But now, because of getting shot, he had a new computer: smarter, smaller, faster, friendlier. To his surprise, he loved it. If his brain hadn’t been hurt, he would have argued with Louisa about spending the money. He would have stayed loyal to the dinosaur on his desktop. But she didn’t ask. She bought it for him as a gift.
Louisa. Her support after his accident had been vital to his recovery. But she still fussed over him, babied him, and did things for him he could have done for himself. Her kindess felt suffocating. He avoided arguments by keeping quiet, and when she barraged him with questions he’d remind her that he wasn’t one of her interview subjects.
He walked to the filing cabinet. When the department decided to move its files onto computer storage, around the time he was considering retirement, he asked if he could have the paper folders with some of the cases he’d worked.
“Take what you want,” the chief told him. “It saves us the trouble of shredding them.”
So Leaphorn had a collection of the more intriguing and complicated crimes he’d solved and criminals and situations he’d found especially interesting or puzzling. He added a few unsolved cases that had baffled him, the department, and the federal agencies that had been part of the team. A file that had something to do with a Mrs. Nez and a boy named Horseman hid in the cabinet somewhere.
He had organized the folders by case number at the station, and he kept them that way. The older files seemed the best place to start. Because of the changes the bullet had made to his brain, those well-established memories were the most vivid. Leaphorn didn’t go back to the beginning of his career, but to a time when he might have encountered the man who was now dead. He pulled a handful of manila folders from a section of the collection that ought to coincide with the early years of Horseman’s life. As good a place to begin as any.
He took as many as he could comfortably carry to the table in the center of his office and thumbed through the stack. Reviewing them stirred memories of troubled souls who had lost their bearings and of men and women who convinced him evil was real. Unlike Jim Chee, Leaphorn was a skeptic when it came to the world of the spirits and witchcraft, but he had seen time and time again how those who forgot the wisdom of their grandparents became lost souls. He remembered another man named Horseman from a different clan and another part of the reservation whom he’d encountered early in his law enforcement career. Luis Horseman had knifed a man in a fight in Gallup, fled the scene, and ended up a corpse with his mouth stuffed with sand, allegedly killed by a shape-shifter.
The files he glanced at made him feel nostalgic for the old excitement of the job and relieved that he didn’t have to deal with the dual stress of the life-threatening danger and the ever-shifting politics that came with police work. Navajoland, like the world in general, had grown more violent.
He finished reviewing that batch of files and went back for another.
After only an hour, he found what he’d been looking for. Mrs. Nez’s name turned up in connection with a domestic violence case. The file was slim, but the details he had included brought the incident back to his recollection as clearly as if the boy had been standing next to him.
Leaphorn remembered how the case opened. He’d seen a child walking along the side of the road. Nothing unusual about that. In Navajoland, people walked, children among them. But the boy wore only one shoe and held out his tiny thumb, trying to hitchhike. When the car got closer, he saw that the child’s dirty face was streaked with tears.
He offered the little boy a ride in the patrol car. Leaphorn recalled that he persuaded the shy, scared youngster to climb in by showing him how to turn on the light bar. The child smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. His dirt-caked pants had a broken zipper. Leaphorn asked the boy if he’d like an apple he’d saved from lunch. After he ate it, the child spoke for the first time, saying thanks and asking if Leaphorn could turn on the flashing lights one more time.
The boy, who said his name was Ricky, was heading to his grandmother’s house to let her know that the baby wouldn’t stop crying and his mother had fallen down. “I’ll check on your mother,” Leaphorn remembered saying, and he drove the boy home. Leaphorn found a woman passed out and smelling strongly of beer—nothing he hadn’t seen before—and a baby whimpering. The woman looked as though someone had beaten her, and beaten her more than once. He remembered Ricky ignoring his mother, as if this state of affairs were common, picking up the baby, and asking Leaphorn if he please had another apple, one for his brother.
What happened in the ensuing years to turn that sweet boy into a casualty discovered at a crime scene?
Leaphorn usually kept his work to himself, not sharing the details with his dear wife, Emma. He liked to leave the cases at the office. But the sight of Ricky’s unconscious mom and the little boy’s efforts to comfort his hungry baby brother left a residue of sadness. When his wife asked what bothered him that night, he’d told her.
“I left the boy with the grandmother,” he remembered saying. “The baby went to the hospital.”
Emma put down the book she’d been reading. “Someone should be helping those little ones.” She asked Leaphorn for the boys’ names and the grandmother’s and for their address. The Horseman boys became one of her projects.
Once a month, she sent Ricky and his little brother funny cards with a dollar bill tucked inside. Leaphorn suspected she did other things for the boys, good deeds he wasn’t aware of. Perhaps because they’d had no children of their own and because Emma’s only sister had never married, the brothers had held a special place in his late wife’s heart.
Leaphorn set the folder on his desk. He thought about that polite, hungry little boy and the thin crying baby. How many lives had been ruined by alcohol and domestic violence? Too many. Bernie said the FBI identified Rick Horseman’s burned body through fingerprints taken when he was arrested for car theft. But he suspected Horseman’s troubles had started long before that.
