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driveway. Louisa coming home, she thought. As she pushed the drawer closed, her gaze drifted to the floor. She noticed a wastebasket with some torn paper worth investigating and a white cardboard filing box on the floor next to it. On top sat the phone charger. Empty. Darn it.
    She hurried out of the office into the living room. She pushed back the drape before opening the front door and saw Chee walking toward the porch.
    “Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Louisa here?”
    “No. Not yet. I was hoping she’d show up so I could talk to her before you got here.”
    “Come outside and take a look at this.”
    She followed him, feeling the intensity of the sun through her uniform shirt. He stopped at the edge of Leaphorn’s driveway and pointed at the dirt with the toe of his boot. “What do you think?”
    “Wheel tracks. A dolly? Maybe the lieutenant or Louisa was moving something.”
    “Maybe one of those rolling suitcases,” Chee said. “Maybe that’s why we can’t find Louisa.”
    “She’ll turn up,” Bernie said. “Hey, thanks for picking me up. I saw lots of files in the lieutenant’s desk drawer. The current stuff might be relevant to the shooting. And we ought to check the information on his computer.”
    Chee laughed as they went inside. “I’ll get right on it. Just point me in the right direction. Anything else?”
    Bernie ignored him, leading the way down the hall to the office.
    “Look at that.” Chee examined the maze of wires dangling behind Leaphorn’s desk. “That computer must be twenty years old. I remember him talking about how slow it was and about how he was going to get a new one.” He shook his head. “It was one of the few things I ever heard him complain about. He didn’t complain much. Except about me.”
    “He appreciates you, so he expects a lot from you,” Bernie said. “He just didn’t know how to show it. I mean, doesn’t know how to show it.”
    “Tough as an old boot,” Chee said.
    Bernie noticed that she hadn’t closed the large drawer completely. “The files are in there.”
    Chee extracted latex gloves from his pants pocket and nudged the drawer fully open. He scrutinized the folders, then pulled one out.
    “Leaphorn and I collaborated on this case. It fascinated me to see how his mind worked. We discovered a crazed scientist experimenting with bubonic plague. An old lady tending her goats helped us solve the thing.”
    “Sounds like an adventure.”
    “It started when a rich grandmother hired the lieutenant to find her granddaughter. The girl had a job as a college intern, working on a public health project on the reservation near Yells Back Butte. Leaphorn’s investigation overlapped a case I was on, a situation where it looked like a young Hopi had killed a Navajo cop.”
    “Did the lieutenant find the granddaughter?”
    “Her body. We found the guy who killed her, and it turned out he’d killed the officer, too. The Hopi guy was innocent, except for eagle poaching.” Chee added, “The lieutenant told me, ‘Good job.’ ”
    She heard the catch in his voice. Although he’d never say it, few things pleased Chee more than the approval of the crusty old lieutenant. “So, how’s he doing?”
    “We just got word that Leaphorn made it into Gallup.”
    She heard something in his voice that made her ask, “What else?”
    Silence. Then Chee said, “He’s too badly injured for treatment there. They called in a helicopter to take him to Albuquerque to the big hospital with the fancy trauma unit.”
    “When he comes out of this, let’s help him get a new computer. A laptop he could take with him on cases, type his notes right into it. That would save him a lot of time.”
    “You think he’d give up his little leather notebook? No way.” Chee turned back to the file drawer. “I’ll thumb through these quickly, see if anything jumps out at me. Then I need to get back to the office. Bigman is on his way. He can box these up for us and deal with