Track of the Cat (4 page)

"Seriously. Who in their right mind would drag a full pack down that canyon on a contraband lark?" Rogelio's hand was trying to wriggle free, his lips brushed her neck.

"Mmmm," he purred, "you're doing it to me again. God but I'm crazy for you, Ana."

Anna tried to fix her mind on the saw grass, the vultures.

"One of your pet kitty cats ate a ranger," Rogelio said and his hand slid down to her thighs. "Lions do that, querida. They're meat eaters."

"Seriously-" Anna said and again caught his hands.

"Seriously," Rogelio replied and pulled her to him.

Even as she responded, she ached for Zachary, for some good, old-fashioned conversation.

First thing in the morning she would call Molly. First thing.

"Reality check," Anna said. She pressed her mouth close to the phone.

"I've only got seven minutes till Mrs. Claremont."

"I found a dead body."

"What's that sound in the background? Where are you?"

"At the pay phone by the washer and dryer in the Cholla Chateau in the Rec. Hall. That's the dryer. It squeaks," Anna explained. Molly knew where she was. She was just being difficult.

"Get a phone. A real phone."

"I promise."

"Okay. A body. Human or otherwise?"

"A woman. I found her up Middle McKittrick Canyon yesterday on my lion transect."

There was a moment's silence. Anna waited through it. Molly was lighting a cigarette. Not for the first time, Anna was amazed that Molly's patients stood it. One hundred and fifty dollars an hour and they had to breathe tobacco smoke. "Middle McKittrick," Molly said. "That's one of those bloody awful washes you've got down there, isn't it?"

"That's right." Anna glanced at her pocket watch. "Four minutes till Mrs.

Claremont."

"Mrs. Claremont will still be neurotic in fifteen. Tell me."

Anna told Molly everything as she had since she was five and her sister was eleven. She told her of the vultures, the tears, the saw grass, the ghosts, the paw prints, the claw marks. Occasionally Molly interrupted with a question, clarifying, Anna knew, the very precise picture she was putting together in her mind.

Mrs. Claremont had been cooling her heels in the Park View Clinic's opulent waiting room for ten minutes by the time Anna had finished.

Another brief silence. Anna waited for the summation. Already, just from talking to Molly, she felt better.

"Okay," Molly said finally. "You didn't give a damn one way or another about this Sheila Drury. Right so far?"

"Right," Anna admitted. She wished Molly would sugarcoat things now and again, but she never would.

"Death, darkness, vultures munching, brought back the bad old days after Zach was killed. That's pretty straightforward. But what I'm hearing through it all is an outraged sense of injustice. Am I close?"

Anna felt around inside her brain, probed down her esophagus, took a left at her sternum, and peered into her heart. "I guess that's right." The surprise sounded in her voice and she heard Molly's foreshortened chuckle, almost the "heh heh heh" of the cartoons.

"Because some of the wrong people die?" Molly was fishing.

"Ah . . . Nope."

"That you weren't hailed a hero for finding her?"

"Nope."

"Because you had to be the one to find a stinking corpse?"

Anna thought about that for a second but it wasn't it, either. Horrible as it was, she loved a good adventure. "Nope."

"I give up," Molly said. "Gotta go. Call me when you hit on it."

There was a click and Molly was gone. Ushering in Mrs. Claremont without apology, Anna didn't doubt.

Craig Eastern came in with a blue plastic basket full of uniforms and white Fruit of the Loom underpants. He didn't look at Anna as he loaded the washer and put two quarters in the slot. Maybe he figured it would make less of an intrusion that way.

Anna realized she was still holding the receiver to her ear and replaced it in its cradle. "I'm done," she announced and Craig cranked in the quarters, starting the noise of the washer.

Outraged injustice.

Anna pondered it as she walked back to her residence. Molly had put her finger right on it. That was the feeling. Anna had mixed it with other emotions, not really even recognized it. Outraged injustice. It was an emotion for the young, for those who still believed in some pure, shining vision of absolute Justice, a virgin to be outraged. Anna had felt the outrage for years when she'd been simpler, blessed enough to see the world in clear crisp black and white.

Over the years she'd been introduced to "mitigating circumstances."

Everything had softened, muted into the more interesting but less dramatic shades of gray.

