by Nevada Barr
The lab report had come back on the water bottle found in Rory's possession after his unplanned hike. The crime lab used by Glacier National Park was the Montana State Lab in Missoula.
It had been less than twenty-four hours since Harry had turned the thing over. Anna was impressed at the turnaround time. Harry Ruick obviously had clout.
The majority of the fingerprints on the bottle were Rory's, but four clear prints of thumb, index and middle finger had been lifted from the plastic. They belonged to Carolyn Van Slyke. To Anna's mind it was proof positive Rory had, if not killed his stepmother, at least been in close enough proximity to her the night he'd gone missing to obtain her water bottle. Though this was obvious enough to real people, Anna'd been around long enough to know it would mean little to a jury were Rory brought to trial. Any defense attorney would be able to argue that of course Mrs. Van Slyke's prints were on the bottle; she was Rory's mother. They could have been put there at any time before the boy'd taken the bottle camping with him. And could Anna swear, under oath, that he'd not had two bottles with him on the trip? No.
Had she not marked it when she took it into evidence, Anna would have had a tough time swearing that water bottle was the water bottle he'd had when he'd been found and not the one he'd used prior to the bear attack. The bottles were identical.
Two other partial prints, belonging neither to Rory nor Carolyn Van Slyke, were also on the bottle. At a guess they belonged to Lester, but they could be from anyone to whom Carolyn had given a drink. The hikers that found Rory could have held it for him. Still they'd be run through the AFIS, the automatic fingerprint identification system, as a matter of course.
The next page ended Anna's waffling. Traces of blood had been found on the bottom of the water bottle. As of the date of this report, the lab was unsure whether there was enough for DNA testing.
The remainder of the pages were just inventory lists: contents of the pack they'd found wedged under the log and the belongings of the deceased. Anna started to put the borrowed pages away and noticed the inventory of Carolyn's belongings wasn't duplicated. There were two lists: items belonging to the deceased and items found on the body of the deceased. At first they appeared identical. Then Anna'd noted the "belongings" list was short one item.
"I see you've made yourself at home," Harry said acidly.
"Yeah." Anna was too absorbed to notice the intended reprimand. "So the army jacket Carolyn was wearing wasn't hers?"
Ruick shook his head disgustedly. Since Anna'd not been aware of his implied rebuke, she also missed its annoyed follow-up at her obtuseness and took the headshake as a negative about the jacket.
"Lester's?" she asked.
"Les doesn't know where she got it. Come on into my office. I'll let you in on any details you haven't already found on Maryanne's desk."
"Thanks," Anna said sincerely.
Ruick muttered something that sounded like "skin of a rhinoceros," but, accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the brass, she politely pretended not to notice.
As it happened, there was no more to tell than she'd discovered through her snooping. No leads on to whom the jacket belonged or why Carolyn was wearing it. Les told Harry that his wife had a habit of appropriating anything belonging to nearby males for her own use and thinking nothing of it. Had she been cold when she'd left that night, she might have snagged some camper's coat off a tree or rock.
"Les was careful to point out that his wife would never steal," Harry said. "That she just 'borrowed without permission.'"
"If the jacket's owner hiked on, we'll never know whose it was. Shoot, he might not even be a hundred percent sure where he lost it," Anna said.
"Follow it up," Ruick ordered.
"Sure." Mentally Anna added another forty miles hard hiking to her list just to chase down this wild goose for the chief ranger.
Army jacket dispensed with, she settled into the task of telling Ruick of her interview with Rory concerning the spousal abuse. She'd not taped it because she'd been afraid of inhibiting the boy's narrative on such a sensitive issue. She taped her recounting of it now while it was fresh in her mind.
When she'd finished, Ruick didn't say anything. Rocking himself absently in his chair he stared into the parking lot. Lunch was over. Cars were coming in. Even in a national park on a beautiful summer's day most folks drove the half-mile to work. No wonder America was the fattest nation on earth.
"The marks on his arms and legs. Bruises, cuts in various stages of healing. I'd have spotted it on a kid in a second," he said finally.
