“Nice,” I said. “Just give me a second.” I fired up the threep’s diagnostic system to find out what was going on. “Great, it’s a Metro Courier.”

“Is that a problem?” Beresford asked.

“The Metro Courier is like the Ford Pinto of threeps.”

“We could try to find you a rental threep if you want,” Beresford said. “I think Enterprise might have some at the airport. It’ll just take forever and you’ll spend your day filling out requisition forms.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. The diagnostic said there was nothing wrong with the threep, which may have meant there was something wrong with the diagnostic. “I’ll walk it out.”

“Come on, then.” Beresford started off again. I followed, limping.

“Agent Chris Shane, Officer Klah Redhouse,” Beresford said, after we reached the lobby, introducing me to a young man in a uniform. “Klah went to Northern Arizona with my son. As it happens he was in Phoenix on tribal business, so you got lucky. It would be a two-hundred-eighty-five-mile walk to Window Rock otherwise.”

“Officer Redhouse,” I said, and held out my hand.

He took it and smiled. “Don’t meet a lot of Hadens,” he said. “Never met one who was an FBI agent before.”

“A first time for everything,” I said.

“You’re limping,” he said.

“Childhood injury,” I said. And then, after a second, “That was a joke.”

“I got that,” he said. “Come on. I’m parked right outside.”

“Be right there,” I said, and then turned to Beresford. “There’s a possibility that I might need this threep for a while.”

“It’s just collecting dust with us,” Beresford said.

“So it won’t be a problem if I keep it in Window Rock for a while,” I asked.

“That’s going to be up to the folks up there,” Beresford said. “Our official policy is to defer to their sovereignty, so if they want you away when you’re done, head to our office in Flagstaff. I’ll let them know you might be on the way. Or get a hotel room. Maybe someone will rent you a broom closet and a plug.”

“Is this a problem?” I asked. “I’m not really versed in the relations between the FBI and the Navajo.”

“We don’t have any problems at the moment,” Beresford said. “We’ve cooperated with them just fine recently, and they have Klah taking you up, which says they don’t have a problem with you. But other than that, who knows. The U.S. government gave the Navajo and a lot of the other Native American nations a whole lot more autonomy a couple of decades back, when it downsized the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service. But that’s also given us an excuse to ignore them and their problems.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Hell, Shane, you might be able to sympathize,” Beresford said. “The U.S. government just pulled the plug on the Hadens, didn’t it? It’s something you folks might say you have in common with the Navajo.”

“I’m not entirely sure I want to be going around making that comparison,” I said.

“That’s probably wise,” Beresford said. “The Navajo have a two-hundred-year head start in the ‘getting screwed by the U.S. government’ category. They might not appreciate you jumping on the train. But now you might understand why some of them might decide to be touchy about you showing up and asking questions. So be polite, be respectful, and go if they tell you to go.”

“Got it.”

“Good,” Beresford said. “Now go on. Klah’s good people. Don’t keep him waiting.”

Chapter Ten

THE RIDE UP to Window Rock took four and a half hours, with Redhouse and me passing the time in innocuous conversation followed by long lapses of silence. Redhouse seemed to enjoy my stories about getting to travel the world with my father and noted that his own travels had been far less extensive.

“I’ve been in the four states the Navajo Nation sits in,” he said. “And the most time that I spent away from it was when I went to Flagstaff for college. Other than that, been nowhere but here.”

“Have you wanted to go anywhere else?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “When you’re a kid all you want to do is be somewhere else.”

“Pretty sure that’s a universal thing,” I said.

“I know,” Redhouse said, and smiled. “And now I don’t mind it so much. I like my family better now that I’m older. Have a fiancée. Have a job.”

“Did you always want to be a police officer?” I asked.

“No,” he said, and smiled again. “I went to college for computer science.”

“That’s kind of a left turn,” I said.

“Just before I went to college the Council decided to invest in a huge server facility outside Window Rock,” Redhouse said. “It would serve the needs of the Navajo and other nations, and then also be used by the surrounding state governments and even the federal government for nonconfidential processing and storage. Solar powered and zero emission. It was going to employ hundreds of Navajo and bring millions of dollars into Window Rock. So when I went to college I studied computing so that I could have a job. The Flagstaff news site even did a story about me and some of my classmates at Northern Arizona. They called us ‘The Silicon Navajos,’ which I didn’t like very much.”

“So what happened?”

“We built the facility and then none of the promised state or federal contracts came in,” Redhouse said. “We were told about budget cuts and reorganizations and changes in agendas and new governors and presidents coming in. We have this state-of-the-art facility now and it’s operating at three percent of capacity. Not so many people got hired to staff it at three percent. So I went to the police academy and became a police officer.”

“Sorry about the switch,” I said.

“It’s not so bad,” Redhouse said. “I had family who were officers before me, so you could say it was a tradition. And I’m doing some good, so that helps. But if I’d known my degree was going to be useless I might have not scheduled so many eight A.M. classes. Did you always want to be an FBI agent?”

“I wanted to be one of those CSI agents,” I said. “Problem for that was my degree is in English.”

“Oof,” Redhouse said. “We’ll see the computer facility as we drive in. You can get a look at what wasted potential looks like.”

An hour later, just south of Window Rock, we rolled by a large, featureless building surrounded on three sides by solar panels.

“I’m guessing that’s it,” I said.

“That’s it,” Redhouse said. “The one positive thing about it is that since we don’t need all the solar capacity we installed, we sell energy to Arizona and New Mexico.”

“At least you’ll make a profit somehow.”

“I wouldn’t call it a profit,” Redhouse said. “It just means running the computer facility bleeds us more slowly than it would otherwise. My mother works for the Council. She says that they’re going to give it a couple more years, tops.”

“What will they do with the building?” I asked.

“That is the question, isn’t it, Agent Shane?” Redhouse said. He sat up, pressed a button on his dash, and took over manual control of the police car. “Now, let’s get you checked in at the station and then we can take you to go see Johnny Sani’s family. My captain is probably going to want to have an officer accompany you. Is that going to be a problem?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Okay, good,” Redhouse said.

“Is it going to be you?” I asked.

Redhouse smiled once more. “Probably.”

*   *   *

Sani’s family lived in a well-kept double-wide in an otherwise less-than-spiff trailer park outside of Sawmill. The family consisted of a grandmother and a sister. Both sat on a couch looking at me, numbly.

“Why would he kill himself?” his sister, Janis, asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

“How did he do it?” asked the grandmother, May.

“Shimasani, you don’t want to know that,” Janis said.

“Yes I do,” May said, forcefully.