Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 05 - Endangered Species

by Endangered Species(lit)

  Over a Scotch she did not drink, she told him the baby killer the headlines had shouted about was the man on whose behalf she'd testified several years previously; the last time she'd ever been lured to the witness stand. Her testimony, along with the obfuscatory powers of the defense attorney and the slow wits of the prosecutor, had gotten the man a light sentence on an insanity plea. He'd served just over three years. Two weeks after he was paroled he had sexually assaulted and killed the three-year-old boy the tourists from Ely, Nevada, had discovered in the shopping bag.

  The psychiatrist was walking the thin line between guilt and responsibility. The subject cut too close to the bone for her to share it in detail with a stranger, she'd said, and Frederick had been stung.

  He temporarily put aside his bizarre courtship of Anna's sister. To give Molly back some semblance of control, he steered the conversation toward the concrete: suspects, clues, the possible connection to the threats she'd received.

  Despite the emotional pressure Molly was under, she hadn't come unprepared. just once, Frederick wished she would. Then you could fancy it a tryst, he mocked himself; still, it would have pleased him.

  As it was, she pulled out her black briefcase. Her secretary had spent the morning in research. Lester Mack, the man arrested for the murder of the boy, and the man whom Dr. Pigeon had been instrumental in saving from life in prison, if not death row, was paroled the same week she received the first death threat.

  The stakes had definitely been raised. Motive, should they now be on the right track, was no longer a mystery.

  Though Lester Mack had been released and Molly threatened before anyone should have known who murdered the boy in the Bloomingdale's bag, Frederick tracked down the parents of the three- year-old victim the following morning. Through his contacts with the NYPD, he learned that the parents were young, both Puerto Rican, with very little understanding of English. The mother had been sixteen and the father eighteen when Lester Mack's trial was in the news. He doubted even now that they connected Molly Pigeon with the murder of their son. Frederick moved on to more promising territory.

  Four years before, Mack had been accused and found guilty of the assault and killing of two other children, both boys, both Puerto Rican, and both from poor families. Either Lester Mack had a racial taste in victims or he was clever enough to realize the difficulty poor families, particularly those with no command of the English language, would have in pushing a successful investigation and prosecution through an already overburdened legal system.

  In an attempt to avoid being racist himself-in the sense of writing off the families of the previous victims as suspects-Frederick uncovered their whereabouts. One family, shattered by the death of their son, had returned to Puerto Rico, where they lived with the husband's mother. Frederick called and spoke with a brother-whether of the wife or the husband, his understanding of Spanish wasn't good enough to discern. As near as he could tell, no one in that household was aware of Mack's release or of his rearrest on suspicion of the same charges that had so impacted their lives.

  The parents of Mack's other early victim had long since divorced. No one knew where the father had gone but his ex-wife thought he might have moved to Los Angeles. She had remarried and lived in Jackson Heights, where she worked in her husband's dry-cleaning business. She had read of the recent murder of the little boy. It had brought back the nightmares, she said.

  When Frederick questioned her about Dr. Pigeon, she seemed to have only a vague recollection of the name. There had been a number of forensics experts and expert witnesses at the Lester Mack trial. She spoke English well enough to converse, but she'd been unable to follow the technical questions and the answers from the witness stand.

  Frederick hung up convinced she'd not linked Molly with the release of Mack, nor did she have the linguistic skills to pen the threatening notes and alter her accent sufficiently to leave the phone messages Molly had played for him.

  Having arrived at another dead end, maxed out his Visa and irritated his boss, Frederick could no longer justify staying in Manhattan and had reluctantly boarded a flight to O'Hare. They'd not yet entered the airspace over Ohio and already he was missing Molly, or more accurately, the way he felt when he was with her." Young" about summed it up. Banal as it was, he suspected this was what was meant by midlife crisis. Had he seen it coming, he hoped he would have had the good sense to buy a sports car or indulge in some other harmless cliche.

  A sudden memory made him laugh aloud, drawing an uncomfortable glance from the matronly woman in the seat next to him.

  Two years before, he'd very nearly bought that sports car. He'd lusted after a lurid purple Ford Probe he'd seen in a dealer's window. He would have bought it if it hadn't been for his daughter, Candice. One night he'd mentioned it and she'd said in a voice rich with the scorn left over from her recent adolescence: "Ye ah, Dad, like a Probe is a sports car..."

  On his lap, closed in a battered leather notebook he'd carried for fifteen years, were three half-written letters to Molly, all carefully crafted with wit and charm. It was just a mind game, he told himself. He'd never send them. Unless Molly wanted him to. There was the loophole. One come-hither look and Frederick knew he would betray Anna in actuality as he had already in his heart. Not without a backward glance. He'd scourge himself for a week or two but the heady narcotic of new romance would kill the pain.

  The world was full of people doing as he did on various levels. Most of them were sublimely unaware of their actions, of the absurdity of their self-made tempests. He wished he were one of them.

  Molly was attracted to him. Frederick was an old enough hand to smell the pheromones. Whether she'd give in to it, he had no idea. He looked at the letters he'd started and wondered if he dared send them.

