Empire of Dust (26 page)

It had been the right thing to say. For all her compassion for the dead man, she could not bear to have the others think of her as less strong-willed or strong-stomached than they. Without another word, she rummaged in her backpack and took out a camera. Laika noticed with some amusement that Tony started toward her, but then changed his mind and knelt beside the body.

Gary Chee was very much in the same condition as Ralph Begay had been. His skin was dried and browned until it resembled old leather. The lips had drawn back from the teeth, and the eyelids were wrinkled pouches, puckering to show the dried eyeballs.

But unlike Begay's body, which had been prepared for burial by the family, Gary Chee's corpse seemed more shrunken, drawn in on itself. "The connective tissues have dried and receded," Laika said. "It's drawn the joints together. Look at the fingers—they're like claws."

"There's not a drop of fluid in the whole body, is there?" Joseph said, crouching on the other side of the corpse.

"No," she said. "I'm wondering about the internal organs."

Joseph slipped on a pair of latex gloves and pressed against the corpse's shirt over its midsection. "Very hollow. I can touch the spine." He sniffed quickly several times. "That smell of vomit is probably bile. And the urine smell is mousy and pungent, more like the pores of a uremia patient than the smell of sterile urine. And I'm betting the fecal odor isn't coming from the anus, but directly from the bowel. Hell, you could probably stick his liver, his kidneys, and the rest of his guts in a shoebox with room to spare."

As Joseph continued to stare at Gary Chee's wizened face, Laika thought about how much more she liked him when he was involved in a practical puzzle like this rather than trying to refute anything that smacked of the supernatural. That was their job, after all, but Joseph seemed to take it too damned seriously, as though any suggestion of a higher power undermined his own worth as a human being.

Joseph went on, as if talking to himself. "But what in the name of . . . what could suck the moisture out of a man's body like this, right through his clothes?"

"Aliens."

They turned around to see one of the tribal policemen, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, looking down at them. "Sure, the same ones been making those big sand paintings. They do it to cattle, don't they?"

"No, they don't," said Joseph with a tinge of impatience. "So-called cattle mutilation has been shown time and again to be just the combination of natural decomposition and scavenger activity."

"Oh yeah? Well if it's scavengers, why aren't they eating the good meat instead of the eyeballs and tongues and . . . well, the private parts and stuff?"

"Because there aren't many scavengers that can bite through cowhide," Joseph said, as though explaining it to a child. "So they take what they can get, which is soft tissue, like eyeballs and tongues and testicles and anuses and other orifices."

"Yeah, well, maybe," said the officer. Then he brightened. "But scavengers didn't do
this
."

Joseph seemed to realize that there would be no victory today, so he threw up his hands. "You got me there, Officer. Doggone, I guess it just has to be aliens, then."

The policeman turned and walked toward his colleagues, seemingly proud of his debating skills. When the cop was out of earshot, Yazzie said, "I don't think he gets off the reservation enough."

"You don't buy the aliens theory?" Laika said with a smile.

"Nope. Or the Navajo spirits. I think it was just a really big kid with a really big magnifying glass."

"So you don't have a pet theory?" she asked.

"If I had a tenable theory for this," Yazzie said, "I'd be a professor of pathology somewhere, not a tribal cop. This is the most puzzling thing I've ever seen."

Laika returned to her examination of the body. She lifted the right hand and looked at the fingernails through a strong magnifying glass. "There's something under his nails."

Joseph held the dead hand, while Laika gently dug underneath the brittle fingernails, one after another, with a small blade, scraping the debris into a small plastic bag. She sealed it and looked at the contents through the clear plastic. "They look like flakes of skin," she said, "but dark, and very dry. Almost like his own."

Joseph shook his head. "There's no sign of any wound, though. We'd see if he had scratched himself."

"That's so bizarre," Laika said, holding the bag up to the sky so that the light shone behind the small dark shreds. "It's like he . . . scratched a mummy or something." She turned to Tony. "Dr. Antonelli, would you please take some more samples? Hair, tissue, clothing, some of the soil? Perhaps Ms. Dominick could help you."

Tony rewarded her with a smile and walked over to Miriam, who was looking less upset than before. Laika and Joseph began to walk around the site, looking for anything that could give them a hint as to the cause of Gary Chee's fate. Yazzie joined them, his eyes on the ground.

Laika noticed the marks of horseshoes in the dirt. "Chee's horse?" she asked Yazzie.

"Almost certainly. It went back to his family's farm."

"So whatever got Chee might have scared the horse."

"A good possibility."

Laika followed the horse tracks for a short distance until she saw a pile of loose rocks at the base of the canyon wall. She walked up to it and kicked over one of the flatter stones. The narrow leaves of the yucca plant that had been crushed beneath it were still green.

"Do you think this was a rock slide?" she asked Joseph and Yazzie.

"Looks like it. Recent, too." Yazzie pointed at the plant Laika had uncovered. "Might have happened last night. The flowers are closed, see? But I don't know what a rock slide would have had to do with Chee's death."

Laika looked at the pile of rocks, at the body thirty yards away, and at the hoof prints. Then she looked high above, to the top of the canyon wall.

"Hey!" she yelled over to the tribal policemen leaning on the truck. "Do any of you know a good tracker?" She started walking toward them. "Anybody who could follow a trail?"

"What?" said the officer who believed in aliens. "You mean, like in the movies?"

