A Thief of Time Read online

  “Always outdoors,” Houk had said. “From the very littlest. Shy as a Navajo. Wasn’t happy around people. We shouldn’t have made him go to school there. We should have gotten him some help.”

  Now Houk put down his glass. Thatcher asked, “When she left here, was she going to see the Navajo? The one who found the pot?”

  “I reckon,” Houk said. “That was her intention. She wanted to know where he got it. All I knew is what he told me. That he didn’t break any law getting it.” Houk was talking directly to Thatcher. “Didn’t get it off public domain land, or off the reservation. Got to be off private land or I won’t have nothing to do with it.”

  “What was his name?” Thatcher asked.

  “Fella named Jimmy Etcitty,” Houk said.

  “Live around here?”

  “South, I think,” Houk said. “Across the border in Arizona. Between Tes Nez Iah and Dinnehotso, I think he said.” Houk stopped. It seemed to Leaphorn that it was to decide whether he had told them enough. And this time Thatcher didn’t interrupt the silence. Houk thought. They waited. Leaphorn studied the room. Everything was dusty except the piano. It glowed with wax. Like most of the bookshelves, a shelf above the piano was lined with pots.

  “I think I told her she should stop at the Dinnehotso Chapter House and ask how to get to the Mildred Roanhorse outfit,” Houk added. “Etcitty’s her son-in-law.”

  “I noticed in the Nelson catalog that they give the customer some sort of documentation on their artifacts,” Leaphorn said. He left the question implied, and Houk let it hang a moment while he thought about how to answer it.

  “They do,” Houk said. “If I happen to find something myself—or sometimes when I have personal knowledge where it came from—then I fill out this sort of statement, time and place and all that, and I sign it and send it along. Case like this, I just give the documentation form to the finder—whoever I’m buying it from. I have them fill it in and sign it.”

  “You show that paper to the lady?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Didn’t have it,” Houk said. “Usually I just have the finder send the letter directly to whoever is buying from me. This case, I gave Etcitty the Nelson form and told him to take care of it.”

  They sat and considered this.

  “Cuts out the middleman on that,” Houk said.

  And, Leaphorn thought, insulates Harrison Houk from any charge of fraud.

  “Might as well get it from the horse’s mouth,” Houk added, somberly. But he winked at Leaphorn.

  There was still plenty of the day left to drive south to the Dinnehotso Chapter House and get directions to the Mildred Roanhorse outfit and find Jimmy Etcitty. On the porch Houk touched Leaphorn’s sleeve.

  “Always wanted to say something to you about what you did,” he said. “That evening I wasn’t in any condition to think about it. But it was a kindly thing. And brave too.”

  “It was just my job,” Leaphorn said. “That highway patrolman was a traffic man. Green about that kind of work. And scared too, I guess. Somebody needed to keep it cool.”

  “Turned out it didn’t matter,” Houk said. “Brigham wasn’t hiding up there anyway. I guess he was already drowned by then. But I thank you.”

  Thatcher was standing at the foot of the steps, waiting and hearing all this. Embarrassing. But he didn’t bring it up until they were out of Bluff driving toward Mexican Water into the blinding noontime sun.

  “Didn’t know you were involved in that Houk case,” he said. He shook his head. “Hell of a thing. The boy was crazy, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s what they said. Schizophrenia. Heard voices. Unhappy around anyone but his dad. A loner. But Houk told me he was great at music. That piano in there, that was the boy’s. Houk said he was good at it and played the guitar and the clarinet.”

  “But dangerous,” Thatcher said. “Ought to been put in a hospital. Locked up until he was safe.”

  “I remember that’s what Houk said they should’ve done. He said his wife wanted to, but he wouldn’t do it. Said he thought it would kill the boy. Locking him up. Said he wasn’t happy except when he was outdoors.”

  “What’d you do to make such an impression on Houk?”

  “Found the boy’s hat,” Leaphorn said. “Washed up on the reservation side of the river. It was already pretty clear he’d tried to swim across.”

