?"

"That's the way I read it."

"We don't have one. I don't even know what it is."

"It's a steel bar with a sort of hook end used for prying things," Leaphorn said. "How about the other items?"

"I can hardly believe it," she said, and laughed. "We have a drip under the sink. For months we had a drip, and Marvin said not to worry, he'd fix it. I guess he finally got around to it." But as she tried to go on, her voice broke. She looked away. "I mean, I guess he was going to."

Leaphorn had intended to borrow Mrs. McKay's telephone to call home, but grief prefers privacy. He drove out to a motel parking lot on old U.S. 66 and called his Window Rock number from the pay phone. Louisa answered.

"Are you at Wiley Denton's house?" she asked.

"Not yet," he said. "That's my next stop."

"He's in oil and gas leases, that sort of thing, isn't he? If he is, ask him if he knows anything about the ownership of Mock Land and Cattle Company or Apache Pipe."

"What's up?" Leaphorn asked. "I think that cattle company is Bill Mock's outfit. Or used to be. Probably owned by his heirs now. He operated a good-sized feedlot operation in Sandoval County, and a ranch."

"Feedlot?"

"Where buyers fatten up range cattle before they send them off to become sirloins and hamburgers," Leaphorn said. And Apache Pipe, I think that's Denton. Years ago, he went into it with the Jicarilla tribe to finance the gas-collection system for the gas wells, but I heard he bought out the tribe's interest."

"Denton's," said Louisa. "How about that."

"Tell me," Leaphorn said.

"That land on top of Mesa de los Lobos is the typical Checkerboard Reservation jumble, which won't surprise you. Much of the north slope of the mesa is reserved Navajo land, and a lot of the south side was in the allocation the government gave to the railroad. Some of that somehow went back into public domain ownership—probably some swapping back and forth with private ownership, and you Navajos bought back a piece of it, and other chunks were sold off by the railroad to various private owners. I'll guess you knew a lot of that already."

"Some of it," Leaphorn said.

"The parcel I think you and Sergeant Chee might be interested in is a six-section block at the head of the Coyote Canyon drainage. Somebody named Arthur Sanders and Sons bought it from the outfit handling land sales for the railroad in 1878. That must have become Sanders Cattle, because in 1903 William L. Elrod bought it from them. Since then, there's two more transfers of title, looks like due to deaths and inheritances, but the company with the title to the six sections is still Elrod Land and Cattle Company. You got that?"

"I've got it," Leaphorn said. "I imagine Chee will want to find out if the Elrod people know what's going on down at the bottom end of their canyon. And thanks. This must have been a lot of hard work for you."

"Hold it. Hold it," Louisa said. "I haven't got to the hard-work part yet, where it gets complicated."

"Oh?"

"Elrod also has a grazing lease on a small tract of Bureau of Land Management land adjoining its property. There's some sort of legal question about whether that lease will be renewed. Argument over whether Elrod overgrazed it, I think it is. Anyway, Elrod dropped its application to renew on that, and the existing lease expires September one."

"September one," Leaphorn said. "Couple more weeks to run then. Any significance to that?"

"I don't know, but maybe. There's an option to buy, contract to sell recorded, which is tied to the Bureau of Land Management lease. Effective when the lease expires. The clerk at the blm office said Apache would probably apply for the lease, but hasn't yet. She said the little tract is just a sort of cut-off corner, and she didn't think anyone else would want it."

"The purchase price didn't happen to be on the record?"

"They never are," Louisa said.

"Let's see," Leaphorn said. "Six sections at six hundred forty acres per section would be almost four thousand acres. With dry country grazing land close to worthless, I doubt if the price would matter to Denton."

Louisa laughed. "Not for raising cattle anyway. The blm was calculating you could graze eight units per square mile on it. I guess that's eight cows per section."

"Cow plus its calf," Leaphorn said.

"So I guess that you guess that Mr. Denton isn't buying it for grazing calves. He thinks he can find the old Golden Calf gold mine up there. Am I right about that?"

"Almost," Leaphorn said. "I think he found the Golden Calf a long time ago."

"Did something you found out today tell you that? Come on home and tell me about it."

"I will," Leaphorn said. "But now I've got to go see Wiley Denton and let him know I'm calling off any sort of arrangement he thinks we might have."

Louisa took a moment to think about this.

"Joe," she said. "I think you should be very careful with this Denton. Don't you think he must be kind of crazy?"

"I have been thinking that for quite a while," Leaphorn said.

Chapter Twenty-Five

« ^ »

Leaphorn's next call was to Wiley Denton's unlisted number. Mrs. Mendoza answered. Yes, Mr. Denton was now home.

"You finding anything useful?" Denton asked. "And how about giving me some sort of idea how much you're charging me?"

"I'll be out to your place in about thirty minutes," Leaphorn said. "I have something I want to show you."

"Well, how much are you going to charge me?"

"Absolutely nothing," Leaphorn said, and hung up.

George Billie was standing by the garage door as Leaphorn stopped at the entry gate. The entry gate slid open, smooth and silent.

"He said to bring you right in," Billie said after Leaphorn parked his car. Billie held the door open and led Leaphorn down the long carpeted hallway to the office. Denton was sitting behind his desk, staring at Leaphorn, his expression blank.

"I guess we're even on the 'hanging up the telephone on one another' business," Denton said. "But at least you didn't call me a son of a bitch."

"No," Leaphorn said. "But I'm going to call you a liar."

Denton's only reaction to that was to continue the stare and, finally, to scratch his ear.

"Maybe I'll make that a damned liar," Leaphorn said.

