14

After Cordova, Chee called Largo with the news of the missing Eleanor Friedman.

“Chee, be here in Window Rock tomorrow at noon to meet with the feds and the state police,” said Largo. “Talk about where to go from here.”

“Anything new?”

“Not much. The Arizona DPT found a Leonard Nez, brought him in for questioning. The wrong Leonard Nez, fortysomething. Benally’s still quiet about Nez’s whereabouts.” Largo made a little puffing noise into the receiver. “The feds sent somebody out here to ask Jackson some questions about Nez. Same ones we asked.”

Largo chuckled. “They think Louisa might have paid him, Nez, or maybe the two of them in a murder-for-hire scheme.”

He asked Chee to give Bernie a message. “Austin Lee’s ex-wife called. Said she doesn’t see Austin much, but if she does, she will give him the news about Leaphorn. She said to tell your wife that the lieutenant and Lee are clan brothers. Said she was sorry about the lieutenant getting shot.”

“I’ll let Bernie know. Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Largo said. “Remind her she’s on leave. Not that it will do any good.”

Chee drove south on I-25 to the outskirts of Santa Fe, past the quirky shed with the huge sculpted dinosaur and the junction for NM 14, the road to the state penitentiary. The towering cloud formations in the June sky had brought a bit of shade, but no rain. Now they hinted at the possibility of a Technicolor sunset.

Bernie watched the scenery change from the cottonwoods of the Cienega Valley to the volcanic cliffs of La Bajada, the steepest hill between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Near the summit she glimpsed the ruts of the old road taken by horses and wagons and then by Model Ts in the days before the paved, divided highway stretched so smoothly between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

“I read in New Mexico Magazine that some of those old cars had to chug up this hill backward to make it over the top,” she said. “It took most of the day to get from Santa Fe to Albuquerque. Now it’s an hour.”

“Less if you’re the one driving,” Chee said. He cruised past the turnoff for Cochiti Lake and onward toward Santo Domingo Pueblo. Bernie pulled out the envelope Davis had given her, taking new interest in the material she had just scanned before, searching for answers to the lieutenant’s questions about the EFB appraisal.

Chee’s phone rang in the car charger.

She answered it, switching to speaker.

“Ah . . . hmm. I’d like to talk to Officer Jim Chee.”

“He’s driving at the moment. This is Officer Manuelito. Is there something I can do for you?”

“You’re the one who almost got shot?”

“Who is this?”

“Jackson. You know, Jackson Benally. I thought of another place people might have got to the car.”

“I can hear you,” Chee said. “Hey, Jackson.”

“Mom lets me drive to the ranch where I work on Saturdays and Sundays and when I’m not in school. We have to leave the keys in the ignition in case they have to move the cars when they bring in a big load of hay or livestock or something.” He spoke fast. Nervous. “What if somebody there made a copy of my key? Then they snuck up and stole the car later? Shot that officer.”

Chee shook his head, eyes on the road. “Let me sit with that idea awhile, Jackson. In the meantime, I’m still wondering what happened to Leonard Nez and thinking about that uncle and his ranch. The idea of somebody making a copy of your car key, figuring out the car is at Bashas’, that’s pretty far-fetched, don’t you—”

He stopped when he heard “Shhhh” and saw Bernie’s finger across her lips.

The phone fell silent, too, but Bernie noticed that it still had bars. Jackson must be thinking.

“What’s the name of this ranch where you work?” she asked.

“The Double X. Near Cortez,” the boy said. “You know where that is?”

“I know where it is. Give me the phone number.”

Jackson rattled off the number from memory, and Bernie jotted it down. A good sign. Maybe he was telling the truth.

“What about Nez?” she said.

“Gosh, I can barely hear you,” Jackson said. “Your signal is getting—” And then he hung up.

Bernie said, “I think we should give the ranch a call, see if Jackson’s story checks out.”

“Go ahead,” Chee said. “Why don’t you just take charge? I’ll keep looking through files, tracking down dead ends, spinning my wheels. Your new pal at the FBI would rather work with you anyway.”

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have shushed you. I thought Jackson might come up with something important if you pretended to be interested.”

