The only remaining sign that a corpse had been on display under the shrubbery adjoining the Twelfth Street entrance to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History was a uniformed policeman who stood beside a taped-off area. He was whistling idly, and he glanced at Rodney without a sign of recognition. Probably too young.
Inside, Rodney’s badge got them through the STAFF ONLY doorway. They took the elevator to the sixth floor and found that Dr. Hartman was not in. A young woman who seemed to be her assistant said she was probably down on the main floor at her mask exhibition. And no, the young woman said, Henry Highhawk had not showed up for work.
“Did you hear what happened?” she asked. “I mean about the guard being killed?”
“We heard,” Rodney said. “Do you know where we can get the key to Highhawk’s office?”
“Dr. Hartman would probably have one,” she said. “But wasn’t that dreadful? You don’t expect something like that to happen to someone you know.”
“Did you know her?” Rodney said.
The young woman looked slightly flustered. “Well, I saw her a lot,” she said. “You know. When I worked late she would be standing there.”
“Her name was Alice Yoakum,” Rodney said, mildly. “Mrs. Alice Yoakum. Is there a way we can page Dr. Hartman? Or call down there for her somehow?”
There was, but Dr. Hartman proved to be either unreachable or too busy to come to the telephone.
“It might not be locked,” Chee said. “It wasn’t when I left. If he didn’t come back who would lock it?”
“Maybe some sort of internal security,” Rodney said.
But nobody had locked it. The door opened under Rodney’s hand. The room was silent, lit by an overhead fluorescent tube, the blinds down as Chee remembered them. Highhawk’s gesture at keeping his light from leaking out into the night was now holding out the daylight.
“You leave the light on last night?” Rodney asked.
Chee nodded. “He said he was coming back. I thought he might. I just pulled the door closed.”
They stood inside the doorway, inspecting the room.
“Everything look like you left it?” Rodney asked.
“Looks like it,” Chee said.
Rodney picked up the telephone, dialed, listened. “This is Rodney,” he said. “Get hold of Sergeant Willis and tell him I’m calling from Henry Highhawk’s office on the sixth floor of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. He’s not here. Nobody’s seen him. Tell him I have Jim Chee with me. We’re going to look around up here and if I don’t hear from him before then, I’ll call back in—” he glanced at his watch “—about forty-five minutes.” He cradled the telephone, sat in Highhawk’s chair, looked at Leaphorn who was leaning against the wall, then at Chee by the window.
“Either one of you have any creative thoughts?” he asked. ’This isn’t my baby—nor yours either for that matter—but here we are knee deep in it.“
“I’m asking myself some questions,” Leaphorn said. “We have this Highhawk vaguely connected to the knifing of a terrorist, or whatever you want to call him, out in New Mexico. Just the name in the victim’s notebook. Now we have him disappearing, I guess, the same night this guard is killed here. But do we know when the guard was killed?”
“Coroner said the first glance looked like it was before midnight,” Rodney said. “He may get closer when they have the autopsy finished.”
Leaphorn looked thoughtful. “So it might have been either shortly before, or shortly after, Highhawk walked out of here. Either way?”
“Sounds like it,” Rodney said. He glanced at Chee. “How about you?”
“I’m thinking that this is the world’s best place to hide a body,” Chee said, slowly. “Tens of thousands of cases and containers lining the halls. Most of them big enough for a body.”
“But locked,” Rodney said. “And some of them, I noticed, were sealed, too.”
“They all use the same simple little master key,” Chee said. “At least most of them must use the same key, or you’d need a truck to haul your keys around. I think you just pick up a key, sign for it, and keep it until you’re finished with it. Something like that.”
“You know if Highhawk had a key?”
“I’d guess so,” Chee said. “He was a conservator. He would have been working with this stuff all the time.”
Leaphorn put his forefinger on a hook which had been screwed into the doorjamb. “I’d been wondering what this was for,” he said. “I’d guess it was where Highhawk hung his key.”
No key hung there now, but the white paint below the hook was discolored with years of finger marks.
“Let’s go look around,” Rodney said. He got up.
“He took it when he left,” Chee said. “And before we go looking, why not make a telephone call first? Call maintenance, or whoever might know, and ask them if they found anything unusual this morning.”
Rodney paused at the doorway, looking interested. “Like what?”
Chee noticed that Leaphorn was looking at him, smiling slightly.
“Chee’s a pessimist,” Leaphorn said. “He thinks somebody killed Highhawk. If somebody did, it would be tough to drag him out of the building—even with the guard dead. Not many people around at night in here, I’d guess, but it would only take one to see you.”