"I guess I've done a little of that," Denton said. "This oil-leasing business sometimes requires it. But now you're going to tell me what you found. And how badly you're going to rip me off when you bill me for your services."

"I found this," Leaphorn said. He took the envelope from his shirt pocket, extracted the lens, held it out toward Denton on his finger.

Denton stared at it, frowned. Said, "What is—" Then he leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, his face a mask of tense muscles. "A lens," he said. "Is that from Linda's glasses?"

"I don't know," Leaphorn said, and held it out. "Do you think it is?"

Denton let out a long-held breath, opened his eyes, leaned forward, and held out his hand. Leaphorn put the lens on his palm. Denton picked it up with finger and thumb, very gently, studied it, held it up to the light, and looked through it for a long moment. Then he laid it carefully on the desk blotter.

"She had beautiful eyes," he said. "Blue as the sky. Most beautiful eyes I ever saw."

Leaphorn said nothing. Denton's own eyes were watering, and then he was crying. He didn't wipe the tears away. No more tension in his face now, but he looked terribly old.

"Where'd you find her?" he asked.

"I didn't find her," Leaphorn said. "I found the lens under the front seat of the car McKay was driving the day you killed him."

"Just that?"

"That's all, and a few long blonde hairs caught in the passenger-side front-seat headrest. Peggy McKay has black hair."

"That bastard," Denton said. "That sick son of a bitch." He rubbed the back of his hand across his face, got up, and walked to the window. He looked out for a moment, then back at Leaphorn. "She had her hair fixed real pretty when she left that morning for that lunch party she was going to. Or said she was going to."

"And she was wearing her glasses?"

"She always did," Denton said, returning his gaze out the window. "I wanted to get her fitted with some of those contact lenses you wear right on your eyes, but she said she never could read well with them on. And she was reading all the time."

"I hear that's common," Leaphorn said.

"She was far-sighted," Denton said in a choked voice. "Said she just needed longer arms." He forced what sounded a little like a chuckle. "But she said the ones she had were long enough to wrap around me."

"It sounds like you're certain that lens is from Linda's glasses."

"Yeah. What else," Denton said, still looking at whatever attracted him outside. "It's the same oval shape. One of those merged-in trifocal grinds."

"Let's go back to where we started," Leaphorn said. "Get back to that day you asked me if I would look for your wife. See if I could find what happened to her, anyway. And I said I would if you wouldn't lie to me. You've been lying to me, so I'm quitting. But I'd still like some straight answers out of you."

Denton had turned away from the window. "Lying about what?" The bright backlighting from the window made it impossible for Leaphorn to read his expression, but the tone was hostile.

"About the maps, for starters. McKay wasn't trying to sell you a location in the Zuñi Mountains. His was on Mesa de los Lobos. Then there's the circumstances of how you shot him. He wasn't just leaving when that happened. He was—"

"What makes you think that?"

"McKay was a sort of fancy dresser. He wouldn't have been walking out of here without his expensive leather jacket, which was hanging on that chair over there with no bullet hole in it, and no blood."

Denton walked over and sat behind his desk, studying Leaphorn. He shrugged. "So what?" he said. "Whether he was leaving, or just getting ready to leave."

"Then there's the gun. Big, clumsy long-barrel thirty-eight revolver. He wouldn't have been carrying a gun like that in the pocket of his jacket. It wouldn't fit anyway. Hell of a job to get it in your pants pocket. Or out of them."

Denton shrugged again. "You're sounding like a damned lawyer."

"Peggy McKay says he didn't have a gun."

Now Denton leaned forward. "What are you saying? You saying I just shot the bastard down and planted the gun on him? Like you police sometimes do?"

"Something like that. Am I close?"

A long minute of silence followed that question. Leaphorn remembered Louisa's warning to him to be careful—that Denton might be a little crazy. He'd always figured Denton to be a little crazy. Who wasn't? But he was conscious of how Denton had moved behind the desk, of desk drawers with pistols in them.

Denton had come to some sort of decision. He exhaled, shook his head, said: "What you're suggesting is I had that pistol in here all ready to plant on him. You're suggesting I invited him here just to execute him. Right? Now why in the world would I do that? The man's trying to sell me what I've been trying to buy. The location of the Golden Calf."

"Because," Leaphorn said, and hesitated. Perhaps it was time for him to lie himself. Time to avoid standing right where Marvin McKay had stood. But he was already past that point. "Because you already knew where this legendary gold deposit is located. You'd already found it. When you learned McKay knew the location, you didn't want him around spreading the word."

"Hell," Denton said. "That doesn't make much sense, does it? Why would I give a damn if he talked about it? People been talking about finding the Golden Calf for a hundred years. More than that. And nobody would believe them. Why would they believe a con artist? And why would I care anyway?"

"Because at the end of the month, an option you have with Elrod Land and Cattle to buy that land at the head of Coyote Canyon goes into effect," Leaphorn said. "If the word gets out before then, the deal can be canceled."

Denton's swivel chair creaked as he leaned back in it, studying Leaphorn. His hands were out of sight, under the table. Then the left one reappeared. He rubbed the crooked hump of his broken nose. Made a wry face.

"Where'd you hear that?"

"It's public record," Leaphorn said. "The contract's tied in with the Bureau of Land Management lease."

"So what," Denton said. "What if you're guessing right? So you think that gives me a motive for murder. Hell, man, I've already been to court on this thing. Found guilty of killing McKay. Already served my time in prison. You know the law. It's over with. No double jeopardy. And what's any of this have to do with finding Linda? That's what you're supposed to be doing."

"That brings us to one of your deceptions that has a lot to do with finding Linda. Let's see if you'll tell the truth about that."

