by Nevada Barr
When the trailing foot recoiled, Scotty would lunge again, cracking her ribs and maybe her spine against the door.
Anna grabbed a handful of hair and, holding his head fast, gouged her right thumb up under his left ear where the angle of his jaw met his skull. The pressure on her rib cage increased. She dug the thumb deeper.
A little pain goes a long way. Even through his alcoholic haze, he had to be feeling the bite of the compliance hold. “Let go. Let go,” she repeated clearly and she pushed harder. She could feel him becoming paralyzed. “Do as I say. Do it. Let go.”
His arms dropped. He tried to say something. It could have been the word “Okay.”
Still holding his head between her fist and the gouging thumb, Anna eased herself from the door. He fell onto both knees. His hands came up to pry her thumb away but she screwed her knuckle into the nerve. “Hands down. On the floor. All the way. Do it. Do it.”
Scotty did it. She followed, pressing till he was facedown on the worn linoleum. “Hands on the small of your back. Cross your wrists. Hands back.”
Anna put one knee on his neck and one on his butt, then fished Pilcher’s handcuffs from her pocket. Scotty twitched when he heard the familiar ratcheting noise but it was too late. She rapped them on his wristbones and quickly made them fast.
Less than a minute had elapsed since she had entered the room. Her heart was pounding and her vision growing fuzzy. Anna sat down on the edge of the bunk. Scotty lay at her feet. One of her peers, a fellow ranger, a commissioned federal law enforcement officer, was bound like a piglet. Anna didn’t know what to do with him. Odds were good she was nearly as surprised at the turn of events as he was. And probably in more trouble.
The National Park Service would not be anxious to believe breaking and entering to further an employee’s blackmailing another employee to keep her from exposing God knew what. If Scotty pieced together a good story-a practical joke, climbed in the wrong window-Anna would end up at best with egg on her face, at worst on charges for assaulting an officer. She fervently hoped either Butkus wasn’t thinking that clearly, or the package contained a severed human head or at least a kilo of something incriminating.
“Jesus, Scotty, what the hell is going on?” she asked peevishly.
“None of your goddam business,” he said from the floor.
Anna thought about that one. “It is,” she decided. “You’re blackmailing a friend of mine. What’re you holding over Tinker?”
“You can’t prove I know a goddam thing about those two.”
“Then tell me what you know about the late Denny Castle. Like what made him ‘late’?”
No answer.
“Where’s Donna?” Anna tried. Scotty said something that could’ve been “Goddam intwerps.” Anna was tired. And she was tired of Scotty Butkus. “Leave Tinker alone,” she said. “Stop the blackmail. It’s killing her.”
“The hell I will.” He began to struggle, trying to sit up. Anna pushed him down with her foot. He banged against the board-and-brick bookcase the Coggins-Clarkes had assembled beneath the room’s one window. Candles rocked precariously. A cheap Instamatic flash camera teetered near the edge.
Anna picked it up. Click! Flash! “Gotcha!” she said. Scotty actually screamed as if the light had burned him. “The ‘old stallion’ knocked down and trussed up like a steer by a rangerette,” Anna said. Click. Flash. Scotty scraped his face away, turning it against the floor. “Too late. Got a good one,” she told him.
“This camera is Tinker’s. So is the film. I’ll see that she gets it. If you bother her, if whatever her big secret is leaks out in any way, I’ll encourage her to have the negatives blown up poster-size and put on trail crew’s bunkhouse door.”
For a moment Scotty neither spoke nor moved and Anna began to be afraid the shock had been too much and he’d died of a massive coronary.
“You’ll pay for this,” he growled finally. Despite the threat, she was relieved to hear him speak. “I got friends in damn near every park in this country. Every one of ‘em’s getting a call from me. I’ll by God smear your name from Acadia to Joshua Tree. You want a career in the Park Service? After this little stunt, you haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell. Not a hope.”
“These people known you long?” Anna asked.
“Damn right they have.”
“Then I can always hope they’ll consider the source.”
Scotty struggled to his knees. Anna let him. “Unlock these goddam cuffs,” he demanded.
