Tracking Bear

by Thurlo, David

  “There’s something I really need to know, Officer Clah. Did my son suffer before he died?”

  “I believe his death was instantaneous,” she said, recalling the execution-style murder.

  “The information I received is that someone was trying to burgle that old garage where I keep some of my junk, and when my son walked in on them, he was killed. Is that true?”

  “We believe there was more to it than that, but I can’t disclose the direction our investigation is taking at the moment. Can you tell me if there was anything of substantial value stored in that garage, or a reason why anyone would think there was?”

  There was no answer for such a long time, Ella wondered if Mrs. Grayhorse was still on the line. All she heard was electronic noise caused by the distant connection.

  Finally, the woman cleared her throat. “My son had been storing some things that belonged to his father there. I’m not sure what they were, but the rest is just old furniture, books, and junk.”

  Ella remembered her feeling that Professor Franklin had been holding out on her. Kee’s house was large—particularly for one person, and was not in the least bit cluttered. There was no reason, as far as she could see, why he couldn’t have kept his own belongings at his home—unless he’d wanted to keep someone else, like whoever had broken into his house, from finding them.

  “Have you heard of NEED, Mrs. Grayhorse?”

  “Oh, of course. I spoke to my sister a few months ago, and it was all she talked about.” She paused. “Imagine, a nuclear power plant on the reservation. But if you have questions about that, I think you should talk to my ex-husband. He was approached to join them because of his particular expertise in physics. He’s ideally qualified to direct such a project, but I’m certain he’ll never join them.”

  “Why do you say that?” She wanted to keep Martha Grayhorse talking. If anyone knew the answers she’d been searching for, Martha might.

  “Kee always felt personally responsible for the plight of the Navajo miners who’d destroyed their health working in the uranium mines in the seventies. That’s because his work at the labs contributed so much to the demand for uranium.”

  “Can you tell me a little more about his work?” Ella said, forcing her tone to stay casual.

  She hesitated. “I don’t think it’s a secret anymore. That was so many years ago,” she said, thinking out loud, then continued. “I don’t understand all the details, but Kee specialized in photo-chemistry. He applied new laser technology—well, new at the time—to purify and enrich uranium, which was then used to power nuclear reactors and make nuclear weapons. Then Kee learned how uranium was being mined on the reservation and realized the danger those miners were in. Without adequate protection, they were risking their lives, and their employers were just letting it happen.”

  “Did Professor Franklin protest what was going on?” Ella asked.

  “Of course. He went back to the Rez and met with several miners’ groups and tribal officials. He explained what radiation could do, but back then, no one took him very seriously because there were a lot of jobs in mining. He spoke to the companies and insisted that the miners be given respirators, and that attention be paid to adequate ventilation, but the companies said they couldn’t afford to spend the extra money. They wouldn’t even issue the miners special clothing.”

  “It must have been very difficult to get people to listen.”

  “You have no idea. Kee tried, he really did. His own family worked the mines. But the miners needed the jobs badly, and they were making more money than they’d ever made in their lives. The risks of something they couldn’t see didn’t seem so great. The politicians listened quietly, but did nothing. They were more afraid of the Russians.”

  “So he was forced to accept the way things were?”

  “Yes, but he had a lot of difficulty continuing his work at the labs after that. He couldn’t reconcile with it because he knew what was happening back home. I saw him become very withdrawn, so much so that he even pushed his son and me away. Eventually, he quit his job at the labs and started working as a teacher, making a fourth of what he’d made before. He was never quite the same after that. It was like all his dreams had been shattered. In the years that followed, Kee changed even more. I think what hit him the hardest was the death of his brother from Red Lung.”

  “Do you think your ex-husband’s ever made peace with his past?”

  There was a pause. Finally, Mrs. Grayhorse answered. “I don’t think Kee will ever find peace. He left the work he loved—his work with lasers—because he knew that the research he was being paid to do would never help people—that it would only lead to more deaths. His dreams turned into nightmares.”

  After Ella hung up, she tried to take in what she’d learned. Kee Franklin was a complex man, but somehow she had to earn his trust, and get him to tell her what he knew. The solution to his son’s murder most likely depended on it.

  As Ella leaned back in her chair, she saw that someone had left a copy of the evening paper on her desk. That usually meant there was something there pertaining to one of her cases. As she opened the paper, she saw that the lead story was about infighting among the Tribal Council members.

  Kevin, now a committee leader, was speaking openly about NEED and how the nuclear power plant was quickly becoming a financial necessity for the tribe. Others, just as outspoken, were voicing their own concerns, quoting Rose’s research on the failed land reclamation efforts and the fate of many Navajo miners.

  A note from Big Ed was stuck on the center of the article. “Stay on top of this. If this is going to turn into a war as it did with gaming, we all better be prepared.”

  Ella sat back, wondering if her mother knew she was now being quoted on page one, when Justine came in.

  “We’ve got more trouble. No one was hurt, but someone in a pickup drove by Councilman Jonas Buck’s house and fired off several rounds through the windows.”

  “Let’s go,” Ella said, heading for the door.

