Hunting Season (39 page)

She turned and walked through the sleet toward the little porchlike area that fronted the ranger station. A thin sheen of ice had formed over the concrete, and she fought for balance as her boots hit it. The door opened and Randy appeared in the flesh, never a pretty sight.

"Hey," he said cheerfully. "Clintus just called. He traced that truck you had problems with to Badger Lundstrom. Wants us to meet him there. I'm to fill you in on the way. Andre and three other deputies'll be there. I guess Clintus isn't taking any chances."

Randy skirted his vehicle and headed for Anna's patrol car. She watched him for a moment, feeling the irritation that interaction with Ranger Thigpen invariably inspired prickling under her collar. Regardless of how many leaves the man turned over she doubted he would ever change perceptibly.

Giving in to the inevitable, she shrugged. "Guess I'm driving," she announced to an invisible and sympathetic audience.

Having dug the keys from her pocket, she slid in behind the wheel and started the ignition. Letting the engine warm, she pulled up the mike to let Tupelo know where they were headed.

Randy's hand whipped out. He switched the radio off as Anna was depressing the mike key. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to cut you off like that. It's just I forgot to tell you. Clintus said to maintain radio silence. He got that from you I guess, thinking the truck driver must've been monitoring our frequency to get your location so exact."

Anger at having somebody—anybody—but especially Randy Thigpen screwing with her machinery hit Anna in a blast of sudden internal heat. Intellectually she accepted his reasoning. Clintus, when he called ten minutes earlier, had made it clear that he did not wish to discuss the Badger Lundstrom situation over the airwaves. That which ran deeper and more primitive than intellect stayed hot as new lava, and Anna chose not to respond verbally lest she expose her basic animal nature. She put the mike back on its hook, buckled her seat belt and drove sedately out the gate. Repetitious, habitual actions brought down her emotional temperature. The extent of her irritation was a clue to how tired and on edge the day—indeed the week—had left her. Not a good mind-set to carry into a potentially dangerous situation. Consciously she brought herself into the present, relaxed her body, breathed, opened her mind and let the dusty clutter of the day drift out of the corners. When she'd gained the level of calm and maturity she sought she said, "What's the plan?"

Without asking, she'd turned south when she left the ranger station, heading toward Lundstrom's residence on the outskirts of Natchez.

"Through the Adams County DMV Clintus tracked down a guy—a soybean farmer by the name of Quantas Elfman—who'd bought that truck," Randy said.

"Right. He was going to check it out,"
Anna said.

"Took him a while, but he did it. This Elfman sold it to a man runs a feed store in Utica about seven years ago. The feed-store owner traded it for two loads of metal pipe last winter."

"Badger Lundstrom provided the pipe," Anna finished for him.

"Yep. According to our feed guy Lundstrom had bought it along with a lot of other scrap an oil man was unloading when his business went belly up. Not that it matters where he got it," Randy said. "Clintus said Andre's already got Lundstrom's place staked out. Lundstrom's home. Clintus was leaving with the other deputies right after he called here."

"I'd been thinking Lundstrom for the driver of that truck made sense," Anna said.

"How so?"

It was a fair question, but the smirk beneath the words suggested Randy didn't believe her, that he thought she'd chosen to pretend previous knowledge where she had none.

Pride pricked her into sharing the suspicions she'd been keeping to herself the past twenty-four hours. "It's my guess Doyce, Badger, Herm, and Martin never played a hand of poker together. Their 'poker nights' were spent poaching from that stand by Mt. Locust. I got two samples of deer flesh, one from our meadow, one from Martin Crowley's dog. I'm betting when the DNA tests are done they'll prove to have come from the same animal."

"One man poaching a doe on federal park lands is a far cry from attempted murder," Randy said.

"There was bark under Doyce Barnette's fingernails, bark from a pecan tree. The stand is nailed to a pecan tree. And I got results back yesterday that the corpse had gunpowder residue on his hands."

