'Well, she didn't go back to her motel room to pack up for a trip. Her stuff was still there. And none of the people there had seen her.'
'Which doesn't sound good.'
'We've got to find that Jeep,' Leaphorn said. 'And meanwhile I'll try to find out who she talked to at the hospital. It could be helpful.'
They jolted off the gravel onto Navajo Route 3 and skirted past Moenkopi to U.S. Highway 160 and Tuba City.
'Where do I drop you?'
'At the filling station right here,' Louisa said, 'but just long enough to use the telephone. I'm going to call Peshlakai and cancel. Tell him I'll get with him later.' Leaphorn stared at her. 'This is getting too interesting,' she said. 'I don't want to quit now.'
It was after nine when they got back to Flag. They stopped for a fast snack at Bob's Burgers and decided to check at the hospital on the chance a doctor who knew something about the Nez case might be working the night shift. The doctor proved to be a young woman who had completed intern training at Toledo in March and was doing her residency duties at the Flagstaff hospital in a deal with the Indian Health Service—paying off her federal medical school loan.
'I don't think I ever saw Mr. Nez,' she said. 'Dr. Howe probably handled him in the Intensive Care Unit. Or maybe the nurse on that floor would know something helpful. Tonight it would be Shirley Ahkeah.'
Shirley Ahkeah remembered Mr. Nez very well. She also remember Dr. Woody. Even better, she remembered Catherine Pollard.
'Poor Mr. Nez,' she said. 'Except for Dr. Howe, it didn't seem like the others cared about him after he was dead.'
'I'm not sure I know what you mean,' Leaphorn said.
'Forget it,' she said. 'It wasn't fair to say it. After all, it was Dr. Woody who checked him in. And Miss Pollard was just doing her job—trying to find out where he picked up the infected flea. Did she ever find out?'
'We don't know,' Leaphorn said. 'The morning after she left here she left a note for her boss. It just said that she was driving up to where Dr. Woody had his mobile laboratory and checking for plague carriers around there. Dr. Woody tells us she never arrived at his lab. She didn't go back to her office or to the motel where she was staying. Nobody has seen her since.'
Shirley's face registered a mixture of shock and surprise. 'You mean—has something happened to her?'
'We don't know,' Leaphorn said. 'Her office reported her disappearance to the police. And the vehicle she was driving is missing, too.'
'You think I was the last one to talk to her? Nobody has seen her since she left here?'
'We don't know. No one that we can locate. Did she say anything to you about where she was going? Anything that would give us a hint of what was going on with her?'
Shirley shook her head. 'Nothing that you don't already know. All she talked about here was Mr. Nez. She wanted to know how he'd been infected. Where and when.'
'Did you tell her?'
'Dr. Delano told her we didn't know for sure. That Nez had a high fever and fully developed plague symptoms —the black splotches under the skin where the capillaries have failed, and the swollen glands—he already had all that when we got him up here in Intensive Care, and they brought him right up. She asked Delano a lot of questions, and he told her that Dr. Woody had said that Nez had been bitten by the flea the evening before he brought him in. And she said that wasn't what Dr. Woody had told her, and Delano—'
'Wait a second,' Louisa said. 'She had already talked to Woody about Nez?'
Shirley chuckled. 'Apparently. She said something about a lying sonofabitch. And Delano, he's sort of touchy and he seemed to think that Miss Pollard was accusing him of lying. So then she said something to make it clear she had meant Woody. And Delano said he wasn't certifying what Woody had told him, because he didn't think it was true either. He said Nez couldn't possibly have developed a fever that high and the other plague symptoms so quickly.'
Shirley shrugged. End of explanation.
Leaphorn frowned, digesting this. He said: 'Do you think Dr. Delano could have misunderstood him? About when Nez was infected?'
'I don't see how,' Shirley said. She pointed. 'They were standing right there and I heard it all myself. Delano had told Woody that Nez had died sometime after midnight. And Woody said he wanted to know just exactly when Nez died. Exactly. He said the flea had bitten Nez on the inside of his thigh the evening before he brought him in. Woody was very emphatic about the time. He told Delano he'd left a list of symptoms and so forth that he wanted timed and charted as the disease developed. He wanted an autopsy scheduled and he wanted to be there when it was done.'
'Was it done?'
'So I hear,' Shirley said. 'Nurses aren't included in the circuit of information at that level, but the word gets around.'
Louisa chuckled at that. 'Hospitals and universities. About the same story.'
'What did you hear?' Leaphorn asked.
'Mostly that Woody had more or less tried to take over the procedure, and the pathologist was sore as hell Otherwise, I guess it was just a finding of another death from bubonic plague. And Woody had a lot of tissue and some of the organs preserved.'
Neither Leaphorn nor Louisa had much to say on their way back to his truck. Settled in their seats, Louisa said they were probably lucky Delano hadn't been there. 'He might have known a little more, but he probably wouldn't
