Sacred Clowns by Tony Hillerman Page B

physical evidence tied to him. All that stolen stuff. Now it seems as if we have another witness who must have seen something incriminating.” He turned and looked at Chee. “The trouble is, I was thinking we had the wrong man.”
    “Why?”
    Leaphorn shook his head, laughed. “Be damned if I know why. I used to think I was logical. Usually I am. It’s just that this Ahkeah seemed wrong for it.” He walked around behind the desk, rummaged in the drawer, and took out a box of pins. “Ever have that happen to you? Your brain tells you one thing. Your instinct another.”
    “Sure,” Chee said. “I guess so.”
    “And which one is right?” In the map on the wall behind his desk he put a pin at Tano Pueblo, and another between Crownpoint and Thoreau, about where Kanitewa had stayed with his father. Chee noticed they had pink heads, the same color as the pins already stuck in the map at Thoreau, and at the place in Coyote Canyon where Ahkeah’s family lived. Leaphorn dropped the surplus pins back into the box. “Did you ever wonder why I fool with those pins?”
    “Yeah,” Chee said. He’d heard of Leaphorn’s pin-littered map ever since he’d joined the force. Captain Largo, his boss when he worked the Tuba City district, told him Leaphorn used them to work out mathematical solutions to crimes that puzzled him. Largo couldn’t explain how that worked. Neither could Chee.
    “I don’t know myself, exactly,” Leaphorn said. “I got into the habit years ago. It seems like sometimes it helps me think. It puts things in perspective.” He tapped the pin at Tano with a finger. “For example, we seem to have a connection now between two crimes. Or do we? About seventy miles apart on the map. Does the Kanitewa boy connect them? It sure as hell looks like it now.”
    “It does to me. I’d bet a year’s pay on it,” Chee said.
    Leaphorn made a tent of his hands and looked at Chee over it. “Why?” he asked. “Why are you so certain?”
    “Because—”
    The telephone on Leaphorn’s desk interrupted him. Leaphorn picked it up, said, “Call me back in ten minutes,” and hung up.
    He looked at Chee, motioned for him to continue.
    “Because of the package, mostly,” Chee said. “Because of the chronology.”
    Leaphorn nodded. “Yes. I think so too. But what was in that package?” He was asking both of them the question. He looked at Chee. “Any ideas?”
    “None,” Chee said. “Except Kanitewa must have thought it was in some way connected with his religion. That’s what he told Blizzard. And he took it to his uncle. To the koshare. We know that. And we think we know that he picked it up in Eric Dorsey’s shop.”
    Leaphorn swiveled in his chair, looked at the map a moment and then back at Chee.
    “The way your report reads, Kanitewa’s dad was driving in to Gallup. The boy had his dad drop him off at Thoreau because Bluehorse had been making a silver bracelet in Dorsey’s class. Bluehorse wanted to give it to his girlfriend that night and he’d asked Kanitewa to pick it up for him. We don’t know when his dad dropped him off. Probably midmorning and probably it doesn’t matter. The next thing we have an approximate time on is when Kanitewa called Bluehorse and asked him to come and get him. That was late in the noon hour because Bluehorse remembers he’d just finished eating lunch. Am I getting this right?”
    “So far,” Chee said.
    “Kanitewa told Bluehorse he was calling from the pay phone out in front of the mission. He said he had Bluehorse’s bracelet, he couldn’t wait for his dad to come back from Gallup, and could Bluehorse come and get him. Pick him up, but not at the mission but at that little place by the highway where they rent videotapes. Kanitewa was very excited. It was very important. Don’t let me down, friend. That sort of thing. So Bluehorse borrowed his mother’s pickup truck and drove over to Thoreau and pulled up at the video place. But Kanitewa wasn’t just