Anna Pigeon - Track of the Cat Part 7

Anna was glad to talk of the woman. She was surprised at her eagerness. Was it the same as the girlish longing to tell her friends of the new boy in her life?

For over three-quarters of an hour, way past midnight eastern daylight time, Molly listened. When Anna had squeezed out her last thought on the subject, Molly listened ten seconds more.

"Christina sounds like a nice woman," she said at last and Anna felt disappointed.

"Is that all?" she demanded.

"Anna, I don't want to throw cold water on your new career as a lesbian. Lord knows it would increase my status in therapists' circles if I could produce a sibling who was a bona fide gay woman, but how long has it been since you've made a friend?"

"I have friends," Anna retorted.

"I don't think so. I think you used to have friends. After Zach was killed-and you finally sobered up-you took off out of New York City like all the demons of h.e.l.l were after you. You became Smokey Bear's right-hand man and you've never looked back. When I run into your old friends at Saks they're wearing black arm bands. Everybody thinks you died, too."

"None of my friends could afford Saks," Anna snapped.

"All right," Molly said. "When I'm at Saks, I see them through the window waiting for the bus to the Lower East Side. But you get my point."

"Maybe I don't."

"Maybe you do. Maybe you need a girlfriend. Maybe you're overwhelmed that this woman was warm and kind and female. Maybe you're gun-shy of attachment because Zach left you. Maybe you miss Zach's feminine side."

"You're shrinking me," Anna complained.

"You're the one with the s.e.xual ident.i.ty crisis. What do you want?"

"Rogelio has a feminine side," Anna countered.

"From what you've told me, Rogelio has a weak side. Not at all the same."

"I'll think about that," Anna promised. "I never know whether you're being commercial or merely profound."

Molly laughed, unoffended. "Hey, one's as good as the other these days. Maybe you are turning gay. That's well and good. I just wanted to give you some other things to think about. Powerful need for affection, identification-all that underrated and overexploited sisterhood stuff-is visceral. Feels almost s.e.xual to those not in touch with themselves."

Anna started to protest that she was in touch with herself, but the lie was too bold for her. "One more complication," she said and felt a wicked pleasure in having a real bomb to drop. "Christina Walters is my prime suspect in what I'm increasingly sure is the murder of the Dog Canyon Ranger."

There was a most satisfying silence on the other end of the line. Anna smiled.

"When I told Mother and Dad I wanted a playmate, I was hinting for a kitten," Molly said. "I liked being an only child. Do you hear this?" There was a shus.h.i.+ng sound, then Molly's voice again. "That was me pouring myself a medicinal scotch and soda. You have till I finish it to fill in the rest of the story. Then I'm going to bed. Ready? Go!"

Anna told her largely conjectural story of love, l.u.s.t, blackmail, and murder.

"How?" Molly asked flatly when she had finished. "Lured her lover upstream like a demented salmon and coshed her with a cactus?"

"Maybe," Anna said. "I've not done 'how' just yet. I'm working on 'why.' Christina Walters, my ... friend... is the only real good 'why' I've got so far."

"Work on 'how,"' Molly advised. "Take my professional word for it: everybody's got ten good reasons to do away with everybody else. It's just n.o.body knows how. Do 'how.' "

There was an odd little clink, like a tiny distant bell. "That," said Molly, "was the last ice-cube hitting my teeth. Goodnight."

"Goodnight," Anna returned but the line had gone dead.

CHAPTER 8.

"Look at the bright side, Gideon," Anna addressed the grouchy-looking ears as the horse dragged his feet, stumbling with childish ill grace up the Frijole Trail away from the barn. "Even with tack I probably weigh less than you'd be packing if you were working for Harland."

It was Thursday and Harland had his mule packer using Pesky and the mules to haul coolers full of food and beer into the trail crew where they were spiked out on the Tejas Trail in the high country.

Paul had sent Anna to ride the Guadalupe Peak Trail. Usually hot Thursdays in June were quiet. With temperatures creeping near the hundred-degree mark and no water available at any of the backcountry campgrounds, only the hardy and the foolhardy were packing in. But this Thursday was the annual Pentecostal Church's fund-raising hike up the highest peak in Texas.

Churches from all over Texas, New Mexico, and as far away as Oklahoma partic.i.p.ated. Every year somebody got hurt, half a dozen people broke park rules, and nearly everybody littered.

Anna began whistling "Nearer My G.o.d to Thee," and the horse p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. "Gonna be a good day, Gideon," she said. "It's not every day you're guaranteed to be hailed as a hero or the anti-Christ or both by sundown."

The beauty of the Chihuahuan Desert had been smoothing the wrinkles from Anna's mind since she'd saddled up at eight a.m. The winds had finally stopped. There would be a reprieve from their incessant scour until probably November. Cholla-the skinny cactus that grew up in angular, spine-covered branches-was beginning to bloom. Festive pink blossoms the size of teacups and looking for all the world like they had been fas.h.i.+oned from crepe paper enlivened the uncompromising cacti. Mexicans called them Velas de Coyotes Velas de Coyotes-candles of the coyotes. p.r.i.c.kly pear pads carried one, two, ten yellow blooms, and the gra.s.ses were rich with wildflowers.

In the midst of all this spiritual plenty Anna was annoyed to find herself once again thinking of death. "Molly said we must concentrate on 'how.' Think, Gideon, think." Anna spoke to keep Gideon awake. On the familiar trail from the Frijole ranch house to the Pine Springs campground-three miles he'd done a hundred times-Gideon tended to doze off while he walked. Then if anything-western diamondback rattler or monarch b.u.t.terfly-woke him suddenly, he'd jump right out from under his rider.

"Okay, Gideon," Anna conceded. "I know you've only got horse brains for brains. I'll think. You listen.

"Quick 'whys.' Maybe in New York everybody has ten good reasons for killing everybody else but in West Texas we are somewhat more civilized. We like the personal touch.

"Water bar, old buddy ..."

Gideon's hoof crashed into the stone set crosswise on the trail and Anna patted his neck rea.s.suringly. "Such a Nureyev you are, a veritable Baryshnikov.

"Okay. The 'whys' in short. Christina's still first with love, l.u.s.t, and blackmail to her credit. Second, the mysterious Erik of legend and lore who kills with a Toyota. Karl coming in third with job envy. We'll squeeze Craig Eastern in in fourth place because he's crazy and maybe crazy enough to kill to keep the moneylenders out of the temple-the developers out of Dog Canyon. Fourth and a half: Mrs. Drury with her insurance money. Rogelio fifth with his homeless prairie dogs." Gideon c.o.c.ked one furry ear.

"What?" Anna demanded. "Who did I forget? Okay. No family favoritism. Last but not least, mother-in-law Edith, spurred on to violence by Emily Post over the grapefruit spoon in the ice-cream incident.

"Pretty slim pickins', Gideon, my little hay-burner. All my suspects are your basic Caspar Milquetoast types."

Gideon snorted, blowing the flies and dust from his nostrils.

"Right," Anna conceded. "We were to do 'how.' "

For a while they rode without speaking, Gideon heaving great complaining sighs, Anna ignoring them. Two military helicopters out of Halloran Air Force Base flew over and Anna shook her fist at them. The airways over the wilderness were supposedly regulated but it seemed all the flyboys fancied themselves the new Tom Cruise.

" 'How' for Christina." Gideon started as if he'd been goosed with a cattle prod. "Aha! Caught you napping," Anna crowed. "Christina could've lured Sheila into the canyon any number of ways. A simple invite even. Sheila, being the stronger of the two, would carry the pack. Then ... Then what, Gideon? Help me here. Aren't you a highly trained police horse? Knocked her over the head? No sign of head trauma. Poisoned her? That's got possibilities. Wait for the autopsy. Frightened her to death? Too farfetched. Drugged her, slathered her with catnip, and waited for a lion to finish the job?"

Gideon stopped, relieved himself in the trail, grunting with unself-conscious equine satisfaction.

"Fair enough," Anna admitted. "We'll drop the catnip angle and leave it at Christina/Poison. Who's next? Ah. Erik. Ditto Erik-if there is an Erik."

Anna fell silent. Had Christina spun her story from scratch, banking on the fact that Anna, a middle-aged woman, more or less alone, a widow without any close friends, would be an easy mark? A few compliments, some laughter, and she'd be so thrilled just to be paid attention to she'd bite anything, swallow it hook, line, and sinker?

