Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  “You put sandwich bags in the gas tanks so they’d stop the flow of fuel and the airplane would crash. Have I got it right?”

  Tabby nodded.

  “Hallelujah.” Anna dropped her hands from the girl’s shoulders. She hadn’t misguessed. Tabby was a lovely little idiot, albeit one with murderous intent. “You didn’t kill Todd and you didn’t kill Slattery. Those bags didn’t do a damn thing but float around in there. Even if by some freakish chance both bags floated over both outlets and stayed there long enough to make a difference, the Beech still had its inboard tanks. We know what wrecked the airplane,” Anna said, trying to get through the tragic glaze over Tabby’s eyes. “It wasn’t you. You failed. You didn’t hurt anybody. The baby won’t be born in jail. Nobody will take him away from you.”

  Tabby was unmoved, face pinched, shoulders hunched.

  “Jesus,” Anna said in desperation. “You do it, Lynette. It’s all true. Swear to God. I’ve got to go.” She stopped at the door and turned back. “Better yet, take Tabby with you. Get Rick. Tell him I need backup. Stafford House. Soon as he can get there.”

  “Rick. Stafford. ASAP,” Lynette repeated.

  “Seat belts,” Anna reminded the interpreter, and ran down the wooden stairs hoping it wasn’t already too late.

  CHAPTER Twenty-six

  CLICK CLICK CLICK.

  Click. Click. Click.

  Clickclickclick.

  Remembering, Anna was stunned by her own boneheadedness. Dot and Mona were vintage World War II stock: B-52s, cigarettes, red lipstick. And Morse code. SOS. Distress signals had been plentiful: the nerves, the snubs, the tension, the silences. Preoccupied with Tabby Belfore, Anna had failed to realize their import.

  As she fired up the pumper truck, Tabby and Lynette came out of the upstairs apartment. Legally Lynette was too drunk to drive but at this hour of the night she would be the only vehicle on the road and, given the surface of the lanes, Anna doubted the VW could get up enough speed to do too much damage if she did stack it. “Wear your seat belts,” she reminded them again. She cinched her own so tight it bruised the thin layer of flesh over her hipbones, but it would keep her behind the steering wheel during what was promising to be a wild ride. “Take care, take care,” she whispered to herself. Dead or injured she would be no good to anyone. Better to be late to Golden Gate than to arrive in hell on time; a piece of rhyming wisdom handed down from her father played through her mind. Raised in California, she and Molly had missed the point of the lesson when they were children. They thought “Golden Gate” referred to the bridge in San Francisco.

  Under the present circumstances, the poem was too apt to be comforting. A few minutes might make the difference between who lived and who died. Anna’s foot grew heavy on the gas pedal and she held on to the steering wheel with all her might, keeping control of the fire truck as it leaped and bucked over the rutted road.

  Everyday life was full of unanswered questions, small mysteries that one took no note of. However bizarre any given fact, any unexplained occurrence, unless it could be tied into the problem, it wasn’t useful information. That was a sticking point in murder investigations; what to factor in and what to ignore.

  Anna had chosen to ignore a smattering of disparate pieces on the assumption they were unrelated to the puzzle she was working on. During the jolting ride from Plum Orchard to Stafford, some of those pieces began to fit in the holes left by the Hansons-as-killers theory.

  Marty had thrown Anna and Dijon out of his place after Dijon had read the memo recalling the Lewin electron microscopes. Dot and Mona complained that they were to have two paid assistants, neither of whom had materialized. Slattery Hammond had taken an uncharacteristic interest in the loggerheads nesting on Cumberland Island. Lynette had gone by Hammond’s the morning of the crash to pick up something the VIPs had lent him and needed returned for their turtle project. That afternoon Anna had been cold-cocked by someone searching for something they didn’t want anyone else to find. Later Anna’s truck was searched and vandalized but nothing was taken, presumably because whatever the thief had been looking for wasn’t there. Later that same day, in a sudden act of charity that went against the grain, Marty Schlessinger offered to help Tabby sort and organize the files Todd left behind. The job had been abandoned halfway through, leaving the apartment and the widow in greater confusion than before. Tonight Anna found a message on the chief ranger’s desk from the VIPs: “See us ASAP.” Then Dot and Mona’s home awash in files, Flicka shut out in the road, and a Coke can used to tap out SOS.

