Free A Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman

her and took their cleansing sweat bath. He didn’t know—would never know—where they’d left her. In a crevice somewhere, probably. High. Protected by deadwood from the predators. Hidden away. He had stayed for two days of the silent days of mourning. Tradition demanded four days, to give the dead time to complete their journey into the oblivion of death. Two days was all he could stand. He’d left them.
    And her. But no more of this.
    Chee’s pickup was still there. Leaphorn walked to it.
    â€œYa te’eh,” Chee said, acknowledging him.
    â€œYa te,” Leaphorn said. He leaned on the truck door. “What brings you out to the Reverend Slick Nakai’s revival?”
    Chee explained about the backhoe loader, and the abortive chase, and what Tso had told him about where the Backhoe Bandit might be found.
    â€œBut I don’t think he is going to show up tonight,” Chee said. “Getting too late.”
    â€œYou going to go in and ask Nakai who this fellow is?” Leaphorn asked.
    â€œI’m going to do that,” Chee said. “When he’s through preaching and when I get a look at the people coming out of the tent.”
    â€œYou think Nakai would tell you he didn’t know this guy, and then tip him off you’re looking for him?”
    Long silence. “He might,” Chee said. “But I think I’ll risk it.”
    Leaphorn didn’t comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.
    There was no hurry for him either, but he went back into the tent. He’d hear the rest of Nakai’s sermon, and see how much money he took in at his collection. And how many, if any, pots. Leaphorn was thinking that maybe he’d learned a little more than he’d first realized. Something had jogged his memory. The thin Navajo with the guitar was the same man he’d seen helping Maxie Davis at the excavation at Chaco Canyon. That answered one small question. A Christian Navajo wouldn’t be worrying about stirring up the chindi of long-dead Anasazi. But it also made an interesting connection—a man who dug up scientific pots at Chaco worked for a man who sold theoretically legal pots. And a man who sold theoretically legal pots linked to a man who stole a backhoe. Backhoes were machines notoriously useful in uprooting Anasazi ruins and despoiling their graves.
    It was just about then, as he walked out of the darkness into the tent, that he became aware of something in his attitude about all this.
    He felt an urgency now. The disappearance of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had been merely something curious—an oddity. Now he sensed something dangerous. He had never been sure he could find the woman. Now he wondered if she’d be alive if he did.

FIVE
    â€œR EMEMBER, BOY ,” Uncle Frank Sam Nakai would sometimes tell Chee, “when you’re tired of walking up a long hill you think about how easy it’s going to be walking down.” Which was Nakai’s Navajo way of saying things tend to even up. For Chee this proved, as his uncle’s aphorisms often did, to be true. Chee’s bad luck was followed by good luck.
    Early Monday a San Juan County sheriff’s deputy, who happened to have read the paperwork about the stolen flatbed trailer and backhoe, also happened to get more or less lost while trying to deliver a warrant. He turned off on an access road to a Southern Union pump site and found the trailer abandoned. The backhoe apparently had been unloaded, driven about twenty yards on its own power, and then rolled up a makeshift ramp—presumably into the back of a truck. The truck had almost new tires on its dual rear wheels. The tread pattern was used by Dayton Tire and Rubber, with a single dealer in Farmington and none in Shiprock. The dealer had no trouble remembering. The only truck tires he sold for a month had been to Farmington U-Haul. The company