  Thatcher drove for a while. Turned on the radio. “Catch the noon news,” he said. “See what they got to say about those pot hunters getting shot.”

  “Good,” Leaphorn said.

  “There was more to it than that,” Thatcher said. “More than finding his goddamned hat.”

  Might as well get it over with. The memories had been flooding back anyway—another of those many things a policeman accumulates in the mind and cannot erase. “You remember the case,” Leaphorn said. “Houk and one of his hired hands came home that night, and found the bodies, and the youngest boy, Brigham, missing, with some of his stuff. And the shotgun he’d done it with was missing too. Big excitement. Houk was even more important then than he is now—legislator and all that. Bunches of men out everywhere looking. This Utah highway patrol officer—a captain or lieutenant or something—he and a bunch he was handling thought they had the boy cornered in a sort of alcove-cave up in a box canyon. Saw something or heard something, and I guess the kid had used the place before as a sort of hangout. Anyway, they’d called for him to come out, and no answer, so this dumb captain is going to have everybody shoot into there, and I said first I’d get a little closer and see what I could see, and turned out nobody was in there.”

  Thatcher looked at him.

  “No big deal,” Leaphorn said. “Nobody was there.”

  “So you didn’t get shot with a shotgun.”

  “I happened to have a pretty clear idea of how far a shotgun will shoot. Not very far.”

  “Yeah,” Thatcher said.

  The tone irritated Leaphorn. “Hell, man,” he said. “The boy was only fourteen.”

  Thatcher had no comment on that. The woman reading the noon news had gotten to the pot hunter shooting. The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office said they had no suspects in the case as yet but they did have promising leads. Casts had been made of the tire tracks of a vehicle believed used by the killer. Both victims had now been identified. They were Joe B. Nails, thirty-one, a former employee of Wellserve in Farmington, and Jimmy Etcitty, thirty-seven, whose address was given as Dinnehotso Chapter House on the Navajo Reservation.

  “Well now,” Thatcher said. “I guess we can skip stopping at Dinnehotso.”

  NINE

  THIS IS JUST ABOUT where they’d left the U-Haul truck parked,” Chee said. He turned off the ignition, set the parking brake. “Pulled up to the edge of the slope with the winch cable run out. Apparently they eased the backhoe down on the cable.”

  The front of Chee’s pickup was pointed down the steep slope. Fifty feet below, the grassy, brushy hump where a little Anasazi pueblo had stood a thousand years ago was a chaos of trenches, jumbled stones, and what looked like broken sticks. Bones reflecting white in the sunlight.

  “Where was the backhoe?”

  Chee pointed. “See the little juniper? At the end of that shallow trench there.”

  “The sheriff hauled everything off, I guess,” Leaphorn said. “After they got their photographs.”

  “That was the plan when I left.”

  Leaphorn didn’t comment. He sat silently, considering the destruction below. This ridge was much higher than it had seemed to Chee in the darkness. Shiprock stuck up like a blue thumb on the western horizon seventy miles away. Behind it, the dim outline of the Carrizo Mountains formed the last margin of the planet. The sagebrush flats between were dappled with the shadow of clouds, drifting eastward under the noon sun.

  “The bodies,” Leaphorn said, “The belagana in the backhoe? Right? Named Nails. And the Navajo partway up this slope under us? Jimmy Etcitty. Which one was shot first?”

  C
hee opened his mouth, closed it. His impulse had been to say the coroner would have to decide. Or about the same time. But he realized what Leaphorn wanted.

  “I’d guess the Navajo was running for his life,” he said. “I’d say he’d seen the white man shot in the machine. He was running for the truck.”

  “Do much checking before you called it in to the sheriff?”

  “Hardly any,” Chee said.

  “But some,” Leaphorn said.

  “Very little.”

  “The killer parked up here?”

  “Down by the oil well pump.”

  “Tire tracks mean anything?”

  “Car or pickup. Some wear.” Chee shrugged. “Dusty dry and in the dark. Couldn’t tell much.”

  “How about his tracks? Or hers?”

  “He parked on the sandstone. No tracks right at the vehicle. After that, mostly scuff marks.”

