'I happened to have a pretty clear idea of how far a shotgun will shoot. Not very far.'
'Yeah,' Thatcher said.
The tone irritated Leaphorn. 'Hell, man,' he said. 'The boy was only fourteen.'
Thatcher had no comment on that. The woman reading the noon news had gotten to the pot hunter shooting. The San Juan County Sheriffs Office said they had no suspects in the case as yet but they did have promising leads. Casts had been made of the tire tracks of a vehicle believed used by the killer. Both victims had now been identified. They were Joe B. Nails, thirty-one, a former employee of Wellserve in Farmington, and Jimmy Etcitty, thirty-seven, whose address was given as Dinnehotso Chapter House on the Navajo Reservation.
'Well now,' Thatcher said. 'I guess we can skip stopping at Dinnehotso.'
Chapter Nine
Ť ^ ť
THIS is JUST ABOUT where they'd left the U-Haul truck parked,' Chee said. He turned off the ignition, set the parking brake. 'Pulled up to the edge of the slope with the winch cable run out. Apparently they eased the backhoe down on the cable.'
The front of Chee's pickup was pointed down the steep slope. Fifty feet below, the grassy, brushy hump where a little Anasazi pueblo had stood a thousand years ago was a chaos of trenches, jumbled stones, and what looked like broken sticks. Bones reflecting white in the sunlight.
'Where was the backhoe?'
Chee pointed. 'See the little juniper? At the end of that shallow trench there.'
'The sheriff hauled everything off, I guess,' Leaphorn said. 'After they got their photographs.'
'That was the plan when I left.'
Leaphorn didn't comment. He sat silently, considering the destruction below. This ridge was much higher than it had seemed to Chee in the darkness. Shiprock stuck up like a blue thumb on the western horizon seventy miles away. Behind it, the dim outline of the Carrizo Mountains formed the last margin of the planet. The sagebrush flats between were dappled with the shadow of clouds, drifting eastward under the noon sun.
'The bodies,' Leaphorn said. 'The belagana in the backhoe? Right? Named Nails. And the Navajo partway up this slope under us? Jimmy Etcitty. Which one was shot first?'
Chee opened his mouth, closed it. His impulse had been to say the coroner would have to decide. Or about the same time. But he realized what Leaphorn wanted.
'I'd guess the Navajo was running for his life,' he said. 'I'd say he'd seen the white man shot in the machine. He was running for the truck.'
'Do much checking before you called it in to the sheriff?'
'Hardly any,' Chee said.
'But some,' Leaphorn said.
'Very little.'
'The killer parked up here?'
'Down by the oil well pump.'
'Tire tracks mean anything?'
'Car or pickup. Some wear.' Chee shrugged. 'Dusty dry and in the dark. Couldn't tell much.'
'How about his tracks? Or hers?'
'He parked on the sandstone. No tracks right at the vehicle. After that, mostly scuff marks.'
'Man?'
'Probably. I don't know.' Chee was remembering how shaken he had been. Too much death. He hadn't been using his head. Now he felt guilty. Had he concentrated, he surely could have found at least something to indicate shoe size.
'Not much use going over it again,' Leaphorn said. 'Too many deputy sheriffs and paramedics and photographers been trampling around.'
And so they scrambled down the hill--Leaphorn losing his footing and sliding twenty feet in a shower of dislodged earth and gravel. Standing there, amid the dislodged stones, amid the scattered bones, Chee felt the familiar uneasiness. Too many chindi had taken to the air here, finding freedom from the bodies that had housed them. Leaphorn was standing at a narrow trench the backhoe had dug beside a crumbled wall, looking thoughtful. But then Leaphorn didn't believe in chindi, or in anything else.
'You studied anthropology, didn't you? At New Mexico?'
'Right,' Chee said. So had Leaphorn, if the word around the Navajo Tribal Police was true. At Arizona State. A BA and an MS.
'Get into the Anasazi much? The archaeological end of it?'
'A little,' Chee said.
'The point is, whoever did this work knew something about what he was doing,' Leaphorn said. 'Anasazi usually buried their dead in the trash midden with the garbage, or right against the walls, sometimes inside the rooms. This guy worked the middenâŚ' Leaphorn gestured to the torn earth beyond them. 'And he worked along the walls. So I'd guess he knew they buried pottery with their corpses, and he knew where to find the graves.'
Chee nodded.
'And maybe he knew this was a late site, and that--rule of thumb--the later the site, the better the pot. Glazed, multicolored, decorated, so forth.' He bent, picked up a shard of broken pottery the size of his hand and inspected it.
'Most of the stuff I've seen here is like this,' he said, handing the shard to Chee. 'Recognize it?'
The interior surface was a rough gray. Under its coating of dust the exterior glowed a glossy rose, with ghostly lines of white wavering through it. Chee touched the glazed surface to his tongue--the automatic reaction of a former anthropology student to a potsherd--and inspected the clean spot. A nice color, but his memory produced nothing more than a confused jumble of titles: Classical. Pueblo III. Incised. Corrugated, etc. He handed the shard to Leaphorn, shook his head.
'It's a type called St. John's Polychrome,' Leaphorn said. 'Late stuff. There's a theory it originated in one of the Chaco outlier villages. I think they're pretty sure it was used for trading.'
Chee was impressed and his face showed it.
Leaphorn chuckled. 'I can't remember stuff like that either,' he said. 'I've been doing some reading.'
'Oh?'
'We seem to have a sort of overlap here,' he said. 'You were looking for a couple of men who stole our backhoe. I'm looking for an anthropologist. A woman who works at Chaco and took off one day three weeks ago to go to Farmington and never came back.'
'Hadn't heard about that,' Chee said.
'She prepared this big, elaborate dinner. Had a guest coming to visit. A man very important to her. She put it in the fridge and she didn't come back.' Leaphorn had been looking out across the grassland toward the distant thunderheads. It must have occurred to him that this would sound strange to Chee. He glanced at him. 'It's a San Juan County missing person's case,' he said. 'But I'm on leave, and it sounded interesting.'
'You mentioned you were quitting,' Chee said. 'I mean resigning.'
'I'm on terminal leave,' Leaphorn said. 'A few more days and I'm a civilian.'
Chee could think of nothing to say. He didn't particularly like Leaphorn, but he respected him.
'But I'm not a civilian yet,' he added, 'and what we have here is peculiar. This overlap, I mean. We have Dr. Friedman-Bernal being a ferocious collector of this kind of pottery.' Leaphorn tapped the potsherd with his forefinger. 'We have Jimmy Etcitty killed here digging up this sort of pot. This same Jimmy Etcitty worked over at Chaco where Friedman-Bernal worked. This same Jimmy Etcitty found a pot somewhere near Bluff which he sold to a collector who sold it to an auction house. This pot got Friedman-Bernal excited enough a month ago to send her driving to Bluff looking for Etcitty. And on top of that we have Friedman-Bernal buying from Slick Nakai, the evangelist, and Nails selling to Slick, and Etcitty playing guitar for Nakai.'
Chee waited, but Leaphorn seemed to have nothing to add.
'I didn't know any of that,' Chee said. 'Just knew Nails and a friend stole the backhoe when I was supposed to be watching the maintenance yard.'
'Nice little tangle of strings, and right here is the knot,' Leaphorn said.
And none of it any of Leaphorn's business, Chee thought. Not if he had resigned. So why was he out here, sitting on that stone wall with his legs in the sun, with almost two hundred miles of driving already behind him today? He must enjoy it or he wouldn't be here. So why has he resigned?