Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  Had the deaths been the end of it, Anna suspected whoever had done it would get off scot-free. Statistics were in their favor. A majority of murders went unsolved. The attack on herself and the truck suggested removing Hammond and Belfore hadn’t proven the final solution the perpetrator had hoped for. Somewhere on the island was a loose end. If she could find it before it was tied off, she would find her man—or woman, she reminded herself. Equal opportunity.

  A BREAK IN the flickering tunnel of trees brought her out of her reverie. Mitch Hanson’s grader was pulled off the road, the driver nowhere in sight. Concentrating on the configurations of clearing and trees, Anna reoriented herself. They’d been on the road a quarter of an hour or more. That would put them just north of where the plane went in, east of the loggerheads’ nesting area. She stopped the truck, tapped Dijon, and pointed. When he removed his headset, she said: “Hanson’s grader.”

  “So? Maybe he’s taking a piss.”

  “Want to mess with him?”

  She didn’t have to ask twice. Hey, it was something to do. Having completed the ritual toxification of boots and trouser cuffs against social-climbing ticks, they walked into the woods on the opposite side of the road from where the grader was parked. This far north, the road ran along the edge of navigable land. To the west, hidden by dense undergrowth and trees, Brickhill River meandered through the salt marshes that formed the western half of Cumberland Island National Seashore. Eastward, toward open ocean, were two miles of maritime woods, a designated wilderness area uncut by roads or trails.

  Pleasurably aware of the soft duff beneath her feet and the simple joy of her own body’s motion, Anna walked with Dijon under the canopy of live oaks. They walked without talking. It lent the exercise a needed touch of tension, and if they actually hoped to catch Hanson in a more compromising activity than merely zipping his fly, it would help to come upon him unawares.

  Much of the way was blocked by undergrowth. They could have pushed through the copses had they chosen to, but a knowledge of the creatures dwelling therein dissuaded them. In addition to the Golden Orb spiders, the protected thickets were rich with the scurrying of rodents and hence a favorite haunt of the island’s rattlesnake population. Anna didn’t mind the enforced circuitousness of the route. If Mitch had half the cunning and sloth his fellows attributed to him, he would also have followed the path of least resistance.

  Temperatures climbed to close to a hundred degrees. Even their slow and easy progress brought on a sweat. The trickle under her hair felt like the creep of six-legged beasties and, for the first time in years, Anna contemplated cutting her hair off. The heat, the work, and the washing were getting to be less of a trade-off for the occasional compliment. For a second or two she dared hope vanity, like puberty, was something one eventually outgrew.

  “Here’s our pal,” Dijon whispered. Anna stopped at his shoulder and listened to the crunch of approaching footsteps. They’d been walking for twenty minutes. At a rough estimate it would put them just less than a mile into the woods. No great distance in the scheme of things, but a trifle ambitious for a man of Hanson’s age and girth.

  “Long ways to go for a pee.” Dijon echoed her thoughts.

  The whisper of crushed leaves that heralded the man’s approach gave way to the man himself. He pushed clear of the grabby fronds of a palmetto and started across the clearing in their general direction.

  “Gun,” Anna murmured. Dijon tensed beside her. It was the magic word at FLETC, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, located an hour or so away in Glynco, Georgia.

  “Got it,” Dijon breathed.

  Hanson carried a Marlin 30-30 on his right shoulder, his elbow crooked familiarly over the stock. Maybe Marty hadn’t been lying about hearing the shot that wounded the Austrian, but simply suffered confusion as to when and how many. This would be about where Shawna, the Austrian’s girlfriend, had placed them—between Lake Whitney and the road. A 30-30 wouldn’t have done as much damage as a shotgun but most hunters owned and used more than one weapon.

  Slung over Hanson’s left shoulder was a burlap bag filled with lumps. Poking out from the tied-up neck of the sack was the handle of a small folding shovel.

  “Saint Nick’s evil twin,” Dijon said, and Anna smiled.

  In a moment Hanson would see them. To dispel the idea they were lurking and spying, Anna stepped out of the brush and hollered. Mitch looked up at the sound of his name. What could have been furtiveness—or just the alarm of being hailed when it wasn’t expected—flickered across his face. A suffusing of bonhomie replaced it almost instantaneously. He changed course, stumping toward them waggling the fingers of the hand balancing the rifle as if seeing them was the biggest treat he could imagine.

  “Nice gun,” Dijon said.

  “Rifle,” Hanson amended. “This is my rifle, this is my gun.” He gestured toward his crotch. “One is for fighting, one is for fun.”

  Ex-military. Anna had forgotten.

  “Hunting?” Dijon asked.

  Hanson raised both palms—a neat trick considering his burdens—in mock surrender. “You got me. Don’t shoot.” He winked at Anna. “You can cuff me though, if you promise to frisk me afterward.”

  Their lack of response didn’t dampen his spirits one whit. “I’ve got a permit to shoot pigs,” he said. “They eat pygmy oaks. One of Norman’s pet-endangered weeds. Don’t noise it about. You’ll have every bleeding heart in the country screaming we’re murdering Wilbur.”

  Dijon looked confused.

  “Like Babe but older,” Anna explained.

  Dijon shook his head disgustedly. “What’s the younger generation coming to?” he said for her.

  “Any luck?” Anna asked, eyeing the sack he carried. There were no signs of blood on the burlap and the lumps were distinctly unpiglike.

  “Not today,” he said.

  “What have you got in the bag?” she asked casually.

  Hanson laid a finger alongside his nose and winked in a practiced manner. “Things to make little girls ask questions.”

  Anna winced. “You want I should kill him?” Dijon asked.

  “Yes please. What do you have in the bag?” she asked again.

  “For me to know and you to find out,” he said. Again the wink. Anna was beginning to think it was a habitual disarmament technique. It set her teeth on edge.

  “Can I look?”

  “Got a warrant?” Hanson lost none of his good humor but the joke was over. He wasn’t going to share the secrets of the sack and there wasn’t a damn thing Anna could do about it. Not legally, anyway. “Where y’all headed?” Hanson’s bright blue eyes flitted from Dijon’s face to Anna’s. “You’re a ways back. Spot a smoke?”

  “No such luck,” Anna said. “I’m beginning to think Cumberland is fireproof.”

  “Hot day for taking in the sights,” Hanson pressed. “But I’d take it as an honor to show you around.”

  For whatever reason, he was determined not to leave them on their own in what was apparently his neck of the woods.

  “Anna had to pee,” Dijon announced.

  Mitch raised his eyebrows. A mile-and-a-half round trip was a long ways to find a ladies’ room.

  “Shy bladder,” Anna said, and: “If you’ll excuse me . . .” She walked purposefully in the direction the sack-wielding Hanson had come from. Behind her she heard a brief splutter but there was no way he could follow. Ladies’ rooms, even when comprised of palmetto and pine, were sacrosanct.

  What she expected to find—especially in the few minutes a respectable bathroom visit allowed—she wasn’t sure. Something in the combination of gun, sack, shovel, and winks made her want to take a look at where Hanson had been, before he had a chance to retrace his steps and erase any tracks he might have left behind.

  Walking rapidly, she scanned the earth and surrounding foliage for any signs of activity. Hanson had made no effort to disguise his trail; there was no need to. In the deep and shifting leaf litter, so dry th
at puffs of dust settled over footprints minutes after they were made, Davy Crockett would have had trouble tracking a moose.

  Anna followed her earlier theory of taking the easy way. After five minutes of searching she was rewarded by signs of fresh digging around the base of a pine. A patch of ground a foot square and several inches deep had been disturbed, the soil overturned onto the needles. The edges of the dig were square and clean, marks smooth and six to seven inches across: the size of the spade on a folding shovel. Three feet from the first dig was a second. This one was almost hidden under the rotting remnants of a fungus-encrusted log. Beyond the crumbling trunk lay a broken piece of one-by-twelve. Partway up, on the bark of the pine, was a cut. Fresh sap oozed from a gash an inch wide and half an inch deep where a chip had been hacked out.

  “Did you fall in?” A hearty voice pushed through the tangle of woods between Anna and the men.

