'Why did you resign?' Chee asked. 'None of my business, I guess, butâŚ'
Leaphorn seemed to be thinking about it. Almost as if for the first time. He glanced at Chee, shrugged. 'I guess I'm tired,' he said.
'But you're using leave time out here, chasing after whatever it is we have here.'
'I've been wondering about that myself,' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe it's the fire horse syndrome. Lifelong habit at work. I think it's because I'd like to find this Friedman-Bernal woman. I'd like to find her and sit her down and say: `Dr. Bernal, why did you prepare that big dinner and then go away and let it rot in your refrigerator?''
To Chee, the answer to why Dr. Bernal let her dinner spoil was all too easy. Especially now. Dr. Bernal was dead.
'You think she's still alive?'
Leaphorn considered. 'After what we have here, it doesn't seem likely, does it?'
'No,' Chee said.
'Unless she did it,' Leaphorn said. 'She had a pistol. She took it with her when she left Chaco.'
'What caliber?' Chee asked. 'I heard this one was small.'
'All I know is small,' Leaphorn said. 'Small handgun. She carried it in her purse.'
'Sounds like twenty-two caliber,' Chee said. 'Or maybe a twenty-five or a small thirty-two.'
Leaphorn rose, stiffly, to his feet. Stretched his back, flexed his shoulders. 'Let's see what we can find,' he said.
They found relatively little. The investigators from the county had taken the bodies and whatever else had interested them, which probably hadn't been much. The victims seemed to be clearly identified, and that would be checked with people who knew them for confirmation. The FBI would be asked to do a run on their fingerprints, just in case. The backhoe had been hauled away and would be gone over carefully for prints in the event the killer had been careless with his hands when he shot Nails. The rental truck would receive the same treatment. So would the two plastic sacks in which Chee had seen the pots carefully packed. And just in case, a cord had been run around the dig site, with the little tags dangling to warn citizens away from a homicide site. If some afterthought brought an investigator back to check on something, nothing would be disturbed.
What interested Chee was outside the cord--a new cardboard carton bearing the red legend SUPERTUFF and the sublegend WASTEBASKET LINERS, and several other messages: 'Why Pay More For Something You'll Throw Away? Six free in this carton. Thirty for the price of twenty-four!'
The cardboard was smudged with white. Chee squatted beside it and recognized fingerprint powder. Someone had checked it and found the cardboard too rough to show prints. Chee picked it up, extracted the carefully folded plastic sacks. Counted them. Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven plus two filled with pots made twenty-nine. He slipped the sacks back into the box and replaced it. One sack unaccounted for. Filled with what? Had the killer taken one set of pots and left the other two? Had Nails's girlfriend, if he had a girlfriend, borrowed one? It was one of those imponderables.
He watched Leaphorn prowling along the trenches, inspecting digging procedures, or perhaps the human bones. Chee had been avoiding the bones without realizing it. Now almost at his foot he noticed the weathered flat surface of a scapula, broken off below the shoulder joint. Just beyond was a very small skull, complete except for the lower jaw. A child, Chee guessed, unless the Anasazi had been even smaller than he remembered. Beyond the skull, partly buried by the excavation dirt, were ribs, and part of a spinal column, the small bones of a foot, three lower jaws placed in a row.
Chee stared. Why had that happened? He strolled over and looked down at them. One was broken, a small jaw with part of its left side missing. The other two were complete. Adult, Chee guessed. An expert would be able to tell the sex of their owners, the approximate ages at death, something about their diet. But why had someone lined them up like this? One of the pot hunters, Chee guessed. It didn't seem the sort of thing one of the deputies would have done. Then Chee noticed another jawbone, and three more, and finally a total of seventeen within a few yards of the juniper where he was standing. He could see only three craniums. Someone-- again surely the pot hunters--had sorted out the jaws. Why? Chee walked over to where Leaphorn was standing, studying something in the trench.
'Find anything?' Leaphorn asked, without looking up.
'Nothing much,' Chee said. 'One of those plastic bags seems to be missing.'
Leaphorn looked up at him.
'The box said contents thirty. There were still twenty-seven folded in it. I saw two with pots in them.'
'Interesting,' Leaphorn said. 'We'll ask about that at the sheriff's office. Maybe they took one.'
'Maybe,' Chee said.
'You notice anything about the skeletons?' Leaphorn was squatting now in the shallow trench, examining bones.
'Somebody seemed to be interested in the jawbones,' Chee said.
'Yes,' Leaphorn said. 'Now why would that be?' He stood up, holding in both hands a small skull. It was gray with the clay of the grave, and the jaw was missing. 'Why in the world would that be?'
Chee had not the slightest idea, and said so.
Leaphorn bent into the grave again, poking at something with a stick. 'I think this is what they call a Chaco outlier site,' he said. 'Same people who lived in the great houses over in the canyon, or probably the same. I think there is some evidence, or at least a theory, that these outliers traded back and forth with the great-house people, maybe came into Chaco for their religious ceremonials. Nobody really knows. This was probably one of the sites being reserved for digging sometime in the future.' He sounded, Chee thought, like an anthropology lecturer.
'You have anything pressing to do in Shiprock tonight?' Chee denied it with a negative motion of his head.
'How about stopping off at the Chaco Center on the way home then,' Leaphorn said. 'Let's see what we can find out about this.'
Chapter Ten
Ť ^ ť
FROM THE DESPOILED OUTLIER SITE to the eastern boundary of the Chaco Culture National Historic Park would be less than twenty-five miles if a road existed across the dry hills and Chaco Mesa. None did. By the oil company roads that carried Leaphorn and Chee back to Highway 44, thence northwest to Nageezi, and then southwest over the bumpy dirt aceess route, it was at least sixty miles. They arrived at the visitors' center just after sundown, found it closed for the day, and drove up to the foot of the bluff where employee housing was located. The Luna family was starting supper -- the superintendent, his wife, a son of perhaps eleven, and a daughter a year or two younger. Supper centered on an entree involving macaroni, cheese, tomatoes, and things that Leaphorn could not readily identify. That he and Chee would eat was a foregone conclusion. Good manners demanded the disclaimer of hunger from the wayfarer, but the geography of the Colorado Plateau made it an obvious lie. Out here there was literally no place to stop to eat. And so they dined, Leaphorn noticing that Chee's appetite was huge and that his own had returned. Perhaps it was the smell of the home cooking--something he hadn't enjoyed since Emma's sickness reached the point where it was no longer prudent for her to be in the kitchen.
Bob Luna's wife, a handsome woman with a friendly, intelligent face, was full of questions about Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. After polite feelers established that questions were not out of order, she asked them. The Luna son, Allen, a blond, profusely freckled boy who looked like a small copy of his blond and freckled mother, put down his fork and listened. His sister listened without interrupting her supper.
'We haven't learned much,' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe the county has done better. It is their jurisdiction. But I doubt it. No sheriff ever has enough officers. In San Juan County it's worse than normal. You're worried to death with everything from vandalism of summer cabins up on Navajo Lake to people tapping distillate out of the gas pipelines, or stealing oil field equipment, things like that. Too much territory. Too few people. So missing persons don't get worked on.' He stopped, surprised at hearing himself deliver this defense of the San Juan County Sheriffs Office. Usually he was complaining about it. 'Anyway,' he added, lamely, 'we haven't learned anything very useful.'