Denton produced a hostile grin. "It's deception now, is it, instead of lie? Well, go ahead. Let's hear it."

"Before McKay came out here that evening he called his wife. Told her he was bringing you your map and all that. He said that from the questions you'd been asking him, he thought you might be planning to cheat him. Take the map and his information and not give him the fifty thousand. He said in case that happened, he had a back-up plan, insurance, something to make you pay."

"She told you that, did she?"

"She did, and with nothing to gain from lying about it.

"What was this insurance? This back-up plan?"

"You tell me," Leaphorn said. "McKay didn't tell her what he had in mind. So now you tell me what he said. It might help us find your wife."

Denton said nothing. He looked away from Leaphorn, at the window. When he looked back, the bravado had slipped away. He shook his head.

"I don't know."

"Come on, Denton, stop wasting our time," Leaphorn said. "You know now Linda must have been in McKay's car out at Fort Wingate that afternoon. That would have been just before he came here. Just before he called his own wife and told her about his 'insurance.' Why not quit kidding yourself?"

Denton had lowered his head into his hands, and was shaking it back and forth. He didn't look up. "Shut up," he said. "Shut up, damn you, and get out of here. And don't ever come back."

Chapter Twenty-Six

« ^ »

Lorenzo perez was in his front yard holding a garden hose with a high-pressure nozzle when Leaphorn drove up—and was doing what seemed eccentric to Leaphorn.

"Watering your rosebush?" he asked. "Looks like you're trying to knock the leaves off."

"No," said Perez, "I'm trying to get rid of the damned aphids."

"They don't like water?"

Perez laughed. "You try to knock them off the stems," Perez said. "It's better than using poison. That kills the ladybugs, and the birds, and all your other helpers. If you can knock the aphids off with the water, they can't climb back up again." He turned off the hose. "But it's a lost cause anyway, trying to grow roses in Gallup. Wrong climate."

"I need a favor, if you have time."

"When you catch me out squirting water on aphids, you know I'm not terrible busy."

"I'm still on that wailing woman business out at the fort," Leaphorn said. "I wanted to see if you could give me a clearer picture of just where those kids were when they heard it, and from which direction they said the sounds were coming."

"You mean go on out there and sort of try to re-create it for you?"

"That's what I had in mind. And maybe see if we could get Gracella Garcia to come along."

"I guess we could handle that. When you want to do it?"

"How about right now?"

"I can't do it today," Perez said. "You in a hurry?"

"Sort of," said Leaphorn. "But I guess it could wait."

"I could pretty well tell you just where it was, if you're in a rush," said Perez as he walked over to his fence. "You know they have those bunkers blocked off? Well, they were—"

"Well, no, I don't. I never had very much business out there, and when I did I wasn't paying that sort of attention."

"You know the military, though," Perez said. "The army divided all those bunkers off into ten blocks, and lettered the blocks from A to J, and then numbered the bunkers. Like, for example, B1028."

"Divided them off by what they had in them?" Leaphorn asked.

"God knows." Perez said. "I think they did it during the Vietnam War when they added some new ones. They were running virtually all the munitions and explosive stuff through Wingate then. Busy, busy. Artillery shells, rockets, mines, everything. Big boom for Gallup. New rail lines had to be built, everything." Perez laughed. "They even built concrete shelters every so often so people working could run in them for shelter in case lightning might strike something and blow things up."

Leaphorn had stopped paying close attention to the rest of this report after Perez cited the bunker-labeling system.

"Each bunker had its own number?"

"Letter and number."

"How many bunkers in each block?"

"I don't know. They used ten letters, A through J, and there's about eight hundred bunkers, so I'd guess a hundred to a block, but maybe they lettered 'em by what's stored inside. Like 'A' for artillery, and 'B' for bombs, and—" Perez paused, unable to think of anything that exploded that started with a "C."

"These days, 'E' for empty would be the letter they'd need for most of the blocks. Anyway, the army rule was no bunker could be closer than two hundred yards to another one, and they used about twenty-four-thousand acres scattering them out. Had to build a hell of a lot of railroad track."

"How about the numbers?" Leaphorn asked. "I noticed some of them had four numbers after the letter."

Perez frowned. "I think maybe all of them did," he said. "No idea why, except they seemed to be in order. Like B1222 would come after B1221."

"What block were the kids in?"

"I think it was 'D,'" Perez said. "Or maybe 'C.'"

"I'm going on out there and look around," Leaphorn said. "If I learn anything, I'll call you."

But now Leaphorn found he couldn't remember the number on the card with Doherty's stuff. He was sure it began with a D, but his usually fine memory had jumbled together Peshlakai's cellphone number, Denton's unlisted number, his advertisement number, and Doherty's four digits. But he did remember telling the number to Chee, and Chee jotting it into his notebook.

Chee was probably still in Gallup. Leaphorn called the fbi office there. Chee wasn't there, but Bernie was. She said Chee would be in any minute for a meeting with Osborne. Did he want to leave a message?

"I wanted to ask him if he had that number found on the back of that business card in Doherty's stuff. I remember he wrote it down."

"It was a 'D' followed by 2187," she said. "Have you found out what it's about?"

"It's probably the number of a bunker out at Fort Wingate," Leaphorn said, thinking how great it had been when he, too, had had such a young and vigorous memory. He explained as much as he knew of the army's blocking system.

"Something to do with the old McKay homicide, you think? Something to do with that wailing woman business?"

"I don't know," Leaphorn said. "I'm going on out there now and see if I can find a bunker with that number on it. And I thought Jim or you might want to check on it."

"You bet," Bernie said. "And by the way, Mr. Denton called for you here. He said he needed to find you as soon as he could. He said it was urgent. He wanted you to call him."

