He gave the FBI dispatcher directions to the scene.
“Highway 64 east through Gobernador, then through Vaqueros Canyon nine miles, then left over a cattle guard on dirt gas field road. Seven miles north to junction with another dirt road that leads to El Paso Gas Buzzard Wash lease. Left on that. He’ll see my unit parked there.”
“It’ll be Special Agent Osborne,” the dispatcher said. “I’ll tell him to call you when he gets lost.”
Dashee had walked down the slope from the crime scene, dusting off his hands and grinning.
“How much do you usually pay the shaman when he does the Ghost Way sing for you to cure you of corpse sickness?” Dashee asked. “I think that might be an appropriate tip to give me.”
“I’ll just deduct that from what I was going to charge you for the crime scene lesson,” Chee said.
“Well, you’ve got yourself a whole lot of work before you’re finished with this fellow here. No identification. No wallet. Expensive duds. Pockets empty except car keys.”
Chee raised his eyebrows. “Car keys but no car?”
“Lots of legwork ahead,” Dashee said, “and without pretty little Bernie Manuelito for you to send out here to do it for you. Maybe you could borrow her back from the Border Patrol.”
3
The week Bernadette Manuelito quit being a Navajo Tribal Police Officer and became a Customs Patrol Officer, her new supervisor had suggested that Rodeo, a village just on the New Mexico side of the Arizona border, would be a fine place for her to live. It would be handy to the section of U.S.-Mexico border she would be patrolling and Customs Officer Eleanda Garza already lived there. Mrs. Garza’s two-bedroom house had one bedroom empty and was available due to the resignation of Customs Officer Dezzie Something-or-Other—Dezzie having quit to marry some fellow in Tucson.
Mrs. Garza was a member of Tohono O’odham Nation, which had been called the Papagos (“The Bean Eaters”), a name given the tribe by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. They had voted in 1980 to resume their traditional name (in English, “The Desert People”) and the sentiment for that was overwhelming. Mrs. Garza was older than Bernadette, larger by about twenty pounds, and married to a telephone company maintenance manner second husband—who lived and worked at Las Cruces. Her son was a new recruit in navy boot camp in San Diego, and her daughter was far away in Chicago, where her son-in-law worked for the
Thus, even though the Desert People are reputed to be sort of hostile to Navajos and Apaches (and vice versa) by the end of the first week as housemates, Mrs. Garza had developed a liking for Bernie.
The feeling was mutual. Bernie was homesick. Her own traditional name was “Girl Who Laughs,” but lately she rarely did. She missed her mother, people she worked with at the Shiprock office of the Navajo Tribal Police, and her girlfriends. Although she hated to admit it, she also missed Sergeant Jim Chee.
Mrs. Garza had spotted that the very first day they talked, when Bernie explained why she had changed jobs. Bernie had described the last case she had been involved in—her very first homicide—how she had bungled the crime scene, and how she had been shot at herself, or thought she had been, anyway. She also described the dreadful shock of finding—locked in one of those miles of mostly empty army ammunition bunkers at old Fort Wingate—the mummified body of a young wife who had written love notes to her husband while she starved to death in the silent darkness.
“I just couldn’t stand any more of that,” Bernie had said. Mrs. Garza had sensed, instantly, that there was more to it than the tragedy involved in the case. But she was too kind (or wise) to press. Not then, anyway. It wasn’t until Eleanda was driving Bernie along the track that runs along the U.S. side of Mexican border fence that the truth emerged.
They had been bumping along the absolute southernmost bottom of New Mexico’s so-called boot heel. For hours Bernie had been mostly silent. She’d seen no evidence of human existence except the steel fence posts and three (sometimes two) strands of the barbed wire stretched between them. Dry, ragged mountains to the south in Sonora, northward in New Mexico, the same ahead, same behind. Bernie had a weakness for botany, her major study at the University of New Mexico, and this landscape was interesting as well as hostile. Various varieties of cacti, with little herds of javlina browsing on the pods of some of them, clumps of gray and tan desert grasses waving their autumn seed stems, the orderly scattering of creosote bush, and species of mesquite new to her and swarming with bees attracted by the honey in the flowers, and brush with more thorns than leaves. Bernie was accustomed to empty country, but Dinetah, her “Land Between the Sacred Mountains,” was greener, friendlier, had at least a few people in it. Philosophers teach that lonely country wears on friendly people.
Eleanda was sympathetic. She had been stopping now and then to show trails illegals used, pointing to examples of the deeper heel prints, the shorter paces and the wider stances that suggested “mules” carrying heavy loads of cocaine or heroin had mixed with the immigrants to use them as cover. She knelt where the limbs of a thorny bush intruded into the trail—showed Bernie a thorn that held a tiny clump of fiber.
“That’s an acacia,” Bernie said. “The catclaw acacia. I forget the scientific name. But the one people try to grow is the desert acacia. Has beautiful yellow flowers. Very fragrant.”
Eleanda laughed. “And right there, that vine to your left with those beautiful white blossoms, that’s sacred datura. You know. The psychedelic. The little button seeds, if you chew them, or brew them, they send you off into visions.”
“As in the rites of the Native American Church,” Bernie said. “I tried that when I was in college.” She shuddered. “How can a flower that beautiful produce something that tastes so terrible?”
“Datura used to be on the illegal substances list,” Eleanda said. “Until the court ruled it was a religious sacrament. But forget the datura. I was showing you the cloth,” she said.
“Cloth?”
“These fibers caught on the claw are from a gunny sack. The drug smugglers use potato sacks to carry the dope in.”
Bernie nodded.
“The illegals, they’re good people. They just can’t get work in Mexico and their families are hungry. They don’t have guns. Wouldn’t hurt anybody if they did. But when you see this”—she pulled the fiber from a thorn—“then you’re not just tracking illegal immigrants going north to look for a job. Then you should be very careful.”
“I’m careful,” Bernie said, and produced a wry smile. “That’s exactly what Sergeant Chee told me when I left. ‘Be very careful.’ That’s all he said.”
“That’s the sergeant you told me about? Did you talk to him about coming down here?”
“I didn’t talk to him about it.”
“You didn’t? What you told me made him sound very nice. But I guess you don’t like him? He was bad to you, wasn’t he?”
“No. No. No,” Bernie said. “It wasn’t that. Really, he’s very kind. Very ...” She paused. How could she express this?
“Kind? To you?”
“I didn’t mean that. He was my boss.”
“So kind to who?”
Bernie shrugged. “Well, pretty much everybody.”
“Like how, for example.”
“Well, I didn’t see this myself,” Bernie said. “But it’s a story people tell about him. He had a hit-and-run homicide case. Real strange one. There’s a radio station at Farmington that has an open mike program. People who want to invite people to a curing ceremony, or buy a horse, or sell baled hay, they just go in and the station lets them use the mike. So this fugitive driver does that. He goes in and broadcasts that he is the man who ran over the fellow beside the road and drove off and left the body. He said he was too drunk to know what he was doing, and he is sorry, and that every month he will send part of his paycheck to the man’s family.”
“Really!” Eleanda said. “I wish we had that kind of drunks. But did he actually send money?”
“Two hundred dollars every month,” Bernie said. “But Sergeant Chee still had this homicide case to solve. Nobody at the open mike station had recognized him, but they remembered he smelled like onions. Jim went to Navajo Agricultural Project onion warehouse and described the bumper stickers on the truck, and the people there told him who owned it. Jim went to his place. He wasn’t home but his grandson was there. An emotionally
