The Wailing Wind

expectantly.

'A connection,' she said. 'Does it connect to the Legend of the Wailing Woman or just to Gallup's richest man shooting his swindler?'

'Probably neither,' Leaphorn said. 'It's very shaky, very foggy.' But as he said that he knew he would tell her about it, discuss it with this white woman. With that knowledge came the familiar guilty feeling. This had been one of the ten thousand reasons he'd loved Emma—this business of laying the problems and troubles of his work before her and finding as he talked, as he measured her reactions, the fog tended to lift and new ideas emerge.

He shouldn't share with another woman this special link he'd had with Emma. But he had done it before with Louisa—a sign of his weakness. And so he turned his notebook to a blank page, got out his pen, and began drawing.

Louisa laughed. 'A map,' she said. 'Why did I know there would be a map.'

Leaphorn found himself grinning. It was a habit he was often kidded about. The dominant feature on the wall in his Criminal Investigation Division office at Navajo Tribal Police headquarters had been an enlarged version of the Indian Country map of the American Automobile Association—a map defaced with hundreds of pinheads, their colors identifying incidents, events, or individuals whom Leaphorn considered significant. The black pins represented places where Navajo Wolves had been reported being seen or where complaints of other witchcraft activities of these mythical 'skinwalkers' had been registered. The red ones marked homes of known bootleggers, blue ones dope dealers, white ones cattle thieves, and so forth. Some were footnoted in the precise and tiny script he used, others coded with symbols only Lieutenant Leaphorn understood. Everyone in the law-and-order community seemed to know of this map, and of the smaller versions Leaphorn kept in his vehicle—mapping out whatever case he happened to be working on at the time.

'I can't deny it,' Leaphorn said. 'I admit I like maps. They help me sort out my thinking. And on this map, here's Wiley Denton's mansion, where he shot McKay. The straight line is Interstate Forty and the railroad running into Gallup. And over here…' He drew a large rectangle.

'Here is Fort Wingate.' He created more squares, circles, and symbols and used the pen as a pointer, identifying them.

'Gallup,' he said. 'And over here's where Doherty's body was found, and this is McGaffey School.'

Louisa examined the sketch. 'Lots of big empty blank spaces,' she said. 'And you haven't told me what McGaffey School has to do with any of this. And where's your mark for the Wailing Woman?'

Leaphorn tapped a spot on the edge of his Fort Wingate square closest to the McGaffey square. 'I think that should be about here,' he said.

Louisa looked surprised. 'Really? I hope you're going to explain this now.'

'Maybe not,' Leaphorn said. 'I'm afraid you might take it seriously.'

'I won't,' she said, but her expression denied that.

'Think of it in terms of connections,' Leaphorn said. 'There seem to be three, with one of them very fuzzy.' He held up one finger. 'Two shooting victims. Both had collected information on that legendary lost Golden Calf mine. McKay seemed to have claimed he'd found it. Doherty seemed to be looking for it. McKay goes to meet Denton and Denton shoots him. Doherty had Denton's unlisted telephone number written in his notebook.'

Leaphorn paused.

Louisa nodded, held up one finger, said: 'One connection.'

Leaphorn held up two fingers.

'Doherty did some of his research out at the Fort Wingate archives. Probably McKay did, too. Natural enough, because in those days when prospecting was booming, the fort was the only military base out here. It was supposed to provide them protection from us Indians.'

Louisa frowned. 'Yes. Seems natural they would. But that doesn't seem to mean much. What are you looking for?'

Leaphorn then held up three fingers—one of them bent.

'Now we come to the vague and foggy one. When Denton shot McKay it was Halloween evening.' He stopped, shook his head. 'I'm sort of embarrassed to even mention this.'

'Go ahead. Halloween gets my attention.'

'The McKinley County sheriffs department had two calls that evening. One was the Denton shooting McKay business out here.' Leaphorn pointed to Denton's house on the map. 'And the other was a call from McGaffey reporting a woman screaming and wailing out on the east side of Fort Wingate.'

'Oh,' said Louisa. 'The Wailing Woman legend comes into play at last. Right?'

'Not quite yet.' Leaphorn said. 'And maybe we should call it the Wailing Wind legend. Question of what, or who, was doing the wailing. Anyway the sheriff sent a deputy out and called Fort Wingate security people. They scouted around and couldn't find anything and decided it was just some sort of Halloween prank.'

'So how do we get to the Wailing Woman legend?'

'Months later,' Leaphorn said. 'Denton had started doing his time in that federal white-collar prison in Texas and he began running ads in the Gallup Independent, Farmington Times, and so forth. Personal ads, addressed to Linda, and signed Wiley, saying he loved her and asking her to come home. I asked around, learned that Linda Denton hadn't been around since the killing. That seemed odd. I checked. Never reported missing, except her parents had talked to the sheriff about it—thinking something must have happened to her.'

'No wonder,' Louisa said. 'What happened next?'

'Nothing,' Leaphorn said. 'She was a mature married woman. No mystery to the killing. Denton did it. Confessed he did it. Worked out a plea bargain. Dead case. The official theory was that Mrs. Denton had been working with McKay and when the deal went sour and he got shot, she just took off. No crime. No reason to look for her.'