pavement and onto the dirt.
“I’d guess this is the route the casino perps took,” Leaphorn said. “They must have known this mesa, living out here, and they must have known it led them into a dead-end situation.' He laughed. “Another argument for my unorthodox theory of the crime. Having them turn off 191 and get lost would be too much of a coincidence for my taste.”
“Lieutenant,” Chee said, 'why don’t you go ahead and tell us what happened at Jorie’s place.”
“What I think may have happened,” Leaphorn said. “Well, let’s say that our villain knocks on Jorie’s door, points the fatal pistol at Jorie, marches him into Jorie’s office, has Jorie sit in his computer chair, then shoots him point-blank so it will pass as a suicide. Then he turns on the computer, leans over the body, types out the suicide note, leaves the computer on, and departs the scene.”
“Why?” Chee asked. “Actually about four or five whys. I think I can see some of the motives, but some of it’s hazy.”
“Jorie was one of these fellows who thrive on litigation. And being a lawyer and admitted to the Utah bar, he could file all the suits he liked without it costing him much. He had two suits pending against our man. He was even suing Timms. Claimed his little airplane panicked his cattle, causing weight loss, loss of calves, so forth. Another suit claimed Timms violated his grazing lease with that unauthorized landing strip. But Timms isn’t my choice of villains. Another one of Jorie’s suits was aimed at canceling our villain’s Bureau of Land Management lease.”
“We’re talking about Mr Gershwin, of course,” Chee said. “Aren’t we?”
“In theory, yes,” Leaphorn said.
“All right,” Chee said. “What’s next?”
“Now he has eliminated one of his two problems - the enemy and his troublesome lawsuits. But not the other one.”
“The money,” Bernie said. “You mean he’d only get a third of that?”
“In my theory, I think it’s a little more complicated,” Leaphorn replied. He looked back at Chee. “You remember in that suicide note, how he told the FBI where to find his two partners, how he stressed that they had sworn never to be taken alive. If they were caught, they wanted to go into history for the number of cops they had killed.”
“His plan to eliminate them,” Chee said, and produced a wry laugh. “It probably would have worked. If those guys were militia members, they’d have their heads full of how the FBI behaved at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Frankly, if I was going in with the SWAT team, I think I’d be blazing away.”
“There must have seemed to be a flaw in that plan, though. Our villain had to wonder how the suicide note would be found. No one had any reason to suspect Jorie. Not a clue to any of the identities. So our villain solved that by finding himself a not-very-bright retired cop who he could trust to tip off the FBI without getting him involved in it.”
“I’ll be damned,” Chee said. “I wondered how you happened to be the one who found Jorie’s body.”
“What was the rush?” Bernie asked. “Sooner or later Jorie would have been missed. Somebody would have gone out to see about him. You know how people out here are.”
“My theoretical villain didn’t think he could wait for that. He didn’t want to risk the cops catching his partners before the cops knew about their plan to go down killing cops. Captured alive, they’d know just exactly who’d turned them in. They’d even the score and get off easier by testifying against him.”
“Yeah,” Bernie said. “That makes sense.”
Chee was leaning forward now. He tapped Leaphorn’s shoulder. “Look. Lieutenant, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Like I thought you weren’t very bright.”
“Matter of fact I wasn’t. He got almost exactly what he wanted out of me.”
Which was true, but Chee let that hang.
“The only thing that went wrong was his partners must have smelled something in the wind. They didn’t go home like they were supposed to—safe in the notion that the police hadn’t a clue to who they were. They didn’t wait for the SWAT teams to arrive and mow them down. They slipped away and hid somewhere.”
“The old Mormon mine,” Chee said. “So why didn’t the FBI find them there?”
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe they were somewhere else when the federal agent took a look. Maybe they went home, as our villain probably told them to do, and then got uneasy and came back to Ironhand’s dad’s hideaway, to wait and see what happened. Or maybe the federals didn’t look hard enough. They’d have had no way of knowing