  It had been so long since he'd been rejected by a woman, he wondered how well he'd handle it. Would he sulk, get angry, scurry away with his tail between his legs, pretend it never happened?

  Even thinking about it made him feel defenseless and a bit of a boob. Often the worst things that happen are when someone important sees to it nothing happens at all; a refusal of love, friendship, or help when it is most needed.

  Leaning back, he tilted the seat the allotted five degrees and let that thought rattle around in his head. There was something about it that had caught in his mind, the idea of rejection being the unkindest cut, indifference the greatest evil, the murder of what might have been.

  Tray tables were being put up in preparation for landing by the time the thought came to rest. That first night he'd met with Molly he had asked her about publicity. She mentioned the Mack trial.

  She said that after Lester Mack's sentencing she'd refused to appear for the defense ever again but that, because of the success of the defense, she'd been-how did she put it? It seemed important to remember her exact words. She said she had people "beating down her door."

  The flight attendant tapped Frederick and he obediently returned his seat back to the full upright position. Before stowing his notebook as requested, he scribbled down a line of inquiry to follow up.

  A new direction and an excuse to call Molly. Not a bad two hours' work.

  Anna was overwhelmed by the world's incomprehensibility.

  All was black as pitch and she couldn't move. She probably wasn't dead. Twice before she'd thought she was dead and had been mistaken. She'd come to believe assuming one was dead-or wishing one was-indicated one was still living. Only mildly reassuring under the circumstances.

  "Why does everything have to be so fucking mysterious." Mouth and throat were dry and the words whispered out like wind over parched earth, but it was reassuring to know some portions of her anatomy still functioned. If she could speak, she was breathing.

  Always a good sign.

  Emboldened by success, she reached up to see if her eyes were open. Her knuckles rasped painfully against splintered boards. As through a shifting mist, memories of the night came back. She was in the hog pen, her fore
head pushed against the slanting lumber of the roof. At some point she'd slipped the surly bonds of earth and tipped over; the slanted sides of the narrow enclosure had kept her from falling. Both legs were folded under her and both were as insensate as the weathered wood, so deeply asleep they ignored her orders to move, not responding with so much as a tingle to indicate life. They felt as if they'd been packed with sand, but she could move her hands and arms. She used one to prop herself upright.

  Her head weighed a ton and pressure had built inside to an uncomfortable degree.

  Directly in front of her the world appeared vaguely lighter.

  Somewhere along the line she must have opened her eyes. They burned and teared. The view didn't change but she could feel water running down her cheeks.

  "Water," she croaked, testing her voice. Thirst bore down upon her with a vengeance and she clawed her yellow pack from where it lay behind her left hip. Fumbling off the cap of the bottle, she held it to her lips with both hands, spilling water down the sides of her face. The melodrama of the picture she presented made her laugh.

  Her lungs sore from processing smoke, the sound came out on a hacking cough.

  For a tense moment she waited for the racket to bring down retribution. There wasn't a sound from without. In a way she was disappointed. The shed had become intolerable and she wasn't altogether sure she could get out of it without assistance. Feeling as she did, the thought of being murdered-if the dispatch was quick and painless-wasn't without its attractions.

  In a past now obscured by cannabis smoke, she had folded her legs into a half-lotus. Her lap was lost in the darkness that wrapped cocoonlike around her. The puzzle of how to disentangle limbs she could neither see nor feel baffled her. Her brain too was cocooned in darkness and smoke. Idly she wondered how many more little gray ells had gone the way of the dodo.

  A fuzzy thought made its appearance in her blasted mindscape: At least I won't get glaucoma for a while. That brought on the giggles and she knew she was still high. Paranoia made its familiar appearance on the tail end of the laughter and she waited, consciously breathing, till it passed.

  Reality began reasserting itself in negatives: it was not light, she was not straight, she was not dead, no one was going to come and pull her out of the hog pen. Armed with knowledge of the parameters, she took action. Helen Keller learns yoga, she thought as she felt down the length of her calf till her hands closed around the ankle that rested on the inner thigh of the opposite leg. Grasping it firmly, she pulled it free and tossed it in the direction of the outside world. It fell with a clunk that sounded as if it had struck something solid. Easy, she reminded herself. In the not too distant future she would have to pay the price for any injuries inflicted.

  The plan was a bust. One leg under her and one thrust out in front cemented her more firmly than ever onto the shed floor. Walking her hands back down the leg from the knee, she hauled the ankle up to its former resting place. After what seemed a long time in thought, she gave up trying to outsmart her body. She hurled the yellow pack out first, then, using the strength of her arms, pulled herself forward, rocking her torso over the useless legs. With hands and elbows, she dragged her body from the enclosure.

  The smell of smoke had given way to the smell of wet ash. Anna rolled onto her back and sat up, her sleeping legs splayed like logs before her. Shh, she heard her grandmother's voice say in her head.

  You'll wake them up... And when she did, it would be excruciating; the unbearable tickle of sensation returning to a million oxygenstarved cells.

