Ill Wind (31 page)

“Don’t like to drive?”

“I’d rather look out the window.”

“It’s not far.” Anna referred to the tent frame Frederick was bivouacked in. “I’ll drive.”

“Goody. I’ll give you a back rub. My first wife—or was it my second? Anyway, I come highly recommended in the back rub department.”

Leaving the tower house, Anna turned right and drove three hundred yards the wrong way on the one-way to the tent colony where VIPs and stabilization crew were housed.

Like the other service areas in Mesa Verde, this was on a loop. Communal showers, toilets, washer/dryer, and pay phone occupied the island created by the gravel drive.

Some of the dwellings were charming. Of native stone, they were built in the round style of Navajo hogans, but the majority were single-room plywood shacks called tent frames. Sixteen by sixteen feet square, they had just room for a bed, stove, and refrigerator. There was no running water. At one time they’d been wooden platforms with canvas forming the walls and roof. When housing became short, they’d been walled in and wood-burning stoves added to give them a longer season of use.

Though cramped and primitive, Anna saw in them blessed privacy and a home for Piedmont. When Stanton left, she would lean on Hills to give her his tent frame till permanent housing became available.

She pulled the Ford into the graveled spot in front of number seventeen. A picnic table under the junipers provided a platform for two scrub jays squabbling over a bit of orange peel. A fire pit with grill was near the table. “I could live here,” Anna said.

“Come in. I’ll give you the fifty-cent tour. Make some decaf.”

Not ready yet to go home, Anna accepted. The tour consisted of “Honey, I’m home,” called to imaginary scorpions. Anna sat on the single bed. It was made up so neatly it worried her. What kind of man made his bed when called out on a motor vehicle accident at three A.M.?

Apparently reading her mind, Stanton said: “Not anal retentive.” He pointed to the long wooden table that occupied the wall between the wood stove and the foot of the bed. It was covered with papers and sketches, some in tidy piles, some scattered about where he’d been working into the wee hours.

Anna got up and looked to keep herself occupied while Stanton busied himself with coffee, drawing the water from a five-gallon plastic container with a spigot.

Photos of Stacy in the kiva, of the shoes with burn marks, were laid out neatly. Drawings of the kiva, of Cliff Palace—quite good drawings—with entrance and exits marked, were placed like maps above the autopsy and 10- 344 report. Lists were everywhere; lists of clues and suspects, lists of things done and things left to do, lists of lists.

“Not anal retentive, you say?”

“Well, not about housework anyway. Although my second ex-wife—or was it my first—thought I should be.”

“You don’t think much of marriage, I take it?”

“Are you kidding? It’s my favorite hobby. Spend every spare penny on it. I’m completely in favor of it, wish both ladies would remarry today.”

Anna laughed. “No doubt about it, widowhood has its upside.” She took the coffee he offered and sat in the straight-backed wooden chair. There being no others, Stanton perched on the foot of his bed.

“Come up with any bright ideas?” Anna indicated the desk. The hasty report she’d written on her previous day’s findings was lying above a legal pad where yet another list was forming. A pair of half glasses served as a paperweight.

“Nothing brilliant. I’m getting slow,” he said. “Can’t solve them in record time anymore. I used to do it with one victim. ‘One-corpse Stanton’ they called me. Now it takes two or three before I catch on.”

He was poking fun at himself but Anna understood. There was no solving a crime till it happened. By then the damage was done. What kept the chase worth the effort was the hope a second could be prevented.

“Pushing forty-five,” Stanton said. “Headed over the proverbial hill.”

“Over the hill,” Anna echoed.

“You aren’t supposed to agree with me,” he complained. “For a park ranger you sure don’t know anything about fishing.”

“No,” Anna said absently. She put down her coffee and took the golf ball from her shirt pocket. “This was in Silva’s truck.”

“And?” Stanton looked at the little ball with interest. His instant attention was gratifying. He trusted Anna not to waste his time.

“Over the hill,” Anna repeated. “In a conversation once, Tom said he couldn’t play golf because he wasn’t over the hill yet.”

“Not his ball.”

“What do you figure would happen if you wedged a golf ball in the linkage over a gas pedal?”

“When the car crashed the ball would roll out.”

“When the pickup crashed.” Anna swiveled in her seat to set the ball down amidst Stanton’s casework. Twisting tore the damaged muscles and she groaned.

