A Thief of Time

by Tony Hillerman

  Instead he looked in his notebook and found the number Dr. Pedwell had given him for the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. “That would have an MLA number,” Pedwell had told him when he’d asked if Elliot had also applied to excavate the site where Etcitty and Nails had been killed. “It’s in New Mexico, and apparently on public land. If it’s on a Navajo section, we record it. If it’s not, Laboratory of Anthropology handles it.”

  “Sounds confusing,” Chee had said.

  “Oh, it is,” Pedwell had agreed. “It’s even more confusing than that.” And he’d started explaining other facets of the numbering system, the Chaco numbers, the Mesa Verde, until Chee had changed the subject. Now he realized he should have asked for a name at Santa Fe.

  He made the call from the station, drawing a surprised look from the desk clerk, who knew he was off. And it took three transfers before he connected with the woman who had access to the information he needed. She had a sweet, distinct middle-aged voice.

  “It’s easier if you know the MLA number,” she said. “Otherwise I have to check through the applicant files.”

  And so he waited.

  “Dr. Elliot has eleven applications on file. You want all of them?”

  “I guess so,” Chee said, not knowing exactly what to expect.

  “MLA 14,751. MLA 19,311. MLA—”

  “Just a moment,” Chee said. “Do they have site locations? What county they’re in. Like that?”

  “On our map, yes.”

  “The one I’m interested in would be in San Juan County, New Mexico.”

  “Just a minute,” she said. The minute passed. “Two of them. MLA 19,311 and MLA 19,327.”

  “Could you pin the location down any more?”

  “I can give you the legal description. Range, township, and section.” She read them off.

  “Was he issued the permits?”

  “Turned down,” she said. “They’re saving those sites to be dug sometime in the future when they have better technology. It’s hard to get permission to dig them now.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Chee said. “It’s exactly what I need.”

  And it was. When he checked the legal description on the U.S. Geological Survey map in Captain Largo’s office, MLA 19,327 proved to share range, township, and section with the oil well pump beyond which he’d found the U-Haul truck.

  He had less luck trying to call Chaco Canyon. The phone was suffering some sort of satellite relay problem that produced both fade-out and echo. Randall Elliot was out of reach at one of the down-canyon ruins. Maxie Davis was somewhere. Luna was doing something, unintelligible to Chee, at Pueblo Bonito.

  Chee glanced at his watch. He calculated the distance to Chaco. About a hundred miles. He remembered the condition of that last twenty-five miles of dirt. He groaned. Why was he doing this on his day off? But he knew why. Much as Leaphorn irritated him, he wanted the man to pat him on the head. To say, “Good job, kid.” Might as well admit it. Also he might as well admit another fact. He was excited now. That grotesque line of lower jaws suddenly seemed to mean something. Perhaps something important.

  The strange weather slowed him a little, rocking his truck when he stretched the limit on the fast pavement of N.M. 44 across the sagebrush flats of Blanco Plateau. End of autumn, he thought. Winter coming out of the west. Behind him over Colorado’s La Plata range, the sky was dark, and when he left the pavement at Blanco Trading Post, he had a direct side wind to deal with—and the tiring business of steering against it as he fought chugholes and ruts. And tumbleweeds and blowing sand chased him across the parking lot at the Chaco visitors’ center.

  The woman he’d talked to was at the desk, looking trim in her park ranger uniform and glad to have Chee break the boredom of a day, and a season, that brought few visitors. She showed him on the Chaco map how to get to Kin Kletso, the site where Randall Elliot would be working today, “if he can work in this wind.” Where Maxie Davis was seemed a mystery, “but maybe she’ll be working with Randall.” Luna had driven into Gallup and wouldn’t be back until tonight.

  Chee went back to his truck, leaning into the wind, squinching his eyes against the dust. At Kin Kletso, he found a Park Service truck parked and an employee sitting in the shelter of one of the walls.

  “Looking for Dr. Randall Elliot,” Chee said. “Did I miss him?”

  “A mile,” the man said. “He didn’t show up today.”

  “You know where…”

  The man waved a dismissive wave. “No idea,” he said. “He’s independent as a hog on ice.”

