Spider Woman's Daughter by Anne Hillerman

talking to him about it. He came to the house with a basket of gifts from him and Louisa right after we got back from our honeymoon. He mentioned this guy named Delos and how people thought he might be a shape shifter and how he had stolen a bunch of money and was exploiting this man from Laos who worked for him.”
    “That was some story,” Chee said. “We never did get a straight answer from the lieutenant on what happened to Delos.”
    “I don’t see anything in the file about that either,” Bernie said.
    “I’ll add it to my list of things to look into tomorrow when I start on the PI files. But we have the problem of tying him in to the Benally car.”
    They worked quietly awhile longer.
    “This is interesting,” Bernie said. “Nothing to do with the Benally family, but you were involved. This man, Randall Elliot, killed a Utah rancher, and almost killed a woman he worked with. Then he disappeared. If he’s still out there . . .”
    “I’ll never forget that case.” Chee stood, stretched. “Leaphorn rafted down the San Juan, hiked into a rugged rocky canyon, and found the missing woman barely alive after Elliot almost killed her. That Elliot guy, an archaeologist, came back in a helicopter to finish her off. I got there in time to help the lieutenant carry her out—she would have died in the next day or two if he hadn’t found her. Elliot disappeared before I arrived, and Leaphorn never talked about what happened before I got there.”
    “And?”
    “Someone found human bones in the area the next spring. DNA matched them to Elliott.”
    “Too bad. He would have been the perfect suspect.”
    They went back to work. The notion of Jackson Benally or Leonard Nez shooting a cop as part of a gang initiation didn’t seem as far-fetched as it had an hour ago.
    After another hour, Chee walked over to where Bernie sat, put his hands on her shoulders. She felt her tense muscle relax with his firm massage. “You know, you could have been killed today. Instead of celebrating our good fortune, here we are, still working at midnight.”
    “I’ll feel like celebrating when we find the guy who shot the lieutenant,” she said. “You ready for bed?”
    He smiled. “Was that a question or an invitation?”
    I n the quiet afterward, she noticed the subtle change in Chee’s breathing as he fell more deeply asleep. She stretched her legs against the cool sheets, wide awake. A coyote began to sing somewhere along the San Juan. She thought about Leaphorn’s empty house, about the lieutenant alone in a hospital bed—if he were still alive. She rewound the day: the breakfast, the phone call, the shot, the bleeding on the sunbaked pavement, the ambulance. She tried to focus on the getaway car: Had there been a second person inside? Was it really the Benally car?
    After an hour, she crept out of bed and went back to the kitchen to work on the files. By dawn she had reviewed them all, made lists of possible suspects and their connections to Leaphorn. None of the criminals in the old cases except for Delos looked especially evil, motivated to shoot a man in cold blood. In fact, they all should be grateful to Leaphorn for attempting to reboot their lives.
    She put on her Nikes when the sky had changed from black to gray with hints of pale peach, and quietly opened the front door. She ran to greet the dawn.
    When she came back, she smelled the sizzling bacon. She saw Chee, phone in one hand, spatula in the other. She could tell from the tension in his body that whatever news he listened to wasn’t welcome.

6

    C hee put the phone down.
    “I’ve got to go in early. The report is back from the shooter’s car.”
    “So, did Mrs. Benally do it?”
    Chee laughed. “Well, her prints are there, along with lots of others. Some are probably Jackson’s. The rest? Who knows. So Largo and Cordova, the FBI guy, want me to check the names tied to the prints. We can compare them to the suspect list we made last night. See if