 Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn are covering separate cases. Chee must find a stolen backhoe, and Leaphorn is looking for an anthropologist accused of stealing pots from a Navajo burial site. However, Leaphorn soon discovers that the anthropolgist is missing, and Chee finds the backhoe at a burial site--along with the dead bodies of two grave robbers. The two men quickly learn that their two cases must somehow be related.