Mourning Dove (17 page)

Justine hesitated. “There’s something strange about his background . . . and maybe him, too. I did a little curious checking on some of our databases, and discovered that he’s got more security
clearances than you, me, and FB-Eyes combined. When I tried to do a background check, all I got was access denied,
then a blue screen. And I mean that literally. Everything just froze up on me,” she said. “But the thing that made me really uncomfortable is that he somehow found out that I’d been . . . curious. He took me aside after last week’s service, and told me that if I had any questions about him and his past, I should just ask him.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah,” she said with a smile. “Hey, it’s me, remember?”

“You’ll ask anyone anything, cuz. So, what did Reverend Tome say?”

“That some events in his life were classified because he used to work for the government.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know. All I really got out of him is that he used to live in Maryland, then Virginia. He gave me a name of an official at the State Department he said would vouch for him. But he wanted to know why I was checking.
I didn’t answer him. I figured he’d ducked my questions and well . . . quid pro quo and all that.”

Ella nodded. “Hmm. The NSA is supposed to be located at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the CIA is in Virginia. He could be linked to some heavy hitters. I would have backpeddled, too. Do you think he has the kind of training that might help us crack Blacksheep’s code?”

“Knowledge of our creation stories
is a plus in this case, maybe the key. Ford—that’s what he insists everyone call him outside of church—has got an entire library at the rectory—books and written accounts that he transcribed after talking to some of our tribe’s elders and medicine men. It’s really impressive. Our community college asked for copies of everything in his collection.”

“Has he agreed?”

“He agreed to work on it—most
of the stuff is copyrighted in his name—but he won’t let anyone else handle the materials. He
said that it’s his personal collection and he doesn’t want any of it out of his sight.”

“Security-conscious. Interesting. Let’s go pay him a visit. Maybe Ford can help us.” Ella picked up the folder containing the copies she’d made of Jimmy’s story, then headed out the door with Justine.

As they drove
up the mesa, to the north side of Shiprock, Ella glanced across at Justine, who was behind the wheel, and began thinking out loud. “Here’s what I don’t get. Jimmy’s brother is an officer. So why didn’t Jimmy send
him
the story? If he was trying to tell law enforcement about criminal or illegal activities, wouldn’t it have made more sense for him to contact Samuel?”

“Samuel’s with the Farmington
PD, not the tribe. Maybe that plays into it.”

“Okay, but if that matters—why? Is something going on here on our land that ties in to what happened overseas? But what on earth could our carjackings have to do with anything going on in Iraq? Soldiers from his unit weren’t here when the carjackings started.”

“I don’t have a clue. If there’s a connection, I don’t see it either.”

Before long they
arrived at the Christian church that Justine attended regularly. They parked in a large lot south of the main entrance, which faced west, and walked through a side door into a one-story wing containing meeting rooms for Sunday School classes. Reverend Campbell was on the phone in a small office and waved at them as they walked by.

Justine took Ella across the hall to the second office, but no
one was inside. “Maybe Reverend Tome’s out on a call,” Justine said.

“I don’t think so,” Ella said. “I remember seeing two cars out there when we pulled up, and if I remember correctly, the custodian here drives a pickup.”

Reverend Campbell came up to them from behind. The Anglo preacher was in his mid-fifties, with thick, bushy eyebrows that
really contrasted against his baldness. “Are you
looking for Reverend Tome?” Seeing Ella nod, he added, “We’re having a problem with a water leak in the garden, and he’s outside trying to fix it. Our custodian went to Farmington to get one of our pulpits repaired, and the soonest we’ll be able to get a plumber in here is tomorrow, so Ford said he’d figure it out. He’s in the garden on the southeast side of the chapel working on it now.” He gave
them a skeptical smile. “God help us all.”

After thanking him, they walked around the building and found Reverend Tome trying to fix an outside faucet attached to the wall about two feet up from the ground.

As Ella approached, she heard him mutter something incomprehensible, then whack the open-end wrench he’d attached to the faucet with a monkey wrench. Suddenly water sprayed out in all directions
like a sprinkler head.

“Tighten the nut, or turn off the handle!” Ella yelled, turning away from the spray.

