accepting a paper bag full of the pseudo dollars. Next he extracted from the wagon bed what appeared to be an oval slab of stone. The buyer jumped up and down in mock excitement. The audience had fallen so silent that Chee could hear the dialogue of the clowns. Even the children and the visitors were simply listening now – sensing the tension.
Janet was wearing a broad grin. “I hope ol’ Asher is seeing this,” she said. “That’s him they’ve got in mind.”
“Money! Money! More money!” Wagon Puller shouted.
Buyer had opened his purse, dumping out more green paper on the packed earth. Both of the clowns, on hands and knees now, scrambled for it.
“Oops,” Janet said. “I’m wrong.”
“You sure are,” Chee said. “Can you imagine Asher pouring out his money like-” He stopped. Cowboy was standing just below, looking up at him, signaling puzzlement.
Chee glanced across the plaza, pointed to where the three boys were standing. Had been standing. Two of them were still there, watching the clowns. Red Shirt had disappeared.
“Aaaah,” Chee said.
“What’s wrong?” Janet said.
Chee cupped his hands, shouted to Cowboy. “I lost him.”
Cowboy shrugged and trotted down the row of spectators, hunting for the boy.
Janet Pete was looking at him. “I screwed up,” Chee said. “Took my eyes off the little bastard. I gotta go help Cowboy hunt him.”
“I’ll go with you,” Janet said. “Look over there. By the mouth of the alley. There’s Applebee. The Nature First lobbyist Davis was telling us about. You said you want to meet him.”
“Maybe later,” Chee said, and scrambled down the ladder.
They scouted the plaza, the sales booths along the side streets, the rows of vehicles, mostly pickups, jamming every possible parking space. At the house of the Kanitewa family, they peered through the open doorway and into windows. The lieutenant had said to stay away, but the lieutenant wasn’t here. The long table in the kitchen-dining room was loaded with food but no one seemed to be home. Back at the dance ground, they saw Cowboy, his eyebrows raised with a question.
“No luck,” Chee said.
“Which direction was he headed?” Cowboy asked. “Last time you saw him.”
“I took my eyes off him,” Chee admitted. “I glanced at the clown show and he just vanished.”
“Yeah,” Cowboy said, his expression skeptical. “Well, he’ll be back.”
Behind Cowboy, there was an outbreak of laughter. A kachina figure wearing a mask with oversized eyes and feathered tufts for ears was threatening one of the koshares with a whip of yucca. The koshare offered the big- eyed kachina a bowl. The other koshares came running up, making pugnacious gestures.
“Now what?” Janet Pete asked.
“That’s what Hopis call the Owl Kachina,” Cowboy said. “Or sometimes ‘The Punisher.’ If it was Mafia, you’d call him the enforcer. And if what’s going on is like in the Hopi villages, he’s warning the koshares to behave themselves, and the koshare chief is trying to bribe him, and the other koshares are suspecting their chief of selling them out.”
Cowboy laughed, punched Janet Pete lightly on the shoulder. “We Pueblo people have always had a realistic view of human nature.”
“Original sin,” Janet said. “Fallen man.”
Chee had been ignoring the clowns, scanning the crowd, hoping that Kanitewa’s red shirt would reappear. He was imagining himself in Leaphorn’s office. Leaphorn would be sitting behind his desk, face blank. Chee would be explaining how he’d let Kanitewa slip away. Long moment of silence while Leaphorn digested this, then Leaphorn asking what the devil he was doing up on the roof, and that leading into some sort of explanation of how he’d turned this assignment into an outing with friends.
“Look,” Chee said. “Forget the theology for now. Let’s find that kid.”
So they looked again, splitting up, canvassing the crowd, checking the sales booths, watching Kanitewa’s home, peering through the windows of countless pickups, even checking the hay sheds and sheep pens between the village and the fields.
At three P.M., as arranged, Chee climbed the ladder to the roof. Cowboy and Janet were there, eating snow cones while they waited for him. They didn’t have to tell him they’d had no better luck than his own.
“I found the two boys who were with him,” Janet said. “They didn’t know where he was. Anyway they claimed they didn’t. But they did confirm that their friend was our elusive Delmar.”
“I found what the little boy shot his arrow at,” Cowboy said. “Nothing.”
“Let’s try again,” Chee said.
The kachinas were gone now and much of the crowd had shifted from the plaza to the sales area. Chee spotted one of the boys who had been with Kanitewa, paper cup in one hand and a slab of fry bread in the other, leaning against a wall. He saw Asher Davis leaning over a table where a Navajo was selling sand-cast silver belt buckles, laughing about something. He saw a Bureau of Indian Affairs cop he’d met once at a briefing in Albuquerque inspecting a basket at an Apache woman’s booth. He saw two red shirts, but a young woman was wearing one and an old man the other.
Chee climbed down the ladder again. He patrolled the narrow streets, took another look through the sheep pens, horse corrals, and hay storage area, and prowled through the ranks of parked vehicles, peering through windows. He didn’t see Kanitewa, but he ran into Cowboy, who was buying another snow cone. Janet joined them.
“The kachinas will be back in thirty minutes or so, and there’ll be more dancing,” Cowboy said. “Probably the kid’ll come back then for the second act. Or after the dance, he’ll go home and we can catch him there.”
“Maybe,” Chee said, trying not to sound skeptical. “But his mother is probably hiding him out. She told the BIA he hadn’t come home.” This was not proving to be a good day and Chee was not optimistic about it getting better.
“There’s Applebee again,” Janet said. “The guy with the hot dog in his hand, buying something at that booth. You want to meet him?”
To their right, at the mouth of an alleyway from which the koshares had come, there was a sudden flurry of sound and excitement. The clown who had ridden the stick horse emerged, running frantically, hat missing now but still wearing the costume. He was shouting something. It sounded like “get the ambulance.” It was “get the ambulance.”
“Somebody must be hurt,” Cowboy said.
Two men and a woman emerged from the alley, the woman sobbing.
“They killed him,” she was saying. “They killed him.”
Chapter 2
“YOU WERE SITTING on the roof?” Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn kept the tone of the question neutral.
“Yessir,” Jim Chee said. “You can see the whole plaza from up there.”
That was the advantage, of course. The disadvantage being that you couldn’t catch the kid once you saw him. But Leaphorn didn’t press that point. It was obvious from Chee’s slightly abashed expression that he was aware of it. Instead, Leaphorn put the first page of Chee’s report facedown on his desk and reread the second and terminal page. It was neatly typed but – by Leaphorn’s standards – sadly incomplete.
“When you heard the woman shouting you say here that you presumed the person killed was the Kanitewa boy. Why did you presume that?”
“Well, I had him on my mind. We were looking for him. Trying to figure out where he had gone.”
Leaphorn looked up from the report over his horn-rimmed glasses. “We?”
Chee hesitated. “I had Deputy Sheriff Dashee with me,” Chee said. “From the Apache County Sheriffs Office.” He hesitated. “And Janet Pete. You know her. The lawyer with DNA.”