"What? You figure Doyce was out hunting when he was killed? He wasn't shot."

"No," Anna said. "Cause of death was suffocation. Doyce and the boys are out hunting, illegally, up in a tree stand easily twenty feet above the ground. The stand's beat to shit but for one corner and there the railing's new, two-by-fours, spit and polish."

"So it got busted and they fixed it. I'm missing something here."

"What do guys wear in tree stands while they're hunting?"

"I give up," Randy said and laughed. "Boxers or briefs?"

Anna laughed with him, then she said, "Safety harnesses. Doyce falls or is pushed through the old rickety railing. He hangs in his harness, claws at the tree. Guy that fat, if he hangs long enough he drowns in his own fat."

"Okay, so Doyce falls. That's an accident. Why not just call nine-one-one?"

"Maybe it wasn't an accident."

"He could've been by himself."

"Not likely. And he didn't move his own corpse."

"Why not just leave him where he died?"

"Covering up that they were poaching?" Anna phrased it like a question because it was a question in her mind. Poaching deer in Mississippi was not a serious enough infraction of the law to inspire three ordinarily law-abiding men to go to such lengths to cover it up.

"Then what do you figure? The hunters get scared we're figuring it out that they had something to do with Doyce's accident and try and scare us off with that hootin' an hollerin' show. That fails. Lundstrom goes after you in a pickup truck," Randy summed up for her. "Why'd they put poor ol' Doyce on Grandma Polly's bed in his underpants?"

"I haven't worked that out yet," Anna admitted.

They drove in silence for a while. Anna concentrated on the road. Over the bridges it was icy, she could feel the Crown Vic wanting to fishtail.

Miles passed in darkness. Sleet, sluggish and black, slid in tarry trails along the side windows. They passed the meadow with the deer stand. Randy, staring out his window, stirred from his lumpish quiet to ask, "Why would Badger Lundstrom leave Doyce hang till he suffocated? Why not cut him down?"

"Why did he loose a two-ton iron pterodactyl over my head?" Anna returned. "Because he thought it would be funny. Maybe this time the joke went too far."

Randy laughed unexpectedly. "You've got to admit your scuttling away from that thing was pretty funny. Too bad it was dark. You'd of been something to see by the light of day."

By the light of day. The phrase jarred Anna on a deep and disquieting level. Suddenly it became of utmost importance that she remember where she'd heard it recently. She almost asked Randy, but a voice she seldom heard but always listened to warned her not to. The ice water that was flooding the world came into Anna's body.

Backing her foot off the accelerator, she let her mind shift up from the asphalt and open to memory. Another mile past to the sharp stinging song of tires on wet pavement before the image came to her. It was the morning after her car had been demolished. Randy had come into the office. They'd spoken of the damage they'd noted to the car body. Then Randy had said he would like to see it in the light of day.

He'd seen the wreck.

He'd not seen it by the light of day.

Randy had a park radio. He'd known where she was and what she was up to. All at once the pieces fell together.

Badger Lundstrom had not been driving the truck, or, if he had, he'd not been alone. And they were not going to his house now. There'd been no last minute call from Clintus.

Anna had been a fool. The price for that would be high.

20

 Randy was blathering on in his mellifluous voice, but she no longer heard the words. The obvious, or what should have been obvious had she not been so blind, so stupid, was slamming into her mind, being transmuted into ice water and pumped throughout her body till her bowels quivered and her extremities were numbed.

Randy demanding weekend nights. Her phone ringing after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays since...? Since hunting season had started, she realized. There was little public land in Mississippi. Hunting was done in privately owned clubs. Clubs were expensive. Badger, Martin, Herm, and Doyce were men of limited means. Randy had accommodated them, running a hunting club of his own that met on Friday and Saturday nights when no one patrolled the parkway but him. On those nights Randy must have rung Anna at home, making sure she was safely tucked in her bed and out of the way before the festivities began.

