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.
Chapter Twenty-five
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. "And here," Krause said. "What the hell was she doing with this?" He pointed to the rear luggage space entry, which read: "One small container of gray powdery substance labeled 'calcium cyanide.'"