past him on the police stretcher. What made you so important? Leaphorn wondered. What made Mr. Santillanes polish his pointed shoes and pack his bags and come west to New Mexico looking for you?
What were you planning that drew someone with a pistol into this dusty place to execute you? And if you could hear my questions, if you could speak, would you even know the answer yourself? The body was past now, disappearing down the corridor. Leaphorn glanced at Chee. Chee looked stricken.
Chee had found himself’simultaneously watching what had been Henry Highhawk emerge from the container and watching his own reaction to what he was seeing. He had been a policeman long enough to have conditioned himself to death. He had handled an old woman frozen in her hogan, a teenaged boy who had hanged himself in the restroom at his boarding school, a child backed over by a pickup truck driven by her mother. He had been investigating officer of so many victims of alcohol that he no longer tried to keep them sorted out in his memory. But he had never been involved with the death of someone he’d known personally, someone who interested him, someone he’d been talking to only a matter of minutes before he died. He had rationalized his Navajo conditioning to avoid the dead, but he hadn’t eliminated the ingrained knowledge that while the body died, the
Rodney had been inspecting the items removed from the container where Highhawk’s body had rested. He held up a flat, black box with something round connected to it by wires. “This looks a little modern for a Borneo fishing village,” he said, showing the box to all of them. The box was a miniature Panasonic cassette tape recorder.
“I think it’s Highhawk’s tape recorder,” Chee said. “He had one just like that when he was at Agnes Tsosie’s place. And I saw it again in the office at his place.” Chee could see now that tape recorder was wired to one of those small, battery-operated watches. It was much like the nine-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent model he was wearing except it used hands instead of digital numbers.
“I think it’s wired to turn on the recorder,” Leaphorn said. “Possibly that’s what Highhawk was talking about on that telephone call. Getting that thing fixed.”
Rodney inspected it carefully. He laughed. “If it was, it wasn’t fixed very well,” he said. “If Highhawk did this he doesn’t know any more about electricity than my wife. And she thinks it leaks out of the telephone.” He unwound the wires and removed the watch. Holding it care fully by the edges, he opened the recorder and popped out the miniature tape. He weighed it in his hand, examined it, and put it back in the machine. “Let’s see what we have on this,” he said. “But first, let’s see what else we have in this container.”
Rodney sorted gingerly among the fish nets, bamboo fish spears, canoe paddles, clothing, and assorted items that Chee couldn’t identify. Pressed against the side of the bin, partly obscured by folded twine of fish netting, was something white. It looked like leather. In fact, to Chee it looked like it might be a
“I guess that’s it,” Rodney said. “Except your team will come along and do a proper search and find the murder weapon in there, and the killer’s photograph, fingerprints, and maybe his business card.”
“We’ll catch that later,” the sergeant said. “We’ll get somebody from the museum who knows what’s supposed to be in there and what isn’t.”
“This is the mask Highhawk had been working on,” Chee said. “Or one of them.”
The sergeant retrieved it, turned it over in his hands, examined it. “What’d you say it was?” he asked Chee, and handed it to him.
“It’s the Yeibichai mask. A Navajo religious mask. Highhawk was working on this one, or one just like it, for that mask display downstairs.”
“Oh,” the sergeant said, his curiosity satisfied and his interest exhausted. “Let’s get this over with.”
They followed Highhawk’s body into the bright fluorescent lighting of the conservancy laboratory. When the sergeant finished whatever he wanted to do with him, Henry Highhawk would go from there to the morgue. Now the cause of death seemed apparent. The blackened round mark of what must be a bullet hole was apparent above the left eye. From it a streak of dried blood discolored the side of Highhawk’s face.
The sergeant went through Highhawk’s pockets, spreading the contents on a laboratory table. Wallet, pocketknife, a half-used roll of Tums, three quarters, two dimes, a penny, a key ring bearing six keys, a crumpled handkerchief, a business card from a plumbing company, a small frog fetish carved out of a basaltic rock.
“What the hell is this?” the sergeant said, pushing the frog with his finger.
“It’s a frog fetish,” Leaphorn said.
The sergeant had not been happy to have two strangers and Rodney standing around while he worked. The sergeant had the responsibility, but obviously Rodney had the rank.
“What the hell is a frog fetish?” the sergeant asked.
“It’s connected with the Navajo religion,” Leaphorn said. “Highhawk was part Navajo. He had a Navajo grandmother. He was interested in the culture.”
The sergeant nodded. He looked slightly less hostile.
“No bin key?” Chee asked.
The sergeant looked at him. “Bin key?”
“When he left his office last night, he took the key that unlocks all these bins off a hook beside his door and put it in his pocket,” Chee said. “It was on a little plain steel ring.” The killer probably had taken Highhawk’s key to open the bin and to relock it. Unless of course the killer was another museum employee with his (or her) own key.
“You saw him put the key in his pocket?”
Chee nodded. “He took it off the hook. He put it in his right front pants pocket.”
“No such key in his pocket,” the sergeant said. “What you see here is everything he had on him. From the car keys he was carrying, it looks like he was driving a Ford. You know about that? You know the license number?“
“There was a Ford Mustang parked in the driveway by his house. I’d say about five or six years old. I didn’t notice the license. And I don’t know if it was his,” Chee said.
“We’ll get it from Motor Vehicles Division. It’s probably parked somewhere close to here.”
