Again Chandler waited for a response. Got none.
"It would be a comfy white-collar prison, of course, but he wouldn't like it," he added.
Joanna got up, took a few steps, sat down again, and massaged her leg muscles.
"They say walking downhill, steep ones anyway, is harder on your leg muscles than going up," she said. "Now I believe them."
Chandler nodded. "It's true," he said.
"Why have you been telling me all this? The only reason I can think of is that you want me to cheat Plymale somehow. You want the diamonds."
"Good thinking," Chandler said. "I want to offer you a deal. A partnership. We both hunt the place where this fellow who gave Tuve his diamond lived down here. Little Billy gave me some information to help with the hunt. I have a notion he gave you some, too. Maybe it's the same stuff. How long it took him to go back to his cave, or whatever it was, and come back with the stone. Information like that. But maybe I got some details he forgot to tell you, and you got some he didn't tell me. So my idea is we work together. Improve our chances. Then when we find the cave-and that's what Tuve called it-you find what you want. Your daddy's arm bone with the DNA. Evidence that proves you're his daughter. And we find the diamonds, which we split fifty-fifty."
"Even though they're mine?" Joanna said.
"Insurance company paid for them," Chandler said. "Remember that."
"Paid a hundred thousand dollars."
"But anyway, legally as of now, they belong to the estate, and the estate belongs to that phony charity Plymale controls."
Joanna nodded. Massaging her legs, trying to think of a way she could get into her backpack without making him suspicious. How to get out the pistol.
"I need a drink," she said. If she could reach around, unzip it, and get out her canteen, maybe she could also slip out the gun. Put it in her jacket pocket. She'd feel safer then. She turned, reached for the backpack.
"Here," Chandler said. "Let me get it for you."
He pulled it off her shoulders, out of her reach, unzipped it, got out the canteen, handed it to her. Got out her pistol, turned it over in his hand, looked at it, checked the chamber and the magazine. Put the muzzle to his nose and sniffed.
"It's still fully loaded," he said. "No burned-powder smell. Is this what you shot Mr. Sherman with?" he asked.
"No," Joanna said, thinking, How could he possibly know about that?
"Well, you won't need it now," he said, and put it in his hip pocket. "And while you're resting a little while, let's compare notes on what Tuve told us. And then we'll go find your bones."
Chandler was laughing now, looking delighted. "And then we'll count out our diamonds and divide 'em up."
21
Bernie Manuelito was still not at the Salt Woman Shrine locale where Sergeant Jim Chee had instructed her to wait. Neither was anyone else. So what was he to do? Chee had not a clue. He had made Cowboy as comfortable as possible for a fellow with a broken and badly swollen leg. He had finally managed to get a call through on his satellite phone to Grand Canyon Park's rescue service and had been assured that either a copter or some other rescue craft would be on hand "as soon as possible."
"You'll just have to wait," Chee told Dashee. "I think I should be going to see if I can find Bernie."
"Good riddance," Dashee said. "It makes me nervous watching you pacing back and forth, biting your fingernails." He groaned, shifted to a more comfortable position on the sand.
"You sure you didn't see any trace of her up around where you were? After all, there's just two ways she could have gone, upriver or downriver, and I didn't see her upriver."
"I am sure," Dashee said. "Absolutely certain. Quit worrying. She'll be back. But you might start worrying about the weather."
Dashee pointed downriver at the towering cumulus cloud, its highest level being blown by stratospheric winds into the flat-topped anvil shape. "That's going to produce what you Navajos call male rains," he said. "Produce lightning, soil erosion, arroyos, floods, and noise. Us Hopis, we like female rains. They produce corn crops and grass. And down here, by the way, you better not let the runoff from one of those catch you in a narrow little canyon."
"I'll worry about the weather, too," Chee said. "But how about if something happened to her?" He pointed at Dashee's ankle. "Something like that. She's smarter than you are, and not so clumsy, but bad things can happen."
"Or how about something even worse happening to you? Like Bernie seeing some nice-looking, polite young tourist guy with one of those float trips coming down the Colorado. She'd realize she could do a lot better than a homely Navajo Tribal Police sergeant with bad manners."
"Bad manners? What do you mean?"
"I'm remembering your tone when you ordered her to wait for you. `You wait here, Bernie.'" Dashee mimicked Chee's official tone almost exactly.
"Okay," Chee said. "You wait here, Mr. Dashee, and don't hurt yourself again. Have you got enough water?"
"I don't think we'll have to worry about going thirsty for long," Dashee said, and a rumble of thunder punctuated the remark. With that Chee did the only thing he could think of doing: He headed downstream, keeping his eyes and his mind focused on finding the sort of tracks Bernie's little waffle-soled sneakers might have left.
