Blood Lure

by Nevada Barr

  Full of questions and needing to pester somebody, she climbed the gentle hill through the blackened campsites and dead trees till she reached the uppermost one, the one where the fire had simply stopped of its own volition, often in the middle of a tree leaving half charred and dying, the other half determinedly thrusting green needles out to catch the sun.

  Lester was there. He sat on a rock, elbows on his knees, hands hanging down, doing nothing. So seldom do people actually do nothing that to see it creates an impression of deadness. That's what Anna felt as she approached him. "Hey," she said feeling a need to announce herself though scarcely six feet separated them.

  Like a man in a trance, he swung his face slowly toward her. His eyes were vacant, as if he took up no space on the planet. "It's Anna Pigeon," she added and some small reassuring life returned to his face.

  "Yes. I was waiting for you."

  For reasons she could not put her finger on, his words gave her a creepy feeling, much as the Grim Reaper's might when he called her name. Les stirred himself and the feeling was gone. "Chief Ranger Ruick told me to wait here, and if you came back, tell you to call him." He reached down and retrieved a radio propped against the stone at his feet.

  Anna took it and radioed Ruick. Her first question was, "Is Buck back with Joan?" Ruick answered in the affirmative and her relief let her know how worried she'd been.

  "Why didn't you call last night?" he demanded.

  "Lost my radio." Silence fussed over the air as he waited for her to explain. She didn't. Radios were not safe. "I need to talk with you in person," she said instead.

  Either Ruick understood her reluctance to chat or gave into it. He didn't press her. "We're no longer in the backcountry. Hiked out. Come down," he ordered. "Call me on the phone when you get here."

  There were a couple of hours of daylight left. With Ponce for conveyance, Anna could have made it down the mountain by shortly after dark. Given her state of fatigue and the vagaries of recent nights, she didn't want to be alone on horseback that late. "First thing in the morning," she promised, uncomfortable committing even that much of her itinerary to whoever might be listening. She longed to quiz Ruick on what, if anything, they'd found in their search for William McCaskil, but didn't. If they'd found him, Harry would have said so. She could only assume they'd given up the search or it had led them out of the high country.

  Radio chore completed, she sat on the ground near Lester Van Slyke. She kept the radio. If he cared about it one way or another, he didn't let on. She guessed he didn't. By the look of him, he didn't care much about anything. If he'd appeared old and sick and gray when they'd met, he looked three days dead now. The sparse hair was greasy and stuck to his pate in dark strands. His skin hung loose, the sagging jowls rough with two days' growth of beard. His pale blue eyes were rimmed in red and he blinked a lot as if he had trouble focusing.

  "Why do you stay here?" Anna asked on impulse.

  "I have to," he said vaguely. "Maybe there's something . . ." His voice trailed off. She waited. "Something I can do," he finished finally.

  "About what?"

  A minute passed. The drop of life that had animated him when he gave her Harry's message drained away.

  "I can't do anything," he said so softly she barely heard him. He wasn't talking to her but to himself, undoubtedly repeating the mantra of ineffectualness the second Mrs. Van Slyke had spent so many years literally and figuratively beating into him.

  For a while Anna watched him grow grayer and smaller. Lester was very nearly catatonic. The man was deeply disturbed and had withdrawn to a potentially pathological extent. Molly would know what to do. Fervently Anna wished her sister were there, would take over, make things right as she'd so often done when Anna was little. But Molly would have wanted to take the tack that was best for the patient, for Mr. Van Slyke. Anna just wanted answers.

  It was not that she was without compassion, at least she liked to think she wasn't, but there was that about Les that brought out her anger. She could understand why his son hated him instead of the woman who tormented him. She could see how he would attract and incite abusers of every stripe. Les Van Slyke was the flesh and blood equivalent of the tar baby. He seemed to invite violence by his self-negation, acceptance of violence only enraging his attacker. Anna put the thoughts inside. They made her uncomfortable. Sweetness, comfort, safety, would that allow him to open up? Or was he so accustomed to responding to abuse from women that Anna would have to don the guise of his dearly departed wife to rouse him?

