Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (7 page)

"Janet, Jano told you how he got those deep slashes on his forearm. Did
he mention exactly when he got scratched?"

The boy brought the coffee, refilled their cups, asked if they were ready to
order breakfast.

"Give us another minute," Chee said.

"When?" Janet said. "Isn't that obvious? It would have been
either while he was catching the eagle or when he was putting it in the cage.
Or somewhere in between. I didn't quiz him about it."

"But did he say? Specifically when?"

"You mean in relation to what?" she asked, grinning at him.
"Come on, Jim. Say it. The police lab people have told you that Jano's
blood is mixed with Kinsman's on Kinsman's shirt. The lab is probably doing
some of their new molecular magic to tell them if Jano's blood had been exposed
to the air longer than Kinsman's, and how much longer, and all that."

"Can they do that now?" he asked, wishing he hadn't been pressing
her on this, making her angry for no reason. "They probably would if they
could, because the official, formal theory of the crime will be that Jano
struggled with Kinsman and got his arm slashed on Kinsman's belt buckle."

"Can they do it? I don't know. Probably. But how can you get cut on a
belt buckle?"

"Kinsman liked to bend the rules when he could. Put a feather in his
uniform hat, that sort of thing. He put a fancy buckle on his belt to see how
long it would be before I told him to take it off.
Anyway
, that's why
the timing seems to be important."

"Well, go ahead then. Ask me. Just exactly to the minute, when did Jano
get his arm slashed?"

"Okay," Chee said. "Exactly, precisely when?"

"Ha!" Janet said. "You're treading on client
confidentiality."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"You know what I mean. I see J. D. Mickey with a new hundred-dollar
haircut and an Italian silk suit addressing the jury. 'Ladies and gentlemen.
The defendant's blood was found mixed with the blood of the victim on Officer
Kinsman's uniform.' And then he gets into all the blood chemistry stuff."
Janet raised her hand, dropped her voice—providing a poor imitation of Mickey's
courtroom dramatics. "'But! But! He told an officer of this court that he
suffered the cut later. After he had moved Officer Kinsman.'"

"So I guess you're not going to tell me," Chee said.

"Right," Janet said. She put down her menu, studied him. Her
expression was somber. "A little while ago, I might have."

Chee let his expression ask the question.

"How can I trust you when you don't trust me?"

Chee waited.

She shook her head. "I'm not just a shyster trying for a reputation
with some sort of cheap acquittal," she said. "I really want to know
if Robert Jano is innocent. I want to know what happened." She put down
her menu and stared at him, inviting a response.

"I understand that," Chee said.

"I respect—" she began. Her voice tightened. She paused, looked
away from him. "When I asked you about the tracks, I wasn't trying to
trick you," she said. "I asked because I think if somebody else had
been there and left any traces you would have found them. That is, if anybody
in the world could have found them. And if there weren't any, then maybe I'm
wrong and maybe Robert Jano did kill your officer, and maybe I should be trying
to talk him into a plea bargain. So I ask you, but you don't trust me, so you
change the subject."

Chee had put down his menu to listen to this. Now he picked it up, opened
it. "And now, once again, I think we should change the subject. How were
things in Washington?"

"I'm really not going to have time for breakfast." She put down
her menu, said, "Thanks for the coffee," and walked out.

"THERE'S JUST ONE THING I can tell you and feel absolutely certain
about it," said Richard Krause without looking up from the box full of
assorted stuff he was picking through. "Cathy Pollard didn't just run off
with our Jeep. Something happened to her. But don't ask me what."

Leaphorn nodded. "That's what my client believes," he said. My
client. It was the first time he'd used that term, and he didn't like the sound
of it. Was this what he was making of himself? A private investigator?

Krause was probably in his late forties, Leaphorn guessed, big-boned, lean
and gristly, probably an athlete in college, with a shock of blondish hair just
showing signs of gray. He was sitting on a high stool behind a table in a faded
green work shirt, dividing his attention between Leaphorn and stacks of
transparent Ziploc bags that seemed to contain small dead insects—fleas or
lice. Or maybe ticks.

