Leaphorn tapped on the table, using all his fingers and both thumbs.
“Joe, the computer is in your office.” Louisa turned to Bernie. “I know you’ve got police business to discuss with him. You’ll be more comfortable in there, and you can talk Navajo without having to translate for me.”
The Lieutenant pushed himself to standing, using the table for leverage. He reached for his cane and, step by slow step, began to move toward his office. Bernie followed. With some effort—and a look that yelled leave-me-alone when she tried to help—the Lieutenant settled into his favorite reading chair. The cat tagged along, too. Leaphorn motioned for Bernie to put the computer on his lap.
“Do you remember I mentioned to you that I’d stopped that man with the dirt in his trunk?” Bernie asked in Diné Bizaad, the language where her best thinking lived.
Leaphorn tapped once: yes.
Bernie told him about Miller’s car being burned near Ship Rock.
Leaphorn typed in Navajo: Who?
“That’s what I want to know. Who did it? Wheeler has been investigating stuff like this here in Window Rock. Those cars were burned as revenge or gang initiations. He gave me a folder about all that. Oh, and he said to tell you hello.” Bernie sat down in the desk chair and rolled it next to the Lieutenant. She opened the folder and showed him the photos, but he didn’t seem interested in them or in the printouts Wheeler had included.
“So, who could have burned the car? Hosteen Tso, the old one who lives out there and saw the fire, thinks it was a skinwalker. Wheeler told me the gang activity he’s tracking might be spreading. Mr. Tso has a grandson who sounded kind of rough on the phone. Maybe he did it. That might take us back to the gang angle.”
Leaphorn moved his right hand over the keyboard, picking out each letter: why? Bernie wondered if the injury had affected his hand-eye coordination or his ability to remember where the letters were. Maybe he had always been a hunt-and-peck typist.
“Why? Good question.”
She felt her cell phone vibrate and looked at it. Captain Largo was on the line.
“Excuse me,” she said. “It’s the boss.”
“Manuelito,” Largo said, “I just got a call from Agent Cordova I thought you’d be interested in.”
“Yes, sir?”
“He told me Miller reported that his car was stolen from outside a bar in Farmington the night before it burned.”
“Interesting.”
“The report is on your desk. You’ll probably want to talk to the deputy who interviewed him about it.”
“Thanks. What do you think?”
The line was silent for a moment. Then Largo chuckled. “It could have happened. It has the same probability as the Navajo Rangers capturing Bigfoot. Are you with Lieutenant Leaphorn now?”
“Yes, sir. He’s sitting right across from me.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“You know he—”
“I know.”
She handed the phone to the Lieutenant. He put it to his ear and, after a moment, turned away from her. When he turned back, his eyes were glistening. He handed her the phone; Largo had disconnected.
She told Leaphorn about the stolen car report and Largo’s skepticism. “That adds a new wrinkle. If it was some random guys who decided to take it, why bother to steal something and not sell it? Or keep it?”
Leaphorn kept his hands still.
“What if whoever took it had been tracking Miller from Flagstaff or Albuquerque because he wanted whatever contraband the guy had? Maybe Miller had reneged on a deal, and this guy thought he was smarter than the feds, or he didn’t realize the feds had already searched the car. When he couldn’t get what he wanted, he got angry and torched the car.”
Leaphorn tapped twice and typed: Not there.
“You mean I’m not there yet with the answer? Or the drugs weren’t out there in the car?”
Why burned there?
Bernie thought for a while. “What about this? Imagine some lowlifes have Miller on their watch list because of the drugs. They carjack him and force him to drive out there to get him to tell them where the drugs are, or the weapons or explosives or whatever he’s involved in. They threaten to hurt him if he doesn’t talk. He tells them where to look, and then they burn the car to scare him. He escapes and makes up the stolen car story because he’s embarrassed to tell the truth. And so his insurance company will pay.”
Leaphorn typed a Navajo word that meant something like “complicated.”
Bernie smiled. “You always did encourage us to go for the obvious solution first. Now all I have to do is think it up. But, if not, at least I have the complex one.”
Leaphorn looked better than when she’d arrived. He was sitting straighter now as he typed again.
Why feds involved?
“That’s my question too, but no one will tell me. I don’t know enough about Miller to figure it out but I could tell by the way he reacted when I stopped him that he’s not squeaky clean. I’m guessing it’s white-collar crime—not sex trafficking or terrorism. Maybe he’s involved in a mortgage scam or Internet fraud.”
Leaphorn didn’t respond. Was he getting tired, or processing the information? The cat stretched out on his lap.
Another idea came to her. “Largo doubts the stolen car story. Maybe Miller drove it out there himself and burned it to destroy whatever evidence the feds and I missed, and then claimed it was stolen. Since the original traffic stop was part of a drug interdiction, I expected the DEA to be involved, but instead I talked to an agent named Jerry Cordova. He asked some questions, but wouldn’t tell me why.”
Leaphorn started typing: What ?s.
“What Miller had been doing at that meeting in Albuquerque, where he said he’d been, whether I’d seen anything else suspicious in the car besides the dirt. I told him I didn’t know, and no. Later, after I found Miller’s phone, he asked me where he’d been calling. If the guy really worked in Flagstaff, I thought it was interesting that he didn’t have many Flagstaff numbers in his phone. I mean, it’s summer. The time for building out there in the mountains before the ground freezes again.”
dirt?
“Cordova didn’t ask me about the dirt. But I keep coming back to it.”
Who is M?
The cat leaped to the floor by Leaphorn’s feet and then onto the windowsill, where it sat, watching an assembly of hummingbirds at the feeder. They looked like airborne jewels, iridescent green-blue, their wings moving so fast Bernie could only see a blur. The cat’s tail twitched.
“I don’t know, and I can’t seem to find out, either. I feel like my logic is going in circles, using lots of energy to stay in one place, like those little birds.” She looked to Leaphorn for a response and discovered that he had closed his eyes.
“I’m tiring you out with so much talking.”
He looked up at her and typed: thinking.
“Me, too. It’s making my brain hurt.”
Leaphorn typed something else.