  Maybe because she feared her own tendency to want to kick the cringing dog, she opted for sweetness and light. To make it ring true she closed her eyes, pictured him not as a self-involved, self-pitying shell of a man but as an old tomcat, battered and beaten till it could barely move, a cat who'd been so misused, when approached by a human hand, it could no longer even hiss but only close its eyes, wait for the blow and hope, this time, it would kill him.

  For animals, compassion came easy. Keeping the vision of the tomcat firmly in mind, she began to speak and was pleasantly surprised to hear her words sounding genuinely kind.

  "I can see that you're tired, Les," she began. "Tired almost to death. And you're alone like you've been alone for a long time, but now it's somehow worse. Everything's worse. Before, you were alone and you were hurting but she was there. She kept things going, moving, like she'd got things moving after your wife died. She was hard and she was angry but she was alive. You were alive. At least a little. And now she's gone and you're tired. Too tired almost to breathe." Les had not moved since she'd begun speaking but tears filled his eyes. They spilled down over his cheeks, divided and divided again as they dripped into the creases time and worry had cut into his face. Bleak as it was, it was a sign of life, and Anna pressed on not knowing whether the experiment would prove cathartic or would break the last weight-bearing wall in his poor old brain. Practicing without a license, Anna thought. She kept her voice low, monotonous, as hypnotic as she dared make it without sounding theatrical. She didn't want him to think for a while, just hear and follow.

  "Without her, things have gotten in such a mess. You don't know how to make things right. You've never known how to make things right, not since your first wife died. At least Carolyn made things real. She made things happen, didn't she?" Anna hazarded a gentle question.

  Les nodded. Satisfied, she went on, spinning an inner landscape for him, wondering as she went how she was going to get where she was headed.

  "Now you're tired and you're scared. You're afraid of what you've done—"

  Les's hands, till then hanging like dead leaves between his knees, twitched. Anna'd got it wrong and the jar threatened to wake him.

  "—you're afraid of what you've done to Rory," she amended. The twitch stopped. Rory then. Anna followed that. "All those years, Rory loving his stepmom and not you. How could you know he knew? The beatings you took were for him, weren't they?" Anna asked, suddenly knowing that in Les's mind this was true. "You took them to keep the marriage together, because Rory needed a mom, because you couldn't bear to see him lose her a second time."

  The tears fell harder. Les nodded again and weak mewling noises made their way out from a deep well of emotion Anna suspected was liberally salted with neurosis in the form of martyrdom, joy of victimhood, self-aggrandizement, and other smarmy and seductive feelings.

  Desperately she rifled through her brain. For whatever sick reasons, Les let Carolyn beat on him. To live with himself he convinced himself he did it for his son. Now he'd convinced himself he was staying in Glacier because he was scared, not for himself, but for his son. Did that mean Les thought Rory killed Carolyn, and by remaining, Les might be able to "do something" along the lines of impeding the investigation or tampering with evidence? Or that he killed her himself and, by lousing up the investigation, could salvage himself—a dad—for Rory?

  Anna couldn't guess which and she dared not remain silent. If the tears were any indication, Les was b
elieving her, hearing her speak as if she knew the innermost secrets of his mind, as if she were in some way his own voice. A wrong guess now and she'd break the spell.

  She came from another direction, feeling her way carefully. "You knew Carolyn was gone that night," Anna said. "You knew she'd left the tent."

  "I knew," Les mumbled, "but I didn't think anything of it. She used to leave at night. She..."

  "She'd go out," Anna affirmed.

  "She'd meet men," Les said.

  The light dawned. "She met men," Anna said. "She took things from them didn't she? She borrowed bits of their clothes, things you'd find so you'd know. Like she borrowed the army coat she was wearing."

  "She did it to hurt me," Les said. "I never let on, but it hurt. It hurt a lot." More tears.

  "That's why you pretended you didn't know where the coat came from? You thought she'd been with Bill McCaskil? Had she known him before? Met him anywhere? An internet chatroom? A courtroom? A conference? Anything?"

  "No. I don't think so."

