She laughed. "You tell McGinnis that?"
"Yeah, and he said, 'You're supposed to be the goddamn detective. You figure it out.' So I figured out there wasn't any bucket. You notice I never came up here with my pick and shovel to check it out."
"I don't know," she said. "You're the tidiest man I ever knew. Just the kind of looter who'd push the dirt back in the hole."
They found Dr. Albert Woody's van just where Chee had said it would be. Woody was standing in the doorway watching them park. To Leaphorn's surprise, he looked delighted to see them.
"Two visitors on the same day," he said as they got out of the truck. "I've never been this popular."
"We won't take much of your time," Leaphorn said. "This is Dr. Louisa Bourebonette, I'm Joe Leaphorn and I presume you must be Dr. Albert Woody."
"Exactly," Woody said. "And glad to meet you. What can I do for you?"
"We're trying to locate a woman named Catherine Pollard. She's a vector control specialist with the Arizona Health Department, and—"
"Oh, yes," Woody said. "I met her over near Red Lake some time ago. She was looking for sick rodents and infected fleas. Looking for the source of a plague case. In a way we're in the same line of work."
He looked very excited, Leaphorn thought. Wired. Ready to burst. As if he were high on amphetamines.
"Have you seen her around here?"
"No," Woody said. "Just over at the Thriftway station. We were both buying gasoline. She noticed my van and introduced herself."
"She's working out of that temporary laboratory in Tuba City," Leaphorn said. "On the morning of July eighth she left a note for her boss saying she was coming up here to collect rodents."
"There was a Navajo Tribal policeman up here talking to me this morning," Woody said. "He asked me about her, too. Come in and let me give you something cold to drink."
"We didn't intend to take a lot of your time."
Leaphorn said.
"Come in. Come in. I've just had something great happen. I need somebody to tell it to. And Dr. Bourebonette, what is your specialty?"
"I'm not a physician," Louisa said. "I'm a cultural anthropologist at Northern Arizona University. I believe you know Dr. Perez there."
"Perez?" Woody said. "Oh, yes. In the lab. He's done some work for me."
"He's a great fan of yours," Louisa said. "In fact, you're his nominee for the next Nobel Prize in medicine." Woody laughed. "Only if I'm guessing right about the internal working of rodents. And only if somebody in the National Center for Emerging Viruses doesn't get it first. But I'm forgetting my manners. Come in. Come in. I want to show you something."
Woody was twisting his hands together, grinning broadly, as they went past him through the doorway.
It was almost cold inside, the air damp and clammy and smelling of animals, formaldehyde, and an array of other chemicals that linger forever in memory. The sound was another mixture—the motor of the air-conditioner engine on the roof, the whir of fans, the scrabbling feet of rodents locked away somewhere out of sight. Woody seated Louisa in a swivel chair near his desk, motioned Leaphorn to a stool beside a white plastic working surface, and leaned his lanky body against the door of what Leaphorn presumed was a floor-to-ceiling refrigerator.
"I've got some good news to share with Dr. Perez," he said. "You can tell him we've found the key to the dragon's cave."
Leaphorn shifted his gaze from Woody to Louisa. Obviously she didn't understand that any better than he did.
"Will he know what that means?" she asked. "He understands you're hunting for a solution to drug-resistant pathogens. Do you mean you've found it?"
Woody looked slightly abashed.
"Something to drink," he said, "and then I'll try to explain myself." He opened the refrigerator door, fished out an ice bucket, extracted three stainless steel cups from an overhead cabinet and a squat brown bottle, which he displayed. "I only have scotch."
Louisa nodded. Leaphorn said he'd settle for water.
Woody talked while he fixed their drinks.
"Bacteria, like about everything alive, split themselves into genera. Call it families. Here we're dealing with the Enterobacteriaceae family. One branch of that is Pasteurellaceae, and a branch of that is Yersinia pestis—the organism that causes bubonic plague. Another branch is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes the famous venereal disease. These days, gonorrhea is hard to treat because—Woody paused, sipping his scotch.
"Wait," he said. "Let me skip back a little. Some of these bacteria, gonorrhea for example, contain a little plasmid with a gene in it that codes for the formation of an enzyme that destroys penicillin. That means you can'ttreat the disease with any of those penicillin drugs. You see?"
"Sure," Louisa said. "Remember, I'm a friend of Professor Perez. I get a lot of this sort of information."
"We now understand that DNA can be transferred between bacteria—especially between bacteria in the same family."
"Kissing cousins," Louisa said. "Like incest."
"Well, I guess," Woody said. "I hadn't thought of it like that."
Leaphorn had been sampling his ice water, which had the ice cube flavor plus staleness, plus an odd taste that matched the aroma of the van's air supply. He put down the glass.
Leaphorn had been doing some reading. He said: "I guess we're talking about a mixture of plague and gonorrhea—which would make the plague microbe resistant to tetracycline and chloramphenicol. Is that about right?"
"About right," Woody said. "And possibly several other antibiotic formulations. But that's not the point. That's not what's important."
"It sounds important to me," Louisa said. "Well, yes. It makes it terribly lethal if one is infected. But what we have here is still a blood-to-blood transmission. It requires a vector—such as a flea—to spread it from one mammal to another. If this evolution converted it directly into an aerobic form—a pneumonic Plague spread by coughing or just breathing the same air we'd have cause for panic."
"No panic then?" Woody laughed. "Actually, the epidemic trackers might even be happier with this form. If a disease kills its victims fast enough, they don't have time to spread it."
Louisa's expression suggested she took no cheer from this. "What is important then?"
Woody opened the door of a bottom cabinet, extracted a wire cage, and displayed it. A tag with the name CHARLEY printed on it was tied to the wire. Inside was a plump brown prairie dog, apparently dead.
"Charley, this fellow here, and his kith and kin in the prairie dog town where I trapped him, are full of plague bacteria—both the old form and the new. Yet he's alive and well, and so are his relatives."
"He looks dead," Louisa said.
"He's asleep," Woody said. "I took some blood and tissue samples. He's still recovering from the chloroform."
"There's more to it than this," Leaphorn said. "You've known for years that when the plague sweeps through it leaves behind a few towns where the bacteria doesn't kill the animals. Host colonies. Or plague reservoirs. Isn't that what they're called?"
"Exactly," Woody said. "And we've studied them for years without finding out what happens in the one prairie dog's immune system to keep it alive while a million others are dying." He stopped, sipped scotch, watched them over the rim of his glass, eyes intense.
"Now we have the key." He tapped the cage with his finger. "We inject this fellow's blood into a mammal that has resisted the standard infection and study the immune reaction. We inject it into a normal mammal and make the same study. See what's happening to white blood cell production, cell walls, so forth. All sorts of new possibilities are open."
"And what you learn from the rodent immune system applies to the human system."