He'd not been late when she'd called for backup the night the hunters had ambushed her. He'd been early, maybe at the stand itself when she radioed. That's why they had been lying in wait when she arrived. The new leaf, the anger when she interviewed Crowley without him; Randy had wanted to be in on the investigation to control it, divert it, feed answers to his cohorts.

Anna felt an utter fool. She deserved to be smacked upside the head for it. She did not deserve to die for it. Unfortunately, for fools in law enforcement, death was too often the penalty for even minor lapses.

Slowly, she came back to herself. Only seconds had passed. She was still behind the wheel, conning the car over the slick road. Randy was still talking. Her mind cleared of self-recrimination and chain of circumstantial evidence. For now she needed to get away from Randy. Summon help if she could. Options clicked through her brain and were discarded. If she reached for the radio, sped up, slowed down or did anything out of the ordinary Randy would realize she knew. So long as he thought her ignorant she was safe. At least until he led her to wherever it was this journey was to end. She was armed but so was he and he had every advantage. Wearing a long jacket buckled down over her gun belt, tricked into driving, Anna was rather neatly trussed up and helpless. Randy, she noted in a sideways glance, was coatless. His right hand, out of sight behind his paunch, undoubtedly rested on the butt of his service weapon. Randy was a smart man. His plan was probably simple. She would disappear, her body buried in the mire of the woods. A great hue and cry would be raised, a search would begin, run, in her absence, by Ranger Thigpen. Her car would be found, left in a place far from where the body was buried. The search would center on the location of the vehicle while her bones moldered to dust in an unnamed grave miles away.

They approached Mt. Locust. Anna noted the rain-dark sign in the spill of the headlights. She needed to take control of their geography. It was a lesson girls were taught in defense classes: regardless of what is promised, never let the villain take you to a second location. If she could get free of the car, the seat belt, while keeping Randy off the scent, there was a chance she could escape. Randy was quick for a fat man but not so quick as Anna.

"I need to stop in here a minute," she said. "I left my camera at the Mt. Locust Ranger Station."

"I've got mine with me," Randy said easily. The lie was well made but, without coat or bag, unless he carried it in his hip pocket, utterly transparent. He realized it and for an instant their eyes locked, the pale blue of his glittering in the phosphorescent green of the dash lights, then going black as he moved his head a fraction of an inch.

"That's okay," Anna said. "I may as well get mine. I have to go to the bathroom anyway." Her voice was natural, light even, but it was no good. The moment their eyes met information had been passed.

In a move so quick Anna realized his gun had not been holstered but waited ready in his hand, he shifted it neatly to his left hand and pressed it to her temple. She heard the hammer draw back and the unmistakable click as the cylinder of a wheel gun rotated a bullet into place. Randy, too clever by half, carried not his service weapon—a nine-millimeter Sig-Sauer semi-automatic like she wore—but a revolver probably unregistered and untraceable.

She'd underestimated Thigpen. He was a rotten ranger because he chose to be, not because he was incapable of the moves. His right hand lifted cuffs from his shirt pocket. Anna's hands, neatly aligned on the top curve of the steering wheel, were smoothly cuffed together. The entire action was over in seconds. Quick as it was, it was not quicker than thought. Ideas scattered up in Anna's mind thick and loud as a flock of blackbirds: moving her hands so she could not be cuffed, trying for the door handle, stepping on the gas or the brake to unseat Randy, even crashing the Crown Vic into the trees on the chance that, in the mess of airbags and broken glass, she could get away.

She did none of these things for the simple reason that she believed with every ounce of her being that Randy would not hesitate to pull the trigger if she deviated in any way from his dictates. No matter what she tried, his heaving finger on a two-pound trigger-pull would be faster.

Anna was not particularly afraid to die—a fact she hid from others as it seemed to set her apart, make her an object of suspicion. But to have one's brains blown out at close range, seat belt fastened, hands cuffed, weapon still holstered, and to have it done by Thigpen—that would surely condemn her to a special kind of hell. Maybe working as a lap dancer at aluminum-siding sales conventions.