Blood Lure

by Nevada Barr

  In Glacier that amoral purity was gone. A wrongness stalked. Had it been only the warped and hostile actions of people, Anna would not have felt the same. But it wasn't. Nature herself was being unnatural. The bear that had torn up their camp was behaving in a creepy, unbear-like way. When human beings were evil they were merely, if the Christian teaching was to be believed, exercising their God-given right to free will. When nature got personal, then whatever passed for Satan was surely afoot.

  No wonder she'd bonded so completely with Joan Rand, Anna thought. The researcher was the only person she could talk to about their bear. Joan had been there. Joan felt it. To others, even Molly or Paul, she would seem just another scared tourist anthropomorphizing and exaggerating, the sort who submit reports in lilac ink of grizzlies juggling hedgehogs.

  The next hour was spent riding back to Fifty Mountain in hopes Bill McCaskil would have returned. But for a brief interlude with two visitors from Washington State, an incredibly chirpy middle-aged man hiking with a serene and homely woman Anna presumed was his wife, she spoke with no one. The Washingtonian had been afire with the news that there was a "Boone and Crockett elk" a mile down the trail that Anna must see. The animal had moved on by the time she and Ponce came to where it was sighted and she was mildly disappointed. She'd never heard a creature referred to as a "Boone and Crockett" but given Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett's legendary stature, it must have been a grand old bull.

  Bill McCaskil had gone the way of the elk. His campsite was empty, pack gone from the tree in front of his tent. What Anna had intended to ask him she wasn't sure but she needed to do something with her time. And though it was so uncharacteristic she didn't recognize the motivation, she wanted to do something around other people.

  Against the wishes of both his son and Chief Ranger Ruick, Lester Van Slyke had hiked back to Flattop. He was taking up residence in his abandoned camp when Anna walked down from McCaskil's site.

  Les was gray with the effort the twelve-mile walk had cost him—a coronary wandering around in shiny new boots. He carried an NPS radio, probably at the insistence of Harry Ruick. Other than that he seemed as ill-prepared for the rigors of camping as ever. He didn't want to talk to her, didn't want to explain his persistence in remaining in the backcountry, didn't want to discuss his former wife's violent behavior. After a quarter of an hour she was glad to leave him in peace and start back the way she'd come, returning to the tiny meadow where she, Joan and Rory had first set up camp.

  It was as it had been before the bear attack. New tents were pitched, not where the old had been, but on the far side of the flat rock as if Joan, or more likely Rory, had suffered an attack of superstition and decided the old pattern had to be broken. Food and other bear attractants were cached high in a tree. A different one from where Rory's stepmother's corpse had hung.

  The researchers were not in evidence. Anna watered Ponce at the little stream that cut through the clearing, found on her topo the place Joan had marked the next hair trap to be disassembled, then remounted and set out to find them. Ponce, erroneously thinking his day's work had been done, carried her with ill grace.

  He was further discomfited when she found the others and it fell to him to carry the heavy rolls of barbed wire and the researchers' packs to the site of the next hair trap. Anna, leading Ponce, walked beside Joan. Rory chose to trail behind for reasons of his own. Buck walked with him but the two didn't speak. Anna was not offended at their choice. It wasn't that she disliked Rory; it was more that he carried about him an oppressive darkness, as if neurosis or deep injury had created in him a small black hole into which good cheer and rationality were sucked away.

  A day's hard work in rough country had put Joan in a good mood. The cobwebs left by generating reports and packaging samples for the lab were burned away.

  "This trap was pretty paltry pickin's," she said. The heat from her face made her brow glisten and the top quarter of her glasses fog up. That and the alder leaves poking through her hair gave her a look of the clichéd mad scientist. "No scat. A few wisps of hair. But at least the love scent hadn't been torn down. This one must have been hung high enough." Joan babbled on happily about barbed wire, lab reports and other resource-manager-type details. Anna half listened, enjoying companionship not content. After a quarter of an hour the going became rugged, the ground broken and the scrub dense. Conversation was replaced by heavy breathing and aggravated grunts. Ponce punished Anna for the arduous duty by pushing her in the middle of the back with his long bony face just infrequently enough she never expected it.

