Spider Woman's Daughter by Anne Hillerman Page A

there’s any link to the lieutenant.”
    “I added a few names this morning,” Bernie said. “I’m surprised the FBI isn’t taking the lead here. That Cordova seemed pretty sharp.”
    “They’re leaving the Navajos to us,” he said. “Largo told me the FBI seriously wants to talk to Louisa. Couldn’t reach her last night.”
    Chee cracked eggs into the hot pan. “Four or five sets of the prints they found match prints on file, but none were names I recognized from the lieutenant’s work. The feds are still searching for matches to the others.”
    “Wow,” she said. “That car was a taxi.”
    “I thought of something else,” Chee said. “That Delos guy? I remember that the Jicarilla cops found a body in an unmarked grave a couple years ago. Turned out to be his.”
    C hee left right after breakfast. She did dishes, then called the Window Rock office to learn they’d heard nothing more about Leaphorn’s condition. She thought about wearing jeans, but put on a clean Navajo Police uniform out of respect for the lieutenant.
    When she started her car, she noticed Leaphorn’s unmailed envelopes, including the brown one addressed to the man in Santa Fe, the one that needed stamps.
    Bernie drove first to the post office to send Leaphorn’s envelopes on the way. She saw the empty parking lot and realized the counter didn’t open until eight; she was half an hour early. She dropped the smaller ones in the mailbox and headed on, southeast to Santa Fe. She’d find a post office along the way.
    She passed a Laundromat. Quik Stop stores. A big truck loaded with hay bales, horses grazing. The junction for the tribe’s Flowing Water Casino. She noticed the plume of steam rising from the Four Corners Power Plant. She turned on the radio, 94.5 FM Navajo-language KYAT. She didn’t mind country music, at least in small doses, but she listened for news coverage of the lieutenant’s shooting. She noticed a homemade green “Tire Repair Open” sign along a fence and then the “Leaving the Navajo Reservation” notice. Circle W pawnshop. A car wash. A big American flag fluttering outside a mobile home.
    She slowed as a truck hauling a trailer pulled onto the highway from a dirt road, noticing that the sedan in the left lane sped past her about ten miles faster than the limit. The radio was advertising jewelry supplies you could order online as she came to Fruitland, the little settlement west of Farmington. Traffic was heavier now, the area populated with a mixture of oil field workers and farmers, Navajos, Mormons, and retirees looking for nirvana in the fabled Southwest. She passed a block-long wrecking yard filled with generations of cars and pickups, even some heavy equipment. Farther along, she saw lots full of new minivans and trucks, windshields shining in the summer sun, tempting drivers to take on debt in exchange for a better ride.
    Finally, the view she loved, the San Juan River south of the highway, flowing between rows of towering ancient cottonwoods.
    Traffic was heaviest between Shiprock and Bloomfield, with fleets of oil and gas trucks making hatchbacks like hers seem tiny. After that, the number of vehicles conveniently dropped off as the scenery grew more spectacular. Her heart soared as she saw Huerfano Mesa, one of the sacred places in the origin stories, the spot where Changing Woman gave birth to the Hero Twins who made the world safe for people. Leaphorn should be here in Dinetah, not in a hospital in Santa Fe, a rich-white-person town.
    Bernie had been to Santa Fe three times before. Once when her Shiprock High School team played a basketball game at the Santa Fe Indian School gymnasium. Once to accompany her mother when she had a booth at the Indian Market. And most recently for a training session at the New Mexico State Police headquarters. The town didn’t resonate with her, but she’d go where she had to for the lieutenant.
    O fficer Jim Chee had never been much for paperwork.
    Now, as he sat