Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  She’d pushed or badgered another human being to the point they wanted to pulverize her in a fist of steel. For a moment she thought about that. Pulling out the punkiness of adolescence, she shook herself. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” Arrogance and indifference; it was an old garment but it still fit.

  The glare of the mercury vapor lights ringing the yard was such that Anna didn’t need her flashlight. Fog clung to fences, trees and car bodies picking up and reflecting back the orangy light till she felt as if she walked inside a pumpkin.

  The mirror on the passenger side was the only part of the Crown Vic that had escaped damage. Using a chunk of twisted metal picked up from the ground, she smashed the intact mirror just for the hell of it. Seven years bad luck; Anna was unmoved. She hadn’t enough faith to be superstitious. Turning to more practical destruction, she bashed what remained of the safety glass from the window on the passenger side. Breaking glass was fun; watching the crystals shatter and fall glittering red-gold from a hundred facets mesmerizing. If rangering didn’t work out, maybe she could get hired on at a wrecking yard.

  The car’s door was bent beyond opening, the metal folded inward in front of the handle. The back of the seat had been crushed until it was inches from the dashboard. The glove box had sprung open, but Anna’s spare flashlight and sunglasses were still inside. Taking pains not to cut herself, she retrieved them.

  To the rear of the car the trunk was open, probably popped during the crash, though she didn’t remember it. The field testing kit for illegal drugs was intact. The briefcase containing her investigative paraphernalia was there, as were the road flares, though they’d been thrown from their box and scattered throughout the now peculiarly shaped trunk. Everything had been put at sixes and sevens by the repeated impacts but nothing appeared to be missing. Except the package of venison Jerri Crowley had given her and the maggot-infested doe’s head she’d picked up in the meadow.

  It was possible those packages, the last items tossed into the trunk, on top and unsecured, had been thrown clear of the vehicle during the crash. Possible. Anna turned on the flashlight she’d taken from the glove box and, nose inches from the metal, examined the trunk’s lock. With the damage inflicted by the truck’s grill it was hard to be sure, but there appeared to be several clean vertical scratches where the trunk might have been pried open after the fact. The Crown Vic spent eighteen hours unsecured outside the Mt. Locust Ranger Station. The place was deserted at night; time and privacy for a bit of car-clouting wouldn’t be hard to come by. Anyone listening to the park’s frequency would have known that was where the car was being towed. A good little ranger, Anna had called the information in to Tupelo at the time.

  Squatting on her heels, she rocked back, staring into the crooked maw of the trunk. Stilwell believed the truck assault was engineered by her poachers. Maybe he wasn’t as far off the mark as she’d thought. Who but the illegal hunters would have any interest in stealing the remnants of a butchered deer?

  Before meat and bone were taken, Anna’d had only a casual interest in the deer; interest based on nothing but a hunch and a guess. Given the effort to deprive her of said items, her interest heightened.

  The venison steak, neatly wrapped in white butcher paper, was gone without a trace. Where the deer’s head had rested on the floor there remained a stain—brain effluvia—and what looked to be two bits of flesh and three disappointed maggots.

  Using her pocket knife, Anna carefully cut the carpet in a neat square around the area and slipped the carpet, maggots and all, into a paper sack from the evidence collection equipment she’d salvaged.

  That done, she loaded up the items she’d chosen to keep and plodded back through the rain to tell the GSA man he could lock up and go home to his supper.

  The Crowley homestead was more or less on her way to Rocky Springs. Martin Crowley, she remembered, worked the night shift at Packard. Jerri would be home by herself. Leaving the black and peaceful lanes of the Trace, Anna followed the back roads that would take her by the Crowley place.

  Rain turned to mist, mist to fog. White tendrils, putting her in mind of graveyards and Victorian novels, snaked across the road in the low places. Discretion suggested she slow to a crawl but commuters, hurrying home from work, drove like lunatics despite the lack of visibility. She was afraid if she slowed to a safe speed, she’d be rear-ended, and she’d had enough of that sort of action to last a while.

