“I think I know who you mean. I’ll call him while you call the hospital.”
It took only two tries to reach Officer Clyde Skeen of the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
“I responded to a single-car roll over near Red Mesa. The driver went down an embankment. Clear road, no traffic. Maybe he fell asleep. Who knows? No signs of alcohol or drugs at the crash, but speed may have been a factor.” Skeen cleared his throat. “Lucky for him, a car came by headed the other way not too long after it happened and noticed the headlights.”
“How badly was he injured?”
“Bad, but he had on his seat belt, and that may save his life. That and the other driver calling 911. Why all the questions?”
“The injured man’s father is the mediator for the Grand Canyon summit, the guy whose car blew up. He’s here in Tuba with me now.”
“So what are you doing in Tuba? I thought you were assigned to the Shiprock district?”
Chee explained.
“You know, Chee, some guys get all the luck.” Skeen cleared his throat again. “I noticed some scrapes on the driver’s side of that car. Might be that someone forced him off the road.”
“Maybe.” It was an area worth investigating, Chee thought.
“Yep. Or maybe we’ve been watching too many car-chase movies.”
Palmer had settled himself onto the lobby couch. His head was in his hands.
Chee sat next to him. “What did the hospital say?”
“Not much. A nurse told me Robert is in intensive care, and she took my number. Intensive care? That’s not good.”
“It means he’s getting all kinds of help.” Chee remembered visiting the Lieutenant on that high-tech ICU floor at the hospital in Santa Fe. The staff, along with some prayers, brought him back from the threshold of death. “Do you want to me to drive you down to Flag?”
Palmer patted his shirt pocket where the cigarettes lived. “I’m no good in hospitals. Too much waiting. I never know what to say. The nurse gave me a direct number to the unit where Robert is so I can check on him. We’re not close anymore. And what could I do, anyway?”
Chee nodded. The few times he’d been a hospital patient, he just wanted to be left alone. “Does his mother know?”
“The officer said he called her first because Rocket had her as his emergency contact.”
“I’m sorry this happened. Let me know if I can do anything to help you.”
“Did the officer tell you about the wreck?”
Chee explained. “He said it looks like speed may have been a factor, but not alcohol. He noticed some scrape marks on the side of the car.”
Palmer said, “Do you think this has anything to do with the mediation or with me?”
“I don’t know.” After a moment, Chee said, “We need to go to bed. I’ll give you a ride to the Justice Center in the morning.”
They walked down the hall. Chee checked Palmer’s room and said good night.
“Hey, Chee?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for making that call.”
Chee slid his key card into his own room’s door slot and saw the green light flash. Bernie had fallen asleep, but she awoke when he gently eased himself into bed next to her.
19
Joe Leaphorn couldn’t stop thinking about Richard Horseman. Little Ricky. A sweet child born with the odds against him. When Emma got sick, because of the damage the tumor did to her brain, she began to lose track of the boys. Her cards for them remained unsent, forgotten, like so many other things she’d once loved and enjoyed.
He recalled their last conversation, before she went in for the surgery that was supposed to restore her brain but instead took her life.
He sat with her in the surgical waiting room, just the two of them. She squeezed his hand and said, “Ayóó anííníshní,” and then again, “I love you.” He remembered the tone of her voice, fear and hope intermixed.
He said, “I’ll see you in the recovery room.”
But she didn’t recover. And despite his focus on work, despite colleagues who reached out to him, and the support that came from Emma’s family, he hadn’t recovered either. After so many years, the gaping wound had scarred over, still raw underneath.
The week after Emma died, he found a pile of cards for the boys in her dresser. He stamped and mailed the cards she’d sealed and addressed. Then he put five dollars in the others, signed them with her name, and mailed them, too, one a week for as long as they lasted.
He’d kept working full-time after that for a while and then switched to contract work. Louisa, a college professor studying comparative spiritual beliefs among the Native people of the Southwest, had come into his life and befriended him. Her companionship helped keep loneliness at bay. At least most days.
Immediately after Emma’s death he’d taken on the case of a missing woman archaeologist because he knew Emma would have wanted him to do that. Now, for her sake, he would find out why a boy she had loved and cared about had grown up to be the first person in the history of Shiprock killed with a car bomb.
He thought more about Horseman. Leaphorn kept the little notebooks he used to jot down facts and questions about his cases as an officer and a detective. When he cleared out his desk at the station, he thought about tossing them, an old man’s memories of his better days. But something made him save them, and often in his consulting work he was glad he had. Perhaps he had made some entries about the boy’s family, or his situation, something he might have forgotten now that would help him help Bernie.
He opened the lower drawer of his desk, reached toward the back, and felt the stacks of old notebooks sandwiched together with a thick rubber band. He pulled them out. He had bundled groups of five years together and written the beginning and ending dates on a slip of paper with each pile. He had at least one notebook for every year. Some years, if crime was rampant or the cases he investigated especially complex, he’d started a second book.
