Blood Lure

by Nevada Barr

  "No persons by those names have contacted Ms. Van Slyke in her professional capacity," Francine said mimicking an automaton.

  Had the sentence with its convoluted precision come from someone else, Anna might have suspected them of hiding something. From Francine it just sounded petty and pompous.

  "Thank you," Anna said again and pulled her soul back from the black and voice-filled void of the telephone to Joan's homey office.

  No cheese down that hole, Anna remembered one of her field rangers, Barth Dinkins, saying. "No cheese," she said aloud.

  Carl G. Micou, registered owner of the abandoned truck and trailer, the man who'd given the Florida motor vehicles department the number of Fetterman's Adventure Trails as his home number, remained a mystery. Anna turned back to her electronics.

  Mentally apologizing to Joan for a phone bill she would probably have a devil of a time getting her department reimbursed for, Anna called Information and, throwing caution to the winds, charged the extra fifty cents and let them dial the Tampa Better Business Bureau for her. A pleasant young man, at least he sounded young and handsome and virile but may well have been a nasty old poop with a nice voice, told her Fetterman's Adventure Trails was a licensed business owned and operated by Woody Fetterman. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had operated at the same location for twenty-six years. The only address for Woody was that of Adventure Trails. There had been no complaints against Fetterman's from either the buying public or other businesses. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had recently closed its doors but he did not know why. He suggested she call the Tampa tourism department, as he thought Adventure Trails was a theme park with rides and so forth. They might be able to help her.

  The department of tourism could tell her little more. The woman who answered the phone offered to send Anna a brochure, then couldn't find one. They'd gone out of business, Anna said, possibly the brochures had been thrown out. That was probably it, the woman agreed. She wrote down Anna's address at Glacier anyway, promising to send it along if she found it. Anna would have been touched by the desire to please if so long on the phone finding out so little hadn't made her crabby.

  An hour's work had provided her with one first name, if "Woody" was legit and not a nickname. Maybe Woodrow. Since Woody had been in business in the same place for twenty-six years he was no fly-by-night. It had been in the back of Anna's mind that Fetterman of Fetterman's Adventure Trails and Bill McCaskil might be one and the same. Twenty-six years, changed that. She couldn't see McCaskil quietly running a business while being indicted and arrested repeatedly for fraud under a handful of other names.

  McCaskil was from the Tampa area—or had been there as a teenager. He could've seen the name Fetterman on his way to work or school every day and remembered it when he needed an alias. If it wasn't for the name cropping up again by way of the owner of the abandoned truck, Anna would have chosen to believe that.

  "Woody Fetterman." Anna wended her way through the phone lines to the Tampa courthouse, records department. Yes, there was a certificate of death for a Woodrow Fetterman. He had died at age eighty-one of natural causes six weeks before.

  Another possibility exhausted. Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Fetterman was not the Fetterman of Adventure Trails. He was not connected with Carolyn Van Slyke by way of divorce. According to Lester, McCaskil hadn't known her before they met at Fifty Mountain Camp.

  "Damn," Anna whispered. The truck and the trailer. The name Fetterman. McCaskil and his aliases. Another possibility entered her mind and she went back to the 10-343 report. Carl G. Micou was born August 4, 1938, considerably older than McCaskil. Still, "Micou" could he one of McCaskil's aliases. Perhaps it wasn't listed because it was unknown or not yet used at the time William McCaskil was indicted for real estate fraud.

  She spent forty more minutes on the phone and eventually ended up back at the records department in Tampa. The search took longer this time but Mr. Micou's death certificate was found. He had died of congestive heart failure in April of 1995, nearly six years ago.

  "His truck is still alive," Anna said wearily.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Never mind. Thanks." Dead men, dead ends.

