Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (12 page)

ACTING LIEUTENANT JIM CHEE sat on a sandstone slab in the shade of a juniper
awaiting the arrival of Joe Leaphorn, Former Boss, Former Mentor, and, as far
as Chee was concerned, Perpetual Legendary Lieutenant. He admired Leaphorn, he
respected him, he even sort of liked him. But for some reason, an impending
meeting with the man had always made him feel uneasy and incompetent. He'd
thought he'd get over that when Leaphorn was no longer his supervisor. Alas, he
hadn't.

This afternoon he didn't need a Leaphorn conversation to make him feel like
a rookie. He'd learned very little prowling around Yells Back, mostly negative,
reinforcing what he already knew. Jano had hit Ben Kinsman on the head with a
rock. He'd found no trace of blood at the blind where Jano had caught the bird
to suggest that Jano's arm had been slashed by the eagle's talons. Nor had he
turned up any evidence that he was overlooking any possible witnesses to the
crime. He reconsidered what Dr. Woody had told him. Woody had recalled seeing a
car coming from the north as he emerged from the track that led toward Yells
Back Butte. Possibly it had been Kinsman en route to meet his destiny. Possibly
it was the person who had killed Kinsman following him. Or possibly Woody's
memory was faulty, or Woody was lying for some reason Chee couldn't fathom.
Whatever the case, Chee had this uneasy feeling that he was missing something
and that Leaphorn, in his gentle way, would point it out.

Well, now he'd find out. The cloud of dust coming down the road from the
north would be the Legendary Lieutenant. Chee got up, put on his hat, and
walked down the hill to where his patrol car had been baking in the sun beside
the road. The pickup pulled up beside it and two people emerged—Leaphorn and a
stocky woman wearing a straw hat, jeans, and a man's shirt.

"Louisa," Leaphorn said. "This is Lieutenant Chee. I think
you met him in Window Rock. Jim, Professor Bourebonette."

"Yes," Chee said as they shook hands, "it's good to see you
again." But it wasn't. Not now. He just wanted to know why Leaphorn was
looking for him. He didn't want any complications.

"I hope this isn't causing you any inconvenience, Leaphorn said.
"I told Dineyahze we'd just wait there at the station if you were coming
in."

"No problem," Chee said, and stood there waiting for Leaphorn to
get on with it.

"I'm still trying to find Catherine Pollard," Leaphorn said.
"I wondered if you've turned up anything."

"Nothing helpful," Chee said.

"She wasn't here the day Kinsman was attacked?"

"Nope. At least, she wasn't until later in the day," Chee said.
"I don't have to tell you how long it takes to get an ambulance into a
place like this. By the time the criminalistics team got its photographs and
all that, it was late afternoon. But she could have shown up after that."

Leaphorn was waiting for him to add something. But what could he add?

"Oh," Chee said. "Of course, she could have gotten here
earlier."

That seemed to be what Leaphorn wanted him to think. The Legendary
Lieutenant nodded.

"I ran into Cowboy Dashee at Cameron today," Leaphorn said.
"He'd heard I was looking for Pollard. Knew about the reward we were
offering for the Jeep she was driving. He told me a woman who keeps some goats
up here had seen a Jeep going up that old road to the Tijinney place before
sunrise that morning. He asked me to pass it along to you. In case it might be
useful."

"He did?"

Leaphorn nodded. "Yeah. He said you had a tough Orie with this Kinsman
homicide. He said he wished he could help you."

"Jano is his cousin," Chee said. "I think they were childhood
buddies. Cowboy thinks I've got the wrong man. Or so I hear."

"Well, anyway, he thought you might want to talk to the woman. He told
me they call her Old Lady Notah," Leaphorn said.

"Old Lady Notah," Chee said. "I think I saw some of her goats
up there by the butte today. I'll go talk to her."

"Might be wasting your time," Leaphorn said. "Or might not
be," Chee said. He looked back toward the butte. "And, hey," he
added. "Would you tell Cowboy I said thanks?"

"Sure," Leaphorn said.

Chee was still looking away from Leaphorn. "Did Cowboy have any other
tips?"

"Well, he has his own theory of the crime." Chee turned.
"Like what?"

"Like Catherine Pollard did it." Chee frowned, thinking about it.
"Had he worked out the motive? The opportunity? All that?"

"More or less," Leaphorn said. "He has her coming up here on
her vector control job. She runs into Kinsman, he makes a move on her. She
resists. They struggle. She bangs him on the head and flees the scene."
Leaphorn gave Chee a while to consider that. Then he said: "But then why
didn't you see her driving out while you were driving in?"

