Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Oscar wasn't a tracker. He moved quickly, his long legs eating up the terrain. She guessed he was following a fairly clear trail and cringed as his great booted feet slapped down, obliterating traces of the shooter. Halfway up the long slope, not more than fifty yards from where she hid, Iverson came to a stop and squatted down, his long green-clad legs poking out at the knees in a fair imitation of a praying mantis. For a while he stared at the ground, then he poked at something with a stick he found nearby. Whatever it was that he had unearthed, he picked up gingerly with two fingers and dropped into a plastic bag that he tucked away in the pocket of his coat. That done, he straightened up again and appeared to be searching the area.

"Stomp, stomp, stomp," Anna whispered. Iverson's boots were falling with the oblivious regularity of the nontracker. Once the obvious had been snatched up, the scene was treated like dirt. There'd be precious little left to see by the time she got there. She wished she'd not stopped for lunch, not commenced her tracking on the far end. Railing against past decisions petered out the way it always had to: when she reached Eve wishing she'd not played with the snake, regret vanished. There are no alternate life paths.

Finally Iverson moved on, and Anna allowed herself to exhale. He didn't go much farther. On higher, drier ground he lost the trail. After a few stabs into the brush, he gave up and returned the way he had come, over the same trail.

"Stomp, stomp, stomp," Anna lamented.

Briefly he stopped at the mouth of Big Manhole. Bowing his head, he dragged off his hat, a green billed cap with earflaps that tied beneath the chin. Ridiculous-looking garment, but Anna wished she had one. The wind was causing her ears to ache.

Iverson stood combing his straw-colored hair with his fingers till it stood out in the wind. Anna wondered if he was paying his respects to Brent Roxbury's ghost or merely cooling his brains the better to think with. Whatever the phenomenon, it was short-lived. Pulling the hat back on, he made short work of the walk up to his truck and drove off. Anna waited till a plume of white told her he was headed out toward the main highway, then she packed up the leavings of her lunch and started down the hillside to see if anything was left of the shooter's trail.

In minutes she reached the place where Iverson had stopped, a small clearing ringed with low growth and boasting a line of sight to the cave, an ideal place to lie in wait with a rifle. Anna paused just outside the clearing and hunkered down on her heels to study the ground. It didn't look as if the sheriff's men or any BLM people had visited the scene. Darkness would have prevented any serious investigation when they'd come to fetch the body the previous night. Either they'd be out later in the day, or they'd already come and gone but had failed to track the sniper.

Iverson's prints were all over the clearing, the easily identifiable marks of a corrugated lug sole, the kind found on every pair of firefighting boots made by White's, the choice of elite wild-land firefighters from every land-management agency in the country.

To one side of the clearing she could see where he'd crouched down and gouged the earth with his twig. In the dirt was a smooth indentation about an inch long with a slight T-shaped mark at one end. A rifle shell, overlooked by the gunman, had left its impression in the soil. That was what Oscar had bagged and pocketed. Several minutes' careful study was unproductive. If the shooter had left other tracks, Iverson's overlay them. With a snort of disgust, Anna turned her attention to the trail Iverson had followed up the slope for such a short distance. Again lug-soled footprints were all she found. Either they all belonged to the heavy-footed, Iverson, or the shooter also had been wearing White's boots. Near the ridge she lost the trail. The crown of this hill and the next were stripped bare of earth. Polished limestone remained, untracked and untrackable.

Plunking herself down on the rock, Anna looked back toward the cave's mouth. A number of possibilities occurred to her. The shooter might not have left any tracks, or the tracks had been destroyed by Iverson. The shooter could have been wearing fire boots. They were common enough. She owned a pair. Zeddie probably did. Holden would. Curt, Peter, and Sondra wouldn't. But then she was wearing Zeddie's clothes. Borrowing or stealing wasn't out of the question.

An extremely unpleasant thought intruded. Maybe the shooter had worn Iverson's boots. Oscar had come directly up to the sniper's lair. Was he tracking, or did he know precisely where to come? The stomping and shuffling: insensitive investigation or intentional destruction of evidence? It wouldn't have been difficult to discover where and when Anna was to meet with Brent. Everyone at Zeddie's had known. They might have told. It wasn't a secret. Brent's choice to leave the message could be telling. Was it that he trusted the members of the core group, knew they had nothing to do with the killing? Or was he careless, overwrought, or overconfident?

The first attempt on Frieda's life had failed. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that Oscar Iverson had gone down into Lechuguilla not to rescue Frieda but to finish the job. If Brent had started to kill Frieda, then lost his nerve and decided to spill the beans to Anna, it made sense. Would an experienced caver like Oscar start an avalanche? Maybe. There was no way of knowing the whole side of the Pigtail would come down. With Holden watching every moment of the rigging, it would have been easier than sabotaging the ropes.

Unless Holden did that himself.

The thought made Anna physically ill. With a surge of relief, she remembered his broken ankle. He'd been at the bottom of the rock slide, not the top. And the person she'd seen scurrying away after the shots were fired was not lame. Suddenly she felt tired and scared.

One person to trust, and a cripple at that.

By early afternoon Anna was back in Zeddie's house. To her delight, but for Calcite, it remained uninhabited. The hike had taken a toll on her weak ankle. Some of the swelling had returned, and she was glad to put her foot up and rest. Trust in one's fellows is like the net beneath the highwire. The act can be done without it, but the effort becomes considerably more taxing. Considering that, the ankle, and the cold, the morning's work had been tiring. Anna was feeling her age, measured not in years but in acquired cynicism and human frailty.

The message light on Zeddie's answering machine was blinking. Brazenly, Anna played back the messages. None was from Sondra. One was for her from Rhonda Tillman. Either a terse or a careful woman, Rhonda said only, "Call me."

Full of good intentions, Anna dragged the cordless phone, along with a cup of hot tea, to the sofa. Wrapped in the ghastly pink-and-green afghan, she sipped her tea and contemplated the instrument. There were several people she would have liked to talk with. Of course, her sister Molly. Jennifer, a friend of hers and a ranger at Mesa Verde. It was Jennifer who was looking after Anna's cat, Piedmont, and the newly orphaned Taco. Frederick the Fed, her ex-whatever, crossed her mind. After two years' silence he'd intruded back into her life. Knowing he'd fallen for her sister didn't lower him in her estimation. To her way of thinking, Molly was quite a catch. But it did render Frederick off-limits forever. Without knowing he was doing so, Frederick Stanton had banished himself from the affections of the Pigeon sisters. Molly would never touch a man Anna was interested in. Anna wouldn't dream of a man interested in her sister.

Besides, she had nothing to say to him.

She had nothing to say to anyone.

Words not related to the deaths of Frieda or Brent balled up and slid off her mind like liquid mercury. Sick as she was of the subject, it consumed her. Rhonda Tillman was the only person with whom she could trust herself to maintain a coherent conversation.