Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (4 page)

She turned away from him, held the tube to her lips for a moment, then
returned it to her pocket.

Leaphorn waited, reviewing what little he knew about nitro as a heart
medication. It served to expand the arteries and thus increase the blood flow.
Neither of the people he'd known who used it had lived very long. Perhaps that
explained the urgency Peabody mentioned in his letter.

Mrs. Vanders sighed. "Where were we?"

"You'd said you thought your niece must be dead."

"Murdered, I think."

"Did someone have a motive? Or did she have something that would
attract a thief?"

"She was being stalked," Mrs. Vanders said. "A man named
Victor Hammar. A graduate student she'd met at the University of New Mexico. A
fairly typical case, I'd guess, for this sort of thing. He was from East
Germany, what used to be East Germany that is, with no family or friends over
here. A very lonely man, I would imagine. And that's the way Catherine
described him to me. They had common interests at the university. Both
biologists. He was studying small mammals. That caused them to do a lot of work
in the laboratory together. I suppose Catherine took pity on him." Mrs.
Vanders shook her head. "Losers always had a special appeal to her. When
her mother was going to buy her a dog, she wanted one from the pound. Something
she could feel sorry for. But with that man…" She grimaced. "Well,
anyway, she couldn't get rid of him. I suspected she dropped out of graduate
school to get away from him. Then, after she took the job in Arizona, he would
turn up at Phoenix when she was there. It was the same thing when she started
working at Flagstaff."

"Had he threatened her?"

"I asked her that and she just laughed. She thought he was perfectly
harmless. She told me to think of him as being like a little lost kitten. Just
a nuisance."

"But you think he was a threat?"

"I think he was a very dangerous man. Under the right circumstances
anyway. When he came here with her once, he seemed polite enough. But there was
a sort of—" She paused, looking for the way to express it. "I think a
lot of anger was right under that nicey-nicey surface ready to explode."

Leaphorn waited for more explanation. Mrs. Vanders merely looked worried.

"I told Catherine that even with kittens, if you hurt one it will
scratch you," she said.

"That's true," Leaphorn said. "If I decide I can be of any help
on this, I'll need his name and address." He thought about it. "And I
think finding that vehicle she was driving is important. I think you should
offer a reward. Something substantial enough to attract attention. To get
people talking about it."

"Of course," Mrs. Vanders said. "Offer whatever you like."

"I'll need all the pertinent biographical information about her. People
who might know her or something about her habits. Names, addresses, that sort
of thing."

"All I have is in the folder you have there," she said.
"There's a report about what a lawyer from Mr. Peabody's office found out,
and a report from a lawyer he hired in Flagstaff to collect what information he
could. It wasn't much. I'm afraid it won't be very helpful."

"When was the last time she saw this Hammar?"

"That's one reason I suspect him," Mrs. Vanders said. "It was
just before she disappeared. He'd come out to Tuba City where she was working.
She'd called to tell me she was coming to see me that weekend. That Ham-mar man
was there at Tuba City when she called."

"Did she say anything that made you think she was afraid of him?"

"No." Mrs. Vanders laughed. "I don't think Catherine's ever
been afraid of anything. She inherited her mother's genes."

Leaphorn frowned. "She said she was coming to see you but she
disappeared instead," he said. "Did she say why she was coming? Just
social, or did she have something on her mind?"

"She was thinking of quitting. She couldn't stand her boss. A man named
Krause." Mrs. Vanders pointed at the folder. "Very arrogant. And she
disapproved of the way he ran the operation."

"Something illegal?"

"I don't know. She said she didn't want to talk about it on the telephone.
But it must have been pretty serious to make her think about leaving."

"Something personal, you think? Did she ever suggest sexual harassment?
Anything like that?"

"She didn't exactly suggest that," Mrs. Vanders said. "But he
was a bachelor. Whatever he was doing it was bad enough to be driving her away
from a job she loved."

Leaphorn questioned that by raising his eyebrows.

"She was excited by that job. She's been working for months to find the
rodents that caused that last outbreak of bubonic plague on your reservation.
Catherine has always been obsessive, even as a child. And since she took this
health department job her obsession has been the plague. She spent one entire
visit telling me about it. About how it killed half the people in Europe in the
Middle Ages. How it spreads. How they're beginning to think the bacteria are
evolving. All that sort of thing. She's on a personal crusade about it. Almost
religious, I'd say. And she thought she might have found some of the rodents it
spreads from. She'd told this Hammar fellow about it and I guess he used that
as an excuse to come out."