“That ruffled my feathers.”

She stared out the window, watched the lava-formed landscape stretch to the blue rim of mountains to the west, thinking about Ellie who’d disappeared and her involvement in all this. Thinking about her promise to Leaphorn and how far she was from fulfilling it.

“You’re quiet,” Chee said.

“I’m frustrated. Wrapping up this appraisal stuff for the lieutenant should have been as easy as one phone call to EFB. Instead, we get another puzzle.”

Chee waited. “What else?”

Bernie sighed. “I don’t like the way the lieutenant looks in that hospital bed. He’s not getting any better. Seeing him that way also makes me realize I need to spend more time with Mama. And I’m worried about Darleen. I tried to call her a couple times today. No answer.”

She paused so long, it seemed she was done. Then she said, “Mostly, though, it’s the case. Our leads vanish or turn into complications when we examine them twice. It’s so disappointing. It’s driving me crazy. I can’t stop thinking about it, wondering what we’ve missed.”

She reached over and put her hand on his leg, felt the warmth of his body through the denim of his jeans. “And I’m wondering if whoever shot the lieutenant might try to kill you, or Largo, or someone else we work with next. What if the feds are wrong, and the shooter is a crazed cop hater?”

Chee took one hand off the steering wheel and put it around her shoulders. She scooted closer to him, glad that the truck had a bench seat. “You have to let it go, honey,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

“Then there’s you,” she said. “There’s us. Not enough time for that, either. If we didn’t work together, we’d hardly see each other.”

“You’re right,” he said. “When we’re done with this, let’s take a little trip up to Monument Valley. We can stay with my relatives up there. Hike around. Not think about work for a day or two.”

They passed the gaudy lights of Casino Hollywood, another successful Indian attempt to even the score with Spanish and Anglo usurpers and their descendants. At Bernalillo, Chee turned northwest onto US 550 toward Zia Pueblo. After about twenty minutes, he put on the turn signal, slowed, and moved toward the shoulder.

“Something wrong?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Getting sleepy? Want me to drive?”

He shut off the engine. Clicked his seat belt free, then reached over to release hers, too. He climbed out and walked around to open her door. He reached for her hand.

“Mrs. Chee, would you stand here with me and savor the moment?”

The sky was majestic. The Sandia Mountains rose like a rugged blue monolith to the east, glowing in the reflected oranges, vivid reds, and brilliant sunflower hues of the sunset. He put his arm around her as they watched the light change from magenta to smoky rose and dissolve into the soft grey of summer predarkness. “I worry about you,” he said. “The happy girl I married has too much to do. Too many burdens.”

She snuggled in closer to him. “Sunday night, when you came home so late, I told myself everything was fine. But still. And after what happened to Leaphorn . . .”

“Life goes too fast,” he said. “We don’t want to live like crazy Santa Fe people.”

She laughed. “Yeah. We want to live like crazy Shiprock Navajos.”

As he held her, she noticed the gentle flirting light of evening’s first star. So’ Tsoh, “Big Star.” Venus, the goddess of love.

Bernie drove through the twilight into Cuba, a speck of a town known for its restaurant, El Bruno’s, which served some of the best New Mexican food in Sandoval County. They both ordered enchiladas, Bernie’s cheese with green chile and Chee’s with roast beef and Christmas chile—red and green. They had stopped here a few times with the lieutenant after a long day of meetings in Albuquerque. Leaphorn always had a burger, Bernie remembered, with no cheese or onion, and followed up with a piece of pie topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

They walked back to the truck, a nearly full rising moon lighting their way.

“How far is it from here to Chaco Canyon?” Bernie asked. “I’d like to see the place where those darn pots came from. And since you don’t have to be at work early . . .” She let the sentence hang.

“It’s a quick fifty miles to the turnoff, then another slow twenty to the ruins.”

“Do you have camping gear in here?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Two sleeping bags. Even a sack of trail mix we can have for breakfast.”

“Let’s spend the night at Chaco. Get up early, see some of the park before we have to go to work.”

