He nodded once.
“Are you helping Bernie?” She didn’t wait for his response. “Let me know if I can do anything. I’d be glad to make calls for you. Whatever you need.”
“Guh.” He meant to say “good,” but he could tell she understood.
When they’d finished dinner, Louisa cleared the table and carefully pulled out the large board with a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, a scene with mountains and multicolored wildflowers. She liked it when he found the pieces to create the picture and said the three-dimensional thinking helped his brain. He considered it a tedious waste of time, but not as big a waste of time as arguing with her. His lady friend meant well, he knew, but she didn’t understand what went on inside his head. No one could unless they’d had damage to their brains. If they were like him, they didn’t want to talk about it even if they could.
“We’re half done with this one. What’s left is harder.”
He walked to where she had the puzzle ready and waved his hand.
“Working,” he told her. “Bernie.”
“Are you sure?”
He nodded.
She smiled. “By the way, I picked up a copy of the Albuquerque Journal when I was out. I left it on the living room table for you.”
He picked up the paper and took it back to his office. He hung the cane on the extra chair, and sat down with the files and his notebooks. He looked at his phone. The first message was from Maryellen Hood. When he’d first come home from the hospital, he had trouble remembering how to use his cell phone. Now it was second nature. He’d even learned to text.
She’d said, “Check your e-mail,” and then, “Be careful, sir. There were some rough players in this case.”
He tapped the computer screen, it came to life, and he went to his e-mail. He scrolled past notices from AARP, Sacred Wind phone service, the latest newsletter from the retired police officers association, and ads for products that embarrassed him. He found a message from Butterfly. He clicked on the subject line: “For a friend of my Dad.”
Maryellen had typed:
Lt. Leaphorn,
The files I found are attached. The ones before the earliest date you see here are paper only, stored offsite and not accessible to me. Please delete these when you are done.
He moved the mouse to the symbol of a paper clip and clicked. An icon that looked like a manila folder drifted to the bottom of the screen. He kept clicking as prompted, thinking how much easier it would be to open a real file and thumb through pages.
The information looked like photocopies of a series of typed sheets dating back two decades. As he had suspected, his encounter with the sad little boy was not the Horseman family’s first experience with law enforcement or family services. Nor was it the last. The social workers’ reports told him that Ricky’s mother had been arrested for drunken driving that resulted in child endangerment, battery on a household member, and child neglect. Periodically, the children were monitored by Navajo Social Services. One entry documented the arrest of a man identified as Naomi’s boyfriend for child abuse.
Leaphorn read on. It looked as though young Ricky did better after he went to live with Mrs. Nez. The reports were boring, perfunctory. Then something happened and a security guard at a Farmington grocery had detained Horseman for throwing rocks at cars. He found that the grandmother complained about the boy’s “attitude of disrespect” and reported him as a runaway several times. Another in the parade of caseworkers wrote that the boy had dropped out of high school and moved back to live with his mother, who had just been released from prison.
The final file Butterfly had sent was a note that Rick Horseman had been arrested in Gallup after a shoplifting incident that involved video games. He was seventeen. There was no juvenile record of arrest for involvement in gangs, drugs, or violent crime.
Leaphorn thought about it. Sometimes puberty alone activated the switch that made boys go crazy for a few years, especially young males growing up in challenging circumstances without male relatives to guide them. Maybe that was what had happened to Horseman. Then Richard Horseman aged out of the system and reporting from the Navajo Social Services stopped. Ready or not, Richard Horseman was legally an adult.
All in all, Ricky grew to manhood with some struggles, but not a hopeless case.
He had asked Largo to check the file on Horseman for him, and he’d noticed the captain’s e-mail when he was scrolling for Butterfly’s message. Largo had written: “One report on Horseman as an adult. Two years ago, he was arrested on suspicion of car theft, but charges dropped for technical errors. Nothing pending.” If the captain couldn’t find anything more, it wasn’t to be found.
At the police station, he’d used his map of Navajoland with colored pushpins marking unsolved crimes with special designations for burglaries, rustling, bootlegging, drug cases, and homicides. It helped him make sense of things, see connections. When he retired, he’d left the map there, but he still liked the idea of mapping crime, diagramming relationships of criminal acts to the varied geography of Navajoland and among the people involved in the cases he was working. Instead of a map now, he used the printout of Bernie’s bullet points to organize his thoughts. He printed the note Bernie had sent him earlier and reread it.
She had written:
Possible reasons for Horseman’s death
He was hired to plant the bomb by someone who wanted to hurt Palmer and blew himself up by accident.
He came to watch the game and just happened to be in the parking lot by the car when it exploded.
He was planning to steal the car when the bomb went off.
He knew there was a bomb in the car and wanted to remove it.
Palmer knew him, sent him out to get something from the car, and he triggered the bomb.
Someone wanted to kill Horseman and used Palmer’s car as the means to do it.
Some combo of the above.
None of the above.