  Anna was willing to bet there never had been an electron microscope—or Schlessinger had sold it. The money for assistants listed had gone into his pocket, then up his nose. Discrepancies in the files might have been able to prove it. Slattery’s sudden interest in endangered species must have been sparked by some suspicion of Schlessinger’s activities. He’d studied the files, obtained proof, and threatened to expose the biologist.

  Given this new slant, even the lie about hearing shots the day the Austrian was injured was explained. Possibly Marty, with his knowledge of the island, had stumbled across Hanson’s operation. For whatever reasons—indifference, power, or free dope—he had kept quiet about it. When things started heating up after the wreck, he needed to point the investigation in a safe direction. What better than a marijuana plot? Judges, police, and the American public were more than willing to believe cannabis farmers capable of any sort of ghastly crime.

  “Damn,” Anna muttered through clenched teeth, afraid if she loosed her jaws she’d bite off her tongue. Murders bore a disappointing relationship to magic tricks—once one knew how they were done they bordered on the banal, leaving one feeling, instead of awestruck, thoroughly foolish for having been taken in.

  Stafford was just over three miles from Plum Orchard. Anna made it in four minutes, possibly a land speed record for that stretch of road. After she rolled to a stop by the wall, she could feel her viscera quivering from the bombardment. Having armed herself with a flashlight and a tire iron, she slipped from the truck and, keeping to the darkest stretch of night near the wall, put twenty feet between herself and her vehicle. Crouching down in a corner formed of wall and palmetto, she waited. Bursting upon a crime in progress with no weapon and no backup was not appealing. She wanted to get the lay of the land before she made any decisions; see if the clanking arrival of the truck stirred anyone from the cottage grounds.

  A minute, then two, of forced inactivity passed. Nothing moved, nothing sounded but for the creak of the cooling truck engine and the stirring of a summer night. Convinced she was alone or outsmarted, Anna came quietly to her feet. The tire iron, a heavy cross suitable for dispatching felons and warding off vampires, she shoved through her belt to free up her right hand. Her left clutched a flashlight with a beam so brown and myopic she tossed it away in disgust. Such a light would serve only to pinpoint her whereabouts.

  The gate remained closed, Schlessinger’s ATV parked in the lee of the wall near the VIPs’ truck. Noiselessly Anna let herself in and, following the darkness where it flowed deepest, moved to the cottage and pressed herself against the wall beneath the single high window. The light had been extinguished and there was no sound from within. Again she waited for two interminable minutes but nothing called attention to itself, not a footfall, a word, or the telltale shush of fabric against wood.

  Fear dug taloned fingers into her stomach at the thought she had come too late, that Dot and Mona lay inside, forever quiet, their knowledge and their files expunged from the face of the earth. How hard could it be to kill two old ladies? Depended on the ladies, Anna thought. Dot, Mona, Alice—these were not women who’d go gentle into that good night. She took comfort from that and from the presence of the vehicles. If Marty had finished his work, the ATV would have been gone.

  Continued silence reassuring her, Anna crept around the corner of the house to stand to one side of the front door. Darkness mixed with the heat, filling the cottage’s in
terior. The barest breath of air came from behind and she thrilled to feel it ruffle her newly shorn locks. A sudden bleating and a clatter followed it. Flicka had caught her scent and skittered across the hardwood toward the door.

  Anna swallowed her heart down to its usual resting place and stepped away from the screen. The noise of the little animal had startled her but she took it as one more sign the cottage was empty. With Dot and Mona available, Flicka tended to ignore mere mortals.

  Reaching inside, she felt for the light switch. Flicka pushed out as soon as the latch was free and jumped up like an ill-mannered puppy, his sharp hooves awakening the chiggers in her thighs. Protected by the lath and plaster of the wall, Anna switched on the interior light, then bobbed quickly, one eye over the windowsill, one eye low around the doorframe, trying not to provide a target where a target was expected or leave it there long enough to be blown away.

