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Amounted to a lot of money. The guy who was telling me said it amounted to better than eight hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow,” Leaphorn said. “I picked up that gossip before, but the tale I heard didn’t have the dollar amount with it.”

“Probably exaggerated,” Rostic said. Anyway, the bird supposed to have the sticky fingers was, was . . . let me put it this way. He was George Perkins then, but he was showing that shrewdness that made Shewnack our Most-Wanted hero. He rigged it up so he left the proper memos, notes, etc., in all the right files so he could present the CIA brass with an unpleasant choice. They could lock him up and watch him try to demonstrate to all who would listen that all he did was heroically deliver the taxpayers’ money to a bunch of corrupt ARVN generals. Generals who, it seemed to Perkins, must be splitting the loot 138

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back with the CIA accountants. And yes indeed, he would be perfectly willing to testify and help the taxpayers recover their money from these villains.”

“Let me guess,” Leaphorn said. “So they said, ‘Oh, well, boys will be boys. You resign, and we’ll put such little things behind us.’ ”

Rostic laughed. “Leaphorn,” he said, “you have been there in the J. Edgar Hoover building, and you understand how federal law enforcement bureaucracy works.”

“But I don’t understand how this connects with Shewnack. Or any of the rest of this.”

“Well, nobody could ever prove there is any connection,” Rostic said. “But the shrewd way he made the money sort of disappear reminded me of the way he planned things. And then, according to my gossip, this guy shows up in Northern California, under some different name, no longer George Perkins. The FBI wouldn’t have minded seeing the CIA get its feathers burned, so it tried to keep a sort of halfway eye on him. Of course, the ex-Mr. Perkins, being an old, old hand at that game, seems to have caught on in a hurry. Maybe he was already calling himself Ray Shewnack. Anyway, the bureau lost track of him.”

Rostic shrugged, considered what he’d been saying, then went on. “But the timing was right. I mean, the sort of slick Shewnack-type jobs happened a time or two. And then when I think the agency was catching on and checking, Perkins seems to have sensed he was being looked at by the FBI. He just disappeared. Next thing you know, a couple of crimes turned up in New Mexico that reminded the bureau of Shewnack jobs in California. And then the double murder of the Handy couple, with the slick setup THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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that left fall guys behind, and absolutely no witnesses or fingerprints. By then that Shewnack MO was familiar.”

“But no actual physical evidence?”

“No, nary a trace that I’ve heard about.”

“You’re an old hand in this business. What do you think?”

“I would imagine that Shewnack might have previously been George Perkins, or who knows who else. But I would also bet nobody is ever going to know for sure. My trouble is I had the bad luck of getting sent over to check on that Totter fire, and there the bastard was, all burned up, and I got stuck with him. And he’s such a spectacu-larly evil son of a bitch that he’s hard to forget.”

“What I’d like you to do,” said Leaphorn, “is sort of give me a picture of what happened when you got to Totter’s place.”

Rostic thought. Nodded. “Two cops already there. A sheriff’s deputy and a state policeman. My only business, as a federal, would be if the burned man was wanted for a federal crime. So I looked at the corpse. They’d moved it out of that burned-up gallery place and laid it out on the trading post floor.” He grimaced. “I guess you guys see a lot of violent scenes, but we’re more into the white-collar crimes. I can still see that bunch of baked meat and scorched bones in my dreams. So then they showed me the folder full of posters. Eleven of them, with a note on the bottom of each naming where it came from. There was Farmington, New Mexico, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, Tucson, Los Angeles, and so forth. Eleven different places. But all of them from western states.”

“Enough to make you suspicious.”

“More than that,” Rostic said. “I call in the list of 140

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places. Gallup checked the files on Shewnack. Six of the eleven had the sort of out-of-the-way robberies that fit our idea of Shewnack’s mode of operations. When they checked later, the other seven looked like they fit, too.”

“You mean the same MO?” Leaphorn asked. “Carefully planned. No fingerprints left behind. Places with no security cameras. Relatively small communities? And how about leaving accomplices behind to take the rap?”

“That, too, in some of them.”

“Were there any live witnesses left in any of those?” Rostic laughed. “How come you waited so long to ask about leaving witnesses behind? Of course he didn’t.” Leaphorn sighed, feeling sort of sick. “I guess I didn’t want to hear it.”

“I can’t blame you. In most cases it worked pretty much like the Handy robbery. If they got a good look at him, he shot ’em.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“Usually twice. The dead tell no tales.”

“A very careful man from what little I know about him,” Leaphorn said. “Did it make you wonder why he’d left those Wanted posters out on the front seat of his car?”

Rostic looked thoughtful. “No, not then, but now that you mention it, you’d think he’d have tucked them away out of sight. Most likely packed in with his stuff locked up in the car trunk.”

“That was going to be one of my questions. Had Totter, or the fire department boys, or the other cops gotten all that out by the time you got there?”

“No. They’d broken one of those wing windows to reach in and get that folder with the posters in it, but the THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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car was still locked. When we got the call, Delbert James was in charge, and he told the sheriff that if the victim was Shewnack, it was very important, and he should make damn sure everything was secure and not messed with until we could take over.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“I see you grinning,” Rostic said, and laughed. “I know how you local cops feel about that. To tell the truth, I can’t say I blame you. The feds come in, take over, screw everything up because they don’t know the territory. They take the credit if a bust gets made, and if it doesn’t they write up reports on how the locals made all the mistakes.”

“Yep,” Leaphorn said. “But we don’t blame it on you guys doing the work. We blame it on the Washington poli-ticians looking over your shoulders.”

“As you should,” Rostic said. “They’re the ones we blame.”

“And sometimes we notice we’ll be dealing with a special agent who just got in from Miami, or from Portland, Maine, and he’s giving our people directions when—” Leaphorn cut that complaint short, noticing that even now just thinking of the couple of horrible examples he was about to use was causing him to lose his temper.

“I can finish that for you,” Rostic said. “We’re giving your people directions when this is the first time we’ve set foot on the reservations, and if we wanted to get to Window Rock we’d have to ask what road to take.”

“Something like that,” Leaphorn said.

“Or as Captain Largo often told me, ‘It ain’t that we think you federals are plain stupid. It’s just that you don’t know nothing yet. It’s the total absolute invincible ignorance that trips you up.’”

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“That’s about it,” Leaphorn said, chuckling at Rostic’s imitation of Largo’s emphatic way of expressing himself.

“But right now I am very glad you did take over and made sure nobody got into whatever Shewnack had locked safely away in his car trunk.”

“He had some things locked in the glove compart-ment, too. One particularly useful item. An almost empty pint bottle of cognac. Very expensive stuff.” Rostic was smiling as he related this. “And being glass, a gold mine of the very first fingerprints we ever had of the murder-ous bastard.”

“Wonderful,” Leaphorn said. “This is just exactly what I hoped you could tell me. And how did they match with the prints the bureau must have collected from all those other places where you had noticed his MO.”

“Also got prints off his stuff in the car trunk. And other evidence, too. For example, a fancy little gold-trimmed paper weight that had been part of the loot in a convenience story robbery in Tulsa. And an expensive little leather zipper bag that still had the Salt Lake City victim’s name and address stitched in the lining. Couple of other things, too. A pair of those fancy soft-soled shoes good for sneaking up on people with, and which leave that soft rubber streak on hard floors if you’re not careful. The rubber matches what the crime scene boys had scraped up from the floor at the Tucson killing.”

“Sort of like he kept souvenirs of his crimes,” Leaphorn said. “How about money? Sergeant Garcia went out to the Totter fire site and found that Delonie there.”

“The assistant bandit at Handy’s?”

“Yeah. He was out on parole. He told us he’d heard Shewnack had burned up there, and he figured, slick THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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as Shewnack was, he would have hidden the loot from his latest robbery somewhere. And Delonie was digging around, looking for it. He said he hadn’t found anything.”

“Neither did we,” Rostic said. “We had the same idea.

He wasn’t the kind of man who would trust Mr. Totter, or anyone else, not to steal his money.”

Rostic finished his hamburger. Shook his head. “I guess we could credit him pretty positively with most of those suspicious cases. That would get him up close to the record for a serial killer.”

Leaphorn drained his cup. Put it down without comment.

“You have any more questions? About the fire or anything?” Rostic asked.

“Well, you didn’t answer my question about the prints on that cognac bottle. Did they match?”

“Of course not,” Rostic said. “Any more questions?”

“How about you? You satisfied?”

Rostic peered at him. Sighed. “Well, hell,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, exactly, but when a guy is as slick as Shewnack seemed to be . . . Well, you always feel sort of uneasy about it. Not quite as confident as you’d like to be.”

“That’s my problem, too,” Leaphorn said. “You have time for another cup?”

“I’m retired,” Rostic said. “I can either sit here and exchange war-against-crime stories with you or go on home and play Free Cell games on my computer. And by the way, you never told me what got you interested in this old case.”

Leaphorn waved at the waiter, ordered coffee refills.

“Then I’ll tell you about Grandma Peshlakai, the theft of 144

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two five-gallon lard cans full of pinyon sap from the work shed behind her hogan, how she came to recover the empty cans at Totter’s Trading Post, and how she discovered that Totter had died before he could be brought to justice and—”

“Wait at minute,” Rostic said. He stopped sugaring his coffee and was looking very interested. “Back up.

You’re telling me Totter stole the old woman’s pinyon sap? What the devil for? And he’s dead? I want to hear more of this.”

And so Leaphorn told him, and before the tale was finished so was a third cup of coffee and two more doughnuts. When it was finished, Rostic considered what he’d heard for a long silent moment.

“Couple of questions,” he said. “Tell me why Totter stole the pinyon sap. And tell me why you’re so interested in him now if he’s dead and gone.”

“If he stole the sap, and the only real evidence supporting that is empty buckets at the trading post, then it might have been something like this,” Leaphorn said, “and I warn you, it is based on guesswork.” With that, Leaphorn recounted the discussion he and Garcia had had speculating that Shewnack had planned to rob Totter, had tried it, had been killed by Totter, and Totter had decided that instead of dealing with a homicide trial he would use the sap to rush the fire along, convert both body and gallery to ashes, thereby disposing of homicide evidence and cashing in on his fire insurance without leaving behind the sort of evidence arson investigators look for.

“You mean the sap?” Rostic said, looking quizzical.

Leaphorn nodded. “Everybody burns pinyon. And that sap burns very, very hot.”

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“So how about the profit from the fire. You think Totter took the valuable stuff out first?”

“Now we come to this damned rug, the photograph of which sucked me into this business. Somebody seems to have taken that rug out. I’ll bet it was the most valuable item Totter had. I saw it in Totter’s gallery before the fire, and there it was on the wall of a mansion outside of Flagstaff after the fire. Unless somebody made a copy of it. Which seems to be very doubtful.”

Rostic was chewing on his lower lip, face full of thought, frowning at Leaphorn, then producing a rueful grin. “That would make the bureau look sort of foolish, wouldn’t it?

But maybe it’s right. It seems to make a certain amount of sense.” He shook his head. “But now I want you to tell me how you’d like it if you had to go to a judge and try to get him to sign an arrest warrant for Totter. Of course you don’t have to worry about that now, with him dead. But think about what you have. If you could get a judge to go even that far, how about trying to get him indicted? You think you could?”

Leaphorn laughed. “Not unless he was willing to confess.”

“Tell me about Totter being dead,” Rostic said. “How did that happen?”

“All I know is the Gallup Independent printed a little obituary notice, just saying he died of complications after a heart attack. Brief illness, I think it said. Died in an Oklahoma City hospital. Said he was buried in the VA cemetery at Oklahoma City, born in Ada, Oklahoma, never married, no survivors listed, any contributions for flowers should go to some charity.”

Rostic looked skeptical.

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“Who brought it in?”

“U.S. mail, with some money attached to pay the publication fee.”

“Sent by whom?”

“Come on,” Leaphorn said, sounding defensive, remembering how he had felt as a rookie cop being grilled by his boss. “All I know is what a secretary at the paper remembered about it. Bernie Manuelito went in there to get me a copy of it. I have the obit at home, and I remember it ran just two years or so after the fire.”

“Okay, then,” Rostic said. “I am getting more and more interested. The obit mentioned burial in the Veterans Administration cemetery in Oklahoma City. You sure they have one there?”

“No,” Leaphorn said.

Rostic thought. “You know,” he said. “I think I’ll check on this.”

“It would be easy for you,” Leaphorn said. “Just call the FBI official there.”

“Hah!” Rostic said. “First they’d refer me to the agent in charge, and he’d want to know my name, identification details, whether I was still in the bureau, and was this my case, and the violation of which federal law was involved, and what was the bureau’s interest in it. Then, after about fifteen minutes of that, he’d tell me to send him a written report specifying the crime being investigated, and—” Rostic noticed Leaphorn’s expression and stopped.

“You see what I mean? I used to work out of that Oklahoma City office. It always went strictly by the book.

I’ll bet it still does.”

“I can understand that,” Leaphorn said. “I was thinking I might go back there myself. Or maybe get Bernie to go.” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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“Investigating a crime in Navajo jurisdiction? How do you explain that?”

“To tell the truth, Bernie’s sort of on administrative leave now, and she’s now Mrs. Jim Chee.”

“Sergeant Chee? Your assistant in the criminal investigation office?”

“Yes. They just got married. I’d ask her to do it sort of semi-unofficially, as a favor. Pay her travel expenses, and so forth.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Rostic said. “I have an old friend back there, a longtime reporter. Guy named Carter Bradley. He was manager of United Press operations in Oklahoma when I was with the bureau there. Sort of famous for knowing everybody who knew anything. Not just knowing who knew. That’s usually easy for reporters.

But Carter knew who would be willing to talk about it. I think he’d do it for me.”

“But if you knew him way back then, he’s probably retired by now.”

Rostic laughed. “Exactly. Just like us. Retired. Bored stiff. Wanting something interesting to do. Give me that obituary and I’ll call him, give him the situation, and tell him what we need to know.”

“I haven’t got it with me here,” Leaphorn said. “But I remember it. Which wasn’t much.”

“We’ll find out who paid his hospital bill. Who arranged to get him buried, if he had any criminal record back there in his home state, everything useful. Do it right now.”

Rostic had reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a cell phone, punched some buttons, said: “Yep.

Here he is. What do I ask him?”

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“What I’d be happy to know,” Leaphorn said, “is whether Mr. Totter is actually dead.”

“Consider it done,” Rostic said, and began punching in numbers.

Leaphorn watched, reassessing his opinion of cell phones. But probably this wouldn’t work. He waited.

“Hello,” Rostic said. “Mrs. Bradley? Well, how are you? This is Ted Rostic. Remember? Special agent with the bureau way back when. Is Carter available?” Rostic nodded, grinned at Leaphorn, signaled the waiter for another coffee refill. So did Leaphorn. This would probably take a while.

It didn’t take very long. A few moments of exchanging memories of screwups and mistakes, a few comments of the travails of becoming elderly and the boredom of retirement, and then Rostic was explaining what he needed to know about the Totter death, giving Bradley his telephone number and asking Leaphorn for his.

“Ah, you mean my cell phone number?” Leaphorn asked. What was that number? Louisa, conscious of his attitude, had written it on a bit of tape and stuck it on the phone, but the phone was in the glove box of his truck. Leaphorn pondered a moment, came up with the number.

Rostic relayed it. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks, Carter.

No, it’s nothing terribly pressing, but the sooner the better.

Lieutenant Leaphorn and I are digging back into an old cold case. Very cold. Fine. Thanks again.” He clicked off, shut the telephone.

“Well, thank you for that,” Leaphorn said.

“Take my number,” Rostic said. “And, damn it, if he calls you first, don’t forget to call me. I’m getting interested in this thing, too.”

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Leaphorn was pulling away from his parking spot at the diner before the unusual look of the Crownpoint school parking lot down the street caught his attention.

Unusual because it was crowded with vehicles. Unlike most school lots in urban areas of the West, most Navajo students got to school by school bus or on foot and there-fore did not jam school lots with student-owned vehicles.

The lot content was also remarkable because relatively few of the vehicles in it were pickup trucks. Mostly newish sedans and sports utility vehicles, and many of them wearing non-New Mexico license plates. Leaphorn had solved this minor mystery even before he’d noticed this. Today was the second Friday of the month, which meant the Crownpoint weavers cooperative was holding its monthly rug auction in the school gymnasium.

Which meant tourists and weaving collectors and tourist shop owners from all over had swarmed in looking for bargains.

He pulled into the lot, found a spot by the fence, fished out his cell phone, and called his home number. Maybe Louisa would be back from her University of Northern Arizona Ute history project earlier than she’d expected.

She wasn’t, but the answering machine informed him he had a message waiting. He punched in the proper code to retrieve it.

It was Louisa’s voice. “I don’t know if this is worth bothering you with,” she said. “But after I headed up toward the southern Ute country, I remembered I’d forgotten the new batteries I’d bought for my tape recorder so I went back to get them. There was a car parked in front of your house and when I pulled into the driveway, a man came out from behind the garage and said he was 150

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looking for you. He said his name was Tommy Vang, and that he lived in Flagstaff, and he wanted to talk to you.

Wouldn’t exactly say about what, but it seemed to have something to do with Mel Bork and that old rug you’re interested in. I think he works for the man who now owns the rug. Anyway, I told him I wasn’t sure where he could find you, but you had talked about going to Crownpoint to see a man named Rostic. Maybe he could find you there.

And he thanked me and left. He was maybe five feet six and slender. Probably in his thirties or early forties, well dressed. Looked like he might be from one of the Pueblo tribes, or maybe Vietnamese. Very polite. Anyway, this getting a late start means I probably won’t be back in Shiprock as soon as I’d hoped. And by the way, it sort of looked like he might have been poking around in the garage before he heard me driving up, but after he left I checked and there didn’t seem to be anything missing.

Anyway, old friend, take care of yourself. See you soon, I hope. Will exchange progress reports with you.” Leaphorn clicked off the phone and sat looking at it, considering Louisa’s tone when she said “Anyway, old friend.” And thinking maybe she was right about cell phones. It was handy to have one with you. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. Unless he was kidding himself, Louisa’s tone had sounded very affectionate, sort of sen-timental, which was good. What was bad was that she wouldn’t be at the house when he got home. It would be empty, silent, cold. He sighed. No reason to hurry home.

Maybe he would find someone at this collection of tribal weavers and the buyers of their work who could tell him something additional about the tale-teller rug. Or maybe he’d meet some old timers to talk to. Maybe, for exam-THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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ple, the auctioneer who always handled this might know something useful.

Leaphorn entered the auditorium and saw that conversation would have to wait. On the stage the auctioneer was a lanky, raw-boned middle-ager wearing the same oversized reservation hat with the same silver-decorated hatband Leaphorn remembered seeing him with at earlier auctions. He was instructing two teenagers who were helping him sort out weavings on the table beside his podium. Leaphorn stood just inside the rear entrance door of the auditorium and inspected the crowd.

As was customary, both sides were lined with chairs, mostly occupied by women—about half were the weavers who had come to watch the rugs, saddle blankets, scarves, and wall hangings, on which they had spent untold hours creating, have their value measured in belagaana dollars. And, as was usual, the other half of the audience was composed of potential customers holding the white paddles marked with the big black numbers that would be recorded with their bids. Leaphorn gave that group only a cursory scanning, and focused on the tables by the entrance. There potential bidders were inspecting scores of weavings that would be moved to the stage for auction-ing a little later. And there would be the old-time dealers of such items in the tourist shops of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Scottsdale, Flagstaff, and all such places where tourists stopped in to find themselves a relic of Native Ameri-cana. Among those old timers, Leaphorn hoped to locate someone he knew, and someone who might know something about what he had come to think of as “that damned rug.”

