The First Eagle

"Oh," Louisa said. "And now she's back."

"It's all just gossip," Leaphorn said. "And you didn't get any of it from me."

"Okay," Louisa said, and shook her head. "Poor Mr. Dashee. What did you tell him?"

"I told him I'd talk to Jim the first chance I get. Probably today." He made a face. "That won't be so easy either, talking to Chee. I'm his ex-boss and he's sort of touchy with me. And, after all, it's none of my business."

"Well, it shouldn't be."

Leaphorn took his eyes off the road long enough to study her expression. "What do you mean by that?"

"You should have just told Mrs. Vanders you were too busy. Or something like that." Leaphorn let that pass.

"You're retired, you know. The golden years. Now's the time to travel, do all those things you wanted to do."

"That's true," Leaphorn said. "I could trot down to the senior center and play—whatever they do down there."

"You're not too old to get into golf."

"I already did that," Leaphorn said. "At a federal law-enforcement seminar in Phoenix. The feds stay at those three-hundred-dollar-a-night resort places with the big golf courses. I went out with some FBI agents and knocked the ball in all eighteen holes. It wasn't hard, but once you've done it, I don't know why you'd want to do it again."

"You think you're going to like this being a private detective any better?"

Leaphorn smiled at her. "I think it may be a lot harder to get the hang of than golf," he said. "Even the FBI agents mastered golf. They don't have much luck at detecting."

"You know, Joe, I have a feeling that Mr. Dashee might be right about what Pollard's aunt has in mind. I think the old lady might not really want you to find her niece."

"You may be right about that," Leaphorn said. "But still, that would make it a lot more interesting than knocking a golf ball around. Why don't we find Chee and see what he thinks."

They spent the rest of the drive to Tuba City with Louisa plowing through Catherine Pollard's hodgepodge of papers.

Leaphorn had already gone through them once, quickly. Pollard wrote fast, producing a tiny, erratic script in which all vowels looked about the same, and an h might be a k, or an I, or perhaps another of her many uncrossed t's. This unintended code was made worse by a personal shorthand, full of abbreviations and cryptic symbols. Not knowing what he was looking for, he'd found nothing helpful.

Now Louisa read and he listened, amazed. "How can you decipher that woman's handwriting?" he said. "Or are you just guessing at it?"

"Schoolteacher skill," Louisa said. "Most students give you computer printouts for the long papers these days, but in olden times you got a lot of practice plowing through bad penmanship. Repetition develops skill." She went slowly through the papers, translating.

The first fatal case this spring had been a middle-aged woman named Nellie Hale, who lived north of the Kaibito chapter house and who had died in the hospital at Farmington the morning of May 19, ten days after being admitted. Pollard's notes were mostly information collected from family and friends about where Nellie Hale had been during the first weeks of May and the last few days of April. They reported checks made around the Hale hogan, the examination of a prairie dog town near Navajo National Monument where the victim had visited her mother (the dogs had fleas but neither fleas nor dogs had the plague), and the discovery of a deserted colony at the edge of the Hale grazing permit. Fleas collected from the burrows were carrying the plague. The burrows were dusted with poison and the case of Nellie Hale put on the back burner.

That brought them to Anderson Nez. Pollard's notes showed the date he died as June 30 in the hospital at Flagstaff, with "date of admission?" followed by "find out!" She had filled the rest of the page with data accumulated from quizzing family and friends about where his prior travels had taken him. This showed he left home on May 24 en route to Encino, California, to visit his brother. He had returned on June 22. Here Louisa paused.

"I can't make this out," she said, pointing.

He looked at the page. "It's 'i g h,'" he said. "I think I'd figure out that's short for 'in good health.' Notice she underlined it. I wonder why?"

"Double underlines," Louisa said, and resumed reading. Anderson Nez had left the next afternoon for the Goldtooth area and "job with Woody," according to Pollard's notes. "Did you notice he was working for Dr. Woody?" Louisa asked. Then she looked embarrassed. "Of course you did."

"Sort of ironic, isn't it?"

"Very," Louisa said. "Did you notice those dates? She was looking for sources of infection starting back three weeks or so before the dates of the deaths. Is that how long it takes for the bacteria to kill you?"

"I think that's the usual time range that's been established, and I guess that explains why she underlined the 'i g h.' In good health on the twenty-second. Dead on the thirtieth," Leaphorn said. "Anything more about Nez?"

"Not on this page," she said. "And I haven't found any mention of that third case you mentioned."

"That was a boy over in New Mexico," Leaphorn said. "They wouldn't handle that here."

They rolled past the Hopi outpost village of Moenkopi and into Tuba City and parked on the packed-dirt lot of the Navajo Tribal Police station. There Leaphorn found Sergeant Dick Roanhorse and Trixie Dodge, old friends from his days in the department, but not Jim Chee. Roanhorse told him Chee had headed out early for the Kinsman homicide crime scene and hadn't called in. He took Leaphorn into the radio room and asked the young man in the dispatcher's chair to try to get Chee on the radio. Then it was nostalgia time.

"You remember when old Captain Largo was out here, and the trouble he had with you?" Trixie asked.

"I'm trying to forget that," Leaphorn said. "I hope none of you people are giving Lieutenant Chee that kind of headache."

"Not that kind. But he's got one," Roanhorse said, and winked.

"Well, now," Trixie said. "If you mean Bernie Manuelito, I wouldn't call that trouble."

"You would if you were her supervisor," Roanhorse said, and noticed Leaphorn's uncomprehending look. "Bernie has what we used to call a crush on the lieutenant, and I guess he's more or less engaged to this woman lawyer, and everybody around here knows it. So he has to walk on eggs all the time."

"Yeah," Leaphorn said. "I'd call that a problem." He remembered now that when the word came on the grapevine at Window Rock that Chee was transferred from Shiprock to Tuba, people thought that was ironic. When he asked why, the answer was that when Officer Manuelito heard Chee was going to marry Janet Pete, she'd gotten herself transferred to Tuba to get away from him.

The dispatcher came to the door. "Lieutenant Chee said he'd be waiting for you," the young man said. "You take U.S. 264 seven miles south from the 160 junction, then turn right on the dirt road that connects there, and then about twenty miles down the dirt. There's a track that connects there leading back toward Black Mesa. Lieutenant Chee said he'll be parked there."

"Okay," Leaphorn said, thinking that would be the old road across the Moenkopi Plateau to Goldtooth where nobody lived anymore, and on into the empty northwestern edge of the Hopi reservation to Dinnebito Wash and Garces Mesa. It was a drive you didn't start without a full tank of gasoline and air in your spare tire. Maybe it was better now. "Thank you."

"You think you can find it?"

Sergeant Roanhorse laughed and whacked Leaphorn on the back. "How soon they forget you," he said.

But Trixie hadn't exhausted the unrequited romance business as yet. "Bernie's been worried all week about whether she should invite him to a kinaalda her family's having for one of her cousins. She invited everybody else but would it be, you know, pushy or something if she invited the boss? Or would he feel hurt if she didn't? Can't make up her mind."

"Is that why she's been so hard to get along with the last day or two?" Roanhorse asked.

"What do you think?" she said. And grinned at him.

Chapter Fifteen

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."

Chapter Sixteen

"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."

"And what you learn from the rodent immune system applies to the human system."

"That's been the basis of medical research for generations," Woody said. He put down his glass. "If it doesn't work this time, we can quit worrying about global warming, asteroids on collision courses, nuclear war, all those minor threats. The tiny little beasties have neutralized our defenses. They'll get us first."

"That sounds extreme," Louisa said. "After all, the world has had these sweeping epidemics before. Humanity survived."

"Before fast mass transportation," Woody said. "In the old days a disease killed everybody in an area, then died out because there was nobody left to pass it around. Now airlines can have it spread planetwide before the Centers for Disease Control knows it's happening."

That produced a moment of thoughtful silence, which Woody ended after mixing another drink.

"Let me show you what had me so excited when you drove up," he said after Louisa declined a refill. He pointed to the larger of his two microscopes. Louisa looked first.

"Notice the clusters of ovoid cells, very regular shapes. Those are the Yersinia. See the rounder ones? They're darker because they take the dye differently. They look a lot like what you find in a gonorrhea victim. But not quite. They also have some of the Yersinia characteristics."

"You couldn't prove it by me," Louisa said. "When I look into one of these things, I always think I'm seeing eyelashes." Leaphorn took his turn. He saw the bacteria and what he guessed were blood cells. Like Louisa, they told him nothing except that he was wasting time. He had come up here to find out what had happened to Catherine Pollard.

"Very interesting," Leaphorn said. "But we're taking too much of your time. About two or three more questions and we'll go. I guess Lieutenant Chee told you that Miss Pollard was trying to find the source of Mr. Nez's infection. Did Nez work for you?"

"Yes. Part-time for several years. He'd put out the traps, and check them, and collect the rodents. Take care of all such things."

"I understand you checked him into the hospital. Did you tell the people there where Nez was infected?"

"I didn't know."

"Not even a general idea?"

"Not even that," Woody said. "He'd been in several places. Here and there. Fleas get into people's clothing. You carry them around. You're not sure when you get bit." Leaphorn weighed that against his own experience. He had been bitten by fleas more than once. Not very painful, but something you noticed.

"When did you notice he was sick?"

"It would have been the evening before I checked him in. He had driven in that morning to do some things, and after we ate our supper he said he had a headache. No other symptoms and no temperature, but you don't take chances in this business. I gave him a dose of doxycycline. Next morning, he still had a headache, and he was also running a temp. It was a hundred and three. I took him right to the hospital."

"How long does it usually take between the infected flea bite and those sort of symptoms?"

"Usually about four or five days. The longest I know of is sixteen days."

"What was the shortest?"

Woody thought. "I've been told of a two-day case, but I have my doubts. I think an earlier flea bite caused that one." He paused. "Here," he said. "Let me show you another slide."

He opened a filing case, pulled out a box of slides, selected one and inserted it into the microscope.

"Take a look at this."

Leaphorn looked. He saw the ovoid cells of the plague bacteria and the rounder specimens of the evolved bacteria. Only the blood cells looked different.

"It looks almost the same," he said.

"You have a good eye," Woody said. "It is almost the same. But this slide is from a blood sample I took from Nez when I took his temperature."

"Oh," Leaphorn said.

"Two things are important here. From the onset of the fever to death was less than three days. That's far too short a time for the standard Yersinia bacteria to kill. And the second—" Woody paused for effect, grinning at Leaphorn.

"Charley is still alive," he said.

Chapter Seventeen

IT HAD TAKEN ACTING LIEUTENANT Jim Chee about a year to learn the three ways of getting things done in the Navajo Tribal Police. Number one was the official system. The word, neatly typed on an official form, worked its way up through the prescribed channels to the correct level, and then down again to the working cops. In number two, the midlevel bureaucrat whom Chee had now become telephoned friends at the Window Rock headquarters and the various substations, explained what he needed done, and either called in lOUs or asked for a favor. Chee learned quickly that number three was the fastest. There, one outlined the problem to the proper woman in the office and asked her for help. If the asker had earned the askee's respect, she would get the really savvy folks at work on the project—the female network.

Since racing back to his Tuba City office from his meeting with the Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn, Chee was using all three systems to make sure that if Catherine Pollard's missing Jeep could be found, it would be found in a hurry. Until it was—in fact, until Pollard herself was found—Chee knew he wouldn't have a comfortable moment. He'd be haunted by the thought that he might be hanging Jano for a crime he hadn't committed. Jano had done it, of course. He'd seen him do it. Or practically had, and there was no alternative. But what had been an open-and-shut case in his mind now had a crack in it. He had to close it.

Therefore, when he walked into the Tuba City station, he went directly to the office of Mrs. Dineyahze and explained to her how important it was to find the vehicle. "All right," she said, "I'll call around. Get some people off their rear ends."

"I'd appreciate it," Chee said. He didn't explain to Mrs. Dineyahze what should be done, which was one of the reasons she liked him.

He hadn't noticed that Officer Bernadette Manuelito had come through the open door of the secretary's office and was standing behind him.

She said, "Can I help?" which was exactly what Bernie often said. Nor did how she looked surprise him, which was shirt wrinkled, hair sort of disheveled, lipstick slightly askew and—despite all that—very feminine and very pretty.

Chee looked at his watch. "Thanks, but you're off-duty now, Bernie. And tomorrow's your day off."

He didn't think that would have much effect, since Bernie did pretty much what she wanted to do. But he could hear the telephone clamoring for attention in his office, and so was the stack of paperwork he'd abandoned this morning. He headed for the door.

"Lieutenant," Bernie said. "My family is having a kinaalda starting next Saturday for Emily—that's my cousin. Over at Burnt Water. You'd be welcome."

"Golly, Bernie, I'd like to. But I don't think I can get away from here."

Bernie looked downcast. "Okay," she said.

The telephone call was to remind him not to be late for a coordination meeting with people from the BIA Law and Order staff, the Coconino County Sheriff's Office, the Arizona Highway Patrol, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency. While he listened, he could overhear Mrs. Dineyahze discussing the impending puberty ceremonial with Bernie—Mrs. D. sounding . cheerful, Ms. Manuelito sounding sad. As for Chee, he felt repentant. He hated hurting Bernie's feelings.

When he returned from the coordination meeting about sundown, his in basket held a report from Mrs. Dineyahze with a note clipped to it. The report assured him that the right people in the state police and highway patrols of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado now had all the needed data on the missing Jeep. More important, they knew why it was needed. A brother cop had been killed. Finding that Jeep was part of the investigation. The same information had gone to police departments in reservation border towns and to sheriff's offices in relevant county seats.

Chee leaned back in his chair, feeling better. If that Jeep was rolling down a highway anywhere in the Four Corners there was a fair chance it would be spotted. If a city cop saw it parked somewhere, there was a good chance the license plate would be checked. He unclipped the note, which was handwritten. By Mrs. Dineyahze's standards, untyped meant unofficial.

"Lt. Chee: Bernie called the Arizona State motor pool and got all the specifications on the Jeep. It had been impounded in a drug bust and had a lot of fancy add-ons, which are listed below. Also note battery and tire types, rims, other things that Bernie thought might turn up at pawnshops, etc. She relayed the list to shops in Gallup, Flag, Farmington, etc., and also called Thrift-way people in Phoenix and asked them to ask their stores on reservation to be alert." This was signed "C. Dineyahze."

Far below this signature, which made it not only unofficial but off the record, Mrs. Dineyahze had scrawled: "Bernie is a good girl."

Chee already knew that. He liked her. He admired her. He thought she was a very neat lady. But he also knew that Bernadette Manuelito had a crush on him, and almost everybody else in the extended family of the Navajo Tribal Police seemed to know it, too. That made Bernie a pain in the neck. In fact, that was how Chee, who wasn't very good at understanding women, had come to notice Bernie had her eye on him. He'd started being kidded about it.

But there was no time to think of that now. Nor about her idea—which was smart. If the Jeep had been abandoned somewhere on the Big Rez or in the border country, the odds were fairly good that it would be stripped—especially since it had been loaded with expensive, easily stolen stuff. Now he was hungry and tired. None of the frozen dinners awaiting him in the little refrigerator in his trailer home had any appeal for him tonight. He'd go by the Kentucky Fried Chicken place, pick up a dinner with biscuits and gravy, go home, dine, kick back, finish Meridian, the Norman Zollinger novel he was reading, and get some sleep.

He was finishing a thigh and the second biscuit when the phone rang.

"You said to call you if anything turned up on the Jeep," the dispatcher said.

"Like what?"

"Like a guy came into the filling station at, Cedar Ridge last Monday and tried to sell the clerk a radio and tape player. It was the same brand that was in that Jeep.

"They have an identification?"

"The clerk said it was a kid from a family named Pooacha. They have a place over on Shinume Wash."

"Okay," Chee said. "Thanks." He looked at his watch. It would have to wait until morning. By midafternoon the next day the Jeep was found. If you discount driving about two hundred miles back and forth, and some of it over roads far too primitive even to be listed as primitive on Chee's AAA Indian Country road map, the whole project proved to be remarkably easy.

Since Officer Manuelito had provided the idea that made it possible, and had the day off anyway, Chee could think of no way to discourage Bernie from coming along. In fact, he didn't even try. He enjoyed her company when she had her mind on business instead of on him. They drove first to the Cedar Ridge trading post, talked to the clerk there, learned the would-be radio salesman was a young man named Tommy Tsi, and got directions to the Pooacha place, where he lived. They took the dusty washboard gravel of Navajo Route 6110 westward to Blue Moon Bench, turned south on the even rougher Route 6120 along Bekihatso Wash, and found the track that wandered through the rocks and saltbush to the Pooacha establishment.

At this intersection a cracked old boot was stuck atop the post beside the cattle guard.

"Well, good," said Bernie, pointing to the boot. "Somebody's home."

"Somebody is," Chee agreed, "unless the last one out forgot to take the boot down. And in my experience, when the road's as bad as this one, the somebody who's there isn't the one you're looking for."

But Tommy Tsi, a very young Pooacha son-in-law, was home—and very nervous when he noticed the uniform. Chee was wearing and the Navajo Tribal Police on his car. No, he didn't still have the radio and tape player. It belonged to a friend who had asked him to try to sell it for him. The friend had reclaimed it, Tsi said, rubbing his hand uneasily over a very sparse mustache as he spoke.

"Give us the friend's name," Chee said. "Where can we locate him?"

"His name?" Tommy Tsi said. And thought awhile. "Well, he's not exactly a close friend. I met him in Flag. I think they call him Shorty. Or something like that."

"And how were you going to get his money back to him when you sold his stuff?"

"Well," Tommy Tsi said. And hesitated again. "I'm not sure."

"That's a shame," Bernie said. "If you could find him we want you to tell him we're not much interested in the radio stuff. We want to find the Jeep. If he can show us where the Jeep is, then he gets to collect the reward."

"Reward? For the Jeep?"

"A thousand bucks," Bernie said. "Twenty fifty-dollar bills. The family of the woman who was driving the Jeep put it up."

"Really," Tsi said. "A thousand bucks."

"For finding the Jeep. That's what this guy did, you know. Found an abandoned vehicle. No law against that, is there?"

"Right," Tommy Tsi agreed, nodding and looking much more cheerful.

"If he told you where the Jeep is, then you could take us there. We could arrange for you to get the money. Then if you can find him again, you could share it with him."

"Yes," Tsi said. "Let me get my hat."

"Tell you what," Chee said. "Bring the radio stuff along, too. We might need that for fingerprints."

"Mine?" Tsi looked startled.

"We know yours are on it," Chee said. "We're thinking of whoever drove it where you found it."

And so they had jolted back down 6120, to 6110, to Cedar Ridge, and thence southward on the pavement past Tuba City and through Moenkopi, and back onto the dusty road past the abandoned Goldtooth trading post, and then a left turn over a cattle guard onto dirt tracks that led up the slope of Ward Terrace. Where the track crossed a shallow wash, Tommy Tsi said, "Here," and pointed down it.

The Jeep had been left mid-wash around a bend some fifty yards downstream. They left Tsi in the car and walked along the edge of the streambed, careful not to mar any tracks that might still be there. There was no sign of foot traffic up the sand. Much of the Jeep's tire marks had already been erased by the pickup Tsi had been driving, and the wind had softened the edges of what few remained. But enough had survived to add one bit of information. Bernie noticed it, too.

"That little rainstorm came through just after you found Ben, didn't it?" And she pointed to a protected place where the Jeep tires had left their imprint in sand that obviously had been damp.

"How far is this from where that happened?"

"I'd say maybe twenty miles as the crow flies," Chee said. "And no rain since. I think that tells us a little something." The Jeep itself told them little else. They stood back from it, examining the ground. The sand around the driver's side had been churned, presumably by Tsi's boots, as he got in and out looking for something easy to loot, and while he pried out the radio.

From the passenger's door, one could step directly onto the stony slope of the arroyo bank. If the occupant had left that way, it made tracking this many days later virtually hopeless.

"What's that stuff in the backseat?" Bernie asked. "I guess the equipment for the job."

"I see some traps," Chee said. "And cages. That canister is probably for poison they blow into burrows to kill the fleas."

He took out his pocketknife, used it to depress the button to open the passenger-side door, then used it to swing the door open.

"Looks like nothing much here," Bernie said, "unless we find something in the litter bag."

Chee wasn't ready to concede that. Leaphorn had once told him that you're more likely to find something if you're not looking for anything in particular. "Just keep an open mind and see what you see," Leaphorn liked to say. Now Chee saw a dark stain on the leather upholstery on the Jeep's passenger seat.

He pointed at it.

"Oh," Bernie said, and made a wry face.

The stain streaked downward, almost black.

"I'd guess dried blood," Chee said. "Let's get the crime scene people out here."

Chapter Eighteen

"DID YOU NOTICE HIS FACE when he said that?" Leaphorn asked. "Said 'Mr. Nez is dead. Charley is still alive.' The damn prairie dog is still alive. Like it was the best news possible."

"I don't think I've ever seen you really angry before," Louisa said.

"I try not to let things get to me," Leaphorn said. You really can't if you're a cop. But that was a little too damn coldhearted for me."

"I've seen a few of the real superbrains act like that before," she said. "He was making a point, of course. The dog's immune system had modified to deal with the new bacteria forms, and nothing mattered except the research. No such luck with Nez. So now he thinks he'll have a whole prairie dog colony full of test subjects. So it's Nez died but the rodent lived. Hip, hip, hooray. And aren't you driving too fast for this road?"

Leaphorn slowed a little, enough so the following breeze engulfed them in dust but not enough to stop the jolting the car was taking. "Weren't you going to have dinner with Mr. Peshlakai and set up interviews with some students? I don't want you to miss that and we're running late."

"Mr. Peshlakai and I always operate on Navajo time," she said. "No such thing as late. We meet when I get there and he gets there. What's got you in such a rush?"

"I'm going on back down to Flag," Leaphorn said. "I want to go to the hospital and talk to the people there and try to find out what Pollard learned that made her so angry."

"You mean that 'Somebody is lying' note in her journal?"

"Yeah. That seemed to explain why she was going back up to Yells Back Butte. To find out for herself."

"Lying about what?" Louisa said, mostly to herself.

"I'd guess she meant about where Nez picked up his lethal flea. That was her job, and from what I've heard, she took it very seriously." He shook his head. "But who knows? I don't. This is getting hard to calculate."

Louisa nodded.

"Find out for herself?" Leaphorn repeated. "And how does she do that? We know she drove up to Yells Back bright and early either to talk to Woody about where he had Nez working on the day the flea got onto him. Or maybe to collect some rodents or fleas from around there for herself. But she didn't go talk to Woody. Or so he tells us. And if she collected fleas she sure must have done it fast, because she drove right out again."

"Any idea now where she drove?"

"Well, she didn't go back to her motel room to pack up for a trip. Her stuff was still there. And none of the people there had seen her."

"Which doesn't sound good."

"We've got to find that Jeep," Leaphorn said. "And meanwhile I'll try to find out who she talked to at the hospital. It could be helpful."

They jolted off the gravel onto Navajo Route 3 and skirted past Moenkopi to U.S. Highway 160 and Tuba City.

"Where do I drop you?"

"At the filling station right here," Louisa said, "but just long enough to use the telephone. I'm going to call Peshlakai and cancel. Tell him I'll get with him later." Leaphorn stared at her. "This is getting too interesting," she said. "I don't want to quit now."

It was after nine when they got back to Flag. They stopped for a fast snack at Bob's Burgers and decided to check at the hospital on the chance a doctor who knew something about the Nez case might be working the night shift. The doctor proved to be a young woman who had completed intern training at Toledo in March and was doing her residency duties at the Flagstaff hospital in a deal with the Indian Health Service—paying off her federal medical school loan.

"I don't think I ever saw Mr. Nez," she said. "Dr. Howe probably handled him in the Intensive Care Unit. Or maybe the nurse on that floor would know something helpful. Tonight it would be Shirley Ahkeah."

Shirley Ahkeah remembered Mr. Nez very well. She also remember Dr. Woody. Even better, she remembered Catherine Pollard.

"Poor Mr. Nez," she said. "Except for Dr. Howe, it didn't seem like the others cared about him after he was dead."

"I'm not sure I know what you mean," Leaphorn said.

"Forget it," she said. "It wasn't fair to say it. After all, it was Dr. Woody who checked him in. And Miss Pollard was just doing her job—trying to find out where he picked up the infected flea. Did she ever find out?"

"We don't know," Leaphorn said. "The morning after she left here she left a note for her boss. It just said that she was driving up to where Dr. Woody had his mobile laboratory and checking for plague carriers around there. Dr. Woody tells us she never arrived at his lab. She didn't go back to her office or to the motel where she was staying. Nobody has seen her since."

Shirley's face registered a mixture of shock and surprise. "You mean—has something happened to her?"

"We don't know," Leaphorn said. "Her office reported her disappearance to the police. And the vehicle she was driving is missing, too."

"You think I was the last one to talk to her? Nobody has seen her since she left here?"

"We don't know. No one that we can locate. Did she say anything to you about where she was going? Anything that would give us a hint of what was going on with her?"

Shirley shook her head. "Nothing that you don't already know. All she talked about here was Mr. Nez. She wanted to know how he'd been infected. Where and when."

"Did you tell her?"

"Dr. Delano told her we didn't know for sure. That Nez had a high fever and fully developed plague symptoms—the black splotches under the skin where the capillaries have failed, and the swollen glands—he already had all that when we got him up here in Intensive Care, and they brought him right up. She asked Delano a lot of questions, and he told her that Dr. Woody had said that Nez had been bitten by the flea the evening before he brought him in. And she said that wasn't what Dr. Woody had told her, and Delano—"

"Wait a second," Louisa said. "She had already talked to Woody about Nez?"

Shirley chuckled. "Apparently. She said something about a lying sonofabitch. And Delano, he's sort of touchy and he seemed to think that Miss Pollard was accusing him of lying. So then she said something to make it clear she had meant Woody. And Delano said he wasn't certifying what Woody had told him, because he didn't think it was true either. He said Nez couldn't possibly have developed a fever that high and the other plague symptoms so quickly."

Shirley shrugged. End of explanation.

Leaphorn frowned, digesting this. He said: "Do you think Dr. Delano could have misunderstood him? About when Nez was infected?"

"I don't see how," Shirley said. She pointed. "They were standing right there and I heard it all myself. Delano had told Woody that Nez had died sometime after midnight. And Woody said he wanted to know just exactly when Nez died. Exactly. He said the flea had bitten Nez on the inside of his thigh the evening before he brought him in. Woody was very emphatic about the time. He told Delano he'd left a list of symptoms and so forth that he wanted timed and charted as the disease developed. He wanted an autopsy scheduled and he wanted to be there when it was done."

"Was it done?"

"So I hear," Shirley said. "Nurses aren't included in the circuit of information at that level, but the word gets around."

Louisa chuckled at that. "Hospitals and universities. About the same story."

"What did you hear?" Leaphorn asked.

"Mostly that Woody had more or less tried to take over the procedure, and the pathologist was sore as hell Otherwise, I guess it was just a finding of another death from bubonic plague. And Woody had a lot of tissue and some of the organs preserved."

Neither Leaphorn nor Louisa had much to say on their way back to his truck. Settled in their seats, Louisa said they were probably lucky Delano hadn't been there. "He might have known a little more, but he probably wouldn't have told us much. Professional dignity involved, you know."

"Yeah," Leaphorn said, and started the engine.

"You're not very talkative," Louisa said. "Did that answer any questions for you?"

"Well, now we know for sure who Miss Pollard thought had been lying to her," Leaphorn said. "And of course that raises the next question."

"Which is why would Woody lie to her? And for that matter, he must have lied to us, too."

"Exactly," Leaphorn said.

"We should go up there again and confront him with it. See what he says."

"Not yet," Leaphorn said. "I think he'd just insist he wasn't lying. He'd come up with some sort of explanation. Or he'd tell me to bug off. Quit wasting his time."

"I guess he could, couldn't he."

"We're just two nosy civilians," Leaphorn said, wondering if that sounded as sad as it felt.

"So what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to call Chee in the morning. See if anything new has turned up on Pollard or her Jeep. And then I'll return Mrs. Vanders's call and tell her what little ^e know. And then I want to go see Krause."

"And see if he knows more than he's told you?"

"I didn't know what questions to ask," Leaphorn said. "And I'd like to get a look at that note Pollard left for him."

Louisa's expression asked him why.

Leaphorn laughed. "Because I spent too many years being a cop, and I can't get over it. I ask him to see the note, so what happens? Possibility A. He finds a reason not to show it to me. That makes me wonder why not."

"Oh," Louisa said. "You think he might, ah, be involved?"

"I don't think that now, but I might if he refused to let me see the note. But on to possibility B. He shows me the note. The handwriting obviously doesn't match her script in the journal. That raises all sorts of possibilities. Or C. He hands me the note, and it has information on it that he didn't think was important enough to mention. Possibility C is the best bet. Even that's unlikely, but it doesn't cost anything to try."

"Are you going to invite me along again?"

"I'm counting on it, Louisa. Instead of the job just being a grind, you make it fun."

She sighed. "I can't go tomorrow. I'm chairing a committee meeting, and it's my project and my committee."

"I'll miss you," Leaphorn said. And he knew he would.

Chapter Nineteen

CHEE HAD STARED AT the telephone with distaste, dreading this call. Then he picked it up, took a deep breath and dialed Janet Pete's office at the federal building in Phoenix. Ms. Pete was not in. Did he want her voice mail? He didn't. Where could he reach her? Was this matter urgent?

"Yes," Chee said. Janet might not agree, but it was urgent for him. He couldn't focus on anything else until the genie that Cowboy's "Pollard did it" theory had released was securely back in the bottle. Chee's "yes" earned him a number in Flagstaff, which proved to be the telephone on a desk in a multiple-users' office assigned to public defenders in the courthouse at Flagstaff.

The very familiar voice of many happy memories said: "Hello, Janet Pete."

"Jim Chee," he said. "Do you have some time to talk, or should I call you back?"

Brief silence. "I have time." The voice was even softer now, or was it his imagination? "Is this about business?"

"Alas, it's business," Chee said. "I've heard Cowboy Dashee's theory of what happened to Kinsman and we've been checking on it. I need to talk to your client. Is he still being held there at Flag? And would you be willing to get me in to talk to him?"

"Yes, on the first one," Janet said. "He's still there because I couldn't get bail for him. Mickey opposed it and I think that's stupid. Where could Jano hide?"

"It is stupid," Chee agreed. "But Mickey wants to go for the death penalty, I guess. If he didn't fight bond, even for a Hopi who sure as hell isn't going to run, then you could use it to prove even the U.S. attorney didn't really believe Jano is dangerous."

Even as he was finishing the sentence, Chee was wondering why he always seemed to begin conversations with Janet like this—as if he were trying to start a fight. The silence at the other end of the line suggested she was having the same thought.

"What do you want to talk to Mr. Jano about?"

"I understand he saw the Jeep Ms. Pollard was driving."

"He saw a Jeep. Have you picked her up yet?" More adversarial than "Have you found her?" Chee closed his eyes, remembering how it had been once. "We haven't located her," he said. "It may not be easy," Janet said. "She's had a long time to hide, and I understand she has plenty of money to make that easy."

"We didn't make the connection until—" He stopped. He wasn't going to apologize. None was needed. Janet had worked as a defense attorney long enough to know how the police operated. How they couldn't possibly investigate every time someone drove off without telling anyone where they were going. Why explain what she already knew?

"Look, Jim," she said. "I'm the man's defense attorney. Unless you can let me see how he—how justice would benefit by letting you cross-examine him, then I can't do it. Tell me what good it would do him."

Chee sighed. "We found the Jeep," he said. "The passenger-side seat was smeared with dried blood. There's evidence it was abandoned within an hour or so after Jano—after Kinsman was hit on the head."

Silence. Then Janet said; "Blood. Whose was it? But you haven't had time for any lab work yet, I guess. Is •Jano a suspect in this, too?"

"I don't see how he could be. I know exactly where he was when the Jeep was being abandoned."

"Where was it?"

"About twenty miles southwest. Down an arroyo."

"You think Jano might have seen something, or heard something, that would help you find Catherine Pollard?"

"I think he might have. Slim chance, but we don't have anything else to go on. Not now, anyway. Maybe we will when the crime scene crew and the lab people finish with the Jeep."

"Okay then," Janet said. "You know the rules. I'm there, and if I cut off the questions, that ends it. You want to do it today?"

"Fair enough," Chee said. "And the sooner the better. I'll leave Tuba City as soon as I hang up."

"I'll meet you at the jail," she said. "And, Jim, let's try not to make each other mad all the time." She didn't wait for a response.

Janet was waiting in the interrogation room—a small dingy space with two barred windows looking out at nothing. She was sitting across a battered wooden table from Robert Jano. She talked quietly. Jano listened intently. Glanced up as Chee appeared in the doorway. Examined Chee with mild, polite curiosity. Chee nodded to him, suddenly aware that when he had caught Jano with his hands still red with Kinsman's blood he hadn't—in his shock and rage—really studied the man. He studied him now. This handsome, polite young killer whom Chee was trying to give a place in history. The first man strapped into a gas chamber under the new federal reservation death sentence law.

He nodded to Janet, said: "Thanks."

"You two have met," Janet said, with no sign that she appreciated the irony of that. They nodded. Jano smiled, then seemed embarrassed that he had. "Have a seat," Janet said, "and I'll go over the rules. Mr. Chee here will ask a question. And, Robert, you won't answer it until I say it's okay. All right?"

Jano nodded. Chee looked at Janet, who returned the look with no trace of warmth. She'd learned a lot, he thought, since he'd first met her in the interrogation room at the San Juan County Jail in Aztec. Many happy times ago. "Okay," Chee said. He looked at Jano. "That morning I arrested you, did you see a young woman anywhere around there?"

"I saw—" he began, but Janet interrupted.

"Just a moment," she said, and took a tape recorder from her purse, put it on the table, set up a microphone and switched it on. "Okay," she said.

"I saw a black Jeep," Jano said. "I didn't see who was driving it."

"When did you see it, and where were you?" Jano looked at Janet. She nodded. "I had climbed the butte and was walking along the rim to where I have a blind for catching eagles. I looked down and saw a black Jeep parked on that rise near the abandoned hogan."

"No one was in it?"

Jano glanced at Janet. She nodded.

"No."

"Did you see Officer Kinsman's car driving in?"

Jano glanced at Janet. "What's the purpose of that question?"

"I want to find out if the Jeep was still there when Kinsman arrived." Janet thought about it. "Okay."

"I saw him coming in, yes. And the Jeep was still there."

Chee looked at Janet. "So," he said, "if Pollard was the Jeep driver, she was in the vicinity when Kinsman was killed."

"Injured," Janet said. "But yes, she was."

"I intend to ask your client to just re-create what he saw and heard and did that morning," Chee said.

She thought. "Go ahead. We'll see."

Jano said he arrived about dawn, parked his pickup, unloaded his eagle cage with the rabbit in it that he'd brought along as bait and climbed the saddle to the rim of the butte. He heard an engine sound, watched and saw the Jeep arriving, but he couldn't see who got out of it because of where it had been parked. He had settled himself into the blind and put the rabbit, secured with a cord on the brush, on top of it. Then he had waited about an hour. The eagle came circling over, in its hunting pattern. It saw the rabbit, dived, and caught it. He had caught the eagle by one leg and its tail. It had slashed his forearm with its other talon. "Then I turned the eagle loose and—"

"Just a second," Chee said. "You had the eagle in the cage when I arrested you. The cage was beside the rocks, just a few feet away. Remember?"

"That was the second eagle," Jano said. "You're saying you caught an eagle, released it and then caught a second one?"

"Yes," Jano said. "Will you tell me why you released the first one?"

Jano looked at Janet.

"No, he won't," she said.

"He'll be asked at the trial," Chee said.

"If it goes to trial, he will say his reason involves religious beliefs that he is not free to discuss outside his kiva. He may say that two of its tail feathers were pulled out in the struggle, eliminating its ritual use. And then, if I have to do it, I will call in an authority on the Hopi religion who will also explain why a eagle thus stained by bloody violence could not be used in the role assigned to it in this religious ceremonial."

"Okay," Chee said. "Please continue, Mr. Jano. What happened next?"

"I took the rabbit and walked maybe two miles down the rim of the butte to where another eagle has its hunting ground, got into the blind there and waited. Then the eagle you saw came for the rabbit and I caught it."

Jano stopped, looked at Chee as if waiting for an argument and then went on.

"This time I was more careful." He smiled and displayed his forearm. "No injury this time."

Jano said he had seen the Navajo Tribal Police car driving up the trail while he was carrying the eagle down the saddle toward his truck. He said he'd hidden behind an outcrop of rock for a while, hoping the policeman would leave, and then had crept down the rest of the way, thinking he had not been seen.

"Then I heard a loud voice. I think it was the policeman. I heard him several times. And then—" Chee held up his hand. "Hold it there. Did you hear a response from the person he was talking to?"

"I just heard that one voice," Kinsman said.

"A man's voice?"

"Yes. It sounded like he was giving orders to someone."

"Orders? What do you mean?"

"Yelling. Like he was arresting someone. You know. Ordering them around."

"Could you tell where the voices were coming from?"

"Just one voice," Jano said. "From about over where I found Mr. Kinsman."

"I want you to skip back a little," Chee said. "When you were climbing down the saddle, was the Jeep still parked where you first saw it parked?"

Jano nodded, then looked at the microphone and said: "Yes, the Jeep was still there."

"Okay. Then what did you do when you heard the voice?"

"I hid behind a juniper for a while, just listening. I could hear what sounded like walking. You know, boots on rocky ground and sort of coming in my direction. Then I heard a voice saying something. And then I heard a sort of a thumping sound."

Jano paused, looking at Chee. "I think it might have been Mr. Kinsman being hit on the head with something. And then there was a clatter."

Jano paused again, pursed his lips, seemed to be remembering the moment.

"Then what?" Chee asked. "I just waited there behind the juniper. And after it was silent awhile, I went to look. And there was Mr. Kinsman on the ground, with the blood running out of his head." He shrugged. "Then you walked up and pointed your gun at me."

"Did you recognize Kinsman?"

Janet Pete said: "Hold it. Hold it." She frowned at Chee. "What are you trying to do, Jim? Establish malice?"

"The D.A. will establish that Kinsman had arrested Mr. Jano before," Chee said. "I wasn't trying anything tricky."

"Maybe not," she said. "But this looks like a good place to cut this off."

"Just one more question," Chee said. "Did you see anyone else when you were there? Anyone at all? Or anything? Going in, or coming out, or anything?"

"I saw a bunch of goats over on the other side of the saddle," Jano said. "Lot of trees over there. I couldn't tell for sure. But maybe there was somebody with them."

"Okay," Janet said. "Mr. Jano and I have some things to talk about. Good-bye, Jim."

Chee stood, took a step toward the door, turned back. "Just one more thing," he said. "I found a blind at the rim of Yells Back where you may have caught an eagle." He described the location and the blind. "Is that right?"

Jano looked at Janet, who looked at Chee. She nodded.

"Yes," Jano said.

"The first eagle, or the second one?"

"The second one."

"Where did you catch the first eagle?"

Jano didn't glance at Janet this time for permission to answer. He sat, eyes on Chee, looking thoughtful.

He won't tell me, Chee thought, because there was only one eagle, or he won't tell me because he isn't willing to reveal the location of another of his kiva's hidden hunting blinds.

Janet cleared her throat, rose. "I'm going to cut this off," she said. "I think—"

Jano held up a hand. "Stand there on the rim at the top of the saddle. Look directly at Humphrey's Peak in the San Franciscos. Walk straight toward it. About two miles you come to the rim again. It's a place there where a slab tilted down and left a gap."

"Thank you," Chee said.

Jano smiled at him. "I think you know eagles," he said.

Chapter Twenty

LEAPHORN AWOKE IN A SILENT HOUSE, with the early sun shining on his face. He had built their house in Window Rock with their bedroom window facing the rising sun because that pleased Emma. Therefore, both the sun and the emptiness were familiar. Louisa had left a note on the kitchen table, which began: "Push ON button on the coffeemaker," and went on to outline the availability of various foods for breakfast and concluded on a more personal note. "I have errands to run before class. Good hunting.

Please call and let me know what luck you're having. I enjoyed yesterday. A LOT. Louisa." Leaphorn pushed the on button, dropped bread into the toaster, got out a plate, cup, knife and the butter dish. Then he went to the telephone, began dialing Mrs. Vanders's number in Santa Fe, then hung up. First he would call Chee. Perhaps that would give him something to tell Mrs. Vanders besides that he had nothing at all to tell her.

"He hasn't arrived yet, Lieutenant Leaphorn," the station secretary said. "Do you want his home number?"

"It's 'Just call me mister' now," Leaphorn said. "And thanks, but I have it."

"Wait a minute. Here he comes now."

Leaphorn waited.

"I was just going to call you," Chee said. "We found the Jeep." He gave Leaphorn the details.

"You said the tire tracks showed the sand was still wet when it got there?"

"Right."

"So it got there after Kinsman was hit."

"Right again. And probably not long after. It wasn't a very wet rain."

"I guess it's too early to have anything much from the crime lab about prints or—" Leaphorn paused. "Look, Lieutenant, I keep forgetting that I'm a civilian now. Just say no comment or something if I'm overstepping."

Chee laughed. "Mr. Leaphorn," he said. "I'm afraid you're always going to be Lieutenant to me. And they said they found a lot of prints everywhere matching the guy who stole the radio. But there was no old latent stuff in the obvious places. The steering wheel, gearshift knob, door handles—all those places had been wiped.

Very thoroughly."

"I don't like the sound of that," Leaphorn said. "No," Chee said. "Either she's on the run and wanted to leave the impression she'd been abducted, or she actually was taken by someone who didn't want to be identified. Take your pick."

"Probably number two if I had to guess. But who knows? And I guess it's way too early to know anything about the blood," Leaphorn said. "Way too early."

"Is there any chance you could find any samples of Pollard's blood anywhere? Was she a blood bank donor? Or was she scheduled for any surgery that she'd stockpile blood for?"

"That was one reason I was about to call you," Chee said. "We can get next of kin and so forth from her employer, but it would be quicker to call that woman who hired you. Was it Vanders?"

Leaphorn provided the name, address and telephone number.

"I'm going to call her right now and tell her the Jeep was found and to expect a call from you," Leaphorn added. "Anything you've told me that you want withheld?" A moment of silence while Chee considered. "Nothing I can think of," he said. "You know any reason we should?" Leaphorn didn't. He called Mrs. Vanders. "Give me a moment to get ready for this," she said. People who call early in the morning usually have bad news."

"It might be," Leaphorn said. "The Jeep she was driving has been located. It had been abandoned in an arroyo about twenty miles from where she said she was going. There was no sign of an accident. But some dried blood was found on the passenger-side seat. The police don't know yet how long the blood was there, whether it was hers or where it came from."

"Blood," Mrs. Vanders said. "Oh, my."

"Dried," Leaphorn said. "Perhaps from an old injury, an old cut. Do you remember if she ever told you of hurting herself? Or of anyone being hurt in that vehicle?"

"Oh," she said. "I don't think so. I can't remember. I just can't make my mind work."

"It's too early to worry," Leaphorn said. "She may be perfectly all right." This was not the time to tell her the Jeep had been wiped clean of fingerprints. He asked her if Catherine might have been a blood bank donor, if she had scheduled any surgery for which she would have stockpiled blood. Mrs. Vanders didn't remember. She didn't think so.

"You'll be getting a call this morning from the officer investigating the case," Leaphorn told her. "A Lieutenant Jim Chee. He'll tell you if anything new has developed."

"Yes," Mrs. Vanders said. "I'm afraid something terrible has happened. She was such a headstrong girl."

"I'm going now to talk to Mr. Krause," Leaphorn said. "Maybe he can tell us something."

Richard Krause was not in his temporary laboratory at Tuba City, but a note was thumbtacked to the door: "Out mouse hunting. Back tomorrow. Reachable through Kaibito Chapter House." Leaphorn topped off his gasoline tank and headed southwest—twenty miles of pavement on U.S. 160 and then another twenty on the washboard gravel of Navajo Route 21. Only three pickups rested in the Chapter House parking lot, and none of them belonged to the Indian Health Service. Discouraging news.

But inside Leaphorn found Mrs. Gracie Nakaidineh in charge of things. Mrs. Nakaidineh remembered him from his days patrolling out of Tuba City long, long ago. And he remembered Gracie as one of those women who always do what needs to be done and know what needs to be known.

"Ah," Gracie said after they had gotten through the greeting ritual common to all old-timers, "you mean you're looking for the Mouse Man."

"Right," Leaphorn said. "He left a note on his door saying he could be contacted here."

"He said if anyone needed to find him, he'd be catching mice along Kaibito Creek. He said he'd be about where it runs into Chaol Canyon."

That meant leaving washboard gravel and taking Navajo Route 6330, which was graded dirt circling up onto the Rainbow Plateau for twenty-six bumpy empty miles. Leaphorn avoided much of that journey. About eight miles out, he spotted an Indian Health Service pickup parked in a growth of willows. He pulled off onto the shoulder, got out his binoculars and tried to make out enough of the symbol painted on its dusty, brush-obscured door to determine "whether it was the Indian Health Service or something else. Failing that, he scanned the area for Krause.

A figure, clad head to foot in some sort of shiny white coverall, was moving through the brush toward the truck, carrying plastic sacks in both hands. Krause? Leaphorn couldn't even tell whether it was a man or woman. Whoever was wearing the astronaut's suit stopped beside the truck and began removing shiny metal boxes from the sacks, placing them in a row in the shade behind the vehicle. That done, he took one of the boxes to the truck bed, put it into another plastic sack, sprayed something from a can into the bag, and then began arranging a row of flat square pans on the tailgate.

It must be Krause on his mouse-hunting expedition, and now he was performing whatever magic biologists perform with mice. He was working with his back to Leaphorn, revealing a curving black tube that extended from a black box low on his back upward into the back of his hood. Here was what Mrs. Notah had seen behind the screen of junipers at Yells Back Butte. The witch who looked part snowman and part elephant.

As that thought occurred to Leaphorn, Krause turned, and as he took the box from the sack, sunlight reflected off the transparent face shield—completing Mrs. Notah's description of her skinwalker. He turned to watch Leaphorn approaching.

Leaphorn restarted the engine and rolled his truck down the slope. He parked, got out, slammed the door noisily behind him.

Krause spun around, yelling something and pointing to a hand-lettered sign on the pickup: IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU'RE TOO DAMNED CLOSE. Leaphorn stopped. He shouted: "I need to talk to you." Krause nodded. He held up a circled thumb and finger, and then a single finger, noted that Leaphorn understood the signals, and turned back to his work—which involved holding a small rodent in one hand over a white enamel tray and running a comb through its fur with the other. That job done, he held up the tiny form of a mouse, dangling it by its long tail, for Leaphorn to see. He dropped the animal into another of the traps, peeled off a pair of latex gloves, disposed of them in a bright red canister beside the truck. He walked toward Leaphorn, pushing back his hood.

"Hantavirus," he said, grinning at Leaphorn. "Which we used to call, in our days of cultural insensitivity, the Navajo Flu."

"A name which we didn't like any better than the American Legion liked your name for Legionnaire's disease."

"So now we give both of them their dignified Greek titles, and everybody is happy," Krause said. "And anyway, what I was doing was separating the fleas from the fur of a Peromyscus, actually a Peromyscus maniculatus, and ninety-nine-point-nine chances out of a hundred, when we test both fleas and mammal, the tests will show I have murdered a perfectly healthy deer mouse who never hosted a virus in his life. But we won't know until we get the lab work done."

"Are you finished here now?" Leaphorn asked. "Do YOU have time for some questions?"

"Some," Krause said. He turned and waved at the row of metal boxes in the shade. "But before I can peel off this uniform—which is officially called a Positive Air Purifying Respirator suit, or PAPR, in vector controller slang—I've got to finish with the mice in those traps. Separate the fleas and then it's slice and dice for the poor little deer mice."

"I have plenty of time," Leaphorn said. "I'll just watch you work."

"From a distance, though. It's probably safe. As far as we know, hantavirus spreads aerobically. In other words, it's carried in the mouse urine, and when that dries, it's in the dust people breathe. The trouble is, if it infects you, there's no way to cure it."

"I'll stay back," Leaphorn said. "And I'll hold my questions until you get out of that suit. I'll bet you're cooking."

"Better cooked than dead," Krause said. "And it's not as bad as it looks. The air blowing into the hood keeps your head cool. Stick your hand close here and feel it."

"I'll take your word for it," Leaphorn said. He watched while Krause emptied the box traps one at a time, combed the fleas out of the fur into individual bags and then extracted the pertinent internal organs. He put those in bottles and the corpses into the disposal canister. He peeled off the PAPR and dropped it into the same can.

"Runs the budget up," he said. "When we're hunting plague, we don't use the PAPRS when we're just trapping. And after we've done the slice-and-dice work, we save 'em for reuse, unless we slosh prairie dog innards on them. But with hantavirus you don't take any chances. But what can I tell you that might be useful?"

"Well, first let me tell you that we found the Jeep Miss Pollard was driving. It had been left in an arroyo down that road that leads past Goldtooth."

"Well, at least she was going in the direction she told me she was going," Krause said, grinning. "No note left for me about taking an early vacation or anything like that?"

"Only a little smear of blood," Leaphorn said.

Krause's grin vanished.

"Oh, shit," he said. "Blood. Her blood?" He shook his head. "From the very first, I've been taking for granted that one day she'd either call or just walk in, probably without even explaining anything until I asked her. You just don't think something is going to happen to Cathy. Nothing that she doesn't want to happen."

"We don't know that it has," Leaphorn said. "Not for sure."

Krause's expression changed again. Immense relief. "It wasn't her blood?"

"That brings us to my question. Do you have any idea where we might find a sample of Miss Pollard's blood? Enough for the lab to make a comparison?"

"Oh," Krause said. "So you just don't know yet? But who else could it belong to? There was no one with her."

"You sure of that?"

"Oh," Krause said again. "Well, no, I guess I'm not. I didn't see her that morning. But she didn't say anything in the note about having company. And she always worked alone. We often do on this kind of work."

"Any possibility that Hammar could have been with her?"

"Remember? Hammar said he was doing his teaching work back at the university that day."

"I remember," Leaphorn said. "That hasn't been checked yet as far as I know. When the lab tells the police it's Miss Pollard's blood in the Jeep, then the alibis get checked."

"Including mine?"

"Of course. Including everybody's."

Leaphorn waited, giving Krause time to amend what he'd said about that morning. But Krause just stood there looking thoughtful.

"Had she cut herself recently? Donated any blood? Any idea where some could be found for the lab?"

Krause closed his eyes, thinking. "She's careful," he said. "In this work you have to be. Hard as hell to work with, but skillful. I don't ever remember her cutting herself in the lab. And in a vector control lab getting cut is a big deal. And if she was a blood donor, she never mentioned it."

"When you came in that morning, where did you find her note?"

"Right on my desk."

"You were going to see if you could find it. Any luck?"

"I've been busy. I'll try," Krause said.

"I'll need a copy," Leaphorn said. "Okay?"

"I guess so," Krause said, and Leaphorn noticed that some of his cordiality had slipped away. "But you're not a policeman. I'll bet the cops will want it."

"They will," Leaphorn said. "I'd be satisfied with a Xerox. Can you remember exactly what it said? Every word of it?"

"I can remember the meaning. She wouldn't be in the office that day. She was taking the Jeep and heading southeast, over toward Black Mesa and Yells Back Butte. Working on the Nez plague fatality."

"Did she say she'd be trapping animals? Prairie dogs or what?"

"Probably. I think so. Either she said it or I took it for granted. I don't think she was specific, but she'd been working on plague. She still hadn't pinned down where Mr. Nez got his fatal infection."

"And that would have been from a prairie dog flea?"

"Well, probably. That Yersinia pestis is a bacteria spread by fleas. But some of the Peromyscus host fleas, too. We got two hundred off one rock squirrel once."

"Would she have had a PAPR with her?"

"She carries one with her stuff in the Jeep. Was it still there when they found the vehicle?"

"I don't know," Leaphorn said. "I'll ask. And I have one more question. In that note, did she tell you why she planned to quit?"

Krause frowned. "Quit?"

"Her job here."

"She wasn't going to quit."

"Her aunt told me that. In a call Pollard made just before she disappeared, she said she was quitting."

"Be damned," Krause said. He stared at Leaphorn, biting his lower lip. "She say why?"

"I think it was because she couldn't get along with you."

"That's true enough," Krause said. "A hardheaded Ionian.

Chapter Twenty-one

SUMMER HAD ARRIVED with dreadful force in Phoenix, and the air conditioning in the Federal Courthouse Building had countered the dry heat outside its double glass windows by producing a clammy chill in the conference room. Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney J. D. Mickey had assembled the assorted forces charged with maintaining law and order in America's high desert country to decide whether to go for the first death penalty under the new congressional act that authorized such penalties for certain crimes committed on federal reservations.

Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police was among those assembled, but being at the bottom level of the hierarchy, he was sitting uncomfortably in a metal folding chair against the wall with an assortment of state cops, deputy sheriffs, and low-ranking deputy U.S. marshals. It had been clear to Chee from the onset of the meeting that the decision had been long since made. Mr. Mickey was serving on some sort of temporary appointment and intended to make the most of it while it lasted. The timing of the death of Benjamin Kinsman opened a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity. National—or at least congressional district regional—publicity was there for the grabbing. He'd go for the historic first. What was happening here was known in upper-level civil service circles as "the CYA maneuver," intended to Cover Your Ass by diluting the blame when things went wrong.

"All right then," Mickey was saying. "Unless anyone has more questions, the policy will be to charge this homicide as a capital crime and impanel a jury for the death sentence. I guess I don't have to remind any of you people here that this will mean a lot more work for all of us."

The woman in the chair to Chee's right was a young Kiowa-Comanche-Polish-Irish cop wearing the uniform of the Law Enforcement Services of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She snorted, "Us!" and muttered, "Means more work for us, all right. Not him. He means he guesses he don't have to remind us he's running for Congress as the law-and-order candidate."

Now Mickey was outlining the nature of this extra work. He introduced Special Agent in Charge John Reynald. Agent Reynald would be coordinating the effort, calling the signals, running the investigation.

"There'll be no problem getting the conviction." Mickey said. "We caught the perpetrator literally red-handed with the victim. What makes it absolutely ironclad is having Jano's blood mixed with the victim's on both of their clothing. The best the defense can come up with is a story that the eagle he was poaching slashed him."

This produced a chuckle.

"Trouble is, the eagle didn't cooperate. There wasn't a trace of Jano's blood on it. What we'll need to get the death penalty is evidence of malice. We'll want witnesses who heard Mr. Jano talking about his previous arrest by Officer Kinsman. We need to find people who can remember hearing him talk about revenge. Talking about how badly Kinsman handled him during that first arrest. Even bad-mouthing Navajos in general. That sort of thing. Check out the bars, places like that."

"Where'd this jerk come from?" the LES woman asked Chee. "He sure doesn't know much about Hopis."

"Indiana, I think," Chee said. "But I guess he's been in Arizona long enough to establish residency for a federal office election."

Mickey was closing down the meeting, shaking hands with the proper people. He stopped Chee at the door.

"Stick around a minute," Mickey said. "I want to have a word or two with you."

Chee stuck around. So did Reynald and Special Agent Edgar Evans, who closed the door behind-the last departee.

"There're several points I want to make," Mickey said. "Point one is that the victim in this case may not have had a perfect personal record, you know what I mean, being a healthy young man and all. If there's any talk going around among his fellow officers that the defense might use to dirty his name, then I want that stopped. Going for the death penalty, you understand why."

"Sure," Chee said, and nodded. "I'll get right to the second point then," Mickey said. "The gossip has it that you're engaged to this Janet Pete. The defense attorney. Either that, or used to be."

Mickey had phrased it as a question. He and Reynald and Evans waited for an answer. Chee said: "Really?"

Mickey frowned. "In a case like this one, in a touchy business like this, culturally sensitive, the press looking over our shoulders, we have to watch out for anything that might look like a conflict of interest."

"That sounds sensible to me," Chee said. "I don't think you're understanding me," Mickey said. "Yes, sir," Chee said. "I understand you." Mickey waited. So did Chee. Mickey's face turned slightly pink.

"Well, then, goddamnit, what's with this gossip? You got something going with Ms. Pete or what?"

Chee smiled. "I had a wise old maternal grandmother who used to teach me things. Or try to teach me when I was smart enough to listen to her," Chee said. "She told me that only a damn fool pays attention to gossip."

Mickey's complexion turned redder. "All right," he said. "Let's get one thing straight. This case is about the murder of a law officer in the performance of his duty. One °f your own men. You're part of the prosecution team. Ms. Pete runs the defense team. You're no lawyer, but you've been in the enforcement business long enough to know how things work. We got the disclosure rule, so the criminal's team gets to know what we're putting into evidence." He paused, staring at Chee. "But sometimes justice requires that you don't show your hole card. Sometimes you have to keep some of your plans and your strategy in the closet. You understand what I'm telling you?"

"I think you're telling me that if this gossip is true, I shouldn't talk in my sleep," Chee said. "Is that about right?" Mickey grinned. "Exactly."

Chee nodded. He'd noticed that Reynald was following this conversation intently. Agent Evans looked bored. "And I might add," Mickey added, "that if somebody else talks in their sleep, you might just give a listen."

"My grandmother had something else to say about gossip," Chee said. "She said it doesn't have a long shelf life. Sometimes you hear the soup's on the table and it's too hot to eat, and by the time the news gets to you it's in the freezer."

Mickey's beeper began chirping as Chee was ending that observation. Whatever the call was about, it broke up the cluster without the ritual shaking of hands that convention required.

Chee hadn't lucked into a shady place to leave his car. He used his handkerchief to open the door without burning his hand, started the engine, rolled down all the windows to let the ovenlike heat escape, turned the air conditioner to maximum and then slid off the scorching upholstery to stand outside until the interior became tolerable. It gave him a little time to plan what he'd do. He'd call Joe Leaphorn from here to see if anything new had developed. He'd call his office to learn what awaited him there, and then he'd head for the north end of the Chuska Mountains, the landscape of his boyhood, and the sheep camp where Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai spent his summers.

From Phoenix, from almost anywhere, that meant a hell of a long drive. But Chee was a man of faith. He did his damnedest to maintain within himself the ultimate value of his people, the sense of peace, harmony and beauty Navajos call hozho. He badly needed Hosteen Nakai's counsel on how to deal with the death of a man and the death of an eagle.

Hosteen Nakai was Chee's maternal granduncle, which gave him special status in Navajo tradition. He had given Chee his real, or war, name, which was "Long Thinker," a name revealed only to those very close to you and used only for ceremonial purposes. Circumstances, and the early death of Chee's father, had magnified Nakai's importance to Chee—making him mentor, spiritual adviser, confessor and friend. By trade he was a rancher and a shaman whose command of the Blessing Way ceremonial and a half dozen other curing rituals was so respected that he taught them to student hataalü at Navajo Community College. If anyone could tell Chee the wise way to handle the messy business of Kinsman, Jano and Mickey, it would be Nakai.

More specifically, Nakai would advise him on how he could deal with the problem posed by the first eagle. If it existed and he caught it, it would die. He had no illusions about its fate in the laboratory. There was a chant to be sung before hunting, asking the prey to know it was respected and to understand the need for it to die. But if Jano was lying, then the eagle he would try to lure to that blind would die for nothing. Chee would be violating the moral code of the Dine, who did not take lightly the killing of anything.

No telephone line came within miles of the Nakai summer hogan, but Chee drove along Navajo Route 12 with not a doubt that his granduncle would be there. Where else would he be? It was summer. His flock would be high in the mountain pastures. The coyotes would be waiting in the fringes of the timber, as they always were. The sheep would need him. Nakai was always where he was needed. So he would be in his pasture tent near his sheep.

But Hosteen Nakai wasn't in his tent up in the high meadows.

It was late twilight when Chee pulled his truck off the entry track and onto the hard-packed earth of the Nakai place. His headlight beams swept across the cluster of trees beside the hogan. They also caught the form of a man, propped on pillows in a portable bed, the sort medical supply companies rent. Chee's heart sank. His granduncle was never sick. Having the bed outside was an ominous sign.

Blue Lady was standing in the hogan doorway, looking out at Chee as he climbed out of the truck, recognizing him, running toward him, saying: "How good. How good. He wanted you to come. I think he sent out his thoughts to you, and you heard him."

Blue Lady was Hosteen's second wife, named for the beauty of the turquoise she wore with her velvet blouse when her kinaalda ceremony initiated her into womanhood. She was the younger sister of Hosteen Nakai's first wife, who had died years before Chee was born. Since Navajo tradition is matrilineal and the man joined his bride's family, practice favored widowers marrying one of their sisters-in-law, thereby maintaining the same residence and the same mother-in-law. Nakai, being most traditional and already studying to be a shaman, had honored that tradition. Blue Lady was the only Nakai grandmother Chee had known.

Now she was hugging Chee to her. "He wanted to see you before he dies," she said.

"Dies? What is it? What happened?" It didn't seem possible to Chee that Hosteen Nakai could be dying. Blue Lady had no answer to that question. She led him over to the trees and motioned him into a rocking chair beside the bed. "I will get the lantern," she said.

Hosteen Nakai was studying him. "Ah," he said, "Long Thinker has come to talk to me. I had hoped for that."

Chee had no idea what to say. He said: "How are you, my father? Are you sick?"

Nakai produced a raspy laugh, which provoked a racking cough. He fumbled on the bed cover, retrieved a plastic device, inserted it into his nostrils and inhaled. The tube connected to it disappeared behind the bed. Connected, Chee presumed, to an oxygen tank. Nakai was trying to breathe deeply, his lungs making an odd sound. But he was smiling at Chee.

"What happened to you?" Chee asked. "I made a mistake," Nakai said. "I went to a bilagaana doctor at Farmington. He told me I was sick. They put me in the hospital and then they broke my ribs, and cut out around in there and put me back together." His voice was trailing off as he finished that, forcing a pause. When he had breath again, he chuckled. "I think they left out some parts. Now I have to get my air through this tube."

Blue Lady was hanging a propane lantern on the limb overhanging the head of the bed.

"He has lung cancer," she said. "They took out one lung, but it had already spread to the other one."

"And all sorts of other places, too, that you don't want to even know about," Nakai said, grinning. "When I die, my chindi will be awful mad. He'll be full of malignant tumors. That's why I made them move my bed out here. I don't want that chindi to be infecting this hogan. I want it out here where the wind will blow it away."

"When you die, it will be because you just got too old to want to live anymore," Chee said. He put his hand on Nakai's arm. Where he had always felt hard muscle, he now felt only dry skin between his palm and the bone. "It will be a long time from now. And remember what Changing Woman taught the people: If you die of natural old age, you don't leave a chindi behind."

"You young people—" Nakai began, but a grimace cut off the words. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the muscles of his face clenched and tightened. Blue Lady was at his side, holding a glass of some liquid. She gripped his hand.

"Time for the pain medicine," she said.

He opened his eyes. "I must talk a little first," he said. "I think he came to ask me something."

"You talk a little later. The medicine will give you some time for that." And Blue Lady raised his head from the pillow and gave him the drink. She looked at Chee. "Some medicine they gave him to let him sleep. Morphine maybe," she said. "It used to work very good. Now it helps a little."

"I should let him rest," Chee said. "You can't," she said. "Besides, he was waiting for you."

"For me?"

"Three people he wanted to see before he goes," she said. "The other two already came." She adjusted the oxygen tube back into Nakai's nostrils, dampened his forehead with a cloth, bent low and put her lips to his cheek, and walked back into the hogan.

Chee stood looking down at Nakai, remembering boyhood, remembering the winter stories in his hogan, the summer stories at the fire beside the sheep-camp tent, remembering the time Nakai had caught him drunk, remembering kindness and wisdom. Then Nakai, eyes still closed, said: "Sit down. Be easy."

Chee sat.

"Now, tell me why you came."

"I came to see you."

"No. No. You didn't know I was sick. You are busy. Some reason brought you here. The last time it was about marrying a girl, but if you married her you didn't invite me to do the ceremony. So I think you didn't do it." Nakai's words came slowly, so softly Chee leaned forward to hear.

"I didn't marry her," Chee said.

"Another woman problem then?"

"No," Chee said.

The morphine was having its effect. Nakai was relaxing a little. "So you came all the way up here to tell me you have no problems to talk to me about. You are the only contented man in all of Dinetah."

"No," Chee said. "Not quite."

"So tell me then," Nakai said. "What brings you?"

So Chee told Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai of the death of Benjamin Kinsman, the arrest of the Hopi eagle poacher, of Jano's unlikely story of the first and second eagles. He told him of the death sentence and even of Janet Pete. And finally Chee said: "Now I am finished."

Nakai had listened so silently that at times Chee—had he not known the man so well—might have thought he was asleep. Chee waited. Twilight had faded into total darkness while he talked and now the high, dry night sky was a-dazzle with stars.

Chee looked at them, remembered how the impatient Coyote spirit had scattered them across the darkness. He hunted out the summer constellations Nakai had taught him to find, and as he found them, tried to match them with the stories they carried in their medicine bundles. And as he thought, he prayed to the Creator, to all the spirits who cared about such things, that the medicine had worked, that Nakai was sleeping, that Nakai would never awaken to his pain.

Nakai sighed. He said: "In a little while I will ask you questions," and was silent again.

Blue Lady came out with a blanket, spread it carefully over Nakai and adjusted the lantern. "He likes the starlight," she said. "Do you need this?"

Chee shook his head. She turned off the flame and walked back into the hogan.

"Could you catch the eagle without harming it?"

"Probably," Chee said. "I tried twice when I was young. I caught the second one."

"Checking the talons and the feathers for dried blood, would the laboratory kill it then?"

Chee considered, remembering the ferocity of eagles, remembering the priorities of the laboratory. "Some oft hem would try to save it, but it would die."

Nakai nodded. "You think Jano tells the truth?"

"Once I was sure there was only one eagle. Now I

don't know. Probably he is lying."

"But you don't know?"

"No."

"And never would know. Even after the federals kill the Hopi you would wonder."

"Of course I would."

Nakai was silent again. Chee found another of the constellations. The small one, low on the horizon. He could not remember its Navajo name, nor the story it carried.

"Then you must get the eagle," Nakai said. "Do you still keep your medicine jish? You have pollen?"

"Yes," Chee said.

"Then take your sweat bath. Make sure you remember the hunting songs. You must tell the eagle, just as we told the buck deer, of our respect for it. Tell it the reason we must send it with our blessings away to its next life. Tell it that it dies to save a valuable man of the Hopi people."

"I will," Chee said. "And tell Blue Lady I need the medicine that makes me sleep."

But Blue Lady had already sensed that. She was coming.

This time there were pills as well as a drink from the cup.

"I will try to sleep now," Nakai said, and smiled at Chee. "Tell the eagle that he will also be saving you, my grandson."

Chapter Twenty-two

WHERE WAS ACTING LIEUTENANT Jim Chee? He'd gone to Phoenix yesterday and hadn't checked in this morning. Maybe he was still there. Maybe he was on his way back. Check later. Leaphorn hung up and considered what to do. First he'd take a shower. He flicked on the television, still tuned to the Flagstaff station he'd been watching before sleep overcame him, and turned on the shower.

They had good showerheads in this Tuba City motel, a fine, hard jet of hot water better than the one in his bathroom. He soaped, scrubbed, listened to the voice of the television newscaster reporting what seemed to be a traffic death, then a quarrel at a school board meeting. Then he heard "—murder of Navajo policeman Benjamin Kinsman." He turned off the shower and walked, dripping soapy water, to stand before the set.

It seemed that Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney J. D. Mickey had held a press conference yesterday evening. He was standing behind a battery of microphones at a podium with a tall, dark-haired man stationed uneasily slightly behind him. The taller man was clad in a white shirt, dark tie and a well-tailored dark business suit, which caused Leaphorn to immediately identify him as an FBI agent—apparently a new one to this part of the world, since Leaphorn didn't recognize him, and probably a special agent in charge, since he had come to take credit for whatever discoveries had been made in an affair that produced the sort of headlines upon which the Bureau fed.

"The evidence the FBI has collected makes it clear that this crime was not only a murder done in the commission of a felony, which would make it a capital crime under the old law, but that it fits the intent of Congress in the passage of the legislation allowing the death penalty for such crimes committed on federal reservations." Mickey paused, looked at his notes, adjusted his glasses. "We didn't decide to seek the death penalty casually," Mickey continued. "We considered the problem confronting the Navajo Tribal Police, and the police of the Hopis and Apaches and all the other reservation tribes, and the same problems shared by the police of the various states. These men and women patrol vast distances, alone in their patrol cars, without the quick backup assistance that officers in the small, more populous states can expect. Our police are utterly vulnerable in this situation, and their killers have time to be miles away before help can arrive. I have the names of the officers who have been killed in just—"

Leaphorn switched off the mortality list and ducked back into the shower. He had known several of those men. Indeed, six of them were Navajo policemen. And it was a story that needed to be told. So why did he resent hearing Mickey tell it? Because Mickey was a hypocrite. He decided to skip breakfast and wait for Chee at the police station.

Chee's car was already in the parking lot, and Acting Lieutenant Chee was sitting behind his desk, looking downcast and exhausted. He looked up from the file he was reading and forced a smile.

"I'll just ask a couple of questions and then I'll be out of here," Leaphorn said. "The first one is, do you have a report yet from the crime scene people? Did they list what they found in the Jeep?"

"This is it," Chee said, waving the file. "I just got it."

"Oh," Leaphorn said.

"Sit down," Chee said. "Let me see what's in it." Leaphorn sat, holding his hat in his lap. It reminded him of his days as a rookie cop, waiting for Captain Largo to decide what to do with him.

"No fingerprints except the radio thief," Chee said. "I think I already told you that. Good wiping job. There were prints on the owner's manual in the glove box, presumed to be Catherine Pollard's." He glanced up at Leaphorn, turned a page and resumed reading. "Here's the list of items found in the Jeep," he said, and handed it across the desk to Leaphorn. "I didn't see anything interesting on it."

It was fairly long. Leaphorn skipped the items in the glove box and door pockets and started with the backseat. There the team had found three filter-tip Kool cigarette butts, a Baby Ruth candy wrapper, a thermos containing cold coffee, a cardboard box containing fourteen folded metal rodent traps, eight larger prairie dog traps, two shovels, rope, and a satchel that contained five pairs of latex gloves and a variety of other items that, while the writer could only guess at their technical titles, were obviously the tools of the vector control trade.

Leaphorn looked up from the list. Chee was watching him.

"Did you notice the spare tire, the jack and the tire tools were all missing?" Chee asked. "I guess our radio thief didn't limit himself to that and the battery."

"This is all of it?" Leaphorn asked. "Everything that they found in the Jeep?"

"That's it," Chee said, frowning. "Why?"

"Krause said she always carried a respirator suit in the Jeep with her."

"A what?"

"They call 'em PAPRS," Leaphorn said. "For Positive Air Purifying Respirator Suit. They look a little like what the astronauts wear, or the people who make computer chips."

"Oh," Chee said. "Maybe she left it at her motel. We can check if you think it's important."

The telephone on Chee's desk buzzed. He picked it up, said, "Yes." Said, "Good, that's a lot faster than I expected." Said, "Sure, I'll hold."

He put his hand over the receiver. "They've got the report on the bloodwork."

Leaphorn said: "Fine," but Chee was listening again. "That's the right number of days," Chee told the telephone, and listened again, frowned, said: "It wasn't? Then what the hell was it?" Listened again, then said: "Well, thanks a lot."

He put down the telephone.

"It wasn't human blood," Chee said. "It was from some sort of rodent. He said he'd guess it was from a prairie dog."

Leaphorn leaned back in his chair. "Well now," he said.

"Yeah," Chee said. He tapped his fingers on the desktop a moment, then picked up the telephone, punched a button and said: "Hold any calls for a while, please."

"Did you see the dried blood on the seat?" Leaphorn asked.

"I did."

"How'd it look? I mean, had it been spilled there, or smeared on, or maybe an injured prairie dog had been put there, or dripped, or what?"

"I don't know," Chee said. "I know it didn't look like somebody had been stabbed, or shot, and bled there. It didn't really look natural—like what you expect to see at a homicide scene." He grimaced. "It looked more like it had been poured out on the edge of the leather seat. Then it had run down the side and a little onto the floor."

"She would have had access to blood," Leaphorn said. "Yeah," Chee said. "I thought of that."

"Why do it?" Leaphorn laughed. "It suggests she didn't have a very high opinion of the Navajo Tribal Police."

Chee looked surprised, saw the point. "You mean we'd just take for granted it was her blood and wouldn't check." He shook his head. "Well, it could happen. And then we'd be looking for her body instead of for her."

"If she did it," Leaphorn said.

"Right. If. You know, Lieutenant, I sort of wish we were back in Window Rock right now, with that map of yours on the wall, and you'd be putting your pins in it." He grinned at Leaphorn. "And explaining to me what happened."

"You're thinking about where the Jeep was left? So far from anywhere?"

"I was," Chee said.

"Way too far to walk to Tuba City. Too far to walk back to Yells Back Butte. So somebody had to meet her, or whoever drove the Jeep there, and give them a lift."

Leaphorn said. "Like who?"

"Did I tell you about Victor Hammar?"

"Hammar? If you did, I don't remember."

"He's a graduate student at Arizona State. A biologist, like Pollard. They were friends. Mrs. Vanders had him pegged as a stalker, a threat to her niece. He'd been out here just a few days before she disappeared, working with her. And he was out here the day I showed up to start my little search." Chee's expression brightened. "Well now," he said, "I think we should talk to Mr. Hammar."

"The trouble is he told me he was teaching his lab course at ASU the day she vanished. I haven't looked into it, but when an alibi is that easy to check you think it's probably true."

Chee nodded and grinned again. "I have a map." He pulled open his desk drawer, rummaged and pulled out a folded Indian Country map. "Just like yours." He spread it on the desktop. "Except it's not mounted so I can stick pins in it."

Leaphorn picked up a pencil, leaned over the map and made some quick additions to terrain features. He drew little lines to mark the cliffs of Yells Back Butte and the saddle linking it to Black Mesa. A dot indicated the location of the Tijinney hogan. With that Leaphorn stopped.

"What do you think?" Chee asked.

"I think we're wasting our time. We need a larger map scale."

Chee extracted a sheet of typing paper from his desk and pencilled in the area around the butte, the roads and the terrain features. He drew a tiny h for the Tijinney hogan, an l for Woody's lab, a faint irregular line from the hogan to represent the track in from the dirt road, and a little j and k for where Jano and Kinsman had left their vehicles. He examined his work for a moment, then added another faint line from the saddle back to the road.

Leaphorn was watching. "What's that?"

"I saw a flock of goats on the wrong side of the saddle and a track leading in. I think it's a shortcut the goatherd uses so he doesn't have to climb over," Chee said.

"I didn't know about that," Leaphorn said. He took the pencil and added an x near the Yells Back cliffs. "And here is where an old woman McGinnis called Old Lady Notah told people she had seen a snowman. The same woman? Probably."

"Snowman? When was that?"

"We don't know the day. Maybe the day Miss Pollard disappeared. The day Ben Kinsman got hit on the head." Leaphorn leaned back in his chair. "She thought she'd seen a skinwalker. First it was a man, then it walked behind a bunch of junipers and when she saw it again it was all white and shiny."

Chee rubbed a finger against his nose, looked up at Leaphorn. "Which is why you were asking me about that filter respirator suit, isn't it? You thought Pollard was wearing it."

"Maybe Miss Pollard. Maybe Dr. Woody. I'll bet he has one. Or maybe somebody else. Anyway, I'm going to go talk to that old lady if I can find her," Leaphorn said.

"Dr. Woody, he'd have access to animal blood, too," Chee said. "And so would Krause, for that matter."

"And so would Hammar, our man with the iron-clad but unchecked alibi. Now I think it might be worth the time to look into that."

They considered this for a while.

"Did you know Frank Sam Nakai?" Chee asked.

"The hataalü?" Leaphorn asked. "I met him a few times. He taught curing ceremonials at the college at Tsali. And he did a yeibichai sing for one of Emma's uncles after he had a stroke. A fine old man, Nakai."

"He's my maternal granduncle," Chee said. "I went to see him last night. He's dying of cancer."

"Ah," Leaphorn said. "Another good man lost."

"Did you see the TV news this morning? The press conference J. D. Mickey called in Phoenix?"

"Some of it," Leaphorn said.

"He's going for the death penalty, of course. The sonofabitch."

"Running for Congress," Leaphorn said. "What he said about cops out here having no backup help, lousy radio communications, all that's true enough."

"It's a funny thing," Chee said. "I catch Jano practically red-handed standing over Kinsman. He was there, and nobody else was around. He had a fine revenge motive. And then there's Jano's blood mixed with Kinsman's on the front of Kinsman's uniform—just about where he would have cut himself on Kinsman's buckle if they'd been struggling. You have a dead-cinch conviction—and all Jano can do is come up with a daydream story about the eagle he poached slashing him—and there's the eagle right there with no blood on it, so he says not that eagle. That's the second eagle, he says. I caught one earlier and turned it loose." Chee shook his head. "And yet, I'm beginning to have some doubts. It's crazy."

Leaphorn let that all pass without comment.

"That other eagle story is so phony that I'm surprised Janet's not too embarrassed to give it to the jury."

Leaphorn made a wry face, shrugged.

"Jano claims he pulled out a couple of the first eagle's tail feathers," Chee said. "I saw one circling up there over Yells Back with a gap in its tail plume."

"So what are you going to do?" Leaphorn asked. "Jano told me how to locate the blind where he caught the first eagle. I'm going to get myself a rabbit as eagle bait and go up there tomorrow and catch the bird. Or shoot it if I can't catch it. If there's no old blood in the grooves in its talons, or in its ankle feathers, then I don't have any more doubts."

Leaphorn considered this. "Well," he said. "Eagles are territorial hunters. It would probably be the same bird. But the blood could be from a rodent it caught."

"If there's dried blood anywhere, I'll take it in and let the lab decide. You want to come along?"

"No thanks," Leaphorn said. "I'm going to go find the lady with the goats and learn about that snowman she saw."

Chapter Twenty-three

ACTING LIEUTENANT JIM CHEE reached Yells Back Butte early and well prepared. He climbed the saddle while the light of dawn was just brightening the sky over Black Mesa, carrying his binoculars, an eagle cage, his lunch, a canteen of water, a quart thermos of coffee, a rabbit and his rifle. He found the tilted slab of rimrock just where Jano said it would be, straightened out the disordered brush that formed the blind's roof. He took out his medicine bag and removed from the doeskin pouch the polished stone replica of a badger, which Frank Sam Nakai had given him as his hunting fetish, and an aspirin bottle, which held pollen. He put the fetish in his right hand and sprinkled a pinch of pollen over it. Then he faced the east and waited. Just as the rim of the sun appeared, he sang his morning song and sprinkled an offering of pollen from the bottle. That done, he shifted into the hunting chant, telling the eagle of his respect for it, asking it to come and join in this sacrifice that would send it into its next life with his blessing and, perhaps, save the life of the Hopi whose arm it had slashed.

Then he climbed down into the blind. By 10:00 A.M. he had watched two eagles patrolling the rim of the butte to the west of his position, neither the one he wanted. He'd found the feather he'd left behind on his original visit to the blind, retrieved it, wrapped it in his handkerchief and laid it aside. He'd consumed about fifty percent of his coffee and the apple from his lunch sack, and read two more chapters of Execution Eve, the Bill Buchanan book he'd brought along to pass the time. At 10:23, the eagle he wanted showed up.

It came from the east, drifting over Black Mesa in lazy circles that brought it nearer and nearer. Through gaps in the blind's brush roofing, Chee followed it through the binoculars, confirming the irregularity in its fan of tail feathers. He lifted the struggling rabbit out of the eagle cage, made sure the nylon cord on its leg was secure and waited until the bird's hunting circle was taking it away. Then he put the rabbit on the roof, squirmed into his best watching position and waited.

On its next circle it swept southward, lost altitude and patrolled over the rolling sagebrush desert away from the butte, disappearing from Chee's view. He put the rifle in a handier place and waited, tense. A moment later, the eagle reappeared, rising on an updraft just a few yards above the rim of the butte and not fifty yards from the blind, then soared above him to the left.

The rabbit had long since given up its struggles and sat motionless on the roof. Chee stirred the brush supporting it with the rifle barrel. Startled, it scrambled to the end of the cord, jerked at it, sat again. The eagle turned, tightened its circle directly overhead. Chee jerked the cord, provoking a fresh flurry of struggles.

And then the eagle produced a raucous whistle and swept down.

Chee pulled the rabbit back toward the center of the blind. As he did, the eagle struck it with a crash, blanking out the sky with extended wings. Chee tugged at the cord, pulling against the thrust of beating wings, reaching for the eagle's legs.

He was lucky. When it struck, the eagle had locked both sets of talons, one through the rabbit's back, the other on its head. Chee grabbed both legs and brought bird, rabbit and much of the brush roof falling down on him. He dragged his jacket over the eagle, folded it over head and wings and inspected the bird's legs. He saw fresh blood on its talons. At the base of the ruff feathers on its left leg, he found something black and brittle. Dried blood. Old rabbit blood, perhaps. Or Jano's. The lab would decide. Either way, Chee could rest now.

He pushed bird, rabbit and jacket into the eagle cage and secured the door. Then he leaned back against the stone, poured himself the last of the coffee, and inspected the damage to himself. It was minimal—just a single cut across the side of his left hand, where the eagle's beak had caught him.

The eagle extricated itself from his jacket, unlocked its talons from the rabbit, and battled frantically against the stiff metal wires that formed the cage.

"First Eagle," Chee said. "Be calm. Be peaceful. I will treat you with respect." The eagle stopped its struggles and fixed Chee with an unblinking stare. "You will go where all eagles go," Chee said, but he was sad when he said it.

Back at the Tuba City police station, Chee parked in the shade. He brought the eagle cage in and put it beside Claire Dineyahze's desk.

"Wow," Claire said. "He looks mean enough. What's he charged with?"

"Resisting arrest and biting a cop," Chee said, displaying the cut on his hand.

"Ugh. You ought to put some disinfectant on that."

"I will," Chee said. "But first I've got to report this capture to the Federal Bureau of Ineptitude in Phoenix. Could you get 'em for me?"

"Sure." She started dialing. "On line three." He picked up the telephone on the adjoining desk. The receptionist at the FBI office said that Agent Reynald was busy and would he leave a message.

"Tell him it concerns the Benjamin Kinsman case," Chee said. "Tell him it's important." He waited. "Yes," the next voice said. "This is Reynald."

"Jim Chee," Chee said. "I want to tell you we have the other eagle in the Jano case."

"Who?"

"Jano," Chee said. "The Hopi who—"

"I know who Jano is," Reynald snapped. "I mean who is the person I'm talking to."

"Jim Chee. Navajo Tribal Police."

"Oh, yes," Reynald said. "Now what's this about an eagle?"

"We caught him today. Where do you want him delivered for the blood testing?"

"We already have the eagle," Reynald said. "Remember? The arresting officer impounded it when he took the perp into custody. It tested negative. No blood was on it."

"This is the other eagle," Chee said. Silence. "Other eagle?"

"Remember?" Chee said, trying to include in the question the same measure of impatience that Reynald had used when he'd asked it. "The suspect's case will be based in part on his claim that the slash on his arm was caused by a first eagle, which he then released," Chee said, reciting it at about the rate a teacher might read a difficult passage to a remedial class. "Whereupon Jano claims he caught a second eagle, which he contends was the bird the arresting officer impounded. He contends that the blood—"

"I know what he contends," Reynald said, and laughed. "I didn't dream you guys—or anybody, for that matter—was taking that seriously."

While Reynald was enjoying his laugh, Chee signaled Claire to listen and to flick on the recording machine.

"Serious or not," Chee said, "we have the eagle now. When the FBI lab checks it for human blood in the talon grooves or the leg ruff feathers, it's either there or it isn't. That takes care of that."

Reynald chuckled. "I can't believe this," he said. "You mean you fellas actually went out and caught yourself a bird to run through the lab? What's that supposed to prove? The lab finds nothing, so you keep catching eagles until you run out of them, and then you tell the jury Jano must have made it up."

"On the other hand, if Jano's blood—" But Reynald was laughing. "And then the defense attorney will say you missed the one he released. Or, better still, the defense catches one for itself, and they put some of Jano's blood on it and present it as evidence."

"Okay," Chee said. "But I want to be clear about this. How does the Federal Bureau of Investigation want me to dispose of this eagle I have here?"

"Whatever you like," Reynald said. "Just don't dump it on me. I'm allergic to feathers."

"All right then, Agent Reynald," Chee said. "It's been a pleasure working with you."

"Just a second," Reynald said. "What I want you to do with that bird is get rid of it. All it can possibly do is complicate this case, and we don't want it complicated. You understand? Get rid of the damned thing."

"I understand," Chee said. "You're telling me to get rid of the eagle."

"And get to work on what you're supposed to be doing. Are you making any progress finding witnesses who can testify that Jano wanted some revenge on Kinsman? People who can swear he was angry about that original arrest?"

"Not yet," Chee said. "I've been busy trying to catch that first eagle."

That out of the way, Chee called the federal public defender's office and asked for Janet Pete. She was in. "Janet, we have the first eagle."

"Really?" She sounded incredulous.

"At least I'm almost certain it's the right one. A couple of its tail feathers are missing, which matches what Jano told us."

"But how did you get it?"

"The same way Jano did. Used the same blind, in fact. Only the decoy rabbit was different."

"Has it gone to the lab yet? When will we know what they find?"

"It hasn't gone to the lab. Reynald didn't want it."

"He what? He said that? When?"

"I called him just a little while ago. He said what it boiled down to was nobody would believe Jano's story and if we dignified it by checking another eagle for his blood, you'd just say we'd caught the wrong eagle and want us to go out and keep catching them. And so forth."

"The sonofabitch," Janet said. There was silence while she thought about it, "But I guess I can see his logic. A negative find wouldn't help his case. Finding Jano's blood on that bird might hurt it. So it would be either no help or a loss for him."

"Unless he wanted justice."

"Well, I don't think he has any doubt Jano killed Kinsman. You don't, do you?"

"I didn't."

"You do now? Really?"

"I want to know if he's telling the truth."

"You may have to let a jury decide."

"Janet, twist Reynald's arm. Tell him you insist on it Tell him if he won't have the tests done you'll petition the court to order it."

Long silence. "Who caught the eagle? How many people know it's caught?"

"I caught it," Chee said. "Claire Dineyahze has it sitting beside her desk right now. That's it."

"Was there dried blood on the feathers? Anywhere else?"

"Not that I could be sure of," Chee said. "Something dried on its feathers. Tell the bastard if he won't order the lab work you'll get it done yourself."

"Jim, it's not that simple."

"Why not?"

"A lot of reasons. In the first place, I won't even know about the eagle until Reynald tells me. If he doesn't think it has any importance, he won't."

"But there's the evidence disclosure rule. Mickey has to tell the defense attorney what evidence he has."

"Not if it's not important enough for him to use. Mickey will say he didn't even intend to mention the eagle in connection with the blood on Kinsman. The defense can use it if it likes. He'll say he considers it too foolish to require any response."

"All that's probably right. So you tell him that you know the eagle was caught, tell him—"

"And he says, How do you know this? Who told you?"

"And you say a confidential informant."

"Come on, Jim," Janet said impatiently. "Don't sound naive. The federal criminal justice world is small and the acoustics are good. How long do you think it took me to know that Mickey had been warning you about leaking stuff to me? My confidential informant said she got it third-hand, but she said Mickey called it 'pillow talk.' Did he?"

"That's what he called it. But do it anyway."

Chee listened while Janet outlined the sort of trouble this would cause for Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee. True, he wasn't a federal employee, but the links between the U.S. justice system and the Tribal Justice operations were strong, close and often personal. And it meant a headache for her, too. She badly wanted to win this case, at the very least to save Jano from the death penalty. It was her first in this new job and she wanted it to be clean, neat and tidy, not a messy affair with her looking like an inept loose cannon who didn't understand the system. And so forth. And while he listened, Chee knew what he had to do. And how to do it. And that the effects might change the direction of his life.

"Tell you what," he said. "You tell Mickey that you have access to a tape recording, with two credible witnesses to certify it's genuine. Tell him that on this tape, the FBI agent whom Mr. Mickey put in charge of the Jano case can be clearly heard ordering a policeman to get rid of evidence that might be beneficial to the defense."

"My God!" Janet said. "That's not true, is it?"

"It's true."

"Did you tape a telephone call with Reynald? When you told him you had the eagle? Surely he didn't give you permission to tape something like that. If he didn't, that's a federal offense."

"I didn't ask him," Chee said. "I just taped it, with a witness listening in."

"That's against the law. You could go to jail. You'll surely lose your job."

"You're being naive now, Janet. You know how the FBI feels about bad publicity."

"I won't have anything to do with this," Janet said.

"That's fair enough," Chee said. "And I want to be fair with you, too. Here's what I'll have to do now. I'll get on the telephone and find out how I can get the necessary laboratory work done. Maybe at the lab at Northern Arizona University or Arizona State. I have to be here at the office until noon tomorrow. I'll check with you then—or you can call me here—so I'll know what's going on. Then I'll take the bird on to the lab and I'll have them send you a copy of their report."

"No, Jim. No. They'll charge you with evidence tampering. They'll think of something. You're being crazy."

"Or maybe just stubborn," Chee said. "Anyway, give me a call tomorrow."

Then he sat back and thought about it. Had he been bluffing? No, he'd do it if he had to. Leaphorn's lady friend would know someone on the NAU biology faculty who could run the tests—and do it right so it would hold water in court. And if they found it wasn't Jano's blood, then maybe Jano was just a damn liar.

But Chee wasn't kidding himself about his motivation. One of the reasons he'd told Janet about the tape was to give her a weapon if she needed it. But part of that was purely selfish—the kind of reason Frank Sam Nakai had always warned him against. He wanted to find out how Janet would use this weapon he'd handed her.

For that, he'd have to wait until tomorrow. Maybe a few days more, but he thought tomorrow would tell him.

Chapter Twenty-four

CHEE SLEPT FITFULLY, the darkness in his little trailer full of bad dreams. He got to his office early, thinking he would get a stack of paperwork out of the way. But the telephone was at his elbow and concentration was hard.

It first rang at eighteen minutes after eight. Joe Leaphorn wanted to know if he could get a copy of the list of items found in Miss Pollard's Jeep.

"Sure," Chee said. "We'll Xerox it. You want it mailed?"

"I'm in Tuba," Leaphorn said. "I'll pick it up."

"You on to something I should know about?"

"I doubt it," Leaphorn said. "I want to show the list to Krause and see if he notices anything funny. Something missing that should be there. That sort of thing."

"Did you locate Mrs. Notah?"

"No. I found some of her goats. Somebody's goats, anyway. But she wasn't around. After I waste some of Krause's time this morning, I think I'll go there and look again. See if she can add anything to what she told McGinnis about the skinwalker who looked like a snowman. Did the FBI pick up that eagle?"

"They didn't want it," Chee said, and told Leaphorn what Reynald had said without mentioning taping the call.

"I'm not too surprised," Leaphorn said. "But you can't blame the people. I've known a lot of good agents. It's the system you get with political police. I'll let you know if Mrs. Notah saw anything useful."

The next two calls were routine business. When call number four arrived, Claire didn't just buzz him. She waved and wrote FBI in the air with her finger.

Chee took a long breath, picked up the telephone, said, "Jim Chee."

"This is Reynald. Do you still have that eagle?"

"It's here," Chee said. "What do—"

"Agent Evans is en route to pick it up," Reynald said. "He'll be there about noon. Be there, because he'll need you to sign a form."

"What are you—" Chee began, but Reynald had hung up.

Chee leaned back in his chair. One question was now answered, he thought. Janet had told Reynald she knew about the eagle, prodding him into action, or she had told J. D. Mickey, who had told Reynald how to react. That solved the first part of the problem. The FBI would have the lab test the eagle. He would know sooner or later whether Jano had lied. That left the second question. How had Janet used the club he'd handed her?

In the periods between his bad dreams the night before, he had worked out three scenarios for Janet. In the first, she would simply stand aside, as she had suggested she would, and see what happened. If nothing happened, when he appeared on the witness stand as Jano's arresting officer, she would lead him to the eagle during cross-examination.

"Lieutenant Chee," she would say, "is it true that you were told by Mr. Jano that he had caught a second eagle after the first one slashed his arm, and that you made an attempt to recapture that first eagle?" To which he would have to say: "Yes."

"Did you capture it?"

"Yes."

"Did you then take the eagle to the laboratory at Northern Arizona University and arrange for an examination to be made to determine if it had Mr. Jano's blood on its talons or feathers?"

"Yes."

"And what did that report show?"

The answer to that, of course, would depend on the laboratory report.

He could now rule out that scenario. She hadn't stood aside. She had intervened. But how? In scenario two, the one for which he ardently longed, Janet went to one of the key federals, told him she had reason to believe the first eagle had been caught and demanded to see the results of the blood testing. Mickey or Reynald, or both, would evade, deny, argue that her request was ridiculous, imply that she was ruining her career in the Department of Justice if she was too stupid to understand that, demand to know the source of this erroneous leak, and so forth. Janet would bravely stand her ground, threaten court action or a leak to the press. And he would love her for her courage and know that he was wrong in not trusting her.

In scenario three, the cause of the previous night's bad dreams, Janet went to Mickey, told Mickey that he had a problem—that Lieutenant Jim Chee had gone out and captured an eagle that he insisted was the same eagle her client would testify had slashed his arm and he had then released. She would recommend that he take custody of said eagle and have tests done to determine if Jano's blood was on it. Whereupon Mickey would tell her to just relax and let the FBI handle collection of evidence in its routine manner. Then Janet would say the FBI had decided against checking the eagle. And Mickey would ask her if Reynald had told her that. And she'd say no. And he'd say how did you find out then. And she would say Lieutenant Chee had told her. And he'd say Chee was misleading her, trying to cause trouble. And about there Janet would realize that she had already caused career-blighting trouble in Mickey's mind and the only way that could be fixed was by using Chee's secret weapon. She would then pledge Mickey to secrecy. She would let him know that in telling Chee he wouldn't get the eagle tested, Reynald had carelessly allowed his telephone conversation to be taped and that on that tape Agent Reynald could be heard imprudently ordering Leaphorn to get rid of the eagle and thus the evidence.

What would this prove? He knew, but he didn't want to admit it or think about it. And he wouldn't have to until Agent Evans arrived to pick up the bird. And not even then, if Evans's conduct didn't somehow tip him off.

Edgar Evans arrived at eleven minutes before noon. Through his open office door Chee watched him come in, watched Claire point him to the eagle cage in the corner behind her, watched her point him to Chee's office.

"Come in," Chee said. "Have a seat."

"I'll need you to sign this," Evans said, and handed Chee a triplicate form. "It certifies that you transferred evidence to me. And I give you this form, which certifies that I received it."

"This makes it awful hard for anything to get lost," Chee said. "Do you always do this?"

Evans stared at Chee. "No," he said. "Not often."

Chee signed the paper.

"You need to be careful with that bird," he said. "It's vicious and that beak is like a knife. I have a blanket out in the car you can put over it to keep it quiet."

Evans didn't comment.

He was putting the cage in the backseat of his sedan when Chee handed him the blanket. He spread it over the cage. "I thought Reynald had decided against this," Chee said. "What made him change his mind?"

Evans slammed the car door, turned to Chee.

"You mind if I pat you down?"

"Why?" Chee asked, but he held out his hands.

Evans quickly, expertly felt along his belt line, checked the front of his shirt, patted his pockets, stepped back.

"You know why, you bastard. To make sure you're not wearing a wire."

"A wire?"

"You're not as stupid as you look," Evans said. "And not half as smart as you think you are."

With that, Evans got into his car and left Jim Chee standing in the parking lot looking after him, knowing which tactic Janet had used and feeling immensely sad.

Chapter Twenty-five

FOR LEAPHORN IT WAS a frustrating day. He'd stopped at Chee's office and picked up the list. He studied it again and saw nothing on it that told him anything. Maybe Krause would see something interesting. Krause wasn't at his office and the note pinned to his door said: "Gone to Inscription House, then Navajo Mission. Back soon." Not very soon, Leaphorn decided, since the round trip would be well over a hundred miles. So he drove to Yells Back Butte, parked, climbed over the saddle and began his second hunt for Old Lady Notah.

After much crashing around the goats again, twenty one in all unless he had counted some twice (easy to do with goats) or missed some others, he didn't find Mrs. Notah. Recrossing the saddle required much huffing and puffing, a couple of rest stops, and produced a resolution to watch his diet and get more exercise. Back at his truck, he drank about half the water in the canteen he'd carelessly left behind, and then just rested awhile. This cul-de-sac walled in by the cliffs of Yells Back and the mass of Black Mesa was a blank spot for all radio reception except, for reasons far beyond Leaphorn's savvy in electronics, KNDN, Gallup's Navajo-language Voice of the Navajo Nation.

He listened to a little country-western music and the Navajo-language open-mike segment, and while he listened he sorted out his thoughts. What would he tell Mrs. Vanders when he called her this evening? Not much, he decided. Why was he feeling illogically happy? Because the tension was gone with Louisa. No more feeling that he was betraying Emma or himself. Or that Louisa was expecting more from him than he could possibly deliver. She'd made it clear. They were friends. How had she put it about marriage? She'd tried it once and didn't care for it. But enough of that. Back to Cathy Pollard's Jeep. That presented a multitude of puzzles.

The Jeep had come here early, as the note from Pollard suggested. Jano said he had seen it arrive, and he had no reason Leaphorn could think of to lie about that. It must have left during the brief downpour of hail and rain, not long after Chee had arrested Jano. Earlier, Chee would have heard it. Later, it wouldn't have left the tire prints in the arroyo sand where it had been abandoned. So that left the question of who was driving it, and what he or she had done after parking it. No one had come down the arroyo to pick up the driver. But an accomplice might have parked near the point where the access road crossed the arroyo and waited for the Jeep's driver to walk back to join him or her along the rocky slope.

That required some sort of partnership, not a sudden panicky impulse. Leaphorn's imagination couldn't produce a motive for such a conspiracy. But he came up with another possibility. No cinch, but a possibility. He started the engine and drove off in search of Richard Krause.

A stopoff at Tuba showed Krause's office still empty with the same note on the door. Leaphorn refilled his gasoline tank and started driving. Krause wasn't at Inscription House. The woman who responded to Leaphorn's knock at the Navajo Mission office door said the Health Department man had left about thirty minutes earlier. Going where? He hadn't said.

So Leaphorn made the long, long drive back to Tuba City, writing off the day as a loser, watching the sunset backlight the towering thunderheads on the western horizon and turn them into a kind of beauty only nature can produce. By the time he reached his motel, he was more than ready to call it quits. Calling Mrs. Vanders could wait. Tomorrow he'd rise earlier and catch Krause before he left his office.

Wrong again. The note on the door the next morning suggested that Krause would be working in the arroyo west of the Shonto Landing Strip. An hour and sixty miles later Leaphorn spotted Krause's truck from the road, and Krause on his knees apparently peering at something on the ground. He heard Leaphorn coming, got to his feet, dusted off his pant legs.

"Collecting fleas," he said, and shook hands.

"It looked like you were blowing into that hole," Leaphorn said.

"Good eye," Krause said. "Fleas detect your breath. If something is killing their host mammal and they're looking for a new host, they're very sensitive to that. You blow into the hole and they come to the mouth of the tunnel." He grinned at Leaphorn. "Some say they prefer garlic on your breath, but I like chili." He stared at the tunnel month. Pointed. "See 'em?"

Leaphorn squatted and stared. "Nope," he said.

"Little black specks. Put your hand down there. They'll jump on it."

"No thanks," Leaphorn said.

"Well, what can I do for you?" Krause said. "And what's new?"

He removed a flexible metal rod from the pickup bed and unfurled the expanse of white flannel cloth attached to the end of it.

"I'd like you to take a look at this list of stuff found in the Jeep," Leaphorn said. "See if it's missing anything that should be there, or if there's anything on it that tells you anything."

Krause had folded the flannel around the rod. Now he pushed it slowly into the rodent hole, deeper and deeper. "Okay," he said. "I'll just give 'em a minute to collect on the flannel. Then when I pull it out, the flannel pulls off the rod and folds over the other way and traps a bunch of fleas."

Krause slipped the flannel off the rod, dropped it into a Ziploc bag, closed it, then checked himself for fleas, found one on his wrist, and disposed of it.

Leaphorn handed him the list. Krause put on a pair of bifocals and studied it. "Kools," he said. "Cathy didn't smoke so those must be from somebody else."

"I think it notes they were old," Leaphorn said. "Could have been there for months."

"Two shovels?" Krause said. "Everybody carries one for the digging we do. Wonder why she had the other one?"

"Let me see it," Leaphorn said, and took the list. Under "on floor behind front seat" it listed "long-handled shovel." Under "rear luggage space," it also listed "long-handled shovel."

"Maybe a mistake," Krause said, and shrugged.

"Listing the same shovel twice."

"Maybe," Leaphorn said, but he doubted it. "And here," Krause said. "What the hell was she doing with this?" He pointed to the rear luggage space entry, which read: "One small container of gray powdery substance labeled 'calcium cyanide.'"

"Sounds like a poison," Leaphorn said. "It damn sure is," Krause said. "We used to use it to clean out infected burrows. You blow that dust down it and it wipes out everything. Pack rats, rattlesnakes, burrowing owls, earthworms, spiders, fleas, anything alive. But it's dangerous to handle. Now we use the pill. It's phostoxin, and we just put it in the ground at the mouth of a burrow and it gets the job done."

