As it turned out, hiking into the wilderness with a potential murderer was not what grated on Anna's nerves. It was hiking with a teenager seesawing unpleasantly between sulkiness and petulance. Gripping tightly to her hard-won adulthood, Anna managed not to engage. Armored with genuine compassion, Joan seemed impervious to the sporadic adolescent barbs. Anna was not. The best she could do was appear to be. Rory, like most teenagers she had met, could be the best of company. And the worst. Like heat-seeking missiles, people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen had an uncanny ability to sense weak spots and hit them with unnerving accuracy.
Has to be hormonal,Anna thought as she meticulously refrained from wincing when he wrote off a generation of the finest rock-and-roll musicians ever to overdose as "overrated bubblegum salesmen." There was a spark of hope to be gleaned: perhaps at menopause, when she underwent reverse adolescence, she, too, would become uniquely dangerous, even if for only a brief period of time.
Till then, she relied on the grainy endurance of middle age to out-walk the strength and suppleness of youth. As the ascent to Flattop grew steeper and hotter and dustier, she picked up the pace and soon walked alone. Almost alone. Drooping along at her heels, nearly as sullen as Rory Van Slyke, was Ponce, the ten-year-old gelding the park used as a pack-horse. Doing double duty as DNA flunky and Harry Ruick's flunky, Anna had too much ground to cover on foot. Out of kindness of heart or weakness of mind she'd volunteered to walk the first twelve miles, four of them nigh onto vertical, so Ponce could carry Rory and Joan's packs.
Buck was to meet them at Fifty Mountain. They would overnight there. In the morning he'd go with Rory and Joan to work hair traps. Anna and Ponce would be on their own for the most part but, when feasible, would camp with the DNA research team. Harry had insisted on this not only for Rory and Joan's security but for hers. Anna'd not put up a fight. Much as she liked camping alone, she was not one-hundred-percent sure their lady-killer had left the park.
Despite the best Zen intentions, her mind did not remain uncluttered during the hours of the hike to Fifty Mountain. In the burn her thoughts turned to the peculiar Mr. Mickleson-Nicholson and his digging of glacier lilies. As they neared the place in the trail where Rory had met up with the hikers, visions of extraneous water bottles danced in her head. No revelations were forthcoming, and by afternoon's end, she plodded on as dull as Ponce and was nearly as glad as he when they reached camp.
Buck was there to greet them and lend a beefy hand and a strong back to unloading and feeding the horse. Grazing was much frowned upon, and along with their gear, Ponce carried pellets for himself.
William McCaskil was still at Fifty Mountain-or at least his tent and pack were in the far campsite where they'd been two days before.
Tent pitched, Anna allowed herself the luxury of a cup of hot tea before getting on with business: finding and again chatting with the felon, McCaskil.
The sun slid behind the mountain, dragging the day's warmth down with it. In this clashing together of day and night, nature chose to unleash one of her showier moments. As Anna drank her tea, fog white as drugstore cotton began pouring down, feather-light liquid in stasis, from over the jagged mountain face to the east. Slow and silent in sinister majesty it cloaked the crags, slipped between them and flowed toward the meadows. In an instant so perfect as to seem eternal, the drift turned from white to wild flamingo.
In its feeble human way, Anna's brain sought to categorize the sight: lava, chiffon, whipped cream, frozen fire. Her puny metaphors exhausted themselves and, for a blissful while, she sat in mindless appreciation.
Pink faded to gray. Tea grew cold. Wind breathed up from some damp mountain lung and she stirred herself. Dusk was long. She had at least an hour of half-light left in which to find and annoy at least one of her fellow campers.
McCaskil had returned from a day hike. When Anna trickled into his campsite he was shrugging out of his pack. His thick wavy hair was tangled and particles of high-country flora were caught in the nest. He'd been hiking cross-country in boots so new they blistered his feet. Anna could tell by the ginger-wincing way he pulled the footwear off. A confidence man, a city slicker, a greenhorn pushing his urban body through the thickets in search of what? Spiritual renewal? By the sour look on his face, it didn't look as though he'd found it.
"Howdy, howdy," she said, just to be irritating.
"Oh. It's you," he said repressively.
