Hunting Season (28 page)

What Randy had done was louse up one interview and produce a list of names that were so patently worthless Anna and Clintus had agreed to waste no time on them and quietly consigned them to the wastebasket.

Thigpen wasn't done. The loose skin under his eyes quivered with barely contained emotion. Anger, Anna suspected. It was what he was good at. She waited.

Randy finally reached the bone of contention he wanted to pick and began gnawing on it. "You interviewed Martin Crowley without me," he said, undecided between sulleness and outright aggression.

"It was your day off," Anna replied mildly.

His gaze finally came up from his breakfast and his eyes locked on hers.

"You could have waited."

She'd've been more impressed if he'd said, "I could have come in on my day off." His statement deserved no reply and she made none.

Avoiding anything so provocative as prolonged eye contact, she studied her field ranger. Try as she might, it was hard to picture the fastidious Mrs. Davidson taking him to her bosom as a confidant. Still, Randy was the only park service employee she could think of who had anything to gain—and one could never underestimate the allure of petty revenge as a perceived gain—by trashing her professional reputation. Paul said his wife suggested her information had come from higher up, maybe Tupelo. Nobody at headquarters knew Anna well enough personally to hate her or to be able to dish the dirt on her with any accuracy. Barth did. Like Randy, he worked with her most days. That thought was so repugnant she shoved it under the rubble in the back of her mind. She and Barth had had their problems when she'd first come on board, but she liked to believe they'd reached a place of mutual respect bordering on friendship.

The coffee pot announced it was done by a strangled gurgle. Doors slamming and muted voices let her know that the maintenance men had arrived at the shop attached to their offices.

She waited a little longer. When it was clear Thigpen had nothing else to add, she said, "Would you like a report on the Crowley interview?"

"I guess." After the fuss he'd made he sounded singularly uninterested. As she began to tell him, he unwrapped his emergency backup breakfast and started stuffing it under his brush of mustache. Watching the greasy muffin crumbs lodge in the stiff hairs, Anna found herself hoping he'd spent the weekend in Bovina with his mistress of long standing. The man's poor wife deserved a break.

"Crowley's a dead end," Randy said when she'd finished. "That whole poker thing's been a waste of time; Doyce never showed. Obviously he went elsewhere with somebody and got himself killed. You and Sheriff Jones have got us barking up the wrong tree."

"What else have we got?" Anna asked reasonably.

"The list," Randy said. "We never started checking out that list of names I came up with."

"Good point. Why don't you get on that today. You're our local man in Natchez."

Thigpen glared at her as if he'd been trapped, which he had. "What're you going to do today?" The question sounded like an accusation.

Anna got up. The conversation was over as far as she was concerned. She wanted to end it while she still retained a bit of the glow from the previous night. "Don't know yet," she said. "The day's still young."

"You don't have a car," Thigpen's voice pursued her into her office.

"I'll think of something."

"You better ride with me."

"I may just do that," Anna lied. She wanted to close her door on the conversation but knew to do so would send a message of retreat so she let it open, the fumes of sausage fat leaking in along with Randy's ill will. He wouldn't be going anywhere soon, and he would probably make sure, if he could, that she didn't go anywhere without him. Maybe he was afraid she'd catch Doyce's murderer all by herself and the blaze of glory he hoped to retire in seventy-three days would be snatched from his legacy.

As the weather continued nasty, and no new leads presented, she wasn't averse to remaining in a warm dry office catching up on the paperwork.

The first order of business was dealing with the aftermath of having her car totaled. For convenience and safety, the wreck had been towed to the ranger station at Mt. Locust. National Park Service cars, like many pieces of government equipment, were leased from the Government Services Administration. GSA, which had a yard in Jackson, Mississippi, would send someone down for the car and dispose of it as they saw fit.

Anna placed a call to them and another to the chief ranger's secretary in Tupelo to keep John Brown apprised of the incident and set the wheels in motion to get another vehicle. The next thirty minutes were dedicated to writing the "accident" report. The forms for accidents, incidents and criminal incidents were different. There was no question that this fell into the third category. Nothing about the destruction of her Crown Vic had been accidental.

By half past nine the necessary forms were completed and a car had been found for her. A new one would be ordered from GSA, but it would be a week or ten days before it was delivered. Till then she would drive a patrol car from the Kosciusko District north of Steve Stilwell's on the other side of Jackson. The district ranger there had a position yet to be filled. Until it was, there was an extra vehicle. It would be driven down to Port Gibson later that day.

She drew up the schedules for the upcoming two weeks. Aware that she was taking the coward's way out, she meticulously gave Randy everything he wanted: late shift Fridays and Saturdays, Sundays so he could get time and a half, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. With barely ten weeks left to deal with the man, she didn't want to give him any excuse to make more mischief for her. Seventy-three days. Anna smiled. Randy wasn't the only one counting the days till his retirement. Thanksgiving, a week away, made scheduling a bit trickier. Barth would want to be home with his family. Randy would want to be home with the turkey. That left only her to work the holiday. Anna preferred it that way. Ever since Zach had died and she'd joined the park service, she'd managed to work every Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years and Valentine's Day. If one couldn't be snuggled in with one's own family, arresting someone else's was the next best thing.

When it was completed, Anna printed the schedule and went into the outer office to use the copy machine. Randy, looking mildly guilty, probably annoyed at himself for being caught actually working, stood near the copier tamping a stack of fresh copies into alignment.

"In the middle of something?" Anna asked politely.

"Done," he said. "It's all yours." Turning a vast acreage of backside to her, he crossed to his desk and secreted the pile of papers in a side drawer.

