Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (10 page)

Leaphorn turned the cup in his hand, considering this. No reason to ask
Dashee how he knew this. Cop gossip travels fast.

Dashee was watching him, looking anxious. "What do you think?" he
said. "Kinsman has a reputation as a woman-chaser. He's attracted and now
he's angry, too. Or maybe he thinks she'll file a complaint and get him
suspended." He shrugged. "They struggle. She whacks him on the head
with a rock. Then she hears Jano coming and flees the scene. Does that sound
plausible?"

"A lot would depend on whether you have a witness who would testify
they saw her there. Do you? I mean, beyond that being where she told her boss
she'd be working that day?"

"I got it from Old Lady Notah. She keeps a bunch of goats up there. She
remembers seeing a Jeep driving up that dirt road past the butte about daylight
that morning. I understand Pollard was driving a Jeep." Dashee looked
slightly abashed. "Just circumstantial evidence. She couldn't identify the
driver. Not even the gender."

"Still, it was probably Pollard," Leaphorn said. "And I
understand the Jeep is still missing. And so is Pollard."

"Right again."

"And you've been offering a thousand-dollar reward for anyone who can find
it."

"True," Leaphorn said. "But if Pollard did it, and Pollard
was fleeing the scene, why didn't Chee see her? Remember, he got there just a few
minutes after it happened. Kinsman's blood was still fresh. There's just that
one narrow dirt road into there, and Chee was driving up it. Why didn't
he—"

Dashee held up his hand. "I don't know, and neither do you. But don't
you think it could have happened?" Leaphorn nodded. "Possibly."

"I don't want to get out of line with this, or sound offensive, but let
me add something else to my theory of the crime. Let's say that Pollard got out
of there, got to a telephone, called somebody and told them her troubles and
asked for help. Let's say whoever it was told her where to hide and they'd
cover her trail for her."

Leaphorn asked; "Like who and how?" But he knew the answer.

"Who? I'd say somebody in her family. Probably her daddy, I'd say. How?
By giving the impression that she's been abducted. Been murdered."

"And they do that by hiring a retired policeman to go looking for
her," Leaphorn said.

"Somebody respected by all the cops," Dashee said.

THE ROCK UPON WHICH CHEE had so carelessly put his weight tumbled down the
slope, bounced into space, struck an obtruding ledge, touched off a clattering
avalanche of stone and dirt and disappeared amid the weeds far below. Chee
shifted his body carefully to his right, exhaled a huge breath and stood for a
moment, leaning against the cliff and letting his heartbeat slow a little. He
was just below the tabletop of Yells Back Butte, high on the saddle that connected
it with Black Mesa. It wasn't a difficult climb for a young man in Chee's
excellent physical shape, and not particularly dangerous if one kept focused on
what he was doing. Chee hadn't. He'd been thinking of Janet Pete, facing the
fact that he was wasting his day off just because she'd implied he hadn't done
a proper job of checking the Kinsman crime scene.

Now, with both feet firmly placed and his shoulder leaning into the cliff
wall, he looked down at where the boulder had made its plunge and thought about
that chronic problem of the Navajo Tribal Police—lack of backup. Had he not
caught himself, he'd be down there in the weeds with broken bones and multiple
abrasions and about sixty miles from help. He was thinking of that as he
scrambled up the last fifty feet of talus and crawled over the rim. Kinsman
would be alive if he hadn't been alone. The story was the same for the two
officers killed in the Kayenta district. A huge territory, never enough
officers for backup, never enough budget for efficient communications, never
what you needed to get the job done. Maybe Janet had been right. He'd take the
FBI examination, or accept the offer he'd had from the BIA law-and-order
people. Or maybe, if all else failed, consider signing on with the Drug
Enforcement Agency.