Anna took this as an invitation and settled herself comfortably at the base of a struggling pine tree. Fog flooded the camp. The evening had gone from chilly to cold. Pulling the hood up on her fleece jacket, she watched McCaskil, in shirtsleeves and shivering, glare at her from under well-shaped eyebrows.
"You're cold," she said pointedly. "Why don't you put your coat on?"
"I like being cold. And I like being alone. Nothing personal." He smiled then as if belatedly remembering some age-old warning about women scorned. "Except when there's a good-looking woman around." The first statement had come from the heart. The second blew out like a smoke screen.
Whatever he hoped to hide with it remained hidden. Anna was no match for him. She'd had a number of years to learn the art of ferreting out information. McCaskil had probably had twice that to practice fraud, deception and misdirection.
Flirting was the tool he chose this evening. Every query of Anna's was met with compliments, her remarks turned aside with double entendres. Fifteen minutes into the fruitless exercise, she realized she'd been lucky the first time and caught him off guard. For whatever reasons, his guard was up now. She would get nothing useful from him till she had a bigger pry bar. It crossed her mind to try and crack open the playboy facade with her knowledge of his conviction for fraud but she didn't know to what end. And she strongly suspected he knew she knew, was ready for it.
Several times she managed to shove Carolyn Van Slyke into the conversation. With the passage of time McCaskil's association with the deceased became ever more fleeting. When she'd first talked with him three days before, he'd referred to her as "the blond" and used her first name. Now she had been relegated to "that woman the bear ate." Since Carolyn had been murdered by a human hand, Anna wondered at McCaskil's seeming conviction that she'd died of natural, if fearsome, causes. When questioned he waved it away. "Whatever," he said callously. "I guess I wasn't paying all that much attention."
Cutting off the chitchat, Anna excused herself. Having walked well out of earshot she radioed Ruick. He'd been off duty for several hours but he was the kind of guy she figured would leave his radio on twenty-four hours of the day. She was right.
"I've got a hunch," she told him. "Run the prints on the second topographical map found on Van Slyke's body. The one in the pocket of the army surplus jacket."
The chief ranger said he would and didn't ask why. Being cagey and mysterious was an occupational hazard in law enforcement. Either Harry accepted that or was convinced Anna's hunch was as uninteresting as it was unimportant.
Grateful not to have to expose her fledgling theory to the harsh reality of nouns and verbs, Anna didn't care which.
The fog was not, as Anna had feared, a precursor to another day's cold rain. By sunrise it had moved on, moved up or simply vanished. The day was exquisite as only a high mountain summer can be: cool and warm at the same time, with breeze on one cheek and unfettered sunshine on the other. There was nothing in the air but air. Not the cloying touch of the moisture of the south, not the putrid undercurrent of a city's stink, not the bracing tang of salt from the seashore. Air so clear Anna felt if she stopped breathing she could soak it in through the pores of her skin.
Joan was gone with Rory and Buck, trudging back down West Flattop Trail to set up camp once more in the small meadow with the great flat boulder. On the surface it seemed unwise. Bears, like lightning, frequently struck twice in the same place. Joan had chosen to camp there again for a couple of reasons. One, Anna was sure, was a bad case of selective memory brought on by a prejudice in favor of Ursus horribilis.She couldn't help but notice that in Joan's conversations the bear had no longer ravaged, savaged or destroyed their camp but merely upset it. The rest of the researcher's logic was sound. There was no better campsite near where they were to dismantle and move the hair trap they'd been aiming for when life intervened with other plans and, too, the bear had found nothing in the way of a food reward. In the bearish sciences this meant it probably would not return.
Not being burdened with a scientific mind, it occurred to Anna that the bear, this bear, their own personal bear, had not been looking for food reward. What else a wild animal, not yet tainted by contact with the human race, might be seeking she wasn't ready to say, but the story of "The Ghost and the Darkness" came to mind. A true story of two lions- solitary hunters, according to scientists, naturally chary of human settlements-who had teamed up apparently for the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of creating terror and taking human life.
If people could go insane, who was Anna to say an animal, if only rarely, couldn't do likewise? Probably an animal smarter than the rest. Too smart for its own good.
