He had organized the folders by case number at the station, and he kept them that way. The older files seemed the best place to start. Because of the changes the bullet had made to his brain, those well-established memories were the most vivid. Leaphorn didn’t go back to the beginning of his career, but to a time when he might have encountered the man who was now dead. He pulled a handful of manila folders from a section of the collection that ought to coincide with the early years of Horseman’s life. As good a place to begin as any.
He took as many as he could comfortably carry to the table in the center of his office and thumbed through the stack. Reviewing them stirred memories of troubled souls who had lost their bearings and of men and women who convinced him evil was real. Unlike Jim Chee, Leaphorn was a skeptic when it came to the world of the spirits and witchcraft, but he had seen time and time again how those who forgot the wisdom of their grandparents became lost souls. He remembered another man named Horseman from a different clan and another part of the reservation whom he’d encountered early in his law enforcement career. Luis Horseman had knifed a man in a fight in Gallup, fled the scene, and ended up a corpse with his mouth stuffed with sand, allegedly killed by a shape-shifter.
The files he glanced at made him feel nostalgic for the old excitement of the job and relieved that he didn’t have to deal with the dual stress of the life-threatening danger and the ever-shifting politics that came with police work. Navajoland, like the world in general, had grown more violent.
He finished reviewing that batch of files and went back for another.
After only an hour, he found what he’d been looking for. Mrs. Nez’s name turned up in connection with a domestic violence case. The file was slim, but the details he had included brought the incident back to his recollection as clearly as if the boy had been standing next to him.
Leaphorn remembered how the case opened. He’d seen a child walking along the side of the road. Nothing unusual about that. In Navajoland, people walked, children among them. But the boy wore only one shoe and held out his tiny thumb, trying to hitchhike. When the car got closer, he saw that the child’s dirty face was streaked with tears.
He offered the little boy a ride in the patrol car. Leaphorn recalled that he persuaded the shy, scared youngster to climb in by showing him how to turn on the light bar. The child smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. His dirt-caked pants had a broken zipper. Leaphorn asked the boy if he’d like an apple he’d saved from lunch. After he ate it, the child spoke for the first time, saying thanks and asking if Leaphorn could turn on the flashing lights one more time.
The boy, who said his name was Ricky, was heading to his grandmother’s house to let her know that the baby wouldn’t stop crying and his mother had fallen down. “I’ll check on your mother,” Leaphorn remembered saying, and he drove the boy home. Leaphorn found a woman passed out and smelling strongly of beer—nothing he hadn’t seen before—and a baby whimpering. The woman looked as though someone had beaten her, and beaten her more than once. He remembered Ricky ignoring his mother, as if this state of affairs were common, picking up the baby, and asking Leaphorn if he please had another apple, one for his brother.
What happened in the ensuing years to turn that sweet boy into a casualty discovered at a crime scene?
Leaphorn usually kept his work to himself, not sharing the details with his dear wife, Emma. He liked to leave the cases at the office. But the sight of Ricky’s unconscious mom and the little boy’s efforts to comfort his hungry baby brother left a residue of sadness. When his wife asked what bothered him that night, he’d told her.
“I left the boy with the grandmother,” he remembered saying. “The baby went to the hospital.”
Emma put down the book she’d been reading. “Someone should be helping those little ones.” She asked Leaphorn for the boys’ names and the grandmother’s and for their address. The Horseman boys became one of her projects.
Once a month, she sent Ricky and his little brother funny cards with a dollar bill tucked inside. Leaphorn suspected she did other things for the boys, good deeds he wasn’t aware of. Perhaps because they’d had no children of their own and because Emma’s only sister had never married, the brothers had held a special place in his late wife’s heart.
Leaphorn set the folder on his desk. He thought about that polite, hungry little boy and the thin crying baby. How many lives had been ruined by alcohol and domestic violence? Too many. Bernie said the FBI identified Rick Horseman’s burned body through fingerprints taken when he was arrested for car theft. But he suspected Horseman’s troubles had started long before that.
The Lieutenant didn’t like loose ends and things that didn’t make sense. They gnawed at him, like beetles slowly eating through the soft wood under the bark of a pi?on tree. If he could figure out why Rick Horseman was standing close to the bombed car, he would know why he was dead.
Leaphorn pushed himself to standing. He would follow up on the mystery of this dead young man for Emma’s sake. For Emma and for Bernie. And he knew just where to begin.
He took a few minutes to compose a note for Louisa, who had gone to her book club meeting, laboriously shaping each letter because of the problems the bullet had created between his brain and his right hand. He placed a notebook in his shirt pocket, slipped on a jacket, found his gloves, and took his truck key from the hook by the door. Then he walked out to the driveway and his pickup. He climbed in, using the steering wheel to help pull himself up, and put his cane on the passenger seat.
He had driven the truck last week, the first time since his accident. Louisa, passenger and copilot, watched his every move while trying not to act nervous. Today, it felt good to get out of the house on his own, and even better to be working on a case again. The department had given him a couple little jobs since his injury, things someone else could have handled, as a goodwill gesture. This was different.
He drove carefully, a mile or two under the speed limit, making his truck one of the slowest vehicles on the road in Window Rock. He pulled into the parking lot at the Navajo Nation Department of Family Services. The daughter of an old colleague worked here, and if he handled things just right, she’d do him a favor. As he approached the entrance, he realized that it might have been smart to make an appointment. Oh well. He had time to wait if he needed to.
The building, like many official government offices on the reservation, needed a facelift. He went to the front desk and wrote the name of the woman he wanted, Maryellen Hood, on a page in his notebook and then “I have trouble speaking.”
“You need to see Maryellen?”
He nodded.
“Can you wait, sir? I’ll see if she’s available.”
Leaphorn nodded again.
“Can I tell her your name?”
He reached into his pocket for his billfold, extracted a card, and handed it to her. The woman looked at it, looked at him again, and disappeared with the card and his note.