He spotted two such men. One, a tall, slender man 152

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wearing a black turtleneck sweater and a neatly trimmed goatee, was heavily engaged in discussing a very large and ornate New Lands rug with an elderly woman. Probably not helpful because Leaphorn had once testified on the other side of a legal action involving sale of Navajo artifacts in his Santa Fe shop. The other man was exactly the person Leaphorn had hoped to see—the operator of Desert Country Arts and Crafts in Albuquerque’s Old Town district. He was short, substantially over the recommended weight for his height, and was bent over a Two Grey Hills carpet, examining it with a magnifying glass.

Burlander was his name, Leaphorn remembered. Octa-vius Burlander.

Leaphorn stopped beside him, waiting. Burlander glanced at him. His eyebrows raised.

“Mr. Burlander,” Leaphorn said, “if you have a little time, I have a question for you?”

Burlander straightened to his full five feet five inches, smiled at Leaphorn, stuck his magnifying glass in his jacket pocket. “Officer,” he said. “The answer is, I am not guilty. Not this time anyway. And, yes, this rug is a genuine Two Grey Hills weaving, unimpaired by any chemical dyes or other indecencies.”

Leaphorn nodded. “And my question is whether you could tell me anything about an old, old rug supposedly woven about a hundred and fifty years ago. It was apparently a tale-teller rug, full of sorrowful memories of the Navajo Long Walk, and was supposed to have been destroyed in a trading post fire a long time—”

“At Totter’s place,” Burlander said, grinning at Leaphorn. “But us people in the business always figured the bastard looted his place himself before he burned it down, THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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and that famous Woven Sorrow rug was the first thing he stole.”

“You have time to tell me about it?”

“Sure,” Burlander said. “If you’ll tell me what you’re doing here. Which one of us in this crowd—” Burlander used both of his short, burly arms in an all-encompassing gesture—“is being investigated by the legendary lieutenant of the Navajo Tribal Police.”

“Nobody,” Leaphorn said. “I’m a civilian now.”

“Heard you’d retired,” Burlander said. “Didn’t believe it. But what about that rug? I never did believe Totter let it burn.”

“Did you know him?”

Burlander grinned. “Just by reputation. He was a relative newcomer out here. Supposed to have come in from California. Bought that old half-abandoned trading post, put in the art gallery. Had a reputation for faking stuff. You know they say bad news travels fast and far. But I hadn’t heard anything about him since the fire.”

“Obituary notice in the Gallup Independent reported he died in Oklahoma City, a few years after that fire. It said he was a veteran, was buried in the VA cemetery.”

“I never heard about that. Guess I shouldn’t have been talking ill about the dead. But what do you want to know about that old rug?”

“First of all,” Leaphorn said, “do you think it survived that fire? If it did, do you think it could be copied? Do you think what I heard about it being sold at the Santa Fe Indian market after the fire could be true? And anything else you know.”

Burlander was laughing. “Be damned,” he said. “I haven’t heard that old rug mentioned for years until this 154

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very morning. Then old George Jessup over there—” Burlander nodded toward the Santa Fe dealer whom Leaphorn had noticed checking New Lands rugs “—well, he asked me if I’d heard it was going to be for sale. Going to be auctioned—e-Bayed, maybe, or maybe Sotheby’s, or some other auction company like that. He asked me if I’d heard about it. I hadn’t. He said all he knew was what a fellow he knows in Phoenix had told him about it. Wanted to know what I thought it would be worth. And if I would bid on it.”

“Would you? And how much would it be worth?”

“No,” Burlander said. “Well, I don’t think so. But if there could be any sort of documentation of all those tales that are told about it, it would bring big money from some collectors.” Burlander made a wry face. “There’s some real freaks out there.”

“A man in Flagstaff owns it now,” Leaphorn said.

“That, or a copy of it. He told me he was thinking about getting rid of it. Which brings me to my other question.

He said he had bought it a long time ago at that market under the porch of the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe.

Where the Pueblo Indians hold their market. What do you think of that story?”

“Well,” Burlander said, frowning, “it sounds sort of wild to me. You don’t see the really old, really expensive things being dealt with there.”

“That occurred to me,” Leaphorn said.

“But, hell, anything’s possible in this business. That would seem to mean that Totter had sneaked it out of his gallery before he burned the place. Got somebody to sell it for him. Who did this Flagstaff owner buy it from? And who is he?”

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“His name’s Jason Delos,” Leaphorn said. “Elderly fellow. Wealthy. Does a lot of big-game hunting. Came from the West Coast, so I hear, and bought a big house up in the San Francisco Peaks just outside Flagstaff.”

“Don’t know him. Did he say why he wants to sell it?” Leaphorn considered how to answer that. Shook his head. “It’s sort of complicated,” he said. “A picture of his living room was printed in a fancy magazine. Somebody who knew it was supposed to have been burned came to see it and ask about it. And on his way back to Flagstaff his car skidded off that mountain road.” Burlander waited, gave Leaphorn a moment to finish the paragraph. When Leaphorn did not continue, he said,

“Fatal accident? Killed the man?”

“They found his body in the car two days later,” Leaphorn said.

Burlander grunted. “Well, that would sure fit into the stories I’ve heard about that rug. You know. About it being cursed by your shaman, and causing misfortune and di-saster to whoever gets involved with it. Well, maybe that’s why this Delos wants to dump it.”

He produced a wry laugh. “And maybe it’s the reason I doubt if I’ll bid on it if it really is up for sale. I’ve got enough problems already.”

The bell signaling resumption of the auction put a stop to their conversation. Leaphorn was handed a bidding paddle (number 87), found himself a seat, and began scanning the row of weavers along the walls, hoping to spot a woman who looked old enough to add something to his collection of information about the Totter rug. Many of them were elderly, several were ancient, and relatively few were young—a glum sign, Leaphorn thought, for the 156

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prospects of maintaining Dineh culture when his generation was gone. But that conclusion caused Leaphorn, being Leaphorn, to consider the other side of the issue.

Maybe that just meant the younger generation was smart enough to notice that the pay scale for working half the winter to weave a rug—such as the one the auctioneer was now offering—that would sell for maybe $200 was not only unwise by belagaana standards but way below the legal minimum wage.

It was a pretty rug, in Leaphorn’s judgment, about six feet by four feet, with a pattern of diamond shapes in muted reds and browns. The auctioneer had noted its good features and, as rules of the association required, noted that some of its yarn was not quite up to collector standards and that some of the color might be “chemical.” But the weave was wonderfully skillful, tight and firm, and it was worth far more than the minimum bid of $125 the weaver had applied to it. Far more, too, he said, than the current bid of $140.

“You look at this in a shop in Santa Fe or Phoenix or even in Gallup, and they’ll charge you at least five hundred dollars for it, and then put seven percent sales tax on top of it,” he said. “Who’s going to offer one-fifty.” Someone did, and then a woman in the row ahead of Leaphorn waved her paddle and jumped it to $155.

The auctioneer finally closed it off at $160. The assistants brought out the next rug, held it up for the audience to admire, and the auctioneer began his description.

Leaphorn reached a sensible conclusion. He was wasting his time in here. Even if some of the waiting weavers were ancient enough to know something useful about the Totter rug, they would almost certainly be traditionalists.

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Therefore, they would not want to talk to a stranger about anything so enveloped in evil. Anyway, what possible good was knowing more about that damned rug going to do. Besides, it made more sense to move around through the crowd, in the auditorium and out of it, to see if Tommy Vang had come here looking for him. Why would Vang do that? Because Mr. Delos had told him to. And why would that be? A question worth getting an answer for.

Leaphorn walked out into the parking lot, stretched, enjoyed the warm sun and the cold, clear air, looked around. He heard someone shouting, “Hey, Joe.” That would not be Tommy Vang; he would never shout and would never call him anything less dignified than Mr.

Leaphorn.

It was Nelson Badonie, who about half a lifetime ago had been a sergeant in the Tuba City Tribal Police office.

He was trotting toward Leaphorn, grinning broadly. “I saw you in there,” Badonie said. “How come you didn’t bid on that rug my wife wove? I was counting on you to run it up to about four hundred dollars.”

“Good to see you, Nelson,” Leaphorn said. “Looks like you’ve been eating well since your Tuba City days.” Badonie patted an expansive belly, still grinning.

“Just got back to my natural weight,” he said. “How about you, though? You slimmed down to mostly bones and gris-tle. And I heard you’ve been thinking about retiring.”

“I have,” Leaphorn said.

“Have thought about it? Or have quit?”

“Both,” Leaphorn said. “I am now unemployed.” Badonie was looking back toward the entrance at a woman standing there. “I’m not,” Badonie said. “That’s 158

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my boss calling me right now.” He waved to her. “By the way, Joe, you remember that Arizona deputy who used to work around Lukachukai, and Teec Nos Pos, and around the west side of the Chuska range? Back when we were younger? Deputy Sheriff Bork, it was then.”

“Yes,” Leaphorn said. “I remember him.”

“Did you hear he got killed the other day over near Flagstaff. They thought it was just a car accident, but I just heard on the noon news it wasn’t. It turns out he was poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” Leaphorn said. “Poisoned how?” He had a sick feeling that he already knew the answer.

“The radio said the fellow at the sheriff’s office reported they had an autopsy done. Didn’t say the reason for doing that in a car wreck. But it seemed to show some poison had killed our Mr. Mel Bork before his car went off the road.” Badonie shrugged. “Thought it might be some sort of violent food poisoning.” Badonie chuckled.

“Too much of that good, hot Hatch green chile, maybe,” he said. “But it does seem funny, doesn’t it? I mean, how something like that could happen.”

“Did they say anything else about it? Have any suspects? Anything like that? Like any other reason why they didn’t think he just skidded, or passed out and ran off the road?”

“All the newscaster said was they were investigating the case as a homicide,” Badonie said. “Poison in the blood, I guess.” Now Badonie was looking over his shoulder again, at his wife summoning him.

“See you later,” he said, grinning, and trotted off wifeward.

Leaphorn didn’t look after him. He extracted the cell THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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phone from his jacket, stared at it, remembered he had loaded a long list of Four Corners area police telephone numbers into it, then worked his way down to Sergeant Garcia’s and punched it in.

A woman’s voice responded to the ring. Yes, she said, he’s here. Just a minute.

In about three minutes Garcia’s voice was saying

“Sergeant Garcia” in his ear, and he was asking Leaphorn what he needed.

“I need to know more about that autopsy report on Mel Bork,” Leaphorn said.

“All I know is what I heard on the radio,” Garcia said.

“They think Bork was poisoned. Probably had that wreck because of that.”

“Do you have the number for the coroner who did the autopsy? I think you said the pathologist was still old Dr.

Saunders. That right?”

“Yeah. It’s Roger Saunders,” Garcia said. “Just a minute and I’ll dig out his number for you.” Leaphorn dialed it, identified himself to a secretary, was put on hold, was told by another older-sounding woman that Dr. Saunders wanted to talk to him and could he hold another minute or two? He held. He switched the phone from right ear to left to allow his aching arm to dangle for a while. He looked around for a shady place to stand out of the warm autumn sun, found one that also allowed him the comfort of leaning on a car fender. He heard a voice saying hello and shifted the phone back to his better ear.

“Dr. Saunders,” he said, “this is Joe Leaphorn. I wondered—”

“Great,” Saunders said. “Aren’t you the cop Garcia 160

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told me about? The one who had suspicions about that Bork death? I’ve got some questions for you.”

“It’s mutual then,” Leaphorn said. “You want to go first?”

“What made you suspicious? That’s the big question.

It sure as hell looked like just another guy driving too fast, skidding down into the ditch. The crash would have killed him even if he hadn’t been poisoned.”

“Mel was investigating an arson fire. Well, it had been ruled not arson, but it was suspicious-looking, a man burned in it, and just a bit before this wreck happened, a death threat turned up on his answering machine.”

“Death threat,” said Saunders, sounding both pleased and sort of excited. “Really? Tell me about that. Who was doing the threatening? I know he had been up in the San Francisco Peaks area talking with somebody up there just before it happened. Was that who was making the death threats?”

Leaphorn sighed. “A lot of this we don’t know yet,” he said. “When we find out, I’ll fill you in. But what I need to know is how the poison got into him, and how fast it might have worked. Things like that.”

“This is likely to sound odd,” Saunders said, “but it appears that Mr. Bork managed to eat, or possibly drink, something we used to call ‘rat zapper’ back in the days when it was legal to use the stuff. You know anything about toxicology?”

“Not much,” Leaphorn said. “I know arsenic is bad for you, and cyanide is worse.”

Saunders laughed. “That’s what most people know, and I guess that’s why the books on the subject are full THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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of cases using those, and a few others about as popular.

The stuff that killed Bork is sodium monofluoroacetate.

People have trouble pronouncing that, so toxicologists just call it compound ten-eighty. Back when it was on the public market it was called Fussol, or Fluorakil, or Mega-rox, or Yancock. For the past thirty years or so, owning it has been illegal except by licensed varmint-control people. We’ve never run into it here before, and none of the people I know in this business have either. You know, I think this case may get me invited to do a paper on it at the next meeting of our national association of folks who poke into corpses.”

“This has me wondering how the poisoner got his hands on it,” Leaphorn said. “Any suggestion?”

“Wouldn’t be too hard out in this part of the world,” Saunders said. “Lots of ranchers and farmers and so forth used it routinely to keep down the rat, mice, and gopher populations. They even used it in coyote bait in some places. Easy to use. It’s based on a extremely toxic substance called . . .” Saunders paused, “—you ready for some more impossible words? Called dichapetalum cy-mosum, which they get out of a South African plant. If you found it in a drawer in an old barn, it would probably be in a box, or mason jar, and it would look a lot like regular wheat flour. Very easy to use. Just a tiny amount would be lethal.”

“How tiny?” Leaphorn asked, thinking of Tommy Vang and the fruitcake cherries.

“Well, say you had about the volume equal to the amount of sulphur on the tip of a kitchen match. I’d say that would be enough to kill about ten or twelve men the size of Mr. Bork. But look, Lieutenant, if you want to know 162

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more, you could call the absolute national expert on it, a Dr. John Harris Trestrail. Lives in Michigan. I could give you his telephone number. Or you can get it out of one of his books. Best one I know about is called Criminal Poisoning, and it’s sort of the international guide for forensic scientists. People like me.”

“I’ll look for it,” Leaphorn said. “But you have any thoughts about how that poison got into Bork?”

“Something he ate, probably. Maybe something he drank.”

“You could mix it into a cake batter? Something like that? Put it in coffee?”

“You could put it in, I’m sure, because it’s water soluble. Maybe not coffee. It’s odorless, but it might give the coffee a wee bit of an acidic taste. Cake? I don’t know if the baking heat would have any effect.”

“How about one of those fat maraschino cherries like people drop into their cocktails,” Leaphorn asked. “Or stick on top of little cakes. Could you inject a little shot of that stuff into one of those?”

“Sure,” Saunders said. “Perfect. In a cherry the victim would never taste it. Or not until it was too late. Soon as it hits the bloodstream it starts screwing up the nervous system, shutting down the heart. Victim goes into a coma in a hurry.”

“From what I know about this case, the poison must have acted awfully fast. He left the house of a man he’d been questioning outside of Flagstaff and was driving home. He’d been given a lunch bag there while he was leaving, and he only got about twenty miles down the road before he ran off into the canyon. Now, given the fact he was a retired cop, and a very experienced moun-THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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tain driver, I’d say it would be a matter of a very few minutes.”

“Well, I’d say that fits very well,” Saunders said. “And when you catch the man who doctored up the cherry, I want to hear about it.”

16

While this conversation was winding down, Leaphorn had been keeping a casual eye on various auction attendees milling in the parking lot, hoping to see someone he recognized from his distant past, and failing at that. But as he slid the cell phone back into his jacket pocket he noticed that a young-looking man seemed to have taken an interest in his pickup truck. He was standing right beside it now, peering into the truck bed.

Leaphorn crossed the lot at something close to a trot, passed the hulking Ford 250 King Cab parked at the end of the row, an equally bulky Dodge Ram, and an SUV whose heritage he didn’t identify. Beyond was his pickup, with a slender man leaning way into its bed, and then coming out of it looking at something in his hand.

The man was Tommy Vang, and Tommy Vang was holding a paper sack, carefully unfolding its top, preparing to open it.

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“Ah, Mr. Vang,” Leaphorn said, “Professor Bourbonette told me you might be coming here to see me.” Tommy Vang had spun with remarkable agility. He stood, feet spread, facing Leaphorn; his eyes were wide as he sucked in a breath.

“And what have you found there?” Leaphorn asked.

“That looks like that lunch sack you so kindly prepared for me at your place.” Leaphorn was talking slowly, intent on Vang’s expression. It had varied from stunned to an unreadable blank.

“That was very polite of you,” Leaphorn added. “I’m sorry to say I’ve been too busy to enjoy it.” Vang nodded, holding the sack against his chest, looking like a little boy caught stealing.

“What caused you to think of making me a lunch?” Leaphorn reached for the sack, lifted it from Vang’s un-resisting hand. “Professor Bourbonette told me you had come to see me in Shiprock. She said you might come here looking for me. Is that correct?” Vang had regained his composure. He swallowed.

Nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I came out to here hoping I could talk to you.”

“Why?”

Vang swallowed again. “To tell you that your friend—

that Mr. Bork who came to see us just before you came.

To tell you he was killed in a car accident. I thought you should know about that.”

Leaphorn waited, eyes on Vang. “Oh?” he said.

“Yes,” Vang said, producing a smile. “You had come to our house looking for him. Remember?”

“Did Mr. Delos send you?”

Vang hesitated. Thought. “Yes,” he said. Grimaced.

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Shook his head. “No,” he said. “He has gone to hunt for another elk. But I thought I should come when I heard on the radio how Mr. Bork died.”

Leaphorn unfolded the sack, looked in, saw a neatly made white bread sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a Ziploc kitchen bag containing what seemed to be a V-shaped slice of something that must be fruitcake.

“This cake of yours looks very good,” he said. “But remember what I told you and Mr. Delos, I never eat it very much because—” he smiled at Vang, and rubbed his stomach “—because for some reason it makes me sick.

Ever since I was a boy. We Navajos never did eat much fruitcake. I guess we’re not used to it.” Vang nodded, looking less tense, suddenly looking pleased. He held out his hand. “Then I am glad you didn’t eat it,” he said. “I will take it back now. It will be stale pretty soon.” He shook his head, frowned disapprovingly.

“Not so good anymore anyway, so I will take it away and get rid of it.”

Leaphorn opened the Ziploc bag, slipped out the slice, and inspected it. It was stiff, firm, multicolored from the fruits mixed into it. He noticed a bit of yellow, probably pineapple, and what might be a bit of apple, and a chunk of peach, and lots and lots of dark red spots. Cherry red, Leaphorn thought. And another cherry, a great big one, sat atop the slice.

“I must say it does look delicious,” Leaphorn said. “I think if I had taken it out and looked at it, I would have loved it.” Leaphorn spent a moment admiring the cake, smiling at Tommy Vang. “Where did you learn how to cook like this, like this wonderful cake? Mr. Delos told me that all of your cooking is excellent.”

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Vang shrugged, produced a sort of shy, half-embarrassed smile.

“Mr. Delos, he sent me to cooking schools. At first when we stopped in Hawaii, and then again in San Francisco.” The smile broadened, became enthusiastic. “It was a great school there. We baked pies. All kind of pies. And muffins and biscuits. Learned how to bake fish, and make kinds of chowder, and stews with vegetables. Learned just about everything. Even pancakes. Even jackflaps.”

“And this fruitcake.” Leaphorn displayed the slice. “Is this your production?”

“Oh, yes,” Vang said.

“Well, it’s a very pretty piece of work.”

“All but that big cherry on the top. I chop up cherries and mix them in with the batter before I bake, but Mr.

