Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 17] (16 page)

When she had first found her way into it, what seemed to her now like hours and hours ago, Bernie had thought of this dark and musty place as a cave. But of course it wasn’t. It was a slot, like all of the hundreds of routes rainwater had cut through eons of time in draining runoff from the plateau surfaces a mile above into the Colorado River. Thus its top was open to the sky through a narrow slit. Ahead of her Bernie could see nothing but gloomy semi-darkness. But by bending her head back and looking almost straight up, she could see a narrow strip of open sky. It was bright, sunny blue in spots, and obscured by the dark bottoms of clouds in others.

Bernie had clung to this cheerful overhead glimpse of the happy outside world until her neck muscles ached. She urgently yearned to be up there, out there in the
clear and bright light and away from here. And she didn’t want to look again at what she had just discovered. At least not until her stomach had settled and her heartbeat slowed. But she took a deep, shuddering breath, switched her little flashlight back on, and looked again.

The body she had almost stumbled over was sprawled on a deposit of sand beside the wall of the slot. The base of wall was pink, the color typical of Navajo sandstone. Just above it a shelf of blue-black basalt jutted. On this, a disheveled pile of blankets seemed to have been used as a sort of a bed. Bernie guessed the man had fallen from that bed and rolled down the sloping sand to rest at the edge of the smooth stone floor. Obviously, a long time ago—or at least long enough to cause the dehydrating flesh to shrink and the skin to look like dried leather. He wore neither shoes nor socks, old denim trousers with ragged bottoms, and an unbuttoned long-sleeved denim shirt. His head was turned to the side, revealing just enough of his face to show, before she looked away, the shape of his skull and one empty eye socket.

Bernie sucked in her breath and snapped off the flash. She needed to save her battery. She had to do some exploring. Do it now. Do it fast and get out of here. She had to find Jim Chee and Cowboy Dashee. Tell them about this. That she had found the man who had given Tuve the diamond. Probably this was the man they had been looking for. Anyway, she had found some sort of hermit. At least something that seemed very strange.

Bernie leaned against the cold stone of the wall, recognizing how shaky her legs were, how exhausted she’d become. And she still had, as Robert Frost had put it, promises to keep and miles to go before she’d sleep.

Miles to go back to the Salt Trail, and then miles to bring Chee and Dashee back here. They’d never find the way in here—through that dreadful tangle of cat’s claw acacia brush—without her showing them. She’d almost given up herself, after snagging herself a half-dozen times on those awful thorns.

The acacias had closed over the bed of the runoff stream that ran—whenever a rainstorm produced some drainage—out of the slot. It had finally occurred to Bernie that the heat from those sun-facing slot walls would discourage the acacias right against the cliff. There she had managed to slip through with only a torn sleeve. And while doing it she had noticed the old pruning that someone had done years ago to keep that narrow path open. That seemed to prove that someone had once occupied this slot, whether or not it was Billy Tuve’s dispenser of diamonds.

When she snapped on the light again and turned it up the slot, what she saw seemed to make that certain. In the gloom ahead the flashlight beam touched off an odd glittering.

Bernie walked slowly toward it. Two vertical lines, perhaps two feet apart and maybe four feet high, flashed back at the flashlight beam. They were arranged on a basalt shelf, probably an extension of the one holding the blankets. But since the slot floor slanted upward, here the shelf was only about knee high over floor level. The glittering spots of light seemed to be coming from the sandstone wall above the basalt level. Now that she was close, she could see that something stood between the lines of flashing dots. It looked like a white bone.

She stepped closer, stopped and stared. It was a
human arm bone. Elbow to wrist, with the bones of the hand still attached by tendons and gristle. Before she had resigned her job with the Navajo Tribal Police, Bernie had spent a few unpleasant duty hours in morgue and autopsy rooms. That had partly accustomed her to dismembered human body parts. But not totally, and the setting here made it worse than usual.

Strange indeed. The spots of glittering light were coming from little round tins that seemed to be attached somehow to the sandstone. She counted twenty such tins in each row, each containing a diamond, which glittered in the light. The forearm bone was still connected at the elbow to the upper arm bone, most of that buried under packed sand. On the sand around it, neat circles of diamonds were arrayed, each perched on a little grayish pad of leather in a small round tin.

Bernie reached for one, hesitated, then picked it up. The pad was formed of the soft folded leather of a pollen pouch. The container was a tin can that, according to the faded red legend on its side, once contained
Truly Sweet
. A smaller line below that declared that to be “The World’s Mildest Dipping Snuff.” That was exactly the way Lieutenant Leaphorn had described the container that had held the Shorty McGinnis diamond.

She unfolded the pouch, put the diamond in it, stuck it back in the snuff can, and put it in the pocket of her jeans.

