"We've got a girl missing from St. Catherine Indian School," Largo said. "Probably a runaway. Probably nothing much." The captain exercised the storyteller's pause-for-effect. "She's the granddaughter of Hosteen Begay. Told a friend she was worried about him. The nuns at St. Catherine called the police there at Santa Fe because they said she wasn't the type that runs away. Whatever type that is." Largo paused again, still looking at something or other in the parking lot. "Attended her morning classes on the fourteenth. Didn't show up for classes after lunch."
Chee didn't comment. The bloody business in the parking lot had happened the night of the eleventh. On the twelfth Old Man Begay had walked into the Two Gray Hills Trading Post, bought his futile bottle of aspirin, and mailed a letter. How long would it take a letter to get from Two Gray Hills to Santa Fe? Two days?
Largo walked back to his desk, found a package of cigarets in the drawer, and lit one. "The other thing," he said through the cloud of blue smoke, "is the fbi is unusually uptight about this one. Very grim. So I did some asking around. It turns out one of their old-timers got killed a couple of months ago, like I told you. He was on something that ties in with this business." Largo turned away from his parking lot inspection to gaze at Chee. "You been a cop long enough to know how it is when a cop gets killed?"
"I've heard," Chee said.
"Well, anyway, they never want us interfering in their jurisdiction. So think how sore they'd get if it happened when they've got an agent dead. And nobody to hang it on."
"Yeah," Chee said.
"Unfortunately," Largo said, "you're the logical one to handle this missing St. Catherine girl."
Chee let that pass. What Largo meant was that he had a reputation for being nosy. He couldn't deny it.
"You want me to be careful," Chee said.
"I want you to turn on the brain," Largo said. "See if you can pick up the girl. If you run into anything that bears on what happened to Gorman, then you back off. Tell me. I tell Sharkey. Everybody's happy."
"Yes, sir," Chee said.
Largo stood by the window, looking at him. "I really mean it," he said. "No screwing around."
"Yes, sir," Chee said.
Chapter 6
The girl's name was sosi. Margaret Billy Sosi. Age seventeen. Daughter of Franklin Sosi, no known address, and Emma Begay Sosi (deceased) of Borrego Pass. The form listed Ashie Begay, grandfather, care of Two Gray Hills Trading Post, as the "person to be notified in event of emergency." The form was a photocopy of an admissions sheet used at the Santa Fe boarding school, and there was nothing on it, or on the attached Navajo Tribal Police missing persons report form, that told Chee anything he didn't already know. He slipped the two sheets back into their folders and turned to the copies he made from the Gorman homicide report.
The wind, blowing from due north now, gusted around his pickup truck and rattled particles of parking lot debris against its door. Chee did not consciously dislike the wind. It was part of the totality of day and place, and to dislike it would be contrary to his Navajo nature. But it made him uneasy. He read quickly through the Gorman file, covering first the chronology of what had happened at the laundry and then turning to the investigating officer's transcription of his interview with Joseph Joe, looking for the oddity that had bothered him when he had first gone through the report.
"Subject Joe said Gorman had called him to the car and engaged him briefly in conversation. Joe said that as he walked away from the Gorman vehicle, the rented vehicle driven by Lerner came into the lot…"
Engaged him briefly in conversation. About what? Why had Gorman driven from Los Angeles to be shot at a laundromat? It seemed to Chee that an answer to the first question might offer some clue to the answer of the second. It certainly seemed a logical question—something he would have asked Old Man Joe. Why hadn't it been asked? Chee glanced at the name of the investigating officer. It was Sharkey. Sharkey seemed smart.
Chee read through the rest of the report. Lerner had chartered a plane at a Pasadena airport, flown to Farmington, and rented an Avis car. Judging from the time elapsed, he had driven directly and rapidly to Shiprock. Looking for Gorman, obviously. How had he found him at the laundry? That could have been easy enough if he knew the car Gorman was driving. He would have been looking for it, and the highway in from Farmington passed directly by the lot where Gorman was parked. That left the question of why. The data in the report on Gorman himself made him seem trivial enough—simply a car thief. Lerner, from the report and what gossip Chee had heard, was a minor Los Angeles hoodlum. The chartered plane seemed grotesquely glossy and expensive for an incident involving such unimportant people.
Chee put the report back in its folder and looked quickly through the papers he'd picked up from his in-basket. Nothing much. A Please Return Call slip showing that "Eddie" had called about "Blue Door." Eddie pumped gas at night at the Chevron station beside the San Juan bridge. His mother was an alcoholic, Eddie did not like bootleggers, and the Blue Door Bar at the reservation boundary outside Farmington was a haunt for those who hauled beer, wine, and whiskey into the reservation's outback. Eddie meant well, but unfortunately his tips never seemed to lead anywhere.
The next memo informed all officers of the theft of a pinto mare from the Two Gray Hills Trading Post; of a pickup order on a man named Nez who had beaten his brother-in-law with a hammer at the family sheep camp above Mexican Water, and of the confirmation of identification of a middle-aged woman found dead beside the Shiprock-Gallup highway. Cause of death was also confirmed. She'd been run over by a vehicle while sprawled, unconscious from alcohol, on the pavement. Chee took a second look at the identification. He didn't know the name, but he knew the woman, and a score like her, and their husbands and their sons. He had arrested them, and manhandled them into his patrol car, and cleaned up after them, and eased their bodies onto stretchers and into ambulances. In the milder seasons, they drank themselves to death in front of trucks on U.S. 666 or Navajo Route 1. Now, with the icy wind beginning to blow, they would drink themselves to death in frozen ditches.
That wind buffeted his truck, stirring a cold draft around his face. Chee turned on the ignition and started his engine. Where was Mary Landon at this moment? Teaching her fifth-graders at Crownpoint. Chee remembered the afternoon he had stood on the walk outside the windows of her classroom and watched her—a silent pantomime through the glass. Mary Landon talking. Mary Landon laughing. Mary Landon coaxing, approving, explaining. Until one of her students had seen him standing there and looked at him, and he had fled in embarrassment.
He turned his mind away from that and rolled the pickup out of the lot. He would see Eddie about the Blue Door later. The stolen pinto mare and the angry brother-in-law and the rest of it could wait. Now the job was to find Margaret Billy Sosi, aged seventeen, granddaughter of Ashie Begay, clanswoman of a dead man whom people called Albert Gorman, who seemed to have been running, but not running fast enough or far enough. And thus the first step to finding Margaret Billy Sosi was finding Hosteen Joseph Joe and asking him the question Sharkey hadn't asked, which was what Albert Gorman had said to him at the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat.