"They must have dropped that charge."
"I wish I'd seen the booking photos."
For a moment they stood staring at their feet. Soot-covered boots had trampled the snow into a gritty pack. Anna's toes were growing cold and the heat she'd generated on the expedition to find Hamlin had turned to a fine sheen of sweat rapidly chilling her skin. Without food it would become increasingly difficult to stay warm. A furnace had to have fuel to burn.
"Damn it." She kicked a grubby clod of snow.
"Fuck," Lindstrom said, and kicked it a second time. "Validating your feelings."
Anna nodded absently.
"Things are looking pretty grim for our intrepid band of adventurers, are they not?"
"Fair to middlin' grim," Anna agreed. "It sounds like we may be stuck here at least another twenty-four hours, maybe more."
"Unless I'm given absolution for obstructing."
"And flaunting. So long as the snow lasts water is not a problem. No food, fear, cold, Dr. Death sleazing around in everybody's mind."
"Exposure," Lindstrom said. "Shock."
"Pudding, Barnaby, pudding!"
Lindstrom looked alarmed, then concerned as he studied Anna for incipient signs of insanity.
It annoyed her. "The Matchmaker," she snapped. "Hello Dolly. 'Pudding' was the code word agreed upon so the boy from Yonkers would know when he was having a bona fide adventure. This is an adventure."
"What tipped you off?"
"Extreme discomfort." Anna shook free of self-pity, a physical act marked by a shrug and a shudder. "We're going to be fine. We focus on keeping everybody warm, hydrated and calm. That's all we've got to do."
"I've got a barn! We could turn it into a burn ward!"
Lindstrom said in such a wonderful imitation of Andy Hardy Anna felt an uncharacteristic surge of optimism.
"Hey! Hey, you guys! I've been trying to reach you on the radio for five minutes." Hugh Pepperdine lumbered through the snow, his face red and gleaming with sweat. On his back was his yellow pack.
"What do you bet he's got food in it?" Lindstrom said.
"Failing that we could always eat him," Anna replied.
Gasping for air, Pepperdine came up beside them. "You gotta monitor your radio." He cocked a finger pistol-like at Anna. "You ought to know that."
Hugh was having way too much fun handing out advice and it crossed Anna's mind to snub him but she didn't. She was too hungry, too tired and too cranky. A snub might set off a chain reaction she'd regret. "Saving batteries," she said pleasantly.
Hugh pulled a radio from the pocket of his brush jacket. "Confiscated this from Howard. He's not law enforcement. I heard Base," he puffed. "I was about halfway up the hill. You should have waited till I got here. Didn't you hear him ask if you were clear to copy?" Pepperdine elaborately avoided looking at Lindstrom. This was secret cop stuff.
Anna was irritated on two counts: one, he was right, and two, he was Pepperdine. "What makes you think I'd've been clear to copy with you listening?"
Hugh ignored that. "What are we going to do about Gonzales? I've had my eye on him. I knew something was hinky. Assault on a federal officer. I go to the mat for my people."
Hot air pumped Pepperdine's ego with each word. He literally puffed up, the chest going out, the belly in.
"Nothing," Anna said flatly. She waited a moment for that to soak in. When Pepperdine opened his mouth to argue, she said again: "Nothing. We are not going to do anything. We are going to stay warm and dry and calm. We will be polite and helpful and when we get out of here Lawrence Gonzales will be the county sheriff's problem."
Hugh looked appalled. "He assaults a federal officer, murders Len and we're supposed to look the other way. That's pretty shoddy police work, Anna. Gonzales could just walk out of here anytime."
"That's right. And we don't know if he had anything to do with Nims." Anna was trying to drill some kind of sense into Hugh Pepperdine but had the feeling she was making no headway. Armed with a little information against his fellows and a little authority from the badge at home on his dresser, Pepperdine was learning that power corrupts.
"I think we ought to arrest the dude."