"Did he say why?"

"I asked. He wouldn't tell me."

Mrs. Mendoza answered the telephone at the Denton home, confirmed that Mr. Denton wanted to talk to him, and put him through.

"Leaphorn," Denton said. "Are you still in Gallup? Come on out to the house. I've got something I have to tell you. Something important."

"I don't work for you anymore, Mr. Denton," Leaphorn said. "In fact, I never did work for you."

"To hell with that," Denton said. "This is something you really need to know."

"Then tell me."

"Not on the damned telephone. I think the fbi has had this line tapped because of the Doherty case. They think I'm involved in that. Come on out."

"I learned in all these years as a cop that when somebody has something important to tell me, it turns out to be a lot more important to them than it is to me."

Silence. Then Denton said, "Meet me halfway then. Where are you?"

Leaphorn considered that. "All right," he said. "In fifteen minutes from now I'll pull into the parking lot at the Smith grocery on Railroad Avenue. You remember my pickup truck?"

"I do," Denton said. "I'll be there."

And there he was, sitting in his big, mud-splattered off-road sports utility vehicle watching as Leaphorn made his turn into the lot, getting out and walking over as Leaphorn parked, leaning in the passenger's-side window.

"Let's take your truck," he said.

"Take it where?" Leaphorn asked.

"Someplace quiet where I can tell you my secret," Denton said while he opened the door and got in.

Leaphorn wasn't liking any of this. He had the uneasy feeling he'd miscalculated.

"We'll do our talking here," Leaphorn said.

"No," Denton said, shaking his head. "Let's get away from all these people."

"Just tell me this secret of yours," Leaphorn said. "Not that I guarantee I'll believe it."

"Part of the secret is I may have to kill you," Denton said, and he pressed what felt like the barrel of a pistol against Leaphorn's ribs.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

« ^ »

When dealing with federal agencies, Sergeant Jim Chee was always conscious of the "Navajo time" stereotype applied to the Dineh. Thus he showed up at the Gold Avenue address of the fbi ten minutes early. Bernie was in the entrance area talking to the receptionist as Chee passed through the metal detector. She looked, as usual, slightly disheveled, as if some impossible breeze had invaded this guarded office, ruffled her hair, and moved the collar of her uniform shirt slightly out of its official alignment. With that notion of her thus confirmed by his glance, Chee's analysis and conclusions advanced to another level. Officer Bernadette Manuelito was a very bewitching young woman in a way he couldn't quite define. Certainly Bernadette's style was equal to (and far beyond) the perfect beauty of Janet Pete or the sensuous, soft, blonde charms of Mary Landon. With that established, and just as Bernie noticed his arrival and turned and recognized him with a smile, Sergeant Chee's consciousness took the great jump to the very top level. Face it. He had fallen in love with Officer Manuelito. And what the devil could he do about that?

Bernie's welcoming smile faded into a wry look.

"The meeting's been postponed," she said. "Something came up down at the Zuñi Pueblo, and the Albuquerque Office supervisor came in, and now Osborne has to go down there with them."

Chee said: "Oh, well." Which wasn't what he would have said had he not been suddenly engulfed with a flood of thoughts about Bernadette Manuelito. "So what?" he added.

"And," Bernie added, "Lieutenant Leaphorn called for you here. He wanted to ask you the number that was on a card with Mr. Doherty's stuff."

"Number?" Chee said. "What number?"

"The number was D2187," Bernie said. "Don't you remember? It was written on the back of a business card Doherty had, and nobody had any idea what it was about."

"Oh," Chee said. "I remember telling Leaphorn about it. I thought he might understand it. Has the Legendary Lieutenant now solved the number puzzle?"

"He thinks it's the army's munitions depot code number for one of the bunkers out at Fort Wingate," Bernie said. Chee was just standing there, staring at her with a strange look on his face but no sign of understanding.

"He thinks it might be near where those kids heard the wailing woman the night Mr. McKay was killed," Bernie said, wondering what was bothering Chee.

"Oh," Chee said. "He wanted me to call him? Where? I need to call him anyway about talking to Hostiin Peshlakai this morning. About what Peshlakai said."

"Maybe at Mr. Denton's place. He said he had to see Denton about something. But he also said he was going out to the fort to see what he could find out," Bernie said. "And what did Hostiin Peshlakai tell you?"

"It's complicated," Chee said. "Let's find Leaphorn first."

He called Denton's number. No, Mrs. Mendoza said, Leaphorn wasn't there and neither was Mr. Denton. "I heard them talking on the telephone. I think Mr. Denton drove down into Gallup to meet him somewhere."

"Let's go find Leaphorn at the fort," Chee said. "I'll tell you on the way out."

"You sound nervous," Bernie said.

"I am," Chee said. "From what Peshlakai told me, I think our Legendary Lieutenant is playing with fire."

Chapter Twenty-Eight

« ^ »

As he rolled his truck through the grocery parking lot toward the exit, Leaphorn was analyzing his situation. It didn't seem reasonable to believe that Wiley Denton actually intended to kill him. However, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggested otherwise. For one thing, he had given Denton a motive. Louisa had warned him that Denton was dangerous. He'd already known that. And yet Leaphorn unloaded on the man the very evidence Denton had already killed one man—and probably two—to protect. He had poked Denton's two sorest spots—his obsession to claim the Golden Calf, legendary or not, and his desperate love of his missing wife.

At this tense moment, Leaphorn was doubting his judgment on several things, but not on that. Denton dearly loved the girl who had been willing to marry him. Leaphorn had been a fool for love himself, had been there and done that, would never ever forget Emma. He crept through the parking-lot traffic, giving right-of-way to everyone, thinking about tactics.