"I guess you're working for her family," Krause said. He opened
another bag, extracted a flea, and put it on a slide, which he placed in a
binocular microscope. "Do they have any theories?"

"Ideas float around," Leaphorn said, asking himself if the ethics
of private investigators, presuming they had them, allowed one to reveal the
identity of clients. He'd deal with that when circumstances required. "The
obvious ones. A sex crime. A nervous breakdown. A rejected boyfriend. Things
like that."

Krause adjusted the microscope's focus, stared into the lenses, grunted and
removed the slide. In its former existence this temporary lab had been a
low-down-payment double-wide mobile home, and the heat of the summer sun
radiated through its aluminum roof. The swamp-cooler fan roared away at its
highest setting, mixing damp air into the dry heat. The rows of specimen jars
on the shelf behind Krause were sweating. So was Krause. So was Leaphorn.

"I really doubt there's a boyfriend involved in this," he said.
"She didn't seem to have one. Never talked about it anyway." He
transferred the flea into another Ziploc bag, wrote something on an adhesive
tag, and stuck it in place. "Of course, there could be a jilted one
floating around somewhere in the past. That wouldn't be the sort of thing Cathy
would have chatted about, even if she chatted. Which she didn't do much."

The cluttered, makeshift laboratory was reminding Leaphorn of his student
career at Arizona State, which in those long-ago days required a mix of natural
science courses even if your major was anthropology. Then he realized it wasn't
as much what he was seeing as what he was smelling—those tissue-preserving,
soap-defying chemicals that drove the scent of death deep into the pores of
even the cleanest students.

"Cathy was a very serious lady. Focused. Just talked about
business," Krause was saying. "She had a thing about bubonic plague.
Thought it was downright criminal that we protect the middle-class urbanites
from these communicable diseases and let the vectors do their thing out here in
the boondocks where nobody gets killed except the working class. Cathy sounded
like one of those old-fashioned Marxists sometimes."

"Tell me about the Jeep," Leaphorn said.

Krause stopped what he'd been doing, stared at Leaphorn, frowning. "The
Jeep? What's to tell?"

"If there's foul play involved in this, the truck will probably be how
the case gets broken."

Krause shook his head. Laughed. "It was just a black Jeep. They all
look alike."

"It's harder to dispose of a vehicle," Leaphorn said.

"Than a body?" Krause said. "Sure. I see what you mean. Well,
actually it was a pretty fancy model. We heard it was one of those seized by
the DEA guys in a drug bust and turned over to the Health Department. Had a
white pinstripe. Very hi-fi radio with special speakers. Telephone installed.
The cowboy model. No top. Roll bars. Winch on the front. Tow-chain hooks and a
trailer hitch on the back. I think it was three years old, but you know they
don't change those models much. I drove it myself some until Cathy got it away
from me."

"How'd that happen?"

"What Cathy wanted, Cathy got." He shrugged. "Actually, she
had a good argument for it. Spent more time out in the bad country while I was
doing the paperwork inhere."

"I'm trying to get the word around that there's a reward out for
whoever finds that vehicle. A thousand dollars."

Krause raised his eyebrows. "The family sounds serious then," he
said, grinning. "What if she just drives in here and parks it? Can I call
in and collect?"

"Probably not," Leaphorn said. "But I'd appreciate the
call."

"I'll be happy to let you know."

"How about a man named Victor Hammar?" Leaphorn asked. "I'm
told they knew each other. You wouldn't put him in the boyfriend
category?"

Krause looked surprised. "Hammar? I don't think so." He shook his
head, grinning.

"One of the theories has it that Hammar was in love with her. The way
it's told, she didn't share the sentiment, but she couldn't get rid of him."

"Naw," Krause said. "I don't think so. Matter of fact, she invited
him out here a while back. He's working on his doctorate in vertebrate biology.
He's interested in what we're doing."

"Just in what you're doing? Not in the woman who's doing it?"

