given up herself, after snagging herself a half-dozen times on those awful thorns.
The acacias had closed over the bed of the runoff stream that ran—whenever a rainstorm produced some drainage—out of the slot. It had finally occurred to Bernie that the heat from those sun-facing slot walls would discourage the acacias right against the cliff. There she had managed to slip through with only a torn sleeve. And while doing it she had noticed the old pruning that someone had done years ago to keep that narrow path open. That seemed to prove that someone had once occupied this slot, whether or not it was Billy Tuve’s dispenser of diamonds.
When she snapped on the light again and turned it up the slot, what she saw seemed to make that certain. In the gloom ahead the flashlight beam touched off an odd glittering.
Bernie walked slowly toward it. Two vertical lines, perhaps two feet apart and maybe four feet high, flashed back at the flashlight beam. They were arranged on a basalt shelf, probably an extension of the one holding the blankets. But since the slot floor slanted upward, here the shelf was only about knee high over floor level. The glittering spots of light seemed to be coming from the sandstone wall above the basalt level. Now that she was close, she could see that something stood between the lines of flashing dots. It looked like a white bone.
She stepped closer, stopped and stared. It was a human arm bone. Elbow to wrist, with the bones of the hand still attached by tendons and gristle. Before she had resigned her job with the Navajo Tribal Police, Bernie had spent a few unpleasant duty hours in morgue and autopsy rooms. That had partly accustomed her to dismembered human body parts. But not totally, and the setting here made it worse than usual.
Strange indeed. The spots of glittering light were coming from little round tins that seemed to be attached somehow to the sandstone. She counted twenty such tins in each row, each containing a diamond, which glittered in the light. The forearm bone was still connected at the elbow to the upper arm bone, most of that buried under packed sand. On the sand around it, neat circles of diamonds were arrayed, each perched on a little grayish pad of leather in a small round tin.
Bernie reached for one, hesitated, then picked it up. The pad was formed of the soft folded leather of a pollen pouch. The container was a tin can that, according to the faded red legend on its side, once contained
She unfolded the pouch, put the diamond in it, stuck it back in the snuff can, and put it in the pocket of her jeans.
Bernie was feeling exuberant. Now she would get out of this dismal place. She would go find Jim and Cowboy. She’d tell them the mission was complete. She had found the diamonds and the body of the dispenser of diamonds. She had found the evidence that would clear poor Billy Tuve of the murder charge. And the robbery charge. And any doubts that Sergeant Jim Chee might have entertained about Officer Bernadette Manuelito would be forever erased.
She started down the smooth stone floor of the slot, pausing here and there to inspect a rock shelf where the hermit had stored his food supplies in cans and sacks and his drinking water in five-gallon tins. Nearby she located his water source, a dripping, moss-grown trickle originating from a spring back in a crack in the slot wall. She let it drip into her palm and cautiously tasted it. It didn’t seem poisonous. Probably hadn’t run through any rock layers contaminated by chemicals and metallic ores.
She turned off her flashlight. The light reflecting through the slot above was dimmer now, but there was still enough reflected to guide her. It was getting close to sundown, though, and she hurried down the slanting floor to get to the mouth of this slot, and back down the canyon to the Colorado River, while she still had some daylight. It was then that she heard a woman’s voice, coming from down the slot, echoing as every sound did in this otherwise silent place. And then a man’s voice—close enough so she could understand it. The man said, “Ms. Craig. Keep your voice down. Let’s keep it very quiet. She might be dangerous.”
23
“I wasn’t raising my voice,” Joanna Craig said, in something close to an indignant whisper. “And why dangerous? It’s either a smallish woman or a tiny little man,” she said. “Judging from the size of their shoes.”
Brad Chandler didn’t respond to that. Instead he put his finger to his lips, put a hand behind an ear, signaling to Joanna that they should listen. She did, and heard nothing but the tinkling sound of water dripping from the gloomy passageway far ahead up the slot and the occasional faint sigh of the wind blowing past the slot’s open roof far overhead.
“We’ll go in a little farther,” Chandler whispered. “If all remains quiet and we see no sign of anyone, then I’ll give us a little better light. We want to pick up that woman’s track again. She must have some reason for being in here.”
“Sure,” Joanna said.
“And you have to take for granted it’s dangerous. There’s a lot of money involved in this, and where there’s money, there are dangerous people.”
“Okay,” Joanna said. “I understand.”
He made a sort of chuckling sound. “And maybe she’s a little woman, but you’re not so big yourself. And even little women can be packing pistols. Remember?”
“I remember you forgot to return mine,” Joanna said. “If it’s dangerous in here, I’d feel a lot safer with it. Didn’t you say we’re partners?”
“Right,” Chandler said. “But don’t let it worry you. I always look after my partners.”
He snapped on his heavy police-model flashlight, directing its beam back and forth across the smooth stone floor.
“There,” Joanna said, pointing. On the dusty stone were the faint tracks left by Bernie’s waffle soles.
As far as the light reached through the gloom, the tracks seemed to continue in an irregular line along the right edge of the floor.
