Dashee nodded.
“The guy on the roof cuts the right wires at the right time. They use a stolen truck with the plates switched, shooting both of the competent security people. They leave total confusion behind, fixing it so they were far away from the scene before roadblocks were up, and so forth. Everything planned. Right?'
“And now this.' Chee waved at the landscape in front of them, dunes stabilized by growths of Mormon tea, stunted junipers, needle grass, and then westward where the Casa Del Eco highlands dropped sharply away into a waste of eroded canyons.
“So?” Dashee asked.
“So why did they come here?”
“Tell me,” Dashee said, 'and then let’s go back to Montezuma Creek and get a loaf of bread and some lunch meat at the store there and have our dinner.”
“Well, first you think maybe they panicked. Figured they’d run into roadblocks if they stayed on the pavement, turned off here, found this old track dead-ended, and just took off.”
“OK,” Dashee said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
“But that doesn’t work because all three of them lived around here, and that Ironhand guy is a Ute. He’d know every road out here. They had a reason to come here.”
“All right,” Dashee said. “So they came here to steal Old Man Timms’s airplane and fly out of our jurisdiction. The FBI liked that one. I liked that one. Everybody liked that one until you went and screwed it up.”
“Call that reason number two, then, and mark it wrong. Now reason number three, currently in favor, is this is the place they had picked to climb down into the canyons and disappear.”
Dashee restarted the engine. “Funny place for that, I’d say, but let’s think about it while we eat.”
“I’d guess this drainage wash here would take you down into Gothic Creek, and then you could follow it all the way down to the San Juan River Canyon, and then if you can get across the river you could go up Butler Wash to just about anywhere. Or downstream a few miles and turn south again up the Chinle Canyon. Lots of places to hide out, but this is sort of an awkward, out-of-the-way place to start walking.”
Dashee shifted into second as they rolled down a rocky slope where the track connected to what the map called ‘unimproved road.'
“If they planned to hole up in the canyons, I’ll bet you they knew what they were doing,” Dashee said.
“I guess so. But then how about Jorie getting out of the truck here and going right home. That’s a long way to walk.”
“Drop it,” Dashee said. “After I eat something and my stomach stops growling at me, I’ll explain it all to you.”
“I want to know how Lieutenant Leaphorn got those identities,” Chee said. “I’m going to find out.”
Chapter Thirteen
Chee scanned the tables in the Anasazi Inn dining room twice. He had looked right past the corner table and the stocky old duffer sitting there with a plump middle-aged woman without recognizing Joe Leaphorn. When he did recognize him on the second take, it came as a sort of a shock. He had seen the Legendary Lieutenant in civilian attire before, but the image he carried in his mind was of Leaphorn in uniform, Leaphorn strictly businesslike, Leaphorn deep in thought. This fellow was laughing at something the woman with him had said.
Chee hadn’t expected the woman—although he should have. When he’d called Leaphorn’s home the answering machine had said, “I’ll be in the Anasazi Inn dining room at eight.” No preamble, no good-bye, just the ten words required. The Legendary Lieutenant at his efficient best, expecting a call, unable to wait for it, rewording his answering machine answer to deal with the problem, handling an affair of the heart, if such it was, just as he’d handle a meeting with a district attorney. The woman dining with him he now recognized as the professor from Northern Arizona University with whom Leaphorn seemed to have something or other going. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of Leaphorn in any sort of romantic situation. Nor to seeing him laughing. That was rare.
What wasn’t rare was the effect this man had on him. Chee had considered it on the drive down to Farmington, had decided he was probably over it by now. He’d had the same feeling as a boy when Hosteen Nakai began teaching him about the Navajo relationship with the world, and at the University of New Mexico when in the presence of the famed Alaska Jack Campbell, who was teaching him early Athabascan culture in Anthropology 209.
He’d tried to describe it to Cowboy, and Cowboy had said, “You mean like a rookie reporting for basketball practice with Michael Jordan, or like a seminary student put on a committee with the pope.” And, yes,
