Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (20 page)

TWO TELEPHONE NOTES were stuck on his spindle when Chee got to his office.
One was from Leaphorn, asking Chee to call him at his motel. The second was
from Janet Pete. It said: "The eagle's being tested today. Please call
me."

Chee wasn't quite ready for that. He dialed Leaphorn's number first.
Yesterday the Legendary Lieutenant had wanted to show Krause the list of stuff
found in the Jeep. Maybe that had developed into something.

"You had breakfast?" Leaphorn asked.

"I'm not much for eating breakfast," Chee said. "What's on
your mind?"

"How about joining me for coffee then at the motel diner? I want to go back
out to Yells Back Butte. Can you get away? I think I should have an officer
along."

An officer along! "Oh," Chee said. He felt elation, quickly tinged
with a little disappointment. The Legendary Lieutenant had done it again. Had
unraveled the puzzle of who had abandoned the Jeep. Had maintained the legend.
Had again outthought Jim Chee. "Sure. I'll be there in ten minutes."

Leaphorn was sitting at a window table, putting butter on a stack of
pancakes. He put the note on the table in front of Chee and smoothed it out.

"I showed the list to Krause," he said. "There were a couple
or three surprises."

"Oh," Chee said, feeling slightly defensive. He hadn't noticed
anything amiss.

"Mostly technical stuff way over our heads," Leaphorn said.
"This blower here, for example, and the container of calcium cyanide. I
figured that was just one of their flea killers. Turns out they don't use it
these days except in some sort of unusual circumstances." He looked up at
Chee. "Like, let's say they needed to wipe out a whole colony of prairie
dogs."

Chee leaned back in his chair, understanding again why he admired Leaphorn
instead of resenting him. The man was giving him a chance to figure it out for
himself. And of course he had.

"Like, let's say, the colony Dr. Woody is working with."

Leaphorn was grinning. "That occurred to me, too." he said.
"I don't think Woody would have wanted that to happen."

Chee nodded. And waited. He could tell from Leaphorn's expression that more
was coming.

"And then there's this," Leaphorn said. "I asked Krause why
there would be two of these long-handled shovels in that Jeep. He said
everybody carried one because of the digging they do, besides getting stuck in
the sand. But just one."

Chee leaned back again, considering that. "Be useful to have one if you
wanted to dig a grave."

Leaphorn nodded. "That also occurred to me. Maybe toss it in, not
knowing there was already one in the Jeep."

"So somewhere between Yells Back Butte and where the Jeep was left we
might be checking on easy places to dig and looking for freshly dug dirt."

"I'd suggest that," Leaphorn said.

"I'm also asking people to check for bicycle tracks along the Goldtooth
road. But there's not much chance they'll find any. Too dry."

This caused Leaphorn's eyebrows to rise. "Bicycle?"

"I noticed Woody had a bicycle rack bolted to the back of that mobile
lab truck," Chee said. "There wasn't a bike on it."

Leaphorn slammed his hand on the tabletop, rattling his plate. "I must
be getting old," he said. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"It wouldn't be a hard bike ride," Chee said, "from where the
Jeep was left back to Yells Back. He could have stepped out of the Jeep onto
rocks, lifted the bike out, and carried it back to the road."

"Sure," Leaphorn said. "Sure he could. But it would have been
clumsy to carry the shovel, too. I've had my brain turned off."

Chee doubted that. It reminded Chee of watching the Easter egg hunt on the
White House lawn on television. Seeing the big brother overlook an egg so the
little kid could find it.

The waitress arrived and offered refills. But now both of them were in a
hurry.

They took Chee's patrol car, roared down Arizona 264, turned right onto the road
to Goldtooth, jolted over the washboard bumps.

"Seems like old times," Leaphorn said. "Us working
together."

"You miss it? I mean, being a cop?"

"I miss this part of it. And the people I worked with. I don't miss the
paperwork. I'll bet you wouldn't, either."

"I hate that part of it," Chee said. "I'm not good at it,
either."

"You're acting now," Leaphorn said. "Usually after you've
done that awhile, they offer you the permanent position. Would you take
it?"

Chee drove for a while without answering. Clouds were building up already,
fleets of great white ships against the dark blue sky. By late evening
yesterday they had towered high enough to produce a few drops of rain here and
there. By this afternoon the monsoon rains might actually begin. Long overdue.

"No," Chee said. "I guess not."

"When I heard you'd applied for the promotion, I sort of wondered
why," Leaphorn said. Chee glanced at him, saw only a profile. Leaphorn was
staring at the clouds. "I imagine you could make a pretty good guess. Part
prestige, mostly the money's better."

