“That doesn’t make sense,” Chee said.
“Well, it sort of does, actually,” Leaphorn said. “The lady who hired me struck me as a mighty shrewd woman. I told her I didn’t see how I could be of any help. She didn’t seem to care.”
Chee nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. I can see it.”
“Except how did she get the Jeep out of here? The TV commercials make them look like they can drive up cliffs, but they can’t.”
“There’s a way, though,” Chee said. “There’s another way in here if you don’t mind doing a little scrambling. An old trail comes up the other side of Yells Back toward Black Mesa. I think the lady with the goats might use it. You could drive the Jeep up there, park it, climb over the saddle, do your deed, and then climb back over the saddle and drive out on the goat path.”
Chee stopped. “There’s trouble with that, though.”
“You mean she wouldn’t do that unless she knew in advance that she was going to need an escape route?”
“Exactly,” Chee said. “How could she have known that?”
Louisa had been listening, looking thoughtful. Now she said: “Do you professionals object if an amateur butts in?”
“Be our guest,” Leaphorn said.
“I find myself wondering just why Pollard was coming up here anyway,” Louisa said. She looked at Leaphorn. “Didn’t you tell me she was looking for the place where Nez was infected? Where the flea bit him?”
“Right,” Leaphorn said, looking puzzled.
“And isn’t the period between infection and death—I mean in cases where treatment doesn’t effect a cure—doesn’t that range just a couple of weeks?” Louisa made one of those modifying gestures with her hands. “I mean, usually. Statistically. Often enough so that when vector control people are looking for the source, they’re looking for places the victim had been during that period. And what Miss Pollard was writing in her notes suggested that she was always trying to find out where the victim was in that period before their death.”
“Ah,” Leaphorn said. “I see.”
Chee, whose interest in plague and vector control people who hunted it extended back only a few minutes, had little idea what any of this was about.
He said: “You mean she knew Nez couldn’t have been around Yells Back in that time frame? How would—?”
“Pollard’s notes show where he was. They show—” She stopped in midsentence. “Just a minute. I don’t want to be wrong about this. The book’s in the car.”
She found it on the dashboard, extracted it, leaned against the fender, and flipped, through the pages.
“Here,” she said. “Under her Anderson Nez heading. It shows that he was visiting his brother in Encino, California. He came home to his mother’s hogan four miles southwest of Copper Mine Trading Post on June twenty-third. The next afternoon, he left to go to his job with Woody near Goldtooth.”
“June twenty-fourth?” Leaphorn said thoughtfully. “Right?”
“And six days later he dies in the hospital at Flag.” She checked back in the notes. “Actually more like five days. Pollard says in here somewhere he died just after midnight.”
“Wow,” Leaphorn said. “Are we sure he died of plague?
“Slow down,” Jim Chee said. “Explain this date business to me.”
Louisa shook her head, looking doubtful. “I guess the point is that Pollard knows a lot more about plague than we do. So she would have known that Nez didn’t get his infected flea up here. Plague doesn’t kill that fast. So she didn’t have any reason to come up here flea hunting when she did.”
“That’s the question,” Leaphorn said. “If that wasn’t her reason, what was? Or did she tell Krause she was coming, and not come? Or did Krause lie about it?”
Louisa was reading from another section of the notebook. She held up her hand.
“Pollard must have been thinking something was funny. She went back out to the Nez place near Copper Mine Mesa. Rechecking.
“’Mom says Nez dug postholes, stretched sheep fencing to expand pens. Family dogs wearing flea collars and sans fleas. No cats. No prairie dog towns in vicinity. No history of rats or rat sign found. Nez drove to Page with mother, buying groceries. No headache. No fever.’” She closed the notebook, shrugged.
“That’s it?” Chee asked.
“There’s a marginal note for her to check sources at Encino,” Louisa said. “I guess to see if he was sick when he was there.”
Chee said, “But she told her boss she was coming up to Yells Back to check for fleas here. Or at least he says she did. I think I’ve met that guy.” He looked at Leaphorn. “Big, raw-boned guy named Krause?”