"So where would she get this cyanide stuff?"

"We still have a supply of it. It's on a shelf back in our supply closet."

"She'd have access to it?"

"Sure," Krause said. "And look at this." He pointed to the next entry: "'Air tank with hose and nozzle.' That's what we used to use to blow the cyanide dust back into the burrow. It was in the storeroom, too."

"What do you think it means—her having that in the Jeep?"

"First, it means she was breaking the rules. She doesn't take that stuff out without checking with me and explaining what she wants it for, and why she's not using the phostoxin instead. And second, she wouldn't be using it unless she wanted to really sterilize burrows. Zap 'em. Something big like prairie dogs. Not just to kill fleas." He returned the list to Leaphorn. "Anything else on there you'd wonder about?"

"No, but there's something that should be on that list that isn't. Her PAPR."

"You always have that with you?"

"No, but you'd damn sure have it if you were going ; to use that calcium cyanide dust." Krause made a wry face. "They say the warning is you smell almonds, but the trouble is, by the time you smell it, it's already too late."

"Not something you'd use casually then." Krause laughed. "Hardly. And before I forget it, I found that note Cathy left me. Made a copy for you." He fished out his wallet, extracted a much-folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Leaphorn. "I don't see anything helpful on it, though." The note was written in Pollard's familiar semi-legible scrawl:

"Boss—Heard stuff about Nez infection at Flag. Think we've been lied to. Going to Yells Back, collect fleas and find out—Will fill you in on it when I get back. Pollard."

Leaphorn looked up from the note at Krause, who was watching his reaction, looking penitent.

"Knowing what I know now, I can see I should have got worried quicker when she didn't get back. But, hell, she was always doing things and then explaining later. If at all. For example, I didn't know where she was the day before. She didn't tell me she was driving down to Flag. Or why." He shrugged, shook his head. "So I just thought she'd gone tearing off somewhere else."

"I wonder why she didn't tell you she was quitting," Leaphorn said.

Krause stared at him. "I don't think she was. Did she tell her aunt why?"

"I gather it was something about you."

Krause had spent too many summers in the sun to look pale. But he did look tense.

"What about me?"

"I don't know," Leaphorn said. "She didn't get specific."

"Well, we never did get along very well," Krause said, and began putting his equipment in the truck. The legend on his sweat-soaked T-shirt said, SUPPORT SCIENCE:

HUG A HERPETOLOGIST.

Chapter Twenty-six

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."

Chapter Twenty-seven

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."

Chapter Twenty-eight

FOR CHEE, the next hours were occupied by the work of wrapping it up. He called the Northern Arizona Medical Center, got the emergency room supervisor, and told the woman Woody was en route in an ambulance and what to expect. Then he called the FBI office in Phoenix. Agent Reynald was occupied. He got Agent Edgar Evans instead.

"This is Jim Chee," he said. "I want to report that the man who killed Officer Ben Kinsman is in custody. His name is Woody. He is a medical doctor, and a—"

"Hold it! Hold it!" Evans said. "What're ya talking about?"

"The arrest this morning of the man who killed Kinsman," Chee said. "You better take notes because your boss will be asking questions. After being read his rights, Dr. Woody made a full confession of the assault on Kinsman to me, in the presence of Joe Leaphorn. He also confessed to the murder of Catherine Pollard, a vector control specialist employed by the Indian Health Service. Woody is critically ill and is now en route to the hospital at Flag in an amb—"

"What the hell is this?" Evans said. "Some kind of joke?"

"In an ambulance," Chee continued. "I recommend you pass this information along to Reynald, so he can get it to Mickey, so Mickey can drop the charges against Jano," Chee said. "If you want to do a television spectacular with this, the Navajo Police office at Tuba City can tell you where you can find the Pollard body and the details you need about how you, the FBI, solved this crime."

"Hold it, Chee," Evans said. "What kind of—"

"No time for silly questions," Chee said, and hung up.

Next he worked his way down the list of law enforcement agencies put to work by J. D. Mickey on the Kinsman case and gave them the pertinent information. Then he called the Public Defender Service in Phoenix. He got the office secretary. Ms. Pete was not in. Ms. Pete had left about an hour ago en route to Tuba City. Yes, there was a telephone in her car. Yes, she would notify Ms. Pete that she should contact him at Tuba City to receive information critical to the Jano case.

"I think she was going to Tuba to talk to you, Lieu tenant Chee," the secretary said. "But this 'critical information.' She'll ask me about that."

"Tell Ms. Pete she was right about the Kinsman case. I arrested the wrong man. Now we have the right one."

Then he called Leaphorn's room at the motel. No answer. He called the desk.

"He's over at the diner," the clerk said. "He said if you called to come on over and join him."

Leaphorn had been busy, too. First he had called the law firm of Peabody, Snell and Click and persuaded a receptionist that he should be allowed to talk to Mr. Peabody himself. He'd told Peabody the circumstances and suggested that, in view of Mrs. Vanders's fragile health, someone close to her should break the news to her. He'd explained that Miss Pollard's body would not be released to the family until the crime scene crew exhumed it properly and the required autopsy had been completed. He'd given him the names of those who could provide further information.

That done, he had called Louisa and recited into her answering machine the details of what had happened. He'd told her he was checking out, would drive back to Window Rock, and would call her from there tomorrow. Then he'd taken a shower, rescued what was left of the soap and shampoo from the bathroom to add to his emergency supply, packed, left a message for Chee at the desk, and strolled over to the diner to eat.

He was enjoying the diner's version of a Navajo taco and watching a Nike commercial on the wall-mounted television when Lieutenant Chee walked in, spotted Leaphorn and came over. He moved Leaphorn's bag from a chair and sat.

"You leaving town?"

"Home to Window Rock," Leaphorn said. "Back to washing my own dishes, doing the laundry, being a housewife," He had to speak up because the Nike ad had been followed by a used-car commercial, which involved noise and shouting.

"I wanted to thank you for the help," Chee said.

Leaphorn nodded. "I thank you in return. It was mutual. Like old times."

"Anyway, if I can ever—"

But now he was talking over a promo for what the Phoenix station called a news break. A pretty young man was telling them there had been a startling development in the Ben Kinsman murder case and he would take them to Alison Padilla, who was "live at the federal building."

Alison was not as pretty as the anchorman, but she seemed competent. She told them that Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney J. D. Mickey had called a press conference a bit earlier. She would let him speak for himself. Mr. Mickey, looking stern, got right to the point.

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken into custody a suspect in the homicide of Officer Benjamin Kinsman and in the death of an Indian Health Service employee who has been missing for several days. The FBI has also developed information which verifies statements made by Robert Jano, who had previously been arrested by the Navajo Tribal police and charged with the Kinsman murder. Charges against Mr. Jano will now be dismissed. More information will be released as details become available."

While Mickey was reading this, Officer Bernadette Manuelito walked in. Chee waved her over, pointed to a seat. Mickey was now waving off questions and ending the conference, and the camera switched back to Ms. Padilla, who began providing background information.

"Lieutenant," Officer Manuelito said. "Mrs. Dineyahze asked me to tell you the U.S. Attorney's office is trying to reach you." She pointed to the screen. "Him."

"Okay," Chee said. "Thanks."

"And the U.S. Public Defender Service. They said it was urgent."

"Okay," Chee said again. "And, Bernie, you remember Mr. Leaphorn, don't you? From when we were both working at Shiprock? Have a seat. Join us."

Bernie smiled at Leaphorn and said she had to get back to the station. "But did you hear what that man said? I think that's awful. He made it sound like we screwed up."

Chee shrugged.

"It's not fair," she said.

"They tend to do that," Leaphorn said. "That's why a lot of the real cops resent the federals."

"Well, anyway, I just think—" Bernie paused, looking for the words to express her indignation.

Chee wanted to change the subject. He said: "Bernie, when did you say they were having the kinaalda for your cousin? Now that we have the FBI handling the Kinsman case, I'm not going to be so busy. Would it still be okay if I came?"

The beeper in her belt holster made its unpleasant noise. "It would be okay," Bernie said, and hurried out the door.

Leaphorn picked up his check, looked at it, fished out his wallet and dropped a dollar tip on the table. "That drive from here to Window seems to get longer and longer," he said. "Got to get moving."

But at the door he paused to shake hands with a woman coming in and chat for a moment. He pointed back into the room and disappeared. Janet Pete had arrived from Phoenix.

She stood in the doorway a moment, scanning the tables. She wore boots and a long skirt with a patterned blouse, and her silky hair was cut short like the chic women on the television shows wore theirs these days. She looked tired, Chee thought, and tense, but still so beautiful that he closed his eyes for a moment and looked away.

When he looked again, she was walking toward him, her expression saying she was glad she had found him. But it revealed nothing else.

Chee stood, pulled back a chair for her and said: "I guess you got the message."

"The message, but not the meaning." She sat, adjusted her skirt. "What does it mean?"

Chee told her how they had found Pollard's body, about Woody's confession that he had killed Kinsman when Kinsman found him burying the woman, about Woody's desperate sickness. She listened without a word. "Mickey was just on television announcing the murder charge against your client is being dropped," Chee said. "Nothing left now but the 'poaching an endangered species' charge. It's a second offense, done while on probation for the first one. But under the circumstances I'd imagine the judge will just sentence Jano to the time he's already spent locked up waiting for the big trial."

Janet was looking at her hands folded on the table in front of her. "Nothing left but that," she said. "That and the wreckage."

He waited for an explanation. None came. She simply looked at him quizzically.

"Let me get you a cup," Chee said. He pushed back his chair, but she shook her head. "I got your call about the eagle being tested," Chee said. "I intended to call you back, but things got too busy. How did it come out? Mickey made it sound like they found blood."

"It doesn't matter now, does it?"

"Well, sure," Chee said. "It would be nice to know Mr. Jano wasn't lying to us."

"I haven't seen the report yet," Janet said.

He sipped his coffee, watching her. The ball was in her court.

She took a deep breath.

"Jim. How long had you known about this Woody? That he'd killed Kinsman?"

"Not very long," Chee said, wondering where this was leading.

"Before you told me about catching the eagle?"

"No. Not until this morning." She looked down at her hands again. Calculating all this, he thought. Adding it up. Searching for a conclusion. She found it.

"I want to know why you told me you'd taped Reynald's telephone call."

"Why not?"

"Why not!" The anger showed in her face as well as her voice. "Because as you certainly knew I am a sworn officer of the court in this case. You tell me you have committed a crime." She threw up her hands. "What did you think I would do?"

Chee shrugged.

"No. Don't just kiss it off. I'm serious. You must have had a reason for telling me. What did you think I would do?"

Chee considered that. By traditional Navajo ethical standards he wouldn't be required to tell the absolute truth unless she asked the question a fourth time. This was time two.

"I thought you'd either push the FBI to get the eagle tested or you'd handle it yourself."

"That's not what I meant. What would I do about the taped call? And for that matter about the agent in charge asking you to destroy evidence."

"I thought the information would be useful. Give you leverage if you needed it," Chee said, thinking: That's the third time.

She stared at him, sighed. "You're not good at pretending to be naive, Jim. I know you too well. You had a reason—"

Chee held up his hand, ending this just short of the fourth question. Why make her ask it? He spoke carefully.

"I thought you would go to Mickey and tell him that you had learned Jano's first eagle had been caught, that the FBI declined to test it on grounds that it would be a waste of time and money and had ordered the eagle disposed of. I presumed that if you did this, Mickey would tell you he agreed with the FBI. He would suggest that you, a rookie member of the federal justice family, should be part of the team and drop the issue. Then you would either agree or you would defy Mickey and tell him you would have the eagle tested yourself."

He paused, then drew a deep breath, looked away.

Janet waited.

Chee sighed. "Or you might start by telling Mickey that you had become aware of a potential risk to the case. The Navajo Police had caught the eagle, the FBI agent representing Mickey had ordered it destroyed and the telephone call during which he had done this had been taped. Therefore you would urgently recommend that he order the first eagle tested immediately and make the results public."

Janet's face was flushed. She looked away from him, shook her head, looked back.

"And what would I say when Mickey asked who had made this unauthorized felonious tape? And what would I tell the grand jury when Mickey called it to investigate?"

"He wouldn't call a grand jury," Chee said. "That would drag Reynald in, Reynald would pass the buck back to Mickey, and then Mickey's political hopes are down the tube. Besides, he'd have no trouble at all figuring out who taped the telephone call."

"And you certainly knew that. So what did you do? You deliberately wrecked your career in law enforcement. You put me in an intolerable position. What happens if there is a grand jury? What do I testify?"

"You'd have to tell the simple truth. That I had told you I had illegally taped Reynald's call. But Mickey will never call the jury."

"And what if he doesn't? There's still the fact that you admitted a felony to me and I, also an officer of the court, failed in my duty to report it."

"And the FBI knows you failed to report it. But the FBI knew it, too, and didn't report it either."

"Not yet," she said.

"They won't."

"And if they do, what then?"

"You say that Jim Chee told you he had, without authorization, taped a telephone call from Agent Reynald." Chee paused. "And that you had believed him."

She stared at him. "Had believed him?"

"Then you say that after you had reported this to the assistant U.S. attorney, Jim Chee informed you that while Reynald had made the remarks exactly as reported, Chee had no such tape."

Janet was rising from her chair. She stood looking down at him. How long? Five or six seconds, but memory doesn't operate on conscious time. And Chee was remembering the happiest day of his life—the moment when their romance had become a love affair. He had imagined their love could blend oil and water. She would become a Navajo in more than name and work on the reservation. She would forget the glitter, power, and prestige of the affluent Washington society that produced her. He would set aside his goal of becoming a shaman. He would become ambitious, compromise with materialism enough to keep her content with what he knew she must see as poverty and failure. He'd been young enough to believe that. Janet had believed it, too. Believed the impossible. She could no more reject the only value system she'd ever known than he could abandon the Navajo Way. He hadn't been fair to her.

"Janet," he said, and stopped, not knowing what else to say.

She said: "Damn you, Jim," and walked away.

Chee finished his coffee, listened to her car starting up and rolling across the parking-lot gravel. He felt numb. She had loved him once, in her way. He knew he'd loved her. Probably he still did. He'd know more about that tomorrow when the pain began.

Also by TONY HILLERMAN

The Fallen Man

Finding Moon

Sacred Clowns

Coyote Waits

Talking God

A Thief of Time

Skinwalkers

The Dark Wind

People of Darkness

Listening Woman

Dance Hall of the Dead

The Fly on the Wall

The Blessing Way

The Boy Who Made Dragonfly (for children)

<NONFICTION>

Hillerman Country

The Great Taos Bank Robbery

Rio Grande

New Mexico

The Spell of New Mexico Indian Country