The good feeling left Leaphorn.
“Any other details? Scars? Limp? Anything like that? Anything that would help identify him?”
“I just got a glance at him,” Perez said. He made a wry face. “Just one look.”
“When did you check the room again?”
“When I didn’t see the passenger get off at Gallup. I sort of was watching for him, you know, because Gallup was his destination. And I didn’t see him. So I thought, well, he got off at another door. But it seemed funny, so when we was ready to pull out west, I took a look.” He shrugged. “The roomette was empty. Nobody home. Just the luggage. So I looked for him. Checked the observation car, and the bar. I walked up and back through all the cars. And then I went back and looked in the room again. Seemed strange to me. But I thought maybe he had got sick and just got off and left everything behind.”
“Everything was unpacked.”
“Unpacked,” Perez agreed. “Stuff scattered around.“ He pointed to the bags. ”I took it and put it in the bags and closed them.“
“Everything?”
Perez looked surprised, then offended.
“Sure, everything. What’d ya think?”
“Newspapers, magazines, empty candy wrappers, paper cups, everything?” Leaphorn asked.
“Well, no,” Perez said. “Not the trash.”
“How about some magazine that might have been worth saving?” Leaphorn phrased the question carefully. Perez was obviously touchy about the question of him taking anything out of the passenger’s room. “Some magazine, maybe, that might have something interesting in it and shouldn’t be thrown away. If it was something he had subscribed to, then it would have an address label on it.”
“Oh,” Perez said, understanding. “No. There wasn’t anything like that. I remember dumping some newspapers in the waste container. I left the trash for the cleaners.”
“Did you leave an empty prescription bottle, or box, or vial, or anything?”
Perez shook his head. “I would have remembered that,” he said. He shook his head again. “Like I’m going to remember that red-headed guy. Standing there looking at me and he had just killed my passenger a few minutes before that.”
In the taxi heading back for his hotel, Leaphorn sorted it out. He listed it, put it in categories, tried to make what little he knew as neat as he could make it. The final summation. Because this was where it finished. No more leads. None. Pointed Shoes would lie in his anonymous grave, forever lost to those who cared about him. If such humans existed, they would go to their own graves wondering how he had vanished. And why he had vanished. As for Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police, who had no legitimate interest in any of this anyway, he would make a return flight reservation from the hotel. He would return the call of Rodney, who had missed him returning Leaphorn’s call, and take Rodney out to dinner tonight if that was possible. Then he would pack. He would get to the airport tomorrow, fly to Albuquerque, and make the long drive back home to Window Rock. There would be no Emma there waiting for him. No Emma to whom he would report this failure. And be forgiven for it.
The cab stopped at a red light. The rain had stopped now. Leaphorn dug out his notebook, flipped through it, stared again at “AURANOFIN” and the number which followed it. He glanced at the license of the cab driver posted on the back of the front seat. Susy Mackinnon.
“Miss Mackinnon,” he said. “Do you know where there’s a pharmacy?”
“Pharmacy? I think there’s one in that shopping center up in the next block. You feeling okay?”
“I’m feeling hopeful,” Leaphorn said. “All of a sudden.”
She glanced back at him, on her face the expression of a woman who is long past being surprised at eccentric passengers. “I’ve found that’s better than despair,” she said.
The pharmacy in the next block was a Merit Drug. The pharmacist was elderly, gray-haired, and good-natured. “That looks like a prescription number all right,” he said. “But it’s not one of ours.”
“Is there any way to tell from this whose prescription it is? Name, address, so forth?”
“Sure. If you tell me where it was filled. If it was ours, see—any Merit Drug anywhere—then we’d have it on the computer. Find it that way.”
Leaphorn put the notebook back in his jacket pocket. He made a wry face. “So,” he said. “I can start checking all the Washington, D.C., drugstores.”
“Or maybe the suburbs. Do you know if it was filled in the city?”
“No way of guessing,” Leaphorn said. “It was just an idea. Looks like a bad one.”
“If I were you, I’d start with Walgreen’s. There was a W at the start of the numbers, and that looks like their code.”
“You know where the nearest Walgreen’s might be?”
“No. But we’ll look that sucker up,” the pharmacist said. He reached for the telephone book. It proved to be just eleven blocks away.
The pharmacist at Walgreen’s was a young man. He decided Leaphorn’s request was odd and that he should wait for his supervisor, now busy with another customer. Leaphorn waited, conscious that his cab was also waiting, with its meter running. The supervisor was a plump, middle-aged black woman, who inspected Leaphorn’s Navajo Tribal Police credentials and then the number written in his notebook.
She punched at the keyboard of the computer, looking at Leaphorn over her glasses.
“Just trying to get an identification? That right? Not a refill or anything?”
“Right,” Leaphorn said. “The pharmacist at another drugstore told me he thought this was your number.”
“It looks like it,” the woman said. She examined whatever had appeared on the screen. Shook her head. Punched again at the keyboard.
Leaphorn waited. The woman waited. She pursed her lips. Punched a single key.
“Elogio Santillanes,” she said. “Is that how you pronounce it? Elogio Santillanes.” She recited a street address and a telephone number, then glanced at the computer screen again. “And that’s apartment three,” she added. She wrote it all on a sheet of note paper and handed it to Leaphorn. “You’re welcome,” she said.
Back in the cab Leaphorn read the address to Miss Susy Mackinnon.
“No more going to the hotel?” she asked.
“First this address,” Leaphorn said. “Then the hotel.”
“Your humor has sure improved,” Miss Mackinnon said. “They selling something in Walgreen’s that you couldn’t get in that other drugstore?”
“The solution to my problem,” Leaphorn said. “And it was absolutely free.”
“I need to remember that place,” Miss Mackinnon said.
The rain had begun again—as much drizzle as rain—and she had the wipers turned to that now-and-then sequence. The blades flashed across the glass and clicked out of sight, leaving brief clarity behind. “You know,” she said, “you’re going to have a hell of a tab. Waiting time and now this trip. I hope you’re good for about thirty-five or forty dollars when you finally get where you’re going. I wouldn’t want to totally tap you out. My intention is to leave you enough for a substantial tip.”
“Um,” Leaphorn said, not really hearing the question. He was thinking of what he would find at apartment number three. A woman. He took that for granted. And what he would say to her? How much would he tell her? Everything, he thought, except the grisly details. Leaphorn’s good mood had been erased by the thought of what lay ahead. But in the long run it would be better for her to know everything. He remembered the endless weeks which led to Emma’s death. The uncertainty. The highs of hope destroyed by reality and followed by despair. He would be the destroyer of this woman’s hope. But then the wound could finally close. She could heal.