Earthway (19 page)

Ford came over while she was inspecting the second bullet hole from the round that had struck the engine block instead of them. His pallor said more about his state of
mind than words could have.

“How . . . ,” he managed, but his voice broke. With his hand clenched around the cross he wore around his neck, he tried again. “
How
did you know? You reacted
before
he fired.”

“The badger fetish my brother gave me . . . it warns me. The stone gets hot whenever there’s danger.” Seeing his reaction, she wished she hadn’t said anything. His hand was now wrapped so tightly
around the cross, his knuckles had turned white.

Justine and Marianna, the only available members of her crime scene team, arrived next. As they processed the scene, Ella phoned Joe Neskahi.

“Where’s Dr. Lee?” she asked.

“At home. She hasn’t moved.”

“Are you absolutely certain that she never left the house? Is it possible she went for a walk without you being aware of it, and someone else
picked her up?”

“No way. I’ve got a clear view of the fence line as well as her house. Since her curtains are open, I can see inside her living room with my binoculars, too. Right now she’s reading a book.”

Anger wound through her. While her prime suspect was relaxing at home, Ford and she had been dodging bullets.

Ella hung up, looked around for Ford, and found him inside Tsosie’s store, drinking
a cup of hot cocoa. “That looks good,” she said.

“Comfort food.” He held it out to her, but she declined. “When I was a kid, my mom would always make hot chocolate whenever we had a big problem. Her cocoa was nothing special, but the whipped cream made the difference,” he added with a shaky smile.

“Are you okay?” she asked softly.

He nodded. “God was keeping watch over us today. It was His
hand that brought us through this.”

Ella noticed that he was staring at her badger fetish. “Does it matter whose side kept us alive? Maybe one of your God’s people makes the fetish change temperature.”

“This isn’t a matter of my side or yours,” he said quickly.

“That’s not what I’m hearing,” Ella countered. “But what difference could it possible make who or what’s responsible? We’re alive.
Take it as a win.”

“It matters to me,” he said quietly. “But there’s something neither of us can refute: You’ve saved my life twice now,” he added in a gentler tone.

“It’s all part of my job. You save souls—I save lives,” she said with a smile. “And speaking of jobs . . . I’m going to need you to answer some questions for me.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you always gas up at this place?”

“Yeah, they’ve
got the best prices. I usually come here once a week—about this time, come to think of it.”

“You’re being targeted. You can’t afford to follow any of your regular routines or schedules.”

“I should have thought of that, but today I was more focused on other things,” he admitted. “But why would someone want me dead so badly?” He looked around, making sure no one but Ella was close enough to hear.
Even so, he lowered his voice. “I’m nowhere close to breaking that code. And killing me wouldn’t solve anything. There are others who could do the job if I couldn’t. I’m certainly not irreplaceable.”

Teeny drove up before Ella could answer. “Wait here, okay?” she asked Ford, then went to join her old friend. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Teeny nodded. “I heard the police calls on my scanner and thought
I might be able to help. What do you need me to do?”

“Take Ford with you and keep him out of sight. He was the sniper’s target.”

Within the minute, Teeny and Ford drove away. Ford’s car was still parked by the pumps. After the bullet strike on the engine block, she had no idea if it would even start. She’d have it towed to the impound yard to be checked out. Ford would be without transportation
for a while, but it didn’t matter. He’d have to stay in protective custody anyway. Experience told her the person after Ford wouldn’t stop until he was dead.

Ella met Teeny two hours later at his secure compound just east of Shiprock. Ford was sitting outside in the enclosed courtyard, a Bible on his lap and Abednego at his feet.

“That episode with the sniper really threw him, Ella,” Teeny
said quietly. “I don’t think he ever really believed that the bomb had been meant for him—not until now. He told me that the sniper would have taken him out if you hadn’t knocked him out of the way when you did.” Teeny paused for several moments. “Something about that is eating at him, too. I can’t put my finger on it, but I don’t think it’s male pride.”

