“Oh,” Krause said. “So you just don’t know yet? But who else could it belong to? There was no one with her.”
“You sure of that?”
“Oh,” Krause said again. “Well, no, I guess I’m not. I didn’t see her that morning. But she didn’t say anything in the note about having company. And she always worked alone. We often do on this kind of work.”
“Any possibility that Hammar could have been with her?”
“Remember? Hammar said he was doing his teaching work back at the university that day.”
“I remember,” Leaphorn said. “That hasn’t been checked yet as far as I know. When the lab tells the police it’s Miss Pollard’s blood in the Jeep, then the alibis get checked.”
“Including mine?”
“Of course. Including everybody’s.”
Leaphorn waited, giving Krause time to amend what he’d said about that morning. But Krause just stood there looking thoughtful.
“Had she cut herself recently? Donated any blood? Any idea where some could be found for the lab?”
Krause closed his eyes, thinking. “She’s careful,” he said. “In this work you have to be. Hard as hell to work with, but skillful. I don’t ever remember her cutting herself in the lab. And in a vector control lab getting cut is a big deal. And if she was a blood donor, she never mentioned it.”
“When you came in that morning, where did you find her note?”
“Right on my desk.”
“You were going to see if you could find it. Any luck?”
“I’ve been busy. I’ll try,” Krause said.
“I’ll need a copy,” Leaphorn said. “Okay?”
“I guess so,” Krause said, and Leaphorn noticed that some of his cordiality had slipped away. “But you’re not a policeman. I’ll bet the cops will want it.”
“They will,” Leaphorn said. “I’d be satisfied with a Xerox. Can you remember exactly what it said? Every word of it?”
“I can remember the meaning. She wouldn’t be in the office that day. She was taking the Jeep and heading southeast, over toward Black Mesa and Yells Back Butte. Working on the Nez plague fatality.”
“Did she say she’d be trapping animals? Prairie dogs or what?”
“Probably. I think so. Either she said it or I took it for granted. I don’t think she was specific, but she’d been working on plague. She still hadn’t pinned down where Mr. Nez got his fatal infection.”
“And that would have been from a prairie dog flea?”
“Well, probably. That Yersinia pestis is a bacteria spread by fleas. But some of the Peromyscus host fleas, too. We got two hundred off one rock squirrel once.”
“Would she have had a PAPRS with her?”
“She carries one with her stuff in the Jeep. Was it still there when they found the vehicle?”
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll ask. And I have one more question. In that note, did she tell you why she planned to quit?”
Krause frowned. “Quit?”
“Her job here.”
“She wasn’t going to quit.”
“Her aunt told me that. In a call Pollard made just before she disappeared, she said she was quitting.”
“Be damned,” Krause said. He stared at Leaphorn, biting his lower lip. “She say why?”
“I think it was because she couldn’t get along with you.”
“That’s true enough,” Krause said. “A hardheaded woman.”
Summer had arrived with dreadful force in Phoenix, and the air conditioning in the Federal Courthouse Building had countered the dry heat outside its double glass windows by producing a clammy chill in the conference room. Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney J. D. Mickey had assembled the assorted forces charged with maintaining law and order in America’s high desert country to decide whether to go for the first death penalty under the new congressional act that authorized such penalties for certain crimes committed on federal reservations.
Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police was among those assembled, but being at the bottom level of the hierarchy, he was sitting uncomfortably in a metal folding chair against the wall with an assortment of state cops, deputy sheriffs, and low-ranking deputy U.S. marshals. It had been clear to Chee from the onset of the meeting that the decision had been long since made. Mr. Mickey was serving on some sort of temporary appointment and intended to make the most of it while it lasted. The timing of the death of Benjamin Kinsman opened a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity. National—or at least congressional district regional—publicity was there for the grabbing. He’d go for the historic first. What was happening here was known in upper-level civil service circles as “the CYA maneuver,” intended to Cover Your Ass by diluting the blame when things went wrong.
