'I'd already gone back. Back to the university.'
'You're on a faculty somewhere?'
'I am just a graduate assistant. At Arizona State. I had lectures that day. Introduction to the laboratory for freshmen.' Hammar grimaced. 'Introduction to Biology. Awful course. Stupid students. And why are you asking me these questions? Do you—'
'Because I was asked to help find the woman,' Leaphorn said, thereby violating his rule and Navajo courtesy by interrupting a speaker. But he wanted to cut off any questions from Hammar. 'I will just collect a little more information and be out of here so you gentlemen can get back to your work. I wonder if Miss Pollard might have left any papers in the office here. If she did, they might be helpful.'
'Papers?' Krause said. 'Well, she had sort of a ledger and she kept her field notes in that. Is that what you mean?'
'Probably,' Leaphorn said.
'Her aunt called me from Santa Fe yesterday and told me you'd come by,' Krause said, shuffling through material stacked on a desk in the corner of the room. 'I think her name is Vanders. Something like that. Cathy was planning to visit her last weekend. I thought maybe that's where she'd gone.'
'You're working for old Mrs. Vanders,' Hammar said, still staring at Leaphorn. 'Here's the sort of stuff that might be useful,' Krause said, handing Leaphorn an accordion file containing a jumble of papers. 'She's going to need it if she comes back.'
'When she gets back,' Hammar said. 'When.'
Leaphorn flipped through the papers, noticing that most of the entries Catherine had made were in a small irregular scribble, hard to read and even harder for a layman to interpret. Like his own notes, they were a shorthand that communicated only to her.
'Fort C,' Leaphorn said. 'What's that?'
'Centers for Disease Control,' Krause said. 'The feds who run the lab at Fort Collins.'
'IHS. That's Indian Health Service?'
'Right,' Krause said. 'Actually, that's who we're working for here, but technically for the Arizona health people. Part of the big, complicated team.'
Leaphorn had skipped to the back.
'Lots of references to A. Nez,' he said.
'Anderson Nez. One of the three fatalities in the last outbreak. Mr. Nez was the last one, and the only one we haven't found the source for,' Krause said.
'And who's this Woody?'
'Ah,' said Hammar. 'That jerk!'
'That's Albert Woody,' Krause said. 'Al. He's into cell biology, but I guess you'd call him an immunologist. Or a pharmacologist. Microbiologist. Or maybe a—I don't know.' Krause chuckled. 'What's his title, Hammar? He's closer to your field than mine.'
'He's a damned jerk,' Hammar said. 'He has a grant from the Institute of Allergy and Immunology, but they say
I he also works for Merck, or Squibb, or one of the other pharmaceutical firms. Or maybe for all of them.'
'Hammar doesn't like him,' Krause said. 'Hammar was trapping rodents somewhere or other this summer and Woody accused him of interfering with one of his own projects. He yelled at you, didn't he?'
'I should have kicked his butt,' Hammar said.
'He's on this plague project, too?'
'No. No. Not really. He's been working out here for years, since we had an outbreak in the nineteen-eighties. He's studying how some hosts of vectors—like prairie dogs, or field mice, and so forth—can be infected by bacteria or viruses and stay alive while others of the same species are killed. For example, plague comes along and wipes out about a billion rodents, and you've got empty burrows and nothing but bones for a hundred miles. But here and there you find a colony still alive. They carry it, but it didn't kill them. They're sort of reservoir colonies. They breed, renew the rodent population, and then the plague spreads again. Probably from them, too. But nobody really knows for sure how it works.'
'It's the same with snowshoe rabbits in the north of Finland,' Hammar said. 'And in your Arctic Alaska. Different bacteria but the same business. It's a seven-year cycle with that, regular as a clock. Everywhere rabbits, then the fever sweeps through and nothing but dead rabbits and it takes seven years to build back up and then the fever comes and wipes them out again.'
'And the drug companies are paying Woody?'
'Wasting their money,' Hammar said. He walked to the door, opened it, and stood looking out.
'It's more like they're looking for the Golden Fleece,' Krause said. 'I just have a sort of hazy idea of what Woody's doing, but I think he's trying to pin down what happens inside a mammal so that it can live with a pathogen that kills its kinfolks. If he learns that, maybe it's just a little step toward understanding intercellular chemistry. Or maybe it's worth a mega-trillion dollars.'
Leaphorn let that hang while he sorted through what he remembered of Organic Chemistry 211 and Biology 331 from his own college days. That was vague now, but he recalled what the surgeon who'd operated on Emma's brain tumor had told him as if it were yesterday. He could still see the man and hear the anger in his voice. It was just a simple staph infection, he'd said, and a few years ago a dozen different antibiotics would have killed the bacteria. But not now. 'Now the microbes are winning the war,' he'd said. And Emma's small body, under the sheet on the gurney rolling down the hallway, was the proof of that.
'Well, maybe that's exaggerating,' Krause said. 'Maybe it would be just a few hundred billion.'
