have to make the climb.'
You could land a copter on this shelf if you had to, Leaphorn guessed. You'd have to be good, but someone who'd flown evacuations in Vietnam would be very good.
Elliot seemed to consider. 'That's a thought,' he said.
He reached into his jacket, extracted a small blue automatic pistol, and pointed it at Leaphorn's throat. 'Unbuckle your belt,' he said.
Leaphorn unbuckled it.
'Pull it out.'
Leaphorn pulled it out. His holster fell to the ground.
'Now kick the gun over here to me.'
Leaphorn did.
'You make it tough,' Elliot said.
'Not tough enough.'
Elliot laughed.
'You'd rather not have a bullet hole in me,' Leaphorn said. 'Or her either.'
'That's right,' Elliot said. 'But I don't have any choice now. You seem to have figured it out.'
'I figured you were going to get us far enough up the rocks to make it count and then tumble us down.'
Elliot nodded.
'I'm not sure of your motive for all this. Killing so many people.'
'Maxie told you that day,' Elliot said. The good humor was suddenly gone, replaced by bitter anger. 'What the hell can a rich kid do to impress anyone?'
'Impress Maxie,' Leaphorn said. 'A truly beautiful young woman.' And he was thinking, maybe I'm like you. I don't want this to go wrong now because of Emma. Emma put little value on finding people to punish them. But this would really have impressed her. You love a woman, you want to impress her. The male instinct. Hero finds lost woman. The life saved. He didn't want it to go wrong now. But it had. In a very little while, wherever and whenever it was most convenient, Randall Elliot would kill Eleanor Friedman-Bernal and Joe Leaphorn. He could think of nothing to prevent it. Except maybe Brigham Houk.
Brigham must be somewhere near. It had taken him only minutes to get the poles and return. He had seen his devil, recognized him, and slipped away. Brigham Houk was a hunter. Brigham Houk was also insane, and afraid of this devil. What would he do? Leaphorn thought he knew.
'We'll leave her here for now and we'll walk over there,' Elliot said, pointing with the pistol toward the edge of the shelf. It was exactly the direction Leaphorn wanted to go. It was the only way that led to convenient shelter. It must be the way Brigham had gone.
'It's going to look funny if too many people fall off things,' Leaphorn said. 'Two is too many.'
'I know,' Elliot said. 'Do you have a better idea?'
'Maybe,' Leaphorn said. 'Tell me your motive for all this.'
'I think you guessed,' Elliot said.
'I guess Maxie,' Leaphorn said. 'You want her. But she's a self-made, class-conscious woman with a lot of bad memories of being put down by the upper class. On top of that, she's a tough one, a little mean. She resents you, and everybody like you, because it's all handed to you. So I think you're going to do something that has nothing to do with being born to the upper, upper, upper class. Something that neither Maxie nor anybody else can ignore. From what you told me at Chaco it's something to do with tracing what happened to these Anasazi by tracking genetic flaws.'
'How about that,' Elliot said. 'You're not as dumb as you try to act.'
'You found the flaw you were hunting in the bones here, and over at the site on the Checkerboard, too, I guess. You were digging here illegally, and our friend here came in and caught you at it.'
Elliot held up his empty hand. 'So I tried to kill her and screwed it up.'
'Curious about something,' Leaphorn said. 'Were you the one who called in the complaint about Eleanor being a pot hunter?'
'Sure,' Elliot said. 'You figured why?'
'Not really,' Leaphorn said. Where the devil was Brigham Houk? Maybe he'd run. Leaphorn doubted it. His father wouldn't have run. But then his father wasn't schizophrenic.
'You can't get a permit to dig,' Elliot said. 'Not in your lifetime. These asshole bureaucrats are always saving it for the future. Well, if a site is being vandalized, that puts it in a different category. Not so tough then, after it's already been messed up. I was going to follow up later with some hints about where to find digs Eleanor was stealing from. They'd find her body, so they'd have their Thief of Time. They wouldn't have to be looking for one and maybe suspecting me. And then I'd get my dig permit.' He laughed. 'Roundabout way, but I've seen it work.'
'You were getting your bones anyway,' Leaphorn said. 'Buying some, digging some up yourself.'
'Wrong category, friend,' Elliot said. 'Those are unofficial bones. Not in site.' I was findingem unofficially, so I'd know where to find 'em officially when I got my permit. You understand that?' Elliot peered at him, grinning. He was enjoying this. 'When I get my permit to excavate, I come back and the bones I find then are registered in place. Photographed. Documented.' He grinned again. 'Same bones, maybe, but now they're official.'
'How about Etcitty,' Leaphorn asked, 'and Nails?' Over Elliot's shoulder, Leaphorn had seen Brigham Houk. He saw Houk because the man wanted Leaphorn to see him. He was behind a fallen sandstone slab, screened by