But now, standing on the flat stone roof of Yells Back Butte, he looked
westward and saw the immense sky, the line of thunderheads building over the
Coconino Rim, the sunlight reflecting off the Vermillion Cliffs below the Utah
border, and the towering cauliflower shape of the storm already delivering a
rain blessing upon the San Francisco Peaks, the Sacred Mountain marking the
western margin of his people's holy land. Chee closed his eyes against that,
remembering Janet's beauty, her wit, her intelligence. But other memories
crowded in: the dreary skies of Washington, the swarms of young men entombed in
three-piece suits and subdued by whatever neckties today's fashion demanded;
remembering the clamor, the sirens, the smell of the traffic, the layers upon
layers of social phoniness. A faint breeze stirred Chee's hair and brought him
the smell of juniper and sage, and a chittering sound from far overhead that
reminded him of why he was here.

At first glance he thought the raptor was a red-tailed hawk, but when it
banked to repeat its inspection of this intruder Chee saw it was a golden
eagle. It was the fourth one he'd seen today—a good year for eagles and a good
place to find them—patrolling the mesa rim-rock where rodents flourished. He
watched this one circle, gray-white against the dark blue sky, until it
satisfied its curiosity and drifted eastward over Black Mesa. When it turned,
he noticed a gap in its fan of tail feathers. Probably an old one. Tail
feathers aren't lost to molting.

Even with Janet's directions, it took Chee half an hour to find Jano's
blind. The Hopi had roofed a crack in the butte's rimrock with a network of
dead sage branches and covered that with foliage cut from nearby brush. Much of
that was broken and scattered now. Chee climbed into the crack, squatted, and
examined the place, reconstructing Jano's strategy.

He would have first assured himself that the eagle he wanted routinely
patrolled this place. He would have probably come in the evening to prepare his
blind—or more likely to repair one members of his kiva had been using for
centuries. If he'd changed anything noticeable, he would have waited a few days
until the eagle had become accustomed to this variation in his landscape. That
done, Jano would have returned early on the morning he was fated to kill Ben
Kinsman. He would have brought a rabbit with him, tied a cord to the rabbit's
leg and put it atop the blind's roof. Then he would have waited, watching
through the cracks for the eagle to appear. Since the eyes of raptors detect
motion far better than any radar, he would have made sure the rabbit moved when
the proper moment came. When the eagle seized it with its talons, he'd pull the
rabbit downward, throw his coat over the bird to overpower it, and push it into
the cage he'd brought.

Chee checked the ground around him, looking for any proof that Jano had been
there. He didn't expect to find anything, and he didn't. The rock where Jano
must have sat while he waited for his eagle was worn smooth. Anyone might have
sat there that day, or no one. He found not a trace of the bloodstains Jano
might have left here had the eagle gashed him. as he caught it. The rain might
have washed blood away, but it would have left a trace in the grainy granite.
He climbed out of the crack, bringing with him only a bedraggled eagle feather
from the sandy floor of the blind and a cigarette butt that looked like it had
weathered much more than last week's shower. The feather was from the body—not
one of the strong wingtip or tail feathers valued for ceremonial objects. And
neither the feather nor the butt showed any sign of bloodstains. He tossed them
back into the blind. Chee spent another hour or so making an equally fruitless
check around the butte. He came across another blind a half mile down the rim,
and several places where stones had been stacked with little painted prayer
sticks placed among them and feathers tied to nearby sage branches. Clearly the
Hopis considered this butte part of their spiritual homeland, and it probably
had been since their first clans arrived about the twelfth century. The federal
government's decision to add it to the Navajo Reservation hadn't changed that,
and never would. The thought made him feel like a trespasser on his own
reservation and did nothing good for Chee's mood. It was time to say to hell
with this and go home.

The desk work required of an acting lieutenant had not helped the muscle
tone in Jim Chee's legs, nor his lungs. He was tired. He stood at the rim,
looking across the saddle, dreading the long climb down. An eagle soared over
Black Mesa and the shape of another was outlined against the clouds far to the
south over the San Francisco Peaks. This was eagle country and always had been.
When the first Hopi clans founded their villages on the First Mesa, the elders
had assigned eagle-collecting territory just as they'd assigned cornfields and springs.
And when the Navajos came along a couple of hundred years later they, too, soon
learned that one came to Black Mesa when one's medicine bundle required eagle
feathers.