"Oh, they're friends," Krause said. "And he probably feels
those glandular urges. Young male, you know. And he likes her, but I think that
was because she sort of gave him a little mothering when he was new in the
country. He has a sort of funny accent. No friends in the department, I'll bet.
From what I've seen of him, probably not many friends anywhere else either. So
along comes Cathy. She's like a lot of these kids who grow up rich. They like
doing good for the working-class losers. So she helped him along. Makes 'em
feel less guilty about being part of the parasitic privileged class."

"When you think about it, though," Leaphorn said, "what you
described is sort of typical of these stalker homicides. You know, the
kindhearted girl takes pity on the poor nerd and he thinks it's love."

"I guess you could ask him. He's out here again and said he was coming
in to get copies of some of our mortality statistics."

"Mortality?"

"In fact, he's late," Krause said, looking at his watch.
"Yeah, mortality. Die-offs among mammal communities in plague outbreaks,
rabbit fever, hantavirus, that sort of thing. How many kangaroo rats survive
compared with ground squirrels, pack rats, prairie dogs, so forth. But my point
is, it's the data that brings him out, not Cathy. Take today, for example. He
knows Cathy's not here, but he's coming anyway."

"He knew she was missing?"

"He called a couple of days after she didn't show up. Wanted to talk to
her."

Leaphorn considered this.

"How well do you remember that conversation?"

Krause looked surprised, frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You know: 'he said,' and 'I said,' and 'he said.' That sort of thing.
How did he react?"

Krause laughed. "You're hard to convince, aren't you?"

"Just curious."

"Well, first he asked whether we'd wrapped up the work on the plague
cases. I said no, we still didn't know where the last one got it. I told him
Cathy was still working on that one. Then he asked if we'd found any live
kangaroo rats up around the Disbah place. That's one of the places where a
hantavirus case had turned up. I told him we hadn't."

Krause tore off a sheet from a roll of paper towels and swabbed the sheen of
perspiration from his forehead. "Let's see now. Then he said he had some
time and thought he'd come out and maybe go along with Cathy if she was still
chasing down prairie dogs and plague fleas. He wanted to ask her if she'd mind.
I said she wasn't here. He said when'll she be back. So I told him about her
not coming to work. Couple of days I guess it was by then." Leaphorn
waited. Krause shook his head. Went back to sorting through his bags. Now the
chemical smell reminded Leaphorn of the Indian Health Service Hospital at
Gallup, of the gurney rolling down the hallway carrying Emma away from him. Of
the doctor explaining-He drew a deep breath, wanting to finish this. Wanting
out of this laboratory.

"She didn't tell you she was taking off?"

"Just left a note. Said she was going back up to Yells Back to collect
some fleas."

"Nothing else?"

Krause shook his head.

"Could I see the note?"

"If I can find it. It probably went in the wastebasket but I'll look
for it."

"How did Hammar react to what you told him?"

"I don't know. I think he said something like, whaddaya mean? Where did
she go? What did she tell you? Where'd she leave the truck? That sort of thing.
Then he seemed worried. What did the police say? Was anybody looking for her?
So forth."

Leaphorn considered. That response seemed normal. Or well rehearsed.

There was the sound of tires crunching over
gravel
, a car door
slamming.

"That's probably Hammar," Krause said. "Ask him
yourself."

ABOUT A MONTH INTO his first semester at Arizona State, Leaphorn had
overcome the tendency of young Navajos to think that all white people look
alike. But the fact was that Victor Hammar looked a lot like a bigger, less
sun-baked weightlifter version of Richard Krause. At second glance Leaphorn
noticed Hammar was also several years younger, his eyes a paler shade of blue,
his ears a bit flatter to his skull, and—since cops are conditioned to look for
"identifying marks"—a tiny scar beside his chin had defied sunburning
and remained white.

Hammar showed less interest in Leaphorn. He shook hands, displayed irregular
teeth with a perfunctory smile, and got down to business.

"Is she back yet?" he asked Krause. "Have you heard anything
from her?"

"Neither one," Krause said.

Hammar issued a violent non-English epithet. A German curse, Leaphorn
guessed. He sat on a stool across from Leaphorn, shook his head, and swore
again—this time in English.