Bernie drove the paved highway to Nageezi. Driving NM 550 after dark used to scare her, with its deadly combination of big trucks, long distances, and occasional random crossroads. The alcoholism that plagues Indian country added to the lethal mix, along with sleepy, inattentive drivers. Then the New Mexico Highway Department widened the road and added rumble ridges to startle drivers who drifted onto the shoulder. Bernie passed trucks hauling cattle, semis on their way west, and a scattering of pickups, station wagons, and SUVs. She made a left when she saw the sign for Chaco Canyon National Historic Site, driving first on pavement and, when it ended, on hard-packed dirt that became washboard and sand. Not another car in sight.

Chee said, “I haven’t been here since the lieutenant and I handled that case where Ellie disappeared the first time. She worked here.”

Bernie nodded. “That the time you rented a helicopter? Did you just put it on your credit card?”

Chee laughed. “That’s a long story. Actually, there were two helicopters. The guy who hurt Ellie was a pilot as well as an archaeologist. He had been digging in the graves of the old ones, and Ellie found out. It was a fascinating case. Leaphorn never talked to me about how he solved it. Except to say he didn’t understand the white culture’s fixation on revenge, getting even.”

“Wasn’t that right after Emma died?” Bernie always wished she’d had a chance to meet Leaphorn’s wife.

“Yes,” Chee said. “He put in for retirement after that, but changed his mind. I think finding Ellie gave him a reason to stay with police work for a few more years.”

“Are you surprised he and Louisa haven’t gotten married?”

“I asked him about that once.” Chee chuckled. “He told me he’d proposed to her and she turned him down. She said she’d already been married and it didn’t agree with her.”

Bernie leaned toward the windshield. “I think I saw something big out there.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “I got a glimpse of it, too.”

“Makes me edgy,” Bernie said. She had grown up with stories of skinwalkers, the legendary Navajo shape shifters who assumed various animal forms and roamed in the darkness looking for and causing trouble. She vividly recalled the hair-raising tales her grandmother told of the evil they created. The unexpected motion on this still, moon-filled night made her feel like a nervous five-year-old.

“Elk have come back to this area,” Chee said. “Maybe some cougar or even a Mexican grey wolf is following them.”

“I just hope all critters stay out of the road.”

“Oh, no,” Chee said. “What about the cat? We won’t be home to feed her.”

“You fed her this morning,” she said. “She had a full bowl of water, too. You can feed her first thing when we get home.”

“Yeah, I know. But still. Poor little thing.”

Bernie kept the truck at a brisk forty-five miles an hour to smooth out the washboards. Around the next curve the headlights bounced off the red coats of three lean Herefords, a small herd in the center of the road. She took her foot off the gas and with both hands on the wheel tapped the brake. She steered to the right, and the lights hit a fourth cow, this one walking toward its companions, sauntering toward the spot the truck would have hit if Bernie had not corrected again, moving farther to the right. She felt a front tire against the soft sand at the edge of the road. The cows looked up and took an interest in the approaching truck.

Bernie thought: Truck, don’t roll. Cow, stand still, be calm. All cows, be calm.

She steered farther off the clay washboard, the tires sinking into the deep ridge of sand at the edge of the hard pack. The truck jolted and slowed, and then the back tires found the solid surface below. She gave it a bit of gas and brought it back to the road.

She heard Chee exhale. The headlights flashed on a road sign, a yellow triangle with a black drawing of a cow.

“Thank goodness that sign is there,” he said. “Good driving. Let me take it awhile.”

She stopped the truck, and they both climbed out. Even though the temperature had probably reached the nineties here during the day, the night air felt cool, pleasant, perfect against her sweaty back. Overhead, despite the brightness of the moon, she could see hundreds of stars. Thousands. Argo Navis, Coyote Star in the southern sky, glittering with a whisper of red and orange. The North Star, or Central Fire, Nahookos Baka’. The music of crickets and other creatures, sounds she didn’t recognize, animated the evening.

“My grandmother never liked any of us to be out at night,” she said. “Chindi roaming around, sniffing out trouble.”

Chee stood next to her, studying the stars. “Mine was the same. It took me years to be comfortable in the dark. I still have my moments.”

“That’s just your good cop sense. And who is to say that those grandmothers were wrong?”

