Ill Wind

Table of Contents

 

PRAISE FOR
ILL WIND

“
Ill Wind
is a breath of fresh air in the crowded mystery field. . . . Anna is delightfully human . . . Barr’s writing is magical.”
—Orlando Sentinel

 

“Her characters are complex and three-dimensional, nicely drawn with just the right combination of good and evil tempered by quirkiness. . . . But it’s Barr’s descriptions of the park, its history and natural beauty that most delight.”

 

“A winner... wherever Anna Pigeon goes, she’ll bring along a big group of fans.”
—Arizona Daily Star

 

“Fun... magnetic... Nevada Barr is an accomplished storyteller. She understands about plot twists, narrative drive, comic relief, and the various other elements vital to the mix... She also has a feeling for the stolidity of mountains and the relentlessness of rivers, and what it is that can make a brilliant, star-filled desert night so scary.”

 

“Fascinating... a spirited tale... a solid mystery ... With Barr’s skill at description, Mesa Verde comes to life.”

 

“A spine-chiller... a haunting tale of murder among the ruins.”
—New Woman

 

“Nevada Barr is a beguiling storyteller with a gift for making fiction appear more real (and more entertaining) than fact. Her people, especially the complex Anna, ring true, and her evocation of the wilderness she knows and loves ranks among the best nature writing anywhere. Barr’s first two novels gained her an enthusiastic following, her third will not disappoint.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Barr writes with a naturalist’s keen eye for detail and an environmentalist’s passion for the outdoors.”

 

“Anna is a pure joy.”
—The Denver Post

 

“In Anna Pigeon, author Barr may have created the most appealing mystery series heroine to come along since Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone... A character who’ll be around to entertain us, hopefully, as long as Nevada Barr doesn’t run out of national parks.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

“Unforgettable... immensely satisfying... a book the reader never wants to end... Barr proves once and for all that she belongs among the most exalted names in the mystery field—Tony Hillerman, Sue Grafton, Dick Francis. She is, on every level, their equal... A book this good is not only a great treat, it’s also a rare and wondrous privilege. Don’t miss out.”
—The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

 

“An outstanding novel... As much a personal journey of self-discovery as it is a mystery.”
—Booklist

 

“Nevada Barr writes with uncommon sensitivity, style, and polish. She is indeed a rare talent you should not pass up.”

 

“Nevada Barr is an expert guide... She will leave you yearning to read more about Anna Pigeon.”

PRAISE FOR
NEVADA BARR
and the award-winning Anna Pigeon novels . . .

 

“Nevada Barr is one of the best.”
—The Boston Globe

 

“A constant source of pleasure.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

 

“Nevada Barr writes with a cool, steady hand about the violence of nature and the cruelty of man.”

 

“A true original... like a combination of Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Sherlock Holmes, and Maureen O’Hara, the engaging character of Anna Pigeon is the only reason most readers will need to return to this series again and again. But it doesn’t hurt that Barr can write rhapsodic passages about America’s beautiful parks and cobble up page-turning whodunits.”
—The Denver Post

 

“Nevada Barr can take the most improbable plot and turn it into a fascinating foray into the human psyche, then dress it up with eloquent descriptions of the great outdoors she so obviously adores... She’s also one of the more eloquent mystery writers around, having the ability to make you feel the chill of the night, smell the smoke of a campfire, experience the isolation of the wilderness. She’s worth reading just for that alone.”

 

“Barr combines primo mysteries with what always feels like a virtual reality tour of one of the parks... There is beauty here. Still, Anna never loses her edginess in a world where your life depends on having a backup light for your backup light.”

 

“There truly is no finer writer in the realm today, and her descriptive prose in observance of the natural world is always stunning.”
—Pages

 

“From the fabric of fiction she creates real worlds, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying, but always convincing.”

FICTION

 

HARD TRUTH
HIGH COUNTRY
FLASHBACK
HUNTING SEASON
BLOOD LURE
DEEP SOUTH
LIBERTY FALLING
BLIND DESCENT
ENDANGERED SPECIES
FIRESTORM
ILL WIND
A SUPERIOR DEATH
TRACK OF THE CAT
BITTERSWEET

 

 

NONFICTION

 

SEEKING ENLIGHTENMENT... HAT BY HAT

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

ILL WIND

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
the author

 

PRINTING HISTORY
Avon special edition / November 1995
Avon edition / April 1996
G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / May 1997
Berkley edition / June 2004

Copyright © 1995 by Nevada Barr.

