Ill Wind (24 page)

“Idn’t it awful,” she was complaining to Frieda. “Ah feel like something out of a horror flick. The one that goes crazy and hacks everybody up at the slumber party.”

“Terminal Hat Head,” Frieda contributed. “Occupational hazard.” The dispatcher sat behind her desk, her computer for once dark, the radio mike near her right hand.

“Hey,” Jennifer greeted Anna.

“Howdy.” Anna leaned her elbows on the counter. Beneath the sheet of glass that topped it were maps of the park and surrounding areas. “Talked to Patsy lately?” she asked Frieda when it became obvious she’d killed the conversation in progress.

“Matter of fact.” Frieda laughed her delicious laugh. “She’s doing okay but Tom’s got her and the girls all atwitter.”

“She’d better be careful,” Anna said. “Stalking is stalking, not flattery. This guardian-angel-in-a-Chevy-truck routine strikes me as a bubble or two off plumb. I think Tom is one weird guy.”

“I think Tom Silva’s cute,” Jennifer said. “Kee-ee-yoot.”

“Better watch out,” Anna kidded her. “Remember what happened to the last guy you thought was cute.”

“Serves Stacy right for bein’ married,” Jennifer retorted. “All the good ones are married.”

“All the good ones are dead,” Anna said before she thought.

She was rewarded with an awkward silence and averted eyes.

“Guess I better look like I’m doing something constructive.” Jennifer smashed her hat down over the ruined hairdo and swaggered toward the door. It wasn’t braggadocio, Anna knew from experience. For a short woman there was no place left for the arms once the gunbelt was strapped in place.

“I should too,” Anna said. Grabbing a handful of Frieda’s butterscotch candies, she made her way back to the eight-by-six-foot cubbyhole that served as an office for Hills, the fire management officer, Anna, half a dozen seasonals, and the Xerox machine.

Her desk was nearly as bad a rat’s nest as Hills’, and most of the rubble wasn’t of her making. Space shared—shared with Homo sapiens who’d not yet attained their thirtieth birthdays—was reduced to chaos. Anna preferred order and knew herself to have entered upon that stage of the game Molly dubbed the Pre-Curmudgeon Warm-ups.

Everything that wasn’t hers she scraped into an accordion envelope, marked it “The Poltergeist File,” and stowed it in the kneehole under Hills’ desk. Before anyone dared to dig that deep the stuff would be transmogrified into historical artifacts by the sheer passage of time.

To impose some semblance of organization, she unearthed all the 10-343 Case Incident and 10-344 Criminal Incident reports that had been turned in since the beginning of the tourist season in April. Thanks to Frieda, they had all been neatly filed in chronological order. Hills hadn’t yet found the time to stir them into his ongoing stew of papers.

Anna separated out all the incidents that had occurred in or around Cliff Palace and ordered them again according to date. The last was the report she had written on the discovery and evacuation of Stacy Meyers’ body.

Reading through it, the day was re-created in her mind but no new details or connections were generated.

Slouching down in the chair, she put her feet up. More blood to the brain. Again she read the report. Words on a page: no leaps of logic, no sparks of genius.

Putting the 344 aside, she picked up the sheaf of 343s and thumbed through them. Most were medicals: broken wrist, respiratory failure, anxiety attack, tachycardia w/ confusion, asthma, fractured C-spine from a kiva diver—the local parlance for tourists who tumbled into the underground rooms.

Anna selected out all the evacuations. But for the wrist and the C-spine, each carry-out was in some way, shape, or form a heart, brain, or breathing difficulty. Not unusual at seven thousand feet with a high percentage of elderly visitors. She set the two fractures aside and looked through the remaining reports.

Pretty standard stuff; the only thing peculiar was the number of them. Anna carried the file into an ex-coat closet now pressed into service as a computer room and called up all the 343s for six summers past. Even accounting for the steady increase in tourism, medical evacuations had quadrupled at Cliff Palace this season. She checked reports for Balcony House and Spruce Tree House. They had remained more or less constant.

“Frieda, are you busy?” she hollered.

“Always.”

“Too busy?”

“What do you want?”

“Computer-nerd stuff.”

“Come here then, I can’t leave the front desk.”