"Yeah," Krause said. "It's worrying me, too."

"And the police," Hammar said. "What are they doing? Nothing,
I think. What do they tell you?"

"Nothing," Krause said. "I think they put the Jeep on the
list to be watched for and—"

"Nothing!" Hammar said. "How could that be?"

"She's a full-grown woman," Krause said. "There's no evidence
of any crime, except maybe for getting off with our vehicle. I guess—"

"Nonsense! Nonsense! Of course something has happened to her. She's
been gone too long. Something happened to her."

Leaphorn cleared his throat. "Do you have any theories about
that?"

Hammar stared at Leaphorn. "What?"

Krause said, "Mr. Leaphorn here is a retired policeman. He's trying to
find Catherine."

Hammar was still staring. "Retired policeman?"

Leaphorn nodded, thinking Hammar would have no idea of what he knew and what
he didn't and trying to decide how he would lead into this.

"Do you remember where you were July eighth? Were you here in Tuba
then?"

"No," Hammar said, still staring.

Leaphorn waited.

"I'd already gone back. Back to the university."

"You're on a faculty somewhere?"

"I am just a graduate assistant. At Arizona State. I had lectures that
day. Introduction to the laboratory for freshmen." Hammar grimaced. "Introduction
to Biology. Awful course. Stupid students. And why are you asking me these
questions? Do you—"

"Because I was asked to help find the woman," Leaphorn said,
thereby violating his rule and Navajo courtesy by interrupting a speaker. But
he wanted to cut off any questions from Hammar. "I will just collect a
little more information and be out of here so you gentlemen can get back to
your work. I wonder if Miss Pollard might have left any papers in the office
here. If she did, they might be helpful."

"Papers?" Krause said. "Well, she had sort of a ledger and
she kept her field notes in that. Is that what you mean?"

"Probably," Leaphorn said.

"Her aunt called me from Santa Fe yesterday and told me you'd come
by," Krause said, shuffling through material stacked on a desk in the
corner of the room. "I think her name is Vanders. Something like that.
Cathy was planning to visit her last weekend. I thought maybe that's where
she'd gone."

"You're working for old Mrs. Vanders," Hammar said, still staring
at Leaphorn. "Here's the sort of stuff that might be useful," Krause
said, handing Leaphorn an accordion file containing a jumble of papers.
"She's going to need it if she comes back."

"When she gets back," Hammar said. "When."

Leaphorn flipped through the papers, noticing that most of the entries
Catherine had made were in a small irregular scribble, hard to read and even
harder for a layman to interpret. Like his own notes, they were a shorthand
that communicated only to her.

"Fort C," Leaphorn said. "What's that?"

"Centers for Disease Control," Krause said. "The feds who run
the lab at Fort Collins."

"IHS. That's Indian Health Service?"

"Right," Krause said. "Actually, that's who we're working for
here, but technically for the Arizona health people. Part of the big,
complicated team."

Leaphorn had skipped to the back.

"Lots of references to A. Nez," he said.

"Anderson Nez. One of the three fatalities in the last outbreak. Mr.
Nez was the last one, and the only one we haven't found the source for,"
Krause said.

"And who's this Woody?"

"Ah," said Hammar. "That jerk!"

"That's Albert Woody," Krause said. "Al. He's into cell
biology, but I guess you'd call him an immunologist. Or a pharmacologist.
Microbiologist. Or maybe a—I don't know." Krause chuckled. "What's
his title, Hammar? He's closer to your field than mine."

"He's a damned jerk," Hammar said. "He has a grant from the
Institute of Allergy and Immunology, but they say

I he also works for Merck, or Squibb, or one of the other pharmaceutical
firms. Or maybe for all of them."

"Hammar doesn't like him," Krause said. "Hammar was trapping
rodents somewhere or other this summer and Woody accused him of interfering
with one of his own projects. He yelled at you, didn't he?"

"I should have kicked his butt," Hammar said.

"He's on this plague project, too?"