Why outraged injustice now? Anna rubbed the fine scratches on her arms.

They were beginning to itch with healing.

Then it was clear, classic: the innocent wrongly accused.

The lion didn't do it.

4

"ANNA, you saying The lion didn't do it' is like Jimmy Hoffa saying the Teamsters didn't do it."

"Paul, there were no saw grass cuts on Sheila. None. Lions wrestle their prey around, drag it. Even if it just chased her into the saw grass and killed her clean, she'd've had to get cut up some."

Paul sighed-a small one, barely audible. The sound of a patient man summoning up his reserves. Tilting back in his chair, he steepled his fingers. "Okay, let's go over this."

Anna felt irritation boiling up inside of her and took a couple of deep breaths to try to dilute it. Paul was about to manage her. Anna loathed being managed. She leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers in conscious mimicry.

They were in the Ranger Division's headquarters, the old Frijole ranch house. It was a two-story home built near a spring just after the turn of the century. Even in the heat of June it was cool. The native stone walls were nearly two feet thick and pecan trees, brought from St. Louis in tins and carefully tended, were now fifty feet high. The shaded oasis was a haven for snakes, scorpions, mice, and rangers. But for an ongoing battle between the District Ranger and the mice, they all managed to live together in relative accord.

"Okay," Paul said again, looking like a man getting his ducks all in a row. "You saw lion tracks."

"Yes," Anna admitted. "By morning the rain had pretty much wiped them out in that silty mud, but they were there."

"Claw marks, puncture wounds, no sign of any other form of trauma."

"Right."

"Then what are you suggesting?" Paul looked across the fingertips he'd used to tap out each one of his points. The pale blue eyes were so open, so willing to hear what she had to say, that Anna felt like an idiot.

There wasn't much she could say. Like a three-year-old, she'd run to Paul Decker half-cocked, no hard facts. Just one anomaly and a gut feeling.

"I'm not sure. Maybe she had a heart attack, or a stroke, or something and the lion came later. I don't know." Anna spoke slowly, feeling her way through her thoughts. "A lot of stuff's been bothering me. Little things: no saw grass cuts, the body not eviscerated, why she was there in the first place, her hair was down and loose-nobody hikes with their hair flying around in their face-little stuff."

Anna petered out rather than stopped. Her eyes had been wandering around the room in a vague sort of way, now they came back to Paul's face just in time to catch the end of a smile slipping from his lips like the tail of a garter snake vanishing into high grass. Anna wished she'd not added the part about the hair. It was a joke that she never let her hair down.

When she did at the rare social events she attended, she was met with a monotonous chorus of: "I didn't recognize you!"

"You've made some good points, Anna." Paul glanced at his watch surreptitiously and suddenly it infuriated her that he was so damned nice, so unfailingly understanding. She knew from experience that he'd sit and listen to her "problem" as long as she felt the need to talk.

"It's not my problem," she said with more vehemence than the situation called for and rose to her feet. "Just thoughts." Anna knew she was overreacting, unwelcome emotions sharpening her tongue and shortening her temper.

"Sit down," Paul returned reasonably. "Obviously it's bothering you. That makes it important."

Anna sat.

"Maybe Sheila was hiking up from Pratt instead of down from Dog Canyon-on a day hike," Paul suggested.

Pratt Cabin was an historic stone house built at the confluence of North McKittrick and McKittrick creeks about two and a half miles in from the Visitors Center. It was a favored stop of visitors to the park and a logical jumping off place for backcountry hikers.

Anna shook her head. "Carrying a full pack? And that wouldn't change the fact that she had to pass through dense saw grass. No cuts." As she argued, she wondered what exactly it was that she was trying to prove.

Paul looked a little pained. "I don't know why she didn't have any cuts, Anna. I wish I did."

She believed him. He'd like to answer her questions, not because they were important or even particularly valid, but because she felt strongly about them and, to Paul, feelings needed to be dealt with.

Shaking off his kindness with a shrugging motion, she tried another tack.

"There've been no incidents of lions attacking humans in West Texas for the last one hundred years. Not one. Zilch. Nada."

"Statistics," Paul said.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics, Anna thought. She nodded, stood up feeling angry and defeated and heartily tired of both emotions. "Now Sheila Drury is a statistic."