Chee took out his binoculars and tried to locate the bird he'd seen against
the cloud. It was gone. He found the one hunting over the mesa and focused on
it—thinking it might be the one he'd watched earlier. It wasn't. This one had a
complete fan of tail feathers. He swung the binoculars downward, focused on the
place where he'd found Jano beside Ben Kinsman's dying body and tried to
re-create how that tragedy must have happened. Jano might not have seen Kinsman
below, because Kinsman would have concealed himself. But looking down from
here, he could hardly have missed noticing Kinsman's patrol car where he'd left
it down the arroyo. Jano had been arrested once for poaching an eagle. He would
have been nervous, and careful.

So why climb down to be captured? Probably because he had no choice. But why
not just release the eagle, hide the cage, climb down and tell the cop he was
up here meditating and saying his prayers? Jano's faded red pickup had been
parked below the low point of the saddle and Kinsman had left his patrol car
near the arroyo maybe a half mile away. Even without binoculars, Jano would
have seen that Kinsman had his escape route blocked.

Chee scanned the valley again, picking up the ruins of what must have been
the tumbled stones that once formed the walls of the Tijinney hogan, its sheep
pens and its fallen brush arbor. Beyond the hogan site, a glint of reflected
sunlight caught his eye. He focused on the spot. The side mirror of some sort
of van parked in a cluster of junipers. What would that be doing up here? Two
of last spring's plague victims had come from this quadrant of the reservation.
The van might be Arizona Health Department people collecting rodents and
checking fleas. He remembered Leaphorn had told him the woman he was looking
for had come up this way working on a plague case.

On the opposite side of the saddle, away from the van, the Tijinney
"death hogan" and the murder site, motion caught Chee's peripheral
vision. He focused on it. A black-and-white goat grazing on a bush. And not
just one. He counted seven, but there might be seventeen or seventy scattered through
that rough area.

While counting them, he found the track. Actually, two tracks, probably
formed by the vehicle of whomever held this grazing lease and drove in now and
then to see about his flock.

It was not something even a sheep-camp Navajo would dignify by calling a
road, but as Chee traced the track back toward the access road through his
binoculars, he realized its importance. Jano did have a way out—a way to avoid
capture without giving up his eagle. He could have slipped down the other side of
the saddle, invisible to the officer waiting to arrest him. He could have left
the eagle in some safe place, made the easy climb over the low point of the
saddle with nothing to incriminate him. Then he could have recovered his Pickup
truck, driven back to the gravel road, followed it a mile or two back toward
Tuba City, and then circled back °n this goatherd's track to recover his
captive bird.

Jano would have known about this track. These were his eagle-catching
grounds. He could have escaped easily. Instead he chose the path that led him
directly to where Kinsman was waiting.

Chee started his descent carefully, remembering the dislodged stone that had
almost sent him tumbling down the slope. It had been a bad day so far. He'd
climbed the saddle thinking that Jano was a man who had killed in what probably
had been a frantic effort to avoid arrest and then made up unlikely lies to
save himself from prison. At the foot of the saddle, Chee stood for a moment to
catch his breath. He glanced at his watch. He'd locate the van now, find out if
whoever was with it had been here on the fateful day and—if they had
been—whether they'd seen anything. If they hadn't, that, too, could be useful
as a sort of negative evidence.

When he'd climbed Yells Back Butte he had nursed a vague, ambiguous hope
that maybe he could find something to suggest Jano wasn't lying, that Jano
wouldn't have to face the death penalty or (worse, in Chee's opinion) life in
prison. To be honest, he had wanted to discover something that would restore
his prestige in the eyes of Janet Pete. But now he knew that the murder of
Benjamin Kinsman had been a deliberate, premeditated, and savage act of
revenge.

