Endocheeney.'
'Just like I said,' Chee said.
'Tell me again.'
I 'He wouldn't say anything. Just shut his mouth and looked grim and wouldn't say a word.'
'What do you think?'
Chee shrugged. The light through the window over the trailer sink dimmed slightly. The shadow of the thunder head over the Chuskas had moved across the Shiprock landscape. With the shadow, the cloud's advance guard of breeze sighed through the window screen. But it wouldn't rain. Leaphorn had studied the cloud. Now he was considering Chee's face, which wore a look of uneasy distaste. Leaphorn felt his own face beginning a smile, a wry one. Here we go again, he thought.
'Witchcraft?' Leaphorn asked. 'A skinwalker?'
Chee said nothing. Leaphorn sipped the stale coffee. Chee shrugged. 'Well,' he said. 'That could explain why Bistie wouldn't talk about it.'
'That's right,' Leaphorn said. He waited.
'Of course,' Chee added, 'so could other things. Protecting somebody in the family.'
'Right,' Leaphorn said. 'If he tells us his motive, it's also the motive for the guy with the butcher knife. Brother. Cousin. Son. Uncle. What relatives does he have?'
'He's born to the Streams Come Together Dinee,' Chee said, 'and born for the Standing Rock People. Three maternal aunts, four uncles. Two paternal aunts, five uncles. Then he's got three sisters and a brother, wife's dead, and two daughters and a son. So not even counting his clan brothers and sisters, he's related to just about everybody north of Kayenta.'
'Anything else you can think of? For why he won't talk?'
'Something he's ashamed of,' Chee said. 'Incest. Doing something wrong to some relative. Witchery.'
Leaphorn could tell Chee didn't like the third alternative any better than he did.
'If it's witchcraft, which one is the skinwalker?'
'Endocheeney,' Chee said.
'Not Bistie,' Leaphorn said, thoughtfully. 'So if you're right, Bistie killed himself a witch, or intended to.' Leaphorn had considered this witch theory before. Nothing much wrong with the idea, except proving it. 'You pick up anything about Endocheeney to support it? Or try it on Bistie?'
'Tried it on Bistie. He just looked stubborn.
Talked to people up there on the Utah border who knew Endocheeney. Got nothing.' Chee was looking at Leaphorn, judging the response.
He's heard about me and witches, Leaphorn thought. 'In other words, everybody just shut up,' he said. 'How about Wilson Sam. Anything there?'
Chee hesitated. 'You mean any connection?'
Leaphorn nodded. It was exactly what he was driving at. They were right. Chee was smart.
'That's out of our jurisdiction here,' Chee said. 'Where he was killed, that's in Chinle's territory. The subagency at Chinle has that case.'
'I know that,' Leaphorn said. 'Did you go out there and look around? Ask around?' It was exactly what Leaphorn would have done under the circumstances—with two killings almost the same hour.
Chee looked surprised, and a little abashed. 'On my day off,' he said. 'Kennedy and I hadn't gotten anything helpful on the Endocheeney thing yet, and I thought—'
Leaphorn held up his palm. 'Why not?' he said. 'You seeing anything that links them?'
Chee shook his head. 'No family connections. Or clan connections. Endocheeney ran sheep, used to work when he was younger with that outfit that lays rails for the Santa Fe railroad. He got food stamps, and now and then sold firewood. Wilson Sam was also a sheepherder, had a job as a flagman on a highway construction job down near Winslow. He was fifty-something years old. Endocheeney was in his middle seventies.'
'Did you try Sam's name on people who knew Endocheeney? To see if…' Leaphorn made a sort of inclusive gesture.
'No luck,' Chee said. 'Didn't seem to know the same people. Endocheeney's people didn't know Sam. Sam's people never heard of Endocheeney.'
'Did you know either one of them? Ever? In any way? Even something casual?'
'No connection with me, either,' Chee said. 'They're not the kind of people policemen deal with. Not drunks. Not thieves. Nothing like that.'
'No mutual friends?'
Chee laughed. 'And no mutual enemies, as far as I can learn.'
The laugh, Leaphorn thought, seemed genuine.
'Okay,' he said. 'How about the shooting-at-you business.'
Chee described it again. While he talked, the cat came through the flap in the screen.
It was a large cat, with short tan hair, a stub of a tail, and pointed ears. It stopped just inside the screen, frozen in the crouch, staring at Leaphorn with intense blue eyes. Quite a cat, Leaphorn thought. Heavy haunches like a bobcat. The hair was matted on the left side of its head, and what looked like a scar distorted the
