'What'd you do to make such an impression on Houk?'
'Found the boy's hat,' Leaphorn said. 'Washed up on the reservation side of the river. It was already pretty clear he'd tried to swim across.'
Thatcher drove for a while. Turned on the radio. 'Catch the noon news,' he said. 'See what they got to say about those pot hunters getting^ shot.'
'Good,' Leaphorn said.
'There was more to it than that,' Thatcher said. 'More than finding his goddamned hat.'
Might as well get it over with. The memories had been flooding back anyway -- another of those many things a policeman accumulates in the mind and cannot erase. 'You remember the case,' Leaphorn said. 'Houk and one of his hired hands came home that night, and found the bodies, and the youngest boy, Brigham, missing, with some of his stuff. And the shotgun he'd done it with was missing too. Big excitement. Houk was even more important then than he is now -- legislator and all that. Bunches of men out everywhere looking. This Utah highway patrol officer -- a captain or lieutenant or something -- he and a bunch he was handling thought they had the boy cornered in a sort of alcove-cave up in a box canyon. Saw something or heard something, and I guess the kid had used the place before as a sort of hangout. Anyway, they'd called for him to come out, and no answer, so this dumb captain is going to have everybody shoot into there, and I said first I'd get a little closer and see what I could see, and turned out nobody was in there.'
Thatcher looked at him.
'No big deal,' Leaphorn said. 'Nobody was there.'
'So you didn't get shot with a shotgun.'
'I happened to have a pretty clear idea of how far a shotgun will shoot. Not very far.'
'Yeah,' Thatcher said.
The tone irritated Leaphorn. 'Hell, man,' he said. 'The boy was only fourteen.'
Thatcher had no comment on that. The woman reading the noon news had gotten to the pot hunter shooting. The San Juan County Sheriffs Office said they had no suspects in the case as yet but they did have promising leads. Casts had been made of the tire tracks of a vehicle believed used by the killer. Both victims had now been identified. They were Joe B. Nails, thirty-one, a former employee of Wellserve in Farmington, and Jimmy Etcitty, thirty-seven, whose address was given as Dinnehotso Chapter House on the Navajo Reservation.
'Well now,' Thatcher said. 'I guess we can skip stopping at Dinnehotso.'
Chapter Nine
T ^ t
THIS is JUST ABOUT where they'd left the U-Haul truck parked,' Chee said. He turned off the ignition, set the parking brake. 'Pulled up to the edge of the slope with the winch cable run out. Apparently they eased the backhoe down on the cable.'
The front of Chee's pickup was pointed down the steep slope. Fifty feet below, the grassy, brushy hump where a little Anasazi pueblo had stood a thousand years ago was a chaos of trenches, jumbled stones, and what looked like broken sticks. Bones reflecting white in the sunlight.
'Where was the backhoe?'
Chee pointed. 'See the little juniper? At the end of that shallow trench there.'
'The sheriff hauled everything off, I guess,' Leaphorn said. 'After they got their photographs.'
'That was the plan when I left.'
Leaphorn didn't comment. He sat silently, considering the destruction below. This ridge was much higher than it had seemed to Chee in the darkness. Shiprock stuck up like a blue thumb on the western horizon seventy miles away. Behind it, the dim outline of the Carrizo Mountains formed the last margin of the planet. The sagebrush flats between were dappled with the shadow of clouds, drifting eastward under the noon sun.
'The bodies,' Leaphorn said. 'The belagana in the backhoe? Right? Named Nails. And the Navajo partway up this slope under us? Jimmy Etcitty. Which one was shot first?'
Chee opened his mouth, closed it. His impulse had been to say the coroner would have to decide. Or about the same time. But he realized what Leaphorn wanted.
'I'd guess the Navajo was running for his life,' he said. 'I'd say he'd seen the white man shot in the machine. He was running for the truck.'
'Do much checking before you called it in to the sheriff?'
'Hardly any,' Chee said.
'But some,' Leaphorn said.
'Very little.'
'The killer parked up here?'
'Down by the oil well pump.'
'Tire tracks mean anything?'
'Car or pickup. Some wear.' Chee shrugged. 'Dusty dry and in the dark. Couldn't tell much.'
'How about his tracks? Or hers?'
'He parked on the sandstone. No tracks right at the vehicle. After that, mostly scuff marks.'
'Man?'
'Probably. I don't know.' Chee was remembering how shaken he had been. Too much death. He hadn't been using his head. Now he felt guilty. Had he concentrated, he surely could have found at least something to indicate