He found the notebooks that should bracket the years he guessed he might have encountered the boy and slipped off the rubber band. He’d seen the child on a warm day, so he started by reading his entries from June, then moved to July. His notes sparked the memory that it had been a refreshingly slow period for crime, before meth made its debut in Navajo country. He scanned entries about cattle rustling, illegal liquor sales, and runaways. He reviewed calls about husbands and boyfriends beating up on wives and girlfriends. The journal recalled lost tourists, stolen vehicles that relatives had allegedly borrowed, dogs killing livestock, UFO and shape-shifter reports. But he saw nothing about a scared boy walking down the road for help.
He thought back to the scene again and remembered the way the light had fallen. It didn’t seem like the August sun, so he went to his notes for May, year by year. If he came up empty, then he’d look through September. But there on the twenty-seventh of May, eighteen years ago, he found the reference. Mostly, it was as he recalled it.
Noticed a child along the shoulder of the road. Pulled up next to him. He was limping because he only had one shoe. He was crying, sobbing. He had on an oversized wristwatch with a green dial.
He had forgotten about the watch. His notes indicated that the situation at the house was worse than he’d recollected. He had recorded the name and age of the woman who lived there, Naomi Horseman, 23, and the boyfriend who lived there, too, but, she said, was away working. Leaphorn had also made a note of the children in the house: Richard Horseman, 4, and Harris Horseman, 1.
The woman had old bruises on her face and neck and a freshly swollen eye. She wouldn’t say what happened, but when I asked if her boyfriend had hurt her, she didn’t deny it.
He heard Louisa’s steps approaching and stopped reading.
She spoke from the doorway to his office. “The news will be on in a few minutes.”
He nodded. They watched the national and then the local news on television together every night before dinner.
She put her hand lightly
on his shoulder. “You’re awfully quiet and busy today.”
“Fine.”
He waited for her to leave before he read the rest of the entry. It seemed like an invasion of the family’s privacy to review his notes with another person in the room.
The woman said her mother often kept the children. The grandmother, Mrs. Nez, had no phone, so after the ambulance left, I took Richard to her place and she agreed to care for him and asked about the baby’s condition. She told me she was angry with her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend for neglecting the boys.
He skimmed his description of the neat house and ramada, the sheep pen, the hogan.
He had written: “Case referred to Social Services.” This is where Butterfly’s notes would help him understand what happened next.
He heard the familiar theme song of the evening news, closed the notebook, grabbed his cane, and went in to be with Louisa.
The most interesting thing on the news was the report on protesters at the Grand Canyon meeting. The announcer talked about them with footage of an elderly white man in Tuba City using a protest sign to beat on the hood of a big black car until fellow protesters strong-armed him away. He saw Jim Chee in the background. Chee, he recalled, had a knack for being in the exact spot where trouble might be lurking.
Louisa said, “I wonder if those people had anything to do with the explosion? What do you think?”
He shrugged. He was pleased that nothing happened in Tuba City that would embarrass the Navajo Nation. Or, if something like that had happened, television hadn’t captured it.
The reporter said that one of the Tuba City protest groups had been linked to ecoterrorism in the past. They showed the footage of the destroyed car in the Shiprock gym parking lot and noted the ongoing FBI investigation. The reporter said the feds had identified the dead man as Richard Horseman, 22.
Leaphorn’s cell phone rang twice during dinner. He itched to answer it, but he and Louisa had an agreement: no calls during the news or at meals. She had baked meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy, one of his favorite dinners, but he wasn’t hungry. His mind kept replaying the scene with the boy. He was missing something, but what? How could those two random events be connected?
“You usually like my meat loaf. Is something bothering you, Joe?”
“Thinking.”
“So you’re working on a case?”
He nodded once.
“Are you helping Bernie?” She didn’t wait for his response. “Let me know if I can do anything. I’d be glad to make calls for you. Whatever you need.”
“Guh.” He meant to say “good,” but he could tell she understood.
When they’d finished dinner, Louisa cleared the table and carefully pulled out the large board with a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, a scene with mountains and multicolored wildflowers. She liked it when he found the pieces to create the picture and said the three-dimensional thinking helped his brain. He considered it a tedious waste of time, but not as big a waste of time as arguing with her. His lady friend meant well, he knew, but she didn’t understand what went on inside his head. No one could unless they’d had damage to their brains. If they were like him, they didn’t want to talk about it even if they could.
“We’re half done with this one. What’s left is harder.”
He walked to where she had the puzzle ready and waved his hand.
“Working,” he told her. “Bernie.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.
She smiled. “By the way, I picked up a copy of the Albuquerque Journal when I was out. I left it on the living room table for you.”
He picked up the paper and took it back to his office. He hung the cane on the extra chair, and sat down with the files and his notebooks. He looked at his phone. The first message was from Maryellen Hood. When he’d first come home from the hospital, he had trouble remembering how to use his cell phone. Now it was second nature. He’d even learned to text.
She’d said, “Check your e-mail,” and then, “Be careful, sir. There were some rough players in this case.”
