At Ease with the Dead Read Online Free PDF

Joshua.” She raised her eyebrows inquisitively and asked, “Was he the one who found the body?”
    I took another sip of wine. “I’m being mollified, right?”
    She laughed. “Was he?”
    I shook my head. “Guy named Lessing. Dennis Lessing. A friend of Bedford’s. Or a friend, anyway, until they had their big fight. He wasn’t even an archaeologist, Lessing. Taught oil geology. At the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. Which is part of the Texas university system now, you’ll be happy to know. University of Texas at El Paso.”
    â€œWhat was the big fight?”
    â€œRight. That summer, Lessing brought a bunch of his students to the Navajo Reservation. A field trip, looking for oil—on-the-job training, evidently. They stayed mostly at Piñon, to the west of Canyon de Chelly. But before they went back to El Paso, he took them to the Canyon to meet Bedford and do a little amateur digging.”
    â€œWhy look for oil on the Navajo Reservation?”
    â€œBecause it was there, I suppose. Daniel Begay said they’d found some on an earlier trip.”
    â€œYes, but the Texas fields were coming in by then, if memory serves. Why go all the way to Arizona in the first place?”
    â€œWhat am I? Mr. Wizard?”
    She smiled. “You’ll always be Mr. Wizard to me, Joshua.”
    â€œThanks, Rita. Means a lot to me.” I swallowed some more claret. “Anyway, Bedford was working with another archaeologist, guy named Randolph, in the northern branch of the Canyon. What they call Canyon del Muerte. He was digging around the White House ruins and he told Lessing that he and his students could dig a little farther upriver. And a week later, Lessing found Ganado’s grave.”
    â€œAnd that started the big fight.”
    â€œYeah. Lessing wanted to take the body back with him to El Paso. Bedford didn’t want him to. Randolph, of course, sided with Bedford. But Lessing took the body anyway.”
    â€œWhy? Why would he want it?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œAnd what happened to Ganado’s body?”
    â€œIt disappeared.”
    â€œDisappeared?”
    â€œIn September, about a month after Lessing came back from the field trip, he was killed. Murdered in his house one night. And no one’s seen Ganado’s body since.”
    Rita sipped at her wine. “One question does spring immediately to mind.”
    I nodded. “Where was David Bedford in September.”
    â€œThat one, yes.”
    â€œStill in Canyon de Chelly. Plenty of witnesses, according to Daniel Begay.”
    â€œAll right. What is it, exactly, that Mr. Begay wants us to do?”
    â€œLocate the remains.”
    â€œWhy now? Why sixty-five years later?”
    â€œEvidently this Ganado has a descendant. A woman. And lately she’s been having dreams.”
    Her face expressionless, Rita repeated the word: “Dreams.”
    â€œAbout Ganado. Nightmares. They’ve gotten so bad she can’t sleep. And she won’t sleep, she thinks, until the remains are located and brought back to the Reservation. She came to Begay and asked him for help. He found out what he could, and now he’d like us to do the rest.”
    â€œWhy do I suddenly feel like a character in a Tony Hillerman novel?”
    â€œIf there are any records at all, anything about Lessing and the body, they’re down in El Paso, at the university.”
    â€œWhy doesn’t Mr. Begay go down there and find them for himself?”
    â€œHe feels that this requires the skilled hand of a professional investigator.”
    â€œMeaning you.”
    I shrugged. “He’s easily impressed.”
    She sipped at her wine, looked at me over the rim of her mug. “I think it’s safe to say that the trail’s fairly cold at this point, Joshua.”
    â€œNot for a guy who can sniff out a grizzly at thirty miles.”
    Sighing, she put the