"Wouldn't I feel a total horse's a.s.s. Nothing personal, Gideon." The scene she'd painted made Anna cringe but she didn't believe it, not entirely. From long experience she knew that she wore her loneliness like armor. Very few people ever recognized it for what it was. To the casual observer it looked very much like arrogance.

Sometimes it was.

"So: Erik, in a jealous rage, talks Sheila into coming to this secluded spot and: one; breaks her neck. Is Erik a big man? Two: injects her with poison. Is the ex-Mr. Walters a chemist or pharmacist?" Anna remembered Christina's mentioning investment banking. "Bored her to death with Ginny Maes and f.a.n.n.y Maes? I've got it! Smothers her with his down sleeping bag, lays her gently in the saw gra.s.s figuring by the time she's found the water will obscure prints, tracks, and marks. Smothering's got possibilities. Wait for the autopsy.

"Karl's next, Gideon. Maybe you want to tune out so you don't have to hear your buddy slandered." Gideon wouldn't dignify that with an answer and Anna went on with her musings. "Karl could've gotten her up there on any of a dozen pretexts: undiscovered pictographs, rare plants. He's powerful. Smothering, neck snapping, it'd be a piece of cake. He wouldn't even break a sweat. Then carry her into the gra.s.s.

"Wait!" Gideon stopped, looked back over his shoulder. "That doesn't work. Anybody in the park would have known I was on lion transect down Middle McKittrick on the seventeenth. In Guadalupe's eighty thousand acres it would be any thinking villain's last choice as a place to hide the body." Unless someone wanted the body found; wanted her to find it on a lion transect. That was where people a.s.sume the lions were. In reality, lion transects were simply places chosen to look for lion sign to find out, often, where the lions were not. If someone wanted the body to be found and wanted it to be found on a lion transect it followed that they wanted it to appear that a lion had done the killing.

Which meant the lion scratches, the strange tracks, were not a coincidence made after the fact by an opportunistic cougar. They had been put there for her to find.

Anna pulled the death scene into her mind. The paw prints-could they have been made by plaster casts or rubber, like children used to make paw prints in the Touch and See Museums? If so, they were the finest casts she'd ever seen. But it was not beyond the realm of possibility.

And the scratches and bites? Could they have been dug into Ranger Drury's flesh with something other than a feline claw? Knife? Ice pick? Fondue skewer?

Gideon, showing sudden energy, trotted down the dry bank of the creek that cut through Pine Canyon. Already, half a mile away from Guadalupe Peak, they could hear shouting. For the moment, Anna shelved the subject of murder. She clicked her tongue against her teeth. "Come on, Gideon, let's go find us some Pentecostals."

People of all ages were swarming up Guadalupe Peak. Overweight men, women and girls in dresses, n.o.body in hiking boots, very few carrying food, many carrying no water at all or a quart to be shared by a family of four when every man, woman, and child would need at least a half gallon to make it comfortably-and safely-the ten miles and 3,000 feet to the top of the mountain and back.

"Half gallon," Anna said time and again. Time and again a smiling face nodded, a hand held up a pittance of water. "We have plenty, sister, praise the Lord."

The opiate of the people was fueling the righteous.

By noon, after she had given nearly all her water away to feverish-looking children dragged along in the religious fervor, Anna found herself hoping for an Old Testament G.o.d to visit the peak with one of His famous scourges: a lightning storm that would blast the rock clean of cloying humanity.

Near three o'clock, as she led Gideon down the trail, a thirteen-year-old girl with a sprained ankle rigid in the saddle, as pale as if she rode on the back of Lucifer himself, Anna gave the last of her water to a red-faced woman, obviously pregnant and obviously overheated.

"Praise the Lord," the girl said.

"Go down," Anna returned. "Forget the peak. Remember that baby. Turn around now. Go down."

"If we suffer, we'll offer it up. Christ suffered on the cross for us," her husband said. He looked to be all of nineteen or twenty.

Anna stood for a moment, Gideon nuzzling her hand where it held the halter rope, and marveled at the beatific stupidity that radiated from the two flushed faces.

"There's no safe way for you to get past this horse," Anna said finally. "He's got a thing about anybody crowding him on the trail. Turn around and go down."

"Honey ..." The girl laid a hand on her husband's arm. Anna could tell she was glad their pilgrimage was to be cut short.