Delos, when it is for someone special, then he buys these big, expensive cherries and he decorates the top with them when I take the pan out of the oven.” Leaphorn considered this a moment.

“This slice here, was this for someone special?”

“Yes! Yes!” Tommy Vang said with a huge smile. “That was specially for you. Mr. Delos came into the kitchen, and he told me a very famous policeman was coming to visit us. He had me take out the cake I had baked for Mr.

Bork, and cut another nice slice of it, and then he brought in his bottle of those big cherries he use in his Manhat-tans, and he decorate it for you.”

“And this is one of those,” Leaphorn asked, touching the cherry on the slice with a fingertip.

Tommy Vang nodded.

Leaphorn removed the cherry, noticed it had lost some of its plumpness, turned it in his fingers, pursed his THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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lips. “It looks delicious,” he said, and opened his mouth.

“Ah,” Vang said. “Mr. Leaphorn.” He held up his hand.

“No, I think maybe those special cherries are maybe not carefully preserved. I wonder if maybe they are not so good after they’ve been in the bottle too long. If they haven’t been kept sealed up, in cold storage.”

“Why would you think that? It’s a very good-looking cherry,” Leaphorn said, and held it out toward Vang. “Did you notice this little puncture hole here in the side? I wondered what would have caused that.” All the good nature was gone now from Tommy Vang’s face. And the tension was back. He leaned forward, staring at the cherry perched between Leaphorn’s thumb and forefinger.

“Right there,” Leaphorn said. “See the puncture mark?” The wind had become gusty now, blowing leaves across the lot, ruffling Vang’s hair. Leaphorn protected the cherry from the dust with his other hand.

“I see it,” Vang said. “Yes. A little hole.”

“Maybe you made it when you put it on the slice of cake. Did you use any sort of pin to do that?”

“No.” Vang said, sucked in a deep breath, and sighed.

“Maybe when they put it in the bottle, the cherry people.

Maybe that’s what did it?”

“I’ll bet they just pour them into the bottle. Wouldn’t you think? I can’t think of any reason they’d stick a needle into them.”

“I don’t know,” Vang said. He stood, arms folded against his chest, looking at Leaphorn with a sad expression.

Leaphorn replaced the cherry on the slice, deposited the slice into the Ziploc sack, zipped it shut, dropped it into the sack, and folded the sack shut again.

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“You said you came to see me about something, Tommy. So let’s sit in my truck awhile, get out of the wind, and let me know what you want to talk about. And I’d like to know more about why you drove all the way out here looking for me. I don’t think it was just to tell me about Mr. Bork being killed because I bet you’d know I probably already had heard about that from the news broadcasts.”

Leaphorn opened the passenger side door, held it.

Tommy Vang stared at him, expression doubtful.

“Please, Tommy. Get in. Something is bothering you.

Let’s talk about it. It shouldn’t take long, and then you can go home again.”

“Home,” Tommy said, shaking his head. He climbed in, and Leaphorn took his own seat behind the wheel.

“What’s worrying you, Tommy?”

Tommy was staring at the windshield. “No worry,” he said. “No worry.”

“But it seems to me that something is just sort of bothering you?”

Tommy laughed. “I have a puzzle,” he said. “You are a policeman. You caught me stealing something from your truck. All you do is just talk to me, very polite. You could have arrested me.”

“For stealing a piece of stale fruitcake?” Tommy ignored that. Just shrugged.

“Then I have a puzzle, too. I don’t know if you heard that the sheriff had an autopsy done to find out what caused Mr. Bork to let his car run down into that canyon.

They announced that Mr. Bork had been poisoned. Apparently the poison gets the blame for his car running off the road. He didn’t die in the accident. He was already THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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dead. Did you hear that? Did you think your cake might have made him sick?”

Tommy Vang was looking down, thinking.

“I’ve been wondering if you might have come here to warn me. Just to keep me from eating it?”

“Not the cake,” Tommy said. “The cake wouldn’t have hurt Mr. Bork. The cake I make is good.”

“Then is it the cherry? Is that it?”

“The cherry might be spoiled. Out in the heat. Fruits get rotted, not preserved properly,” Vang said, his voice so choked that Leaphorn could barely understand him.

“Maybe that was what got the people sick.” The people, Leaphorn thought. Other people? Tommy’s command of the nuances of English was somewhat shaky, but he seemed to have more people than just Mel Bork in mind. Leaphorn considered that, decided to let it wait and come back to that question later.

“Well, let’s not worry about that then,” Leaphorn said.

“I’m curious about how you got acquainted with Mr. Delos.

I guess he worked for our government in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Is that where you met him?”

“In Laos,” Tommy said, staring at the windshield. “In our mountains. A long, long time ago.” Laos? Leaphorn considered that, wishing he had a better recollection of Asian geography and the pattern of that war. If his memory was right, Laos would be on the border of about everything. It would fit Delos’s presumed role as a CIA operative. The CIA was working on all the edges there.

“Is that where you started working for Mr. Delos?”

“My father did,” Tommy said. “And my uncles, and—” he exhaled, shook his head, broke off his study of the wind-172

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shield to look at Leaphorn “—and about everybody in our village. All the Vangs, and Thaos, and the Chues anyway. All the families except the Cheng men. They had mostly joined the Vietcong. And the Pham. I don’t know about them, but I think they were maybe working with the Pathet Lao.”

“You’re not Vietnamese, then?”

“We were Hmong,” Tommy said. “Our people were running out of China. Getting away from the wars that always went. Coming down into the Laos mountains, I think maybe same time Europeans were migrating into America. My older kinfolks still used Chinese words. But the CIA didn’t mind. They recruited the men in our village. We were already having to fight both the Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao. Trying to protect our villages. And then the Americans came in and wanted us to help them fight their war. That how I got acquainted with the colonel. He wasn’t Mr. Delos then. He was Colonel Perkins. He was recruiting my family members.”

“What did this colonel want you to do for him?” Tommy produced a wry-sounding laugh. “I guess you would say he was a collector of information. He would come into our house, and my father and uncles, and the men from the Thao and Chue families would come in and talk. And Mr. Delos would tell each one of them where he wanted them to go, and what he wanted them to watch for. Mostly he would be sending them back into Vietnam to watch the trails the Congs were using. When they got back, Mr. Delos would come again, and they would tell him what they had seen.”

“Did he have you doing anything for him?” Tommy shifted in his seat, wiped his hand across his eyes. “I was too young to be useful at first, and my mother THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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wouldn’t let me go anyway. Then one night my uncle came back, and he said some North Vietnam soldiers had seen them and they had killed my father and my youngest uncle. Or maybe just took them captive. He wasn’t sure, and I never did find out. But after that, the Vietcong came to our village, and my mother and sister and I, we had to hide out in the mountains.”

With that Tommy resumed his study of the windshield, lost in his memories.

Leaphorn waited, as unwilling to interrupt such thoughts as he was to break into a conversation, and just studied Tommy Vang. Very slender, Leaphorn noted.

Very neat. Trimmed. Buttoned. Clean shaven. Shirt cuffs correct. Trousers somehow still properly creased. Vang raised a hand, and wiped the back of it across his cheek.

Wiping away a tear, perhaps. The wind rattled dust against the truck door. Two women hurried past, one carrying a blanket. Tommy sighed, shifted in his seat.

“We were living in a sort of a cave shelter up there in the high ridges after that. The American planes, they came over, very loud, very low, and they bombed our village with napalm. I guess they’d got the word that the Cong had moved in.” He laughed. “I always wondered if Mr. Delos told them. Anyway, we went back down later to pick up what was left.”

With that Tommy lapsed into silence, looking straight ahead.

Overcome with memories, Leaphorn guessed.

“Not much left,” Tommy Vang said. “Even the pigs.

The napalm fire had flooded right over all their pens so they couldn’t get away.” He sighed. “All burned up. I still remember. It smelled like a huge roast feast like we’d 174

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have for a wedding banquet. That is sort of special with the Hmong elders.” He glanced at Leaphorn, looking doubtful. “I think the way we are supposed to be taught God gave us multiple souls, or maybe I should say duplicate souls, and the duplicate souls live on in our animals.”

“I read about that when I studied anthropology. In an article about Hmong funeral rituals.”

“I don’t know enough about it,” Vang said. “I was too young. The elders were busy with fighting the Vietcong and the others. And hiding. Too busy to teach the children. You understand?”

“I do,” Leaphorn said. “It happened in a different way to some of us. We were hauled away to boarding schools.

But I’d like to know when you finally got reconnected with Mr. Delos?”

“That was later. My mother died and I got put in a refugee camp. Mr. Delos found me there and started paying me a fee to get him information on anyone in the camp who was—” Tommy paused, trying to decide how to explain. “People who were what he called ‘Cong-connected.’

I did that, and then, it was the next summer I think, he came and got me and took me Saigon. I worked for him there. We stayed at a big hotel and he went to work down at the U.S. embassy until the North Vietnamese came in, and the helicopters came in and the Americans got on them and went home. I told him I could find my way back to Klin Vat. I would help rebuild our village and get back with my relatives in the Vang family. Not a good idea, Mr.

Delos said to me.”

Tommy held up an open hand to demonstrate how Mr. Delos had made his case.

“In the first place, Mr. Delos said, he had done some THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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checking and he had learned that between the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese army getting their revenge, there didn’t seem to be any Hmong people left from that village.” With that Tommy pulled down one of his fingers.

“In the second place, there wasn’t anything left of the village.” A second finger came down. “It had been hit with that napalm again. And in the third place, Mr. Delos said there didn’t seem to be anyone left in that part of our mountains. He thought the Vangs, and the Chengs, and the Thaos must have all scattered elsewhere to escape the Pathet Lao and the Vietcong.”

Tommy Vang closed his hand, looked down at it. Expression sad.

“But you still want to go back?”

Tommy Vang turned in the seat, and stared at Leaphorn, his expression incredulous. “Of course. Of course. I am all alone here. Alone. Nobody at all here.

And there, I know I could find some of my people. Not many maybe. But there would be somebody there. I think so. I am pretty sure of that.”

He turned away, stared out the side window, silent.

Then he raised his hands, a gesture that encompassed all he was seeing. The dusty wind, the desiccated landscape of high country desert with winter coming on. “It is cold here,” said Vang, talking to the glass. “And there is the green, the warmth, the ferns, the moss, the high grasses, and the waving bamboo. There is the sense of everything being alive. Here all I see is dead. Dead rock, cliffs with snow on them. And the sand.”

A tumbleweed bounced off the windshield. “And that,” Tommy added. “Those damned weeds that are nothing but brittle stems and sharp stickers.” 176

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“So you’re going back?” Leaphorn said. “You’re planning that? Have you made your plans? Arranged it?” Tommy Vang sighed. “Mr. Delos has told me he will make the arrangements. When the proper time comes, he will send me home.”

“Has he made any plans for that?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about it. But he said that when he is finished with everything here, he will send me back. Or maybe he will go back with me.” Finished with what? Leaphorn thought. But that question too would wait. Anyway, he thought he knew the answer.

“Would you be going back to Vietnam? Or Laos? I don’t imagine the Hmong have any sort of passport, or entry visas, or that sort of paperwork.”

“If they ever did, they probably wouldn’t by now,” Tommy said. “I guess our mountains are not ours anymore. We fought for the Americans, and the Americans went home.”

“Yes,” Leaphorn said. “We sometimes do things without really knowing what we are doing. Then we say we’re sorry about that. But I guess that doesn’t help much.”

Tommy Vang opened his door. “Would you give me back my piece of fruitcake? I must be going now. I have more things to do.”

“It’s still early,” Leaphorn said. “You said you had come here to talk to me. We haven’t talked much. Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

Vang settled himself into the seat. “I guess I don’t know. I think I found things I didn’t expect.”

“Like what?”

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Vang smiled at Leaphorn. “Like you are a nice man. I didn’t expect that.”

“You didn’t like me?”

“No. Because you are a policeman. I didn’t think I would like a policeman.”

“Why not?”

“I have sometimes heard bad things about them,” Vang said. “Probably not true. Maybe some policeman are bad and some are good.” He smiled, shrugged. “But now I have to go. I have to find a place out here—” he waved both hands in a widespread gesture. “I know its name, but its name is not on my map.”

“Maybe I can help you with that.” He patted Vang’s shoulder. “Maybe that would prove to you that I’m one of the good policemen. What’s the name of the place?” Vang extracted a folded postcard from his shirt pocket. Unfolded it, read from it.

Leaphorn understood “chapter house,” but the rest was lost in Vang’s Hmong interpretation of the message.

“Let me see it,” Leaphorn said, and took the card.

On it was written:

Tomas Delonie. Torreon. Chapter house. Use 371 north, then Navajo 9 east to Whitehorse Lake, then 12 miles northeast to Pueblo Pintado, the 9 southeast about 40 miles, then 197 short distance northeast. Look for Torreon Navajo Mission signs. Ask directions.

“I think you will have troubles finding that place,” Leaphorn said. “I think I should help you.”

“Yes,” Vang said. “This place. Torreon. I not find on my map. Nor some of these roads. They’re not included.

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Not marked.” He showed Leaphorn his map. It was an old Chevron Service Station version.

“An old map,” Leaphorn said. “I have a better one.” Tomas Delonie, he was thinking. Why was Tommy Vang making this trip?

“Mr. Delos gave you these directions, I guess,” Leaphorn said. “He didn’t have a new map. And I would doubt that he knows this eastern side of the Navajo Reservation very well.”

“I guess he wouldn’t,” Vang said.

“But he wrote these directions for you?”

“Oh, yes,” Vang said.

Leaphorn opened his mouth intending to ask why. To learn if Vang would tell him if Delos had explained the reason for this trip and just what he wanted Vang to learn about Delonie. But he wanted to approach that carefully with Vang.

“I guess he wanted to be sure he knew just where Mr. Delonie lives, and where he works, and things like that. Things he’d need to know if he wanted to come and visit him. He didn’t explain it, but it was about like that, I think. He told me just to sort of act like I was a tourist. You know. Asking about things, looking all around. But then he wanted me to be able to tell him what sort of vehicle Mr. Delonie drove—car or truck, what kind, what color. If he lived alone. Things like that. When he went to work.

When he came home. If he had a woman, or anybody else, living with him.”

Vang paused, reached into his jacket pocket. “And he gave me this.”

Vang extracted a very small camera and showed it to Leaphorn.

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“It is one of those new ones with the computer chips,” Vang said, smiling proudly. “Very modern. You look through the finder, and see what you are photographing, and click it. Then if you don’t like it, you can erase it, and shoot again until you get good pictures. What you think?

Pretty nice?”

“He wanted you to photograph Delonie?” That thought surprised Leaphorn.

“No. No. Not like taking his portrait, not anything like that. He said just take casual pictures. Of his house, his truck, things like that. But he didn’t want Mr. Delonie to see me taking pictures. He told me that lots of people don’t like having their pictures taken.”

“Did he want you to question Mr. Delonie about anything?”

“Oh no,” Vang said. “I was just to be acting like a tourist. Just curious. Just looking around. It would be best, Mr.

Delos said, if Mr. Delonie didn’t even notice me.”

“Did he tell you anything about Delonie? About whether he was an old friend? Anything like that?”

“No,” Vang said, “but I don’t think he was a friend.” Leaphorn studied Vang. “What causes you to think that?”

Vang shrugged. “Nothing, really. Just the way he looked when he talked about him. It make me think that Mr. Delonie made Mr. Delos feel nervous. Or something like that, I think.”

Exactly, Leaphorn thought. Mr. Vang is short on information but well armed with an astute intelligence. Smart enough to try to look beyond the bright and shiny surface of external appearances.

“You know, Tommy, I think the only sensible thing for 180

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us to do is for me to take you there,” Leaphorn said. “We can leave your car here in Crownpoint. Lock it up. We’ll tell whoever’s at the Tribal Police office. They’ll take care of it.”

Vang looked doubtful.

“Otherwise, you’ll probably get lost,” Leaphorn said.

“I think I have to take the truck I came in,” Vang said.

“Have to have it.”

Leaphorn noticed Vang was looking tense, fright-ened.

“Why not just ride with me?”

Vang looked at Leaphorn, looked away, then down.

“After I go where Mr. Delonie lives, ah—. After I do what Mr. Delos told me to do, then I have to drive over to that place where he will be shooting the elk, and wait for him there, and he will be looking for this truck, and if I am riding in another truck, I think then he would think that I have been disobeying him.”

“Oh,” Leaphorn said. And waited.

“Yes,” Vang said. “I think I had better be there in that truck I drive for him.”

“Are you sort of afraid of him?”

“Afraid?” Vang asked, and thought about it. Nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “Very afraid.”

Leaphorn considered that for a moment. Of course he would be afraid. Everything in Tommy’s life depended on Jason Delos. Going home to his Hmong mountains, most of all.

“Okay,” he said. “Then we will turn the arrangement around. We’ll leave my truck at the Tribal Police office and we’ll take this one.”

And so they did. Vang pulled his King Cab pickup THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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into the Tribal Police parking lot behind Leaphorn, then turned off the ignition and waited while Leaphorn went into the office.

Inside, Leaphorn shook hands with Corporal Des-mond Shirley and explained what he was doing. Then he returned to his pickup and removed his cell phone and his police issue .38 pistol from the glove box. He dropped both into his jacket pocket, locked the door, and walked over to where Vang was sitting in his vehicle, watching.

“I think I should drive,” Leaphorn said.

Vang looked surprised.

“Because while you know the truck better, I know the roads, and all these pickups are pretty much alike.” Vang scooted over.

He took them north past the Crownpoint airport, then eastward across twenty-five miles of absolutely empty country toward Whitehorse. For the first half hour they drove in a sort of nervous silence, with Vang keeping his eye on his own road map—apparently making sure Leaphorn was taking them where his instructions told him to go. At the little settlement of Whitehorse, the pavement of Navajo 9 swerves northward to climb Chaco Mesa en route to the ancient ruins of Pueblo Pintado before swerv-ing back southward toward Torreon. Leaphorn turned off the pavement onto the twenty-three miles of dirt road that goes directly to Torreon without the wide detour.

“Ah, Mr. Leaphorn,” Vang said, sounding uneasy.

“You are leaving Highway 9. But my map says Nine takes us to Torreon. Takes us to find Mr. Delonie.”

“It does,” Leaphorn said. “But this dirt road takes us there directly, without going way up on Chaco Mesa. This way we get there quicker, and right to the Torreon Chap-182

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ter House. We should stop there and ask where we can find Delonie.”

“Oh,” Vang said. “Would he maybe be at the chapter house? Is that like a government office? For the Navajos who live around there?”

“It is,” Leaphorn said. “But Delonie isn’t a Navajo. I know he’s part Indian—Pottawatomie and Seminole—

because the name sounds French.”

“French?” Vang’s tone suggested he would like an explanation.

“Both of those tribes once lived in the part of America where a lot of French people settled. Like Louisiana and that southern coastal country. Then the Pottawatomies helped General Jackson defeat the British in the War of 1812. The fight for New Orleans. And when Jackson was elected president, he granted citizenship to the Pottawatomies who helped him. Made them the ‘Citizen Band.’

Then when the white people wanted the land they were living on, he had the army round them up and moved them to Kansas.”

Leaphorn glanced at Vang, noticed that Vang was not following his explanation and decided to hurry through it.

“Anyway, then the railroad built a transcontinental line through there, and the land in Kansas got valuable and the white people wanted it. So the Pottawatomies were rounded up again and moved down to Oklahoma.

They called it Indian Territory then. A lot of Seminoles got there, too, but I don’t remember how that happened.” Vang considered this.

“I think this is something like what happened to our people, too. My parents said our ancestors started way up north, in China, and kept being pushed south, and finally THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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got chased up into the mountains. But if Mr. Delonie is not a Navajo, why then would those at the Navajo Chapter House be likely know where to find him?”

