Leaphorn stopped, knowing he was wasting time.
“Good ideas,” Chee said, knowing he wasn’t fooling Leaphorn. “Anything I can do for you?”
“It’s nothing important,” Leaphorn said. “Just something that’s been sort of sticking in my mind for years. Just curiosity really.” Chee tried his own coffee and found it absolutely delicious. He waited for Leaphorn to decide how he wanted to ask this favor.
“It was eleven years this fall,” Leaphorn said. “I was assigned to the Chinle office then and we had a young man disappear from the lodge at Canyon de Chelly. Fellow named Harold Breedlove. He and his wife were there celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary.
His birthday, too. The way his wife told it, he got a telephone call. He tells her he has to meet someone about a business deal. He says he’ll be right back and he drives off in their car. He doesn’t come back. Next morning she calls the Arizona Highway Patrol.
They call us.”
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Leaphorn paused, understanding that such a strong reaction to what seemed like nothing more sinister than a man taking a vacation from his wife needed an explanation. “They’re a big ranching family. The Breedloves. The Lazy B ranch up in Colorado, leases in New Mexico and Arizona, all sorts of mining interests, and so forth. The old man ran for Congress once. Anyway, we put out a description of the car. It was a new green Land Rover. Easy to spot out here. And about a week later an officer spots it. It had been left up an arroyo beside that road that runs from 191 over to the Sweetwater chapter house.”
“I’m sort of remembering that case now,” Chee said. “But very dimly. I was new then, working way over at Crownpoint.” And, Chee thought, having absolutely nothing to do with the Breedlove case. So where could this conversation possibly be leading?
“No sign of violence at the car, that right?” Chee asked. “No blood. No weapon. No note. No nothing.”
“Not even tracks,” Leaphorn said. “A week of wind took care of that.”
“And nothing stolen out of the car, if I remember it right,” Chee said. “Seems like I remember somebody saying it still had an expensive audio system in it, spare tire, everything still there.” Leaphorn sipped his coffee, thinking. Then he said, “So it seemed then. Now I don’t know. Maybe some mountain climbing equipment was stolen.”
“Ah,” Chee said. He put down the coffee cup. Now he understood where Leaphorn was heading.
“That skeleton up on Ship Rock,” Leaphorn said. “All I know about it is what I read in the
“Not that I know of,” Chee said. “There’s no evidence of foul play, but Captain Largo got the FBI laboratory people to take a look at everything. Last I heard, they hadn’t come up with anything.”
“Nothing much but bare bones to work with, I heard,” Leaphorn said. “And what was left of the clothing. I guess people who climb mountains don’t take along their billfolds.”
“Or engraved jewelry,” Chee added. “Or anything else they’re not using. At least this guy didn’t.”
“You get an estimate on his age?”
“The pathologist said between thirty and thirty-five. No sign of any health problems which affected bone development. I guess you don’t expect health problems in people who climb mountains. And he probably grew up someplace with lots of fluoride in the drinking water.”
Leaphorn chuckled. “Which means no fillings in his teeth and no help from any dental charts.”
“We had lots of that kind of luck on this one,” Chee said.
Leaphorn drained his cup, put it down. “How was he dressed?”
Chee frowned. It was an odd question. “Like a mountain climber,” he said. “You know. Special boots with those soft rubber soles, all the gear hanging off of him.”
“I was thinking about the season,” Leaphorn said. “Black as that Ship Rock is, the sun gets it hot in the summer—even up there a mile and a half above sea level. And in the winter, it gets coated with ice. The snow packs in where it’s shaded. Layers of ice form.”
“Yeah,” Chee said. “Well, this guy wasn’t wearing cold-weather gear. Just pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Maybe some sort of thermal underwear, though. He was on a sort of shelf a couple of hundred feet below the peak. Way too high for the coyotes to get to him, but the buzzards and ravens had been there.”
“Did the rescue team bring everything down? Was there anything that you’d expect to find that wasn’t there? I mean, you’d expect to find if you knew anything about the gear climbers carry.”
“As far as I know nothing was missing,” Chee said. “Of course, stuff may have fallen down into cracks. The birds would have scattered things around.”
“A lot of rope, I guess,” Leaphorn said.
“Quite a bit,” Chee said. “I don’t know how much would be normal. I know climbing rope stretches a lot. Largo sent it to the FBI lab to see if they could tell if a knot slipped, or it broke, or what.”
“Did they bring down the other end?”
“Other end?”
Leaphorn nodded. “If it broke, there’d be the other end. He would have had it secured someplace. A piton driven in or tied to something secure. In case he slipped.”
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