metal, then rapped again, and—harder this time—once again. No response. He tried the doorknob. Locked. He leaned his ear against the door and listened. Nothing at first, except the vibrations from the air conditioner, then a faint, rhythmic sound. Chee stepped back from the van and inspected it. It had a custom-made body mounted on a heavy GMC truck chassis with dual rear wheels. It looked expensive, fairly new and—judging from the dents and abrasions—heavily (or carelessly) used in rough country. Except for the lack of a door, nothing was different on the driver's side. Built against the rear was a fold-down metal ladder to provide access to the roof and a rack, which now held a dirt bike, a folding table and two chairs, a five-gallon gasoline can, a pick, a shovel, and an assortment of rodent traps and cages. There were no windows on the rear and the only side windows were high on the wall. Placed high, Chee guessed, to allow more space for storage cabinets.
He knocked again, rattled the knob, shouted, received no response, put his ear against the door again. This time he heard another faint sound. Something scratching. A tiny squeak, like chalk on a blackboard.
Chee folded down the access ladder, climbed onto the roof, dropped to his stomach, and secured a firm grip on the air-conditioner engine mount. Then he squirmed over the edge and leaned down to look into the high windows. All he saw was darkness and a streak of light reflecting from a white surface.
'Ho, there,' a voice shouted. 'Whatcha doing?' Chee jerked his head up. He looked down into a face staring up at him, expression quizzical, bright blue eyes, dark, sun-peeled face, tufts of gray hair protruding from under a dark blue cap that bore the legend SQUIBB. The man carried what looked like a shoebox containing what seemed to be a dead prairie dog inside a plastic sack. 'Is that your car I saw back there?' the man asked. 'The Navajo Tribal Police car?'
'Yeah,' Chee said, trying to scramble to his feet without further loss of dignity. He pointed down to the roof under his boots. 'I heard something in there,' he stammered. 'Thought I did, anyway. Something squeaking. And I couldn't raise anyone, so—'
'Probably one of the rodents,' the man said. He put down the shoebox, extracted a key ring from a pocket and unlocked the doors. 'Come on down. How about a drink of something.'
Chee scrambled down the ladder. The man under the Squibb cap was holding the door open for him. Cold air rushed out.
'My name's Chee,' he said, extending a hand. 'With the Navajo Tribal Police. I guess you're with the Arizona Health Department.'
'No,' the man said. 'I'm Al Woody. I'm working on a research project up here. For the National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service, so forth. But come on in.'
Inside Chee turned down a beer and accepted a glass of water. Woody opened the door of a built-in floor-to- ceiling refrigerator and brought out a bottle white with frost. He scraped away the ice crystals and showed Chee a Dewar's scotch label.
'Antifreeze,' he said, laughing, and began pouring himself a drink. 'But once I was preserving some tissue a*id turned the fridge down so low that even the whiskey froze up on me.'
Chee sipped his water, noticing it was stale and had a slightly unpleasant taste. He searched his brain for a proper apology for trying to peek into the man's window. He decided there wasn't one. He'd just forget it and let Woody think whatever he wanted to think.
'I'm doing some back-checking on a homicide case we had up here,' Chee said. 'It was July eighth. One of our officers was killed. Hit on the head with a rock. You probably heard about it on the radio or saw it in the paper. We're trying to find any witnesses we might have overlooked.'
'I heard about that,' Woody said. 'But the man down at the trading post told me you'd caught the killer right in the act.'
'Who told you?'
'That grouchy old man at the Short Mountain Trading Post,' Woody said, frowning. 'I think his name was Mac something. Sounded Scotch. Did he have it wrong?'
'About as close as you can get,' Chee said. 'The smoking gun was a bloody rock.'
'The old man said it was a Hopi and the cop had arrested the same guy before,' Woody said, looking pensive. Then he nodded, understanding it. 'But out here you'd get Hopis on the jury. So you're trying not to leave them any grounds for reasonable doubts.'
'Yeah,' Chee said. 'I guess that about sums it up-Were you working up here that day? If you were, did you see anybody? Or anything? Or hear anything?'
'July eighth, was it?' He punched buttons on his digital watch. 'That would make it a Friday,' he said, and frowned, thinking about it. 'I drove down to Flagstaff, but
I think that was Wednesday. I think I was up here Tuesday early, and then I drove over to Third Mesa. That's one of the prairie dog colonies I'm watching. Over there by Bacavi. That and some kangaroo rats.'
'It rained that day,' Chee said. 'Thundershower. Little bit of hail.'
Woody nodded. 'Yeah, I remember,' he said. 'I'd stopped at the Hopi Cultural Center to get some coffee, and you could see a lot of lightning over that side of Black Mesa and southwest over the San Francisco Peaks, and it looked like it was pouring down at Yells Back Butte. I was feeling glad I got down that road before it got muddy.'
'Did you see anybody when you were driving out? Meet anyone coming in?'
Woody had been unzipping the plastic bag while he talked, and a puff of escaping air added another unpleasant aroma to the room. Now he pulled out the prairie dog, stiff with rigor mortis, and laid it carefully on the tabletop. He stared at it, felt its neck, groin area and under the front legs. He looked thoughtful. Then he shook his head, dismissing some troublesome notion.
'Going out?' he said. 'I think I saw that old lady that herds her goats over on the other side of the butte. I think that was Tuesday I saw her. And then, when I was turning out onto the gravel, I remember seeing a car corning from the Tuba City direction.'
'Was it a police car?'
Woody looked up from the prairie dog. 'It might have been. It was too far away to tell. But, you know, he never did pass me. Maybe he turned in toward the butte. Maybe that was your policeman. Or maybe the Hopi.'