“Because when there aren’t many people around, everybody gets noticed. I guess you’ve seen that very few people live out here.” He glanced at the odometer. “In the thirty-one miles since we left Whitehorse we have not passed even one residential place. And just about forty people live at Whitehorse. Where there are very few people, the people who are there all seem to know one another, no matter their tribe or their race.”

“It was that way in our mountains, too. But just in the mountains. Out of the mountains where there were more people nobody liked the Hmongs.”

“Look to the south,” Leaphorn said, gesturing to the mountain dominating that horizon with enough early winter snowpack to provide a glittering reflection of afternoon sunlight. “The map you have calls it Mount Taylor; it’s fifty miles from here, and there is absolutely nobody between us and that mountain.”

Vang considered that. “It looks so close.”

“It’s an old volcano,” Leaphorn said, finding himself lapsing into his habit of becoming a tour director anytime he was driving with anyone unfamiliar with his territory.

“Biggest mountain in this part of the reservation. Eleven thousand three hundred and something feet high. It has a lot of historical and religious significance for us. In our people’s origin story, it was built by First Man when the Navajos first got here. It’s one of our four sacred mountains. Four mountains that mark the boundaries of our land. We have several names for that one. The Navajo ceremonial name is tsoodzil, and the formal title is 184

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dootl’izhiidzii, which translates to ‘Turquoise Mountain.’

And then on the map it’s named after General Zachary Taylor, and we also call it ‘Mother of Rains’ because the west winds pile clouds on top of it and then drive out over the prairie.”

Leaphorn noticed Vang had been trying to suppress a grin. Recognized what might be an opportunity to get closer to this man. To understand him. To be understood.

“You’re smiling,” Leaphorn said. “What?”

“The way you say those two Navajo names,” he said, grinning again. “Our Hmong language has words like that.

You have to make funny sounds when you say them.”

“Some of our words don’t fit well with the white man’s alphabet,” Leaphorn said. “And since your people originated in China—well, at least a lot of anthropologists believe you did, and there’s pretty good evidence that was your point of origin, too. So it wouldn’t surprise me if we had some connections way back in time. How about your tribe’s stories of how it originated?” Vang looked surprised. Raised his eyebrows. Said, “I don’t anything know about that. About what you mean.”

“I mean like what we call ‘origin stories.’ For example, in the Judeo-Christian culture—the Europe-based white culture—in that one God created the universe in a series of six days, and then said we should rest on the seventh one.” Leaphorn summarized the rest and mentioned the Garden of Eden.

“Adam and Eve,” Vang said. “I’ve heard about that.” He smiled, touched his side. “And that’s why we have one less rib on one side of our chest.”

Leaphorn paused, glanced at Vang, his facial expression a question. Vang nodded. Yes. He was interested.

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“Well, Navajo tradition, at least the way I was taught it in my clan, doesn’t give us such a clear statement of the creating power, or the sequences of how it happened. We believe we first existed in a series of previous worlds, but not exactly as flesh and blood humans. We were more like concepts, sort of the notion of what we would eventually be. Anyway, in our first world we do evil things and the Creator destroys it, and we escape into a second world.

These early humans . . .” Leaphorn paused again, studying Vang. “Am I getting too confusing?”

“Go on,” Vang said.

“Let’s call this early version of humans prehumans,” Leaphorn said. “Anyway, bad conduct again, and the second world was destroyed, and they escaped into the third world. Now our origin stories get more detailed. We learn how the prehumans were separated into the sexes; men and women. Men doing the hunting and fishing and being the warriors, and the women raising families.

The selfish, mean, greedy behavior was going on again, and the Creator repeated the process. The way my clan teaches the story, a sort of super-version of Coyote kid-napped the baby of another of these primal beings—one we call Water Monster—and he was so enraged he produced a terrible flood and drowned the third world as punishment. So we climbed up through a hollow reed and escaped into this world.”

Leaphorn gestured at the landscape they were driving through, the eroded slopes of the butte they were passing, the distant mountain ridges, the high, dry, semi-desert landscape of rabbit brush, snakeweed, bunchgrass, and juniper and, above it all, a scattering of puffy clouds decorating the clear deep blue of the high country sky.

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“Our Fourth World,” Leaphorn said. “We call it Glittering World.”

He glanced at Vang, who was staring out the windshield.

It was a longer statement than Leaphorn had intended, but Vang’s expression showed he was interested.

Maybe even intensely interested.

“You have any questions?” Leaphorn asked.

“Oh, yes,” Vang said. “You climbed up to here—” Vang indicated “here” with a wave of his hand at the landscape.

“Climbed up a hollow reed?”

“Well, as I understand it, we weren’t really humans yet. But they had human characteristics. The same tendency to push and shove, try to get on top, try to get out in front, and they still had to get revenge, for example, if someone hurt them. The habits that always got them into trouble. I guess you could just call it selfishness. Being greedy.”

Vang considered this. Nodded. “All the bad things that were the reason the Creating Spirit punished them for. The reasons the Creator made the flood. To destroy all that. That’s what it means?”

“I think so,” Leaphorn said. “That’s all that seems to make any sense, anyway. In any of these various religions, the Creator seems to have started mankind, to have given humans a bunch of lessons on how to live the good life, be happy, stay happy by loving your neighbors, feeding the poor, not being selfish. Not chasing after fame, fortune, three car garages, all that. But he didn’t make us slaves.

He gave us a way to tell good from evil, but he also gave us free will. You know. Do you want to get rich, or do you want have a good life. It’s our choice.” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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“I think our people got created a lot like that, too. But I never really had much chance to hear our stories. And I don’t think the Hmong ever had much chance to get rich.” He sighed. “Didn’t even have any chance to teach their children about all that.”

Vang’s voice faded into a sort of sadness when he said that, and he looked down at his hands.

Something like me, Leaphorn was thinking. Tommy Vang sitting there beside him was another product of childhood interrupted. Vang’s by war. Joe Leaphorn’s by that old assimilation policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By the school buses that hauled Indian kids away to boarding schools. Away from our hogans where the old people would have been teaching us all the ancestor stories—of the first, second, and third worlds. The buses brought them home when summer came, of course, to help with the herding, and their other duties, but the summer was the time tradition allowed for another set of stories, about hunting, relations with the animal worlds.

The origin stories could be told only in the cold times, during the season when the thunder sleeps, when it was quiet, and the snow kept them in the hogans, and there was nothing to distract them, nothing to keep the children from listening, and thinking, and understanding.

And thus, Leaphorn was thinking, the assimilation program had cost much of this generation the heart and soul of the Navajo system of values. And this led him to another thought. Why younger, much more modern Officer Jim Chee, who had been born late enough to escape assimilation, was much better tuned to the Navajo Way than he was. Why Jim Chee still believed he could be both a policeman enforcing most belagaana laws and a 188

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shaman conducting the ceremonies that cured people who violated Navajo cultural rules and restored them to harmony.

“Why don’t you tell me what you remember,” Leaphorn said. “When I was a lot younger and a student, I studied anthropology at the university. I learned just a little, very, very little, about the cultures of your part of the world. Didn’t your Creator have an emissary, sort of an am-bassador, who he sent down to sort of govern humanity?”

“Ah, yes,” Vang said, looking delighted. “How you know about that?”

“Mostly just from books,” Leaphorn said. “We used one called”—Leaphorn paused, probing his memory—“I think it was Hmong, A History of a People.”

“Did it tell about Hua Tai?”

“I have to think,” Leaphorn said, noticing that Vang’s attitude had changed abruptly. His patient, enduring leth-argy had converted into enthusiasm.

“As I remember it,” Leaphorn said, “Hua Tai was the God who created the world and the people. But most of the little bit we learned was about his lieutenant. I think

‘Harshoes,’ or something like that. I sort of thought of him as being like Mohammed. You know, the prophet who represented God to the Arabian world.”

“You say his name ‘Yer Shua,’” Vang said, pronouncing the syllables very slowly and repeating them. “I have heard about Mohammed. They talk about him some on the television news. About the war in Iraq. But Yer Shua was different, I think. He was part God and part man, I think. I remember they told about him being a farmer like the rest of the Hmong people, and raising pigs and having a whole lot of wives. And he was the one who tried THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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to take care of the Hmong people. I mean he tried to protect them.”

“We Navajos have what we call yei, ” Leaphorn said.

“Powerful, like spirits, but good. And the belagaana—

white people—they have . . . well it depends on whether they’re Christian, or Jewish, or what. Anyway, their bad supernatural beings are devils, or witches, or some other names. Good ones are angels.”

They crossed the Continental Divide on Navajo Route 9 as Leaphorn was covering this side of theology, and now the Torreon ridge rose about six miles ahead, and beyond it Torreon arroyo and Torreon itself, with its chapter house and maybe, Leaphorn guessed, something like 150 residents scattered around the valley. Above it all, rising like a great sunlit thumb against a background of scattered clouds some thirty miles to the southeast, was Cabezon Peak. The thoughts Leaphorn had been forming jelled into a sudden decision. He slowed, pulled the vehicle off to the side where a ranch entry road had widened the shoulder.

“There’s Torreon,” he told Vang, pointing at the scattered buildings far ahead. “Before we get there, let’s talk about what we’re doing there.” He released his seat belt and opened the car door.

“Talk?” Vang said. “What we talk about?”

“I want to hear some more about what you’ve been telling me about the Hmong, for one thing,” Leaphorn said. “And if you’re interested, I’ll tell you more about the Dineh and about our traditional relationship with God and the spirits. And then we ought to plan what we’re going to do about finding Mr. Delonie. And we should stretch our legs a little. I’m getting old, and I get stiff.” 190

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“Sure,” Vang said.

Leaphorn got out, stretched, leaned against the fender, admired the view, planning his tactics. Vang joined him, glanced at Leaphorn inquiringly, and leaned against the car door.

“Not many people,” Leaphorn said. “A few down below, then miles and miles and miles in every direction, no sign of people.” He pointed down the road toward the village. “ ‘Torreon’ means tower, and when that little valley was first occupied by people, they built one out of stones because enemies kept attacking them.” Vang considered that. “Like what they say about Hmong. Everywhere we went people attacked us.” He glanced at Leaphorn, a wry smile. “We even had a god like that. His name was Nau Yong, and they called him

‘the Savage One’ because what he liked to do was capture lots of Hmong people, and tear them apart and drink their blood.” Vang grimaced. “Like he was a great tiger in the forest. They said he was the chief of all the bad spirits.

Sort of like their king.”

Leaphorn considered this. “Did he live on top of a mountain?” Leaphorn asked.

Vang looked surprised. “How did you know?”

“Maybe I read it somewhere,” Leaphorn said. “But that’s usually how it worked.”

He pointed toward the south, where Mount Taylor’s crest was visible against the horizon. “That’s our Sacred Mountain of the South, our boundary marker. According to my clan’s traditions, it was the home of a supernatural named ‘Ye-iitsoh.’ He was our version of your, ah, Nau Yong. Sort of in charge of all the vestiges of greed, hatred, malice, selfishness, cruelty, and so forth. The way THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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our origin worked, our First Man spirit when he was escaping the flood that forced us to move up here, he sent a diving bird back into the water to recover what he called his ‘way to make money.’ In other words, it contained everything that caused the greed and selfishness.” Leaphorn was watching Tommy Vang’s expression through every word of this.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“Sure,” Vang said. He threw out his hands. “Everybody fighting everybody else to collect more money, bigger car, bigger house, get famous on television. Get to the top of that mountain yourself. Step on the Hmong people. Climb over them.”

Leaphorn chuckled. “That’s the general idea.”

“I heard that you Navajo say the way to find witches, anybody evil, is to look for people who have more than they need and their kinfolks are hungry.” Leaphorn nodded. “And also according to our origin story, two good yei decided to go around this glittering world and eliminate all the bad yei to make this place safe for regular humans, like you and me, to live here.

They killed the Ye-iitsoh up on the mountain, cut his head off.”

Leaphorn pointed at Cabezon Peak. “That’s his head,” he said. “It rolled all the way down there and turned into stone. And Ye-iitsoh’s blood flowed down the other side of the mountain and dried into all the back lava flow along the highway around Grants.”

“So I guess everybody has this idea about evil. Pretty much alike,” Vang said.

“And people who fight evil, too,” Leaphorn said.

“Sometimes that’s got to be policemen.” 192

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Vang looked at him. “Like you?”

Leaphorn considered that. “Maybe like both of us,” he said. “I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions.”

“Oh,” Vang said. And thought for a moment. “What do I know?”

“First, when Mr. Delos brought you from Asia, you came to San Francisco, right?”

“Yes. We stayed in a hotel there.”

“What year was that?”

“Year?” He shook his head.

“Then how old were you?”

“I was ten. Or maybe eleven. Mr. Delos had to buy me some new clothes because I had gotten a little bigger.”

“And what did you do at the hotel?”

“A woman came in every day. A Chinese woman. And she would help me some with learning better English.

Like we would watch the children’s program on television, and she would help explain. And then she started teaching me how to cook, and how to iron shirts, and how to keep everything neat and clean. Things like that. And sometimes she would take me out in a taxicab and show me the city. And every evening we would sort of plan a dinner if Mr. Delos was going to be home, and she would teach me how to cook it. And then I would put out the plates and the silver, and she would go.” Vang looked at Leaphorn, smiling. “That was fun. And good, good food.”

“She didn’t stay at night.”

“No. No. Just daytime. Five days a week. That was for maybe the first year. Then Mr. Delos thought I was ready to go to cooking school and I would spend my daytimes at a sort of restaurant-bakery and food store. The boss there was from Manila. A nice man, and he knew something THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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about Hmong people, but the other language he spoke was sometimes Spanish and sometimes a sort of tribal speech. From his island, I think.”

“Were you still living in the hotel?”

“Oh, no. We moved into an apartment building. Close enough so I could walk down to where I was working.”

“And what was Mr. Delos doing?”

“He was gone away most of the time. Sometimes people would come there to see him, and Mr. Delos would tell me to plan a meal for them, buy the wine, all that. I would put flowers on the table. Make everything nice. Put on this sort of apron and white cap he bought for me, and be the waiter. I enjoyed that.”

“Gone most of the time?” Leaphorn said. “For days, or weeks, or months? Do you know where?”

“Usually just a few days, but sometimes for a long time. Once for more than a month. I think that time, he had gone to Phoenix, and another time he was in San Diego, and once it was Albuquerque.”

“Did he always tell you where he was going?”

“No, but usually, after he had taught me how to do it, he was having me arrange the trip for him.” Vang was smiling again. “He said I was his butler-valet. Like the man in the hotel lobbies who does all the arranging for you.”

“You called the travel agencies, worked out the schedule, bought the tickets, everything?”

“Sure,” Vang said. “Mr. Delos always had me call the same agency. There was a woman there. Mrs. Jackson.

Always first class. And she knew all about where he liked to sit, that he liked late flights. If he wanted to have a car waiting for him. All those sort of things.” 194

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“You just gave her the credit card number? Or what?”

“Yes. Well, no. She had the number. She say: ‘Mr.

Vang, do I just put this on his regular business card.’ And then she would e-mail the paper to get him on the air-plane and I would print it out for him.”

“Overseas flights, too. Or was he making any of them?”

“Yes. Not many though. One to Mexico City. One to Manila. One to London, but I think he had me cancel that.”

“She handled the visas, too. “

“Sure,” Vang said. “Very nice lady.”

Leaphorn nodded, thinking of the benefits of the very rich.

“Sometimes there would be two tickets. Because he would take me along to take care of things for him if he was staying several days.”

Leaphorn was silent a moment, considering that.

“She handled your visa for you when you needed one?

Tommy, did Mr. Delos get you naturalized. As an American citizen, I mean. Were you sworn in and all that?”

“Oh yes,” Tommy Vang said. “That was exciting. It was when I was twenty-one years old. The same day I registered so I could vote.”

“Several years before that—I’d say when you were about fifteen or sixteen—was Mr. Delos away for a long period of time? Maybe as long as a year?”

“Oh, it was longer than that,” Tommy Vang said. “For about five years, he was gone most of the time. Sometimes he’d call about the mail, or messages. And then he would call and tell me to meet him at the airport, and THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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he’d be home for maybe a week and then he’d have to leave again.”

“You just stayed at the apartment?”

“And worked for Mr. Martinez, at his bakery, restaurant place.” He produced a wry sounding laugh. “Not good times. I watched television, and went for walks, and worked a lot. Nobody to talk to. Spent some time at the li-brary trying to learn something about what had happened to the Hmong people.”

“And thinking about going home?”

“No money,” Tommy Vang said. “Sometimes I tried to talk to Mr. Delos about that, but he would just say when everything was finished here, he would take me back himself.”

“He never paid you any salary?”

“He said it was just like he was my daddy. He gave me my clothes, my home, my food, everything I need. Had me taught things. Just like I was his son.” Leaphorn looked at Tommy. Yes, that statement seemed serious. It also seemed terrible.

“Time to get moving again,” he said. “Mr. Delonie will be getting home from wherever he works about now. Time to get back on the road. Get down to Torreon and find out where he lives.”

Fastening his seat belt, Leaphorn noticed Tommy was staring at him. Tommy frowned, gestured toward the glove box.

“Your telephone,” he said. “I think I hear it ringing in there.”

Leaphorn got it out, flipped it open. Punched the wrong button. Punched the proper one. Listened.

“Hello?”

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“Is this Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn?” a voice asked.

“Ted Rostic asked me to call you about an obituary. I’m Carter Bradley, and I guess I’ve got some bad news for you.” Bradley chuckled. “Or maybe it’s good news.”

“About Totter?” Leaphorn said.

“Yeah. Saint Anthony’s Hospital records said they hadn’t admitted anyone named Totter. Not that year anyway. Hope I got the date right.” He repeated it.

“That’s right,” Leaphorn said.

“Had a Tyler die a few weeks after that date,” Bradley said. “But that was a woman.”

“I wonder if whoever sent the obituary to the paper had the hospital right. Seems unlikely, but you—”

“Well, the obituary said this Totter was buried in the Veterans Administration cemetery. Turns out he wasn’t.

No record of it, and the VA keeps good records.”

“Well, I thank you,” Leaphorn said. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I am,” Bradley said. “Why would anybody pull a stunt like that?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “Did you call Ted Rostic?”

“I did,” Bradley said. “He didn’t know either. But he didn’t sound surprised either.”

Leaphorn pulled back onto the highway, heading for Torreon, thinking how he’d have to handle this. Tommy Vang was watching him, looking curious.

Leaphorn sighed.

“Tommy,” he said. “I am going to tell you some very important things. Very serious for you and other people, too.

That call was about Mr. Totter, the man who had that famous rug hanging on Mr. Delos’s wall. You know about that?” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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“I heard something about it,” Tommy said. “About his gallery being burned, but somehow the carpet being saved. And about Mr. Totter going away and dying, and being buried.”

“That call was from an old retired newspaper reporter. Somebody about like me. He checked for me back in Oklahoma where Mr. Totter was supposed to have gone. But Mr. Bradley found out that Mr. Totter didn’t die in that hospital there. And he hasn’t been buried.”

“Oh,” Tommy said, looking surprised, awaiting an explanation.

“I think he is still alive. And I think he is a very dangerous man.”

“Ah,” Tommy said, and raised his eyebrows.

“You’re not going to like hearing what I’m going to tell you, Tommy. And I can’t prove a lot of it. But when we find Mr. Delonie, I’m going to tell him all this, too. And maybe he’s the one who can prove whether I’m wrong or right.” He shrugged. “Probably the only one, for that matter—”

“I guess this is all about what Mr. Delos has been doing with those cherries?” Tommy Vang said. His tone sad.