"Anna, this is a federal matter. There'll be an autopsy as a matter of course. If they're not satisfied, the FBI will follow it up."

"Can I see the autopsy report?" Anna demanded.

There was a silence. There'd never been a death-accidental or otherwise-in the park's twenty-year history. Nobody knew precisely what to do or who should do it. As crime in the parks had grown, law enforcement had become increasingly important. Enforcement rangers were sent to ten weeks of training, were fingerprinted, drug tested, and had to carry handcuffs and side arms. But in the smaller, more remote parks there was little in the way of hardcore crime.

Paul jotted something down in the little yellow notebook he carried in his shirt pocket. "I'll ask about the autopsy. I can't see why there'd be a problem since you were the first officer on the scene, but you never know."

"It's governmental," Anna said and Paul laughed. Anna didn't. The bureaucratic delays so slowed work that government agencies had become a laughingstock. One day the bureaucrats would succeed in choking the parks to death. Already they'd so bound them with red tape that by the time there was permission and funding to save an area, an animal, it was usually too late. Death had its own timetable.

Paul tucked the notebook back in his pocket and Anna edged toward the door. "Thanks, Paul," she said, though she was unsure of what she was thanking him for. Everybody always said "Thanks, Paul." Maybe, she thought as she banged out the screen door feeling anything but grateful, one just felt obliged to him for caring.

Paul Decker cared that his people were happy.

Unfortunately there usually wasn't a damn thing he could do to ensure that they were.

"Be fair," Anna said half aloud, trying to temper her anger with words.

Leave it alone, she told herself.

Mind racing too fast for her feet to follow, she found herself stopped under the pecan trees on the flagstone walk outside the ranch house.

Overhead, the leaves made a pleasant clacking. Beyond the stone fence, where the overflow from the spring spilled out into the field, was a line of bright green. Grass following the moisture till it disappeared into the earth a hundred yards out. To the right were the small hay barn and roofed shed for the stock animals. Two big brown rumps were visible near the manger.

On impulse, Anna canceled her plans to spend the afternoon trying to make order out of the chaos in the Emergency Medical Supply cabinet. She vaulted the stone wall and let herself into the paddock from the side gate.

Karl Johnson, a currycomb lost in his enormous hand, was grooming Gideon, a big chocolate-colored quarter horse with one white foot. Karl looked like an almost classic ogre from out of a children's fairy tale. Six-foot-six inches tall, he weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds.

Wiry reddish-brown hair curled out from nose, ears, the top of his uniform shirt, and sprang from his massive skull. His nose was pug to the point of absurdity, as if a button had been sewn on the square lumpy face when the real nose had been lost.

Anna guessed Karl to be thirty-one or -two at most but he'd been with Guadalupe forever. He'd worked trails, fought fire-he was even a clerk-typist for a couple of years. Up until eighteen months before, he'd held Anna's job. Then he'd been Acting Dog Canyon Ranger until Sheila had been hired on. After that Karl had transferred to Roads and Trails. The gossip was he was sulking because they'd not given him the Dog Canyon position.

Now he took care of the stock. Broad shoulders obscuring half the length of Gideon's back, he carefully curried the animal's hide. The huge man was whistling "If I only had a brain..."

Anna laughed, her impotent anger momentarily lost.

Karl jumped as if she'd poked him with a cattle prod and Gideon shied in sympathy.

"Sorry," Anna apologized, "I thought you'd heard me come up."

"I was thinking," Karl said as if that explained things. "You going riding?"

"I thought I would. Are you taking Gideon out?" She was just asking to be polite. Karl wouldn't ride. And he wouldn't say why. It was that that had probably cost him the Dog Canyon job. Like everyone else, Anna assumed he was afraid to get on the horses.

Karl shook his head. "Just combing him. They're still nervous. That lightning a few nights ago got 'em jumpy. It scared me too," he addressed the horse and Gideon rotated one ear back to listen. "It's nothing to be embarrassed about. Lookie here," he said to Anna and picked up Gideon's right front hoof. In Karl's hand it looked delicate, almost like a deer's hoof. A crack ran up from the bottom to half an inch below the quick.