Anna opened the copier. "Forgot your original." Randy grunted like a stuck hog.

She pulled out the page he'd been reproducing to hand it to him. When she turned it over Randy's face was staring up at her in black and white. Emblazoned underneath was randall thigpen for sheriff.

EXPERIENCE COUNTS.

"What's this?" she asked.

Randy looked sheepish for a second, then whatever guilt he felt hardened into a self-righteous mask of entitlement.

He stepped away from the desk and took the paper from Anna's hand to put it in the drawer with two or three hundred other like flyers printed at government expense, on a government machine, on the taxpayers' time.

"I intend to pay for it, a nickel a page like at Office Depot. I just had no time to get into town to do it."

He lied. He'd been with the service long enough to know there was no system in place for collecting the nickels of pilfering employees. Not only that, but government employees were forbidden to run for elected office. The potential for conflict of interest was too great, as was the possibility of undue influence being used for leverage.

Anna waited for Randy to say something. When he finally did, she was surprised at his demeanor. It wasn't exactly contrite, but he was striving manfully for humility, and though his natural truculence poked through the thin places, he was nearly succeeding.

"I know it's against regulations technically. But I'm going to be shed of this place in a couple months so there'd be no big overlap."

He was right and he was wrong.

"I'm fifty-six," he went on when she said nothing. "If I miss this election I'll be sixty before the chance rolls around again. I know I'm not in the best of shape. I'll probably be an old man at sixty."

Listening to him, Anna realized she was hearing his real voice for the first time. The overlays he used to hide behind, intimidate and blend in had fallen away. The adopted Southern accent was gone, leaving a trace of his childhood in Jersey. Bluster, bravado and heartiness were stripped away. At long last Randy Thigpen pared down to the bare bones of his truths: he was fat, he wasn't getting any younger and he wanted to be the sheriff of Adams County in his retirement.

Honesty, Anna could respect, even—or perhaps especially—from the likes of Randall Thigpen. "You got any leave time built up?" With leave time tacked on he could retire early.

"No."

"Sick leave?"

"Tons."

"We'll work something out. Till then keep this stuff out of my sight and use the copier at the Piggly Wiggly if you have to."

Thigpen smiled. This too was genuine and, because of that, damn rare. It was charming. For a moment Anna allowed herself to almost like the man.

As if in payment for the favor, Randy asked, "What happened last night? I mean, I got the gist of it through the grapevine this morning but no details."

This was the first interest he had shown in her near-death experience. A normal coworker would have been hovering around the coffee- pot when she walked in, waiting for the news. Rangers loved stories, especially their own. Randy had either subverted this natural urge for tribal gossip to his own need to gripe about being left out of the Crowley interview and run copies of his campaign poster, or he genuinely didn't care enough about her continued existence even to the extent of mild curiosity. Indifference was colder even than hatred.

"Glad you asked," she said honestly and told him how the destruction of her vehicle had come about. He laughed a little more than she would have liked but almost made up for it by appearing impressed by her clever snaking-out in the dark on the passenger side, a fortuitous bit of paranoia that had saved her skin.

Randy'd seesawed from anger when she first arrived because he'd missed the Crowley interview to nearly honest humility when caught making campaign posters. Now that her story was told, he'd returned to the role he'd chosen for himself earlier in the week; the new leaf was again in evidence.

Anna watched for a moment, waiting to see if any more emotional about-faces were in the offing, but Thigpen had stabilized in the helpful ranger mode.

The act of having a simple conversation with Randy was tiring. Muscles used only by middle managers and tightrope walkers were constantly taxed. The need to be alone, or at least away from Randy, became paramount. With a sigh she tried to disguise as a yawn, Anna stood, retrieved her duty belt and headed resolutely for the door into the garage where the pumper truck was housed.

"Need a lift to Mt. Locust?"

"I thought I'd take the pumper truck," Anna said. "It's time it was given a run. This is as good an excuse as any."

"I took it out for a run the other day." Randy rose reaching for his duty belt. "Everything's just peachy. I'll take you on down to Mt. Locust. I'd kinda like to see the wreck by the light of day."

Had Anna been a betting woman she would have put a month's salary on the fact that Randy hadn't taken the pumper truck out "the other day"—or any day since she'd conic to the Trace. That sort of routine activity wasn't logged so there was no way to prove it. To call him on the lie would only cause him to lie again. Why, Anna couldn't guess. Maybe he found her company too irresistible to pass up.

"I'm not going to Mt. Locust." Anna changed plans instantly. "Thought I'd go on down to Natchez, have another talk with Raymond Barnette."

Randy lost interest. "I don't have time to go all the way to Natchez," he said and returned to the R & R catalogue, his sudden helpfulness evaporating.

Anna'd hoped he'd say that but wondered what had killed his stated desire. Driving the pumper truck into the gloomy day, she contemplated why interviewing Raymond Barnette was of so little interest to Thigpen. He'd been avid about the interviews of the poker players and the physical examination of the meadow. He'd been pointedly indifferent to the incident where her car was crushed and, now, totally unconcerned about participating in further congress with the undertaker. Was he merely being capricious or did he know something she didn't? And if so, what?

Most of the way to Natchez she pondered those questions She also spent mental time on the odious fact that someone had tried to kill her. The night, the rain, then Paul's revelation and the intimate and most welcome celebration that followed had conspired to make the assault on her patrol vehicle seem almost a dream. Till she found herself driving with one eye on the rearview mirror, starting to sweat every time a pickup truck appeared there, she hadn't been fully aware of the impact the attack had on her.

Just past the bridge where the incident occurred, she pulled two of the pumper truck's wheels off the road and parked.