Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

"I just think there are many explanations you haven't considered.

You're too close to this. Too personally involved. To put it bluntly, you're out of line. It's time you went home."

A brief maelstrom of emotions ranging from acute humiliation to homicidal rage seethed. Because she was female, her body's natural response to the onslaught was tears, tears of anger that, had she allowed them to fall, surely would have burnt holes in the carpet like droplets of battery acid. Determinedly impassive, she waited for the storm to abate. She hadn't a leg to stand on. Everything George Laymon said was true. A Chinese aphorism came to mind: If you keep going the way you're going, eventually you'll get where you're headed. Where she was headed was out of town, if not tarred and feathered riding on a rail, then the modern-day equivalent.

Going home to Mesa Verde, her tower house, her cat, tempted Anna to the very soul. It was, as the bard had said, peevish and self-willed harlotry that bade her stay. Self-willed harlotry won. The time had come to grovel fetchingly.

Anna sighed and rubbed now-dry eyes. "Thanks, George. A counselor would be good. I know I've been a pain in the neck. I guess I needed to blame Frieda's death on somebody human. God is so unsatisfying." She laughed, and it took no effort to sound shaky and uncertain. "I'll talk to a shrink, get some rest, and get this ankle stable. I'd like to be here for Brent's funeral, get some closure. Then I'll head home." Laymon couldn't very well refuse to let her stay for the funeral of a coworker whose body she had found. That and a shrink appointment would buy her a few more days in which to continue wearing out her welcome. "Thanks again for listening," she said. "This has been a rough week."

Laymon was relenting, though his eyes were still wary. Anna didn't want to overplay her hand. Pushing herself up from her chair and limping more than was called for by her rapidly healing ankle, she allowed herself to be shunted from his office.

Outside the building, she stood in the thin winter sunlight pretending she felt some heat from it. Sheltered from the wind, it was almost true. She turned her face to the light the way a sunflower will. The day was young. Laymon was a professional; he'd managed to rake her over the coals in less than a quarter of an hour. One thing was sure: she was officially on foot. CACA wouldn't be giving her a vehicle in the near future. Later she would consider bumming a ride into town and renting a car. Since 1994 when the NPS had bumped most of their law-enforcement rangers up to GS-9s, her poverty days were over. Anna made thirty thousand and change annually. For a single woman living forty-five miles from the nearest retail store, thirty grand stretched a long ways. A rental car wouldn't break the bank. Maybe tomorrow, she thought. Today she was going on a hike.

Zeddie's house was empty. She was working the Big Room down in Carlsbad Cavern till noon, then roving a section of trail in the twilight zone after lunch. Peter would be hanging about, within whispering distance. Where Schatz was, was anybody's guess. Solitude was a relief. Having alienated her hostess with accusations of murder, Anna didn't relish getting caught raiding her refrigerator for a packed lunch. A bottle of Dos Equis beckoned with its long and graceful neck, but she declined, taking an Orange Crush instead. Demon alcohol would have to wait till she didn't have so much on her mind.

A quick forage through the bathroom cabinets produced an Ace bandage. Ankle taped, food and water in a purloined daypack, Anna left the housing area and started cross-country in the direction of Big Manhole. A mile's walk took her over a rise in the earth that effectively blocked the Carlsbad buildings from view. Out of sight of headquarters, she ceased to move in a straight line and began making slow wide arcs, her eyes fixed on the ground.

CACA's backcountry was rugged and not well traveled. The park was known for its cavern; visitors came to see the cave, not to hike. Little money was dedicated to the creation and upkeep of trails. Anna hoped this would simplify her task. In a hiking park the plethora of footprints would have rendered tracking nearly impossible.

The desert was not good country for finding sign. The earth was hard-baked and covered with stones, though recent rains had softened it somewhat. On that Anna pinned her hopes. That and the shooter's mindset. He hadn't planned on leaving any witnesses. Maybe he'd not bothered to cover his trail. With her escape, he'd been thrown off balance. The glimpse she'd had of him, he'd been running. Runners left good prints.

Two hours' careful traverse of sand and rock turned up little besides weathered litter and game trails. Cold drove the life of the desert underground, and she hadn't seen so much as a jack rabbit or a horned lizard. Three times she'd come across recently made footprints, and three times the trails turned away from her objective: shooting distance to Big Manhole. Anna remained unconcerned. Tracking was slow business, two hours scarcely a beginning.

Wind, cutting in an endless blade across the exposed skin of her face, was an irritant, but she chose to use rather than fight it. This time of year it blew unwaveringly from the northwest. By keeping it first to one quarter, then, when she turned and began tracking in the opposite direction, to the other, she could stay on course without bothering to lift her eyes from the ground.

Two more hours passed without producing results. Anna found a fold in the earth to deflect the wind and lunched on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Doritos, and the orange soda. From her niche she could see what she believed was the hill that housed the entrance to Big Manhole. In an unending landscape of fawn-colored hills it was hard to be sure without digging out the binoculars she'd pilfered from Zeddie's mantel. Beyond the hill a valley had been carved by a now-dry watercourse. The riverbed writhed like a snake through scabby hills and up under cliffs of white limestone. In an ancient oxbow, dry for centuries, was a pipe sticking out of the ground, a "dry hole" marker, where a well had been. A quarter of a mile beyond was another well, this one up and running. A black speck, followed by a comet's tail of white, barreled down the road toward the wells. A truck fighting the same choking dust that had engulfed Anna.

She retrieved Zeddie's field glasses. A cement truck, no doubt laying a well pad somewhere in the hills. She followed the trail of dust back to where the rutted dirt to Big Manhole forked off from the gravel, then traced it up to the bald hillock where she'd found Brent's Blazer. A cream-colored pickup was parked there. Because of its protective coloring she hadn't noticed it with the naked eye.

Interest rejuvenated, she moved the glasses slowly down the hill till she rested them on the entrance to the cave. Brent's blood, black now, stained the rock, but the body was gone. The sheriff would have taken care of that. Big Manhole was locked, or at least closed. The driver of the pickup was nowhere in sight.

A minute's watch, and he appeared. Walking up from the gully separating Anna from Big Manhole came the rangy weathered form of Oscar Iverson. He was in uniform and so on duty. This wasn't a recreational jaunt. Probably he was there for the same reason she was; to see what he could find about the shooter who'd killed Roxbury. He'd driven around to the cave to backtrack.

Anna deliberated on whether to show herself or not. Laymon had made it abundantly clear that she was persona non grata in these parts, and the previous night, Oscar had seemed none too pleased with her either. From her protected crevice she would be all but invisible unless she purposely called attention to herself.

In times past she'd learned a good deal more from watching people than from talking with them. Words were used to obfuscate as often as to communicate. She decided on the role of unseen spy and cupped both hands around the end of the binoculars lest they catch the sun and flash out her whereabouts.