faded green work shirt, dividing his attention between Leaphorn and stacks of transparent Ziploc bags that seemed to contain small dead insects—fleas or lice. Or maybe ticks.
'I guess you're working for her family,' Krause said. He opened another bag, extracted a flea, and put it on a slide, which he placed in a binocular microscope. 'Do they have any theories?'
'Ideas float around,' Leaphorn said, asking himself if the ethics of private investigators, presuming they had them, allowed one to reveal the identity of clients. He'd deal with that when circumstances required. 'The obvious ones. A sex crime. A nervous breakdown. A rejected boyfriend. Things like that.'
Krause adjusted the microscope's focus, stared into the lenses, grunted and removed the slide. In its former existence this temporary lab had been a low-down-payment double-wide mobile home, and the heat of the summer sun radiated through its aluminum roof. The swamp-cooler fan roared away at its highest setting, mixing damp air into the dry heat. The rows of specimen jars on the shelf behind Krause were sweating. So was Krause. So was Leaphorn.
'I really doubt there's a boyfriend involved in this,' he said. 'She didn't seem to have one. Never talked about it anyway.' He transferred the flea into another Ziploc bag, wrote something on an adhesive tag, and stuck it in place. 'Of course, there could be a jilted one floating around somewhere in the past. That wouldn't be the sort of thing Cathy would have chatted about, even if she chatted. Which she didn't do much.'
The cluttered, makeshift laboratory was reminding Leaphorn of his student career at Arizona State, which in those long-ago days required a mix of natural science courses even if your major was anthropology. Then he realized it wasn't as much what he was seeing as what he was smelling—those tissue-preserving, soap-defying chemicals that drove the scent of death deep into the pores of even the cleanest students.
'Cathy was a very serious lady. Focused. Just talked about business,' Krause was saying. 'She had a thing about bubonic plague. Thought it was downright criminal that we protect the middle-class urbanites from these communicable diseases and let the vectors do their thing out here in the boondocks where nobody gets killed except the working class. Cathy sounded like one of those old-fashioned Marxists sometimes.'
'Tell me about the Jeep,' Leaphorn said.
Krause stopped what he'd been doing, stared at Leaphorn, frowning. 'The Jeep? What's to tell?'
'If there's foul play involved in this, the truck will probably be how the case gets broken.'
Krause shook his head. Laughed. 'It was just a black Jeep. They all look alike.'
'It's harder to dispose of a vehicle,' Leaphorn said.
'Than a body?' Krause said. 'Sure. I see what you mean. Well, actually it was a pretty fancy model. We heard it was one of those seized by the DEA guys in a drug bust and turned over to the Health Department. Had a white pinstripe. Very hi-fi radio with special speakers. Telephone installed. The cowboy model. No top. Roll bars. Winch on the front. Tow-chain hooks and a trailer hitch on the back. I think it was three years old, but you know they don't change those models much. I drove it myself some until Cathy got it away from me.'
'How'd that happen?'
'What Cathy wanted, Cathy got.' He shrugged. 'Actually, she had a good argument for it. Spent more time out in the bad country while I was doing the paperwork inhere.'
'I'm trying to get the word around that there's a reward out for whoever finds that vehicle. A thousand dollars.'
Krause raised his eyebrows. 'The family sounds serious then,' he said, grinning. 'What if she just drives in here and parks it? Can I call in and collect?'
'Probably not,' Leaphorn said. 'But I'd appreciate the call.'
'I'll be happy to let you know.'
'How about a man named Victor Hammar?' Leaphorn asked. 'I'm told they knew each other. You wouldn't put him in the boyfriend category?'
Krause looked surprised. 'Hammar? I don't think so.' He shook his head, grinning.
'One of the theories has it that Hammar was in love with her. The way it's told, she didn't share the sentiment, but she couldn't get rid of him.'
'Naw,' Krause said. 'I don't think so. Matter of fact, she invited him out here a while back. He's working on his doctorate in vertebrate biology. He's interested in what we're doing.'
'Just in what you're doing? Not in the woman who's doing it?'
'Oh, they're friends,' Krause said. 'And he probably feels those glandular urges. Young male, you know. And he likes her, but I think that was because she sort of gave him a little mothering when he was new in the country. He has a sort of funny accent. No friends in the department, I'll bet. From what I've seen of him, probably not many friends anywhere else either. So along comes Cathy. She's like a lot of these kids who grow up rich. They like doing good for the working-class losers. So she helped him along. Makes 'em feel less guilty about being part of the parasitic privileged class.'
'When you think about it, though,' Leaphorn said, 'what you described is sort of typical of these stalker homicides. You know, the kindhearted girl takes pity on the poor nerd and he thinks it's love.'
'I guess you could ask him. He's out here again and said he was coming in to get copies of some of our mortality statistics.'
'Mortality?'
'In fact, he's late,' Krause said, looking at his watch. 'Yeah, mortality. Die-offs among mammal communities in plague outbreaks, rabbit fever, hantavirus, that sort of thing. How many kangaroo rats survive compared with ground squirrels, pack rats, prairie dogs, so forth. But my point is, it's the data that brings him out, not Cathy. Take today, for example. He knows Cathy's not here, but he's coming anyway.'
'He knew she was missing?'
'He called a couple of days after she didn't show up. Wanted to talk to her.'