THE VAN WAS PARKED on the sandy bed of a shallow wash, partly shaded by a
cluster of junipers and screened by a growth of four-winged saltbush. No one
was visible, but what looked like an oversized air-conditioning unit was
purring away on its roof. Chee stood on the fold-down step beside its door and
rapped on the metal, then rapped again, and—harder this time—once again. No
response. He tried the doorknob. Locked. He leaned his ear against the door and
listened. Nothing at first, except the vibrations from the air conditioner,
then a faint, rhythmic sound. Chee stepped back from the van and inspected it.
It had a custom-made body mounted on a heavy GMC truck chassis with dual rear
wheels. It looked expensive, fairly new and—judging from the dents and
abrasions—heavily (or carelessly) used in rough country. Except for the lack of
a door, nothing was different on the driver's side. Built against the rear was
a fold-down metal ladder to provide access to the roof and a rack, which now
held a dirt bike, a folding table and two chairs, a five-gallon gasoline can, a
pick, a shovel, and an assortment of rodent traps and cages. There were no
windows on the rear and the only side windows were high on the wall. Placed
high, Chee guessed, to allow more space for storage cabinets.

He knocked again, rattled the knob, shouted, received no response, put his
ear against the door again. This time he heard another faint sound. Something
scratching. A tiny squeak, like chalk on a blackboard.

Chee folded down the access ladder, climbed onto the roof, dropped to his stomach,
and secured a firm grip on the air-conditioner engine mount. Then he squirmed
over the edge and leaned down to look into the high windows. All he saw was
darkness and a streak of light reflecting from a white surface.

"Ho, there," a voice shouted. "Whatcha doing?" Chee
jerked his head up. He looked down into a face staring up at him, expression
quizzical, bright blue eyes, dark, sun-peeled face, tufts of gray hair
protruding from under a dark blue cap that bore the legend SQUIBB. The man
carried what looked like a shoebox containing what seemed to be a dead prairie
dog inside a plastic sack. "Is that your car I saw back there?" the
man asked. "The Navajo Tribal Police car?"

"Yeah," Chee said, trying to scramble to his feet without further
loss of dignity. He pointed down to the roof under his boots. "I heard
something in there," he stammered. "Thought I did, anyway. Something
squeaking. And I couldn't raise anyone, so—"

"Probably one of the rodents," the man said. He put down the
shoebox, extracted a key ring from a pocket and unlocked the doors. "Come
on down. How about a drink of something."

Chee scrambled down the ladder. The man under the Squibb cap was holding the
door open for him. Cold air rushed out.

"My name's Chee," he said, extending a hand. "With the Navajo
Tribal Police. I guess you're with the Arizona Health Department."

"No," the man said. "I'm Al Woody. I'm working on a research
project up here. For the National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service,
so forth. But come on in."

Inside Chee turned down a beer and accepted a glass of water. Woody opened
the door of a built-in floor-to-ceiling refrigerator and brought out a bottle
white with frost. He scraped away the ice crystals and showed Chee a Dewar's
scotch label.

"Antifreeze," he said, laughing, and began pouring himself a
drink. "But once I was preserving some tissue a*id turned the fridge down
so low that even the whiskey froze up on me."

Chee sipped his water, noticing it was stale and had a slightly unpleasant
taste. He searched his brain for a proper apology for trying to peek into the
man's window. He decided there wasn't one. He'd just forget it and let Woody
think whatever he wanted to think.

"I'm doing some back-checking on a homicide case we had up here,"
Chee said. "It was July eighth. One of our officers was killed. Hit on the
head with a rock. You probably heard about it on the radio or saw it in the
paper. We're trying to find any witnesses we might have overlooked."

"I heard about that," Woody said. "But the man down at the
trading post told me you'd caught the killer right in the act."

"Who told you?"

"That grouchy old man at the Short Mountain Trading Post," Woody
said, frowning. "I think his name was Mac something. Sounded Scotch. Did
he have it wrong?"

"About as close as you can get," Chee said. "The smoking gun
was a bloody rock."

"The old man said it was a Hopi and the cop had arrested the same guy
before," Woody said, looking pensive. Then he nodded, understanding it.
"But out here you'd get Hopis on the jury. So you're trying not to leave
them any grounds for reasonable doubts."

