by Nevada Barr
“While he carries that end, you get in contact with George Kastner. He’s acting chief ranger while I’m gone. He knows everything that’s going on. I’d left word for you to be notified, but it must have slipped through the cracks.”
The cracks were in Leo Johnson’s brain—or his ego—but Lorraine hadn’t risen to the position of chief ranger in one of the crown jewel parks by venting to underlings.
They talked a while longer. Lorraine wanted Anna to give up the undercover business and turn the investigation over to Kastner. Anna argued against it. She appreciated the sentiment—it was clear Lorraine Knight was putting her health and welfare above the need to catch the bad guys. But though Anna’s nights in the wilderness had apparently left her without feelings for her fellow men, they had engendered a finely honed desire to get to the bottom of things. In the end she prevailed. After talking with George Kastner, she would face Tiny Bigalo and see if she still had a job. Lorraine promised to put in a call to Dane Trapper, the Ahwanee’s general manager, to make sure Tiny would be in a forgiving mood by the time the interview rolled around.
George Kastner was in his mid to late fifties. A barrel-shaped man, he carried his weight in chest and shoulders. Anna guessed he’d been devilishly strong in his youth and could still impress the new rangers when he had to. Snowy hair topped a face as craggy as any mountain. He’d been born to fit Yosemite. That, or the Sierra had carved him in its likeness.
He ushered Anna into his office as if he’d been expecting her, which it turned out he had.
“Lorraine called and gave me a heads-up,” he said as Anna crossed to the traditional visitor’s chair by his desk. “First thing she told me to do was to find out how bad hurt you really were and if you’d been sugarcoating it for her.
“So. How are you really?”
Instead of retreating behind his desk he perched on the corner looking down at her, the heel of his shoe knocking softly against the wood. Anna suspected, even in repose, there would be some small part of him that tapped, twitched or fidgeted. Before the years had gentled his energy, he must have filled rooms.
“I’m good,” she said. “The ankle hurts, but it’s braced. I can walk on it. The burns and frostbite are superficial.”
“Good. Good. Let’s get on with it then.” He circled around his desk and sat down. The office chair with its high back looked as if it had been made for a child. Kastner chose not to be scary, and Anna was grateful. She expected intimidating people could be part of how he got things done. And she didn’t doubt he was a man who got things done. Not a visionary, perhaps, or even a creative thinker, but the sort of sergeant-at-arms who keeps the great slothful beasts bureaucracies grow into from drowning in their own fat.
“Okay. Here’s where we are. Leo’s sent two rangers up the hill. They’ll try to find the man who attacked you. Do you think this guy is dead, this Mark?”
Before she could answer, he’d flipped through a stack of Post-it notes stuck in an overlapping fan-shaped pattern near his left elbow. “Mark Bellman. At least Bellman’s the name we got from the guy sharing Dix’s tent with him. Without a date of birth or driver’s license we haven’t had much luck tracing him. By the time we got word of your incident on the Illilouette Trail they’d cleared out of the park.
“You think you killed Bellman?”
Anna thought about it a moment, pictured the fire, suddenly voracious, leaping up from his fuel-soaked feet to snatch and lap at his face and hair. She recalled the screams trailing after her in the darkness as she fled. She waited a moment to see if an all-consuming grief or repentance would overwhelm her. Nothing. She shook her head. “I can’t say for sure. The man was not a seasoned hiker. He was tired, probably dehydrated, badly injured”—she broke off this thought to tell Kastner about the eye-gouging part of the evening’s entertainment. Describing the actual gore, the gush and the dangling, she braced herself for an onslaught of remorse. Nothing.
She resumed where she’d left off answering his original question. “He was bound to be suffering some shock before the burning. With another man I’d be pretty sure the cold had finished him off. With this guy I’m not betting on it. He was one of those cockroach kind of guys, quick, creepy and almost impossible to eradicate.”
“Eradicate,” Kastner echoed her last word. Before he’d had a chance to change the expression on his face, Anna thought she saw horror there—or revulsion—and wondered if it was of Mark, the incident or her.
“We’ll get word back from the rangers soon.” He glanced at his watch. “They left shortly after eight o’clock. It’s nearly nine-thirty. They should be up the trail to where the incident occurred.”
“Will they go all the way to the lake?” Anna asked. “There’s no hurry. I’m pretty sure the guy I left up there is dead.” As she uttered the words she was taken aback at how heartless they sounded, the ruminations of a sociopath.
Kastner wasn’t deaf to nuance.
“Tell me about him.” Kastner folded his hands together on the desk and looked at her from beneath bristling white eyebrows, giving the impression of a psychiatrist rather than a law enforcement ranger.
Anna didn’t like it. Didn’t like that she’d sounded so callous about Phil’s being dead, so disappointed that Mark was not; she didn’t like it that she felt precisely as callous and disappointed as she’d sounded.
In careful professional language she told him of hitting the man called Phil and of Mark’s sinister assertion that Phil wasn’t yet dead when he’d left him. Kastner asked her a lot more questions, but they were pertinent to the case rather than her mental stability. After Leo Johnson, Anna was relieved to at last be giving a proper report.
In closing she added her own conclusions: “I think you might want to get a helicopter up to Lower Merced. Even before I left there was buzz around Camp 4 that something was up, big money to be had. If I could figure out which lake this bonanza was at some of the climbers are bound to. If Mark . . . Bellman . . . is still alive back there or got out and his buddies are up the Illilouette, there could be trouble.”
“More trouble,” Kastner said.
“More trouble.”
He took notes. When he’d satisfied himself she’d told him all she could, he sat strumming his fingers and jiggling his knee for a minute or more. Still and quiet in her chair, Anna waited.
Contemplations complete, he said: “Okay. I’ll work with what you’ve given me. Here’s what we’ve got. It’s not much, but then we’ve not had much to work with.”
Anna knew he blamed this on her, but since it was the sort of general ambient accusation superiors often threw out, she ignored it.
“We traced the license plate on the red Ford Excursion. I won’t drag you through all the hoops, but we weren’t able to tie it directly to Mark Bellman or whatever his real name is. The Excursion is owned by a subsidiary of a corporation. The pink slip must have frayed edges, it’s filtered down through so many layers of obfuscation.”
“So it told you nothing.”
“On the contrary. It told us a good deal.” Kastner responded with the verbal pouncing of a teacher who has elicited the response he wanted and is itching to make a point out of it. “Casual thugs or penny-ante drug dealers don’t have the intelligence or the machinery in place to hide the ownership of a vehicle that completely. Your playmates on the Illilouette were, if not very big fish themselves, then in the employ of very big fish.” Suddenly the joy of deduction and intellectual exercise drained out of Kastner’s faded hazel eyes. Compassion replaced it. “You’re lucky you are alive.”
Anna had been more comfortable with intellectual joy. Compassion was an iffy thing. Had he compassion for all human life the look of horror and revulsion could return when he remembered at what costs she had managed this staying-alive business.
“Any results on the tox scan of the blood in the syringe?” she asked to stop Kastner’s brotherly love before it could metastasize.
“Yup, as a matter of fact. Leo
got that in pretty quickly. Hang on. No DNA of course. What’s the point till you’ve got something to match it to? Besides the budget doesn’t factor in the high tech unless its well warranted. Here we go.” Kastner smoothed a multipage printout on the desk with the care of a master craftsman hanging wallpaper, then pushed his glasses up on his forehead the better to read the small print. “Nope to cocaine, barbiturates, some hallucinogens, though they don’t test for a lot of them. Trace of THC—marijuana.” He looked up. “Far as it goes, it doesn’t look to be connected—at least materially—to our drug-dealing compatriots, but it was meant to kill you. The blood is not just HIV positive. The virus has matured into AIDS. There is little doubt that, had you injected the stuff, you would have gotten the disease.”
