Anna Pigeon - Track of the Cat Part 3

Tuesdays and Wednesdays were her lieu days, her days off. She'd call her sister, do her laundry, go into Carlsbad, shoot fifty rounds at the range, have a Prissy's Special and a couple of Tecates at Lucy's, take in a movie, do her grocery shopping. Then there'd be Wednesday to get through.

Anna flung the Murphy bed, unmade, up into its niche. While the water heated for coffee, she sat down at her desk. Her naked thighs stuck to the wooden chair. Already the day was heating up.

Opening the bottom drawer, Anna pulled out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope from under an untidy pile of bills-paid and unpaid.

"Don't do it," she said aloud. "Just don't do it." But she folded back the flap and pulled the pictures out anyway.

A tall, skinny man with fine eyes and clear pale skin looked out at her from a bridge over a little lake in Central Park. Behind him was the top of the Plaza Hotel. Terribly earnest, he stood with his hands folded on the bridge's ornate metal railing, his sensual mouth composed in solemn lines. Except for the glittering purple insect feelers bobbing on his head, he might have been a stockbroker or a young senator.

But Zach was an actor. A cla.s.sical actor. He was good. He might have made it. Then again, Anna thought wearily, maybe not. During their years in New York they'd watched an awful lot of good actors give up, go home and join the family business. Or worse, stick it out waiting tables and driving cabs, keeping their courage up with alcohol and boasts.

Anna looked at the next photo. Zach's head shot. So intense. A beautiful man in that sensitive, dying-of-tuberculosis, turn-of-the-century mold. Born too tall to play Hamlet.

"G.o.d, I miss you, Zach. It's beautiful here. But you'd've hated West Texas." Anna might have laughed but her throat was too tight. It was going to be one of those days. She put the pictures away and closed the drawer gently, as if they slept.

The water for her coffee had all but boiled away. Refilling the pan, she started the morning over.

On her way into Carlsbad, Anna saw the blue six-pac pickup the Roads and Trails foreman drove parked along the fence just inside the park boundary. He and Manny were standing near the fenceline with binoculars. There wasn't a dead fawn in the bed of the truck, so she pulled over.

"Hey, Manny, Harland," she greeted them as she climbed out of the Rambler.

Manny just nodded and kept looking out across the mesquite toward the escarpment.

Harland let his gla.s.ses fall down around his neck on their strap. They weren't government issue. They were finely crafted, expensive, birding binoculars. Many things about Harland Roberts were a little cla.s.sier than the run-of-the-mill. In his early fifties, he had Stewart Granger gray streaks at his temples and aquiline good looks.

Anna'd worked for him on a couple of projects. Harland got things done. In government service that was saying something.

"I didn't recognize you with your hair down," Harland said as he leaned against her car and folded his arms.

Anna pushed the cloud of hair back from her face. Thinking of Zach, feeling sorry for herself, she'd blown it dry and curled it, wearing it as she had when she was younger.

"It looks good," Harland said.

The compliment both pleased and made her feel self-conscious. "What's happening?" She jerked her chin to where Manny still surveyed the countryside.

"This is where the injured fawn was reported," Roberts said. "There's hair and blood on the barbed wire, but it looks like the little guy got himself untangled and crawled off somewhere. We've walked this area for a quarter of a mile in every direction but no luck."

"Maybe he's okay," Anna said.

"Let's hope so."

They stood a moment watching Manny watching the brush.

"I don't see how you can do it, Harland. I wouldn't have your job for all the tea in China," Anna said suddenly.

He looked at her, mild reproach in his eyes. "I don't like destroying an animal. But I'd rather that than have them suf fer."

Anna was sorry but she didn't say so. Letting her eyes wander, she hoped to fix on a new topic. In the rack across the six-pac's rear window was a seven millimeter Browning hunting rifle. "That your own?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I figured. A bit too fine for government work. Do you hunt big game?"

"I used to," Harland answered and Anna could tell he was uncomfortable with the subject. "I bought that line about it being a 'challenge.' When I found out a bull elk had an intelligence level equivalent to that of an eighteen-month-old toddler, I kind of lost my taste for it."

Anna smiled. Then remembered. "How's the hunt for the lion going?" she asked.

"No luck. We'll go up again today. I called old Jerimiah D. and he said he will lend us his dogs."

"Jerimiah D.?"

"Paulsen," Harland said. "He keeps hunting dogs."

"I bet," Anna said bitterly. "What does he get? The head? The pelt? Or just to be in on the kill?" Paulsen owned twenty-five thousand acres that bordered the park's northern boundary. He'd fought against every environmental issue in New Mexico and North Texas for thirty years. Usually he won.

