“Is the pathologist still Roger Saunders?” Leaphorn asked. “I’ve always heard tales of how testy he was. Did he say you’d have to get a court order, or what?” Garcia chuckled. “You know about Roger then, don’t you? He told me he is backed up with work on actual homicide cases. But when I whined a little, he said that if we can arouse his curiosity, he’ll do it.”
“Tell him we think Bork might have been poisoned by a slice of fruitcake. That should get him interested.” Garcia laughed. “I don’t think so. I think he’d refer me to a psychiatrist. I’m dead certain he’d ask me why we think that. Why do we?”
Leaphorn described the urging he’d received to eat the special cake made by Mr. Delos’s cook and help-mate, a man named Tommy Vang, and how Bork had THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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been given a slice of same as a snack just before he drove away from the Delos place, and how the timing made it just about right for Bork to be feeling its effects and losing control of his car about where he did.
Leaphorn added a few details to his explanation and awaited a response.
It was a skeptical-sounding snort.
“You’re not happy with that?”
“Well, it explains what you mean when you said you were guessing,” Garcia said. “About a dozen guesses to reach that conclusion. You guess that Bork ate the cake, and when he ate it, it took however long for whatever poison to work, that Mr. Delos has a motive, and so forth.”
“I plead guilty to that.”
“Well, I’ll go anyway. You have anything else we could tell Saunders to get him interested?”
“That’s it,” Leaphorn said.
“That’s it then. Come on,” Garcia said, his tone somewhere between scornful and incredulous. “But you still want me to push for the autopsy?”
“Well, there’s also the fact that Bork, a longtime law officer, is a very experienced driver in our mountain-ous country. He is extremely unlikely to have that sort of accident. Don’t you agree? And we can also argue that Delos probably thought Bork was poking into some sort of insurance fraud involving that tale-teller rug. Maybe that would satisfy the need for a motive. And then maybe you could get him to listen to that threatening telephone tape.”
More silence from Garcia. Then a sigh.
“Well, it might appeal to Dr. Saunders. He always 128
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seems to get a kick out of discovering different kinds of homicide weapons anyway. Breaks the monotony. Maybe that notion of a fruitcake as the murder weapon would appeal to him.”
“And Sergeant, would you please let me know what he finds out? Delos gave me a slice of that fruitcake, too.
I have it in a sack in my truck cooler box.” Garcia laughed. “Playing it safe, are you? Well, keep it there a while, and remind me of your cell phone number.”
Leaphorn provided the number. “And one more thing,” he said. “Do you remember the names of the FBI people who were there at Totter’s Trading Post? Working on it after the fire.”
“Well, let me think about that a minute,” Garcia said.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said, and waited.
“Well, let’s see.” He chuckled. “One of them was Special Agent John O’Malley. I’ll bet you remember him.”
“Unfortunately,” Leaphorn said. “I had some trouble with him down through the years.”
“Me, too,” Garcia said. “And I remember Ted Rostic was there, too. Out of the Gallup office then, I think. Nice guy, he was. And then Sharkey. Remember him? Don’t recall his first name.”
“Jay, I think it was. Or Jason. Another hard man to work with. Anyone else?”
“Probably. They sort of swarmed in when it turned out the burned man was Shewnack. But I don’t remember who.”
“All retired by now, I guess.”
“Probably. I heard O’Malley had died back in Wash-THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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ington. Don’t know about Sharkey. I know Rostic is retired. I heard he lives in Gallup.”
“Good,” Leaphorn said.
“For what?” Garcia said. “What are you after?”
“I can’t seem to let this thing go,” Leaphorn said. “I mean that Totter fire. The whole thing. If I can get hold of Rostic, I’ll see what he remembers about it.” The information operator found no number for Ted Rostic in the Gallup directory.
“But, there’s a Ted in Crownpoint. Could that be him?”
“I’ll bet it is.”
“Want me to ring him for you? For seventy-five cents?”
“I’m on Social Security,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll dial it myself.” He did, and Rostic answered on the fourth ring.
“Leaphorn. Leaphorn,” Rostic said. “That sounds familiar. Sounds like a young fellow I knew once with the Navajo Tribal Police.”
“Yeah,” Leaphorn said. “We met on that Ashie Pinto business. When one of our officers got burned up in his car.”
“Uh-huh,” Rostic said. “That was a sad piece of business.”
“I’m interested in another fire now. The one years ago at Totter’s Trading Post with an FBI Most-Wanted felon burned up in it. Do you remember that one?”
“Oh, boy,” Rostic said. “I sure do. Ray Shewnack was the victim’s name. I think that was my first real excite-ment as a police officer. Real big deal. Finding one of our top targets. A real genuine villain, that Shewnack was.”
“Any reason you can’t talk about it now?” 130
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“I’m retired,” Rostic said. “But it’s hard for me to believe anyone would still be interested. What are you doing? You wouldn’t be writing one of those serial killer celebrity books, would you?”
“No. Just trying to satisfy one of those old nagging questions.”
“Where you calling from?”
“Home in Shiprock. I’m retired, too.”
“And probably just as bored with it as I am,” said Rostic. “If you want to drive on over, I’ll meet you at that little place across from the Crownpoint High School. How about for lunch? Now you’ve reminded me of that business, I’d like to talk about it, too. Could you make it for noon?”
“Easily. Plenty of time,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll see you there.”
Plenty of time, indeed. Just about seventy miles from Leaphorn’s garage to the fried-chicken place across the street from Crownpoint High, and it was now just a little after sunrise. He would just cruise along, maybe stop here and there to see if he could find an old friend at the Yah-Ta-Hay store, and look in at the chapter houses at Twin Lakes, Coyote Canyon, and Standing Rock. In his days as Officer Leaphorn, patrolling that part of the Rez, he had learned the chapter house almost always had a pot of coffee on the stove and maybe a muffin or something to go with it while he updated information about current affairs involving cattle theft, booze bootlegging, or other disruptions of harmony. He would use this unhurried trip to see if he could get himself into the proper mood that the retirement world seems to demand, if one was going to survive in it.
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The stop at Ya-Ta-Hay was a disappointment. Those working at the place seemed to be universally of the much-younger generation. No one he knew. At Twin Lakes, the parking lot was empty except for an old Ford Pinto, whose owner was an elderly lady whom he had known for about forty years but who was the grumpy sort.
He was not in a mood today to be the audience for her in-exhaustible armory of complaints about the ineptitude of the Tribal Council, nor to provide explanations for why the Navajo Tribal Police could not stamp out the reservation’s plague of drunk drivers.
His luck got better after he made the turn toward the east onto Navajo Route 9. The morning sunlight was glittering off the early snowpack on the high slopes of Soodzil, Mount Taylor on belagaana road maps, or dootl’izhiidziil to traditional Navajo shaman; it was Joe Leaphorn’s favorite view. Locally it was called Turquoise Mountain, and known as the sacred mountain of the South, built by First Man of materials brought up from the dark, flooded third world, and pinned to the earth with a magic flint knife by that powerful yei when it tried to float away. As Leaphorn had learned in the hogan stories of his childhood winters, it had been magically decorated with turquoise, fog, and female rain, and had been made home of dootl’altsoil