Window Rock lives on government: offices for the Navajo Nation’s president, legislators, and their staffs, the court system and its support team, fish and wildlife, archaeology, fire and rescue, veterans’ affairs, tourism, and economic development. The state of Arizona’s bureaucracy provides jobs with departments for drivers’ licenses and social services. Federal offices perch along Navajo Route 3 and Arizona 264—the highway to St. Michael’s and Ganado, home of the historic Hubbell Trading Post.
The Navajo Division of Public Safety headquarters occupies an assembly of low buildings on the edge of the mesa country that frames the town. The compound has a 1960s utilitarian, strictly-business feel to it. Most of the officers who serve are Diné—the Navajo word loosely meaning “The People.” Related or not, they treat each other like relatives, occasionally engaging in family feuds but, in times of stress, working together with a single focus. In addition to following police procedure, for the officers on the force, serving effectively means understanding relationships among and between the Navajo Nation’s extended families. The officers need to know who has a grudge against whom, who has problems with drugs or drinking, who might be a little crazy, born mean, or both. They need to understand who respects the Navajo Way and who is estranged from it. The roughly 230 men and women commissioned as officers work out of seven home-base locations, responding each year to an average of more than 289,000 calls for service spread out over the 17.2 million acres of the reservation.
Inside the police building, Bernie noticed an eerie quiet, the absence of the usual joking and carrying on, a stillness befitting he who had been ambushed. News travels fast in a place like this, and word that a famous old policeman had been shot down in cold blood moved like lightning.
Captain Largo paced in his office, door open. Bernie had never seen Largo agitated. She tapped on the door frame, saw him glance up, and walked in.
“How is the lieutenant?” she asked.
“The ambulance just got to Gallup. He made it that far.”
Bernie looked at her hands, discovering dried blood beneath her nails.
“You did just right out there. Good description of the car,” Largo said. “Sit down.”
She felt the cool metal of the straight-backed chair through her shirt. It was the only furniture in the office except for Largo’s roller chair and desk. He sat, too, looking across the piles of paper on the flat metal desktop. “No trace of the shooter yet.”
“I thought of some other details,” she said. “I told the FBI. Damage to the rear right fender. Whining sound, like a bad fan belt. The shooter was wearing gloves or had dark hands.”
“Cordova filled me in. He said you were a good witness.” Largo moved to the window. She glanced past him at the view of the parking lot, the sun glinting off the windshields. He said, “We’re having coffee, joking, and then, bang. It could have been you, me, any of us in that room, any week over the past whatever many years we’ve been meeting there. Any wacko with a grudge could have taken a shot.”
She felt the current of anger in his voice and noticed the lines of stress in his forehead. Largo seemed noticeably older than at breakfast.
“We’ll catch him,” Bernie said. “And we’ll find out why. I promised the lieutenant before he left with the EMTs.”
Largo sighed, sat down again. “I want you to take the next couple of days off. I’ve been involved in things like this before. They take a toll.”
“Sir, I have to work on this case.” She tried to keep her voice calm, not to let her surprise show.
Largo said, “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”
“Put me in charge of this, Captain. I’ll work my heart out.”
“We’re all in this together. Everyone here feels just like you do.”
“You’re wrong about that, sir.” She didn’t remember ever being so furious, so close to exploding. “I saw him fall. If I’d walked out there with him, I might have gotten a shot off. I have to do this. I promised him. Promised to—”
Largo held out his hands, palms facing her. “Enough. What is it about ‘off the case’ you don’t understand, Officer?”
Bernie felt the room closing in on her.
Largo was standing now, speaking louder. “Not only were you the first responder at an incident where a fellow officer was seriously wounded, you may be the only eyewitness. You know the rules about this. Or if you don’t, you ought to.” He stepped close enough to touch her. “If you were a man, I’d treat you the same. Same as any officer who is there when a brother goes down. Don’t start thinking this is sexist or something. It’s normal procedure. Clear?”
The phone rang. He answered it. Nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Then he turned to her. “They’re done at the crime scene.” He picked up Leaphorn’s keys and put them in Bernie’s hand. “Go back to the restaurant. Get his truck and drive it to the house. Tell Louisa what happened. His records still have ‘Wife, Emma’ as emergency contact. We need to find some family. Do that for him. Then you’re out of here.”
She sat silently until she could trust herself to speak. “Emma had some brothers. I remember him talking about Emma’s sister, too, when we first met. I don’t know about anybody else, anybody closer.” Largo knew the rest, how Emma’s traditional Navajo family had assumed that Leaphorn would marry Emma’s sister after Emma died from complications of brain surgery. Leaphorn’s violation of that expectation had created a chasm.
