Rock with Wings (10 page)

“We’re the company responsible for some of those photovoltaic panels that got ripped in half by the wind or crushed by the snow. I’m here to make good on those mistakes and to find a site for our next solar farm.”

“Solar farm?” As far as she knew, every farm used the sun to make things grow.

“That’s engineer talk for an array of panels installed together to create a lot of energy, enough for the reservation and to ship to California. Solar power is the way of the future. Clean, renewable, nonpolluting. I can’t imagine a better project to spend time on.”

Some twenty thousand families lived on the reservation without power, as though they were in a third-world country. It was ironic, Bernie thought, since the Navajo Nation was home to some of America’s biggest reserves of coal and uranium, as well as abundant sun and wind for alternative energy. Bernie knew people who had tried solar power. At first they had been happy with their electricity for lights and refrigerators, then sad when the panels stopped working.

Oster continued explaining. “We’ll do some training and leave a pool of support personnel homeowners can call if they have problems down the line. We’re hiring.” He handed her a business card. “If you hear of people who could use a job, ask them to call or go to the website.”

“Do you have an office in Shiprock?”

“I’m working from my motel in Farmington for now, but I need an office here while we’re doing the assessments and making the repairs or replacements on the old system. Do you know of any space available?”

“Check the shopping center near Smith’s,” she said. “They had some empty storefronts last time I looked.”

“Smith’s?”

“That’s the big grocery.” She told him where to find it.

Bernie printed two copies of the form she’d put together and gave them to him. He pulled a slim silver pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, tapping it against the paper.

“I noticed that you spell Shiprock here as one word. I thought it was two.”

“The rock itself, the big blackish formation, that’s two words. The town is one word. The US Post Office wanted it that way.”

He smiled. “One more thing to confuse us newcomers. Here’s another question for you. Is there a Starbucks around here? Or someplace where I can get a latte and use Wi-Fi?”

“We’re still waiting for the first Shiprock Starbucks.” The wait would be indefinite, she thought. No one she knew would pay those prices for a cup of coffee. Well, maybe Darleen and her friends. “The library has Internet and computers. It’s across the highway from the medical center, near the Boys and Girls Club. As for coffee, I think the best is Giant.”

He looked puzzled.

“The Giant service station.”

He nodded. “Giant. That’s a new one on me. When I hear Giant, I think of the baseball team.”

Now she was puzzled.

“You know. The San Francisco Giants? The team that has solar panels at the ballpark?”

“I’m not really up on baseball. Basketball is king around here. The station is up there past the bridge.”

“I must have missed it.”

“Hold on.” She opened the filing cabinet and found a file labeled “Maps.” Amazingly, the one she wanted was in the front. It showed the intricacies of the Shiprock metropolis, population 8,000. She circled the shopping center, the Giant station, the library, and the police station, and handed him the map. “Good luck with your project. Where will the new panels be?”

“We’re looking at several sites. It’s on the way. The world is changing, and Primal Solar is making it happen.”

What a zealot, she thought as Oster left. But at least he was working for a good cause. She’d be curious to see a solar-powered car.

Bernie went to the front to sign out the key to the evidence storage room. Sandra turned on the camera that monitored the area.

“Be sure that thing is working,” said Bernie. “I had a bad experience with my dash cam.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

The dirt looked like regular dirt, nothing mixed with it except the material nature provided—tiny fragments of snakeskin, little cacti, black seeds that might have come from saltbush—and a bit of man-made litter. The boxes and their contents seemed innocent, but why did Miller have this stuff in his trunk, and why wouldn’t he talk about it?

There must have been something else in his car, something she’d missed in the dark. Something worth more than the money he’d offered her. She knew guilt when she saw it.

When she left the evidence room, she noticed another man in a suit, the second one that day. His back was to her as he talked with Captain Largo.

“Manuelito, I think you’ll remember Agent Jerry Cordova.” Largo nodded at Cordova. “Use my office.”

Chee got to the station at 6:45 that morning to find a stout woman in a Navajo Police uniform waiting for him. There were streaks of gray in her smooth dark hair.