  The new hair trap was to be strung up less than half a mile from the old. Wire taut, love scent high and inviting, rotten wood piled and doused with the irresistibly vile blood lure, they finished near six that evening. The work cleansed Anna's psyche as it had Joan's and she managed the trip back to camp restfully free of dark forebodings and acid contemplations. Off the beaten paths, they encountered no park visitors and Anna was glad. At peace, for the moment, in her own reality, she had no desire to be dragged into anyone else's.

  In an unusual burst of intraspecies appreciation, she remembered the chipper fellow from Washington who had delighted her with his odd turn of phrase.

  Anna decided to share. "I heard something funny today. A guy'd seen a big bull elk and called him a 'Boone and Crockett' elk." Joan and Buck looked blank. "Like in Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett," Anna explained. "You know, bigger than life." Still nothing. Gifts rebuffed, she was annoyed.

  "Shall we tell her?" Buck asked.

  "I think not," Joan said. "You don't know her like I do. She is exhibiting an uncharacteristic enjoyment in bipeds. It's a train of thought that would be a shame to derail so close to the station."

  "Tell me what?" Anna demanded.

  "She insists," Joan said.

  "'Boone and Crockett' are the ultimate word on trophy animals," Buck told her. "They have a whole rating system depending on the size of the animals. Well . . . the size of their heads. That's where the numbers come in."

  "My little guy was talking about the elk dead?" Anna was aghast.

  "As he pictured him on the wall of his den," Buck confirmed.

  The creepiness that had been temporarily held at bay by the advent of real work returned. Even apparent innocents from the great state of Washington harbored deadly intentions.

  It wasn't until they'd been back in camp for an hour or more and been revived by an internal application of hot drinks that she spoke again and then it was of the dark subjects that had been consuming her mind.

  Summarily banishing Buck and Rory simply because she did not wish to feel the impact of a stranger in the first instance and an adolescent in the second, Anna fired up the hissing glare of a Coleman lantern, set it on the wide flat table of stone and spread out her gruesome evidence collection for Joan's scientific perusal.

  "I don't know diddly about human forensic pathology," Joan warned her as they knelt like aging White Rock fairies on the edge of the stone.

  "All evil is not human," Anna said apropos of nothing but the growing unease Glacier's backcountry had instilled in her.

  "If not, it stems from humans," Joan said, either exposing a cynical streak Anna hadn't suspected or infected with Anna's pervasive sense of dislocation.

  Anna didn't argue with her. "Look at the pieces left of the blue bag," she said. "See here where it's streaked with dust and this yellow pollen-like stuff? I can't remember seeing anything hereabouts that would leave residue like this. Not that I've been looking," she admitted.

  Joan shoved her glasses up on her head the better to see close up and, fabric pinched delicately between gloved fingers and thumbs, she examined it in the cold and noisy light from the Coleman. After a minute of two of this she stopped, retrieved a large Sherlock-Holmes-style magnifying glass from her day pack, said, "I wish I had my microscope," and studied the torn fabric for several minutes more.

  "In my book, dust is dust is dust," she said at last and returned the navy st
uff bag to Anna. "This is fine, grayish green, could be from argillite—alpine talus. Up high. Way high. Like tops of mountains. Or it could have come from under the bookcase in my bedroom. Lab tests would tell you what it's made of and maybe what kind of rocks it came from but, contrary to public opinion, rocks are not stationary. They slide and tumble, fall, wash down creeks.

  "The yellow dust is different. I can't be a hundred percent sure but I don't think it is pollen. It looks more like scales, the weensy feathery scales you'd find on the wings of moths or butterflies."

  Anna wasn't completely flummoxed. On Isle Royale, just outside the screen doors of most of the lean-tos, she'd seen butterflies crowd together en masse. They came to get the salts left behind by sleepy campers who, rather than stumble through the dark to the pit toilet, merely stood on the shelter step to urinate.

  "Something in the bag attracted butterflies? A lot of butterflies?" As she said it, Anna knew it made little sense. Even if they'd been drawn to the bag in great numbers, when they beat their tiny wings, the scales didn't fall off.

