“Nothing?”
“Lab decided the clothes were foreign made. European or South American probably. Not Hong Kong.”
“That’s a big help,” Leaphorn said. He sipped the coffee. It was fresh. Compared to the instant stuff he’d been drinking at home it was delicious.
“It confirmed my hunch, I think,” Kennedy said. “If we ever get that sucker identified, it will be a federal case. He’ll be some biggie in drugs, or moving money illegally. Something international.”
“Sounds like it,” Leaphorn said. He was thinking of a middle-aged woman sitting somewhere wondering what had happened to Pointed Shoes. He was wondering what circumstances brought a man in old, worn, lovingly polished custom-built shoes to die amid the chamisa, sage, and snakeweed east of Gallup. He was wondering about the fatal little puncture at the base of his skull. “Anything new about the cause of death? The weapon?”
“Nothing changed. It’s still a thin knife blade inserted between the first vertebra and the base of the skull. Still a single thrust. No needless cuts or punctures. Still a real pro did it.”
“And what brings a real pro to Gallup? Does the Bureau have any thoughts on that?”
Kennedy laughed. “You caught me twenty-eight years too late, Joe. When I was on the green side of thirty and still bucking for J. Edgar’s job, then this one would have worried me to death. Somewhere back there about murder case three hundred and nine it dawned on me I wasn’t going to save the world.”
“You ran out of curiosity,” Leaphorn said.
“I got old,” Kennedy said. “Or maybe wise. But I’m curious about what brings you off the reservation in this kind of weather.”
“Just feeling restless,” Leaphorn said. “I think I’m going to drive out there where the body was.”
“It’ll be dark by the time you could get out there.”
“If the pathologist is right, it was dark when that guy got knifed. The night before we found him. You want to come along?”
Kennedy didn’t want to come along. Leaphorn cruised slowly down Interstate 40, his patrol car causing a brief bubble of uneasy sixty-five-mile-an-hour caution in the flood of eastbound traffic. The cold front now was again producing intermittent snow, flurries of small, feathery flakes which seemed as cold and dry as dust, followed by gaps in which the western horizon glowed dully with the dying day. He angled off the highway at the Fort Wingate interchange and stopped where the access road met the old fort’s entrance route. He sat a moment, reviving the question he raised when he’d seen the body. Any link between this obsolete ammunition depot—long on the Pentagon’s list for abandonment—and a corpse left nearby wearing clothing cut by a foreign tailor? Smuggling out explosives? From what little Leaphorn knew about the mile after mile of bunkers here, they held the shells for heavy artillery. There was nothing one would sneak out in a briefcase—or find a use for if one did. He restarted the car and drove under the interstate to old U.S. Highway 66, and down it toward the Shell Oil Company’s refinery at Iyanbito. The Santa Fe railroad had built the twin tracks of its California-bound main line here, paralleling the old highway with the towering pink ramparts of Nashodishgish Mesa walling in this corridor to the north. Leaphorn parked again, pulling the car off in the snakeweed beside the pavement. From this point it was less than four hundred yards to the growth of chamisa where the body of Pointed Shoes had been laid. Leaphorn checked the right-of-way fence. Easy enough to climb through. Easy enough to pass that small body over. But that hadn’t been done.
Not unless whoever did it could cross four hundred yards of soft, dusty earth without leaving tracks.
Leaphorn climbed through the fence and walked toward the tracks. A train was coming from the east, creating its freight train thunder. Its locomotive headlight made a dazzling point in the darkness. Leaphorn kept his eyes down, the brim of his uniform hat shading his face, walking steadily across the brushy landscape. The locomotive flashed past, pushed by three other diesels and trailing noise, towing flatcars carrying piggyback truck trailers, and then a parade of tank cars, then hopper cars, then cars carrying new automobiles stacked high, then old slab-side freight cars, and finally a caboose. Leaphorn was close enough now to see light in the caboose window. What could the brakeman in it see? Could some engineer have seen two men (three men? four men? The thought was irrational) carrying Pointed Shoes along the right of way to his resting place?
He stood watching the disappearing caboose lights and the glare of an approaching east-bound headlight on the next track. The snow was a little heavier now, the wind colder on his neck. He pulled up his jacket collar, pulled down the hat brim. What he didn’t know about this business had touched something inside Leaphorn—a bitterness he usually kept so submerged that it was forgotten. Under this dreary cold sky it surfaced. If Pointed Shoes had been something different than he was, someone too important to vanish unmissed and unreported, someone whose tailored suit was not frayed, whose shoe heels were not worn, then the system would have answered all these questions long ago. Train schedules would have been checked, train crews located and interviewed. Leaphorn shivered, pulled the jacket tighter around him, looked down the track trying to get a reading on what an engineer could see along the track in the glare of his headlight. From the high vantage point of the cabin, he could see quite a lot, Leaphorn guessed.
The freight rumbled past, leaving silence. Leaphorn wandered down the track, and away from it back toward the road. Then he heard another train coming from the east. Much faster than the freights. It would be the Amtrak, he thought, and turned to watch it come. It whistled twice, probably for the crossing of a county road up ahead. And then it was roaring past. Seventy miles an hour, he guessed. Not yet slowing for its stop at Gallup. He smiled, remembering the suggestion he had put into Emma’s voice—that maybe they stopped the Amtrak and put him off. He was close enough to see the heads of people at the windows, people in the glass-roofed observation car. People with a fear of flying, or rich enough to afford not to fly. Maybe they stopped the Amtrak and put him off, he thought. Well, maybe they did. It seemed no more foolish than his vision of a platoon of men carrying Pointed Shoes down the tracks.
Bernard St. Germain happened to be the only railroader who Leaphorn knew personally—a brakeman-conductor with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company. Leaphorn called him from the Fina station off the Iyanbito interchange and got the recording on St. Germain’s answering machine. But while he was leaving a message, St. Germain picked up the receiver.
“I have a very simple question,” Leaphorn said. “Can a passenger stop an Amtrak train? Do they still have that cord that can be pulled to set the air brakes, like you see in the old movies?”
“Now there’s a box in each car, like a fire alarm box,” St. Germain said. “They call it the ‘big hole lever.’ A passenger can reach in there and pull it.”
“And it stops the train?”
