Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  After Hecuba had gobbled and rattled her dinner down and curled up to sleep, Anna made her a bed of dish towels and nestled her warm soft body into it. Past the knee-weakening first wave of relief and fortified by exposure to one exquisite fur-coated life, she felt able to climb the stairs to the abattoir a psychopath had made of her bedroom.

  The carnage was no less horrifying for being expected. Knowing her cat to be safe, Anna was better able to see it in all its ghastly glory. Touch-ing nothing, she examined the animal remains. The burning went deep but she could tell it had been a squirrel, an Abert she assumed from the bits of black fur remaining. The Aberts were particular favorites of hers. She'd never seen them anywhere but the middle West, from Grand Canyon to Rocky. These squirrels were coal black with exceedingly long white-tufted ears. While glad it wasn't Hecuba, Anna grieved for the loss of the small life and, because of the wanton cruelty of it, suffered a cold desire to surgically remove the perpetrator from the land of the living.

  Through the sharp odors of burned flesh, fur and scorched fabric, she could smell an accelerant. Most of it had been consumed but several drops had fallen on the down comforter. Lighter fluid was her guess: cheap, efficient, easy to come by. Also easy to detect, but this crime was committed with detection in mind. The squirrel had been soaked but not the coverlet. The intent was not arson but terror, terror painted in blood and bone, choreographed, as if the perpetrator fancied himself an artist of cruelty.

  Or herself.

  A woman could as easily ignite a caged squirrel as a man, though Anna had significantly more trouble picturing it. Women could be as brutal as their male counterparts, as unfeeling and possibly even more vicious. Women were also more practical. Evil was done to get, avoid or control. This was done partly to frighten Anna but, from the care taken to stage it, she guessed it had been done mostly for fun.

  What remained of the squirrel was beginning to stiffen. The incident had happened several hours earlier, between noon and four or five. Plenty of time for Robert Proffit-or a long-legged woman-to hike out and arrange this nasty surprise. But time to plan it? Aberts weren't common- not rare, but not common. The animal had to be trapped and transported before it was sacrificed. Did the doer of the deed know Anna had adopted a black-and-white kitten? Proffit knew. Maybe. They hadn't found him at the enclave but that didn't mean he hadn't been around, or returned and heard the story from Alexis or Beth. Anna doubted the plan had been that intricate. Had that been the case it would be logical that the wretch- whoever he or she might be-wouldn't have brought the squirrel at all but would have expected to find and kill Hecuba. All the better to terrorize you, my dear...

  Anna tried to picture the handsome, competent Miss Perry in the act of insane evil that had resulted in the ruin of her bedroom, the Abert and her peace of mind. Rita didn't give off those vibes but then neither, it was said, did Ted Bundy. Rita had proven alarmingly unconcerned over Anna's report of the blood-dripping backpack. With her passion for an as yet undiscovered greater good, Rita could probably bring herself to slaughter a squirrel for the cause, whatever it was. Slaughter maybe, but Anna could not see her torturing it or nailing thirteen living mice to an outhouse wall.

  The individual she could easily picture tormenting small helpless creatures was Mr. Sheppard. What he might hope to gain from such a theatrical display of wanton cruelty wasn't readily apparent. The crime, though aimed at frightening Anna, was anonymous. There wasn't much that was more personal than butchering an animal in one's bed; anyone who'd seen The Godfather knew that. She was being warned away. Away from what was unspecified. Given the only case she'd been in Rocky long enough to be associated with was the kidnap of the girls, she had to make certain assumptions.

  Had Sheppard, for reasons of his own, spirited the girls away? Was that why Alexis and Beth were less than anxious to be reunited with their families when they'd finally reappeared? Why they would not say where they had been, where Candace still was? Had Candace been killed or had she chosen to stay gone, taken a bus or hitchhiked out of the clutches of Sheppard?

  Speculation was giving Anna a headache, or, rather, adding to the ache that locked back, shoulder and neck in an unkind embrace. The hot bath, like the Holy Grail, seemed a chimera leading her onward, yet never letting her get any closer.