He tapped the computer screen, it came to life, and he went to his e-mail. He scrolled past notices from AARP, Sacred Wind phone service, the latest newsletter from the retired police officers association, and ads for products that embarrassed him. He found a message from Butterfly. He clicked on the subject line: “For a friend of my Dad.”
Maryellen had typed:
Lt. Leaphorn,
The files I found are attached. The ones before the earliest date you see here are paper only, stored offsite and not accessible to me. Please delete these when you are done.
He moved the mouse to the symbol of a paper clip and clicked. An icon that looked like a manila folder drifted to the bottom of the screen. He kept clicking as prompted, thinking how much easier it would be to open a real file and thumb through pages.
The information looked like photocopies of a series of typed sheets dating back two decades. As he had suspected, his encounter with the sad little boy was not the Horseman family’s first experience with law enforcement or family services. Nor was it the last. The social workers’ reports told him that Ricky’s mother had been arrested for drunken driving that resulted in child endangerment, battery on a household member, and child neglect. Periodically, the children were monitored by Navajo Social Services. One entry documented the arrest of a man identified as Naomi’s boyfriend for child abuse.
Leaphorn read on. It looked as though young Ricky did better after he went to live with Mrs. Nez. The reports were boring, perfunctory. Then something happened and a security guard at a Farmington grocery had detained Horseman for throwing rocks at cars. He found that the grandmother complained about the boy’s “attitude of disrespect” and reported him as a runaway several times. Another in the parade of caseworkers wrote that the boy had dropped out of high school and moved back to live with his mother, who had just been released from prison.
The final file Butterfly had sent was a note that Rick Horseman had been arrested in Gallup after a shoplifting incident that involved video games. He was seventeen. There was no juvenile record of arrest for involvement in gangs, drugs, or violent crime.
Leaphorn thought about it. Sometimes puberty alone activated the switch that made boys go crazy for a few years, especially young males growing up in challenging circumstances without male relatives to guide them. Maybe that was what had happened to Horseman. Then Richard Horseman aged out of the system and reporting from the Navajo Social Services stopped. Ready or not, Richard Horseman was legally an adult.
All in all, Ricky grew to manhood with some struggles, but not a hopeless case.
He had asked Largo to check the file on Horseman for him, and he’d noticed the captain’s e-mail when he was scrolling for Butterfly’s message. Largo had written: “One report on Horseman as an adult. Two years ago, he was arrested on suspicion of car theft, but charges dropped for technical errors. Nothing pending.” If the captain couldn’t find anything more, it wasn’t to be found.
At the police station, he’d used his map of Navajoland with colored pushpins marking unsolved crimes with special designations for burglaries, rustling, bootlegging, drug cases, and homicides. It helped him make sense of things, see connections. When he retired, he’d left the map there, but he still liked the idea of mapping crime, diagramming relationships of criminal acts to the varied geography of Navajoland and among the people involved in the cases he was working. Instead of a map now, he used the printout of Bernie’s bullet points to organize his thoughts. He printed the note Bernie had sent him earlier and reread it.
She had written:
Possible reasons for Horseman’s death
He was hired to plant the bomb by someone who wanted to hurt Palmer and blew himself up by accident.
He came to watch the game and just happened to be in the parking lot by the car when it exploded.
He was planning to steal the car when the bomb went off.
/>
He knew there was a bomb in the car and wanted to remove it.
Palmer knew him, sent him out to get something from the car, and he triggered the bomb.
Someone wanted to kill Horseman and used Palmer’s car as the means to do it.
Some combo of the above.
None of the above.
Leaphorn’s brain expanded the speculation. A fancy BMW might have offered more temptation than Horseman could resist. Perhaps he stole cars on assignment. The FBI, using their fancy equipment and extensive bureaucracy, had ruled out the possibility that Horseman was a bomb maker and found no link between him and any terrorist group. Maybe while he stood there, contemplating the heist, he discovered that the car was unlocked or jimmied his way in, never suspecting that there would be a bomb there. Maybe someone hired Horseman to put the bomb in the car and he’d accidentally made a deadly mistake. He leaned back in his chair and noticed the newspaper Louisa had picked up. The Shiprock bombing was on page three. He glanced at the photograph of the bomb scene, studying it closely. It captured emergency responders at work. In the background he saw an officer in a Navajo Police uniform talking to a man in a red shirt. He didn’t recognize the officer, but he figured it must be the rookie Bernie had mentioned. He looked for her in the photo but didn’t spot her. He’d have to tease Bernie about that, accuse her of hiding from the camera.
Leaphorn went back to work with Butterfly’s files. This time, he read more closely, noting the progression of incidents involving either overt neglect or profound maternal ignorance. He read about male friends of Rick and Harris’s mother who showed up briefly in the reports, most of whom shared her problem with drugs and alcohol. None of them seemed interested in the boys. One social worker commented that a son-in-law of Mrs. Nez was a “positive influence” on Rick and paid some medical bills for baby Harris. Another outlined the grandmother’s efforts to get social services more involved in helping the boys’ mother. Each caseworker added more observations and theories. Meanwhile, the home situation grew worse for the boys.
Song of the Lion Page 19