  "Not exactly. Above treeline we have incredible blooms of army cutworm moths June through September. The moths lay their eggs on the Great Plains and the caterpillars mature there. Then they migrate to the Rockies to feed. In the fall they go back. Lay eggs and die. There're not so many as there once were. They spray crops in Iowa, we lose moths in Montana. An argument for global environmental policies local politicians won't hear. Putting that together with the white dust, I'm guessing your bag was set down or dragged around somewhere above treeline on Mount Stimpson or Mount Cleveland or, oh, shoot, I don't know, one of them. We get aggregations of the cutworm moths from about twenty-one hundred meters in elevation up to about twenty-eight hundred meters. They like south and southwest faces." Joan took in the dark jagged ring of mountains cutting into the night sky around Flattop.

  Sick of man-made light and racket, Anna turned off the lantern. In the sudden and blessed balm of night's silence, the two of them sat without speaking, watching the mountain peaks from where the blue sack had purportedly traveled.

  The moon was waning, but in the thin clear air over the Rockies, its light was strong. Trees inked black on the shoulders of the mountains. Above their reach slivers of glaciers and the pale, much shattered talus that spent a majority of its life beneath the snow, caught the moonlight. The longer Anna stared the brighter the peaks became until, in their glory, they kindled a healing awe within her. "I wouldn't think there'd be much in that part of the world to attract people."

  Joan laughed. "You sound so wistful. There's not much. Hardly anybody goes up there. Mountain goats."

  "Trails?" Anna asked.

  "Not that high."

  "Just goats? I thought the bears denned at the higher elevations."

  "Higher. Not that high. They do go up there in summer, though. The moths are a major source of protein for the grizzlies. They tear up whole hillsides of alpine talus, turning over the rocks and licking up the moths. See? Global. Spray wheat in Minnesota, starve a grizzly in the Rockies. Who'd know?"

  "They know now," Anna pointed out. Neither bothered to add, "Who'd care?" Just a small circle of friends, as the old song went.

  "Our butcher went up there for some reason," Anna said after a while. "Since he apparently isn't in the park to enjoy nature—at least not as we like to think of it—he must have had a pressing reason to travel so far off the beaten path. Ponce will not be pleased when I tell him tomorrow's itinerary."

  Anna's radio ended further speculation.

  "Your hunch paid off," Ruick said after they'd exchanged the requisite call numbers. "The prints on the second topo found in the army coat match those Bill McCaskil put on file when he was arrested for fraud. Looks like the victim was wearing his coat when she was killed."

  16

  Anna did not ride to Fifty Mountain at first light. She was under strict orders from Harry to delay until the cavalry arrived in the person of four law enforcement rangers from down in the valley. Camp in the ill-fated meadow with its altar rock was broken. Joan and Rory, alone by necessity and Joan's choice now that Buck and Anna were needed elsewhere, left to service the next hair trap on Joan's list. This one was on the far eastern edge of Flattop Mountain near the confluence of Mineral and Cattle King creeks. After they'd gone, Anna packed her gear on Ponce not knowing when she would be rejoining the bear DNA research project as a productive member.

  Far from chafing at the delay, she was glad to saunter over with Buck around noon. Several broken bones and knife wounds ago she'd lost her taste for facing unsavory types on equal terms. No right-thinking law enforcement officer wanted a fair fight.

  When they arrived, the chief ranger and four others whom Anna didn't recognize were sitting in the food preparation area with Lester Van Slyke, talking in low voices. Ruick came over to where Anna tethered Ponce to the hitching rail.

  "Our bird has flown the coop," he said, leaning on the rail, a water bottle held easily in one hand. Ruick seemed at home, in control everywhere Anna had an opportunity to observe him. "Les said he was here last night, saw him go to the outhouse once. He didn't use the food prep area or speak to anybody as far as Les noticed. Then Les sees him all packed up and heading out in the dark."

  "What time?" Anna asked.

  "Around eight, eight-thirty." Their eyes met. Anna hadn't out-thought him. "He knew we were coming to have a word."

  "Les has a radio," Anna said.