“Find whoever we need to call,” Largo said. “Then start your leave. Chee will be in charge on our end, our liaison with the feds, reporting to me.”
“Chee?”
Largo frowned. “I know you, Manuelito. I know you’ll be involved. You won’t be able to stop yourself. But I don’t want to hear about it unless you want me to fire you. Now get out of here.”
She walked into the hallway outside Largo’s office and saw Chee standing there, a little pale, clenching and unclenching his hands.
“Hey you,” he said. Then he hugged her fiercely, without any more words, and she hugged back, forgetting she was in uniform, at work, with other cops around.
Finally, she raised her face from his chest.
“Largo told me to drive Leaphorn’s truck back to his house, see if I could find any names or numbers of relatives for emergency contacts. And then go home, off the case. Can you pick me up at Leaphorn’s place?”
“I’ll meet you there. I have to talk to Largo first.”
“He told me you’re in charge of the investigation,” Bernie said.
Chee nodded. “Yeah. That’s the second reason I’m here. I hope Largo knows what he’s doing.”
The parking lot at the Navajo Inn was virtually deserted now, police vehicles gone, yellow crime scene tape removed, trapped tourists on their way. Bernie parked her old Toyota next to Leaphorn’s white truck, one slot over from the spot the shooter had used. Someone, she noticed, had thrown dirt over the blood and swept it up. The dark spot baking into the asphalt beneath the Arizona sun could have been an oil leak. Bernie opened the unlocked driver’s door. She climbed up into the truck cab and struggled with the lever, finally managing to force the seat forward enough for her legs. Chee joked that instead of telling people how tall she was, she should tell them how short she was.
She removed the round silver sunshade from the windshield and felt the heat seep in. The truck, an early 1990s Ford, seemed like an extension of Leaphorn himself. Nothing extraneous. Not a fast food wrapper, discarded toothpick, or empty to-go cup in sight. She noticed his well-used blue thermos on the passenger seat and, next to it, a pile of mail and an open package of new manila envelopes.
The Ford started right up. She located the gas gauge—half a tank—and noticed the odometer: 180,432. Almost as many miles as her little Toyota.
She slowed the truck in front of Leaphorn’s house, parked in the empty driveway. She pushed the doorbell, waited for Louisa to answer, then rapped her knuckles against the wooden frame. When the house showed no signs of life, she tried the knob. Locked.
Returning to the truck, she picked up the thermos, the envelopes, and the mail. She propped the sunshade in the windshield and walked around the house to the back door. As she suspected, it was unlocked. She knocked and called, “Louisa?” She waited without getting an answer, opened the door, and stepped into the kitchen.
“Louisa? Are you here?”
Over the stainless steel sink, a moon-faced clock ticked loudly. Otherwise, the room was quiet and as neat as she remembered it. A water glass, a spoon, and a mug with the Arizona Wildcats logo stood in the drain rack near the sink.
The few times she’d been here, she’d come with Chee when he needed to discuss a puzzling case with the lieutenant. Louisa had served them coffee and store-bought sugar cookies at this kitchen table and offered an occasional opinion. The sessions prompted the lieutenant to question an odd fact or unlikely sequence of events, which inspired Chee to remember or reconsider something. The process left her smart, competent husband feeling like a schoolboy.
Bernie put the thermos and the mail on the table. Where was Louisa? Why was there one cup in the drain rack, not two?
The kitchen window faced the house next door. More Navajos lived like white people now, some in government houses built close to each other so they could have running water and electricity. When she was a girl, the nearest neighbors, her mother’s sister and her family, lived three miles away. Sage, rocks, and welcome emptiness lay between them. Because he was so much older, Leaphorn must have grown up somewhere with even fewer neighbors. After he got well, she’d ask about that, prompt him to tell her some stories from his childhood.
Fatigue washed over her as though she’d run a marathon with thirty-pound weights on her legs. If she had sprinted faster, she would know who fired the shot that took down the lieutenant. She’d eased up on her jogging after she and Jim got married. She used to rise at sunrise, no matter what the season. Run to greet the day. She’d grown lazy, and that might have let the person who hurt him go free.
I wonder if he’ll live through this, Bernie thought, but pushed the speculation aside. Her upbringing conditioned her to avoid negative thoughts, even as questions. Her Navajo name was Laughing Girl, but she didn’t feel like laughing now. She noticed the start of a headache. She thought of how the Holy People advised the Diné not to focus on conflict or sorrow. But evil surrounded her, too, some days as much as beauty. She saw the downside of humanity every day she worked as a police officer, in situations that ranged from petty arguments among clan members to four-year-olds fending for themselves while their parents cooked meth in the kitchen instead of dinner.