Anna made no comment. She would have too. On a child it would have set off all the alarm bells. One didn't expect it on a grown man.
"I've heard of course of wives beating their husbands," Ruick said. "I've just never come across it before."
Neither had Anna. She must remember to ask Molly just how rare the phenomenon was.
"It doesn't make sense," Ruick said. "Les is no Tarzan. I mean he is— was—what? Eighteen years older than his wife?"
"Eighteen," Anna confirmed from the birth dates on the notes she had with her.
"And in bad shape. Still he outweighed her by a good thirty pounds and is six or eight inches taller. What did he have to be afraid of if he fought back?"
"Being abandoned," Anna said with certainty. She remembered how it felt when Zach had died. What would she put up with not to feel that again? "It was like we'd been living in black and white and all of a sudden our world got colorized," Rory had said. Lester was scared to death to go back to that black-and-white world. Even black and blue must have seemed an improvement.
"Give me abandonment any day of the week," Harry said.
Anna guessed none of his wives had ever up and died on him. If he'd ever been married. She looked around his office past the ubiquitous NPS certificates and awards. No pictures of wives or kids.
"Are you married?" she asked apropos of nothing but her thoughts.
"Twenty-seven years. I played it safe. Eilene is a little bit of a thing who wouldn't hurt a fly. What do you say you and me go have another chat with Lester?"
13
Lester was doing what depressed and grieving people traditionally do: everything wrong. The curtains of his second-floor motel room were drawn. The room was overwarm and stuffy. He'd not showered or shaved or dressed. In a plaid flannel bathrobe he'd probably had since before his son was born, he'd been sitting in an unmade bed watching television.
When he opened the door to Harry Ruick's knock Anna was taken aback at how much he'd deteriorated since she'd seen him last. The thinning gray hair stood out in bed-wrinkled strands and colorless stubble highlighted the crease and sag of his cheeks. Puffy eyes rimmed with red attested to the fact he'd spent much of the intervening time weeping. That or he suffered from allergies.
Eyes watering at the sudden exposure to light—or reality—he said absurdly, "May I help you?"
"We'd like to talk with you for a minute," Harry said. He pulled off his straw summer Stetson and held it in front of him like a steering wheel. Anna didn't know if he did it from respect or good manners. Either way she liked him for the gesture. Her Stetson was at home on a peg in the closet in Rocky Springs, along with her service weapon and other needful things. Today she wore the goofy-looking green NPS billed field cap. It crossed her mind to snatch it off in deference to age or grief but the rules regarding women, manners and the wearing of hats had become blurred. One never knew, anymore, what was proper.
She left it on. Beneath its polyester squeeze her hair probably looked as bad as Lester's.
Mr. Van Slyke was baffled for a moment. Then his face cleared somewhat and he said, "Of course. Won't you please come in? Please excuse the mess. I..."
The brittle safety of polite platitudes fell away and his words dried up. Sidling by ahead of Harry, Anna looked closely at him. His skin hung loose over muscles devoid of elasticity; his was the face of a man who'd had a small stroke or was in shock. Taking his hand she shook it as if
they'd just been introduced. "Good to see you again," she murmured. His skin was dry and warm. Not shock. Probably just old-fashioned depression. She shied away from a sudden memory of the weeks and months after Zach died when she'd moved in slow motion, pushing through a life grown thick and suffocating as Delta mud. But then Zach never beat her. Zach was the kind of guy who put mice out, then left the door ajar in case it got cold and they wanted back in.
Even without Carolyn's ghost, the room would have been enough to depress Anna. As Les had warned, it was a mess. The contents of a backpack and a suitcase were disgorged over the available surfaces, along with the remains of an uneaten fast-food supper. There was a single chair of that sterile motel hybrid between kitchen straight-back and easy chair beside a round table piled with the soiled and disorganized guts of Lester's day pack, and the bed.
