Nevada Barr - Blind Descent

Past the Impressionist pachyderm lay what she had been seeking. Expectation did little to soften the blow. As she leaned against the elephant's cool flank, her eyes prickled with tears. The cavern extended another four or five hundred feet. Aragonite chandeliers had hung in defiant profusion from a ceiling of gold. The meandering stream had curved through formations looking more like cloud than solid earth. The end of the room had been cloaked in draperies of such delicacy it would have taken little imagination to see them moving in a nonexistent breeze. At their base, filled by a waterfall from the creek, was what had been the room's crowning jewel, a clear blue lake, garnished with lily pads of ruby-colored stone.

That was what had been. Before poison rained down from above, then was pumped back up in the form of double homicide. "Marble clouds, lily pads ruined," Frieda said that first night in Tinker's. She'd seen it. What remained was tragic, Philistines in the temple. Aragonite trees lay smashed on the cavern floor, their branches defiled with dirt and rock from a gout in the ceiling. The lake was full of mud, the lily pads broken. Half the lake and part of the waterfall were buried under cement and pea gravel. A pipe casing a foot in diameter cut through the ruined ceiling to plunge into the hideous pile and disappear.

The Blacktail, as Holden said, was drilling legally on a legal lease. But concrete trucks had run night and day, pulverizing the desert and causing the one neighbor in forty miles to complain of noise. Roxbury had ordered too much pipe. Inspired by the image of Peter angling his drinking straw into Zeddie's milkshake, Anna and Holden had pieced it together. The Blacktail drilled not straight down as required by the lease, but at an angle, pushing their pipe deep into the protected land of the park in search of gas.

When they'd hit open space, the cavern where Anna stood, and ceased to get any return-no mud or rock cuttings circulating back up-they didn't report it. When there was such an indication of underground spaces, regulations demanded a cease in drilling so the possibility of a cavern could be explored. The Blacktail couldn't afford to report it. They couldn't bear the scrutiny. In order to fill the hole so they could go on drilling, they pumped concrete and gravel into the earth day after day, night after night till they'd laid a new bed for their pipe. And destroyed a natural cavern that beggared man's proudest cathedrals.

Unanswered questions abounded. Why had Brent been part of it when he didn't have the courage-or the lack of morality-to go through with it? He'd ordered the extra pipe, the additional concrete and gravel, and had made a feeble attempt to falsity the data. So feeble, he must have wanted to get caught. Brent had pushed the stone to kill Frieda and might have been the one who started the slide that finished the job. Had he done it for money? From the way he lived, he hadn't gotten enough to make it worth killing over.

Anna took a thirty-five-millimeter camera from her pack. The camera was designed to capture Kodak moments: babies and birthdays. The flash would be lost in a room this size, but for her purposes it would suffice. She sought proof, not art. Armed with photos and an eyewitness, Holden could close down the Blacktail. With luck and hard work he could bring the owners or operators to task. They would not be sufficiently punished; drawing, quartering, and disemboweling were outlawed in New Mexico. They would be fined, the modern equivalent of the pound of flesh. Anna couldn't remember what Exxon paid for the Valdez incident, but she would keep her fingers crossed that this settlement would make the other look like pin money.

The soullessness of the business of business saddened her. One roll of film finished, she loaded a second. Crimes of passion committed by passionless men for money.

The Park Service would deal more harshly with participants within its own ranks. Jobs would be lost, reputations destroyed. Charges of conspiracy and racketeering might buy prison time for the perpetrator. For Oscar Iverson. He'd spoken with Brent in the Pigtail. He'd known Brent was meeting Anna at Big Manhole. As cliché dictated, he'd returned to the scene of the crime and taken away the one shred of evidence, the rifle shell. The shell had been carefully wiped clean of prints by the time the sheriff's department got their hands on it.

"Anna Pigeon."

So wrapped was she in her thoughts and belief in her solitude, she screeched like an owl and stumbled back. As she fell, her lamp was knocked askew. Light from an alien helmet struck her night-adjusted eyes with the force of an oncoming locomotive. Less than two yards away a man stood blanketed in darkness.

"You are in a great deal of trouble, Anna. A very great deal of trouble."

Shielding her eyes, Anna took a guess. "George Laymon?" The intrusion had goosed her adrenal glands. Fatigue was gone. She was on her feet before the words were out.

"The same."

"Get the light out of my eyes."

He acted as if he didn't hear. Adjusting her headlamp to illuminate him, she joined the pissing contest.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"The best defense is a good offense. I'm here to find you. Curt said you'd gone on alone, adding stupidity to your considerable list of transgressions. Lord! What a travesty."

His light had slipped beyond her and touched on the desecration of pipe and cement. "What an unholy mess." Trained on his face, Anna's lamp revealed shock and sadness in the slump of muscles. "Drilling," he said. "One leak in that gas pipe and not only is this room gone but all of Lechuguilla. The atmosphere poisoned."

Anna was losing her adrenaline high. Enough of an edge remained to sharpen her voice if not her wits. "What made you come?"

Laymon turned his back on the mountain of cement and pea gravel. "My secretary went to Oscar's office. The key was missing from the board. You were gone. Mr. Schatz was gone. A quick check and we found the padlock cut on the gate to Lechuguilla's access road. So we put together what we hoped wasn't going to turn out to be a rescue team."

"We?"

"Oscar and the others stayed back with Curt and the woman. Finding Mrs. McCarty won't get you off the hook. The superintendent is not pleased. If there's a regulation in NPS-9 you failed to break, I've yet to find it."

After the words "Oscar's with Curt and the woman," Anna quit listening. Altruism-the safety of Curt and Sondra-sparked, then was lost in a blinding flash of self-interest. Oscar was between Anna and the culvert leading out of the cave.

"Oscar's involved," she said. "We've got to get back."

Laymon looked at her, then at the ruin behind her. "Surely not Oscar," he said, but she could see the idea was not completely foreign to him.

"I think Brent made a halfhearted attempt to silence Frieda, then backed off," Anna told him. "By the time we got to Katie's Pigtail, something had changed. Oscar talked to Brent. Pressured him somehow to try again."

Laymon looked weary, and every day of his sixty years showed. "All you have is a theory, Anna. I admit it sounds plausible, but without proof I wouldn't dare dignify it with any kind of formal accusation."

"Oscar's the cave resource manager. Oscar closed this wing of Lechuguilla."

"For the safety of the cave and the cavers. I concurred with the closure."

"Oscar stomped the scene of Brent's shooting and carried away the shell."

Laymon said nothing. He sat on a finger of dead gray concrete that spilled out from the mass trashing the lake. Shoulders stooped, he flicked at the mud on his boot tops with one glove. "I sent a law-enforcement ranger. Oscar stopped him and went himself. I wrote it off as overzealousness. Everybody wants to play cop." He raised his head. "Present company not excluded. By your Wonder Woman act you endangered yourself, Curt Schatz, the resource, and those of us who've had to come after you. Since you didn't see fit to report any of your suspicions to the superintendent and myself, who did you work with? Or are you foolish enough to be working solo?"