  Sprinkled around the edges of Joan's office was all the information that, by any wild stretch of the imagination, could pertain to the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Anna had already run to ground what little Fetterman, Fetterman and Micou had to offer. She'd verified that Lester's wife was indeed the queen of sluts. Swiveling Joan's chair slowly she let the other bits and pieces slide by: the army jacket with the topo and the file card. Anna rolled over and, without touching it, reread a copy of the card found in the pocket of what would undoubtedly be Bill McCaskil's coat. "B & C" was written in a loose hand across the top. Below those initials were numbers, measurements by the look of them: 12 11/16, 17 13/16, 30 12/16. The last, 30 8/19, was underlined in heavy ink.

  When they caught McCaskil, if she were around, Anna'd ask him what the numbers meant. Probably nothing. His waist size. Who knew? She examined the photocopy of the topo. It had been reduced in size till it fit on two fourteen-and-a-half-inch sheets of paper taped together. Most of the type was too tiny for eyes that had seen more than forty years. There was nothing new since she'd looked at the original, no nifty clues pencilled in the margins, no big red X where the body had been found.

  Anna rotated the chair another quarter turn and glanced briefly at her notes on Rory Van Slyke. Rory's dad was an abuse victim. Rory'd gone missing for thirty-six hours. Rory'd turned up having lost a sweatshirt and gained a water bottle, probably his dead stepmother's. Anna's mind drifted and she let it. No lunch, half a bag of gummi bears, her blood sugar was sufficiently screwed up her mind might actually go someplace interesting. It didn't. It merely cast back to the night on Flattop when Joan had divvied up the scattered remnants of the bear-ravaged camp, the ones she and Anna had stuffed unceremoniously in a sack before jaunting off with Harry in search of the lost boy. It was then Anna'd noted the extraneous water bottle in the bag beside the strange stick she'd picked up just outside the camp.

  Rory had denied any knowledge of that stick, Anna remembered, just as he'd denied knowing how the water bottles had proliferated. A foot long, worn smooth, of hardwood, not pine or aspen, unweathered, Anna and Joan had known it was carried in recently so when they'd found it they'd saved it. Rory said he'd never seen it. Anna hadn't thought much about it at the time. It was a stick of wood not a stick of dynamite. Now she worried it around because it fit neatly into her collection of bizarre things that didn't fit.

  Anna had kept the stick. Force of habit caused her to pack it out as she would any piece of litter. Unless the house had been burglarized by beavers it was probably on the floor of Joan's spare room, where it had been dumped when she unpacked before the last foray into the wilderness.

  Thinking about it, she picked up a ruler, close in length to the mystery stick, though a good deal skinnier, and began to fiddle with it. If Rory had not been lying about the stick then it had been dropped in the little meadow by someone else on or about the time they'd been camped out there. Not more than a day or two prior to their arrival. Wood, even hardwood, weathers quickly out-of-doors.

  Experimentally Anna waved the ruler about, trying to ascertain the possible uses for a finished length of hardwood, several times the thickness of a ruler, packed into the backcountry. Perhaps a woodcarver, seeking his muse in the mountains, might carry in a prize piece of wood. If she remembered right, the piece she and Joan found had been battered and worn smooth with much handling. Perhaps a woodcarver who went for long periods of time between artistic inspirations.

  To the detriment of the ruler's edge, she drummed it lightly against the chair arm as she thought. The minor cracking sound as she played startled her. Before and, she thought but wasn't sure, during the attack on their camp by the bear, she'd heard the crack of wood on wood. That same sound had awakened her from her troubled sleep in the rocks on the flank of Cathedral Peak. Both times she
'd written it off to twigs snapping under the weight of real or imagined marauders. Whacking the chair's arm again she noted the distinct quality of the sound.

  So what? So somebody was banging pieces of wood together while a bear ransacked the camp or, even less likely, while a bear thoughtfully returned Anna's water bottle to her. Did Rory hear in his dreams the crack of wood before his mother's water bottle was left beside him the night he'd been lost? Why? A signal? Nervous habit? Voodoo ritual?

  "Damn," Anna repeated to herself. All roads led to blasphemy. She put the ruler back where she'd found it.