"No. No. Not really. He's been working out here for years, since we had
an outbreak in the nineteen-eighties. He's studying how some hosts of
vectors—like prairie dogs, or field mice, and so forth—can be infected by bacteria
or viruses and stay alive while others of the same species are killed. For
example, plague comes along and wipes out about a billion rodents, and you've
got empty burrows and nothing but bones for a hundred miles. But here and there
you find a colony still alive. They carry it, but it didn't kill them. They're
sort of reservoir colonies. They breed, renew the rodent population, and then
the plague spreads again. Probably from them, too. But nobody really knows for
sure how it works."

"It's the same with snowshoe rabbits in the north of Finland,"
Hammar said. "And in your Arctic Alaska. Different bacteria but the same
business. It's a seven-year cycle with that, regular as a clock. Everywhere
rabbits, then the fever sweeps through and nothing but dead rabbits and it
takes seven years to build back up and then the fever comes and wipes them out
again."

"And the drug companies are paying Woody?"

"Wasting their money," Hammar said. He walked to the door, opened it,
and stood looking out.

"It's more like they're looking for the Golden Fleece," Krause
said. "I just have a sort of hazy idea of what Woody's doing, but I think
he's trying to pin down what happens inside a mammal so that it can live with a
pathogen that kills its kinfolks. If he learns that, maybe it's just a little
step toward understanding intercellular chemistry. Or maybe it's worth a
mega-trillion dollars."

Leaphorn let that hang while he sorted through what he remembered of Organic
Chemistry 211 and Biology 331 from his own college days. That was vague now,
but he recalled what the surgeon who'd operated on Emma's brain tumor had told
him as if it were yesterday. He could still see the man and hear the anger in
his voice. It was just a simple staph infection, he'd said, and a few years ago
a dozen different antibiotics would have killed the bacteria. But not now.
"Now the microbes are winning the war," he'd said. And Emma's small
body, under the sheet on the gurney rolling down the hallway, was the proof of
that.

"Well, maybe that's exaggerating," Krause said. "Maybe it
would be just a few hundred billion."

"You're talking about a way to make better antibiotics?" Leaphorn
said. "That's what Woody's after?"

"Not exactly. More likely he'd like to find the way a mammal's immune
system is being adjusted so that it can kill the microbe. It would probably be
more like a vaccine."

Leaphorn looked up from the journal. "Miss Pollard seems to connect him
to Nez," he said. "The note says: 'Check Woody on Nez.' Wonder what
that would mean."

"I wouldn't know," Krause said.

"Maybe Nez was that guy Woody had working for him," Hammar said.
"Sort of a smallish fellow, with his hair cut real short. He'd put out
traps for Woody and help him take blood samples from the animals. Things like
that."

"Maybe so," Krause said. "I know that over the years Woody
has located a bunch of prairie dog colonies that seem to resist the plague. And
he was also collecting kangaroo rats, field mice, and so forth. The sort of rodents
that spread the hantavirus. Cathy said he's been working with one near Yells
Back Butte. That might be why Cathy was going up there. If Nez had been working
for Woody, maybe she was going up there to see if he knew where Nez was when he
got infected."

"Could Mr. Nez have been bitten up there?" Leaphorn asked. "I
understand there'd been a couple of plague victims from that area in the
past."

"I don't think so," Krause said. "She had pretty well pinned
down where Nez had been during the period he was infected. It was mostly up
south of here. Between Tuba and Page."

Krause had been sorting slides while he talked. Now he looked up at
Leaphorn. "You know much about bacteria?"

"Just the basic stuff. Freshman-level biology."

"Well, with plague, the flea just puts a tiny bit in your bloodstream,
and then it usually takes five or six days, sometimes longer, for the bacteria
to multiply enough so you start showing any symptoms, usually a fever. Or maybe
if you get bitten by a bunch of fleas, or they're loaded with some really
virulent stuff, then it's quicker. So you skip back a few days from when the
fever showed up and find out where the victim's been from that date to maybe a
week earlier. When you know that, then you start checking those places for dead
mammals and infected fleas."

Hammar was still looking out the door. He said: "Poor Mr. Nez. Killed
by a flea. Too bad the flea didn't bite Al Woody."