  Nineteen

  They arrived at a large residence west of Shiprock a few miles off Highway 64 near Shiprock Wash, the main channel of a long branching network of arroyos that ran for miles before entering the San Juan River. The area was relatively flat here, part of the old river’s floodplain, and was dotted with low alkali flats, dried-up marshes, and salt cedar—a non-native species that tapped into the precious water table.

  No other houses were within view, and had other buildings or vehicles been there, they would have certainly seen them. The dirt road passing by the Buck residence led all the way to the river. As Justine parked in the narrow lane leading a hundred feet to the house, Jonas Buck strode out toward them.

  “It took you all a heck of a long time to get here. Where have you been? I called over a half hour ago! This is an emergency! That truck is probably halfway across the county now.”

  “Tell us what happened,” Ella asked quickly, looking toward the stucco, wood-framed house. A picture window was shattered, and the stucco in several spots had been broken loose from the impact of gunfire. From where she stood, the spacing and marks looked like those made by a shotgun blast, unless the shooter fired more than a dozen small-caliber rounds.

  “I got off lucky. My wife’s already at work, and my kids are at the college for morning classes. I was alone inside, and out of their range because they fired from the road.” Jonas shook his head. “For the first time in my life I wish I lived in one of those residential areas closer to town. Then maybe someone might have seen something.”

  “When you called Dispatch, did you give them a description of the pickup?”

  “Well, as much as I could. I was having breakfast in the kitchen and ran to the window as soon as I thought it was safe. All I saw was the tailgate of a light blue Ford pickup headed for the highway. But I can’t say for sure if it was the shooter’s vehicle or someone else passing by.”

  “Did you check to see if any other vehicles were around, maybe
headed toward the river, or see anyone on foot?” Justine asked.

  “There was nobody walking around outside that I could see, and there were no other vehicles in sight by the time I went out to look.”

  “Does anyone in this area have a light blue truck?” Ella added.

  “Not that I’ve seen before.”

  “About the truck. Did you see anything that could help identify that particular truck from any other Ford models of the same color?” Ella asked.

  “Well, there was a pro-NEED sticker on the back window—you know, those that practically glow in the dark. And they wonder why I’m against the entire project! Their people have fancy college degrees but not one lick of common sense.”

  While Justine collected the rounds that were still imbedded in the stucco and in the sheetrock wall at the back of the living room, Ella took a look around outside. Once again, events tended to indicate a campaign of terrorism and harassment against NEED project opponents. But it was too neat. Someone sure was going to a lot of trouble to make NEED advocates look like prime suspects and loonies.

  “They used a shotgun,” Justine told Ella, showing her the buckshot. “It’s going to be practically impossible to track this down. If we’d have found some of those damn .380 pistol slugs, we’d have something. The way it stands, we sure don’t have much to go on except that sticker and the fact that it was a light blue Ford pickup.”

  Ella nodded. “It’s either someone pro-NEED but not too bright, or someone who is out to bury them with innuendo and circumstantial evidence. There are a lot of NEED stickers around these days, though.”

  “When I think of the ear-shattering blast of that shotgun going off inside a pickup, I vote for the not-too-bright analysis,” Justine said with a shrug.

  After they’d taken Buck’s statement and photographed what tire imprints they could find where the pickup had apparently turned around in the road, Ella and Justine got ready to leave. “Where to now, boss?” Justine asked.

  Ella looked at her. “According to Buck, his closest neighbor lives at the house we passed, out by the highway. There’s always a chance of him having seen something pertinent since the pickup must have passed by twice. We can check on that when we go by. Then I want to go to Jason Franklin’s duplex.”

  “I checked it out myself the day after his death. I couldn’t find anything to connect to the crime.”

  “I still would like to take a look. Now that we have some direction to a motive, maybe something will connect this time. Do you know if it’s been rented out yet?”

  “Dr. Franklin paid the next month’s rent, I heard. I don’t think he wants to go through his son’s things yet. But I doubt many Navajos will even go look at the place while Jason’s possessions are still there. His things would be associated with the chindi.”

  “That’s good luck for us. We need to refocus our thinking and start at the beginning—with Jason.”

  No one was at home at the house closer to the highway, so Ella left a card with a note asking the resident to call her, then they drove to Officer Franklin’s apartment. The small rental unit was just below the bluff in the older, central section of the town of Shiprock. Ella remembered the drive-in theater that had been close to that spot once.

  The apartments were nothing more than a hastily built duplex on land that belonged to an allottee. Instead of trying to graze livestock on the small parcels of land, some families had decided renting was more profitable.

  “I wonder where the Rez will be fifteen, twenty years from now?” Justine said as she pulled up and parked. “It sure is a mess these days—we’re not industrial, but we’re not rural anymore either. We’re stuck in the middle in a limbo of sorts.”

  “Yeah.” Ella nodded in agreement. “But we’ve survived worse as a people.”

  “The way things are going, do you think there’ll be anything left of the way things were when our mothers grew up in another, say, twenty years?”