  “Man?”

  “Probably. I don’t know.” Chee was remembering how shaken he had been. Too much death. He hadn’t been using his head. Now he felt guilty. Had he concentrated, he surely could have found at least something to indicate shoe size.

  “Not much use going over it again,” Leaphorn said. “Too many deputy sheriffs and paramedics and photographers been trampling around.”

  And so they scrambled down the hill—Leaphorn losing his footing and sliding twenty feet in a shower of dislodged earth and gravel. Standing there, amid the dislodged stones, amid the scattered bones, Chee felt the familiar uneasiness. Too many chindi had taken to the air here, finding freedom from the bodies that had housed them. Leaphorn was standing at a narrow trench the backhoe had dug beside a crumbled wall, looking thoughtful. But then Leaphorn didn’t believe in chindi, or in anything else.

  “You studied anthropology, didn’t you? At New Mexico?”

  “Right,” Chee said. So had Leaphorn, if the word around the Navajo Tribal Police was true. At Arizona State. A BA and an MS.

  “Get into the Anasazi much? The archaeological end of it?”

  “A little,” Chee said.

  “The point is, whoever did this work knew something about what he was doing,” Leaphorn said. “Anasazi usually buried their dead in the trash midden with the garbage, or right against the walls, sometimes inside the rooms. This guy worked the midden….” Leaphorn gestured to the torn earth beyond them. “And he worked along the walls. So I’d guess he knew they buried pottery with their corpses, and he knew where to find the graves.”

  Chee nodded.

  “And maybe he knew this was a late site, and that—rule of thumb—the later the site, the better the pot. Glazed, multicolored, decorated, so forth.” He bent, picked up a shard of broken pottery the size of his hand and inspected it.

  “Most of the stuff I’ve seen here is like this,” he said, handing the shard to Chee. “Recognize it?”

  The interior surface was a rough gray. Under its coating of dust the exterior glowed a glossy rose, with ghostly lines of white wavering through it. Chee touched the glazed surface to his tongue—the automatic reaction of a former anthropology student to a potsherd—and inspected the clean spot. A nice color, but his memory produced nothing more than a confused jumble of titles: Classical. Pueblo III. Incised. Corrugated, etc. He handed the shard to Leaphorn, shook his head.

  “It’s a type called St. John’s Polychrome,” Leaphorn said. “Late stuff. There’s a theory it originated in one of the Chaco outlier villages. I think they’re pretty sure it was used for trading.”

  Chee was impressed and his face showed it.

  Leaphorn chuckled. “I can’t remember stuff like that either,” he said. “I’ve been doing some reading.”

  “Oh?”

  “We seem to have a sort of overlap here,” he said. “You were looking for a couple of men who stole our backhoe. I’m looking for an anthropologist. A woman who works at Chaco and took off one day three weeks ago to go to Farmington and never came back.”

  “Hadn’t heard about that,” Chee said.

  “She prepared this big, elaborate dinner. Had a guest coming to visit. A man very important to her. She put it in the fridge and she didn’t come back.” Leaphorn had been looking out across the grassland toward the distant thunderheads. It must have occurred to him that this would sound strange to Chee. He glanced at him. “It’s a San Juan County missing person’s case,” he said. “But I’m on leave, and it sounded interesting.”

  “You mentioned you were quitting,” Chee said. “I mean resigning.”

  “I’m on terminal leave,” Leaphorn said. “A few more days and I’m a civilian.”

  Chee could think of nothing to say. He didn’t particularly like Leaphorn, but he respected him.

  “But I’m not a civilian yet,” he added, “and what we have here is peculiar. This overlap, I mean. We have Dr. Friedman-Bernal being a ferocious collector of this kind of pottery.” Leaphorn tapped the potsherd with his forefinger. “We have Jimmy Etcitty killed here digging up this sort of pot. This same Jimmy Etcitty worked over at Chaco where Friedman-Bernal worked. This same Jimmy Etcitty found a pot somewhere near Bluff which he sold to a collector who sold it to an auction house. This pot got Friedman-Bernal excited enough a month ago to send her driving to Bluff looking for Etcitty. And on top of that we have Friedman-Bernal buying from Slick Nakai, the evangelist, and Nails selling to Slick, and Etcitty playing guitar for Nakai.”