“Water
is
off! But the nut’s on crooked. If I pry it off, there’s gonna be a flood!” he said, sputtering water.

“Where’s the cut-off valve?” Ella asked, ducking and trying to avoid the main spray of water that was quickly turning the sand under her feet into a muddy soup.

“Down at the
street where the water meter is? I’m not sure.”

Ella crouched next to him and tried to turn the wrench. It must have been hammered into place because she couldn’t budge it. The nut below was cracked and obviously cross-threaded. Soaked, Ella turned to Justine as she ducked to one side to keep the spray from shooting right up into her face. “Find Reverend Campbell. See if there’s a water-cut off
where the hot water heater is. If not, get the water key, run down to the street, and turn off all the water.”

Ford wrapped his hand around the nut and wrench to block out the spray. “I can fix this. Just give me a minute to back the nut off a few turns.”

Ella grabbed his arm. “The nut is
cracked
. When it breaks loose the faucet’s going to fall off. Let’s wrap an old towel or rag over the leak
and slow it down until Justine gets the water turned off.”

As soon as the reverend let go to find a towel, the collar nut dropped off in two pieces. The pressure pushed the faucet right off the pipe, and water shot straight out like a fire hose. Reverend Tome hugged the wall, trying to stem the flow with the palm of his hand, but water sprayed everywhere. Ella looked around, desperate to find
something that would plug the pipe. She saw a big, flat rock, one of several positioned around a young tree, and ran over to grab it. Maybe they could hold it against the pipe hard enough to reduce the flow to a trickle.

“Hold this against the pipe,” she yelled, returning with the rock. He looked up and smiled, his face soaked, hair dripping down over his eyes. Just then, the water stopped.

“Is it off?” Reverend Campbell shouted, sticking his head out an open window.

“Yes!” Ella answered, then glanced over at Tome, who was looking down at the muddy pool they were both squatting in. He might have been a genius with a computer or pencil and paper, but his IQ obviously took a hundred-point hit when he had a wrench in his hand.

As they both stood up, he gave her a sheepish smile and
brushed droplets of water from his forehead. “Were you looking for me, Detective Clah?”

“I sure didn’t come to try out for the mud wrestling team,” she shot back, then smiled, taking the sting out of her words. “Well, what the heck. Haven’t played in the water since I was a kid.”

He gave her a relieved smile. “Forgive me, I’m not much of a plumber.”

“Gee, you think?” she answered, laughing.

They went inside to warm up, wrapped in blankets Justine had brought and, after Reverend Campbell went to the rectory and ran
their clothes through a quick dryer cycle, Ella met Tome again in his office. Justine remained behind to talk to Reverend Campbell.

Tome offered her a cup of herbal tea. “It’s hot and will help you get the chill out.”

Ella accepted the brew, which obviously contained some
mint, judging from the enticing scent. “Thanks, Reverend Tome.”

“My friends call me Ford. So, why did you come looking for me?”

“I need your help with a case we’re working, but I’ll need you to keep what I’m about to tell you in the strictest confidence,” Ella said.

“I excel at keeping secrets,” he said in a quiet, somber voice.

Something about the way he’d said it caught her attention and
her eyes narrowed. She had a feeling he’d just uttered the understatement of the year. “I need help with something that’s right up your alley,” she said, explaining quickly about Jimmy’s story and the circumstances surrounding its arrival on her desk.

He nodded, curiosity alive on his face. “I’ll do my best to help you,” he said. “But I’m puzzled about something. Why didn’t you go to your brother,
the
hataalii
?”

“I did, and, so far, he doesn’t know what to make of it. Then I heard about your collection on the subject,” Ella said. “Would you mind helping, too?”

“I’d be happy to give it a try, but it wouldn’t be a good idea for your brother and me to try and figure it out together,” he said in a quiet voice.

“It’s that big of a problem?”

He shrugged. “A problem does exist, and trying
to ignore it won’t help anyone,” he said slowly. “I respect your brother, but I think the type of work he does only ends up holding our people back. The time for medicine men has come and gone. Moving forward into the twenty-first century is our only choice if we want to survive as a nation.”

Ella understood the problem now. Both were trying to help
the tribe—but their philosophies were diametrically
opposed. It was the classic struggle between the traditionalists and the modernists—with religion and healing at the center. “But surely by hanging on to our culture—the beliefs that make us Navajo—we can only get stronger.”