Anna just looked at him, not rising from the bed where she sat. “Ralph keeps the key in his briefcase on the Lorelei. I didn’t bring it.” She got up then, held open the bedroom door. Scotty crawled through and she watched as he worked his way to his feet using the walls of narrow hallway.
She closed and locked the door. Scotty would get the cuffs off, but it would take him a while. It would keep him away from her.
Suddenly too tired to stand, she sat back down on the bottom bunk. At her feet was the plastic-wrapped bundle Scotty had come across land and water to leave in Tinker’s way.
A growing dread would not allow her to open it slowly, scientifically. Grabbing two corners, Anna yanked the bag and shook it. The body of a baby tumbled out and she screamed.
But it wasn’t a baby. It was a plastic baby doll and it had been painted blue from head to foot.
TWENTY
Anna clicked through the rest of the pictures in Tinker’s Instamatic. She took two of the doll and two of the torn screen. When the film was used up, she rewound it and dropped the roll into her pocket. Tinker could not be trusted to be sufficiently hard-hearted. Anna could.
She wrapped the blue baby in its plastic shroud, then glanced at the clock: a rhinestone Sylvester, tail and eyes twitching off the seconds. After ten p.m. and she was marooned in Rock Harbor with no food, no wine, no dry clothes, no change of underwear, and no place to sleep.
Patience would just be closing the restaurant at the lodge. All Anna needed to do was look moderately pitiful and she would provide everything but the underwear. Anna bundled herself and the baby out the window, replaced the screen, and set off through the fog at a trot.
The lights of the lodge glowed a warm welcome. Coming out of the darkness of the trees, Anna felt as if she’d been lost in the wilderness for a month. “I once was lost, but now am found.” Whistling the old hymn, she felt her spirits rise.
Two parties, one of six and one of eight, still lingered in the dining room. Though they were subject to the glares of a waitress and two busboys, Anna was grateful to them. They had forced the kitchen to stay open. And the bar. She ordered pasta Alfredo and a glass of Chianti. The pasta was gooey and the bread reheated but, glad to be in a warm well-lit place where nice people brought food, she was not inclined to be picky.
Patience, looking tired but well groomed, had drifted over to Anna’s table and been wheedled out of an invitation to sleep on her sofa. By the time a pretty young waiter, angling for a tip, brought over a second glass of Chianti, Anna had begun to feel downright expansive. Even the snufflings of Carrie Ann, trying to chip the crockery at the sideboard, seemed more homey than sullen.
Near eleven the larger party called for their check and Patience felt she could go home. Carrie Ann in tow, she came by Anna’s table. Scarcely into her teens, Carrie was already taller and bigger than her mother.
“We are practicing togetherness.” Patience explained Carrie’s late hours as Anna pushed up out of her chair, then finished the last swallow of Chianti. “Surveillance in the guise of Motherly Love has taken the place of trust and ‘do your own thing.’ Certain persons of the childish persuasion seemed to think three a.m. was a good hour to retire.”
Anna found herself wishing Patience would address her insults/parables/whatevers to her daughter instead of banking them like an expert billiard player off Anna. No such thing as a free lunch, she reminded herself. She was to be had for a meal and a bed.
“More star-crossed di
sappearances?” Anna said to say something.
“In spades,” Patience replied.
“Oh God!” Carrie Ann rolled her oversized brown eyes. “What speech now? AIDS or ‘when I was your age’?”
“Shut up!” her mother snapped. To Anna she said: “Get your tubes tied.”
Anna began to wonder if partaking in this dispute was going to be too much to pay for a dry bed.
Shortly after they reached the Bittners’ apartment, Carrie disappeared into her room.
“Gad!” Patience threw herself onto the vinyl of an institutional rendition of an overstuffed chair. “I need a drink. Need, not want: the point when connoisseur becomes addict. Can I pour you something?”
“Whatever,” Anna replied. She wanted the hot shower, the flannel gown, the sofa Patience had lent her in the past, but, ever mindful of her beggar-not-chooser status, she schooled herself to listen to anything from confession to kvetching.
