picking up a hitchhiker. Or does it look like he shot himself?”
“This investigation has just started, Mr. Belshaw. I’m not in a position to release any information.”
Chandler considered this for a moment. How long would it take Arizona State Police to discover there was no Jim Belshaw at the Flagstaff Best Western? Probably just a few minutes. Moya would radio the state cop office in Flagstaff, tell them to send someone over. Then what? When the crime scene crew arrived, and a regular criminal investigator got there, they’d be looking at that little notebook Sherman carried. Would they find Brad Chandler’s name written in it? Would they find Chandler’s cell phone number? An awfully good chance of that. And maybe the Grand Hotel number.
“Officer Moya,” Chandler said. “If somebody shot Sherman, I want to see him punished. I probably don’t know anything that would help, but if I knew more about what you found, maybe that would trigger a memory. For example, I think he was planning to take a hike down into the canyon. Was there any hiking stuff in his vehicle? For example, he told me once he knew an Indian who he was going to hire as a guide if he went. So if he was doing that, maybe there would be two sets of camping stuff, or hiking stuff, in the car.”
This caused a moment of silence on the Moya end of the conversation.
“Well, thank you for the offer, Mr. Belshaw. But you were wrong about that. I saw what seemed to be just one backpack in the car. But then we don’t mess around with the scene of a violent crime like this until the crime scene crew gets here with all its stuff. I just reached in to get a look at his billfold for an identification, and noticed the blood and that big pistol down on the floor. That’s about all. Hold on just a minute.”
Chandler held on, nervously, hearing the sounds of Moya using his radio.
“Mr. Belshaw, you sure you gave me that Flagstaff hotel right? We radioed in. Our Flagstaff office said Best Western doesn’t have any Belshaw registered.”
Chandler managed a laugh. “That because I just pulled into the front entrance here, decided to call Sherman before I checked in, and got all this bad news. I’ll go in now and see if they’re still holding my reservation. I’ll check in and wait. But with Sherman in bad shape, I may not want to stay here in Flagstaff.”
“Hey,” Moya said. “Stay there. We need to talk to you.”
“We’re breaking up on this damn cell phone now,” Chandler said. “I can’t hear you. Just static. Can you read me? Hello? Hello? Officer Moya. Hello? Well, if you can still hear me, I’ll check in here. I want to find out what happened to Sherman.”
With that, Chandler just listened. Heard Moya yelling at him. Heard Moya cursing. Finally heard Moya give up and break the connection. Then he shut off his own cell phone, shook his head, and started working on the problems this had left him.
The worst one was that notebook Sherman carried in his jacket pocket. There might be some chance Sherman hadn’t jotted his name in his book. An awfully good chance he’d noted his telephone number at the Grand Hotel. It wouldn’t take much detective work to send them after the man who had called Sherman’s cell phone number. But there was nothing he could do about that now.
What he had to do now was find out what happened to Billy Tuve. Had Tuve shot Sherman? Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. If not, who had? Probably one of those other people Plymale had warned him were trying to find the diamonds. Or, as Plymale wanted him to believe, to find the bones. And his job for Plymale was just to keep that from happening. He could probably have accomplished that simply and easily by erasing Tuve from the game. But he had never trusted Plymale. Killing Tuve would have wiped out his chance for his big payoff—a satchel full of prime diamonds.
And now where was Billy Tuve? The competitive team Plymale had described seemed to have eliminated Sherman. From what little he had learned from that damned Arizona state cop, Tuve’s stuff hadn’t been left behind in Sherman’s car. From that, Chandler’s logical mind developed the only logical conclusion. The bad guys had come for Tuve. Sherman had resisted. They shot Sherman. They took Tuve away with them, and the only possible use they had for him was identical to Chandler’s own. They’d take him to the canyon bottom and use him to find the diamonds. But where? Somewhere very close to the termination of the Hopi Salt Trail, near where the Hopis harvested their ceremonial salt. The jeep-driver guide he had hired to take him to the bottom tomorrow had been full of information about sacred places in the canyon, and the Salt Shrine was near the point where the Little Colorado Canyon dumped its water into the Colorado River. No jeep trail would take them anywhere near that, the driver said, but he could drop them at the head of a trail he’d noticed in his
Back at his car, Chandler opened the trunk and took out a small aluminum valise. He unlocked it on the front seat and extracted two cans—one a Burma Shave shaving cream dispenser, the other a can of Always Fresh deodorant, both of which had been reengineered by some previous owner so that their tops screwed off, and both of which had been slipped out of an old evidence locker. Chandler presumed they’d previously been used to carry purchase-size packs of crack cocaine. He imagined them tucked in a grocery store sack with bread, soup cans, etc., offering a relatively safe way for the dope dealer to smuggle the stuff to the user. For him, they offered a simple way to get his pet little .25-caliber pistol past airport security x-ray machines.
Now he screwed off the tops, extracted pistol barrel, working parts, magazine, etc., wiped off the thick deposit of shaving cream covering the parts, blew the cream out of the barrel, cleaned it with a rod he kept in the can for that purpose, and reassembled the weapon. He’d had it made at a specialty machine shop in Switzerland on one of his skiing trips there, and it worked with typical Swiss efficiency. He clicked a round into the chamber, ejected it into his hand, and put it back into the chamber.
It worked perfectly. When Ms. Joanna Craig arrived with Tuve at the Hopi shrine tomorrow, he’d be down there waiting.
15
Joe Leaphorn found he had a way to get in touch with Sergeant Chee after all. He found Chee’s cell phone number where he had jotted it on the margin of his desk calendar. And now that cell phone began ringing in Chee’s jacket pocket. Chee was standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon, watching Cowboy Dashee planting some painted prayer sticks at an odd-looking rock formation.
Chee snorted out a Navajo version of an expletive, extracted the phone, clicked it on, and said, “Chee.”
