“Preliminary investigation indicates that there was an explosive device planted somewhere on the bulldozer, one that was triggered by an electronic detonator.” He took a deep breath, but it did not cover the anger in his voice. He was outraged by this, personally. As well he should be. “It was probably something like a garage-door opener.”

The analytical part of her mind was the first to recover. “Not easy to trace.” She made notes rapidly as things occurred to her. First and foremost, this was a job for the police, not a private investigator.

“True, given that there are several hundred thousand of them in the Tulsa area alone. But that is not what we want you to look into. The police can handle the criminal investigation.” Sleighbow was firm on that, and she appreciated it. She was not a Magnum, P.I. She’d never handled anything worse than a spouse-beater before this, and she really didn’t want to start butting in on police territory now. “That’s their job, and we are willing to let them do it,” he continued. “It’ll be murder charges before this is over, and an insurance company does not need to handle a potato as hot as that. What Romulus wants you to do is to look into who or what is behind this. Is it a conspiracy, and if it is, did the developer try to defraud us by concealing it? Or was this simply an isolated act of a single disgruntled employee? That’s what we want to know. Was there fraud going on; was the developer deliberately misleading us?”

“I can live with that,” she told him, much relieved. “More, that’s something I can do.” It would not be the first fraud case she had handled, although it was certainly the biggest, and potentially the nastiest. “Now, why me? Because I’m Native American and you figure the crew and the protesters will talk to me where they won’t talk to the police?”

To her surprise, Sleighbow chuckled. “That, and because you are by all accounts a very attractive and small woman. Construction workers are less likely to think you’re a threat.”

She answered his chuckle with one of her own. “You’re figuring out all my secrets. But you’re putting me between a rock and a hard place, you know. If I find out there was a conspiracy—”

“That’s all we need to know. We don’t need to know if the conspiracy actually performed the sabotage. I want you to understand that from the beginning.”

“In other words,” she said dryly, “no Nancy Drew.”