Deputy Bales stifled a yawn. "Yeah," he said. "The dead guy came in on a chartered plane. Or anyway, the people at the airport said a private plane flew in, and he got out of it and rented the car. A hood out of Los Angeles. With a long rap sheet."
"Um," Chee said. He'd heard about the plane and the rented car and the police record. The homicide was exotic enough to be fuel for gossip. The fbi told nobody anything. But the Farmington police told the New Mexico State Police, who told the Sheriffs Office, who told the Navajo cops, who told the Bureau of Indian Affairs law and order people, who told the Arizona Highway Patrol. In the small, dull world of law enforcement, anything unusual is a precious commodity, worth weeks of conversation.
"I wonder if he really is wounded," the deputy said.
"Pretty sure about that," Chee said. "Old Joseph Joe is supposed to have seen him hanging on the car door, looking hurt. And when I looked in the car, there was blood on the front seat."
"Been wondering about that," the deputy said. "How'd you find it?"
"Just took time," Chee said. "You know how it is. Just keep asking until you ask the right person."
It had taken three days to find the right person, a boy getting off the bus from the Toadlena school. He'd seen the green sedan going by on the road that led from Two Gray Hills southward toward Owl Springs. Chee had stopped at the Two Gray Hills Trading Post and got a fix on who lived down that road and how to find their places. Then another hard afternoon of driving on doubtful trails. "Found it about dark yesterday," he added.
Bales had tilted his hat far back on his head. "And Sharkey decides to wait and catch him about daylight, when he's sleeping. Or when we hope he's sleeping. Course we don't even know he's there."
"No," Chee said. But he had no doubt at all that Albert Gorman was there. This terrible road led to the Begay hogan and nowhere else. And from his abandoned car, Gorman's tracks led toward the Begay place. They were the uncertain, wavering tracks of a man either drunk or badly hurt. And finally, there was what he'd learned at the trading post at Two Gray Hills on his way back. The trader wasn't there, but the woman handling the cash register had told him that, yes, Old Man Begay had a visitor.
"Hosteen Begay came in three-four days ago and asked what medicine to buy for somebody who hurt himself and had a lot of pain," she'd said. She'd sold him a bottle of aspirin and a stamp for an envelope he'd wanted mailed.
For several hundred yards the dim parking lights had been picking up the black gloss of spilled crankcase oil. Now they reflected from a green Plymouth sedan, blocking the trail. Chee parked his truck behind it, cut the lights and the engine, and climbed out.
Sharkey had the window of his pickup down. He was leaning out, looking at Chee.
"About three quarters of a mile up the track here," Chee said, pointing.
It was then he noticed for the first time that fog was forming. A trace of it drifted like gray smoke through the beam of Sharkey's lights just as he turned them off, and then the smell of fog was in Chee's nostrils and the dampness on his face.
Chapter 3
In the high, dry mountains of the Colorado Plateau, fog is out of its element. It forms as part of a climatic accident, produced when a cold front crosses a mountain range and collides with warmer air on the opposite slope. And it survives no longer than a fish out of water. By dawn, when the four of them reached the place of Hosteen Begay, the fog had already lost its character as a solid blinding cloud. Now it survived only in pockets, as patches and fragments. Chee stood at the edge of one such fragment, exactly where Sharkey had told him to stand—on the slope west of the meadow where Begay had built his hogan. His role was to make sure that if Gorman tried to escape he would not escape in that direction. Chee rested a hip against a boulder. He waited and watched. At the moment, he watched Deputy Bales, who stood beside a ponderosa pine, right hand against the tree trunk and his left holding a long-barreled revolver, its muzzle pointing at the ground. The bottom of the tree trunk and Bales's lower legs were obscured by the mist, making—in the dim light—man and tree seem somehow detached from solid earth. Over the meadow, the fog was almost solid, frayed only here and there by the very beginning of a cold dawn breeze. Chee glanced at his watch. In eleven minutes it would be sunrise.
The hogan was a little below where Chee and the deputy waited. Through the ebbing mist, Chee could make out its conical roof, which seemed to be formed of slabs sliced from ponderosa logs in their first trip past the blade at the sawmill. The mist eddied and obscured this and eddied again. The short tin smoke pipe jutting from the center of the roof cone seemed to be blocked, closed by something pressed up into it from inside the hogan. Chee stared, straining his vision. He could think of just one reason to block a hogan's smoke hole.
Chee clicked his tongue, producing a nondescript sound just loud enough to catch the deputy's attention. Then he motioned his intention to move. Bales looked surprised. He tapped the face of his wristwatch, reminding Chee of the few minutes left. Just at sunrise, Sharkey and his man would be at the hogan's east-facing door. If Hosteen Begay emerged to bless the new day in the traditional fashion, they would pull him out of harm's way, rush into the hogan, and overpower Gorman. If he didn't appear, they'd rush in anyway. That was the plan. Chee had a feeling now that it would be an exercise in futility.
He moved along the slope away from Bales toward the north side of the hogan. From what Chee had learned of Hosteen Begay at Two Gray Hills he was an old-fashioned man, a traditional man, a man who knew the Navajo Way and followed it. He would have built this hogan as Changing Woman taught—with a single doorway facing the direction of dawn, the direction of all beginnings. North was the direction of darkness, the direction of evil. It was through the north wall of a hogan that a corpse must be removed in the sad event of death striking someone inside. Then the smoke hole would be plugged, the entrance boarded, and the place abandoned—with the corpse hole left open to warn the People that this had become a death hogan. The body could be removed, but never the malicious chindi of the dead person. The ghost infection was permanent.
Chee had circled about a hundred yards, keeping out of sight. Now he was almost due north of the place. Through the thinning mist he could see the dark hole where the logs of the wall had been chopped away. Someone had indeed died inside the hogan of Hosteen Begay and left his ghost behind.
Chapter 4
The thing to do is find the body—if there is one," Sharkey said. "You take care of that, Chee. We'll see what we can find around here."
Sharkey was standing at the hogan doorway, a small, hard-looking man of maybe forty-five with blond hair, short-cropped and curly.
"Here's some more old bandage." Bales's voice came from behind Sharkey, inside the hogan. "Dried blood on this one, too."
"What else are you finding?" Chee asked. "Any bedroll?"
"See if you can find where they put the body," Sharkey said, his voice impatient.
"Sure," Chee said. He already had an idea where the body might be. From the description they had of Gorman he wouldn't be particularly heavy. But Begay was an old man, and carrying a full-sized corpse wouldn't be easy. Probably he'd have dragged it on the blankets that had been its bed. And the best convenient burial site was obvious. A line of cliffs towered over Begay's little meadow to the northwest, their base littered with giant sandstone boulders tumbled out of their walls. It was the ideal place to put a body where it would be safe from predators. Chee headed for the talus slope.
Sharkey's agent was climbing out of the arroyo that ran behind the hogan. He nodded at Chee. "Nothing in the corral or the sheep pens," he said. "And the manure looks old."