Leaphorn shifted his position and examined the victim’s shoes. The leather was expensive, and under the day's thin film of dust it glowed with a thousand polishings. Handmade shoes, Leaphorn guessed. But made a long time ago. And now the heels were worn, and one sole had been replaced by a shoemaker.
“You noticed the teeth?” Kennedy asked.
“I noticed the lack of them,” Leaphorn said. “Did anyone find a set of false teeth?”
“No,” Baca said. “But nobody really looked. Not yet. It seemed to me that the first question to consider was how this guy got here.”
Leaphorn found himself wondering why the sheriff’s office had called the FBI. Had Baca sensed something about the death of this tidy man that suggested a federal crime? He looked around him. The track ran endlessly east, endlessly west—the Santa Fe main line from the Midwest to California. North, the red sandstone ramparts of lyanbito Mesa; south, the piñon hills which rose toward the Zuni Mesa and the Zuni Mountains. And just across the busy lanes of Interstate 40 stood Fort Wingate. Old Fort Wingate, where the U.S. Army had been storing ammunition since the Spanish-American War.
“How did he get here? That’s the question,” Kennedy said. “He wasn't thrown off the Amtrak, that's obvious. He doesn't look the type to be riding a freight. So I’d guess that probably somebody carried him here. But why the hell would anybody do that?“
“Could this have anything to do with Fort Wingate?” Leaphorn asked. A half-mile or so up the main line he could see the siding that curved away toward the military base.
Baca laughed, shrugged.
“Who knows?” Kennedy said.
“I heard they were going to shut the place down,” Leaphorn said. “It’s obsolete.”
“I heard that too,” Kennedy said. “You think you can find any tracks?”
Leaphorn tried. He walked down the railroad embankment some twenty paces and started a circle through the sage, snakeweed, and chamisa. The soil here was typical of a sagebrush flat: loose, light, and with enough fine caliche particles to form a crust. An early autumn shower had moved over this area about a week ago, making tracking easy. Leaphorn circled back to the embankment without finding anything except the marks left by rodents, lizards, and snakes and confident there had been nothing to find. He walked another dozen yards down the track and started another, wider circle. Again, he found nothing that wasn’t far too old or caused by an animal. Then he crisscrossed the sagebrush around the body, slowly, eyes down.
Kennedy, Baca, and Jackson were waiting for him on the embankment above the body. Behind him, far down the track, an ambulance had parked with a white sedan behind it—the car used by the pathologist from the Public Health Service hospital in Gallup. Leaphorn made a wry face. He shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said. “If someone carried him in from this side, they carried him up from way down the tracks.”
“Or down from way up the tracks,” Baca said, grinning.
“What were you looking for?” Kennedy asked. “Besides tracks.”
“Nothing in particular,” Leaphorn said. “You’re not really looking for anything in particular. If you do that, you don't see things you're not looking for.”
“So you think he got brought in from way down the track?” Kennedy said.
“I don’t know,” Leaphorn said. “Why would anyone do that? That's lots of hard work. And the risk of being seen while you're doing it. Why is this sagebrush better than any other sagebrush?”
“Maybe they hauled him in from the other side,” Kennedy said.
Leaphorn stared across the tracks. There was no road over there either. “How about lifting him off a train?”
“Amtrak is going about sixty-five miles an hour here,” Kennedy said. “Doesn’t start slowing for Gallup for miles. I can't see that man on a freight, and they don't stop out here either. I checked with the railroad on all that.”
They stood then on the embankment above the man with the pointed shoes, with nothing to say in the presence of death. The ambulance crew came down the track, carrying a stretcher, trailed by the pathologist carrying a satchel. He was a small young man with a blond mustache. Leaphorn didn’t recognize him and he didn't introduce himself.
He squatted beside the body, tested the skin at the neck, tested the stiffness of the wrists, bent finger joints, looked into the toothless mouth.
He looked up at Kennedy. “How’d he get here?”
Kennedy shrugged.
The doctor unbuttoned the suit coat and the shirt, pulled up the undershirt, examined the chest and abdomen. “There's no blood anywhere. No nothin’.“ He unbuckled the belt, unzipped the trouser fly, felt. “You guys know what killed him?” he asked nobody in particular.
“What?” Baca said. “What killed him?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” the doctor said, still intent on the body. “I just got here. I was asking you.”
He rose, took a step back. “Put him on the stretcher,” he ordered. “Face down.”
Face down on the stretcher the man with the pointed shoes looked even smaller. The back of his dark suit was floured with gray dust, his dignity diminished. The doctor ran his hands over the body, up the spine, felt the back of the head, massaged the neck.
“Ah,” he said. “Here we are.”
The doctor parted the hair at the back of the man’s head at the point where the spine joins the skull. The hair, Leaphorn noticed, was matted and stiff. The doctor leaned back, looking up at them, grinning happily. “See?”
Leaphorn could see very little—only a small place where neck became skull and where there seemed to be the blackness of congealed blood.
“What am I seeing?” Kennedy asked, sounding irritated. “I don’t see a damned thing.”
The pathologist stood, brushed off his hands, and looked down at the man in the pointed shoes.
“What you see is where somebody who knows how to use a knife can kill somebody quick,” he said. “Like lightning. You stick it in that little gap between the first vertebra and the base of the skull. Cut the spinal cord.” He chuckled. “Zap.”
“That what happened?” Kennedy asked. “How long ago?”
“Looks like it,” the doctor said. “I’d say it was probably yesterday. But we'll do an autopsy. Then you'll have your answer.”
“One answer,” Kennedy said. “Or two. How and when. That leaves who.”
And why, Leaphorn thought. Why was always the question that lay at the heart of things. It was the answer Joe Leaphorn always looked for. Why did this man—obviously not a Navajo—have the name of a Navajo woman written on a note in his pocket? And the misspelled name of a Navajo’ ceremonial? The Yeibichai. It was the ceremonial in which the great mystical, mythical, magical spirits who formed the culture of the Navajos and created their first four clans actually appeared, personified in masks worn by dancers. Was the murdered man headed for a Yeibichai? As a matter of fact, he couldn't have been. It was weeks too early. The Yeibichai was a winter ceremonial. It could be performed only after the snakes had hibernated, only in the Season When Thunder Sleeps. But why else would he have the note?
Leaphorn pondered and found no possible answers. He would find Agnes Tsosie and ask her.
The Agnes Tsosie Leaphorn remembered proved to be—apparently—the right one. At least when Leaphorn inquired about her as the first step in what he feared would be a time-consuming hunt he learned the family was planning a Yeibichai ceremonial for her. He spent a few hours making telephone inquiries and decided he had struck it lucky. There seemed to be only three of the great Night Chant ceremonials scheduled so far. One would be held at the Navajo Nation Fair at Window Rock for a man named Roanhorse and another was planned in December over near Burnt Water for someone in the Gorman family. That left Agnes Tsosie of Lower Greasewood as the only possibility.