“That’s him.”
“What else did she tell him?”
“Krause said she came by early that day before he got to work. He didn’t see her. She just left him a note,” Leaphorn said. “I didn’t see it, but Krause said that she just reported she was going up to Yells Back to collect fleas.”
“By the way,” Chee asked, “with Pollard missing, as well as the Jeep she was driving, how did you get her notebook?”
“I guess we should call it a journal,” Leaphorn said. “It was with a folder full of stuff her aunt’s lawyer collected from her motel room in Tuba. It looks like she took the notes she jotted down in the field and converted them into sort of a report when she got home with her comments.”
“Like a diary?” Chee asked.
“Not really,” Leaphorn said. “There’s nothing very personal or private in it.”
“That was the last entry about Nez?” Chee asked.
“No,” Louisa said. She flipped back through the pages.
“’July 6. Krause says he heard Dr. Woody checked Nez into the hospital. Krause not
answering his telephone. Will get to Flag mañana and see what I can learn.’
“’July 7. Can’t believe what I heard at Flag today. Somebody is lying. Yells Back Butte mañana, collect fleas, find out.’”
Louisa shut the notebook. “That’s it. The final entry.”
It’s funny,” Leaphorn said, “how you can look at something a half dozen times and not see it.”
Louisa waited for him to explain that, decided he didn’t intend to and said, “Like what?”
“Like what Catherine Pollard wrote in that journal,” Leaphorn said. “I should have noticed the pattern. The incubation period of that bacteria. I should have wondered why she would be coming up here.”
They were jolting up the rocky tracks that had once given the Tijinney family access to the world outside the shadow of Yells Back Butte and Black Mesa. Over Black Mesa afternoon clouds were forming, hinting that the rainy season might finally begin.
“How?” Louisa said. “Did you know when Mr. Nez died?”
“I could have found out,” Leaphorn said. “That would have been as easy as making a telephone call.”
“Oh, knock it off,” Louisa said. “I’ve noticed males have this practice of entertaining themselves with self-flagellation. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. We females find that habit tiresome.”
Leaphorn considered that awhile. Grinned.
“You mean like Jim Chee blaming himself for not getting up here quick enough to keep Kinsman from getting himself hit on the head.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay,” Leaphorn said. “You’re right. I guess I couldn’t have known.”
“On the other hand, you shouldn’t get too complacent,” Louisa said. “I hope you noticed that I figured it out pretty quick.”
He laughed. “I noticed it. It took me a while to deal with that. Then two thoughts occurred. You could translate Pollard’s scribbles and I couldn’t, and you were paying attention while Professor Perez was educating us about pathogenic bacteria last night and I was just sitting there letting my mind wander. I decided that you just have a much higher tolerance for boredom than I do.”
“Academics have to be boredom-invulnerable,” Louisa said. “Otherwise we’d
walk out of faculty meetings, and if you do that, you don’t get tenure. You have to go get real jobs.”
Leaphorn shifted into second and followed the established tire tracks through the arroyo where Chee had left his car that fatal day. They ran out of old tracks on the little hump of high ground that overlooked what was left of the old Tijinney place. Leaphorn stopped and turned off the ignition, and they sat looking down on the abandoned homestead.
“Mr. Chee said Woody had his van parked over closer to the butte,” Louisa said. “Over there where all those jumpers are growing by the arroyo.”
“I remember,” Leaphorn said. “I just wanted to take a look.” He waved at the ruined hogan, its door missing, its roof fallen, its north wall tumbled. Beyond it stood the remains of a brush arbor, a sheep pen formed of stacked stones, two stone pylons that once would have supported timbers on which water storage barrels had rested. “Sad,” he said.
“Some people would call it picturesque.”
“People who don’t understand how much work went into building all that. And trying to make a living here.”
“I know,” Louisa said. “I was a farm girl myself. Lots of work, but Iowa had rich black dirt. And enough rain. And indoor plumbing. Electricity. All that.”