"Move along," Denton said, pushing the pistol against Leaphorn's side. "Do a left turn out on Railroad Avenue."

"You were going to tell me something I needed to know," Leaphorn said. "Remember? Called it a secret. That's how you got me to meet you."

"We'll get to that when we get where we have some privacy."

"Give me a hint," Leaphorn said. "Tell me what McKay told you about his back-up plan. No use to keep lying, is there?"

Denton snorted. "You're not going to believe this, either."

"Probably not," Leaphorn said. "Why not try me?" He stopped again and waved ahead a blue Chevy that was waiting for him to pass.

"All right," Denton said. "McKay said he had a love affair started with Linda, but she didn't want to leave me. So he made this bet with her. He took her to a little hut way back in the Zuñi Mountains. Took her shoes away from her, and said he was going back to see me and tell me I could have her back along with his Golden Calf map for fifty thousand dollars."

The Chevy drove past. The pickup behind Leaphorn honked.

"What else did he say?"

"He said he bet her I wouldn't pay to get her back."

The pickup honked again. Leaphorn eased his truck forward.

"What'd you say to that?"

Denton's laugh had a bitter sound. "Just like the court records show. Marvin McKay pulled out his pistol, and I shot the son of a bitch."

Leaphorn was heading for the exit now, a bit above the legal pace. "Didn't you believe him?"

"Of course not," Denton said.

"How about now?"

"Well, maybe some of it. Do a left on Railroad."

Leaphorn jammed down on the accelerator and made a tire-squealing right turn into a gap in the traffic. He felt the pistol barrel jamming into his ribs.

"Left," Denton said. "We're going the wrong way."

"We're going the right way," Leaphorn said. "And I don't think you're going to shoot me because I think you still want me to find Linda for you."

"Fat chance of that." Denton said. But the pistol moved away from Leaphorn's ribs. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, I think I know where she is, and I want to go there and find out. But first, I've got to make a telephone call."

Denton laughed. "Oh, come on, Leaphorn. You've been calling me a liar, but you never called me stupid before."

"I call Lorenzo Perez; he calls the security man at Fort Wingate and tells him we've got business out in the bunker area and to let us in."

"Fort Wingate?" Denton said. "You said McKay was there the day I shot him, and he had a woman in his car. Right?"

Leaphorn nodded.

"Who's this Perez?"

"Former undersheriff. Knows people at the fort. Hand me the cellphone out of the glovebox."

Denton got out the cellphone, inspected it, said: "What's the number for Perez?"

Leaphorn told him.

"You know how it sounds when you cock a pistol?"

"Sure."

"Then listen to this." The click of a pistol being cocked followed. "The pistol is a forty-five caliber. You know what that does to somebody. If you say anything to Perez that sounds suspicious to me, then I shoot you, turn off the ignition, grab the wheel, pull your truck off the road, wipe everything down for my fingerprints, leave the gun on the floor. No prints on it and none on the rounds in the magazine. There'll be not a drop of blood on me. I just open the door and step out and walk away."

"You won't have to bother with a self-defense plea this time, then," Leaphorn said.

"Right," said Denton. He pushed the speaker volume to the top, dialed the number, listened for a second to the voice that answered, then handed it to Leaphorn.

"Lorenzo, this is Joe Leaphorn. Can I get you to call security out at Fort Wingate and ask them to let me in? Just tell 'em I'm working on something with you."

"Sure," Lorenzo said. "I already did. What is—"

"Thanks," Leaphorn said, and disconnected.

"Already did?" Denton said. "What's that mean?"

"I told him I was going out there today to see what I could find."

Denton didn't comment on that. And when Leaphorn asked him what else McKay had said about Linda and his back-up plan, Denton said, "I don't want to talk about it." The rest of the trip was made in tense and gloomy silence. Leaphorn broke it once, just before they made the turn into the fort's entrance, to comment on a massive cumulus-nebulous cloud building up over the Zuñi Mountains. He pointed toward it. "Maybe we'll finally get some rain," he said. "That looks promising."

Denton said, "Just drive," and he didn't speak again until Leaphorn slowed at the security gate of the bunker area.

"Remember this," he said, and showed Leaphorn the pistol, one of those 1902 model .45 automatics the U.S. Army had been using through every war up to Desert Storm. "If the security man at the gate wants to talk, don't."

The security man offered no opportunity for conversation. He simply grinned and waved them through.

Leaphorn had long since abandoned the notion that Wiley Denton wouldn't actually shoot him and had been concentrating on coming up with some sort of action to abort that. He'd read too much and had seen too many movies about the training of the Green Berets in efficient killing to have much hope of overpowering Denton. He might be rusty, being half a lifetime away from ambushing Vietcong on the Cambodian side of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but he was incurably bigger, burlier, and, alas, younger than Leaphorn. He'd finally settled on getting Denton to bunker D2187 so filled with dread (or hope) concerning what they might find there that he would be—despite his training—incautious for a required moment or two. During which Leaphorn would do something suitable, which he hoped he could think of.

Now, however, the problem was finding bunker D2187 in the vast maze of weed-grown railroad tracks, crumbling asphalt access roads, and rows and rows of great grassy humps. While these were neatly spaced two hundred yards apart as the army had required, the rolling terrain of the Zuñi Mountains foothills defeated the West Pointian obsession with straight and unbroken lines. After two wrong turns, one of which led them into an old but still unbroken security fence, Denton began to lose patience.

"I'm beginning to get skeptical about this," he said. "Where do you think you're going?"

"We're going to a block of bunkers labeled 'D,'" Leaphorn said.

