Spider Woman's Daughter Page 7

  “Oh, never mind that.” Louisa’s words came in a rush. “A boring one. Bernie, it must have been awful for you, watching Joe get shot like that.”

  Bernie said, “I’m off work for a few days, but Largo says that’s just routine. He asked me to track down the lieutenant’s closest relatives, just in case. Can you give me any names, contact info?”

  “Joe didn’t have any brothers or sisters left. His parents, that whole generation of his family, had either died or he was out of touch with them. He has the addresses of a few cousins—I guess they are cousins—in his little notebook. He’d send checks now and then.”

  “The brown book he kept in his pocket?” Chee asked.

  “Always. Are you going to see him?” Louisa said.

  “Tomorrow, if he’s allowed to have visitors,” Bernie said.

  Chee raised his eyebrows. Bernie hated hospitals.

  “What conference is it you’re going to in Houston, in case we need to reach you?” he asked.

  “Just call my cell. You’ve got the number now. Give Joe my love and stay safe out there, both of you. Gotta go.”

  Louisa hung up.

  “What do you think?” Chee asked.

  “She’s lying about something. But not about caring for the lieutenant.”

  “Did you notice that she denied shooting him before we even had a chance to ask her?”

  “That must have been some argument,” Bernie said. “Louisa is in Albuquerque, just an hour from Santa Fe and the hospital. Why would she head on to a boring conference rather than be with Leaphorn? They’ve shared a house for years. ”

  “He went with her to some of those conferences. He’d be reading in the hotel while she was at the sessions. I remembered him saying that those academic types live in their own world and how Navajos ought to plant an observer there, write a book about their unusual cultural practices.”

  Bernie started a pot of coffee while Chee called Cordova. Then he hooked up the laptop, powered on, and inserted the disc. Shiprock, unlike some places on the reservation, had fairly reliable Internet service, in part because of its government offices and the pressure they put on the powers that be to acknowledge that the twenty-first century had arrived, even in rural New Mexico.

  She pulled a chair around so she could see the computer screen. “Louisa is hiding something. Why wouldn’t she tell us what kind of a conference it was? Or where in Houston she’d be staying? If she’s even going to Houston.”

  “I bet you the FBI goes down that trail. Looks into it as a possible murder for hire,” Chee said.

  Bernie laughed. “You’ve watched too many DVDs from that bargain bin. Louisa hires Jackson Benally or Leonard Nez?”

  “Well, it’s hard to find a professional assassin in Window Rock. You might have to take what you can get, settle for college kids.”

  Bernie said, “Even the FBIs aren’t that lame.”

  “I’ll bet you a dinner.”

  “Steak?”

  “Shake.”

  He got up, poured two cups of coffee, stirred the requisite two teaspoons of sugar into Bernie’s, left his as it came from the pot.

  She took a sip. “What about the lieutenant’s mysterious cousins?”

  “Ah, now you’re the one thinking like an FBI. If Leaphorn is giving them money, they want him to live as long as possible.”

  “I meant, I need to find some relatives to let them know what happened, like Largo asked. I’ll get that notebook when I go to the hospital tomorrow.”

  Bernie saw him frown. Start to speak, probably to try to discourage her from making the four-hour one-way drive, then yield to studying the computer screen. She’d taught him that he couldn’t talk her out of anything once she’d made up her mind. No more than she could convince him that the lieutenant would have trusted Jim Chee, the same man who wasn’t always the best cop on the force, to run the Navajo end of this investigation.

  “You were going to say something?”

  “Tell the lieutenant hello for me.”

  Leaphorn, they quickly learned, had been busy until the end of his official police career and as a consultant to the force. Cases ranged from sheep and cattle rustling to domestic violence, burglary, bootlegging, and drug sales. Most of his arrests had resulted in convictions. Bernie made a second shorter list of those who had been released without charges, in case they held a grudge.

  They reviewed the cases for an hour, finding nothing interesting enough to be the motive for attempted murder. Bernie got up, poured them more coffee, switched off the pot. When she sat back down, she noticed something.

