Track Of The Cat

by Nevada Barr

  16

  AT ten till eight the following morning Anna's disability leave came to an end. She was back in uniform. Along with Paul, Corinne, and Cheryl, she sat in the conference room in the Administration building. At the head of the long, well-polished oak table, Corinne blinked benignly from behind aviator-style spectacles. It was a habit Anna had learned not to be comforted by. The sleepy, rabbit-eyed winks meant nothing. It was just a facial gesture the Chief Ranger adopted when she was waiting; a disarming, feminine version of the poker face.

  Harland Roberts came in and the waiting was over. Corinne looked pointedly at the wall clock but the minute hand still held at two minutes till eight. He was not late. Inspired by the assumption of guilt, he apologized anyway and Corinne accepted it.

  "I don't want this dragging on," Ranger Mathers began the meeting without preamble. "What've you got, Paul?"

  Paul Decker, head of Search and Rescue for the Guadalupes, quickly adopted her manner: clipped, no frills. "Every search is an emergency," he began. "But we don't know yet whether we've got a search. Craig went into the backcountry on the West Side on July fifteenth-five days ago. From what I understand, mostly from conversations he had with Manny, he'd planned staying two days and two nights. The next two days, the seventeenth and eighteenth, were his lieu days. He didn't report to work yesterday and he didn't return to the housing area.

  "We've no way of knowing whether he's still in the backcountry or if he came out when he told Manny he would and went someplace for the weekend and got hurt or delayed there.

  "Yesterday I called the University in El Paso and followed up on a few leads they gave me. No one has seen him. I doubt there's any cause for panic but, by the same token, there's no excuse for delay.

  "All we know is he was collecting on the West Side but not precisely what or where. He had gathering permits for the entire park and left no itinerary. We need to locate his vehicle and narrow the area of the search. I'll go into William's ranch house near the escarpment. Anna will drive around the far western boundary to PX Well and a couple of other places where he may have parked and walked in. Cheryl is going to hold the fort down here. You'll be the only law enforcement within hailing distance so keep in touch with the Visitors Center," Paul said to Cheryl and she nodded. "Harland will head over to Dog Canyon and drive around to Marcus to see if Craig left his Volvo outside the fence on that old access road. It's unlikely Craig would walk in over Cut Off Mountain but who knows what he was looking for. Anybody?"

  Corinne looked at each of them expectantly, almost a nonverbal demand.

  Maintaining, as always, a low political profile, Cheryl Light stared at her finger-ends.

  "Martians," Harland said gently when the Chief Ranger's gaze raked across him. The sadness of his smile disarmed the remark's cruelty.

  When Corinne came to her, Anna just shook her head. She had been interested in the reptiles Craig was collecting but wasn't informed enough about his project to know any particular animal or habitat he might've been studying this trip.

  Paul started to speak again but before he could, Harland raised his hand a few inches. A habit very few people shake regardless of how many years have elapsed since they were in third grade. Paul waited.

  "He might not have been delayed or injured," Harland said slowly. "He may have just taken off. Craig is…" He caught Anna's eye and she looked back without expression, curious to see if he would give away Craig's secret to the staff. "… spontaneous," Roberts finished and Anna was relieved. Not so much because Craig Eastern had been protected but because Harland hadn't proved a cad.

  "That's a possibility," Paul conceded. "Let's hope that's the case. Then nothing is lost but a little time and sleep. Still, we've got to search."

  "Of course," Harland agreed.

  Before the meeting broke up the search plan had been established. If the car was found they would begin at that point. Meanwhile, Christina Walters would be detailed to conduct a phone search of the usual places: police, hospitals, Border Patrol, family, friends, etc.

  Anna fell into step beside Harland as he walked out the back door to the employee parking lot. Remembering the sad "Martian" smile, she stopped at his truck, rested her elbows on the tailgate.

  One hand on the door handle, he waited politely for her to speak.

  "Have you got any particular reason to think Craig just ran off?" she asked. For a moment she thought he wasn't going to answer. Behind his gray eyes, she could see a small struggle taking place. When he finally did speak, she felt he was choosing his way carefully, censoring his thoughts before they became words.

