The First Eagle

'If she did it,' Leaphorn said.

'Right. If. You know, Lieutenant, I sort of wish we were back in Window Rock right now, with that map of yours on the wall, and you'd be putting your pins in it.' He grinned at Leaphorn. 'And explaining to me what happened.'

'You're thinking about where the Jeep was left? So far from anywhere?'

'I was,' Chee said.

'Way too far to walk to Tuba City. Too far to walk back to Yells Back Butte. So somebody had to meet her, or whoever drove the Jeep there, and give them a lift.'

Leaphorn said. 'Like who?'

'Did I tell you about Victor Hammar?'

'Hammar? If you did, I don't remember.'

'He's a graduate student at Arizona State. A biologist, like Pollard. They were friends. Mrs. Vanders had him pegged as a stalker, a threat to her niece. He'd been out here just a few days before she disappeared, working with her. And he was out here the day I showed up to start my little search.' Chee's expression brightened. 'Well now,' he said, 'I think we should talk to Mr. Hammar.'

'The trouble is he told me he was teaching his lab course at ASU the day she vanished. I haven't looked into it, but when an alibi is that easy to check you think it's probably true.'

Chee nodded and grinned again. 'I have a map.' He pulled open his desk drawer, rummaged and pulled out a folded Indian Country map. 'Just like yours.' He spread it on the desktop. 'Except it's not mounted so I can stick pins in it.'

Leaphorn picked up a pencil, leaned over the map and made some quick additions to terrain features. He drew little lines to mark the cliffs of Yells Back Butte and the saddle linking it to Black Mesa. A dot indicated the location of the Tijinney hogan. With that Leaphorn stopped.

'What do you think?' Chee asked.

'I think we're wasting our time. We need a larger map scale.'

Chee extracted a sheet of typing paper from his desk and pencilled in the area around the butte, the roads and the terrain features. He drew a tiny h for the Tijinney hogan, an l for Woody's lab, a faint irregular line from the hogan to represent the track in from the dirt road, and a little j and k for where Jano and Kinsman had left their vehicles. He examined his work for a moment, then added another faint line from the saddle back to the road.

Leaphorn was watching. 'What's that?'

'I saw a flock of goats on the wrong side of the saddle and a track leading in. I think it's a shortcut the goatherd uses so he doesn't have to climb over,' Chee said.

'I didn't know about that,' Leaphorn said. He took the pencil and added an x near the Yells Back cliffs. 'And here is where an old woman McGinnis called Old Lady Notah told people she had seen a snowman. The same woman? Probably.'

'Snowman? When was that?'

'We don't know the day. Maybe the day Miss Pollard disappeared. The day Ben Kinsman got hit on the head.' Leaphorn leaned back in his chair. 'She thought she'd seen a skinwalker. First it was a man, then it walked behind a bunch of junipers and when she saw it again it was all white and shiny.'

Chee rubbed a finger against his nose, looked up at Leaphorn. 'Which is why you were asking me about that filter respirator suit, isn't it? You thought Pollard was wearing it.'

'Maybe Miss Pollard. Maybe Dr. Woody. I'll bet he has one. Or maybe somebody else. Anyway, I'm going to go talk to that old lady if I can find her,' Leaphorn said.

'Dr. Woody, he'd have access to animal blood, too,' Chee said. 'And so would Krause, for that matter.'

'And so would Hammar, our man with the iron-clad but unchecked alibi. Now I think it might be worth the time to look into that.'

They considered this for a while.

'Did you know Frank Sam Nakai?' Chee asked.

'The hataalu?' Leaphorn asked. 'I met him a few times. He taught curing ceremonials at the college at Tsali. And he did a yeibichai sing for one of Emma's uncles after he had a stroke. A fine old man, Nakai.'

'He's my maternal granduncle,' Chee said. 'I went to see him last night. He's dying of cancer.'

'Ah,' Leaphorn said. 'Another good man lost.'

'Did you see the TV news this morning? The press conference J. D. Mickey called in Phoenix?'

'Some of it,' Leaphorn said.

'He's going for the death penalty, of course. The sonofabitch.'

'Running for Congress,' Leaphorn said. 'What he said about cops out here having no backup help, lousy radio communications, all that's true enough.'

'It's a funny thing,' Chee said. 'I catch Jano practically red-handed standing over Kinsman. He was there, and nobody else was around. He had a fine revenge motive. And then there's Jano's blood mixed with Kinsman's on the front of Kinsman's uniform—just about where he would have cut himself on Kinsman's buckle if they'd been struggling. You have a dead-cinch conviction—and all Jano can do is come up with a daydream story about the eagle he poached slashing him—and there's the eagle right there with no blood on it, so he says not that eagle.