'She came back,' Jenks said. He looked thoughtful, running the tip of his thumb under the headband, adjusting it. 'Must have been a couple of weeks before she got killed. This time she wanted to know what sort of treatment would be indicated for two or three diseases, and how long you'd be hospitalized. Things like that.'
'What diseases?' Leaphorn asked, although when he asked it he couldn't imagine what the answer would mean to him.
'One was TB,' Jenks said. 'I remember that. And I think one was some sort of liver pathology.' He shrugged. 'Nothing unusual. Sort of routine ailments we deal with around here, I remember that.'
'And did she tell you then? I mean tell you why she wanted the dates those people died?' He was thinking of Roosevelt Bistie—the man who tried to kill Endocheeney—the man they had locked up at Shiprock, with not much reason to keep him, according to Kennedy's report. Roosevelt Bistie had something wrong with his liver. But so did a lot of people. And what the hell could that mean, anyway?
'I was in a hurry,' Jenks said. 'Two of our staff were on vacation and I was covering for one of them and I was trying to get my own operation caught up so I could go on vacation myself. So I didn't ask any questions. Just told her what she wanted to know and got rid of her.'
'Did she ever explain it to you? In any way at all?'
'When I got back from vacation—couple of weeks after that—somebody told me somebody had shot her.'
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. Shot her and left Leaphorn to guess why, since nobody else seemed to care a lot. And here might be the motive—this further example of Irma Onesalt in the role of busybody, to use the
'Do you think what she was working on had anything to do with why…' Jenks didn't complete the sentence.
'Who knows,' Leaphorn said. 'FBI handles homicides on Indian reservations.' He heard himself saying it, his voice curt and unfriendly, and felt a twinge of self-disgust. Why this animus against Jenks? It wasn't just that he felt Jenks's attitude was patronizing. It was part of a resentment against all doctors. They seemed to know so much, but when he gave them Emma, the only thing that mattered, they would know absolutely nothing. That was the principal source of this resentment. And it wasn't fair to Jenks, or to any of them. Jenks had come to the Big Reservation, as many of the Indian Health Service doctors did, because the federal loans that had financed his education required two years in the military or the Indian Health Service. But Jenks had stayed beyond the two-year obligation, as some other IHS doctors did—delaying the Mercedes, the country club membership, the three-day work week, and the winters in the Bahamas—to help Navajos fight the battle of diabetes, dysentery, bubonic plague, and all those ailments that follow poor diets, bad water, and isolation. He shouldn't resent Jenks. Not only wasn't it fair; showing it would hurt his chances of learning everything Jenks could tell him.
'However,' Leaphorn added, 'we know something about it. And from what we know, the FBI hasn't a clue about motive.' Nor do I, Leaphorn thought. Not about motive. Not about anything else. Certainly not about how to connect three and a half murders whose only connection seems to be an aimless lack of motive. 'Maybe this list Irma had would help. All Navajo names, you said. Right? Could you think of any of them?'
Jenks's expression suggested he was probing his brain for names. All the homicide victims were still alive when Jenks had seen the list, Leaphorn thought, but wouldn't it be wonderful and remarkable if…
'One was Ethelmary Largewhiskers,' Jenks said, faintly amused. 'One was Woody's Mother.'
Leaphorn rarely allowed his face to show irritation, and he didn't now. These were exactly the sort of names he'd expect Jenks to remember: names that were quaint, or cute, that would provoke a smile at a cocktail party somewhere when Dr. Jenks had become bored with Navajos—when too few of them drove wagons, and hauled drinking water forty miles, and slept in the desert with their sheep, and too many drove station wagons and got their teeth straightened by the orthodontist.
'Any others?' Leaphorn asked. 'It might be important.'
Jenks put on the expression of a man trying hard for a recall. And failing. He shook his head.
'Would you remember any, if you heard?'
Jenks shrugged. 'Maybe.'
'How about Wilson Sam?'
Jenks wrinkled his face. Shook his head. 'Isn't he that guy who got killed early this summer?'
'Right,' Leaphorn said. 'Was his name on the list?'
'I don't remember,' Jenks said. 'But he was still alive then. He didn't get killed until after Onesalt. If I remember it right, and I think I do because they did the autopsy at Farmington and the pathologist there called me about it.'
'You're right. I'm just fishing around. How about Dugai Endocheeney?'
Jenks produced the expression that signifies deep thought. 'No,' he said. 'I mean no, I can't remember. Been a long time.' He shook his head. Stopped the gesture. Frowned. 'I've heard the name,' he said. 'Not on the list, I think, but…' He paused, adjusted the headband. 'Wasn't he a homicide victim too? The other one that was killed about then?'
'Yes,' Leaphorn said.
'Joe Harris did the autopsy too, at Farmington,' Jenks said. 'He told me he got a dime out of one of the wounds. That's why I remembered it, I guess.'
'Harris found a dime in the wound?' Harris was the San Juan County coroner working out of the Farmington hospital. Pathologists, like police, seemed to know one another and swap yarns.
'He said Endocheeney got stabbed a bunch of times through the pocket of his jacket. In knifings we're always finding threads and stuff like that in the wound. Whatever the knife happens to hit on the way in through the clothing. Buttons. Paper. Whatever. This time it hit a dime.'
