The Wailing Wind - Leaphorn & Chee 17 (8 page)

Mrs. Hano laughed. "Questions. Questions. I just got a glimpse. Just enough to think Mr. McKay might have had his wife with him." She gave Leaphorn a wry look. "Then when Mr. Denton killed Mr. McKay and Mr. Denton's wife went away, I got to thinking maybe it wasn't Mr. McKay's wife napping in his car."

Chapter Eight

Before leaphorn left the archives building, he hurried things along by getting Mrs. Hano to call the fort security number and have someone go down and unlock the gate on the road that led into the area where the TPL crews were converting rocket fuel into plastic explosive and, beyond that, into the infinity of bunkers.

The call turned out to be needless. The guard was a retired
Gallup
cop who recognized Leaphorn. He also was one of those who had earned a little overtime that Halloween night five years earlier helping the
McKinley
County
sheriff's office in its fruitless hunt for what the guard called "those damned kids with their practical jokes."

And maybe the guard was right. Change the maybe to probably. What Leaphorn had learned in the archives had jarred his self-confidence. He seemed to have misjudged McKay, for starters. At least he wasn't the sort of con artist Leaphorn had presumed. And a huge doubt had clouded his certainty about Wiley Denton's missing wife. Maybe everyone was right about her except her parents, who had the good reason of loving her, plus
Denton
and himself. Maybe he really was a romantic, as both Emma and Louisa labeled him. Perhaps
Denton
could claim love, or love plus a frail ego that couldn't tolerate this betrayal, for his own self-deception. Or perhaps that same frail ego had triggered
Denton
into a double murder when he learned his wife had betrayed him.

Leaphorn drove past miles of bunkers, having intended to refresh his very rusty memory of the fort's layout and stimulate some new ideas. Instead he was concentrating on reassessing his old obsession with the fate of Linda Denton. If the woman in McKay's car had been Linda, if she had gone with McKay to tell Wiley she was leaving him for a new, young, and handsome lover, an enraged
Denton
might have shot them both. But then he could hardly expect even a very friendly local judge would slap his wrist on a self-defense plea. A double homicide including one's wife, a local girl, would have probably drawn a life term. So
Denton
shot both but hid Linda's body.

But no.
Denton
's housekeeper had been there. She'd called the police. She would have known.

Yet the newspaper ads urging Linda to come home looked exactly like a cover. Leaphorn went over it again without finding a logical way to make Wiley Denton a double murderer. Finally he drove up the slope where the southern boundary of the old fort had been expanded into the
Zuñi
Mountains
' foothills and parked at the ruins of a small prehistoric pueblo.

He'd been there when he was a very new cop. Someone had complained that an official at the base had excavated the site, a possible violation of the federal antiquities act. It wasn't Navajo Tribal Police business, but the
Gallup Independent
had reported that Officer Leaphorn had just been awarded a master's degree in anthropology. Thus he was sent out to take a look, had reported the site was probably a very late Anasazi outpost with no genuine evidence of looting apparent. Nothing had come of it, except Leaphorn remembered the hilltop offered a superb view of the fort below and the red rock high country across Interstate 40 and the railroad to the south. This afternoon he needed something like that to look at to restore his spirits.

He parked, sat on the tumbled wall of the ruin, and tried to fit what he'd learned from Mrs. Hano into the puzzle of Linda Denton. He found that McKay had stopped being a closed case and had become a sort of mystery himself.
Denton
, too, seemed to have a different role in this odd conundrum. And maybe even young Mr. Doherty. Cowboy Dashee had given the impression that
Denton
might be the suspect of choice in the theory of the Doherty homicide the Bureau was developing. What did the Federals know that he didn't? Probably a lot.

The sun was low now, spreading the long shadow of this hill across the empty road below, and giving a shape to the rows of huge, half-buried quonset huts spread for miles below. He looked at them awhile, watched the shadows spread, counted the bunkers in one section, tried to estimate their number, and finally guessed at a thousand, more or less. But it told him only that he had to know more about McKay and Doherty and
Denton
before he could solve this nagging question of what had happened to a young woman named Linda.

Chapter Nine

Yesterday had been as bad for Officer Bernadette Manuelito as it had been for Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired. A lot of exercise and frustration, capped off with a painful blow to the self-confidence.

