Hunting Season (31 page)

All through the maze of speculation and retribution that they wandered, Stilwell maintained an undercurrent of gleeful superiority. Anna sensed, because he so clearly meant her to, that he knew something she didn't. Because he was so smug about it, she suspected it had nothing to do with murder and mayhem but was personal.

Rather than reassuring her, that increased her sense of disquiet. She wasted a lot of energy wondering what he was up to. By the hints he dropped she could tell he wanted her to try and wheedle it out of him. Her curiosity was such she would have dedicated herself to cajolery if she'd believed it would work, but Stilwell was having way too good a time to tell his secret. She chose not to give him the satisfaction of watching her fail.

As they neared North Jackson with its plethora of trendy eateries on County Line Road, Anna's stomach reminded her it was nearing suppertime. Once the idea was conceived it took over. A nice dinner in good company would be an excellent way to cleanse her soul of the niggling loneliness and insecurity that had been dogging her the past week. "Want to get a bite to cat?" she asked.

"Can't," Steve said. "I've got a hot date."

He didn't even have the decency to sound disappointed.

"On a weeknight?" she asked with some asperity, then had to smile because she heard her mother in her own words.

"When sweeping a woman off her dainty little feet, the key is consistency and, above all, persistence. Women can't resist perseverance. Taps into two of their driving forces: guilt and vanity."

Steve was so pleased with himself and so right Anna wanted to punch him. Seat belts and the spurious dignity of middle age kept her from it.

"Who is the lucky lady?"

"Wouldn't you like to know," Steve said delightedly.

She would but would never lower herself to ask.

He suffered through the silence for less than a minute. "A mutual friend," he said finally, trying to tease her back into the game.

Anna said nothing. The only mutual friends they had were large, armed men. "You're gay and at long last throwing wide the closet door?"

Congratulating herself on social heroics, Anna turned down his offer of a consolation prize consisting of a drink of single malt scotch served in a coffee mug.

Partway down Interstate Two-twenty, the freeway that, until the fifteen-mile stretch of scenic parkway between Clinton and Ridge-land was completed, connected the northern portion of the Trace to the southern end, she remembered the dead deer parts she'd been ferrying when the killer truck appeared in her rearview mirror. They were the sole reason she'd been on the road the previous night. The excitement of the crash with its aftermath of report writing had pushed it from her mind.

General Services Administration had a center in Jackson. The wrecked Crown Vic would have been picked up from where she and Barth had dumped it at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station and towed there. Turning off at Medgar Evers Boulevard she wound her way into the city, reaching the GSA yard at quarter of six. Luck was with her; one employee, already working late and mildly disgruntled that he would have to stay later, pointed to where her vehicle had been unloaded. Deciding his duties did not require him to both stay late and get wet, he remained in his office as Anna squished across the yard toward the far corner of the lot. Cyclone fencing eight feet high and topped with razor wire secured an assortment of government equipment, some new, some discarded.

At the sight of her car, mangled and crushed into a wad of metal, she realized she could never have survived and was overtaken by an unwelcome frisson of pure terror. The jolt of fear was so strong she stopped and stood in the rain, willing it to pass. Occasionally law-enforcement officers lost their nerve, had to retire or go into another line of work. Experiencing the paralysis of overwhelming fear for her mortal self, Anna fully understood the phenomenon.

She'd pushed or badgered another human being to the point they wanted to pulverize her in a fist of steel. For a moment she thought about that. Pulling out the punkiness of adolescence, she shook herself. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." Arrogance and indifference; it was an old garment but it still fit.

The glare of the mercury vapor lights ringing the yard was such that Anna didn't need her flashlight. Fog clung to fences, trees and car bodies picking up and reflecting back the orangy light till she felt as if she walked inside a pumpkin.

