The Wailing Wind - Leaphorn & Chee 17 Read Online Free PDF Page A

grapevine. Interest there would have died with the confession. Leaphorn obviously maintained his interest. He'd made this something personal.
    "Placed advertisements from the federal prison?"
    "Easy enough. Just had his house manager do it."
    "Saying what?"
    "In the
Arizona
Republic
it was a little box ad in the personals. Said 'Linda, I love you. Please come home.' About the same in the Gallup Independent , and the Farmington Times , and the Albuquerque Journal , and the Deseret News in
Salt
Lake
. Then he ran some more offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for information about her whereabouts."
    "Never a word?"
    "I guess not."
    This also surprised Chee. It seemed out of character.
    "You talked to him about it?"
    "I tried to after he came home from prison," Leaphorn admitted. "He called me a son of a bitch and hung up."
     
    Chapter Four
     
    Officer bernie manuelito had risen even earlier than usual, driven over to her mother's place at Hogback, had a most unsatisfactory visit, went on to Farmington thinking she would use this unexpected (and undeserved) day off to shop, decided that was a bad idea considering the mood she was in, and headed south on Route 371 to the Tsale Trading Post. She'd have a talk with old man Rodney Yellow. Hostiin Yellow was her mother's senior brother, the elder male in the Yoo'l Dineh—the Bead People clan—and a shaman. He had been very active in the Medicine Man Association and in the movement to train young singers to keep some of the less-used curing rituals alive. More important to Bernie, he had conducted the kinaalda ceremony for her when she reached puberty, had given her her secret ceremonial "war name," and was her very favorite uncle.
    Hostiin Yellow was also an authority on what the scientists out at the
Chaco
National Monument
called "ethnobotany." Maybe he could tell her something about the various stickers and seedpods she'd found on the victim's pant legs and socks. Which was why, she told herself, she was going to visit him. That and family duty. She glanced down at the speedometer. Eleven miles over the limit. Oh, well. Never any traffic on 371. The emptiness was one of the reasons she loved to drive it. That and passing the grotesque monuments of erosion of the Bisti Badlands, and seeing the serene shape of the
Turquoise
Mountain
rising to the east. Pretty soon now it would be wearing its winter snowcap, and monsoon rains of late summer had already started turning the grazing country a pale green. Enjoying that, she forgot for a moment how arrogant Sergeant Chee had acted, but the memory of it came right back again.
    "And just keep your mouth shut about it," Chee had said, giving her his stern "I'm your boss" look. He had taken the tobacco tin from her hand, put it in a plastic evidence sack, and placed the sack in his shirt jacket pocket, and said: "I'll see what I can do about this," and walked into Captain Largo's office. When he came out he gave her another of those looks and told her to go home, take the rest of the week off, and: "For God's sake, don't talk to anybody about this."
    That was it. He didn't even have the decency, the respect, to tell her she was suspended. Maybe she wasn't. Just take the rest of the week off, he said—looking very dour. Big deal. That was just a day and a half before her shift ended anyway. What had Largo said after Chee told him about the tobacco tin? The captain had already been angry after his meeting with the fbi guys. Not that he chewed her out much. Just asked a bunch of questions. And glared at her. But then he hadn't known about her taking the tin away—a tin that Chee seemed to think would have had prints on it. Hers now, if none other.
    Hostiin Yellow wasn't at his place behind the Tsale Trading Post. The lady there said he was supposed to be doing his botanical talk for the kids at the
Standing
Rock
School
. Bernie took the dirt road shortcut thirteen miles over the mesa and saved about thirty minutes by driving too