“It’s not,” Ella answered grudgingly.
“He needs to believe that it was his God, not my badger fetish, that gave me advance warning. But the badger, for whatever the reason, turns hot when danger’s close by. Whether or not he can accept it, it’s the truth.”

Teeny shook his head. “No, that’s not it. I suspect that what’s bothering him is that you can’t—won’t—share his beliefs.”

Seeing Ella, Abednego yipped and Ford looked up from
his reading. Ella smiled and waved, asking him wordlessly to come back inside and join them.

“Have you made any progress finding the sniper?” Ford asked quickly as he came up.

“We’ve learned a few more things about him,” Ella said, following Teeny to the conference table. “We know he’s a confident shooter who can fire accurately at what must have been four hundred yards. He’s also cool enough
to police his brass afterwards. All we found were some scuffed-out bootprints. He parked on the asphalt road that runs along the rim of the mesa so he wouldn’t leave tire tracks. The area is now being canvassed to see if anyone saw the sniper or his vehicle. Most important of all, I believe the shooter is afraid of you.”

“Afraid of
me
? Why?” Ford looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.

“Look
at the facts. In each attack he’s kept his distance. That leads me to believe that you know your assailant and he—or she—is afraid of coming too close in case the attempt to kill you fails and you end up recognizing him.”

“She?” Ford stared at her.

“It might be a woman,” Ella said. “What I need you to do now is think hard. You deal with a lot of people, some of them deeply troubled, I’d guess.
Who hates you enough to want you dead?”

“What about Dr. Lee? She’s the one I’ve been investigating. She might have figured out that I was the one who placed the device in her purse. If she’s really planning an attack against the power plant, she might see me as a serious threat.”

“She was at home when it went down. But there’s another alternative I think we need to consider. Maybe we’re dealing
with two separate, unrelated crimes. Number one, Dr. Lee’s involved in some kind of covert ops, and number two, someone’s got a grudge against you.”

“No one has a serious grudge against me, Ella. I’d know about it. Dr. Lee is the best bet,” Ford said. “Although we’ve yet to establish who her associates are, we know she has them. Their interest in the
Tsétaak’á
Generating Station makes me their
common enemy.”

She nodded, lost in thought. “Our sniper might be the man who slipped her the ammo,” Ella said, then filled him in on what she and Vera saw. “We didn’t see a rifle at her house, so I’m guessing she gave it to the sniper before we started watching her every move. Thing is, the shape of the box looked wrong. The bullets that were passed could have been for her .38, which she might
have easily stashed almost anywhere.”

“Maybe some of the interesting bits we’ve turned up will help you,” Ford said.

“Wait—you’ve made progress?” Ella asked quickly.

“I was going to tell you when we got together at the Totah,” Ford said.

Ella gave Teeny a hard look saying without words that they shouldn’t have waited.

He shrugged. “I was hoping for a little more time to run some new decryption
programs. That way we could have given you something more definitive,” Teeny said.

“What we’ve discovered was that her blog, dated the day before the bomb incident on campus, mentioned the words ‘Red Rock’ and ‘dawn.’ Those were the
only
references to time of day and location. The rest read like a travel brochure and were totally different from her other blogs, which dealt with women’s issues.
Also, the
only
times she ever mentions locations is when she’s using it to make a point about poverty, or the need for medical care in remote areas on the Rez,” Ford said.

“Any idea who visits her site?” Ella asked.

“We can identify servers, and have picked up some screen names that we were able to track back to some of her
students. But there are others we can’t identify for various reasons,”
Teeny said.

“Does she get a lot of hits per day on her Web page?” Ella asked.

“We counted ten to twelve on average,” Teeny said. “Most have URLs that can be tracked back to the college. The others came from well-known, popular servers, and those are harder to isolate to individuals.”

“I checked her e-mails and she’s also been getting messages from individuals who have obvious, phony addresses,”
Ford said. “Like spammers who want to avoid being nailed, those URLs are used only once and are virtually untraceable. I was trying to find something that would give us a lead when I saw that one of the letters mentioned plaid shirts sold at the trading post near Hogback. But I’ve been there and know they only carry a few of those tourist T-shirts. So I’m sure that was code, but I haven’t been
able to correlate it to any other incident that happened around that time.”