The Lieutenant didn’t like loose ends and things that didn’t make sense. They gnawed at him, like beetles slowly eating through the soft wood under the bark of a piñon tree. If he could figure out why Rick Horseman was standing close to the bombed car, he would know why he was dead.
Leaphorn pushed himself to standing. He would follow up on the mystery of this dead young man for Emma’s sake. For Emma and for Bernie. And he knew just where to begin.
He took a few minutes to compose a note for Louisa, who had gone to her book club meeting, laboriously shaping each letter because of the problems the bullet had created between his brain and his right hand. He placed a notebook in his shirt pocket, slipped on a jacket, found his gloves, and took his truck key from the hook by the door. Then he walked out to the driveway and his pickup. He climbed in, using the steering wheel to help pull himself up, and put his cane on the passenger seat.
He had driven the truck last week, the first time since his accident. Louisa, passenger and copilot, watched his every move while trying not to act nervous. Today, it felt good to get out of the house on his own, and even better to be working on a case again. The department had given him a couple little jobs since his injury, things someone else could have handled, as a goodwill gesture. This was different.
He drove carefully, a mile or two under the speed limit, making his truck one of the slowest vehicles on the road in Window Rock. He pulled into the parking lot at the Navajo Nation Department of Family Services. The daughter of an old colleague worked here, and if he handled things just right, she’d do him a favor. As he approached the entrance, he realized that it might have been smart to make an appointment. Oh well. He had time to wait if he needed to.
The building, like many official government offices on the reservation, needed a facelift. He went to the front desk and wrote the name of the woman he wanted, Maryellen Hood, on a page in his notebook and then “I have trouble speaking.”
“You need to see Maryellen?”
He nodded.
“Can you wait, si
r? I’ll see if she’s available.”
Leaphorn nodded again.
“Can I tell her your name?”
He reached into his pocket for his billfold, extracted a card, and handed it to her. The woman looked at it, looked at him again, and disappeared with the card and his note.
He made his way to a chair and took a pen from his pocket. While he waited, he made a list of what he knew already about Rick Horseman and his mysterious death. The list was short.
After about ten minutes, a slim Diné lady invited him into a small office with a window that offered a glimpse of the arid landscape of Window Rock. She motioned him to a padded folding chair on one side of a table cluttered with papers, books, and folders. She cleared off a place in front of him and one across the table for herself.
“Lieutenant, what a pleasure. My father used to talk about you all the time and I’ve always wanted to meet you. I heard about that crazy woman who tried to kill you. I’m glad you’re doing so well.”
He said the Navajo word for father with a question in his voice, and Maryellen understood. She shared news of her father’s retirement and his renewed interest in volunteering and home improvement projects.
When the right time came, Leaphorn tried to tell her what he wanted, first in Navajo and, when he realized she didn’t comprehend, in English.
Because she still couldn’t understand, he laboriously wrote down his request and supporting information in bullet points: the approximate date he’d called social services; the location of the home where he’d found the intoxicated, injured mother and the crying baby; and the names Ricky Horseman, as the child he’d transported, and Marie Nez, as the woman who had claimed the boy.
Maryellen frowned at the note. “I doubt that we still have the specific information about that family, that case.” She tapped a manicured nail on the sheet of paper. “That was a long time ago. And besides, you remember, I’m sure, that case records are confidential. I’m sorry I can’t help you. But it was an honor to meet you.”
He could drop it now, he thought. Go home. Eat the dinner Louisa would fix for him. Relax. Watch TV. But he remembered Emma addressing those envelopes in her small, precise handwriting. He remembered Emma’s smile as she showed him the cards—a frog that sprang out when the card opened, a fire truck with a ladder that expanded. He wondered if the grandmother gave the boys those cards, if the grandmother used the money to buy something for the kids. In any case, sending them gave Emma pleasure.
He looked at Maryellen’s shiny fingernails. “Shiprock bomb.”
“You think this might be connected?”
Leaphorn nodded once.
“I don’t know how these records could have anything to do with that, sir, but you’re the detective.”
He said, “Important.” And then a word he didn’t use much: “Please.”
She wrinkled her brow and looked at the desktop a moment. “How is the best way for me to follow up with you?”
He moved his fingers as if he were typing and then pushing a button.
“I don’t . . . Oh, wait. Is it easy for you to e-mail?”
Leaphorn nodded. Not easy, but easier than trying to speak English or laboriously print the letters.
She looked at his card again. “Is this your correct address?”
He nodded.
She said, “I can’t promise. I’ll see what I can do.”
Maryellen walked the few steps to her desk. She opened a drawer and removed a purse the color of buckskin. She unzipped a pocket, took out a small flat case, opened that, and reached for a card. She handed it to him.
“This is the best way to contact me.”
He noticed that the e-mail was a private address, not the official one for business, and that the name printed on it was k’aalógii. Butterfly, not Maryellen.
She said, “I saw pictures of that explosion on TV. The boy you’re asking about, did he die at the scene?”
Leaphorn wasn’t sure if Horseman’s name had been released by the FBI, but he knew how the game worked.
He shook his head and said, “Later . . . ,” this time with a finger to his lips.
He didn’t realize he’d left his cane in the waiting room until he got to the car. He went back for it with a spring in his step.
12
Bernie drove to the Justice Center. The parking lot was nearly filled with cars, trucks, and SUVs, but she found a place for her Toyota near an old pumpkin-colored VW camper that reminded her of something from the ’60s. November’s pale sunlight provided a little extra heat, and she always tried to park her car where it caught the rays in the winter. She could have walked from the motel, she realized, and a walk would have calmed her.
She noticed the protesters, a remarkably energetic group despite the lack of attention they were drawing. She spotted the big white truck with a television station logo on the side; weekends were notoriously slow news times except for traffic accidents and DUI arrests. She wondered if Palmer and the delegates would allow the cameras inside.
As she walked toward the courthouse, a man with his gray hair in a bun handed her a “Save the Grand Canyon” flyer.
“There’s no more space in the meeting room, sweetheart. You can stand in the hall, but you can’t see or hear a thing from there.” He wore a windbreaker, and his cheeks were red with cold. “I don’t like the way they shut us out.”
“Who shut you out?”
“The cops, the developers of course. The National Park Service, the tourism vultures, the greedy Indians . . .” He stopped, and Bernie realized that he had figured out she was an Indian. “Uh, did you know they have the Navajo council in their pockets? Hopis, too.”
“Really?”
He tapped the flyer. “Read that. It will open your eyes.”
The man moved closer, and Bernie could tell he wasn’t as old as she’d initially thought. “Even though it’s cold, we’re safer out here. I heard that there could be a bomb inside.”
“A bomb?”
“Boom. Like the one at that high school the other night that killed that protester. I saw it on TV.”
She was almost at the building’s doors when she heard someone walking up behind her. Moving quickly.
“Miss. Excuse me.”
She turned. A man in a dark coat and a hat that covered his ears smiled at her. He had a camera. “Jack Rightman, KOAX. How about a comment on the meeting?”
“I haven’t been there yet.”
Bun Man trotted up to Rightman. “I’ve got something to tell you.” When Rightman turned away, Bernie walked into the building. One of the Arizona officers in the lobby opened the door for her.
“If you are here for the meeting, all the seats are filled, ma’am.” He was dark and muscular. About her age or maybe a touch older.
“I’m Officer Manuelito, Navajo Police. My husband’s the Navajo sergeant who got assigned to keep an eye on the mediator.”
“Albert Anderson.” He extended his hand toward her. “Chee’s here, babysitting Palmer, in with the delegates. If you want to catch him at the break, they use the stage exit.” He smiled. “You know, I made you for a cop. I noticed how you handled yourself with that wacko out there. If he’d tried to pull anything, you could have held your own.”
“That man strikes me as mostly talk, but he mentioned a bomb threat. Did you hear anything about that?”
“Nope. But you Navajo cops are running the show. I’m here because I could use the overtime.” Anderson shifted his weight from heel to toe and back again. “I heard about that incident in Shiprock. A huge arena crammed full of spectators? That could have been a whole lot worse. Do the feds have a suspect?”
Bernie said, “I don’t know.” If Cordova had learned something, she thought, he hadn’t shared it with her.
Anderson said, “You might mention that bomb talk to the honcho in charge, Captain Ward. Head on down the hall and take the steps.”
Bernie found Ward in conversation with a man dressed in overalls. Sh
e introduced herself and mentioned the bomb rumor.
Ward grimaced. “That story has been going around all day, and so far it’s just talk. We haven’t had any phone calls about a bomb, but the feds here are on the alert, doing what they do.”
Bernie realized that, as far as she knew, the explosion at Shiprock had come without warning. If she’d been in Captain Ward’s position she would have reacted with the same skepticism, but the chaos she’d experienced in the parking lot gave her a different perspective.
The captain said, “Chee ought to be in the meeting room doing his impression of a bodyguard. You know where that is?”
“No, sir.”
He gave her directions.
She went inside and stood against the back wall, trying to look inconspicuous while hunting for her husband. The room was about half filled, some people seated, studying their phones or chatting, others standing at their seats or in the aisles. Onstage, she saw people she assumed to be the delegates, but not Palmer or Chee.
She spotted a tall, thin man in a white cowboy hat in the aisle about halfway toward the stage. It took her a minute to come up with the name: Lee Something? No, Something Lee. She walked up to him.
“Mr. Lee, I never got a chance to thank you for staying with the injured man and helping with the traffic situation after the explosion at the high school. Ahéhee’.”
She could tell from his expression he didn’t remember her.
“I was the officer in charge for a while out there. Bernadette Manuelito.”
“Howdy. Sorry I didn’t recognize you. You look shorter when you’re not working.” He chuckled, then turned sober. “Did that guy make it?”
“No, he died at the hospital.”
Lee took off his hat. “He was banged up pretty bad. Any ideas yet on what caused that explosion?”
His short joke still grated on her. “Not that I’ve heard. The feds are in charge of the investigation.”
He nodded. “What brings you here, ma’am? I mean, Officer?”
“My husband has an assignment, so I thought I’d give him some company. How about you?”
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