A shudder went through Anna’s insides, the kind that quakes the viscera and draws the blood from the skin. Dying in a fight, by a bullet to the brain, the crashing of a plane, a knife between the ribs, a Lexus between the shoulder blades—these held little terror for her. It had been a wondrous and glorious while since she’d looked forward to death as the antidote to a loneliness and grief that robbed life of its luster, but she’d lived so many years thinking of death as a friend that even now, when she wished to put off acquaintance with the grim reaper as long as possible, she still did not fear him.
AIDS she feared. Because Zach had been in the theater—or perhaps because they’d lived in New York—or maybe because both she and her husband had delighted in wit and irreverence, they’d known a lot of gays of both genders: the wild and the wonderful, the crazy, the coy. Then the eighties had come and people began to die. The sins of the sexual revolution coming to roost on just the one group while the rest had to watch, whisper, “There but for the grace of God,” and live with the ragged holes left in the fabric of their lives.
Fearing hospitals, helplessness, sickness and pity, Anna doubted she could face such a death with any dignity or grace.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered. “Who’d do that to me? Who’d do that to anybody?”
Kastner was looking at her, that nasty debilitating compassion warming his gaze.
“Close call,” she said, trying to brush away the heebie-jeebies. “Any fingerprints?”
“None.”
“Could you trace the syringe?”
“Too common, and it didn’t come from the clinic here. We use a different manufacturer. Lowest bidder of course.”
“Of course.”
“This doesn’t strike me as a drug dealer’s response,” he said. Anna was pleased he’d once again become a man of business. “Guys who operate on a level where they can hide things in company-owned subsidiaries are usually more to the point. Giving someone AIDS might be a death sentence, but it’s not quick-acting enough. If it was meant to shut you up, it wouldn’t work. The walking dead have nothing to lose but their souls. Makes them too brave to be threatened much.”
Anna said nothing. She was thinking.
“I’ve got to make some calls,” he said. Assuming it was a dismissal, she rose to leave. He waved her back to her seat and reached for the phone.
While he dialed and talked, Anna sifted through her mind, picking out pieces of information. Blood. A used syringe. Her first thought should have been AIDS. Had she been thinking in her capacity as an emergency medical technician she would have. Because her mind was full of the drug connections, she’d overlooked the obvious.
The syringe had been meant to scare a nosey obstructionist waitress into quitting, not to shut up a law enforcement ranger. Scott had seemed—at least for a moment, till he recovered himself—to know something about the needle when she’d first shown it to him.
Scott had met Jim Wither in the penitentiary. Wither had been teaching there so he might be near a good friend of his, a friend who had died of pneumonia. AIDS victims died of opportunistic diseases that invaded their compromised immune systems. Many died of pneumonia. The blood in the syringe had come from an infected person. Jim Wither was an old bachelor, no sign of wives, ex-wives or girlfriends, ex or otherwise. Jim’s pal in Soledad was most likely his lover. If that was true, the blood had probably come from the head chef. Scott Wooldrich roomed with Wither. Both men had access to her locker. Jim had been furious with her. Could he have believed she knew of his illness and would tell, thus getting him removed from his dearly loved position as chef?
She pondered that while George Kastner hung up, dialed again and began talking. Why would he use his own blood to kill, infect or frighten her? If he was trying to keep the knowledge of his disease under wraps, sticking a sample of his blood in a place it might be sent in for analysis was insane.
Accepting that Jim would use his own blood against her for whatever reason was mad, the next step in her reasoning had to be that someone else had used Wither’s blood, planted it in her jacket, then said something to the chef that would make him behave inhospitably, thus making him the prime suspect, and, after a DNA match, the fall guy.
“Okay,” Kastner said, dragging her thoughts back into the room. “The cavalry is on its way. The Navy is sending a helicopter and a SWAT team to help us out. I doubt we’ll need anything like that kind of firepower but the Navy boys could use the practice and I love a good show. The helicopter should be here around eleven o’clock. Why don’t you plan on going up there with us?”
“Sure.” She’d not expected to be included. When high adventure called in the guise of a helicopter ride and a drug raid, the usually peaceful park rangers hated to miss out on it. There was nothing like arriving on scene in a big military aircraft to make one feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger. A lowly import like her could expect to be bumped down.
“Anything on the downed plane?” she asked.
