Osborne displayed the Visa card. “You loan this to Mr. Chinosa?”
Desboti looked as though he didn’t know how to answer that. He said: “What?”
Osborne laughed. “We’re going to find out, one way or another. Why not just tell us about it. How’d you get the card. Save time.”
“This Manley guy. He said use it if I need it. Just pay him back.”
“It’s Mankin,” Osborne said. “Were you there when he was shot?”
“Shot?” Desboti’s eyes were wide.
“Or were you the one who shot him?”
Chee had been leaning against Chinosa’s van, watching Osborne work, thinking he was handling it fairly well, and maybe this blunt approach would save time. It did.
“I didn’t shoot anybody,” Desboti said, talking fast now. “I was cleaning up that campground. That’s my job. For the tribal parks. And bears had smelled the food in the trash and turned over the canister. Scattered the stuff all around, and there it was on the ground with the garbage. Dirty, but a pretty good-looking billfold. I just picked it up and cleaned it off.”
“Cleaned it off?”
Desboti grimaced again. “People come through here, they’ve saved up those damned paper diapers and they dump ’em out at the campgrounds.”
“Oh,” Osborne said, and glanced at Chee. It seemed to Chee that this answered a question for him. It made that trash bin a logical place to bury things you didn’t want recovered.
“The credit card was in the wallet? What else?” Osborne asked.
“No money,” Desboti said, looking thoughtful. Looking like he was trying to remember. “Nothing much. Driver’s license. Two keys. Looked like car keys. Pretty empty, like it was new.”
“You have it?”
Desboti opened his mouth, closed it, looked down, shrugged. Reached into his hip pocket and extracted a slim black leather wallet. “Just my stuff in it now,” he said. He extracted what looked to Chee like a twenty and several small bills and handed it to Osborne.
He inspected it. Extracted two small padlock keys and showed them to Desboti. “These yours?”
“No. They were in it.”
“Driver’s license? Any other papers?”
“Well, yeah. There was a driver’s license. And some cards. Insurance I think. And receipts you get at the gasoline pump. I think that was all.” Desboti nodded, licked his lips. “Did you say somebody shot that man?”
“Yes,” Osborne said. “Where are those other papers from the wallet.”
“Went back into the trash with the baby diapers, then into the truck and off to the trash dump.”
Chee closed his eyes. Osborne was going to say they’d go to that dump and Desboti was going to show them where he thought he dumped the load, and then they were going to start sorting through a mountain of dirty diapers, empty beer cans, and worse.
But Osborne didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he shrugged. “Let’s go see exactly where you found this wallet.”
Which, Chee thought, would be a waste of time but far better than sifting through smelly diapers for the papers. And it was.
Driving back to Farmington through the summer darkness, Chee found himself beginning to form a fondness for Osborne. He steered the chat into telling Osborne about being sent by the Navajo Tribal Police back to a training session at the FBI Academy, comparing notes, relaxed and casual. “I still try to do those memory exercises they taught us. I can remember everything about that Jeep Cherokee rented to Mankin. How good are you?”
“I’ve lost some of it I guess. It was dirty white. Year-old model. Something over twenty-three thousand miles on it. Tires looked a little worse than that. Chip on the windshield. Lot of dirt and gravelly stuff on the floor pad. Lot of various tools in the back. Got it all written in my notes.”
“I remember his copy of the rental form had him refusing the insurance, so forth,” Chee said. “I think he put down some sort of oil-drilling outfit for his company.”
“Got you there,” Osborne said. “It was Seamless Weld.”
“Oh, well,” Chee said. “That could be pipeline maintenance. What did your boss say about Mankin? What he was doing up here? All that?”
“I don’t know,” Osborne said, looking grim. “We were told the El Paso office handled that.”
“They didn’t tell you what they found out? Boy! How can you work a case without that sort of information?”
Osborne didn’t answer.
“Maybe you’ll get it tomorrow,” Chee said. “The fax machine broke.”
“No,” Osborne said. “I called down there and asked about it and the word was to cool it. Just find out who was using that credit card. Other people were handling the case and they’d be giving me my instructions.”
“Be damned,” Chee said. “That sounds funny.”
“Funny? Yeah, I guess you could call it that.” But his tone was bitter.
“I’ll help you if I can,” Chee said. “I’d presume our victim is the man who checked out that Hertz rental car left over by that pipeline pumping station—or whatever that contraption is. Match the prints in the car with the corpse and—”
“I’m sure that’s all been done,” Osborne said.
Chee said: “Was it—” and then cut off the questions. Why embarrass Osborne. It wasn’t his fault. The FBI bureaucrats had always been notoriously inept. And now the word was that the Homeland Security law had laid another thick layer of political patronage on top of that—adding the chaos of a new power struggle to an already clogged system. Chee restarted his sentence. “Was it still my problem, I’d concentrate on that seven miles between where the car was left and where the body was dumped. Try to find somebody along that route who saw something. Then I’d look around the area he parked the car. There must be a reason they moved the body so far away from there. Killer shoots Mankin. His helper drives Mankin’s car off to hide it.”
“How about a better idea,” Osborne said. “Why don’t I just tell my supervisor if they won’t give me the information I need to work with, then I say to hell with it and quit.”
6
This windy afternoon was a sort of sad anniversary for Officer Bernadette Manuelito, and she was finding it tough to maintain her usual high level of cheerfulness. First the anniversary itself—six months since she had made the big decision—was confronting her with the thought that maybe she had made a horrible mistake in changing jobs and bidding good-bye to the Navajo Tribal Police and her family and friends (and Sergeant Jim Chee) to join the U.S. Customs Service.
A second damper on her spirits was the letter from Chee folded into a pocket of her U.S. Customs Service uniform. It was an infuriatingly ambiguous letter. So damned typical of Sergeant Chee. Third, was the uniform itself, the costume of the Customs Service Border Patrol. New, stiff, and uncomfortable. She had felt much better, and looked better, in the NTP uniform she had cast aside.
Forth, and finally, there was the immediate cause of her discontent: she was lost.
Being lost was a new and unpleasant experience for Bernie. In the “Land Between the Sacred Mountains” of her Navajos, she knew the landscape by heart. Look east, the Turquoise Mountain rose against the sky. To the west, the Chuska Range formed the horizon. Beyond that the San Francisco Peaks were the landmark. South, the Zuni Mountains. North, the La Platas. No need for a compass. No need for a map. But down here along the Mexican border all the mountains looked alike to her—dry, saw-toothed, and unfriendly.
The rough and rutted road on which she had parked her Border Patrol pickup also seemed unfriendly. Her U.S. Geological Survey map labeled it “primitive.” Just ahead it divided. The left fork seemed to angle westward toward the Animas Mountains, and the right fork headed northward toward either the Hatchets or the Little Hatchets. The map indicated no such fork. It showed the track continuing westward toward the little New Mexico village of Rodeo (now her home), where it connected with an asphalt road running toward Douglas, Arizona.
The map was old, probably obsolete, obviously wrong. Bernie folded it. She’d take the right fork. It had the advantage of reducing the chance she wander across the Mexican border into the great emptiness of the Sonoran
