was trying to say something. Nothing came out but a sort of an odd sound. A squeaking sound. It occurred to him that Mama was afraid. Afraid of him.
“Mama,” Leroy Fleck said. “I got even. Did you see that? I didn’t let him step on me. I didn’t kiss any boot.”
He waited. Not long but more time than he could afford under the circumstances, waiting for Mama to win her struggle to form words. But no words came and Fleck could read absolutely nothing in her eyes except fear. He walked out the door without a glance toward the reception desk, and down the narrow hallway toward the rear exit, and out into the cold, gray rain.
Chapter Nineteen
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Museum Security had located Dr. Hartman, and Dr. Hartman had located possible sources of the fish trap. It was a matter of deciding in what part of the world the trap had originated (obviously in a place which produced both bamboo and good-sized fish) and then knowing how to retrieve data from the museum’s computerized inventory system. The computer gave them thirty-seven possible bamboo fish traps of appropriate antiquity. Dr. Hartman knew almost nothing about fish and almost everything about primitive construction methods and quite a bit about botany. Thus she was able to organize the hunt.
She pushed her chair back from the computer terminal, and her hair back from her forehead.
“I’m going to say this Palawan Island tribe is the best bet, and then we should check, I’d say, this coastal Borneo collection, and then probably Java. If none of those collections is missing a fish trap, then it’s back to the drawing board. That must be a Smithsonian fish trap and if it is then we can find out where it was stored.”
She led them down the hallway, a party of five now with the addition of a tired-looking museum security man. With Hartman and Rodney leading the way, they hurried past what seemed to Leaphorn a wilderness of branch corridors all lined with an infinity of locked containers stacked high above head level. They turned right and left and left again and stopped, while Hartman unlocked a door. Above his head, Leaphorn noticed what looked like, but surely wasn’t, one of those carved stone caskets in which ancient Egyptians interred their very important corpses. It was covered with a sheet of heavy plastic, once transparent but now rendered translucent with years of dust.
“I have a thing with locks,” Dr. Hartman was saying. “They never want to open for me.”
Leaphorn considered whether it would be bad manners to lift the plastic for a peek. He noticed Chee was looking too.
“Looks like one of those Egyptian mummy cases,” Leaphorn said. “What do you call ’em? But they wouldn’t have a mummy here.”
“I think it is,” Chee said, and lifted the sheet.
“Yeah, a mummy coffin.” His expression registered distaste. “I can’t think of the name either.”
Dr. Hartman had solved the lock. “In here,” she said, and ushered them into a huge, gloomy room occupied by row after row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving racks. As far as Leaphorn could see in every direction every foot of shelf space seemed occupied by something—mostly by what appeared to be locked canisters.
Dr. Hartman examined her list of possible fish trap locations, then walked briskly down the central corridor, checking row numbers.
“Row eleven,” she said, and did an abrupt left turn. She stopped a third of the way down and checked bin numbers.
“Okay, here we are,” she said, and inserted her key in the lock.
“I think I had better handle that,” Rodney said, holding his hand out for the key. “And this is the time to remind everyone that we may be interested in fingerprints in here. So don’t be touching things.”
Rodney unlocked the container. He pulled open the door. It was jammed with odds and ends, the biggest of which was a bamboo device even larger than the fish trap found by the janitor. It occupied most of the bin, with the remaining space filled with what seemed to be a seining nets and other such paraphernalia.
“No luck here,” Rodney said. He closed and locked the door. “On to, where was it? Borneo?”
“I’m having trouble with making this seem real,” Dr. Hartman said. “Do you really think someone killed Henry and left his body in here?”
“No,” Rodney said. “Not really. But he’s missing. And a guard’s been killed. And a fish trap was located out of place. So it’s prudent to look. Especially since we don’t know where else to look.”
The Borneo fisherman’s bin, Dr. Hartman’s second choice, happened to be only two aisles away.
Rodney unlocked it, pulled open the door.
They looked at the top of a human head.
Leaphorn heard Dr. Hartman gasp and Jim Chee suck in his breath. Rodney leaned forward, felt the man’s neck, stepped aside to give Chee a better view. “Is this Highhawk?”
Chee leaned forward. “That’s him.”
Some of the homicide forensic crew was still out at the Twelfth Street entrance and got there fast. So did the homicide sergeant who’d been working the Alice Yoakum affair. Rodney gave him the victim’s identification. He explained about the fish trap and how they had found the body. Dr. Hartman left, looking pale and shaken. Chee and Leaphorn remained. They stood back, away from the activity, trying to keep out of the way. Photographs were taken. Measurements were made. The rigid body of Henry Highhawk was lifted out of the bin and onto a stretcher.
Leaphorn noticed the long hair tied into a Navajo-style bun, he noticed the narrow face, sensitive even in the distortion of death. He noticed the dark mark above the eye which must be a bullet hole and the smear of blood which had emerged from it. He noticed the metal brace supporting the leg, and the shoe lift lengthening it. Here was the man whose name was scrawled on a note in a terrorist’s pocket. The man who had drawn a second terrorist all the way to Arizona, if Leaphorn was guessing correctly, to a curing ceremonial at the Agnes Tsosie place. Here was a white man who wanted to be an Indian—specifically to be a Navajo. A man who dug up the bones of whites to protest whites digging up Indian bones. A man important enough to be killed at what certainly must have been a terrible risk to the man who killed him. Leaphorn looked into Highhawk’s upturned face as it went