  Not ready to face that, she left them unmolested and dug the flashlight from her pack. The lawn chairs were gone, the r)iles burned down to ash, the ash cooled with water and raked over with needles and debris. Shining the narrow beam as far as it would reach into the recesses between the thinly scattered oaks, Anna noted the mature plants were missing as well. Those plants had achieved the stature of small trees, twelve or fifteen feet high and carrying enough dope to retail for $1,500 to $2,500 a plant. They were gone as if they'd never been. Even the roots had been dug up, or the stems cut flush and covered with leaf litter. The Hansons had been busy little bees.

  Confusion swirled, turning Anna's thoughts into a tornado that threatened to rip up what little equilibrium she'd regained. How long had she been down the rabbit hole? It was night. Which night) The ashes still gave off heat and she took comfort in that. She'd not lost a day. Screwing up her courage, she dug out her pocket watch and shined the flash on it: 2:42. Four or five hours had passed since she'd crawled into the hog pen. For at least three of that she'd been asleep. Lost time. It made her nervous. She put the watch and flashlight away and began to massage her legs.

  Twenty minutes later she had her body back, such as it was. It was not pleased with her, nor she with it. During her protracted sabbatical from reality, she'd become home to a thriving colony of chiggers, Several times she tried to count the bites but always lost her place. She'd find herself, numbers gone from her mind, head hanging, trouser legs rolled, wondering what she'd been trying to prove. Conceding victory to the chiggers, she turned her limited attention span on ticks.

  By the light of her flash she began detaching engorged insects from her person. One or ten or a hundred-she couldn't tell. At first she crushed them between her nails. The death penalty: not revenge, just discouraging recidivism. It wasn't long before the gore upset her stomach and she stopped, satisfying herself with flinging the bugs into the darkness and trusting she'd have moved before they had time to crawl back.

  Like a tape loop on video, she saw herself taking the same action over and over again. Having no idea whether or not she was making any progress, she finally stopped but she doubted she'd gotten them all.

  Minutes ticked by as she sat in the dark, trying to decide what to do next. Eyes and lungs burned, the pressure in her head had transmuted into a dull ache. There weren't three square inches of skin anywhere on her body that did not itch with such viciousness it took all her self-control not to claw the flesh from bone. Anna hated the South and everyone and everything crawling around in it.

  A solution came to her: she had to get the hell out of there.

  When she tried to stand it came home to her how thoroughly ripped she was. Many shects to the wind. Vertigo made the forest whirl.

  She fell to her knees and vomited up the water she'd consumed.

  Nausea: she didn't remember that from the good old days. Her body had outgrown its tolerance for recreational poisons.

  Stomach empty, she felt marginally better and pushed herself to her feet, achieving the vertical on the second attempt. Around her, black trees were spinning, she could feel them, and dared not look.

  Eyes down, she fished out her compass and shined the flashlight on it. Looking only at the controlled world of the compass face, she began pushing determinedly east.

  Distance was as relative as time had become. Anna followed the needle in her palm as a true believer would follow the star. Navigation around obstacles was beyond her mutant mental powers. Gone was her fear of noise or thickets. What was one more bite? Merely an addition to her already splendid collection. She bulled her way through the brush, trusting the rattlers had retired for the night and calling down curses on the head of any spider who wouldn't give her a tucking break.

  An eternity of scratches and bumps and confused dreams later, she staggered out onto the dunes. Silver light bathed her and she dropped to all fours." Thankyoubabyjesus," she whispered without thought of irreverence. Always before, away from the haunts of man she'd found solace. Fear of wild places had been alien to her. Control having been stripped away, the darkling woods took on a different face. Crumpled on the sand, the ocean at peace as far as she could see, she felt the soft light penetrate her soul, lift the darkness from within, and she understood at last why the ancients had condemned the wilderness as the walks of the devil.

  Beauty, true and lasting beauty, was personified by the squatting bulk of the pumper truck. She
'd come out of the woods just three hundred yards south of where she'd parked. She ran to it as to a long-lost love.

  Before she left the denuded marijuana plantation, she'd finished the last ol' her water. It was with relief she downed half a liter from the canteen on the seat. Water cleared her head marginally. Motion had restored her muscles. She knew her lungs would hurt for a while. She'd consider herself lucky if she didn't come down with bronchitis. Of her myriad ills all were somewhat alleviated but for the ticks and the chiggers.

  Having doffed only her boots and pocket watch, Anna waded fully clothed into the sea and let the ocean close over her head. Salt water purified, weightlessness calmed her spirit. Time warped again but this time she could live with it. She luxuriated in the warn] surf.

  Bobbing like a bit of kelp on the tide, she lay at the surface, vatching the panorama of beach.

  The nesting sites of the loggerheads were invisible in front of oat grass, thrust up black and spiky, the light of the moon behind the blades. A trail, something dragged, cut between two of the nests, breaking down a lip of sand carved by high tide. The Hansons, Anna thought, dragging their harvest. Wind and water would obliterate the track by noon. An ideal setup: a couple on a houseboat known to anchor in different places to savor island views. A few nights a year they anchor just off the beach, drag their goods in, stow them aboard, and motor sedately away.