"These have a 'G' over the doors," Denton said. "Are you lost, or are you just bulling me?"

Leaphorn backed around, made the first possible right turn onto a street where the asphalt paving was so worn it was mostly reduced to gravel. The first bunker he passed bore the label D2163 (faded by years of weather) over its massive door. After a slow quarter mile of counting off numbers, Leaphorn pulled his pickup off the gravel and parked in front of bunker D2187. Finally! It actually existed. He took a deep breath and blew it out.

"This is it?" Denton asked.

Leaphorn took his flashlight from the glovebox, opened his door, got out, and studied the bunker door—a great, heavy slab of steel covered with peeled and rusty-looking army paint. Fastened to the bunker's bare cement front to the right of the entry were two steel boxes, mounted side by side, labeled respectively "1" and "2." A metal tube ran up the concrete face of the bunker into box 2, and another such tube linked box 2 to box 1, from which five similar tubes emerged. One ran up the face of the bunker and disappeared over the roof. The four others ran downward, three of them disappearing through the front of the bunker at floor level and the other running along the ground and up the wall and linking to a device on one of the bottom hinges.

Denton now had joined him in this inspection.

"The one going over the roof probably served the ventilating pump they have on top of these bunkers," Denton said. "The others probably involve some sort of an alarm system, humidity or temperature sensors, or maybe an alarm to signal if the door opened without the proper code." He produced a contemptuous snort. "And you haven't got the code."

"Nobody has the code," Leaphorn said. "It's been decommissioned for years. The army base up in Utah that is supposed to keep an eye on things uses it now and then to shoot off target rockets down to White Sands for that Star Wars foolishness. No need for security anymore."

As he was explaining that, he was thinking the door seemed altogether too secure. Another steel box, slightly rusted, was welded to its center. Near the bottom was a bolt locking device. The bolt seemed to be missing. The only thing Leaphorn was sure he understood was the steel locking bar that swung across the door and, when clamped down, prevented it from being opened.

Leaphorn took two steps toward the door.

"Hold it," Denton said. "You want me to believe you're going to get into that vault?"

Denton was holding the .45, still cocked, now pointed at the ground about halfway between him and Leaphorn.

"We'll see," Leaphorn said, and walked to the door.

It wasn't a fast walk. Leaphorn had become belatedly aware that he had managed to make himself an ally to Denton if Denton planned to kill him and get away with it. The thunderstorm brewing over the Zuñis was producing lightning now and would probably dump enough rain to erase their tracks. The rumble of thunder echoed along the rows of bunkers, and the updrafts feeding the cloud were producing gusty winds. He had brought Denton to an absolutely perfect place for Denton to shoot him. No one would be near enough to hear a pistol shot even on a quiet day. Denton could probably drive out through the main gate with no more than a wave, or if he thought the security man would be curious, he could find a way out easily enough on the Zuñi Mountains side, where ranchers had been using their wire cutters for years to get their cattle into the free grazing.

Now that he was closer, Leaphorn could read the faded little sign posted over the box on the door: lock door. Bad news. He checked the small box on the door, which he now saw was like those used in prisons as containers for coded locking devices. But, good news, this box was empty.

Then he noticed at his feet a section of thick wire. He picked it up. It had been cut. Still on the wire was a circular metal tab. Leaphorn found the place where the wire had been run through a flange on the door and a matching flange on the doorjamb. This tab had been the official seal.

"Okay, Leaphorn," Denton said. "Enough of this screwing around. I think this is a sort of setup. You're killing time. Waiting for somebody to come."

It was just then that Leaphorn remembered both the pliers and the crowbar. McKay had used the pliers to cut the wire. As he looked at the metal locking bar in place across the door, he understood why McKay had bought the crowbar. He needed it as a "cheat bar," to apply leverage to push the blocking bar up out of the slots that held it. But what had McKay done with it? He'd found the pliers in McKay's car. Once the wire was cut, he had no more need for them here. But if he'd left Linda Denton locked in this bunker, he'd need the crowbar to get her out.

Denton was standing right behind Leaphorn now, and he pressed the pistol against Leaphorn's spine.

"Back in the truck," he said. "Now, or I kill you here."

As he heard that, Leaphorn saw the crowbar, lying in the weeds against the concrete wall.

He pointed to it.

"Marvin McKay bought that bar at a Gallup hardware store the day you killed him," Leaphorn said. "Put that damned pistol back in your pocket, and we'll pick up the crowbar and use it to find out what happened to your wife."

Again, the pressure of the pistol against Leaphorn's back disappeared.

"What are you talking about?" Denton said.

"I'm getting the crowbar. I'll show you."

Leaphorn picked up the heavy steel bar and examined the locking arrangement a moment. Using the flange as a fulcrum, he put the bar end under the locking bar and pulled down with his full weight. The locking bar slid upward.

"Now, pull the door open."

Denton did.

They stood engulfed in a rush of warm, stale air, and peered into a vast, empty darkness. Nothing but a clutter of cartons against the left wall, and two black barrel-like containers that once had probably held some sort of explosive. Denton was holding the pistol down by his side now.

"You think she's in there?"

The only light in the bunker followed them through the doorway. It dimly illuminated a gray concrete floor, which stretched sixty empty feet to the great half circle of gray concrete that formed the back wall.

Leaphorn walked in just a few steps before he noticed Denton wasn't following. He was still standing, slumped, staring at the door post.

"What'd you find?" Leaphorn said, and walked back toward the door.

Denton pointed, but his eyes were closed.

Words were scrawled on the concrete. Leaphorn turned on his flashlight and illuminated: bump i am so sorry.

