Taka was nodding. “They are all there is,” he said.
“We’ll call them when you are finished here,” Leaphorn said, glancing at Rostik.
“I’m finished,” Rostik said to Taka. “I’ll just need to know where we can reach you if we need to know something else.”
“How about a friend here? Somebody you can stay with tonight?”
Taka thought. He gave Leaphorn a name, the son of another of the high school teachers.
Rostik left. They made the calls on the colonel’s telephone and Roanhorse took Taka in hand. He’d deliver him to the house of the friend.
“I’ll lock the place up,” Captain Largo said. “We’ll keep an eye on it until the feds go over it.”
“One last look at the darkroom,” Leaphorn said. “No one will ever know.”
With Largo peering over his shoulder, he went through the stack of prints in the dryer basket?eleven photographs of segments of the same outcropping of what seemed to be part of a long basaltic ridge. They were taken?or seemed to be?from the same viewpoint, as if the camera with a telescopic lens had been shifted slightly on a tripod for each exposure.
“Landscapes,” Largo said. “If those are his landscapes he’s not going to get rich with them.”
“No,” Leaphorn said, and placed them back in the dryer basket. “You recognize the place?”
“They could have been taken any of a hundred places,” Largo said. “It just looked like a big bunch of extruded lava. Fairly old.
Could be out there around Ship Rock. Could be down in the malpais south of Grants. Could be over east of Black Mesa. Could be lots of places.”
On the porch, Largo paused to lock the front door.
“Can you think of any reason those pictures might have been taken?” Leaphorn asked.
“None,” Largo said. “No idea why any teenage kid does anything.”
“They might have been taken by the colonel,” Leaphorn said. “He was a photographer, too.”
Largo nodded. “True,” he said. But he wasn’t particularly interested.
“Odd though,” Leaphorn said. “When he feels better I might ask him.”
“Maybe the colonel did take them,” Largo said. “But so what. People are always taking pictures of rocks. They think they see a shape like a duck, or Ronald Reagan, or God knows what.”
“You think the boy did it?”
“The killing? I don’t. How about you?”
Leaphorn shook his head. The sort of a shake that avoids an answer.
“I’ve got another question,” Leaphorn said. “While Chee is a common name among us Dinee, unfortunately, it is not all that damn common. How the hell did your Jim Chee get himself mixed up with this?”
Largo’s expression was grim. “I intend to find out.”
“So do I,” Leaphorn said. Chapter 14
JANET PETE HAD not liked the idea. Basically, no matter what she said, Jim Chee understood that she hadn’t liked it because she hadn’t trusted him. At worst, she thought he might betray her. Chee doubted that she really believed that, although the possibility that she did lingered in his memory. And rankled. At best, she wasn’t certain she could depend on his discretion. On his good judgment. That rankled, too. In a way, that was even worse.
Chee had finally let his temper show. That was a weakness new to him, and he realized it. He explained it to himself as a product of raw nerves; of a hand which, with every twinge, reminded him it might never be fully useful again; of traumatic memories which recalled his failure to perform his duty. However he explained it, he didn’t like the way it felt.
“Janet,” he said. “Spare me all that lawyer talk. I’ve told you I won’t ask the old man for a confession. I won’t ask him what he was doing out there that night. Or how he got there. Or what the hell caused him to shoot Nez. I just want to ask him about the story he told to the professor. Just why he thinks the Enemy Way sing was done for all those horse thieves, and the Ghostway Chant added for one of them. I won’t ask him anything that would make any sense to the FBI. Or to you either, for that matter.”
That had touched a nerve. Janet’s voice turned chilly.
“I’ll spare you the lawyer talk. You spare me the ‘I’m more Indian than you are’ crap. Okay?”
Chee hesitated. “Right,” he said. “Sorry about that.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “But you play by the rules. I’m going to be there every minute. Ashie Pinto only answers what I want him to answer. You two speak better Navajo than I do, so if I want you to explain a question, you by God explain it until I understand what you’re getting at or it doesn’t get answered. Understood?”
Chee had understood perfectly.
Janet Pete set it up for three that afternoon and Chee took a cab down to the County Detention Center where federal prisoners were being held. It was a sunny, windless autumn afternoon with a fringe of high clouds drifting in from the northwest, reminding him that the TV weatherman had reported snow in Flagstaff last night and the front?as always?was drifting eastward. He showed his credentials to the desk clerk and a deputy jailer escorted him to the visitors’ room.
Janet Pete was waiting. She sat behind a long wooden table in a straight wooden chair looking small and tired and beautiful.
“Yaa’ eh t’eeh,” Chee began, and swallowed it and said, “Hello, Janet,” instead.
