Timeline Read Free Page B

Doe.”
    “And?”
    “Nothing helpful. No wallet, no credit cards, no keys. The only thing he had on him was this.” She gave Beverly a folded piece of paper. It looked like a computer printout, and showed an odd pattern of dots in a gridlike pattern. At the bottom was written “mon. ste. mere.”
    “ ‘Monstemere?’ Does that mean anything to you?”
    Hood shook her head. “You ask me, he’s psychotic.”
    Beverly Tsosie said, “Well, I can’t sedate him until we know what’s going on in his head. Better get skull films to rule out trauma and hematoma.”
    “Radiology’s being remodeled, remember, Bev? X rays’ll take forever. Why don’t you do an MRI? Scan total body, you have it all.”
    “Order it,” Tsosie said.
    Nancy Hood turned to leave. “Oh, and surprise, surprise. Jimmy is here, from the police.”
    :
    Dan Baker was restless. Just as he predicted, they’d had to spend hours sitting around the waiting room of McKinley Hospital. After they got lunch — burritos in red chile sauce — they had come back to see a policeman in the parking lot, looking over their car, running his hand along the side door panel. Just seeing him gave Baker a chill. He thought of going over to the cop but decided not to. Instead, they returned to the waiting room. He called his daughter and said they’d be late; in fact, they might not even get to Phoenix until tomorrow.
    And they waited. Finally, around four o’clock, when Baker went to the desk to inquire about the old man, the woman said, “Are you a relative?”
    “No, but—”
    “Then please wait over there. Doctor will be with you shortly.”
    He went back and sat down, sighing. He got up again, walked over to the window, and looked at his car. The cop had gone, but now there was a fluttering tag under the windshield wiper. Baker drummed his fingers on the windowsill. These little towns, you get in trouble, anything could happen. And the longer he waited, the more his mind spun scenarios. The old guy was in a coma; they couldn’t leave town until he woke up. The old guy died; they were charged with manslaughter. They weren’t charged, but they had to appear at the inquest, in four days.
    When somebody finally came to talk to them, it wasn’t the petite doctor, it was the cop. He was a young policeman in his twenties, in a neatly pressed uniform. He had long hair, and his nametag said JAMES WAUNEKA. Baker wondered what kind of a name that was. Hopi or Navajo, probably.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Baker?” Wauneka was very polite, introduced himself. “I’ve just been with the doctor. She’s finished her examination, and the MRI results are back. There’s absolutely no evidence he was struck by a car. And I looked at your car myself. No sign of any impact. I think you may have hit a pothole and just thought you hit him. Road’s pretty bad out there.”
    Baker glared at his wife, who refused to meet his eye. Liz said, “Is he going to be all right?”
    “Looks like it, yes.”
    “Then we can go?” Baker said.
    “Honey,” Liz said, “don’t you want to give him that thing you found?”
    “Oh, yes.” Baker brought out the little ceramic square. “I found this, near where he was.”
    The cop turned the ceramic over in his hands. “ITC,” he said, reading the stamp on the side. “Where exactly did you find this?”
    “About thirty yards from the road. I thought he might have been in a car that went off the road, so I checked. But there was no car.”
    “Anything else?”
    “No. That’s all.”
    “Well, thanks,” Wauneka said, slipping the ceramic in his pocket. And then he paused. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it carefully. “We found this in his clothing. I wondered if you had ever seen it.”
     
    Baker glanced at the paper: a bunch of dots arranged in grids. “No,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
    “You didn’t give it to him?”
    “No.”
    “Any idea what it might