Well, now he'd find out. The cloud of dust coming down the road from the north would be the Legendary Lieutenant. Chee got up, put on his hat, and walked down the hill to where his patrol car had been baking in the sun beside the road. The pickup pulled up beside it and two people emerged—Leaphorn and a stocky woman wearing a straw hat, jeans, and a man's shirt.
"Louisa," Leaphorn said. "This is Lieutenant Chee. I think you met him in Window Rock. Jim, Professor Bourebonette."
"Yes," Chee said as they shook hands, "it's good to see you again." But it wasn't. Not now. He just wanted to know why Leaphorn was looking for him. He didn't want any complications.
"I hope this isn't causing you any inconvenience, Leaphorn said. "I told Dineyahze we'd just wait there at the station if you were coming in."
"No problem," Chee said, and stood there waiting for Leaphorn to get on with it.
"I'm still trying to find Catherine Pollard," Leaphorn said. "I wondered if you've turned up anything."
"Nothing helpful," Chee said.
"She wasn't here the day Kinsman was attacked?"
"Nope. At least, she wasn't until later in the day," Chee said. "I don't have to tell you how long it takes to get an ambulance into a place like this. By the time the criminalistics team got its photographs and all that, it was late afternoon. But she could have shown up after that."
Leaphorn was waiting for him to add something. But what could he add?
"Oh," Chee said. "Of course, she could have gotten here earlier."
That seemed to be what Leaphorn wanted him to think. The Legendary Lieutenant nodded.
"I ran into Cowboy Dashee at Cameron today," Leaphorn said. "He'd heard I was looking for Pollard. Knew about the reward we were offering for the Jeep she was driving. He told me a woman who keeps some goats up here had seen a Jeep going up that old road to the Tijinney place before sunrise that morning. He asked me to pass it along to you. In case it might be useful."
"He did?"
Leaphorn nodded. "Yeah. He said you had a tough Orie with this Kinsman homicide. He said he wished he could help you."
"Jano is his cousin," Chee said. "I think they were childhood buddies. Cowboy thinks I've got the wrong man. Or so I hear."
"Well, anyway, he thought you might want to talk to the woman. He told me they call her Old Lady Notah," Leaphorn said.
"Old Lady Notah," Chee said. "I think I saw some of her goats up there by the butte today. I'll go talk to her."
"Might be wasting your time," Leaphorn said. "Or might not be," Chee said. He looked back toward the butte. "And, hey," he added. "Would you tell Cowboy I said thanks?"
"Sure," Leaphorn said.
Chee was still looking away from Leaphorn. "Did Cowboy have any other tips?"
"Well, he has his own theory of the crime." Chee turned. "Like what?"
"Like Catherine Pollard did it." Chee frowned, thinking about it. "Had he worked out the motive? The opportunity? All that?"
"More or less," Leaphorn said. "He has her coming up here on her vector control job. She runs into Kinsman, he makes a move on her. She resists. They struggle. She bangs him on the head and flees the scene." Leaphorn gave Chee a while to consider that. Then he said: "But then why didn't you see her driving out while you were driving in?"
"That's what I was thinking. And if she's on the run, why did her family—" He stopped, looking abashed.
Leaphorn grinned. "If Cowboy is guessing right, the family hired me to look for her thinking that would make it look like she'd been abducted. Or killed or something like that."
"That doesn't make sense," Chee said. "Well, it sort of does, actually," Leaphorn said. "The lady who hired me struck me as a mighty shrewd woman. I told her I didn't see how I could be of any help. She didn't seem to care."
Chee nodded. "Yeah, I guess so. I can see it."
"Except how did she get the Jeep out of here? The TV commercials make them look like they can drive up cliffs, but they can't."
"There's a way, though," Chee said. "There's another way in here if you don't mind doing a little scrambling. An old trail comes up the other side of Yells Back toward Black Mesa. I think the lady with the goats might use it. You could drive the Jeep up there, park it, climb over the saddle, do your deed, and then climb back over the saddle and drive out on the goat path."
Chee stopped. "There's trouble with that, though."
"You mean she wouldn't do that unless she knew in advance that she was going to need an escape route?"
"Exactly," Chee said. "How could she have known that?"
Louisa had been listening, looking thoughtful. Now she said: "Do you professionals object if an amateur butts in?"
"Be our guest," Leaphorn said.
"I find myself wondering just why Pollard was coming up here anyway," Louisa said. She looked at Leaphorn. "Didn't you tell me she was looking for the place where Nez was infected? Where the flea bit him?"
"Right," Leaphorn said, looking puzzled.
"And isn't the period between infection and death—I mean in cases where treatment doesn't effect a cure—doesn't that range just a couple of weeks?" Louisa made one of those modifying gestures with her hands. "I mean, usually. Statistically. Often enough so that when vector control people are looking for the source, they're looking for places the victim had been during that period. And what Miss Pollard was writing in her notes suggested that she was always trying to find out where the victim was in that period before their death."
"Ah," Leaphorn said. "I see."
Chee, whose interest in plague and vector control people who hunted it extended back only a few minutes, had little idea what any of this was about.
He said: "You mean she knew Nez couldn't have been around Yells Back in that time frame? How would—?"
"Pollard's notes show where he was. They show—" She stopped in midsentence. "Just a minute. I don't want to be wrong about this. The book's in the car."
She found it on the dashboard, extracted it, leaned against the fender, and flipped through the pages.
"Here," she said. "Under her Anderson Nez heading. It shows that he was visiting his brother in Encino, California. He came home to his mother's hogan four miles southwest of Copper Mine Trading Post on June twenty-third. The next afternoon, he left to go to his job with Woody near Goldtooth."
"June twenty-fourth?" Leaphorn said thoughtfully. "Right?"
"And six days later he dies in the hospital at Flag." She checked back in the notes. "Actually more like five days. Pollard says in here somewhere he died just after midnight."
"Wow," Leaphorn said. "Are we sure he died of plague?"
"Slow down," Jim Chee said. "Explain this date business to me."
Louisa shook her head, looking doubtful. "I guess the point is that Pollard knows a lot more about plague than we do. So she would have known that Nez didn't get his infected flea up here. Plague doesn't kill that fast. So she didn't have any reason to come up here flea hunting when she did."
"That's the question," Leaphorn said. "If that wasn't her reason, what was? Or did she tell Krause she was coming, and not come? Or did Krause lie about it?"
Louisa was reading from another section of the notebook. She held up her hand.