"What do you need it for? You still live in that rusty old trailer,
don't you?"

Chee decided to turn the cross-examination around.

"You think they'll offer me the job?"

Long silence. "Probably not."

"Why's that?"

"I suspect the powers that be will get the impression that you would
not be a proper team player. You wouldn't cooperate well with other law
enforcement agencies," Leaphorn said.

"Any agency in particular?"

"Well, maybe the FBI."

"Oh," Chee said. "What have you heard?"

"It has been said that the FBI would hesitate to handle sensitive
business with you over the telephone."

Chee laughed. "Man, oh man," he said. "How fast the word does
travel. Did you hear that this morning?"

"Last night already," Leaphorn said.

"Who?"

"Kennedy called me from Albuquerque. Remember him? We worked with him a
time or two, and then the Bureau transferred him. He was asking me about a
thing we were looking into just before I retired. He's retiring himself at the
end of the year and he wanted to know how I liked being a civilian. Asked about
you, too. And he said you had made yourself some enemies. So I asked him how
you managed that."

"And he said I'd taped a telephone call without per mission," Chee
said. "Thereby violating a federal statute."

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "Did he have it right?"

Chee nodded.

"It's nice you don't want that promotion then," Leaphorn said.
"Had you decided that before or after you turned on the tape
recorder?"

Chee thought for a moment. "Before, I guess. But I didn't really
realize it."

They turned up the track toward Yells Back Butte, circled around a barrier
of tumbled boulders and found themselves engulfed in goats. And not just the
goats. There, beside the track was an aged woman on a large roan horse watching
them.

"Lucked out," Leaphorn said. He climbed out of the patrol car,
said "
Ya'eeh te'h"
to Old Lady Notah and introduced himself,
reciting his membership in his born to and born for clans. Then he introduced
Jim Chee, by maternal and paternal clans and as a member of the Navajo Tribal
Police at Tuba City. The horse stared at Chee suspiciously, the goats milled
around, and Mrs. Notah returned the courtesy.

"It is a long way to Tuba City," Mrs. Notah said. "And I have
seen you here before. I think it must be because the other policeman was killed
here. Or because the Hopi came to steal our eagles."

"It is even more than that, mother," Leaphorn said. "A woman
who worked with the health department came here the day the policeman was
killed. No one has seen her since. Her family asked me to look for her."

Mrs. Notah waited a bit to see if Leaphorn had more to say. Then she said:
"I don't know where she is." Leaphorn nodded. "They say you saw
a skinwalker somewhere near here. Was that the day the policeman was
killed?"

She nodded. "Yes. It was that day it rained. Now I think it might have
been somebody who helps the man who works in that big motor home."

Chee sucked in his breath.

Leaphorn said: "Why do you think that?"

"After that day I saw that man come out of his place carrying a white
suit. He walked way up the slope with it, and through the junipers, and then he
put it on and put a white hood over his head." She laughed. "I think
it is something to keep the sickness off of them. I saw something like that on
television."

"I think that's right," Leaphorn said. And then he asked Mrs.
Notah to try to tell them everything she had seen or heard around Yells Back
Butte that morning. She did, and it took quite a while.

She had risen before dawn, lit her propane burner, warmed her coffee and ate
some fry bread. Then she saddled her horse and rode there. While she was
rounding up the goats, she heard a truck coming up the track toward the butte.
About sunup, she had seen a man climb up the saddle and disappear over the rim
onto the top of the butte.

"I thought it must be one of the Hopi eagle-catchers come to get one.
They used to come out here a lot before the government changed the boundary,
and I had seen this same man the afternoon before. Just looking around,"
she said. "That's the way they used to work. Then they would come back
before daylight the next morning and go up and catch one." Chee asked:
"Did you tell anyone about this?"

"I was down by the road when a police car came by. I told him I thought
the Hopis were going to steal an eagle again."

Chee nodded. Mrs. Notah had been Kinsman's confidential source.

Next in Mrs. Notah's narration was the arrival of the black Jeep.

"It was going too fast for those rocks," Mrs. Notah said. "I
thought it would be the young woman with the short hair, but I couldn't see who
it was."

"Why the woman with the short hair?" Leaphorn asked.

"I have seen her driving that car before. She drives too fast."
Mrs. Notah emphasized her disapproval with a negative shake of her head.
"Then I had to go get that goat there." She pointed at a black and
white male that had wandered far down the track. "Maybe a half-hour later,
when I moved the goats back up near the butte, I saw somebody moving behind the
trees, and then I saw the thing in the white suit."