“Yes, and more than that. In a way, I guess it’s about all these religious things we’ve been talking about. About the chief of the evil spirits you Hmong call Nau Yong.”

“All right,” Tommy Vang said. “I will listen.”

“Let’s start way back when you were still a teenager, living in San Francisco. By yourself then, because Mr. Delos was mostly away on his long business trips. We move to this area. To a service station-tourist gallery-food store beside the highway, run by a couple named Handy.

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One day, a man showed up there. He gave his name as Ray Shewnack, a big, good-looking man, great smile, made friends fast.”

Leaphorn described what happened next, how Shewnack killed Handy and his wife, betrayed his new friends, and vanished with the money.

“Now we skip ahead to when you are a mature man, living mostly alone in California with Mr. Delos often away on a business trip. A man who calls himself Totter buys a roadside store, adds an Indian art gallery to it, does some business. Time passes; the three who went to prison for the Handys’ murders are now getting out on parole.” Leaphorn paused, studied Tommy, who had his lips pursed, staring ahead, seeming deep in memories. Putting things together, Leaphorn hoped.

“I want you to remember the time element and the places. These three people the man called Shewnack had betrayed would be getting out of prison. Coming back right into this very empty country where everybody knows everybody. Think about that. Remember these three would recognize Shewnack if they saw him. Okay?” Tommy nodded.

“So then this Totter hires a man, a stranger so it would seem, to help him at the store. Fire breaks out, the man is burned beyond recognition but left behind a bunch of stuff to identify him as Shewnack, who by then is on the FBI Most-Wanted-Fugitives list. Shewnack is declared dead. Totter collects fire insurance, sells the place, disappears. Then the death notice is published declaring Totter also dead.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Tommy Vang said. “But he isn’t dead. And you are pretty sure that the man who was THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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called Shewnack became Mr. Totter and got rid of Shewnack, and then announced that Totter was dead, and now he has disappeared again.”

“Not exactly vanished this time,” Leaphorn said. “I think we know the name he is using now.” He was staring at Tommy. “Do you agree?”

Tommy exhaled. “Like it would be Mr. Delos, the man who poisons people with fat red cherries?”

“And who, with the latest little packages of cherries, has fixed it very carefully so that if they kill Mr. Delonie, it will be Tommy Vang who brought the poison to the victim, whose fingerprints are all over the bottle, and whose handwriting is on the delivery note.”

Leaphorn waited a reaction to that. Got none.

“Does that make sense to you?”

Tommy nodded. “I am thinking how he had me press my thumb down on the top of the bottle cap. He said it was to make sure it was tight, but it was screwed on tight.” He held up his thumb, inspected the tip, rubbed his hand against his shirt.

“It makes me remember what he told me once, about people. About me. He said when God created humans he let them grow into two groups. A few of them—very few and only males among them—they are the predators. They are like our God of the devil spirits who ate the souls of the others. And the other people. Just about everybody else. They are the prey. The weak ones, he called them. Helpless ones. He said nearly all the Hmong were the prey. But maybe I was the exception. Maybe he could teach me to be one of the powerful ones.” Tommy paused, shook his head.

“Did he try to teach you how to be powerful?” 200

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“At first, when we were living in that hotel. But pretty soon, he got very angry and gave up. Told me to just forget about it. And then after a while, he would try to teach me things again.”

“Did things happen to cause that?”

“I guess I just kept disappointing him. But finally, I came into the dining room where he had all the silver stuff, and I saw the old woman who worked for him putting some of the big serving spoons into her purse. I told her she better put them back because Mr. Delos would miss them, and he’d call the police, and she’d be put in jail. And then—”

Leaphorn violated one of the key rules of Navajo courtesy. He held up his hand, interrupting. “Let me guess. He was angry. He told you that you should have let her take the stolen stuff down to the exit, catch her there leaving, get hotel security involved, and then let her know that she was thereafter at your mercy. Anytime she didn’t follow your orders, you could bring charges against her.” Tommy was nodding. “That’s the way it was. He sat me down, told me how powerful people get to be powerful. How they get control. But I think he saw it might not do any good, so he just got up and told me he guessed I would always be a prey. That I better start learning. And he walked away.”

“No more trying to make you a powerful person?”

“Not since then. Not hardly any.”

“Well, let’s go then and see if we can find Mr.

Delonie.”

Two pickup trucks and an aged Chevy sedan were parked at the Torreon Chapter House, but the owner of one truck was leaving. No, he hadn’t seen Delonie today THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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and wasn’t sure where he would be. The other truck, on closer inspection, proved to have been left there with a blown rear tire, and no one was inside the building except Mrs. Sandra Nezbah, a sturdily built, middle-aged woman who greeted them with a warm smile. But no, she wasn’t sure where Delonie might be found now. She looked at her watch. Probably at home. And where was that? She took them to a side door and pointed eastward, toward the slopes of Torreon ridge. His was the little house with the flat roof and the big barn behind it, and that vehicle by the barn looked like it might be his. “That great big Dodge Ram truck,” she said admiringly. “Has diesel power, four-wheel drive. Quite a truck.”

17

The truck was still there when Leaphorn pulled up by the driveway, turned off the ignition, and waited the polite Navajo moment for the residents to recognize his pres-ence. Short wait, because Delonie had heard them and stood by the barn door looking out at them.

“Ya eeh teh,” Leaphorn shouted as he got out. “Mr.

Delonie. We are happy we found you at home.”

“Well,” said, Delonie, still standing at the barn door and looking uneasy. “Is it Lieutenant Leaphorn? What brings you out here? You working for my parole officer these days?”

“I want you to meet Tommy Vang,” Leaphorn said, gesturing to Tommy, who was climbing out of the truck.

“We want to provide you with some information, and see what you think about it.”

Delonie considered that. Produced a skeptical-looking grin. “I’ll bet you’re not about to tell me you found all the 204

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loot Shewnack took from the Handy’s robbery. Did you dig that up?”

“More important than that,” Leaphorn said. “We want to tell you some things and see if you will agree with us that this fellow we’ve been calling Shewnack is still alive.

In fact, still in operation.”

Delonie took a deep breath. “Still alive? Shewnack?

You telling me that son of a bitch didn’t burn up at Totter’s? Who was it then? What do you mean?”

“It’s going to take a few minutes to explain what we’re talking about. You have some time?”

“I’ve got the rest of my life for this,” Delonie said. He ushered them into his house, gestured around the front room, said, “Make yourselves comfortable.” Then he disappeared into what seemed to be the kitchen. “Got about half a pot of coffee in here, and I’ll warm it up a little and see how it tastes.”

A glance around the room showed Leaphorn that Delonie was not better than most in bachelor housekeeping.

For seating it offered a massive old sofa, its sagging cush-ions partly hidden by an army blanket; a recliner chair upholstered in cracked black plastic; a rocking chair with a well-worn square cushion; three straight-backed wooden dining room chairs, two waiting at a cluttered table and the third leaned against the wall. The floor surface was a linoleum sheet patterned with blue-green tiles, but the effect was marred by too many years of hard wear.

Beyond all this, a double-width sliding glass door looked out into a walled patio.

“Take a seat in there,” Delonie said. “This java is a little stale but drinkable and I’ll have it hot in a minute.” Leaphorn was looking at Tommy Vang, hoping to use THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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that available minute to plan how they’d communicate with Delonie. But Vang’s eyes—and his attention—were focused on the view out the window, where a busy squad-ron of hummingbirds was zipping, drinking, pushing, and waiting around a cluster of feeders hanging from the patio rafters. Maybe a dozen of them, Leaphorn estimated, but they were moving too fast for an accurate count. But he thought he recognized at least three species.

In the little yard beyond the dangling feeders, a larger gaggle of birds were at work. Delonie, or whoever was responsible, had converted the patio into a disorganized forest of fence posts, each topped by grain feeders.

These were augmented by a variety of others, some hanging from the limbs of pinyon trees, some attached to the yard wall, and the largest one—a log partially hollowed to hold more bulky bird food and fitted with a birdbath of cast concrete shaped to look like someone’s version of an oversized clam shell. At the moment, two doves were drinking from it. Above and behind and all around the air was aflutter with avian activity.

Tommy Vang was grinning at Leaphorn, pointing at the aerial show.

Delonie emerged from the kitchen. On his right hand he was balancing a tray that held a can of condensed milk, a sugar sack from which a spoon handle emerged, and three cups. His left hand held a steaming coffeepot.

He put the tray on the table and poured the coffee.

“Grab one and doctor it up the way you like, and then I want you to tell me how this son of a bitch Shewnack has raised himself from the dead.”

Delonie chose the recliner as his spot for this conversation, but he sat on the chair’s edge, making no attempt 206

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to get comfortable. He had poured a bit of condensed milk and a dollop of sugar into his cup, and now he swirled it around. He glanced at Vang now and then, but mostly kept his eyes on Leaphorn.

Leaphorn was drinking his coffee black. He took a sip, suppressed a startled reaction, and smiled at Delonie over the rim. It was stale, but it was hot. And it was the first coffee he’d had for a while.

“First, I want to tell you about Tommy Vang here,” he said. “He’s a part of this story, and he brought you a present. He’ll give you that later, after we do some explaining.

Tommy has got to tell you about his part, and that goes all the way back to the Vietnam War.”

Delonie nodded at Vang, took a sip of his coffee, and waited—still on the very edge of the chair. “Yes,” he said.

“Go ahead, Tommy,” Leaphorn said. “Tell Mr. Delonie about the CIA agent, and how he was working with your family in the mountains, and about his taking you out of the refugee camp. All that.”

Tommy Vang did as he was told. Hesitantly at first, and in a low voice that grew louder as he began to see that Delonie was interested—even in hearing about his cooking lessons and his valet duties. When he reached the times when he was often left alone and his boss was away week after week, he hesitated, glanced at Leaphorn for instructions.

“Now we are getting to the time when you are about to be involved. About now this fellow has disappeared from San Francisco and a fellow who calls himself Ray Shewnack has showed up out here. You remember?” Delonie’s expression had changed as Leaphorn was saying that. He bent forward, eyes intent.

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“Damn right,” Delonie said. “I remember that day.

Cold day. Ellie and me had been over to the Sky City Casino. Having some lunch, talking to some people, and Bennie Begay saw us, and Bennie brought this Shewnack over. They’d been playing seven card stud in the poker room, as I remember it, and Begay introduced us. Said Shewnack was from California, was a detective with the Santa Monica Police Department. Out here on vacation.

Just looking around.”

Delonie nodded to Leaphorn. “How about that? A policeman on vacation.”

“I guess it sort of fits into what we’re going to be telling you. Changed names, changed places, never the same twice.”

“Evil son of a bitch,” Delonie said. “Like those worst kind of witches you Navajos have. The shape shifters.”

“To tell the truth, I’d thought of that myself,” Leaphorn said.

“I could tell he was interested in Ellie right from the start. Sat down, talked about how much he admired our part of the country, said he was going to move out here, wanted to know where we lived. Where we worked. You couldn’t imagine anybody being any friendlier.” Delonie took a drink of his coffee, slammed the cup down on the table. “If I’d just been smart enough to see what was coming. If I just had a gun with me and been that smart, I’d a killed the bastard. Would’ve been a lot better off.” The sound of rage in this produced a moment of silence. Leaphorn noticed that Tommy Vang’s expression went from startled to nervous.

“But how can anyone read the future?” Leaphorn asked. “Here you are, being friendly to a stranger.” 208

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“Yeah,” Delonie said, and laughed. A bitter sound.

“So what happened next?”

“He keeps showing up at the Handys’ place. Driving a pale blue Cadillac four door. Bought gasoline the first time and got out and checked his tire pressure and his oil.” Delonie produced a wry smile. “Remember when people did that? I mean ask the gasoline pumper to do it for them? Well, he did it himself. That’s how friendly he was. And then he went in, got himself some cigarettes, talked to Ellie and Handy. Did a lot of smiling, being friendly. That kept on happening for a while.” Delonie stopped. Stared out the window. Shook his head. “Pretty soon, dumb as I am, I could see Ellie was a hell of a lot more interested in Shewnack than she was in me. And pretty soon he’d be coming about quitting time, and we’d go down the road a ways, or maybe back over to the Acoma tribes casino, and eat something and so-cialize. Sometime play a little poker. And Shewnack was filling us in on his career as a policeman, mostly talking about how really dumb criminals made the job so easy for the cops. He was full of stories about that. Then he would tell us how easy it would be out here in the wide open country to get a lot of money by pulling stuff off. Not so many cops out here. Not well trained. Not all that smart, either. Said the secret was knowing how to not leave any evidence behind. So on, so forth. Full of good yarns about how it happened, and how cops really weren’t all that interested in doing the work to catch people. Underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked. We heard that a lot from Shewnack. Just let nature take its course and the dumb criminals will catch themselves. Anyway, I admit it was kind of interesting, and Ellie got real caught up in THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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it. One day she asked him how he would organize one if he wanted to rob a place, and he said, you mean like where you guys work, and she said yeah, how would you do that? And he said, well the real pros we run into now and then in California do a lot of planning. First, will there be enough profit involved for it to be worth the time. And he said Handy’s store wouldn’t be a prospect, because the day’s take would just be a few hundred bucks.” Delonie stopped, drank coffee, stared out the window at the bird activity.

“Knowing what I know now, I’m sure he knew better even when he said that, but Ellie fell for it. She told him that Handy never takes his money into the bank more than once a week, and sometimes it’s a whole month before he drives it into the bank in Gallup. Told him he keeps the money in a hidden safe. So forth. Anyway, sweet Ellie wasn’t deceptive at all. Any question Shewnack had, she answered.

And then, when the time came, what does he do to her?” Delonie left that question hang, staring out the glass door into the patio.

“Those birds get even livelier than that in the spring,” he said. “Birds get to thinking about nesting, pairing up.

Even the Gambel quails are coming in, laying their eggs under the heavy brush out there. And after the hatch, they bring the young ones into the patio sometimes.

Daddy quail sits on the wall and keeps an eye out for cats or hawks or anything he thinks looks dangerous. And the mama quail sort of herds them around. Teaches ’em to run into the bushes or hide under things when she gives

’em the danger warning.”

Delonie’s lips had curved into a sad smile now, remembering this.

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“I used to get Ellie to come out here sometimes and watch them with me.” He shook his head. “Very good company, Ellie was. She should have married me like I asked her. I think she would have if Shewnack hadn’t come along.”

“I talked to the police who handled that case,” Leaphorn said. “They told me how nice they thought she was.”

“Prison changed her, I guess,” Delonie said. “Did me, too. When I finally got out, I tried to find her, but she didn’t want to see me anymore. I finally gave up. Then, just a while back, I heard she was dead.”

“You knew Bennie Begay is dead, too?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“That means you are a very important person to this man who calls himself Shewnack. The only one left who could identify him with that double murder.”

“If he wasn’t already burned up,” Delonie said.

“You believe that?”

“Well, should I believe you or the famous old Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

“We’ll give you a choice,” Leaphorn said, and began connecting the dots of time and place between a man calling himself Shewnack leaving Handy’s store with the loot, and a man who called himself Totter appearing back in the high, dry Four Corners Country and buying himself an old trading post and gallery. Then the fire destroying a man Totter had hired, who the FBI decided was Shewnack. Then Totter cashing in, disappearing.

“Then,” Leaphorn continued, but Delonie held up his hand.

“And then we learn that Mr. Totter is dead, too,” he said. “How does that work in this blueprint of yours?” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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“It didn’t, but then we checked on the obituary notice, turns out it was false. The man who called himself Totter didn’t die.”

“Still alive? Where?”

“Just outside Flagstaff now, if we’re right. We think he’s a man who used to be a CIA agent in Vietnam. Mr.

Vang here knew him when he was calling himself George Perkins. The way this funny trail leads, he got caught stealing CIA bribery money, got bumped out of the CIA, took Tommy Vang here out of a Hmong refugee camp, settled—if we can call it that—in San Francisco. As Tommy told you, he was gone a lot on trips. He was gone, for example, in the long period before the Handys were killed, and he was gone again for a long time when Totter was taking over that trading post and doing his business from there. Then—”

Delonie held up his hand again.

“Let me finish that for you. Then, when those of us doing time for the Handys started getting out on parole, he decided we’d see him and turn him in. So he hired himself a helper, burned him up, left evidence to persuade the FBI this was Shewnack, thereby eliminating that problem. That it?”

“Just about,” Leaphorn said.

“Pretty weak connection, seems to me. You want me to think this Jason Delos is Shewnack?” Leaphorn nodded.

“You left out that rug,” Tommy Vang said. “And you left out how Totter stole that pinyon sap so the fire wouldn’t look like arson.”

“Pinyon sap?” Delonie said. “And a rug?” He was grinning. “I know this Shewnack sort of proved I’m stupid, 212

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but I’ve learned some from that. What are you trying to sell me here?”

Leaphorn explained the rug, explained—rather lamely—the sap, the lard buckets, the very hot fire without any sign of those fire-spreading chemicals the arson investigators are trained to look for.

Delonie thought about it, nodded. “If I was the grand jury, I’d guess maybe I’d be interested in all this. But I think I’d be asking for more evidence. Isn’t this all pretty much just circumstantial?” He laughed. “Notice that language I’m using. We learn that doing time in prison. Lots of guard-house lawyers in there. But I think I’d be wondering what you are trying to accomplish with all this.” Leaphorn was wondering, too. Wondering what he was doing here. He was tired. His back hurt. He was supposed to be retired. Delonie was right. If they had Delonie on the witness stand ready to swear Jason Delos was actually Ray Shewnack, the defense attorney would note Delonie was a paroled convict and repeatedly note the total, absolute, utter lack of any concrete evidence.

To hell with it, Leaphorn thought.

“I guess you’d have to say we’re trying to save your life, Mr. Delonie. To keep this ‘raised from the ashes’ Ray Shewnack from erasing you as the only threat left.” He pulled the little gift box from his jacket pocket.

Handed it to Delonie. “Here’s the present he sent you.”

“What do you mean, save my life?” Delonie asked.

He took the little box, held it gingerly, turned it over, read the note on it, tapped it with his finger.

“Who wrote this?”

“I wrote it,” Tommy said. “Mr. Delos spoke it to me and told me to write it down.”

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“Who is it supposed to be from? From this Delos man?”

“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “It’s a little bottle of cherries. The big ones he uses in the bourbon drinks he likes to make.”

Delonie tore open the wrapping, pulled the box apart, extracted the bottle, examined it carefully.

“Nice thing to send somebody,” Delonie said. “If I thought this Delos was actually that Ray Shewnack, I’d be very surprised. I never did think he had any use for me.

He smiled at everybody, and slapped your back, but you could tell.”

“It won’t have any Delos fingerprints on it,” Leaphorn said. “Neither that slick paper wrapping nor the bottle, nor the bottle top. Nobody handled it, except Mr. Vang here. Delos even had Tommy press his thumb down on the bottle cap. Perfect place for a thumbprint.” Delonie twisted the cap open, laid it aside, looked into the bottle, sniffed it.

“Smells fine,” he said.

Tommy Vang was looking extremely nervous, leaning forward, reaching toward Mr. Delonie. “Don’t eat it.”

“We think it’s poison,” Leaphorn said.

Delonie frowned. “These cherries?”

He reached into his pocket, took out a jackknife, opened it, pried out a cherry, and let it roll onto the table.

He stared at it, said, “Looks good.”

“I think if you take a real close look at it, you’re going to find a little puncture hole in it someplace. Where a needle gave it a shot of something like strychnine. Something you wouldn’t want in your stomach.” Delonie used the knife to roll the cherry onto a piece 214

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of paper, picked it up, studied it. Put it down, frowned at Leaphorn. “Little bitty hole,” he said.