  "Nothing I can prove in a court of law," he said with a feeble attempt at lightness. Even that tiny spark vanished with the next sentence. "Not even something I'd want bantered around, run though the gossip mill."

  Anna did gossip, loved a good gossip, but seldom with anyone in the park. Her reputation for being able to keep her mouth shut was better than it deserved to be. Evidently it was about to pay off. Harland continued.

  "It crossed my mind that Craig might be running away from something. It would be true to form. He's not a psychopath. When he commits… when he does something maybe he shouldn't, he's aware of it. He has a conscience. It hurts him. If he'd done something he felt pretty bad about, I don't think he could deal with his feelings, or with being found out. I think he'd run away. Like a little kid."

  "What do you think he might have done?" Anna prodded but Harland was done confiding.

  "Could've been anything," he replied easily. "Something we might even think was silly. It only needed to be important in Craig's mind." With that, he opened the door of his pickup and Anna took it correctly as a dismissal.

  On the long drive around the western boundary of the park to PX Well, Anna pondered the crimes Craig could be running from: guilt at slandering Drury, maybe even Sheila's death, the attempt on her own life.

  Craig was passionate, dedicated. And insane. It didn't take a great stretch of the imagination to picture him killing to keep the developers out of the park, the bulldozers and concrete mixers out of Dog Canyon. Not only would he be fighting against the destruction of the fragile canyon when the RV sites were put in, but against the ongoing degradation of the area as the great roaring, gas-guzzling beasts rolled in with their baggage of humanity. People who had no intention of meeting Nature on her own terms but who must travel to the wilderness in a motorized hotel room replete with TVs, VCRs, showers, toilets, and growling generators.

  Then would come the demands that inevitably followed RV invasions: sewage dumps, water and electric hookups, and, finally, the cry of "Why can't we drive through the park? How are people supposed to see it?"

  Anna could envision Craig committing murder to save the Guadalupe Mountains from such defilement. With very little effort, she could picture herself helping him.

  And then trying to kill her because she wouldn't leave Drury's demise well enough alone? Eastern couldn't have known she'd reached enough dead ends, was shaken enough from her fall to drop the investigation. Maybe he thought when she came back from Mexico she'd begin to dig again, with twice the energy now her life, too, had been threatened.

  So he ran.

  He'd left his pet snakes behind. Paul had noticed when he checked Craig's apartment. Snakes, though, could live for weeks without food. Anna couldn't imagine they would suffer undue psychological trauma from the loss of Craig's companionship.

  According to Paul, he'd not taken any clothes or books or anything, either. But then Craig was crazy. Maybe he'd run from everything-murder, snakes, laundry, phone bills.

  Anna sighed and switched on the radio. Trying to second-guess lunatics, drunks, or the Office of Personnel Management was an exercise in frustration. Their logic totally eluded her.

  Jarring bones and rattling teeth drowned out any thought for a while as she forced the truck over the broken rock of the rutted road. So bad was the surface, even ten miles an hour was too fast to maintain control. Anna doubte
d Craig's old Volvo could make it over such rugged terrain, but she'd seen cars in stranger places.

  The heat grew oppressive. The plastic steering wheel burned her hands. Her feet, in their regulation boots, felt as if her socks had been dipped in kerosene and set on fire.

  Mentally excusing herself to Rogelio's environmental purism, she rolled up the window and cranked up the air conditioner.

  Eastern's Volvo was not at PX Well. While she was there, Anna checked the rain gauge. Dry, as she'd expected. Not a trace of rain had fallen on the West Side since February and very little more than that in the entire Southwest. The region was in its fourth year of drought. Fires burned out of control in Arizona, Nevada, and all over New Mexico. Every morning in the ranger report was news of another fifteen-, twenty-, thirty-thousand acres burned. Even Yosemite was on fire.

  Close to four-thirty Anna arrived back at Park Headquarters. Harland's Roads and Trails truck wasn't in the lot but Paul's one-ton was there between the jeep Cheryl was driving and the Chief Ranger's van.

