Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  The vehicle yielded nothing but a weakness for Hershey's Kisses on the part of one of the seasonals. The ranger with the sweet tooth had not been so rude as to leave wadded up pieces of foil littering the seat or clut-tering up the ashtray, but several of the candies' thin strips of paper read-ing "KISS KISS KISS" had escaped, blown under the seat, worked their way into crevices. One had wended or wafted through the cage to settle on the floor of the back seat. That one Anna left in place, a cheery message for the next person arrested.

  The trunk contained the customary patrol paraphernalia: flares, first aid pack, accident investigation kit, field drug-testing kit-pretty much a waste of space but somewhere along the line it became part of the gear- Breathalyzer, a couple of traffic cones, tow chain. The only thing unex-pected was the tidiness with which these items had been stowed and the cleanliness of the carpeted area beneath them.

  Rangers' trunks were occasionally tidy but seldom clean. They suf-fered too much use. Items used in rain, mud, sand and forest duff were routinely chucked in. This carpet looked freshly vacuumed.

  No law forbade employees from detailing their patrol vehicles even unto the inside of the trunk. Under most circumstances, Anna would have found it commendable. Given the hellacious schedules the rangers were working at the tail end of the tourist season while burdened with search-and-rescue assignments and out-of-park fire details, Anna found it suspicious.

  Working quickly and quietly she removed the gear, then played her light carefully over the exposed carpeting. Clean. Vacuumed. But not sham-pooed. On the right rear side near the wheel well there was a dark stain, two sides of it ruler-straight where a tarp or canvas had been laid down, the other edge irregular as if liquid had spilled over. Pinching up a bit of the dried substance, Anna spit on her fingers and rubbed them together, a quick and dirty field test. The brownish particles reconstituted to blood red. Finding yet one more use for her battered Swiss Army Knife, she neatly cut out a two-by-two inch square of the carpeting and slipped it into a small manila evidence envelope. That done, she pocketed it and restored the items to the trunk in the same order in which she had found them.

  By the time she finished, dawn had made it over the mountains and was reaching fog-colored fingers down into the trees. Time to go.

  She ascended the shorter, if no less steep, route to Fern Lake that began at the Bierstat Lake trailhead. The trip up was more time-consuming than the trek down had been. She reached the campground near eight o'clock. Most sites were full. Campers were stirring about in a sleepy chill, metal and plastic cups of hot beverages clasped between their hands. Anna liked campgrounds best in the early hours. Removed from their safe houses and comfortable routines, human beings showed a vulnerable, more benevolent aspect of themselves. People hiked without alarm clocks, and those who were sensible enough to experience the natural rhythms of the earth maintained elastic itineraries. Around a morning camp at a vacation spot there was none of the mindless hurrying of a workday morn-ing. There was also the heady smell of campfire smoke. The perfume calmed Anna the way lavender was purported to soothe agitated Victo-rian ladies, until she remembered fires were banned in all but a few of the frontcountry sites.

  For the next half an hour or so, she played her least favorite role required by her job, that of wet blanket. The campers made the usual excuses. A woman said they were unaware of the regulation, never saw any of the multitude of signs or read any of the brochures or the regula-tions printed on the backcountry permit. A man, gruff at first but growing more amenable when he found Anna was going to give him a warning rather than a citation, went for the classic excuse: "The other ranger said I could." Though Anna had heard that more times than she could count and under practically every illegal circumstance she could think of, this time it was the reason she issued only warnings. After the conditions she'd noted on her previous visit-conditions that had not been rectified in her short absence-if not actually giving visitors permission to have fires, Ray was certainly turning a blind eye to it.

  Bleeker was up and dressed. As he damn well better be, Anna thought sourly, having spent the last three-quarters of an hour doing his job for him. Sitting in the morning sun on the cabin's front steps, he greeted her with a smile. "Coffee's on," he said, as if he were expecting her. Probably he was. While she was fiddling about with her firebugs, fisherpersons making the early commute from camp to lake would likely have told him. People liked to tell rangers things they didn't already know.

  "You changed your hair!" Anna said. His sandy brown baby-fine hair had been dyed a dramatic dark brown, almost black.

  "You like?" He tilted his head and struck a pose in such a perfect mim-icry of a fashion model that Anna laughed.

  "Hair's a renewable resource," she said equitably. "Might as well amuse yourself with it."

  "If I take after my dad, mine's an endangered species. Figured I might as well enjoy it while it lasts."

  Anna followed him into the cabin, once more struck by how immacu-late he kept it. Too bad his housekeeping skills didn't bleed over into campground maintenance. Over excellent coffee, she talked with him about this professional shortcoming.

  When she first broached the subject what she took to be startlingly cold fury froze his eyes and she braced herself for a long and ugly bout of justifications, shifting blame and counteraccusations.

  Apparently the look had not been fury but chagrin. He readily admit-ted that he'd let the campground chores slide. Apologizing profusely, he promised to be vigilant in the future. Anna hoped he was telling the truth. His ready acceptance of blame put her in mind of a landlord she'd had in college. Complaints on the part of his tenants were handled with the same mix of "Sorry" and "I'll get right on it." He never did. Moving the man was like trying to move a warm wall of mud with nothing but one's bare hands.

