Ill Wind (28 page)

Since then they’d all come to terms with one another and the dorm no longer had pests but, as Jennifer had dubbed them, politically correct pets.

Anna’s wristwatch beeped. The mouse squeaked on the same frequency and ran behind the refrigerator. Three A.M. on the nose: Anna tried a combination of invisible-to-the-naked-eye buttons on the watch to turn off the hourly alarm. The beeping stopped but she had no idea whether it was of natural causes or if she’d won. “Man against Nature: Woman against Technology,” she mumbled.

Half a glass of burgundy sat before her on the table. Her third, but since the first two were downed six hours earlier, she figured they didn’t count. Hopefully, this one would help her to sleep and without the usual cost: waking with the jitters just before dawn.

Jack of diamonds: she put it on a black queen in the solitaire game she’d been playing since one-thirty. A space was freed up and two more moves revealed a second ace. She enjoyed a vague sense of triumph. Her mind wasn’t on the game, merely in free-fall, unloosed by solitaire’s mantra of boredom. This game had many of the earmarks of the one she and Stanton had spent the day pursuing. One by one they’d peeled away lies in hopes of uncovering a truth they could play, one that would start the game moving again.

Another of Frederick the Fed’s infernal lists cluttered up her notebook. While Jennifer and Hills attended to the medical at Cliff Palace, the two of them had divided up all the stories in need of checking. “The lie detector part,” Stanton had called it. A line cut down the middle of the yellow notepaper. On Anna’s side was “Policy, Truck, Rose/ Radio” and “Beavens/Veil.” In her own handwriting was added “Stephanie/Dane.” On Stanton’s side was “Silva/ Gun/Threats.”

Stanton’s day had been a complete washout. Before he could question him, Silva had been let out on bail, paid not by Patsy but by Ted Greeley. Neither Greeley nor Silva could be found.

Anna’s half of the investigation had gone well. One phone call proved Rose Meyers a member of the liars’ club. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy she’d shown Anna had been canceled six months previously for lack of payment.

Knowing the truth without knowing the rationale behind it was fairly useless. Maybe Rose was not yet aware the policy had been canceled—or knew but wasn’t ready to admit it to herself or anyone else. Maybe she’d been trying to impress Stanton. An underpaid public servant might find a lady a wee bit more enticing if she had two hundred grand. Money was a proven aphrodisiac.

Whatever the reason, Mutual Casualty and Life told Anna there was no policy, no payoff. Rose had said Stacy’d left them with nothing, then changed her tune when the truth was nothing.

Red seven on black eight; nothing revealed. She turned over another three cards.

It seemed unlikely Rose would be lying to Bella and Hattie about the operation. That would be cruel, and despite her dislike of the woman, Anna believed that in her own way Rose loved her daughter. Therefore logic would suggest Rose did have money. Fact indicated it did not come from where she’d claimed.

Anna was too old to believe that people always lied for a reason. Mostly they lied because it was easy, felt good, or was habit. However, this particular lie was complex, suggesting a more focused motive. If Rose wanted to hide the source of the money, it was probably illegal or embarrassing.

Greeley as a potential new stepdaddy might have that kind of capital. Would Rose want to admit she and Ted were that intimate? Sharing a bed meant nothing but sharing a checkbook was a real commitment. And money was a stronger motive for murder than love.

Anna put a red four on a red five, woke up to her game, and took it back. Things just weren’t adding up: murdering one’s spouse was passé. Stacy had no inheritance, no insurance, and though in a divorce he might sue for custody of Bella, he had the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Rose could be intimate with whomever’s checkbook she pleased without much in the way of adverse consequences.

If there was a good reason for Rose to kill her husband, Anna was missing it. A woman scorned crossed her mind but she dismissed it. Her own presumed affair with Stacy might possibly foment a woman miffed, but hardly scorned.

Twenty-four-carat motive or not, Rose had a lot of money and was lying about where she’d gotten it. That qualified her as a suspect.

“Truck,” the next item on Stanton’s hit list, referred to the elusive truck Beavens reported hearing and Anna and Stanton had chased. A tour of the housing areas revealed the whereabouts of thirteen trucks. Trucks were in vogue even for suburbanites. In parks they were de rigueur. Without exception they were teensy little Toyotas, Ford Rangers—toy trucks. Only Tom Silva owned a good old-fashioned bubba truck complete with shovel and gun rack. But even Silva’s Chevy couldn’t grind out the kind of racket that had pulled Anna and Stanton from their chindi vigil.

