Tracking Bear (8 page)

Following her line of vision, he added, “I’m doing some research for an assignment—a term paper. I’m trying to get my GED. Then, if I can manage it, I’m going to enroll in the local college.”

“What kind of degree are you going after?”

“I’m not sure yet. Business
of some kind. Maybe an MBA eventually, if I can get a scholarship.” He gestured for them to take a seat on the sofa. “Now how can I help you?” Ella got right to it. “How long had you known Officer Franklin?”

“We met two years ago last summer—July, I guess.”

“How did you two meet?”

“He was on patrol, busting kids who were setting off illegal fireworks, bottle rockets and stuff. It was during
that long drought. I’d wandered onto the turf of a rival gang looking for a friend of mine, and nearly got killed when they jumped me. Officer Franklin came flying out of his unit with nothing more than a nightstick and beat back about five guys. Then he loaded me up and took me to the hospital. I bled all over his car seat. If it hadn’t been for him, I probably wouldn’t be here today. I’ve got the
scars to prove it.”

“And you became friends after that?”

“We weren’t friends, really. I just owed him big-time, so I tried to pay him back the only way I could.”

“How’s that?”

“If something was brewing around here, I’d let him know about it.”

“Nothing more than that?”

“Not lately. I’ve heard about a couple of cars being stolen recently, but I have no idea who’s behind that. The only thing
I’m positive about is that it’s not gang-related. I would have known if any of the kids were involved.”

“What gang are you in?”

“The Many Devils, but I’m not active. If there was such a thing as quitting, I would have. As it is, I just see the guys every once in a while, but go my own way now.”

“And they accept that?” Ella asked skeptically.

“They don’t hassle me. Most of them are younger
than me anyway, and I’m bigger than they are. I also know a lot people who owe me favors and would back me up.”

Ella walked to an attractive watercolor painting of a stallion hung on the wall. It was done in a style especially popular in the sixties and seventies—a stylized design using bright blues and yellows and geometric shapes reminiscent of those found on Navajo rugs. “I tried doing something
like this in high school, but just don’t have the talent. Are you an artist?”

“No. That’s the only thing my old man left behind when he walked out. He took off when I was eight or nine, and I haven’t seen him since.”

Ella nodded, suspecting now that one of the reasons Jason had befriended this boy was because he could easily identify with him. “Is there anything you can tell us about Officer
Franklin that might help us find his killer?”

Albert paused, mulling her question over in his mind. “You probably already know this, but about two weeks ago he told me that someone had tried to break off the lock on the rear door of that old garage his mom owned. Sine he couldn’t believe that anyone would want the old junk in there, he thought it might have been an initiation rite for a gang.
But I set him straight.”

“You don’t think it was an initiation?”

“No way. For one, nobody trying to get ranked into a gang would have backed out. He would have broken in, one way or another, even if he had to break a window or ram it with a stolen car. To fail would have made him look like a wuss in front of everyone, and he’d probably have gotten the crap beat out of him. Not that he could
have avoided that anyway. Most of the ranking around here involves taking on three or four of their own guys and staying on your feet.”

“So what’s your theory?” Ella asked.

“I’ve thought about that a lot because I wanted to help him. Obviously, someone wanted something that was stored in there, maybe some family heirloom, or whatever, that meant something to them, but it took time for that person
to build up his courage because he wasn’t really a thief. In other words, we’re talking amateur night.”

“That’s a plausible theory.” Ella stood up. “Thanks for your time.”

As they went back to the car, Ella remained quiet and Justine didn’t interrupt.

“So here is the way I see it,” Ella said at last. “Jason saw evidence that someone was casing the place. So he started making frequent but randomly
timed stops, and caught up to the perp. But it must have been someone he knew or recognized, so he lowered his guard. The perp panicked, turned the tables on Jason, and killed him.”

“I get the part about Jason recognizing his killer, but if we accept the rest of your theory, that would mean that the perp wasn’t out to kill Jason. Of course that would fit with what we already know—Jason wasn’t
called
to the scene. That means someone was there ahead of him for a reason. It may have been because of what was stored inside that building, or what the perp believed was in there. But there was no way he could have known that Jason would show up.”