They bounced along for another twenty minutes, grateful for lunar illumination and the lack of cattle, elk, feral horses, or even another vehicle on the road. They could see the iconic bulk of Fajada Butte rising in the distance.

“I’ve never seen this place at night,” Chee said. “It’s even more deserted, lonelier, mysterious.”

“Is the mystery still where the people went?”

“That one has been pretty much solved,” he said. “It used to be said that they disappeared. Better research showed that they moved on when conditions here got too hard. No one yet really knows why they settled here in the first place, built these huge structures and miles of wide roadway to connect them. And of course we don’t know what went on in their kivas.”

“I remember my uncle telling me stories about our people and the old ones who lived here,” she said. “How they were related to us Navajos, especially to the Kiiyaa’áanii.”

“I heard how that clan was named for a stone tower somewhere out here. Or was that in Canyon de Chelly? Did your uncle tell you about Pueblo Pintado?” Chee said.

“Probably. I’m sorry I don’t remember everything he said. But I know he told me that without the Diné, there would have been no civilization here.”

They felt and heard the difference as the truck’s tires rolled from dirt to pavement. Bernie noticed a sign: “Chaco Canyon Visitor Center .5 mile.” It would be good to stretch out and get to sleep.

Then she saw something move. “In the road.”

Chee braked.

Large black shapes loomed ahead. The glare from the truck’s headlights flashed in their eyes. Unlike the sleepy cattle, the elk bounded off the roadway and kept going.

“They’re huge,” she said.

“Yeah,” Chee said. “They get bigger here at lower altitude. The ones you’re used to are up in the Chuskas. Smaller there.”

She laughed. “So that’s why the trout swim in mountain streams and whales live in the ocean?”

“Exactly,” he said. “I always knew you were a quick study.”

They pulled into the campground, and Chee switched to parking lights. They passed domed tents next to picnic tables and grills on stands, camping trailers and the boxy shapes of RVs. It took a few minutes to find the first empty spot. They pulled the tarps and sleeping bags from the trunk, trying to be quiet, and spread them out on sandy earth still warm from the June day.

They moved their sleeping bags close together and started to take off their shoes.

“What’s that noise?” Chee kept his voice low.

“Sounds like a cross between a gurgle and sandpaper. I bet it’s frogs or toads or something.”

“I thought they needed water.”

“There must have been some rain here,” Bernie said. The desert was wonderful, she thought, packed full of life waiting quietly under the earth’s surface. Waiting for a drop of moisture to inspire it to spring forth. “I bet we’ll see wildflowers in bloom tomorrow.”

Chee walked to the truck. He returned with their water bottles and handed her hers. “You made me thirsty.”

They climbed into the sleeping bags, and he pulled her close. They watched the moon move across the endless New Mexico night sky until they fell asleep.

Bernie awoke to pearly predawn light. She looked at Chee, his dark eyes open to the sky. “Come run with me,” she whispered. They pulled on their shoes and went to welcome the day. They ran through the campground, where blue, gray, and green nylon tents sprouted like mushrooms, jogging toward the main road beneath the weathered sandstone cliffs. The cool air reverberated with bird calls.

They ran until the sun rose, then circled back and found the campground coming to life. They heard muffled conversations and smelled bacon and coffee. A slot over from where they camped, a woman in a plaid shirt tended a fire beneath a grill. “Good morning, neighbors,” she said as she saw them approach. She picked up the coffeepot by its handle, using a towel as a hot pad. “I’ve got some extra. Join me?”

“Sounds great,” Bernie said. “How kind of you.”

The woman gave Bernie a cup that matched the blue camping pot and poured Chee’s into a red mug and offered them milk and sugar.

“I don’t care where I am,” she said. “I can’t start the day without a hit of this.”

Bernie tried a sip. It was tea, not the coffee she expected. She should have known from the smell. At least it was hot.

“Enjoying the ruins?” Chee asked.

“I come every few years,” the woman said. “My husband used to come with me, always complaining about how far it was from Denver. Now he’s with his new wife, complaining about something else, no doubt.” She chuckled, refilled her own cup. “I’m Karen.”

