"The 'D' might stand for Denton, of course. Are those the last four numbers of his unlisted telephone?"
"No. We thought of that. Funny thing to copy. Made us wonder if Doherty knew something about McKay that we don't. It had to mean something or he wouldn't have made a copy. Seems funny."
It seemed funny to Chee, too, and he jotted the numbers into his own notebook. He'd try D2187 on Leaphorn. The Legendary Lieutenant would probably recognize them as map coordinates.
With the number and the sooty shoes in mind, Chee had driven directly from Osborne's office to the pay telephone outside the Pancake House, called the U.S. Forest Service office, asked for Denny Pacheco, and told him his problem. He needed Pacheco to check his records for the past big burn season, find out which fires the late Thomas Doherty had worked, and call Chee at his office in Shiprock.
"Just drop whatever unimportant stuff I might be working on and do it, huh?" said Pacheco. "Why am I going to do something like that?"
"Because I'm your good buddy, is why," Chee said. "And we're trying to find out where this guy was when somebody shot him. It would need to be a fire within, say. fifty or sixty miles of where he was found."
"And where was that?"
Chee explained it.
"So I plow through all that paper for you, and call you at your office with it?" Pacheco asked. "And you remember this when I need a ticket fixed. Right?"
"Anything short of a felony," Chee had said, and he found Pacheco's message waiting on his answering machine when he got back to his office. Pacheco had listed three fires where Doherty's name was on the crew payroll. One was the huge Mesa Verde burn, one was a smaller fire south in the White Mountains, and one was a little nipped-in-the-bud lightning-caused blaze in the Coyote Canyon drainage. The bigger ones were too distant to interest Chee. The lightning burn was in a narrow canyon draining the north slope of Mesa de los Lobos "This one is well within your rmileage limits," Pacheco said. "Bad hot spots due to accumulation of dead timber, trash, etc., but we got to it fast with fire-suppression planes, and then it rained to dampen it down. We let the hot spots burn out the fuel trash and just sent a man in to make sure it didn't take off again. That was your Doherty."
Chee listened to that again.Probably their canyon. He'd heard that this fire, like the one that roared through the Mesa Verde National Monument area, had uncovered interesting rock art. Perhaps it had also uncovered signs of the legendary Golden Calf dig. Perhaps Doherty had seen them.
The phone buzzed. He picked it up. Officer Bernadette Manuelito calling. Take line three.
Chapter Twelve
« ^ »
Chee sucked in his breath, picked up the telephone, punched button three, and said: "Bernie. I was just going to—"
"Sergeant Chee," said the strained-sounding voice in his ear, "this is Bernadette Manuelito. Are you still looking for where that man was shot?"
"Well, yes," Chee said. "But I think we have a pretty good idea now. It looks like—"
"He was shot in a canyon draining off of Mesa de los Lobos," Officer Manuelito said. "About two miles up a little drainage that runs into Coyote Canyon. There's an old placer mining sluice there—"
"Wait a minute," Chee said. "What—"
But Bernie wasn't being interrupted. "And that's the place it looks like he dug up the sand with the placer gold in it."
"Bernie," Chee said. "Slow down."
"I found what looked like his tracks there, and the same sort of seeds that were in his shoes and socks, but I didn't stake off the scene because somebody shot at me."
With that, Officer Manuelito inhaled deeply. A moment of silence ensued.
"Shot at you!" Chee said.
"I think so," Bernie said. "He missed. That's why I called in, really. I didn't see him and maybe he wasn't shooting at me, but I thought I should report it. And find out whether I'm still suspended."
"Somebody shot at you!" Chee shouted. "Are you all right? Where are you? Where are you calling from?"
"I'm home," Bernie said. "But you didn't answer me. Am I still suspended?"
"You never were suspended," Chee said. From there the conversation settled into a relatively normal pace, with Chee shutting up and letting Officer Manuelito give an uninterrupted account of her afternoon. It wasn't until it had ended and Chee was leaning back in his chair, shocked, feeling stunned, digesting the fact that Bernie Manuelito might well have been killed, that he remembered that he had forgotten to apologize.
He'd need to report all this to Captain Largo, but Largo wasn't in his office today. Chee picked up the telephone again. He'd call Osborne, tell him the probable site of the Doherty homicide had been found, tell him an officer had been shot at there, and give him the details. He'd enjoy doing that. But halfway through punching in the numbers, he hung up. Officer Bernadette Manuelito was coming in. Officer Manuelito deserved to make her own report.
Chapter Thirteen
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The car rolling to a stop in the parking lot of the McDonald's where Joe Leaphorn was eating a hamburger was a shiny black latest version of Jaguar's Vanden Plas sedan—which Leaphorn guessed was the only one of its vintage in Gallup. The man climbing out of it seemed totally out of character for the car. He wore rumpled jeans, a plaid work shirt, and a gimme cap decorated with a trucking company's decal. It shaded a slightly lopsided and weather-beaten face with a mouth that was too large for it.
Wiley Denton. He'd said he'd meet Leaphorn at the McDonald's at 12:15 P.M. and came through the entrance twenty-three seconds early.
Leaphorn stood and motioned Denton over to his booth. They shook hands, and sat.
"I guess I owe you an apology," Denton said.
"How's that?"
"Last time I talked to you, I mean, before calling you down at Window Rock this morning, I hung up on you. Called you a son of a bitch. I shouldn't have said that. Sorry about that."
"I've been called that several times," Leaphorn said. "Before and since."
"I remember I was pretty pissed off at the time. Didn't mean to give any offense."
"None taken," Leaphorn said.
"Hope not," said Denton, "because I'm going to ask you for a favor. I'd like to get you to do some work for me."
Leaphorn considered this a moment, looked at Denton who was studying his reaction, and waved over at the service counter. "You want to get yourself something to eat?"
"No," Denton said. He glanced around at the lunchroom crowded with the noontime hungry. "What I'd rather do, if you've got the time, is go out to the house where we could talk with some privacy." He pushed back his chair, then stopped. "Unless you're just not interested."
Leaphorn was definitely interested. "Let's go have a talk," he said.
Denton's house and its grounds occupied an expanse of the high slope that looked down on Gallup, Interstate 40 and the railroad below, and, fifty miles to the east, the shape of Mount Taylor—the Navajo's sacred Turquoise Mountain. Leaphorn had seen a few more imposing residences, most of them in Aspen where the moguls of Silicon Valley and the entertainment industry had been buying five-million-dollar houses and tearing them down to make room for fifty-million-dollar houses, but by Four Corners standards this place was a mansion. Denton pushed the proper button and the iron gate slid open, groaning and shrieking, to admit them to the drive. A little past the halfway point the gate stopped.
"Well, hell," Denton said, and jammed the heel of his hand down on the car horn. "I told George to fix that damn thing."
"Sounds like it needs greasing," Leaphorn said.
"I think George needs some greasing, too," Denton said. "He hasn't been good for much since—ah, since I went away and did my time."