“Wine! Lord, what would we do without it?” Patience asked rhetorically. “Wine is about the only thing you can count on. Too bad you can’t choose vintage children. Can’t say, ‘Ah, yes, ’78, that was an excellent year for children. Sweet, a little precocious, but not impertinent.‘ Do you remember Prohibition?”
“Not firsthand,” Anna replied. “I’ve seen the movies. Loved Sean Connery in The Untouchables.”
“It almost killed the California wine industry. A crippling blow.” Patience brought two glasses of red wine over to the couch where Anna huddled dreaming of dry flannel gowns. “Some kept going in secret-like the Catholics in Communist Russia or the secular artists during the Inquisition-artists smuggling their art out of a repressive country.”
“Mmm.” Anna drank of the red. It slid down rich, uncompromising. “California?” she guessed.
“No!” Patience laughed. “Hungarian. Who cares?” she said with a sudden change of attitude. “Wine’s wine. It’ll get you there.”
“ ‘There’s’ not where it used to be,” Anna said wearily and, with the words, realized she’d probably consumed enough alcohol for one night.
“You sound like a woman who’s had a long day,” Patience observed.
“Long day,” Anna agreed. She found she didn’t want to talk about it, about Jo, Stanton and his pointed questions, about Scotty or blackmail or blue plastic baby dolls. What she wanted, she realized, was to watch TV. Preferably something familiar, something without too much violence.
“Isn’t Murder, She Wrote on tonight?” she asked. “I haven’t looked at television for a while.”
TWENTY ONE
A good night’s sleep had cleared Anna’s head. Sitting on Patience’s couch, warm in a tangle of bedclothes, she turned the doll between her hands. It was fairly realistic: the legs bowed, the arms were pudgy, the glassy blue eyes closed when the little body was placed on the horizontal. There were no marks of violence, no tiny broken legs, no doll-sized knife in its back. Nothing that Anna could see to indicate a threat. The blue was the only abnormality.
Blue to indicate death by suffocation or drowning, immersion in the icy waters of Superior; a death, or a burial like Denny Castle’s? Then why the “Hopkins” in the blackmail note?
Anna put the toy back in its garbage bag. “Patience, can I use your phone?” she hollered. From behind the bathroom door came a muffled affirmative.
A private phone: Anna felt the luxury of it as she lifted the receiver. Dutifully she recited her credit card number to a user-friendly AT amp;T operator and was channeled through long-distance information to the Hopkins Public Library. An efficient-sounding woman answered on the first ring. Anna introduced herself. “I’m doing a background check on a Theresa Coggins,” she told the librarian. “She lived in Hopkins from 1974 to 1980. Is there any way you could check the local paper for any reference to her during those years?”
Normally, no, but it wasn’t a busy morning and the librarian had always wanted to be a park ranger, so yes, this once. She would call back.
Patience emerged from the bath in a cloud of commercial scent. Her slender frame was draped with tasteful elegance in dove-gray linen with shoes to match. “How do you do it?” Anna asked.
“Perhaps I didn’t marry well,” Patience said with a wink, “but I divorced brilliantly. Carrie Ann!”
Looking dull as an ox beside her mother, Carrie trudged up the hall and was taken off to the lodge in maternal custody.
Anna showered with the bathroom door open so she could hear the phone. As she was toweling dry, it rang. Mindful of her guest manners, she answered, “Bittner residence, Anna Pigeon speaking.”
It was the librarian from Hopkins. Yes, there had been a number of articles on Theresa Coggins published in the newspaper between 1978 and 1980. Ms. Coggins and her husband, David Coggins, had been on trial for manslaughter. They had been accused of the wrongful death of their daughter, Constantina, aged ten months, twelve days.
“Whoa!” Anna breathed.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“They were finally acquitted,” the librarian said, sounding mildly disappointed. “That’s everything, except a wedding announcement two years later: David Coggins marrying a woman named Agnes Larson. Nothing else on Theresa Coggins. She may have left town or changed her name.”
“Do you have a fax machine?” Anna asked abruptly.
“There’s one at the post office.”
Anna gave the librarian the park’s fax number and her own profuse thanks.
The newspaper articles beat her to the ranger station on Mott. Seventeen articles in all, covering the death of the child, the trial, the public outcry, the acquittal.
