He brought that up with Cowboy as they drove in the deputy’s patrol car to the meeting place on Casa Del Eco Mesa.
“Exactly what I’ve been telling you,” Cowboy said. “You pick on the feds all the time. Hostile. I think it grows out of your basic and well-justified inferiority complex. There’s a little envy mixed in there, too, I think. Healthy, good-looking guys, blow-dry haircuts, big salaries, good retirement, shiny shoes, Hollywood always making movies about them, heel-e-o-copters to fly around in, flak jackets, expense accounts, retirement pensions and"—Cowboy paused, gave Chee a sidewise glance -"and getting to associate with those real pretty Justice Department public-defender lawyers all the time.”
Which was Cowboy’s effort to open the subject of Janet Pete. Chee had once asked Cowboy to be his best man if Janet insisted on the white people’s style of wedding Janet’s mother wanted instead of the Navajo wedding Chee preferred. He never really explained to Cowboy how that affair had crashed and burned, and he wasn’t going to do it now.
“How about you, Cowboy?” Chee said. “Nobody ever accused you of loving the federals. You’re the one who told me the most popular course in the FBI Academy is Insufferable Arrogance 101.”
“It’s Arrogance 201 that’s popular. They expect recruits to test out of 101. Anyhow, most of them are nice guys. Just a lot richer than us.”
One of them was awaiting them at Truck Base, sitting in a black van, monitoring radio traffic with a book open on the seat beside him. He said the Special Agent running this part of the show had gone down in the canyon, and they were supposed to wait for instructions.
The radio tech pointed to the yellow police-line tape he’d parked beside.
“Don’t go inside that,” he said. “That’s where the perps abandoned their truck. We can’t have people messing that up until the crime-lab team signs off on it.”
“OK,” Cowboy said. “We’ll just wait.”
They leaned against Cowboy’s patrol car.
“Why didn’t you tell him you were the one who put up the tape?” Chee asked.
“Just being nice,” Cowboy said. “You ought to try that. The feds respond well to kindness.”
Chee let that one pass into a long silence, which he broke with a question.
“Have you heard how the Bureau got the perps identified? I know they announced it to the press, which means they’re sure of ’em. So first I thought they’d found the inside man and got him to talk. This Teddy Bai guy they were holding at the hospital. Do you know if they got him to talk?”
“All I know is fourth-hand,” Cowboy said. “I heard your old boss did it. Got the names for them.”
“Old boss?”
“Joe Leaphorn,” Dashee said. “The Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn. Who else?”
“Be damned,” Chee said. “How the devil could that have happened?” But he noticed that he wasn’t really surprised.
“They said the sheriff got a call from some old friend from Aneth, or someplace like that—a former county cop named Potts. This Potts said Leaphorn came to his house and asked him about three men and then how to find this Jorie guy’s place. Hour or so later Leaphorn calls the cops from Jorie’s house and tells them Jorie’s killed himself. That’s all I know.”
“Be damned,” Chee said again. “How in hell does -"
“How long did you work for him?” Cowboy asked. “Three, four years?”
“Seemed longer,” Chee said.
“So you know he’s smart,” Cowboy said. “Logical, thinks things out.”
“Yeah,” Chee said, sounding grumpy. “Everything fits into a pattern for him. Every effect has its cause. I told you about his map, didn’t I? Full of different colored pins marking different sort of things. He’d stick ’em in there marking off travel times, confluences, so forth. Looking for a pattern.”
Chee paused, struck by a sudden thought. “Or lack of one,” he added.
Cowboy looked at him. “Like what do you mean?”
“Like I just thought of something that doesn’t fit here. Remember, you told me this truck abandoned here was an oversized cab job, right? And you found two sets of footprints around it. And three was the number of guys seen in the robbery.”
“Right,” Cowboy said. “So where’s that leading?”
“So how did this Jorie get from here to his home up in Utah?”
Silence while Cowboy considered that. He sighed. “I don’t know. How about they dropped him off at his house before they got here. Or how about he actually got out of the truck here, but he was very careful where he stepped.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“No. Not really. I’m pretty good at finding tracks.”
The door of the communications van opened, and the tech leaned out.
“Cabot called in,” he shouted. “Says you guys can take off now. He wants you back here in the morning. About daylight.”
Dashee waved good-bye. The communications tech returned to his reading. Chee said, “Does this somehow remind you of our Great Manhunt of 1998?”
Dashee backed his car up to the track, turned it in the direction of the wandering road that would take them back to pavement.
“Hold it a minute,” Chee said. “Let’s sit here a little while where we can see the lay of the land and think about this.”
“Think?” Dashee said. “You’re not an acting lieutenant anymore. That thinking can get you in trouble.“ But he pulled the car off the track and turned off the ignition.
They sat. After a while Dashee said, “What are you thinking about? I’m thinking about how early we have to hit the floor tomorrow to get up by daylight. How about you?”
“I’m thinking this started out looking like a well-planned operation. Everything was timed out precisely." Chee looked at Dashee, meshed his fingers together. “Perfect precision,” he said. “You agree.”
Dashee nodded.
“The guy on the roof cuts the right wires at the right time. They use a stolen truck with the plates switched, shooting both of the competent security people. They leave total confusion behind, fixing it so they were far away from the scene before roadblocks were up, and so forth. Everything planned. Right?"
“And now this." Chee waved at the landscape in front of them, dunes stabilized by growths of Mormon tea, stunted junipers, needle grass, and then westward where the Casa Del Eco highlands dropped sharply away into a waste of eroded canyons.
“So?” Dashee asked.
“So why did they come here?”
“Tell me,” Dashee said, "and then let’s go back to Montezuma Creek and get a loaf of bread and some lunch meat at the store there and have our dinner.”
“Well, first you think maybe they panicked. Figured they’d run into roadblocks if they stayed on the pavement, turned off here, found this old track dead-ended, and just took off.”
“OK,” Dashee said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
“But that doesn’t work because all three of them lived around here, and that Ironhand guy is a Ute. He’d know every road out here. They had a reason to come here.”
“All right,” Dashee said. “So they came here to steal Old Man Timms’s airplane and fly out of our jurisdiction. The FBI liked that one. I liked that one. Everybody liked that one until you went and screwed it up.”
“Call that reason number two, then, and mark it wrong. Now reason number three, currently in favor, is this is the place they had picked to climb down into the canyons and disappear.”
Dashee restarted the engine. “Funny place for that, I’d say, but let’s think about it while we eat.”
“I’d guess this drainage wash here would take you down into Gothic Creek, and then you could follow it all the way down to the San Juan River Canyon, and then if you can get across the river you could go up Butler Wash to just about anywhere. Or downstream a few miles and turn south again up the Chinle Canyon. Lots of places to hide out, but this is sort of an awkward, out-of-the-way place to start walking.”