  The great room was empty. Papers were everywhere, the file boxes overturned. Half-burned pages smoldered on the hearth-stones. A bath and bedroom opened off a stubby hallway to the rear of the house. Had Anna been armed she might have felt duty-bound to go in. Building searches gave her a bad feeling. In training she’d only been killed twice, both times during a building search. She was not sorry to be excused from this one, and heartily relieved there were no dead bodies cluttering up the front room.

  Leaving the light burning, she ran lightly around the small dwelling. Afraid of being abandoned for a third time in a single night, Flicka hesitated for a moment, making short runs back and forth, then trotted off, sticking close to Anna’s heels.

  Playing at Wee Willie Winkie, she peered in the windows and spied through the lock on a back door that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in fifty years. Enough light spilled into the back rooms that Anna was satisfied that, unless the three women were crowded together under the bed, the cottage was empty.

  Relief didn’t live long enough to blossom before it was replaced by alarm and frustration. Dot and Mona had been taken somewhere. First rule of self-preservation: Never let yourself be taken to the second scene of the crime. Regardless of promises made, evildoers don’t move the party for the greater comfort of the victim. Anna remembered a defensive-tactics instructor shouting at a timid young woman student, “These guys will rape you, kill you, and leave your body in a ditch. Why is it you don’t think they’d lie to you?”

  Having returned to the front of the cottage, she stepped inside hoping to find something to indicate where Marty had taken them. They’d gone on foot, that much was clear by the vehicles left behind. It had been less than an hour since Anna had seen the VIPs. The sorting and destroying of files must have taken up some of that time. They couldn’t have gotten too far. Anna had 360 degrees to choose from, all equally dark and uninviting. To the east lay forest, the Chimneys, and the sea. To the south was the sound, the marshes, and an old cemetery. Westward the sound snuggled up to Stafford’s grounds. North was the designated wilderness area with both forest and saltwater marsh. A wealth of places to hide a body or two. With care and tides and fiddler crabs, a learned biologist could probably manage it so they’d never be found; not by dogs and not by time.

  Standing in the mess, Anna noticed she’d lost her shadow. Flicka had been with her when she came back from the rear of the cottage but hadn’t followed her inside.

  First the fawn was shut outside the grounds. Possibly it had been an accident. Maybe an act of intimidation, adding anxiety about their pet to Dot and Mona’s mental stress. Or the fawn was a distraction Marty didn’t need. With coke and adrenaline calling the shots, the man was undoubtedly operating on the edge.

  Then Flicka was shut inside.

  Because he’d tried to follow, was Anna’s guess.

  “Flicka, here, baby,” she called softly, hurrying out into the yard. Hey, Lassie, Timmy’s in the well, came a mocking thought, but it was the only hope she had to go on and she clung to it.

  A brief search located the fawn. He was standing at the edge of the cleared ground behind Stafford House. On seeing Anna, he bleated once, then stared into the black wall of woods. Afraid she would distract him, she fell back and hid in the shadows of what once had served Stafford as a servants’ wing. For maybe a minute the animal trotted back and forth at the tree line bleating; then he stepped delicately into the foliage and was gone.

  Anna followed as fast as she dared, entering the woods where he had vanished. A fatted moon had deigned to rise and fragments of light littered the forest floor. Relying on hope as much as hearing, she trailed the little beast. Once he’d established his direction, he moved along at a good pace. Near the salt marshes that skirted the sound, the woods thinned.

  The tide was in. Only the tips of the grasses showed above the water. They ebbed and flowed with the currents. In the unrevealing light of the moon, it was impossible to tell where grass ended and water began. The shoreline was equally uncertain. Land and marsh and sea blended seamlessly into one another. Fireflies added their stars and brought the sky into this confluence of elements.

  Trusting to the fawn’s sense of smell, Anna followed in his wake. Several times he stopped and wandered aimlessly along the edge of land and marsh bleating plaintively. At each stop Anna found herself holding her breath, afraid both that he’d lost the trail and that he’d found its end. Bodies, weighted and submerged in the high saltwater grasses beyond the low-tide mark, would be effectively hidden from the world. The natural action of the sea would wash away all signs of interference. Carrion eaters would take care of the rest.

