"It seems a strange name," Mrs. Vanders said. "I suspect there's some story behind it."
"Probably," Leaphorn said. "I think it's a local name for a little finger sticking out from Black Mesa. On the edge of the Hopi Reservation. And when was she going out there?"
"The day after she called me," Mrs. Vanders said. "That would be a week ago next Friday."
Leaphorn nodded, sorting out some memories. That would be July 8, just about the day—No. It was exactly the day when Officer Benjamin Kinsman had his skull cracked with a rock somewhere very near Yells Back Butte. Same time. Same place. Leaphorn had never learned to believe in coincidences.
"All right, Mrs. Vanders," Leaphorn said, "I'll see what I can find out."
Chapter Four
CHEE WAS NOT STANDING at the waiting room window just to watch the Northern Arizona Medical Center parking lot and the cloud shadows dappling the mountains across the valley. He was postponing the painful moment when he would walk into Officer Benjamin Kinsman's room and give Benny the foredoomed official "last opportunity" to tell them who had murdered him.
Actually, it wasn't murder yet. The neurologist in charge had called Shiprock yesterday to report that Kinsman had become brain-dead and procedures could now begin to end his ordeal. But this was going to be a legally complicated and socially sensitive process. The U.S. Attorney's office was nervous. Converting the charge against Jano from attempted homicide to murder had to be done exactly right. Therefore, J. D. Mickey, the acting assistant U.S. attorney charged with handling the prosecution, had decided that the arresting officer must be present when the plug was pulled. He wanted Chee to testify that he was available to receive any possible last words. That meant that the defense attorney should be there, too.
Chee had no idea why. Everybody involved had the same boss. As an indigent, Jano would be represented by another Justice Department lawyer. Said lawyer being—Chee glanced at his watch—eleven minutes late. But maybe that was his vehicle pulling into the lot. No. It was a pickup truck. Even in Arizona, Justice Department lawyers didn't arrive in trucks.
In fact, it was a familiar truck. Dodge Ram king cab pickups of the early nineties looked a lot alike, but this one had a winch attached to the front bumper and fender damage covered with paint that didn't quite match. It was Joe Leaphorn's truck.
Chee sighed. Fate seemed to be tying him to his former boss again, endlessly renewing the sense of inferiority Chee felt in the presence of the Legendary Lieutenant.
But he felt a little better after he thought about it. There was no way the murder of Officer Kinsman could involve Leaphorn. The Legendary Lieutenant had been retired since last year. As a rookie, Kinsman had never worked for him. There were no clan relationships that Chee knew about. Leaphorn would be coming to visit some sick friend. This would be one of those coincidences that Leaphorn had told him, about a hundred times, not to believe in. Chee relaxed. He watched a white Chevy sedan, driving too fast, skid through the parking lot gate. A federal motor-pool Chevy. The defense lawyer finally. Now the plugs could be pulled, stopping the machines that had kept Kinsman's lungs pumping and his heart beating for all these days, since the wind of life that had blown through Benny had left, taking Benny's consciousness on its last great adventure.
Now the lawyers would agree, in view of the seriousness of the case, to ignore the objections the Kinsman family might have and conduct a useless autopsy. That would prove that the blow to the head had caused Benny's death and therefore the People of the United States could apply the death penalty and kill Robert Jano to even the score. The fact that neither the Navajos nor the Hopis believed in this eye-for-an-eye philosophy of the white men would be ignored.
Two floors below him the white Chevy had parked. The driver's-side door opened, a pair of black trouser legs emerged, then a hand holding a briefcase.
"Lieutenant Chee," said a familiar voice just behind him. "Could I talk to you for a minute?"
Joe Leaphorn was standing in the doorway, holding his battered gray Stetson in his hands and looking apologetic.
So much for coincidences.
Chapter Five
"SOMEPLACE QUIETER, MAYBE," Leaphorn had said, meaning a place where no one would overhear him. So Chee led him down the hall to the empty orthopedic waiting room. He pulled back a chair by the table and motioned toward another one.
"I know you just have a minute," Leaphorn said, and sat down. "The defense attorney just drove up."
"Yeah," Chee said, thinking that Leaphorn not only had Managed to find him in this unlikely place but knew why he was here and what was going on. Probably knew more than Chee did. That irritated Chee, but it didn't surprise him.
"I wanted to ask if the name Catherine Anne Pollard meant anything to you. If a missing persons report was filed on her. Or a stolen vehicle report? Anything like that?"
"Pollard?" Chee said. "I don't think so. It doesn't ring a bell." Thank God Leaphorn wasn't involving himself in the Kinsman business. It was already complicated enough.
"Woman, early thirties, working with the Indian Health Service," Leaphorn said. "In vector control. Looking for the source of that bubonic plague outbreak. Checking rodents. You know how they work."
"Oh, yeah," Chee said. "I heard about it. When I get back to Tuba I'll check our reports. I think somebody in environmental health or the Indian Health Service called Window Rock about her not coming back from a job and they passed it along to us." He shrugged. "I got the impression they were more worried about losing the department's Jeep."
Leaphorn grinned at him. "Not exactly the crime of the century."
"No," Chee said. "If she was about thirteen you'd be checking the motels. At her age, if she wants to run off somewhere, that's her business. As long as she brings back the Jeep."
"She didn't, then? It's still missing?"
"I don't know," Chee said. "If she returned it, APH forgot to tell us."
"That wouldn't be unusual," Leaphorn said.
Chee nodded, and looked at Leaphorn. Wanting an explanation for his interest in something that seemed both obvious and trivial.
"Somebody in her family thinks she's dead. Thinks somebody killed her." Leaphorn let that hang a moment, made an apologetic face. "I know that's what kinfolks usually think. But this time there's a suspicion that a would-be boyfriend was stalking her."
"That's not unusual either," Chee said. He felt vaguely disappointed. Leaphorn had done some private detecting right after he'd retired, but that had been to tie up a loose end from his career, close out an old case. This sounded purely commercial. Was the Legendary Lieutenant Leap-horn reduced to doing routine private detective stuff?
Leaphorn took a notebook out of his shirt pocket, looked at it, tapped it against the tabletop. It occurred to Chee that this was embarrassing Leaphorn, and that embarrassed Chee. The Legendary Lieutenant, totally unflappable when he'd been in charge, didn't know how to handle being a civilian. Asking favors. Chee didn't know how to handle it either. He noticed that Leaphorn's burr-cut hair, long black-salted-with-gray, had become gray-salted-with-black.
"Anything I can do?" Chee asked.
Leaphorn put the notebook back in his pocket.
"You know how I am about coincidences," he said.
"Yep," Chee said.
"Well, this one is so strained I hate to even mention it-" He shook his head.
Chee waited.
"From what I know now, the last time anyone heard of this woman, she was heading out of Tuba City checking on prairie dog colonies, looking for dead rodents. One of the places on her list was that area around Yells Back Butte."
Chee thought about that a moment, took a deep breath, thinking he'd been too optimistic. But "that area around Yells Back Butte" didn't make it much of a coincidence with his Kinsman case. That "around" could include a huge bunch of territory. He waited to see if Leaphorn was finished. He wasn't.