that the councilwoman unquestionably knew it wasn't fair to expect more than a radio dispatcher and a night staffer to be on duty at dawn, that the council-woman had gone over this complaint with him at least twice before, and that the council-woman was making a lot of her early rising to remind Leaphorn that Navajo bureaucrats, like all good Navajos, should be up at dawn to bless the rising sun with prayer and a pinch of pollen.
Now the councilwoman was silent. Leaphorn, Navajo fashion, waited for the signal that would tell him whether she had finished with what she had to say or was merely pausing to collect her thoughts. The councilwoman sighed, and shook her head.
'Not no Navajo police at all,' she summarized. 'Not one on the whole Canoncito Reservation. All we got is a Laguna policeman, now and then, part of the time.' She paused again. Leaphorn waited.
'He just sits there in that little building by the road and he doesn't do nothing. Most of the time he's not even there.' The councilwoman, aware that Leaphorn had heard all this before, wasn't bothering to look at him while she recited it. She was studying his map.
'You call on the telephone and nobody answers. You go by there and knock, nobody home.' Her eyes drifted from map to Leaphorn. She was finished.
'Your Canoncito policeman is an officer of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,' Leaphorn said. 'He's a Laguna Indian, but he's actually a BIA policeman. He doesn't work for the Lagunas. He works for you.' Leaphorn explained, as he had twice before, that since the Canoncito Band lived on a reservation way over by Albuquerque, so far from the Big Reservation, and since only twelve hundred Navajos lived there, the Judicial Committee of the Tribal Council had voted to work out a deal with the BIA instead of keeping a full shift of the NTP stationed there. Leaphorn did not mention that the councilwoman was a member of that committee, and neither did the councilwoman. She listened with patient Navajo courtesy, her eyes wandering across Leaphorn's map.
'Just two kinds of pins on the Canoncito,' she said when Leaphorn had finished.
'Those are left over from before the Tribal Council voted to give jurisdiction to the Bureau of Indian Affairs,' Leaphorn said, trying to avoid the next question, which would be What do the pins mean? The pins were all in shades of red or were black, Leaphorn's way of marking alcohol-related arrests and witchcraft complaints. The two were really Canoncito's only disruptions of the peace. Leaphorn did not believe in witches, but there were those on the Big Reservation who claimed everybody at Canoncito must be a skinwalker.
'Because of that decision by the Tribal Council, the BIA takes care of Canoncito,' Leaphorn concluded.
'No,' the councilwoman said. 'The BIA don't.'
The morning had gone like that. The councilwoman finally left, replaced by a small freckled white man who declared himself owner of the company that provided stock for the Navajo rodeo. He wanted assurance that his broncos, riding bulls, and roping calves would be adequately guarded at night. That pulled Leaphorn into the maze of administrative decisions, memos, and paperwork required by the rodeo—an event dreaded by all hands in the Window Rock contingent of the tribal police. Before he could finish the adjustments required to police this three-day flood of macho white cowboys, macho Indian cowboys, cowboy groupies, drunks, thieves, con men, Texans, swindlers, photographers, and just plain tourists, the telephone rang again.
It was the principal of Kinlichee Boarding School, reporting that Emerson Tso had reopened his bootlegging operation. Not only was Tso selling to any Kinlichee student willing to make the short walk over to his place; he was bringing bottles to the dorm at night. The principal wanted Tso locked up forever. Leaphorn, who detested whiskey as ardently as he hated witchcraft, promised to have Tso brought in that day. His voice was so grim when he said it that the principal simply said thank you and hung up.
And so finally, just before lunch, there was time for thinking about three unsolved homicides and the question of coincidence. But first Leaphorn took the telephone off the hook. He walked to the window and looked out across the narrow asphalt of Navajo Route 27 at the scattered red-stone buildings that housed the government bureaucracy of his tribe, at the sandstone cliffs behind the village, and at the thunderclouds beginning to form in the August sky, clouds that in this summer of drought would probably not climb quite high enough up the sky to release any moisture. He cleared his mind of Tribal Council members, rodeos, and bootleggers. Sitting again, he swiveled his chair to face the map.
Leaphorn's map was known throughout the tribal police—a symbol of his eccentricity. It was mounted on corkboard on the wall behind his desk—a common 'Indian Country' map published by the Auto Club of Southern California and popular for its large scale and its accurate details. What drew attention to Leaphorn's map was the way he used it.
It was decorated in a hundred places with colored pins, each color representing its own sort of crime. It was inscribed in a hundred places with notes written in Leaphorn's cryptic shorthand. The notes reminded Leaphorn of information he'd accumulated in a lifetime of living on the reservation and half a lifetime of working it as a cop. The tiny
The notes were permanent, but the pins came and went with the ebb and flow of misbehavior. Blue ones marked places where cattle had been stolen. They disappeared when the cattle thief was caught driving a truckload of heifers down a back road. Gaudy rashes of scarlet, red, and pink ones (the colors Leaphorn attached to alcohol- related crimes) spread and subsided inside the reservation with the fate of bootleggers. They made a permanent rosy blotch around reservation border towns and lined the entrance highways. Markers for rapes, violent assaults, family mayhem, and other, less damaging, violent losses of control tended to follow and mingle with the red. A few pins, mostly on the reservation's margins, marked such white-man crimes as burglary, vandalism, and robbery. At the moment, Leaphorn was interested only in three brown pins with white centers. They marked his homicides.
Homicides were unusual on the reservation. Violent death was usually accidental: a drunk stumbling in front of a passing car, drunken fights outside a bar, an alcohol-primed explosion of family tensions—the sort of unpremeditated violence that lends itself to instant solutions. When brown-and-white pins appeared, they rarely remained more than a day or two.
Now there were three. And they'd been stuck in Leaphorn's corkboard, and in his consciousness, for weeks. In fact, the oldest had been there almost two months.
Irma Onesalt was her name—pin number one. Leaphorn had stuck it beside the road between Upper Greasewood and Lukachukai fifty-four days ago. The bullet that killed her was a 30-06, the second most popular caliber in the world and the one that hung on the rifle rack across the rear window of every third pickup truck on the reservation, and around it. Everybody seemed to own one, if they didn't own a 30-30. And sometimes even if they did. Irma Onesalt, born to the Bitter Water Clan, born for the Towering House People, daughter of Alice and Homer