Bernie was feeling exuberant. Now she would get out of this dismal place. She would go find Jim and Cowboy. She’d tell them the mission was complete. She had found the diamonds and the body of the dispenser of diamonds. She had found the evidence that would clear poor Billy
Tuve of the murder charge. And the robbery charge. And any doubts that Sergeant Jim Chee might have entertained about Officer Bernadette Manuelito would be forever erased.

She started down the smooth stone floor of the slot, pausing here and there to inspect a rock shelf where the hermit had stored his food supplies in cans and sacks and his drinking water in five-gallon tins. Nearby she located his water source, a dripping, moss-grown trickle originating from a spring back in a crack in the slot wall. She let it drip into her palm and cautiously tasted it. It didn’t seem poisonous. Probably hadn’t run through any rock layers contaminated by chemicals and metallic ores.

She turned off her flashlight. The light reflecting through the slot above was dimmer now, but there was still enough reflected to guide her. It was getting close to sundown, though, and she hurried down the slanting floor to get to the mouth of this slot, and back down the canyon to the Colorado River, while she still had some daylight. It was then that she heard a woman’s voice, coming from down the slot, echoing as every sound did in this otherwise silent place. And then a man’s voice—close enough so she could understand it. The man said, “Ms. Craig. Keep your voice down. Let’s keep it very quiet. She might be dangerous.”

“I wasn’t raising my voice,” Joanna Craig said, in something close to an indignant whisper. “And why dangerous? It’s either a smallish woman or a tiny little man,” she said. “Judging from the size of their shoes.”

Brad Chandler didn’t respond to that. Instead he put his finger to his lips, put a hand behind an ear, signaling to Joanna that they should listen. She did, and heard nothing but the tinkling sound of water dripping from the gloomy passageway far ahead up the slot and the occasional faint sigh of the wind blowing past the slot’s open roof far overhead.

“We’ll go in a little farther,” Chandler whispered. “If all remains quiet and we see no sign of anyone, then I’ll give us a little better light. We want to pick up that woman’s track again. She must have some reason for being in here.”

“Sure,” Joanna said.

“And you have to take for granted it’s dangerous. There’s a lot of money involved in this, and where there’s money, there are dangerous people.”

“Okay,” Joanna said. “I understand.”

He made a sort of chuckling sound. “And maybe she’s a little woman, but you’re not so big yourself. And even little women can be packing pistols. Remember?”

“I remember you forgot to return mine,” Joanna said. “If it’s dangerous in here, I’d feel a lot safer with it. Didn’t you say we’re partners?”

“Right,” Chandler said. “But don’t let it worry you. I always look after my partners.”

He snapped on his heavy police-model flashlight, directing its beam back and forth across the smooth stone floor.

“There,” Joanna said, pointing. On the dusty stone were the faint tracks left by Bernie’s waffle soles.

As far as the light reached through the gloom, the tracks seemed to continue in an irregular line along the right edge of the floor.

“Let’s hope it stays this easy,” Chandler said.

“Take a look up,” Joanna said. “At the sky almost straight overhead.”

Chandler glanced at Joanna, suspicious.

“I saw a flash of lightning,” she said.

A boom of thunder punctuated her statement, producing a deafening battery of echoes from the cliffs.

“Guess it’s going to rain,” Chandler said, looking up now. “We’ll be dry in here. And if it keeps doing that, you can talk as loud as you like.”

“Yes,” she began, intending to tell this big, obnoxious
man what she had read about the effects of rainstorms above the canyon. And what one of the people at the Park Service Center had told her of the sudden flash floods roaring down the little washes that drained the mesa tops. But no. Maybe that knowledge, and his ignorance, might be useful if she had any luck. And Joanna Craig had no doubt that she was going to need a lot of luck to get out of this situation.

He shifted the light beam, revealing nothing but the uneven layers of stone of the slot cliffs to the left, then he directed it up the cliffs, then across the slot. The light produced a brief burst of glitter as it passed the diamonds and then illuminated the cliffs to the right.

“There!” Chandler said, keeping the beam focused on the high shelf where Bernie had seen the diamond man’s bed. “See the cloth? I think we’ve found something.”

“Didn’t you notice something shining?” Joanna asked. She pointed. “Back that way.”

Chandler ignored her. Walked toward the shelf.

“Somebody had a bed roll up there,” he said. “This must be where the man with the diamonds lived.”

And as he said that, the beam of the flash struck the corpse.

Joanna sucked in her breath.

“Yes,” Chandler said. “I see him now. Or what’s left of him.”

He focused the light on the body. “Looks like somebody got here first,” he said, and switched the flashlight into his left hand and used his right to take out his pistol.

“You’re not going to need that gun,” Joanna said. “He’s already dead. A long time dead, the way he looks.”

“I can see that, dammit,” Chandler said. “But who killed him?”

“Look at him,” Joanna said. “Maybe it was time. Old age. Anyway, it certainly wasn’t very recently. He’s practically a mummy.”