"The animal will be salvaged for the display in the new Visitors Center," Harland said, overlooking her rudeness. "They can freeze-dry them so they look lifelike now. They're going to use it in an educational display. Corinne was glad to get it, in a way. That VC's her baby. If people are better informed, maybe this won't happen next time."

Anna doubted they could freeze-dry a "specimen" that large but she didn't say so. Instead, wanting suddenly to escape Harland and the conversation, she excused herself: "I better leave you to it."

"Wait." Harland laid a hand on her arm. "You didn't hear the big news." He was smiling, a boyish smile with a lot of charm. Making amends for her churlishness, it seemed. Letting her know there were no hard feelings.

Anna waited.

"We've got exotics on the West Side."

Resource Management spent countless hours and dollars eradicating exotic plant species that endangered native vegetation. "What?" Anna asked. "It's awful dry over there for tamarisk."

"Worse than tamarisk," Harland said, a twinkle in his gray eyes. "Martians. Tell her, Manny."

Manny looked their way a moment, the thin, pockmarked face showing a trace of humor but no inclination to join in the conversation. "You tell her, Harland."

"Craig Eastern was camped over there a couple nights back working on his snake studies and he saw a UFO. A greenish halo that danced over the ground and made noise like cosmic footsteps. A putt-putt. putt-putt. Sort of a celestial Model T. Manny said he was all shook up. Thought they'd come to take him home, I guess." Sort of a celestial Model T. Manny said he was all shook up. Thought they'd come to take him home, I guess."

"Craig is a strange man," Anna said.

Harland moved slightly so he was between her and Manny. When he spoke, his voice was low, pitched for her ears only. "Craig Eastern is crazy," he said. "Seriously. He's mentally ill. This is not for public consumption. You're out alone a lot. You take care of yourself."

Before Anna could respond one way or another, he had turned away, was calling to Manny, giving up the hunt for the fawn.

As they climbed into his truck, Roberts looked back over his shoulder. "I like the hair, Anna."

Anna spent the next twenty miles thinking about Harland Roberts.

He had a talent for knocking her a little off balance. Talking with him she felt younger, more vulnerable, less sure of herself. Harland was of an age where men seldom looked at women as peers, coworkers. Always, however well concealed behind training or good manners, was the pervasive concept of women as the Weaker s.e.x.

The d.a.m.ned thing of it was, Anna thought, it made her behave like a "flawed vessel." She wasn't sure if it was knee-jerk, a nerve touched from early socialization or-and this was the creepy thought-because she liked it.

"Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely!" Anna said aloud and moved her thoughts on to other things.

Roberts had said Craig Eastern was crazy. Everybody said Eastern was crazy, but Harland meant it. "He's mentally ill." He'd used those words. And: "Take care of yourself."

Anna knew Craig was fanatic about keeping the park undeveloped. It was more than just the inescapable animosity one felt when forced to see what the human race was doing to the planet. With Craig it was personal, a betrayal of him as well as Texas and the world.

Craig had been one of the most outspoken opponents of Drury's proposal to develop recreational vehicle sites in Dog Canyon. In a way, his very vehemence undermined his cause. His rhetoric was so heated that none of the bra.s.s wanted to align themselves with him.

"You're out alone a lot. Take care of yourself."

Did Harland Roberts think Craig was crazy enough to hurt somebody? To hurt her? Craig talked a lot about shooting visitors. But all naturalists talked about shooting visitors. It was a way of letting off steam.

Was it different with Eastern? Looking at his nervous rantings through the curtain of suspicion Harland had dropped he did seem a little insane.

Anna's mind jumped to the nearest conclusion: Sheila Drury was dead. If the lion didn't do it ...

It was absurd. She was clutching at straws, and melodramatic straws at that.

The autopsy would show something: congenital heart failure, brain aneurysm. Something that would prove Sheila was dead before the lion tasted her. But by the time the report came-if it ever did and wasn't simply lost in some FBI file-it would be too late. Not many days would pa.s.s before Paulsen's dogs would tree a cougar. It would be dubbed, after the required five minutes of deliberation, to be the cougar, and it would be shot.

"d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n!" Anna pounded the Rambler's steering wheel with the flat of her hand. The car swerved into the oncoming lane and a subcompact with Ohio plates honked, the driver mouthing obscenities.

"Think of something else, it's your day off," Anna ordered herself.

For twelve hours she managed to school her mind. Distract it, was more accurate: a Schwarzenegger movie, a couple of Tecates, a "new" Patsy Cline tape.

Near nine p.m., as she drove back to Guadalupe, Patsy singing "Too Many Secrets," Anna began again to worry at the edges of the Drury Lion Kill.

Beside her on the seat, atop an acc.u.mulated pile of rubble, were the slides she'd taken on the lion transect and of the Dog Canyon Ranger's corpse. Anna had taken them to Wal-Mart's one hour photo service and paid for the developing out of her own pocket.

