Lock In (Lock In, #1)(33)

“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.

I looked over to Redhouse, who was standing next to the chair I was sitting in, holding the glass of tea they had offered him. They offered me one as well. It sat on the table in front of me, between me and Sani’s relatives.

Redhouse nodded at me. “He cut his throat,” I said.

May looked at me balefully but said nothing else. Janis held her grandmother and looked at me, expressionless. I waited for a couple of minutes and then began again.

“Our records show—” I said, and then stopped. “Well, actually, we don’t have any records for John.”

“Johnny,” Janis said.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Johnny. All the records we have for Johnny are from here. From the Navajo Nation. So our first question is why that’s the case.”

“Until last year Johnny never left here,” Janis said.