Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

An impatient wail cut over the phone line. "Oops. Gotta go," Rhonda said. "Andrew is awake." The line went dead. Anna wasn't done talking. She needed to bounce these new thoughts off another brain. Expose the obvious flaws. Air off her thinking lest it become circular and self-perpetuating.

The empty house, so recently a boon, began to chafe on her nerves. Where was Curt? Had he made the calls? Where was Iverson? What had he done with the rifle shell? Had there been an autopsy of Brent Roxbury? Anna was out of the loop, out of her park, out of her jurisdiction, and possibly out of her league.

For a quarter of an hour she stalked from room to room, gazed out over tracts of desert, of street, of employee housing. Able to stand her own company no longer, she put on a coat and limped down to headquarters to see if she couldn't mooch a ride into town.

Jewel was typing furiously as Anna let herself into the chief of resource management's office. Her face was screwed up as if she went for a speed record. Loath to break her concentration in case she was training for the secretarial Olympics, Anna closed the door softly and walked soundlessly across the room on moccasined feet. She was at Jewel's desk before the secretary noticed her.

With a start and a squawk, Jewel banged the screen button and blacked out her computer. She wasn't fast enough, and Anna smiled.

"Aren't you the sneaky snake," Jewel said, and tried to regain her composure by preening hair-sprayed wings with porcelain nails.

"Sorry," Anna said.

"You here to be chewed out too?" Jewel asked with evident satisfaction.

"Too?"

"George told me Oscar was in hot water, messing over at Big Manhole. Seems you're a girl who can't resist hot water."

"Not this time," Anna said, and told her why she'd come. A few phone calls, and Jewel found a maintenance man who was driving into town to get machine parts. He picked up Anna on his way out of the compound. Being a pariah had its upside; Anna doubted Jewel would have been so forthcoming had virtue's reward not been the removal of Anna Pigeon.

Sixty-five minutes later she was outfitted with a Dodge Neon the color and stature of the average aphid, along with a full tank of gasoline. Credit cards were wonderful things. Anna drove to the BLM building on the eastern edge of town and again presented herself to the receptionist. Sans blood and dust, he didn't recognize her until she asked for Holden. Without bothering to phone ahead, the young man walked her back to Tillman's desk. On the way he asked questions about the shooting: How loud? How much blood? Color? Texture? Just as Anna was writing him off as a ghoul, he explained he was an amateur filmmaker-documentaries, mostly-but he wanted to make movies a la the Coen brothers in Minnesota. He was studying visual images. Anna laughed, not because she found his ambition amusing but because with that information she'd instantly forgiven him his prying. He was an artist not a busybody-as if that mattered one whit in the giant scheme of things.

Behind the fabric-covered partition that marked out his work space in a room of like spaces, Tillman was packing to leave. "Hey, Anna," he said. He was pleased to see her. It took her by surprise. She'd begun to think she'd alienated every living soul in New Mexico.

"Bad timing," he went on. "You caught me on my way out the door. What with one thing and another I got swamped. I'm in the field this afternoon."

"Can I ride along?" she asked on impulse.

Holden acted glad of the company. Foot encased in a walking cast, he took a BLM truck with an automatic transmission and drove out of town on the highway Anna had taken to Big Manhole. She found it hard to believe she'd made the journey only the day before. Corpse, bullets, wind-it felt as if it had happened years ago, or perhaps in a dream.

Holden told her everything he knew about the Roxbury Incident, as he now called it, a name to depersonalize uncomfortable memories. Along with the sheriff and the county coroner, Holden had gone out to Big Manhole. They'd arrived around eight o'clock, full dark, so there hadn't been much to see. The coroner pronounced Brent dead of a gunshot wound. A deputy recovered the rifle slug that killed him. The shot had ripped through Roxbury at a shallow angle and emerged where jawbone met ear. Much of its power spent, the slug lodged in the limestone lip above the cave entrance. As evidence it was of little value. Rock and bone had worked on it until it was simply a misshapen hunk of lead sporting fragments of Roxbury's flesh. Any rifling that might have been used to match it to the murder weapon was destroyed.

Anna told Holden of watching Iverson take the rifle shell, and he nodded as at old news. "George Laymon called and told us. The shell will be fingerprinted as soon as the park gets it to town. The sheriff wanted his own guys to do the work."

Turning in the shell didn't mean much. If it produced the killer's prints, it might be telling. If it had none there would be no way of knowing whether the shooter had wiped it before he loaded his weapon or if Iverson had wiped it clean of fingerprints before turning it over to the police.

"That's BLM land," Anna said as a thought occurred to her. "What was Oscar doing over there anyway?"

"It's only a few hundred yards from the park boundary. The superintendent wanted to know if any damage had been done, that sort of thing."

"Makes sense." Anna wondered why she used that phrase whenever she was particularly confused. "Oscar really trampled the scene," she said after a while.

Tillman laughed. "Captain Lightfoot. We kid him that he'll never get lost. That boy could leave tracks in concrete. Old Laymon won't let him anywhere near the more delicate crystal formations. Scared his feet'll hit high enough on the Richter scale it'd shatter anything within a fifteen-foot radius. He wouldn't have found much anyway. That whole ridge is nothing but one big rock."

"So I discovered." Holden didn't ask her what she had been doing there, and in her heart, she thanked him. Justifying herself was becoming a habit she'd just as soon break.

Because she needed to talk to someone and Holden was the only person whom she didn't suspect and who was still speaking to her, Anna shared her ideas about Oscar and Brent working together or in tandem to effect the death of Frieda Dierkz. Oscar and Holden were friends. Metaphorically speaking, Anna trod on eggs. She kept her statements theoretical, hypothetical, intellectual, trying her damnedest to convey suspicion without offending. After she finished her story Holden was silent for so long she began to get nervous.

"I'll have to think on this," he said in his slow, deliberate way. "I don't believe Oscar's got it in him to kick a cat out of the middle of the dinner table. But there might be something in what you say. I've got to think on it."

Anna had to be satisfied with that. She dropped the subject. "Are we going up to Big Manhole?" she asked as he turned the truck off the highway onto a gravel road that looked familiar.

"Not unless you want to. I was headed out to the Blacktail to go over some reports."

Anna had no desire to go to Big Manhole.

The Blacktail was like many other gas wells dotting the landscape of the Southwest. The Bureau of Land Management was not dedicated to conservation. Like the United States Forest Service, they were a multiple-use organization. Public lands were not only used for recreation and wildlife preserves but were leased to ranchers for grazing livestock, miners seeking precious metals, lumber interests, hunters, and companies drilling for oil and gas. By some estimates, 30 percent of the gas reserves in the lower forty-eight states were located under New Mexico. It was a boom and bust economy. The doomsayers predicted the petroleum would be pumped out by the year 2040. Advocates of preservation used these predictions to push for the development of alternate energy sources. Oil interests used them to try to force Congress into opening wilderness areas in Alaska to drilling. So far the oil interests were winning. Anna had been on the fringes of the ongoing battle for so long she was more than casually interested to see the inner workings of a producing well.