"Lt. Chee: Bernie called the Arizona State motor pool and got all the specifications on the Jeep. It had been impounded in a drug bust and had a lot of fancy add-ons, which are listed below. Also note battery and tire types, rims, other things that Bernie thought might turn up at pawnshops, etc. She relayed the list to shops in Gallup, Flag, Farmington, etc., and also called Thrift-way people in Phoenix and asked them to ask their stores on reservation to be alert." This was signed "C. Dineyahze."
Far below this signature, which made it not only unofficial but off the record, Mrs. Dineyahze had scrawled: "Bernie is a good girl."
Chee already knew that. He liked her. He admired her. He thought she was a very neat lady. But he also knew that Bernadette Manuelito had a crush on him, and almost everybody else in the extended family of the Navajo Tribal Police seemed to know it, too. That made Bernie a pain in the neck. In fact, that was how Chee, who wasn't very good at understanding women, had come to notice Bernie had her eye on him. He'd started being kidded about it.
But there was no time to think of that now. Nor about her idea—which was smart. If the Jeep had been abandoned somewhere on the Big Rez or in the border country, the odds were fairly good that it would be stripped—especially since it had been loaded with expensive, easily stolen stuff. Now he was hungry and tired. None of the frozen dinners awaiting him in the little refrigerator in his trailer home had any appeal for him tonight. He'd go by the Kentucky Fried Chicken place, pick up a dinner with biscuits and gravy, go home, dine, kick back, finish Meridian, the Norman Zollinger novel he was reading, and get some sleep.
He was finishing a thigh and the second biscuit when the phone rang.
"You said to call you if anything turned up on the Jeep," the dispatcher said.
"Like what?"
"Like a guy came into the filling station at, Cedar Ridge last Monday and tried to sell the clerk a radio and tape player. It was the same brand that was in that Jeep.
"They have an identification?"
"The clerk said it was a kid from a family named Pooacha. They have a place over on Shinume Wash."
"Okay," Chee said. "Thanks." He looked at his watch. It would have to wait until morning. By midafternoon the next day the Jeep was found. If you discount driving about two hundred miles back and forth, and some of it over roads far too primitive even to be listed as primitive on Chee's AAA Indian Country road map, the whole project proved to be remarkably easy.
Since Officer Manuelito had provided the idea that made it possible, and had the day off anyway, Chee could think of no way to discourage Bernie from coming along. In fact, he didn't even try. He enjoyed her company when she had her mind on business instead of on him. They drove first to the Cedar Ridge trading post, talked to the clerk there, learned the would-be radio salesman was a young man named Tommy Tsi, and got directions to the Pooacha place, where he lived. They took the dusty washboard gravel of Navajo Route 6110 westward to Blue Moon Bench, turned south on the even rougher Route 6120 along Bekihatso Wash, and found the track that wandered through the rocks and saltbush to the Pooacha establishment.
At this intersection a cracked old boot was stuck atop the post beside the cattle guard.
"Well, good," said Bernie, pointing to the boot. "Somebody's home."
"Somebody is," Chee agreed, "unless the last one out forgot to take the boot down. And in my experience, when the road's as bad as this one, the somebody who's there isn't the one you're looking for."
But Tommy Tsi, a very young Pooacha son-in-law, was home—and very nervous when he noticed the uniform. Chee was wearing and the Navajo Tribal Police on his car. No, he didn't still have the radio and tape player. It belonged to a friend who had asked him to try to sell it for him. The friend had reclaimed it, Tsi said, rubbing his hand uneasily over a very sparse mustache as he spoke.
"Give us the friend's name," Chee said. "Where can we locate him?"
"His name?" Tommy Tsi said. And thought awhile. "Well, he's not exactly a close friend. I met him in Flag. I think they call him Shorty. Or something like that."
"And how were you going to get his money back to him when you sold his stuff?"
"Well," Tommy Tsi said. And hesitated again. "I'm not sure."
"That's a shame," Bernie said. "If you could find him we want you to tell him we're not much interested in the radio stuff. We want to find the Jeep. If he can show us where the Jeep is, then he gets to collect the reward."
"Reward? For the Jeep?"
"A thousand bucks," Bernie said. "Twenty fifty-dollar bills. The family of the woman who was driving the Jeep put it up."
"Really," Tsi said. "A thousand bucks."
"For finding the Jeep. That's what this guy did, you know. Found an abandoned vehicle. No law against that, is there?"
"Right," Tommy Tsi agreed, nodding and looking much more cheerful.
"If he told you where the Jeep is, then you could take us there. We could arrange for you to get the money. Then if you can find him again, you could share it with him."
"Yes," Tsi said. "Let me get my hat."
"Tell you what," Chee said. "Bring the radio stuff along, too. We might need that for fingerprints."
"Mine?" Tsi looked startled.
"We know yours are on it," Chee said. "We're thinking of whoever drove it where you found it."
And so they had jolted back down 6120, to 6110, to Cedar Ridge, and thence southward on the pavement past Tuba City and through Moenkopi, and back onto the dusty road past the abandoned Goldtooth trading post, and then a left turn over a cattle guard onto dirt tracks that led up the slope of Ward Terrace. Where the track crossed a shallow wash, Tommy Tsi said, "Here," and pointed down it.
The Jeep had been left mid-wash around a bend some fifty yards downstream. They left Tsi in the car and walked along the edge of the streambed, careful not to mar any tracks that might still be there. There was no sign of foot traffic up the sand. Much of the Jeep's tire marks had already been erased by the pickup Tsi had been driving, and the wind had softened the edges of what few remained. But enough had survived to add one bit of information. Bernie noticed it, too.
"That little rainstorm came through just after you found Ben, didn't it?" And she pointed to a protected place where the Jeep tires had left their imprint in sand that obviously had been damp.
"How far is this from where that happened?"
"I'd say maybe twenty miles as the crow flies," Chee said. "And no rain since. I think that tells us a little something." The Jeep itself told them little else. They stood back from it, examining the ground. The sand around the driver's side had been churned, presumably by Tsi's boots, as he got in and out looking for something easy to loot, and while he pried out the radio.
From the passenger's door, one could step directly onto the stony slope of the arroyo bank. If the occupant had left that way, it made tracking this many days later virtually hopeless.
"What's that stuff in the backseat?" Bernie asked. "I guess the equipment for the job."
"I see some traps," Chee said. "And cages. That canister is probably for poison they blow into burrows to kill the fleas."
He took out his pocketknife, used it to depress the button to open the passenger-side door, then used it to swing the door open.
"Looks like nothing much here," Bernie said, "unless we find something in the litter bag."
Chee wasn't ready to concede that. Leaphorn had once told him that you're more likely to find something if you're not looking for anything in particular. "Just keep an open mind and see what you see," Leaphorn liked to say. Now Chee saw a dark stain on the leather upholstery on the Jeep's passenger seat.