The Shape Shifter by Tony Hillerman Read Free Book Online Page A

to his Asian housekeeper. What are you going to tell him?
    Going to just show him your Coconino deputy sheriff ’s badge and tell him you’re investigating a crime?” Leaphorn shook his head. “I see your point. What’s the crime?”
    “Exactly.” Garcia tested his tea again, looking thoughtful.
    Leaphorn waited.
    “So you’re curious, too?” Garcia asked.
    “Afraid so,” Leaphorn said. “After all these years.” Garcia drained his iced tea, picked up the ticket, put on his hat.
    “Joe,” he said. “Let’s drive out to that old Totter place and look around and have a talk. I’ll explain why I’m still curious, and then you tell me what’s bothering you.”
    “It’s a long drive,” Leaphorn said. “All the way up there past Lukachukai.”
    “Well, it’s a long story, too,” Garcia said. “And a real sad one. Goes all the way back to that crime that put Ray Shewnack on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. And I wouldn’t think you’d be too busy. Being retired.”
    “I’m afraid you’re right,” Leaphorn said, with a rueful chuckle.
    “We’ll burn Coconino County sheriff gasoline,” Garcia said, as they got into his patrol car. “And remember, you’ve got to tell me more about what pulled THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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    you into this. As I recall, all you were doing up there at Totter’s that day was sort of taking orders from the federals.”
    “My story isn’t all that long,” Leaphorn said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand it myself.”

    8
    Garcia swerved off the interstate at Holbrook and roared up Highway 71 past Bidahochi, took 191 to Chinli, and thence along the north rim of Canyon de Chelly to Lukachukai and onward past Round Rock onto the gravel road that wandered between Los Gigante buttes into the empty rough country. Here the Carrizo Mountains ended and became the Lukachukai stem of the Chuska range.
    That represented a three-hour drive, but Garcia made it in less than that. Talking all the way, and sometimes listening to Leaphorn.
    Leaphorn had been doing some listening, too, but mostly he was enjoying his role as passenger—a position that policemen almost never hold. He had wasted a few moments trying to remember the last time he had rolled down a highway without being the driver. Then he concentrated on enjoying the experience, savoring the beauty of the landscape, the pattern of cloud shadows on 54
    TONY HILLERMAN
    the hills—all those details you miss when you’re navigat-ing through traffic—happy to surrender the job of staring at the center stripe, reading road signs, and so forth, to Sergeant Garcia.
    Anyway a lot of what Garcia was telling him was already stored in his memory. It dealt with the old double murder of an elderly couple named Handy at their place of business. It had been so ruthlessly coldhearted that it had put Ray Shewnack right up among the FBI’s blue ribbon Most Wanted felons, advertised in post offices across the nation. But most of what Leaphorn had learned had been just hearsay filtered through police coffee talks. With Garcia he was hearing it right from the horse’s mouth. Or almost. Garcia had been too green to be at the middle of the first chase. But he’d been deeply involved in the cleanup work.
    “Funny thing, Joe. Naturally it seemed downright too evil to believe for me back then. I was just a rookie.
    Hadn’t seen a lot of violent crime.” Garcia shook his head, laughed. “But here I am now. Seen just about everything from incest murders to just-for-fun killings, and it still shocks me when I think about it.”
    “You don’t mean the robbery itself,” Leaphorn said.
    “You mean . . .”
    “Well, not exactly. I mean the coldhearted and clever way Shewnack set it up. The way he used his partners and then betrayed them. Planning things so he could use his friends sort of as bait while he was driving away with all the loot. And that’s why I’ve always thought we should have taken a harder look at the Totter fire.