“Great. Ask for Mary Ellen Goode. She’s the official naturalist, and she’s a also quite a looker.”
“Well, that clinches it,” he said with a grin. Then he frowned and asked if Mary Ellen Goode had a large boyfriend or, worse, a husband. She shook her head. “Not anymore,” she said, a strange look on her face.
38
Cam had been shown back to Ranger Goode’s office after he checked in with the lobby desk, and Mary Ellen Goode was indeed a looker, as pretty as his previous interlocutor had been anything but. Five six or seven, bouncy short black hair, bright blue eyes, a figure that challenged the official severity of her Park Service uniform, and a roombrightening smile. She was obviously a woman who knew she was good-looking and had long since grown comfortable in her skin. He noticed that she also had a Dr. in front of her name on her Park Service name tag, which he’d discovered while making other observations. Her title was park ecologist. He introduced himself, showed ID, and then asked about mountain lions in the Smokies.
“Officially?” she said. “No gotchee. Panthers are considered to have been extirpated from the ecosystem in the Smokies. No confirmed sightings since 1920.”
“‘Extirpated’?” he asked.
“Polite word for hunted out of existence. There was one study done by a researcher named Culbertson in 1977 that suggests there were three to six mountain lions living in the park. They were probably descendants of the original nineteenth-century population. But nowadays we think that what people are seeing, if not a bobcat, might be escaped captive-bred western cats.”
“Is captive breeding legal?” Cam asked.
“Not in North Carolina, but it’s legal to own western cougars in Tennessee. The cats that have been caught or found along the East Coast states are usually defanged or declawed, which would indicate captive breeding.”
“But you do get sightings up here?”
“Sure, every year, a half-dozen or so. But no pictures and no sign whenever we investigate the area of the sightings. And some of the people doing the reporting wouldn’t know a mountain lion from a mountain goat.”
“How big could one get?”
“A hundred and twenty to two hundred and twenty pounds. Six, seven feet long. A rear pad print ought to be eight to ten inches across, or larger.”
He thought about the mark in the frost on the hood of his truck. “Big enough to take down a man.”
“Oh, heck yes,” she said. “Think about playing with your house cat on the sofa until it gets annoyed and starts working those hind legs. Now scale that up twenty times and visualize a two-hundred-pounder landing on you from a tree, knocking you flat on your back on the ground, hard enough to take your breath away, seizing your whole face in its mouth, clamping its fangs through your cheeks and into your sinuses, its front claws stripping all the meat off your baby back ribs while its hind claws spread your intestines all over the trail. All in about five seconds, with the appropriate sound effects.”
“I think I need a bathroom,” Cam said.
“Exactly. And they can do all that from the ground or from a run, too, as cyclists are discovering in not-so-remote parts of California. Ever seen the films of a cheetah overtaking a gazelle? A mountain lion can do that, too, just for not quite as long a distance. They mainly feed on deer, which are not slow animals.”
“And if this happened to a human, what would the cat do with the, um, remains?”
“Consume all the soft and squishy bits first, then drag the corpse to a hiding place, stash it under a pile of brush or up in a tree, and come back for seconds and thirds until everything was gone. Arms and legs would get carried back to cubs in the den if it was a female. Major bones crunched for marrow. Skulls emptied.”
Cam tried to push away the grisly images she was conjuring up. “Would they be easy to track?”
She gave him an appraising look. “Track? I think it’s your turn, Lieutenant. What’s this all about?”
He told her about the stories of cat dancers, reiterating most of what the large lady at Carter’s Trading Post had told him.
She started shaking her head about two-thirds of the way through his summation. “Very, very unlikely,” she said. “These are highly secretive nocturnal animals. You’d almost have to know where it was denning up and then work back around its hunting range. And even then
…”
“Then-what?”
“Well, these cats are interesting. They’re first-class hunters and even better ambushers. Highly tuned senses-hearing, smell, night vision, footfall vibrations, and just cat sense. You tried tracking a mountain lion without specially trained dogs? The cat would turn that game around right about sunset and you’d probably end up as dinner.”
“How about a really good tracker? Indian-good?”
She shrugged. “It’s possible, I guess. But I wouldn’t try anything remotely like it. Following a bear would be less dangerous than following a panther. And all this just for a picture? No way.”
He’d run out of questions, and as much as he’d have liked to have spent some more time with the beautiful Dr. Goode, he knew he should cut it off. He thanked her very much and asked how he could find some of the better guides in the area.
“Yellow Pages?” she suggested with a smile.
“I knew that,” he said.
Cam spent the rest of the day dropping by the various guide and expedition shops in the towns of Lore and Trailwood, learning little. That evening, he went for a short walk to exercise the dogs. It was short because darkness came suddenly and the temperature dropped right along with the light. He fed the dogs, left them in the cabin, stoked the woodstove, and went back into town around seven o’clock to find something to eat. The obvious central attraction was a log cabin lodge affair with wraparound porches. The place advertised mountain cooking, whatever that meant.
