“Enough to make you suspicious.”
“More than that,” Rostic said. “I call in the list of 140
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places. Gallup checked the files on Shewnack. Six of the eleven had the sort of out-of-the-way robberies that fit our idea of Shewnack’s mode of operations. When they checked later, the other seven looked like they fit, too.”
“You mean the same MO?” Leaphorn asked. “Carefully planned. No fingerprints left behind. Places with no security cameras. Relatively small communities? And how about leaving accomplices behind to take the rap?”
“That, too, in some of them.”
“Were there any live witnesses left in any of those?” Rostic laughed. “How come you waited so long to ask about leaving witnesses behind? Of course he didn’t.” Leaphorn sighed, feeling sort of sick. “I guess I didn’t want to hear it.”
“I can’t blame you. In most cases it worked pretty much like the Handy robbery. If they got a good look at him, he shot ’em.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“Usually twice. The dead tell no tales.”
“A very careful man from what little I know about him,” Leaphorn said. “Did it make you wonder why he’d left those Wanted posters out on the front seat of his car?”
Rostic looked thoughtful. “No, not then, but now that you mention it, you’d think he’d have tucked them away out of sight. Most likely packed in with his stuff locked up in the car trunk.”
“That was going to be one of my questions. Had Totter, or the fire department boys, or the other cops gotten all that out by the time you got there?”
“No. They’d broken one of those wing windows to reach in and get that folder with the posters in it, but the THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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car was still locked. When we got the call, Delbert James was in charge, and he told the sheriff that if the victim was Shewnack, it was very important, and he should make damn sure everything was secure and not messed with until we could take over.”
Leaphorn nodded.
“I see you grinning,” Rostic said, and laughed. “I know how you local cops feel about that. To tell the truth, I can’t say I blame you. The feds come in, take over, screw everything up because they don’t know the territory. They take the credit if a bust gets made, and if it doesn’t they write up reports on how the locals made all the mistakes.”
“Yep,” Leaphorn said. “But we don’t blame it on you guys doing the work. We blame it on the Washington poli- ticians looking over your shoulders.”
“As you should,” Rostic said. “They’re the ones we blame.”
“And sometimes we notice we’ll be dealing with a special agent who just got in from Miami, or from Portland, Maine, and he’s giving our people directions when—” Leaphorn cut that complaint short, noticing that even now just thinking of the couple of horrible examples he was about to use was causing him to lose his temper.
“I can finish that for you,” Rostic said. “We’re giving your people directions when this is the first time we’ve set foot on the reservations, and if we wanted to get to Window Rock we’d have to ask what road to take.”
“Something like that,” Leaphorn said.
“Or as Captain Largo often told me, ‘It ain’t that we think you federals are plain stupid. It’s just that you don’t know nothing yet. It’s the total absolute invincible ignorance that trips you up.’”
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“That’s about it,” Leaphorn said, chuckling at Rostic’s imitation of Largo’s emphatic way of expressing himself.
“But right now I am very glad you did take over and made sure nobody got into whatever Shewnack had locked safely away in his car trunk.”
“He had some things locked in the glove compart-ment, too. One particularly useful item. An almost empty pint bottle of cognac. Very expensive stuff.” Rostic was smiling as he related this. “And being glass, a gold mine of the very first fingerprints we ever had of the murder-ous bastard.”
“Wonderful,” Leaphorn said. “This is just exactly what I hoped you could tell me. And how did they match with the prints the bureau must have collected from all those other places where you had noticed his MO.”
“Also got prints off his stuff in the car trunk. And other evidence, too. For example, a fancy little gold-trimmed paper weight that had been part of the loot in a convenience story robbery in Tulsa. And an expensive little leather zipper bag that still had the Salt Lake City victim’s name and address stitched in the lining. Couple of other things, too. A pair of those fancy soft-soled shoes good for sneaking up on people with, and which leave that soft rubber streak on hard floors if you’re not careful. The rubber matches what the crime scene boys had scraped up from the floor at the Tucson killing.”
“Sort of like he kept souvenirs of his crimes,” Leaphorn said. “How about money? Sergeant Garcia went out to the Totter fire site and found that Delonie there.”
“The assistant bandit at Handy’s?”
“Yeah. He was out on parole. He told us he’d heard Shewnack had burned up there, and he figured, slick THE SHAPE SHIFTER
