Leaphorn avoided the blood and squatted beside the defaced wallpaper.
“He left a message?”
“He left two,” Rostik said.
“‘Save Taka,’” Leaphorn read. “Is that what it says?”
“His son’s name is Taka,” Rostik said. “According to the neighbors.”
Leaphorn was far more interested by the other message. Ji apparently had written them in his own blood by moving a shaky finger across the wall. SAVE TAKA above, and below it: LIED TO CHEE.
“Any theories about this bottom one?” Leaphorn asked.
“Not yet,” Rostik said.
Leaphorn pushed himself erect, grunting. He was getting old for the squatting position. He looked at Captain Largo. Largo looked back, expressionless.
“Unfortunately, Chee is a common name among Navajos,” Largo said. “Like Smith in Chicago, or Martinez in Albuquerque.”
Leaphorn drifted into the kitchen, looking at tidiness, touching nothing. Huan Ji’s bedroom was fairly large, but suggested a monastery cell?a narrow bed tightly made, a chair, a small desk, a dresser, a chest of drawers with what seemed to be a camera bag on top of it. Everything tidy. Nothing to suggest someone lived here. He stood at the desk, looking down at the blotter, the little cup holding paper clips, the pen in its holder.
Behind him, Rostik cleared his throat. “Don’t touch anything. We’ll go through all of this later,” Rostik said. “Everything in here. Everything in the house. With trained people.”
“Of course,” Leaphorn said.
Taka’s room was tidy by Leaphorn’s standards, if not by Huan Ji’s. An identical narrow bed, covers tight. Similar furniture. But the boy’s desk was cluttered with books and papers and his dresser was a gallery of photographs. Leaphorn, hands in his jacket pockets, examined these pictures. Most of them were of a girl, a moderately pretty Navajo of perhaps sixteen. One of these seemed to be a school yearbook portrait, re-photographed and blown up to eleven-by-fourteen-inch size. The others were candid shots, apparently taken when the subject wasn’t looking. Some included two or three other youngsters, but always with the girl. Many of them had been taken, judging from the compressed background, with a telescopic lens.
The back porch was screened, a repository for stored items. A door opened from it into a side room which Leaphorn guessed had been tacked on as a third bedroom. The door bore the stenciled legend: DARKROOM. KNOCK BEFORE OPENING. He glanced at Rostik, nodded at him, turned the knob. It was dark inside, the windows covered with opaque plastic, the air heavy with the smell of acids. Leaphorn switched on the overhead light. It was a small room, sparsely furnished. Along one side, a table bore a small enlarger, a set of developing tanks, and an array of the inevitable chemical containers. Beside that was another table and on it an open-faced cabinet held boxes which Leaphorn presumed held photographic paper. His gaze wandered over all of this and returned to the developing trays and the electric print dryer beside them. Eight-by-ten prints were stacked in the basket below the dryer.
Leaphorn picked up the top one by the edges. It was a black-and-white photograph of what seemed to be a rugged, irregular outcropping of rock. He replaced the print and picked up the one below it. At first he thought it was identical. Then he saw it was apparently another segment of the same outcropping, with some overlapping. He replaced it and reached for a third print.
Rostik touched his elbow.
“I don’t want anything touched,” he said. “The experts may want to go over this room.”
“Then I will leave it for the experts,” Leaphorn said.
On the porch again, he suddenly remembered the professor waiting in the car. He wanted to talk to Largo about Officer Jim Chee, but he didn’t want to wash any Tribal Police laundry in front of Agent Rostik of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. First he would explain things to Bourebonette. He’d tell her to start the engine and turn on the heater. He’d tell her that he wouldn’t be much longer.
As he started across the street, he saw the old white Jeepster turn the corner. It rolled halfway down the block, stopped, began backing away from the cluster of police cars at the Huan Ji house. Then it stopped again, remaining motionless on the street. Guilt, Leaphorn thought. Or perhaps fear struggling with curiosity. Whatever the driver’s motivations, the Jeepster rolled forward again. Leaphorn trotted across the street in front of it to his own car. Bourebonette had rolled down the window. She was watching him.
“It was about what we thought,” he said. “Someone shot Mr. Ji twice. Fatally. No one saw it or heard anything. No suspects. And this?” he nodded toward the Jeepster now pulling into the gravel driveway at the Ji residence “?will probably be Taka, who is Mr. Ji’s son.”
Professor Bourebonette was looking past him at the car. “Does he know?”
“Probably not. Not unless he did it.”
Bourebonette looked down. “How sad.” she said. “How terrible. Is his mother home? Do you think this could?” She stopped.
“Be connected with the Nez homicide?” Leaphorn finished. “Who knows. You don’t see anything on the surface, but?” He shrugged.
Across the street, Rostik and Largo were talking to a slender boy in jeans and a black leather jacket. Largo had his large hand on the boy’s shoulder. They moved through the front door and disappeared into the house.
“I think I’ll go back over there,” Leaphorn said.
“Do they need your help?”
Leaphorn chuckled. “The man in charge is the young man in the gray suit,” he said. “If he wants my help he has shown absolutely no sign of it. I’ll be quick this time.”
Roanhorse was waiting on the porch.
