The rest of the afternoon she dedicated to the familiar chore of packing for the backcountry. It was something she had done so many times in her life she found the Zenlike sameness of laundry and sorting and putting things into small plastic bags as freeing as a walking meditation.
Around five o’clock, as she was contemplating a nap in reward for her labors, Harry rapped on the screen door. The autopsy results had come. Northern Montana was not rife with murders and the medical examiner had worked up Carolyn Van Slyke’s corpse first thing.
Much of it they already knew from observation: no defensive wounds, no sexual assault, no skin beneath the fingernails, no bullets in the body, no knife wounds but the filleting of the front upper quadrant of the skull where the M.E. approximated two to three ounces of flesh had been excised.
The cause of death was severing of the spinal cord between the first and second cervical vertebrae. That surprised Anna. Given the cutting on the face, she thought head injury would be the cause, that the removal of the flesh might have been done in part to hide the nature of the blow.
“Did he just twist her head till her neck snapped?” she asked. She’d seen it done in a dozen movies but never come across it in real life. For some reason the image made her queasier than the slicing and dicing.
“Nope,” Harry said. “Weirder yet.” He handed her the report he’d been reading from and she scanned the last half of a page.
Carolyn Van Slyke had been struck on the side of the head with such force her neck had snapped, not just crushing the cord but knocking the skull so fast and hard that it was propelled over the opposite shoulder and down toward the clavicle, pulverizing the outer edges of three vertebrae and hyperextending the muscles and tendons of the neck.
“She must have been hit with a tree trunk to get that kind of torque,” Anna said.
“No tree trunk,” Ruick said. “What’s missing?”
Anna didn’t like to be quizzed. Then again, she loved a challenge. For half a minute she skimmed what had been read to her and read again the final paragraphs. “Ah!” she said as the light finally dawned. “No injury to the skull. No point of impact, cracking, etcetera.”
“She was hit by something soft,” Ruick said.
“Like a man’s forearm?”
“I’ve never met a man who could hit that hard.”
“Kicked, hit with a booted calf, Jean Claude Van Damme style?”
“It would have to be one heck of a kick.”
“What if she was already unconscious and the killer forced her head back and down?”
“That was the best I could come up with,” Ruick admitted. “But Dr. Janis, the M.E., said doing it slowly like that would have squashed the spinal cord. The severing suggests a single, sudden, hard blow.”
“That’s helpful,” Anna said dryly. “Did Dr. Janis have any suggestions?”
“One. She said a boy she’d seen in Helena had been killed that way. The kid was seven years old. His nineteen-year-old brother and his buddies got drunk and were swinging around a heavy padded boxer’s punching bag on the end of a chain. The kid stepped out, caught the full force of it above his left eye, his head snapped back and down, producing injuries like those of our pet corpse.”
“At least we know what to look for now,” Anna said. “A guy in the backcountry with an oversized bolster. Shouldn’t be too hard to track down.”
“Wish I had something more tangible but this is as good as it gets.” They talked of Anna and Joan’s return to the backcountry. Anna was against Rory going. They hadn’t enough to arrest him for the murder of his stepmother. With him now claiming he may have had the two water bottles all along, he was barely a suspect, no proof to take to a grand jury. Ruick had reservations as well but wanted to keep the Van Slykes in the park; allowing Rory to continue with the DNA project would keep not only him in the area but Les as well. Rory’s father was determined to return to Fifty Mountain Camp and finish his stay so he and his son could return to Seattle together.
“It’s as if neither will leave till the other one does and both of them are hot to get back up on Flattop Mountain,” Anna said. “Why?”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out, I guess.”
They struck a compromise. If Joan Rand said no, the deal was off. If she said yes, Buck, the stalwart backcountry ranger, would be detailed to go along as insurance.
Joan said yes.
14
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 façade 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.