  Climbing out of the air-conditioned cab, Anna was hit by the heat. For a few seconds it felt delicious. Then the caress grew heavy, gluing her clothes to her body. Escaping up the cement steps, she let herself in the rear door of the building.

  The others were already gathered around the conference table. Christina Walters had joined them. She smiled faintly when Anna caught her eye and Anna walked around the table and took the chair next to hers. The glower of the Chief Ranger, shorn of its amiable sheep's clothing, filled the room with a silence too active to allow for conversation.

  Paul sat across the table poring through a sheaf of forms. Looking busy, Anna speculated. Corinne's silences clamored too loudly to allow for reading.

  Cheryl was lost again in her finger-ends.

  Shifting her revolver and radio so they didn't bite into her ribs quite so hard, Anna settled in to await Corinne's signal that the meeting could begin.

  Through the door connecting the conference room with the offices came an irregular tattoo of muffled thumps and slaps, as though in the adjoining room a confession were being beaten out of some uncooperative suspect. Marta huffing through books and manuals, telegraphed sullen disapproval that Christina was asked to the meeting and she was not.

  A pointed look from Corinne Mathers sent Christina to close the door.

  As she resumed her seat, Harland Roberts came in from the hall. His dark hair was ruffled like a boy's, one lock falling over his forehead as if he had driven with his window rolled down.

  Corinne glanced at the wall clock: 4:34. He was late. This time he didn't apologize. Apparently, the actuality of his guilt satisfied the Chief Ranger. Her face relaxed and she smiled; the meeting could begin.

  No trace had been found of Craig's vehicle: no tracks, nothing. There were six gates in the fence around the boundary, most were the dead ends of rutted gravel roads leading into old wells and stock tanks left over from when the Guadalupes had been used for sheep and cattle grazing. The Volvo hadn't been found at any of them.

  Next, Christina gave her report. There had been no official recognition of Eastern in the past seven days: no traffic violations, accidents, hospitalizations, arrests, or parking tickets concerning a Craig Eastern anywhere in a one-hundred-and-fifteen-mile radius of the park. Nor had any of the names and numbers she'd followed up from the University of Texas at El Paso proved fruitful.

  Anna wondered whether or not Harland had given her the phone number of the mental institution in Austin. As if her thought cued Roberts's voice, he said: " Austin?"

  "I followed up on the number you suggested, Harland," Christina replied carefully. Anna was not surprised at her natural sensitivity. She'd come to expect it. "The information had to be pried out of them, but I finally found a nurse who would talk with me. They've not seen Craig for. two years."

  "Nurse?" Corinne pounced on the word. "Does Craig have a physical problem?"

  Christina looked uncomfortable. This was not her secret to tell. In truth, it wasn't Harland's either, but somehow it seemed he'd earned a right to it.

  "Not a physical problem, Corinne," he replied.

  The Chief Ranger waited, both of her small capable hands palm-down on the blond wood of the table.

  Anna was put in mind of Piedmont: alert, casually deadly, waiting for a mouse to run out from behind the stove.

  Sure as death, the mouse panicked.

  "It's a personal matter, Corinne," Harland said when the pressure got to him. "Not something I feel I can discuss without Craig's permission."

  "I understand your reticence to tell something you might have learned in confidence," Corinne said reasonably. "But any information we get could save Craig's life. It will not leave this room." She didn't look at any of them for compliance. She didn't have to. The implied threat was clear in her tone. If the story worked its way back to her in any form there would be hell to pay.

  Harland caved in. Anna didn't blame him. The information was relevant. And Corinne demanded it.

  "I'm in a position to know that Craig has, in the past, suffered from a mental illness severe enough to get him institutionalized on more than one occasion."

  A silence as deep as the one Corinne imposed before meetings developed on the conference table in front of them. To Anna it felt as if it were comprised of one part guilt and nine parts embarrassment. Mental illness was still taboo. They felt guilty because they'd thought Craig was crazy. Now they were embarrassed because they knew he was. If he came back to work, the first few days they'd all tiptoe around glad-handing him as if he were the most regular Joe they'd ever met.

  "Hunting Martians," Corinne muttered and shook her head. "Christina, after the meeting get me that clinic on the phone. They'll talk to me." To Harland, she said only: "I should have been informed."