“I’m Jim. This is Bernie.”

Bernie noticed a pad of paper open to sketches.

“You an artist?”

“Sort of. I make drawings of places I like, a visual journal. Chaco is still my favorite. I did the major ruins a few years ago with Mr. Complainer. Now I’m exploring sites farther out.”

“Are you hiking by yourself?” Chee asked.

Karen nodded.

“Be careful,” he said.

“I was.” She sipped her tea. “I’d offer you breakfast, but I’m not cooking this morning. Packing up and heading for home.”

Bernie said, “We’re off to see the ruins, then we have to get this guy to work.”

“So you live around here? I’m jealous. What do you do?” Karen asked.

“I’m a cop,” Chee said. He turned his head toward Bernie. “She is, too. We’re based in Shiprock.”

“Well, you might find this interesting,” Karen said. “Earlier this week, I was sketching on the trail out at Pueblo Alto. When I parked, there was one other car there. I hiked up, went off to find a place with a view of Pueblo del Arroyo—that’s the ruin closest to the parking lot. I walked up a dry wash and set up in the shade at a great vista point. I lose track of time when I work, so I’m not sure how long I’d been there, but I heard a commotion. It sounded like people arguing. I noticed a couple of hikers on the rim trail. A woman in a long-sleeved shirt, you know, one of those expensive ones to keep out the UV rays? The other one had one of those khaki hats that tie on with a string. The dorky-looking ones that old people wear?”

Chee nodded. Karen continued. “The dorky-hat person was twisting the other person’s arm, kind of pulling her. The woman was resisting, but Dorky Hat seemed to overpower her. Or she just gave in. They moved out of sight, but I could hear them arguing for a while longer. I didn’t think much more about it. I went back to sketching. The light was just right, you know? Well, I stopped to get out my water bottle, and I noticed Dorky Hat down below, running. I thought at the time it was too hot to be running. I finished, packed up, ambled down to my car. The other car—I assume it was theirs—was gone.”

Karen put her mug down. “I figured the woman must have hiked out earlier or later or something, and I’d missed seeing her. But it stuck with me.”

“Did you mention it at the park headquarters?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t want the rangers to think I was a deranged artist. I decided I’d go in this morning and report it, but the office isn’t open yet and I have to get on the road.”

“We’ll tell them about it,” Bernie said. “We’re heading down there in a few minutes anyway. Anything else about that incident you think we ought to mention?”

Karen said, “I heard a loud noise while I was working. I thought it was a car backfiring, or someone setting off a firecracker out here. But now that I’m thinking about it and talking to you guys, it could have been a gunshot.”

Bernie and Chee drove to the visitor center and went to the information desk. They identified themselves to the gray-haired ranger, Andrew Stephen, as police officers with the Navajo Nation. “Is Joe Wakara here today?”

“No. I’m in charge today. Can I help you with something?”

“So even that old geezer gets a day off,” Chee said.

Stephen laughed. “You know him, huh?”

Wakara, a friend of Leaphorn’s, had been head of security at the park for as long as Chee could remember.

Chee mentioned the conversation about the quarreling hikers.

“We haven’t had any reports of anyone missing,” Stephen said. “I’ll ask our guy who makes the rounds to hike up that trail a ways this afternoon. Just in case.”

“Where is Pueblo Alto, anyway?” Bernie asked.

Stephen showed her on the map.

“I haven’t been to Chaco for a while,” Chee said. “Isn’t this a new visitor center?”

“It opened a few years ago. The old building you remember had to be razed.”

“Old? Wasn’t it built in the late nineteen-fifties?”

“Ironic, isn’t it. Modern America couldn’t build a visitor center to last seventy years,” Stephen said. “These Pueblo buildings still stand after more than a thousand. But this time we did it right. We brought in an Indian to bless the site.”

He smiled at Chee. “Policeman, huh? You’re the one I call if someone gets nervous about livestock on the Navajo Nation part of the road?”

“Depends on if the cows want to file a complaint about the traffic harassing them. You worked here long?”

“Fifteen years,” Stephen said. “I love it. Except for the road.”

“Did you know a woman named Eleanor Friedman-Bernal who used to do research here?” Bernie asked.

