The agent stared at the blood on Delahart’s face and hands and turned to Chee again. “What’d you do to him?”
Delahart spoke first. “Let’s get this over with. He didn’t do anything, and I didn’t shoot anybody. I hid in the john, and I couldn’t see what happened. I’ve got a life. I can’t sit here growing old.”
Burke ignored him. “I’ll take a look, see what you missed, get some photos. The body’s still there?”
“Yes.”
“The man had a name. Samuel. He worked for me.” Delahart’s voice had an edge. “When you go down there, bring me my phone. I need to make some calls, get some work done.”
“Of course you do, and I’m here to wait on you.” Burke’s smile was totally devoid of good nature. They watched him stride down the hall. His walk reminded Chee of students strutting onstage at graduation.
“Are all FBI guys like that?” Delahart asked.
“No.” Chee turned to Bahe. “Shall I take Delahart to the station?”
“I’ll do that.” Bahe walked over to Delahart and stared down at him a moment. “Agent Burke is in charge of the murder investigation, but you have some business to settle with the Navajo Nation for digging a grave outside your permit area. Chee here looked at the photos your people took. No grave before you arrived.”
Delahart shrugged. “We talked about that. Take it up with Robinson. Give him the citation and tell him I said to pay it.”
“What about the body at the gravesite?”
“There is no body. We dug a hole, lined up some rocks. It was a joke, a prop.”
Bahe said, “Well, there’s something there now. Detective Tsinnie sent what we found for analysis, but it sure looks like bone fragments.”
Delahart’s jaw dropped. “Samuel drove the backhoe we used to dig the hole. I was gonna say you could talk to him about it, but I guess you can’t. He might have found some animal bones or something to make the grave realistic.”
Chee was remembering the chip he’d found near the grave. “Was Samuel a gambler?”
Delahart shook his head. “That guy had a bunch of issues, but gambling wasn’t one of them. When Robinson and I took him to Vegas with us on the plane, I never saw him even put a quarter in a slot machine.”
“What did he do for you?”
“Whatever I asked. He was a mean son of a gun.”
Chee left Delahart with Bahe and found Erdman in her office. She rose when he entered. “Hey. I owe you a big apology. You were right about that room. If I’d listened to you, we might have arrived in time to save that guy, or maybe see who shot him.”
“You were doing your job. You did well up there. Very professional.”
She handed him the surveillance tape.
“Did you look at it?”
“I saw the big guy who got killed getting out of the elevator. Room service bringing up the cart we saw. Miscellaneous men, women, teenagers, a guy with a hat. Old folks struggling with big suitcases, a couple sneaking in their dog.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Because of the way the building curves, you can’t see the door to the room where we found the dead guy. It’s a flaw in the way the camera was installed. I’m not sure how much this will help you.”
“Agent Burke will be in touch if he needs something else.”
She gave him a hotel business card with her name and extension. “Give him that, too. You know, I’d never seen a dead person before.”
“They say you get used it. I never have.”
“Do you really think I did OK?”
“You held your own just fine. If you ever get tired of doing this, you ought to consider becoming a real cop.”
Chee typed up his report, relieved that this was not his case or his business. He included as many details as he could recall, even the most minor things, in part to demonstrate that he wasn’t some hick cop but mostly to get it out of his brain and to minimize contact with Burke in the future.
He also typed out the notes from his interview with Mary Toledo about the bloody towels and the necklace. When he was done, he found Bahe at his desk on the phone. He motioned Chee to sit, and ended his call.
“What’s your take on Delahart? Did he kill Samuel?”
“Maybe. He strikes me as a guy who thinks the rules don’t apply to him. Maybe not. The sight of the body shocked him.” Chee took the poker chip out of his pocket. “Did I show you this?” He placed it on Bahe’s desktop. “I found it on the road where I saw that missing woman’s car, before we discovered the grave.”
Bahe looked at the chip, turning it over in his hand. “They don’t use these at any casinos around here that I know of. Kind of pretty.”
“I wonder if Delahart dropped it when he was out there supervising Samuel. Maybe he kept it as a good luck token or something.”
“It didn’t work very well.” Bahe gave the chip back. “Maybe whoever shot Samuel was really after Delahart, but that’s a federal case. Our concern is still that grave. The bone fragments make it more complicated. Without that, we could have just ordered the movie folks to remove it. Now comes the wait for lab results to see if what we found was human.”
Chee appreciated the “we,” even though he knew his discovery had caused the complications. “Will that take long?”
“Normally, yes. But the medical examiner has some eager interns looking for stuff to do. We ought to know pretty soon.” Bahe stood. “Go back to your cousin’s place and get some rest if he’ll let you. You look beat.”
“I’m OK.”
Bahe nodded. “We work with a hataalii here, a good man. Maybe you’ve heard of him.” He gave Chee the name. “I’m going to ask him to help us with that back there.” He nodded in the direction of the hotel. “If those bones are human, by some bizarre chance, we can deal with that, too.”
Chee knew of the healer by reputation but had never attended one of his ceremonies. He appreciated Bahe’s concern. “Let me know, and I will come back for that with Bernie. It would be a good thing.”
Chee called Bernie before he ventured into his cousin’s land of no phone service. To his joy, she answered. She was at work, and she talked about the burned car and Mr. Tso’s grandson and the old man’s skinwalker theory.
“How’s your day going?” she asked.
He told her.
“I think that big shot from the movie company killed Samuel,” she said, “but it was an accident. He and Samuel were in the drug business together, and Samuel wanted more money.”
“Interesting guess.”
“Anything new in the case of the bloody towels?”
“No.”
“What if the necklace belonged to a tourist woman who found it in a pawnshop or an antique store or something? She has plenty of jewelry. She hasn’t even missed it. Mystery solved.”
“So why were she and whoever making so much noise in there? Why the blood?”