The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (34 page)

He was in too deep for confession. Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly. It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

Too late for confession.

Maybe not too late to end it.

FORTY-ONE

Steve and the chief ranger wasted no time. The senator was abandoned to amuse himself as best he could until Hank and the plane had time to come back for him. Chief Ranger Madden debated whether it should be he or Steve flying back to Wahweap with Anna and Jenny. The need to be in charge vied with the need to do what was best. At least that’s what Jenny thought as she watched inner shadows flit across his face while Hank walked around the plane doing a preflight check. Regardless of the fact he’d flown in only a few hours earlier, Hank erred on the side of caution. Once he’d told Jenny his goal in life was to die a very old pilot.

Madden chose to stay in Bullfrog. It had been a decade or more since he had practiced hands-on law enforcement, and Steve did it every day. Jenny was impressed by the decision. She’d thought his vanity greater than his intelligence.

Steve took the right seat. Anna and Jenny buckled themselves in back.

Nearly a week had passed since Jenny saw the man now cooling his heels—and the rest of his anatomy—in Beatrice’s examining room. Houseboats were allotted two weeks on the water with any given group. If she’d met up with the partiers during their second week, by now they would have dispersed, back to wherever home was. Conceivably, the boat could be cleaned and back on the lake with another group, but Jenny didn’t think so. From Anna’s description of Kay, someone, somewhere, was waiting for her to come home, and as yet there’d been no alarm raised. So, instead of enjoying the beauty of the landscape as seen from the air, Jenny searched the surface of the lake for the old-model houseboat. Judging by the cant of their heads and the concentration on their faces, Anna and Steve were doing the same.

At a quarter of five they landed on the small strip the NPS maintained on the outskirts of Page. Awaiting them was a 1979 Jeep Cherokee, painted Park Service green, with the bison badge on its doors and the Wahweap district ranger behind the wheel. Doug Schneider was in his early fifties, well muscled, his iron gray hair worn in a brush cut that had been fashionable when Jenny was in grade school. The soothing gray and green of the NPS uniform did nothing to soften the military look he cultivated. Jenny was willing to bet his wife had to iron all his permanent-press uniform shirts. Simply plucking them from the dryer in a timely manner couldn’t create the crispness of Doug’s pleats and creases.

As they climbed into the Jeep, Steve made introductions. Again Anna and Jenny took the rear seat. The moment the doors were closed the two rangers began to talk.

“I think we’ve found your boat,” Doug said as he backed out of the gravel lot behind the hangar. “According to Dream Vacations—the outfit that rents it out—their last day on the lake is tomorrow. They have to be back in Wahweap by nine
A.M.
I sent out an APB. A boat that fit the description was spotted in Padre Bay around two thirty. With luck, it is headed in and will moor at Wahweap tonight. By now they’ve got to be running low on beer.”

Doug Schneider smiled grimly. Doug Schneider always smiled grimly. Jenny guessed it was probably the same smile he used when watching lambs play or Donald Duck cartoons.

“We’ll need to do a stakeout,” Schneider said.

“Sure,” Steve replied easily. “Let’s stake out in the fancy dining room overlooking the bay and get something to eat.”

Doug Schneider’s smile grew grimmer. When he raised his eyes and caught Jenny watching his reflection in the rearview mirror, she winked at him. He blinked as if she’d spit in his eye. Anna elbowed her in the ribs but didn’t look at her. Not good to be giggling girls at the district ranger’s expense.

“Who’s the boat rented to?” Steve asked.

“The guy that signed the check was a Trey Benton out of Fort Collins, Colorado. I got hold of his mother. She said he and a bunch of his buddies from a paintball club sold tickets on campus to raise the money for the boat. Kids could buy in either for one week or both. Other than her son and his best friend, an engineering student named Leo Sackamoto, she didn’t know who had bought into the deal.”

“That’s just nifty,” Steve said. “The third man could have cleared out by now. We got a dead girl on the plateau. We got the two boys dead in the slot. Pretty little line of corpses from point A to point B. The third kid, the one we assume stayed alive long enough to mess with Anna, is unaccounted for.”

“Unsub three looks good for it,” Doug said.