  "She just meets him around the campfire and hops in the sack with him?" Anna said skeptically.

  "You didn't know her. It didn't take long. It didn't matter who. She'd go off with bellboys when we stayed at hotels. Or the bartender. When I was in the hospital she got to my orderly. A boy no older than Rory is now. I didn't want Rory to know. The coat and all. I didn't want Rory to know."

  One mystery solved: why Carolyn had McCaskil's coat on and why Les was so peculiar on the subject. None of that factored into why Les stayed on, unless he wanted vengeance on McCaskil and, after the bellboys and bartenders and orderlies, why bother?

  "You think Rory saw McCaskil and his stepmother together and killed her for it," Anna said, her voice sudden and harsh.

  Les jerked as if she'd slapped him then covered his face with both hands. "Yes," he managed.

  "Well, that's a crock," Anna said sympathetically.

  "It is?" A thread of hope cut through the molasses of tears in Les's throat.

  Maybe it wasn't. Scared by the bear, maybe Rory had run home to stepmomma, found her in the arms of the latest blunt instrument she'd chosen to beat her husband with, followed, chased or lured her a few miles from camp and killed her. It was the best scenario she'd come up with yet. It even explained why McCaskil would run. Even if he was innocent, who'd believe him when he'd been having sex with the deceased under her husband's nose? It happened every day, and in the usual run of things all three parties survived. But juries liked moral payback. A man with as many brushes with the law as Bill McCaskil would know that.

  Anna kept these thoughts to herself. Lester Van Slyke had convinced her of one thing, he didn't kill his wife. If he could be made to believe Rory wasn't suspected either, maybe he'd go home or to a motel. Anywhere would be better than plopped down confusing what was already a sufficiently mind-numbing investigation.

  "Rory's going to be okay," Anna said because that's what one says. "You don't have to stay here anymore. Tomorrow you'll go down with me."

  "Okay," Les said, docile, empty.

  Anna sighed. Of course the old guy would ride Ponce unless she wanted to be all day on the trail. She'd have to walk. Even pretending to be compassionate had consequences.

  Tired as she was, Anna did not sleep well. Her nerves were sufficiently raw that the chance scraping of her wedding ring against the plastic zipper of her sleeping bag was enough to bring her to a sitting position, heart pounding. She was continuing to suffer an alien and disquieting need to flee from nature and hide out behind four strong walls, concrete sidewalks and tended lawns.

  The previous night's tears and sleep had revived Les Van Slyke. He was, if not quite his old self, at least mobile. They were on the trail before sunrise and, thanks to Lester's radio, there was a truck and horse trailer waiting for them at Packer's Roost when they hiked out around noon.

  Harry Ruick was in meetings till three-thirty. Anna celebrated this reprieve in Joan's house bathing, anointing herself with perfume, putting on clothing unsuited to rugged terrain and otherwise armoring herself against the wild things with the mundane soothing pastimes once called indulgence but, in the nineties, renamed "self-care."

  If Ruick noticed that she looked or smelled better than when last they'd met, he was too much a professional to comment. Seated in a relatively comfortable chair in his office, the afternoon sun painting a warm square across her knees, Anna reported. She told him of the army cutworm moth excavation made not by claws but by a spade, of the den, the rock, the gunshot. She told him of the cave swept clean but for the wax on the ledge and the peanut half, the dime and dog biscuit fragment overlooked in the dust. She kept till last the part about the water bottle punctured by pointed teeth that had been left for her. Law enforcement officers do not like fairy stories, head investigators do not like underlings with overactive imaginations or a penchant for the romantic.

  It crossed Anna's mind to withhold the incident entirely as irrelevant and damaging to her credibility. The decision to include it came only when she remembered a similar incident had happened before. Maybe had happened before.

  "Remember Rory and the water bottle nonsense?" she asked. "He's since changed his story, but originally he said he lay down to sleep without one and woke with one beside him."

  "Right. One covered with his murdered stepmother's fingerprints," Harry said warningly.

  Looked at in the harsh light of reason, the benevolent bear spirit that brought drinking water to lost souls was pretty irrational.