  With a sense of doing her duty, yet without much hope that duty would pay off, she called the chief ranger to report the breaking and entering. In truth no actual breakage had occurred. Anna hadn't bothered to lock her doors, a situation that would change until this butcher of squirrels, abductor of teenage girls and disembodied taunter of disabled rock climbers was behind bars.

  While she waited for Lorraine and whomever else she deemed neces-sary to arrive, Anna photographed the grisly bedspread and Abert remains with her 35 mm camera. One day the NFS would graduate to digital. Maybe after patrol rangers were issued cell phones.

  The rangers came. Rita Perry wasn't with them. Due to the renewed search for Candace Watson, ranger schedules had been scrambled. Rita was on six ten-hour days, off four. She still had two lieu days coming this rotation.

  The crime scene investigation was carried out with diligence, if not optimism. Nothing so delicious as a dusty footprint on the hardwood floors or a hair follicle with DNA was found. The furnishings in Anna's room had been used in Mississippi, packed by broad-shouldered strangers, moved by the kind auspices of half a dozen park employees. Fingerprinting and trace evidence was a complex nightmare that there wasn't time, money or expertise to unravel. The incident, after all, was merely a gruesome prank involving only the death of a squirrel.

  Possible motives were bandied about: resentment of Anna as the first female district ranger hired, hostility from family members of the former owners of the house who'd taken umbrage when their widowed mother sold out to the NPS to rent to government employees and moved to Florida with a man half her age. The search. Mr. Sheppard. Robert Proffit.

  Anna didn't bring up Rita Perry's name. She had too little to go on and the new kid on the block wasn't going to earn any points accusing a beloved seasonal who was both younger and prettier than she was.

  After an excessively long interval during which the rangers surmised, speculated and fumed, Anna resisted the urge to scream and throw her-self on the floor in a tantrum of fatigue and muscle rebellion. Finally the party broke up. Anna gathered the four corners of her comforter together and deposited the ruined Abert in his oversized goose-down shroud in the garbage can outside.

  Having locked every door, checked the closets, even those too small to harbor a criminal over the age of six, and carried Hecuba up the stairs for company, she at long last lowered her stinking raging body into a bath so hot it stung the skin. Her deep groan of relief brought an answering chirp from the kitten, who sat on the edge of the tub the better to witness this disgusting immersion ritual.

  Hecuba was still young enough her brain wasn't yet aware her tail was part of the same cat. She allowed it to fall over the edge, the last two inches in the water. Anna smiled. Smiling was about the only movement that didn't hurt. She wished she had not blown off Rita's offer of Valium. Not that she'd feel particularly comfortable at the moment ingesting any drug provided by her frontcountry ranger.

  It crossed her mind to drag Molly or Paul into the tub with her by wav of the cell phone. Fearing the sound of a loving voice would be the undo-ing of her, she settled into the heat with only the cat for company. As she slid down in the niggardly prefab tub, sacrificing her knees to the chill air that she might soak both spine and skull in the hot water, she set about ordering this unconscionably long week in her mind.

  Mice. Unkempt campsites. Bleeding pack. Twenty-four hours on the manzanita. The note from Proffit. Rita's lying about it. Proffit's voice lur-ing children. Alexis pregnant. Candace and the other girls, unseen but laughing, prodding at Heath under the RV Proffit bunking at Rita's, a stone's throw from the Thompson River District ranger station. The butchered Abert.

  Wor
king at Rocky Mountain National Park was way more exciting than Anna had bargained for. The days just flew by when others were hav-ing fun at one's expense.

  Hoping the hot water heater was a big one, she nudged the left knob with her big toe. Her fragmented thoughts floated on the sound of the running water. She didn't examine them too closely, just allowed them to brush by each other, seeing if any connections could be made.

  Two things formed out of the mental mist. One that was there too often, and one conspicuous by its absence. Nowhere could she detect money or personal gain. The cases she'd worked in the parks-other than those of spontaneous combustion: a fistfight over a campsite, domestic violence-were fueled by greed. Lust for money, power, prestige. Mostly money. Money could buy the other two. Lesser crimes had been fomented by lesser demons: jealousy, revenge, spite.

