Red Mesa (16 page)

Justine stopped by Ella’s car as she put the shovel in the back compartment. “Sometimes your life seems so organized and well planned in comparison to mine, Ella.”

“Believe me, it’s not.
I just have more responsibilities these days that determine what I do and when, giving me a de facto schedule.”

Justine mulled it over for a moment. “That makes sense.”

“What about you?” Ella asked gently. “Now that you’ve lived the life for a while, do you regret having become a cop?”

Justine shook her head. “No, but it does carry a price, as you often said in the past. Sometimes it seems
that work is at the center of everything I do and think.”

A vehicle passed them on the road, slowing down briefly, then speeding up. Justine, like Ella, never took her eyes away from it, tensing for a moment, then relaxing after it went by.

“For a moment I thought it was Big Ed,” Justine said. “He has a dark pickup like that.”

“Yeah, I thought it was him, too, but if it had been the chief,
he would have stopped. It was just someone curious about two women talking by the side of the road after dark.”

“Yeah, well, now that you put it that way,” Justine said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Ella said, wondering if the person who’d set up the meeting by leaving the notes had come by to check and see if the plan had worked. Tomorrow, when they had a spare moment, she’d tell Justine what she
suspected, and maybe together they could figure out who to thank.

“See you at the office bright and early. And, Ella?” She paused for a moment as if uncertain how to word what she wanted to say. “I’m glad things are back on track between us.”

“So am I.” Ella watched her drive away, then started her own vehicle. She was ill at ease out here all of a sudden. Checking the rearview mirror every
few minutes, she drove around until she was certain no one was tailing her. At long last, telling herself that this time her instincts had to be wrong, she drove home.

ELEVEN

Ella had been in her office for almost an hour when Joseph Neskahi knocked on the door.

“Hey, Ella. Do you know if Justine’s coming in today? She’s not in her office or the lab, and I haven’t seen her around.”

“As far as I know, she hasn’t phoned in sick,” Ella said. “Let me have a look, and check with the front desk.”

The same uneasiness that had plagued her all night long began to
gnaw at her again. She asked the duty officer, looked around the station, in Justine’s office and the lab, and even checked the rest rooms, but there was no sign of her cousin.

Not seeing Justine’s police vehicle in the parking lot, Ella returned to her office and called Justine’s home. Angela answered the phone.

“I was just wondering if Justine’s sick today,” Ella said, making sure her voice
remained calm and steady. She didn’t want to alarm her cousin Angela.

“She’s not with you?” Angela’s voice tensed. “I know she came home yesterday, told us she’d received a note from you, and then went out to meet you later in the evening. As far as I know, she never came back. I thought she might have spent the night at your mom’s place. What’s going on?”

“She did meet me last night, but I
never left a note for her. Actually, I received one that I thought was from her, and that’s how we both ended up meeting at Beautiful Mesa. By any chance, did you see the note she got?”

“I think it’s on her dresser. Wait, let me go check.” Angela came back. “No, it’s not here. She must have taken it with her. Is my daughter all right?” Fear tainted Angela’s clear voice.

“I’m sure she is. Please
don’t worry. She probably went to see a friend after we talked, and spent the night,” Ella said, thinking of Natoni.

She heard Angela’s long sigh. “That may be. My daughter wouldn’t necessarily check in with me. We just don’t talk much lately. She’s so tense all the time, I try not to ask her any questions that will make her angry, and she seldom volunteers anything. It hasn’t been easy.”

“I’ll
call you as soon as I find her,” Ella said, sensing how worried her cousin was.

“Do that, please. All I know for sure is that she went to meet with you, hoping to work out that problem you two have been having at work.”

Ella remembered the pickup that had driven by that reminded her of the chief’s truck. For the first time she was forced to consider the possibility that whoever had sent the
notes hadn’t had good intentions at all. There was the chance they’d been set up somehow. Instinct told her that Justine’s failure to show up was no coincidence. Something was wrong, and there was no time to lose.