“Ellie? A bit. I got hired on a few months before she nearly got killed. She called here last month, all excited. Said she’d left her college job and was moving back to New Mexico. Said she’d come see the ruins and that she’d stop in and say hi.”

Bernie said, “I’m doing some work for the AIRC. I’d love to talk to her about some Chaco pots.”

“She knows a lot about them,” Stephen said. “That’s her specialty. Absolutely passionate about it. Do you know her?”

“I met her,” Chee said. “I worked on that case where she nearly died. So she has been back here?”

“Not yet. Not that I know of. I guess her plans changed. They say she always was a little flaky. I heard she planned to start up that appraisal business again, now that she’s not teaching anymore. That must be keeping her busy.”

Stephen smiled at Bernie. “If you’re interested in pottery, we’ve got some books on it over there. Some hard-to-find reference stuff that focuses mostly on pots from here.”

They wandered over to a section of the room that served as the bookstore, then spent a few minutes with the exhibits. Since most of the material found at Chaco Canyon had been shipped elsewhere a long time ago, the exhibit items were on loan. The Maxwell Museum at the University of New Mexico had provided the artifacts, examples of jewelry, animal carvings, bits of worked turquoise, stone tools, black-and-white potshards, part of a long and close association between the two institutions.

A group of Navajo kids, six- and seven-year-olds, swarmed into the visitor center. In addition to two women, obviously teachers, Bernie noticed a tall young man with the little people. Stoop Boy. She watched him intervene with two boys who had been pushing each other, put a hand on each one’s arm and squat down to talk to them at eye level. Interesting, she thought. She’d assumed he didn’t have a job.

Stoop Boy noticed Bernie and smiled. She never saw him smile when he was with Darleen. He walked over to her, bringing the kids along.

“Yá’át’ééh,” he said.

She couldn’t remember his name, and he seemed to sense that and let her off the hook. He looked at Chee, said, “I’m Charley Zah,” and introduced himself Navajo style. “I’m a friend of Officer Manuelito’s sister.”

Chee reciprocated with his own introduction. The urchins in Zah’s grasp squirmed. “You’ve got your hands full.”

“Literally.” Zah laughed. “We bring the kids here a couple times with the summer program. We tell Chaco stories on the bus, talk about the ones who lived here. Then we let them see the ruins, get some sunlight, watch the ravens soar.

“Are you here on business?” Zah asked. “I understand they found a few bodies out there. And then there’s the question of what happened to all the other bodies they didn’t find here. Alien abductions?”

Chee laughed. “We don’t get to handle those cold cases. We leave that to the archaeologists. They are puzzling over how a place so big would have so few burials.”

The restless youngsters pulled on Stoop Boy’s hands. “We’re starting our tour at Pueblo Bonito, in case you want to tag along, or avoid us. But the first stop is out there.” He pointed toward the restroom with his chin and let the boys lead him away. “Nice to meet you,” he said to Chee, and, “Nice to see you again,” to Bernie.

“So that’s the guy leading Darleen into trouble?”

“I may have pegged him wrong,” Bernie said. “He sure seems different here.”

“It must be what they call the Chaco Phenomenon.”

“You know everything?”

Chee grinned. “And what I don’t know, I make up.”

They left the visitor center for the trail to Una Vida, a structure archaeologists call a great house, a towering ruin of hand-carved stone partly buried beneath eons of blowing sand and a thin layer of tough vegetation. The trail through what was left of the rooms took them to petroglyphs, ancient artists’ depictions of animals, spirals, lightning, and perhaps divine beings.

Bernie paused near a section of wall that differed from the rest of the stone masonry. “This could have been an old sheep camp.”

Chee trotted up with the tour pamphlet. “That’s right. Evidently Navajo sheep corrals were here around eighteen hundred.”

“With a touch of water this would be good sheep country,” Bernie said.

They walked back toward the visitor center and the truck, aware of the growing heat.

“In a couple of weeks, this place will be full of people who come for the solstice,” Chee said.

“All those spiritual seekers and wannabe Indians make my head spin,” she said.

