“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.”
8
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.