"Get thee behind me, Dean Koontz," she said aloud, realizing she'd slipped into nightmare in the midst of the most stunningly beautiful of days. Joan was right. The meadow was a fine campground. Tonight, barring unforeseen circumstances, Anna would be joining her and the boys there. Till then she would enjoy the day, the solitude and pursuing to the best of her abilities the job she'd been given.
William McCaskil's camp looked uninhabited she noted as she lugged her tent and gear down toward the food preparation area and Ponce's makeshift paddock, a tying rail between the food area and the outhouse. A powerful temptation to search his tent coursed through her. The previous night she'd struck out with the slippery fellow. Or missed the basket or fumbled the ball-it was hard to know just what game McCaskil was playing. Had she been a private citizen, she might have given in to the urge. As a federal law enforcement officer she could not. Even in a tent in the wilderness, an American citizen had a reasonable expectation of privacy. If she found anything during an unauthorized search the evidence would be tainted and she would have done the investigation more harm than good.
After a night's sleep and a feed, Ponce was of a cheerier disposition than the day before and Anna's weight was somewhat less than he was accustomed to carrying. In easy companionship they started west, Ponce looking for anything tasty he might snag in passing and Anna looking for nothing in particular. Since there were no clues in the form of tracks or paper trails, and her meager list of suspects had already been interviewed within an inch of their tawdry little lives, she decided to return to the scene of the crime. Third time's the charm,she told herself, wondering who'd coined the idiotic aphorism. The true charm was being on horseback under a fathomless sky with nobody to answer to for the entirety of a splendid day.
Riding on flat improved trails was a luxury and a joy. But as she dismounted and tied Ponce to the log where Joan and the excitable ranger had waited while she and Ruick bushwhacked to the body, Anna was reminded that it had been a long time since she'd been in the saddle. What little padding she once had on her posterior had since lost its stuffing. Her sit-bones complained of miles of insult.
A strip of orange surveyor's tape indicated where the body had been taken from the brush. Anna entered the scrub and began the steep alder-choked journey down the side of the ravine. Alone, rested, the sun shining, she was able to give the now-battered path her undivided attention. She discovered nothing but a discarded Good amp; Plenty box. It had not been there prior to the murder. The cardboard paper had not been rained on. Anna knew she hadn't dropped it and she was sure Harry hadn't. No ranger had. Park rangers were subject to the ailments of the general populace: prejudice, stupidity, small-mindedness, malice; but she had never known a single one she suspected of littering. In the days since the body had been recovered the crime scene had been visited by an ill-mannered civilian.
With the exception of arsonists, who liked to see the fruits of their labors, most criminals did not return to the scene of the crime. Could be a curious visitor who had learned of the location by some means. Could be a hiker coincidentally chose that spot to take a leak and clean his pockets. Still, Anna bagged the candy box, marked the day, time and place she'd found it, and tucked it away. One never knew.
The Good amp; Plenty was the sum total of excitement. In the irregular opening in the alders where Gary had found Mrs. Van Slyke, Anna sifted through leaf litter, crawled into the neighboring tangle of bushes, examined weedy trunks and found nothing.
At length, enjoying a childish morbidity, she lay down in the place where Carolyn had been dumped and, folding her hands behind her head, contemplated being among the quick, and the sure knowledge that one day she would join the dead. Molly said thoughts of mortality came with one's fiftieth birthday. Anna still had a few years to go. But then she'd always been precocious.
Free from what she expected to see, Anna finally saw what was actually there.
In law enforcement classes, teachers were always admonishing students not to forget to look up. In real life, officers, rangers, forgot. Unless it was obvious, evidence in treetops went largely unnoticed. Both times that Anna'd crawled into this ravine, she'd seen little above eye-level.
High in the scrub, hard to assess from a supine position but probably six or seven feet up, a handful of the dusty-looking leaves were striated. Had the marked leaves not been so far from the ground Anna would have thought they'd been brushed with mud, painted by a passing boot after the rains and, so, after the body recovery. High as they were, above where tracks could be found, they held less interest.
Plants, like other life forms, were subject to disease and death, molds and rusts and parasites. Anna wasn't well enough versed in the pathologies of Montana's flora to speculate what this augured and her mind drifted. Drifted far enough to notice no other leaves, no other bushes were affected.