“Agreed. So let’s say the perp knew something of value was stored there—that’s why he wanted in,” Ella said. “But we saw the stuff in there—it was
just old junk or used furniture, books, and magazines. So now we’re looking for someone who
thought
something of value was there, someone Jason knew and caught searching through the boxes. This had to have been a person who didn’t want anyone to know what he’d been doing. In other words, not a professional burglar, but rather someone with a reputation to maintain. That could explain why they were
carrying a top-of-the-line firearm and not just a Saturday night special.”

“We’re narrowing down the field,” Justine said with a nod. “Whoever did this carries a concealed handgun, and will kill anyone who threatens them in some way, even a police officer performing their duty.”

“I want to interview Kee Franklin next,” Ella said, “but before we do that, I want to run a complete background check
on him.”

“I’ve done a preliminary report,” Justine said. “He’s got an interesting background, from what I managed to find out.”

“Fill me in.”

“Kee Franklin was enrolled in a boarding school when he was six and spent every school year living away from his parents. Right out of high school he joined the Army. When his hitch was up he traveled to Albuquerque, took a college entrance exam, and
got an incredibly high score. He received a scholarship, majored in physics, and got his doctorate in less than six years. But, after that, there’s a fifteen-year gap in his work history. It’s like he dropped off a cliff. Then he suddenly shows up as a professor in a Los Alamos, New Mexico, branch college.”

“Maybe Blalock can help me. It sounds like he worked for the government, maybe the Department
of Energy or Defense, or even the CIA. Keep digging. I have a feeling Professor Franklin is at the heart of whatever’s happening.”

Ella dropped Justine off at the station so she could work on Professor Franklin’s background check, then went to Dwayne Blalock’s office. The resident FBI agent had been here for nearly a decade. Over the years he’d changed from the dogmatic Anglo she’d first met when she’d returned to the Rez to a laid-back, pragmatic
man who’d learned to work effectively with the tribal police.

His office these days was on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock. Lucas Payestewa, the Hopi FBI agent who also worked the Four Corners area, had Blalock’s old office in Farmington, less than a half hour away.

Ella sat down across from Blalock, and, as he looked up, she was struck again by the odd coloring of his eyes—one was brown, the
other blue. That was what had earned him the name of FB-Eyes among the local
Dineh.

Blalock had jurisdiction over homicides on the Rez, but having confidence in Ella and her Special Investigations team, he usually let the tribal cops take the lead. Ella knew Blalock better than anyone else around here, and had worked with him on many occasions. Both owed their lives to each other several times
over.

Ella filled him in on the details of her case, then waited as the agent, built like a college quarterback except for a few extra pounds above his belt, stretched out languidly to his full six-foot-two length.

“Okay. It sounds like you think this was more than just a bungled burglary that went bad. Do you think Kee Franklin is implicated in his son’s death?”

Ella took a deep breath then
let it out again. “I think ‘implicated’ is too strong a word. But I’ll bet there’s a connection, though I’m not sure what that could be.”

“And on that basis, you want me to try and get you what’s probably classified background information? From what you’ve told me, my guess is that the guy was probably doing some kind of classified nuke work, maybe at one of the labs in Albuquerque, Los Alamos,
or White Sands.”

“A police officer who happens to be the professor’s son has been murdered, and there may be a family connection in the motive. What I expect is for you to help us do everything possible to find the killer. You can consider that a formal request if you’d like.”

“You don’t have to get testy, Ella. If you had any evidence that Kee Franklin was involved, I could open some doors
for you, or at least look in some of them myself and tell you if I found something. But you have nothing to go on.”

“Kee Franklin’s ex-wife is living with her new husband—a serviceman, in Europe. They’ve been there for over two years now, so I’ve already factored her out of the equation. Here’s the family connection that piques my curiosity. I believe Jason Franklin’s death may have had something
to do with the controversy surrounding the nuclear power plant. Kee is a noted physicist and a qualified expert on these matters. Both stood against NEED and the proposed power plant. Kee’s opinions in particular seem to carry a lot of weight, but he’s against a project that could be worth many millions of dollars. Maybe a billion, in the long run.”

“I see where you’re going. You’re thinking
that the murder may have been a warning to Kee—cooperate or else. But you’ve got nothing solid, Ella.”