With Anna breathing down her neck, Frieda used D-Base to cross-reference all the evacuations by the patients’ point of origin, age, sex, race, and primary complaint. “Looks like a normal group,” Frieda said. “Old people and sick people. You were expecting somebody else?”

“I don’t know what I was expecting.” Anna sat down on Frieda’s desk and looked through the reports again: ten-thirty, eleven o’clock, eleven-eighteen, April twelfth, twenty-sixth, May third, twenty-fourth, and thirty-first, June seventh, June fourteenth. “Try by time.”

Frieda complied. “All but two were in the morning.”

That was something. The usual time for rescue excitement was midafternoon, when the day’s heat was setting in. “Try by date.”

“Hey ho.” Frieda clicked the keys. “Well, lookie there!”

“What?” Anna demanded.

“All but two—the afternoon ones—fell on Tuesday. And I thought Mondays were tough... Coincidence?”

“Got to be,” Anna said. “Thanks, Frieda.”

Back at her own desk Anna fanned out the reports now reduced by two, the two neither in the morning nor on a Tuesday. “What do I know now?” she whispered to herself.

“What?” Frieda called.

“Nothing,” Anna answered both her own question and the dispatcher’s. She pored over the paltry bits of information she had gathered. Rose lied about when and where she’d seen Greeley both the night of the murder and since.

Greeley was still grousing about the sugar in his D-14 Cat’s fuel tank. The murder had so overshadowed it there’d been no further investigation to speak of.

“Hey, Frieda,” Anna interrupted herself. “Do private vendors like Greeley have to show proof of insurance before they’re hired?”

“Yes. Too much liability otherwise. Why?”

“Just wondering.” Even if Stacy had been the sugar-slinging chain swinger, his ecotage had been aborted. Had he succeeded, all Greeley would have suffered was a fat check from the insurance company—not even much in the way of inconvenience or delay. Greeley killing Meyers to avenge the Caterpillar was absurd.

Tom Silva was sullen and scared or angry—Anna couldn’t tell which. Beavens was lying to somebody, either to her or to Jamie about his veil sighting. His report of leaving before the other interpreters had yet to be checked out. Jamie was claiming a closer kinship with the deceased than Anna believed existed and riding the revenge of the Anasazi theory pretty hard. She had even filed a backcountry permit to hold a vigil all night in the fatal kiva. The request had been denied.

How any of that tied in with seven evacuations from Cliff, all cardiopulmonary or central nervous system problems, all early in the day on a Tuesday, Anna couldn’t fathom.

An unpleasant thought wandered through her tired mind. “No,” she breathed as she dragged a calendar from the middle of a pile. On it she marked all the days of the evacuations with a tiny, faint “X” in pencil. Forgetting her gun and radio, she took the calendar over to the museum.

Jamie Burke was working at the front desk. Several visitors clustered around a single brochure arguing over the drawing of Mesa Verde’s road system. Jamie stood behind the counter, her elbows resting on the glass, reading Louis L’Amour’s
Haunted Mesa.

“Got a minute?” Anna asked.

Jamie raised her head with a practiced look of long-suffering patience. When she saw it was Anna, she relaxed. “I’m stuck here till five-thirty.”

Anna pushed the calendar over the glass. “Could you mark the veil sightings for me, if you remember when they were?”

Jamie studied the calendar for a minute, then borrowed Anna’s pen. “April the eleventh, May twenty-third, the thirteenth of June, and, no matter what he says now, Claude saw one on the twenty-first.” As she counted each day she made a big black check mark on the page.

“Thanks.” Anna gathered up the calendar without looking at it and tucked her pen back in her shirt pocket.

“Aren’t you going to tell me what this is all about?” Jamie asked.

“When it gels,” Anna lied easily.

Back at her desk in the CRO, she took out the calendar and studied it. All alleged veil sightings were on Monday nights before the Tuesday morning medical evacuations.

“Damn.”

“What?” Frieda hollered.

“I said I’m calling it a day, giving up the ghost, so to speak.”

Chindi.

“Pshaw!” Anna used her sister’s word for “expletive deleted.”

“ YOU SHOW ME YOURS, I’LL SHOW YOU MINE,” STANTON said.

“No dice. Yours first.”