"You know who this 'Bump' is?"

"I'm Bump," Denton said. "Because of my nose." He touched a finger to the disfigurement.

"Oh," Leaphorn said.

"She said she loved that bump on my nose. That it reminded her of the kind of man I was." Denton tried to laugh at that, but couldn't manage it. "Had to be Linda who wrote it," he said. "Nobody else called me that."

Leaphorn touched the scrawl. "I think she must have written this with her lipstick," he said.

"I'll go find her," Denton said. "Linda," he shouted, and rushed off into the gloom with the shout echoing and echoing in the huge empty tomb.

They found Mrs. Linda Denton, née Linda Verbiscar,lying primly on a sheet of heavy corrugated cardboard behind the empty drums.

She was facedown, with her head turned sideways. The cool, utterly dry, almost airless climate of the sealed bunker had converted her into a mummy.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

« ^

What hostiin peshlakai had told Chee, he had recited in the presence of Ms. Knoblock, his court-appointed attorney, and Mr. Harjo, who seemed to be serving as her interpreter as well as Agent Osborne's. And Peshlakai spoke, as seemed to be his habit, in general and ambiguous terms.

"But what it all boiled down to, Bernie, when you read between the lines, and you went ahead and completed a few sentences for him, was that Wiley Denton murdered Doherty with our friend Peshlakai aiding and abetting—if not actually pulling the trigger."

Bernie looked very sad when she heard that. "Putting that old man in prison," she said. "That would be awful. That would kill him."

"Probably," Chee said. "But I don't think Harjo actually understood a lot of it. Not from the way he was translating it to Ms. Knoblock."

Bernie gave him a sidelong glance. "And you didn't butt in and explain things to them. Right? You seem to be implying something, well, something sneaky."

"I don't know what I'm implying," Chee said. "But I know for sure that Peshlakai had no idea he was getting himself involved in a murder."

"How did he get tied up with Denton anyway?"

"Just by living where he did. He'd see Denton coming up the canyon, nosing around, digging out sand samples and that sort of thing. And he must have warned Denton that he shouldn't go up to the headwaters area of Coyote Canyon because of the holy places there. He would be violating taboos, and that would make him sick. And so Denton was sympathetic, or seemed to be, and said he'd help Peshlakai guard the place. Denton gave Peshlakai a cellphone, showed him how to use it, and told him when he saw anyone prowling around up the canyon, he should call."

"So he called him when Doherty showed up at the placer site?"

"Exactly," Chee said. "And Denton carne. Whereupon one of them shot Doherty."

"With Peshlakai's rifle?"

"Unfortunately. Peshlakai didn't say so, but Osborne's crime scene crew finally recovered the slug with their metal detectors. It matched that old thirty-thirty, just like the bullet he fired to scare you away."

Bernie shuddered, remembering that. "And they put Doherty's body back in his truck," Bernie said. "And then one of them drove it up to where I found it, and the other one came along in Denton's car, and then everybody went home. Everybody except Thomas Doherty."

"Peshlakai didn't get into explaining that, or say who actually fired the shot."

Bernie sighed. "I don't guess it matters much. Whether he's killer or conspirator. He's way too old to last long in prison."

"He wouldn't want to," Chee said.

Bernie rubbed her hand across her face. "I hate this," she said. "Just hate it. So many people get hurt."

"I know," Chee said. A long silence followed. Chee broke it with what sounded a little like a laugh.

"What?" Bernie said.

"I sounded like I was agreeing with you, but I really wasn't. You were feeling pity for the victims, and sometimes the ones we arrest are the worst victims of all. I wasn't thinking that. I was thinking about us."

"What do you mean?"

"You might have been killed in Coyote Canyon," Chee said. "That's been a nightmare ever since you told me."

"No one would have blamed you for it," Bernie said.

"I didn't mean that," Chee said.

They turned into the fort entrance, showed their police credentials at the security gate, were assured that Leaphorn and another man had driven through a bit earlier, and were given some general instructions about how to find the D block of bunkers and bunker D2187.

Bernie spotted Leaphorn's pickup far ahead as they turned onto the worn asphalt lane, and they parked behind it.

"The door's open," Bernie said.

Chee took out his flashlight and stepped out of the car. Bernie was already out.

"Bernie. Why don't you wait here until I—"

"Because I'm a cop, just as much as you are."

"But I'm the sergeant," Chee said. "Stay back."

He walked to the open door, looked in, flicked on his flashlight.

The beam illuminated the forms of two men, one seated on a barrel, the other standing. The man standing held a flashlight. The seated man held a pistol dangling from his right hand and what seemed to be a sheet of paper, illuminated by the flash, in the other. The seated man ignored the light from Chee's flash. The standing man looked into the flashlight. Joe Leaphorn.

"Wiley Denton," Chee shouted. "Drop the pistol."

Denton seemed not to hear.

"Police," Chee shouted. "Drop that pistol."

Chee had his own pistol cocked. He was aware of Bernie standing beside him.

Denton stood up, faced Chee, his pistol came up.

Chee leaped against Bernie, knocked her out of the doorway. His momentum slammed him into the door-jamb, the flashlight fell from his numbed arm. He found himself on his knees, still gripping his own pistol.

In the bunker he saw Denton standing, illuminated by Leaphorn's flashlight. No pistol visible now.

"He's all right," Leaphorn shouted. "Come on in."

Chee walked down the floor, pistol pointed. Bernie had recovered his flashlight and was walking with him, the light focused on Denton.

"Wiley," Leaphorn said. "Hand your pistol over to Sergeant Chee. You don't need it now."

Denton pulled the pistol out of the waistband of his trousers. "Take it," he said, and handed it to Chee.