  The rest of the reports had little more information to be wrung out of them. The lab report on the blue stuff sack had yet to be returned but she expected no surprises. From her intimate and prolonged traverse across the alpine talus with its moth-bearing rocks, she had no doubt the traces on the bag were just as Joan had said: rock and moth-wing dust. The bloody traces within might be other than that of Carolyn Van Slyke, but Anna doubted it. The lab report on the peanut and biscuit fragment would probably be equally unenlightening. Most often things were precisely what they appeared to be.

  Because she was there and could think of nothing better to do, she filled out a BIMS, a bear incident management systems report on the sow and two cubs she'd seen feeding in the cirque below Cathedral Peak. After she'd finished, she thumbed through BIMS submitted since she'd come to Glacier. She didn't know what she hoped for.

  "Validation," she said aloud. Since she had no hard evidence to base it on, she'd not bothered to put it into words for Harry Ruick, or even more damning, into writing on any reports, but she had an overweening sense of bear, a bear padding through the incidents in Glacier. The obvious was the tearing apart of the camp. Less so was the flesh of the victim cached out of reach of a bear. A man digging the food of and dwelling in the den of a bear. The water bottle with teethmarks of a bear.

  Nothing striking presented itself. The BIMS that were totally bogus, the lavender ink describing the bear juggling the hedgehog and the report of the dancing bear, Anna set aside. The rest, including the report of the attack on their camp, painted an active but not extraordinarily so, picture of bears being bears.

  Shuffling the crazies back into the pile, Anna felt a sudden sympathy with the lavender ink. Things were not necessarily untrue simply because they were unbelievable.

  She had done what she could. Her ear was hot from being pressed to a phone all day. Her stomach was full of complaining gummi bears and the light was going from Joan's window.

  Anna went "home." Home for so many years had been wherever she fed the cat. Walking through a rapidly cooling twilight enlivened by mosquitoes bent on fueling reproduction with her blood, Anna found herself terribly lonely for her critters, Piedmont's comforting purr and even Taco's three-legged bounding, leaping, licking, declaration of welcome that she'd come to expect whenever she opened the front door. Sheriff Davidson, Paul, the new man in her life, she missed as well but not with the same childish want. Davidson hadn't seen her cry like Piedmont had, hadn't saved her life like Taco had.

  The next morning Anna slept in, then typed up the scraps and snippets of information she'd gleaned in a day's calling and turned them in to Harry. He read them through carefully and, in the end, could find nothing more enlightening than she had.

  "We'll follow up on this Fetterman thing," he said. "I'll call Tampa and see if we can't get the local police to make a few inquiries for us."

  He didn't sound overly enthused. Anna didn't blame him. If they could connect the name of Fetterman to Van Slyke, which they'd failed to do, it might be of some interest but probably wouldn't go far toward solving their murder.

  "We got the lab reports back," Ruick said. "Rush job because I hinted it was part of the murder investigation but I think what you stumbled across on Cathedral Peak was an amateur entomologist with a dog off leash." He pushed the folder across the desk and Anna read it without picking it up. The peanut was, near as they could tell, a peanut. The crust of biscuit she'd found was broken down: twenty-three percent protein, four percent fat, ten percent fiber, seven percent ash, a little calcium and a dash of phosphorus. The rest was dry matter and moisture.

  "Dog food." Being a responsible pet owner she'd read the backs of dog food bags to make sure Taco got a balanced diet.

  They sat for a bit. Maryanne stuck her head in the office and reminded Harry that the fire management officer from Waterton was due in a few minutes.

  "Well," Harry said, "I hate to keep you tied up when there's no point in it. Not to mention when I borrowed you, Glacier started paying your salary." He smiled to let Anna know it was a joke. Anna smiled back politely, pretending she believed him. Budgets were counted out by nickels and dimes. Money was always tight. "You can either pack it in and go back to the Trace or go on up. Joan's got another four days before this round of traps is completed. You can probably pick up enough about DNA testing to convince John Brown we didn't waste your time completely."

  "I'll give him a call," Anna said. "See what he wants me to do." The interview was over. She pushed up out of the chair.