  She ignored it. Running, she zigzagged through live oaks and skirted undergrowth, looking for other disturbances to the ground or the surrounding plant life. Thirty yards farther in, just where the way opened through a daunting wall of palmetto, she found the marks of another dig, this one long and narrow, a trench four feet long, three inches wide, and about that deep.

  “Are you okay?” came a bluff shout. Dijon had failed to curb Hanson’s rescue—or survival—instincts any longer. The two men were shouting after her. Soon they would follow if they hadn’t already started.

  Anna didn’t want Mitch to know what she’d found until she figured out just what it was she had found. Running as swiftly and lightly as she could in the heavy boots, she made her way back past the place she’d first discovered turned earth. Rebuckling her belt as if she’d recently doffed her trousers, she emerged in the path of Dijon and Mitch only slightly out of breath.

  “We were coming in to pull you out,” Mitch said jovially.

  The routinely scatological turn of his humor left Anna unamused. Coy crudities, like bad puns, created a conversational vacuum. Luckily little was required of her. A noncommittal grunt seemed to fill the bill and the three of them walked out of the woods, Hanson’s chatter clearing the way of all indigenous fauna.

  Back at their vehicles, the maintenance man carefully stowed his burlap sack and rifle in a locking toolbox behind the seat of the grader. Then, elbows on the tailgate of the pumper truck, settled in to chat till the rains came. A subtle form of filibuster. Hanson had no intention of leaving the area till Anna and Dijon were safely on their way.

  There was nothing for it but to concede. Mouthing the usual platitudes—“Better get back to work. Be seeing you. Take it easy”—Anna climbed behind the wheel. In the sideview mirror she noted that Hanson watched them till a turn in the road took them from view.

  “So what did you find?” Dijon asked.

  “Digging,” Anna said succinctly.

  Dijon thought about it for a moment. “Morels?”

  “Not mushroom country or morel season. Besides, there’s no law against gathering mushrooms. He would have shown them to us.”

  “I knew that. Just testing you.”

  “Ginseng?” Anna ventured. Ginseng root was highly prized by the Chinese and had a growing consumer base among herbalists in the United States. At present market value it sold for about four hundred dollars a pound. The humble root was reputed to cure most ailments and serve as a preventative for the rest. Digging ginseng in the wild-lands of the South and East had been a means of income for generations of locals. The national parks were dedicated to protecting the fast-vanishing plant, but because of the wealth of plants and the easy access, park lands were favorite targets of the gatherers.

  “Does ginseng grow on Cumberland?” Anna asked.

  “Soil’s wrong,” Dijon replied. “And pygmy oaks don’t grow within two thousand miles. Only place I know of is on the coast of California. Whatever Hanson was hunting, it wasn’t pigs.”

  CHAPTER Twenty-one

  “IS EVERY BODY HERE frigging weird or is it just me?” Dijon asked.

  “It’s just you,” Anna reassured him.

  They’d left Mitch standing guard over his grader, passed Al and Rick near The Settlement—a cluster of houses, including Marty’s, that were still privately owned—and driven out to Lake Whitney to eat their sandwiches. It was a bit of a challenge to drive to Whitney. A road existed but it was rough at best and guaranteed to mire a heavy vehicle like the pumper axle-deep in sand at worst. Today they’d avoided the worst. Adopting Rick’s beach-driving techniques, Anna had roared through the soft spots like a bat out of hell to the accompaniment of colorful rodeo-inspired epithets from Dijon Smith.

  Now they sat in the perfect white sand of a dune that was creeping inland, threatening the little freshwater lake’s existence.

  “What did you get from Dot and Mona?” Anna asked.

  “Zip. Or more accurately, too much zip. Pretty nearly everybody, including us, had been around that meadow in the last three days. Near as the old ladies can remember, the only people who actually messed with the airplane itself were Hammond of course, Norman Hull—”

  “Makes sense, especially since he flew with the guy off and on.”

  “Todd on his security rounds, and Hanson with the gas truck.”

  “Everybody and nobody.”

  “Back where we started?”

  “Back where we started,” Anna agreed. “Want to go for a walk?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Dijon pushed himself to his feet and stuffed the remainder of his lunch into his yellow pack.