She paused, rewarded them with a wry smile. "I went away for a while
then, and on the way back to the goats, I heard a car coming, very, very
slowly, up the trail. It was a police car, and I thought, That policeman knows
how to drive over rocks. When I came back to the goats, I saw the man who works
in that motor home was over at the old Tijinney hogan. He was right in there,
and I thought
bilagaana
don't know about death hogans, or maybe that's
the skinwalker. A witch, well, he don't care about
chindis
."

"What was he doing?" Leaphorn asked. "I couldn't see much
over the wall from where I was," she said. "But when he came out, I
could see he was carrying a shovel."

Chee parked his patrol car on the hump overlooking the Tijinney place. They
walked down together, Chee carrying the shovel from the trunk of his car, and
stood looking over the tumbled stone. The hard-packed earthen floor was
littered with pieces of the fallen roof, blown-in tumbleweeds, and the debris
vandals had left. It was flat and smooth except for a half dozen holes and the
filled-in excavation where the fire pit had been.

"That's where it would be," Chee said, pointing.

Leaphorn nodded. "I've been doing nothing for about a week but sitting
in a car seat. Give me the shovel. I need a little exercise."

"Well, now," Chee said, but he surrendered the shovel. For a
Navajo as traditional as Chee, digging for a corpse in a death hogan wasn't a
task done lightly. It would require at least a sweat bath and, more properly, a
curing ceremony, to restore the violator of such taboos to
hozho
.

"Easy digging," Leaphorn said, tossing aside his sixth spadeful. A
few moments later he stopped, put aside the shovel, squatted beside the hole.
He dug with his hands.

He turned and looked at Chee. "I guess we have found Catherine
Pollard," he said. He pulled out a forearm clad in the white plastic of
her PAPR suit and brushed away the earth. "She's still wearing her double
set of protective gloves."

DR. WOODY OPENED HIS DOOR at the second knock. He said: "Good morning,
gentlemen," leaned against the doorway and motioned them in. He was
wearing walking shorts and a sleeveless undershirt. It seemed to Leaphorn that
the odd pink skin color he'd noticed when he'd first met the man was a tone
redder. "I think this is what they call serendipity, or a fortunate
accident. Anyway, I'm glad you're here."

"And why is that?" Leaphorn asked.

"Have a seat first," Woody said. He swayed, supported himself with
a hand against the wall, then pointed Leaphorn to the chair and Chee to a
narrow bed, now folded out of the wall. He seated himself on the stool beside
the lab working area. "Now," he said, "I'm glad to see you
because I need a ride. I need to get to Tuba City and make some telephone
calls. Normally, I would drive this thing. But it's hard to drive. I'm feeling
pretty bad. Dizzy. Last time I took my temp it was almost one hundred and four.
I was afraid I wouldn't make it out."

"We'll be glad to take you," Chee said. "But first we need to
get answers to some questions."

"Sure," Woody said. "But later. After we get going. And one
of you will have to stay here and take care of things." He leaned forward
over the table and ran his hand over his face. Leaphorn now noticed a dark
discoloration under his arm, spreading down the rib cage under the undershirt.

"Hell of a bruise there on your side," Leaphorn said. "We
should get you to a hospital."

"Unfortunately, it's not a bruise. It's the capillaries breaking down under
the skin. Releases the blood into the tissue. We'll go to the Medical Center at
Flagstaff. But first I have to do some telephoning. And someone should stay
here. Look after things. The animals in the cages. The files."

"We found the body of Catherine Pollard buried out there," Chee
said, "Do you know anything about that?"

"I buried her," Woody said. "But, dammit, we don't have time
to talk about that now. I can tell you about it while we're driving to Tuba
City. But I've got to get there before I'm too sick to talk, and these cell
phones won't work out here."

"Did you kill her?"

"Sure," Woody said. "You want to know why?"

"I think I could guess," Chee said.

"Silly woman didn't give me a choice. I told her she couldn't
exterminate that dog colony and I told her why. They might hold the key to
saving millions of lives." Woody laughed. "She said I'd lied to her
once and that was all she allowed."

"Lied," Chee said. "You told her the rodents weren't
infected. Was that it?"

Woody nodded. "She put on her protective suit and was getting ready to
pump cyanide dust into the burrow when I stopped her. And then the cop saw me
burying her."

"You killed him, too?" Chee said.