"Yeah," Chee said. "I guess that about sums it up-Were you
working up here that day? If you were, did you see anybody? Or anything? Or
hear anything?"

"July eighth, was it?" He punched buttons on his digital watch.
"That would make it a Friday," he said, and frowned, thinking about
it. "I drove down to Flagstaff, but

I think that was Wednesday. I think I was up here Tuesday early, and then I
drove over to Third Mesa. That's one of the prairie dog colonies I'm watching.
Over there by Bacavi. That and some kangaroo rats."

"It rained that day," Chee said. "Thundershower. Little bit
of hail."

Woody nodded. "Yeah, I remember," he said. "I'd stopped at
the Hopi Cultural Center to get some coffee, and you could see a lot of
lightning over that side of Black Mesa and southwest over the San Francisco
Peaks, and it looked like it was pouring down at Yells Back Butte. I was
feeling glad I got down that road before it got muddy."

"Did you see anybody when you were driving out? Meet anyone coming
in?"

Woody had been unzipping the plastic bag while he talked, and a puff of
escaping air added another unpleasant aroma to the room. Now he pulled out the
prairie dog, stiff with rigor mortis, and laid it carefully on the tabletop. He
stared at it, felt its neck, groin area and under the front legs. He looked
thoughtful. Then he shook his head, dismissing some troublesome notion.

"Going out?" he said. "I think I saw that old lady that herds
her goats over on the other side of the butte. I think that was Tuesday I saw
her. And then, when I was turning out onto the gravel, I remember seeing a car
corning from the Tuba City direction."

"Was it a police car?"

Woody looked up from the prairie dog. "It might have been. It was too
far away to tell. But, you know, he never did pass me. Maybe he turned in
toward the butte. Maybe that was your policeman. Or maybe the Hopi."

"Possibly," Chee said. "About when was it?"

"Morning. Fairly early."

Woody reclosed the bag, shook it vigorously, reopened it, and poured its
contents onto a white plastic sheet on the table.

"Fleas," he said. He selected stainless-steel tweezers from a tray
on a lab table, picked up a flea and showed it to Chee. "Now, if I'm lucky,
the blood in these fleas is laced with
Yersinia pestis
and"—Woody
poked the prairie dog with the tweezers—"so is the blood of our friend
here. And if I'm very lucky, it will be
Yersinia X
, the new, modified,
recently evolved fast-acting stuff that kills mammals much quicker than the old
stuff." He redeposited the flea among its brethren on the plastic, grinned
at Chee. "Then, if fortune continues to smile on me, the autopsy I'm about
to do on this dog here will confirm what not finding any swollen glands
suggests. That this fellow here didn't die of bubonic plague. He died of
something old-fashioned."

Chee frowned, not quite understanding Woody's excitement. "So he died
of what?"

"That's not the question. Could be old age, any of those ills that
beset elderly mammals. Doesn't matter. The question is, why didn't the plague
kill him?"

"But that's nothing new, is it? Haven't you guys known for years that
when the plague comes through, it always leaves behind a colony here and there
that's immune or something? And then the stuff spreads again, from them? I
thought—"

Woody had no patience for this. "Sure, sure, sure," he said.
"Reservoir colonies. Host colonies. They've been studied for years. How
come their immune system blocks the bacteria? If it kills the bacteria, how
come the toxin released doesn't kill the dog? If our friend here just has the
original version of
Pasteurella pestis
, as we used to call it, then he
just gives us another chance to poke around in the blind alley. But if he
has—"

It had been a hard and disappointing day for Chee, and this interruption
rankled him. He interrupted Woody: "If he has developed immunity to this
new fast-acting germ, you can compare—"

"Germ!" Woody said, laughing. "I don't hear that good old
word much these days. But yes. It gives us something to check against. Here's
what we know about the blood chemistry of the dogs who survived the old
plague." He suggested a big box with his hands. "Now we know this
modified bacteria is also killing most of those survivors. We want to know the
difference in the chemistry of those who survived the new stuff." Chee
nodded. "You understand that?"