Inside, the place was divided into two main rooms, separated by the kitchen area. The smaller room was for dining and the larger contained a well-attended bar. There were two people in the dining room, but more like twenty in the bar, men and women. It was complete with jukebox, tables for two and four, a small dance floor, a place in the corner for a live combo, and a forty-foot-long polished hardwood bar. Cam took a stool at the bar, looked over the surprisingly good scotch selection, and ordered a Maccallan on one rock from one of the very busy bartenders.
He finished his scotch, covered his tab, and headed for the dining room. As he did so, three Park Service rangers in uniform came through the front door, and one of them was the lovely Dr. Goode. She smiled and waved in his direction as they headed for the bar, causing one of the young men with her to give him a suspicious once-over. He waved back and then let the waitress take him to a table.
As he was finishing dinner, the rangers left. A few minutes later, Mary Ellen Goode came back in and headed over. He started to get up, but she waved him down and slipped into a chair.
“Had dinner?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ll eat later.” She looked around for a moment to see if anyone was watching them. “Look, I’ve been thinking about your inquiry. Is this serious stuff?”
He told her about the chair, and then said only that a suspect had mentioned the term cat dancers as being somehow connected to the executions.
“Connected how?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Didn’t know what the term actually meant until the lady at the store told me. But since there aren’t any lions, I guess I’m going to declare defeat and go home.”
“Well,” she said, staring down at the table for a moment. “That is the official Park Service line. But…”
He finished eating, wiped his face, and pushed his plate and silverware aside. “Go on.”
“A ranger I used to date two years ago told me the same story once. In fact, he was thinking of opening a file on it, except he thought headquarters would laugh. He thought that it might be real, and that the people doing it were dangerous.”
“I saw a ranger
packing a belt and a gun last night,” he said. “We don’t associate our national parks with dangerous people. You know, park rangers are all about warm and fuzzy bunny lectures.”
Her face clouded. “We have a lot of sworn officers now,” she said. “Two years ago, some bikers from Atlanta came up into our park and set up a crystal-meth lab in a camper. Two of our rangers went to investigate the smell, and the bastards gunned them down when they knocked on the door. One of them was Joel Hatch, my fiance.”
“Oops,” Cam said. “Sorry.”
“Well, bad things happen to good people, don’t they? The good news is that an Atlanta field office special team caught up with them in a bar in Blue Ridge, Georgia. Apparently, there was ‘resistance.’”
Cam nodded. “Resistance is good,” he said. “Saves everyone a lot of time and effort. But I’m sorry for your loss.” He wanted to tell her about Annie, then decided to let it go.
“Thank you,” she said automatically. “Anyway, I’d forgotten all about the mountain lion business until you asked today. I’d never heard that term- cat dancers -however.”
“Know a guide named White Eye Mitchell?”
“Only by reputation. Supposedly, he found a missing hiker five years ago, after everyone else had given up.”
“‘Supposedly’?”
“Well, we think he’d guided the man in. Rumor was that they’d argued, and Mitchell left him out there to calibrate his thinking. There was no proof of that, of course, and the rescuee wasn’t talking, for some reason.”
Cam nodded. “Could I ask you to pulse your sources up here, see if you can find out anything more?”
She looked at him. “You’re leaving some things out. Am I right?”
“Yes,” he said. “But I can assure you that my case is as serious as a heart attack.”
“Does our local sheriff know you’re here?”
“Yes, he does. I checked in with him first thing. But he doesn’t have the whole picture, either, and I was able to convince him that that was a good place to be right now.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll ask around. How long will you be up here?”
“Don’t know,” Cam said. “Until I find something.”
“Or something finds you,” she said softly.
It was his turn to stare at her. “What’s that mean, exactly?” he asked.
“I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “But the truly wild parts of this country seem to attract all kinds of edgy critters these days.” She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge a bad thought. “Don’t mind me,” she said with a smile. “Too much time alone, I think.”
“I can actually relate to that,” he began, but then two men came into the dining room from the bar and called hello to Mary Ellen. She excused herself and went to join them. Cam paid his bill and went outside. It was cold but clear, and he felt like taking a walk. The night sky was so filled with blazing stars that he actually stopped in the parking lot to look up at them.
When he got back to his truck, he found a small note stuck into the driver’s side window.
“I get off duty at 2300,” it said. “We need to talk.” This was followed by a cell phone number, and the signature was “M.E.G.”
39
When he got back to the cabins, he noticed there’d been a dusting of snow in the area-nothing serious, but enough for the headlights to show that a vehicle had driven down the line of cabins sometime after the snow and then back out. Before he turned into the parking space by his cabin, he got out of his truck to see if the vehicle had stopped, but it didn’t look like it. Straight tracks; big tires, like his own. He squatted down and fingered the edges of the tracks, which, had this been the movies, should have told him how old they were. Instead, the bits of snow and mud melted in his hand and told him absolutely nothing. Indian scout you are not, he decided.
The snow leading up to his cabin, on the front steps, and frosting the edges of the porch was undisturbed. He let the dogs out and watched them to see if they focused on anything near the cabin, but Frick just ran around, nose down, tail up, while Frack made the trees afraid. He checked the little back deck, where a rusty barbecue on wheels lived, but there were no signs that anyone had been back there, either-unless, of course, they had come before the snow. Enough of this paranoia, he said to himself, and went inside to see if he could raise Bobby Lee Baggett. As he expected, he got voice mail. He left his name and cell number and then went to retrieve the dogs.
