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, 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."
"There's not much to tell," Leaphorn said. "She's a vector control person for the Indian Health Service, or maybe it's the Arizona Health Department. They sort of operate together. She's been working out of Tuba City. About two weeks ago she drove out in the morning to check on rodent burrows and didn't come back."
He stopped, waiting for Perez to ask the standard questions about boyfriend, stalker, nervous breakdown, job stress, et cetera.
"I'd guess that's why Louisa wanted me to find out whether the Hammar boy was teaching his lab on July eighth," Perez said. "Was that the day?"
Leaphorn nodded.
"Mike Devente handles those lab programs," Perez said. "He said Hammar was sick. Had food poisoning or something."
"Sick," Leaphorn said.
Perez laughed. "Or called in sick, anyway. With teaching assistants, sometimes there's a difference."
Perez sampled his second potato, said: "Is he a suspect?"
"He might be if we had a crime," Leaphorn said. "All we have is a woman who drove off in an Indian Health Service vehicle and didn't come back."
"Louisa said this Pollard lady was checking sources for this latest Yersinia pestis outbreak. Is that why you are interested in Woody?" THE FIRST EAGLE
Leaphorn shook his head. "I never heard of him before today. But they're both interested in prairie dogs, pack rats and so forth and in the same territory. Not many people are, so maybe their paths crossed. Maybe he saw her somewhere. Maybe she told him where she was going."
Perez looked thoughtful. "Yeah," he said.
"They're working in the same field, so he'd probably know about her," Leaphorn said. "But in such a big country it's not likely they'd meet, and if they did, why is she going to tell a virtual stranger that she's going to run off with a government vehicle?"
"Mutual interests, though," Perez said. "They cut pretty deep. How often do you find someone who wants to talk to you about fleas on prairie dogs? And Woody is a downright fanatic about his work. Run him into another human with any knowledge of infectious diseases, immunology, any of that, and he's going to tell 'em a lot more about it than they'll want to know. He's obsessed by it. He thinks the bacteria are going to eliminate mammals unless we do something about it. And if they don't get us, the viruses will. He feels this need to warn everybody about it. Jeremiah complex."
"I can sympathize with that," Leaphorn said. "I'm always talking about what's wrong with the War on Drugs. Until I notice everybody is yawning."
"Same problem with me," Perez said. "I'll bet you're not very interested in discussing molecular mineral transmission through cell walls."
"Only if you explained it so I could understand it." Leaphorn said. He wished he hadn't mentioned Woody to Louisa, wished she hadn't invited Perez, wished they could just be having a relaxing evening together. "And first I guess you'd have to explain why I should care about it."
It was the wrong thing to say, inspiring Dr. Perez to defend pure science and orate on the need to collect knowledge merely for the sake of knowledge. Leaphorn nibbled at the second chop. He down-rated his character for lacking the courage to refuse it. He examined his semihostile reaction to Perez. It had begun when he saw the Saab parked where he liked to park in Louisa's driveway and worsened when he saw the man standing beside her in the doorway, grinning at him. And it clicked up another notch when he noticed that Perez seemed to be looking upon him as a rival. Perez was jealous, he concluded. But then what about Joe Leaphorn? Was Joe Leaphorn jealous? It was an unsettling thought, and he took another bite of the lamb chop to drive it away.