shoe size.
'Not much use going over it again,' Leaphorn said. 'Too many deputy sheriffs and paramedics and photographers been trampling around.'
And so they scrambled down the hill--Leaphorn losing his footing and sliding twenty feet in a shower of dislodged earth and gravel. Standing there, amid the dislodged stones, amid the scattered bones, Chee felt the familiar uneasiness. Too many chindi had taken to the air here, finding freedom from the bodies that had housed them. Leaphorn was standing at a narrow trench the backhoe had dug beside a crumbled wall, looking thoughtful. But then Leaphorn didn't believe in chindi, or in anything else.
'You studied anthropology, didn't you? At New Mexico?'
'Right,' Chee said. So had Leaphorn, if the word around the Navajo Tribal Police was true. At Arizona State. A BA and an MS.
'Get into the Anasazi much? The archaeological end of it?'
'A little,' Chee said.
'The point is, whoever did this work knew something about what he was doing,' Leaphorn said. 'Anasazi usually buried their dead in the trash midden with the garbage, or right against the walls, sometimes inside the rooms. This guy worked the middena?S' Leaphorn gestured to the torn earth beyond them. 'And he worked along the walls. So I'd guess he knew they buried pottery with their corpses, and he knew where to find the graves.'
Chee nodded.
'And maybe he knew this was a late site, and that--rule of thumb--the later the site, the better the pot. Glazed, multicolored, decorated, so forth.' He bent, picked up a shard of broken pottery the size of his hand and inspected it.
'Most of the stuff I've seen here is like this,' he said, handing the shard to Chee. 'Recognize it?'
The interior surface was a rough gray. Under its coating of dust the exterior glowed a glossy rose, with ghostly lines of white wavering through it. Chee touched the glazed surface to his tongue--the automatic reaction of a former anthropology student to a potsherd--and inspected the clean spot. A nice color, but his memory produced nothing more than a confused jumble of titles: Classical. Pueblo III. Incised. Corrugated, etc. He handed the shard to Leaphorn, shook his head.
'It's a type called St. John's Polychrome,' Leaphorn said. 'Late stuff. There's a theory it originated in one of the Chaco outlier villages. I think they're pretty sure it was used for trading.'
Chee was impressed and his face showed it.
Leaphorn chuckled. 'I can't remember stuff like that either,' he said. 'I've been doing some reading.'
'Oh?'
'We seem to have a sort of overlap here,' he said. 'You were looking for a couple of men who stole our backhoe. I'm looking for an anthropologist. A woman who works at Chaco and took off one day three weeks ago to go to Farmington and never came back.'
'Hadn't heard about that,' Chee said.
'She prepared this big, elaborate dinner. Had a guest coming to visit. A man very important to her. She put it in the fridge and she didn't come back.' Leaphorn had been looking out across the grassland toward the distant thunderheads. It must have occurred to him that this would sound strange to Chee. He glanced at him. 'It's a San Juan County missing person's case,' he said. 'But I'm on leave, and it sounded interesting.'
'You mentioned you were quitting,' Chee said. 'I mean resigning.'
'I'm on terminal leave,' Leaphorn said. 'A few more days and I'm a civilian.'
Chee could think of nothing to say. He didn't particularly like Leaphorn, but he respected him.
'But I'm not a civilian yet,' he added, 'and what we have here is peculiar. This overlap, I mean. We have Dr. Friedman-Bernal being a ferocious collector of this kind of pottery.' Leaphorn tapped the potsherd with his forefinger. 'We have Jimmy Etcitty killed here digging up this sort of pot. This same Jimmy Etcitty worked over at Chaco where Friedman-Bernal worked. This same Jimmy Etcitty found a pot somewhere near Bluff which he sold to a collector who sold it to an auction house. This pot got Friedman-Bernal excited enough a month ago to send her driving to Bluff looking for Etcitty. And on top of that we have Friedman-Bernal buying from Slick Nakai, the evangelist, and Nails selling to Slick, and Etcitty playing guitar for Nakai.'
Chee waited, but Leaphorn seemed to have nothing to add.
'I didn't know any of that,' Chee said. 'Just knew Nails and a friend stole the backhoe when I was supposed to be watching the maintenance yard.'
'Nice little tangle of strings, and right here is the knot,' Leaphorn said.
And none of it any of Leaphorn's business, Chee thought. Not if he had resigned. So why was he out here, sitting on that stone wall with his legs in the sun, with almost two hundred miles of driving already behind him today? He must enjoy it or he wouldn't be here. So why has he resigned?
'Why did you resign?' Chee asked. 'None of my business, I guess, buta?S'
Leaphorn seemed to be thinking about it. Almost as if for the first time. He glanced at Chee, shrugged. 'I guess I'm tired,' he said.
'But you're using leave time out here, chasing after whatever it is we have here.'
'I've been wondering about that myself,' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe it's the fire horse syndrome. Lifelong habit at work. I think it's because I'd like to find this Friedman-Bernal woman. I'd like to find her and sit her down and say: `Dr. Bernal, why did you prepare that big dinner and then go away and let it rot in your refrigerator?''
To Chee, the answer to why Dr. Bernal let her dinner spoil was all too easy. Especially now. Dr. Bernal was dead.
'You think she's still alive?'