“Old Man McGinnis told me kids had vandalized this place. It looks like it.”
“Not Navajo kids, I’ll bet,” she said. “Isn’t it a death hogan?”
“I think the old lady died in it,” Leaphorn said. “You notice the north wall’s partly knocked down.”
“The traditional way to take out the body, isn’t it? North, the direction of evil.”
Leaphorn nodded. “But McGinnis was complaining that a lot of young Navajos, not just the city ones, don’t respect the old ways these days. They ignore the taboos, if they ever heard of them. He thinks some of them tore into this place, looking for stuff they could sell. He said they even dug this deep hole where the fire pit was. Apparently they thought something valuable was buried there.”
Louisa shook her head. “I wouldn’t think there would be anything very valuable left in that hogan. And I don’t see any sign of a big deep hole.”
Leaphorn chuckled. “I don’t either. But then McGinnis never certifies the accuracy. He just passes along the gossip. And as for the value, he said they were looking for ceremonial stuff. When that hogan was built, the owner probably had a place in the wall beside the door where he kept his medicine bundle. Minerals from the sacred mountains. That sort of thing. Some collectors will pay big money for some of that material, and the older it is the better.”
“I guess so,” Louisa said. “Collecting antiques is not my thing.”
Leaphorn smiled at her. “You collect everybody’s antique stories. Even ours. That’s how I met you, remember. One of your sources was in jail.”
“Collect them and preserve them,” she said. “Remember when you were telling me about how First Man and First Woman found the baby White Shell Girl on Huerfano Mesa and you had it all wrong?”
“I had it exactly right,” Leaphorn said. “That’s the version we hold to in my Red Forehead Clan. That makes it correct. The other clans have it wrong. And you know what, I’m going to take a closer look at that hogan. Let’s see if McGinnis knew what he was talking about.”
She walked down the slope with him. There was nothing left of the hogan building but the circle of stacked stone that formed a wall around the hard-packed earth of the floor, and the ponderosa poles and shreds of tar paper that had formed its collapsed roof.
“There was a hole there once,” Louisa said. “Mostly filled in, though.”
They were in cloud shadow now, and the thunderhead over the mesa made a rumbling noise. They climbed the slope back to the truck.
“I wonder what they found?”
“In the hole?” Leaphorn said. “I’d guess nothing. I never heard of a Navajo burying anything under his hogan fire pit. But of course McGinnis had an answer for that. He said Old Man Tijinney was a silversmith. Had a lard bucket full of silver dollars.”
“Sounds more logical than ceremonial things,” Louisa said.
“Until you ask why bury a bucket when there’s a million places you could hide it. And hoarding wealth isn’t part of the Navajo Way anyway. There’re always kinfolks who need it.”
She laughed. “You tell McGinnis that?”
“Yeah, and he said, ‘You’re supposed to be the goddamn detective. You figure it out.’ So I figured out there wasn’t any bucket. You notice I never came up here with my pick and shovel to check it out.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the tidiest man I ever knew. Just the kind of looter who’d push the dirt back in the hole.”
They found Dr. Albert Woody’s van just where Chee had said it would be. Woody was standing in the doorway watching them park. To Leaphorn’s surprise, he looked delighted to see them.
“Two visitors on the same day,” he said as they got out of the truck. “I’ve never been this popular.”
“We won’t take much of your time,” Leaphorn said. “This is Dr. Louisa Bourebonette, I’m Joe Leaphorn and I presume you must be Dr. Albert Woody.”
“Exactly,” Woody said. “And glad to meet you. What can I do for you?”
“We’re trying to locate a woman named Catherine Pollard. She’s a vector control specialist with the Arizona Health Department, and—”
“Oh, yes,” Woody said. “I met her over near Red Lake some time ago. She was looking for sick rodents and infected fleas. Looking for the source of a plague case. In a way we’re in the same line of work.”
He looked very excited, Leaphorn thought. Wired. Ready to burst. As if he were high on amphetamines.