"That's what I was thinking. And if she's on the run, why did her
family—" He stopped, looking abashed.

Leaphorn grinned. "If Cowboy is guessing right, the family hired me to
look for her thinking that would make it look like she'd been abducted. Or
killed or something like that."

"That doesn't make sense," Chee said. "Well, it sort of does,
actually," Leaphorn said. "The lady who hired me struck me as a
mighty shrewd woman. I told her I didn't see how I could be of any help. She
didn't seem to care."

Chee nodded. "Yeah, I guess so. I can see it."

"Except how did she get the Jeep out of here? The TV commercials make
them look like they can drive up cliffs, but they can't."

"There's a way, though," Chee said. "There's another way in
here if you don't mind doing a little scrambling. An old trail comes up the
other side of Yells Back toward Black Mesa. I think the lady with the goats
might use it. You could drive the Jeep up there, park it, climb over the
saddle, do your deed, and then climb back over the saddle and drive out on the
goat path."

Chee stopped. "There's trouble with that, though."

"You mean she wouldn't do that unless she knew in advance that she was
going to need an escape route?"

"Exactly," Chee said. "How could she have known that?"

Louisa had been listening, looking thoughtful. Now she said: "Do you
professionals object if an amateur butts in?"

"Be our guest," Leaphorn said.

"I find myself wondering just why Pollard was coming up here
anyway," Louisa said. She looked at Leaphorn. "Didn't you tell me she
was looking for the place where Nez was infected? Where the flea bit him?"

"Right," Leaphorn said, looking puzzled.

"And isn't the period between infection and death—I mean in cases where
treatment doesn't effect a cure—doesn't that range just a couple of
weeks?" Louisa made one of those modifying gestures with her hands.
"I mean, usually. Statistically. Often enough so that when vector control
people are looking for the source, they're looking for places the victim had
been during that period. And what Miss Pollard was writing in her notes
suggested that she was always trying to find out where the victim was in that period
before their death."

"Ah," Leaphorn said. "I see."

Chee, whose interest in plague and vector control people who hunted it
extended back only a few minutes, had little idea what any of this was about.

He said: "You mean she knew Nez couldn't have been around Yells Back in
that time frame? How would—?"

"Pollard's notes show where he was. They show—" She stopped in
midsentence. "Just a minute. I don't want to be wrong about this. The
book's in the car."

She found it on the dashboard, extracted it, leaned against the fender, and
flipped through the pages.

"Here," she said. "Under her Anderson Nez heading. It shows
that he was visiting his brother in Encino, California. He came home to his
mother's hogan four miles southwest of Copper Mine Trading Post on June
twenty-third. The next afternoon, he left to go to his job with Woody near
Goldtooth."

"June twenty-fourth?" Leaphorn said thoughtfully.
"Right?"

"And six days later he dies in the hospital at Flag." She checked
back in the notes. "Actually more like five days. Pollard says in here
somewhere he died just after midnight."

"Wow," Leaphorn said. "Are we sure he died of plague?"

"Slow down," Jim Chee said. "Explain this date business to
me."

Louisa shook her head, looking doubtful. "I guess the point is that
Pollard knows a lot more about plague than we do. So she would have known that
Nez didn't get his infected flea up here. Plague doesn't kill that fast. So she
didn't have any reason to come up here flea hunting when she did."

"That's the question," Leaphorn said. "If that wasn't her
reason, what was? Or did she tell Krause she was coming, and not come? Or did
Krause lie about it?"

Louisa was reading from another section of the notebook. She held up her
hand.

"Pollard must have been thinking something was funny. She went back out
to the Nez place near Copper Mine Mesa. Rechecking.

"'Mom says Nez dug pestholes, stretched sheep fencing to expand pens.
Family dogs wearing flea collars and sans fleas. No cats. No prairie dog towns
in vicinity. No history of rats or rat sign found. Nez drove to Page with
mother, buying groceries. No headache. No fever.'" She closed the
notebook, shrugged.

"That's it?" Chee asked.

"There's a marginal note for her to check sources at Encino,"
Louisa said. "I guess to see if he was sick when he was there." Chee
said, "But she told her boss she was coming up to Yells Back to check for
fleas here. Or at least he says she did. I think I've met that guy." He
looked at Leaphorn. "Big, raw-boned guy named Krause?"

"That's him."

"What else did she tell him?"

"Krause said she came by early that day before he got to work. He
didn't see her. She just left him a note," Leaphorn said. "I didn't
see it, but Krause said that she just reported she was going up to Yells Back to
collect fleas."