  In Rocky's mess of mice and squirrels, battered girls and bloody Chris-tians, there didn't seem to be anything to gain. At least nothing a sane person would find alluring.

  That brought Anna to the other thing, the thing that appeared too often. The through line, the consistent theme. Murder of the mice was psychotic. Burning the squirrel: psychotic. Disembodied voices, poking at a paraplegic with pointy sticks: psychotic. Battered girls in panties. Psy-chotic. Stuffing bleeding flesh into backpacks. Major psychotic. A sudden chill took her, despite the steaming water. The winter before, in the high country of Yosemite National Park, she'd dealt with an individual she felt to be genuinely evil, the kind of evil that suffers such a cold indifference to the wants and needs-the very lives-of those around it that to kill a busload of rabbis on their way to temple, simply to obtain an olive for one's martini, wouldn't give the monster pause.

  Though she found it unsettling on several levels, Anna could under-stand that sort of criminal. Dormant, comatose, she told herself with more fervency than an innocent woman would have required, that evil dwelt within her. In the snow of the Sierra it had been called forth. Perhaps it had saved her life. Still, she never wanted to feel its icy grip again.

  Whatever-whoever-was torturing rodents and children and bloody-ing innocent backpacks in the Rockies was different. True evil had logic, desire, goals and a sense of self-preservation. The miasma poisoning Rocky was not so much evil as sickness. A deep festering so putrid and toxic that, in a way, Anna was relieved she could not understand it. A bus-load of holy men versus an olive... well, if one were starving for a bit of pimiento... but to understand why one would torture the helpless for no other reason than personal enjoyment would be a glimpse into a part of one's mind better left unknown.

  One or more persons in or around Rocky was a serial killer of small animals. This person might or might not be one and the same as the abductor of girls-if the girls had indeed been abducted and weren't using the story to cover up running away.

  Most of what Anna knew of psychopaths, she had gleaned from movies and books-fiction, not documentary or texts. In America there was a great and fluctuating sea of common knowledge dispersed and rati-fied by the popular media's echoing what they gleaned from other popu-lar media sources. A lot was inaccurate. Not all of it. That would be too easy. But a lot of it.

  Anna "knew" that psychopaths-or was it sociopaths, she really must call Molly-who wanted to grow up to be serial killers customarily started out, often at a heart-stoppingly young age, with the destruction of lesser lives. Like Bram Stoker's Renfield, hoping to work his way up from flies to spiders to mice, then asking in one of the most frightening lines in a truly scary book: "May I have a kitten?"

  Given this was true-and where Homo sapiens were involved, nothing was consistently true-Rocky's own personal psycho might yet be im-mature, still in the caterpillar state where small, legal murders, murders which, without the torture, were even considered admirable in pest removal circles, were sufficient to slake the need for pain and death. Again according to the movies and paperback thrillers, baby psychos could be from five years old to teens or possibly early twenties. Then there seemed to come a decade where they disappeared into cocoons. A sort of awkward age, too old to slaughter the family pet, too young to kill the girl next door.

  At age thirty they emerged to meet the profile: thirties, white, male, often intelligent, tends to be a loner, could live with Mom.

  Robert Proffit was a bit old-and a bit young-for the overt part of the predatory pattern, but perhaps he was slower than others to mature and continued to amuse himself with small game.

  Sheppard was older than the template and struck Anna more as an abuser, a tyrant, than a killer. Far more satisfying to lord it over one's vic-tims for a lifetime than snuff them out in a moment. No, Sheppard didn't strike her as a man to break his toys past all mending.

  But then no person had been killed, or at least no body found. The saga of Beth, Alexis and the still missing Candace could be one of crime and punishment. The crime: running away. Maybe the punishment, whatever it was, was what Anna was being warned away from sticking her nose in.