  “Here’s a case where the bad guy seems to have vanished.” She tapped the keyboard. “Looks like insurance fraud involving a rug from the Long Walk.”

  “I think you and I did some background work for the lieutenant on that one,” Chee said.

  “I recall talking to him about it. He came to the house with a basket of gifts from him and Louisa right after we got back from our honeymoon. He mentioned this guy named Delos and how people thought he might be a shape shifter and how he had stolen a bunch of money and was exploiting this man from Laos who worked for him.”

  “That was some story,” Chee said. “We never did get a straight answer from the lieutenant on what happened to Delos.”

  “I don’t see anything in the file about that either,” Bernie said.

  “I’ll add it to my list of things to look into tomorrow when I start on the PI files. But we have the problem of tying him in to the Benally car.”

  They worked quietly awhile longer.

  “This is interesting,” Bernie said. “Nothing to do with the Benally family, but you were involved. This man, Randall Elliot, killed a Utah rancher, and almost killed a woman he worked with. Then he disappeared. If he’s still out there . . .”

  “I’ll never forget that case.” Chee stood, stretched. “Leaphorn rafted down the San Juan, hiked into a rugged rocky canyon, and found the missing woman barely alive after Elliot almost killed her. That Elliot guy, an archaeologist, came back in a helicopter to finish her off. I got there in time to help the lieutenant carry her out—she would have died in the next day or two if he hadn’t found her. Elliot disappeared before I arrived, and Leaphorn never talked about what happened before I got there.”

  “And?”

  “Someone found human bones in the area the next spring. DNA matched them to Elliott.”

  “Too bad. He would have been the perfect suspect.”

  They went back to work. The notion of Jackson Benally or Leonard Nez shooting a cop as part of a gang initiation didn’t seem as far-fetched as it had an hour ago.

  After another hour, Chee walked over to where Bernie sat, put his hands on her shoulders. She felt her tense muscle relax with his firm massage. “You know, you could have been killed today. Instead of celebrating our good fortune, here we are, still working at midnight.”

  “I’ll feel like celebrating when we find the guy who shot the lieutenant,” she said. “You ready for bed?”

  He smiled. “Was that a question or an invitation?”

  In the quiet afterward, she noticed the subtle change in Chee’s breathing as he fell more deeply asleep. She stretched her legs against the cool sheets, wide awake. A coyote began to sing somewhere along the San Juan. She thought about Leaphorn’s empty house, about the lieutenant alone in a hospital bed—if he were still alive. She rewound the day: the breakfast, the phone call, the shot, the bleeding on the sunbaked pavement, the ambulance. She tried to focus on the getaway car: Had there been a second person inside? Was it really the Benally car?

  After an hour, she crept out of bed and went back to the kitchen to work on the files. By dawn she had reviewed them all, made lists of possible suspects and their connections to Leaphorn. None of the criminals in the old cases except for Delos looked especially evil
, motivated to shoot a man in cold blood. In fact, they all should be grateful to Leaphorn for attempting to reboot their lives.

  She put on her Nikes when the sky had changed from black to gray with hints of pale peach, and quietly opened the front door. She ran to greet the dawn.

  When she came back, she smelled the sizzling bacon. She saw Chee, phone in one hand, spatula in the other. She could tell from the tension in his body that whatever news he listened to wasn’t welcome.

  6

  Chee put the phone down.

  “I’ve got to go in early. The report is back from the shooter’s car.”

  “So, did Mrs. Benally do it?”

  Chee laughed. “Well, her prints are there, along with lots of others. Some are probably Jackson’s. The rest? Who knows. So Largo and Cordova, the FBI guy, want me to check the names tied to the prints. We can compare them to the suspect list we made last night. See if there’s any link to the lieutenant.”

  “I added a few names this morning,” Bernie said. “I’m surprised the FBI isn’t taking the lead here. That Cordova seemed pretty sharp.”

