'Anyway,' Leaphorn continued, 'Jackson had apparently been picked for this assignment simply because he was a Navajo and looked like one. His job must have been to help Hall set up his equipment and make sure that nobody knew what was going on. It wouldn't have seemed difficult, for the very reason the military chose this route for its overland missile. The country was almost completely deserted. Hall set up in Many Ruins Canyon complex, which The People avoid because of the Anasazi ghosts, and Jackson scared the few stragglers out by pretending to be a witch.'
'Except Horseman,' McKee said.
'Yeah. Except Horseman.' Leaphorn's voice was flat.
'It wasn't your fault,' McKee said.
'Remember what I said to Jackson at the trading post? I said if Horseman don't come out we'll come in looking for him. So Jackson brought him out for us and laid him out where we couldn't miss him.'
'Use your head, Joe. There was no way you could have stopped it from happening.'
'I was slow figuring it out,' Leaphorn said. 'I smelled something about Jackson. But I figured him to act like a Navajo and he was acting like a white man.'
'Thanks a lot,' McKee said.
'If he was a Navajo, no matter what he was doing in there, killing Horseman would have screwed it up for him. He would have gone off somewhere and had a sweat bath, and then he would have found himself a Singer and got himself cured and forgot about it.'
Leaphorn told McKee about the Enemy Way and about finding the place where Jackson had built the road up Ceniza Mesa.
'He had put one of the radar sets up there and then he was improving his road so he could get it down fast, without using the winch. When he missed his hat, he knew someone had seen him, so he moved the radar back over to the plateau. I didn't know about the radar but it was beginning to be clear by then that there had to be a lot of money involved somewhere. You put it together-a lot. of money and a killing. It's not natural, and it's not Navajo.'
'All right,' McKee said. 'I'll buy that. But how did Hall get into it?'
'I don't know,' Leaphorn said. 'I hear the federals are looking into a little West Coast electronics company with Mafia ownership. I think Hall did some work for them before-something legitimate.' He looked at McKee pensively. 'Didn't that business about Jackson wanting you to write the letter tell you something?'
'It told me he didn't want anybody coming in there looking for us,' McKee said. 'What else?'
'Think about it,' Leaphorn said. 'If you have a bunch of computer tapes giving you the exact performance of the other guy's ballistic missile system, it's worth a bunch of money. But it's worth a lot more if the other side doesn't suspect you've got it. Right?'
'Because if he suspects he changes the system,' McKee said. 'Eddie said something about that. About the letter being worth a lot of money.'
A nurse came in then, a Navajo girl, in the uniform of the Indian Service Hospital. She scolded Leaphorn for staying too long, took McKee's temperature and gave him a capsule and a drink of water.
When McKee awoke again, there was a tray beside his bed with a covered dish of food on it, and beside the dish was an envelope.
He turned the envelope in his good hand, aware before he opened it of the familiar feeling of his common sense struggling with his perennial incurable optimism. The note inside was from Ellen Leon. Tomorrow, it began, the doctor would let her come to visit him. It was not just fourteen blunt words in blue ink on blue paper. It was a long letter.
