by Nevada Barr
Though she found it unsettling on several levels, Anna could understand that sort of criminal. Dormant, comatose, she told herself with more fervency than an innocent woman would have required, that evil dwelt within her. In the snow of the Sierra it had been called forth. Perhaps it had saved her life. Still, she never wanted to feel its icy grip again.
Whatever—whoever—was torturing rodents and children and bloodying innocent backpacks in the Rockies was different. True evil had logic, desire, goals and a sense of self-preservation. The miasma poisoning Rocky was not so much evil as sickness. A deep festering so putrid and toxic that, in a way, Anna was relieved she could not understand it. A busload of holy men versus an olive . . . well, if one were starving for a bit of pimiento . . . but to understand why one would torture the helpless for no other reason than personal enjoyment would be a glimpse into a part of one’s mind better left unknown.
One or more persons in or around Rocky was a serial killer of small animals. This person might or might not be one and the same as the abductor of girls—if the girls had indeed been abducted and weren’t using the story to cover up running away.
Most of what Anna knew of psychopaths, she had gleaned from movies and books—fiction, not documentary or texts. In America there was a great fluctuating sea of common knowledge dispersed and ratified by the popular media’s echoing what they gleaned from other popular media sources. A lot was inaccurate. Not all of it. That would be too easy. But a lot of it.
Anna “knew” that psychopaths—or was it sociopaths, she really must call Molly—who wanted to grow up to be serial killers customarily started out, often at a heart-stoppingly young age, with the destruction of lesser lives. Like Bram Stoker’s Renfield, hoping to work his way up from flies to spiders to mice, then asking in one of the most frightening lines in a truly scary book: “May I have a kitten?”
Given this was true—and where Homo sapiens were involved, nothing was consistently true—Rocky’s own personal psycho might yet be immature, still in the caterpillar state where small, legal murders, murders which, without the torture, were even considered admirable in pest removal circles, were sufficient to slake the need for pain and death. Again according to the movies and paperback thrillers, baby psychos could be from five years old to teens or possibly early twenties. Then there seemed to come a decade where they disappeared into cocoons. A sort of awkward age, too old to slaughter the family pet, too young to kill the girl next door.
At age thirty they emerged to meet the profile: thirties, white, male, often intelligent, tends to be a loner, could live with Mom.
Robert Proffit was a bit old—and a bit young—for the overt part of the predatory pattern, but perhaps he was slower than others to mature and continued to amuse himself with small game.
Sheppard was older than the template and struck Anna more as an abuser, a tyrant, than a killer. Far more satisfying to lord it over one’s victims for a lifetime than snuff them out in a moment. No, Sheppard didn’t strike her as a man to break his toys past all mending.
But then no person had been killed, or at least no body found. The saga of Beth, Alexis and the still missing Candace could be one of crime and punishment. The crime: running away. Maybe the punishment, whatever it was, was what Anna was being warned away from sticking her nose in.
Rita Perry resurfaced in Anna’s mind. Rita knew of the live mousetrap, the bleeding pack. Rita harbored Robert Proffit. Rita was sleeping with—euphemistically speaking—the Fern Lake ranger, Raymond Bleeker.
Having been handed much guiltier-looking prospects, Anna would have preferred to overlook Bleeker. He had proximity to the mouse incident, the live trap, Odessa Lake and Picnic Rock. The New Canaan enclave and Rollin’ Roost were a bit of a stretch, but he was young, strong, owned a car and, judging by the look of the Fern Lake campground, hadn’t been spending a whole lot of time doing his job.
As with all law enforcement personnel, Bleeker had undergone a thorough background check prior to being hired. Anna had read it. Nothing popped up in the way of red flags. The man had never been arrested or accused of so much as shoplifting or vandalism. Neither the high school nor the college he attended had anything to say against him but remarked on a tendency to tardiness. His reviews from previous parks were uniformly glowing. In a litigious, feel-good, politically correct world where victimhood was claimed and lauded by many, the rating system for seasonals had become as inflated as the grades in most schools, but managers found ways of cluing in one another: things not said, damning with faint praise. In retrospect the good reports surprised Anna. Maybe Ray had done a better job in other parks than he was doing at Fern Lake. Rita might be proving a distraction. Backcountry/frontcountry romances required a lot of hours on the trail.
Sheppard would have been checked out by both the NPS and local law enforcement during the search. Such was the cynical nature of the law, when children went missing, moms and dads were front and center on the list of suspected kidnappers. Same for Robert Proffit. A handsome young man who went out of his way to work with seventh- and eighth-grade girls would not go unnoticed. If there’d been anything untoward in either of their records, Lorraine would have told her.
Anna would recheck the background reports, see what she could find by way of alibis for the time the squirrel was killed, but first on her list in the morning, when it came, would be finding out why Rita happened to be passing Picnic Rock at such an auspicious moment in Anna’s life.
Tired as she was, Anna was not sorry when her alarm woke her at 4:30 A.M. The hot bath and Advil had done her back a world of good, but lying in one place for so long had brought back the ache. Movement was what was needed, warm blood flowing through the damaged soft tissues.