“Whatever was classified twenty or more years ago can’t be that earth-shattering now, but it could give me a lead. I’ve got to rule out motives before I can cross off any suspects.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Blalock grumbled.

That was the best she’d get. Ella walked out as he picked up his
phone. Blalock usually managed to deliver on her requests, though he grumbled more about them now that he was getting closer to retirement age. Or maybe, when people got older, they just had less patience with the crap thrown their way. Of course maneuvering around bureaucratic red tape had never been his idea of real law enforcement work anyway.

When she returned to her office, Ella saw that
Justine had left another folder labeled “Jason Franklin” on her desk, one she could put inside the other she’d already begun to fill.

She started to sort through the contents. Jason’s uncle—Kee’s younger brother, and at least one of his cousins, had died from cancer after working in the uranium mines. From the bits and pieces Justine had managed to gather, they’d been slow, cruel deaths.

Ella
sat back and considered everything. Her next step would be finding out who the other key players were in the pro and con debate surrounding the nuclear power plant. If a killer was among them, she’d find him.

It was early by her standards when Ella left the station for home. She’d been putting in a lot of overtime lately, as had all the field officers and today she was hoping to spend some
time with Dawn.

But it wasn’t meant to be. When she got home, she learned from Rose and Herman that Dawn had gone over to play at her best friend’s house after day school. Alice and Dawn were becoming inseparable. Both girls had working moms and grandmothers who took care of them during the day.

“You should have telephoned, daughter. Had you told me you were going to be home early, I wouldn’t
have let her go. But the arrangement was perfect for me. My friend and I have to go take photos to document some information we’ll be presenting at a series of meetings that the traditionalists will be sponsoring at the college.”

“What information do you have to document with photographs?”

“The harm the old uranium mines have done to the land. I need to show everyone what some of those places
look like. I can try telling them, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Most of the traditionalists are now supporting a move to force the tribe to repair the land before we even consider opening the uranium mines again—which, of course, is what’ll happen if the nuclear power plant becomes a reality.”

“That doesn’t sound irresponsible, but is it realistic? The tribe just doesn’t
have the funds for that, and the companies who caused the damage are no longer in existence.”

“I know, but people have to see we can’t move forward until we settle our debt to the land. Mother Earth cries out to us, and we can’t ignore her. She’s part of us. Changing Woman’s twin sons freed the earth of monsters, but in our carelessness, we brought some back.”

Ella looked at Herman Cloud and
her mother. They were both in their late sixties, and their vision wasn’t as good as it had been once, though neither would ever admit it. This time of year, the sun would set quickly, and the thought of them in an area that had many open mines that were nothing more than unmarked holes in the ground made her uneasy. “Let me go with you guys.”

Rose’s eyes narrowed. “So you can take care of the
old folks? No thank you, daughter. Stay here.”

“Okay, I admit I’m concerned, but I also need to be up on whatever affects the tribe. I’d like to see the damage for myself. I’ve never really been to one of the mines.”

Rose met her daughter’s gaze, then looked at Herman, who shrugged. “All right,” Rose said at last.

Ella offered to drive, and was relieved when Herman accepted and tossed her the
keys to a late-model SUV parked outside. “My son and I traded vehicles—my green pickup for his SUV. I’ve always wanted a Jeep, and he had his eye on my pickup’s souped-up engine.”

It took them nearly two hours to reach an area containing some of the mines in the Carrizo Mountains west of Shiprock. There were few roads—most of the routes to the mines had been recovered by time and the elements,
and piñon and juniper trees dotted the rocky slopes of sedimentary rocks that contained the uranium-bearing ores.

Old drilling sites, with settling ponds now dry but still visible, showed where those searching for uranium had drilled to locate the beds of ore and determine their depths. In some places the wood and rusting metal frameworks of mining machinery stood over the vertical shafts, but
in other places only graying timbers covered the pits.

Whenever they reached a mine or settling pond, or the remnants of machinery used to hoist ore and miners, they climbed out of the SUV and walked around carefully while Rose took photos.

