What would this prove? He knew, but he didn’t want to admit it or think about it. And he wouldn’t have to until Agent Evans arrived to pick up the bird. And not even then, if Evans’s conduct didn’t somehow tip him off.
Edgar Evans arrived at eleven minutes before noon. Through his open office door Chee watched him come in, watched Claire point him to the eagle cage in the corner behind her, watched her point him to Chee’s office.
“Come in,” Chee said. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll need you to sign this,” Evans said, and handed Chee a triplicate form. “It certifies that you transferred evidence to me. And I give you this form, which certifies that I received it.”
“This makes it awful hard for anything to get lost,” Chee said. “Do you always do this?”
Evans stared at Chee. “No,” he said. “Not often.”
Chee signed the paper.
“You need to be careful with that bird,” he said. “It’s vicious and that beak is like a knife. I have a blanket out in the car you can put over it to keep it quiet.”
Evans didn’t comment.
He was putting the cage in the backseat of his sedan when Chee handed him the blanket. He spread it over the cage.
“I thought Reynald had decided against this,” Chee said. “What made him change his mind?”
Evans slammed the car door, turned to Chee.
“You mind if I pat you down?”
“Why?” Chee asked, but he held out his hands.
Evans quickly, expertly felt along his belt line, checked the front of his shirt, patted his pockets, stepped back.
“You know why, you bastard. To make sure you’re not wearing a wire.”
“A wire?”
“You’re not as stupid as you look,” Evans said. “And not half as smart as you think you are.”
With that, Evans got into his car and left Jim Chee standing in the parking lot looking after him, knowing which tactic Janet had used and feeling immensely sad.
For Leaphorn it was a frustrating day. He’d stopped at Chee’s office and picked up the list. He studied it again and saw nothing on it that told him anything. Maybe Krause would see something interesting. Krause wasn’t at his office and the note pinned to his door said: “Gone to Inscription House, then Navajo Mission. Back soon.” Not very soon, Leaphorn decided, since the round trip would be well over a hundred miles. So he drove to Yells Back Butte, parked, climbed over the saddle and began his second hunt for Old Lady Notah.
After much crashing around the goats again, twenty-one in all unless he had counted some twice (easy to do with goats) or missed some others, he didn’t find Mrs. Notah. Recrossing the saddle required much huffing and puffing, a couple of rest stops, and produced a resolution to watch his diet and get more exercise. Back at his truck, he drank about half the water in the canteen he’d carelessly left behind, and then just rested awhile. This cul-de-sac walled in by the cliffs of Yells Back and the mass of Black Mesa was a blank spot for all radio reception except, for reasons far beyond Leaphorn’s savvy in electronics, KNDN, Gallup’s Navajo-language Voice of the Navajo Nation.
He listened to a little country-western music and the Navajo-language open-mike segment, and while he listened he sorted out his thoughts. What would he tell Mrs. Vanders when he called her this evening? Not much, he decided. Why was he feeling illogically happy? Because the tension was gone with Louisa. No more feeling that he was betraying Emma or himself. Or that Louisa was expecting more from him than he could possibly deliver. She’d made it clear. They were friends. How had she put it about marriage? She’d tried it once and didn’t care for it. But enough of that. Back to Cathy Pollard’s Jeep. That presented a multitude of puzzles.
The Jeep had come here early, as the note from Pollard suggested. Jano said he had seen it arrive, and he had no reason Leaphorn could think of to lie about that. It must have left during the brief downpour of hail and rain, not long after Chee had arrested Jano. Earlier, Chee would have heard it. Later, it wouldn’t have left the tire prints in the arroyo sand where it had been abandoned. So that left the question of who was driving it, and what he or she had done after parking it. No one had come down the arroyo to pick up the driver. But an accomplice might have parked near the point where the access road crossed the arroyo and waited for the Jeep’s driver to walk back to join him or her along the rocky slope.
That required some sort of partnership, not a sudden panicky impulse. Leaphorn’s imagination couldn’t produce a motive for such a conspiracy. But he came up with another possibility. No cinch, but a possibility. He started the engine and drove off in search of Richard Krause.
A stopoff at Tuba showed Krause’s office still empty with the same note on the door. Leaphorn refilled his gasoline tank and started driving. Krause wasn’t at Inscription House. The woman who responded to Leaphorn’s knock at the Navajo Mission office door said the Health Department man had left about thirty minutes earlier. Going where? He hadn’t said.
So Leaphorn made the long, long drive back to Tuba City, writing off the day as a loser, watching the sunset backlight the towering thunderheads on the western horizon and turn them into a kind of beauty only nature can produce. By the time he reached his motel, he was more than ready to call it quits. Calling Mrs. Vanders could wait. Tomorrow he’d rise earlier and catch Krause before he left his office.
Wrong again. The note on the door the next morning suggested that Krause would be working in the arroyo west of the Shonto Landing Strip. An hour and sixty miles later Leaphorn spotted Krause’s truck from the road, and Krause on his knees apparently peering at something on the ground. He heard Leaphorn coming, got to his feet, dusted off his pant legs.