"By the way," Chee asked, "with Pollard missing, as well as
the Jeep she was driving, how did you get her notebook?"

"I guess we should call it a journal," Leaphorn said. "It was
with a folder full of stuff her aunt's lawyer collected from her motel room in
Tuba. It looks like she took the notes she jotted down in the field and
converted them into sort of a report when she got home with her comments."

"Like a diary?" Chee asked.

"Not really," Leaphorn said. "There's nothing very personal or
private in it."

"That was the last entry about Nez?" Chee asked. "No,"
Louisa said. She flipped back through the pages. "'July 6. Krause says he
heard Dr. Woody checked Nez into the hospital. Krause not answering his
telephone. Will get to Flag manana and see what I can learn.' "'July 7.
Can't believe what I heard at Flag today. Somebody is lying. Yells Back Butte
manana, collect fleas, find out.'"

Louisa shut the notebook. "That's it. The final entry."

"IT'S FUNNY," LEAPHORN SAID, "how you can look at something a
half dozen times and not see it."

Louisa waited for him to explain that, decided he didn't intend to and said,
"Like what?"

"Like what Catherine Pollard wrote in that journal," Leaphorn
said. "I should have noticed the pattern. The incubation period of that
bacteria. I should have wondered why she would be coming up here."

They were jolting up the rocky tracks that had once given the Tijinney
family access to the world outside the shadow of Yells Back Butte and Black
Mesa. Over Black Mesa afternoon clouds were forming, hinting that the rainy
season might finally begin.

"How?" Louisa said. "Did you know when Mr. Nez died?"

"I could have found out," Leaphorn said. "That would have
been as easy as making a telephone call."

"Oh, knock it off," Louisa said. "I've noticed males have
this practice of entertaining themselves with self-flagellation.
Mea culpa,
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
. We females find that habit tiresome."

Leaphorn considered that awhile. Grinned.

"You mean like Jim Chee blaming himself for not getting up here quick
enough to keep Kinsman from getting himself hit on the head."

"Exactly."

"Okay," Leaphorn said. "You're right. I guess I couldn't have
known."

"On the other hand, you shouldn't get too complacent," Louisa
said. "I hope you noticed that I figured it out pretty quick."

He laughed. "I noticed it. It took me a while to deal with that. Then
two thoughts occurred. You could translate Pollard's scribbles and I couldn't,
and you were paying attention while Professor Perez was educating us about
pathogenic bacteria last night and I was just sitting there letting my mind
wander. I decided that you just have a much higher tolerance for boredom than I
do."

"Academics have to be boredom-invulnerable, Louisa said.
"Otherwise we'd walk out of faculty meetings, and if you do that, you
don't get tenure. You have to go get real jobs."
Jim
Leaphorn shifted into second and
followed the established tire tracks through the arroyo where Chee had left his
car that fatal day. They ran out of old tracks on the little hump of high
ground that overlooked on what was left of the old Tijinney place. Leaphorn
stopped and turned off the ignition, and they sat looking down on the abandoned
homestead.

"Mr. Chee said Woody had his van parked over closer to the butte,"
Louisa said. "Over there where all those junipers are growing by the
arroyo."

"I remember," Leaphorn said. "I just wanted to take a
look." He waved at the ruined hogan, its door missing, its roof fallen,
its north wall tumbled. Beyond it stood the remains of a brush arbor, a sheep
pen formed of stacked stones, two stone pylons that once would have supported
timbers on which water storage barrels had rested. "Sad," he said.

"Some people would call it picturesque."

"People who don't understand how much work went into building all that.
And trying to make a living here."

"I know," Louisa said. "I was a farm girl myself. Lots of
work, but Iowa had rich black dirt. And enough rain. And indoor plumbing.
Electricity. All that."

"Old Man McGinnis told me kids had vandalized this place. It looks like
it."

"Not Navajo kids, I'll bet," she said. "Isn't it a death
hogan?"

"I think the old lady died in it," Leaphorn said. "You notice
the north wall's partly knocked down."

"The traditional way to take out the body, isn't it? North, the
direction of evil." Leaphorn nodded. "But McGinnis was complaining
that a lot of young Navajos, not just the city ones, don't respect the old ways
these days. They ignore the taboos, if they ever heard of them. He thinks some
of them tore into this place, looking for stuff they could sell. He said they
even dug this deep hole where the fire pit was. Apparently they thought
something valuable was buried there."

