gray powder. Would an FBI lab technician be sorting out Joe Leaphorn’s fingerprints? He checked his memory. No, he had handled everything carefully, by the edges.
Now he spread the prints on the cabinet top in two neat rows and examined them methodically. They were all the standard eight by ten inches on black-and-white glossy paper. All seemed to be exposures of parts of the same dark basaltic outcrop. They seemed to have been shot from a considerable distance through a telescopic lens. Or perhaps they had been magnified in the enlarger. The same negative had been used to make several of the prints, each blown up to a different magnification. But the angle in all was almost exactly the same?as if all the negatives had been exposed from the same location, but had been made by using lenses of different focal lengths and by shifting the camera on the tripod. All included the same segment of that outcrop. Some more of it, some less, depending on the lens. But in all, the same features were near the center of the print.
Leaphorn showed them to Bourebonette and explained what he was thinking.
“Why telescopic?” she asked.
“Notice this juniper in the foreground here in this one? Here it is in this other one. Notice how the relationship in size has changed. A telescopic lens compresses the distance like that.”
Bourebonette nodded. “Sure,” she said. ‘That’s the way the optics would work.”
“You know the Reservation pretty well. Does this look familiar?”
She studied the prints. “They’re all the same place, obviously. But we don’t get enough of it to put it in the landscape.”
“Have you seen it?”
She laughed. “Probably. Or something like it. It could be about forty places in the malpais down around Grants. Or maybe out in the Bisti badlands, or in the Zuni Mountains, or on the Black Mesa side of Monument Valley, or down around the Hopi Buttes, or out here beyond Ship Rock toward Littlewater or Sanostee. Or one of those volcanic throats east of Mount Taylor, or?” She shook her head, and handed the prints to Leaphorn. “Hard to tell. Any place that lava bubbled up through the cracks during a volcanic period. And that happened a lot out here.”
“It would be near here someplace, I think,” Leaphorn said. “We can presume Ji or his son shot them. Do you have any idea why either one would do that? Or make all these prints?”
“No idea,” she said. “But they certainly weren’t taken for the beauty of the landscape. Could you call the boy and ask him?
Didn’t you say he was staying with some friends here?”
“They decided against that. They’re taking him to Albuquerque to stay with some relatives instead. He won’t be there yet. But let’s see if we can locate the negatives. Maybe they’ll include enough background to tell us where this is.”
They spent almost thirty minutes sorting negative files without finding anything useful.
Leaphorn pulled the wastebasket from under the sink, sorted through it, and extracted a crumpled sheet of photographic paper. It was part of the same scene, blown up larger on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet. The print was much darker. Overexposed in the enlarger, Leaphorn guessed, and thrown away. He spread it on the cabinet, looked at Bourebonette, raised his eyebrows in a question.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe big enough to work with.” She looked at Leaphorn and grinned. “But work on what?”
“I think maybe we’re just wasting our time,” he said and put the picture back in the wastebasket.
“I’m thinking you’re in a strange business,” she said.
“Oh, not usually,” he said. “All this is an oddity.”
“A single-minded photographer,” she said. “Rocks and this girl.” She touched the portrait of the teenager Leaphorn had noticed earlier. “Several of these. Probably the boy’s girlfriend, I’d guess.”
“It looks like it’s a photocopy,” Leaphorn said. “Not very good.”
“Out of this, maybe,” she said. The Ship Rock High School yearbook was on the shelf behind the enlarger.
They found the girl’s portrait among the cheerleaders. She was a junior. Jenifer Dineyahze.
“I think we should go find Jenifer Dineyahze,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe she can tell us something useful.” But even as he said it, he doubted it.
Jenifer Dineyahze proved to be a rider of the Ship Rock school bus.
“It’s a little tough to tell you exactly where the Dineyahzes live,” the acting assistant principal told them, and he dug a map out of his desk drawer and showed them which school bus she rode and just about where the bus picked her up. “Back in here,” he said, putting the tip of his pencil on the slope of Beautiful Mountain. “Or here, maybe.” And he moved it a little toward Sanostee. “You’ll see the place where the track takes off to the left.”
Before they left Ship Rock, Leaphorn filled the tank of his patrol car?as he always did on junkets that would take him onto the back roads. But at least this errand took them south and west, toward Window Rock and home. And it would take them past the place where Jim Chee had arrested Ashie Pinto. It would give him a look at the rock formation where the painter had done his vandalism.
“What do you think you’re going to learn?” Bourebonette asked.
“Frankly, nothing,” Leaphorn said. “I think tomorrow I’ll get on the telephone and try to get hold of the boy in Albuquerque and I’ll ask him about the pictures. But it’s sort of on the way home?or back to your car. And you never know.”
They turned west off Route 666 toward Red Rock on Navajo 33.
Bourebonette pointed south toward Rol Hai Rock and then toward Barber Peak across the highway. “Those pictures,” she said. “It could be a little piece of either one of those.”
“Or even of some of those rays that run out from Ship Rock,” he said. “Any new ideas by now of why he took them?”