“All right then,” Mickey was saying. “Unless anyone has more questions, the policy will be to charge this homicide as a capital crime and impanel a jury for the death sentence. I guess I don’t have to remind any of you people here that this will mean a lot more work for all of us.”
The woman in the chair to Chee’s right was a young Kiowa-Comanche-Polish-Irish cop wearing the uniform of the Law Enforcement Services of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She snorted, “Us!” and muttered, “Means more work for us, all right. Not him. He means he guesses he don’t have to remind us he’s running for Congress as the law-and-order candidate.”
Now Mickey was outlining the nature of this extra work. He introduced Special Agent in Charge John Reynald. Agent Reynald would be coordinating the effort, calling ‘the signals, running the investigation.
“There’ll be no problem getting the conviction,” Mickey said. “We caught the perpetrator literally red-handed with the victim. What makes it absolutely iron-clad is having Jano’s blood mixed with the victim’s on both of their clothing. The best the defense can come up with is a story that the eagle he was poaching slashed him.”
This produced a chuckle.
“Trouble is, the eagle didn’t cooperate. There wasn’t a trace of Jano’s blood on it. What we’ll need to get the death penalty is evidence of malice. We’ll want witnesses who heard Mr. Jano talking about his previous arrest by Officer Kinsman. We need to find people who can remember hearing him talk about revenge. Talking about how badly Kinsman handled him during that first arrest. Even bad-mouthing Navajos in general. That sort of thing. Check out the bars, places like that.”
“Where’d this jerk come from?” the LES woman asked Chee. “He sure doesn’t know much about Hopis.”
“Indiana, I think,” Chee said. “But I guess he’s been in Arizona long enough to establish residency for a federal office election.”’
Mickey was closing down the meeting, shaking hands with the proper people. He stopped Chee at the door.
“Stick around a minute,” Mickey said. “I want to have a word or two with you.”
Chee stuck around. So did Reynald and Special Agent Edgar Evans, who closed the door behind the last departee.
“There’re several points I want to make,”
Mickey said. “Point one is that the victim in this case may not have had a perfect personal record, you know what I mean, being a healthy young man and all. If there’s any talk going around among his fellow officers that the defense might use to dirty his name, then I want that stopped. Going for the death penalty, you understand why.”
“Sure,” Chee said, and nodded.
“I’ll get right to the second point then,” Mickey said. “The gossip has it that you’re engaged to this Janet Pete. The defense attorney. Either that, or used to be.”
Mickey had phrased it as a question. He and Reynald and Evans waited for an answer.
Chee said: “Really?”
Mickey frowned. “In a case like this one, in a touchy business like this, culturally sensitive, the press looking over our shoulders, we have to watch out for anything that might look like a conflict of interest.”
“That sounds sensible to me,” Chee said.<
br />
“I don’t think you’re understanding me,” Mickey said.
“Yes, sir,” Chee said. “I understand you.”
Mickey waited. So did Chee. Mickey’s face turned slightly pink.
“Well, then, goddamnit, what’s with this gossip? You got something going with Ms. Pete or what?”
Chee smiled. “I had a wise old maternal grandmother who used to teach me things. Or try to teach me when I was smart enough to listen to her,” Chee said. “She told me that only a damn fool pays attention to gossip.”
Mickey’s complexion turned redder. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get one thing straight. This case is about the murder of a law officer in the performance of his duty. One of your own men. You’re part of the prosecution team. Ms. Pete runs the defense team. You’re no lawyer, but you’ve been in the enforcement business long enough to know how things work. We got the disclosure rule, so the criminal’s team gets to know what we’re putting into evidence.”
He paused, staring at Chee. “But sometimes justice requires that you don’t show your hole card. Sometimes you have to keep some of your plans and your strategy in the closet. You understand what I’m telling you?”
“I think you’re telling me that if this gossip is true, I shouldn’t talk in my sleep,” Chee said. “Is that about right?”