  Rita Perry resurfaced in Anna's mind. Rita knew of the live mousetrap, the bleeding pack. Rita harbored Robert Proffit. Rita was sleeping with- euphemistically speaking-the Fern Lake ranger, Raymond Bleeker.

  Having been handed much guiltier-looking prospects, Anna would have preferred to overlook Bleeker. He had proximity to the mouse inci-dent, the live trap, Odessa Lake and Picnic Rock. The New Canaan enclave and Rollin' Roost were a bit of a stretch, but he was young, strong, owned a car and, judging by the look of the Fern Lake campground, hadn't been spending a whole lot of time doing his job.

  As with all law enforcement personnel, Bleeker had undergone a thor-ough background check prior to being hired. Anna had read it. Nothing popped up in the way of red flags. The man had never been arrested or accused of so much as shoplifting or vandalism. Neither the high school nor the college he attended had anything to say against him but remarked on a tendency to tardiness. His reviews from previous parks were uni-formly glowing. In a litigious, feel-good, politically correct world where victimhood was claimed and lauded by many, the rating system for sea-sonals had become as inflated as the grades in most schools, but man-agers found ways of cluing in one another: things not said, damning with faint praise. In retrospect the good reports surprised Anna. Maybe Ray had done a better job in other parks than he was doing at Fern Lake. Rita might be proving a distraction. Backcountry/frontcountry romances required a lot of hours on the trail.

  Sheppard would have been checked out by both the NFS and local law enforcement during the search. Such was the cynical nature of the law. when children went missing, moms and dads were front and center on the list of suspected kidnappers. Same for Robert Proffit. A handsome young man who went out of his way to work with seventh- and eighth-grade girls would not go unnoticed. If there'd been anything untoward in either of their records, Lorraine would have told her.

  Anna would recheck the background reports, see what she could find by way of alibis for the time the squirrel was killed, but first on her list in the morning, when it came, would be finding out why Rita happened to be passing Picnic Rock at such an auspicious moment in Anna's life.

  Tired as she was, Anna was not sorry when her alarm woke her at 4:30 A.M. The hot bath and Advil had done her back a world of good, but lying in one place for so long had brought back the ache. Movement was what was needed, warm blood flowing through the damaged soft tissues. Her days as an iron woman of thirty-five were long gone. Strength and endurance had waned a bit. What took their place served her better: the stubbornness of keeping on keeping on. Perhaps it was only an increased ability to suffer discomfort. Whatever it was, it had carried her up steeper trails than the one she would tackle today.

  Having locked the house, she loaded Hecuba, her litter box, food and water into the Crown Vie. The little cat would spend her day at the Thompson River District office. Anna did not want to waste time won-dering if there would be bleeding cat parts festooning her house when she got home.

  This being the third of R
ita Perry's four days off, Anna hoped she might again make the hike to Fern Lake or the Tourmaline Gorge area to do whatever it was she did up there other than pry boulders off the legs of the girl rangers and have wild unhallowed sex with the boy rangers.

  The kitten settled in, she grabbed a flashlight she'd found in the bot-tom drawer of her desk. The sun would be up in half an hour. To the east she could have seen the faint hope of dawn had she not been down in tall pines. Beneath the lodgepoles it was as chilly and dark as a November midnight in Mississippi. Anna was pleased. What she was doing wasn't illegal, or particularly unethical; still, she didn't want any witnesses.

  Rita's Crown Vic-or rather the patrol vehicle Rita shared with Thompson River District's two other law enforcement seasonals-was parked on the gravel between the ranger station and Rita's quarters. In a shared government vehicle there can be no expectation of privacy. Anna was well within her rights to search it to her heart's content.

  Had Anna been required to tell a judge specifically what she sought for the purposes for warrant, she wouldn't have been able to do it. Anna was fishing, hoping to snag any bit of information that might illuminate the enigma that was Rita. She was definitely a woman with secrets. Anna could smell them on her like a man's cologne after a long embrace. At the best of times Anna had trouble resisting a secret. When that secret might pertain to budding psychos and destruction of park wildlife-and her best comforter-she didn't even try.