The cop-speak sounded silly to Jenny. It was just wrong to hear park rangers say “the perp” or “scenario” or “unsub.” It was like hearing small boys practicing saying “fuck,” like they were pretending to be bigger or tougher or more experienced than they were.

“I guess he’d look good for it if we could see him,” Steve said.

At the end of hour two at the restaurant, the rangers ran out of speculation and small talk. In their capacity as potential witnesses, females, seasonals, and subordinates, neither Jenny nor Anna had the energy to speak. At least Jenny hadn’t. Anna might have been keeping quiet for her own reasons. It was Jenny who broke the last dragging silence in over an hour of dragging silences.

“There it is,” she said, pointing out the window toward Wahweap’s mooring area. A majority of the boats on the lake did not dock but tied up to buoys and used smaller runabouts or skiffs to get to shore.

The houseboat was silhouetted against water turned silver with evening. The stone-and-sand landscape beyond had the dull glow of antique gold. Square-bowed and riding low, the houseboat drove a wide vee through the molten water.

“Vamos,”
Steve said. “We don’t want anybody scattering before you girls get a chance to look at their shining faces.”

From another source Jenny might have taken umbrage at the “girls.” From Steve Gluck, she didn’t. He was an equal-opportunity kind of guy and often called visiting mucky-mucks he was shepherding around “you boys.” Jenny sensed that, in some indefinable way, Steve felt older than all other living humans.

Doug Schneider pulled up next to the houseboat as Steve threw the bumpers over the side to cushion the hulls from one another. Jenny leaped neatly over the gunwale onto the party boat and began lashing the NPS boat to the houseboat’s cleats.

Music played loud. Their arrival didn’t even make a dent in the chatter and laughter of the kids on board.

“Hey, man, it’s Smokey the Bear,” someone called down from the upper deck. “Where’s your Smokey Bear hat, Ranger Rick?”

Jenny stepped back to see who was doing the talking, caught her heel on a battered boogie board, and fell on her ass in an undignified fashion. Pratfalls were clearly considered high comedy by this stratum of society. The entire upper deck burst into raucous laughter. Someone shouted, “Not Ranger Rick, Ranger Rita!” and “Ranger Grace,” and more hilarity was enjoyed by all.

Having washed aboard on the gale of laughter, Anna held out her hand to help Jenny to her feet. Pretending not to see it, Jenny rose in one smooth motion. It was bad enough to make a fool of herself in front of people whose shit she had hauled. To make a fool of herself in front of Anna made her want to send each and every über-rich spoiled kid to sleep with the fishes. Instead of giving in to this tempting tide of pique, she made herself laugh. Helpless adult anger would delight the drunken little sots. She refused to give them that pleasure.

Doug and Steve followed them on board, and the partiers crowded back into the cabin to make room. The Wahweap district ranger gave Jenny an irritated scowl as he stepped around her. Probably feeling she’d shamed the entire Park Service by landing on her rump.

Schneider stepped to the center of the small deck in the stern and held his hands up for quiet. “No one is to leave this boat,” he ordered in a voice that had been born to shout orders to the troops from horseback.

For a second the gabble faded to a dull roar, and Jenny thought Doug had the buggers cowed. She was wrong.

“Oooh,” came a taunt. “Hey, we better not leave town or the sheriff will shoot us!”

“Who shot the sheriff?” several girls sang and leaned over the rail from the upper deck, breasts spilling from tiny bikini tops.

“He’s kinda cute.”

Doug Schneider’s hard-boned face was getting harder, his thin-line lips thinner. If he could have gotten away with it, Jenny didn’t doubt that he would have pulled his gun and fired it into the air to get their attention.

Steve ambled into the space where Schneider was affixed like a land mine waiting to be stepped on. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the box of drunken kids wearily. Scratching his head the way Jenny’d seen him do so many times over the years, pushing his ball cap back, exposing a slightly receding hairline, he said quietly, “We got us a couple of dead bodies. We think they might be friends of yours.”

Those in the front lines who heard Steve’s words passed them back. Quiet and attention flowed out from the stern until it had snuffed the jeering and the drunken fun from the entire boat.

When the transformation was complete, Steve fumbled in the left breast pocket of his shirt, saying, “We’d sure appreciate if you guys could give us a hand with identifying them so we can get hold of their folks.” He fished out a packet of Polaroid snapshots.