Woody nodded. "Same problem. Exactly the same. I can't let anything
interfere with this," he said, gesturing around the lab. Then he produced
a weak chuckle, shook his head. "But something is. It's the disease
itself. Isn't that ironic? This new, improved, drug-resistant version of
Yersinia
pestis
is making me another lab specimen."

He was reaching into a drawer as he said that. When his hand came out it
held a long-barreled pistol. Probably .22 caliber, Chee guessed. The right size
for shooting rodents, but not something anyone wanted to be shot with.

"I just don't have time for this," Woody said. "You stay
here," he said to Leaphorn. "Look after things. I'll ride with
Lieutenant Chee. We'll send somebody back to take over when I get to the
telephone."

Chee looked at the pistol, then at Woody. His own revolver was in the
holster on his hip. But he wasn't going to need it.

"I'll tell you what we're going to do," Chee said. "We're
going to take Mr. Leaphorn with us. As soon as we get out of this radio blind
spot, we'll call an ambulance to meet us. I'll send out a patrolman to take
care of this place. We'll turn on the siren and get to Tuba City fast."

Chee stood and took a step toward the door and opened it. "Come
on," he said to Woody. "You're looking sicker and sicker."

"I want him to stay," Woody said, and waved the pistol toward
Leaphorn. Chee reached and grabbed the gun out of Woody's hand and handed it to
Leaphorn. "Come on," he said. "Hurry."

Woody was in no condition to hurry. Chee had to half-carry him to the patrol
car.

They raised the dispatcher just as they bounced away from the radio shadow
of Yells Back Butte. Chee told him to send an ambulance down the road to
Goldtooth and an officer to guard Woody's mobile lab at the butte. Leaphorn sat
in the back with Woody, and Woody talked.

He'd found two fleas in his groin area when he awakened the day before and
immediately redosed himself with an antibiotic, hoping the fleas, if infected
at all, were carrying the unmutated bacteria. By this morning a fever had
developed. He knew then that he had the form that resisted medication and had
killed Nez so quickly. He had hurriedly compiled his most recent notes in
readable form, put away breakable items, stored the blood samples he'd been
working on in the refrigerator for preservation and started the engine. But by
then he felt so dizzy that he knew he couldn't drive the big vehicle out. So
he'd begun a note explaining where he stood in the project, to be passed along
to an associate at the Center for Control of Infectious Diseases.

"It's there in the folder on the desk with his name on it—a microbiologist
named Roy Bobbin Hovey. But I forgot to mention that he'll want an autopsy. The
name and number are in my wallet in case I'm out of it before we get to a
telephone. Tell him to do the autopsy. He'll know what organs to check."

"Your organs?" Leaphorn asked.

Woody's chin had dropped down to his breastbone. "Of course," he
mumbled. "Who else?"

Chee was driving far too fast for the washboard road and watching in the
rearview mirror.

"How were you able to hit Officer Kinsman on the head?" he asked.
"Why didn't he cuff you?"

"He was careless," Woody said. "I said, Aren't you going to
put those handcuffs on me, and when he twisted around to reach for them, that's
when I hit him."

"Then when we left with Kinsman, you drove the Jeep out and abandoned it
and poured the blood on the seat so it would look like a murder-kidnapping?
Right? And took your bicycle along so you could ride it back from there? Is
that right?"

But by then, Dr. Woody had drifted off into unconsciousness. Or perhaps he
didn't think the answer mattered.

They met the ambulance about ten miles from Moenkopi, warned the attendants
that Woody was probably in the final stages of bubonic plague and sent it
racing off toward the Northern Arizona Medical Center. At his station, Chee
fished out the note from Woody's wallet, left Leaphorn talking with Claire, and
disappeared into his office to make the telephone call.

He emerged looking angry, flopped into a chair across from Leaphorn, wiped
his forehead, and said: "Whew, what a day."

"Did you get the man?" Leaphorn asked.

"Yeah. Dr. Hovey said he'll fly out to Flagstaff today."

"Quite a shock, I guess," Leaphorn said. "Learning your
associate is a double murderer."

"That didn't seem to bother him. He asked about Woody's condition, and
his notes, and who was looking after his papers, and where he could pick them
up, and were they being cared for, and how about the animals he was working
with, and was the prairie dog colony safe."

"Like that, huh?"

"Pissed me off, to tell the truth," Chee said. "I said I
hoped we could keep the sonofabitch alive until we can try him for killing two
people. And that irritated him. He sort of snorted and said: 'Two people. We're
trying to save all of humanity.'"

Leaphorn sighed. "Matter of fact, I think Woody
was
trying to
save humanity."