She sat on a sandstone slab in a mixed growth of aspen and spruce, eating her sack lunch, thinking of Sergeant Jim Chee, and facing north to take advantage of the view. Pastora Peak and the Carrizo Mountains blocked off the Colorado Rockies, and the Lukachukai Forest around her closed off Utah's peaks. But an infinity of New Mexico's empty corner spread below her, and to the left lay the northern half of Arizona. This immensity, dappled with cloud shadows and punctuated with assorted mountain peaks, was enough to lift the human spirit. At least it did for Bernie. So did remembering the day when she was a brand-new rookie recruit in the Navajo Tribal Police and Jim Chee had stopped here to show her his favorite view of the Navajo Nation. That day a thunderstorm was building its cloud towers over Chaco Mesa miles to the northeast and another was taking shape near Tsoodzil, the Turquoise Mountain of the East. But the rolling grassland below them was bright under the afternoon sun. Chee had pointed to a little gray column of dirt and debris moving erratically over the fields across Highway 66. 'Dust devil,' she had said, and it was then she had her first glimpse behind Chee's police badge.
'Dust devil,' he repeated, thoughtfully. 'Yes. We have the same idea. I was taught to see in those nasty little twisters the Hard Flint Boys struggling with the Wind Children. The good
She finished her thermos of coffee, trying to decide what to do about Chee. If anything. She still hadn't come to any conclusions, but her mother seemed to have deemed him acceptable. 'This Mr. Chee,' she'd said. 'I heard he's born to the Slow Talking Dineh, and his daddy was a Bitter Water.' That remark had come apropos of absolutely nothing, and her mother hadn't expanded on it. Nor did she need to. It meant her mother had been asking around, and had satisfied herself that since Bernie was born to the Ashjjhi Dineh, and for Bead People, none of the Navajo incest taboos were at risk if Bernie smiled at Chee. Smiling was as far as it had gone, and maybe as far as she wanted it to go. Jim Chee was proving hard to understand.
But she was still thinking about him when she pulled her patrol car up the third little wash north of Cove and saw the sun glinting off the back window of a truck—pale blue as described and blocking the narrow track up the bottom of the dry wash.
New Mexico plates. Bernie jotted down the numbers. She stepped out of her car, walked up the wash, noticing the vehicle's windows were open. And stopped. A rifle was in the rack across the back window. Who would walk off and leave that to be stolen?
'Hello,' Bernie shouted, and waited.
'Hey. Anyone home?' And waited again.
No answer. She unsnapped the flap on her holster, touched the butt of the pistol, and moved silently to the passenger-side door.
A man wearing jeans and a jean jacket was lying on his side on the front seat, head against the driver-side door, a red gimme cap covering most of his face, knees drawn up a little.
Sleeping one off, thought Bernie, who'd been in police work now long enough to recognize that. But she didn't detect the sick odor of whiskey sleep. No sign of motion. No sign of breathing, either.
She sucked in a deep breath, moved a fraction closer to the door. '
Strands of the man's long, curly blonde hair were visible around the cap. His jean jacket and shoes were dusty. It seemed to Officer Manuelito he was emphatically unconscious if not dead. She opened the door, grabbed the door post, pulled herself up on the running board. She pushed up the bottom of the jean-clad leg and reached for his ankle to check for a pulse. The ankle was cold. No pulse, and as cold as death.
The feel of the lifeless ankle under her hand abruptly replaced in Bernie's mind her awareness of herself as cop with an awareness of herself as Navajo. A thousand years before the Dineh were aware of bacteria or viruses, they were aware of the contagion spread by the newly dead and the dying. The elders called this danger
Back at her patrol car she gave the dispatcher her report.
'Natural, you think?' he asked. 'No decapitation. No blood. No bullet holes. No smell of gunpowder. Nothing interesting?'
'It looked like he just died,' Bernie said. 'One bottle too many.'
'Then I've got an ambulance over at Toadlena, if it's still there. Hold on a minute and I'll let you know.'
Bernie held on. The hand holding the mike was dirty, smeared with what looked like soot. From the dead man's shoe, she guessed, or his pant leg. She grimaced, switched the mike to her left hand, and wiped the dirt away on the leg of her uniform trousers.
'Okay, Bernie. Got him. He should be there in less than an hour.'
That proved to be overly optimistic. An hour and almost twenty-two minutes had plodded past before the ambulance and its crew arrived, and to Bernie it seemed a lot longer. She sat in her car thinking of the corpse and who he might have been. Then got out and scouted around the pickup to reassure herself she hadn't overlooked anything—such as a row of bullet holes through the windshield, or a pool of dried blood on the floor around the brake pedal, or bloodstains on the steering wheel, or maybe on the rifle in the window rack, or a suicide note clutched in the victim's hand.
She found nothing like that, but she noticed that the victim's jeans had collected lots of those troublesome chamisa seeds in their travels, and so had the sock on the ankle she had tested—chamisa seeds, sandburs, and other of those stickery, clinging seeds by which dry-country plants spread their species. The rubber sole of the sneaker on the foot she'd touched had also accumulated five goathead stickers—the curse of bike riders. She sat in her car, considering that, and climbed out again to inspect the local flora. Here it was above nine thousand feet, not the climate for chamisa. She found none now, nor any sandburs or goatheads. She collected the seedpods from a cluster of asters, gone to seed early at this high, cold altitude, and which just possibly might grow in the hotter climate of her Shiprock flower bed. She added the seeds from two growths of columbine and from a vine she couldn't identify. And being tidy, she went back to the columbines and salvaged the little Prince Albert pipe tobacco tin she'd noticed among the weeds. It was dirty, but it was better that trying to carry her seed collection loose in her pocket.
Chapter Two
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