'Just barely,' Chee said. 'I never smoked a pipe. Why would he take something like that?'
'The theory is that maybe he wanted the sand in it, for the same reason McKay had it.'
Osborne was grinning, enjoying this. Chee rewarded him with a quizzical look and wasted a few moments pondering.
'Like maybe McKay was pretending it was placer gold sand,' Chee said. 'Using it to persuade Denton he'd found the gold mine he was trying to sell him? Is that it?'
'All I know is the can had some sand in it and according to the case records, a little of what they called 'placer gold dust' mixed in,' said Osborne, 'and Doherty had it with him in his truck. We found it out on the ground. As you know the ambulance crew got there before the crime scene people. Things got knocked around.' Osborne's expression said that was all he intended to say about this subject.
'One more thing that might help me. Could you tell anything from the stuff in his truck, on his boots, clothes. Anything that would give you a hint at where he'd been between leaving Gallup and getting shot?'
'Not much,' Osborne said. He looked at his watch, frowned, and glanced at Chee. 'You're going to ask me what kind of rocks he was walking on, and I can't help you about that.' He pushed back from the table. 'I can tell you he walked through somebody's camp fire, or ash heap, or something. He had soot all over his shoes. And there's something I'd like to ask you about.'
Chee nodded.
Osborne studied him. About to tell Chee something. Or ask him something. Then he picked up his notebook and paged through it. 'Maybe those numbers will mean something to you,' he said.
'Numbers?'
'On that insurance card of McKay's that Doherty copied. I remembered I copied them down. D2187. That ring any bells with you? It didn't with us, and it didn't with the insurance agent.'
'The 'D' might stand for Denton, of course. Are those the last four numbers of his unlisted telephone?'
'No. We thought of that. Funny thing to copy. Made us wonder if Doherty knew something about McKay that we don't. It had to mean something or he wouldn't have made a copy. Seems funny.'
It seemed funny to Chee, too, and he jotted the numbers into his own notebook. He'd try D2187 on Leaphorn. The Legendary Lieutenant would probably recognize them as map coordinates.
With the number and the sooty shoes in mind, Chee had driven directly from Osborne's office to the pay telephone outside the Pancake House, called the U.S. Forest Service office, asked for Denny Pacheco, and told him his problem. He needed Pacheco to check his records for the past big burn season, find out which fires the late Thomas Doherty had worked, and call Chee at his office in Shiprock.
'Just drop whatever unimportant stuff I might be working on and do it, huh?' said Pacheco. 'Why am I going to do something like that?'
'Because I'm your good buddy, is why,' Chee said. 'And we're trying to find out where this guy was when somebody shot him. It would need to be a fire within, say. fifty or sixty miles of where he was found.'
'And where was that?'
Chee explained it.
'So I plow through all that paper for you, and call you at your office with it?' Pacheco asked. 'And you remember this when I need a ticket fixed. Right?'
'Anything short of a felony,' Chee had said, and he found Pacheco's message waiting on his answering machine when he got back to his office. Pacheco had listed three fires where Doherty's name was on the crew payroll. One was the huge Mesa Verde burn, one was a smaller fire south in the White Mountains, and one was a little nipped- in-the-bud lightning-caused blaze in the Coyote Canyon drainage. The bigger ones were too distant to interest Chee. The lightning burn was in a narrow canyon draining the north slope of Mesa de los Lobos 'This one is well within your rmileage limits,' Pacheco said. 'Bad hot spots due to accumulation of dead timber, trash, etc., but we got to it fast with fire-suppression planes, and then it rained to dampen it down. We let the hot spots burn out the fuel trash and just sent a man in to make sure it didn't take off again. That was your Doherty.'
Chee listened to that again.Probably their canyon. He'd heard that this fire, like the one that roared through the Mesa Verde National Monument area, had uncovered interesting rock art. Perhaps it had also uncovered signs of the legendary Golden Calf dig. Perhaps Doherty had seen them.
The phone buzzed. He picked it up. Officer Bernadette Manuelito calling. Take line three.
Chapter Twelve
« ^ »
Chee sucked in his breath, picked up the telephone, punched button three, and said: 'Bernie. I was just going to—'
'Sergeant Chee,' said the strained-sounding voice in his ear, 'this is Bernadette Manuelito. Are you still looking for where that man was shot?'
'Well, yes,' Chee said. 'But I think we have a pretty good idea now. It looks like—'
'He was shot in a canyon draining off of Mesa de los Lobos,' Officer Manuelito said. 'About two miles up a little drainage that runs into Coyote Canyon. There's an old placer mining sluice there—'
'Wait a minute,' Chee said. 'What—'
But Bernie wasn't being interrupted. 'And that's the place it looks like he dug up the sand with the placer gold in it.'
'Bernie,' Chee said. 'Slow down.'
'I found what looked like his tracks there, and the same sort of seeds that were in his shoes and socks, but I didn't stake off the scene because somebody shot at me.'
