That had proved easy. His name was Platero, he lived less than a mile from the school, and, yes indeed, he could tell them who was Delmar’s best friend. It was a boy named Felix Bluehorse. “Sometimes Felix gets off at his place, and sometimes vice versa,” Platero said. “Bluehorse used to go to school here, before he switched over to Thoreau, and we still give him a ride sometimes. They’re good buddies.”
Even better, Felix Bluehorse’s mother worked for the Navajo Communications Company and lived in Crownpoint. Better yet, Felix was home when they got there and was anxious to talk to somebody. But first, he wanted to see their police identification. Felix was small and about sixteen, with enough white blood mixed with his Navajo genes to make him vulnerable to acne. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s mobile home looking down on them. Obviously, he was enjoying this.
“I’ve got to be careful who I talk to,” Felix said. “Somebody’s after Delmar.” He looked at Blizzard, then at Chee, savoring their reaction.
Chee waited. They were in Navajo country, but it was Blizzard’s case.
“Who?” Blizzard asked. “Why?”
“The man who killed Mr. Dorsey,” Felix said.
Abruptly, it wasn’t Blizzard’s case. Now it was Chee’s case.
“You know what,” Chee said. “I think you have some very important information. Can we come in and sit down and talk about it?”
In the crowded Bluehorse living room it developed that Felix Bluehorse did have quite a bit of information, if one could only calculate what it meant.
Chee was thinking of that now, going over it in his mind, reading through the report he’d typed for Lieutenant Leaphorn, wondering if he’d left anything out. If he had, it was too late to do anything about it. There was a tap on the door, it opened, and the lieutenant looked in at him. The lieutenant looked old and tired.
“Virginia said you were looking for me.”
“Yes sir,” Chee said. He stood, handed Leaphorn the file folder.
“You find him?”
“No sir,” Chee said. “Well, not exactly. Blizzard found him…”
Leaphorn’s expression stopped Chee. It was a broad, happy grin.
Chee hurried on. “… at Grants, and he picked him up and took him to Crownpoint.” Chee swallowed. “But he got away again.”
Leaphorn’s grin disappeared. He tapped the folder. “It all in here?”
“Yes sir.”
“I’ll read it,” Leaphorn said. His tone suggested to Chee that reading it would not have high priority.
“It connects the Kanitewa boy to the homicide at Thoreau,” Chee said.
Leaphorn took his hand off the doorknob, flipped the report open, scanned it, looked up at Chee. “Let’s talk in my office,” he said.
But before they talked, Leaphorn eased himself into the chair behind his desk, put on his glasses, slowly reread Chee’s report, placed it on the desk top, restored his glasses to their case, put the case in his shirt pocket, and looked at Chee for a long moment.
“What’d you think of the Bluehorse boy?”
“He seemed like a nice kid,” Chee said. “He wanted to cooperate. Enjoying the excitement, somebody paying attention to him. Liking being important.”
“He said he had no idea where Kanitewa was hiding out. You think that’s true?”
“Maybe,” Chee said. “I doubt it. I’d bet he could give us two or three guesses if he wanted to.”
Leaphorn nodded. “He told you that Kanitewa thought the man who killed Dorsey would be after him?”
“Right,” Chee said.
“And the man was a Navajo?”
“Oh,” Chee said, embarrassed. “I think he actually said Kanitewa told him it was a man he’d seen at Saint Bonaventure Mission. You know, you’re dealing with a hearsay, secondhand description. He said Kanitewa said this man was medium-sized and kind of old. I think we just took for granted we were talking about a Navajo because he didn’t say ‘white,’ or ‘Chinese,’ or ‘Hispanic.’”
Leaphorn produced an affirmative grunt. He extracted his glasses, reread part of the report.
“You say here Bluehorse said he didn’t know whether Kanitewa had actually witnessed the crime.”
“We pressed him on that. He said he wasn’t sure. Maybe Kanitewa had actually seen it. But he didn’t tell him he had. I’d say if Delmar had seen it, he’d have said so. And he would have yelled. Reported it.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said.
“I’d guess that when he heard the radio broadcast about Dorsey being killed, he remembered seeing this guy going into the shop and put two and two together.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“Could it be Eugene Ahkeah?” Chee asked.
Leaphorn said, “Big. Kind of old. That could be just about anybody. Could be Ahkeah. He’s not much older than you. But for a teenager, ‘kind of old’ is anybody over twenty.”
“And Ahkeah was there that day,” Chee said. “Other people saw him?”
“Yep,” Leaphorn said. He sighed, got up, walked to the window, and stood, hands in his pockets, looking out. “We’ve got our man in jail,” he said, finally. “We’ve got him at the scene. There’s no question he had the opportunity. We’ve got a good motive – theft plus drunkenness. And we have physical evidence tied to him. All that stolen stuff. Now it seems as if we have another witness who must have seen something incriminating.” He turned and looked at Chee. “The trouble is, I was thinking we had the wrong man.”
“Why?”
Leaphorn shook his head, laughed. “Be damned if I know why. I used to think I was logical. Usually I am. It’s just that this Ahkeah seemed wrong for it.” He walked around behind the desk, rummaged in the drawer, and took out a box of pins. “Ever have that happen to you? Your brain tells you one thing. Your instinct another.”
“Sure,” Chee said. “I guess so.”
“And which one is right?” In the map on the wall behind his desk he put a pin at Tano Pueblo, and another between Crownpoint and Thoreau, about where Kanitewa had stayed with his father. Chee noticed they had pink heads, the same color as the pins already stuck in the map at Thoreau, and at the place in Coyote Canyon where Ahkeah’s family lived. Leaphorn dropped the surplus pins back into the box. “Did you ever wonder why I fool with those pins?”
“Yeah,” Chee said. He’d heard of Leaphorn’s pin-littered map ever since he’d joined the force. Captain Largo, his boss when he worked the Tuba City district, told him Leaphorn used them to work out mathematical solutions to crimes that puzzled him. Largo couldn’t explain how that worked. Neither could Chee.
“I don’t know myself, exactly,” Leaphorn said. “I got into the habit years ago. It seems like sometimes it helps me think. It puts things in perspective.” He tapped the pin at Tano with a finger. “For example, we seem to have a connection now between two crimes. Or do we? About seventy miles apart on the map. Does the Kanitewa boy connect them? It sure as hell looks like it now.”
“It does to me. I’d bet a year’s pay on it,” Chee said.
Leaphorn made a tent of his hands and looked at Chee over it. “Why?” he asked. “Why are you so certain?”
“Because-”
The telephone on Leaphorn’s desk interrupted him. Leaphorn picked it up, said, “Call me back in ten minutes,” and hung up.
He looked at Chee, motioned for him to continue.
“Because of the package, mostly,” Chee said. “Because of the chronology.”
Leaphorn nodded. “Yes. I think so too. But what was in that package?” He was asking both of them the question. He looked at Chee. “Any ideas?”
“None,” Chee said. “Except Kanitewa must have thought it was in some way connected with his religion. That’s what he told Blizzard. And he took it to his uncle. To the koshare. We know that. And we think we know that he picked it up in Eric Dorsey’s shop.”
Leaphorn swiveled in his chair, looked at the map a moment and then back at Chee.
“The way your report reads, Kanitewa’s dad was driving in to Gallup. The boy had his dad drop him off at