“
Yá’át’ééh
.” He introduced himself.

Rosella Tsinnie did the same, Navajo style, with parental clans. “I’ve heard about you from Lieutenant Leaphorn. Heard about you for years.” From her tone, what she had heard wasn’t necessarily complimentary. “How is the one who retired doing?”

“The Lieutenant is recovering from that bullet.”

She moved toward the door. “Let’s go to this burial you found.”

“Don’t we need to wait for Captain Bahe?”

“No. I’ll drive.”

“You know where the site is?”

“I read your report. You can talk to me about what you didn’t put in there on the way out.”

Although he had never met Tsinnie, Chee realized he knew her by reputation. She was one of the first women criminal investigators in the department, smart and irascible. She’d paid her dues with her time at Window Rock and later at Kayenta, and she could have
retired, but Chee had heard she was supporting a young granddaughter and a husband who had developed cancer after a career as a uranium miner. Like Leaphorn, she was a legend.

Tsinnie climbed into her unit, moved an insulated lunch bag from the passenger seat, started the engine, and pulled out as Chee fastened his seat belt. She drove fast and well, a person who knew the Monument Valley road and its idiosyncrasies as well as her own driveway. With their early departure they avoided the buses crammed with sightseers, encountering only a few local pickups raising clouds of dust. Chee looked out the window at the buttes, noticing how different they seemed in the morning’s soft light.

“OK, Chee, review what happened last night for me. Start at the beginning. Don’t leave anything out, even if you think it’s not important.”

The question reminded him of the Lieutenant. He summarized his conversation with Bahe, his search of viewpoints outside the park, his discovery of the RV and his decision to ignore it, the cruise along the Monument Valley Park loop road, the encounter with the woman who had noticed the red car. How he heard the music, found the car, and removed the keys from the ignition.

“I followed the footprints in the sand up a rise, down, and then up again to the ridge. I saw Melissa standing there. She gathered up her equipment, and I led the way back, a shorter route. That’s when we came across the site.” He described Melissa’s fall, his discovery of the rocks around what looked to be a grave, and his search of the gravesite, noticing the tightness in his throat and tingling on his skin as he spoke. “That’s about it.”

Tsinnie kept her gaze on the road. “What did you talk to the woman about?”

“Photography, mostly, at first. The movie business.”

“What else?”

“I told her that her friends were worried about her. She told me she wasn’t lost.”

Tsinnie passed a pickup towing a horse trailer. The driver acknowledged her by raising his index finger from the steering wheel.

“So what do you think? What does your gut tell you about that place? Is it really a grave?”

“It has something to do with the movie people. Bahe thinks it may be part of a set. The call about the missing woman might have been a way to draw attention to it—but what would be the point of that? Of getting the police involved?”

“Keep talking.”

Chee took a breath in. Exhaled. “My instincts say the woman I found didn’t know about it.” He stopped, surprised at the conviction in his own voice.

Tsinnie slowed down as they passed a cluster of cows and calves walking on the other side of the road. “Did you see the grave first? Or did the lost woman point it out to you?”

Chee paused. “I heard her grunt when she fell. I turned to help her; that’s when I noticed it. If she hadn’t tripped, I could have walked right by it.” Melissa could have faked it, Chee realized. The entire call could have been a setup. “She said she didn’t know it was there—she had never seen it before. She seemed to be as surprised as I was at the discovery.”

“Anything else?”

“The boss guy, a man named Robinson, laughed it off when I mentioned the grave to him. But some others I met out there, Navajo guys, they knew about it. They didn’t want to talk, but I could tell from their reaction.”

“What else?”

“Nothing at the moment.”

Chee looked out the window at a row of distinctive red sandstone spires. American explorers had named the formation Three
Sisters because it reminded them of a short procession of nuns. He had heard that these were Holy People who had stopped at this spot to argue and turned to rock.

Even though it was relatively early and Tsinnie had the aircon on, Chee felt uncomfortably warm. By the time the visitors at the new hotel finished their breakfast and checked their e-mail, it would be in the nineties. In the valley, most of the rare shade came from the angle of the sun on the monuments. The few trees grew only along the washes.