Mrs. Vanders made a deprecating gesture. "Being a student of mice and
rats and other rodents, that gives him an excuse, I guess. She said he might go
out there with her to help her with the rodents. Apparently he wasn't with her
when she left Tuba City, but I thought he might have followed her. I guess they
trap them or poison them or something. And she said it was a hard-to get-to
place, so maybe she would want him to help her carry in whatever they use. It's
out on the edge of the Hopi Reservation. A place called Yells Back Butte."

"Yells Back Butte," Leaphorn said.

"It seems a strange name," Mrs. Vanders said. "I suspect
there's some story behind it."

"Probably," Leaphorn said. "I think it's a local name for a
little finger sticking out from Black Mesa. On the edge of the Hopi
Reservation. And when was she going out there?"

"The day after she called me," Mrs. Vanders said. "That would
be a week ago next Friday."

Leaphorn nodded, sorting out some memories. That would be July 8, just about
the day—No. It was exactly the day when Officer Benjamin Kinsman had his skull
cracked with a rock somewhere very near Yells Back Butte. Same time. Same
place. Leaphorn had never learned to believe in coincidences.

"All right, Mrs. Vanders," Leaphorn said, "I'll see what I
can find out."

CHEE WAS NOT STANDING at the waiting room window just to watch the Northern
Arizona Medical Center parking lot and the cloud shadows dappling the mountains
across the valley. He was postponing the painful moment when he would walk into
Officer Benjamin Kinsman's room and give Benny the foredoomed official
"last opportunity" to tell them who had murdered him.

Actually, it wasn't murder yet. The neurologist in charge had called
Shiprock yesterday to report that Kinsman had become brain-dead and procedures
could now begin to end his ordeal. But this was going to be a legally
complicated and socially sensitive process. The U.S. Attorney's office was
nervous. Converting the charge against Jano from attempted homicide to murder
had to be done exactly right. Therefore, J. D. Mickey, the acting assistant
U.S. attorney charged with handling the prosecution, had decided that the
arresting officer must be present when the plug was pulled. He wanted Chee to
testify that he was available to receive any possible last words. That meant
that the defense attorney should be there, too.

Chee had no idea why. Everybody involved had the same boss. As an indigent,
Jano would be represented by another Justice Department lawyer. Said lawyer
being—Chee glanced at his watch—eleven minutes late. But maybe that was his
vehicle pulling into the lot. No. It was a pickup truck. Even in Arizona,
Justice Department lawyers didn't arrive in trucks.

In fact, it was a familiar truck. Dodge Ram king cab pickups of the early
nineties looked a lot alike, but this one had a winch attached to the front
bumper and fender damage covered with paint that didn't quite match. It was Joe
Leaphorn's truck.

Chee sighed. Fate seemed to be tying him to his former boss again, endlessly
renewing the sense of inferiority Chee felt in the presence of the Legendary
Lieutenant.

But he felt a little better after he thought about it. There was no way the
murder of Officer Kinsman could involve Leaphorn. The Legendary Lieutenant had
been retired since last year. As a rookie, Kinsman had never worked for him.
There were no clan relationships that Chee knew about. Leaphorn would be coming
to visit some sick friend. This would be one of those coincidences that
Leaphorn had told him, about a hundred times, not to believe in. Chee relaxed.
He watched a white Chevy sedan, driving too fast, skid through the parking lot
gate. A federal motor-pool Chevy. The defense lawyer finally. Now the plugs
could be pulled, stopping the machines that had kept Kinsman's lungs pumping
and his heart beating for all these days, since the wind of life that had blown
through Benny had left, taking Benny's consciousness on its last great
adventure.

Now the lawyers would agree, in view of the seriousness of the case, to
ignore the objections the Kinsman family might have and conduct a useless
autopsy. That would prove that the blow to the head had caused Benny's death
and therefore the People of the United States could apply the death penalty and
kill Robert Jano to even the score. The fact that neither the Navajos nor the
Hopis believed in this eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the white men would be
ignored.

Two floors below him the white Chevy had parked. The driver's-side door opened,
a pair of black trouser legs emerged, then a hand holding a briefcase.

"Lieutenant Chee," said a familiar voice just behind him.
"Could I talk to you for a minute?"

Joe Leaphorn was standing in the doorway, holding his battered gray Stetson
in his hands and looking apologetic.

So much for coincidences.

"SOMEPLACE QUIETER, MAYBE," Leaphorn had said, meaning a place
where no one would overhear him. So Chee led him down the hall to the empty
orthopedic waiting room. He pulled back a chair by the table and motioned
toward another one.

"I know you just have a minute," Leaphorn said, and sat down.
"The defense attorney just drove up."

"Yeah," Chee said, thinking that Leaphorn not only had Managed to
find him in this unlikely place but knew why he was here and what was going on.
Probably knew more than Chee did. That irritated Chee, but it didn't surprise
him.

