Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 17] (15 page)

Successful skip tracers develop through endless practice the craft of concealment. One does not capture the wanted man nor repossess the overdue auto if the culprit sees you first. Almost anywhere in its meandering official 277 miles, the Grand Canyon offers a fine assortment of hiding places. The bottom end of the Hopi Salt Trail was no exception. Bradford Chandler selected a niche in the nearby cliff. It offered shade, a comfortable place to sit, the cover of a growth of tamarisk bushes, and a good view of the final hundred yards of the trail down which Joanna Craig would be coming. While he sat there waiting, he developed and refined his tactics for dealing with the woman.

Since she probably had shot Sherman, she probably had a pistol, and seemed to have no hesitation about shooting
it. If she was carrying it in her hand, which he thought unlikely, he would simply shoot her. Why take the risk? More likely it would be tucked away. Perhaps even disposed of, since she would logically expect the police to be looking for her. Anyway, if the pistol was not displayed, he would assume the role of a businessman proposing a deal, which should, if his lies were well told, seem persuasive.

He stretched his legs, took another drink from his water bottle, and went over it again. He’d hardly started that when she appeared, alone, trudging wearily down the final rough segment of the trail, looking dusty, disheveled, and exhausted.

He stood. She stopped at the trail end, studied the area for a minute, then walked past him, not more than a dozen yards beyond the bush he was behind. Then Chandler stepped out behind her.

“Ms. Craig,” he said, in a voice just loud enough for her to hear. “I’d like to introduce myself and talk to you for a few minutes.”

Joanna Craig issued a sort of semi-shriek and spun around staring at Chandler, face white, eyes wide, looking terrified.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Who—” She took a deep breath. “You startled me.”

“I’m sorry,” Chandler said. “I beg your pardon. You look tired. And it’s so hot down here. You should sit down for a moment. Get a little rest. Could I offer you a drink of water?”

“But who are you? How did you know my—” She cut off that question, which told Chandler that she might already know the answer.

“I’m Jim Belshaw,” he said. “A sort of private investigator
by trade. And I think we have something in common. I’d like to explain myself to you and see if we can work out some sort of partnership.”

“Oh,” Joanna said. She wiped her hand across her forehead. Studied him.

Chandler pulled back a limb of the bush and pointed to the shady shelf where he’d been sitting.

“No cushions. But it’s comfortable.” He extracted his water bottle from its pocket and handed it her. “It’s warm and I’m afraid I can’t offer you a glass.”

Joanna held up a hand, rejecting it, studying him. “What are you doing down here? And…and…who did you say you were?”

“I’m Jim Belshaw. I work for Corporate Investigations in Los Angeles.” He smiled at her, then chuckled. Awaited a response, and added, “But here in the Grand Canyon today, I’m on my own time. And I’ll bet you can guess what I’m doing here.”

“Well,” Joanna said. She sat on the shelf, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Why don’t you just tell me.”

“Actually, I was here waiting for a Hopi named Billy Tuve to show up. I watched the two of you coming down the Salt Trail, or whatever they call it. Now you’re here but I’m still waiting for Tuve. Is he coming along?”

“Why? What do you want?”

“Why? Because I am looking for a bunch of diamonds,” Chandler said. “I think you are, too.”

Joanna took a moment to respond to that. The only reason this big, athletic-looking man would know her name, would know about the diamonds connected with it, would be that he was working for Plymale. And if he was working for Plymale, there was a good chance he could
accomplish the job the lawyer must have given him by killing her. He was big enough to do it barehanded. And her little pistol was tucked away in her backpack. She looked up at him, trying to read something in the face smiling down at her.

“What makes you think that I’m looking for diamonds?”

“Because they used to belong to your father,” Chandler said.

“Oh,” Joanna said. No doubt now he was working for Plymale, but then why were they having this conversation? She rubbed her hands down her legs, so tired the muscles were cramping. She looked up again, saw this big young man still staring down at her, awaiting an answer. Let him wait. She needed time to think about this.

“And also because if justice was done, they would be your diamonds now.”

He waited again.

“That’s correct, isn’t it?”

“I think it is,” Joanna said. “And I also think you’re working for the man who cheated my mother. Took everything away from her. How else could you know all this about me? About my business?”

“I don’t know it for sure. It’s what Old Man Plymale told me. What do you think? Should I trust him? He seemed to me to be a pretty slippery fellow. And I’m in a profession that has to learn how to spot the unreliable types.”

“I think he’s a thief. A crook. A totally unscrupulous man,” Joanna said. “So why are you working for him? And what is he paying you to do?”

Chandler chuckled. “I think you already know that.
He wants me to make sure you don’t get the evidence you need to prove you are the direct descendant of Old Man Clarke, thereby recovering for you the estate your father would have inherited, and thereby depriving Mr. Plymale of his ill-gotten charity scam and, much, much worse, thereby subjecting him to a court-ordered audit of what he’s done with all that tax-exempt cash. That would probably land him in a federal prison.”

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.”

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 her 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.