"One of their sources of private amusement are tales of how they have misled this plague of gold prospectors—the men who swarmed into these mountains with their greed inspired by the great discoveries in California and the Black Hills. For example, the records here at Wingate suggest the famous 'Lost Adams diggings,' of which I have told you previously, are'two days travel' from the fort, and the equally notorious 'Golden Calf' bonanza was also said to be 'an easy day's ride' from our post here. Among the gold seekers, the universally accepted dogma is that the direction from here is south, over the Zuñi Mountains. My old, old friend Anson Bai tells me, and the same comes from other mouths, that both of those gold deposits were actually found in the opposite direction—north of the fort toward Mesa de los Lobos and Coyote Canyon. They say this misdirection was provided deliberately by various Navajo guides partly because of these people's ineffable sense of humor and partly out of patriotism. They understand that the worst thing that can happen to a tribe is to have whites discover gold deposits on the tribe's land."
Leaphorn reread the letter, returned it to its place, and closed the box.
"You don't need a copy?"
"No thanks," Leaphorn said. "I can remember it."
"You read that last part?"
Leaphorn nodded.
"Like what happened to those tribes in California," Mrs. Hano said. "Pretty well exterminated. The Nez Perce, and the people up in the Dakotas."
Mrs. Hano was a Zuñi married to a Hopi, Leaphorn remembered. But if he had her family properly sorted out, then one of her daughters married an Osage. Finding oil on Osage land had pretty well killed off that tribe.
"Mr. Doherty had you make copies of that letter. Is that right?"
"Just one," Mrs. Hano said. "He said he was in a hurry."
"Did he say why?"
Mrs. Hano shook her head. "None of my business, and I didn't ask. I remembered that Mr. McKay was in a hurry, too. He had someone waiting for him in his car."
"He did? Did he say who?"
"No. I noticed it was a woman, and I told him to bring her on in to be comfortable, and he said she was taking a nap and he didn't want to bother her."
"A woman? Young. Old. Indian. White. Did you recognize her?"
Mrs. Hano laughed. "Questions. Questions. I just got a glimpse. Just enough to think Mr. McKay might have had his wife with him." She gave Leaphorn a wry look. "Then when Mr. Denton killed Mr. McKay and Mr. Denton's wife went away, I got to thinking maybe it wasn't Mr. McKay's wife napping in his car."
Chapter Eight
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Before leaphorn left the archives building, he hurried things along by getting Mrs. Hano to call the fort security number and have someone go down and unlock the gate on the road that led into the area where the TPL crews were converting rocket fuel into plastic explosive and, beyond that, into the infinity of bunkers.
The call turned out to be needless. The guard was a retired Gallup cop who recognized Leaphorn. He also was one of those who had earned a little overtime that Halloween night five years earlier helping the McKinley County sheriff's office in its fruitless hunt for what the guard called "those damned kids with their practical jokes."
And maybe the guard was right. Change the maybe to probably. What Leaphorn had learned in the archives had jarred his self-confidence. He seemed to have misjudged McKay, for starters. At least he wasn't the sort of con artist Leaphorn had presumed. And a huge doubt had clouded his certainty about Wiley Denton's missing wife. Maybe everyone was right about her except her parents, who had the good reason of loving her, plus Denton and himself. Maybe he really was a romantic, as both Emma and Louisa labeled him. Perhaps Denton could claim love, or love plus a frail ego that couldn't tolerate this betrayal, for his own self-deception. Or perhaps that same frail ego had triggered Denton into a double murder when he learned his wife had betrayed him.
Leaphorn drove past miles of bunkers, having intended to refresh his very rusty memory of the fort's layout and stimulate some new ideas. Instead he was concentrating on reassessing his old obsession with the fate of Linda Denton. If the woman in McKay's car had been Linda, if she had gone with McKay to tell Wiley she was leaving him for a new, young, and handsome lover, an enraged Denton might have shot them both. But then he could hardly expect even a very friendly local judge would slap his wrist on a self-defense plea. A double homicide including one's wife, a local girl, would have probably drawn a life term. So Denton shot both but hid Linda's body.
But no. Denton's housekeeper had been there. She'd called the police. She would have known.
Yet the newspaper ads urging Linda to come home looked exactly like a cover. Leaphorn went over it again without finding a logical way to make Wiley Denton a double murderer. Finally he drove up the slope where the southern boundary of the old fort had been expanded into the Zuñi Mountains' foothills and parked at the ruins of a small prehistoric pueblo.
He'd been there when he was a very new cop. Someone had complained that an official at the base had excavated the site, a possible violation of the federal antiquities act. It wasn't Navajo Tribal Police business, but the Gallup Independent had reported that Officer Leaphorn had just been awarded a master's degree in anthropology. Thus he was sent out to take a look, had reported the site was probably a very late Anasazi outpost with no genuine evidence of looting apparent. Nothing had come of it, except Leaphorn remembered the hilltop offered a superb view of the fort below and the red rock high country across Interstate 40 and the railroad to the south. This afternoon he needed something like that to look at to restore his spirits.
He parked, sat on the tumbled wall of the ruin, and tried to fit what he'd learned from Mrs. Hano into the puzzle of Linda Denton. He found that McKay had stopped being a closed case and had become a sort of mystery himself. Denton, too, seemed to have a different role in this odd conundrum. And maybe even young Mr. Doherty. Cowboy Dashee had given the impression that Denton might be the suspect of choice in the theory of the Doherty homicide the Bureau was developing. What did the Federals know that he didn't? Probably a lot.
The sun was low now, spreading the long shadow of this hill across the empty road below, and giving a shape to the rows of huge, half-buried quonset huts spread for miles below. He looked at them awhile, watched the shadows spread, counted the bunkers in one section, tried to estimate their number, and finally guessed at a thousand, more or less. But it told him only that he had to know more about McKay and Doherty and Denton before he could solve this nagging question of what had happened to a young woman named Linda.
Chapter Nine
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Yesterday had been as bad for Officer Bernadette Manuelito as it had been for Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired. A lot of exercise and frustration, capped off with a painful blow to the self-confidence.
Bernie had spent the day trying to take a look into every canyon, arroyo, and wash that drained the west slope of the Chuska in the area prescribed by the mileage limit suggested by Thomas Doherty's Zip Lube sticker. While that territorial description included a relatively small area of mountain slope, it involved a lot of back-and-forth and up-and-down driving to locate drainages, and literally miles of walking. She had accumulated pretty much the same mixture of burrs and stickers on her pant legs and socks as had the late Mr. Doherty, with the exception of the goathead seeds of the puncturevine she'd seen in the rubber soles of his shoes. Thus she concluded that the drainages she'd explored lacked the cool damp spots where Doherty had been. Or, more likely, her entire idea was half-baked nonsense.
Bernie might have dropped her one-woman campaign as useless had it not been for the call she made to the dispatcher on her way home. Rudy Nez was dispatching again. Rudy said there were no calls or messages for her. Quiet day, in fact. A couple of driving-under-the-influence arrests, a domestic violence call, and so forth. And a couple of Feds had come in with Captain Nakai from Window Rock and had a meeting with Captain Largo, and the radio on unit nine was out of service again and Elliot called in for a backup out at Red Valley and then called in and said he didn't need it. And Sergeant Yazzie, from over at Crownpoint, he—