The first paragraph of the first article told the story. “During last Sunday’s cold snap, when temperatures were hovering at thirteen below with a windchill factor in the minus forties, David and Theresa Coggins went cross-country skiing on Winetka Lake near their home in south Hopkins. They took their ten-month-old daughter, Constantina, along in a backpack worn by Mrs. Coggins. Exertion kept David and Theresa from feeling the cold but the baby, confined to the backpack, froze to death.
“ ‘I thought she was sleeping,’ said the nineteen-year-old mother. ‘Then she just wouldn’t wake up.’ ”
Anna leaned back and rested her head against the wall in the dispatch room. A blue baby doll: “Scotty should have his heart cut out with a dull Boy Scout knife.”
“Put me on your list of volunteers,” Sandra Fox said, never taking her fingers from the printout she was reading. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re a shit, you know that, Anna Pigeon?”
“I’m just postponing the inevitable. You always find out everything eventually. Think of it as a challenge.”
“I hate that damn fax machine,” Sandra said without rancor. “Messages blatting in and out of my dispatch and I can’t read them.”
Anna chuckled aloud to let Sandra know she knew it was a joke. Sandra went on with her reading, fingers keeping her place when she was interrupted by the phone or the radio. Anna slipped off her shoe and buried her toes in Delphi’s warm fur. The dog thumped the floor with her tail.
Scotty was blackmailing Tinker to stop her and her husband from investigating the disappearance of his wife, the alleged lover of the dead man.
Damning as it was, Anna was not convinced Scotty had killed Denny. She could see Scotty, in a drunken rage, accidentally killing his wife. But the Castle murder appeared calculating, dangerous, clever.
“Scotty hasn’t got the balls,” she muttered.
“Beginning, middle, and end,” Sandra said, “or I don’t want to hear any of the story.”
Anna relapsed into thought. If not Scotty, who? Jim Tattinger, because he was a creep? Because Castle was a threat to him professionally? Because Castle knew or suspected something? Tattinger had left the Virgin Islands under a pall. Had Denny known why? Had Tattinger been suspected of plundering the shipwrecks? Suspected but not proven guilty, so the ac
cusation was never made public? Or, more likely, to avoid bad press the NPS had decided to “handle it from within”?
Was Tattinger continuing those activities at ISRO?
“Sandra, do me a favor?”
“No. No way. Not possible. Tit for tat. Eye for an eye. You scratch my back, et cetera.”
“Find out why Jim Tattinger left the Virgin Islands.”
“Is Jim being investigated in the Castle thing?”
“No,” Anna admitted. “There’s not a scrap of evidence against him. That’s why I need you to find out for me. Personnel, the District Ranger-the official channels will be closed.”
“Island dispatcher to island dispatcher?” Sandra said with a smile. “The centers through which all information flows? You want me to abuse my position of trust to wheedle gossip from an unsuspecting peer?”
“That’s it in a nutshell.”
“Tit for tat,” Sandra replied.
Anna told her what she could of the circumstantial evidence built up around Tattinger, of finding him sneaking around near where the Kamloops went down after the murder but before the body recovery. She wanted to hint at Jo’s and the Bradshaws’ innocence, but until they were officially cleared by the FBI, she didn’t dare. It wasn’t much, but Sandra took it as a sign of good faith.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she promised.
Anna thanked her and left for the sunshine on the dock. The fog had burned away and the day promised to reach close to seventy degrees. She was anxious to get back to the north shore, resume her routine duties.
The Belle Isle needed refueling and Anna’s supply of candy bars was perilously low, so she made a stop at Rock. Pacing in front of the bench above the harbor was Damien Coggins-Clarke, preparing for his nature walk. Anna jogged up the path in his direction. Once again she was given a less than enthusiastic greeting.
“It’s okay,” Anna said gently. “There’ll be no more threats. The past won’t be dragged out. It’s been taken care of.”
Damien stopped pacing and looked at her squarely for the first time. “The Windigo is so powerful. People eaten up with fear. They must devour others but they’ll never be sated. I thought I could take care of her,” he added simply. “But all I could do was love her.”