Hosteen Begay's belongings were dumped out of sight farther down the wash, behind a screen of piñons. Chee sorted through them quickly, identifying bedding, clothing, boxes of cooking utensils, and two sacks of food. Begay's furniture was also here. A kitchen chair, a cot, a light chest of drawers, enough other odds and ends of living to convince Chee that even with two horses hauling, it must have taken more than one trip to move it all here. He stood beside the cache and looked around. This was what he'd expected, had expected since his mind had time to calculate what finding the Four Mountains Bundle had meant. He'd expected it, but it still left him sick. And there was one more thing to be found.
He found Ashie Begay a bit farther down the wash, his body dumped as unceremoniously as the furniture. Begay had been shot in the head, just like his horses.
Chapter 23
It took chee three hours to get his pickup out of the Chuskas. Twice it involved digging through drifts, and twice he had to unload the horse and lead it up slopes where the truck lacked the traction to pull the load. By the time he reached the graded road leading to the Toadlena boarding school he was weary to the bone, with another thirteen miles through the snow to Highway 666 and thirty more to Shiprock. The snow blew steadily from the north-north-west, and he drove northward alternately through a narrow white tunnel formed by his headlights reflecting off the driven flakes and brief blinding oblivions of ground blizzards. His radio told him that Navajo Route 1 was closed from Shiprock south to Kayenta, and Navajo Route 3 was closed from Two Story to Keams Canyon, and that U.S. 666 was closed from Mancos Creek, Colorado, to Gallup, New Mexico. That helped explain why Chee's pickup truck had the highway to itself. He drove about twenty-five miles an hour, slowing as well as he could when he sensed the ground blizzards coming, his fingers sensitive to traction under his wheels and his shoulder muscles aching with fatigue. He'd covered the body of Hosteen Ashie Begay with Begay's bedroll, thinking that he, like Gorman, had had to make his journey into the underworld with his hair unwashed—without even the imperfect preparations Gorman's corpse had received. But the man who killed him had at least sent along with Begay the spirits of his horses. Had he known that sacrifice of the owner's horse had been an ancient Navajo custom? Possibly. But Chee had no illusions that this was why the horses had been killed. They were killed for the same reason Begay was killed, and his hogan emptied, and Gorman's corpse prepared for burial—a great deal of trouble to make it seem that nothing unusual had happened at Begay's hogan. But why? Why? Why?
There seemed to Chee to be little enough mystery about who the killer was. It was Vaggan, or some surrogate Vaggan—one of those who, in white society, did such things for pay. But it was probably the man Shaw had identified as Vaggan. This seemed to be his job, whatever its purpose. And it would have been easy enough to learn about Navajo burial customs. They would be covered in any of a half-dozen books available in the Los Angeles library. Anyone who could read could have learned enough to fake what had happened at the Begay hogan. Who had done it didn't matter—Vaggan or someone like him. The question was why.
Chee was finding he couldn't make his mind work very well. The headache had returned. Fatigue, probably, and eyestrain induced from staring into the reflecting snow. He put Begay's body out of his consciousness and thought only about driving. And finally there to his right was the sign indicating the entrance road to the Shiprock landing strip, and he could feel the highway sloping downward into the San Juan river bottom, and Shiprock was just ahead.
He turned the horse into the shelter of the tribal barn, and left the horse trailer in the lot, and drove into the village. Across the bridge he hesitated a moment. A left turn at the junction would take him to his trailer home, to hot coffee, food, his bed. To a telephone to report to Captain Largo what he had found. To deal again with the question of why. The postcard would come up again. Inevitably. It lay at the center of all of this. Had, apparently, triggered it. What had been written on that postcard? Chee turned right, downriver toward the place where the aluminum trailer was parked under a cottonwood tree.
It looked different, somehow, in this storm. Before temperatures had dropped, snow had crusted on the cold aluminum and collected more snow, and cost the trailer its machine-made look. It loomed in Chee's headlights now as a great white shape, tied to the earth by a drift, as natural as a snow-caked boulder and looking as if it had stood below its tree forever. Light glowed from the small windows. Grayson, or somebody, was home. Chee honked the pickup's horn and waited a moment before it occurred to him that Grayson was a city man who wouldn't be aware of this rural custom of giving warning before invading privacy. He turned up his coat collar and stepped out into the blowing snow.
If Grayson had heard his horn, there was no evidence of it. Chee rapped his knuckles against the aluminum door panel, waited, and rapped again. The wind worked under the bottom of his coat and around the collar and up his pants legs, as cold as death. It reminded Chee of the corpse of Hosteen Ashie Begay lying frozen under the old man's bedroll. And then the voice of Grayson, through the door.
"Who is it?"
"It's Chee," Chee shouted. "Navajo Police."
"What do you want?"
"We found your uncle's body," Chee said. "Ashie Begay. I need to talk to you."
Silence. The cold gripped Chee's ankles, numbed his cheeks. Then Grayson's voice shouted, "Come on in."
The door opened. It opened outward, as trailer doors open to conserve inside space, no more than six inches, and then the wind pushed it shut again. Chee stood a moment, looking at it, wondering what Grayson was doing and finally understanding. Grayson was playing it safe, as a protected witness might be expected to do. He opened the door and stepped in.
Grayson was sitting behind the table, his back against the wall, examining Chee. Chee shut the door and stood against it, enjoying the warmth and letting Grayson see his hands were empty.
"You found whose body?" Grayson said. "Where? What happened?"
Grayson's hands were out of sight beneath the table. Would he have a weapon? Would a protected witness be allowed to have a gun? Perhaps even be encouraged to keep one? Why not?
"Not far from his hogan," Chee said. "Somebody had shot him."
Grayson's face registered a kind of dismay. He looked a little older than Chee had remembered, a little more tired. Maybe it was the artificial light. More likely it was Chee's mood. The corner of his mouth pulled back in the beginning of one of those wry clicks of sympathy or surprise or sorrow, but Grayson stopped it. He brought his hands out from under the table, rubbed his face with the right one. The left one lay on the table, limp and empty. "Why would anyone want to kill that old man?" Grayson said.
"Your uncle," Chee said.
Grayson stared at him.
"We know who you are," Chee said. "It saves time if we get that out of the way. You're Leroy Gorman. You're in the Department of Justice Witness Protection Program under the name of Grayson. You're living here under the Grayson name until it's time to go back to Los Angeles to testify in federal court."
The man who was Leroy Gorman, older brother of Albert Gorman, nephew of Ashie Begay, stared at Chee, his expression blank. And bleak. And Chee thought, What is his real name? His war name? The name his maternal uncle would have given him, privately and secretly when he was a child, the name he would have whispered through the mask at the Yeibichi ceremonial where he changed from boy to man? The name that would label his real identity, that no one would know except those closest to him, what was that? This Los Angeles Navajo doesn't have a war name, Chee thought, because he doesn't have a family. He isn't Dinee. He felt pity for Leroy Gorman. Part of it was fatigue, and part of it was pity for himself.