  Flicka stopped a final time. Anna waited for him to pick up the scent. Time dragged. The fawn paced and cried. Twice he lay down and curled nose to tail as if he’d given up. He was as nervy as Anna and the respites were short-lived. After a restless moment he’d leap up again to run along the water’s edge. At length he trotted back toward Anna, stopped dead in the path, and sitting on his haunches, bleated at the moon in a gentle parody of the wolf. Flicka was lost. Then so were Dot and Mona.

  That’s what you get for trusting prey to track predator, Anna thought acidly.

  For lack of a better idea, she stayed where she was, eyes and ears waiting for the night to tell her something. The moon had pushed above the trees to the west. In this wan light, she noticed a scrap of white suspended several feet above the ground. A piece of paper had fallen and been caught on the spines of an oak seedling.

  Wishing she had a flashlight and cursing whoever was responsible for maintaining Cumberland Island’s fire cache equipment, she lifted the paper to her eyes. Of itself it told her nothing, but excited at the possibilities it suggested, she walked along at a snail’s pace, searching each bush and blade of grass. Ten feet farther on she was rewarded for her diligence. A second bit of paper was trampled into the wet earth in a footprint—it was too dark to see it without a flashlight but Anna could feel the edges with the tips of her fingers. By turning the paper this way and that she could discern what could have been the marks of a sneaker tread.

  Four yards farther she found another. Eyes opened by this discovery, she began looking for other signs, and despite the poor light, found them. Dot and Mona had dragged their feet, broken off twigs, dropped bits of paper and, once, a button from a blouse. Crafty old women, Anna thought, and smiled. With a more durable form of bread crumbs, they’d left a trail a blind woman could follow. Cast in the role of that blind woman, Anna inched along the narrow stretch of land between woods and water noting unsmoked cigarettes, a pocketknife, Mona’s Timex, Dot’s pinky ring, and three more buttons. She left the items where she found them. If Rick had better luck with his flashlight, he was sure to stumble across the trail more quickly than she had. She could use the company.

  Heartened by Anna’s taking the lead, Flicka gave up mourning and trotted at her side, poking at each new piece of information with a cool dry nose.

  Twenty minutes were marked off in butts and buttons, then thirty; still Anna’s ears picked up no sign of the other women.
Going was slow, but at a guess, she and the fawn had been following the trail for a mile to a mile and a half. Schlessinger was walking Dot and Mona up the waterline into the designated wilderness area of the park where, though less than pristine or untrammeled, there was less likely to be any future disturbance of his makeshift graveyard. In wilderness areas no power equipment was allowed: no cars, ATVs, chain saws, bulldozers. The less readily accessible an area, the less it was used by visitors. Over the years Anna noticed even a modest walk—a half or three quarters of a mile from the parking lot—and the tourist component was reduced by ninety percent. People were lazy, people loved their cars, felt insecure away from them. Law enforcement officers—even federal law enforcement officers, contrary to some opinions—were people. Without compelling evidence, the farther one had to walk from his patrol car, the less likely a search of that area became.

  To Anna’s right the bank grew steep. Currents eddying through the sound had undercut the soil and it had fallen away, exposing roots the size of a man’s thigh. In places trees had all but toppled into the marsh. Clinging tenaciously to life, they hung over the sea grasses at right angles. In the dark, with what appeared to be a vast meadow undulating to her left, Anna found it unnerving. Her faith that she knew up from down had been severely challenged over the previous thirty-six hours.

  Navigable land narrowed between the crumbling bank and the muddy commencement of the marsh. Losing options put Anna on edge but this was where the VIPs’ trail was to be found and she had no choice but to follow it.

  When she and the ever-faithful Flicka had traveled another mile or more, her ears picked up the sounds they’d been straining for. Voices, muted, distant, and suddenly stifled, hit her senses with the impact of an air horn in a closed room. She stopped so suddenly Flicka stumbled against her. The fawn, her admirable compatriot, had just become a liability. When he caught the scent of his benefactresses he’d trot bleating into their midst, effectively announcing that he’d been freed and possibly followed. Anna’s memory flashed back to a night in west Texas when she’d nearly laid down her life for a mountain lion. For those who’d seen the light, animals made good hostages. Anna could easily see Schlessinger, a knife at Flicka’s throat, saying: “Nobody moves or Bambi gets it.” Chances were Dot, Mona, even she, would do as they were told rather than see that perfect life cut down.