It was obvious enough how Hoski had done it. When the FBI’s reaction had proved the messenger legitimate, he had gone to a department store and bought easy-to-recognize, easy-to-match clothing. Then he had called a friend. (Not a friend, Leaphorn corrected himself. He had called an accomplice. Hoski had no friends. In all those months in Washington he had seen no one except Rosemary Rita Oliveras.) He had told the accomplice exactly which items to buy, and to have his face bandaged as if his right scalp had been slashed open. He had told him to come early and unobserved to the laundromat, to lock himself into a toilet booth and to wait. When Hoski had appeared, this man had simply assumed Hoskis role had carried the laundry back to Hoskis apartment and waited. And inside the men’s room booth, Hoski had dressed in a set of clothing the man must have brought for him, and removed the bandage, and covered his sewn scalp with a wig or a hat, and vanished. Away from Washington, and from FBI agents, and from Rosemary Rita Oliveras. He must have been tempted to call her, Leaphorn thought. The only thing that Hoski hadn’t planned on was falling in love with this woman. But he had.
Something in those telephone transcripts said he had. They were terse, but you found love somehow in what was said, and left unsaid. But Hoski hadn’t contacted her. He had left Rosemary Rita Oliveras without a word. The FBI would have known if he had tipped her off. She was an uncomplicated woman. She couldn’t have faked the frantic worry, or the hurt.
Leaphorn lit another cigarette. He thought of the nature of the man the FBI called Hoski; a man smart enough to use the FBI as Hoski had done and then to arrange that clever escape. What had that taken? Leaphorn imagined how it must have been done. First, the call to the ambulance to minimize the risk. Then the broken glass gripped carefully, placed against the cringing skin. The brain telling the muscle to perform the act that every instinct screamed against. God! What sort of man was Hoski?
Leaphorn turned back to the file. The last items were three poorly printed propaganda leaflets left at the scenes of various Buffalo Society crimes. The rhetoric was uncompromising anger. The white man had attempted genocide against the Buffalo People. But the Great Power of the Sun was just. The Sun had ordained the Buffalo Society as his avenger. When seven symbolic crimes had been avenged, white men everywhere would be stricken. The earth would be cleansed of them. Then the sacred buffalo herds and the people they nourished would again flourish and populate the land.
The crimes were listed, with the number of victims, in the order they would be avenged.
Most of them were familiar. The Wounded Knee Massacre was there, and the ghastly slaughter at Sand Creek, and the mutilation of Acoma males after their pueblo stronghold fell to the Spanish. But the first crime was unfamiliar to Leaphorn. It was an attack on a Kiowa encampment in West Texas by a force of cavalry and Texas Rangers. The pamphlet called it the Olds Prairie Murders, said it came when the men were away hunting buffalo, and listed the dead as eleven children and three adults. That was the smallest casualty total. The death toll increased down the list, culminating with the Subjugation of the Navajos.
For that, the pamphleteer listed a death toll of 3,500 children and 2,500 adults. Probably, Leaphorn thought, as fair a guess as any. He put the pamphlet aside and found a sort of anxious uneasiness again intruding into his thoughts. He was overlooking something.
Something important. Abruptly he knew it was related to what Mrs. Cigarette had told him.
Something about where she had sat, with her head against the stone, while she had listened to the voices in the earth. But what had she said? Just enough to let Leaphorn know that he had guessed wrong about which of the cul-de-sacs in the mesa cliff she had used for this communion with the stone. She had not used the one closest to the Tso hogan. Anna Atcitty had led her up a sheep trail beside the mesa.
Leaphorn closed his eyes, grimaced with concentration, remembering how he had stood on the mesa rim, looking down on the Tso hogan, on the wagon track leading to it, on the brush arbor. There had been a cul-de-sac below him and another perhaps two hundred yards to his left, where sheep had once been penned. Leaphorn could see it again in memory the sheep track angling gradually away from the wagon road. And then he was suddenly, chillingly aware of what his subconscious had been trying to tell him. If Listening Woman had sat there, she would have been plainly visible to the killer as he approached the hogan down the wagon track and even more obvious as he left. Did that mean Mrs.
Cigarette had lied? Leaphorn wasted hardly a second on that. Mrs. Cigarette had not lied.
It meant the wagon road was not the way the killer had come and gone. He had come out of the canyon, and departed into it. And that meant that if he emerged again, he would find Father Tso and Theodora Adams just where he had found Hosteen Tso and Anna Atcitty.
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T
he nucleus of the cloud formed about noon over the Nevada-Arizona border. By the time it trailed its dark-blue shadow across the Grand Canyon, it had built into a tower more than a mile from its sparkling white top to its flat, dark base. It crossed the southern slopes of Short Mountain at mid afternoon, growing fast. Fierce internal up-drafts pushed its cap above thirty thousand feet. There the mist droplets turned to ice, and fell, and melted, and were caught again in updrafts and soared into the frigid stratosphere, only to fall again increasing in size with this churning and producing immense charges of static electricity which caused the cloud to mutter and grumble with thunder and produce occasional explosive bolts of lightning. These linked cloud with mountain or mesa top for brilliant seconds, and sent waves of echoes booming down the canyons below. And finally, the icy droplets glittering at the cloud-top against the deep-blue sky became too heavy for the winds, and too large to evaporate in the warm air below. Then thin curtains of falling ice and water lowered from the black base of the cloud and at last touched the ground. Thus, east of Short Mountain, the cloud became a male rain.
Leaphorn stopped the carryall, turned off the ignition and listened to it coming. The sun slanted into the falling water, creating a gaudy double rainbow which seemed to move steadily toward him, narrowing its arch as it came in accordance with rainbow optics.
There was sound now, the muted approaching roar of billions of particles of ice and water striking stone. The first huge drop struck the roof of Leaphorns carryall. Plong! Plong-plong! And a torrent of rain and hail swept over the vehicle. The screen of falling water dimmed the landscape for a moment, the droplets reflecting the sun like a rhinestone curtain. And then the light was drowned. Leaphorn sat, engulfed in sound. He glanced at his watch, and waited, enjoying the storm as he enjoyed all things right and natural not thinking for a moment about any of the unnatural affairs that involved him. He put aside the sense of urgency that had brought him down this wagon track much faster than it could wisely be driven. It took a fraction over seven minutes for the storm to pass Leaphorns carryall. He started the engine and drove through the diminishing shower. A mile short of the Tso place, runoff water flashing down an arroyo had cut deeply into its bank. Leaphorn climbed out of the carryall and examined the road. A couple of hours with a shovel would make it passable again. Now it was not. It would be quicker to walk.
Leaphorn walked. The sun emerged. In places the sandstone landscape was littered with hail. In places the hot stone steamed, the cold rain water evaporating to form patches of ground mist. The air was cold, smelling washed and clean. The Tso hogan, as Leaphorn approached it, appeared deserted.