“A Flagstaff private investigator, former cop named Bork, went to see Mr. Delos about this rug we told you about. Asked a bunch of questions about how Delos got it when it was one of the art things supposed to be burned up in Totter’s fire. Delos gave him a little lunch to take home with him. It had a slice of fruitcake with it, and Mr.

Delos had put one of these very special cherries on the top of the slice. Hour or so later on the way home Mr. Bork died of poisoning.”

“Oh,” Delonie said.

“Then I came along to find out what had happened to Bork. I asked Mr. Delos a lot of questions about that rug, how he came to have it, so forth. He had Mr. Vang make me a little lunch, too. Put a slice of fruitcake in it, put one of these cherries on top.”

“I didn’t,” Tommy said. “Mr. Delos did that always.

Used them as decorations. Just for somebody special, he would say. And put it on top. I didn’t know he was punching those holes in them.”

“Why didn’t it poison you?” Delonie asked.

“I don’t like fruitcake and I didn’t get around to stealing the cherry off the top, and finally Vang here heard what had happened to Mr. Bork. It made him nervous. So he found me and tried to take the lunch back.” Delonie rolled two more cherries out of the bottle, looked at them, then looked out the sliding glass door, considering the activity among the birds.

“About this time of day, we usually have a bunch of crows showing up. If I’m not home, they crowd out the smaller birds and pig out on the bird food. Not just eat THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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it, they scatter it all around. I run ’em off. Used to have a shotgun I could thin them out with, but the probation officer wouldn’t let me keep that.”

“You thinking about poisoning them?” Leaphorn asked.

“Crows will eat just about anything. They’d gobble these up. If they really are poison, that would be fewer crows around to steal the eggs out of other birds’ nests.

Looks like a way to show whether you’re telling the truth.”

And so Delonie put the cherries back into the jar, slid open the glass door, and walked out into the patio. Some of the bigger birds fled, but Leaphorn noticed that most of the smaller ones seemed to recognize him as harmless.

He placed four of the cherries in a line atop the wall, and one on each of the roofs of four of the bird feeders, came back through the door, turned to survey his handiwork, then hurried back out again. He retrieved the cherries from the feeder roof, put them back into the bottle, came in, and slid the door shut, and stood far enough inside to be invisible to the birds, watching.

“In case you wondered why I wanted those cherries back,” he said. “While them cherries would be way too big for the wrens, and finches, and the little ones to handle, putting them right on the feeders might tempt the doves, or the bigger ones. Them birds have to deal with all sorts of predators. Hawks, crows, snakes, rats, stray cats. Killing a few crows just does my birds a favor, but I didn’t want to kill any of the good ones.”

Leaphorn looked at his watch. “How long would you guess we’ll be waiting to see if this works?” Delonie laughed. “Not long,” he said. “Crows are 216

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smart. They watch. In fact, there was a little flock of the local crows up in the trees back there watching when I came out. They’re not here all the time because they know I have those feeders rigged so they can’t get their big heads into most of them. But when they see me come out carrying something that looks like it might be food, they start flying in a hurry. They want to beat the little birds to it.”

Even as Delonie was saying that, two crows arrived, landing in a pinyon just beyond the wall. Three others followed. One noticed the cherries, landed on the wall.

Picked up a cherry, found it a little too large to swallow, and flew back into the pinyon with it. Minutes passed. The sight of the cherries attracted another crow to the wall. It speared a cherry and stayed on the wall and worked away at getting it torn up enough to swallow. Then he pecked another one, knocked it off the wall, and flew down into the patio to find it. A third crow grabbed the remaining cherry, held it in his beak briefly. Put it back on the wall, pecked at it. It fell into the grass below, and the crow flew down looking for it.

Leaphorn checked the time. How long had it taken the poison to kill Bork? No way of knowing, but it had apparently acted to affect his driving within a relatively few minutes. Bork weighed maybe two hundred pounds.

A crow would be a matter of ounces. Did a crow have a craw, as chickens did, in which foods were ground before being dumped into the stomach? Leaphorn didn’t know.

But while he was pondering that, Tommy Vang touched his shoulder.

“Look,” he said, pointing.

The crow that had carried its prize into the pinyon THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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was moving its wings. It seemed to fall from one branch to a lower one, recover itself, flap its wings, and begin a sort of frantic flight. A very short flight. Abruptly its effort stopped, and it dropped behind the wall.

“Poisoned, I guess,” said Tommy Vang. “I guess you were right about those little puncture holes.” Delonie was standing beside them now, watching.

“That one on the ground there, too,” he said. “Look at that.”

The crow was on the grass, trying to stand, trying to get its wings moving. Dying.

“I guess that would have been me,” Delonie said. “I guess I owe you gentlemen a thank-you or something.”

“What we need from you,” Leaphorn said, “is to tag along with us to visit Mr. Delos, make sure he is the man you remember as Ray Shewnack so we can get him arrested and indicted and get him put away.” But even as he said it, Leaphorn was thinking he’d need a lot of luck to make any of those things happen.

“Where we going to get me a chance to look at him?” Delonie asked. “That means driving to Flagstaff, I guess.”

“Mr. Vang is going to help us with that,” Leaphorn said. “Mr. Delos left home to go hunting. Hunting elk. He was going after a big trophy bull elk up on one of those hunters’ ranch places along the Colorado-New Mexico border. Vang’s supposed to drive up there tomorrow and give him a bunch of information about you. About where you live, alone or what, where you work, your habits, what your vehicle looked like. Stuff like that.” Delonie was studying Vang while receiving this information. “Supposed to get acquainted, sort of, or just snoop around?”

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“He said better if you didn’t see me,” Vang said. “I was supposed to just find out when you weren’t home and leave those cherries in your mailbox, or by your front door, and then go away.”

Delonie considered this. “That son of a bitch,” he said.

“He sure had me all figured out, didn’t he? He figured I’d be eating those cherries while I sat there wondering who the hell had sent them. He was right, too. I wouldn’t have had the brains to stop and think about it.” Leaphorn shrugged. “Why would you? You didn’t have any reason to be suspecting anything. You knew Shewnack was dead. Formally certified by the Federal Bureau of Identification.”

Delonie nodded. “Now let’s figure out how we’re going to nail him. If we want to catch him out hunting, we’ll need to get there early. That’s when the elk and the deer are coming out of the cover to get themselves a wake-up drink of water. And that’s when those hunting-camp-type hunters are all set up waiting for them. We need to start getting ourselves ready for this. It’s a long drive up there.”

18

Getting ready for the venture first involved cleaning off enough of the table so that Tommy Vang could spread out his old road map, let them inspect the marks Delos had drawn on it, and expose the notes of instruction he had written for Tommy. They sat in the three straight-backed chairs, with Delonie in the middle.

Delonie tapped the area Delos had circled.

“That’s where he’s doing his hunting? Is that it?” he asked. “If it is, then our best bet would be to drive over to Cuba on 550.” He paused, shook his head. “But there we got a choice. Either the long way on pavement on 537

through the Jicarilla Apache Reservation, or take the short way. Just keep going north out of Cuba to La Jara on old Highway 112 straight up to Dulce. Both get you to the same place. The first way is a lot longer, but it’s all paved road. That county road 112 gets you going over a lot of dirt.”

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Leaphorn was trying to remember the shorter route.

Terrible when snow was melting, but probably not bad this time of year. While he was pondering this, Delonie muttered something negative about the old Delos map, got up, disappeared into what was probably a bedroom, and emerged with other maps. One was a bound volume of reproductions of U.S. Geological Survey section surveys, another was an oil field pipeline route map that Leaphorn didn’t recognize, and the third was a copy of the AAA Indian Country map like the one Leaphorn used himself. Delonie put them all on the table, pushed aside the USGA volume and the pipeline maps, and folded the Indian Country version to expose the pertinent portion of the Colorado-New Mexico border. On it, he carefully pencil-sketched the circle from Delos’s map. Checked his work with the Delos map, made some slight corrections, and stared at the Delos notes.

“Can you read this scribbling here,” he asked Tommy Vang.

Vang leaned over the map, looking surprised. He picked up the pencil Delonie had dropped on the map.

“Sure,” he said, and tapped a scribble with the pencil tip. “Right here he says ‘Wash cuts across road here. Park in wash. Wait in car. I come.’ And this right here that sort of looks like a big M. Those lines beside it is ‘Lazy W.’” Vang laughed. “I think lazy because it’s not an M but a W

laying on its back.”

“It’s probably the rancher’s cattle brand,” Delonie said, studying Vang, frowning. “How long you been working for this man? Brought you over from Asia when you were a boy, did he? That would have been close to thirty years ago. Did you already know English then?” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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Vang laughed. “I was just nine or ten, I think. Just talked Hmong, and a little bit of Vietnamese, and some words of Chinese. But I studied English on the television in San Francisco. On the programs they had for children.” Vang laughed. “Funny stuff. Clowns and puppets and little things supposed to be like animals. But it taught you numbers and if you paid attention you could get the meaning of the words they were saying.”

“Never went to any regular school then,” Delonie said, sounding incredulous.

“But you learn a lot on television. Like you watch Law and Order, and NYPD Blue, and those other ones, and you learn a lot about how policemen like Mr. Leaphorn here do their work. And you learn about different kind of guns.

The only ones we had when I was a boy were the rifles the Americans brought for us, and some my uncles had taken from the Vietcong and the Pathet Lao.” Delonie considered that, now looking grim. “Are you telling me that miserable bastard never put you into any regular school? You never did really have anybody teaching you anything?”

“Oh, no,” Vang said, looking shocked. “Mr. Delos put me in a cooking school. I helped in the kitchen and the people there taught me how to make bread, and cookies, and soups, and . . . well just about everything.”

“But nobody taught you how to read. Or write, or anything like that?”

“Well, not sit behind a desk in a regular classroom like I see they do on television. Not anything like that.

But I learned all sorts of other things. Mr. Delos and the woman who ran the food place where I was learning how to cook, they got me into a dry cleaner’s place. Where 222

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they work on making clothing fit better.” Thinking of that caused Vang to smile.

“I learned how to mend, and patch, and iron, and do what they called ‘destaining.’ I was very good at that.” Delonie was looking somber. “Never did send you to a regular sort of school then,” he said. “Just kept you home and you worked for him. Did his cooking, and was sort of like a housekeeper.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “I guess that’s about what you were telling me, wasn’t it. But I wasn’t taking it seriously.”

“Well, that’s the way it was,” Leaphorn said. “Mr. Vang was Mr. Delos’s cook, housekeeper, and sort of secretary, too. Arranged his trips. Things like that.”

“Worked for the bastard about twenty-five years or so, then, I’d estimate. What kind of wages did he pay you?”

“Wages?” Vang asked. “Nothing much when I was just a boy, I guess, but later on when I went out to do the shopping for things, Mr. Delos told me to just use the charge for stuff I needed.”

“For stuff you needed,” Delonie said. “Like what?” Vang shrugged. “Like socks and underwear, and when I got older, razor blades, and that deodorant for under your arms. Sometimes I would buy chewing gum, or candy bars, things like that. Mr. Delos didn’t seem to mind.”

Delonie recovered the pencil and began jotting figures on the corner of the map.

“I’m figuring minimum wage at an average of $5 an hour in California ’cause it goes up and down. Higher now. Lower then. Figure him a forty-hour, five-day week, even though he was working full time and seven days, just figure it at forty. That would be two hundred bucks a THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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week. Now maybe we should cut that in half because he got room and board. Make it a hundred per week. That fair?”

Without waiting for Vang or Leaphorn to answer, Delonie was doing the math.

“I’m calling it twenty years—knocking off those years before Vang was in his late teens. Then knocking two weeks off each year for vacation time, even though Vang didn’t get any vacation. That gives us an even thousand weeks. Right? Multiply that by a hundred dollars a week, and it comes out Delos owes Vang a hundred thousand dollars. Right? Now if we figure in some interest, compounded annually, then it means that Mr. Delos—” Leaphorn, who almost never interrupted anyone, interrupted. “Mr. Delonie,” he said. “We see your point. But don’t you think we should be sort of changing the subject and getting back to what we’ve got to do tomorrow?” Delonie stared at Leaphorn. Put down the pencil.

Picked it up again.

“All right. I guess so. I can’t get it in my mind though, that this Delos is really going to be Ray Shewnack. If I see him, and it really is Shewnack, what I think I’m going to do is just shoot him.”

“You do that, you’ll be right back in prison again,” Leaphorn said. “And not just for parole violation.” Delonie nodded. “I know. But it would damn sure be worth it.”

“Trouble is, I’d be going in there with you. Me and Tommy Vang here.”

“You think you can go up there, catch him, take him in, and get him convicted of anything? Damned if I see how. Me, a convicted felon, as your only witness.” 224

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“Let the jury decide,” Leaphorn said. “Anyway, you can’t cook the rabbit until you catch it.” Delonie made a wry face, bent over the map again.

“Well,” he said. “If Delos wants to meet Mr. Vang right here where he marked that spot, it must mean he’d have his hunting stand pretty close. I guess we can drive up there, though. He must know that area pretty well.”

“Mr. Delos has been there before,” Tommy Vang said. “He took me once, when I was a lot younger.” He smiled at the thought. “I got to learn how to cook on the woodstove. Mostly just frying meat and boiling stuff and mixing drinks for people. But the cooking wasn’t easy until you know how to control the heat. Be way too hot, or then too cold.” He shrugged. “The way my mother had to do it.”

“Has a kitchen then,” Delonie said. “I guess they have a cabin up there handy for those permit hunters to keep dry and comfortable.”

“A little log house,” Tommy said. “Mostly just one big room and a little kitchen place and then there was a water tank on the roof. You turned a big valve and the water came down in a sink in the kitchen.” His expression registered disapproval. “It didn’t look very clean. Everything dirty. The water, too, I mean. Sort of rusty looking.”

“You were a mountain boy, weren’t you?” Delonie said. “Maybe that sort of reminded you of home. Log cabin, wood fire, and all.”

“It did,” Vang said, and looked down. “But we weren’t dirty like that.”

Delonie was staring at him, expression grim. “That son of a bitch,” he said. “He should have taken you home again.”

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“He said he would,” Vang said. “Said he was going to do that.”

“Do you still believe that?” Delonie asked.

Vang considered. “I used to believe it. For a long time I believed it,” he said. Then he bent over the map, either studying it or, Leaphorn guessed, not wanting them to see that he was about to cry.

“Right here,” Vang said, tapping an ink dot beside a line which, in the map marking code, identified a road as

“doubtful” and to be avoided in bad weather.

“I guess that’s where we’re going,” Leaphorn said.

“Shouldn’t be any problem this time of year.”

“I think that’s going to be on the old T.J.D. Cater spread,” Delonie said. “I hunted up fairly near to there when I was a lot younger. The old man owned a lot of his own land and then his grazing permit spread out over a bunch of National Forest leases. Went way up into the mountains, I remember. It was all posted. No trespassing. Had a deal with the Game Department people to let the deer and elk graze on his leased grass and drink his water. Then they’d give him a bundle of hunting permits he could sell.”

“But Mr. Delos said he’d be hunting on the Wither-spoon Ranch,” Vang said. “And that’s where he went last year. That mark he made right there, that little squiggle, he said that was a big sign by the road. It tells people that anybody who goes on the property without permission will be prosecuted. Big sign says Posted, and then there’s what Delos said they call ‘The Lazy W,’ painted on a board nailed to a tree.”

“Yeah,” Delonie said. “When old Cater died, With-erspoon’s the one who bought out the estate. And that 226

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sounds like his brand. That’s what I heard. Anyway, whoever has it, to hunt up there you still had to either sneak in, or pay the bastards their fee.”

“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “Now let’s figure out the best way to get there.”

Delonie pushed back his chair and rose.

“I’ll leave that to you, Lieutenant Leaphorn,” he said.

“I’m going to fix us some supper. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day and probably pretty interesting. We should eat something and then get some sleep.”

19

For Leaphorn, getting some sleep had been easier said than accomplished. After feeding them overfried pork chops with bread, gravy, and more coffee, Delonie had put him and Tommy Vang in a space once apparently used as a second bedroom but now stacked full of odds and ends of mostly broken furniture. Vang fit himself neatly onto a sagging sofa against the wall, leaving Leaphorn to retire upon a stack of three old mattresses on the floor.

It was comfortable enough, and certainly Leaphorn was tired enough, but his mind was occupied with setting up plans for the various unpleasant situations he kept imagining. Ideally, Delonie would get an early look at Delos, would clearly identify him as the man who called himself Ray Shewnack, the one who had murdered the Handys in cold blood and then gone on to earn high rank-ing on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted felons. In that case, he would manage to persuade Delonie to choke down 228

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his long-building hatred and come back with Leaphorn to get a warrant for the arrest of Delos. An even happier outcome involved Delonie staring through his telescopic sight a bit and declaring that Delos was not Shewnack, that he didn’t resemble Shewnack in any way at all, and asking what in the world had provoked Leaphorn into taking them on this foolish wild-goose chase. Whereupon Leaphorn would apologize to Delonie, head for home, and try to forget this whole affair.

But what about Tommy Vang then? And what if Delonie simply kept looking through that telescopic sight on his rifle until he was certain it was Shewnack and then shot the man? Even worse, what if Delos, who had clearly demonstrated his tendency to be cautious, saw them first, recognized the danger, and initiated shooting himself ?

Judging from the trophy heads on his wall, he was good at shooting. And Delos certainly knew Delonie was a dangerous enemy, and the fact that he had also poisoned one of those delicious-looking cherries for Leaphorn’s own lunch made it clear that the name of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, was also on his kill list.

Leaphorn had worked his way through a multitude of such thoughts, including whether Tommy Vang was still perhaps just a little bit loyal to Delos, how much he could be trusted, and how to handle the Vang situation in general. He was still thinking that when he finally dozed off. He resumed pondering it when the sound of Delonie clumping around in the next room and the smell of coffee perking jarred him out of an uneasy sleep.

He rubbed his eyes. Moonlight coming through the dusty window revealed Vang curled on the sofa, lost in the sleep of the innocent. Leaphorn stared at him for a THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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moment, decided he would rule Tommy an ally with some reservations, and pulled on his boots.

By a little after three A.M., the coffee had been con-sumed, they had piled into the King Cab pickup Tommy Vang had been driving, they had slid through the sleeping town of Cuba while the moon was sailing high over the San Pedro Mountains, and now they were making pretty good time on County Road 112. Vang had suggested that he should drive, since he knew the truck, but Leaphorn had again noted that pickups were a lot alike and that he knew the roads. Thus Vang had settled in the jump seat behind them, and was occupying himself for the first thirty minutes or so examining Delonie’s lever-action 30-30 rifle. He had seen lots of firearms, he explained—

the U.S. Army rifles carried by the ARVN, the Russian models the Vietcong used, and the Chinese weapons carried by the Pathet Lao—but never one that loaded itself by pulling down a lever. Before many miles he somehow resumed his sleep on the jump seat behind them.

Delonie was riding up front, wide awake but deep in some sort of silent contemplation. Totally silent for miles, except for muttering a sardonic “heavy traffic this morning” remark when they met the first car they’d seen in about fifty miles. But now he stirred, glanced at Leaphorn.

“If we’re where I think we are,” he said, “that mountain is what they call Dead Man’s Peak, and you’ve got a junction just ahead. If I read Vang’s old map right, you’re taking the left turn. That right? That takes you past Stink-ing Lake and then across a lot of Jicarilla Apache Reservation lands and into Dulce. Then what?”

“Then we turn east for about four miles or so on U.S.

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84, back on pavement then for a few minutes, and then north on gravel toward a little old village up there named, ah, Edith, I think it is, and then we jog northwestward a little—in to Colorado and winding under Archuleta Mesa, and going very slow because we will have to be looking for that little turnoff road Delos marked.”