  Jerri answered the door at the first knock. Usually when Anna called on lone women after dark they were relieved to see it was her, a small member of their own gender and therefore no threat in the way of bodily harm or fates worse than death.

  The sight of Anna in her diminutive and female aspect didn’t have that calming effect on Mrs. Crowley. Since Anna’ d last seen her, their budding friendship had been nipped.

  “Mrs. Crowley?” Anna said, no longer comfortable with using Jerri’s Christian name.

  “Ranger Pigeon,” Jerri returned formally. “What brings you here after working hours?”

  Since Anna was in uniform, fully armed with a radio crackling at her belt, Jerri pointedly referred to her own working hours. Because she was born southern and raised right, the censure was delivered obliquely with the overlay of sugar that never quite masks the taste of the medicine.

  An invitation to come in out of the rain and the cold was not forthcoming. Anna decided to force the issue. “Mind if I come in and sit a while? It’s been a long day.” She smiled in her best Catholic school manner and adopted what she hoped was a harmless appealing look.

  “Martin’s at work,” Jerri said.

  Anna said nothing and did her best to look pathetic and bedraggled. It wasn’t a stretch for even a novice actor. Her adventures at the wrecking yard had left her clothes damp and rumpled, her hair alternately plastered to her head and curling rebelliously where it had dried in the air from the heater.

  Southern hospitality triumphed over self-preservation.

  “Come on in.” Jerri opened the door the rest of the way. Anna stepped inside thinking that Ted Bundy would have had a field day in Mississippi.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” Jerri asked. Now that Anna’s muddy boots had crossed her threshold, hostess duties kicked in.

  Anna accepted and perched on the edge of the well-worn sofa, watching Jerri leave through the kitchen door. At home, no husband or company expected, Jerri still dressed to the teeth. Hair was high, makeup immaculate. In place of skirt and boots she wore tight new Levi’s and red high-heeled mules with a scrap of jaunty boa accenting the toes.

  The living room was in the same state of total disarray as it had been on Anna’s previous visit. The carpet and furniture showed the depredations of kids as well as dogs. Anna wondered where the little beasts were.

  Jerri reappeared with a single mug of coffee. She’d remembered Anna liked cream but she wasn’t going to drink with her.

  “Do you have kids?” Anna asked as she accepted the coffee. People liked to talk about their kids; Anna was striving for common ground.

  “Two boys. I told you before,” Jerri replied. Her tone sent the message that this was to be business only. To see how firm this stance was, Anna tried again. “Do you have a dog?” She nodded at a chew toy left in front of the fireplace.

  “Outside.” Jerri didn’t sit but leaned her elbows on the back of her husband’s Barcalounger. “Killer” she’d called him when she kissed his hair. How apt was the nickname? Anna wondered as she sipped her coffee.

  “What can I do you for?” Jerri asked, her southern drawl now made of edges instead of curves.

  “Actually I’ve come to beg a favor,” Anna said.

  Jerri didn’t help by asking what that might be. Drumming porcelain nails silently against the fabric of the chair back, she waited.

  Anna wasn’t going to charm this woman against her will. Women were harder than men. They saw more, trusted less. Anna decided to get on with it. “That venison steak you gave
me the other day was delicious. I’ve never had venison before.” The last part, at least, was true. “I was hoping I could talk you out of another.” Asking for food. An almost sacred request. Jerri was proof against it.

  “All gone,” she said. “Sorry. If Martin ever gets another deer we’ll set a couple good cuts aside for you.”

  “To Catholic Charities in Port Gibson?”

  “I don’t know where he took it.”

  “From the grousing I hear hunting’s not been all that great this year. When did Martin get lucky?”

  “A week or so ago. I don’t remember.”

  “Do you know where he got it? I could pass the information on to guys looking for a good place.”

  “He belongs to a hunting club.”

  That killed that line of inquiry. Hunt clubs were private property. The rights to hunt on them were jealously guarded and often expensive.