As he started a fire in the woodstove, he remembered that he’d left the gun in the glove compartment. He went back out to the truck to retrieve it and took another look around. His was still the only cabin that appeared to be occupied. The only other light on was up at the office at the top of the lane. The sky was partially overcast now and the air smelled as if there was some more snow on the way. There was no wind to speak of, and the only sounds were coming from the truck’s engine as it cooled down in the frosty air. He tried to imagine a mountain lion padding silently around the cabins, green eyes glowing in the darkness. He heard a clump of snow fall out of a pine tree behind him and caught a glimpse of a big gray night bird, bent on murder, gliding soundlessly down into the ravine behind the line of cabins. The surrounding foothills were indistinct dark shapes. The cabin park was too low for him to be able to see the Smokies, which began their humped stretch west to Tennessee only about five miles away. He shivered in the night air, called in the dogs, and went back into the cabin, where the woodstove was already producing an agreeable heat. He broke out his Shelby Foote and settled in to read about Grant’s expedition against Fort Donaldson on the Tennessee River.
The sheriff called him back at 10:00 P.M. Cam gave him an abbreviated summary of what he had been doing, and told him he’d found out what the term cat dancers meant.
“Hopefully it’s not too fanciful.”
“Actually,” Cam said, and the sheriff groaned. He groaned some more once he heard the story.
“Mountain lions? Guys chasing mountain lions for-what, the thrill of it all?”
“For a picture, actually,” Cam said. “That, of course, explains everything. I guess it’s extreme wildlife photography. Stand by for the documentary.”
“Judas Priest!” the sheriff said. “And the rangers told you that mountain lions are extinct up there?”
“Unfortunately, yes. The occasional sighting is excitedly reported-always with absolutely zero evidence.”
“And how exactly does this lunacy connect to our problems here in Manceford County?”
Cam began to make Indian chanting noises, indicating that he had no idea, and the sheriff swore. “Look,” he said. “Spend another day or so up there, report back in, and we’ll see where to go from there.”
Cam said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up. He went to the front door and looked out. It was snowing again, and this looked like more than a passing squall. He wondered if he ought to go out and put the snow straps on his tires, but he decided against it. The radio forecast had been for snow squalls only.
Half an hour later, he made the call. To his surprise, a man answered.
“I got a note to call this number,” Cam said. “Who am I talking to?”
“You want to know about the cat dancers?”
“That’s right,” Cam replied.
“Where you staying?”
Cam told him.
“Which cabin?”
“The only occupied one,” Cam said. “You’ll see my truck. You a park ranger?”
“Half an hour,” the man said, and hung up. Cam found his notebook and wrote down the phone number, along with a note to get Jay-Kay to ID the number for him. He checked on the snow again, and it was still coming down.
He considered his situation. He’d just told a stranger where he was, and that he was alone in an empty cabin park. There was only one road in and out of the cabin area. If another wrecking crew showed up, it would be a really bad idea to be trapped in the cabin. His problem was that he hadn’t brought
extreme-weather clothing with him, he had only one nontactical weapon, and he had no backup. He’d just assumed that the phone number belonged to Mary Ellen Goode, the smiling ranger.
He figured he could try calling the local law. And tell them what? he wondered. Frick got up and came over to see what was bothering him. Well, I do have some backup, he thought as he rubbed her ears. Frack came over to get in line for ear rubbing. The shepherds could read his mood like a book.
He put on a second pair of socks, long johns, and a sweater over his flannel shirt. He got his coat and gloves, and happily found a knit watch cap in his bag. He opened the front door and looked out. The truck’s hood was already showing an inch or so of snow. The sky was completely overcast, and the whirling snowfall obiterated things far off. The vehicle tracks in the road were just faint indentations now.
Leaving the lights in his cabin on, he locked the front door. He got the Peacemaker and his Maglite, took the dogs out the back door, and walked next door to the adjoining cabin. He went around the side that was away from his cabin to minimize visible footprints. He tried its front door. It was locked, but the back door was not. He let himself and the dogs inside and unlocked the front door from the inside. The outside temperature wasn’t that cold, maybe low twenties, and it was the same in the empty cabin. The dogs had their winter growth, so they’d be all right. He set up a chair so that he could see the snow-covered lane between the cabins, then sat down to wait. The only lights visible were the one he had left on inside his cabin and the amber security light up at the office. He tried the phone in the empty cabin, but it was dead. He thought about going back and getting his cell phone but decided against it. He had the dogs, he had the Colt, and he wasn’t where he’d said he’d be. If hostiles were coming, he should have at least a little warning.
After thirty minutes of waiting, he got up and moved around the empty cabin. The mountain cold had begun to penetrate his layers of clothes and he needed to restore his circulation. The shepherds were curled up by the front door. Frack was dozing; Frick was watching Cam. The snow was still coming down outside, and now the security light up by the road was only an amber glow. The smoke from his cabin’s woodstove was barely visible.
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