Why did the Holy People lead the Diné to a world with so much sorrow? Big sorrows, like a good man catching a bullet in the brain. Like her mother abandoning the loom she loved because arthritis crippled her hands. Like her sister Darleen, on the road to becoming a lost young woman.
A sound startled her, and then she recognized it: a row of ice cubes falling into the freezer box. Get on with it, she thought. Stop wasting time. She noticed the yellow phone on the wall. The missing Louisa must have a cell phone because of all the traveling she did. Bernie stood, scanned the list of numbers attached to the refrigerator with a magnet from the Navajo Times. Several doctors, a dentist, a car repair shop. Nothing identified as Louisa’s cell. The lieutenant must have had her number memorized or programmed into his phone. He complained about how you couldn’t get a reliable signal on the reservation and how cell phones interrupted the quiet, but he’d got his, he’d told her and Chee, to keep Louisa happy. He probably had the phone with him when the shooter attacked. But maybe he’d left it here. Worth a look. Find the phone, call Louisa, give her the news. And the logical place for the phone would be connected to a charger.
Bernie didn’t notice a charger in the kitchen, so she walked down the hall, passing the living room on the right. The lieutenant or Louisa had closed the drapes to keep out the heat, leaving the house in soft, dim light. Prowling made her edgy, unsettled.
She noticed an open door on the left, a bathroom. Neat, almost sterile. Just the essential towels, hand soap, and a box of tissues; not a toothbrush or a vitamin bottle in sight. It reminded her of a motel, except for the cat box near the bathtub. The electrical outlets were empty; no charger.
The room across the hall held a double bed with a masculine grey spread draped over it and a colorful Teec Nos Pos blanket on top of that. She ran her hand over the weaving. Smooth, fine work. She’d ask the lieutenant to tell her about this rug, who gave it to him and why. The round-topped alarm clock on the dresser reminded Bernie of the clock her grandfather had owned. On the simple wooden table next to it sat a book with a pair of black-framed reading glasses on top of it, and a gooseneck lamp. No phone, cell or otherwise.
She found Leaphorn’s office at the next doorway. Another large rug, this one woven to include deep aniline red yarn and the terraced diamond designs that marked the Ganado style, occupied part of the wooden floor. Among the books on his shelves, the lieutenant had intermixed brown-glazed Navajo pots, a small polychrome Hopi seed jar shaped like a flying saucer, an alabaster eagle, and an assembly of Zuni fetishes. A stuffed chair sat in the corner with a nearby table and a floor lamp. On the table, Bernie noticed a wedding basket and two framed photographs. She leaned down for a closer look at the smaller picture, a black-and-white shot of a Navajo woman holding the same basket, a young Leaphorn standing beside her, both of them smiling. She guessed the woman was his late wife, Emma. Next to it, the lieutenant had parked the color picture of Chee and Bernie on the white beach in Hawaii the week after their wedding, the vast deep ocean blue behind them. No photos of Louisa, his housemate, friend, and maybe something more than that for the past five years. No photos of anyone else, including those who might be relatives.
The room’s focal point was the lieutenant’s rolltop desk. She sat behind it, feeling like an intruder. He had piled a stack of books next to the computer monitor. She opened the top one, From This Earth: The Ancient Art of Pueblo Pottery, to a page Leaphorn had marked with a slip of paper and found a spread of photos of pots and potshards with geometric designs. She glanced at the other titles: Anasazi Pottery; Ten Centuries of Prehistoric Ceramic Art; Pueblo Potters of the Four Corners Country; Ceramic Treasures of Chaco Canyon. All from the Navajo Nation library. A research project, she guessed, for a client somewhere.
A dog barked, and then she heard a woman’s voice and an end to the barking. She wouldn’t like living so close to neighbors. She and Jim didn’t have a fancy place, but she loved the silence of their spot along the San Juan River.
She scanned the lieutenant’s desktop for the phone. Not there. She pulled her shirttail free and used it to open the top drawer. A neat pile of pens in one compartment. Pencils, all sharpened, in the other, along with an organized arrangement of letter-size envelopes, paper clips, and business cards wrapped in a rubber band.
She opened the large lower drawer next. She saw neatly labeled folders with old-fashioned paper tabs for alphabetizing, scores of files arranged behind pastel dividers. Nothing marked “death threats.”
She heard a vehicle approach on the gravel road and pull up into the driveway. Louisa coming home, she thought. As she pushed the drawer closed, her gaze drifted to the floor. She noticed a wastebasket with some torn paper worth investigating and a white cardboard filing box on the floor next to it. On top sat the phone charger. Empty. Darn it.
She hurried out of the office into the living room. She pushed back the drape before opening the front door and saw Chee walking toward the porch.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Louisa here?”
“No. Not yet. I was hoping she’d show up so I could talk to her before you got here.”