Her days as an iron woman of thirty-five were long gone. Strength and endurance had waned a bit. What took their place served her better: the stubbornness of keeping on keeping on. Perhaps it was only an increased ability to suffer discomfort. Whatever it was, it had carried her up steeper trails than the one she would tackle today.
Having locked the house, she loaded Hecuba, her litter box, food and water into the Crown Vic. The little cat would spend her day at the Thompson River District office. Anna did not want to waste time wondering if there would be bleeding cat parts festooning her house when she got home.
This being the third of Rita Perry’s four days off, Anna hoped she might again make the hike to Fern Lake or the Tourmaline Gorge area to do whatever it was she did up there other than pry boulders off the legs of the girl rangers and have wild unhallowed sex with the boy rangers.
The kitten settled in, she grabbed a flashlight she’d found in the bottom drawer of her desk. The sun would be up in half an hour. To the east she could have seen the faint hope of dawn had she not been down in tall pines. Beneath the lodgepoles it was as chilly and dark as a November midnight in Mississippi. Anna was pleased. What she was doing wasn’t illegal, or particularly unethical; still, she didn’t want any witnesses.
Rita’s Crown Vic—or rather the patrol vehicle Rita shared with Thompson River District’s two other law enforcement seasonals—was parked on the gravel between the ranger station and Rita’s quarters. In a shared government vehicle there can be no expectation of privacy. Anna was well within her rights to search it to her heart’s content.
Had Anna been required to tell a judge specifically what she sought for the purposes for warrant, she wouldn’t have been able to do it. Anna was fishing, hoping to snag any bit of information that might illuminate the enigma that was Rita. She was definitely a woman with secrets. Anna could smell them on her like a man’s cologne after a long embrace. At the best of times Anna had trouble resisting a secret. When that secret might pertain to budding psychos and destruction of park wildlife—and her best comforter—she didn’t even try.
The vehicle yielded nothing but a weakness for Hershey’s Kisses on the part of one of the seasonals. The ranger with the sweet tooth had not been so rude as to leave wadded-up pieces
of foil littering the seat or cluttering up the ashtray, but several of the candies’ thin strips of paper reading “KISS KISS KISS” had escaped, blown under the seat, worked their way into crevices. One had wended or wafted through the cage to settle on the floor of the back seat. That one Anna left in place, a cheery message for the next person arrested.
The trunk contained the customary patrol paraphernalia: flares, first-aid pack, accident investigation kit, field drug-testing kit—pretty much a waste of space but somewhere along the line it became part of the gear—Breathalyzer, a couple of traffic cones, tow chain. The only thing unexpected was the tidiness with which these items had been stowed and the cleanliness of the carpeted area beneath them.
Rangers’ trunks were occasionally tidy but seldom clean. They suffered too much use. Items used in rain, mud, sand and forest duff were routinely chucked in. This carpet looked freshly vacuumed.
No law forbade employees from detailing their patrol vehicles even unto the inside of the trunk. Under most circumstances, Anna would have found it commendable. Given the hellacious schedules the rangers were working at the tail end of the tourist season while burdened with search-and-rescue assignments and out-of-park fire details, Anna found it suspicious.
Working quickly and quietly she removed the gear, then played her light carefully over the exposed carpeting. Clean. Vacuumed. But not shampooed. On the right rear side near the wheel well there was a dark stain, two sides of it ruler-straight where a tarp or canvas had been laid down, the other edge irregular as if liquid had spilled over. Pinching up a bit of the dried substance, Anna spit on her fingers and rubbed them together, a quick and dirty field test. The brownish particles reconstituted to blood red. Finding yet one more use for her battered Swiss Army Knife, she neatly cut out a two-by-two-inch square of the carpeting and slipped it into a small manila evidence envelope. That done, she pocketed it and restored the items to the trunk in the same order in which she had found them.
By the time she finished, dawn had made it over the mountains and was reaching fog-colored fingers down into the trees. Time to go.
She ascended the shorter, if no less steep, route to Fern Lake that began at the Bierstat Lake trailhead. The trip up was more time-consuming than the trek down had been. She reached the campground near eight o’clock. Most sites were full. Campers were stirring about in a sleepy chill, metal and plastic cups of hot beverages clasped between their hands. Anna liked campgrounds best in the early hours. Removed from their safe houses and comfortable routines, human beings showed a vulnerable, more benevolent aspect of themselves. People hiked without alarm clocks, and those who were sensible enough to experience the natural rhythms of the earth maintained elastic itineraries. Around a morning camp at a vacation spot there was none of the mindless hurrying of a workday morning. There was also the heady smell of campfire smoke. The perfume calmed Anna the way lavender was purported to soothe agitated Victorian ladies, until she remembered fires were banned in all but a few of the frontcountry sites.
For the next half an hour or so, she played her least favorite role required by her job, that of wet blanket. The campers made the usual excuses. A woman said they were unaware of the regulation, never saw any of the multitude of signs or read any of the brochures or the regulations printed on the backcountry permit. A man, gruff at first but growing more amenable when he found Anna was going to give him a warning rather than a citation, went for the classic excuse: “The other ranger said I could.” Though Anna had heard that more times than she could count and under practically every illegal circumstance she could think of, this time it was the reason she issued only warnings. After the conditions she’d noted on her previous visit—conditions that had not been rectified in her short absence—if not actually giving visitors permission to have fires, Ray was certainly turning a blind eye to it.
