The woman at the desk in the department office looked at him curiously, taking in the bandage on his hand first, and his being a Navajo second. “Dr. Tagert?” she said, and chuckled. She sorted quickly through papers on the desk and extracted what looked like a list. “He has office hours this afternoon. Right now in fact. And his office is room 217.” She gestured down the hallway and chuckled again. “I wish you luck.”
The door of 217 was open.
Chee looked into a cluttered room, lit by two dusty windows, divided by two long desks placed back to back in its center. Books were everywhere, jamming bookcases that occupied the walls, stacked on chairs, tumbled out of untidy piles on the desks. Behind the nearest desk, her back to Chee, a woman was typing.
Chee tapped at the door.
“He’s still not here,” the woman said without looking around at him. “We haven’t heard from him.”
“I’m looking for Professor Tagert,” Chee said. “Any idea where I could find him?”
“None,” she said, and turned around, looking at Chee over the tops of reading glasses. “Which class are you in?”
“I’m a cop,” he said. He fished out his identification and handed it to her. Not a worry in the world if the Bureau bitched about him nosing into an FBI case. He was going to quit anyway.
She looked at the identification, at him, at his damaged hand. She was a plump woman in her late twenties, Chee guessed, with a round, good-natured face and short brown hair.
“On duty?”
Shrewd, Chee thought. “More or less,” he said. “I’m working on a case that involves a man Dr. Tagert did some business with. I wanted to see what Dr. Tagert could tell me about this guy.”
“Who is it?” She smiled at him, shrugged.
“None of my business, maybe. But I’m Tagert’s teaching assistant. Maybe I could help.”
“Where would Tagert be, this time of day?”
She laughed. “I can’t help you with that. He’s supposed to be sitting right there?” she pointed across the desk “?having his office hours. And he was supposed to be here all last week, meeting his classes. And the week before that, attending the presemester faculty meetings. Nobody knows where the hell he is.” She pointed across the desk at a stack of envelopes overflowing a wire basket on the adjoining desk. “Unopened mail,” she said.
Chee looked at the stack. A lot of mail.
“From when? How long has he been gone?”
“I saw him at the end of summer session.” She laughed again but there was no humor in it. “Or almost the end. He usually manages to quit a little early. Had me grade his papers for him and turn in his grades. He said he had to get going on some research.”
Chee found himself a lot more interested. “My name’s Jim Chee,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m Jean Jacobs.” She held out her hand.
Chee shook it.
“Can I sit down?”
She gestured toward a chair. “Move the books.”
He sat. “Doesn’t anybody know where he is? How about Mrs. Tagert?”
“They’re separated,” Jacobs said. “I called her when the department chairman first got excited about finding him. She said she didn’t know and she didn’t want to know and if I found him to please not tell her about it.”
“Strange,” Chee said.
“Not really,” Jacobs said. “Dr. Tagert wouldn’t be a happy man to live with. In fact
“ She let that trail off, unfinished.
“I meant strange nobody knows where he is,” Chee said. “You’d think he’d keep the department informed.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Jacobs said. “Not if you knew him.”
Chee was remembering his own days as an undergraduate here. Usually things had been fairly well organized, but not always. And it had seemed to him that the tenure/academic freedom system made faculty members almost totally independent.
“What’s the chairman doing about it?”
“He’s pissed off. He got me to start Tagert’s Trans-Mississippi West class. And I met with his seminars just to tell those poor souls what he’ll expect, hand out the reading lists, and all that. And then the dean called and wanted to know when he’d be back, and what he was doing?as if it was my fault.” Jean Jacobs’s expression soured at the memory. “I hope the Navajos got him,” she added.
“Is that where he was going? To the Navajo Reservation?”
“Who knows?” she said. “Or gives a damn. But that’s where he’d been working.”
“You know what he was working on?”
“Vaguely. It had to be cops and robbers. That’s his field. ‘Law and Order in the Old West.’ He’s The Authority in that particular category.” She paused. “Or so he tells everybody.”
“Do you know if he was working on that with a Navajo named Ashie Pinto?”
“Sure,” she said. “Pinto was one of his informants this summer. For old stories and things like that.” Her eyes