“Come outside and take a look at this.”
She followed him, feeling the intensity of the sun through her uniform shirt. He stopped at the edge of Leaphorn’s driveway and pointed at the dirt with the toe of his boot. “What do you think?”
“Wheel tracks. A dolly? Maybe the lieutenant or Louisa was moving something.”
“Maybe one of those rolling suitcases,” Chee said. “Maybe that’s why we can’t find Louisa.”
“She’ll turn up,” Bernie said. “Hey, thanks for picking me up. I saw lots of files in the lieutenant’s desk drawer. The current stuff might be relevant to the shooting. And we ought to check the information on his computer.”
Chee laughed as they went inside. “I’ll get right on it. Just point me in the right direction. Anything else?”
Bernie ignored him, leading the way down the hall to the office.
“Look at that.” Chee examined the maze of wires dangling behind Leaphorn’s desk. “That computer must be twenty years old. I remember him talking about how slow it was and about how he was going to get a new one.” He shook his head. “It was one of the few things I ever heard him complain about. He didn’t complain much. Except about me.”
“He appreciates you, so he expects a lot from you,” Bernie said. “He just didn’t know how to show it. I mean, doesn’t know how to show it.”
“Tough as an old boot,” Chee said.
Bernie noticed that she hadn’t closed the large drawer completely. “The files are in there.”
Chee extracted latex gloves from his pants pocket and nudged the drawer fully open. He scrutinized the folders, then pulled one out.
“Leaphorn and I collaborated on this case. It fascinated me to see how his mind worked. We discovered a crazed scientist experimenting with bubonic plague. An old lady tending her goats helped us solve the thing.”
“Sounds like an adventure.”
“It started when a rich grandmother hired the lieutenant to find her granddaughter. The girl had a job as a college intern, working on a public health project on the reservation near Yells Back Butte. Leaphorn’s investigation overlapped a case I was on, a situation where it looked like a young Hopi had killed a Navajo cop.”
“Did the lieutenant find the granddaughter?”
“Her body. We found the guy who killed her, and it turned out he’d killed the officer, too. The Hopi guy was innocent, except for eagle poaching.” Chee added, “The lieutenant told me, ‘Good job.’ ”
She heard the catch in his voice. Although he’d never say it, few things pleased Chee more than the approval of the crusty old lieutenant. “So, how’s he doing?”
“We just got word that Leaphorn made it into Gallup.”
She heard something in his voice that made her ask, “What else?”
Silence. Then Chee said, “He’s too badly injured for treatment there. They called in a helicopter to take him to Albuquerque to the big hospital with the fancy trauma unit.”
“When he comes out of this, let’s help him get a new computer. A laptop he could take with him on cases, type his notes right into it. That would save him a lot of time.”
“You think he’d give up his little leather notebook? No way.” Chee turned back to the file drawer. “I’ll thumb through these quickly, see if anything jumps out at me. Then I need to get back to the office. Bigman is on his way. He can box these up for us and deal with the computer.”
“And will you look for Leaphorn’s phone?” she asked. “I’m going to check the rest of the house, see if there’s anything out of the ordinary. Maybe his cell will turn up, and I can call Louisa’s cell.”
She left Chee fanning through the folders. She noticed again how quiet the house was, how different from her cubicle at the station or the constant noise of her unit when she was on the road. The semiretired life might be nice, she thought, but kind of lonely.
She found Louisa’s bedroom at the end of the hall. Unlike Leaphorn’s room, it looked ransacked. Clothes tossed everywhere, drawers hanging open, shoes on the dresser top. She looked in the closet for a suitcase and saw empty hangers.
Chee’s voice startled her. “Some of these folders might be worth following up on, but they’re old. Bigman can look at the computer files, see what’s more recent. You ready?”
“I’m coming.” She told him what she’d found, and what she hadn’t found.
“Maybe Louisa keeps her suitcase in the garage or in another closet. Maybe she’s just naturally messy. Like your little sister.”
Bernie said, “I don’t think she’s messy. Look how neat the rest of this house is. I think she left in a hurry. Let’s go. You’ve got a lot to do.”
On the way out, she pulled a business card from her pocket and wrote “Louisa, call ASAP” on the back. She left it in the center of the kitchen table, along with Leaphorn’s truck keys.
Bernie slid into the passenger seat of Chee’s police unit, feeling the heat from the upholstery and a film of sweat on her upper lip. Chee maneuvered in behind the wheel and had just started the engine when Largo’s voice bellowed through on the scanner.
“Chee, is Bernie with you?”
“Yes, sir. We’re heading back to the Navajo Inn for her car.”
“Not yet,” Largo said. “We found a vehicle that could be the shooter’s. Bernie needs to give us an ID.”