  “I don’t know. But we’re at a crossroads as a tribe. The decisions we make now will affect what kids like Dawn inherit.”

  As they reached the building, Ella glanced around. “Does the neighbor have the key?”

  “He did before,” Justine answered.

  They knocked on the adjacent door and soon a young man wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with the Washington Redskins logo and colors appeared.

  Ella flashed her badge, and he nodded wearily.

  “Here’s the key,” he said, reaching for a hook on the wall behind the door. “When you’re through, bring it back. We had a break-in while my neighbor was still alive, so the owners asked me to keep a special eye on the place now that nobody’s there. Of course only kids would go in there now. The chindi and all that.”

  “Wait. There was a break-in?” Ella asked, then glanced at Justine, who shook her head, letting her know this was the first she’d heard of it. “When?”

  “It wasn’t a big deal or anything, but someone broke into both my place and Jason’s about a week before he was killed. Nothing much was taken, so we decided not to bother reporting it. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, not the way the police are running around like crazy these days.”

  “What was taken?”

  “Jason lost his VCR, but they left his TV, so he didn’t really care. He was going to get a DVD player anyway. I lost twenty bucks from a drawer and a boom box with a bad speaker, so they won’t get anything for it. They took my tapes, too. All in all, not exactly a haul. Jason bought better locks for both of us after that. We needed new ones anyway, because they twisted off the old doorknobs with a pipe wrench, probably.”

  “Did they trash the place as they searched?” Ella asked.

  He shrugged. “Not really, but there wasn’t much to trash. Neither Jason nor I have a lot of stuff.”

  “Okay, thanks. If you think of anything else…”

  “I’ll give one of you a call. I still have Officer Goodluck’s number.” He smiled at Justine, and she grinned.

  As they walked next door, Justine glanced at Ella. “In my experience, bachelors never spend much money on their places except for electronic stuff—boys’ toys. But Jason’s apartment didn’t even have much of that.”

  They stopped at the window, and Ella peered in. “I can see an old-looking computer with floppy drives and a TV. Is that pretty much it?”

  “If I remember correctly.”

  A moment later they walked inside and looked around. The desktop computer was bulky, and probably too old for anything except word processing and simple games, which she confirmed after locating a few floppy disks. The color TV had rabbit ears instead of an antenna or cable. Ella turned it on just to check it out. The picture was snowy, but at least you could hear well enough. “Lousy reception, maybe he only watched rental movies. Did he have a radio?”

  “I don’t remember seeing one. There’s nothing much of value here. And no reason to believe there would be, judging from the duplex itself,” Justine said. “Do you think this was associated with the breaking and entering at Dr. Franklin’s place? That occurred at around the same time.”

  “Then there’s the B and E at the garage where Jason was killed,” Ella said. “That’s three burglaries, all connected to two men—Jason and his father, if you dismiss the neighbor’s burglary as a cover-up.”

  “So we go back to the theory that gains more credibility by the second—that someone’s searching for something that belongs to Professor Franklin. That tends to indicate that Jason’s murder was not premeditated but something that happened because of the circumstances, just as we first thought,” Justine said.

  Ella sat on the sofa and looked around. “If you were Jason, and you were trying to hide something here, where would you have put it?”

  “Behind the bookcase or between the pages of a book, if we’re dealing with papers. But just in case we’re wrong about that, I think I should go through his computer files and take a closer look at everything here.”

  “Okay—let�
�s search for a printout or maybe a disk stashed someplace,” Ella said. “Come to think of it, if he were trying to hide a disk, the very best place would be in plain sight, mixed in with those old games.”

  “I checked through all those when I was here last, but I’ll give it another go.”

  As Ella walked around the rooms, searching in drawers, inside books, and behind furniture, Justine turned on the computer and went through every floppy disk she could find. Then she searched all the files on his hard drive.

  After an hour, they’d still found nothing to justify their efforts. Ella met Justine back in the living room. “I came out empty-handed.”

  “Me too. At least the computer hard drive was small, and it didn’t take long to open every file.”

  Ella rubbed her shoulder with one hand, trying to ease the tension she felt. “I’ve been thinking…if what we’re searching for belongs to the professor, it could be anything from a research paper to mathematical equations he jotted down on a napkin.”

  “I thought of that. Believe me, I went through everything. There was zip. Even the computer coding on the nontext files looked authentic.”

  “We’ve got to talk to Professor Franklin and make him see that he has to confide in us. No more dancing around.”

  “Do you want to check again to see if he’s home?”

  “Yeah. Let’s call first.” Thirty seconds later, Ella canceled the call. “No answer, but maybe he’s just not picking up.”

  “Last time we called ahead, too, and nobody answered, so we didn’t stop by,” Justine said. “Shall we check anyway?”

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  Ella remained quiet as they drove to Farmington, where Kee Franklin lived. A peculiar restlessness gnawed at her. She had a feeling that she was overlooking something.

  When they arrived at Franklin’s home they saw that his SUV still wasn’t in the driveway, and there were no fresh tracks leading to the garage. “It looks like he isn’t ducking our calls,” Justine said.