Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Brent Roxbury had been discharged for conduct unbecoming an enlisted man. He'd been caught exposing himself. Local law enforcement suspected he'd been at it for some time. Reports of a man fitting his description flashing women in parks and on bike paths near the base had been coming in for a year and a half-roughly the amount of time Roxbury had served. When he inadvertently flashed Lieutenant Marsha Coleman of the military police while she was jogging with her cocker spaniel, she arrested him. Securing him with the dog's leash, she delivered him to the town's constabulary. Dog tags were found, military connections noted, and he was turned back over to the army for discipline.

Anna thanked her informant, withstood a couple minutes more of his voice, then got him off the line. Her right ear was sore from being pressed so long against the receiver, and she had the beginnings of a headache that strenuous games of phone tag always engendered.

A brief raid on Zeddie's medicine cabinet produced two Advil. Anna washed them down with cold coffee and returned to the SF-171. Evidently Brent had liked the area. After his discharge his home addresses all had been in Missouri. The last was in Springfield, where he'd met and married Amy.

Since coming to New Mexico he'd eked out a living by working with the various agencies and the oil and gas companies. His SF-171 had the required three names to call for references. They were all people from the petroleum industry. The last was the man responsible for managing the Blacktail. Anna circled it. Seldom was a shooting brought on by something in the distant past. Long planned and finally executed revenges or a sudden irresistible opportunity to redress an old wrong did happen, but usually the reason was closer to home, closer to the now. People had long memories, but they had short fuses.

Rarely did anyone exhibit the patience and discipline of the Count of Monte Cristo.

Like a kaleidoscope, each time the information spun, the pieces created new patterns. Chances were good Brent had outgrown his antisocial form of self-expression-or gotten terrifically good at it. A few calls to the police departments of the previous Missouri addresses assured Anna there'd been no further arrests on that score. Unless one was psycho, flashing was hardly a killing offense. Certainly not for Amy. Brent's early career as a pervert for Uncle Sam further exonerated her and her dentist. Few courts would quibble over giving Mom custody when Dad was a convicted sex offender, even of the most benign variety.

Brent's indiscretions got his ex off the hook and in no way linked him to Frieda, or to Oscar as his shooter. Yet, try as she might, Anna couldn't let go of the subject. Something niggled in the back of her brain wanting to link Roxbury's military history with events in New Mexico. Maybe it was just that she was so sick of questions she was beginning to hallucinate answers.

There would be another skeleton, she promised herself. She just hadn't looked in the right closet.

In the case of Sondra McCarty, Anna had no doubt she was in the appropriate closet. The form the skeleton would take remained to be seen. At the start of the investigation she had considered the possibility that Sondra didn't survive the rock fall. After Jewel assured her the woman was alive and well and winging her way homeward, she'd dropped the idea. Now evidence was mounting that Sondra had never left Lechuguilla, had never gotten any farther than Katie's Pigtail.

Zeddie and Peter wrapped together in the darkness; such a sudden coupling after the separation of husband and wife spoke of great need or great assurance. Anna had assumed it was the wall of dirt between Peter and his spouse that gave them the confidence to turn to each other so publicly. A wall of dirt on top of that same spouse would be just as reassuring and a whole lot more final.

Trying to tie them to Frieda was what had kept them on the back burner of Anna's mind. Both had had ample opportunity to kill her. Peter was her physician for the first forty-eight hours after the rock had struck her. Their culpability in her eventual death was too great a stretch. Factoring out the original attempt on Frieda's life-an opinion held by nearly everyone but Anna-and putting Sondra in the place of the corpse du jour, it was no stretch at all. Brent's shooting could be explained as well. Peter and or Zeddie arranged for Sondra's death in the ill-begotten rock fall. Brent saw something. Brent was silenced. Zeddie made a much better suspect for desert stalking and sharpshooting than either Amy or the boyfriend.

"Damn." Anna had only just been forgiven for accusing Zeddie and Peter of murder. To do it again was liable to get her thrown off her couch. Or killed. Shoving herself up from the table, she stared at the winter-bleak patio. Wandering through the kitchen, she blindly looked into the refrigerator. Hopeful, Calcite swished around her ankles. Anna picked her up and set her abstractedly on the kitchen counter. The cat twitched her tail, and Anna caught it. Loose ends. The Zeddie-McCarty-Sondra triangle tied up a lot of loose ends.

Calcite jumped to the floor when a sigh gusted from Anna's lungs. The solution didn't sit well. The sequence of events rendered Frieda's death so unnecessary, so peripheral. Was that what was bothering her? The idea that her friend's death had been meaningless, a by-product? Anna shook off the thought. No one else had seen Frieda's face, heard the tremor of certainty and horror as she described looking up, seeing her headlamp flash over a gloved hand rolling down a stone, the fear and the sadness born of knowing someone wished to take her life from her.

Anna cleared her mind. Like it or not, she would have to tackle Zeddie.

Sondra was, as advertised, a royal pain in the patootie. Possibly not above blackmailing a man into marrying her. An ambitious woman who wanted to do it the old-fashioned way, climbing the ladder one man at a time. From what Rhonda had uncovered, she had used her evil wiles to snatch another woman's beau. Plenty of reasons to hate her. More than enough never to have her over for dinner. But murder? Intelligent people-at least sane intelligent people-realized that murder was doing it the hard way. Zeddie and Peter were worldly enough to know things could be lived through, faced down, or bought off with less backlash than murder. Breaking that strongest of taboos was usually a step taken in desperation. Adultery, fornication-the stuff of love triangles-just weren't that big a deal anymore. Photos on Zeddie's mantel indicated she and Peter had been together since his marriage. Clearly it was not necessary to do so over his wife's dead body. Either they were not as sane as Anna presumed, or there was something she was missing.

Why had McCarty allowed himself to be blackmailed into matrimony? Why had he gone on vacation with his wife, girlfriend, and ex-girlfriend? Did he like the fireworks? Was it a game, one that had taken an unexpectedly ugly turn?

Tawdry questions, half answered with half-truths, jammed Anna's brain like sand poured into a piston engine. Before she blew a gasket, she decided to stop thinking. Her stomach reminded her it was past lunch. Her watch told her it was one thirty. Zeddie, Peter, and Curt should have crawled out of the arteries of New Mexico by now. Curt and Peter would be home shortly, eager for hot showers and clean clothes. They would probably spend the afternoon watching a ball game. December: Anna couldn't remember if it was baseball, football, or basketball season, but undoubtedly Madison Avenue had arranged for one sport or another to peddle beer and cars on a Sunday afternoon. Mere fire and brimstone, a murder investigation couldn't compete. She would have to postpone Peter and start with Zeddie. She had a feeling the "something more" she sought lurked in that quarter.