Ella went out into the “pigpen,” the office three of the sergeants shared, and found Joseph Neskahi. “Are you free right now?” she asked him.

“If you need me, I am,” he replied.

“I’d like you to ride along with me,” she said, then filled him in as they headed to her unit. “I can’t find Justine. Apparently she didn’t come home last night or call in sick this morning either. Nobody has heard from her since yesterday. I know she’s been acting strange lately, but Justine’s never been this irresponsible. I have a feeling something’s happened to her.”

Ella drove in silence,
not ready to tell Joseph the details of her meeting with Justine last night. As she glanced over at him, she realized that the veteran officer knew there was more going on than she’d said, but hadn’t breached her silence out of respect.

“We’re going to Beautiful Mesa,” she said at last, and filled him in on her meeting with Justine the night before.

“Do you have the note that Justine supposedly
sent you?”

She nodded. “It looked like her handwriting. I would have noticed it otherwise.”

“Maybe her vehicle broke down and she’s having radio problems. Or perhaps she stayed with a friend, overslept, and is on her way to the station right now. She didn’t call because she was hoping that no one would notice she was late.”

“I don’t buy it. That doesn’t sound like Justine,” Ella said.

“I hear
what you’re saying, but lately Justine hasn’t been acting like Justine,” Joseph pointed out.

Ella shook her head. “There’s more going on.”

“Your intuition?”

She knew what he was thinking. Her intuition, a part of the “gift” many attributed to her family’s legacy, was legendary at the station. The inescapable fact was that her hunches usually paid off. “All I can tell you is that something’s
very wrong. I can just feel it.”

They finally arrived at Beautiful Mesa, and she turned off the road at the same place she and Justine had been last night. The muscles in her stomach were so tense they ached. She left the unit wordlessly, and Joseph followed. Though he hadn’t spoken, she could sense the same tension in him.

“Look over there,” he said, breaking the silence.

Ella saw him purse
his lips and cock his head to the side, pointing Navajo style. For a moment her breath froze in the back of her throat. The sergeant had found what appeared to be a shallow grave. The ground around the mound was disturbed, probably by a shovel, and was darker, filled with what looked like ash and burned plant debris.

“Was that here yesterday when you were around?”

“It was evening and I didn’t
notice. All I saw was a small campfire about thirty yards ahead. I’d just put out the burning branches by smothering them with dirt when Justine drove up. I could smell gasoline or some similar accelerant on the wood, probably used to start the fire.”

“Let’s go take a closer look at the place where the fire was, then we can check out the mound,” Joseph said, walking ahead slowly.

She recognized
his reluctance to go poking around a possible grave site. Despite being modernists, they’d been taught the same thing—stay away from the dead. And according to tradition, until four days had passed after the death, the
chindi
—the evil in a person that remained behind—would not have departed yet. They weren’t even supposed to say the dead person’s name during that time period, or touch something
that belonged to the person. If you did, the
chindi
would come after you. You’d get sick for sure, and other terrible things would happen to you.

That belief had protected the
Dineh
from contagion and disease at times, but for a law enforcement officer, it only served to make an unpleasant duty even more difficult.

The burned juniper branches she’d smothered with shovel-loads of sand were easily
uncovered. Neskahi poked around the branches gingerly with his boot, but it was pretty obvious what was there.

“I guess we need to check out that mound now. It could be an animal someone buried. It looks shallow,” Joseph said as they walked back toward the disturbed ground, stopping ten feet away.

“Maybe.” Ella’s voice was taut as she tried to estimate the length of the mound, hoping it was
too short to be a human body. Even the possibility that Justine could be lying beneath there terrified her.

Knowing that as the ranking officer, it fell to her to set the example, she took a few steps closer to the apparent grave and studied it closely, trying to remain objective. “We’ll have to use our hands only. We don’t want to disturb or lose any evidence. Keep an eye out for footprints
or marks around the mound, too. We have to preserve the site in case it turns out to be a crime scene.”

They looked around carefully, but there were no tracks other than their own within twenty feet of the site.