The world of the shrubbery pressed around her, began to feel claustrophobic. Sticks poked in her side. Leaves stuck in her hair. Skinny bark-clad fingers scratched at her arms. Light was deceitful, playing tricks with leaf shadows stirred by a wind that scarcely ever penetrated down to ground level. Heat, held close and dusty, itched on her skin.
Time to abandon her macabre resting spot. She rose and pushed into the branches to pluck one of the marred specimens. The rust-colored markings were smeared from the rain, but protected by the leaves above, enough remained for study. Dried blood-in her chosen profession Anna had had the opportunity to see plenty of the stuff- was slathered on various surfaces. A spit test reconstituted the brown to red. She took a small paper bag from her pack and collected several of the leaves. Blood in trees was not as rare as it might seem. Predators roamed the skies. These twiggy boughs were insufficient to support a dining hawk or eagle but occasionally they dropped wounded prey. If this was the case the tiny critter's corpse had been whisked away by a lucky groundling.
Her gory find stowed in an inside pocket, Anna stood in the alder and waited. Flies found her. Deerflies with jaws like airborne Chihuahuas flew kamikaze missions at the backs of her knees. Absently, she slapped them into the next world.
At length the information she waited for came into view: another patch of the rusty leaves a couple yards deeper in the brush. Shifting her attention down she moved toward it carefully, seeking any further sign underfoot or lower on the bushes. Runoff from the rain had erased any trail that might have been left and the sturdy alders retained no sign of anyone's passing.
Having reached the second cluster of streaked foliage she repeated the process. It took a sweaty, fly-bitten two hours to travel the rest of the trail but before noon she reached its end. Had she been a crow she could have flown from the place Carolyn's body was dumped to the pine tree where the blood trail ended in a matter of seconds. The two places were no more than seventy feet apart.
A pine, a lodgepole, rose gracefully out of the thicket. Its shade and the acidity of the fallen needles had opened a small needle-lined space beneath the boughs into which Anna moved gratefully. Her assumption that this was the blood trail's terminus was based not on what she found but on what she'd ceased to find. Three quarters of an hour's careful search around the tree led her to no new manifestations of rust-streaked leaves. Since the trail had been laid overhead, Anna crouched on her heels and studied the interlocking green of the pine above her.
This time the search was short. Twelve or fifteen feet up, partially secured to a branch with string of some sort was a navy-blue stuff bag vomiting pieces of clear-or once clear-plastic. All had been ripped to ribbons, by talons probably, though a bobcat or cougar or even a very talented fox was a possibility. Other than that, Anna could think of no pawed and clawed carnivores who frequented the avian stomping grounds.
The bark ringing the tree's trunk was unscarred. Whoever had put the package there had not done so by climbing. Having shed her day pack, Anna shinnied up for a closer look. Straddling a comfortable branch she tried to put together the pieces.
It didn't take long. With understanding came fear's cold touch, sickening in the warmth of noon. The torn plastic was blood-smeared as the leaves had been and comprised several different sources, two sandwich bags cut open, and part of what would undoubtedly turn out to be the tail end of a cheap poncho, the kind one can buy at the check-out counter in gas stations and carry in purse or trunk for soggy emergencies. The navy cloth was from a simple stuff sack, the sort hikers used to stow extraneous things. This one was eight or ten inches wide and twice that long. Bag and baggies had been drawn into the tree on a rope pull. A line of torn threads fuzzed the bark where the makeshift rope had been thrown over the limb and dragged. The line was secured with a slipknot. The dangling remainder had been cut, the frayed end tossed up into the lower branches. The rope was as cobbled together as the packaging: strips of torn fabric, white with narrow blue striping, tied end to end.
Carolyn Van Slyke's face had been cut off. The bloody slabs of meat had been carried high like a trophy or a team pennant over the butcher's head, leaving traces of blood on the cloaking leaves as he passed through. Away from the body, the murderer had packaged up the steaks in what he had at hand-sandwich bags and a raincoat-stuffed them in a sack that had been used maybe to carry his lunch, and cached this new treat up high where bears and other animals couldn't make away with it.
He'd been saving Carolyn Van Slyke's face for later.