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few good gags with his buddies at the station. Sure, that made plenty of sense! He could envision it
clearly: the paleface sucker from Florida somberly questioning other Navahos about sandpaintings and
medicine men. He smiled to himself. Ooljee was good, and bis guest had nearly bought it. Nearly.
Well, two could play. Moody would smile and nod and appear to take it all seriously, and when the time
came, he'd be the one to deliver the punch lines. Ooljee was a good guy and a good cop. He was only
having a little fun.
Just as Moody had it all figured, the sergeant threw him a big, fat, sweeping curve.
"I have been devoting some time and thought to die matter of a motive."
"You ain't been the only one, brother."
"The sandpainting is the obvious solution. What we do not know is the question. I think whoever wanted
it, or a copy of it, needed it for a particular reason, and not to complete a collection. It may be that this
particular sand-painting was used against the murderer in the past, or against his family, or a close friend.
Or it may have been employed against a stranger who hired die murderer.
"By destroying it according to tradition he may have been removing the threat it presented to someone.
You would call it an exorcism."
Lordy, mused Moody. Just when common sense had been reasserting its good ol' self.
"If this guy can electrocute people by an as yet undetermined method, why the hell would he need to
trash a bunch of colored sand? You ain't trying to tell me we're dealing with something like voodoo, are
you?"
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"It provides a rationale for a seemingly irrational act," Ooljee argued. "The underlying principle is the
same. To affect another, they need only believe they can be affected.''
"This is starting to affect me," Moody grumbled.
"It does offer us a motive."
Moody eyed him sharply. "You don't really believe in any of this scrim, do you?"
The sergeant sidestepped the question. "What matters is that someone else may. People who believe are
people capable of anything."
"So we're back where we started," Moody murmured. "The guy's a nut."
"People have killed for stranger reasons: because their god or their devil told them to, or simply because
they didn't like the cast of another man' s eyes, or the tone of his voice.''
Moody couldn't argue with that. He'd seen it happen too often on Tampa's mean streets.
"It does not matter," Ooljee went on, "that we are dealing only with a pile of colored sand and pulverized
masonite. What is significant is that whoever did the damage may believe that the sandpainting had real
power. It gives us a new line to pursue. There are ways of checking such things. Not as thoroughly or
efficiently as I would like, but we can make a beginning."
"Right." Moody relaxed a little. It was a relief to find out that Ooljee had had a serious goal from the
start.
Beyond the fact that Ganado served as the commercial center of a major high-tech manufacturing area,
Moody knew nothing about the city. As they drew within sight of the first towers, however, he knew he
was going to have to discard many of his preconceptions.
Fanciful spires rose from massive office blocks that had seemingly been integrated elsewhere and then
laid down intact atop the high desert plateau. Not one of the buildings could properly be called old, every
one of them having been erected within the last century. Patterned after the rugged buttes and monuments
he'd seen from the air, the structures appeared a part of the landscape, as though escarpments and mesas
had been hollowed out and overlaid with glass and plexan and composites. Climate-controlled pedways
connected the major buildings above street level, soaring arteries of spun composite and metallic glass.
Downtown, the tall buildings shut out the sun. New construction was going up everywhere. Moody was
assaulted by advertisements in a dozen languages. He might as well have been in Manhattan. Only the
buildings themselves hewed to a smaller scale.
The peculiar squiggles and curves on many signs which he thought comprised some unknown Middle
Eastern language were in fact, according to Ooljee, components of written Navaho.
"Until the early part of the twentieth century there was no such thing as written Navaho.'' The sergeant
eased their truck around a slow delivery van. "It may look confusing, but writing it is nothing compared to
trying to learn the grammar. And you should see what Hopi looks like!" He uttered a nasal melange of
consonants and gutturals.
"For something so difficult to write, it sounds beautiful. It is much like singing. The Chinese understand."
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