“Have you seen her around here?”
“No,” Woody said. “Just over at the Thrift-way station. We were both buying gasoline. She noticed my van and introduced herself.”
“She’s working out of that temporary laboratory in Tuba City,” Leaphorn said. “On the morning of July eighth she left a note for her boss saying she was coming up here to collect rodents.”
“There was a Navajo Tribal policeman up here talking to me this morning,” Woody said. “He asked me about her, too. Come in and let me give you something cold to drink.”
“We didn’t intend to take a lot of your time,” Leaphorn said.
“Come in. Come in. I’ve just had something great happen. I need somebody to tell it to. And Dr. Bourebonette, what is your specialty?”
“I’m not a physician,” Louisa said. “I’m a cultural anthropologist at Northern Arizona University. I believe you know Dr. Perez there.”
“Perez?” Woody said. “Oh, yes. In the lab. He’s done some work for me.”
“He’s a great fan of yours,” Louisa said. “In fact, you’re his nominee for the next Nobel Prize in medicine.”
Woody laughed. “Only if I’m guessing right about the internal working of rodents. And only if somebody in the National Center for Emerging Viruses doesn’t get it first. But I’m forgetting my manners. Come in. Come in. I want to show you something.”
Woody was twisting his hands together, grinning broadly, as they went past him through the doorway.
It was almost cold inside, the air damp and clammy and smelling of animals, formaldehyde, and an array of other chemicals that linger forever in memory. The sound was another mixture—the motor of the air-conditioner engine on the roof, the whir of fans, the scrabbling feet of rodents locked away somewhere out of sight. Woody seated Louisa in a swivel chair near his desk, motioned Leaphorn to a stool beside a white plastic working surface, and leaned his lanky body against the door of what Leaphorn presumed was a floor-to-ceiling refrigerator.
“I’ve got some good news to share with Dr. Perez,” he said. “You can tell him we’ve found the key to the dragon’s cave.”
Leaphorn shifted his gaze from Woody to Louisa. Obviously she didn’t understand that any better than he did.
“Will he know
what that means?” she asked. “He understands you’re hunting for a solution to drug-resistant pathogens. Do you mean you’ve found it?”
Woody looked slightly abashed.
“Something to drink,” he said, “and then I’ll try to explain myself.” He opened the refrigerator door, fished out an ice bucket, extracted three stainless steel cups from an overhead cabinet and a squat brown bottle, which he displayed. “I only have scotch.”
Louisa nodded. Leaphorn said he’d settle for water.
Woody talked while he fixed their drinks.
“Bacteria, like about everything alive, split themselves into genera. Call it families. Here we’re dealing with the Enterobacteriaceae family. One branch of that is Pasteurellaceae, and a branch of that is Yersinia pestis—the organism that causes bubonic plague. Another branch is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes the famous venereal disease. These days, gonorrhea is hard to treat because—” Woody paused, sipping his scotch.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me skip back a little. Some of these bacteria, gonorrhea for example, contain a little plasmid with a gene in it that codes for the formation of an enzyme that destroys penicillin. That means you can’t treat the disease with any of those penicillin drugs. You see?”
“Sure,” Louisa said. “Remember, I’m a friend of Professor Perez. I get a lot of this sort of information.”
“We now understand that DNA can be transferred between bacteria—especially between bacteria in the same family.”
“Kissing cousins,” Louisa said. “Like incest.”
“Well, I guess,” Woody said. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”
Leaphorn had been sampling his ice water, which had the ice cube flavor plus staleness, plus an odd taste that matched the aroma of the van’s air supply. He put down the cup.
Leaphorn had been doing some reading. He said: “I guess we’re talking about a mixture of plague and gonorrhea—which would make the plague microbe resistant to tetracycline and chioramphenicol. Is that about right?”
“About right,” Woody said. “And possibly several other antibiotic formulations. But that’s not the point. That’s not what’s important.”
The First Eagle Page 15