  Maybe he was home. Chee drove to the temporary housing. Nothing in the parking area. He knocked at the door marked Elliot. Knocked again. Walked around the building to the back. Randall Elliot hadn’t pulled the drapes across his sliding-glass patio door. Chee peered into what must be the living room. Elliot seemed to have converted it into a work area. Sawhorses supported planks on which cardboard cartons were lined. Those that Chee could see into seemed to contain bones. Skulls, ribs, jawbones. Chee pressed his forehead against the cool glass, shading his eyes with both hands, straining to see. Against the wall, boxes were lined. Books on shelves against the kitchen partition. No sign of Elliot.

  Chee glanced down at the lock that held the door. Simple enough. He looked around him. No one visible. He dug out his penknife, opened the proper blade, slipped the catch.

  Once inside he closed the drapes and turned on the light. He hurried through a quick search of the bedroom, kitchen, and bath, touching hardly anything and using his handkerchief to avoid leaving prints. This made him nervous. Worse, it made him feel dirty and ashamed.

  But back in the living room he lingered over the boxes of bones. They seemed to be arranged in groups, tagged by site. Chee checked the tags, looking for either N.R. 723 or MLA 19,327. On the makeshift table by the kitchen door he found the N.R. number.

  The tag was tied through the eye socket of a skull, number on one side, notes on the other. They seemed to be in some sort of personal shorthand, with numbers in millimeters. Bone thickness, Chee guessed, but the rest of it meant nothing to him.

  The N.R. 723 box contained four lower jaws, one apparently from a child, one broken. He examined them. Each contained an extra molar, or a trace of one, on the right side. Each had two of the small holes low in the bones through which Elliot’s petition had stated nerves and blood vessels grow.

  Chee put the jaws back in the box exactly as he had found them, wiped his fingers on his pants legs, and sat down to sort out the significance of this. It seemed clear enough. Elliot’s genetic tracking had led him to the same site as had Eleanor Friedman-Bernal’s pottery chase. No. That didn’t state it accurately. In their mutual fishing expeditions, both had struck pay dirt in the same ruins. Perhaps, Chee thought, one of the jawbones belonged to the potter.

  He thought about site MLA 19,327, the lined jawbones, the missing plastic sack from the box of thirty. Thinking about that, he made another search of the apartment.

  He found a black plastic sack in the bottom of a wastebasket in the kitchen. He carefully set aside the table scraps and wadded papers that had buried it and put it on the counter beside the sink. The top was tied in a knot. Chee untied it and examined the plastic. SUPERTUFF was printed around the top. The missing sack.

  Inside it were seven human mandibles, two of them child-sized, two broken. Chee counted teeth. Each had seventeen—one more than standard—and in each the superfluous molar was second from the back and out of line.

  He put the sack back in the wastebasket, recovered it with waste, and picked up the telephone.

  No, the woman at the visitors’ center said, Elliot hadn’t reported in. Nor had Luna or Maxie Davis.

  “Can you get me Mrs. Luna?”

  “Now that’s easy,” she said.

  Mrs. Luna answered on the third ring and remembered Chee instantly. How was he? How was Mr. Leaphorn? “But this isn’t what you called about.”

  “No,” Chee said. “I cam
e out to talk to Randall Elliot but he’s away somewhere. I remembered you said he went to Washington last month. You said his travel agent called and you took the message. Do you remember the name of the agency?”

  “Bolack’s,” Mrs. Luna said. “I think just about everybody out here uses Bolack’s.”

  Chee called Bolack Travel in Farmington.

  “Navajo Tribal Police,” he told the man who answered. “We need to confirm the dates of an airline ticket. Don’t know the airline, but the tickets were issued by your agency to Randall Elliot, address at Chaco Canyon.”

  “You know about when? This year? This month? Yesterday?”

  “Probably late last month,” Chee said.

  “Randall Elliot,” the man said. “Randall Elliot. Let’s see.” Chee heard the clacking sound of a computer keyboard. Silence. More clacking. More silence.