"I wanted to ask if the name Catherine Anne Pollard meant anything to
you. If a missing persons report was filed on her. Or a stolen vehicle report?
Anything like that?"

"Pollard?" Chee said. "I don't think so. It doesn't ring a
bell." Thank God Leaphorn wasn't involving himself in the Kinsman
business. It was already complicated enough.

"Woman, early thirties, working with the Indian Health Service,"
Leaphorn said. "In vector control. Looking for the source of that bubonic
plague outbreak. Checking rodents. You know how they work."

"Oh, yeah," Chee said. "I heard about it. When I get back to
Tuba I'll check our reports. I think somebody in environmental health or the
Indian Health Service called Window Rock about her not coming back from a job
and they passed it along to us." He shrugged. "I got the impression
they were more worried about losing the department's Jeep."

Leaphorn grinned at him. "Not exactly the crime of the century."

"No," Chee said. "If she was about thirteen you'd be checking
the motels. At her age, if she wants to run off somewhere, that's her business.
As long as she brings back the Jeep."

"She didn't, then? It's still missing?"

"I don't know," Chee said. "If she returned it, APH forgot to
tell us."

"That wouldn't be unusual," Leaphorn said.

Chee nodded, and looked at Leaphorn. Wanting an explanation for his interest
in something that seemed both obvious and trivial.

"Somebody in her family thinks she's dead. Thinks somebody killed
her." Leaphorn let that hang a moment, made an apologetic face. "I
know that's what kinfolks usually think. But this time there's a suspicion that
a would-be boyfriend was stalking her."

"That's not unusual either," Chee said. He felt vaguely
disappointed. Leaphorn had done some private detecting right after he'd
retired, but that had been to tie up a loose end from his career, close out an
old case. This sounded purely commercial. Was the Legendary Lieutenant
Leap-horn reduced to doing routine private detective stuff?

Leaphorn took a notebook out of his shirt pocket, looked at it, tapped it
against the tabletop. It occurred to Chee that this was embarrassing Leaphorn,
and that embarrassed Chee. The Legendary Lieutenant, totally unflappable when
he'd been in charge, didn't know how to handle being a civilian. Asking favors.
Chee didn't know how to handle it either. He noticed that Leaphorn's burr-cut
hair, long black-salted-with-gray, had become gray-salted-with-black.

"Anything I can do?" Chee asked.

Leaphorn put the notebook back in his pocket.

"You know how I am about coincidences," he said.

"Yep," Chee said.

"Well, this one is so strained I hate to even mention it-" He
shook his head.

Chee waited.

"From what I know now, the last time anyone heard of this woman, she
was heading out of Tuba City checking on prairie dog colonies, looking for dead
rodents. One of the places on her list was that area around Yells Back Butte."

Chee thought about that a moment, took a deep breath, thinking he'd been too
optimistic. But "that area around Yells Back Butte" didn't make it
much of a coincidence with his Kinsman case. That "around" could
include a huge bunch of territory. He waited to see if Leaphorn was finished.
He wasn't.

"That was the morning of July eighth," Leaphorn said.

"July eighth," Chee said, frowning. "I was out there that
morning."

"I was thinking that you were," Leaphorn said. "Look, I'm headed
to Window Rock now and all I know now is from some preliminary checking a
lawyer did for Pollard's aunt. I couldn't reach Pollard's boss on the telephone
and soon as I do, I'll go to Tuba and talk to him. If I learn anything useful,
I'll let you know."

"I'd appreciate that," Chee said. "I'd like to know some more
about this."

"Probably absolutely no connection with the Kinsman case,"
Leaphorn said. "I don't see how there could be. Unless you know some
reason to feel otherwise. I just thought—"

A loud voice from the doorway interrupted him.

"Chee!" The speaker was a beefy young man with reddish-blond hair
and a complexion that suffered from too many hours of dry air and high-altitude
sun. The coat of his dark blue suit was unbuttoned, his necktie was slightly
loose, his white shirt was rumpled and his expression was irritated.
"Mickey wants to get this damned thing over with," he said. "He
wants you in there."

He was pointing at Chee, a violation of the Dine rules of courtesy. Now he
beckoned to Chee with his finger—rude in a multitude of other cultures.

Chee rose, his face darkened a shade.

"Mr. Leaphorn," Chee said, motioning toward the man, "this
gentleman is Agent Edgar Evans of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was
assigned out here just a couple of months ago."

Leaphorn acknowledged that with a nod toward Evans.

"Chee," Agent Evans said, "Mickey is in a hell of a—"

"Tell Mr. Mickey I'll be there in a minute or so," Chee said. And
to Leaphorn: "I'll call you from the office when I know what we have."