Dude. Anna doubted Hugh had ever used the word before in his life. He seemed fairly pleased with the effect until Lindstrom echoed "Dooo-oowd" in diphthong-laden valley speak.
"Arrest him with what?" Anna asked reasonably. "And do what with him? Tie him to a snag with our belts? Lawrence may not want to be arrested. Have you got some sort of black-belt, kung-fu training I don't know about? We've been working, sleeping and eating with the guy for two weeks. Nobody seems to have suffered overmuch."
"Nims," Pepperdine said.
"We don't know that. Leave sleeping dogs lie. And give Howard his radio back."
Pepperdine hugged the Motorola protectively against his chest. "Howard's not law enforcement. It's just you and me."
"Jennifer's law enforcement," Lindstrom pointed out.
"She hasn't been to FLETC," Hugh snapped.
FLETC was the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia where all permanent law enforcement rangers with the National Park Service went for training. Pepperdine was so fresh from its hallowed halls he was going to be a major pain in the ass. Anna suppressed a sigh.
"We'll work things out," she said. "You want a radio? Take mine."
Forgetting his trek up the hill had been to replace the radio with the dying battery, he snatched it eagerly, as if it was somehow invested with special authority. Immediately he switched it on and stowed it in his pocket. Anna clicked off the one she'd traded for, saving the battery.
When the three of them reached the wash, Anna told Stephen and Hugh to inform the others of the rescue efforts, cautioned Hugh to keep his mouth shut about the background checks and excused herself to do "girl things."
She wanted another look at the body.
ANNA ROCKED BACK on her heels and sat quietly in the snow. Flakes, fine as silt, continued to drift from the air, more as if they were formed from the matrix of fog than falling from a distant cloud. Light was evenly spread, air and snow uniformly glowing. There were no shadows.
The shelter they'd used to cover Leonard Nims's body had been disturbed, the snow shaken off when the aluminum cloth had been peeled back. Someone had been messing with the corpse.
Anna surmised someone rather than something not because all animals had perished in the fire—many would have survived—but because there were heavy, human, fire-booted tracks. They neatly skirted a car-sized boulder in the stream bed as if this obvious sidetrack could obscure their origin. The trail came from the bivouac, stomped around the body and returned the way it had come.
Something had been removed or something added to the scene: incriminating evidence taken or misleading evidence planted. Cop-thinking, Anna realized. The obvious was more human and mundane: curiosity. Somebody just wanting to see the dead guy. Cheap thrills. The fact that she'd said the corpse was not to be visited notwithstanding. Who was she? Some lady EMT with the word "Security" typed in after her name on her red-dog, the term used to describe the pink paper firefighters' time was recorded on. Out here the trappings of rank were stripped away. Nature was a great equalizer.
By the look of the drift in the tracks, they were several hours old. More than that Anna couldn't tell. Everyone but Paula wore fire boots. The tracks looked too big to be Jennifer's but Anna wouldn't even swear to that.
Having learned all she could from the outside, Anna moved to unveil the body. Nims had been dead sixteen to eighteen hours. With rigor mortis and the cold, his body was stiff as a board. Where it wasn't black, the skin was a dirty gray. Len's right cheek was dark and mottled. Blood, no longer moved by his heart, had settled in postmortem lividity. The blue eyes were still open hut the orbs had begun to dry and they no longer had that startling brightness. Anna tried to close the lids with a gentle sweep of her hand the way she'd seen it done in a thousand movies but they wouldn't stay down. She found herself pressing too hard, felt tissue give beneath her fingers and made herself stop.
With the cold, the hunger, the isolation, a scary edge was being neared. That place where nightmares and reality become indistinguishable. They were all somewhere in the neighborhood of that chasm. Some closer than others. Anna rocked back on her haunches, made herself look away from the body and let the peaceful desolation of the landscape calm her febrile mind.
There were times it was not good to be too much alone, she thought, and wished she'd made Stephen come with her.
