Hunting Season (32 page)

Stopping, she eased her Mag light from its leather holder and switched it on. Nothing yet moved within range. Never good to run from creatures born and bred for the chase. Till the dog—if it was a dog and not a collared alligator, raccoon or some other form of Crowley eccentricity—proved itself amiable, Anna took the pepper spray from her belt and waited. The jingle and splash was joined by a noise humans make only when indulging in a particularly sensual yawn, a cross between a whine and groan made in the back of the throat.

This same utterance from a dog invariably offered obsequious friendship and an invitation to play. Thus announcing himself, the animal wagged into the narrow beam of her flash. Putting away the pepper spray, Anna laughed, the unashamed friendliness of the puppy tickling her. It wasn't a big dog and, if behavior was any indication, not more than six or seven months old. The fur was moplike and curly, the eyes round and bright and black.

"Hey, buddy," Anna said, squatting on her heels. "You look like Benji's understudy. Where did you come from?"

Taken to unimaginable heights of ecstasy by the sound of her voice, the little creature wiggled all over, from blunt snout to feathery tail.

"What have you got there?" she asked in a voice only furry creatures ever heard her use. The puppy had a disreputable object in his mouth that he was alternately banging against her leg and dancing away with in an invitation to what, with a puppy, could evolve into an endless and soggy game of fetch.

He wriggled close again, into the circle of the flashlight, and Anna saw what it was: the hoof and anklebone of a deer. A treat Martin had probably saved for him from his most recent kill, a part of which had been stolen from the trunk of the ruined patrol car. The kill that Jerri had refused to give Anna another sample of.

"Come here, come on boy," Anna cajoled. The puppy pranced closer and she grabbed the hoof. There followed an undignified tug-of-war, Anna kneeling in the water on the front walk, the puppy growling happily and digging muddy paws into the brown winter grass.

Being the larger and more determined animal, Anna won. The puppy scampered off into the dark and barked, urging Anna to throw it.

Ignoring his importuning, she examined it under the light of her flash. Bits of hide and fragments of rotting flesh still adhered to the bone. It would suffice.

The puppy woofed again. "Sorry, little fella," Anna apologized. "I need this." Feeling more guilty than a sane person ought to, she carried her ill-gotten gains to the car.

The frustration of this investigation had brought her to new lows. Not only was she harassing women in the night, she was stealing from puppies.

16

 Anna finished her day. She didn't follow her usual widowed habit of sitting with her cat on her lap reading a book; she chatted on the phone. Not with her sister. With her boyfriend. She and Paul had entered into that time, usually sadly foreshortened, where the littles of the other's life are endlessly fascinating. Compassion flowed for the smallest affronts to the lover's safety or mental well-being. Jokes brought laughter even if they weren't funny but simply because they were shared. The phone was clung to, pressed to the ear, not because there was anything more to say but because the connection was too delicious to be broken.

Anna was old enough and cynical enough to step outside herself and see the meaningless babble for what it was. She was happy enough and young enough to watch this reversion to adolescence with a tolerant smile and a certain pride that Zach's death had left enough of her heart behind that she was still capable of it.

Before she went to bed, a touch of healthy paranoia pushed its way into the euphoria induced by twenty minutes of Paul Davidson whispering in her ear. Walking Taco through the campground—his constitutional, her duty—she carried her service weapon in the pocket of her raincoat.

Back at her house she took the hoof she'd wrested from the puppy's jaw and the evidence bag with its body fluids and maggots from the trunk of her car and put it in her refrigerator for safe keeping.

Before bed, she locked her doors and windows.

 The phone ringing dragged her out of a pleasant dream a few minutes after midnight. Dislodging Piedmont from her chest and receiving a claw in the shoulder for her disservice, she stumbled for the phone in the hall. All America had cordless phones and cellulars. The National Park Service, consistently behind the technological curve, had yet to graduate from a black phone tethered to a wall jack. As soon as she answered the caller hung up.

