She unfolded the pouch, put the diamond in it, stuck it back in the snuff can, and put it in the pocket of her jeans.
Bernie was feeling exuberant. Now she would get out of this dismal place. She would go find Jim and Cowboy. She’d tell them the mission was complete. She had found the diamonds and the body of the dispenser of diamonds. She had found the evidence that would clear poor Billy Tuve of the murder charge. And the robbery charge. And any doubts that Sergeant Jim Chee might have entertained about Officer Bernadette Manuelito would be forever erased.
She started down the smooth stone floor of the slot, pausing here and there to inspect a rock shelf where the hermit had stored his food supplies in cans and sacks and his drinking water in five-gallon tins. Nearby she located his water source, a dripping, moss-grown trickle originating from a spring back in a crack in the slot wall. She let it drip into her palm and cautiously tasted it. It didn’t seem poisonous. Probably hadn’t run through any rock layers contaminated by chemicals and metallic ores.
She turned off her flashlight. The light reflecting through the slot above was dimmer now, but there was still enough reflected to guide her. It was getting close to sundown, though, and she hurried down the slanting floor to get to the mouth of this slot, and back down the canyon to the Colorado River, while she still had some daylight. It was then that she heard a woman’s voice, coming from down the slot, echoing as every sound did in this otherwise silent place. And then a man’s voice—close enough so she could understand it. The man said, “Ms. Craig. Keep your voice down. Let’s keep it very quiet. She might be dangerous.”
23
“I wasn’t raising my voice,” Joanna Craig said, in something close to an indignant whisper. “And why dangerous? It’s either a smallish woman or a tiny little man,” she said. “Judging from the size of their shoes.”
Brad Chandler didn’t respond to that. Instead he put his finger to his lips, put a hand behind an ear, signaling to Joanna that they should listen. She did, and heard nothing but the tinkling sound of water dripping from the gloomy passageway far ahead up the slot and the occasional faint sigh of the wind blowing past the slot’s open roof far overhead.
“We’ll go in a little farther,” Chandler whispered. “If all remains quiet and we see no sign of anyone, then I’ll give us a little better light. We want to pick up that woman’s track again. She must have some reason for being in here.”
“Sure,” Joanna said.
“And you have to take for granted it’s dangerous. There’s a lot of money involved in this, and where there’s money, there are dangerous people.”
“Okay,” Joanna said. “I understand.”
He made a sort of chuckling sound. “And maybe she’s a little woman, but you’re not so big yourself. And even little women can be packing pistols. Remember?”
“I remember you forgot to return mine,” Joanna said. “If it’s dangerous in here, I’d feel a lot safer with it. Didn’t you say we’re partners?”
“Right,” Chandler said. “But don’t let it worry you. I always look after my partners.”
He snapped on his heavy police-model flashlight, directing its beam back and forth across the smooth stone floor.
“There,” Joanna said, pointing. On the dusty stone were the faint tracks left by Bernie’s waffle soles.
As far as the light reached through the gloom, the tracks seemed to continue in an irregular line along the right edge of the floor.
“Let’s hope it stays this easy,” Chandler said.
“Take a look up,” Joanna said. “At the sky almost straight overhead.”
Chandler glanced at Joanna, suspicious.
“I saw a flash of lightning,” she said.
A boom of thunder punctuated her statement, producing a deafening battery of echoes from the cliffs.
“Guess it’s going to rain,” Chandler said, looking up now. “We’ll be dry in here. And if it keeps doing that, you can talk as loud as you like.”
“Yes,” she began, intending to tell this big, obnoxious man what she had read about the effects of rainstorms above the canyon. And what one of the people at the Park Service Center had told her of the sudden flash floods roaring down the little washes that drained the mesa tops. But no. Maybe that knowledge, and his ignorance, might be useful if she had any luck. And Joanna Craig had no doubt that she was going to need a lot of luck to get out of this situation.
He shifted the light beam, revealing nothing but the uneven layers of stone of the slot cliffs to the left, then he directed it up the cliffs, then across the slot. The light produced a brief burst of glitter as it passed the diamonds and then illuminated the cliffs to the right.
“There!” Chandler said, keeping the beam focused on the high shelf where Bernie had seen the diamond man’s bed. “See the cloth? I think we’ve found something.”
“Didn’t you notice something shining?” Joanna asked. She pointed. “Back that way.”
Chandler ignored her. Walked toward the shelf.
“Somebody had a bed roll up there,” he said. “This must be where the man with the diamonds lived.”
And as he said that, the beam of the flash struck the corpse.
Joanna sucked in her breath.
“Yes,” Chandler said. “I see him now. Or what’s left of him.”
He focused the light on the body. “Looks like somebody got here first,” he said, and switched the flashlight into his left hand and used his right to take out his pistol.
“You’re not going to need that gun,” Joanna said. “He’s already dead. A long time dead, the way he looks.”
“I can see that, dammit,” Chandler said. “But who killed him?”
“Look at him,” Joanna said. “Maybe it was time. Old age. Anyway, it certainly wasn’t very recently. He’s practically a mummy.”
“I see it now,” Chandler said. “And look, here’s some more of those footprints. All around here. She’s probably close. Anyway, I’ll keep this pistol handy.” He shined the light directly into Joanna’s face. “Might need it,” he said, grinning at her.
Joanna turned away from the flashlight, held out her hand. “Then give me mine. Maybe I’ll need it.”
He ignored that, swinging the flashlight beam past the body.
“And there,” he said. “Wow. Just look at that. Those must be my diamonds.”
“Arranged in two rows,” Joanna said. But she was staring at the white shape standing between the glittering columns. And thinking, My father’s arm. And noticing this man had said “my diamonds.” Not that she had ever believed he would share them with her. Or that she cared about the diamonds anyway, for that matter. The bone was what she wanted.
24
Bernie had reacted fast at the first sound of the voices. Strange voices. The man’s voice had an East Coast urban sound. Not Jim and not Cowboy, and it certainly didn’t sound like what she’d expect Billy Tuve to sound like. Who were they? What were they doing here? And why were they following her?
Lieutenant Leaphorn believed these diamonds were involved in a legal battle so big it had attracted FBI interest. Both of these people were armed. Park Service rules prohibited firearms in the canyon, so they weren’t merely tourists. If they thought she was dangerous to them, they might be dangerous to her. She ran up the slanting floor as fast and as quietly as the rock-cluttered pathway allowed. She wanted to find a place as far from the voices as she could get. A place where she could conceal herself until she could locate a way out of this slot.
Instead she ran almost immediately into a dead end. Part of one of the cliff walls had collapsed into a towering dam of chunks, slabs, and boulders blocking the floor and partially the slot. She climbed. A chunk of sandstone slid under her weight and dislodged smaller stones, bruising Bernie’s knee and starting a rattling little landslide that touched off a chorus of echoes. Surely they would have heard that. She moved cautiously toward the wall, slid under a tilted slab leaning against it, and sat down.