The enormity of this landscape made him feel humble, a small cog in the huge wheel of the universe. Made the puzzle of the grave seem unimportant. Unless, of course, a murder was involved.

“I think it’s a publicity stunt,” Tsinnie said, “creating a fake grave for us to investigate as a way to get the media out here. Since you’re not from around here, you were an easy target.”

Chee said nothing.

“Of all the places in Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii that she could have gone for pictures, why was she there? Why Rabbit Ridge? You didn’t ask her, did you?”

He wasn’t Lieutenant Leaphorn, but he’d seen plenty of ploys, dishonesty, smooth talkers, and skillful liars. He resented the implication that he’d been used.

“Rabbit Ridge? So that’s what it’s called.”

Tsinnie’s earrings, some sort of red-and-orange stone surrounded by a narrow border of silver, moved when she turned toward him. “Right. We’re getting close to the site. Tell me where to stop.”

She parked, and they hiked away from the road, following the prints he and Melissa had left in the sand the night before. Tsinnie looked at the tracks. “So these big ones are yours, and these others are hers?”

He nodded. Tsinnie seemed to be memorizing the patterns of the shoe tread.

The monuments glowed, the sun bronzing the stone soaring up from the sandy valley floor. They looked just as they had been presented in the stories from Chee’s childhood. Landscapes like this put humanity in perspective, he thought. They ensure that we humans know our small place in this vast universe.

He trudged toward the ridge ahead of Tsinnie, his boots sliding on the sand. She was wearing sneakers—not uniform, but smart. She kept up with him.

He noticed a delicate chevron pattern, the path of a snake. Chee was careful to avoid it. He still remembered his grandmother telling him not to walk in a snake’s trail or the creature would follow him home. Elsewhere he spotted the thin lines made by lizards’ tails and the tiny impressions left by their delicate clawed feet. He saw bird footprints, too, and the place where a raptor had swooped up dinner, shaping the sand with its wings. Chee liked this kind of art better than old paintings at a museum. It was free, and frequently changing, too.

“Up ahead,” Tsinnie said. “Is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, Chee, I was hoping you’d made this up. Been hallucinating or something.”

It looked less sinister in the daylight—a mound of reddish dirt surrounded by a ring of stones of various sizes, invisible from the road. The perpetrators had created it in a depression where, Chee guessed, it would be fairly easy to dig.

Tsinnie gave the orders. “Look for tire tracks, signs of somebody hauling grave-digging machinery down there close to the road.” She chuckled. “Let me know if you stumble across something interesting.”

Chee reminded himself that his assignment here was only temporary, Tsinnie a passing irritation, like indigestion. She only knew him through Leaphorn’s comments, and the Legendary Lieutenant had always given him more grief than praise.

He sauntered along slowly enough to take in whatever disturbance might be on the roadside, noticing tough desert grasses and the hoof prints of cattle. He had decided to give it another five minutes and then turn back when some different indentations caught his eye. A vehicle, probably a backhoe, had moved from the hard-packed dirt onto the sand.

He took a picture of the tracks with his phone, then followed the scar with his eyes until it disappeared over a rise. He walked up the hill, knowing that the grave lay on the other side.

Tsinnie’s voice broke his concentration.

“Chee, come over here. I found some footprints that you and not-really-lost girl managed not to step on.”

“OK. I’ve got some backhoe tracks down here.” He jogged back to the gravesite. She pointed to two sets of prints. Both looked to Chee as if they’d been made by hiking boots. “Get some pictures of these in case this is a big deal.” The tone of her voice suggested that she sincerely hoped it would be a little deal. She opened the bag she’d brought along and handed him a camera. “Know how to use this?”

Chee examined it. “Any trick to it?”

Tsinnie raised an eyebrow ever so slightly. “Point and shoot. Take some exposures of these before the wind does more damage. You see anything interesting?”

“I found some wide tire tracks and the place where the machine left the road and then went back to it. Looks like a backhoe did the work on this.”

