From behind him, McKee heard a faint click.
Eddie had slipped the safety catch on his automatic back into place.
"It's almost four o'clock," the Navajo said. "The hell of it is with this job we never know how much time we have."
Chapter 15
At approximately four o'clock Joe Leaphorn, sweating profusely, led his borrowed horse the last steep yards to the top of the ridge behind Ceniza Mesa. Almost immediately he found exactly what he had hoped to find. And when he found it the pieces of the puzzle locked neatly into place—confirming his meticulously logical conclusions. He knew why Luis Horseman had been killed. He knew, with equal certainty, that the Big Navajo had done the killing. The fact that he had no idea how he could prove it was not, for the moment, important.
At about ten minutes after four o'clock, Lieutenant Leaphorn found something he had not expected to find on the Ceniza ridge. And suddenly he was no longer sure of anything. This unexpected fact visible at his feet fell like a stone in a reflecting pool, turning the mirrored image into shattered confusion. The answer he had found converted itself into another question. Leaphorn no longer had any idea why Horseman had died. He was, in fact, more baffled than ever.
Leaphorn had left the Chinle subagency at noon, towing Sam George Takes's horse and trailer, determined to learn what the Big Navajo had been doing at Ceniza Mesa. At first he drove faster than he should because he was worried. Billy Nez had come home from the Enemy Way, picked up his rifle, and left again on his pony. Charley Nez, as usual, didn't know where he had gone. But Leaphorn could guess. And he didn't like the conclusion. He was sure Billy Nez would ride to the place where Luis Horseman had hidden. Nez would pick up the tracks of the Big Navajo's Land-Rover there, and he would follow it. Because Leaphorn couldn't think his way through the puzzle of Luis Horseman's death, he had no idea what Nez would find—if anything. And because Leaphorn didn't know, he worried.
Leaphorn began driving more slowly and worrying less as the carryall climbed the long slope past Many Farms. He had been working his way methodically around the crucial question, the question which held the key to this entire affair, the question of motive. By the time the carryall reached the summit of the grade and began the gradual drop to Agua Sal Wash the answer was taking shape. He pulled off the asphalt, parked on the shoulder and sat, examining his potential solution for flaws. He could find no serious ones, and that eliminated his worry about young Nez. Nez almost certainly wouldn't find the Big Navajo on the Lukachukai plateau. The man would be long gone. And, if he did find him, it wouldn't matter much unless Nez did something remarkably foolish.
Leaphorn went through his solution again, looking for a hole. The Big Navajo must have found the Army's missing rocket on Ceniza Mesa.
Why, Leaphorn asked himself angrily, had he been so quick to reject this idea when he learned the reward was canceled? The Big Navajo had been clearing a track to the top when Billy Nez found him and stole the hat. He would have needed such a road to haul the remains down. And then he had cached the rocket somewhere until he could find out how to collect the reward. Horseman had found the rocket and claimed it. A Navajo would not kill for money, but he would kill in anger. The two had fought—fought in some sandy arroyo bottom. Horseman had been smothered. And the Big Navajo had moved his body down to Teastah Wash. Why? "To avoid having the area where his rocket was hidden searched by Law and Order people looking for Horseman." Now the Big Navajo was waiting, with the inbred patience of the Dinee, for the moment when sun, wind, and birdsong made the time seem right to claim the Army's $10,000. Or perhaps he had learned by now that the reward had been canceled. It seemed to make little difference. Leaphorn could think of no possible way to connect the missile with the murder.
He looked out across the expanse of the Agua Sal Valley, past Los Gigantes Buttes. There was Ceniza Mesa—twenty miles away, a table-topped mass of stone rising out of an ocean of ragged erosion like an immense aircraft carrier. Eons ago the mesa had been part of the Lukachukai plateau. It was still moored to the mountain ramparts by a sway-backed saddle ridge. It was on that saddle ridge that Billy Nez had seen the Big Navajo working and it was there Leaphorn would prove his theory. Perhaps Billy Nez had lied. Leaphorn thought about it. Billy Nez hadn't lied.
He pulled the carryall back on the pavement and drove down the slope toward Round Rock, enjoying the beauty of the view. For the first time since the body of Luis Horseman had been found he felt at peace with himself. He switched on the radio. "Ha at isshq nilj?" the broadcast voice demanded. "What clan are you? Are you in the Jesus clan?" Navajo with a Texas accent. A radio preacher from Gallup. Leaphorn pushed the button. Country music from Cortez. He snapped off the radio.
"He stirs, he stirs, he stirs, he stirs," Leaphorn sang.
"Among the lands of dawning, he stirs, he stirs.
The pollen Of dawning, he stirs, he stirs.
Now in old age wandering, he stirs, he stirs.
Now on the trail of beauty, he stirs, Talking God, he stirs…"
The mood lasted past Round Rock, past the turnoff at Seklagaidesi, down eleven jolting miles of ungraded wagon track. Leaphorn still sang the endless ritual verses from the Night Way as he unloaded the horse where the track dead-ended at an abandoned death hogan. He trotted the animal across the broken, empty landscape, skirting Toh-Chin-Lini Butte, moving southeastward toward the Ceniza saddle. He saw the bones of a sheep, the empty burrows of a prairie-dog town, and the moving shadow of a Cooper's hawk swinging in the sky above him. He saw no tire tracks and he expected to see none. That would have been luck. Leaphorn never counted on luck. Instead he expected order—the natural sequence of behavior, the cause producing the natural effect, the human behaving in the way it was natural for him to behave. He counted on that and upon his own ability to sort out the chaos of observed facts and find in them this natural order. Leaphorn knew from experience that he was unusually adept at this. As a policeman, he found it to be talent which saved him a great deal of labor. It was a talent which, when it worked unusually well, caused him a faint subconscious uneasiness, grating on his ingrained Navajo conviction that any divergence from the human norm was unnatural and—therefore—unhealthy. And it was a talent which caused him, when the facts refused to fall into the pattern demanded by nature and the Navajo Way, acute mental discomfort.
He had felt that discomfort ever since Horseman had turned up dead—contrary to nature and Leaphorn's logic—far from the place where nature and logic insisted he should be. But as he led his borrowed horse the last steep yards to the crest of the Ceniza saddle the discomfort was gone. The top of the ridge was narrow. In a very few moments he would find tire tracks and the tracks would match the tread pattern drawn for him by Billy Nez. Of that Leaphorn was certain. When he examined these tracks he would find the Land-Rover had driven up the saddle to the mesa top empty and had come down with a heavy weight on its rear tires. And then the irritatingly chaotic affair of Luis Horseman would be basically orderly, with only a few minor puzzles to solve.
The narrow ridge offered few choices of paths, even for a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and Leaphorn found the tire tracks quickly. There were four sets instead of the two he had expected to find, indicating two trips up and two trips down. He made no attempt to find meaning in that. He concentrated on the fresher tracks, establishing by the traction direction which of them had been made going up the slope. In an area where the soil was soft he checked the depth of the tire marks. Exactly as he had expected. On the trip down, the rear tires had cut almost a half-inch deeper.
Behind him the horse snorted and stamped, fighting off the flies.