The thought of Silva jogged something in the back of Anna’s tired mind. She set down the playing cards and stared into her wine as if waiting for a vision. Trucks and Tom and noise and trucks and Tom... It was coming to her. Back in June, before all the fuss, Tom had complained a “big goddamn truck” almost ran him off the road. Anna remembered following up on his complaint just to prove she was fair-minded and finding nothing. She’d even written a case incident report to keep her credit good. Later Silva’d said he was just “jerking her chain.”

Tom drove a real pickup and wore cowboy shirts with the sleeves ripped out. What would he consider big? Surely not a snubby-nosed little Mitsubishi. To a construction worker, “big truck” would mean a Kenmore, a Peterbilt, a Mac.

First a truck, then no truck, now a truck. Another lie. Anna swallowed the medium through which the oracle had revealed this truth.

Next on the list was “Rose/Radio.” That had been a worthless line of inquiry. Rose had returned belt, gun, and radio to the CRO around two o’clock. When Anna’d dared ask if she’d lent or used the radio, Rose had climbed into an uncommunicative huff and departed.

Feeling spiteful, Anna had taken the radio out of its leather holster and dusted the hard plastic case for fingerprints. There wasn’t a print on it. Either Rose was an anal-retentive housekeeper or it had been wiped clean so the last user could go undetected.

“Beavens/Veil” had proved a bit easier. At least Beavens was still speaking to Anna, that was a start. She’d found him down in Spruce Tree House just as he was being relieved for a meal break. He’d brought a bag lunch and they sat together in the cool of the alcove at the rear of the ancient pueblo amid the prosaic needs of a modern-day Park Service: oxygen bottle, backboard, first-aid kit, and white helium-filled balloons. The last interpreter out of the ruin in the evening affixed these to the upper ramparts. Al Stinson’s brainchild, the balloons kept the vultures from roosting and whitewashing the national historic treasure with bird droppings.

Beavens had been his usual self: shrugging, replying to everything with “no big deal.” Halfway through his bag of Doritos—that and a ruin-temperature Dr Pepper constituted lunch—Anna noticed he was nervously fingering a gold chain around his neck. At an earlier meeting she remembered him holding on to a small gold cross suspended from it as Stanton had questioned him about the veil.

On a hunch, she turned the conversation along more spiritual lines. After a moment’s silence, she said, “One thing I don’t like about living in the park is it’s so far to church.”

Beavens’ face, pasty despite the best efforts of the high desert sun, lit up for the first time in Anna’s short acquaintance with him. Animation lent him youth and even a certain charm. “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior?” he asked.

Such was the hope in his voice, Anna might have felt guilty had she not been fairly sure she’d stumbled on the key that would unlock his confidence. “Washed in the blood of the lamb a year ago next month,” she said.

A boyish smile curved up the corners of his mouth and transformed his face. “You!” he exclaimed. “I never would have guessed.”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“Amen. Which church do you go to?” He was leaning forward, defenses down. Anna didn’t want to lose him with a wrong answer.

“I’ve only been here a couple months. So far I haven’t found anything that really works for me,” she equivocated.

Beavens nodded sympathetically. “I can’t find anything either. This New Age stuff is like a cancer. It’s eaten away a lot of real belief. Maybe we could get together a Bible study group up on the mesa?”

Anna had a sinking feeling she was going to pay dearly for this particular deception. “The park is kind of a magnet for the New Agers,” she said. “What with crystals and the American Indian thing that’s caught on.”

Beavens’ face continued to look receptive, so she pressed on. “All this sitting around in kivas waiting for spirits, I don’t know . . .” She trailed off, hoping he would fill in with his own ideas. She wasn’t disappointed.

“It’s just an invitation to Satan, that’s all it amounts to,” he said eagerly. “The Bible warns us that there’ll be stumbling blocks on the road to heaven. These people are just providing the Devil with tools—or maybe I should say fools—to do his work. It’s like holding séances or messing with Ouija boards. You can’t go calling up this kind of stuff. You’ve got to turn away from it, turn to the Bible.”