  Circumnavigating the lake to the northwest, Anna led the way. The edges of Whitney were rich in plant life, glistening cattails and lily pads the size of dinner plates. The maritime forest pushed back from its shores to higher, drier land. There was little cover. Letting the heat dictate a languid pace, Anna walked slowly. A beautiful young alligator, not more than four feet long and still bearing the yellow hash marks of childhood on its tail, stared emotionlessly at them from a cool lair of mud beneath the water grasses.

  “Hey,” Anna said, pointing, “company.”

  “God, I hate those things.”

  “You’re going to hurt his feelings,” Anna warned.

  “They don’t have feelings,” Dijon returned. “That’s what makes them so creepy.”

  Looking at the dead reptilian eyes, Anna tended to agree but chose not to give Dijon the satisfaction. “You never know.”

  “Let’s just hope he prefers white meat,” Dijon said, and made her laugh by giving the alligator an absurdly wide berth.

  On the opposite side of the lake, Anna found what she was looking for: Shawna and Guenther’s camp. The two were responsible, if not law-abiding, campers. They’d had a small fire but they’d doused the embers with water, then stirred the ashes and doused it again in the prescribed manner. No litter marred the sand and Anna found the remains of the fire only by careful searching. They’d taken the time to bury the ash and spread the charred wood so those next on the site could enjoy the illusion of pristine discovery.

  “Well, that was edifying,” Dijon said sarcastically when she had finished. “More than worth an alligator-infested hike in the noonday sun. What are we looking for, exactly?”

  “Beats me.” Anna shoved her ball cap back and scratched at the roots of her hair where sweat and sand combined to torment her scalp. As hot as it was and as destructive to the skin, she loved the feel of the sun on her face. For a moment she reveled in the sybaritic blast before replacing her hat. “Guenther getting shot the same day as the crash; he and Shawna camping out here where nobody’s supposed to be not more than a mile or two from where the plane went in. It seems too cozy for coincidence.”

  “Coincidence is cozy where cozy ain’t supposed to be.”

  Anna didn’t dignify that with a reply.

  “Ooh, I get it, international conspiracy,” Dijon said. “He’s Austrian, she’s what . . . Cheyenne?”

  “Navajo, I think,” Anna said absently.

&nbs
p; “Mafia drug cartels,” Dijon said with certainty. “Exporting ceremonial peyote. Hey, lookit here.” He jumped back from, then sneaked back up upon, a mark he found in the soft soil at the lake’s edge. “Snake track. Jesus, I’d hate to meet up with him in a dark alley.”

  They had continued around Lake Whitney to the south rather than retrace their steps. Anna caught up to him. A stick-straight trail cut from the waterline across the sand to disappear into a rugged stand of high grass. She squatted down on her heels and examined the mark. It wasn’t a snake’s trail or the drag of an alligator’s tail. The line was drawn too straight to have been made by any animal other than man.

  “Hopscotch? I dare you to cross this line?” Dijon suggested when she voiced her thoughts.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Once into the coarse grasses, the line disappeared. After a few minutes’ search, they chalked it up to one more question in the growing catalogue of unanswered questions they’d been compiling.

  DEPRESSED, TABBY HAD retired early, barely finding the strength to murmur a goodnight in Anna’s direction. After the vandalism to her truck Anna had taken note of the fact that Tabby had access to the fire escape from her bedroom window by way of a narrow wooden catwalk that ran the length of the apartment. Because of the woman’s condition and her emotional frailty, it hadn’t crossed Anna’s mind till too late that Tabby could well have been the vandal. In her blind assumption of Mrs. Belfore’s helplessness, she hadn’t bothered to check her room to see if she was still in bed. Just to be fair, Anna put a mental mark in her sleuth’s debit column but didn’t take it very seriously. Her belief in Tabby’s ineptitude was rooted too deep.

  She returned the tepid goodnight and was glad to see the door close behind the girl. The day’s adventures had earned her a headache and two ticks, one lodged at the nape of her neck, the other under the waistband of her trousers. Even a head-to-toe inspection with a hand mirror and combing her hair with a fine-toothed comb didn’t rid her of the feeling that bloodsucking insects were crawling all over her.