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Now cut the crap,” she said, “and call the repair techs to fix the machine. You have a problem with your MRI — and that’s all you have.”
    :
    Jimmy Wauneka wanted to be finished with the Traub case as soon as possible. But back in the ER, he saw a plastic bag filled with the old guy’s clothes and personal belongings. There was nothing to do but call ITC again. This time he spoke to another vice president, a Ms. Kramer. Dr. Gordon was in meetings and was unavailable.
    “It’s about Dr. Traub,” he said.
    “Oh yes.” A sad sigh. “Poor Dr. Traub. Such a nice man.”
    “His body was cremated today, but we still have some of his personal effects. I don’t know what you want us to do with them.”
    “Dr. Traub doesn’t have any living relatives,” Ms. Kramer said. “I doubt anybody here would want his clothes, or anything. What effects were you speaking of?”
    “Well, there was a diagram in his pocket. It looks like a church, or maybe a monastery.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Do you know why he would have a diagram of a monastery?”
    “No, I really couldn’t say. To tell the truth, Dr. Traub got a little strange, the last few weeks. He was quite depressed, ever since his wife died. Are you sure it’s a monastery?”
    “No, I’m not. I don’t know what it is. Do you want this diagram back?”
    “If you wouldn’t mind sending it along.”
    “And what about this ceramic thing?”
    “Ceramic thing?”
    “He had a piece of ceramic. It’s about an inch square, and it’s stamped ‘ITC.’ “
    “Oh. Okay. That’s no problem.”
    “I was wondering what that might be.”
    “What that might be? It’s an ID tag.”
    “It doesn’t look like any ID tag I ever saw.”
    “It’s a new kind. We use them here to get through security doors, and so on.”
    “You want that back, too?”
    “If it’s not too much trouble. Tell you what, I’ll give you our FedEx number, and you can just stick it in an envelope and drop it off.”
    Jimmy Wauneka hung up the phone and he thought, Bullshit.
    :
    He called Father Grogan, the priest at his local Catholic parish, and told him about the diagram, and the abbreviation at the bottom: mon.ste.mere.
    “That would be the Monastery of Sainte-Mère,” he said promptly.
    “So it is a monastery?”
    “Oh absolutely.”
    “Where?”
    “I have no idea. It’s not a Spanish name. ‘Mère’ is French for ‘Mother.’ Saint Mother means the Virgin Mary. Perhaps it’s in Louisiana.”
    “How would I locate it?” Wauneka said.
    “I have a listing of monasteries here someplace. Give me an hour or two to dig it up.”
    :
    “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I don’t see any mystery here.”
    Carlos Chavez was the assistant chief of police in Gallup, about to retire from the force, and he had been Jimmy Wauneka’s adviser from the start. Now he was sitting back with his boots up on his desk, listening to Wauneka with a very skeptical look.
    “Well, here’s the thing,” Wauneka said. “They pick up this guy out by Corazón Canyon, demented and raving, but there’s no sunburn, no dehydration, no exposure.”
    “So he was dumped. His family pushed him out of the car.”
    “No. No living family.”
    “Okay, then he drove himself out there.”
    “Nobody saw a car.”
    “Who’s nobody?”
    “The people who picked him up.”
    Chavez sighed. “Did you go out to Corazón Canyon yourself, and look for a car?”
    Wauneka hesitated. “No.”
    “You took somebody’s word for it.”
    “Yes. I guess I did.”
    “You guess? Meaning a car could still be out there.”
    “Maybe. Yeah.”
    “Okay. So what did you do next?”
    “I called his company, ITC.”
    “And they told you what?”
    “They said he was depressed, because his wife had died.”
    “Figures.”
    “I don’t know,” Wauneka said. “Because I called the apartment building where Traub lived. I talked to the building manager. The wife died a year ago.”
    “So this happened close to the anniversary of her death,