Out of deference to rank, Anna left the chair for Harry. Sliding loose change and motel brochures to one side, she perched on the low dresser beside the television. Lester hadn't turned it off when he'd answered the door. Garish colors and rude noises emanating from the set proved the only life the room had: distorted, invasive, inconsequential.
Anna composed herself to let Harry take the lead and watched the men settle, Harry, hat in hand, at the small cluttered table and Les Van Slyke on the edge of the unmade bed, his bruised and bony knees sticking out from under the battered flannel robe. She was put in mind of Rory's image of Les as a whimpering dog. It was not a pretty picture, particularly of a boy to have of his father.
"Mr. Van Slyke—" Harry began.
"Lester, Les," the old man begged, and the humility on his face made Anna want to deliver a swift kick to his nether regions.
"Les," Harry amended. "We—or rather Anna here—has been talking with Rory. He suggested your relationship with your wife, Carolyn, was not as smooth as you painted it."
Lester tweaked at his bathrobe, arranging it demurely over his knees. As soon as he let go it fell away again. He left it alone. After enough time had passed that Anna had to actively clamp a lid on herself to keep from jumping in with questions of her own, he said, "All couples have their little troubles now and again. Carolyn was quite a few years younger than I am. I suppose she got restless sometimes."
"Did you argue?" Harry persisted.
"Most married people argue," Lester said, making eye contact with the rug between the toes of his mangy brown carpet slippers.
"Did she ever get violent?" Harry asked.
"Carolyn did have a temper," Lester said and, to Anna's surprise, he smiled as if at a pleasing memory. "She was a feisty one."
"Did she ever get violent with you?" Harry pressed patiently.
At that Lester looked mildly alarmed. His fleshless white hands skittered about over his knees like frightened cave spiders. "How do you mean?" he asked.
"Hit you, clawed you, threw things at you," Harry explained. Ruick, like Anna, had to know Lester was playing for time, but for reasons of his own the chief ranger had chosen to give it to him.
"She'd get frustrated," Lester admitted. "She threw things once or twice. Carolyn was a complicated woman and I've always been a simple man. Sometimes it was too much for her. Especially with her having that high-stress job. She needed to let off a little steam once in a while."
Anna should have admired his loyalty but she didn't. Domestic abuse cases occurred wherever people cohabited, whether it be in houses or tents or camper trailers. Over the years her sympathies with the abused person's attachment to the abuser had hardened into an impatience that verged on anger. Molly had explained the psychological dynamics of the victim/victimizer relationship and, though Anna had come to accept it intellectually, viscerally it still pissed her off.
Other than the fleeting smile at his deceased wife's "feistiness" Lester showed no emotion. Now Harry shot Anna a look, eyebrows raised, lips crimped, that suggested, at least to Anna's mind, that Rory had been exaggerating or maybe out-and-out lying. Given Mr. Van Slyke's equanimity she could see how Harry might think that. But he hadn't been there, hadn't see Rory or heard his voice as the tale unfolded. Rory might not have his facts right, but Anna would have bet the farm that he believed the things he'd said.
She believed them too. Most people, when hit with the questions Harry had put to Les, would have said, "Why do you ask?" Les showed no interest. He'd been too busy evading, minimizing, rationalizing— major tools in the building and shoring up of denial.
Harry's eyebrows seemed to signal defeat. Anna took that as a call for backup and entered the fray.
"Mr. Van Slyke," she began and continued, bulldozing over his protestations that she must call him "Les." "When Harry asks about your wife hurting you, he means like the times she inflicted injuries that put you in the hospital. Your son said she broke your collarbone, burst your eardrum and once nearly cut your face in half with a kitchen stool."
The blunt assault of words didn't have the effect she'd been hoping for. Beneath the pasty sagging skin there was a rippling disturbance, but it could have as easily been brought on by Rory's bizarre lies as an unmasking of the truth.
"Why would Rory say that?" he asked, bewildered. Not quite bewildered enough. His left hand scampered up his right arm and his forefinger stretched out, gently stroking the scar that bisected his face.