Louisa shook her head. "I wouldn't think there would be anything very
valuable left in that hogan. And I don't see any sign of a big deep hole."

Leaphorn chuckled. "I don't either. But then McGinnis never certifies
the accuracy. He just passes along the gossip. And as for the value, he said
they were looking for ceremonial stuff. When that hogan was built, the owner
probably had a place in the wall beside the door where he kept his medicine
bundle. Minerals from the sacred mountains. That sort of thing. Some collectors
will pay big money for some of that material, and the older it is the
better."

"I guess so," Louisa said. "Collecting antiques is not my
thing."

Leaphorn smiled at her. "You collect everybody's antique stories. Even
ours. That's how I met you, remember. One of your sources was in jail."

"Collect them and preserve them," she said. "Remember when
you were telling me about how First Man and First Woman found the baby White
Shell Girl on Huerfano Mesa and you had it all wrong?"

"I had it exactly right," Leaphorn said. "That's the version we
hold to in my Red Forehead Clan. That makes it correct. The other clans have it
wrong. And you know what, I'm going to take a closer look at that hogan. Let's
see if McGinnis knew what he was talking about."

She walked down the slope with him. There was nothing left of the hogan
building but the circle of stacked stone that formed a wall around the
hard-packed earth of the floor, and the ponderosa poles and shreds of tar paper
that had formed its collapsed roof.

"There was a hole there once," Louisa said. "Mostly filled
in, though."

They were in cloud shadow now, and the thunderhead over the mesa made a
rumbling noise. They climbed the slope back to the truck.

"I wonder what they found?"

"In the hole?" Leaphorn said. "I'd guess nothing. I never
heard of a Navajo burying anything under his hogan fire pit. But of course
McGinnis had an answer for that. He said Old Man Tijinney was a silversmith.
Had a lard bucket full of silver dollars."

"Sounds more logical than ceremonial things."

Louisa said.

"Until you ask why bury a bucket when there's a million places you
could hide it. And hoarding wealth isn't part of the Navajo Way anyway.
There're always kin-folks who need it."

She laughed. "You tell McGinnis that?"

"Yeah, and he said, 'You're supposed to be the goddamn detective. You
figure it out.' So I figured out there wasn't any bucket. You notice I never
came up here with my pick and shovel to check it out."

"I don't know," she said. "You're the tidiest man I ever knew.
Just the kind of looter who'd push the dirt back in the hole."

They found Dr. Albert Woody's van just where Chee had said it would be.
Woody was standing in the doorway watching them park. To Leaphorn's surprise,
he looked delighted to see them.

"Two visitors on the same day," he said as they got out of the
truck. "I've never been this popular."

"We won't take much of your time," Leaphorn said. "This is
Dr. Louisa Bourebonette, I'm Joe Leaphorn and I presume you must be Dr. Albert
Woody."

"Exactly," Woody said. "And glad to meet you. What can I do
for you?"

"We're trying to locate a woman named Catherine Pollard. She's a vector
control specialist with the Arizona Health Department, and—"

"Oh, yes," Woody said. "I met her over near Red Lake some
time ago. She was looking for sick rodents and infected fleas. Looking for the
source of a plague case. In a way we're in the same line of work."

He looked very excited, Leaphorn thought. Wired. Ready to burst. As if he
were high on amphetamines.

"Have you seen her around here?"

"No," Woody said. "Just over at the Thriftway station. We
were both buying gasoline. She noticed my van and introduced herself."

"She's working out of that temporary laboratory in Tuba City,"
Leaphorn said. "On the morning of July eighth she left a note for her boss
saying she was coming up here to collect rodents."

"There was a Navajo Tribal policeman up here talking to me this
morning," Woody said. "He asked me about her, too. Come in and let me
give you something cold to drink."

"We didn't intend to take a lot of your time."

Leaphorn said.

"Come in. Come in. I've just had something great happen. I need
somebody to tell it to. And Dr. Bourebonette, what is your specialty?"

"I'm not a physician," Louisa said. "I'm a cultural
anthropologist at Northern Arizona University. I believe you know Dr. Perez
there."

"Perez?" Woody said. "Oh, yes. In the lab. He's done some
work for me."

"He's a great fan of yours," Louisa said. "In fact, you're
his nominee for the next Nobel Prize in medicine." Woody laughed.
"Only if I'm guessing right about the internal working of rodents. And
only if somebody in the National Center for Emerging Viruses doesn't get it
first. But I'm forgetting my manners. Come in. Come in. I want to show you
something."

Woody was twisting his hands together, grinning broadly, as they went past
him through the doorway.

