'But what do you think? Another Navajo?' Chee thought. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Couldn't be absolutely sure. But when we eliminated what everybody who lived there was wearing, I think it was a boot with a flat rubber heel. And probably a smallish hole worn in the right sole.'
'Different suspect, then,' Leaphorn said. 'Or different shoes.' In fact, three different suspects. In fact, maybe four different suspects, counting Onesalt. He shook his head, thinking of the implausible, irrational insanity of it. Then he thought of Chee. An impressive young man. But why didn't he have at least an inkling of who had tried to kill him? Or why? Could he possibly not know? Leaphorn's back hurt. Sitting too long always did it these days. Easing himself out of the chair, he walked to the window over the sink and looked out. He felt something gritty under his boot sole, leaned down, and found it. The round lead pellet from a shotgun shell. He showed it to Chee. 'This one of them?'
'I guess so,' Chee said. 'I swept up, but when they went through the bedclothes, they bounced around. Got into everything.'
Into everything except Jim Chee, Leaphorn thought. Too bad he had so much trouble learning to believe in luck. 'Did you see anything at all that would connect the Endocheeney and Sam things? Anything at all? Anything to connect either one of them to this?' Leaphorn gestured at the three patched shotgun holes.
'I've thought about that,' Chee said. 'Nothing.'
'Did the name Irma Onesalt turn up either place?'
'Onesalt? The woman somebody shot down near Window Rock? No.'
'I'm going to ask Largo to take you off of everything else and have you rework everything about Endocheeney and Sam,' Leaphorn said. 'You willing? I mean talk to everybody about everything. Who people talked to. Who people saw. Try to get a fix on whatever the killers were driving. Just try to find out every damn thing. Work on it day after day after day until we get some feeling for what the hell went on. All right?'
'Sure,' Chee said. 'Fine.'
'Anything else about this shooting of your own here that didn't seem to fit on the FBI report?'
Chee thought about it. His lips twitched in a gesture of doubt or deprecation.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Just this morning, I found this. Might not have anything to do with anything. Probably doesn't.' He pulled out his wallet again and extracted from it something small and roundish and ivory-colored. He handed it to Leaphorn. It was a bead formed, apparently, from bone.
'Where was it?'
'On the floor under the bunk. Maybe it fell out when I changed the bedding.'
'What do you think?' Leaphorn asked.
'I think I never had anything that had beads like that on it, or knew anybody who did. And I wonder how it got here.'
'Or why?' Leaphorn asked.
'Yes. Or why.'
If you believed in witches, Leaphorn thought, as Chee probably did, you would have to think of a bone bead as a way witches killed—the bone being human, and the fatal illness being 'corpse sickness.' And if you loaded your own shotgun shells, or even if you didn't, you would know how simple it would be to remove the little plug from the end, and the wadding, and add a bone bead to the lead pellets.
Chapter 6
Contents - Prev / Next
the wind blew out of the southwest, hot and dry, whipping sand across the rutted track in front of Jim Chee's patrol car. Chee had backed the car a hundred yards up the gravel road that led to Badwater Wash Trading Post. He'd parked it under the gnarled limbs of a one-seed juniper—a place that gave him a little shade and a long view back down the road he had traveled. Now he simply sat, waiting and watching. If anyone was following, Chee intended to know it.
'I'm going to go along with the lieutenant,' Captain Largo had told him. 'Leaphorn wants me to rearrange things and let you work on our killings.' As usual when he talked, Captain Largo's hands were living their separate life, sorting through papers on the captain's desk, rearranging whatever the captain kept in the top drawer, trying to reshape a crease in the captain's hat. 'I think he's wrong,' Largo said. 'I think we ought to leave those cases to the FBI. The FBI's not going to break them, and neither are we, but the FBI's getting paid for it, and nobody's going to do any good on them until we have some luck—and taking you off your regular work isn't going to make us lucky. Is it?'
'No, sir,' Chee had said. He wasn't sure Largo expected an answer, or wanted one, but being agreeable seemed a good policy. He didn't want the captain to change his mind.
'I think that Leaphorn thinks you getting shot is connected with one or the other of those killings, or maybe both of them. He didn't say so, but that's what I think he thinks. I can't see any connection. How about it?'
Chee shrugged. 'I don't see how there could be.'
'No,' Largo agreed. His expression, as he looked at Chee, was skeptical. 'Unless you're not telling me something.' The tone of the statement included a question mark.
'I'm not not telling you anything,' Chee said.
'Sometimes you haven't,' Largo said. But he didn't pursue it. 'Real reason I'm going along with this is I want you to stay alive. Just getting shot at is bad enough.' Largo pointed to the folder on his desk. 'Look at that, and it's not finished yet. If somebody kills you, think how it would be.' Largo threw out his arms in a gesture encompassing mountains of forms. 'When we had that man killed over in the Crownpoint sub-agency back in the sixties, they were doing reports on that for two years.'
'Okay,' Chee said. 'That's okay with me.'
'What I mean is, poke around on Endocheeney and Wilson Sam and see what you can hear, but mostly I want you out where it would be hard for anybody to get a shot at you. In case they're still trying. Let 'em cool off. Be careful.'