“I see it now,” Chandler said. “And look, here’s some more of those footprints. All around here. She’s probably close. Anyway, I’ll keep this pistol handy.” He shined the light directly into Joanna’s face. “Might need it,” he said, grinning at her.

Joanna turned away from the flashlight, held out her hand. “Then give me mine. Maybe I’ll need it.”

He ignored that, swinging the flashlight beam past the body.

“And there,” he said. “Wow. Just look at that. Those must be my diamonds.”

“Arranged in two rows,” Joanna said. But she was staring at the white shape standing between the glittering columns. And thinking, My father’s arm. And noticing this man had said “my diamonds.” Not that she had ever believed he would share them with her. Or that she cared about the diamonds anyway, for that matter. The bone was what she wanted.

Bernie had reacted fast at the first sound of the voices. Strange voices. The man’s voice had an East Coast urban sound. Not Jim and not Cowboy, and it certainly didn’t sound like what she’d expect Billy Tuve to sound like. Who were they? What were they doing here? And why were they following her?

Lieutenant Leaphorn believed these diamonds were involved in a legal battle so big it had attracted FBI interest. Both of these people were armed. Park Service rules prohibited firearms in the canyon, so they weren’t merely tourists. If they thought she was dangerous to them, they might be dangerous to her. She ran up the slanting floor as fast and as quietly as the rock-cluttered pathway allowed. She wanted to find a place as far from the voices as she could get. A place where she could
conceal herself until she could locate a way out of this slot.

Instead she ran almost immediately into a dead end. Part of one of the cliff walls had collapsed into a towering dam of chunks, slabs, and boulders blocking the floor and partially the slot. She climbed. A chunk of sandstone slid under her weight and dislodged smaller stones, bruising Bernie’s knee and starting a rattling little landslide that touched off a chorus of echoes. Surely they would have heard that. She moved cautiously toward the wall, slid under a tilted slab leaning against it, and sat down.

Time to subdue panic. Time to rest. Time to think. Time to make a plan.

Thinking came first. Remembering everything she had heard from Chee about the genesis of this crazy business. Then remembering (now she could hardly believe this) her voluntarily tagging along uninvited and unwanted.

Why? Out of a sense of adventure? Out of a yen to get a close look at the botanical/geological magic of this incredible canyon? Well, that was her excuse and it was partly true. But mostly it was to be with Jim Chee. She loved Jim Chee. Or thought she did. But where was Sergeant Chee now, when she really needed him?

Bernie slid a little deeper under the slab, trying to get more comfortable, realizing this line of thought was utterly unproductive. She had to remember what else she knew, things that might tell her something about this couple she was hiding from. Everything she knew about that might bear on what she must do now. Just what Chee had heard from Lieutenant Leaphorn, who had harvested it from his lifelong and nationwide Cop Good Old Boy Network.

The FBI was interested in a Gallup pawnshop arrest, which had to mean somebody big in the Washington bureaucracy was interested, which according to the inter-cop psychic vibration connected it to an old legal battle over a plutocrat’s estate, the outcome of which had left a nonprofit foundation with the money and a woman who thought she should have inherited it determined to get it back. A great pile of money was involved and—as she had overheard the man telling the woman—you have to connect piles of money with dangerous people trying to get it.

Probably true in the white man’s world, Bernie thought, and in this canyon, too. Both of them had arrived with guns, which made them fit Bernie’s notion of dangerous people. And now the man had the woman’s gun, and the woman wanted it back, and he wouldn’t give it to her. That, and the tone of the conversation, suggested they were not really partners in whatever they were doing here. She guessed the woman was the one who thought she had been cheated out of her inheritance. The one who had put up the money to bail Tuve out of jail. Because he had one of the diamonds. If she remembered what she’d heard from Chee, this woman believed the man carrying the case of diamonds was her father and that the foundation’s lawyer had cheated her out of her inheritance.

Bernie groaned. Not enough data to figure out anything useful in this situation. Wishing she had really paid attention to what Chee had been saying. At the time it had seemed like another fairy tale. Sort of like the Havasupai version of how a shaman had forced the Grand Canyon cliffs to stop clapping themselves together to kill people by walking across the river with a tree log on his head.

The man? Was he someone she had brought along to help her until their deal went sour? Or maybe someone representing the foundation, here to protect its interests?

Bernie had no way to decide that, but she knew that if she stayed half hidden here, they would find her if they wanted to. She had to have a plan.

A flash of lightning erased the gloom down the slot below where she sat, giving her a momentary glimpse of the place the diamond dispenser had lived and died, and of a small woman and a big man standing near it. The following crash of thunder started echoes bouncing around the slot. Another flash illuminated the scene. The man, she now saw, was holding a white stick in his hand, waving it. Probably the arm bone of the skeleton man.

She had to stop wasting time. She had to have a plan.