“Yeah,” Delonie said, peering out the window. “That hump over there, it’s part of the San Juans, I guess, but they call that long ridge the Chalk Mountain. I’ve hunted up there a little in my younger days.” He sighed. “Complicated country. You never knew whether you were still on the Jicarilla land, or over in Colorado trespassing on the Southern Ute Reservation, or which state you were in.” The thought of that caused Delonie to chuckle.

Leaphorn glanced at him. “Something funny?”

“Not that it mattered. We wouldn’t have had a hunting license for either state, or from the Apaches, and I don’t think the Southern Utes give them.”

“I think we’d better start looking for a turnoff place,” Leaphorn said.

“And I think maybe it’s time you ought to switch off your headlights. If Delos is out getting ready to hunt, he’s going to notice somebody coming. And who is he going to think would be arriving here this early in the morning. It would be way too early for Tommy.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Leaphorn said. The moon was down now, but the eastern horizon was showing its predawn brightness. He slowed, snapped off the headlights, crept along until his eyes were better adjusted to the gloom. They rolled down the slope of the hill they’d just climbed, crossed a culvert with the sound of a stream gurgling under it, negotiated a sharp curve beyond the THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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culvert, and were in the dark shadows cast by a heavy growth of stream-side willows. Leaphorn switched on the headlights again.

Just ahead the beams lit a sign. POSTED. And below it the graphic design of a W tilted over on its side. Leaphorn eased the pickup to a crawl, turned off the headlights.

Just beyond the Ponderosa pine on which the sign was mounted a dirt lane turned off the gravel road they’d been following.

“Well,” Delonie said. “I guess that would be old With-erspoon’s Lazy W brand on that sign there. So here we are. Now we find out what happens next.” Leaphorn didn’t comment on that. Just beyond the Ponderosa pine on which the sign was mounted, rutted tracks swerved off the gravel. Leaphorn guided the pickup onto them, switched on the headlights. They illuminated a three-strand barbed-wire gate, stretched between two fence posts. From the top wire another sign dangled, a square piece of white tin on which the words ALL TRESPASS-ERS WILL BE PROSECUTED were painted in red.

Leaphorn stopped the truck and turned off its headlights.

“Why don’t you just drive right through it?” Delonie asked.

“That would make it malicious mischief, too,” Leaphorn said. “You take care of it.”

“Got wire cutters?”

Leaphorn laughed. “No. But that gate pole looks like it used to be a little aspen. I doubt if you’d need any.” Delonie got out, grabbed the gate pole, applied com-bined leg and arm leverage, broke it, tossed broken pole and wires aside, stepped back, and waved Leaphorn in.

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Inside the fence the road slanted downward toward a small stream. They bumped across a small culvert and the ranch road, now deeply rutted, took them into heavy stream-side growths of willow and brushy trees and almost total darkness. Leaphorn flicked on the lights again, but just long enough to see what he was driving into, then restored the darkness. Better let the ruts steer them, along with what little he could see in the dimness, than take a chance of their headlights giving Delos an early warning.

They rolled along, very slowly, very silently, letting the front wheels take them wherever the ruts guided the pickup along the meandering stream.

“Getting brighter ahead,” Delonie said.

It was, and the road was suddenly less rutted and slanting upward. Ahead now they could see a bare-looking ridge faintly illuminated by the predawn glow along the eastern horizon.

“There it is,” Delonie said, in a hoarse whisper, pointing ahead and to the right.

Leaphorn could make out the shape of a small house, slanted roof, tall stone chimney, junipers crowding in beside it. He stopped the pickup, turned off the ignition, and listened. A still, windless morning. First there was only the ticking sound of the engine cooling. Then the odd rasping sound of what locals would call a Saw-Whet owl, in recognition of its unpleasant voice. It called and called and called, and finally got a barely audible answer from somewhere far behind them. Then the yipping of coyotes from the ridge behind the cabin, which lapsed quickly into nothing but the vague sound of the breeze and the even vaguer voice of the stream.

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Leaphorn yawned, suddenly feeling some of the tension draining away and the accumulated fatigue taking over. He rubbed his eyes. This was not a time to be getting sleepy.

“What now?” Delonie whispered.

“We wait until it gets a little lighter,” Leaphorn said, talking very low. “Mr. Vang told me Mr. Delos comes up here alone. The way he describes his hunting tactics he gets out to the blind when there’s just enough light to see a little. That would be just about now, I’d think.” Vang was sort of semi-standing in the space behind them, leaning forward for a better view out the windshield. “He says its takes him about twenty minutes to walk from the cabin around to the hillside where the blind is. There’s a regular trail he follows, and he wants to be off it and into the blind before the elk come out of the timber on the slope to start drinking in the stream. He wants to be all ready with everything when that happens. He used to talk to me about that. Back when I was younger. When he was still trying to teach me how to be a hunter.” The tone of that was sad.

“When did he stop doing that?” Leaphorn asked.

“A long, long time ago,” Vang said. “When I was maybe twelve. He said he didn’t see any signs in me that I would get to be one of the predator people. But he was going to try again later.”

“But he didn’t?”

“Not yet,” Vang said.

Delonie wasn’t interested in this.

“Point is you think he’s already gone?” Delonie asked.

“That is, if he was ever here.”

“Oh, I think he was here,” Vang said. “I was to come here to meet him. After I left that box . . .” 234

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“After you left me that gift box of poisoned cherries,” Delonie said. “I guess you were supposed to come and give him a report on how many of them I’d eaten before they killed me.”

“No. No,” Vang said. “I was just supposed to leave the box.”

Leaphorn made a shushing sound.

“Hand me up the rifle, Mr. Vang,” Delonie said. “I want to do some looking around through the scope. See what I can see.”

Vang dropped back, felt around, handed up the 30-30.

Delonie put it on his lap, muzzle pointed away from Leaphorn, and began loosening the clamps that held the scope in place. He took it off, pulled out his shirt tail, pol-ished the scope with the cloth, then looked through it. First peering at the house, then scanning the area around it.

“No sign of any life,” he said. “Didn’t expect any.” The rifle lay on the seat beside Delonie. Leaphorn reached it, slid it away, leaned it against the driver’s-side door. He glanced at Delonie, who hadn’t seemed to notice.

“Let me have a look through that scope,” Leaphorn said, and Delonie handed it to him.

Leaphorn looked, saw no signs of life, hadn’t expected any. “Nobody home,” he said, also wondering if there ever had been.

“Beginning to wonder some more about all this,” Delonie said. “You pretty sure Mr. Vang has been telling us right?”

“Oh yes,” Vang said. “I told you right. You see that little bit of white on top of that bush. Beside the house?

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See? It sort of moves when the breeze blows? That’s a white towel.”

Delonie said, “Towel?”

Leaphorn said, “Where?”

“Look at the bushes right by the uphill side of the house. Beyond the porch. On the bush.”

“That could be anything. Piece of some sort of trash caught there,” Delonie said.

Leaphorn moved the scope. Found bushes, saw a wee bit of white amid the green, looked again. Yep.

“I see it now,” he said, and handed the scope to Delonie. He said, “Mr. Vang, you got damn good eyesight. But Delonie is right. It could be anything.”

“Yes,” Vang said. “But I remember Mr. Delos told me when he went hunting he would hang out a white towel there, and when he came back from hunting, he would take it in. That was so I would know to wait for him.”

“Well, now,” Delonie said, “if Mr. Vang here is telling us right, I guess we could walk right up there and make ourselves at home.”

Leaphorn had no comment on that. He held his wrist-watch close enough to read its hands, looked out at the brightening sky, and found himself confronting the same need for self-analysis he’d felt a few days ago when he was home alone, analyzing what he had run into since he’d begun this chase of Mel Bork and the tale-teller rug.

Wondering if he had slipped prematurely into senile de-mentia. Why was he here and what did he expect to accomplish? He couldn’t quite imagine that. But on the other hand, he couldn’t imagine turning back either. So they may as well get on with it.

“Here’s what I think we should do,” Leaphorn said.

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“Mr. Vang will stay in the truck here. Sitting behind the steering wheel. Like the driver doing just what Mr. Delos probably was expecting to find. Is that right, Tommy?”

“I think so. This is what he told me to do.”

“Then Mr. Delonie and I will get out and find us a place where we can sit and watch for Mr. Delos to come back.

Either we’ll sit together, or close enough so that when Mr.

Delonie gets a good enough look to make sure he knows who it is, he can signal me, one way or another.”

“Um,” Delonie said, “then what?”

Leaphorn had been hoping he wouldn’t ask that. “I guess it will depend on a lot of things.”

“Tell me,” Delonie said. “Like what?”

“Like whether when you see him you tell us he is this Shewnack. Or whether you tell us he isn’t, and you don’t know who he is.”

“If he ain’t Shewnack, I’d vote for just driving right on out of here. Heading right on home.”

“I guess we might do that,” Leaphorn agreed. “But I’d think if it’s Delos, then I think you have some questions you’d like to ask him about that bottle of poisoned cherries he sent you. I know I’m curious about the one on top of that slice of fruitcake he sent me off with.” Delonie snorted. “He’ll point at Tommy Vang here and tell us Vang must have done that. Tell us that Tommy has been sort of crazy ever since he was a kid. All mixed up by all that violence back in Laos, or wherever it was.”

While he was listening to that, Leaphorn was thinking that Delonie was probably right. That was just about what Delos would say. And it might even be true. But if he was going to play out this game, he had better get moving. He THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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opened the truck door, which turned on the interior light, and quickly shut it.

“Let’s minimize the light,” he said to Delonie. “When I say ready, we both hop out and shut the doors behind us. Then Vang can climb over into where he’s supposed to be sitting.”

“First off,” Delonie said, “you hand me back my rifle.”

“I’ll carry it,” Leaphorn said.

“I’ll put the scope back on it,” Delonie said. “Can’t use the scope here in this closed space with it tied to a rifle barrel. But get it outside and it’s better.” Leaphorn considered this.

“I’ll tell you this, too. I ain’t getting out of this truck without that rifle,” Delonie said. “If it’s Shewnack, he’d kill me on sight. I want to have something to protect myself with.”

“So do I,” Leaphorn said. “I want to protect myself from going to jail with you if you shoot him.”

“Don’t trust me?”

“You think I should?”

Delonie laughed. Punched Leaphorn on the shoulder.

“Okay,” he said. “You keep that pistol I’ve noticed has been bulging out of your jacket pocket. I’ll take my rifle.

And I promise you I won’t kill the son of a bitch unless it comes to downright self-defense. No other choice.” He held out his hand. Leaphorn shook it.

“Now,” he said. “We get out.”

They did, quickly, and Leaphorn handed Delonie the rifle over the hood of the truck.

“Noticed you handed it butt first,” Delonie said. “I appreciated that.”

“Just good manners,” Leaphorn said.

20

The place they found as their lookout point was in an outcropping of granite slabs where a healthy growth of Forestieria and willow had developed. Besides the camouflage, it also had a deep layer of decayed pine needles and aspen leaves, providing something to sit upon. They had concluded that the hunting blind this cabin served would be off to their right, probably up the ridge line less than a mile distant. There the slope was higher and more heavily forested with Ponderosa and fir, and it would look almost directly down on the stream they had been following.

From their own location, they would be looking down on a hunter returning to the cabin from the blind with his approaches pretty well covered. Pretty well, Leaphorn thought, but not perfect. If the man they were awaiting knew they were here, he would probably be smart enough to find a way to avoid them.

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His resting place gave Leaphorn a clear view of the cabin itself, and covered most of the open space the blind–to–cabin trail would cross. Delonie, ten or so yards to his left, had a slightly different angle. He sat now, rifle supported atop the slab he was positioned behind, scanning the landscape below through the scope. Looking fairly comfortable.

Leaphorn was not comfortable, not physically nor mentally. He was leaning against the granite behind him, his bottom resting on a bed of matted leaves mixed with chunks of rock. His mind had been going over and over and over the various scenarios that were about to unfold.

Finally he’d concluded that this was sheer guesswork and drifted off into even murkier territory. If a man did appear below, walking toward the cabin, carrying a rifle, which name could be applied to him? Mr. Delos, of course, was obvious. And Delonie would, perhaps, be seeing Mr.

Shewnack. But how about Mr. Totter, whose obituary had already been written, or how about the Special Operations CIA agent whose name was . . . ? Leaphorn couldn’t recall the name the FBI gossip had given the man. It didn’t matter anyway, because before that he’d probably had yet another name, yet another persona.

Leaphorn rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, shook his head. Too tired, too sleepy. But he didn’t want to doze. He wanted to remain alert. He was remembering shape-shifter stories he’d heard down the years.

His maternal grandmother telling them about a night when she was a little girl, out on the mountain watching the sheep, and about the man with the wolf’s head cape over his shoulders coming across the grass toward her, and about how, when her father came riding up, the man THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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had changed into a woman, and was running away, and how as she ran, she changed into a big brown bird and flew into the woods.

That was when he was too young for the school bus trip into the classrooms, but through the years he’d heard scores of other such tales of encounters with the ye-na-l’o-si, and the an’t-i-zi people who practiced other forms of witchcraft. The last really impressive story he’d heard came from the driver of a Kerr-McGee drilling rig. A Texan who’d never heard of skinwalkers or shape shifters or anything about Navajo witchcraft problems. Leaphorn remembered the young man, standing beside his truck, telling him about it. The driver said he’d had his truck in third gear, making the long climb on U.S. 163 from Kay-enta toward Mexican Hat. His load had been heavy and the engine was straining. Then he noticed this man running along beside the truck, waving at him to stop. He’d described the runner just as the skinwalkers are usually described—wearing something that looked like a wolf’s head. He’d checked his odometer and saw he was doing twenty-three miles an hour. Too damn fast for a normal human, he’d said, so when he got over the ridge he stepped on the gas.

Leaphorn could still see the driver, standing beside his truck at the Mexican Hat service station, looking puzzled and a little scared, telling his story, saying that it wasn’t until he got the truck up to almost fifty on the down slope that the man fell behind. “When I looked in the rearview mirror, there was nothing there but a big gray animal sitting beside the road. Looked like an oversized dog, to me. Now you’re an Indian policeman. How do you explain that?”

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And, of course, Leaphorn had to say he couldn’t.

Beside him Delonie stirred.

“Getting plenty light enough now for the elk to be out,” he said. “Our man should be getting—” Then came the sound of a shot, a sort of slapping sound, carried a long, long way on the still, cool morning air. Then came a second echo, followed by an even fainter one. A moment later, the clap sound of second shot, and a second series of echoes.

They sat in silence. The echoes died away. No third shot followed.

“What do you think?” Delonie asked. “He hit his elk and then finished him off. Or he missed him once. Or maybe he missed him twice?”

Leaphorn was seeing the row of trophy heads on the Delos wall.

“I’d say he shot his big bull elk twice,” he said.

“I was hoping he missed. The elk would have run away, and he’d be coming right back to get something to eat.”

“It doesn’t work that way here,” Leaphorn said. “The way Tommy described it to me, Mr. Delos doesn’t have to go out there and bleed what he shoots, and then get the carcass back to his truck like us common people. He gets on his cell phone, calls the ranch office, tells them he got his elk. And they know where, of course, because they set up the blind for him. Then they drive out and do the work for him.”

“Oh,” Delonie said. “I didn’t know they go that far.”

“Even farther,” Leaphorn said. “Vang told me they fly into the Flagstaff airport in their little Piper something or other, fly him back to the landing strip at the ranch, THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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and deliver him to that house down there. If Vang hadn’t brought that pickup truck in for him, he’d call them from here and they’d come and pick him up and then they’d fly him back to Flagstaff again. It all goes on the credit card, I guess.”

“So we wait for the bastard,” Delonie said.

They did. Minutes ticked by. The sky became brighter and brighter, with the fog banks rimming the mountains glowing, then turning a dazzling red, reflecting light from the cabin windows.

“Mr. Vang still out there in the pickup, I see,” Delonie said, breaking a long silence. “Looks like he might be asleep.”

“I’m close to that myself,” Leaphorn said. He rubbed his eyes again, took another hard look at the cabin, suddenly felt Delonie’s harsh whisper.

“There he is,” Delonie said. Pointing. “Down beyond the truck, coming out of the brush there by the creek.

Creeping along.”

“I see him now,” Leaphorn said. In the dim dawn light the figure seemed to be a tall man wearing a hat with floppy brims and what looked like the mixed gray-tan-green camouflage uniform modern hunters seem to favor, with a heavy-looking rifle hanging from its carrying strap over his left shoulder. Leaphorn glanced at Delonie, who was motionless, staring through the scope.

“Recognize him?”

“It could be Shewnack,” Delonie said. “Wish he’d take that damned hat off. I need better light to tell anything.” The figure was moving very slowly toward the rear of the pickup, as if the man was stalking it. He stopped behind the truck, motionless. Trying, Leaphorn guessed, 244

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to determine if he could see anything helpful through the rear window.

“He’s big and tall like Shewnack,” Delonie said, still staring through the scope. “I’d guess it could be him. But that hat covers too much of his face from this angle.”

“I think we better get closer. Maybe just go right on down.”

“Go down and knock that silly hat off of him,” Delonie said. “See what he’s got to say for himself.”

“Sooner the better,” Leaphorn said, pushing himself stiffly erect, feeling the reminder his leg muscles were sending him that he was getting older and was, techni-cally at least, in retirement. The groaning sound Delonie was making suggested he was feeling the same symptoms of elderliness.

They moved cautiously away from the granite outcrop and the brushy growth that had hidden them, Leaphorn feeling for the pistol in his jacket pocket, using thumb and forefinger to assure himself that the safety would slide off easily. Below them, the man in hunting garb was at the side of the truck now, opening the door, holding it open, Tommy Vang was climbing out, standing to face him. No handshake offered, Leaphorn noticed. Just talking. A big man to a little man. The big man making a gesture, which Leaphorn interpreted as angry. The big man taking Tommy by the arm, perhaps shaking him, although Leaphorn wasn’t sure of that. Then the two were walking toward the house, big man in front, Tommy following. And then the two disappeared onto the porch, out of sight.

Probably indoors.

“Let’s get down there,” Leaphorn said. “Find out THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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what’s happening.” Delonie must have felt the same way.

He had already broken into a trot.

They stopped at the windowless north wall of the house to get their breath and to listen, Leaphorn enjoying the reassuring feel of the pistol in his jacket, and Delonie tensely holding his rifle against his chest. They moved slowly around the corner to the porch.

“What’s that?” Delonie whispered. He was pointing at a heap of fresh dirt, the dark humus formed by centuries of fallen leaves and pine needles rotting every summer.

The humus seemed to have been dug from a hole under a sloping formation of broken sandstone. A shovel, with damp-looking humus still on its blade, leaned against the stone.

Leaphorn stepped over beside it. About three feet deep, he estimated. Between four and five feet long, a bit more than two feet wide, and a careless, irregular digging job. “Now what do you think is going to be buried there?” Delonie whispered. “Nothing very big.”

“No,” Leaphorn agreed. “But look how quick you could get something hidden in it. Just push that humus over it, and topple that sandstone slab over that, scatter a few handfuls of dead leaves and trash around. After the first rain there wouldn’t be much sign anybody had ever dug there.”

“Makes you wonder,” Delonie whispered, as they slipped cautiously around the corner by the porch.

The hunter was standing at the front door, watching them.

“Well, now,” Delos said, “what has brought the legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn all the way out here to my hunting camp.”

21

Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, would sometimes wish that he had looked at his watch and noted the exact moment when he and Delonie had stepped in front of that porch and saw the man in the hunting camouflage smiling down at them. At that moment began an episode which seemed to last an awfully long time, but in reality must have been over in just a few minutes.