Naked, cold and thoroughly awake, she stood in the dark, Taco, ever helpful, licking the backs of her knees. The calls, the hanging up, had been going on for several weeks. Anna'd written it off to the vagaries of late-night dialers. The truck incident fresh in mind, she wondered if the calls were not separate meaningless incidents but a way of discerning her whereabouts.

Thinking back, she was pretty sure the mystery calls came on or near the weekends. Tonight was Thursday night. Anna worked late Sunday and Wednesday. Barth had night shift Monday and Tuesday. Friday and Saturday had been claimed by Randy. Thursdays were a hole in the schedule.

Doyce Barnette had been killed and his body dumped at Mt. Locust on a Saturday night. Had she received a call that night? Anna couldn't remember. Was someone calling, making sure the rangers were snugged up safe in their beds so they could murder old fat men with impunity? Unlikely. Poachers? That was closer to the mark. Locals might know Thursday nights were uncovered. They might also know Randy Thigpen worked Fridays and Saturdays and that he could be counted on to be warm and dry in the district office making personal phone calls and reading paperback novels rather than patrolling the roads. Randy had recently moved to Natchez. He wanted to be sheriff, wanted to be a big man around town. It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that he would turn a blind eye to his future constituents' misdemeanors in the hope of currying favor.

Taco tried his best to get Anna to trip over him while she rechecked the locks. Before she went back to sleep, she put her nine-millimeter on the nightstand.

 The following morning two messages awaited her on the office answering machine. Both were from Sheriff Jones. Anna rang him at his office. The dispatcher said he was out but she was to tell Anna when she called that they'd had a break in the hunt for the burgundy pickup. A 1978 Ford matching that description was registered to a Quantus Elfman in Natchez. Clintus and Andre had driven out to the Elfman farm to question the man.

Anna thanked her and rang off. For a minute or more she considered calling Randy. He wasn't on the schedule till 4 p.m., but she didn't relish him jumping down her throat again because the investigation went on even when he was off duty. In the end she decided not to. Giving in was the coward's way out and, much as she wished it didn't, that rankled more than the scene she could expect from her field ranger.

The next order of business was calling Kate Kendall of the United States Geological Survey, in Glacier/Waterton National Peace Park on the border of Montana and Canada. The previous summer Anna had had the privilege of working with Kate on a groundbreaking DNA project used to identify and study the grizzly bear population in the park.

From Kate she got the information she needed and the address of the lab at the University of Idaho where the DNA samples for animals were analyzed. Kate assured her that the fluids and maggots from the deer skull and the hoof and ankle bone she'd taken from the Crowley's dog should be sufficient for the extraction of samples.

Telling no one what she was doing, Anna packaged the body parts and Fed-Exed them to the lab. Analysis would cost one hundred fourteen dollars. She paid for it out of her own pocket. Though Anna's salary wasn't as high as many thought it should be, she had been able to set quite a bit aside. When one had no life, one had relatively few expenses. If all went well, that could change. Already she was planning a clothes shopping trip to the mall on her next lieu day. One of romance's hidden costs. The lab expenditure had not been cleared with Tupelo, and she would probably have a fight on her hands when she tried to get reimbursed. It was her hope that, when the time came, the evidence would have proved sufficiently useful to make it worth the government's while.

Having left the Fed Ex office—actually a counter near the pharmacy in the back of Port Gibson Drug and Sundries that provided money orders and faxes, collected gas and water bills and cashed employment checks as well as handling Federal Express packages—Anna turned her car toward Natchez. The storm that crouched over the South was being pushed out by a high-pressure zone from the Northwest. Anna could see a line of blue-black arcing across the sky in a textbook example of an approaching front. Temperatures were dropping fast. According to the weatherman on the radio it would be in the twenties by midnight with a chance of sleet or snow. Anna didn't much like the cold but the prospect of snow was exciting. Since coming to Mississippi, she found she missed waking up in the morning and finding the world miraculously transformed into a clean and glittering place as cold and untouched as her own warped vision of heaven: a wonderful place to visit...