Seeing the gesture, Anna willfully misunderstood his question. "Rory said it because the boy loves his father, loves you and seeing you hurt broke his heart."
That got the desired reaction. Not only are more flies caught with honey, more can be killed. Anna felt a pang of guilt for manipulating Les's emotions. It didn't last long.
He rubbed his eyes with both fists like a very small child. There were tears left like snail trails on his knuckles. The rounded shoulders shuddered with a convulsive sigh.
Harry had a look of annoyance on his face directed not at the weepy old man but at Anna. She huffed, a teensy puff of air from her nostrils. If he was thinking she should leap to the bed and put the feminine arms of comfort around Lester, he had another think coming. She leaned back against the mirror, made herself comfortable for the duration of the waterworks.
The chief ranger had, indeed, been expecting something of the sort. Seeing her settle in he put his hat on the top of the clutter on the table and stood. Stooping awkwardly, he patted Les's shoulder. Words failed him. Again Anna got the flash of annoyance. She considered suggesting the classic comfort "there, there" but thought better of it.
Lester calmed down. Ruick retreated with unflattering speed back to the safety of his lonely chair.
Painfully, Les pulled himself together, or as much together as he would ever get. A handkerchief was found, eyes dried, nose blown. Water was sipped, housecoat readjusted. Then he settled himself to answer honestly.
They didn't get anything in the way of revelations. Honesty is an individual perception. If Les had ever been able to view his situation objectively—or, more to the point, as others would view it—the ability had been lost. The need to feel okay about himself and still to stay with Carolyn had to be balanced. The only way to do that was to create a new truth, one where being a victim was acceptable, even admirable. Telling them now of his wife's transgressions, Lester could not go outside the reality he had made for himself. "She had a temper" and "sometimes she got carried away" were the best he could do. The broken collarbone, the ruptured eardrum were accidents. She didn't mean it. Lester had zigged when he should have zagged, etc., etc., ad nauseam. The blow from the metal kitchen stool that had scarred his face he simply slid over as if it wasn't worth mentioning. As if it had never happened.
Of Rory, for whom the sudden tears had presumably been shed since they clearly were not for his own miserable situation, he said, "The boy shouldn't have taken it so much to heart. I never minded."
The words came to Anna's ear not in Lester's confused, sad voice but the desperate wail of his son when he'd said the same thing earlier in the day.
Harry gave Lester a few minutes
more than Anna would have to collect himself then said, "We're just about done here Mr. . . . Les. We understand this has got to be a rough time for you. Real rough. We're sorry—"
For an instant Anna was afraid he would parrot the empty phrase in vogue in TV cop shows, "We're sorry for your loss," but he didn't.
"—to have to put you through more questions, but in cases like this we can't wait on good manners."
"I understand," Les said. He pulled the handkerchief from the pocket of his robe where he'd stuffed it and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. "Go ahead."
"You said earlier that the army surplus jacket your wife was wearing when we found her was not hers. Do you have any idea who it belonged to?"
Les kept his face down and blew his nose again though it didn't need it. "I guess it could have been Carolyn's," he said. "She was always getting new clothes. I never paid much attention." He was lying. A husband might not notice if his wife bought a different shade of lipstick or a new blouse but if she suddenly started sporting oversized U.S. Army fatigues he'd probably sit up and take note.
Ruick nodded slowly. "I see," he said and Anna wondered if he was seeing the same thing she was: a skittering of weasel tail vanishing down a secret hole.
"We thank you for your time." Harry rose and reclaimed his Stetson. "We'll talk again before you make any decisions about what to do next."
Back in Ruick's pickup, painted white with the standard green reflective NPS stripe down the side, as she and Ruick buckled their seat belts, Anna said: "Our suspects stink."
"Kind of hard to picture that particular worm turning, isn't it?"
"Rory doesn't fit the bill much better."
"There's always the homicidal stranger just passing through."
"Fortuitous accident?"
"Could be. If it is and our murderous Mr. X has moved on, we're pretty much guaranteed a segment on Unsolved Mysteries," he said sourly.