  “They’re leaving the Navajos to us,” he said. “Largo told me the FBI seriously wants to talk to Louisa. Couldn’t reach her last night.”

  Chee cracked eggs into the hot pan. “Four or five sets of the prints they found match prints on file, but none were names I recognized from the lieutenant’s work. The feds are still searching for matches to the others.”

  “Wow,” she said. “That car was a taxi.”

  “I thought of something else,” Chee said. “That Delos guy? I remember that the Jicarilla cops found a body in an unmarked grave a couple years ago. Turned out to be his.”

  Chee left right after breakfast. She did dishes, then called the Window Rock office to learn they’d heard nothing more about Leaphorn’s condition. She thought about wearing jeans, but put on a clean Navajo Police uniform out of respect for the lieutenant.

  When she started her car, she noticed Leaphorn’s unmailed envelopes, including the brown one addressed to the man in Santa Fe, the one that needed stamps.

  Bernie drove first to the post office to send Leaphorn’s envelopes on the way. She saw the empty parking lot and realized the counter didn’t open until eight; she was half an hour early. She dropped the smaller ones in the mailbox and headed on, southeast to Santa Fe. She’d find a post office along the way.

  She passed a Laundromat. Quik Stop stores. A big truck loaded with hay bales, horses grazing. The junction for the tribe’s Flowing Water Casino. She noticed the plume of steam rising from the Four Corners Power Plant. She turned on the radio, 94.5 FM Navajo-language KYAT. She didn’t mind country music, at least in small doses, but she listened for news coverage of the lieutenant’s shooting. She noticed a homemade green “Tire Repair Open” sign along a fence and then the “Leaving the Navajo Reservation” notice. Circle W pawnshop. A car wash. A big American flag fluttering outside a mobile home.

  She slowed as a truck hauling a trailer pulled onto the highway from a dirt road, noticing that the sedan in the left lane sped past her about ten miles faster than the limit. The radio was advertising jewelry supplies you could order online as she came to Fruitland, the little settlement west of Farmington. Traffic was heavier now, the area populated with a mixture of oil field workers and farmers, Navajos, Mormons, and retirees looking for nirvana in the fabled Southwest. She passed a block-long wrecking yard filled with generations of cars and pickups, even some heavy equipment. Farther along, she saw lots full of new minivans and trucks, windshields shining in the summer sun, tempting drivers to take on debt in exchange for a better ride.

  Finally, the view she loved, the San Juan River south of the highway, flowing between rows of towering ancient cottonwoods.

  Traffic was heaviest between Shiprock and Bloomfield, with fleets of oil and gas trucks making hatchbacks like hers seem tiny. After that, the number of vehicles conveniently dropped off as the scenery grew more spectacular. Her heart soared as she saw Huerfano Mesa, one of the sacred places in the origin stories, the spot where Changing Woman gave birth to the Hero Twins who made the world safe for people. Leaphorn should be here in Dinetah, not in a hospital in Santa Fe, a rich-white-person town.

  Bernie had been to Santa Fe three times before. Once when her Shiprock High School team played a basketball game at the Santa Fe Indian School gymnasium. Once to accompany her mother when she had a booth at the Indian Market. And most recently for a training session at the New Mexico State Police headquarters. The town didn’t resonate with her, but she’d go where she had to for the lieutenant.

  Officer Jim Chee had never been much for paperwork.

  Now, as he sat at his desk half done with the tedious job of checking the names from the prints against the lieutenant’s caseload, he was grumpy.

  He wanted to be out finding the Benally kid, not leaving it to the Gallup Police. He wanted to ask the young man why his car had so many fingerprints, where he was at the time of the shooting. Instead, he’d spent two hours comparing names of Navajos linked to the prints in the Benally car with names in the criminal reports database, and then with the names of people Leaphorn might have arrested. Looking for someone other than suspect number one, in case, as Bernie believed, Jackson Benally lacked a motive to shoot Leaphorn. Looking, but coming up with nothing except other fingerprints for which there was no match and no obvious tie to Leaphorn.

