'Yes, sir,' Chee said.
'Musket, wasn't it?' Largo asked. 'Joseph Musket. On parole from the New Mexico State Penitentiary at Santa Fe. Right? But the silver hasn't turned up sold anywhere. And nobody's seen anything of Musket?' Largo was eyeing him curiously. 'That's right, isn't it? You staying on top of that one?'
'I am,' Chee had said. That had been midsummer, maybe six weeks after Chee's transfer from the Crownpoint subagency, and he didn't know how to read Captain Largo. Now summer was ending and he still didn't know.
'That's a funny one,' Largo had said. He had frowned. 'What the hell did he do with all the pawn goods? Why doesn't he try to sell it? And where'd he go? You think he's dead?'
The same questions had been nagging Chee ever since he'd gotten the case. He didn't have any answers.
Largo noticed that. He sighed; peered back into the folder. 'How about bootlegging?' he asked without looking up. 'Any luck nailing Priscilla Bisti?'
'Just one near miss,' Chee said. 'But she and her boys got all the wine out of the pickup before we got there. No way to prove it was theirs.'
Largo was looking at him, lips pursed. Largo's hands were folded across his ample stomach. The thumbs waved up and down, patiently. 'You going to have to be smart to catch old Priscilla.' Largo nodded, agreeing with himself. 'Smart,' he repeated.
Chee said nothing.
'How about all that witchcraft gossip out around Black Mesa?' Largo asked. 'Doing any good with that?'
'Nothing I can pin down,' Chee said. 'Seems to be more of it than's natural, and maybe it's because so many people are going to be uprooted and moved out to make room for the Hopis. Trouble is I'm still too new around here for anybody to be telling me anything about witches.' He wanted to remind Largo of that. It wasn't fair of the captain to expect him, still a stranger, to learn anything about witches. The clans of the northwestern reservation didn't know him yet. As far as they knew, he might be a skinwalker himself.
Largo didn't comment on the explanation. He fished out another manila folder. 'Maybe you'll have some luck on this one,' he said. 'Somebody doesn't like a windmill.' He slipped a letter out of the folder and handed it to Chee.
Chee read what Window Rock reported, with half of his mind trying to analyze Largo. The way the Navajos calculate kinship, the captain was a relative through clan linkage. Chee's crucial 'born to' clan was the Slow Talking Dinee of his mother, but his 'born for' clan—the clan of his father—was the Bitter Water People. Largo was born to the Standing Rock Dinee, but was 'born for' the Red Forehead Dinee, which was also the secondary 'born for' clan of Chee's father. That made kinsmen. Distant kinsmen, true enough, but kinsmen in a culture that made family of first importance and responsibility to relatives the highest value. Chee read the letter and thought about kinship. But he was remembering how a paternal uncle had once cheated him on a used-refrigerator sale, and that the worst whipping he'd ever taken in the Two Gray Hills Boarding School was from a maternal cousin. He handed the letter back to Largo without any comment.
'Whenever there's any trouble out there in the Joint Use Reservation it's usually the Gishis,' Largo said. 'Them and maybe the Yazzie outfit.' He paused, thinking about it. 'Or the Begays,' he added. 'They're into a lot of trouble.' He folded the letter back into the file and handed the file to Chee. 'Could be just about anybody,' he concluded. 'Anyway, get it cleared up.'
Chee took the folder. 'Get it cleared up,' he said.
Largo looked at him, his expression mild. 'That's right,' he said. 'Can't have somebody screwing up that Hopi windmill. When the Hopis move onto our land, they got to have water for their cows.'
'Got any other suggestions about suspects?'
Largo pursed his lips. 'We have to move about nine thousand Navajos off that Joint Use land,' he said. 'I'd say you could cut it down to about nine thousand suspects.'
'Thanks,' Chee said.
'Glad to help,' Largo said. 'You take it from there and get it narrowed down to one.' He grinned, showing crooked white teeth. 'That'll be your job. Narrow it down to one and catch him.'
Which was exactly what Chee had been spending this long night trying to do. The plane was gone now, and if anything stirred around the windmill, Chee could neither see nor hear it. He yawned, unholstered his pistol, and used its barrel to scratch an otherwise unreachable place between his shoulder blades. The moon was down and the stars blazed without competition in a black sky. It was suddenly colder. Chee picked up the blanket, untangled it from the mesquite, and draped it around his shoulders. He thought about the windmill, and the sort of malice involved in vandalizing it, and why the vandal didn't spread his attentions among windmills 1 through 8, and then he thought about the perplexing affair of Joseph Musket, who had stolen maybe seventy-five pounds of silver concha belts, squash blossom necklaces, bracelets, and assorted pawn silver, and then done absolutely nothing with the loot. Chee had already worked the puzzle of Joseph Musket over in his mind so often that all the corners were worn smooth. He worked it over again, looking for something overlooked.
Why had Jake West hired Musket? Because he was a friend of West's son. Why had West fired him? Because he had suspected Musket of stealing. That made sense. And then Musket came back to the Burnt Water Trading Post the night after he was fired and looted its storeroom of pawned jewelry. That, too, made sense. But stolen jewelry always turned up. It was given to girl friends. It was sold. It was pawned at other trading posts, or in Albuquerque, or Phoenix, or Durango, or Farmington, or any of those places surrounding the reservation which traded in jewelry. It was so logical, inevitable, predictable, that police all through the Southwest had a standard procedure for working such cases. They posted descriptions, and waited. And when the jewelry started turning up, they worked back from that. Why hadn't the inevitable happened this time? What was different about Musket? Chee considered what little Musket's parole officer had been able to tell him about the man. Even his nickname was an enigma. Ironfingers. Navajos tended to match such labels with personal characteristics, calling a slim girl Slim Girl or a man with a thin mustache Little Whiskers. What would cause a young man to be called Iron-fingers? More important, was he still alive? Largo had asked that, too. If he was dead, that would explain everything.
Except why he was dead.
Chee sighed, and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, and found himself thinking of another of his unresolved cases. John Doe: cause of death, gunshot wound in the temple. Size of bullet, .38 caliber. Size of John Doe, five feet, seven inches. Weight of John Doe, probably 155 pounds, based on what was left of him when Chee and Cowboy Dashee brought him in. Identity of John Doe? Who the hell knows? Probably Navajo. Probably mature young adult. Certainly male. He had been Chee's introduction to duty in the Tuba City district. His first day after his
