old Mr Timms, trying to defraud his insurance company, and Mr Gershwin, trying to get rid of a lawsuit.”
“Doesn’t do a lot for one’s opinion of humanity,” Leaphorn said.
Louisa was still looking thoughtful. “I’ll bet you know this district court clerk personally, don’t you? If I’d call the federal district court and asked for the court clerk, I’d get shifted around four or five times, put on hold, and finally get somebody who’d tell me he couldn’t release that information, or I had to drive up to Denver and get it from the judge or something like that.' Louisa was sounding slightly resentful. “This all-encompassing, eternal, universal, everlasting good-old-boy network. You do know him, don’t you?”
“I confess,” Leaphorn said. “But you know, it’s a small world up here in this empty country. Work as a cop as long as I did, you know about everybody who has anything to do with the law.”
“I guess so,” Louisa said. “So he said he’d trot down and look it up for you?”
“I think it’s just punch the proper keys on his computer and up comes Jorie, Everett, Plaintiff, and a list of petitions filed under that name. Something like that. He said this Jorie did a lot of business with the federal court. And he was also suing our Mr Timms. Some sort of a claim he was violating rights of neighboring leaseholders by unauthorized use of BLM land for an airport.”
“Well, now. That’s nice. A Department of Defense spokesman would call that peripheral damage.”
“Peripheral benefit in this case,” Leaphorn said.
“It’s collateral damage. But how about the suicide note?”
“Remember it wasn’t handwritten on paper,” Leaphorn said. “It was typed into a computer. Anyone could have done it. And remember that last manhunt. One of the perps turned up dead and the FBI declared him a suicide. That might have given somebody the idea that the feds would go for that notion again.”
Louisa laughed. “You know what I’m wondering? Did the neat little trick Mr Timms tried to pull off suggest to retired lieutenant Joe Leaphorn that Gershwin might have seen the same opportunity to deal with a lawsuit?”
Leaphorn grinned. “As a matter of fact, I think it did.'
Near the crest of Washington Pass he pulled off the pavement onto a dirt track that led through a grove of Ponderosa pines. He pulled to a stop at the edge of a cliff and gestured eastward. Below them lay a vast landscape dappled with cloud shadows and late-morning sunlight and rimmed north and east by the shapes of mesas and mountains. They stood on the rimrock, just looking.
“Wow,” Louisa said. “I never get enough of this.”
“It’s home country for me,” Leaphorn said. “Emma used to get me to drive up here and look at it those times I was thinking of taking a job in Washington.' He pointed northeast. “We lived right down there when I was a boy, about ten miles down between the Two Grey Hills Trading Post and Toadlena. My mother planted my umbilical cord under a pinon on the hill behind our hogan.' He chuckled. “Emma knew the legend. That’s the binding the wandering child can never break.”
“You still miss her, don’t you?”
“I will always miss her,” Leaphorn said.
Louisa put her arm around him and hugged.
“Due east,” she said. “That hump of clouds. Could that be Mount Taylor?”
“It is, and that’s why its other name—I should say one of its other names—is Mother of Rains. The westerlies are pushed up there, and the mist becomes rain in the colder air and then the clouds drift on, dumping the moisture before they get to Albuquerque.”
“
“And due north, - maybe forty miles, there’s Ship Rock sticking up like a finger pointing at the sky, and, beyond, that blue bump on the horizon is the nose of Sleeping Ute Mountain.”
“Scene of the crime,” Louisa said.
Leaphorn said nothing. He was frowning, looking north. He drew in a deep breath, let it out.
“What?” Louisa said. “Why this sudden look of worry?”
He shook his head.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Let’s drive on down to Two Grey Hills. I want to call Chee. I want to make sure the Bureau sent some people in
