The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  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 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.”

  “Ma
ybe 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.”

  Leaphorn blamed it on being lonely—this bad habit he’d developed of talking too much. And now he was paying the price. Instead of waiting until he’d arrived at Louisa Bourebonette’s little house in Flagstaff to tell her of his adventures, the empty silence in his Tuba City motel room had provoked him into babbling away on the telephone. He’d told her about his visit with John McGinnis and his talk with Krause. He had given her a thumbnail sketch of Hammar and asked if she could think of an easy, make-no-waves way to check on his alibi.

  “Can’t you just call the police in Tempe and have them do it? I thought that’s what was done.”

  “If I was still a cop I could, providing we had any evidence a crime had been committed and some reason to believe Mr. Hammar was a suspect in this crime.”

  “Lieutenant Chee would do it.”

  “If he would, that would take care of problem one. We’d still have problems two and three,” Leaphorn said. “How is Chee going to explain to the Tempe police why he wants them to poke into the life of a citizen when there’s not even a crime to suspect him of committing?”

  “Yeah,” Louisa said. “I see it. Academics can be touchy about things like that. I’ll handle it myself.”

  Which left Leaphorn merely breathing into the phone for a moment or two. Then he said:

  “What?”

  “Hammar was supposed to be teaching a lab class July eighth, isn’t that what he said? So I have a friend over in our biology department who knows people in biology down at ASU. He calls somebody in his good-old-boy network down at Tempe and they ask around and if Mr. Hammar cut his lab class that day—or got somebody to handle it—then we know it. That sound okay?”

  “That sounds great,” Leaphorn said. It would also have been a great place to end the conversation, just to tell Louisa he’d be there for dinner tonight and say good-bye. But, alas, he kept on talking.

  He told her about Dr. Woody and his project. Even though Louisa’s field was ethnology and, even worse, mythology—on the extreme opposite end of the academic spectrum from microbiology—Louisa had heard of Woody. She said the fellow she’d ask to make the call to Tempe for her sometimes worked with the man, doing blood and tissue studies in his microbiology lab at the NAU.

  Thus the restful evening Leaphorn had yearned for with Louisa had turned into a threesome with Professor Michael Perez invited to join them.

  “He’s one of the brighter ones,” Louisa had said, thereby separating him from a good many of the hard science faculty, whom she found too narrow for her taste. “He’ll be interested in what you’re doing, and maybe he can tell you something helpful.”

  Leaphorn doubted that. In fact, he was wondering if he would ever learn anything helpful about Catherine Pollard. He’d classified what McGinnis had told him as no higher than interesting, and yesterday had left him wondering why he was wasting so much energy on what seemed more and more like a hopeless cause. He’d spent weary hours locating the sheep camp where Anderson Nez resided during the grazing months. As expected, he found the Navajo taboo against talking about the dead adding to the usual taciturnity of rural folks dealing with a citified stranger. Except for a teenager who remembered Catherine Pollard coming by earlier collecting fleas off their sheepdogs, checking rodent burrows and quizzing everyone about where Nez might have been, he learned just about nothing at the camp beyond confirming what Hammar had told him. Yes indeed, Nez had worked part-time for several summers helping Dr. Woody catch rodents.

  He arrived at Louisa’s house just before sunset with the high dry-weather ice crystals dusted across the stratosphere reflecting red. The spot where he usually parked his pickup in her narrow driveway was occupied by a weather-beaten Saab sedan. Its owner was standing beside Louisa in the doorway as Leaphorn came up the steps—a lanky man with a narrow face and a narrow white goatee whose bright blue eyes were inspecting Leaphorn with undisguised curiosity.

  “Joe,” Louisa said. “This is Mike Perez, who’ll tell us both more about molecular biology than we want to know.”

  They shook hands.

  “Or about bacteria, or virology,” Perez said, grinning. “We don’t understand the virus end of it yet, but that doesn’t keep us from pretending we do.”

  Louisa had presumed that Leaphorn, being Navajo, enjoyed mutton so the entree was lamb chops. Having been raised a sheep-camp Navajo, Leaphorn was both thoroughly tired of mutton

  and far too polite to say so. He ate his lamb chop with green mint jelly and listened to Professor Perez discuss Woody’s work with rodents. Two or three questions early in the meal had established that Perez seemed to know absolutely nothing that would connect him to Catherine Pollard. But he knew an awful lot about the career and personality of Dr. Albert Woody.

  “Mike thinks Woody’s going to be one of the great ones,” Louisa said. “Nobel Prize winner, books written about him. The Man Who Saved Humanity. A giant of medical science. That sort of thing.”

  Perez looked embarrassed by that. “Louisa tends to exaggerate. It’s an occupational hazard of mythologists, you know,” he said. “Hercules wasn’t really any stronger than Gorgeous George, and Medusa just had her hair done in cornrows, and Paul Bunyan’s blue ox was really brown. But I do think that Woody has a shot at it. Maybe one chance in a hundred. But that’s better odds than Speed Ball lottery.”

  Louisa offered Leaphorn another chop. “Everyone in the hard sciences is making the headlines these days,” she said. “It’s ‘breakthrough of the month’ season. If it isn’t a new way to clone toe-jam fungus, it’s rediscovering life on Mars.”

  “I saw something about that life on Mars business,” Leaphorn said. “It sounded like that molecules-in-the-asteroid discovery back in the sixties. Didn’t the geologists discredit that?”

  Perez nodded. “This one is a NASA publicity ploy. They’d been having their usual run of fiascoes and blunders, so they dug out an asteroid with the proper minerals in it and conned the reporters again. New generation of science writers, nobody remembered the old story, and it looked better on TV than the footage of astronauts demonstrating their bigger bubblegum bubbles, and that other sophomoric stuff they’re always bragging about.”

  Louisa laughed. “Mike resents NASA because it siphons federal research money away from his microbiology research. It must have some purpose.”

  Perez looked slightly offended. “I don’t resent our
Clowns in Space program. It provides entertainment. But what Woody’s working on is dead serious.”

  “Like recording the blood pressure of prairie dogs,” Louisa said.

  Leaphorn watched her pass Perez the bowl of boiled new potatoes. He had decided to drop out of this conversation and be a spectator.

  Perez took a small potato. Looked at Louisa thoughtfully. Took another one.

  “I just read a paper this morning from one of the microbiologists at NIH,” Perez said, pausing to sample the potato. “NIH.” He grinned at Louisa. “For you mythologists, that’s the National Institutes of Health.”

  Louisa tried to let that pass but didn’t manage it. “Not affiliated with the UN then,” she said. “For you biologists, that’s United Period Nations.”

  Perez laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Peace be with us all. My point is, this guy was reporting dreadful stuff. For example, remember cholera? Virtually wiped out back in the sixties. Well, there were almost a hundred thousand new cases in South America alone in the past two years. And TB, the old ‘white plague,’ which we finally eliminated about 1970. Well, now the world death rate from that is up to three million per annum again—and the pathogen is a DR mycobacterium.”

  Louisa gave Leaphorn a wry look. “I listen to this guy a lot and learn his jargon. He’s trying to say the TB germ has become drug-resistant.”

  “What we’d call the perpetrator,” Leaphorn said.

  “Great subject for dinner conversation,” Louisa said. “Cholera and TB.”

  “More cheerful, though, than telling you about the summer-session papers I’ve been grading,” Perez said. “But I’d like to hear from Mr. Leaphorn about this vanished biologist he’s looking for.”