“Here,” Herman said, pointing to a mine face in the side of a sandstone cliff bearing a spray-painted number, now nearly faded away. “This was slated to
be reclaimed—meaning that they were supposed to blast the entrance to the mine shaft and seal it up. But once the company shut down, the money for that ran out and the cleanup crews just drove away. I’ve heard that there are maybe a thousand or more holes in the earth within a twenty-mile radius of here. No one’s really sure how many more there are throughout the reservation. The mining company took
its records with it and, of course, many of the companies are out of business now. Who knows where their records ended up?”

“The land has to be restored—we need to find harmony again,” Rose replied staunchly. They walked to the crest of a low hill, and Rose went a bit farther down the other side, watching a herd of sheep grazing on the contaminated brush growing around the perimeter of a dried-up
settling pond. The ground was nearly yellow in places, and looked ill, if such a thing were possible.

Ella watched her mother. Rose wasn’t afraid, but she was. She’d heard about radiation contamination, and the last thing she wanted was to linger out here. “There should be some warning signs around this area,” Ella said.

“There were at one time, but vandalism and the weather have taken their
toll. I recognize this place. A large uranium tailings pile was buried in the earth here. They’d left it for years out in the open beside a mill, and the winds carried it everywhere, even onto nearby school grounds. When the company was finally forced into doing something, they trucked it up here and buried it. Basically, they just poisoned the earth somewhere else.”

Ella watched Rose as she
sang a brief prayer and offered corn pollen to the four directions. Working together, Ella and Herman helped Rose gather and shape a mound of rocks that would serve as a shrine. Rose then placed a small piece of whiteshell on it, invoking Changing Woman.

In the Navajo Way it was said that the right prayers could invoke and compel a deity to help overcome an evil. But in this case, not even Changing
Woman, who represented the mystery of life springing up from nothing, the deity said to be the last hope of the world, would be able to bless a land so cursed.

Rose shook her head. “Indian grass used to grow here. It fed sheep and people, now there’s only tumbleweeds, snakeweed, and foul earth. The land is tired. Once, our people were able to live off the land. The sheep were healthy and the
grass tall. When we needed something, we would take a sheep from the corral, sell it or trade it for what we needed, or use the sheep itself for wool and meat. As long as our sheep flourished, we were never poor.

“Now, many of the Plant People are gone. The government has divided our land into parcels, and we can’t even graze our livestock the way we were meant to do because the land is apportioned
into grazing districts. These days, we end up fighting each other for the land. And this is what we call progress?” Rose shook her head.

“Worst of all, the
Dineh
are forced to graze sheep in areas like this—where the land is poisoned from the chemicals they brought from the earth.” Herman pursed his lips, pointing Navajo style to the few head of sheep feeding on the slim pickings fifty feet away.
“The animals eat contaminated plants, then the people eat the animals, and eventually we become one with the poison.”

“The circle of life has become the circle of death. We poisoned our Mother Earth. We have to make things right again or we’ll die along with her.”

Rose took another step downhill, when suddenly the earth seemed to shift. Ella lunged forward and pulled her mother away as the earth
parted, revealing an old mine shaft that had been covered by a few inches of dirt blown over the broken-down boards at the top.

Rose, still shaking from the near accident, looked at her daughter as Herman hurried over to help her away. “Now imagine children playing here.”

“I think it’s time we went back,” Ella said, noting that the sun was low on the horizon.

Rose nodded. “I agree. We have
to go now if we’re going to attend tonight’s Chapter House meeting.”

Ella remembered last year when her mother had started a near riot at a meeting. All the way back to Shiprock, she tried to talk her mother into calling it a day, but Rose’s course was set. Once Rose made a decision, she never backed down. If anything, she picked up steam like a freight train and never deviated from the track.
Herman, wisely, said nothing.

Sometime later, Ella parked among the vehicles, mostly pickups, in the gravel parking lot that surrounded a small stucco-and-wood-frame building. The Chapter House was purely functional, and no landscaping other than the surrounding desert was present, unlike most public buildings off the Rez.

People were already gathered by the doors in small groups. She could
spot the traditionalist women based on appearance alone. Many of them wore long pleated skirts and velveteen blouses. Silver-and-turquoise jewelry and concha belts were common. The men, both modernists and traditionalists, tended to dress in Western-style jeans, boots, and flannel shirts. A few of the more traditionalist men wore headbands as well, though cowboy hats were most common.