  "Just a thought," Anna said and let it go at that.

  "This guy who brought the water shot at you?" Ruick asked skeptically.

  "Yes." Anna'd done elaborating. Harry was as frustrated as she.

  "You're sure? You saw the gun?"

  "Heard the shot."

  The chief ranger drummed his fingers on his desk pad and gazed out his window. "Before the rock was rolled, or after?"

  "After," Anna said. "During."

  "So the shot came at the same time the rock was crashing down?"

  "That's right." Anna could see where the rock Harry was rolling was going to come crashing down too, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. She couldn't even find it in her heart to blame him. The murder was nine days old. Trails were cold. Witnesses, what they had of them, had scattered. There were no leads but Bill McCaskil, and the case against him was paper-thin. Harry would not want a reason showing up that would demand he pull his already depleted ranger force from their primary duties for the chasing of wild geese on Cathedral Peak.

  "So you could have heard something else," he said, as Anna knew he would. "The boulder could have busted some smaller rocks or snapped a tree limb. That can sound like a gunshot."

  "I could have heard something else," Anna agreed. Harry looked at her with what might have been a hint of apology in his eyes.

  What he said was, "Could you have been mistaken about a person rolling the rock? Could it have been dislodged by accident? Someone hiding behind it, knocked it loose, that sort of thing?"

  Anna thought about it for a moment. "No," she said at last. "It was pushed."

  "Okay." Harry accepted her statement at face value and Anna was relieved.

  She watched the sun creep up her thighs. Harry watched the maintenance vehicles come and go from the cluster of buildings down the road beyond the parking lot.

  "We're pretty much up against it," he said finally. Anna realized then she'd been waiting for the subtle blame-placing, when lesser men begin the slippery process of easing fault off their own shoulders onto the shoulders of others. Ruick was not a lesser man.

  "We don't have much to go on," he said. "I agree with you that Les probably is in the clear. His motive, even if the missus was flaunting McCaskil in his face, is too old. Les has been there too many times. If we had a straw-and-camel's-back situation with Mrs. Van Slyke's latest adultery, Les would have snatched up a rock or whatever. It would have been a crime of passion occurring at the s
cene, and more likely than not Les would have remained with the body and confessed to the first person who showed up. He wouldn't steal film, move the body, defile the corpse and cache the flesh."

  "He'll be staying in a motel till Rory's done," Anna said, just to contribute something.

  "Thank God for that. When he keels over from a heart attack they can damn well dial nine-one-one and let the police take care of it."

  Harry sounded so callous toward human life Anna laughed.

  "If I'd ever thought Rory was worth much as a suspect, I'd never have sent him back up with Joan," Harry said. "Even though we don't have enough for an arrest, there are ways."

  Anna took the opening and outlined the story that had been haunting Lester Van Slyke, that Rory had run to Fifty Mountain after the bear attack on their camp, caught Carolyn in flagrante and killed her. On the hike out, Anna had given the theory a good deal of thought. In the end she'd found it flawed. She repeated it now because which information was valid and which was not was Harry's call, not hers.

  He considered it much as she had, and in the end rejected it for the same reasons. Rory'd had no knife, no blood on him. Did he run to Fifty Mountain in his slippers, bumble into the wrong tent, catch Carolyn with McCaskil, then Carolyn dresses, hikes three miles, he follows and kills her? Or did he accidentally meet Carolyn on the trail in the dead of night in the arms of her lover and strike her down? With what? He was strong but slight. The story didn't hold together.

  "William McCaskil's still in the running," Anna said without much enthusiasm.

  Ruick just grunted. McCaskil might have had sex with the victim, might even have lent her his coat, but neither of those things were illegal. What made him interesting was the fact that he had run, but there were lots of reasons for that. McCaskil was a convicted felon. It made sense that he wouldn't want to be mixed up in a murder investigation, especially if he was involved in something shady that he didn't particularly want to talk about. Unless they could connect him to the victim in some substantial way or prove he'd committed like incidents in the past, all they could do was talk to him and let him go.