“What did he find out for you?” Bernie asked.
Leaphorn shrugged. Drained his coffee cup, extended it toward Bernie, suggesting the need for a refill.
“Didn’t amount to anything,” he said. “Great coffee you’re making, Bernie. I bet you didn’t follow Chee’s old formula of ‘too little grounds, boiled too long.’” Chee was grinning at Leaphorn, ignoring the jibe.
“Come on, Lieutenant, quit the stalling. What’d you find out? And what got you so interested in the first place?”
“You’re a married man now,” Leaphorn said, and handed his empty cup to Chee. “Time to learn how to be a good host.”
“No more coffee until you quit stalling,” Chee said.
Leaphorn sighed, thought a bit. “Well,” he said, “it THE SHAPE SHIFTER
5
turned out the obituary was a fake. Mr. Totter hadn’t died in that Oklahoma City hospital, and hadn’t been buried in that Veterans Administration cemetery.” He paused, shrugged.
“Well, go on,” Chee said. “Why the obituary? What’s the story?”
Bernie took the cup from Leaphorn’s hand.
“But don’t tell it until I get back with the refill,” she said. “I want to hear this.”
“Why the fake being dead?” Chee asked. “What happened to Totter?”
Leaphorn pondered. How much of this could he tell?
He imagined Chee and Bernie, under oath on the witness stand, the U.S. District Attorney’s prosecutor reminding them they were under oath, or the penalty of perjury.
“When did you first hear this? Who told you? When did he tell you? After his Navajo Tribal Police retirement, then?
But wasn’t he still a deputized law enforcement officer for about three Arizona and New Mexico counties?”
“Well?” Chee asked.
“I’m waiting for your wife to get back with the coffee,” Leaphorn said. “Being polite. You should learn about that.”
“I’m back,” Bernie said, and handed him his cup. “I’m curious, too. What happened to Mr. Totter?”
“To tell the truth, we don’t really know,” Leaphorn said. And paused. “Not for sure, anyway.” Another thoughtful pause. “Let me rephrase that. To tell the truth, we think we know what happened to Totter, but we never could have proved it.”
Chee, who had been standing, pulled up a chair and sat down. “Hey,” he said. “I’ll bet this is going to be interesting.”
6
TONY HILLERMAN
“Let me get some more cookies,” Bernie said, hopping out of her chair. “Don’t start until I get back.” That gave Leaphorn about two minutes to decide how to handle this.
“Long and complicated story,” he said, “and it may cause you both to think I’ve gone senile. I’ve got to start it way back by reminding you both of our origin stories, about there being so much meanness, greed, and evil in those first three worlds that the Creator destroyed them, and how our First Man brought all that evil up to this fourth world of ours.”
Chee looked puzzled. And impatient. “How can that connect with Totter’s obituary?”
Leaphorn chuckled. “You’ll probably still be wondering about that when I finish this. But while I’m telling you about it, I want you to think about how our Hero Twins killed the evil monster on the Turquoise Mountain, and how they tried to rid this fourth world of ours of all the other evils and also about that name we sometime use for our worst kind of witches. One version translates into English as skinwalkers. Another version comes out as shape shifters.”
“Fits better sometimes,” Chee said. “The last time someone told me about seeing a skinwalker bothering her sheep, she said when she went into the hogan to get her rifle to shoot it, it saw her coming and turned into an owl. Flew away.”
“My mother told me about one,” Bernie said. “It changed from a wolf into some sort of bird.”
“Well, keep that in mind when I tell you about Totter, and so forth,” Leaphorn said.
Chee was grinning.
THE SHAPE SHIFTER
7
“Okay,” he said. “I promise.”
“Me, too,” said Bernie, who seemed to be taking this a little more seriously. “On with the story.” Leaphorn took a cookie, sampled the fresh coffee.
“For me it started just about the time you two were enjoying yourselves in Hawaii. I had a call telling me I had mail down at the office, so I went down to see what it was.
That’s what pulled me into it.”
He took a bite of cookie, remembering he’d had to park in the visitors’ parking lot. It was just starting to rain. “Big lightning bolt just as I parked there,” he said.
“If I was as well tutored in our Navajo mythology as your husband is, Bernie, I would have recognized right away that the spirit world wasn’t happy. I’d have seen that as a bad omen.”
Chee had never got quite used to Leaphorn kidding him about his goal of being both a tribal policeman and a certified shaman, conducting Navajo curing ceremonials.
Chee was frowning.
“Come on, Lieutenant,” he said. “You’re saying it was beginning to rain. Lightning flashes. Now tell us what happened next.”
“Big lightning bolt just as I got there,” he said, smiling at Chee. “And I think when I’m finished with this, with as much as I can tell you anyway, you’re going to agree it was a very bad omen.”
2
Eleven days earlier . . .
The boom of the lightning bolt caused Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, to hesitate a moment before he climbed out of his pickup in the visitors’ parking lot. He took a serious look at the clouds building up in the western sky as he walked into the Navajo Tribal Police building. End of autumn, he was thinking. Monsoon season pretty much over. Handsome clouds of fog over the Lukachukai range this morning, but nothing promising a really good female rain. Just a noisy male thunderstorm.
It would be hunting season soon, he thought, which normally would have meant a lot of work for him. This year he could just kick back, sit by the fire. He’d let younger cops try to keep track of the poachers and go hunting for the city folks who always seemed to be losing themselves in the mountains.
Leaphorn sighed as he walked through the entrance.
10
TONY HILLERMAN
He should have been enjoying that sort of thinking, but he wasn’t. He felt . . . well . . . retired.
Nobody in the police department hall. Good. He hurried into the reception office. Good again. Nobody there except the pretty young Hopi woman manning the desk, and she was ignoring him, chatting on the telephone.
He took off his hat and waited.
She said: “Just a moment,” into the telephone, glanced at him, said: “Yes, sir. Can I help you?”
“I had a message from Captain Pinto. Pinto said I should come in and pick up my mail.”
“Mail?” She looked puzzled. “And you are?”
“I’m Joe Leaphorn.”
“Leaphorn. Oh, yes,” she said. “The captain said you might be in.” She fumbled in a desk drawer, pulled out a manila envelope, looked at the address on it. Then at him.
“Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn,” she said. “Is that you?”
“That was me,” Leaphorn said. “Once.” He thanked her, took the envelope back to his truck, and climbed in, feeling even more obsolete than he had as he’d driven by the police-parking-only spaces and stopped in visitors’
parking.
The return address looked sort of promising. Why Worry Security, with a Flagstaff, Arizona, street address.
The name penned under that was Mel Bork. Bork? Well, at least it wasn’t just more of the junk mail he’d been receiving.
“Bork?” Leaphorn said it aloud, suddenly remembering. Smiling. Ah yes. A skinny young man named Bork had been his fellow semi-greenhorn westerner friend from way, way back when both of them were young country-boy cops sent back East to learn some law enforcement THE SHAPE SHIFTER