The elbow had reappeared from behind the pillar. Motionless now. Its owner must be leaning on the pillar. Reading, perhaps.
“I hid,” Chee said. “Like a rabbit.”
She looked at him. “Why like a rabbit? You think you should have come on like Monster Slayer?” She grabbed his wrist and raised his hand. “Me mighty redskin. Me take on gun with bare hands. Me big hero. Me dead, but me hero.” She dropped his hand. “If you didn’t have time to do a little ghost dance to make your hospital gown bulletproof, I think the smart thing to do was get under the bed.”
“The way it worked, I guess I was hiding behind another guy. My roommate.” He gave her a quick sketch of what had happened, from the furtive trip downstairs to find out how the body had been stolen from the morgue. He told it quickly, without interpretation and without speculation. Just the facts, he thought. Just the facts. And while he told them, he watched her face.
She pursed her lips into a soundless whistle and shuddered. “I’d have been terrified.” She looked at him a moment, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “How did you think to climb up into the ceiling?”
“That’s not the point,” Chee said. “The point is I got away because I left the blond man somebody to shoot. He came into the room to shoot himself an Indian. Nobody home but a Mexican. So the Chicano gets shot instead of me.”
She was frowning at him again. “So?”
“So? What do you mean, so?”
“So what,” she said. “You on some guilt trip? You think you should have stayed behind? Bared your chest and said, ‘Here I am. Don’t shoot this other guy.’ Come on.” Her voice was scornful. “He shot the nurse, didn’t he? The only difference would have been he’d have shot both of you.”
“Maybe,” Chee said.
“You really are weird,” Mary Landon said. “Either that, or you want me to think you are.”
“Well,” Chee said. “No use talking about it now. Let’s see what else we can find.”
They found very little. There was a lengthy story about the Native American Church, the ceremony, and what the members said about Dillon Charley’s vision of warning. There was a short item in which the sheriff reported that one of the victims had been definitely identified from dental work as an employee of Petrolab. But the story seemed quickly to die away for lack of new information.
If Sena, or any of the other victims, was identified, it wasn’t mentioned in the Beacon. Nor was there any follow-up story on the arrest of Dillon Charley. His release, whenever it happened, went without notice in the paper.
They worked through the microfilm slowly now, page by page, looking for the remainders of a story that was no longer banner headline news. Halfway through the September editions, after an hour of finding nothing, Mary had an idea.
“Hey,” she said. “Newspapers do anniversary stories. You know. They start, ‘A year ago today…’ and then they rehash it all. Why don’t we skip ahead a year?”
Chee stood and stretched. He pushed the lever to the left. The reels hummed with the rewinding. The young woman had left the microfilm area. The elbow was missing from the pillar. Protruding now into Chee’s line of vision was the tip of a nose and a shock of hair. The hair was blond. Very blond. Chee felt his stomach muscles tighten. He released the lever and moved his right hand into his coat pocket. The hand found the pistol grip. The thumb found the hammer.
“What?” Mary said. She was staring at him.
The man emerged from behind the pillar. He glanced at Mary. He was very blond, but he wasn’t the blond man. Far too young. No resemblance at all. He moved to the microfilm file and began rummaging.
“Nothing,” Chee said. “I’m just jumpy.”
They found the anniversary story. It reported little new.
By the time the copying desk had made Xeroxes of the microfilmed stories for them, it was five o’clock.
“Now what?” Mary asked. “It occurs to me that Sergeant Chee of the Mounties has just wasted one afternoon, plus the afternoon of one Crownpoint schoolteacher, and isn’t going to have the slightest idea of what to do next. This is a dead end. Right?”
“No,” Chee said. They were climbing the stairway that spiraled upward through the four levels of the working end of the university library. An artist had used the stairwell walls to depict in paint and plaster the history of man’s efforts to record his communication with his fellows. Here, below the ground floor, they climbed past pictographs and petroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was far overhead, and the symbolic language of computers even higher. “Maybe it doesn’t lead anywhere, but I’d like to talk to some of those men who got warned away from that explosion. I’d like to find out what Dillon Charley told them.”
They emerged on the ground-floor level. Through the glass south wall of the library, the Humanities Building loomed above the sycamores of the central mall, a monolithic sculpture against a dark-blue autumn sky. Usually Chee liked the building. Today it reminded him of tombstones.
“Why?” Mary said. “What can they possibly tell you that has anything to do with this?”
“Maybe nothing,” Chee said. “But the killings grew out of the keepsake box, and stealing the keepsake box seems to have something to do somehow with Dillon Charley’s peyote religion, and everything seems to lead back to what happened at the oil well.”
“Or maybe you’re just curious,” Mary said. “Anyway, you won’t be able to find them. It’s been thirty years.”
“It won’t be so hard,” Chee said. “They’ll probably all be kinfolks of Dillon Charley. He hired them, so they’ll be kinfolks. Cousins, or uncles, or in-laws at least. The Navajos not only invented nepotism. We perfected it.”
“But thirty years,” Mary said. “They’ll be dead. Or half of them will be.”
“One or two, probably,” Chee said. “We know Dillon Charley is. But the odds are about four of them are still around.” They were outside now, walking across the bricked mall south of the library with the brittle sycamore leaves underfoot and the heatless light of the setting sun throwing their shadows a hundred yards ahead and turning the craggy east face of the Sandia Mountains the color of diluted blood. Chee thought of that, and of Hunt walking fifty feet behind them, and of the target they would make for someone standing at any of the walkways or balconies that overlooked the mall.
“And what can they remember about thirty years? Probably not much.”
“Who knows?” Chee said. He thought. Probably nothing with any real accuracy. But there was no other lead to follow. And if nothing else, hunting survivors of the People of Darkness would take him out on the reservation. He would take Mary with him. On the reservation, the blond man would never know where to look for them.
22
A DAY LATER, Chee had taken a fruitless shot in the dark and added a few details to his list of names of Dillon Charley’s People of Dankness.
The shot in the dark had taken him to the university’s Geology Department library. With some help from a cooperative graduate student, he had found a copy of the geologist’s log of the oil well. “It looks fairly typical of that area,” the student told him. “There’s been some shallow production from the Galisteo formation.” He checked through it quickly. “Looks like they found the formation but not the oil.”
“You see anything unusual about it?” Chee asked. The log was totally incomprehensible to him. He stared at the sheet of symbols and notations, feeling foolish.
“I’m no authority on Valencia County petroleum geology,” the young man said. “But it looks like what I’d expect. What are you looking for?”
“That’s the trouble,” Chee said. “I don’t know.”
His luck in hunting Charley’s roustabout crew had been only a little better. He and Mary had driven to the reservation and spent the remaining hours of daylight jolting over the washboard back roads and wagon trails of the Checkerboard, hunting information to go with the names extracted from the Grants Beacon. By nightfall the list had looked like this: