"Did you look in the billfold?"
"We have to inventory the money," Langer said. He sorted through papers on a clipboard. "Had a ten and three ones and seventy-three cents in change. Driver's license. So forth."
"Anything else you remember?"
"I didn't check him in," Langer said. "Al did. On the evening shift. Says here: 'Nothing else of value.'"
Chee nodded.
"What you looking for?"
"Just fishing," Chee said.
"Speaking of which," Langer said, "can you get a permit for fishing up there at Wheatfields Lake? Free, I mean."
"Well," Chee said. "I guess you know—"
Janet Pete appeared at the hall door. "He says he'll talk to you."
"I thank you," Chee said.
The room held a bare wooden table and two chairs. Roosevelt Bistie sat in one of them, eyes half closed, face sagging. But he returned Chee's salutation. Chee put his hand on the back of the other chair, glanced at Janet Pete. She was leaning against the wall behind Bistie, watching Chee. The paper sack was under Bistie's chair.
"Could we talk in private?" Chee asked her.
"I'm Mr. Bistie's legal counsel," she said. "I'll stay."
Chee sat down, feeling defeated. It had never been likely that Bistie would talk. He hadn't, after all, in the past. It was even less likely that he would talk about the subject Chee intended to raise, which was witchcraft. There was a simple enough reason for that. Witches hated to be talked about—to even have their evil business discussed. Therefore the prudent Navajo discussed witchcraft, if at all, only with those known and trusted. Not with a stranger. Certainly not with two strangers. However, there was no harm in trying.
"I have heard something which I think you would like to know," Chee said. "I will tell you what I heard. And then I will ask you a question. I hope you will give me an answer. But if you won't, you won't."
Bistie looked interested. So did Janet Pete.
"First," Chee said, speaking slowly, intent on Bistie's expression, "I will tell you what the people over at the Badwater Wash Trading Post hear. They hear that a little piece of bone was found in the body of that man you took a shot at."
There was a lag of a second or two. Then Bistie smiled a very slight smile. He nodded at Chee.
Chee glanced at Janet Pete. She looked puzzled. "Understand that I do not know if this is true," Chee said. "I will go to the hospital where the body of that man was taken and I will try to find out if it was true. Should I tell you what I find out?"
No smile now. Bistie was studying Chee's face. But he nodded.
"Now I have a question for you to answer. Do you have a little piece of bone?"
Bistie stared at Chee, face blank.
"Don't answer that," Janet Pete said. "Not until I find out what's going on here." She frowned at Chee. "What's this all about? It sounds like an attempt to get Mr. Bistie to incriminate himself. What are you driving at?"
"We know Mr. Bistie didn't kill Endocheeney," Chee said. "Somebody else killed him. We don't know who. We aren't likely to find out who until we know why. Mr. Bistie here seems to have had a good reason to kill Endocheeney, because he tried to do it. Maybe it was the same reason. Maybe it was because Endocheeney was a skinwalker. Maybe he witched Mr. Bistie. Put the witch bone into him. Maybe Endocheeney witched somebody else. If what I heard at Bad-water Wash isn't just gossip, maybe Mr. Endocheeney had a bone put in him because that other person, the one who knifed Endocheeney, put it in him when he stabbed Endocheeney to turn the witching around." Chee was talking directly to Janet Pete, but he was watching Bistie from the corner of his eye. If Bistie's face revealed any emotion, it was satisfaction.
"It sounds like nonsense to me," Janet Pete said.
"Would you recommend to your client that he answer my question, then?" Chee asked. "Did he believe Mr. Endocheeney was a witch?"
"I'll talk to him about this," she said. "There are no charges against him. None. He's not accused of anything. You're just holding him to satisfy your curiosity."
"About a murder," Chee said. "And there may be a charge filed by now. Attempted homicide."
"Based on what?" Janet Pete asked. "On what he told you and Kennedy before consulting with his attorney? That's absolutely all you have."
"That, and some other stuff," Chee said. "Witnesses who put him where it happened. His license number. The ejected shell from his rifle." Which, as far as Chee knew, hadn't been found and wasn't being looked for. Why look for a shell casing from a shot that missed when they had a butcher knife, which didn't miss? But Janet Pete wouldn't know they hadn't found it.
"I don't think there's any basis for charges," Janet Pete said.
Chee shrugged. "It's not up to me. I think Kennedy—"
"I think I will call Kennedy," Janet Pete said. "Because I don't believe you." She walked to the door, stopped with her hand on the knob, smiled at Chee. "Are you coming?"
"I'll just wait," Chee said.
"Then my client is coming," she said. She motioned to Bistie. He got up, steadied himself with a hand on the tabletop.
"This interview is over," Janet Pete said, and she closed the door behind them.
Chee waited. Then he went to the door and glanced down the hall. Janet Pete was using the telephone in the pay booth. Chee closed the door again, picked up Bistie's sack, sorted quickly through it. Nothing interesting. He extracted Bistie's billfold.
In it, in the corner of the currency pocket that held a ten and three ones, Chee found a bead. He turned it over between thumb and first finger, examining it. Then he put it back where he had found it, put the wallet back in the sack, and the sack back on the floor under Bistie's chair. The bead seemed to be made of bone. In fact, it looked exactly like the one he'd found on the floor of his trailer.
Chapter 10
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the turbulence caused by the thunderhead was sweeping across the valley floor toward them. It kicked up an opaque gray-white wall of dust which obscured the distant shape of Black Mesa and spawned dust devils in the caliche flats south of them. They were standing, Officer Al Gorman and Joe Leaphorn, beside Gorman's patrol car on the track that led across the sagebrush flats below Sege Butte toward Chilchinbito Canyon.
"Right here," Gorman said. "Here's where he parked his car, or pickup, or whatever."
Leaphorn nodded. Gorman was sweating. A trickle of it ran down his neck and under his shirt collar. It was partly the heat, and partly that Gorman should lose a few pounds, and partly, Leaphorn knew, because he made Gorman nervous.
"Tracks lead right back here." Gorman pointed. "From over there near the rim of Chilchinbito Canyon, where he killed Sam, and down that slope there, where the shale outcrops are, and then across the sagebrush right up to here."
Leaphorn grunted. He was watching the dust storm moving down the valley with its outrider of whirlwinds. One of them had crossed a gypsum sink, and its winds had sucked up that heavier mineral. The cone changed from the yellow-gray of the dusty earth to almost pure white. It was the sort of thing Emma would have noticed, and found beauty in, and related in some way or other to the mythology of The People. Emma would have said something about the Blue Flint Boys playing their games. They were the yei personalities credited with stirring up whirlwinds. He would describe it to her tonight. He would if she was awake and aware—and not in that vague world she now so often retreated into.
Beside him, Gorman was describing the sign he had followed from killing scene to car, and the sign the car had left, and his conclusion that the killer had raced away. "Spun his wheels in the grass," Gorman was saying. "Tore it up. Threw dirt. And then, right down there, he backed around and drove on back toward the road."
"Where was the killing?"
"See that little bunch of juniper? Look across the shale slope, and then to the right. That man…" Gorman stopped, glanced at Leaphorn for a reading of whether the lieutenant would allow him to avoid "wearing out the name" of a dead man. He made his decision and restated the sentence. "That's where Wilson Sam was, by the juniper. Looked like it was a regular stopping place for him when he was out with the sheep. And the killer got him about twenty-five, thirty yards to the right of those junipers."