'Well, to get to the bottom line, the guy got away and he left behind Bistie's body.'
'Bistie's body?' Leaphorn reached for the folder, digesting this.
'Shot,' Streib said. 'Twice. With a pistol, probably. Probably a thirty-eight or so.'
Leaphorn extracted the report from the folder. Two sheets. He read. He glanced at the signature. Kennedy. He handed the report back to Streib.
'What do you think?' Streib asked.
Leaphorn shook his head.
'I think it's getting interesting,' Streib said. That meant, Leaphorn understood from half a lifetime spent working with the federals, that people with clout and high civil service numbers were beginning to think they had more bodies than could be politely buried. He took off his hospital gown, picked up his undershirt, and considered the problem of how to get it on without moving his right arm around more than was necessary.
'I think we should have kept that Indian locked up a while,' Streib said. He chuckled. 'I guess that's belaboring the obvious.' The chuckle turned into a laugh. 'I'm sure his doctor would have recommended it.'
'You think we could have got him to change his mind? Tell us what he had against Endocheeney?' Leaphorn asked. He thought a moment. If they had taken Bistie back into custody, Leaphorn had planned to try an old, old trick. The traditional culture allows a lie, if it does no harm, but the lie can be repeated only three times. The fourth time told, it locks the teller into the deceit. He couldn't have worked it on Bistie directly, because Bistie would have simply continued to refuse to say anything about Endocheeney, or bone beads, or witchcraft. But maybe he could have worked around the edges. Maybe. Maybe not.
'I'm not so sure,' Leaphorn said. He was even less sure he could have talked Streib into signing his name on the sort of complaint they would have needed. This was a notably untidy piece of work, this business of a man who seemed to think he'd shot a man who'd actually been stabbed. And the FBI hadn't fooled the taxpayers all these years by getting itself involved with the messy ones. Streib was a good man, but he hadn't survived twenty years in the Agency jungle without learning the lessons it taught.
'Maybe not,' Streib said. 'I defer to you redskins on that. But anyhow…' He shrugged, letting it trail off. 'This is going to put the heat on. Now we don't just have a bunch of singles. Now we got ourselves a double. And maybe more than a double. You know how that works.'
'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. Doubling homicides didn't double the interest—it was more like squaring it. And if you had yourself genuine serial killings, nicely mysterious, the interest and the pressure and the potential for publicity went right through the roof. Publicity had never been an issue with Navajo Tribal Police—they simply never got any—but for federals, good press brought the billions pouring in and kept the J. Edgar Hoover Building swarming with fat-cat bureaucrats. But it had damned sure better be good press.
Streib had seated himself. He looked at the report and then at Leaphorn, who was pulling on his pants with left-handed awkwardness. Streib's round, ageless, unlined face made it difficult for him to look worried. Now he managed. 'Trouble is, among the many troubles, I can't see how the hell to get a handle on this. Doesn't seem to have a handle.'
Leaphorn was learning how difficult it can be to fasten the top button of his uniform trousers with his left-hand fingers after a lifetime of doing it with right-hand fingers. And he was remembering the question Jim Chee had raised. ('I heard gossip at Badwater Trading Post,' Chee had said. 'They say a bone was found in Endocheeney's corpse.') Had the pathologist found the bone?
'The autopsy on Old Man Endocheeney up at Farmington,' Leaphorn said. 'I think somebody should talk to the pathologist about that. Find out every little thing they found in that stab wound.'
Streib put the report back in the folder, the folder on his lap, pulled out his pipe, and looked at the No Smoking sign beside the door. Beside the sign, Little Orphan Annie stared from a poster that read: 'Little Orphan Annie's Parents Smoked.' Beside that poster was another, a photograph of rows and rows of tombstones, with a legend reading 'Marlboro Country.' Streib sniffed at the pipe, put it back in his jacket pocket.
'Why?' he asked.
'One of our people heard rumors that a little fragment of bone was found in the wound,' Leaphorn said. He kept his eyes on Streib. Would that be enough explanation? Streib's expression said it wasn't.
'Jim Chee found a little bone bead in his house trailer along with the lead pellets after somebody shot the shotgun through his wall,' Leaphorn said. 'And Roosevelt Bistie was carrying a little bone bead in his wallet.'
Understanding dawned slowly, and unhappily, causing Streib's round face to convert itself from its unaccustomed expression of worry to an equally unaccustomed look of sorrow and dismay.
'Bone,' he said. 'As in skinwalking. As in witchcraft. As in corpse sickness.'
'Bone,' Leaphorn said.
'Lordy, lordy, lordy,' Streib said. 'What the hell next? I hate it.'
'But maybe it's a handle.'
'Handle, shit,' Streib said, with a passion that was rare for him. 'You remember way back when that cop got ambushed over on the Laguna-Acoma. You remember that one. The agent on that one said something about witchcraft when he was working it, put it in his report. I think they called him all the way back to Washington so the very top dogs could chew him out in person. That was after doing it by letters and telegrams.'
'But it was witchcraft,' Leaphorn said. 'Or it wasn't, of course, but the Lagunas they tried for it said they killed the cop because he had been witching them, and the judge ruled insanity, and they—'
'They went into a mental hospital, and the agent got transferred from Albuquerque to East Poison Spider, Wyoming,' Streib said, voice rich with passion. ' 'The judge ruled' don't cut it in Washington. In Washington they don't believe in agents who believe in witches.'
'I'd do it myself. Look into it, I mean. But I think you'd have more luck talking to the doctor,' Leaphorn said. 'Getting taken seriously. I go in there, a Navajo, and start talking to the doc about witch bones and corpse sickness and—'
'I know. I know,' Streib said. He looked at Leaphorn quizzically. 'A bone bead, you said? Human?'