The mirror on the passenger side was the only part of the Crown Vic that had escaped damage. Using a chunk of twisted metal picked up from the ground, she smashed the intact mirror just for the hell of it. Seven years bad luck; Anna was unmoved. She hadn't enough faith to be superstitious. Turning to more practical destruction, she bashed what remained of the safety glass from the window on the passenger side. Breaking glass was fun; watching the crystals shatter and fall glittering red-gold from a hundred facets mesmerizing. If rangering didn't work out, maybe she could get hired on at a wrecking yard.

The car's door was bent beyond opening, the metal folded inward in front of the handle. The back of the seat had been crushed until it was inches from the dashboard. The glove box had sprung open, but Anna's spare flashlight and sunglasses were still inside. Taking pains not to cut herself, she retrieved them.

To the rear of the car the trunk was open, probably popped during the crash, though she didn't remember it. The field testing kit for illegal drugs was intact. The briefcase containing her investigative paraphernalia was there, as were the road flares, though they'd been thrown from their box and scattered throughout the now peculiarly shaped trunk. Everything had been put at sixes and sevens by the repeated impacts but nothing appeared to be missing. Except the package of venison Jerri Crowley had given her and the maggot-infested doe's head she'd picked up in the meadow.

It was possible those packages, the last items tossed into the trunk, on top and unsecured, had been thrown clear of the vehicle during the crash. Possible. Anna turned on the flashlight she'd taken from the glove box and, nose inches from the metal, examined the trunk's lock. With the damage inflicted by the truck's grill it was hard to be sure, but there appeared to be several clean vertical scratches where the trunk might have been pried open after the fact. The Crown Vic spent eighteen hours unsecured outside the Mt. Locust Ranger Station. The place was deserted at night; time and privacy for a bit of car-clouting wouldn't be hard to come by. Anyone listening to the park's frequency would have known that was where the car was being towed. A good little ranger, Anna had called the information in to Tupelo at the time.

Squatting on her heels, she rocked back, staring into crooked maw of the trunk. Stilwell believed the truck assault was engineered by her poachers. Maybe he wasn't as far off the mark as she'd thought. Who but the illegal hunters would have any interest in stealing the remnants of a butchered deer?

Before meat and bone were taken, Anna'd had only a casual interest in the deer; interest based on nothing but a hunch and a guess. Given the effort to deprive her of said items, her interest heightened.

The venison steak, neatly wrapped in white butcher paper, was gone without a trace. Where the deer's head had rested on the floor there remained a stain—brain effluvia—and what looked to be two bits of flesh and three disappointed maggots.

Using her pocket knife, Anna carefully cut the carpet in a neat square around the area and slipped the carpet, maggots and all, into a paper sack from the evidence collection equipment she'd salvaged.

That done, she loaded up the items she'd chosen to keep and plodded back through the rain to tell the GSA man he could lock up and go home to his supper.

 The Crowley homestead was more or less on her way to Rocky Springs. Martin Crowley, she remembered, worked the night shift at Packard. Jerri would be home by herself. Leaving the black and peaceful lanes of the Trace, Anna followed the back roads that would take her by the Crowley place.

Rain turned to mist, mist to fog. White tendrils, putting her in mind of graveyards and Victorian novels, snaked across the road in the low places. Discretion suggested she slow to a crawl but commuters, hurrying home from work, drove like lunatics despite the lack of visibility. She was afraid if she slowed to a safe speed, she'd be rear-ended, and she'd had enough of that sort of action to last a while.

Jerri answered the door at the first knock. Usually when Anna called on lone women after dark they were relieved to see it was her, a small member of their own gender and therefore no threat in the way of bodily harm or fates worse than death.

The sight of Anna in her diminutive and female aspect didn't have that calming effect on Mrs. Crowley. Since Anna'd last seen her, their budding friendship had been nipped.

"Mrs. Crowley?" Anna said, no longer comfortable with using Jerri's Christian name.

"Ranger Pigeon," Jerri returned formally. "What brings you here after working hours?"

