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recently shot. Two and two make four and the ballistics test raises a problem. Even the FBI won’t be able to shrug that off.” 86 of 102

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“I think the rifle doesn’t exist,” Leaphorn said.

“Oh?”

“It’s my impression that Demott didn’t want to involve his sister. So he didn’t want the Nez thing connected to the Maryboy thing because with Nez, you have his sister indicted as an accessory.”

“I see,” Chee said, a little hesitantly. “But how about Nez? Won’t he be talking about it?”

“Nez isn’t much for talking. And he’s going to think I pushed Demott off the cliff to keep Demott from shooting him.”

“Yeah. I see that.”

“I think Demott did this partly to keep the Breedlove Corporation from strip-mining the ranch. Ruining his creek. So he left the world a suicide letter certifying that he was on Ship Rock with Hal a week after the famous birthday. Add that to Hal signing the register a week after the same birthday.”

“One’s as phony as the other,” Chee said.

“Is that right?” Leaphorn said. “I would like to sit there and listen while you try to persuade the agent in charge that he should reopen his Maryboy homicide, throw away a written point-of-death confession on grounds that Demott was lying about his motive. I can just see that. ‘And what was his real motive, Mr. Chee?’ His real motive was trying to prove that accidental death that happened eleven years ago actually happened on a different weekend, and then—” Chee was laughing. Leaphorn stopped.

“All right,” Chee said. “I get your point. All it would do is waste a lot of work, maybe get Mrs. Breedlove indicted for something or other, and give the ranch back to the Breedlove Corporation.”

“And get a big commission to the attorney,” Leaphorn added.

“Yeah,” Chee said.

“Tomorrow, when the news is out, I’ll send Shaw details about the suicide note. And give him back what’s left of his money. Now, what were you going to tell me about cattle rustling?”

“It sounds trivial after this,” Chee said, “but Officer Manuelito arrested Dick Finch today. He was loading Maryboy heifers into his camper.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing fiction involving Navajo Tribal Police, I lean upon the professionals for help. In this book, it was provided by personnel of both the N.T.P. and the Navajo Rangers, and especially by old friend Captain Bill Hillgartner. My thanks also to Chief Leonard G. Butler, Lieutenants Raymond Smith and Clarence Hawthorne, and Sergeants McConnel Wood and Wilfred Tahy. If any technical details are wrong, it wasn’t because they didn’t try to teach me. Robert Rosebrough, author of The San Juan Mountains, loaned me his journal of a Ship Rock climb and gave me other help.

PerfectBound e-Book Exclusive Extras

Leaphorn, Chee,

and the Navajo Way

I

thought you might like to know the roots of my two favorite characters — Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (now retired) and Sgt. Jim Chee, both of the Navajo Tribal Police.

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green

“crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers — my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.

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When I needed such a cop for what I intended to be a very minor character in The Blessing Way (1970), this sheriff came to mind. I added on Navajo cultural and religious characteristics, and he became Leaphorn in fledgling form. Luckily for me and Leaphorn and all of us, the late Joan Kahn, then mystery editor of what was then Harper & Row, required some substantial rewriting of that manuscript to bring it up to standards and I — having begun to see the possibilities of Leaphorn — gave him a much better role in the rewrite and made him more Navajo.

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of People of Darkness

(1980) make sense — and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheevy’s “days of old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in a universe of consumerism.

I’ll confess here that Leaphorn is the fellow I’d prefer to have living next door and that we share an awful lot of ideas and attitudes.

I’ll admit that Chee would sometimes test my patience, as did those students upon whom I modeled him. But both of them in their ways, represent the aspects of the Navajo Way, which I respect and admire. And I will also confess that I never start one of these books in which they appear without being motivated by a desire to give