Leaphorn smiled at Evans and turned back to Chee.

"I am particularly interested in that Jeep," Leaphorn said.
"People don't just walk away from good trucks. It's odd. Someone sees it,
mentions it to someone else, the word gets around."

Chee chuckled. (More, Leaphorn suspected, for Evans's benefit than his own.)
"It does," Chee said. "And pretty soon people begin deciding no
one wants it anymore, and parts of it begin showing up on other people's
trucks."

"I'd like to spread the word that there's a reward for locating that
Jeep," Leaphorn said.

Evans cleared his throat loudly.

"How much?" Chee asked.

"How does a thousand dollars sound?"

"About right," Chee said, turning toward the door. He Motioned to
Agent Evans. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

Officer Benjamin Kinsman's room was lit by the sun pouring through its two
windows and a battery of ceiling fluorescent lights. Entering involved slipping
past a burly male nurse and two young women in the sort of pale blue smocks
doctors wear. Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney J. D. Mickey stood by the windows.
The shape of Officer Kinsman lay at rigid attention in the center of the bed,
covered with a sheet. One of the vital signs monitors on the wall above the bed
registered a horizontal white line. The other screen was blank.

Mickey looked at
his
watch, then at Chee, glanced at the doors and
nodded.

"You're the arresting officer?"

"That's correct," Chee said.

"What I want you to do is ask the victim here if he can tell you
anything about who killed him. What happened. All that. We just want to get it
on the record in case the defense tries something fancy."

Chee licked his lips, cleared his throat, looked at the body.

"Ben," he said. "Can you tell me who killed you? Can you hear
me? Can you tell me anything?"

"Pull the sheet down," Mickey said. "Off of his face."

Chee shook his head. "Ben," he said. "I'm sorry I didn't get
there quicker. Be happy on your journey."

Agent Evans was pulling at the sheet, drawing it down to reveal Benjamin
Kinsman's waxen face.

Chee gripped his wrist. Hard. "No," he said. "Don't do
that." He pulled the sheet back in place.

"Let it go," Mickey said, looking at his watch again. "I
guess we're done here." He turned toward the door.

Standing there, looking in at Chee, at all of them, was Janet Pete.

"Better late than never," Mickey said. "I hope you got here
early enough to know all your client's legal rights were satisfied."

Janet Pete, looking very pale, nodded. She stood aside to let them pass.

Behind Chee the medical crew was working fast, disconnecting wires and
tubes—starting the bed rolling toward the side exit. There, Chee guessed,
Officer Benjamin Kinsman's kidneys would be salvaged, perhaps also his heart,
perhaps whatever else some other person could use. But Ben was far, far away now.
Only his
chindi
would remain here. Or would it follow the corpse into
other rooms? Into other bodies? Navajo theology did not cover such
contingencies. Corpses were dangerous, excepting only those of infants who die
before their first laugh, and people who die naturally of old age. The good of
Benjamin Kinsman would go with his spirit. The part of his personality that was
out of harmony would linger as a
chindi
, causing sickness. Chee turned
away from the body.

Janet was still standing at the door. He stopped. "Hello, Jim."

"Hello, Janet." He took a deep breath. "It's good to see
you."

"Even like this?" She made a weak gesture at the room and tried to
smile.

He didn't answer that. He felt dizzy, sick, and depleted. "I tried to
call you, but you're never home. I'm Robert Jano's counsel," she said.
"I guess you knew that?"

"I didn't know it," Chee said. "Not until I heard what Mr.
Mickey said."

"You're the arresting officer,
as
I heard? Is that right? So I
need to talk to you."

"Fine," Chee said. "But I can't do it now. And not here.
Somewhere away from here." He swallowed down the bile. "How about
dinner?"

"I can't tonight. Mr. Mickey has us all conferring about the case. And,
Jim, you look exhausted. I think you must be working too hard."

"I'm not," he said. "And you look great. Will you be here
tomorrow?"

"I have to drive down to Phoenix."

"How about breakfast then? At the hotel."

"Good," she said, and they set the time.

Mickey was standing down the hallway. "Ms. Pete," he called.

"Got to go," she said, and turned, then turned back again.
"Jim," she said, "tired or not, you look fine."

"You, too," Chee said. She did. The classic, perfect beauty you
see on the cover of
Vogue
, or on any of the fashion magazines.

Chee leaned against the wall and watched her walk down the hall, around the
corner and out of sight, wishing he had thought of something more romantic to
say than "You, too." Wishing he knew what to do about her. About
them. Wishing he knew whether he could trust her. Wishing life wasn't so damned
complicated.