Since Anna was in uniform, fully armed with a radio crackling at her belt, Jerri pointedly referred to her own working hours. Because she was born southern and raised right, the censure was delivered obliquely with the overlay of sugar that never quite masks the taste of the medicine.

An invitation to come in out of the rain and the cold was not forthcoming. Anna decided to force the issue. "Mind if I come in and sit a while? It's been a long day." She smiled in her best Catholic school manner and adopted what she hoped was a harmless appealing look.

"Martin's at work," Jerri said.

Anna said nothing and did her best to look pathetic and bedraggled. It wasn't a stretch for even a novice actor. Her adventures at the wrecking yard had left her clothes damp and rumpled, her hair alternately plastered to her head and curling rebelliously where it had dried in the air from the heater.

Southern hospitality triumphed over self-preservation.

"Come on in." Jerri opened the door the rest of the way. Anna stepped inside thinking that Ted Bundy would have had a field day in Mississippi.

"Can I get you a cup of coffee?" Jerri asked. Now that Anna's muddy boots had crossed her threshold, hostess duties kicked in.

Anna accepted and perched on the edge of the well-worn sofa, watching Jerri leave through the kitchen door. At home, no husband or company expected, Jerri still dressed to the teeth. Hair was high, makeup immaculate. In place of skirt and boots she wore tight new Levi's and red high-heeled mules with a scrap of jaunty boa accenting the toes.

The living room was in the same state of total disarray as it had been on Anna's previous visit. The carpet and furniture showed the depredations of kids as well as clogs. Anna wondered where the little beasts were.

Jerri reappeared with a single mug of coffee. She'd remembered Anna liked cream but she wasn't going to drink with her.

"Do you have kids?" Anna asked as she accepted the coffee. People liked to talk about their kids; Anna was striving for common ground.

"Two boys. I told you before," Jerri replied. Her tone sent the message that this was to be business only. To see how firm this stance was, Anna tried again. "Do you have a dog?" She nodded at a chew toy left in front of the fireplace.

"Outside." Jerri didn't sit but leaned her elbows on the back of her husband's Barcalounger. "Killer" she'd called him when she kissed his hair. How apt was the nickname? Anna wondered as she sipped her coffee.

"What can I do you for?" Jerri asked, her southern drawl now made of edges instead of curves.

"Actually I've come to beg a favor," Anna said.

Jerri didn't help by asking what that might be. Drumming porcelain nails silently against the fabric of the chair back, she waited.

Anna wasn't going to charm this woman against her will. Women were harder than men. They saw more, trusted less. Anna decided to get on with it. "That venison steak you gave me the other day was delicious. I've never had venison before." The last part, at least, was true. "I was hoping I could talk you out of another." Asking for food. An almost sacred request. Jerri was proof against it.

"All gone," she said. "Sorry. If Martin ever gets another deer we'll set a couple good cuts aside for you."

"To Catholic Charities in Port Gibson?"

"I don't know where he took it."

"From the grousing I hear hunting's not been all that great this year. When did Martin get lucky?"

"A week or so ago. I don't remember."

"Do you know where he got it? I could pass the information on to guys looking for a good place."

"He belongs to a hunting club."

That killed that line of inquiry. Hunt clubs were private property. The rights to hunt on them were jealously guarded and often expensive.

"Which club?" Anna asked.

"I don't know."

Jerri wasn't going to know anything and her bone-deep sense of hospitality was wearing thin.

Anna decided to leave before she was thrown out.

Jerri didn't stand in the doorway, porch light on, and watch Anna safely to her car, as was the genteel and lovely custom of these environs. She saw Anna as far as the door, probably to make sure she was really leaving, then shut it firmly a nanosecond after Anna's rear end vacated the airspace.

Halfway down the walkway to her car, feeling her way toward the whiter blob in the utter black of a rainy night in the country, Anna heard the unmistakable jingle of tags rattling on a dog's collar underscored by the delicate slurping sound of paws hurrying through flooded grass. Her experiences with Mississippi canines had been as mixed as that with the voting citizens.