  Chee waited, but Leaphorn seemed to have nothing to add.

  “I didn’t know any of that,” Chee said. “Just knew Nails and a friend stole the backhoe when I was supposed to be watching the maintenance yard.”

  “Nice little tangle of strings, and right here is the knot,” Leaphorn said.

  And none of it any of Leaphorn’s business, Chee thought. Not if he had resigned. So why was he out here, sitting on that stone wall with his legs in the sun, with almost two hundred miles of driving already behind him today? He must enjoy it or he wouldn’t be here. So why has he resigned?

  “Why did you resign?” Chee asked. “None of my business, I guess, but…”

  Leaphorn seemed to be thinking about it. Almost as if for the first time. He glanced at Chee, shrugged. “I guess I’m tired,” he said.

  “But you’re using leave time out here, chasing after whatever it is we have here.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe it’s the fire horse syndrome. Lifelong habit at work. I think it’s because I’d like to find this Friedman-Bernal woman. I’d like to find her and sit her down and say: ‘Dr. Bernal, why did you prepare that big dinner and then go away and let it rot in your refrigerator?’”

  To Chee, the answer to why Dr. Bernal let her dinner spoil was all too easy. Especially now. Dr. Bernal was dead.

  “You think she’s still alive?”

  Leaphorn considered. “After what we have here, it doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

  “No,” Chee said.

  “Unless she did it,” Leaphorn said. “She had a pistol. She took it with her when she left Chaco.”

  “What caliber?” Chee asked. “I heard this one was small.”

  “All I know is small,” Leaphorn said. “Small handgun. She carried it in her purse.”

  “Sounds like twenty-two caliber,” Chee said. “Or maybe a twenty-five or a small thirty-two.”

  Leaphorn rose, stiffly, to his feet. Stretched his back, flexed his shoulders. “Let’s see what we can find,” he said.

  They found relatively little. The investigators from the county had taken the bodies and whatever else had interested them, which probably hadn’t been much. The victims seemed to be clearly identified, and that would be checked with people who knew them for confirmation. The FBI would be asked to do a run on their fingerprints, just in case. The backhoe had been hauled away and would be gone over carefully for prints in the event the killer had been careless with his hands when he shot Nails. The rental truck would receive the same treatment. So would the two plasti
c sacks in which Chee had seen the pots carefully packed. And just in case, a cord had been run around the dig site, with the little tags dangling to warn citizens away from a homicide site. If some afterthought brought an investigator back to check on something, nothing would be disturbed.

  What interested Chee was outside the cord—a new cardboard carton bearing the red legend SUPERTUFF and the sublegend WASTEBASKET LINERS, and several other messages: “Why Pay More For Something You’ll Throw Away? Six free in this carton. Thirty for the price of twenty-four!”

  The cardboard was smudged with white. Chee squatted beside it and recognized fingerprint powder. Someone had checked it and found the cardboard too rough to show prints. Chee picked it up, extracted the carefully folded plastic sacks. Counted them. Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven plus two filled with pots made twenty-nine. He slipped the sacks back into the box and replaced it. One sack unaccounted for. Filled with what? Had the killer taken one set of pots and left the other two? Had Nails’s girlfriend, if he had a girlfriend, borrowed one? It was one of those imponderables.

  He watched Leaphorn prowling along the trenches, inspecting digging procedures, or perhaps the human bones. Chee had been avoiding the bones without realizing it. Now almost at his foot he noticed the weathered flat surface of a scapula, broken off below the shoulder joint. Just beyond was a very small skull, complete except for the lower jaw. A child, Chee guessed, unless the Anasazi had been even smaller than he remembered. Beyond the skull, partly buried by the excavation dirt, were ribs, and part of a spinal column, the small bones of a foot, three lower jaws placed in a row.