'The night he crashed, he didn't touch down here,' Chee said. He walked toward the wreckage. A hundred yards, two hundred yards. Finally he stopped. He squatted again, touched a faint indentation in the sand with a fingertip. 'Here was the first lantern,' he said. He glanced over his shoulder. 'And his wheels touched right there. See? Just a few feet past the lantern.'
Miss Pauling looked at the wheel tracks and then past them at the wreckage, looming just ahead of them. 'My God,' she said. 'He didn't have a chance, did he?'
'Somebody put out five lanterns in a straight line between here and the rock.' Chee pointed. 'There were five more lanterns on the other side of the rock.'
The lawyer was staring at Chee, lips slightly parted. He read the implications of the lantern placement instantly. Miss Pauling was thinking of something else. 'Did he have his landing lights on? Your report didn't mention that.'
'I didn't see any light,' Chee said. 'I think I would have seen the glow.'
'So he was depending on whoever put the lanterns out,' Miss Pauling said. Then what Chee had said about the lanterns beyond the rock finally reached her. She looked at him, her face startled. 'Five more lanterns beyond the rock? Behind it?'
'Yes,' Chee said. He felt a pity for the woman. To lose your brother is bad. To learn someone killed him is worse.
'But why…?'
Chee shook his head. 'Maybe somebody wanted him to land but not to take off,' he said. 'I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about the lanterns. All I found was the little depressions. Like this one.'
She stared at him wordlessly. Studying him. 'You don't think you're wrong.'
'Well, no,' Chee said. 'This little oval shape, with these sharp indentations around the edge—it looks just the size and shape for those dry-cell batteries you attach the lantern bulb to. I'll measure it and check, but I don't know what else it would be.'
'No,' Miss Pauling said. She released a long breath, and with it her shoulders slumped. A little life seemed to leave her. 'I don't know what else it would be, either.' Miss Pauling's face had changed. It had hardened. 'Somebody killed him.'
'These lanterns,' the lawyer said. 'They were gone when you got here? They weren't mentioned in your report.'
'They were gone,' Chee said. 'I found the trace of them just before you drove up. When I was here before, it was dark.'
'But they weren't in the follow-up report either. The one that was made after the airplane was searched and all that. That was done in the daytime.'
'That was federal cops,' Chee said. 'I guess they didn't notice the marks.'
The lawyer looked at Chee thoughtfully. 'I wouldn't have,' he said finally. He smiled. 'I've always heard that Indians were good trackers.'
A long time ago, in his senior year at the University of New Mexico, Chee had resolved never to let such generalizations irritate him. It was a resolution he rarely managed to keep.
'I am a Navajo,' Chee said. 'We don't have a word in our language for 'Indians.' Just specific words. For Utes, and Hopis, and Apaches. A white is a
'Of course,' the lawyer said. He was still observing Chee. 'But how do you learn it?'
'I had a teacher,' Chee said. 'My mother's brother. He showed me what to look for.' Chee stopped. He was not in the mood to discuss tracking with this odd stranger.
'Like what?' the lawyer said.
Chee tried to think of examples. He shrugged. 'You see a man walk by. You go look at the tracks he made. You see him walk by, carrying something heavy in one hand. You look at the tracks. You go again tomorrow to look at the tracks after a day. And after two days. You see a fat man and a thin man squatting in the shade, talking. When they leave, you go and look at the marks a fat man makes when he squats on his heels, and the marks a thin man makes.' Chee stopped again. He was thinking of his uncle, in the Chuska high country tracking the mule deer. Showing how the bucks dragged their hooves when rutting, how to estimate the age of a doe by reading the splaying of its cloven toes in its tracks. Of his uncle kneeling beside the track left in the drying mud by a pickup truck, testing the moisture in a ridge of dirt, showing him how to estimate how many hours had passed since the tire had left that print. Much more than that, of course. But he had said enough to satisfy courtesy.
The lawyer had taken out his billfold. He extracted a business card and handed it to Chee.
'I'm Ben Gaines,' he said. 'I'll be representing Mr. Pauling's estate. Could I hire you? In your spare time?'
'For what?'
'For pretty much what you'd do anyway,' Ben Gaines gestured toward the wreck. 'Putting together just exactly what happened here.'
'I won't be doing that,' Chee said. 'This isn't my case. This is a first-degree felony. It involves non-Navajos. This was part of the Navajo-Hopi Joint Use Reservation, but now it's Hopi. Outside my territory. Outside my jurisdiction. I'm here working on something else. Came down here because I was curious.'
'All the better,' Gaines said. 'There won't be any question of conflict of interest.'
'I'm not sure the rules would allow it,' Chee said. 'I'd have to check with the captain.' It occurred to Chee that one way or another he'd be doing what the lawyer wanted. His curiosity would demand it.
Gaines was chuckling. 'I was just thinking that it might be just as well if your boss didn't know about this arrangement. Nothing wrong with it. But if you ask a bureaucrat if there's a rule against something, he'll always tell