“These were taken postmortem and they’re going to be pretty hard for some of you to look at, but I’m asking you to try.”

A girl in her very early twenties, if that, stepped out from the wall of flesh that had formed outside the sliding patio doors to the cabin.

“How do you want us to do this, Officer?” she asked with complete sobriety.

“He’s good, isn’t he?” Jenny murmured to Anna.

Anna nodded. “Twenty years and twenty pounds ago he’d have been a great Marc Antony.”

“Ouch,” Jenny said.

“What?” Anna looked mildly confused. “Marc Antony wasn’t old and fat,” she said matter-of-factly.

Theater people were more pragmatic than Jenny would have thought. Maybe one had to see oneself realistically before she could know what had to be done to play someone else with any insight. As good an actor as he was, Brian Dennehy would probably be wasting his time auditioning for the part of Tinker Bell.

“Are you okay with this?” Jenny asked Anna.

“Yup.”

“Are you scared?”

“Nope.”

“Am I annoying you?”

“Is that a trick question?”

Jenny smiled both to herself and her housemate.

“Shall we?” Jenny asked. She and Anna moved apart and began amiably circulating through the boaters as they’d been instructed to during the ride out, making no challenges, asking no questions, just searching faces. Anna was looking for the third man who’d been present during the assault on Kay. Jenny was just looking, hoping something she saw—or something she failed to see—would trigger a flash of brilliance. At this point, even a spark would be reassuring.

The high spirits, or imitation thereof, leached from the gathering by Steve Gluck’s plea for assistance, the milling kids looked more like kids, tired sunburned kids who’d eaten too much, drunk too much, and secretly wanted someone to order them to go to bed early. Their densely packed bodies mumbled and shifted or asked questions Jenny pretended not to know the answers to as she swam through the human pond. She saw kids fondling each other in a desultory way. She saw kids smoking dope and shooting her challenging glances as if she were DEA and not NPS. She saw one kid puking over the rail. She saw kids who looked vaguely familiar. She didn’t see anything that helped sort out the quagmire that had culminated in the deaths of three young people and the scarring of Anna Pigeon.

Having stared into every bleary-eyed face she could find, she stopped mingling at the stern end of the upper deck and rested her forearms on the rail, looking over the now dark water to the lights of Wahweap. Jim and Steve were no longer in sight. Undoubtedly working their way through the crowded cabin and foredeck.

After a few minutes, Anna came and leaned beside her. “Anything?” Jenny asked.

“No. You?”

“No.”

For a moment they stood without speaking. With what sounded like a contented sigh Anna said, “Dark is very dark out in the wilds. Dark is safe here. In the city, at night, if you find yourself alone in the dark—on an empty street or in the hall of a building—that’s when your antennae are out. There’s safety in light and crowds in a city. Out here, it’s just the opposite. Dark is good. Alone is safest.”

“Unless you’re in a solution hole,” Jenny said and immediately wished she’d bitten her tongue off. Why on earth had she felt the need to drag out Anna’s nightmare and shove it in her face? It was Anna saying, “Alone is safest,” she realized. The words had shut Jenny out.

Fortunately Anna seemed unfazed by her lack of sensitivity.

“Even in the jar. I was trapped, sure, but alone was safest. Darkness was my friend.”

Jenny bumped shoulders with Anna to let her know, safest or not, she was not alone. Anna returned the pressure, and they stood in the velvety night in companionable silence, looking over the water until Steve stepped out on the stern deck and waved them down.

Doug was in his boat by the time they squeezed and excused their way down the narrow stairs and through the main cabin.

“Any luck?” Steve asked as they came aft to meet him.

“Nothing,” Anna said.

“Nada,” Jenny added. “How’d you guys do?”

“Three positive I.Ds,” Steve said. “Not bad for an hour’s work. Get the lines, would you?” he asked, then stepped over the space between the two boats and jumped heavily on deck. Jenny made short work of loosing the bow and stern lines from where she’d secured them. This done she followed him, then turned to make sure Anna was coming.

She wasn’t. She was standing in the houseboat’s stern staring at the deck, a look of concern on her face.