  “Which club?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jerri wasn’t going to know anything and her bone-deep sense of hospitality was wearing thin.

  Anna decided to leave before she was thrown out.

  Jerri didn’t stand in the doorway, porch light on, and watch Anna safely to her car, as was the genteel and lovely custom of these environs. She saw Anna as far as the door, probably to make sure she was really leaving, then shut it firmly a nanosecond after Anna’s rear end vacated the airspace.

  Halfway down the walkway to her car, feeling her way toward the whiter blob in the utter black of a rainy night in the country, Anna heard the unmistakable jingle of tags rattling on a dog’s collar underscored by the delicate slurping sound of paws hurrying through flooded grass. Her experiences with Mississippi canines had been as mixed as that with the voting citizens.

  Stopping, she eased her Mag-Lite from its leather holder and switched it on. Nothing yet moved within range. Never good to run from creatures born and bred for the chase. Till the dog—if it was a dog and not a collared alligator, raccoon or some other form of Crowley eccentricity—proved itself amiable, Anna took the pepper spray from her belt and waited. The jingle and splash was joined by a noise humans make only when indulging in a particularly sensual yawn, a cross between a whine and groan made in the back of the throat.

  This same utterance from a dog invariably offered obsequious friendship and an invitation to play. Thus announcing himself, the animal wagged into the narrow beam of her flash. Putting away the pepper spray, Anna laughed, the unashamed friendliness of the puppy tickling her. It wasn’t a big dog and, if behavior was any indication, not more than six or seven months old. The fur was moplike and curly, the eyes round and bright and black.

  “Hey, buddy,” Anna said, squatting on her heels. “You look like Benji’s understudy. Where did you come from?”

  Taken to unimaginable heights of ecstasy by the sound of her voice, the little creature wiggled all over, from blunt snout to feathery tail.

  “What have you got there?” she asked in a voice only furry creatures ever heard her use. The puppy had a disreputable object in his mouth that he was alternately banging against her leg and dancing away with in an invitation to what, with a puppy, could evolve into an endless and soggy game of fetch.

  He wriggled close again, into the circle of the flashlight, and Anna saw what it was: the hoof and anklebone of a deer. A treat Martin had probably saved for him from his most recent kill, a part of which had been stolen from the trunk of the ruined patrol car. The kill that Jerri had refused to give Anna another sample of.

  “Come here, come on boy,” Anna cajoled. The puppy pranced closer and she grabbed the hoof. There followed an undignified tug-of-war, Anna kneeling in the water on the front walk, the puppy growling happily and digging muddy paws into the brown winter grass.

  Being the larger and more determined animal, Anna won. The puppy scampered off into the dark and barked, urging Anna to throw it.

  Ignoring his importuning, she examined it under the light of her flash. Bits of hide and fragments of rotting flesh still adhered to the bone. It would suffice.

  The puppy woofed again. “Sorry, little fella,” Anna apologized. “I need this.” Feeling more guilty than a sane person ought to, she carried her ill-gotten gains to the car.

  The frustration of this investigation had brought her to new lows. Not only was she harassing women in the night, she was stealing from puppies.

  16

  Anna finished her day. She didn’t follow her usual widowed habit of sitting with her cat on her lap reading a book; she chatted on the phone. Not with her sister. With her boyfriend.

  She and Paul had entered into that time, usually sadly foreshortened, where the littles of the other’s life are endlessly fascinating. Compassion flowed for the smallest affronts to the lover’s safety or mental well-being. Jokes brought laughter even if they weren’t funny but simply because they were shared. The phone was clung to, pressed to the ear, not because there was anything more to say but because the connection was too delicious to be broken.

  Anna was old enough and cynical enough to step outside herself and see the meaningless babble for what it was. She was happy enough and young enough to watch this reversion to adolescence with a tolerant smile and a certain pride that Zach’s death had left enough of her heart behind that she was still capable of it.

  Before she went to bed, a touch of healthy paranoia pushed its way into the euphoria induced by twenty minutes of Paul Davidson whispering in her ear. Walking Taco through the campground—his constitutional, her duty—she carried her service weapon in the pocket of her raincoat.