Chee grunted. He'd taken six hours of biology at the University of New
Mexico to help meet the science requirement for his degree in anthropology. The
teacher had been a full professor, an international authority on spiders who
had made no effort to hide his boredom with basic undergraduate courses nor his
disdain for the ignorance of his students. He'd sounded a lot like Woody.
"That's easy enough to understand," Chee said. "So when you
solve the puzzle, you develop a vaccine and save untold billions of prairie
dogs from the plague."

Woody had done something to the flea that produced a brownish fluid and put
a bit of it into a petri dish and a drop on a glass slide. He looked up. His
face, already unnaturally flushed, was now even redder.

"You think it's funny?" he said. "Well, you're not the only
one who does. A lot of the experts at the NIH do, too. And at Squibb. And the
New
England Journal of Medicine
. And the American Pharmaceutical Association.
The same damn fools who thought we won the microbe war with penicillin and the
streptomycin drugs."

Woody slammed his fist on the countertop, his voice rising. "So they
misused them, and misused them, and kept on misusing them until they'd evolved
whole new variations of drug-resistant bacteria. And now, by God, we're burying
the dead! By the tens of thousands. Count Africa and Asia and its millions. And
these damn fools sit on their hands and watch it get worse."

Chee was no stranger to anger barely under control. He'd seen it while
breaking up bar fights, in domestic disputes, in various other ugly forms. But
Woody's rage had a sort of fierce, focused intensity that was new to him.

"I didn't mean to sound flippant," Chee said. "I'm just not
familiar with the implications of this sort of research."

Woody took a sip of his Dewar's, his face flushed. He shook his head,
studied Chee, recognized repentance.

"Sorry I'm so damned touchy about this," he said, and laughed.
"I think it's because I'm scared. All the little beasties we had beaten
ten years ago are back and meaner than ever. TB is an epidemic again. So is
malaria. So is cholera. We had the staph bacteria whipped with nine different
antibiotics. Now none of 'em work on some of it. And then there's the same
story with viruses. Viruses. They're what makes this most important. You know
that Influenza A, that Swine Flu that came out of nowhere in 1918 and killed
maybe forty million people in just a few months. That's more than were killed
in four years of war. Viruses scare me even more than bacteria."

Chee raised his eyebrows.

"Because nothing stops them except your immune system. You don't cure a
viral sickness. You try to prevent it with a vaccine. That's to prepare your
immune system to deal with it if it shows up."

"Yeah," Chee said. "Like polio."

"Like polio. Like some forms of influenza. Like a lot of things,"
Woody said. He refilled his whiskey glass. "Are you familiar with the
Bible?"

"I've read it," Chee said.

"Remember what the prophet says in the Book of Chronicles? 'We are
powerless against this terrible multitude that will come against us.'"

Chee wasn't sure how to take this. "Do you read that as an Old
Testament prophet warning us against viruses?"

"As it stands now, they are a terrible multitude and we are damn near
powerless against them," Woody said.

Not as well prepared as some of these rodents are anyway. Some of these prairie
dogs here somehow have had their immune systems modified to deal with this
evolved bacteria. And some of the kangaroo rats have learned to live with the
hantavirus. We have to find out how."

Woody's discourse had restored his good temper. He grinned at Chee. "We
don't want the rodents outlasting the humans."

Chee nodded. He slid off the stool, picked up his hat. "I'll let you
get back to work. Thanks for the time. And the information."

"I just had a thought," Woody said. "The Indian Health
Service has had people up here the last several weeks working through this area.
Doing the vector control cleanup on that plague outbreak. You might ask them if
they had anyone out there on that day."

"They did," Chee said. "I was just going to get into that.
One of their people was supposed to be checking on rodents around here the day
Kinsman was killed. I was going to ask you if you'd seen her. And then I was
going to be on my way."

"A woman? Did she notice anything helpful?"

"Nobody even knows for sure if she got here. She's missing," Chee
said. "So is the vehicle she was driving."

"Missing?" Woody said, startled. "Really? You think there
could be some connection with the attack on your policeman?"