Skinwalkers

Leaphorn's office door opened.

Dr. Bahe Yellowhorse was a barrel of a man. He wore a black felt reservation hat with a silver-and-turquoise band and a turkey feather. A closely braided rope of hair hung, Sioux fashion, behind each ear, the end of each tied with a red string. The belt that held his jeans over his broad, flat belly was two inches wide, studded with turquoise and buckled with a sand-cast silver replica of Rainbow Man curved around the symbol of Father Sun.

'Ya-tah,' said Yellowhorse, grinning. But the grin looked mechanical.

'Ya-tah-hey,' Leaphorn said. 'Have a ch—'

'Going to have a meeting of Judicial Committee this afternoon,' Yellowhorse said, easing himself into the chair across from Leaphorn's desk. 'My people want me to talk to the committee about doing something to catch that fellow that killed Hosteen Endocheeney.'

Yellowhorse dug in the pocket of his denim shirt and dug out a package of cigarets, giving Leaphorn an opportunity to comment. Leaphorn didn't. Old Man Endocheeney had been a resident of that great sprawl of Utah- Arizona borderlands included in the Badwater Chapter. Leaphorn didn't want to discuss the case with Tribal Councilman Bahe Yellowhorse.

'We're working on it,' he said.

'That means you're not getting nowhere.' said Yellowhorse. 'You having any luck at all?'

'The FBI has jurisdiction,' Leaphorn said, thinking that this was his day for telling people what they already knew. 'Felony committed on federal trust land comes under—'

Yellowhorse held up a huge brown hand. 'Save it,' he said. 'I know how it works. The feds don't know anything unless you guys tell 'em. You finding out who killed Endocheeney? I need to know something to tell my people back at the chapter house.'

He leaned back in the wooden chair, extracted a cigaret from the package, and tapped its filtered end uselessly against his thumbnail, eyes on Leaphorn.

Leaphorn considered his police academy conditioning against ever telling anybody anything about anything, weighed it against common sense. Yellowhorse was sometimes an unusually severe pain in the ass, but he did have a legitimate interest. Beyond that, Leaphorn admired the man and respected what he was trying to do. Bahe Yellowhorse, born to the Dolii Dinee, the Blue Bird People of his mother. But he had no paternal clan. His father was an Oglala Sioux. Yellowhorse had founded the Bad Water Clinic mostly with his own money. True, there was a big Kellogg Foundation grant in it, and some other foundation money, and some federal funds. But from what Leaphorn knew, most of the money, and all of the energy, had come from Yellowhorse himself.

'You can tell them we have a suspect in the Endocheeney homicide,' Leaphorn said. 'Witnesses put him at the hogan at the right time. Expect to pick him up today and talk to him.'

'You got the right fellow?' Yellowhorse asked. 'He have a motive?'

'We haven't talked to him,' Leaphorn said. 'We're told he said he wanted to kill Endocheeney, so you can presume a motive.'

Yellowhorse shrugged. 'How about the other killing? Whatever his name was?'

'We don't know,' Leaphorn said. 'Maybe they're connected.'

'Your suspect,' Yellowhorse said. He paused, put the cigaret between his lips, lit it with a silver lighter, and exhaled smoke. 'He another one of my constituents?'

'Seems to live up in the Lukachukais. Long way from your country.'

Yellowhorse stared at Leaphorn, waiting for further explanation. None came. He inhaled smoke again, held it in his lungs, let it trickle from his nostrils. He extracted the cigaret and came just close enough to pointing it at Leaphorn to imply the insult without delivering it. Navajos do not point at one another.

'You guys s'posed to be out of the religion business, aren't you? Since the court cracked down on you for hassling the peyote people?'

Leaphorn's dark face turned a shade darker. 'We haven't been arresting anyone for possession of peyote for years,' Leaphorn said. He had been very young when the Tribal Council had passed its ill-fated law banning the use of hallucinogens, a law openly aimed at suppressing the Native American Church, which used peyote as a sacrament. He hadn't liked the law, had been glad when the federal court ruled it violated the First Amendment, and he didn't like to be reminded of it. He especially didn't like to be reminded of it in this insulting way by Yellowhorse.

'How about the Navajo religion?' Yellowhorse asked. 'The tribal police got any policies against that these days?'

'No,' Leaphorn said.

'I didn't think you did,' Yellowhorse said. 'But you got a cop working out of Shiprock who seems to think you have.'

Yellowhorse inhaled tobacco smoke. Leaphorn waited. Yellowhorse waited. Leaphorn waited longer.

'I'm a crystal gazer,' Yellowhorse said. 'Always had a gift for it, since I was a boy. But only been practicing for the last few years. People come to me at the clinic. I tell 'em what's wrong with 'em. What kind of cure they need.'

Leaphorn said nothing. Yellowhorse smoked, exhaled. Smoked again.

'If they have been fooling with wood that's been struck by lightning, or been around a grave too much, or have ghost sickness, then I tell them whether they need a Mountaintop sing, or an Enemy Way, or whatever cure they need. If they need a gallstone removed, or their tonsils out, or a course of antibiotics to knock a strep infection, then I check them into the clinic for that. Now, the American Medical Association hasn't approved it, but it's free. No charge. And a lot of the people out there are getting to know about me doing it, and it brings 'em in where we can get a look at 'em. The sick ones come in. Wouldn't have come in otherwise. They'd have gone to some other medicine man instead of me. And that way we catch a lot of early diabetic cases, and glaucoma, and skin cancer, blood poisoning, and God knows what.'