“Collecting fleas,” he said, and shook hands.
“It looked like you were blowing into that hole,” Leaphorn said.
“Good eye,” Krause said. “Fleas detect your breath. If something is killing their host mammal and they’re looking for a new host, they’re very sensitive to that. You blow into the hole and they come to the mouth of the tunnel.” He grinned at Leaphorn. “Some say they prefer garlic on your breath, but I like chili.” He stared at the tunnel month. Pointed. “See ’em?”
Leaphorn squatted and stared. “Nope,” he said.
“Little black specks. Put your hand down there. They’ll jump on it.”
“No thanks,” Leaphorn said.
“Well, what can I do for you?” Krause said. “And what’s new?”
He removed a flexible metal rod from the pickup bed and unfurled the expanse of white flannel cloth attached to the end of it.
“I’d like you to take a look at this list of stuff found in the Jeep,” Leaphorn said. “See if it’s missing anything that should be there, or if there’s anything on it that tells you anything.”
Krause had folded the flannel around the rod. Now he pushed it slowly into the rodent hole, deeper and deeper. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll just give ’em a minute to collect on the flannel. Then when I pull it out, the flannel pulls off the rod and folds over the other way and traps a bunch of fleas.”
Krause slipped the flannel off the rod, dropped it into a Ziploc bag, closed it, then checked himself for fleas, found one on his wrist, and disposed of it.
Leaphorn handed him the list. Krause put on a pair of bifocals and studied it. “Kools,” he said. “Cathy didn’t smoke so those must be from somebody else.”
“I think it notes they were old,” Leaphorn said. “Could have been there for months.”
“Two shovels?” Krause said. “Everybody carries one for the digging we do. Wonder why she had the other one?”
“Let me see it,” Leaphorn said, and took the list. Under “on floor behind front seat” it listed “long-handled shovel.” Under “rear luggage space,” it also listed “long-handled shovel.”
“Maybe a mistake,” Krause said, and shrugged. “listing the same shovel twice.”
“Maybe,” Leaphorn said, but he doubted it.
“Sounds like a poison,” Leaphorn said.
“It damn sure is,” Krause said. “We used to use it to clean out infected burrows. You blow that dust down it and it wipes out everything. Pack rats, rattlesnakes, burrowing owls, earthworms, spiders, fleas, anything alive. But it’s dangerous to handle. Now we use ‘the pill.’ It’s phostoxin, and we just put it in the ground at the mouth of a burrow and it gets the job done.”
“So where would she get this cyanide stuff?”
“We still have a supply of it. It’s on a shelf back in our supply closet.”
“She’d have access to it?”
“Sure,” Krause said. “And look at this.” He pointed to the next entry: “’Air tank with hose and nozzle.’ That’s what we used to use to blow the cyanide dust back into the burrow. It was in the storeroom, too.”
“What do you think it means—her having that in the Jeep?”
“First, it means she was breaking the rules. She doesn’t take that stuff out without checking with me and explaining what she wants it for, and why she’s not using the phostoxin instead.
And second, she wouldn’t be using it unless she wanted to really sterilize burrows. Zap ’em. Something big like prairie dogs. Not just to kill fleas.”
He returned the list to Leaphorn.
“Anything else on there you’d wonder about?”
“No, but there’s something that should be on that list that isn’t. Her PAPRS.”
“You always have that with you?”
“No, but you’d damn sure have it if you were going to use that calcium cyanide dust.” Krause made a wry face. “They say the warning is you smell almonds, but the trouble is, by the time you smell it, it’s already too late.”
“Not something you’d use casually then.”
Krause laughed. “Hardly. And before I forget it, I found that note Cathy left me. Made a copy for you.” He fished out his wallet, extracted a much-folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Leaphorn. “I don’t see anything helpful on it, though.”
The note was written in Pollard’s familiar semilegible scrawl:
Boss—Heard stuff about Nez infection at Flag. Think we’ve been lied to. Going toYells Back, collect fleas and find out—Will fill you in on it when I get back. Pollard.
Leaphorn looked up from the note at Krause, who was watching his reaction, looking penitent.
“Knowing what I know now, I can see I should have got worried quicker when she didn’t get back. But, hell, she was always doing things and then explaining later. If at all. For example, I didn’t know where she was the day before. She didn’t tell me she was driving down to Flag. Or why.” He shrugged, shook his head. “So I just thought she’d gone tearing off somewhere else.”
“I wonder why she didn’t tell you she was quitting,” Leaphorn said.
Krause stared at him. “I don’t think she was. Did she tell her aunt why?”
“I gather it was something about you.”
Krause had spent too many summers in the sun to look pale. But he did look tense.
“What about me?”
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “She didn’t get specific.”
“Well, we never did get along very well,” Krause said, and began putting his equipment in the truck. The legend on his sweat-soaked T-shirt said, SUPPORT SCIENCE: HUG A HERPETOLOGIST.
Two telephone notes were stuck on his spindle when Chee got to his office. One was from Leaphorn, asking Chee to call him at his motel. The second was from Janet Pete. It said: “The eagle’s being tested today. Please call me.”