  Anna moved on. Proffit, Rita and Ray were the only people she knew for certain could have been in place for both the murder of the mice and the Abert squirrel in her bedroom. Of the three, only Proffit seemed to have a motive-if psychosis could be called a motive. Rita had the ghost of one, her association with Proffit. Ray might have had reasons of his own. Unlike the Shadow, Anna didn't know what evil lurked in the hearts of men. Ray could have hiked out the previous afternoon. He assured her he'd been in the high country all that day but could think of no way to prove it.

  Anna wasn't surprised. Fern Lake was not isolated. Campers came and -went, knocked on the door for shelter when it rained, sugar if they'd for-gotten it, or simply because the cabin was cute and they wanted a peek inside. In the nonpark world this would have provided a plethora of wit-nesses to a person's whereabouts on a given afternoon. Here, people were mostly nameless vacation nomads.

  For a minute or so, a long and not uncomfortable silence, they sipped their coffee.

  "I led a nature walk from two till maybe three-thirty," he volunteered. 'Then sat around with a couple from Missouri, I think. Or Mississippi. Minnesota. One of those 'M' states till around five, if that helps."

  "They still here?" Anna asked.

  "I doubt it."

  "Don't worry about it."

  "This about that squirrel business at your house?"

  Anna was startled. She'd not mentioned the nature of her disturbance over the radio. Then she remembered cell phones. She'd been warned the reception was nil at Fern Lake, but a mile up the Bear Lake Trail, one could call Istanbul if necessary.

  "Yeah."

  "Checking alibis?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why do you have to check mine?" He seemed merely interested, not defensive or angry. Anna was relieved at the professionalism.

  "The mice on the outhouse."

  "Ahh. Weirdness personified. Makes sense."

  "No. It doesn't. That's the problem."

  "It must make sense to somebody."

  Anna knew that to be true, but it wasn't a somebody she'd care to meet in a dark alley. Or let cat-sit.

  "I wish I had a video of me someplace else at the cru
cial time, Ray said.

  "Me, too," Anna said sincerely, then again: "Don't worry about it."

  Ray excused himself and vanished into the room where the gear was stored, saying he had something to show her. Listening to him crash around for what seemed a phenomenally long time, she helped herself to another cup of his fine coffee. Finally he emerged empty-handed.

  "Couldn't find it," he said with a grin that indicated he wasn't heart-broken over the failure.

  "What was it?"

  "Nothing much. If it turns up, I'll show it to you next time you drop by."

  Not in a mood to aid and abet the mysteriousness her seasonal was so obviously enjoying, Anna said nothing. She had someplace else she wanted to be anyway.

  Getting away was delayed for thirty minutes. Bleeker was in a chatty mood and kept up a steady stream of conversation, jumping from one subject to another. Throughout the chitchat ran a subtle line of justifica-tion for his letting the campground go to hell. He would have her believe all of his time was taken up with nature walks and evening programs. These weren't scheduled at the backcountry camp but neither were they discouraged. Anna commended him for his edifying the visitors, then reminded him none too gently that that was only a small part of his job. At the end of the half-hour, Bleeker looked at his watch, stopped talking and abruptly announced it was time to get to work on putting the camp-ground in order.

  Thus was Anna dismissed.

  The Odessa Lake campground was on her chosen route. Because Ray had failed so spectacularly at Fern, she stopped to inspect it on her way through. Two of the sites were occupied, the tents nestled like bright and poisonous mushrooms among the spectacularly huge boulders that had fallen into the narrow neck of Tourmaline Gorge. Both camps had been -abandoned for the day, their residents hiking or fishing or annoying the natural resources in one way or another, but for one rather woebegone vacationer.

  Perched on a rock like a Goth version of the White Rock fairy was a girl of ten or eleven. Her hair was coal black and cut in a spiky punked-out style that made her look younger and ageless at the same time. She was gaunt to the point Anna wondered if she suffered the early stages of anorexia, and dressed in the uniform of a boy emulating gang chic: over-sized shorts with the crotch nearly to her knees and a man-sized football jersey with the number 1 in white on a red background.

  "Hey," she said listlessly as Anna walked into her camp.

  "Hey your own self. Where is everybody?"

  "Fishing."

  Anna couldn't tell if the girl was sullen or just hadn't had enough to eat in her short life to give her the energy for enthusiasm.

  "They leave you behind to guard the camp?"

  "I don't like to kill things," she said with a vehemence Anna couldn't but admire.

  'A girl after my own heart." Anna was in a hurry but there was some-thing about this champion of fishes that touched her. "What do you like?" she asked, to prove another human being cared on at least a rudi-mentary level.

  The girl looked away, toward Odessa and Fern lakes, and spoke as if to the killers of fish who'd left her to her own devices for the day. "The ranger from the other lake leads nature walks and does evening programs," she said in the flat voice with which she'd hailed Anna. "Yesterday afternoon he took us all around the lake in the afternoon and told us about the plants and the animals for a couple hours."