At length her brain settled and she pushed on.
The footprints were most plentiful behind Nims's right shoulder and slightly to the rear. Anna moved to stand in the same place, leaned down and rolled the corpse back and toward her. It came up all of a piece and was surprisingly heavy. Sand beneath the body was compressed into the shape of chest and limbs as if Nims had tried to squeeze himself into the earth to escape the fire or his assailant. A thin layer of ice had formed where the body's heat, leached out slowly in the hours after death, had melted blown snow. Nims should have been frozen to the ground but whoever had stood here before had rolled the corpse up just as she was doing and rifled the pockets of the shirt. The button flaps were undone and the fabric pulled away from the body where ice had once adhered it to the flesh.
Since Anna had failed to search the corpse when they'd first found it, she could only surmise something had been taken rather than left. Cursing herself for a fool, she made a careful search of the body. Compass in the left shirt pocket. Right pocket empty. Len carried a leather knife sheath on his belt beneath his left arm. The sheath was empty. Dollars to doughnuts the knife was in his ribs, Anna thought. The handle of the weapon was of metal with holes cut out either for weight or style. By the size of the hilt and sheath, the blade was close to six inches long. Judging from the angle, the point of the weapon had been driven into the heart. There were no signs of a struggle.
Nims's trouser pockets yielded nothing of a telling nature: lint, Chap Stick, gum, a spare handkerchief. Somewhere along the line he'd shed his yellow pack—probably as he fled the fire— but the square canvas envelope that housed his fire shelter was still on his webbed belt.
The snap was closed and it struck Anna as peculiar. She was willing to bet there wasn't a person among them who'd taken the time to resnap the case after deploying their shelter. She opened it and looked inside, not sure what, if anything, she expected to find. It was empty but for a handful of crumbs. On a hunch she put one on the tip of her tongue: a cookie crumb. A number of things fell into place. When Anna returned to their bivouac she would count the shelters but she knew there would be only eight.
Nims might not share his shelter to save another's life but not everyone was so single-minded. In the 1980s, Anna remembered, winds had snatched a fire shelter from a man's hands. His buddy had made him lie beneath him, sharing his own shelter. Both men survived.
The crumbs in Len's shelter envelope: too lazy to carry the added weight of the aluminum tent, he had probably jettisoned it in favor of extra food. Just as nature was about to cull the idiot from the gene pool, someone had taken pity and let Nims into their shake 'n' bake. That would account for the deep depression in the sand beneath the corpse. Someone had lain on top of him.
Why save a man's life at the risk of one's own just to stick a knife between his ribs? Surely it would be simpler to let him burn to death? No investigation, no prosecution; just one little secret to carry to the grave.
Unless Len forced himself on his benefactor.
No signs of a struggle, Anna reminded herself. With the firestorm bearing down it would have required utmost cooperation to survive.
An impulse killing, then. Something had happened in the shelter during the storm that had caused savior to turn executioner, driving Nims's own knife into his heart.
Anna remembered trying to breathe, to think, not to think, to remember the pledge of allegiance and keep her pinky fingers from being roasted. She doubted she could have focused on anybody else long enough to bother killing them.
She pulled the shelter back over the corpse. Nims's left hand with the blood-encrusted glove protruded from beneath the covering, reaching out as if for help. Anna grabbed the thumb and pulled. The glove slipped from the dead hand. She remembered noting when he'd come to the medical tent how small his feet were. His hands, too, were delicate and well formed. On a corpse they were unpleasantly human, touching. Anna wished she could tuck the hand under the tarp but it would mean breaking the arm and she wasn't up for that. Feeling she'd done something irreverent, she tugged the glove back in place.
The bloody glove argued against the instantaneous death other factors pointed to. To soak the glove so completely, Nims must have grabbed at the knife as it went in. Anna tried reaching her left armpit with her left hand. It was devilishly awkward but in great pain or fear might have been accomplished.