"And the letter," Leaphorn said. "Let me keep that for you. You'll always want it."

Denton handed Leaphorn the letter, turned away from Chee, and put his arms behind his back.

"Mr. Denton," Chee said. "I arrest you for the murder of Thomas Doherty. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. Anything you say may be used against you."

"Oh!" Bernie exclaimed. "What did you do to your arm? It's bleeding."

"Banged it on the doorjamb," Chee said. "I'll take Mr. Denton out to the car and call this in." He was looking at Linda on her cardboard resting place. "Send an ambulance, I guess." He tugged at Denton's sleeve.

"Just a minute," Denton said, and turned to Leaphorn. "Let me read that last part again."

Leaphorn looked at Denton's hands, cuffed behind his back, said: "I'll read it to you."

"No. You don't need to do that," Denton said. "I can remember every word of it."

In the reflected light of the flash, Leaphorn's face looked old and exhausted. "Wiley," he said, "remember something else, too. Remember you didn't want this to happen. Remember this was because of a lot of misunderstanding."

"I'm remembering something else, too. That remark you made to me about Shakespeare. I asked the woman at the library about Othello, and she got me a copy. He was just about as stupid as me. But with me, I didn't have someone egging me on. I did it to myself. Looking for a treasure when I already had one."

"Come on," Chee said, and he and Wiley walked through the darkness toward the brilliant sunlight of the open door.

Bernie had been staring down at the body. She shook her head and turned away. "It's hard to believe this," she said. "She starved to death here in the dark. It's just too awful. What was McKay doing? Using her as a hostage, I guess. But why didn't Mr. Denton come and get her? What happened?"

"Denton shot McKay before he had time to tell him where he was holding Linda. Denton said he didn't believe any of it," Leaphorn said. "Don't you think we should get out of here?"

"What did Linda say?" Bernie asked, pointing to the paper in Leaphorn's hand. "Could I read it?"

Leaphorn didn't answer that.

"I guess not," she said. "But could you tell me whether she was angry?"

"I guess you would say it was a love letter," Leaphorn said. "She apologized for introducing McKay to Denton, said she didn't know McKay was an evil man. She said that since Denton hadn't come for her, she was afraid McKay had killed him, and he would never then be able to read her letter. But she would slip off into dreams now and then, and she would dream of Denton being in a hospital, recovering. If he did, she knew he would come and she would try to stay alive until then. And if she failed him again, she wanted him to know that she always loved him and that she was sorry."

Leaphorn turned off the flashlight. He didn't want to see Bernie's face.

"She was sorry," Bernie said in a choked voice. "She said she was sorry?"

The reflected light from the doorway showed Leaphorn that Bernie's eyes were wet. Time to change the subject.

"What happened to Jim's arm?"

"Oh," she said. "When he saw Denton holding that pistol, he jumped into me. He knocked me out of the doorway."

"Hurt you?"

"No, it didn't hurt me," Bernie said, her tone indignant. "He was trying to protect me."

"I think we need to get out into the sunshine," Leaphorn said.

"I should stay," Bernie said. "I'm on duty. Stay with the body until the crime scene crew gets here."

"I'll stay with you then," Leaphorn said. "Aren't you concerned about the chindi? Linda's ghost would have been locked in here with no way out."

"Lieutenant Leaphorn," Bernie said. "Haven't you forgotten? When one dies, their good goes with them. Only the bad is left behind to form the ghost. I doubt if Linda Denton left much of a chindi."

They stood beside the body for a while, with nothing to say. Bernie focused her flash on a little black plastic case partly obscured by Linda Denton's skirt and glanced at Leaphorn—a questioning look.

"That's some sort of miniature disk player," Leaphorn said. "She loved music, and Denton had just given it to her. Birthday present, I think he said."

"I guess that was the source of the music those kids heard. If it hadn't been for the wind wailing that night—" With that Bernie found a tissue in her pocket and wiped her eyes. "Hadn't been for the wind they would have known they were hearing Linda and not a ghost."

Leaphorn nodded. "We have that story of our own, you know, about the Hard Flint boys twisting the good air into evil."

"Right now I'm thinking my mother was right," she said. "There's just too much evil in this business for me. Too much sorrow."

"You wouldn't have any trouble getting another job," Leaphorn said. "Something where you help people instead of arresting them."

"I know," Bernie said. "I'm thinking about it. I'm going to quit this. I'd like to make people happy."

Leaphorn pointed toward the bunker door. Through it, they could see Sergeant Jim Chee putting Wiley Denton in his patrol car. "You know, Bernie, you could start that 'making people happy' career right now. Tell that young man out there what you've just told me."

Bernie looked out into the sunlight, at Chee talking to Denton through the car window. She looked back at Leaphorn, shrugged, spread her hands in that gesture of defeated frustration.

Leaphorn nodded. "I know," he said. "When I was a lot younger, an old Zuñi told me their legend about that. Two of their young hunters rescued a dragonfly stuck in the mud. It gave them the usual wishes you get in these stories. One wished to be the smartest man in the world. The dragonfly said, 'So you shall be.' But the second hunter wanted to be smarter than the smartest man in the world."

On this Leaphorn paused, partly for effect, partly to see if Bernie had already heard a version of this, and partly to see if she had cheered up enough to be listening. She was listening.

"So the dragonfly converted the second hunter into a woman," Bernie said, laughing and nodding at Leaphorn.

"I'm retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, but I'm still commissioned as a McKinley County deputy sheriff," he said. "I can stay here with the body."

Then he watched her walk toward the open door. Toward the dazzling sunlight. Toward Jim Chee.