'Nope,' Leaphorn said.
A man appeared at the apartment door. 'Finding anything?' he asked. He walked past Leaphorn without a glance and into the bedroom. 'Glad to see you people getting interested in this,' he said. 'Ellie's been missing almost three weeks now.'
Thatcher put a fragment of pot carefully back into its box. 'Who are you?' he asked.
'My name's Elliot,' he said. 'I work with Ellie on the Keet Katl dig. Or did work with her. What's this Luna's been telling me? You think she's stealing artifacts?'
Leaphorn found himself interested--wondering how Thatcher would deal with this. It wasn't the sort of thing anticipated and covered in the law enforcement training Thatcher would have received. No chapter covering intrusion of civilian into scene of investigation.
'Mr. Elliot,' Thatcher said, 'I want you to wait outside on the porch until we get finished in here. Then I want to talk to you.'
Elliot laughed. 'For God's sake,' he said, in a tone that canceled any misunderstanding the laugh might have caused. 'A woman vanishes for almost a month and nobody can get you guys off your butts. But somebody calls in with an anonymousâŚ'
'Talk to you in a minute,' Thatcher said. 'Soon as I'm done in here.'
'Done what?' Elliot said. 'Done stirring through her potsherds? If you get `em out of order, get 'em mixed up, it will screw up everything for her.'
'Out,' Thatcher said, voice still mild.
Elliot stared at him.
Maybe middle thirties or a little older, Leap-horn thought. A couple of inches over six feet, slender, athletic. The sun had bleached his hair even lighter than its usual very light brown. His jeans were worn and so were his jean jacket and his boots. But they fit. They had been expensive. And the face fit the pattern--a little weatherbeaten but what Emma would have called 'an upper-class face.' A little narrow, large blue eyes, nothing crooked, nothing bent, nothing scarred. Not the face you'd see looking out of a truckload of migrant workers, or in a roofing crew, or the cab of a road grader.
'Of course this place is full of pots.' Elliot's voice was angry. 'Studying pots is Ellie's job--'
Thatcher gripped Elliot at the elbow. `Talk to you later,' he said mildly, and moved him past Leaphorn and out the door. He closed the door behind him.
'Trouble is,' Thatcher said, 'everything he says is true. Her business is pots. So she'll have a bunch of `em here. So what the hell are we looking for?'
Leaphorn shrugged. 'I think we just look,' he said. 'We find what we find. Then we think about it.'
They found more boxes of potsherds in the closet, each shard bearing a label that seemed to identify it with the place it had been found. They found an album of photographs, many of them snapshots of people who seemed to be anthropologists working at digs. There were three notebooks--two filled and one almost half filled--in which little pencil drawings of abstract patterns and pots were interposed with carbon rubbings of what they agreed must be the surface patterns of potsherds. The notes that surrounded these were in the special shorthand scientists develop to save themselves time.
'You studied this stuff at Arizona State,' Thatcher said. 'Can't you make it out?'
'I studied anthropology,' Leaphorn admitted. 'But mostly I studied cultural anthropology. This is a specialty and I didn't get into it. We went on a few digs in a Southwestern Anthro class, but the Anasazi culture wasn't my thing. Neither were ceramics.'
Among the papers on the bed were two Nelson's catalogs, both auctions of American Indian art, African art, and Oceanic art. Both facedown, both open to pages that featured illustrations of Mimbres, Hohokam, and Anasazi pots. Leaphorn studied them. The appraised prices ranged from $2,950 to $41,500 for a Mimbres urn. Two of the Anasazi ceramics had been circled in red in one catalog, and one in the other. The prices were $4,200, $3,700, and $14,500.
'Heard of Nelson's all my life,' Thatcher said. 'Thought they were just a London outfit. Just auctioned art, masterpieces, the Mono. Lisa, things like that.'
'This is art,' Leaphorn said.
'A painting is art,' Thatcher said. 'What kind of nut pays fourteen grand for a pot?' He tossed the catalog back on the bed.
Leaphorn picked it up.
The cover picture was a stylized re-creation of a pictograph--stick-figure Indians with lances riding horses with pipestem legs across a deerskin surface.
Across the top the legend read:
NELSON'S
FOUNDED 1744
Fine American Indian Art
New York Auction May 25 and 26
It opened easily to the pottery pages. Ten photographs of pots, each numbered and described in a numbered caption. Number 242 was circled in red. Leaphorn read the caption:
. Anasazi St. John's Polychrome bowl, circa A.D. 1000-1250, of deep rounded form, painted on the interior in rose with wavy pale 'ghost lines.' Has a geometric pattern enclosing two interlocked spirals. Two hatched, serrated rectangles below the rim. Interior surface serrated. Diameter 754 inches (19 cm). $4,000/$4,200.
Resale offer by an anonymous collector. Documentation.
Inside the scrawled red circle, the same pen had put a question mark over 'anonymous collector' and scribbled notations in the margin. What looked like a telephone number. Words that seemed to be names. 'Call Q!' 'See Houk.' Houk. The name made a faint echo in Leaphorn's mind. He'd known someone named Houk. The only notation that meant anything to him was: 'Nakai, Slick.' Leaphorn knew about Slick Nakai. Had met him a time or two. Nakai was a preacher. A fundamentalist Christian evangelist. He pulled a revival tent around the reservation in a trailer behind an old Cadillac sedan, putting it up here and there--exhorting those who came to hear him to quit drinking, leave off fornication, confess their sins, abandon their pagan ways, and come to Jesus. Leaphorn scanned the other names, looking for anything familiar, read the description of a Tonto Polychrome olla valued at $1,400/ $1,800. He put the catalog back on the bed. On the next page, a Mimbres black-on-white burial pot, with a 'kill hole' in its bottom and its exterior featuring lizards chasing lizards, was advertised for $38,600. Leaphorn grimaced and put down the catalog.
'I'm going to make a sort of rough inventory,' Thatcher said, sorting through one of the boxes. 'Just jot down some idea of what we have here, which we both know is absolutely nothing that is going to be of any use to us.'
Leaphorn sat in the swivel chair and looked at the 365-day calendar on the desk. It was turned to October 11. 'What day was it they said Dr. Hyphenated left here? Wasn't it the thirteenth?'
'Yeah,' Thatcher said.
Leaphorn flipped over a page to October 13. 'Do it!' was written under the date. He turned the next page. Across this was written: 'Away.' The next page held two notes: 'Be ready for Lehman. See H. Houk.'
H. Houk. Would it be Harrison Houk? Maybe. An unusual name, and the man fit the circumstances. Houk would be into everything and the Houk ranch--outside of Bluff and just over the San Juan River from the north side of the reservation--was in the heart of Anasazi ruins country.
The next page was October 16. It was blank. So was the next page. That took him to Wednesday. Across this was written: 'Lehman!!! about 4 P.M. dinner, sauerbraten, etc.'
Leaphorn thumbed through the pages up to the present. So far Dr. Friedman-Bernal had missed two other appointments. She would miss another one next week. Unless she came home.
He put down the calendar, walked into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator, remembering how Emma liked to make sauerbraten. 'It's way too much work,' he would say, which was better than telling her that he really didn't like it very well. And Emma would say: 'No more work than Navajo tacos, and less cholesterol.'
The smell of soured milk and stale food filled his nostrils. The worse smell came from a transparent ovenware container on the top shelf. It held a Ziploc bag containing what seemed to be a large piece of meat soaking in a reddish brown liquid. Sauerbraten. Leaphorn grimaced, shut the door, and walked back into the room where Thatcher was completing his inventory.