panniers and emptied them into the sand. Everything fell out: a jury-rigged piece of electronic equipment, hammers, chisels, U.S.G.S. maps, a handheld GPS unit, coffeepot, frying pan, empty food sacks, a pair of hobbles, dirty underwear, old batteries, and a folded-up piece of parchment.
Maddox seized the parchment. It was a crude map covered with clumsily drawn peaks, rivers, rocks, dotted lines, old-time Spanish lettering-and there, in the middle, had been inked a heavy, Spanish-style X.
An honest-to-God treasure map.
Strange that Corvus hadn't mentioned it.
He refolded the greasy parchment and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, then resumed his search for the notebook. Scrabbling around on the ground on his hands and knees, combing through the spilled equipment and supplies, he found everything a prospector might need-except the notebook.
He studied the electronic device again. A homemade piece of shit, a dented metal box with some switches, dials, and a small LED screen. Corvus hadn't mentioned it but it looked important. He better take that, too.
He went back through the stuff, opening up the canvas sacks, shaking out flour and dried beans, probing the panniers for a hidden compartment, ripping away the packsaddle's fleece lining. Still no notebook. Returning to the dead body, Maddox searched the blood-soaked clothes a third time, feeling for a rectangular lump. But all he found was a greasy pencil stub in the man's right pocket.
He sat back, his head throbbing. Had the man on horseback taken the notebook? Was it coincidence the man had showed up-or something else? A terrible idea came to him: the man on horseback was a rival. He was doing just what Maddox had been doing, trailing Weathers and hoping to cash in on his discovery. Maybe he'd gotten his hands on the notebook.
Well, Maddox had found the map. And it seemed to him that the map would be as important as the notebook, if not more so.
Maddox looked around at the scene, the dead body, the blood, the burro, the scattered mess. The cops were coming. With a great force of will, Maddox controlled his breathing, controlled his heart, calling up the meditation techniques he had taught himself in prison. He exhaled, inhaled, quelling the battering in his chest down to a gentle pulsing. Calm gradually returned. He still had plenty of time. He removed the rock sample from his pocket, and turned it over in the moonlight, then took out the map. He had those and the machine, which should more than satisfy Corvus.
In the meantime he had a body to bury.
4
DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT JIMMIE Wilier sat in the back of the police chopper, tired
as hell, feeling the thudding of the rotors in every bone. He glanced down at the ghostly nightscape slipping by underneath them. The chopper pilot was following the course of the ChamaRiver, every bend shimmering like the blade of a scimitar. They passed small villages along the banks, little more than clusters of lights-San Juan Pueblo, Medanales, Abiquiii. Here and there a lonely car crawled along Highway 84, throwing a tiny yellow beam into the great darkness. North of Abiquiii reservoir all lights ceased; beyond lay the mountains and canyons of the Chama wilderness and the vast high mesa country, uninhabited to the Colorado border.
Wilier shook his head. It was a hell of a place to get murdered.
He fingered the pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket. He was annoyed at being roused out of his bed at midnight, annoyed at getting Santa Fe's lone police chopper aloft, annoyed that they couldn't find the M.E., annoyed that his own deputy was out at the Cities of Gold Casino, blowing his miserable paycheck on the tables, cell phone turned off. On top of that it cost six hundred dollars an hour to run the chopper, an expense that came straight out of his budget. And this was only the first trip. There would have to be a second with the M.E. and the scene-of- crime team before they could move the body and collect evidence. Then there would be the publicity . . . Perhaps, thought Wilier hopefully, it was just another drug murder and wouldn't garner more than a day's story in the New Mexican.
Yeah, please make it a drug murder.
'There. Joaquin Wash. Head east,' said Broadbent to the pilot. Wilier shot a glance at the man who'd spoiled his evening. He was tall, rangy, wearing a pair of worn-out cowboy boots, one bound together with duct tape.
The chopper banked away from the river.
'Can you fly lower?'
The chopper descended, slowing down at the same time, and Wilier could see the canyon rims awash in the moonlight, their depths like bottomless cracks in the earth. Spooky damn country.
'The Maze is right down there,' Broadbent said. 'The body was just inside the mouth where the Maze joins JoaquinCanyon.'
The chopper slowed more, came back around. The moon was almost directly overhead, illuminating most of the canyon bottom. Wilier saw nothing but silvery sand.
'Put it down in that open area.'
'Sure thing.'
The pilot went into a hover and began the descent, the chopper whipping up a whirlwind of dust from the dry wash before touching down. In a moment they had come to rest, dust clouds billowing away, the thudding whistle of the rotors powering down.
'I'll stay with the chopper,' said the pilot. 'You do your thing.'
'Thanks, Freddy.'
Broadbent piled out and Wilier followed, keeping low, his eyes covered against the flying dust, jogging until he was beyond the backwash. Then he stopped, straightened up, slid the pack out of his pocket, and fired one up.
Broadbent walked ahead. Wilier switched on his Maglite and shined it around. 'Don't step on any tracks,' he called to Broadbent. 'I don't want the forensic guys on my case.' He shined the Mag up the mouth of the canyon. There was nothing but a flat bed of sand between two walls of sandstone.
'What's up there?'
'That's the Maze,' said Broadbent.
'Where's it go to?'
'A whole lot of canyons running up into Mesa de los Viejos. Easy to get lost in there, Detective.'
'Right.' He swept the light back and forth. 'I don't see any tracks.'
'Neither do I. But they have to be around here somewhere.'
'Lead the way.'
He followed Broadbent, walking slowly. The flashlight was hardly necessary in the bright moonlight, and in fact it was more of a hindrance. He switched it off.
'I still don't see any tracks.' He looked ahead. The canyon was bathed from wall to wall in moonlight, and it looked empty-not a rock or a bush, a footprint or a body as far as the eye could see.
Broadbent hesitated, looking around.
Wilier started to get a bad feeling.
'The body was right in this area. And the tracks of my horse should be plainly visible over there . . .'
Wilier said nothing. He bent down, snubbed his cigarette out in the sand, put the butt in his pocket.
'The body was right in this area. I'm sure of it.'
Wilier switched on the light, shined it around. Nothing. He switched it off, took another drag.
'The burro was over there,' Broadbent continued, 'about a hundred yards off.'
There were no tracks, no body, no burro, nothing but an empty canyon in the moonlight. 'You sure this is the right place?' Wilier asked.
'Positive.'
Wilier hooked his thumbs into his belt and watched Broadbent walk around and examine the ground. He was a tall, easy-moving type. In town they said he was Croesus-but up close he sure didn't look rich, with those crappy old boots and Salvation Army shirt.
Wilier hawked up a piece of phlegm. There must be a thousand canyons out here, it was the middle of the night-Broadbent had taken them to the wrong canyon.
