"Flashed?"
"She said like the flash thing on her daughter's little camera."
"What did the man look like when he quit being a witch?"
"She didn't stick around to see," McGinnis said. "But wait a minute. You ain't heard all of it yet. She said when this skinwalker turned around he looked like he had an elephant's trunk coming out of his back. Now how about that?"
"You're right," Leaphorn said. "That's a new one."
"And come to think of it, you can add that one to your Yells Back Butte stories. That's about where Old Lady Notah has her grazing lease."
"Well, now," Leaphorn said, "I think I might want to talk to her about that. I'd like to hear some more details."
"Me, too," McGinnis said, and laughed. "She said the skinwalker looked like a snowman."
Chapter Seven
THEY'D AGREED TO MEET FOR BREAKFAST, early because Janet had to drive south to Phoenix and Chee had to go about as far north to Tuba City. "Let's make it seven on the dot, and not by Navajo time," Janet had said.
There he was, a little before seven, waiting for her at a table in the hotel coffee shop, thinking about the night he'd walked into her apartment in Gallup. He'd been carrying flowers, a videotape of a traditional Navajo wedding and the notion that she could explain away the way she had used him, and—
He didn't want to think about that. Not now and not ever. What could change that she'd gotten information from him and tipped off the law professor, the man she'd told Chee she hated?
Before he'd finally slept, he decided he would simply ask her if they were still engaged. "Janet," he would say. "Do you still want to marry me?" Get right to the point. But this morning, with his head still full of gloomy thoughts, he wasn't so sure. Did he really want her to say yes? He decided she probably would. She had left her high-society inside-the-Beltway life and come back to Indian Country, which said she really loved him. But that would carry with it, in some subtle way, her understanding that he would climb the ladder of success into the social strata where she felt at home.
There was another possibility. She had taken her first reservation job to escape her law professor lover. Did this return simply mean she wanted the man to pursue her again? Chee turned away from that thought and remembered how sweet it had been before she had betrayed him (or, as she saw it, before he had insulted her because of his unreasonable jealousy). He could land a federal job in Washington. Could he be happy there? He thought of himself as a drunk, worthless, dying of a destroyed liver. Was that what had killed Janet's Navajo father? Had he drowned himself in whiskey to escape Janet's ruling-caste mother?
When he'd exhausted all the dark corners that scenario offered, he turned to an alternative. Janet had come back to him. She'd be willing to live on the Big Rez, wife of a cop, living in what her friends would rate as slum housing, where high culture was a second-run movie. In that line of thought, love overcame all. But it wouldn't. She'd yearn for the life she'd given up. He would see it. They'd be miserable.
Finally he thought of Janet as court-appointed defense attorney and of himself as arresting officer. But by the time she walked in, exactly on time, he was back to thinking of her as an Eastern social butterfly, and that thought gave this Flagstaff dining room a worn, grungy look that he'd never noticed before.
He pulled back a chair for her.
"I guess you're used to classier places in Washington," he said, and instantly wished he hadn't so carelessly touched the nerve of their disagreement.
Janet's smile wavered. She looked at him a moment, somberly, and looked away. "I'll bet the coffee is better here."
"It's always fresh anyway," he said. "Or almost always."
A teenage boy delivered two mugs and a bowl filled with single-serving-size containers labeled "non-dairy creamer."
Janet looked over her mug at him. "Jim."
Chee waited. "What?"
"Oh, nothing. I guess this is a time to talk business."
"So we take off our friend hats, and put on adversary hats?"
"Not really," Janet said. "But I'd like to know if you're absolutely certain Robert Jano killed Officer Kinsman."
"Sure I'm certain," Chee said. He felt his face flush—"You must have read the arrest report. I was there, wasn't I? And what do you do with it if I say I'm not sure? Do you tell the jury that even the arresting officer told you that he had reasonable doubts?"
He'd tried to keep the anger out of his voice, but Janet's face told him he hadn't managed it. Another raw nerve touched.
"I'd do absolutely nothing with it," she said. "It's just that Jano swears he didn't do it. I'll be working with him. I'd like to believe him."
"Don't," Chee said. He sipped his coffee and put down the mug. It occurred to him that he hadn't noticed how it tasted. He picked up one of the containers-. "'Non-dairy creamer,'" he read. "Produced, I understand, on non-dairy farms."
Janet managed a smile. "You know what? Doesn't this episode we're having here remind you of the first time we met? Remember? In the holding room at the San Juan County Jail in Aztec. You were trying to keep me from bonding out that old man."
"And you were trying to keep me from talking to him."
"But I got him out." Janet was grinning at him now.
"But not until I got the information I wanted," Chee said.
"Okay," Janet said, still grinning. "We'll call that one a tie. Even though you had to cheat a little."
"How about our next competition," Chee said. "Remember the old alcoholic? You thought Leaphorn and I were picking on him. Until your client pleaded guilty."
"That was a sad, sad case," Janet said. She sipped her coffee. "Some things about it still bother me. Some things about this one bother me, too."
"Like what? Like the fact Jano is a Hopi and the Hopis are peaceful people? Nonviolent?"
"There's that, of course," Janet said. "But everything he told me has a sort of logic to it and a lot of it can be checked out."
"Like what? What can be checked?"
"Like, for example, he said he was going to collect an eagle his kiva needed for a ceremonial. His brothers in is religious group can confirm that. That made it a religious pilgrimage, on which no evil thoughts are allowed."
"Such as thoughts of revenge? Such as getting even with Kinsman for the prior arrest? The kind of thoughts D.A. will want to suggest to the jury if he's going for malice, premeditation. The death penalty stuff."
"Right," she said.
"They would confirm why he was going for the eagle, and the prosecution would concede it," Chee said. |*But how do you prove that deep down Jano didn't want 1 even the score?" Janet shrugged.
"J. D. Mickey will probably state that in his opening. He'll say that Jano had gone onto the Navajo reservation to poach an eagle—a crime in itself. He'll say that Officer Benjamin Kinsman of the Navajo Tribal Police had previously arrested him doing the same crime last year and that Jano got off on some sort of technicality. He'll say that when he saw Kinsman was after him again, Jano was enraged. So instead of releasing the bird, getting rid of the evidence and trying to escape, he let Kinsman catch him, caught him off-guard and brained him."
"Is that the way Mickey is planning it?"
"I'm just guessing," Chee said.
"I have no doubt at all that Mickey will go for death. It would be the first one since the 1994 Congress allowed federal death penalties and there would be a media coverage circus." Janet doctored her coffee with the nondairy creamer, tasted it. "Mickey for Congress," she intoned. "Your law-and-order candidate."
"That's the way I see it," Chee said. "But the courts would have to rule that Kinsman was a federal officer."
"People in criminal justice say he was." Chee shrugged. "Probably."