“Anything based on a system or mathematical analysis of speech or word patterns and letter placement, like the code generated by the famous Enigma machines of World War II, can be broken,” Teeny said. “But something this random is practically unbreakable. The message only becomes clear after the fact. Without the key,
we can’t break the code unless we can link each portion to an action, date, time, individual, or location.”

“We need to stick to what we know, then,” Ella said firmly. “Besides Dr. Lee and her associates, who else is your enemy, Ford? Give me some names.”

“That’s just it, Ella. I have no enemies,” he said flatly. “My mission is to counsel people spiritually and to love them no matter what they
do or say. As I said, no enemies.”

“Not admitting a person’s your enemy doesn’t change the hard facts.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Ford said softly. “The way you perceive someone can ultimately change how they think about you . . . and themselves. Love can turn an enemy into a friend.”

She exhaled softly. Her father would have said pretty close to the same thing. Yet the police officer in her
just wanted to pick Ford up and shake him until his brains rattled.

“All right. Let me rephrase this. Who might have a reason to resent you? Think of anyone you might have counseled, telling them things they didn’t want to hear. Or maybe someone who has made it clear they don’t like you, either personally or because of something connected to the church. And, Ford, think hard. Your life’s on the
line.”

“My life is in God’s hands,” he said flatly.

Ella exhaled loudly. “I’m just asking you to tell me the truth, Ford. How could that offend your God?”

“If you love, you can’t see your brother as your enemy.”

“Do you believe in evil?” Ella countered.

Ford paused.

“If you do, Ford, and if you believe that evil presents a danger to everyone, then you owe it to the rest of us to help restore
the balance.”

“That’s exactly what I do, though our methods are different.”

Ella glanced at Teeny, looking for help, but he shook his head and shrugged. Ella focused on Ford once more. “Don’t think of it in terms of enemies then. Who in your congregation is capable of violence against you or anyone else?”

“At any given time we all lose our tempers. I don’t judge my brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Ella felt her frustration turning into anger and knew it was time to stop going in circles. If he couldn’t admit that a parishioner might be gunning for him, that avenue of discussion was
closed, at least for the moment. “All right, Ford. Focus on the code, and see if you can find some answers we can use,” she said, standing up.

As Ford turned back to the computer, Teeny walked her to the door.

“The Way is closed to him now, so you can’t expect him to react to threats and aggression as if he was a Navajo
hataalii
,” Teeny said in a whisper-soft voice. “He’s rejected a lot of what it means to be Navajo, maybe because he associates it with a past he wants or needs to suppress. As a minister in his new life, he’s cut from a different mold—maybe more so than most, in order to refute his take-no-prisoners
background. That’s part of the reason you’re drawn to him.”

“There’s a lot I admire about him, but our beliefs . . . they’re poles apart,” she said at last. “Sometimes, around him, I feel pressured to reject my own background and culture, and my family.”

“Nobody can make you do that. You believe too much in yourself. At least your ultimate goals are the same. Navajos try to restore the balance
one way, while Christians work from a different perspective.”

“One that can turn them into victims.”

“Sometimes, but in the long run they tip the scales on the side of good. That, in itself, helps restore balance.”

Ella smiled at him. “You’re a smart man.”

On her way minutes later, Ella decided to follow a hunch and head directly to Ford’s church. For a brief moment, she considered calling
Reverend Campbell and letting him know she was on the way, but then decided against it. She didn’t want him to prepare. She’d have a better chance to get the kind of answers she needed if she caught him off guard.

When Ella arrived at Good Shepherd Church, she was relieved to see Reverend Paul Campbell’s old blue sedan parked by the open side door. Ella went inside, and as she
walked down the
hall, heard the reverend practicing his sermon inside his office.

A second later, Reverend Campbell stepped out into the hall. “I thought I heard footsteps. Welcome, Investigator Clah,” the tall, balding Anglo man said, greeting her with a smile.