  "That's crossed my mind. You think Les told him? Some kind of conspiracy? Hired assassin?" Ruick laughed and Anna found herself laughing with him. Outside the confines of a movie theater the phrases sounded absurd. Lester Van Slyke from Seattle, Washington, hiring a con man with no history of doing hits for pay to murder his abusive wife in the Montana wilderness.

  "People have their own twisted logic," Anna said, responding as much to her thoughts as Ruick's words. "There's too many ties for there not to be some kind of a connection." She leaned on the rail, elbow close to Ponce's nose. Occasionally she felt the flick of his tail on her backside and was content to let him keep the flies off the both of them. "Maybe we've been going at the connection from the wrong side," she said, the theory forming as she spoke. "Because it was Mrs. Van Slyke who was killed I've been trying to connect her with McCaskil as an enemy. McCaskil in the role of killer: come on purpose to kill her for his own reasons, a chance psychotic episode in which he kills her, or hired by the abused husband to do the deed. What if Mrs. Van Slyke and McCaskil were pals, in league for something more natural to a divorce lawyer and a fraud? She was wearing his coat when she was killed. Or at least a coat with his topographical map in the pocket. What if they were hatching some scheme that went sour? Mrs. Van Slyke dies. McCaskil stays in the park to finish his business? He sure doesn't fit the profile of a nature-lover and backwoodsman."

  "Where does that leave our murderer?"

  "I don't know. Maybe a falling out among thieves?"

  "Or we're back to Les. If he weren't so . . ." Ruick glanced over his shoulder at the group on the hill behind them. ". . . so damned ineffectual, I'd have found some reason to arrest him by now."

  Ruick squirted water into his mouth and swooshed it around more to entertain himself than to quench any real thirst. "What kind of fraud could a city-bred con man pull up here? Glacier's got nothing in the way of gold, silver, precious stones, gas, oil. One of the reasons it's been left alone is nobody ever figured out how to make any money out of it."

  "Timber?"

  Ruick looked at her. Not only was the terrain too rugged to log, cutting and stealing timber wasn't exactly a subtle crime. In a park where helicopter tours flew over on a daily basis, even a small-scale operation would be shut down less than twenty-four hours after it started.

  "Right," Anna said. "Rare plants?"

  Harry shook his head.

  "Poaching?"

  "Sure, some. But why bother? There are ranches just over the hill in British Columbia where you ca
n legally shoot elk, bear, you name it. And since they're hand-raised, you can get 'em trophy-sized. They don't count that way, not with the big-league hunters. They insist the prey be 'wild.' But there's probably ways around that."

  Ruick had pretty much shot down any ideas Anna had, so she said nothing. She couldn't figure out if this particular murder had too many clues and too many suspects, or too few. Why carve the face but not enough to confuse identification? What was easily obtained or carried into the backcountry that could deliver a blow powerful enough to sever the spinal cord yet soft enough not to crush or crack the skull? Why was the victim wearing a stranger's coat? Why didn't everybody leave right away? McCaskil, Lester, Rory—they had to know they were or could be suspects. If they'd done it, why stay? If they hadn't done it, why stay?

  "We'll ask the s.o.b. when we find him," Ruick said philosophically.

  Anna'd told him in greater detail about the macabre tree ornament she'd found near where Carolyn's body had been dumped. As she filled the chief ranger in on the details, she wished she'd never mentioned it over the radio. Too many listeners.

  Ruick took possession of the ripped and bloody bags, forming the next link in the chain of evidence. He and his rangers had come to Flattop on horseback. One man would be sent back down to take Anna's find to the lab. The remaining three and Harry would track down McCaskil if they could.

  Decisions to disturb the wilderness aspect of a national park were not made lightly. Helicopters, bulldozers, chainsaws, even tracking dogs were not brought in at the first whimpering of human discomfort. In Anna's years of watching park politics, some of the most courageous choices she'd seen upper management make were those made not to pour technology on a problem, not to bring in guns and dogs and fork-lifts and borate bombers, but to fight nature on nature's terms. Or, more courageous still, not to fight at all, to let the fire burn, the river change course, the historic crumble without replacement.