“Except for a few of what look like shovel or digging-tool scrapes, the tracks have been obliterated. Sand has been thrown over them, and a branch was used lightly, wiping out any marks
on the sand,” Neskahi pointed out, putting on one pair of latex gloves, then another pair over them. This prevented touching something that had touched the dead, and was accepted procedure by Navajo cops.

Ella did the same, extracting the gloves from her jacket pocket and putting them on as she spoke. “I suspect that whatever’s there isn’t someone’s pet. This is something else, and whatever it
is has been burned. Smell the gasoline still in the soil, along with all the ashes and burned debris?”

Even as she said the words, dread pried into her. She’d confronted death and loss before. Yet nothing, not even her father’s murder, had prepared her for what this might be. She’d been here less than half a day ago, and her cousin had been with her. Now Justine was gone, and there was this one
solitary grave. She needed to keep a cool head, but the iciness in her stomach and the prickling sensation all over her body fought against that resolve.

Joseph took a deep breath, holding his hands down at his sides as if they were already contaminated. “Maybe we should call in the coroner first.”

She smiled hesitantly at him. “Dr. Roanhorse isn’t about to dig, my friend, especially until we’ve
confirmed that a body is here.”

He nodded, then following her lead, crouched and began moving the sand aside with gloved hands.

She wondered if the sergeant would have an Enemy Way done, the Sing to remove contamination. She didn’t really believe in that, but she felt dirty as she moved the sand, ashes, and dark debris particles aside, working to uncover what lay beneath. She would shower for
a long time before she touched her daughter tonight.

Ella worked quickly, wanting to make up for Joseph’s slow pace. Fear drove her. The possibility that she’d find Justine buried there filled her with dread so intense she could scarcely breathe. Then, slowly, the ground became warm enough to feel the heat through her double layer of gloves. It was obvious whatever was burned here had become
very hot, and the residual heat was still present in the soil.

The debris began to look more like fragments of cloth. She wanted to stop, but somehow willed herself to continue, swallowing the bile at the back of her throat. A heartbeat later, she uncovered a charred piece of bone big enough to be part of an arm or leg. It was still smoking, and she had to drop it to avoid melting a hole in her
gloves.

As she brushed the ash-laden dirt aside, the heated remnants of a shattered, badly burned human skull emerged. She wanted to vomit, but feeling Joseph’s disgust and knowing he was watching her, she stood up slowly and took a deep breath.

“We have to stop now until the rest of the remains cool off. Whoever did this was almost successful in destroying the skeleton. The ME is going to have
a hard time with this.” Ella took off her first pair of gloves, put them in an evidence bag, sealed it, then took off the other pair.

“There’s certainly no way to tell who that is,” he said slowly, standing up and taking a step back.

What he really meant was that there was no way to tell if that was Justine.

“There was only that one fire when you were here last night?”

A shudder ripped through
Ella. “Just the one you poked through over there. It had been left burning. I assumed that someone had stopped to get warm and set fire to some fallen branches with a little gasoline.”

“Justine saw it, too?”

She nodded. But she had been the only one to see Justine, except for whoever was in that pickup. And as far as her cousin Angela knew, Justine had come here to meet her and never returned
home. The possibility that she was being framed hit her suddenly.

She pushed back the thought. She had no evidence to indicate that it was Justine who lay buried in the fire pit before her. She was jumping to conclusions. Her cousin could show up at any moment. Ella held on to that bit of logic and hope, knowing that to think anything else now would render her useless.

“I’ll call Dr. Roanhorse,”
she said. “You call Big Ed and let him know we’ve found a body, and get Ralph Tache over here with the crime scene van.”

“That will only make it you, me, and Tache working the scene. We’re going to need some more help,” Neskahi said.

She thought of Harry, but he was undercover, and no longer part of the department, though she might be able to get his help one way or the other. But if Samuel
Begaye was behind this, she wanted Harry out there tracking the dirtbag. “There’s FB-Eyes and Paycheck. They’ll need to be part of this anyway.”

“You want to call them or should I?”