  "I'll see an official letter of thanks gets into your personnel file," Ruick said. He stood and shook hands with her. He was warm and friendly, but she could tell she was already sinking out of his sight. Chances were he'd barely remember her name when next they met. The chief ranger was moving on to the next crisis to threaten his park. Or his career.

  "You can leave your gear with the receptionist any time today," Maryanne told her as she left. A nice way of reminding her the radio needed to be checked in ASAP. Ponce had already gone back to the comfort of his paddock.

  "Will do," Anna said, feeling mildly miffed. In her mind she heard her tiny, mean, long-dead grandmother cackling: "Think you're so important? Put your finger in a bucket of water, pull it out and see how big a hole it leaves."

  21

  John Brown, Anna's chief ranger on the Natchez Trace Parkway, was I markedly grumpy about the disruption of her learning project, somewhat mollified by having had her off the payroll for over a week, and amenable to allowing her to remain four more days to finish up, or attempt to, her training on the use of DNA research in the management of park wildlife.

  Dispatch notified Joan of Anna's return. Rather than try to give detailed directions that draggled off trail through rugged country, she kindly agreed to meet Anna at Fifty Mountain so she could walk with them to the next trap site. Buck had been cut loose from the project and was hiking out as Anna hiked in, though by a different trail. He had a girlfriend in Waterton, Canada.

  Civilization, much as she'd looked forward to it, had proved a disappointment. The sense of order, safety and rationality she had fantasized 21 about had not been forthcoming. In place of safety she'd found dullness and isolation. Order and rationality had consisted of scribbling the crazy parts down on report forms and filing them, imposing not order, but an appearance of order. People so desperately needed an illusion of control to give them courage to get up in the morning.

  Anna's illusion of control had been smashed years before with the sudden, meaningless death of her husband. In the years since, she'd made an effort not to give in to the need to put the pieces back together, but to see and know and accept with some degree of grace that life is meaningless. There is no Grand Plan. Everything doesn't happen for the best. One can knock till one's knuckles are bloody and the door may not be opened. Those who didn't know her well construed this to mean she was cynical or even bitter. Anna felt it allowed her to see past expectations to what was and freed her from the need to figure out what it meant.

  Unfortunately, this cultivated mind-set was only half useful. It was good to see what was. But it was her job to figure out what it meant. She had failed at her job. That others had failed too was of little comfort.

  Heading into the wilderness with thoughts such as these muting her senses, she found she was disappointed in the out-of-doors as well. The realization was so alarming she stoppe
d walking and stood in the heat of the sun. She'd grown disenchanted with the natural world because it had been behaving in what seemed an unnatural manner, and disappointed with the world of people because it behaved precisely as she'd come to expect it would.

  This way madness lies, she thought and took some time to realign her brain. For twenty minutes she stood sweating in the heat of the switchback noting only the breezes, the color of thimbleberry, the feather-light scratch of needles against the sky. Finally, having found her way back into her own skin, she walked on with a lighter load. Expectations abandoned, now whatever occurred, however strange, would be as nature intended. Everything would make sense. That she could not see the pattern was a fault within herself, not an aberration within the natural world.

  Joan and Rory were waiting for her at Fifty Mountain Camp. They looked and smelled as if they'd been in the bush for three days and Anna was delighted. Joan's nose and forehead were sunburned and she had a scratch on one cheek from battling the shrubbery. Rory had grown brown and, to Anna's eye, taller, stronger and clearer since the death of his stepmother. Not being a Christian soul, Anna believed there were those who belonged on the Better Off Dead list. She didn't doubt that the toxic Carolyn Van Slyke was such a person. Next time she saw Lester, Anna would be disappointed if he, too, had not begun to flourish now that the influence of his violent wife was removed. Disappointed, not surprised. There was that about Lester that Anna suspected craved the violence, that he might seek out another wife who, if not actually prone to physical violence, would at least verbally and psychologically abuse him.

  "Are you going to college, Rory?" she asked abruptly in the midst of their reunion.