Chee first found Bernie's tracks in the damp sand down by the river. When he couldn't see any more of them there, he headed for any unusual-looking sort of flora along the cliffs and eventually found them again, along with the evidence that Bernie had yielded to her temptation to collect seed pods from whatever plant she considered interesting. His irritation at having to go hunting for her was flooded away by a variety of memories of Bernie-how sweet she looked when deep in thought, when she smiled at him, when she was rapt in admiration of a cloud formation, or a sunset, or the shape of a walnut shell, or the shadows spreading out across the sagebrush slopes when the sun was low. If she was with him now, he thought, she would be admiring the thunderstorm looming above them.
For a while Chee focused on revisiting memories of those times with Bernie, but then the pleasure was interrupted. He began finding other tracks.
Tracks of two people. One wearing hiking boots. Big boots. Size eleven he guessed. The other small, narrow, probably women's casual sportswear. The man was usually walking in front, the woman sometimes stepping on his tracks. The two usually close together. A couple of tourists, he thought, nothing to concern him. Yet they did seem to share Bernie's interest in various growths of canyon-bottom plants.
He sat on a slab of fallen stone at the canyon mouth, taking a sip from his canteen, considering what those tracks meant. A pair of tourists might naturally be curious about the oddity of Grand Canyon botany. Possibly they had no interest in Bernie. Or merely wondered what she was doing.
He recapped his canteen and resumed his tracking, moving a little faster now and enjoying it less, remembering what Lieutenant Leaphorn had so often said about never believing in coincidences.
At the mouth of the next canyon draining into the Colorado, he found Bernie's tracks going in perhaps a hundred yards and the paired tracks following her in and out. Still, he thought, maybe nothing to worry about.
But it did worry him. And he hurried.
Around the next bend in the Colorado's south-side cliff, he came to a wider canyon mouth. Bernie had gone in. The paired tracks had come along after her. Someone wearing small moccasins had also been up this canyon recently. These tracks were faint and Chee spent several minutes seeing what he could learn from them.
Bernie's shoe soles blurred some of them. And some of them, on the way out, had blurred Bernie's tracks. Thus the moccasins had come out after Bernie went in. Interesting but not alarming.
What was alarming was the lack of a sign that either Bernie or the two producing the paired tracks had come out. Chee lost interest in the moccasin tracks and hurried up the side canyon.
The first couple of hundred yards were easy tracking. Both Bernie and the pair following he
r had walked right up the middle of the smooth stone floor, leaving their prints in the accumulated dust and debris. Then Bernie's disappeared, and it took him a while to discover where she had climbed up a slope where fallen slabs and boulders were piled. Chee climbed it. He found tracks where she had walked around, and the place where she had climbed back down, causing a little avalanche of her own in the process. Under the slope her tracks resumed, as did the paired tracks and multiple traces of the little moccasins.
Bernie's tracks resumed their travels up the canyon floor with the paired tracks following her. But the moccasin tracks didn't.
Why not? Chee had no idea. Nor interest. He cared about Bernie and the big man and little woman so relentlessly trailing her. These three sets of tracks were easy to follow, and Chee followed them at something close to a run. The canyon now boomed with echoing thunder, and the formidable cloud he'd seen before he turned into this side canyon had drifted overhead, darkening his narrow world with its shadow, causing the temperature to drop, and bringing with it a cool breeze.
Chee's running stopped just ahead. On the left side of the canyon was another runoff gorge. It was a narrow slot with its entrance choked by a dense growth of cat's claw acacias-the vegetation detested by cattlemen and sheep herders all across the arid West. The big man's and little woman's shoe prints were there, too, often blurring Bernie's own shoe prints. Bernie was looking for a way in, he guessed, and not finding it.
He paused a moment, thinking, inhaling the suddenly cool, fresh air. A flash of lightning lit the canyon, and just a second behind it came the explosive crack it caused, and the rolling boom of thunder. No time to waste here. He was rushing up the floor of the main canyon, running now because the thunder was becoming almost constant and a shower of popcorn hail had started, the little white balls bouncing off rocks and his hat brim. He had seen her tracks easily until now. But when the real rain started they'd be erased fast.
But there were no more tracks up the canyon. None. No sign of those little waffle soles anywhere, not on the still-dusty smooth stone of the stream bottom, not along the banks, not in any of the places where interesting-looking seed pods might have lured her. Nor were there any signs of the big man's boot prints, which had always been easy to spot.
Which meant what? Bernie hadn't turned back. He wouldn't have missed downhill tracks. She must have found a way through that mass of acacia brush. She must be up in that narrow little slot. And the big man and little woman must be up there with her.
22
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 robber
y 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."
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 17 - Skeleton Man Page 17