He shook his head. “I don’t see it that way, and when your brother does a Sing that takes the place of medical science . . . or God . . . then we really have serious differences.”

“Where does your faith in God come from? Were you raised Christian?”

He shook his head. “No, my family had no beliefs to speak of. Not Christian, not Navajo, not much of anything, really. But life experience quickly taught me that I needed something strong—something that could see me through anything. This is the path I chose.”

“My brother came from a home with strong beliefs, and chose a different
path than you, but you’re both working for the benefit of others. When you get down to basic values, there’s not as much separating you as you might think.”

“It’s what we choose to trust, to put our faith in, that’s at the heart of what divides us. Wars have been fought for less, you know,” he said, then met her gaze. “We have the same end goal—the preservation of our tribe—but our philosophies
are totally incompatible.”

“Your beliefs demand that you try and change him. Good thing his don’t require the same thing.”

“No, we’re not that kind of church. Justine knows. We don’t ram our beliefs down anyone’s throats. We’re here—that’s all. We’re a friendly presence, and we can offer a cold drink in the name of our Lord. . . .”

“In your case, Reverend, from the faucet!” Ella said, then
laughed out loud.

He laughed hard, too. “I’m never going to live this down, am I?”

“A forced baptism? No, probably not,” Ella said, smiling widely.

Twenty minutes later, Reverend Tome sat behind his desk, having read Jimmy’s story. He looked down at the pages again, then spoke in a thoughtful voice. “With the exception of Mourning Dove and a few other characters like Trickster, nothing here
belongs to any of the Navajo creation stories I know about. Without a frame of reference, it’s going to be a tough code to break, especially with all those non-Navajo characters, like Chopra. And somehow I don’t think Jimmy was talking about that self-help guru when he wrote this. Then there’s supposed to be some kind of retribution or justice coming on page five. But there’s no page five. Where’s
the rest of it?”

“We don’t know. That’s all I got. Maybe he sent me what he had on hand—getting rid of it fast to safeguard it, and the rest was taken from him when he was killed. I just don’t know.”

He nodded absently, his thoughts miles away. “The barter items—shoes, nails, umbrellas, even gumdrops, must have some other meaning. And Trickster, meanwhile, is probably a human with those devious
qualities. But the only shot we’ve got to break this is to go deep into the head of the man who wrote it. Get me his bio and any intel you can provide or get from the military or any other government agency.”

“We can interview people who knew him, but I don’t know how forthcoming Army Intel is going to be,” Ella said. “Getting information from them or other government agencies may take us months—or
years.”

“In that case, let me see what I can do,” he said.

Ella nodded slowly. Somehow she didn’t doubt that he’d get more information than they could—providing Justine’s discoveries about him were on target. “If anything in the story jumps out at you, will you let me know right away?”

“Absolutely. And I’ll keep the pages locked in my safe when
I’m not working on them. I’ll also run some code-breaking
encryptions on it to see if there is any structural significance or numerical relationships that could represent something else—longitude and latitude, Social Security numbers, whatever. If there’s something like that in here, I’ll find it.”

It was the matter-of-fact way he spoke about it that assured Ella she’d come to the right place. Ford—Reverend Tome—obviously had been involved in some code
breaking at one time or another.

“I’ve always liked puzzles,” he added. “Do you?”

She nodded and smiled, knowing that such interests were always sought after by the intelligence services. “That’s why I’m in the business I’m in. I like solving them, Reverend Tome.”

“Call me Ford, remember? My friends do,” he said with an easy smile. “By the way, since I’m helping you, will you reciprocate and
help me with a problem
I’ve
been having?”

“I’ll try,” Ella said cautiously. “Not plumbing?”

He laughed. “Besides that. The women in this parish—particularly my neighbor, Lila Curtis—keep trying to fix me up with their daughters, nieces, you name it. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but it’s making me crazy. I need to find a reason for them to back off. Will you let them see us together
a few times? Give me a few nice smiles, I’ll do the same for you, and they’ll fill in the rest.” He paused. “But . . . never mind. You’re probably dating someone, maybe even engaged. . . .”