The boy looked up from his wife's face.

"No way," Anna lied. "Hooves like sledgehammers. Scares me even to think about it."

"Next year," the boy promised.

"Next year," Anna repeated.

With a truly beautiful smile, he handed her back the empty water bottle. "Thank you for the water, sister."

"You're welcome," Anna said mechanically. She was suddenly transfixed by the squared, white, one-quart, government-issue water bottle in its canvas holster. They were ubiquitous at GUMO: in fire packs, in pickups, on saddles, on belts, in car seats. But not in Sheila Drury's backpack. It wasn't the missing camera that had set off the alarms in Anna's head. It was the simple fact Sheila had been carrying no water.

In June, in the desert, no one, least of all an experienced hiker, carried a heavy pack eight miles without water. It couldn't be done. Not in June. Not with the heat and the wind. Anna had drunk three-quarters of a gallon that day.

Sheila had not been lured down Middle McKittrick. She had been forced. Or carried. Probably on short notice. The pack was just a prop-like a stage prop-to make it look as though she'd gone on her own.

"Holy smoke!" Anna breathed.

"What's wrong? What's happening?" the girl squeaked from Gideon's back and Anna was sorry she had frightened her.

"Nothing, Mary. You're okay. I just remembered something I need to do." Anna turned and smiled rea.s.suringly. "Another twenty minutes and we'll be down. Hang in there."

"That's an interesting theory, Anna," Paul was saying. Anna had delivered the girl into the hands of her church group leader, and given Gideon four carrots and a quarter-cup of horse vitamins he was particularly fond of. Now she sat in Paul's cool cluttered office in the old Frijole ranch house. "For the sake of argument, let's say you're right on all counts. Who do you think forced Sheila to hike up out of Dog Canyon and down Middle McKittrick?"

It had been on the tip of Anna's tongue to tell him: Karl. Karl wanted the Dog Canyon District Ranger position, he resented Sheila for getting it. He had the strength. He knew the park better than anyone. But Paul was looking at her shrewdly. Not unlike a psychiatrist testing the waters to see just exactly what kind of crazy the patient was. Under that gentle, blue gaze she said only: "In a closed area, without water, strange paw prints, no saw gra.s.s cuts. I think we should get our hands on the autopsy report ASAP."

"The FBI-" Paul began.

"f.u.c.k the FBI!" Anna snapped. "They've n6 idea what lions do or don't do. Unless there are bags of cocaine on the corpse they don't give a d.a.m.n."

Paul said nothing.

"Sorry," Anna said. She almost meant it.

"I know you're wound up over this thing, Anna. It's not going to get any better. You may as well know some of the ranchers are lobbying for the right to hunt lions in certain areas of the park that border their lands."

Anna didn't know what it was she was going to say but Paul stopped the words with an upraised hand before they gusted out of her.

"I don't think that's going to happen, Anna. It's just talk by a few people. There's no precedent for it in this park. Corinne and I have talked it over and we're of the opinion it will all blow over. These things usually do.

"Much as I admire your concern, I don't think your pursuing this is going to help, Anna. I think you might even end up doing more harm than good."

Anna waited a moment, trying to let her anger pa.s.s. It didn't. It backed up in her throat till it felt like her chest was going to explode.

"Did Corinne decide that?" she asked finally.

"We both did, Anna. This time, I think Corinne's right."

"What if-"

"What if," Paul cut her off, his famous patience finally exhausted, "I get you the autopsy report. If it says lion kill, no poisons, no signs of other violence, then you let go of this thing and get back to the business of being a park ranger?" The phone rang and he s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. "Frijole," he barked.

Anna guessed she was dismissed. Determined not to look contrite, she slid out of her chair and left the room, back straight.

Small triumph, she thought as she stopped outside under the pecan trees, listened to the soothing chatter of a spring that had whispered the incomprehensible secrets of the desert for a thousand years. She was becoming a thorn in Paul Decker's side. A boil on his neck. A pain in his b.u.t.t. Not a good way to beef up one's year-end evaluation.

A gopher, pus.h.i.+ng two fistfuls of soil, poked his little brown head out of a new-made hole among the roots of a pecan. "Hi guy," Anna greeted him. With a look of alarm, the little face vanished. "Et tu," she muttered.