“I’m going to search for more boot prints. Find me when you’re done.”

The camera was simple, an older digital model with a zoom. After he took pictures of the boot prints and the route of the backhoe, Chee hiked to the road, where Tsinnie was standing by the unit, drinking from a water bottle.

She glanced up at him. “We’re going out to the movie camp now to talk to the man in charge,” Tsinnie said. “We can tell him they’ll have to pay a fine and clean it up. No one who lives out here would have used a backhoe to make a grave.”

It seemed to Chee that more evidence was called for, but he didn’t argue. Maybe the force of her personality would make Robinson confess.

The camp was quiet. A few people clustered in little groups outside in the shade created by the food tent. He overheard snatches of conversation, zombie actors talking about kids and the baseball season as he led the way. The detective following. What an odd world. He didn’t understand the fascination with zombies. To his way of thinking, there was enough unexplained evil in real life.

He knocked on the production office door and, when there was no answer, went to the one with the Administration sign. The woman behind the desk told them that Robinson wasn’t at work yet. Could she help?

“Is he the top man here?” Tsinnie asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Where can we find him?”

The woman hesitated. “He worked late last night, so he’s probably still asleep in the green trailer with the Land Rover parked in front. That way.” She pointed. “Like I said, they all had a late night filming. He’s probably not—”

Tsinnie charged off while the woman was still talking.

“Thanks,” Chee said.

He caught up to Tsinnie as she approached the front door. She looked at him. “He knows you. You knock.”

Robinson—hair mussed, bare-chested, in pajama pants—opened the door more quickly than Chee expected. “Officer Chee. What’s the problem? What time is it, anyway?”

“Time to tell us about the grave.” Tsinnie took charge, introducing herself tersely.

Robinson looked at Chee. “What the— We went over all this last night.”

The trailer was equipped with blackout shades, Chee noticed. A computer screen glowed blue in the darkness beyond the doorway. “Detective Tsinnie thought of some questions I didn’t ask you.”

“We were at the gravesite,” she said. “This is important, or I wouldn’t waste my time here.”

Robinson exhaled. “OK. Let me get dressed. I’ll meet you in the crew tent in five minutes.”

“No, we’ll talk now in your trailer.”

Chee knew the technique. Catch a contact off guard, off balance. Surprise him into telling the truth.

Robinson started to say something, then turned and walked into the room, leaving the door open. He sat at the desk. Tsinnie stood next to his chair, looking down at him, and Chee stood by the door.

Even in the semidarkness Chee could see that, unlike the neat office, Robinson’s personal trailer was a mess. The laundry, papers, and unwashed dishes reminded Chee of the low points of his bachelor days, the debris of a life moving too fast.

Tsinnie got to the point. “Tell me why that grave is out there.”

“No idea. I don’t know anything about it. I told Chee that last night.”

“You guys want some extra publicity, so you decided to use the Navajo Police to get it. That was a bad, bad decision.”

Robinson stood. “Listen. Why would I want to waste time talking to the police? We’re on a tight shooting schedule. Whatever distracts from the filming costs us money. That certainly includes this nonsense. The planet is full of bones and graveyards. Why is this a big deal, anyway?” Robinson rubbed his hands through his hair, amplifying the bed-head effect. “This is crazy.”

Chee watched Tsinnie bristle, stand a little taller. “I live out here. I know everyone. I would have heard about that grave. I didn’t. It’s new with you people. It wasn’t here before you came.”

Robinson walked to the corner of his trailer that served as a kitchen. Chee watched him run water into a coffee mug and put the cup in the microwave.

Tsinnie raised her voice over the whir of the oven. “When the grave is exhumed and we come up with nothing, that could look like a way to get attention for a zombie movie. But it will be bad news for you, or whoever came up with this idea. And expensive.”

And, Chee thought, embarrassing for the Navajo Police.

“Like I told you, detective, and like I told Chee, I don’t know anything about this.”

“Who would?”

“Well—” The bell on the microwave cut him off. Chee watched him remove the cup and add the instant coffee powder.