“Nope. It’s being looked into. Naturally enough, no flight plan was made and no one called to say it hadn’t come in at the estimated time of arrival. Once we get the plane out of the lake we’ll have more to go on, but that’ll have to wait till spring thaw. We can get a couple divers down but won’t be bringing anything up till April at the earliest.”
The radio on a narrow table behind the acting chief ranger squawked out his call number. “That’ll be my guys,” he said, and answered, repeating his call number, then: “Go ahead.”
In the terse language of radio protocol one of Kastner’s rangers reported they had found the place where Anna left the trail and followed her track fifty or so yards into the trees. There they’d discovered the remains of the burned sleeping bag, the camp stove and the flashlight. A second set of what might be tracks paralleled those Anna had left.
“I forgot,” Anna interrupted.
“Stand by,” Kastner said into the radio. He nodded to her to finish.
“I forgot to tell you. Before I left their camp up at the lake, I burned their boots. Mark—the one who came after me—had his feet wrapped up in sweaters or whatever.”
“You burned their boots,” he repeated, blank of face and voice.
“Yes.”
“Roger that.” Into the mike he repeated the part about the clothbound feet.
“Could be those tracks then,” the ranger replied. “They led to the burn but not away. Not unless they came back to the trail. There were a mess of tracks. We couldn’t sort them all out.”
“No 1144?” Kastner said. “Corpse,” he said, for Anna’s edification.
“Nobody living or dead. Should Kenny and I go on up to Lower Merced?”
“No,” he told her. “Head on out. Stay at the trailhead. Don’t let anybody go up it, and stop and detain anyone hiking out.
“Is there anything else you forgot to tell me?” the acting chief asked Anna when his radio conversation was done.
She thought back over her report. “Well, I pretty much burned everything at their camp that I could get my hands on but, other than that, no, I don’t think so.”
“Did you burn that other man—what did you call him? Phil—before you left?”
“No!” Anna was shocked he would th
ink her capable of such a thing. “He was out cold but breathing when I left.”
“Did you maybe accidentally catch the tent on fire where the other man was sleeping? You know, when you were burning everything? A spark get away? An accident?”
Anna looked hard into Kastner’s eyes. The compassion was lurking in the depths, but she saw something else too. Fear maybe.
The acting chief ranger was wondering if she was a homicidal pyromaniac who burned unconscious felons and drug dealers curled up snug in their sleeping bags.
Denying one was a lunatic tended to sound insane. Anna didn’t know why that was true, but it was. Rather than risk it she simply restated the truth.
“I knocked out Phil with the blunt side of an ax blade. I burned what I could of their gear to keep them from pursuing me.”
Kastner said nothing. For a moment he studied her. She sat quietly, dreading that he would see what it was he was looking for. Finally he said: “Lorraine tells me you intend to stay on at the Ahwahnee.”
“That’s right.”
“If your theory about the missing kids is correct, if they got wind of this thing and were killed for claim jumping, it seems to me your work is done.”
“There are loose ends.”
“Like the bloody syringe.”
“Yeah.” There were other things too, but she wasn’t sure what they were; mostly they were just stirrings in her gut. She didn’t elaborate.
“Eleven o’clock, then.”
This time he was dismissing her.
Anna decided to put off her crow-eating session with Tiny Bigalo a few more hours. With a bad ankle, Tiny would likely stick her at the receptionist’s desk. Because Tiny was angry at her for missing a shift, she might very well put her on for today’s lunch rush, and Anna had a helicopter to catch before noon.
At eleven o’clock Anna, Kastner and a half-dozen rangers waited on Crane Flat, a snowy meadow above the valley’s rim. A cruel wind cut down from the northeast, stinging the tips of Anna’s frostbitten fingers through the quilting of her gloves. Other than that it was ideal flying weather. The sky was the translucent blue of winter. The sun, painfully bright and cold, reflected off a burnished crust of snow. Grasses, usually hidden beneath a thick blanket of white this time of year, pushed through the shabby covering, each blade separate, frosted and glittering like the blades of a new-honed scythe.