Chee wasn’t quite ready for that. He dialed Leaphorn’s number first. Yesterday the Legendary Lieutenant had wanted to show Krause the list of stuff found in the Jeep. Maybe that had developed into something.
“You had breakfast?” Leaphorn asked.
“I’m not much for eating breakfast,” Chee said. “What’s on your mind?”
“How about joining me for coffee then at the motel diner? I want to go back out to Yells Back Butte. Can you get away? I think I should have an officer along.”
An officer along! “Oh,” Chee said. He felt elation, quickly tinged with a little disappointment. The Legendary Lieutenant had done it again. Had unraveled the puzzle of who had abandoned the Jeep. Had maintained the legend. Had again out-thought Jim Chee. “Sure. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Leaphorn was sitting at a window table, putting butter on a stack of pancakes. He put the note on the table in front of Chee and smoothed it out.
“I showed the list to Krause,” he said. “There were a couple or three surprises.”
“Oh,” Chee said, feeling slightly defensive. He hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
“Mostly technical stuff way over our heads,” Leaphorn said. “This blower here, for example, and the container of calcium cyanide. I figured that was just one of their flea killers. Turns out they don’t use it these days except in some sort of unusual circumstances.” He looked up at Chee. “Like, let’s say they needed to wipe out a whole colony of prairie dogs.”
Chee leaned back in his chair, understanding again why he admired Leaphorn instead of resenting him. The man was giving him a chance to figure it out for himself. And of course he had.
“Like, let’s say, the colony Dr. Woody is working with.”
Leaphorn was grinning. “That occurred to me, too,” he said. “I don’t think Woody would have wanted that to happen.”
Chee nodded. And waited. He could tell from Leaphorn’s expression that more was coming.
“And then there’s this,” Leaphorn said. “I asked Krause why there would be two of these long-handled shovels in that Jeep. He said everybody carried one because of the digging they do, besides getting stuck in the sand. But just one.”
Chee leaned back again, considering that. “Be useful to have one if you wanted to dig a grave.”
Leaphorn nodded. “That also occurred to me. Maybe toss it in, not knowing there was already one in the Jeep.”
“So somewhere between Yells Back Butte and where the Jeep was left we might be checking on easy places to dig and looking for freshly dug dirt.”
“I’d suggest that,” Leaphorn said.
“I’m also asking people to check for bicycle tracks along the Goldtooth road. But there’s not much chance they’ll find any. Too dry.”
This caused Leaphorn’s eyebrows to rise. “Bicycle?”
“I noticed Woody had a bicycle rack bolted to the back of that mobile lab truck,” Chee said. “There wasn’t a bike on it.”
Leaphorn slammed his hand on the tabletop, rattling his plate. “I must be getting old,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“It wouldn’t be a hard bike ride,” Chee said, “from where the Jeep was left back to Yells Back. He could have stepped out of the Jeep onto rocks, lifted the bike out, and carried it back to the road.”
“Sure,” Leaphorn said. “Sure he could. But it would have been clumsy to carry the shovel, too. I’ve had my brain turned off.”
Chee doubted that. It reminded Chee of watching the Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn on television. Seeing the big brother overlook an egg so the little kid could find it.
The waitress arrived and offered refills. But now both of them were in a hurry.
They took Chee’s patrol car, roared down Arizona 264, turned right onto the road to Goldtooth, jolted over the washboard bumps.
“Seems like old times,” Leaphorn said. “Us working together.”
“You miss it? I mean, being a cop?”
“I miss this part of it. And the people I worked with. I don’t miss the paperwork. I’ll bet you wouldn’t, either.”
“I hate that part of it,” Chee said. “I’m not good at it, either.”
; “You’re acting now,” Leaphorn said. “Usually after you’ve done that a while, they offer you the permanent position. Would you take it?”
Chee drove for a while without answering. Clouds were building up already, fleets of great white ships against the dark blue sky. By late evening yesterday they had towered high enough to produce a few drops of rain here and there. By this afternoon the monsoon rains might actually begin. Long overdue.
“No,” Chee said. “I guess not.”
“When I heard you’d applied for the promotion, I sort of wondered why,” Leaphorn said.
Chee glanced at him, saw only a profile. Leaphorn was staring at the clouds. “I imagine you could make a pretty good guess. Part prestige, mostly the money’s better.”
“What do you need it for? You still live in that rusty old trailer, don’t you?”
Chee decided to turn the cross-examination around.
“You think they’ll offer me the job?”
Long silence. “Probably not.”
“Why’s that?”
“I suspect the powers that be will get the impression that you would not be a proper team player. You wouldn’t cooperate well with other law enforcement agencies,” Leaphorn said.
“Any agency in particular?”
“Well, maybe the FBI.”
“Oh,” Chee said. “What have you heard?”
“It has been said that the FBI would hesitate to handle sensitive business with you over the telephone.”
Chee laughed. “Man, oh man,” he said. “How fast the word does travel. Did you hear that this morning?”
“Last night already,” Leaphorn said.
The First Eagle Page 22