“I can’t blame them for wanting to be here. There’s no place in the world quite like this. And to think that the ones who lived here were so wise that we can still use their solar markers ten centuries later. That’s impressive.”

“I love the way the architecture blends into the landscape,” Bernie said. “I wonder what brought the people here?”

Chee walked ahead to open the truck. “They came on foot, honey. The pickup hadn’t been invented yet.”

They didn’t have time for more hiking, but they explored the paved loop trail with views of the remains of more massive ruins of a culture that rose and fell over the course of three centuries. Then they headed out of the park, driving past the Fajada Butte overlook and the junction for the Wijiji ruins. Bernie said, “Seeing this place makes me more curious about the pottery that came from here, the things the lieutenant was working on. And about Ellie.”

Chee slowed as they left the pavement for the dirt road. “Interesting that the ranger said Ellie planned to come back to visit.”

“That’s probably why she had Pueblo Alto on her calendar,” Bernie said. “Maybe she decided to shoot the lieutenant and go into hiding first.”

“We’ll ask her when we find her. Or when the feds bring her in.”

Bernie said, “She sounds like a cool character. Focused on her job. I guess spending all that time with old pots would tend to make you, well, detached.”

“Or not liking people much in the first place gives you the perfect personality for that.”

“Sounds like Dr. Davis, too. Maybe pot people are all introverts.”

They bounced along in silence for a while. The washboards they encountered on the way out had a pattern that denied the truck a comfortable ride at any speed. Fast or slow, the road threatened to shake the bolts loose. Bernie saw a lean coyote, its tan coat the same color as the sandy earth, a contrast to the grey of the sage. She watched a trio of turkey vultures soar against the vivid blue sky. No clouds yet.

Chee said, “Davis lied about not remembering me. I could tell by the way she looked at me that she knew who I was. I thought she seemed familiar. But when I met her she had long, curly red hair.”

“When did you meet her?”

“Years ago. It was here at Chaco, working the missing Ellie case with the lieutenant. We interviewed her as part of the investigation. Most folks don’t have that many encounters with the police. They remember them.”

“Maybe she’s trying to forget that whole phase of her life,” Bernie said.

“Maybe. But she and Ellie lived in employee housing. It seems odd that she wouldn’t have recognized EFB either.”

“She might not have known what Ellie called her business,” Bernie said. “You saw her check the database.”

Bernie noticed a car approaching them, bouncing along the washboard barely under control. “You know, the other thing that’s wrong here is this Leonard Nez. Jackson being so closemouthed about him and about what they were doing that day, if they didn’t shoot the lieutenant. The Nez guy must have some pull with Jackson, holding something over him, threatening him.”

“Yeah,” Chee said. “I don’t buy the story of an unnamed uncle who lives down a road Zuni way. Whatever it is, it’s big enough that Jackson was willing to spend a night in jail rather than share it.”

Chee pulled out to pass a king cab truck hauling a camping trailer, moving away from the cloud of dust it generated and into the clear air. “You know the ranch where Jackson said he works?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Bernie said. “The Jacobs family has been out there for generations.”

“I think the number Jackson gave you is the same number Ellie jotted down on her desk pad next to ‘SJ,’ ” he said. “I remembered the Colorado area code.”

Bernie checked her notes from the visit to EFB and took out her cell phone. When she finally had reception, she called. No answer, but the recording told her she’d reached the Double X Ranch.

“You were right,” she said. “That ties Ellie and Jackson and the car.”

She opened the glove box, extracted a map, and spread it across her lap.

“I think I’ve got this down,” Chee said. “I stay on the highway until we reach Farmington. Or until I pull over for you to drive. Correct me if I’m wrong. But I guess I don’t even need to say that anymore, do I, sweetheart?”

She punched him in the arm. Not hard, but hard enough.

“I’m looking for the shortest way to get from Shiprock to the Double X Ranch,” she said.

“You could use the GPS in your phone.”

“Right,” Bernie said. “I love the way that computer voice twists up Navajo place names. Can I use the truck?”

“Sorry. While you’re finding SJ this afternoon, I’ve got to get to Window Rock. I wonder what new torture Largo has dreamed up for me?”