'You're talking about a way to make better antibiotics?' Leaphorn said. 'That's what Woody's after?'
'Not exactly. More likely he'd like to find the way a mammal's immune system is being adjusted so that it can kill the microbe. It would probably be more like a vaccine.'
Leaphorn looked up from the journal. 'Miss Pollard seems to connect him to Nez,' he said. 'The note says: 'Check Woody on Nez.' Wonder what that would mean.'
'I wouldn't know,' Krause said.
'Maybe Nez was that guy Woody had working for him,' Hammar said. 'Sort of a smallish fellow, with his hair cut real short. He'd put out traps for Woody and help him take blood samples from the animals. Things like that.'
'Maybe so,' Krause said. 'I know that over the years Woody has located a bunch of prairie dog colonies that seem to resist the plague. And he was also collecting kangaroo rats, field mice, and so forth. The sort of rodents that spread the hantavirus. Cathy said he's been working with one near Yells Back Butte. That might be why Cathy was going up there. If Nez had been working for Woody, maybe she was going up there to see if he knew where Nez was when he got infected.'
'Could Mr. Nez have been bitten up there?' Leaphorn asked. 'I understand there'd been a couple of plague victims from that area in the past.'
'I don't think so,' Krause said. 'She had pretty well pinned down where Nez had been during the period he was infected. It was mostly up south of here. Between Tuba and Page.'
Krause had been sorting slides while he talked. Now he looked up at Leaphorn. 'You know much about bacteria?'
'Just the basic stuff. Freshman-level biology.'
'Well, with plague, the flea just puts a tiny bit in your bloodstream, and then it usually takes five or six days, sometimes longer, for the bacteria to multiply enough so you start showing any symptoms, usually a fever. Or maybe if you get bitten by a bunch of fleas, or they're loaded with some really virulent stuff, then it's quicker. So you skip back a few days from when the fever showed up and find out where the victim's been from that date to maybe a week earlier. When you know that, then you start checking those places for dead mammals and infected fleas.'
Hammar was still looking out the door. He said: 'Poor Mr. Nez. Killed by a flea. Too bad the flea didn't bite Al Woody.'
Chapter Ten
LEAPHORN BLAMED IT ON BEING LONELY—this bad habit he'd developed of talking too much. And now he was paying the price. Instead of waiting until he'd arrived at Louisa Bourebonette's little house in Flagstaff to tell her of his adventures, the empty silence in his Tuba City motel room had provoked him into babbling away on the telephone. He'd told her about his visit with John McGinnis after his talk with Krause. He had given her a thumbnail sketch of Hammar and asked if she could think of an easy, make-no-waves way to check on his alibi.
'Can't you just call the police in Tempe and have them do it? I thought that's what was done.'
'If I was still a cop I could, providing we had any evidence a crime had been committed and some reason to believe Mr. Hammar was a suspect in this crime.'
'Lieutenant Chee would do it.'
'If he would, that would take care of problem one. We'd still have problems two and three,' Leaphorn said. 'How is Chee going to explain to the Tempe police why he wants them to poke into the life of a citizen when there's not even a crime to suspect him of committing?'
'Yeah,' Louisa said. 'I see it. Academics can be touchy about things like that. I'll handle it myself.'
Which left Leaphorn merely breathing into the phone for a moment or two. Then he said: 'What?'
'Hammar was supposed to be teaching a lab class July eighth, isn't that what he said? So I have a friend over in our biology department who knows people in biology down at ASU. He calls somebody in his good-old-boy network down at Tempe and they ask around and if Mr. Hammar cut his lab class that day—or got somebody to handle it—then we know it. That sound okay?'
'That sounds great,' Leaphorn said. It would also have been a great place to end the conversation, just to tell Louisa he'd be there for dinner tonight and say goodbye. But, alas, he kept on talking.
He told her about Dr. Woody and his project. Even though Louisa's field was ethnology and, even worse, mythology—on the extreme opposite end of the academic spectrum from microbiology—Louisa had heard of Woody. She said the fellow she'd ask to make the call to Tempe for her sometimes worked with the man, doing blood and tissue studies in his microbiology lab at the NAU.
Thus the restful evening Leaphorn had yearned for with Louisa had turned into a threesome with Professor Michael Perez invited to join them.
'He's one of the brighter ones,' Louisa had said, thereby separating him from a good many of the hard science faculty, whom she found too narrow for her taste. 'He'll be interested in what you're doing, and maybe he can tell you something helpful.'
Leaphorn doubted that. In fact, he was wondering if he would ever learn anything helpful about Catherine Pollard. He'd classified what McGinnis had told him as no higher than interesting, and yesterday had left him wondering why he was wasting so much energy on what seemed more and more like a hopeless cause. He'd spent weary hours locating the sheep camp where Anderson Nez resided during the grazing months. As expected, he found the Navajo taboo against talking about the dead adding to the usual taciturnity of rural folks dealing with a citified stranger. Except for a teenager who remembered Catherine Pollard coming by earlier collecting fleas off their sheepdogs, checking rodent burrows and quizzing everyone about where Nez might have been, he learned just about nothing at the camp beyond confirming what Hammar had told him. Yes indeed, Nez had worked part-time for several summers helping Dr. Woody catch rodents.
He arrived at Louisa's house just before sunset with the high dry-weather ice crystals dusted across the stratosphere reflecting red. The spot where he usually parked his pickup in her narrow driveway was occupied by a weather-beaten Saab sedan. Its owner was standing beside Louisa in the doorway as Leaphorn came up the steps—a lanky man with a narrow face and a narrow white goatee whose bright blue eyes were inspecting Leaphorn with undisguised curiosity.