“Prayer,” Anna said.

“Yes!” Beavens looked relieved beyond measure; someone understood him.

Anna ignored a mild pang of remorse. “What with all that’s been happening, I kind of think the demons have been called up already.”

In the middle of a sip of Dr Pepper, Beavens nodded his agreement and nearly choked himself to death. When he’d recovered somewhat, he managed to squeak out: “Burke, the spirit veil.”

Now Anna leaned forward. “Summer solstice—the night you saw the interp’s truck—”

“Heard it.”

“Heard it, then. Did you really see the veil?” she asked as one conspirator might ask another.

“I saw something,” Beavens replied in the same tone. “But we can’t give it credence, can’t spread the bad word. I say get thee behind me, Satan!” He laughed, but Anna could see he was serious, nervous and serious. He was fiddling with the cross again.

An instinct to pounce welled up strongly. Forcing it down, she leaned back and crossed her ankles. “That kind of thing spreads like wildfire,” she agreed. “People want to believe in signs and portents.”

“Original sin,” Beavens said.

Anna didn’t know where that fit in or exactly what it was. Sister Mary Judette had explained it in religion class but that was close to thirty years before. To say something, she threw in a cliché from her own formative years and hoped it was general enough to fit any conversational requirement: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

“Exactly.”

“What was it like, the something you saw?”

“Weird,” Beavens confided. “‘Spirit veil’ is a pretty good description. It’s Jamie Burke, she’d better cut it out, too. She’s got no idea who she’s messing with.”

Anna looked interested.

“She’s got half the interps in the park watching and thinking and waiting. So it shows up. You call up the Devil, he comes.”

Anna nodded sagely. “Was it like a kind of curtain?” She brought the conversation back to where she wanted it.

“Kind of. An iridescent shimmer. Maybe a hundred feet long. It was really neat-looking,” he said, then thinking better of it added, “But then it would be, wouldn’t it?”

Another interpreter, a frosted blonde art teacher from Oklahoma, came into the shade of the alcove. “They’re all yours, Claude,” she said as she took a Flintstones lunch box out of the first-aid cabinet and sat down cross-legged on the smooth stone floor.

Anna walked Beavens out into the sunlight. “You didn’t want to admit seeing the veil because it’d just give the Devil his due? Recruiting for him, sort of?”

“No sense being Lucifer’s patsy.”

As Anna turned to go, he followed her a couple of steps. “Let’s do that Bible study, okay?”

“Anytime.” Anna escaped into a knot of visitors.

So there had been something—a spirit veil or the Devil’s shirttail, but definitely something.

Anna stared at the cards on the table. Nothing left to play. Miss Mouse was back, poking her little gray nose around the door frame from the direction of the kitchen. “I’ve got a cat,” Anna threatened. The mouse twitched her whiskers but didn’t run away.

Eyes down at the tabletop with its scattered playing cards, Anna rested her head in her hands. Three choices: finish her wine and try to get some sleep, deal another hand of solitaire, or cheat. Cheating seemed the most profitable course.

Shuffling the remaining cards into what she hoped would prove a more cooperative order, she eyed the last item on the list, the one she had written: “Stephanie/Dane.”

Hills would have a few choice words to say about the phone bill she’d run up tracking them down. Stephanie McFarland was the asthmatic girl she and Stacy had carried out of Cliff Palace. The child who had died. Dane was the boy helitack had evacuated earlier in the day. Both were young and, other than asthma, in good condition. Both sets of parents had insisted the children had been up at seven thousand feet before without ill effects.

Fourteen long-distance calls had gathered the information Anna’d been looking for. Both children had had previous attacks of like severity. Stephanie’s had been triggered by fumes when as a child she’d locked herself in a broom closet and shattered a bottle of cleaning solution in her attempts to dislodge the door. By the time her mother had found her she was suffering statis asthmaticus and she very nearly lost her life.

After a bit of cajoling, the ER nurse at Southwest Memorial in Cortez told Anna Dane’s parents, Eli and Dina Bjornson, were staying at the Aneth Lodge. Immediate danger to their son past, they’d been fairly communicative. Dane had had one serious attack before, brought on not by radon or sniffing glue but by exposure to chemical Mace some boys at his junior high school had been playing with.