Technically she should have turned the roll in to the clerk, filled out a form for funding, and waited the requisite eternity for the machinery to grind out one small task.

Patience was not Anna's strong suit.

Contemplating the envelope she had a.s.siduously ignored all day, she wondered what it was she was so anxious to see. Sheila Drury's intestines festooning the front of her uniform like macabre confetti?

Most definitely, she wanted to see the blood again. If she remembered correctly, there'd been very little. Surely that indicated the lion had clawed Ranger Drury sometime after she had achieved corpse-hood.

That might be an argument that would quicken some kind of interest in Paul. Then he would stop the hunt. If he could. Corinne Mathers wasn't known for her willingness to listen to her District Rangers. Mathers acted like a woman with a political itinerary. Guadalupe was a stop along the way.

"Be fair," Anna chided herself, but this time she expected she was being fair. Maybe even generous. Corinne was a woman on her way up.

Mankins was in the Cholla Chateau with Cheryl Light, watching television when Anna pulled in. She could see the blue-gray light through the windows. Manny would be three sheets to the wind by this time of night. Fleetingly, Anna wondered if his wife, Yolanda, cared that he drank so much beer. Guadalupe, like so many parks, was isolated, the employees living in rented government housing miles from anywhere. It became its own small, sometimes incestuous, society. Loneliness, boredom, and booze were occupational hazards.

The light in Craig's apartment was out. There was only the eerie purple glow of his snake aquarium light through the white curtain. Either he'd already gone to bed or he was camping on the West Side despite the invasion of the s.p.a.ce aliens.

Anna smiled at the thought. Then she remembered Harland's warning. Feeling a fool, she locked her door behind her after she'd brought in the groceries.

The slides were tossed into the bag with the onions and the chocolate pudding. Leaving the frozen goods to hold their own for a few minutes more, Anna took them out and carried them over to the desk. The little slide viewer was in the top drawer with pens and .357 cartridges.

With hope but no expectations, she peered quickly through the transect photos, then dropped the first corpse shot into the viewer and held it up to the light.

Nothing had changed. The images that she held in her mind were accurate. The shots of the scratches and the puncture wounds were disappointing. The light was so poor when she'd taken them that the colors were faded. It was impossible to tell where the blood ended and the mud began. Not enough proof to impress Corinne Mathers with the lion's innocence.

Anna sat back. Piedmont had leapt silently to the desk top and was pus.h.i.+ng the slide box back and forth between his paws. Soon he would grow bored and the box would be knocked to the floor with one sudden swat.

Was that the way it was with Sheila? Had she delicately made her way into the saw gra.s.s, protecting her arms and face, then, with the sudden swipe of one deadly paw, been struck down? And, before the lion dragged or worried at his prey, he was frightened away?

It could have happened that way. But, Anna didn't believe it. "Just being stubborn," she told Piedmont as she risked a skewered finger, rescuing the box of slides from his paws. She replaced it with another toy, a plastic ball with a bell encased inside.

The cat would have nothing to do with it. Anna had ruined everything. With a flick of his sausage tail, he jumped down.

"Be that way," Anna said peevishly. She dropped the next slide into the viewer and held it up to her eye. One of the last shots on the roll: a picture of the paw prints she'd found behind Sheila in the mud. If Anna remembered correctly the two sets had been about a yard apart It was hard to tell from the picture and she wished she'd had the presence of mind to put a pen or a dime in the shot at the time; something to give a size reference. The prints themselves were cookie-cutter perfect in the smooth surface of the fine-grained silt.

Anna put the second slide of the prints in and stared at it unthinkingly. With an uncluttered mind, the obvious became obvious. The difference between front and hind paw prints was minimal but she had spent a lot of hours with her eyes on the ground studying lion sign. The hind paw's central pad was more heart-shaped, the sides convex rather than concave. In these pictures both sets, front and back, were identical-even to the crease marks on the pads themselves.

Both sets of prints, the front and the hind, were forepaws. "That can't be right ..." she whispered, pus.h.i.+ng her eye closer to the light source. She changed slides; studied the first one again. There were no prints from hind paws.

A lion with four front paws.

A lion that walked on its hands.

A lion eleven feet long that kept its hind paws on the stone.

A lion with its a.s.s in a sling.

Anna listed the absurdities. "When is a Lion not a Lion?" she said aloud, putting her confusion into riddle formula.

When it's dead, she thought, and that's what this lion-or some lion-will be if the hunt's not stopped.

Again she looked at the slides. She was not mistaken.

Proof.

Proof of what, she wasn't exactly sure. Proof there was something fishy about the Drury Lion Kill.