“Ready for that back rub?” Stanton asked.

“No thanks.” Anna had been given a goodly number of back rubs over the years. They’d been anything but relaxing and healthful. Most had degenerated fairly quickly into wrestling matches. She was too tired to defend her virtue.

“You’ll like it. It’ll be good for you. Really.” Stanton was bustling: setting down coffee, grabbing up pillows and blankets. “I’ve been to school. I’m certified and everything.” He carried the bedding out through the screen door.

He was shaking an army blanket out on the picnic table. The jays had fled to the branches of a nearby juniper and watched with interest. “Soft is no good,” he was saying as Anna came up behind him. “You can’t really do much with soft. Padded is best but this’ll do.” He plumped a pillow down on one end of the table. “Climb on up,” he said. “Office hours have commenced.”

More out of curiosity than anything else, Anna complied, lying belly-down on the tabletop.

“I’m a Rolfer,” Stanton said, climbing up and straddling her. “A proponent and practitioner of the art of Rolfing.” With that he pushed his knuckles into her back.

What followed was the least sexual and most healing experience Anna had ever had. His strong fingers seemed to knead and pry the pain from between her muscles and realign her much maligned vertebrae.

When he’d finished, she lay quiet for another minute or so, enjoying the heat radiating through her back. “That’s the first honest-to-God back rub I’ve ever had,” she said truthfully.

By mutual agreement she and Stanton put the investigation on hold till they’d rested. Anna suffered from the pleasant but frustrating sense that things were just about to come clear, words on the tip of the tongue, connections about to be made. She doubted she’d be able to sleep but natural fatigue and the continuing warmth Stanton’s fingers had worked into her back conspired to shut down her brain and she slept without dreaming.

Around two-thirty that afternoon she awoke. Even that late in the day she was doomed to a cold shower. “Sorry,” Jennifer said when she stalked into the kitchen to make coffee. “I didn’t figure anybody else’d be showering so late. I was steaming me out a hangover. A doozy. Alcohol poisoning of the worst kind. Have some of my coffee as a peace offerin’ whilst yours does its thing.”

Anna accepted a mugful and dressed it with a dollop of heavy whipping cream.

“How do you stay so skinny?” Jennifer demanded. “I get fat on NutraSweet and water.”

“Are you on late today?” Anna asked.

“Yes ma’am. Till forever. I can’t wait till you stop messin’ with that FBI guy. With both you’n Stacy off the schedule, seems all I do is work night shifts.”

Anna tried to look sympathetic out of gratitude for the coffee. “Where’d you get your hangover?”

Jennifer laughed, then clutched her head. “Jamie and I did Durango. She’s still in bed. You should’ve seen her. She got to arm-wrestling boys for drinks. She’s just too strong for her own good. We like to drowned.”

“Sounds like fun,” Anna fed the conversation. Not yet through her first cup of coffee and already prying suspiciously into other people’s lives; she’d be glad when the investigation was over and she could resume the life of a disinterested third party. “Who drove you home?”

“The bartender at Flannigan’s took Jamie’s car keys. We had to crash in her station wagon till he opened up around ten this morning.”

Jennifer buckled on her gun and left Anna to finish the coffee.

By four-thirty Stanton still hadn’t called. Anna left word with Dispatch to radio her if he checked in, and drove down to the CRO. The events of the previous night were settling in her mind and she needed to sort them out. Laying out facts in the no-nonsense format demanded by government form 10-343 seemed to help. As senior person on the scene, Hills should have written the report but Anna had no worries that he’d beaten her to the punch. Like a lot of district rangers, Hills had joined the NPS because of a love of hiking, canoeing, shooting, backpacking, climbing—challenging himself physically. When he climbed up into management he was forced to confront his worst fear: paperwork. Brawling drunks he could handle. The sight of a computer lit up the yellow streak down his broad back.

As she banked into the CRO, she asked Frieda, “Has Stanton called?”

“Not yet.”

“Silva?”

“DOA. Massive cerebral hemorrhage.”

“Too bad.”

“Yes indeedy. You, Hills, and the guys are scheduled to do a fatality debriefing with Dr. Whitcomb Friday morning. Write it down.”

Successfully resisting the urge to unload the night’s pressures on Frieda, Anna slipped around the partition to her desk. As usual it was piled with clutter not of her making. Evidently Hills had dumped Stacy’s personal defensive equipment there after invetorying it. Anna scooped it up to dump back on the district ranger’s desk. The radio’s leather case tumbled out of her clutches. “Whoa!”