  Back at her house she took the hoof she’d wrested from the puppy’s jaw and the evidence bag with its body fluids and maggots from the trunk of her car and put it in her refrigerator for safe keeping.

  Before bed, she locked her doors and windows.

  The phone ringing dragged her out of a pleasant dream a few minutes after midnight. Dislodging Piedmont from her chest and receiving a claw in the shoulder for her disservice, she stumbled for the phone in the hall. All America had cordless phones and cellulars. The National Park Service, consistently behind the technological curve, had yet to graduate from a black phone tethered to a wall jack. As soon as she answered the caller hung up.

  Naked, cold and thoroughly awake, she stood in the dark, Taco, ever helpful, licking the backs of her knees. The calls, the hanging up, had been going on for several weeks. Anna’d written it off to the vagaries of late-night dialers. The truck incident fresh in mind, she wondered if the calls were not separate meaningless incidents but a way of discerning her whereabouts.

  Thinking back, she was pretty sure the mystery calls came on or near the weekends. Tonight was Thursday night. Anna worked late Sunday and Wednesday. Barth had night shift Monday and Tuesday. Friday and Saturday had been claimed by Randy. Thursdays were a hole in the schedule.

  Doyce Barnette had been killed and his body dumped at Mt. Locust on a Saturday night. Had she received a call that night? Anna couldn’t remember. Was someone calling, making sure the rangers were snugged up safe in their beds so they could murder old fat men with impunity? Unlikely. Poachers? That was closer to the mark. Locals might know Thursday nights were uncovered. They might also know Randy Thigpen worked Fridays and Saturdays and that he could be counted on to be warm and dry in the district office making personal phone calls and reading paperback novels rather than patrolling the roads. Randy had recently moved to Natchez. He wanted to be sheriff, wanted to be a big man around town. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he would turn a blind eye to his future constituents’ misdemeanors in the hope of currying favor.

  Taco tried his best to get Anna to trip over him while she rechecked the locks. Before she went back to sleep, she put her nine-millimeter on the nightstand.

  The following morning two messages awaited her on the office answering machine. Both were from Sheriff Jones. Anna rang him at his office. The dispatcher said he was out but she was to tell Anna
when she called that they’d had a break in the hunt for the burgundy pickup. A 1978 Ford matching that description was registered to a Quantus Elfman in Natchez. Clintus and André had driven out to the Elfman farm to question the man.

  Anna thanked her and rang off. For a minute or more she considered calling Randy. He wasn’t on the schedule till 4 P.M., but she didn’t relish him jumping down her throat again because the investigation went on even when he was off duty. In the end she decided not to. Giving in was the coward’s way out and, much as she wished it didn’t, that rankled more than the scene she could expect from her field ranger.

  The next order of business was calling Kate Kendall of the United States Geological Survey, in Glacier/Waterton National Peace Park on the border of Montana and Canada. The previous summer Anna had had the privilege of working with Kate on a groundbreaking DNA project used to identify and study the grizzly bear population in the park.

  From Kate she got the information she needed and the address of the lab at the University of Idaho where the DNA samples for animals were analyzed. Kate assured her that the fluids and maggots from the deer skull and the hoof and ankle bone she’d taken from the Crowley’s dog should be sufficient for the extraction of samples.

  Telling no one what she was doing, Anna packaged the body parts and FedExed them to the lab. Analysis would cost one hundred fourteen dollars. She paid for it out of her own pocket. Though Anna’s salary wasn’t as high as many thought it should be, she had been able to set quite a bit aside. When one had no life, one had relatively few expenses. If all went well, that could change. Already she was planning a clothes shopping trip to the mall on her next lieu day. One of romance’s hidden costs. The lab expenditure had not been cleared with Tupelo, and she would probably have a fight on her hands when she tried to get reimbursed. It was her hope that, when the time came, the evidence would have proved sufficiently useful to make it worth the government’s while.