It was Jason Delos standing above them on the porch, looking even taller and more formidable than Leaphorn had remembered him. He was smiling, clean shaven, his hair tidy, both his hands deep in the pockets of an oversized hunting coat. The right-hand pocket, Leaphorn noticed, was bulging, with the bulge pointing toward him.

But his eyes had seemed friendly. Then their focus shifted to Delonie. The smile remained on his lips but was gone from his eyes.

“And my old friend Tomas Delonie,” Delos said. “I 248

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haven’t seen you in many, many years. But you shouldn’t be holding that rifle, Tomas,” he said. “They tell me you’re out on parole. Having that rifle makes you a violator, and Lieutenant Leaphorn would have to take you right back to prison. Drop that piece of yours on the ground there.” The tone was no longer friendly. The bulge in his pocket moved forward. “I mean drop the rifle right now.” Leaphorn’s eyes were focused on the bulge in the right-hand pocket of Delos’s jacket. Delos was almost certainly aiming a pistol right past Leaphorn’s head at Delonie, who now was letting his 30-30 dangle, muzzle downward.

“I drop it, it gets all dirty,” Delonie said. “I don’t want to do that.”

Delos shrugged. “Ah, well,” he said. His hand flashed out of the jacket pocket, pistol in it.

Delos fired. Delonie spun, rifle clattering to the ground. Delos fired again. Delonie dropped on his side, rifle beside him.

Delos had his pistol aimed at Leaphorn now, eyes intent. He shook his head.

“What do you think, Lieutenant?” he asked. “Would you rate that the proper decision, under the circumstances? About what you would have done if our positions were reversed?”

“I’m not sure what your position is,” Leaphorn said.

He was thinking that his own position was even worse than he’d anticipated. This man, whoever he was, was very fast with a pistol. And a very good shot. Leaphorn tightened his grip on the pistol in his own jacket pocket.

“Don’t do that,” Delos said. “Don’t be fondling that gun. That’s dangerous. Not polite either. Better you take your hand out of that pocket.”

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“Maybe so,” Leaphorn said.

“Without the pistol in it.”

“All right,” Leaphorn said. And eased out his hand.

Delos nodded, and shifted his gaze back to Delonie, now sprawled on his side and absolutely motionless. Then studying Vang, looking thoughtful.

“Tommy, first I think we should get that rifle out of Mr. Delonie’s reach. Just in case he wasn’t hit as hard as it seems.” He held his hand out.

Vang grabbed the rifle by its barrel, slid it on the ground toward the porch, and looked up, awaiting further instructions.

That was not what Delos wanted, Leaphorn thought.

Now how would he react to Tommy not handing him the rifle?

Delos seemed unsure himself for a moment. But he nodded.

“Now go over and help Lieutenant Leaphorn take off his jacket. Get behind him, slip it off his shoulders, make sure that pistol of his stays in the pocket, and then bring it here and hand it to me.”

Maybe Delos will be careless, Leaphorn was thinking.

Maybe Tommy will deliberately give me a chance. Maybe there’ll be a moment when he blocks the man’s view.

When I can get my pistol out and use it.

“Hands high,” Delos said. “And Tommy, you make certain you are always behind him. Remember, from now on, I’m grading you on how well you can follow instructions. And remember, this lieutenant here is a highly regarded lawman. He is very much one of the predator class. He can be very dangerous if you give him the least little opportunity.”

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Tommy seemed to be trying for a passing grade. He felt the jacket pockets to make sure he knew where the pistol hid, then slid the jacket down over Leaphorn’s shoulders as he lowered his arms. He folded the jacket neatly, took it to the edge of the porch, and handed it up to Delos.

“Very good,” Delos said. “Now go over to Mr. Delonie and check on the condition of his health. Take your hand and check the artery on the side of his neck. Under the jaw. You will have to use a little pressure probably. Then tell me what you feel.”

Tommy knelt beside Delonie, looked at the arm that had been holding the rifle when Delos shot him.

“Bleeding some, the arm is,” Tommy said. “And the bone has been broken.”

“Check that neck artery,” Delos said. “Then get close to his face. See if you can detect any breathing.” Tommy felt Delonie’s neck, looked thoughtful. Tried again. “Feel nothing here,” he said. Then he bent over Delonie’s face, close, then closer. Sat up, shook his head.

“Feel no air coming out. Don’t hear anything either.”

“All right,” Delos said. “Now pull back his jacket and his shirt and take a look at where that second shot got him.”

Tommy did as told. He looked back at Delos, held up one hand to display blood on it, and then stood, faced Delos, and put his other hand high on his right-side rib cage. “It hit him right about here,” he said. “Bleeding right there. And I think broken rib bone. Maybe two.”

“Good,” Delos said. “Now you sit there and watch Mr.

Delonie. Carefully, I mean, because sometimes people aren’t quite as dead as they seem to be. Now I’m going THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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to ask the lieutenant some questions, and I want you to listen. You let me know if he’s not being honest with me.” Tommy nodded and sank into a yoga-like position, legs folded under him.

Leaphorn, aware of how his own tired legs were aching, was thinking how comfortable Tommy looked.

He felt totally exhausted. Hard day yesterday, almost no sleep, then the long drive, and now this. And he was supposed to be retired. Instead he was standing here like a fool, dizzy with fatigue. Making it worse, he had nothing to blame but his own foolishness.

Delos waved his pistol.

“Lieutenant Leaphorn, I want you now to sit down on the ground and then stretch your legs out in front of you.

I want to interview you, and I don’t want either of us to be distracted by your deciding you want to try to get the jump on me. Understand that?”

“Clear enough,” Leaphorn said. He eased himself down on the thickest patch of grass and weeds available, leaned back, and stretched out his legs. It felt good, but as Delos intended, it left him with no chance of getting up in a rush. Overhead he noticed the sunrise had turned the strips of fog clouds over the mountain ridges a brilliant scarlet. Almost morning. And the birds knew it. He could hear robins chirping and the odd sound mountain grouse make when seasons are changing.

“First, I’ll explain the rules. Very simply. If I see any hint you’re just killing time, stalling, playing a game with me, or if I see any hint you’re about to do something reckless, then I will shoot you in the leg. You understand?”

“Yes,” Leaphorn said, “clear enough.”

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Delos was grinning at him. “I will let you pick the leg.

Which one would you prefer?”

“Take your pick.”

“Good,” Delos said. “I’ll shoot the left one first. Above the knee.”

Leaphorn nodded.

“First question,” Delos said. “How did Tommy make his connection with you? I want to know what prompted that to happen.”

Leaphorn considered that. How much did he want Delos to know? Was Tommy going to remain loyal to Delos, as Delos seemed to think? Was he right in concluding that Delos intended to kill him, and Delonie, and Tommy Vang, too? Vang? Why else prepare that little grave? Vang was the only visitor Delos had been expecting.

“You sort of arranged that yourself,” Leaphorn said.

“Sending Tommy over to my home in Shiprock to see if he could recapture that specially prepared cherry you’d given me for my lunch.”

That provoked a long, thoughtful pause.

“That was the way I told him to behave,” Delos said.

“Did he just walk right in and ask you for it?” Leaphorn laughed. “No, he was careful. He waited until he knew I was gone, and then until he saw this professor friend of mine who lives there, too, drive away.

Then he got into my garage, but the professor had forgotten something, and she came back and saw him coming out of the garage. She asked him what he was doing. He said he was looking for me, and she told him he could find me at Crownpoint. So he came to Crownpoint to find me.”

“Tommy,” Delos said, “Is that the way it happened? It sounds like you were being pretty careless.” THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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“Oh, I tried to be careful,” Tommy said, sounding penitent. “But bad luck. Both times bad luck. At Crownpoint I found the lieutenant’s truck in the parking lot. I found the lunch sack, too, but he saw me getting it.”

“You blamed bad luck twice, Tommy. Remember how I tried to teach you about that? We don’t give luck any chance to be bad. And I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of excuse from you. Now tell me how you let this all happen.” He waved his pistol in a circle, bringing in both Delonie and Leaphorn in the sweep. “You were told to come here alone, just to bring me a report.”

“Lieutenant Leaphorn, he told me—”

Leaphorn interrupted him.

“You’re going to have to take the blame for that yourself, Mr. Delos, for several reasons.”

“Oh, now. This is what I’ve been waiting to hear. If one doesn’t understand his mistakes, one is likely to be doomed to repeat them.” Delos was smiling down at Leaphorn, pistol pointing directly at him now.

Leaphorn shifted his legs, making them more comfortable and getting them in a slightly better position to move fast if the opportunity to do anything ever developed. At the moment, that didn’t seem likely. Even if something happened to distract Delos—maybe a mountain lion trotting by, or a minor earthquake—Leaphorn hadn’t come up with any sensible idea of what he could do. The only plan he had seemed pretty hopeless. When Delos had ordered him to sit down, he’d noticed a promising-looking stone, about the size of an apple. When he was lowering himself to the ground, he’d carefully covered the rock with his hands. Finally, when Delos was looking at Tommy, Leaphorn had pulled it closer. Now he had it 254

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gripped in his palm. Fairly good throwing size, if he ever had a chance. And if he did get the chance, maybe about one in a million odds that he could hit Delos with it before Delos shot him. But better than nothing.

“Crownpoint,” Delos said. “That seems to be where you sort of added Tommy to your team, or tried to, if I have this figured right. How did Tommy do that?”

“Actually you get credit for that, too,” Leaphorn said.

Delos stared at him. “Explain.”

“That old, obsolete map you gave him. The roads have been rerouted some in the years since that thing was drawn.”

“So why did Tommy tell you where he was going?” Leaphorn glanced over at Tommy, who was staring at him and looking very tense.

“You know,” Leaphorn said, “I think we should skip all the way back to the beginning where all this started.

That’s where you made your first mistake.”

“The beginning? Where do you think that would be, Lieutenant?”

“I know where it was for me,” Leaphorn said. “It was when you stole those two five-gallon cans of pinyon sap from Grandma Peshlakai.”

Delos was frowning. “Are you going all the way back to that fire at the trading post? How does that—” He stopped. “You’re stalling, Lieutenant. Remember what I promised you I’d do.” He aimed the pistol. “Was it the left leg you chose?”

“If you don’t believe that was a mistake, let me tell you another one. This one more serious.” Leaphorn stopped, grinning at Delos, trying desperately to think of some Delos error he could come up with.

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“Make it fast, then,” Delos said. “I am losing—” Delonie emitted a sort of choking groan, and moved one of his legs.

The Delos pistol swerved from Leaphorn to Delonie.

He aimed it, carefully.

Then he raised the gun and focused on Tommy Vang.

“It seems your diagnosis of Mr. Delonie’s health was far too pessimistic, Tommy. And now you’ll have an opportunity to correct it.”

“I think his arm is hurting him,” Vang said. “The bone is broken. I think—”

“Stop thinking, Tommy. Pick up the rifle there. Now you have a chance to demonstrate that you are—just as I always tried to teach you—that you are good enough material to become one of the predator class.”

“Oh,” Tommy said.

“Pick it up,” Delos said.

Tommy picked up the 30-30, looked at it, looked at Delonie.

“Make sure it’s loaded,” Delos said.

“It is loaded.”

“Now remember what I taught you. When something has to be done, don’t hesitate thinking about it, simply decide the best way to do it and get it done immediately.

Here, for example, where do you shoot Mr. Delonie to save him from his pain, and you from your problem? I would suggest the center of his chest. But it is your choice.

You pick your place.”

Vang raised the rifle, swung it past Delonie’s body, and shot Delos in the chest.

Then, as Delos staggered backward, he shot him again.

22

The first step now for Leaphorn was to deal with Tommy Vang, who was standing at the edge of the porch, rifle dangling from his right hand, as pale and wan as his brown skin would allow, and looking totally stricken. Leaphorn stepped off the porch floor, took the rifle, tossed it away, and hugged him.

“Tommy, Tommy,” he said. “You did exactly what you had to do. You saved our lives. Saved not just Mr. Delonie, but me and yourself. He was going to kill us all. You saw that, didn’t you.”

“I guess Mr. Delos is dead,” Tommy said. “Did I kill Mr. Delos?”

“He is dead,” Leaphorn said, and hugged Tommy again. “We thank you for that.”

“I didn’t want to shoot anyone,” Tommy mumbled.

“Not even Mr. Delos.”

“Well, don’t feel bad about it,” Leaphorn said. “We are very proud of you. Mr. Delonie and I.” 258

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“But now . . . now what I do? What do I do?”

“First, you’ll help me get Mr. Delonie into the house there, and then we will bandage his arm and put a splint on it, and see about getting him some medical attention.

Then we’ll think about that.”

Getting Delonie into the house was no problem. As Delos had suspected, Delonie was not nearly as badly hurt as he’d been pretending. He stepped onto the porch, cushioning his broken arm with his good one, grimacing, and pausing a moment to look down at Delos.

“Well, Shewnack, you dirty son of a bitch, you finally got what you deserve,” he said. He prodded Delos’s shoulder with his foot, went into the cabin, and the cleanup work began.

Vang dashed back to the truck to get the first-aid kit Delos always kept in its glove box, and Leaphorn peeled off Delonie’s jacket and his bloody shirt. The cabin had been supplied to meet the needs of tired and dirty hunters. Leaphorn filled a pan with water from the twenty-gallon tank labeled FOR COOKING, which stood beside the stove, got towels from a cabinet drawer, ordered Delonie to sit by the table, and started carefully washing away the dried blood from the entry and exit holes the bullet had made about three inches below his elbow. By the time he’d finished that—with Delonie watching, expression grim and teeth gritted—the water was steaming and Vang was back with the kit.

“Here something for the pain,” Vang said, holding up a paper package and a small bottle, “and here is something to kill off the germs.”

“Hand me the bottle,” Delonie said. He glanced at it, said, “Wrong kind of alcohol,” and laid it on the table.

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“Ah,” Vang said. “I look in the cabinets. I go find the whiskey.”

Leaphorn used the contents of the small bottle on Delonie’s wounds, both arm and chest, and then applied the prescribed salves to the proper places. Vang handed Delonie a large brown bottle, cap already removed.

“Tommy, Tommy,” Delonie said, with a huge smile,

“If you decide not to go home to your Hmong mountains now, you can move right in with me. This is Black Label Johnny Walker you just handed me. Just what the doctor ordered.” He raised the bottle, admired it, tilted his head back, and took in a large mouthful. Then another. Sighed.

And smiled again.

Vang was watching this, looking forlorn.

“Better I go home to my Hmong people. But I guess there’s no way to do that now.” He sighed. “I guess there never was. I guess I just never did get smart enough to know that.”

Delonie, who had been watching Leaphorn wrapping strips of torn toweling around his arm splint, was studying Tommy now.

“There’s a way you can go back, if that’s what you want,” he said. “Just collect some of all that money Delos owes you, and get yourself a ticket.”

Vang stared, looking baffled.

“Go out there on the porch right now and see if the bastard has a wallet in his hip pocket. Or in his jacket.

Fish it out and bring it in here. I figure he owes you about twenty-five years’ wages. He won’t have that much on him, probably, but let’s see what he has.” Tommy was shaking his head. “I wouldn’t do that. Not take the wallet from Mr. Delos. I don’t do that.” 260

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Delonie said nothing to that. Neither did Leaphorn, who was securing the last strip around Delonie’s arm.

Leaphorn was wondering what Delonie was thinking.

Leaphorn was thinking of what he had here. A dead victim of a homicide, done deliberately but in self-defense.

A victim of an attempted homicide. Two witnesses to the homicide, and two witnesses to the attempted homicide, one of them the perpetrator of this whole mess. And himself, a sworn officer of the law, more or less retired but still carrying deputy badges.

“Well,” Leaphorn said to Delonie, “I guess that’s as good as I can get you fixed. Any ideas of what—” Delonie stood up abruptly and walked out the door onto the porch, rolled Delos’s corpse enough to feel the hip pocket, then felt through the jacket pockets. Finally he extracted a large leather wallet. He brought it back into the cabin.

“Here we are, Tommy. Let’s see what your employer left for you.”

He slipped an assortment of bills out of the wallet onto the tabletop and separated them into piles while Tommy watched.

“Here you have five one hundreds,” Delonie said, tapping the money. “And here you have nine fifties, and here are four twenties, and five tens, and an assortment of fives and ones. You do the arithmetic for me, but I’ll bet it would be right at a thousand dollars, maybe a little more.”

Tommy Vang was separating the bills, counting. “I say it would be one thousand one hundred and ninety-three dollars,” Tommy told them.

“Enough to fly you to where you find your Hmong THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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family, you think? Maybe not. But you could pawn that expensive rifle Delos was carrying. That would bring a couple of hundred more, at least.”

Tommy considered that, standing rigid, rubbing his hands against the side of his trouser legs, worried, deep in thought.

Leaphorn was also thinking. Homicide charge, attempted homicide, armed robbery now. What else? What could he be charged with? Aiding and abetting about everything, he guessed. The list for him would be less violent but quite a bit longer when the attorneys got involved. But why worry about it now?

“If you’re ready to move, we better tidy up here some and get going,” Leaphorn said.

“What about Mr. Delos,” Tommy said. “We leave him?”

“I think Mr. Delos deserves a decent burial,” Delonie said. “He dug a nice little grave out there for you, Tommy.

I think we should let him use it.”

Leaphorn had been thinking the same thing. “Better than just leaving him out for the coyotes and the ravens,” he said. “We could say a little prayer over him.”

“I don’t think he would have cared about that,” Tommy Vang said.

They slid Delos off the porch, Tommy carrying his legs, Leaphorn holding his shoulders, sat him beside the grave, and slid him sideways into it. The body lay on its right side, legs folded. Delonie picked up the shovel, handed it to Leaphorn.

“I think we should let Mr. Delos take his luggage with him,” Leaphorn said.

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want the ranch cleanup crew to worry about his driving off and leaving all his stuff behind. That would cause a lot of trouble.” He secured the shovel and handed it to Leaphorn. “Tommy, why don’t you look around in there and bring out his bag, or his shaving stuff, or whatever he brought with him. Want to leave the place tidy.” Wordlessly, Tommy stepped back onto the porch and disappeared into the cabin. Leaphorn followed him, picked up the 30-30, returned with it, and tossed it into the grave beside the body.

“Hey!” Delonie shouted. “That’s my rifle.”

“Was it?” Leaphorn said, staring at him. “Folks out of prison on parole are not allowed to have guns. Violates the parole. If you get down there and get it, I guess I’ll have to take you in. Turn you over to your parole officer.”

“Well, then,” Delonie said, and shrugged.

Tommy appeared carrying a large satchel in one hand and a small briefcase in the other. He sat the satchel on the porch, nodded to Leaphorn, and displayed the case. “When he travels, this is the one he carries to keep his special money in,” he said. “There’s money in it now.” Leaphorn took the case, clicked it open, looked in. The money was there, in bundles secured by rubber bands. He took one out, checked it. All fifties. Delonie, who had been watching this, said, “Wow!” Leaphorn pulled the satchel over, opened it, and checked the contents. He found clothing, toiletries, electric razor, spare shoes, nothing unusual. He looked at Delonie, whose eyes were still focused on the briefcase.

“I think we will keep the satchel out,” he said.

Delonie grinned. “I agree.”

“Maybe there is enough in there to give Tommy Vang THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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something to live on when he gets back to Laos and his mountains,” Leaphorn said. “And I am going to take out two of those fifty-dollar bills to pay Grandma Peshlakai for that pinyon sap he stole from her, and two more to pay her for about thirty years of interest.” Shoveling in the pile of humus took less than five minutes. Toppling the stone slab, with Delonie helping out with his undamaged arm, took only seconds. Leaphorn stepped back. It had worked even better than he expected. He spent another few moments collecting leaves, pine needles, and assorted debris, and scattering it in places that looked unnaturally fresh. Then he stepped back, inspected it, and said: “Finished.”