  “That’s funny,” the man said. “We issued them, but he didn’t pick them up. It was an October eleven departure, with an October sixteen return. Mesa from Farmington to Albuquerque, American from Albuquerque to Washington. You just need the dates?”

  “The tickets weren’t picked up? You’re certain?”

  “I sure am. Makes a lot of work for nothing.”

  Chee called Mrs. Luna again. Listening to the ring, he felt a sense of urgency. Randall Elliot wasn’t in Washington that morning Eleanor Friedman-Bernal drove away to oblivion. He didn’t go. But he pretended to go. He arranged it so that everyone in this gossipy place would think he was in Washington. Why? So they wouldn’t be curious about where he’d actually gone. And where was that? Chee thought he knew. He hoped he was wrong.

  “Hello,” Mrs. Luna said.

  “Chee again,” he said. “Another question. Did a deputy sheriff come out here yesterday to talk to people?”

  “He did. About a month late, I’d say.”

  “Did he tell you about the note left for Lieutenant Leaphorn? The one that sounded like Dr. Friedman might still be alive.”

  “Is alive,” Mrs. Luna said. “He said the note said, ‘Tell Leaphorn she is still alive.’”

  “Does everybody here know about that? Does Elliot?”

  “Of course. Because everybody was beginning to have their doubts. You know, that’s a long time to just disappear unless something bad has happened.”

  “You sure about Elliot?”

  “He was right here when he told Bob and me.”

  “Well, thanks a lot,” Chee said.

  The wind had fallen now into something near a calm. Which was lucky for Chee. He drove back to Blanco Trading Post much faster than the rutted dirt roadbed made wise, and then much faster than the law allowed on N.M. 44 to Farmington. He was worried. He had told Undersheriff Bates to tell the people at Chaco about Houk’s note. He should not have done that. But maybe these suspicions were groundless. He thought of a way he could check—a call he should have made before he left Chaco.

  He pulled into the grocery store at Bloomfield and ran to the pay phone, then ran back to his truck for the supply of quarters he kept in the glove box. He called the Farmington airport, identified himself, asked the woman who answered who there rented helicopters. He jotted down the two names she gave him, and their numbers. The line was busy at Aero Services. He dialed Flight Contractors. A man who identified himself as Sanchez answered. Yes, they had rented a copter that morning to Randall Elliot.

  “Pretty sorry weather for flying, even in a copter,” Sanchez said. “But he’s got the credentials and the experience. Flew for the navy in Nam.”

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He’s an anthropologist,” Sanchez said. “We been renting to him for two, three years now. Said he was going down over the White Horse Lake country hunting one of them Indian ruins. If you’re going to fly in this kind of weather, that’s a good place to fly. Just grass and snakeweed down that way.”

  It was also just about exactly the opposite direction from where Elliot was really flying, Chee thought. Southeast instead of northwest.

  “When did he leave?”

  “I’d say maybe three hours ago. Maybe a little longer.”

  “Do you have another one to rent? With a pilot.”

  “Have the chopper,” Sanchez said. “Have to see about the pilot. When’s it for?”

  Chee made some instant calculations. “Thirty minutes,” he said.

  “I doubt it by then,” Sanchez said. “I’ll try.”

  It took Chee a little less than that, at considerable risk of a speeding ticket. Sanchez had found a pilot, but the pilot hadn’t arrived.

  “He’s the substitute pilot for the air ambulance service,” Sanchez said. “Man named Ed King. He didn’t care much for this weather, but then the wind’s been dying.”

  In fact the wind had moderated to a steady breeze. It seemed to be dying away as the weather front that brought it moved southeast. But now the sky to the north and west was a solid dark overcast.

  While they waited for King, he’d see if he could get hold of Leaphorn. If he couldn’t, he’d leave word for him. Tell him about finding the missing wastebasket liner hidden in Elliot’s kitchen with the bones in it, and about Elliot’s rejected applications to dig those sites. He’d tell Leaphorn that Elliot hadn’t taken the flight to Washington the weekend that Friedman-Bernal disappeared. That provoked another thought.

