"Hello," Bernie shouted, and waited.
"Hey. Anyone home?" And waited again.
No answer. She unsnapped the flap on her holster, touched the butt of the pistol, and moved silently to the passenger-side door.
A man wearing jeans and a jean jacket was lying on his side on the front seat, head against the driver-side door, a red gimme cap covering most of his face, knees drawn up a little.
Sleeping one off, thought Bernie, who'd been in police work now long enough to recognize that. But she didn't detect the sick odor of whiskey sleep. No sign of motion. No sign of breathing, either.
She sucked in a deep breath, moved a fraction closer to the door. "Ya eeh teh," Bernie said, loudly. No answer. She could see no sign of blood or any hint of violence.
Strands of the man's long, curly blonde hair were visible around the cap. His jean jacket and shoes were dusty. It seemed to Officer Manuelito he was emphatically unconscious if not dead. She opened the door, grabbed the door post, pulled herself up on the running board. She pushed up the bottom of the jean-clad leg and reached for his ankle to check for a pulse. The ankle was cold. No pulse, and as cold as death.
The feel of the lifeless ankle under her hand abruptly replaced in Bernie's mind her awareness of herself as cop with an awareness of herself as Navajo. A thousand years before the Dineh were aware of bacteria or viruses, they were aware of the contagion spread by the newly dead and the dying. The elders called this danger chindi, the name of a ghost, and taught their people to avoid it for four days—longer if the death came inside a closed house where the chindi would linger. Bernie stepped off the running board and stood for a moment. What should she do now? First she would call this in. When she got home, she would ask her mother to recommend the right shaman to arrange the proper curing ceremony.
Back at her patrol car she gave the dispatcher her report.
"Natural, you think?" he asked. "No decapitation. No blood. No bullet holes. No smell of gunpowder. Nothing interesting?"
"It looked like he just died," Bernie said. "One bottle too many."
"Then I've got an ambulance over at Toadlena, if it's still there. Hold on a minute and I'll let you know."
Bernie held on. The hand holding the mike was dirty, smeared with what looked like soot. From the dead man's shoe, she guessed, or his pant leg. She grimaced, switched the mike to her left hand, and wiped the dirt away on the leg of her uniform trousers.
"Okay, Bernie. Got him. He should be there in less than an hour."
That proved to be overly optimistic. An hour and almost twenty-two minutes had plodded past before the ambulance and its crew arrived, and to Bernie it seemed a lot longer. She sat in her car thinking of the corpse and who he might have been. Then got out and scouted around the pickup to reassure herself she hadn't overlooked anything—such as a row of bullet holes through the windshield, or a pool of dried blood on the floor around the brake pedal, or bloodstains on the steering wheel, or maybe on the rifle in the window rack, or a suicide note clutched in the victim's hand.
She found nothing like that, but she noticed that the victim's jeans had collected lots of those troublesome chamisa seeds in their travels, and so had the sock on the ankle she had tested—chamisa seeds, sandburs, and other of those stickery, clinging seeds by which dry-country plants spread their species. The rubber sole of the sneaker on the foot she'd touched had also accumulated five goathead stickers—the curse of bike riders. She sat in her car, considering that, and climbed out again to inspect the local flora. Here it was above nine thousand feet, not the climate for chamisa. She found none now, nor any sandburs or goatheads. She collected the seedpods from a cluster of asters, gone to seed early at this high, cold altitude, and which just possibly might grow in the hotter climate of her Shiprock flower bed. She added the seeds from two growths of columbine and from a vine she couldn't identify. And being tidy, she went back to the columbines and salvaged the little Prince Albert pipe tobacco tin she'd noticed among the weeds. It was dirty, but it was better that trying to carry her seed collection loose in her pocket.
Chapter Two
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Joe leaphorn had been slow to learn how to cope with retirement, but he had learned. And one of the lessons had been to prepare himself when he tagged along with Professor Louisa Bourbonette on one of her excursions. These tended to be out to the less acculturated districts of the Navajo reservations to collect memories of elders on her "oral history" tapes. That usually left him sitting in an oven-hot hogan or lolling in her car and had caused him to buy himself a comfortable folding chair to relax upon in the shade of hogan brush arbors.
He was relaxing in it now under a tree beside the hay barn of the Two Grey Hills Trading Post. The breeze was blowing out of cumulus clouds forming a towering line over the ridge of the Lukachukai and producing an occasional promising rumble of thunder. Louisa was selecting a rug from the famous stock of the Two Grey Hills store—a wedding gift for one of Louisa's various nieces. Since the professor took even grocery shopping seriously, and this was a very special gift, Leaphorn knew he had plenty of quiet thinking time. He had been thinking of Louisa's quest for perfection amid the Two Grey Hills rug stock as sort of a race with the thunder-head climbing over the mountain. Would the rain come before the purchase? Would both purchase and cloud fizzle without success—the cloud drifting away to disappointing dissipation in dry air over the buffalo plains and Louisa emerging from the T.P. without a rug? Or would the cloud climb higher, higher, higher, its bottom turning blue-black and its top glittering with ice crystals, and the blessed rain begin speckling the packed dirt of the Two Grey Hills parking lot, and Louisa, happily holding the perfect collectors' quality rug, signaling him to drive over to the porch to keep the raindrops from hitting it.
A dazzling lightning bolt connected the slope of the mountain with the cloud, producing an explosive crack of thunder and suggesting the cloud might be winning. Just then a Chevy sedan rolled into the parking lot, with sheriff painted on its side. The driver slowed to park near the porch, then aborted that move and rolled his car over to Leaphorn's tree.
"Lieutenant Leaphorn," said the driver, "you oughtn't be sitting under a tree in a lightning storm."
A face from the past. Deputy Sheriff Delo Bellman.
Leaphorn raised his hand in greeting, considered saying: "Hello, Delo," but said: "Delo, ya eeh teh."
"You been listening to the news?" Delo asked.
"Some of it," Leaphorn said. Bellman didn't need a radio to collect the news. He was widely known as the premier gossip of the Four Corners Country law enforcement fraternity.
"Hear about the killing?" Bellman said. "That man your guys found dead near Cove the other day. It turns out he was old Bart Hegarty's nephew. Fellow named Thomas Doherty."
Leaphorn produced the facial expression appropriate for such sad news. His experiences with Bart Hegarty had been neither frequent nor particularly pleasant. He hadn't been among the mourners when the sheriff hadn't survived sliding his car into an icy bridge's abutment a few winters back. "Died of what?" Leaphorn asked. "If he was the sheriff's nephew he must have been fairly young."
"Late twenties, I guess. Bullet in the back," said Bellman, with the somber pleasure gossips feel when passing along the unpleasant. "Rifle bullet."
That surprised Leaphorn, pretty well saying the Doherty boy hadn't been shot in the car. But he didn't ask for details. He nodded, trying not to give Bellman an interested audience. Maybe he would go about his business. Leaphorn had heard on the TV news last night that neither cause of death nor identity of the victim had been released by the fbi. But the mere fact the Federals had taken the case away from the ntp had told Leaphorn that either it was a homicide or the victim was a fugitive felon.