The unsettled weather helped her think. Steve Stilwell linking the assault on her to the poachers, then finding a person or persons had jimmied the smashed trunk and stolen the deer meat and skull, forged the first link in the chain of evidence suggesting the two were connected. If made by the poachers, the attempt on her life by the truck shed a different light on the mad-dog pursuit of her through the woods. It suggested that Randy had been wrong; they weren't good old boys having a little fun. They wanted her dead. Had the chase through the woods been the only incident, Anna would have thought little of it; opportunism, deadly but not sustained, an impulse to the kill requiring little in the way of planning or motive. When linked to the truck battering her car, the woodland chase lost any vestige of a one-time insanity. For two attempts to be made there had to be a motive greater than getting nailed for poaching. Putting the poachers together with the death of Doyce unloosed images she'd filed away as useless: the strange details of the autopsy report, the deer stand so beautifully swept and neatly repaired. One glaring anomaly bothered her: the place and the way the body had been "disposed" of, laid out in a public place with shameful implications underlined by the circling of a religious text pointing toward depths of depravity deeper even than those suggested by the semi-nudity.

At the roadside parallel to the meadow where the deer stand was built, Anna pulled over. Letting the engine idle so she could continue to enjoy the heat, she took the folder with Doyce Barnette's autopsy report from her briefcase and began rereading it.

The connection, tenuous at best, was there. No motive could be discerned, but if Anna uncovered the "how" of the crime, the "who" and "why" should follow, particularly if more than one individual was involved. Honor among thieves was pretty much a myth.

Anna changed shoes, trading her uniform boots for sneakers, took a length of sturdy yellow rope from the trunk and trudged the now familiar route across the meadow. Wind, growing ever colder, found the chinks in her Gore-Tex armor and poked icy fingers under her collar. Still, it was good to be out of doors and on her own. Nature could be benign, dramatic, deadly—any of a seemingly endless array of faces—but all of them were beautiful.

Black with rain, skeletal without their summer dress of leaves, branches raked at the dark sky, beckoning the winds that drove the front. The meadow grasses, too sodden and cold to move, lay in tawny shades, the brown of oak leaves lacing the edges near the woods. The air was not yet cold enough to be odorless, and on the gusting wind, Anna smelled the life sleeping beneath the ground and a faint breath of woodsmoke from where some soul kept the home fires burning.

The deer stand was as bleak and lifeless as the branches overhead. The new wood where the railing had been repaired was rapidly graying to match the rest. There'd been so much precipitation in the last week that for a moment Anna despaired. The minute traces she hoped to find might have been washed away.

Though she'd visited the place recently, the stand was higher than Anna remembered, close to twenty feet from platform to ground, twenty-four from the top of the railing. The old pecan it was built against was such a grand tree it dwarfed things merely human and confused the sense of scale.

Anna dropped the rope and the scurvy World War II knapsack she used to house her field investigation tools. From the sack she took an oversized magnifying glass worthy of Sherlock Holmes that she'd cannibalized from her Oxford English Dictionary set.

Wishing she had more light to work by, she set about examining first the tree and then the bottom of an angled two-by-four attached to the pecan by tenpenny nails driven into the flesh of the living plant to support the platform. The bark and the dead wood of the two-by-four were blackened and swollen from days of rain. Either water had erased the traces she sought or they'd never been there in the first place. After fifteen minutes of hoping and straining her eyes in the strange half-light preceding the storm, she gave up and carried knapsack and rope around to the stairs at the rear of the stand.

Deer stands, like duck blinds, icefishing huts and other structures used only a few weeks each year, received little attention in the way of upkeep and repair. The third step on the narrow stair hung by a nail. Three boards had rotted through on one side of the platform. A four-foot length of warping one-by-twelve had been thrown over them to provide a walkway. The railing on the north and backside of the stand was broken.