 

All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without
permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via
the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher
is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized
electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic
piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s
rights is appreciated.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-04223-6

 

BERKLEY
^®
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY and the “B” design
are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

NO GRAVEYARDS; THAT BOTHERED ANNA. PEOPLE died. Unless you ate them, burned them, or mailed them to a friend, the bodies had to go somewhere. In any event, there would at least be bones. A civilization that lived and died for six hundred years should leave a mountain of bones.

No graveyards and then no people. Inhabitants cooking, weaving, farming one day, then, the next, gone. Pots still on cold ashes, doormats rotting in doorways, tools lying beside half-finished jobs.

So: an invading army swooped down and massacred everybody. Then where were the bashed-in skulls? Chipped bone fragments? Teeth sown like corn?

A plague: the American version of the Black Death, an antiquated form of Captain Tripps, killing two out of every three people. The survivors abandoning a desolated community, carting thousands and thousands of dead bodies with them? Not bloody likely. Not in a society without benefit of the wheel.

Once people got factored into an equation all bets were off; still, there ought to be corpses. Anna couldn’t think of any civilization that couldn’t be counted on to leave corpses and garbage for the next generation.

 

 

A hand smacked down on the Formica and Anna started in her chair.

“Where were you?” hissed Alberta Stinson, head of Interpretation for Chapin Mesa.

“Anywhere but here, Al,” Anna whispered back. She dragged a hand down her face to clear it of dreams and looked surreptitiously at her watch. The staff meeting had been dragging on for two hours. The coffee was done and there never had been any doughnuts.

Stinson poked Anna in the ribs with a blunt forefinger. “Stay awake. The Boys are on a rampage.” Al always referred to Mesa Verde’s administration rather disdainfully as “The Boys.” Stinson was fifteen pounds over what the glossy magazines recommended, with salt-and-pepper hair that looked as if it had been cut with pinking shears. Leading tours, giving programs, wandering the myriad ruins on the mesas, she had a face creased by the weather from forehead to chin, and the skin around her eyes was crinkled from squinting against the sun’s glare. Near as Anna could tell, the woman had but two passions in life: discovering why the Old Ones had vanished and seeing to it that any despoilers of their relics did likewise.

Anna pulled Stinson’s yellow pad toward her. Beneath Al’s sketches of nooses, guillotines, and other means of mayhem, she scribbled: “No help here. I’m a lowly GS-7. No teeth.”

Al snorted.

Thirty minutes had elapsed since Anna had mentally checked out and still the debate raged. Money had come down from Congress, scads of the stuff, allocated for the digging up and replacing of the antiquated waterline serving the homes and public buildings of Mesa Verde National Park. Since May heavy machinery and heated arguments had roared over the ancient land. Meetings had been called and called off on a weekly basis.

The resultant acrimony clogged the high desert air like dust from the ditcher. As always in small towns, toxins trickled down. When the powers that be waged war, the peasants took sides. Even the seasonals gathered in tight groups, biting assorted backs and sipping righteous indignation with beer chasers.

New to the mesa, Anna’d not been drafted into either army, but the constant dissension wore at her nerves and aggravated her hermit tendencies.

Around a table of metal and Formica—the kind usually reserved for the serving of bad chicken at awards banquets—sat the leading players: a lean and hungry-looking administrative officer with a head for figures and an eye for progress; the chief ranger, a wary whip of a man determined to drag the park out of the dark ages of plumbing and into the more impressive visitation statistics additional water would allow; Ted Greeley, the contractor hired to pull off this feat in a timely manner; and Al Stinson: historian, archaeologist, and defender of the dead. Or at least the sanctity of science’s claim on the dead.

When the Anasazi had vanished from the mesa, their twelfth-century secrets had vanished with them. Stinson was determined to stop twentieth-century machinery from destroying any clue before it was studied. Since the entire landscape of Chapin Mesa was a treasure trove of artifacts, the digging of so much as a post hole gave the archaeologist nightmares. The contractor had been brought on board to trench seventeen miles of land six feet deep.