“You Navajos came up from the underworld,” Streib said. “Up from the fourth world into the fifth world. Through a hollow reed, wasn’t it?”
“Flooded out, just like you
“I guess my ancestors – the German ones – came out of Alsace. That part that switches back to France depending on who won the last war. But I never much wanted to go see it.”
Streib uncapped his thermos, poured coffee into a cup marked austin sam for tribal council, new lands chapter, and handed it to Leaphorn. He poured coffee into the thermos cap for himself “Maybe if I had a good- looking woman as a traveling companion I’d find Alsace more interesting.”
Leaphorn let it pass. Sipped coffee.
Streib grinned at him. “Admit it,” he said. “Knock off the bullshit about tracking down your roots. I’ve met the prof a couple of times. At cultural doings there at the university. She’s a nice-looking woman.”
Leaphorn finished his coffee slowly.
“Don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed,” Streib said.
“See if you can pour me some more coffee,” Leaphorn said, passing the cup. “Without talking.”
“I’m not knocking it,” Streib said. “I think it’s a good idea. Why not? You’ve been alone now for too damn long. It’s making you cranky. The old testosterone must still be working. Young man like you. You better find yourself a permanent lady or you’ll be hanging around the squaw dances and getting yourself into trouble.”
Leaphorn thought: A year and eight months and eleven days since the nurse had awakened him in the chair in Emma’s room. She slipped away, the nurse had said. Emma had died while both of them were sleeping. Six hundred and twenty-two days. A lot longer if you counted the days before the operation, the days when the tumor had pressed against Emma’s brain and cost her her ability to think clearly. It had robbed her of her memory, her happiness, her humor, and her personality, and even – on some terrible days – of her knowledge of who she was, and who he was. He remembered those nights when she would awaken beside him confused and terrified. When…
“Change the subject,” Leaphorn said, and Streib instantly detected the anger in his voice.
That took them back to the killing of Eric Dorsey, routine as it seemed. A bit odd, perhaps, with no motive apparent immediately, and no promising suspects. But such things took time to develop, and the case was still fresh.
“One oddity though,” Leaphorn said. He told Streib about Delmar Kanitewa running away the day Dorsey was killed, the bludgeon murder of his uncle, and the koshare effigy in Dorsey’s shop.
“So,” Streib said. “What’s the connection?”
“Sounds unlikely,” Leaphorn said. “But maybe.”
“Or maybe not,” Dilly said. “Maybe the kid just happened to take off the same day.”
“And the boy’s uncle being killed there at Tano. How about that?”
“I know you don’t believe in coincidences,” Streib said. “But they do happen. For example, you and the lady both wanting to go take a look at China. And this looks like another one. Unless you can see some possible link.”
“I can’t,” Leaphorn said. “But I’d like it better if we had a suspect in custody.”
Which, as it happened, they did.
Chapter 5
“HIS NAME’S Eugene Ahkeah,” said Lieutenant Toddy. “The family lives out toward Coyote Canyon but he’s got a place in Thoreau. He works out at the Saint Bonaventure Mission. Sort of a handyman job.”
The lieutenant had spread an array of items on his desk top. “When he’s sober,” he added. He handed Streib an inventory sheet. Streib glanced at it and passed it to Leaphorn.
Cardboard grocery carton in which the following items were found:
• Plastic bread wrapper containing two ingots of silver
Plastic grocery bag containing following items:
• Sand-cast silver bracelet
• Sand-cast silver concha belt
• Hammered silver ornamental pin
• Seven silver belt buckles
• Four ingots of silver
• Ball-peen hammer with bloodstains on hammer head and on handle
Leaphorn looked from the list at the array on the table, making an unnecessary check of the inventory. Unneeded but not useless. It kept him from thinking his dreary thoughts. About the wages of avarice. About, almost certainly, the bloody cost of alcohol among The People, whose hunger was rarely for money. It was for oblivion bought by the bottle.
“Did you send a blood sample off to the lab?” Streib was asking.
“It’s ready to go,” Toddy said. “We just found this stuff this morning.”
“It was under his house?” Streib asked. “That what you said?”
“Actually, it’s a mobile home.”
“Did you get a search warrant?”
Lieutenant Toddy gave Leaphorn an uneasy sidelong glance.
“We told him we’d gotten this call. A man called – wouldn’t give his name – and reported some things taken from Dorsey’s shop were under Ahkeah’s place. We told Ahkeah we’d get a search warrant if he wanted us to,” Toddy said. “And he said there wasn’t anything under there. And I told him we’d have to find out for ourselves, one way or the other, and he said, ‘Well, let’s go see, then.’ And he came out and pulled away the plywood he had there to keep the animals out, and there was the box. In plain view. Just pushed back in there.”
Lieutenant Toddy paused, wrinkled his forehead at the weirdness of human behavior, and shook his head.
“He pulled the box out himself,” Toddy added.
“How did he act then?” Leaphorn asked. “What’d he say? Any explanation?”
Toddy shrugged. “He acted like he’d been drinking. He said, ‘How’d that get under there?’”
“Was he drunk?”
“About two-thirds. Maybe four-fifths.”
“Any idea at all who the call was from? Did Ahkeah have any idea?”
“The dispatcher took it,” Toddy said. “A man. He wouldn’t give a name. She said he sounded like an Anglo. And Ahkeah, he acted like he didn’t have any idea.”
“I’ll handle the blood sample,” Streib said. “Get it to the lab for you. Did you get a statement from Ahkeah?”
“He said he didn’t know anything about it.” Toddy extracted a clipboard from his desk and handed it to Streib. “He said Dorsey was a friend of his. That he didn’t kill him.”
Streib read, lips pursed. He handed the clipboard to Leaphorn. The statement was brief and Toddy had summarized it well. He’d only left out that Ahkeah wasn’t going to talk to anyone anymore until he got a lawyer. Everybody was watching television these days. Doing it like they did it on TV.
“Did he call a lawyer?” Leaphorn asked.
“He said he didn’t have any money so we called DNA for him. He said they were going to send somebody out from Window Rock.”
Leaphorn felt one of those uneasy premonitions. The supply of legal aid people at Window Rock was small, of those competent to defend criminal cases even smaller.
