'If he told you where the Jeep is, then you could take us there. We could arrange for you to get the money. Then if you can find him again, you could share it with him.'
'Yes,' Tsi said. 'Let me get my hat.'
'Tell you what,' Chee said. 'Bring the radio stuff along, too. We might need that for fingerprints.'
'Mine?' Tsi looked startled.
'We know yours are on it,' Chee said. 'We're thinking of whoever drove it where you found it.'
And so they had jolted back down 6120, to 6110, to Cedar Ridge, and thence southward on the pavement past Tuba City and through Moenkopi, and back onto the dusty road past the abandoned Goldtooth trading post, and then a left turn over a cattle guard onto dirt tracks that led up the slope of Ward Terrace. Where the track crossed a shallow wash, Tommy Tsi said, 'Here,' and pointed down it.
The Jeep had been left mid-wash around a bend some fifty yards downstream. They left Tsi in the car and walked along the edge of the streambed, careful not to mar any tracks that might still be there. There was no sign of foot traffic up the sand. Much of the Jeep's tire marks had already been erased by the pickup Tsi had been driving, and the wind had softened the edges of what few remained. But enough had survived to add one bit of information. Bernie noticed it, too.
'That little rainstorm came through just after you found Ben, didn't it?' And she pointed to a protected place where the Jeep tires had left their imprint in sand that obviously had been damp.
'How far is this from where that happened?'
'I'd say maybe twenty miles as the crow flies,' Chee said. 'And no rain since. I think that tells us a little something.' The Jeep itself told them little else. They stood back from it, examining the ground. The sand around the driver's side had been churned, presumably by Tsi's boots,
From the passenger's door, one could step directly onto the stony slope of the arroyo bank. If the occupant had left that way, it made tracking this many days later virtually hopeless.
'What's that stuff in the backseat?' Bernie asked. 'I guess the equipment for the job.'
'I see some traps,' Chee said. 'And cages. That canister is probably for poison they blow into burrows to kill the fleas.'
He took out his pocketknife, used it to depress the button to open the passenger-side door, then used it to swing the door open.
'Looks like nothing much here,' Bernie said, 'unless we find something in the litter bag.'
Chee wasn't ready to concede that. Leaphorn had once told him that you're more likely to find something if you're not looking for anything in particular. 'Just keep an open mind and see what you see,' Leaphorn liked to say. Now Chee saw a dark stain on the leather upholstery on the Jeep's passenger seat.
He pointed at it.
'Oh,' Bernie said, and made a wry face.
The stain streaked downward, almost black.
'I'd guess dried blood,' Chee said. 'Let's get the crime scene people out here.'
Chapter Eighteen
'DID YOU NOTICE HIS FACE when he said that?' Leaphorn asked. 'Said 'Mr. Nez is dead. Charley is still alive.' The damn prairie dog is still alive. Like it was the best news possible.'
'I don't think I've ever seen you really angry before,' Louisa said.
'I try not to let things get to me,' Leaphorn said. You really can't if you're a cop. But that was a little too damn coldhearted for me.'
'I've seen a few of the real superbrains act like that before,' she said. 'He was making a point, of course. The dog's immune system had modified to deal with the new bacteria forms, and nothing mattered except the research. No such luck with Nez. So now he thinks he'll have a whole prairie dog colony full of test subjects. So it's Nez died but the rodent lived. Hip, hip, hooray. And aren't you driving too fast for this road?'
Leaphorn slowed a little, enough so the following breeze engulfed them in dust but not enough to stop the jolting the car was taking. 'Weren't you going to have dinner with Mr. Peshlakai and set up interviews with some students? I don't want you to miss that and we're running late.'
'Mr. Peshlakai and I always operate on Navajo time,' she said. 'No such thing as late. We meet when I get there and he gets there. What's got you in such a rush?'
'I'm going on back down to Flag,' Leaphorn said. 'I want to go to the hospital and talk to the people there and try to find out what Pollard learned that made her so angry.'
'You mean that 'Somebody is lying' note in her journal?'
'Yeah. That seemed to explain why she was going back up to Yells Back Butte. To find out for herself.'
'Lying about what?' Louisa said, mostly to herself.
'I'd guess she meant about where Nez picked up his lethal flea. That was her job, and from what I've heard, she took it very seriously.' He shook his head. 'But who knows? I don't. This is getting hard to calculate.'
Louisa nodded.
'Find out for herself?' Leaphorn repeated. 'And how does she do that? We know she drove up to Yells Back bright and early either to talk to Woody about where he had Nez working on the day the flea got onto him. Or maybe to collect some rodents or fleas from around there for herself. But she didn't go talk to Woody. Or so he tells us. And if she collected fleas she sure must have done it fast, because she drove right out again.'
'Any idea now where she drove?'
