drawer and polished the pane. He polished other windows. Abruptly he walked to the telephone and called Chaco Canyon.
Until recently telephone calls between the world outside and Chaco had traveled via a Navajo Communications Company telephone line. From Crownpoint northeast, the wire wandered across the rolling grassland, attached mostly to fence posts and relying on its own poles only when no fence was available going in the right direction. This system made telephone service subject to the same hazards as the ranch fence on which it piggybacked. Drifts of tumbleweeds, winter blizzards, dry rot, errant cattle, broke down both fences and communications. When it was operating, voices sometimes tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. But recently this system had been modernized. Calls were now routed two hundred miles east to Santa Fe, then beamed to a satellite and re- broadcast to a receiving dish at Chaco. The space age system, like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration which made it possible, was frequently out of operation. When it operated at all, voices tended to fade in and out with the wind velocity. Today was no exception.
A woman's voice answered, strong at first, then drifting away into space. No, Bob Luna wasn't in. No use ringing his number because she'd seen him driving away and she hadn't seen him return.
How about Maxie Davis?
Just a minute. She might not be up yet. It was, after all, early Sunday morning.
Maxie Davis was up. 'Who?' she asked. 'I'm sorry. I can hardly hear you.'
Leaphorn could hear Maxie Davis perfectly-- as if she were standing beside him. 'Leaphorn,' he repeated. 'The Navajo cop who was out there a couple of days ago.'
'Oh. Have you found her?'
'No luck,' Leaphorn said. 'Do you remember a little leather-covered notebook she used? Probably carried in her shirt pocket?'
'Notebook? Yeah. I remember it. She always used it when she was working.'
'Know where she keeps it? When it's not with her?'
'No idea. Probably in a drawer somewhere.'
'You've known her long?'
'Off and on, yes. Since we were graduate students.'
'How about Dr. Elliot?'
Maxie Davis laughed. 'We're sort of a team, I guess you'd say.' And then, perhaps thinking Leaphorn would misunderstand, added: 'Professionally. We're the two who write the bible on the Anasazi.' again, the sound fading in and out. `After Randall Elliot and me, no more need for Anasazi research.'
'Not Friedman-Bernal? She's not part of it?'
'Different field,' Davis said. 'She's ceramics. We're people. She's pots.'
They had decided, he and Emma, to install the telephone in the kitchen. To hang it on the wall beside the refrigerator. Standing there, listening to Maxie Davis, Leaphorn inspected the room. It was neat. No dishes, dirty or otherwise, were in sight. Windows clean, sink clean, floor clean. Leaphorn leaned forward to the full reach of the telephone receiver cord and plucked a napkin from the back of the chair. He'd used it while he'd eaten his eggs. He held the receiver against his ear with his shoulder while he folded it.
'I'm going to come back out there,' he said. 'I'd like to talk to you. And to Elliot if he's there.'
'I doubt it,' Maxie Davis said. 'He's usually out in the field on Sunday.'
But Elliot was there, leaning against the porch support watching Leaphorn as he parked his pickup in the apartment's courtyard.
'Ya tay,' Elliot said, getting the pronunciation of the Navajo greeting almost right. 'Didn't know policemen worked on Sunday.'
'They don't tell you that when they recruit you,' Leaphorn said, 'but it happens now and then.'
Maxie Davis appeared at the door. She was wearing a loose blue T-shirt decorated with a figure copied from a petroglyph. Short dark hair fell around her face. She looked feminine, intelligent, and beautiful.
'I'll bet I know where she keeps that notebook,' Davis said. 'Do you still have the key?'
Leaphorn shook his head. 'I'll get one from headquarters.' Or, he thought, failing that, it would be simple enough to get into the apartment. He'd noticed that when Thatcher had unlocked the door.
'Luna's away,' Elliot said. 'We can get in through the patio door.'
Elliot managed it with the long blade of his pocketknife, simply sliding the blade in and lifting the latch.
'Something you learn in graduate school,' he said.
Or in juvenile detention centers, Leaphorn thought. He wondered if Elliot had ever been in one of those. It didn't seem likely. Jail is not socially acceptable for prep school boys. Everything seemed exactly as it had been when he'd been here with Thatcher--the same stale air, the same dustiness, the boxes of pots, the disarray. Thatcher had searched it, in his tentative way, looking for evidence that Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was a violator of the Federal Antiquities Act. Now Leaphorn intended to search it in his own way, looking for the woman herself.
'Ellie kept her purse in the dresser,' Maxie Davis said. She opened a bottom drawer. 'In here. And I remember seeing her drop that notebook in it when she came in from work.'
Davis extracted a purse and handed it to Leaphorn. It was beige leather. It looked new and it looked expensive. Leaphorn unsnapped it, checked through lipstick, small bottles, package of sugarless gum, Tums, small scissors, odds and ends. No small leather notebook. Emma had three purses--a very small one, a very good one, and a worn one used in the workaday world of shopping.
'She had another purse?' Leaphorn said, making it half a question.