  Chee walked outside, away from the confusion, looked at the Shiprock substation parking lot and Shiprock itself, a black lava thumb against the blue sky. The wind had already started to blow, a soft breeze now, but a bad sign for more dust in the air as the day heated up.

  He went back to his desk, checked his e-mail, watched a brief video of a dog on a surfboard that his friend Cowboy Dashee had sent. Just when he could think of nothing else to delay resuming the inevitable, he felt the cell phone vibrate in his pocket. Bernie. He pulled out the phone, smiling, then remembered Bernie was driving to Santa Fe, passing through lonely country not defaced by cell phone towers. He looked at the number. Darleen.

  “Hello there,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Terrible. I can’t get Bernie on the phone,” Darleen said. “Did she take Mama somewhere?”

  “Bernie’s off to Santa Fe. There’s bad reception on that road. She’s by herself as far as I know. She wouldn’t take your mother, because she was going to see the officer who got shot.”

  “Mama’s gone,” Darleen said. “Mama’s gone.”

  “Gone? Did she pass away?”

  “Oh my God, I didn’t think of that. She could be dead. Maybe whoever kidnapped her killed her. Should I call the police? You are the police!” The words came in a torrent.

  Chee said, “Calm down. Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning. But first, take a breath or two.”

  Darleen rushed ahead. “Mama’s disappeared. Totally gone. She’s like nowhere. I looked all over the house, around outside, in the closets, in the bathroom. Everywhere, dude, every stinking where. Called for her really loud, screaming my stupid head off. Then I got in my car and drove around the neighborhood, yelling out the window like a madwoman. Nothing. She’s nowhere.”

  Chee thought about it. “Was she there when you got home last night?”

  A pause. “I guess she was asleep in her room. Ah. Um. I got in kinda late and then I did some drawings.” Another pause. “I didn’t feel so good this morning, so I didn’t get up until just now.”

  “Did you see her last night?”

  “Not exactly. The door to her room was closed. When I looked in this morning, her bed was empty, already made. She’s missing, dude. Missing. Person. Who would wanna kidnap an old lady?”

  “I don’t think she was kidnapped,” Chee said.

  “Maybe she just went for a walk and fell down somewhere,” Darleen said. “You think that cou
lda happened? The dog packs are bad out here.”

  Chee had handled cases in which feral dogs had attacked cattle and horses and killed sheep and lambs. He’d dealt with some incidents of wild dogs charging and biting people, too. “Is your mother’s walker there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Darleen, I’m going to give you some suggestions, places to check. Take your phone with you. Call back when you’re done.”

  He hung up, went back to his fingerprint files. Darleen’s distraction was good luck; he uncovered something interesting—a possible suspect.

  His phone vibrated ten minutes later.

  “Mama’s okay. I went to the Darkwaters’ house, like you said. She spent the night with Mrs. Darkwater. They were eating breakfast when I called over there earlier and had the radio on so loud they didn’t hear the phone in the other room or me hollering for her.”

  “I’m glad it worked out,” Chee said.

  “Me too.”

  “Next time Mama goes on a sleepover, ask Mrs. Darkwater to leave you a note,” Chee said.

  “Um. Actually, they did. It was on the table, but I didn’t see it. One from Bernie there, too. I was lucky that you answered the phone. I’m glad Bernie wasn’t around for this.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  He waited for her to say “thank you” but she didn’t.

  Santa Fe’s Christus St. Vincent hospital has numerous entrances, different doors for accessing its many services. Bernie headed for large sliding glass doors that looked like a main entrance. They led to an imposing lobby and another sign, “Information.” The receptionist glanced up. “May I help you?” As she stared at Bernie’s uniform, Bernie noticed the dark bags beneath her eyes.

  “I’m looking for Lieutenant—I mean Mr. Joe Leaphorn. He was admitted yesterday.”

  The woman typed the name.

  “He’s in CCU.”

  “Is that Spanish for something?”

  The woman narrowed her eyes. “Critical care unit.” She told Bernie the room number.

  “How do I get there?”