'She thinks something happened to Ms. Bernal,' Thatcher said, glancing in the rearview mirror at Leaphorn. 'You ought to have that seat belt on.'
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. He fumbled it around him, thinking that probably nothing had happened to the woman. He thought of the anonymous call that had provoked this trip. There would be a connection, somewhere. One thing somehow would link Dr. What's-Her-Name's departure from Chaco with the motive for the call. The departure had led to the call, or something had happened that provoked both.
'What do you think?' he would have asked Emma. 'Woman takes off for Farmington and drops off the world. Two days later somebody nasty turns her in for stealing pots. It could be she'd done something to make him sore, and knew he'd find out about it and turn her in. So she took off. Or she went to Farmington, made him sore there, and took off. So what you think?'
And Emma would have asked him three or four questions, and found out how little he knew about the woman, or about anything else to do with this, and then she would have smiled at him and used one of those dusty aphorisms from her Bitter Water Clan.
'Only yearling coyotes think there's just one way to catch a rabbit,' she'd say. And then she'd say, 'About next Tuesday the woman will call and tell her friends she ran away and got married, and it won't have anything to do with stealing pots.' Maybe Emma would be right and maybe she'd be wrong, and that didn't really matter. It was a game they had played for years. Emma's astute mind working against his own intelligence, honing his thinking, testing his logic against her common sense. It helped him. She enjoyed it. It was fun.
Had been fun.
Leaphorn noticed it immediately -- the cold, stagnant air of abandoned places. He was standing beside Thatcher when Thatcher unlocked the door to the apartment of Dr. Friedman-Bernal and pushed it open. The trapped air flowed outward into Leaphorn's sensitive nostrils. He sensed dust in it, and all that mixture of smells which humans leave behind them when they go away.
The Park Service calls such apartments TPH, temporary personnel housing. At Chaco, six of them were built into an L-shaped frame structure on a concrete slab--part of a complex that included maintenance and storage buildings, the motor pool, and the permanent personnel housing: a line of eight frame bungalows backed against the low cliff of Chaco Mesa.
'Well,' Thatcher said. He walked into the apartment with Maxie Davis a step behind him. Leaphorn leaned against the door. Thatcher stopped. 'Ms. Davis,' he said, 'I'm going to ask you to wait outside for a while. Under this search warrant herea?S well, it makes everything different. I may have to take an oath on what was in here when I opened the door.' He smiled at her. 'Things like that.'
'I'll wait,' Maxie Davis said. She walked past Leaphorn, smiling at him nervously, and sat on the porch railing in the slanting sunlight. Her face was somber. Again, Leaphorn noticed her striking beauty. She was a small young woman. Cap off now, her dark hair needed combing. Her oval face had been burned almost as dark as Leaphorn's. She stared toward the maintenance yard, where a man in coveralls was doing something to the front end of a flatbed truck. Her fingers tapped at the railing--small, battered fingers on a small, scarred hand. Her blue work shirt draped against her back. Under it, every line of her body was tense. Beyond her the weedy yard, the maintenance shed, the tumbled boulders along the cliff, seemed almost luminous in the brilliant late-afternoon sunlight. It made the gloom inside Dr. Friedman-Bernal's apartment behind Leaphorn seem even more shadowy than it was.
Thatcher walked through the living room, pulled open the drapes and exposed sliding-glass doors. They framed Fajada Butte and the expanse of the Chaco Valley. Except for a stack of books on the coffee table in front of the bleak brown institutional sofa, the room looked unused. Thatcher picked up the top book, examined it, put it down, and walked into the bedroom. He stood just inside the doorway, shaking his head.
'It would help some,' he said, 'if you knew what the hell you're looking for.'
The room held a desk, two chairs, and two double beds. One seemed to be for sleeping-- the covers carelessly pulled back in place after its last use. The other was work space--covered now with three cardboard boxes and a litter of notebooks, computer printouts, and other papers. Beyond this bed other boxes lined the floor along the wall. They seemed to hold mostly broken bits of pottery. 'No way on God's green earth of telling where she got any of this stuff.” Thatcher said. 'Not that I know of. It might be perfectly legal.'
'Unless her field notes tell us something,' Leaphorn said. 'They might. In fact, if she collected that stuff as part of some project or other, they should tell exactly where she picked up every bit of that stuff. And it's going to be legal unless she's been selling the artifacts.'
'And of course if she's doing it for a project, it's legal,' Thatcher said. 'Unless she doesn't have the right permit. And if she's selling the stuff, she sure as hell ain't going to write down anything incriminating.'
'Nope,' Leaphorn said.
A man appeared at the apartment door. 'Finding anything?' he asked. He walked past Leaphorn without a glance and into the bedroom. 'Glad to see you people getting interested in this,' he said. 'Ellie's been missing almost three weeks now.'
Thatcher put a fragment of pot carefully back into its box. 'Who are you?' he asked.
'My name's Elliot,' he said. 'I work with Ellie on the Keet Katl dig. Or did work with her. What's this Luna's been telling me? You think she's stealing artifacts?'
Leaphorn found himself interested--wondering how Thatcher would deal with this. It wasn't the sort of thing anticipated and covered in the law enforcement training Thatcher would have received. No chapter covering intrusion of civilian into scene of investigation.
'Mr. Elliot,' Thatcher said, 'I want you to wait outside on the porch until we get finished in here. Then I want to talk to you.'
Elliot laughed. 'For God's sake,' he said, in a tone that canceled any misunderstanding the laugh might have caused. 'A woman vanishes for almost a month and nobody can get you guys off your butts. But somebody calls in with an anonymousa?S'
'Talk to you in a minute,' Thatcher said. 'Soon as I'm done in here.'
'Done what?' Elliot said. 'Done stirring through her potsherds? If you get `em out of order, get 'em mixed up, it will screw up everything for her.'
'Out,' Thatcher said, voice still mild.
Elliot stared at him.