  “Mr. Sanchez. Could you check and see if Dr. Elliot took out a helicopter on, let’s see, the thirteenth of October?”

  Sanchez looked as doubtful as he had when Chee had said he should bill the copter rental to the Navajo Tribal Police. The look had hardened, and Chee had finally presented his MasterCard and waited while Sanchez checked his credit balance. It seemed to have reached the minimum guarantee. (“Now,” said Sanchez, cheerful again, “if it’s okay with the tribal auditors you can get your money back.”)

  “I don’t know that I’m supposed to be telling all this stuff,” Sanchez said. “Randall’s a regular customer of ours. It might get back to him.”

  “It’s police business,” Chee said. “Part of a criminal investigation.”

  “About what?” Sanchez looked stubborn.

  “Those two men shot out in the Checkerboard. Nails and Etcitty.”

  “Oh,” Sanchez said. “I’ll check.”

  “While you do, I’ll call my office.”

  Benally was in charge of the shift. No, Benally knew no way to get in touch with Leaphorn.

  “Matter of fact, you have a message from him. Woman named Irene Musket called from Mexican Hat. She said Leaphorn headed down the San Juan—” Benally paused, chuckling. “You know,” he said, “this sounds just like the screwy stuff you get mixed up in, Jim. Anyway, she said Leaphorn took off down the San Juan yesterday evening in a boat, looking for a boat this anthropologist you’re looking for took. She was supposed to pick him up this morning at Mexican Hat, and call you if he didn’t show up. Well, he didn’t show up.”

  And just then the door opened behind Chee, letting in the cold breeze.

  “Somebody here want a chopper ride?”

  A burly, bald-headed man with a great yellow mustache was standing holding it open, looking at Chee. “You the daredevil who wants to fly out into this weather? I’m the daredevil here to take you.”

  EIGHTEEN

  FINDING THE KAYAK Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had borrowed seemed simple enough to Leaphorn. She could have gone only downriver. The cliffs that walled in the San Juan between Bluff and Mexican Hat limited takeout places to a few sandy benches and the mouths of perhaps a score of washes and canyons. Since Leaphorn’s reason and instincts told him her target ruin was on the reservation side of the river, his hunting grounds were further limited. And the description he had been given of the woman suggested she wouldn’t be strong enough to pull the heavy rubber kayak very far out of the water. Therefore, finding it, even in the gathering darkness with only a flashlight, would be easy. Finding the woman would be the tough part.

  Leaphorn had
calculated without the wind. It treated Houk’s little craft like a sail, pushing against its sides and forcing Leaphorn into a constant struggle to keep it in the current. About four miles below the Bluff bridge, he let the kayak drift into a sandbar on the north side of the river, as much to stretch cramping muscles and give himself a rest as in any hope of finding something. On the cliffs here he found an array of petroglyphs cut through the black desert varnish into the sandstone. He studied a row of square-shouldered figures with chevron-like stripes above their heads and little arcs suggesting sound waves issuing from their mouths. If they hadn’t predated the time his own people had invaded this stone wilderness, he would have thought they represented the Navajo yei called Talking God. Just above them was the figure of a bird—an unambiguous representation of the snowy egret. Above that, Kokopelli played his flute, bent so far forward that it pointed at the earth. The ground here was littered with shards of pottery but Leaphorn found no sign of the kayak. He hadn’t expected to.

  Relaunched, he paddled the kayak back into the current. Twilight now, and he found himself relaxing. Someone had said that “the rush of the river soothes the mind.” It did seem to, in contrast to the sound of wind, which always made him tense. But the wind was moderating now.

  He heard the call of a bird behind him, and a coyote somewhere on the Utah side, and the distant voice of rapids from the darkness ahead.

  He checked two possible landing points on the reservation side, and spent more time than he’d planned looking at the mouths of Butler Wash and Comb Creek on the Utah side. When he pushed off again, it was into the light of the rising moon—a little past full. Leaphorn heard an abrupt flurry of sound. A snowy egret had been startled from its roosting place. It flew away from him into the moonlight, a graceful white shape moving against the black cliff, solitary, disappearing into the darkness where the river bent.