“What?” Frieda called over the room divider.

“Nothing.” Anna dropped the gunbelt back where she’d found it and pinched up the radio case between thumb and forefinger. Burnt into the leather were two prints, etched marks such as had manifested on Stacy’s shoes. The prints on the case hadn’t been there when Rose had returned it. Anna was sure of that. In her fingerprinting frenzy she would have noticed.

The prints on Stacy’s shoes had taken between one and three days to appear. Lost as they’d been in her trunk, Anna couldn’t be more precise.

If these marks came from the same hand, and it was hard to imagine they hadn’t, they’d been made not more than one to three days previously, considerably after Stacy had died and before Rose had returned the radio.

Anna closed her eyes and ears and marshaled her thoughts. Whoever removed Stacy’s shoes had used the radio. Whoever used the radio had access to Rose’s house. Did Stacy’s murder have anything to do with Silva’s death? Probably. Two murders in one sleepy park were highly unlikely. Rose might have killed Stacy for some matrimonial crime as yet unpublished, but why Tom? Greeley killing Silva for pilfering, monkeywrenching? Overkill to say the least.
Strangers on a Train?
You kill mine, I’ll kill yours.

There weren’t enough players for a really good game of detection, Anna thought. Drew was in and out of the picture. Clearly he felt Stacy and Rose were making the wrong choices for Bella. Did his protectiveness over children extend to Silva’s? Did he believe Tom was abusing Missy and Mindy in some way? Anna thought back to the wreck. Drew’s efforts to salvage Silva’s life seemed genuine enough.

Rousing herself, Anna called over the wall. “Frieda, Stanton call yet?”

“You’re sitting on the phone back there. Did it ring?”

“I guess not,” Anna conceded. Taking the radio case, she again gave Frieda the message to let her know when Stanton woke up. Frieda rolled her eyes but Anna was wrapped up in her own thoughts and missed it.

There was one last thing to check, then she would go stir Stanton up whether he was rested or not.

 

 

THE maintenance yard was empty when she drove in. Maintenance and Construction worked seven A.M. to three-thirty Monday through Friday. By three thirty-one there was never any sign of them.

As she’d expected, the chain-link gate to the fenced-off area where Ted Greeley kept his heavy equipment was locked, the chain and padlock as she had thought they would be.

Frieda called then and Anna abandoned her train of thought. Stanton was awake. She found him sitting on the picnic table with his feet on the bench nursing a cup of coffee.

“Good morning.” She sat down beside him, adjusting her gun so the butt wouldn’t pry against her ribs. “Get a good nap?”

“Yes indeedy. Is it still Monday?”

“All day.”

Anna told Stanton about chains and locks and their connection with Stacy Meyers, Monday nights, and the Cliff Palace loop. “What I can’t figure out is why and how. Without those, ‘who’ is pretty worthless.”

Stanton took another sip of coffee. Anna wished he’d offer her some. Not because it looked particularly good, but because it was something to do with her hands. In lieu of the coffee, she picked up a twig and began methodically snapping it in small pieces.

They sat in silence for a time. The sun was low in the sky and bathed them in amber light. To the west, Anna could just see the tops of thunderheads. It was probably raining in Dove Creek. A small doe wandered out from behind the tent frame. The air was so still they could hear the tearing sound as she cropped the grass.

Stanton seemed transfixed by the nearness of the graceful animal.

“Missing Chicago?” Anna ribbed him.

“In Chicago we have rats bigger than that.”

“Her.”

“How can you tell?”

“No antlers.”

“I thought they fell off.”

“They grow back.”

“No kidding!”

Anna felt her leg being gently pulled and laughed. “You’re such a rube, Frederick.”

The doe’s head came up at the sound of laughter but the deer was looking not at them but down the footpath leading along the canyon’s edge to the housing loop. Frederick and Anna watched with her. Moments later Bella and her aunt came into view. Bella was in the lead. In her arms she carried a basket woven of pastel strips, a relic of a previous Easter. If the care she took not to let the basket bump or tip was any indication of contents, Anna would’ve guessed nitroglycerin or at least goldfish. Hattie followed with a plastic spatula, the kind cooks use to scrape the last of the cake batter from the bowl.