Bernie had spent the day trying to take a look into every canyon, arroyo, and wash that drained the west slope of the Chuska in the area prescribed by the mileage limit suggested by Thomas Doherty's Zip Lube sticker. While that territorial description included a relatively small area of mountain slope, it involved a lot of back-and-forth and up-and-down driving to locate drainages, and literally miles of walking. She had accumulated pretty much the same mixture of burrs and stickers on her pant legs and socks as had the late Mr. Doherty, with the exception of the goathead seeds of the puncturevine she'd seen in the rubber soles of his shoes. Thus she concluded that the drainages she'd explored lacked the cool damp spots where Doherty had been. Or, more likely, her entire idea was half-baked nonsense.

Bernie might have dropped her one-woman campaign as useless had it not been for the call she made to the dispatcher on her way home. Rudy Nez was dispatching again. Rudy said there were no calls or messages for her. Quiet day, in fact. A couple of driving-under-the-influence arrests, a domestic violence call, and so forth. And a couple of Feds had come in with Captain Nakai from Window Rock and had a meeting with Captain Largo, and the radio on unit nine was out of service again and Elliot called in for a backup out at Red Valley and then called in and said he didn't need it. And Sergeant Yazzie, from over at Crownpoint, he—

"What did the Feds want?" Bernie asked.

"How would I know?" Rudy said, sounding a bit miffed. Among Navajos such interruptions are not done. One listens until the speaker completes his speech. One certainly doesn't break into the middle of sentences.

"I don't know how you'd know, Rudy," Bernie said. "But I'll bet you do know."

"I could guess," Rudy said. "Apparently they found a pinch or two of placer gold dust in Doherty's truck. On the floor mat probably, or under it, or maybe in his shoes. And they want Captain Largo to get us out checking the appropriate chapter houses to see if he's been doing any placer mining."

"They didn't say where they found this gold dust?"

"Not to me, they didn't. I already said that, didn't I? Maybe they told Captain Largo. Ask him." Nez was irked by that interruption, and she got no more out of him.

But she had enough to put the pieces together.

Sergeant Chee had turned her
Prince Albert
can and its sandy contents over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Which is what he should have done. Had to do, in fact. Not doing that would be concealing evidence in a federal felony case. She imagined the scene; the fbi agent asking Chee how he had come into possession of the tin. Sergeant Chee saying that Officer Manuelito had turned it in. And the agent asking when this had happened, the agent asking why Officer Manuelito had not left the can at the scene of the murder, the agent asking if said officer had taken care to preserve fingerprints, the agent asking if Officer Manuelito's training had not taught her that such prints might be crucial in bringing the perpetrator of the crime to justice. She imagined Chee standing there, red-faced, embarrassed, and angry at her for causing this. Sergeant Chee walking out of the office, wondering how the hell Officer Manuelito could have been so stupid. But, of course, he had to turn it in. He was a cop, wasn't he. What else could he do?

But now it was today, not yesterday. She had awakened angry after a restless night spent reliving a dozen variations of the scene just described—angry and determined to keep trying to prove she was just as smart as they were. She was going to find the place where this Thomas Doherty had been when he was shot, and if she couldn't, then she was going to resign and go find herself a dull, boring job as a secretary, or a salesclerk, or something a long way from Jim Chee.

Therefore, here she was glumly and hopelessly checking the botany of drainages on the east slope of the
Chuska
Mountains
. The first little canyon had been much like the last one yesterday—the same dry-country thistles, sandburs, chamisa, thorns. The second one she tried was larger, looked more promising. She had made a map for herself, thinking that if it worked for the Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn it might work for her, and, according to her markings on that, this one was on the very margins of the distance she had allowed. It was connected somewhere downstream with the Coyote Canyon Wash, which drained the Remanent Mesa, or was it
Mesa
de los Lobos? Bernie was not yet accustomed to the English or Spanish titles maps put on landmarks. Anyway, it was deeper than the last one, which improved the chances for the seep water and afternoon shade that were needed to add the variety required for the seeds and stickers Doherty's socks and pant legs had encountered.

She followed a very marginal track in her elderly pickup until an unusually jarring dozen yards over boulders reminded her of the doubtful condition of her tires. There she pulled off to the side and walked. She'd found dampness in a place or two within the first quarter mile and some signs of truck tire tracks that didn't seem to match Doherty's tires. Not that she had looked at them when she had a chance, but Captain Largo had mentioned they were the same sort of Firestones he had on his pickup—and she had then looked very carefully at those.

Around an abrupt bend she saw a hogan. It was high enough up the slope to be safe from flash floods, built in the traditional octagonal shape of this part of Navajo Country, with its door facing properly eastward, a roof of dark-red tarpaper, and a rusty-looking chimney pipe jutting from the central smoke hole—the tarpaper and the pipe having by now become almost as traditional as the shape.