It was almost cold inside, the air damp and clammy and smelling of animals,
formaldehyde, and an array of other chemicals that linger forever in memory.
The sound was another mixture—the motor of the air-conditioner engine on the
roof, the whir of fans, the scrabbling feet of rodents locked away somewhere
out of sight. Woody seated Louisa in a swivel chair near his desk, motioned
Leaphorn to a stool beside a white plastic working surface, and leaned his lanky
body against the door of what Leaphorn presumed was a floor-to-ceiling
refrigerator.

"I've got some good news to share with Dr. Perez," he said.
"You can tell him we've found the key to the dragon's cave."

Leaphorn shifted his gaze from Woody to Louisa. Obviously she didn't
understand that any better than he did.

"Will he know what that means?" she asked. "He understands
you're hunting for a solution to drug-resistant pathogens. Do you mean you've
found it?"

Woody looked slightly abashed.

"Something to drink," he said, "and then I'll try to explain
myself." He opened the refrigerator door, fished out an ice bucket,
extracted three stainless steel cups from an overhead cabinet and a squat brown
bottle, which he displayed. "I only have scotch."

Louisa nodded. Leaphorn said he'd settle for water.

Woody talked while he fixed their drinks.

"Bacteria, like about everything alive, split themselves into genera.
Call it families. Here we're dealing with the
Enterobacteriaceae
family. One branch of that is
Pasteurellaceae
, and a branch of that is
Yersinia pestis
—the organism that causes bubonic plague. Another
branch is
Neisseria gonorrhoeae
, which causes the famous venereal disease.
These days, gonorrhea is hard to treat because—Woody paused, sipping his
scotch.

"Wait," he said. "Let me skip back a little. Some of these
bacteria, gonorrhea for example, contain a little plasmid with a gene in it
that codes for the formation of an enzyme that destroys penicillin. That means
you can'ttreat the disease with any of those penicillin drugs. You see?"

"Sure," Louisa said. "Remember, I'm a friend of Professor
Perez. I get a lot of this sort of information."

"We now understand that DNA can be transferred between bacteria—especially
between bacteria in the same family."

"Kissing cousins," Louisa said. "Like incest."

"Well, I guess," Woody said. "I hadn't thought of it like
that."

Leaphorn had been sampling his ice water, which had the ice cube flavor plus
staleness, plus an odd taste that matched the aroma of the van's air supply. He
put down the glass.

Leaphorn had been doing some reading. He said: "I guess we're talking
about a mixture of plague and gonorrhea—which would make the plague microbe
resistant to tetracycline and chloramphenicol. Is that about right?"

"About right," Woody said. "And possibly several other
antibiotic formulations. But that's not the point. That's not what's
important."

"It sounds important to me," Louisa said. "Well, yes. It
makes it terribly lethal if one is infected. But what we have here is still a
blood-to-blood transmission. It requires a vector—such as a flea—to spread it
from one mammal to another. If this evolution converted it directly into an
aerobic form—a pneumonic Plague spread by coughing or just breathing the same
air we'd have cause for panic."

"No panic then?" Woody laughed. "Actually, the epidemic
trackers might even be happier with this form. If a disease kills its victims
fast enough, they don't have time to spread it."

Louisa's expression suggested she took no cheer from this. "What is
important then?"

Woody opened the door of a bottom cabinet, extracted a wire cage, and
displayed it. A tag with the name CHARLEY printed on it was tied to the wire.
Inside was a plump brown prairie dog, apparently dead.

"Charley, this fellow here, and his kith and kin in the prairie dog
town where I trapped him, are full of plague bacteria—both the old form and the
new. Yet he's alive and well, and so are his relatives."

"He looks dead," Louisa said.

"He's asleep," Woody said. "I took some blood and tissue
samples. He's still recovering from the chloroform."

"There's more to it than this," Leaphorn said. "You've known
for years that when the plague sweeps through it leaves behind a few towns
where the bacteria doesn't kill the animals. Host colonies. Or plague
reservoirs. Isn't that what they're called?"

"Exactly," Woody said. "And we've studied them for years
without finding out what happens in the one prairie dog's immune system to keep
it alive while a million others are dying." He stopped, sipped scotch,
watched them over the rim of his glass, eyes intense.

"Now we have the key." He tapped the cage with his finger.
"We inject this fellow's blood into a mammal that has resisted the
standard infection and study the immune reaction. We inject it into a normal
mammal and make the same study. See what's happening to white blood cell production,
cell walls, so forth. All sorts of new possibilities are open."