Mickey grinned. “Exactly.”
Chee nodded. He’d noticed that Reynald was following this conversation intently. Agent Evans looked bored.
“And I might add,” Mickey added, “that if somebody else talks in their sleep, you might just give a listen.”
“My grandmother had something else to say about gossip,” Chee said. “She said it doesn’t have a long shelf life. Sometimes you hear the soup’s on the table and it’s too hot to eat, and by the time the news gets to you it’s in the freezer.”
Mickey’s beeper began chirping as Chee was ending that observation. Whatever the call was about, it broke up the cluster without the ritual shaking of hands that convention required.
Chee hadn’t lucked into a shady place to leave his car. He used his handkerchief to open the door without burning his hand, started the engine, rolled down all the windows to let the ovenlike heat escape, turned the air conditioner to maximum and then slid off the scorching upholstery to stand outside until the interior became tolerable. It gave him a little time to plan what he’d do. He’d call Joe Leaphorn from here to see if anything new had developed. He’d call his office to learn what awaited him there, and then he’d head for the north end of the Chuska Mountains, the landscape of his boyhood, and the sheep camp where Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai spent his summers.
From Phoenix, from almost anywhere, that meant a hell of a long drive. But Chee was a man of faith. He did his damnedest to maintain within himself the ultimate value of his people, the sense of peace, harmony and beauty Navajos call hozho. He badly needed Hosteen Nakai’s counsel on how to deal with the death of a man and the death of an eagle.
Hosteen Nakai was Chee’s maternal grand-uncle, which gave him special status in Navajo tradition. He had given Chee his real, or war, name, which was “Long Thinker,” a name revealed only to those very close to you and used only for ceremonial purposes. Circumstances, and the early death of Chee’s father, had magnified Nakai’s importance to Chee—making him mentor, spiritual adviser, confessor and friend. By trade he was a rancher and a shaman whose command of the Blessing Way ceremonial and a half dozen other curing rituals was so respected that he taught them to student hataalii at Navajo Community College. If anyone could tell Chee the wise way to handle the messy business of Kinsman, Jano and Mickey, it would be Nakai.
More specifically, Nakai would advise him on how he could deal with the problem posed by the first eagle. If it existed and he caught it, it would die. He had no illusions about its fate in the laboratory. There was a chant to be sung before hunting, asking the prey to know it was respected and to understand the need for it to die. But if Jano was lying, then the eagle he would try to lure to that blind would die for nothing. Chee would be violating the moral code of the Dine, who did not take lightly the killing of anything.
No telephone line came within miles of the Nakai summer hogan, but Chee drove along Navajo Route 12 with not a doubt that his granduncle would be there. Where else would he be? It was summer. His flock would be high in the mountain pastures. The coyotes would be waiting in the fringes of the timber, as they always were. The sheep would need him. Nakai was always where he was needed. So he would be in his pasture tent near his sheep.
But Hosteen Nakai wasn’t in his tent up in the high meadows.
It was late twilight when Chee pulled his truck off the entry track and onto the hard-packed earth of the Nakai place. His headlight beams swept across the cluster of trees beside the hogan. They also caught the form of a man, propped on pillows in a portable bed, the sort medical supply companies rent. Chee’s heart sank. His granduncle was never sick. Having the bed outside was an ominous sign.
Blue Lady was standing in the hogan doorway, looking out at Chee as he climbed out of the truck, recognizing him, running toward him, saying: “How good. How good. He wanted you to come. I think he sent out his thoughts to you, and you heard him.”
Blue Lady was Hosteen’s second wife, named for the beauty of the turquoise she wore with her velvet blouse when her kinaalda ceremony initiated her into womanhood. She was the younger sister of Hosteen Nakai’s first wife, who had died years before Chee was born. Since Navajo tradition is matrilineal and the man joined his bride’s family, practice favored widowers marrying one of their sisters-in-law, thereby maintaining the same residence and the same mother-in-law.
