'I doubt it,' Chee said.
Benally agreed. He grinned. 'The best plan would have been for you to have grabbed him when he was driving out of the yard with it.'
Chee called Pete's office from the station phone. He'd break it by degrees. Tell her first that a lot of things were wrong with the Buick, sort of slip into the part about tearing it up. But Miss Pete wasn't in, wasn't back from Phoenix, had called in and said she'd be held over for a day.
Wonderful. Chee felt immense relief. He put the Buick out of his mind. He thought about the Backhoe Bandit, who was going to get away with it. He thought about what the preacher had told him Saturday night.
The preacher said he didn't know the name of the man who owned the patched-up car. He thought he'd heard him called Jody, or maybe Joey. He thought the man worked in the Blanco field--maybe for Southern Union Gas, but maybe not. The man sometimes brought him a pot which the preacher said he sometimes bought. The last time he saw him, the man had asked if the preacher would buy a whole bunch of pots if the man could get them. 'And I told him maybe I could and maybe I couldn't. It would depend on whether I had any money.'
'So maybe he'll come back again and maybe he won't.'
'I think he'll be back,' the preacher had said. 'I told him if I couldn't handle it, I knew somebody who could.' And he told Chee about the woman anthropologist, and that led him to Lieutenant Leaphorn. The preacher was a talkative man.
Chee sat now in his pickup truck beside the willows shading the police parking lot. He felt relief on one hand, pressure on the other. The dreaded meeting with Janet Pete was off, at least until tomorrow. But when it came, he wanted to conclude his story by telling Pete how he had nailed the man to blame for all this. It didn't seem likely that was going to happen. Largo's solution was sensible if you were patient, even though it probably wouldn't produce an indictment. Aside from what it had done to Chee, the crime was relatively minor. Theft of equipment worth perhaps $10,000 in its badly used condition. Hardly an event to provoke all-out deployment of police to run down evidence. So the Backhoe Bandit would get away with it. Unless the rent-a-truck could be found with the backhoe on it. Where would it be?
Chee shifted sideways in the seat, leaned a knee against the dashboard, thought. Nails was a pot hunter. Probably he wanted the backhoe for digging up burials to find a lot of them. With the teeth removed from the shovel to minimize breakage, they were a favorite tool of the professionals. And from what the preacher said, Nails must be going professional. He must have found a likely ruins. What Nails had told the preacher suggested he'd found a wholesale source. Therefore it was a safe presumption that he'd stolen the backhoe to dig them.
So far it was easy. The hard question was where?
The willow branches dangling around Chee's pickup had turned yellow with the season. Chee studied them a moment to rest the brain. Surely he must know something helpful. How about the trailer? Stolen. Then brought back to haul out the backhoe. Then abandoned in favor of the truck? The night the trailer was stolen the backhoe was still being repaired. Had the head off the engine, in fact. So they took the trailer, and brought it back when the backhoe was ready to roll. Pretty stupid, on the face of it. But Chee had checked and learned the trailer was scheduled to haul equipment to a job at Burnt Water the next day. The Backhoe Bandit knew a hell of a lot about what went on in that maintenance yard. Interesting, but it didn't help now.
The next answers did. The question was why steal the trailer at all? Why not simply rent the U-Haul truck earlier, and haul the backhoe out on that? And why not rent the backhoe, instead of stealing it? As Chee thought it through, the answers connected. Rental trucks were easy to trace, so the Backhoe Bandit avoided the risk of having the truck seen at the burglary. A rented backhoe would also be easy to trace. But there would be no reason to trace it if it was checked back in after it was used. So whya?S ? Chee's orderly mind sorted through it. The truck was needed instead of the trailer because the trailer couldn't be pulled where the backhoe was needed. Could it be the dig site was somewhere from which the backhoe couldn't be extricated? Of course. It would be at the bottom of someplace, and that would explain why Nails had rented a truck with a power winch. Running a backhoe down the steep slope of a canyon could well be possible where pulling it out wouldn't be.
Chee climbed out of the cab, trotted into the office, and called the Farmington office of Wellserve, Inc. Yes, they could provide the police with a copy of their well-service route map. Yes, the service superintendent could mark the route Nails had served.
When Chee left Wellserve with the map folded on the seat beside him he had three hours left before sundown. Then there would be a half-moon. A good night for a pot hunter to work, and a good night to hunt pot hunters. He stopped at the sheriffs office and found out who was patrolling where tonight. If Nails was off reservation land, he'd need a deputy along to make an arrest. Then he drove up the San Juan River valley through the little oil town of Bloomfield, and out of the valley into the infinity of sagebrush that covers the Blanco Plateau. He was remembering he'd read somewhere of somebody estimating more than a hundred thousand Anasazi sites on the Colorado Plateau--only a few of them excavated, only a few thousand even mapped. But it wouldn't be impossible. He would guess Nails had found sites along the service roads he traveled and would be looting them. Chee knew some of those sites himself. And he knew what attracted the Anasazi. A cliff faced to catch the winter sun and shaded in the summer, enough floodplain to grow something, and a source of water. That, particularly the water, narrowed it a lot.
He scouted Canyon Largo first, and Blanco Canyon, and Jasis Canyon. He found two sites that had been dug into fairly recently. But nothing new and no sign of the tire tread pattern he was looking for. He moved north then and checked Gobernador Canyon and La Jara and the Vaqueros Wash eastward in the Carson National Forest. He found nothing. He skipped westward, driving far faster than the speed limit down New Mexico Highway 44. The light was dying now--a cloudless autumn evening with the western sky a dull copper glow. He checked out a couple of canyons near Ojo Encino, restricting himself always to the access roads gouged out to reach the gas wells and pump stations Nails had been serving.
By midnight he finished checking the roads leading from the Star Lake Pump Station, driving slowly, using his flashlight to check for tracks at every possible turnoff. He circled back past the sleeping trading post the maps called White Horse Lake. He crossed the Continental Divide, and dropped into the network of arroyos that drain Chaco Mesa. Again he found nothing. He circled back across Chaco Wash and picked up the gravel road that leads northwestward toward Nageezi Trading Post.
Beyond Betonnie Tsosie Wash he stopped the pickup in the middle of the road. He climbed out wearily, stretched, and turned on the flash to check the turnoff of an access trail. He stood in the light of the half-moon, yawning, his flash reflecting from the chalky dust. It showed, clear and fresh, the dual tracks of an almost new Dayton tire tread.
Chee's watch showed 2:04 A.M. At 2:56 he found the place where, maybe a thousand years ago, a little band of Anasazi families had lived, and built their cluster of small stone shelters and living spaces, and died. Chee had been walking for more than a mile. He had left his pickup by a pump site and followed the twin tracks on foot. The pump marked the dead end of this branch of the service road -- if two ruts wandering through the sage and juniper could be called that. From here, the dual tires had made their own road. Away from the hard-packed ruts, they