"Yeah. Someone who can spot broken twigs and misplaced pebbles and tell me the height and weight of the guy who did it."

One of the other officers spoke. "Old Sam Bitsosie is a helluva tracker. Lived here in the canyon for, oh, forty years, I bet."

"He still alive?" asked the cattle mutilation believer.

"Oh yeah, lives in Chinle."

"Okay," said Laika. "That's who I want."

"To track what in particular?" Yazzie said. "If you don't mind my asking."

"Not at all. Something was in this canyon last night with Gary Chee. It got in here, as Mr. Chee would attest, if he could, and it left. I want to know where it came from and where it went, and maybe a tracker can tell us that."

"I'm starting to wonder about you, Dr. Kelly," Yazzie said. "Are you a scientific investigator, or a cop? You seem more interested in the perpetrator than in the phenomenon."

"That's because I think the perpetrator is the phenomenon." Laika turned back to the other policemen. "Would this Mr. Bitsosie do a job for us if we paid him?"

"Probably. I got a cell phone. Want me to give him a call?"

"Yeah, see if he can get out here right away. Two hundred dollars for the rest of the day. Cash." Laika turned to Tony. "Dr. Antonelli, would you come over here a moment?" She led him to the base of the cliff where the rocks had fallen. "This may sound goofy," she said in a low voice, "but I think there's a link here. Something fell from the top, and whatever it is might be the thing that did this to Chee."

"Something fell from up there?" Tony said, looking two hundred feet up at the edge of the cliff. "And then walked away? Does that seem likely?"

"For Chrissake, does
any
of this seem likely? I suspect whatever might have done that to Chee might also be able to take that fall unharmed. Go with Yazzie and the other cop to get the tracker, and start him here. See where he ends up."

"What are you going to be doing?"

"Going to the site of the new drawing with Joseph and Miriam. I want to see what else she might have been close to in her dreams." Laika smiled. "Besides you." Tony blushed and she slapped him once on the shoulder. "Let's go."

"He says four!" the tribal cop called from the truck.

"What?" said Laika, walking toward him.

"Four hundred he wants to come out here."

"Three," Laika said, and watched as the Navajo spoke into the phone.

"He says to tell you four," he said after a moment. "He says he's seventy-eight years old, and if he's gotta come out here and start . . . screwin' around in the dirt, it's gotta be worth it. And he said if it isn't, to go and track yourself." He held his ear back to the phone. "And he says if you're from the government, you can afford four."

Laika smiled ruefully. "Tell him four, if he can get out here within the hour. A minute later, and it's three."

"Mr. Bitsosie?" the policeman began, then said, "Hello?" He clicked the phone shut. "He must've heard you. Guess he's on his way."

T
he old tracker arrived in forty-five minutes. By then the body of Gary Chee had been taken away, and Laika, Joseph, and Miriam had left with a policeman to look at the sand drawing at the eastern end of the canyon. Yazzie and Tony had agreed to meet them for dinner at Abner's, a roadhouse northeast of the canyon on Route 12.

It didn't take long for Tony to wish he'd gone with the others. Sam Bitsosie, a short, wizened, and ill-tempered old man whose face looked not dissimilar to the dehydrated Gary Chee's, demanded his four hundred dollars immediately. Tony gave him two hundred and said he'd pay the rest at the end of the day. Bitsosie bellowed, "Bullshit!", and said that he wanted it now and if he didn't get it that Dr. Antonelli could buy himself a goddam bloodhound. A tentative truce was reached when Officer Yazzie offered to hold the money.

"All right," Tony said. "Someone was killed right around here. Can you tell me where?"

"What do I look like, Houdini?" said Sam Bitsosie. "No, I can't just tell you—I have to look around a little." He walked around the log, then moved in the direction of the rock slide, and stopped after walking ten feet. "Here, right here."

"How do you know?" Tony asked.

"What, are you blind? I'm the one who's seventy-eight, sonny. See here, where the marks of the hooves are deeper, and there are more of them? Something jumped on this horse, maybe to attack the rider, am I right?"

"We don't know. We're asking
you
to figure it out. Can you tell where the attacker came from?"

Bitsosie gave a broad and theatrical shrug. "Gallup?"

"No," said Tony with a sigh, "I meant where . . . right
here
."

"I
know
what you meant, it was a little joke, okay? Lemme see." The old man walked around, looking at the ground, kneeling now and then with a loud moan. "My knees," he kept saying. "Shoulda asked
five
hundred."

At last he led the way to the rocks. "Over here. He came from here. It's hard to tell, because you big-footed cops have been walking all over the place."

"I'm not a cop," said Tony. "I'm a scientist."

"You still got big feet, sonny. But this is it. I don't know where he was before this." Then Bitsosie looked up at the side of the cliff, and saw the empty places where the stones had been. "Maybe he
rode
down."

"What?"

"On the rocks. Coyote coulda done that, you know."

"You serious? I mean, about riding down?"

"Well, everybody's gotta come from somewhere." He looked at Tony and grinned. "Take me—I'm from Ganado." The grin vanished. "Another joke."

"Okay," said Tony, "so the attacker started there, came over here, attacked the victim. Then what?"

Bitsosie eyed the ground. "Too many flatfoots tromping around. Have to go out. . . ."

He started moving in ever-widening circles around the spot where he said the attack had taken place. The old man's path reminded Tony of one of those spiral Indian designs. At last, thirty feet from the center of the circle, Bitsosie stopped and bent down.