“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.