Bleeker was up and dressed. As he damn well better be, Anna thought sourly, having spent the last three-quarters of an hour doing his job for him. Sitting in the morning sun on the cabin’s front steps, he greeted her with a smile. “Coffee’s on,” he said, as if he were expecting her. Probably he was. While she was fiddling about with her firebugs, fisherpersons making the early commute from camp to lake would likely have told him. People liked to tell rangers things they didn’t already know.
“You changed your hair!” Anna said. His sandy brown baby-fine hair had been dyed a dramatic dark brown, almost black.
“You like?” He tilted his head and struck a pose in such a perfect mimicry of a fashion model that Anna laughed.
“Hair’s a renewable resource,” she said equitably. “Might as well amuse yourself with it.”
“If I take after my dad, mine’s an endangered species. Figured I might as well enjoy it while it lasts.”
Anna followed him into the cabin, once more struck by how immaculate he kept it. Too bad his housekeeping skills didn’t bleed over into campground maintenance. Over excellent coffee, she talked with him about this professional shortcoming.
When she first broached the subject what she took to be startlingly cold fury froze his eyes and she braced herself for a long and ugly bout of justifications, shifting blame and counteraccusations.
Apparently the look had not been fury but chagrin. He readily admitted that he’d let the campground chores slide. Apologizing profusely, he promised to be vigilant in the future. Anna hoped he was telling the truth. His ready acceptance of blame put her in mind of a landlord she’d had in college. Complaints on the part of his tenants were handled with the same mix of “Sorry” and “I’ll get right on it.” He never did. Moving the man was like trying to move a warm wall of mud with nothing but one’s bare hands.
Anna moved on. Proffit, Rita and Ray were the only people she knew for certain could have been in place for both the murder of the mice and the Abert squirrel in her bedroom. Of the three, only Proffit seemed to have a motive—if psychosis could be called a motive. Rita had the ghost of one, her association with Proffit. Ray might have had reasons of his own. Unlike the Shadow, Anna didn’t know what evil lurked in the hearts of men. Ray could have hiked out the previous afternoon. He assured her he’d been in the high country all that day but could think of no way to prove it.
Anna wasn’t surprised. Fern Lake was not isolated. Campers came and went, knocked on the door for shelter when it rained, sugar if they’d forgotten it, or simply because the cabin was cute and they wanted a peek inside. In the nonpark world this would have provided a plethora of witnesses to a person’s whereabouts on a given afternoon. Here, people were mostly nameless vacation nomads.
For a minute or so, a long and not uncomfortable silence, they sipped their coffee.
“I led a nature walk from two till maybe three-thirty,” he volunteered. “Then sat around with a couple from Missouri, I think. Or Mississippi. Minnesota. One of those ‘M’ states till around five, if that helps.”
“They still here?” Anna asked.
“I doubt it.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“This about that squirrel business at your house?”
Anna was startled. She’d not mentioned the nature of her disturbance over the radio. Then she remembered cell phones. She’d been warned the reception was nil at Fern Lake, but a mile up the Bear Lake Trail, one could call Istanbul if necessary.
“Yeah.”
“Checking alibis?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you have to check mine?” He seemed merely interested, not defensive or angry. Anna was relieved at the professionalism.
“The mice on the outhouse.”
“Ahh. Weirdness personified. Makes sense.”
“No. It doesn’t. That’s the problem.”
“It must make sense to somebody.”
Anna knew that to be true, but it wasn’t a somebody she’d care to meet in a dark alley. Or let cat-sit.
“I wish I had a video of me someplace else at the crucial time,” Ray said.
“Me, too
,” Anna said sincerely, then again: “Don’t worry about it.”
Ray excused himself and vanished into the room where the gear was stored, saying he had something to show her. Listening to him crash around for what seemed a phenomenally long time, she helped herself to another cup of coffee. Finally he emerged empty-handed.
“Couldn’t find it,” he said with a grin that indicated he wasn’t heartbroken over the failure.
“What was it?”
“Nothing much. If it turns up, I’ll show it to you next time you drop by.”
Not in a mood to aid and abet the mysteriousness her seasonal was so obviously enjoying, Anna said nothing. She had someplace else she wanted to be anyway.
Getting away was delayed for thirty minutes. Bleeker was in a chatty mood and kept up a steady stream of conversation, jumping from one subject to another. Throughout the chitchat ran a subtle line of justification for his letting the campground go to hell. He would have her believe all of his time was taken up with nature walks and evening programs. These weren’t scheduled at the backcountry camp but neither were they discouraged. Anna commended him for his edifying the visitors, then reminded him none too gently that that was only a small part of his job. At the end of the half hour, Bleeker looked at his watch, stopped talking and abruptly announced it was time to get to work on putting the campground in order.
Thus was Anna dismissed.