While assisting Sergeant Jim Chee in investigating a robbery, Joe Leaphorn turns up a clue that leads to a search for the remains of a passenger--carrying a fortune in diamonds--on a plane that went down in the Grand Canyon fifty years earlier.

When the roar of a low-flying plane awakens him in the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes knows something strange is happening at the nearby airfield on the coast of North Carolina. But nothing can prepare him for what he finds: a large airplane has crash-landed and is now sitting sideways on the runway, and there are no signs of a pilot or cargo. When the body of a local man is discovered-shot dead and lying on the grass near the crash site-Winston...