Stanton hummed the first few bars of “Getting to Know You” from
The King and I
and Anna laughed. There’d been too many times on Isle Royale when he’d gotten her to share more than she intended, then failed to return the favor.

“I got the marks on the shoes analyzed,” he said. “You know what amazed me the most?”

Anna waited.

“That the NPS actually makes you wear them. They’re symptomatic of a severe fashion disorder.”

“The marks . . .” Anna prompted.

“Yes. The marks. They were spaced right for fingerprints.” She and Stanton were sitting on the ledge above the Cliff Palace ruin, a wide chunk of sandstone tucked up in the shadows under the trees. In front of them stone fanned out in an apron to the cliff ’s edge, then there was darkness; the gulf of Cliff Canyon. Beyond the black was another pale ribbon where the far side of the canyon cut down through reservation lands. Even without a moon the sandstone picked up illumination from the night sky, reflecting back the dim glow of starlight. The soft down-canyon wind brought on by cooling air settling had died and the air was absolutely still.

Stanton scrunched his legs up more tightly, hugging his knees to his chest, and sucked air through an architecturally generous nose.

“Sitting on a cold rock in the dark is so much more fun than crawling into bed after a long day. Wish I’d thought of this years ago.”

“You were showing me yours.”

“You’ve no romance in your soul, Anna. Too many years hobnobbing with Mother Nature. Too pragmatic a lady for my money. In south Chicago we know what moonlight’s all about.”

“Moon’s not up.”

“In Chicago we have glorious streetlights and we can turn them on whenever we want. But have it your way. Showing you mine.” He dropped a long arm down and snatched off his shoe without untying it. The white sock was pulled partway off and dangled trunklike over the rock. “The marks were here, here, and here on the right shoe.” He placed his thumb and two fingers so the thumb was on the inside of the shoe and the index and middle fingers on the outside, his palm cupping the heel, as if the shoe walked on his hand.

“They weren’t smudges so much as burns. Something reacted with the leather and caused the discolorations.”

“Funny I never noticed them till the other day,” Anna said.

“They may not have shown up right away.”

“Any idea what made them?”

“Acid—what kind he didn’t know.” Stanton studied the shoe. “But looky.” He held it up at eye level, still grasping it with his palm beneath the heel. “We can figure Meyers didn’t pull it off himself. It wouldn’t be impossible to take your own shoe off with your hand in this position, but highly unlikely.”

“So something with caustic digits removed his shoes after he was dead?” Anna teased.

“That seems to about sum it up.”

“That fits hand in glove with what I’ve come up with.”

“Goody.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and waggled his feet. His bare shins gleamed in the starlight. “Now do I get to find out why I’m sitting on a rock in the middle of the night instead of curled snug in my little bed?”

“We’re on chindi patrol.”

Stanton groaned.

“I’m getting overtime,” Anna added helpfully.

“I’m exempt.”

“Too bad. This promises to be a long one.” Anna told him her story of carry-outs and spirit veil sightings, Monday nights and Tuesday mornings, and left him to flounder with cause and effect.

He continued wagging his feet as if transfixed by the metronomic motion. “Ms. Burke lying?” he suggested after a minute or two. “Putting her paranormal next to the normal to lend it credence?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her, but I didn’t tell her when the medicals were or why I wanted the sighting dates.”

“Could she have gotten the dates of the medicals out of the files?”

“I suppose. She doesn’t have a key to the CRO and it would cause comment if she came in and looked through the files. They’re no guarded secret or anything, interps just never look at them, so it’d be something to gossip about when who’s sleeping with whom grew thin.”

“Could she get into the office at night, when no gossips were about?”

“Sure. Somebody’d probably let her in if she asked. Security—except for the administration building—is pretty lax. It seems a stretch though. Why bother? She never bothers to substantiate any of her other stories. Anyway, at least one Monday night I heard her talking about the veil and then the next day we had that medical. There’s no way she could’ve planned to have all the cardiopulmonary and central nervous system problems occur on Tuesday morning.”

“Was she on duty each time there was a carry-out?”

Anna thought about it. Near as she could remember, she was.

“Jamie Burke, Medicine Woman.” Stanton bounced his eyebrows suggestively. Light and shadow dappled his fair skin, and Anna realized the moon had risen.