Nakai, being most traditional and already studying to be a shaman, had honored that tradition.
Blue Lady was the only Nakai grandmother Chee had known.
Now she was hugging Chee to her. “He wanted to see you before he dies,” she said.
“Dies? What is it? What happened?” It didn’t seem possible to Chee that Hosteen Nakai could be dying. Blue Lady had no answer to that question. She led him over to the trees and motioned him into a rocking chair beside the bed.
“I will get the lantern,” she said.
Hosteen Nakai was studying him. “Ah,” he said, “Long Thinker has come to talk to me. I had hoped for that.”
Chee had no idea what to say. He said: “How are you, my father? Are you sick?”
Nakai produced a raspy laugh, which provoked a racking cough. He fumbled on the bed cover, retrieved a plastic device, inserted it into his nostrils and inhaled. The tube connected to it disappeared behind the bed. Connected, Chee presumed, to an oxygen tank. Nakai was trying to breathe deeply, his lungs making an odd sound. But he was smiling at Chee.
“What happened to you?” Chee asked.
“I made a mistake,” Nakai said. “I went to a bilagaana doctor at Farmington. He told me I was sick. They put me in the hospital and then they broke my ribs, and cut out around in there and put me back together.” His voice was trailing off as he finished that, forcing a pause. When he had breath again, he chuckled. “I think they left out some parts. Now I have to get my air through this tube.”
Blue Lady was hanging a propane lantern on the limb overhanging the head of the bed.
“He has lung cancer,” she said. “They took out one lung, but it had already spread to the other one.”
“And all sorts of other places, too, that you don’t want to even know about,” Nakai said, grinning. “When I die, my chindi will be awful mad. He’ll be full of malignant tumors. That’s why I made them move my bed out here. I don’t want that chindi to be infecting this hogan. I want it out here where the wind will blow it away.”
“When you die, it will be because you just got too old to want to live anymore,” Chee said. He put his hand on Nakai’s arm. Where he had always felt hard muscle, he now felt only dry skin between his palm and the bone. “It will be a long time from now. And remember what Changing Wom
an taught the people: If you die of natural old age, you don’t leave a chindi behind.”
“You young people—” Nakai began, but a grimace cut off the words. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the muscles of his face clenched and tightened. Blue Lady was at his side, holding a glass of some liquid. She gripped his hand.
“Time for the pain medicine,” she said.
He opened his eyes. “I must talk a little first,” he said. “I think he came to ask me something.”
“You talk a little later. The medicine will give you some time for that.” And Blue Lady raised his head from the pillow and gave him the drink. She looked at Chee. “Some medicine they gave him to let him sleep. Morphine maybe,” she said. “It used to work very good. Now it helps a little.”
“I should let him rest,” Chee said.
“You can’t,” she said. “Besides, he was waiting for you.”
“For me?”
“Three people he wanted to see before he goes,” she said. “The other two already came.”
She adjusted the oxygen tube back into Nakai’s nostrils, dampened his forehead with a cloth, bent low and put her lips to his cheek, and walked back into the hogan.
Chee stood looking down. at Nakai, remembering boyhood, remembering the winter stories in his hogan, the summer stories at the fire beside the sheep-camp tent, remembering the time Nakai had caught him drunk, remembering kindness and wisdom. Then Nakai, eyes still closed, said: “Sit down. Be easy.”
Chee sat.
“Now, tell me why you came.”
“I came to see you.”
“No. No. You didn’t know I was sick. You are busy. Some reason brought you here. The last time it was about marrying a girl, but if you married her you didn’t invite me to do the ceremony. So I think you didn’t do it.” Nakai’s words came slowly, so softly Chee leaned forward to hear.
“I didn’t marry her,” Chee said.
“Another woman problem then?”
“No,” Chee said.
The morphine was having its effect. Nakai was relaxing a little. “So you came all the way up here to tell me you have no problems to talk to me about. You are the only contented man in all of Dinetah.”
The First Eagle Page 19