  Paul screwed himself around in his chair like a drill-bit emerging straight and true out of soft pine. "We don't know where Craig is, but we can infer from what information we do have that he may be in trouble. I'd like some air coverage. If we could borrow a helicopter from the Forest Service we could try and locate his camp. See if he left the backcountry."

  "Craig's tent is desert camo," Harland said. "He was bragging about it to me the other day. It'll be a bitch to find in broken country."

  Corinne jerked her chin at Christina. With a certain awe of Chris's telepathic powers, Anna watched her quietly leave the conference room.

  Several minutes later she returned in the midst of a discussion of Craig Eastern's probable itineraries. Corinne looked at her and everyone stopped talking.

  "Due to the fires, all helicopters in the Southwest region are in use. Highest priority. It will be a week or ten days before they can guarantee us one for this search."

  "Paulsen's got one," Anna said, remembering suddenly.

  "Jerimiah D.? That's right," Harland added. "He has."

  Christina went without the nod, and returned to report that Paulsen's helicopter was undergoing repairs. The rotor was in Sante Fe being worked on. As soon as it was running, he'd be glad to lend it to the National Park Service.

  The meeting adjourned at five after six. Search dogs had been promised by the El Paso Police Department in two days' time. At present all their dogs were in use searching for a ten-year-old boy lost in the Gila National Forest.

  Tomorrow Anna and Paul would begin a man hunt, starting with the most likely points of entry: Williams Ranch and PX Well. Anna would ride Gideon; Paul, Pesky. Harland was to coordinate transportation for the rangers and the livestock.

  It was, Paul pointed out, better than sitting on their hands.

  Christina would continue her search by phone.

  Harland was waiting at PX Well when Anna and Gideon rode out the next evening. She was late, nearly two hours. Always, as she rode, was the nagging sense that just a little further, just over the next ragged, rocky hill, she would find something. She'd blown her shrill plastic search whistle till her ears were buzzing and Gideon had begu
n to flinch as if she laid a lash to him. Between the two of them they'd consumed forty pounds of water-five gallons-and would've consumed another gallon if they'd had it.

  The sight of the waiting horse trailer gave the old horse back his youth. Then he saw Roberts and began to flag. Gideon stumbled half a dozen times in the last quarter-mile. He was putting on a show for Harland.

  A long drink of water was waiting for the horse and a cold Milwaukee Black Label for Anna, courtesy of Harland Roberts. She was popping the top as she said: "I'm in uniform, I really shouldn't."

  Harland opened a can for himself, sipping to her gulps. More of a promise never to tell on her than a serious drinking of beer. Anna slid to the ground in the shade of the horse trailer, her back against the fender.

  "Not a damn thing," she said to his questioning look. "Davy Crockett couldn't track a tank over this kind of country. Yours Truly was totally baffled. We played it by ear. Followed the obvious animal trails, sought out the snakiest-looking country. Not so much as a gum wrapper. Maybe the Martians did beam him up." She leaned her head back against the warm metal of the trailer and poured another quarter of a can of beer down her throat. It was the finest beverage she'd ever tasted. Heaven was just Hell in the shade with a cold beer.

  "Maybe tomorrow," Harland said.

  "Maybe tomorrow."

  Tomorrow brought the dog from El Paso and the policewoman who worked with her. The dog's name was Natasha Osirus. Her handler, Betsy McLeod, called her Nosy. Nosy was an eleven-year-old golden retriever trained to search. Serious, almost grave, she was terribly dedicated until Betsy produced a well-chewed Raggedy Ann doll, then she was the silliest of puppies. Like Nosy, Betsy was blond, though Anna suspected it was due more to Lady Clairol than the desert sun. Both had a loose-jointed unkempt look that put Anna at ease immediately. They also shared a warmth and a brown-eyed sincerity that gave one faith.

  Noon found Paul, Anna, Betsy, and the dog on the porch of the Williams ranch house. A plain wooden building, it had been constructed at the turn of the century for a new bride who took one look at the desert stretching barbarous miles out from her very doorstep and fled back to civilization.