  Receiving an education about the fishes didn't spark in her the same passion that the thought of killing them had. Perhaps she was more about rejection than acceptance. Not unusual in a preteen female.

  "Sounds interesting," Anna said. "Tell me what you saw." She didn't give a damn what the kid saw but she wanted to keep her talking. She sensed something off about the girl.

  The ploy was unsuccessful.

  "I've got to go," the scrawny Goth announced and slid down from the rock, hiking the baggy shorts up over her skinny thighs. Without a good-bye or a wave of the hand she walked toward Odessa Lake and the murderers of fishes.

  Mildly unsettling as the interview had been it had settled one ques-tion. Ray Bleeker was telling the truth. Having led a two-hour nature walk the previous afternoon, there was no way he could have been Anna's squirrel butcher.

  By ten o'clock she'd reached Picnic Rock. Rather than try and follow Rita unseen, she'd gambled that pulling her out from under a rock wasn't the only reason Rita had hiked up Tourmaline Gorge, just as shoving her off one hadn't been Robert Proffit's goal. Both, she believed, were fortu-itous accidents. The first lucky for her, the second for Mr. Proffit.

  Waiting when there was an action to be taken drove Anna nuts. Wait-ing when waiting was all she could do, she rather enjoyed. A time of forced indolence for the body and necessary alertness for the mind.

  She watched through the quiet of the morning as the sun's warmth worked its golden stillness down the ragged granite and into the trees. By one o'clock, even the birds and insects seemed to drowse. The golden eagle never returned, but she imagined him close and twice saw shadows glide across the sparkling gray of the granite slab. At two o'clock, the first white cloud appeared. Soon it was joined by others, and their subtle grumbling suggested there was lightning within and they were not averse to loosing it on the unwary hiker who dared climb too near their heaven.

  At two-forty-three the crunch of boots on dirt and gravel grated on Anna's ears, so long attuned to the more euphonious whisperings of the real world.

  Pay dirt, she thought. Waiting rather than trailing had been a gamble. Far more satisfying to win on a long shot. It was in her mind to spring silently to her feet to await the younger ranger's passing. Damaged muscles and sinews rebelled and she did little more than flinch and fold. Bowing to necessity, she eased up slowly, pushing off the rock and won-dering if this was what one felt like all the time when one was very old.

  First you must live that long, she told herself reassuringly. Like many a wild child of the sixties and seventies, she'd figured she'd die young. The idea had never bothered her much till she'd met Paul.

  The owner of the crunching boots was Rita Perry. Anna let her pass, then quietly fell in behind her.

  Following her was not terribly difficult. People not expecting a stalker travel in blind cocoons of thought. A phenomenon muggers count on to further their predatory ends. Anna had taken the rudimentary precaution of wearing pine- and dirt-hued shorts and shirt. There was no shortage of this unexciting palette in her wardrobe. It was as if, wearing the national park uniform for so many years, she'd come to think of variations on the green and gray as the only suitable color for clothing.

  For a couple of miles, maybe less, Rita followed the trail up toward Gabletop Mountain. Since Gabletop was not a terribly popular destina-tion in the park, the trail was not maintained with the assiduity of those to Longs Peak or Frozen Lake or a dozen other heavily visited destina-tions. This was not only a practical choice on the part of the Park Service, but an aesthetic one. Visitors willing to push farther and harder into the wilderness enjoyed a sense of newness, of being one of the few to discover this world. A wide, well-maintained trail with water bars and rock steps up the tricky bits spoiled the fantasy.

  Rather than walk steadily as was her habit when covering ground, Anna walked in fits and starts, pausing often to listen for Rita's boots on the trail. With no crowds for cover and Rita's easy recognition of her, Anna couldn't risk keeping her in sight. On the few occasions she mis-judged and rounded a bend in the trail to see Rita's retreating form, she backed off and waited. Given her weakened condition, the difference in their ages, Rita's long-legged stride and the fact the woman hiked like an all-terrain vehicle running on premium fuel, Anna's greatest concern was that gasping for breath would give her away. Two years at near sea level. her days spent sitting in offices and patrol cars, hadn't served her well for a return to mountain duty.

  After ninety minutes of this forced march, tree line was reached and Anna was afforded a clear view of a sketchy trail winding up to the barren rocky heights. No Rit
a. Backtracking, her attention on the minutiae to either side of the trail, Anna found where she had turned off. Again uphill. Had she not been fighting for breath, Anna would have noticed it when first she passed. The cut-off had been used many times. This must have been where Proffit was headed when he and Anna had met up at Picnic Rock, where Rita was going when she stopped to rescue her.

  Anna took out her topographical map of the area. It looked as if Rita was cutting up to the backside of Loomis, a small lake, scarcely more than a pond. Ignoring the burning in her lungs and the plaints of her back muscles, Anna picked up the pace. No mean feat in country grown so steep she slid on the downed needles and clung to trees to help herself along.

  The burst of speed paid off. Twenty minutes of hard climbing and she caught a glimpse of Rita. Another hour and the woman, who Anna had come to believe was a machine, her heart a nine-pound hammer, her legs pistons of titanium, crested the butte above Loomis, dropped down several hundred yards and came to a stop.