Nevada Barr - The Rope

The hair was the right color, and, judging by the form under the sheet, he was big enough to be the man who hit Kay. “Sorry,” Anna said. “I don’t know for sure that I’ve seen him before.”

“I have,” Jenny said.

The bodies in Panther Canyon’s end were recovered by the dive team, sans Jenny Gorman. Jenny was Lake Powell’s best diver, but Steve hadn’t wanted her back in the cold water after her bout with hypothermia. Regis guessed there were psychological reasons as well. Steve hadn’t said as much. Since anything that smacked of psychotherapy got Gorman’s hackles up, he wouldn’t have.

Regis spun his office chair in a full circle just to feel he was moving. He’d played every angle he could think of to be in Panther during the recovery. He wasn’t law enforcement, or a diver, or high enough in the pecking order to stick his nose anywhere he wanted, so he’d failed. Pushing harder—or simply going AWOL from headquarters and showing up—would have looked peculiar. Since he and Bethy had stayed in Page on their lieu days, it was more difficult to keep abreast of things without calling attention to himself.

Best scenario, they’d think he was a ghoul with poor work habits. Worst scenario? He didn’t want to think about that. The brief high he’d gotten from playing cat-and-mouse was burning out. Would they find telltale marks on the bodies? God, he hoped not.

“It was an accident,” he said firmly. Not firmly enough. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself. Trying again, he said, “It was an accident.” Better. Accidents did happen. People died. It wasn’t that far-fetched. Canyoneering was a dangerous sport. Inexperienced—even experienced—climbers died every year. These two could very well have died by accident.

The logic of this argument lowered his blood pressure a few points. In the parks, deaths were nearly always accidental. During the six years he’d been at Lake Powell he couldn’t remember a single homicide.

“It was an accident,” he said for the third time. Perfect. It sounded true.

God damn, but he hadn’t bargained for this. The thrill of feeling alive, of knowing he was fully in the world, that his life was not being measured away in meetings and memos and conversations that never changed, had gone into overdrive. Nerves accelerated from charged to jangling. Excitement became fear. He felt like a man flayed alive. Every word spoken, every movement made, crashing against raw flesh.

Regis hadn’t been able to worm his way into the viewing of the bodies either. He knew Anna identified one of the bodies, more or less. Not as anybody specific but as one of the attack boys. Jenny’d recognized the other as a partier on the houseboat that defiled Panther’s grotto. College-age men accidentally dying in the slot canyon that led up to the plateau where, a few days before, college-age men had assaulted a woman was not a coincidence anybody would swallow. Poetic justice was even more rare than the ordinary prosaic justice occasionally available in the courts.

Even the dullest law enforcement type—and neither Steve nor Jim was a dullard—would know these men had been murdered.

Regis rose from his desk and closed his office door so he could pace without being observed. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn. The office was cramped, but pacing was better than sitting.

He sensed killing could become an addiction. Having once taken a living creature that was There and changed it into a chunk of meat, rendering it Not There by an act of will, if one was not horrified by the act—or perhaps even if one was—the power of the act would eventually draw the killer back. A need to kill again would build, to see if it was the same, see if it was different, got better, harder, or easier.

What had never crossed his mind, in all of the hours he’d spent thinking of Anna and the jar, Kay and the assault, was that killing could become an act of indifference. Taking a life should be a passionate interaction, not a whim or a matter of convenience. It chilled him to think death and life were no different, that There and Not There were equally insignificant, equally banal.

The perfect crime.

He remembered thinking of the ultimate seduction of a life without consequences. There was no such thing. Webs were woven and flies were caught in them. Threads snapped until everything was in ruins. A need to confess, pour everything out in a putrid flood before a priest or a ranger, was building. The need was so great, membranes in his mind grew thin with the desire to burst, let secrets spew like pus from a suppurating wound.

Shaking his head, he paced three steps, turned, paced three, and turned.

He was in too deep for confession. Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly. It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

Too late for confession.

Maybe not too late to end it.

Steve and the chief ranger wasted no time. The senator was abandoned to amuse himself as best he could until Hank and the plane had time to come back for him. Chief Ranger Madden debated whether it should be he or Steve flying back to Wahweap with Anna and Jenny. The need to be in charge vied with the need to do what was best. At least that’s what Jenny thought as she watched inner shadows flit across his face while Hank walked around the plane doing a preflight check. Regardless of the fact he’d flown in only a few hours earlier, Hank erred on the side of caution. Once he’d told Jenny his goal in life was to die a very old pilot.

Madden chose to stay in Bullfrog. It had been a decade or more since he had practiced hands-on law enforcement, and Steve did it every day. Jenny was impressed by the decision. She’d thought his vanity greater than his intelligence.

Steve took the right seat. Anna and Jenny buckled themselves in back.

Nearly a week had passed since Jenny saw the man now cooling his heels—and the rest of his anatomy—in Beatrice’s examining room. Houseboats were allotted two weeks on the water with any given group. If she’d met up with the partiers during their second week, by now they would have dispersed, back to wherever home was. Conceivably, the boat could be cleaned and back on the lake with another group, but Jenny didn’t think so. From Anna’s description of Kay, someone, somewhere, was waiting for her to come home, and as yet there’d been no alarm raised. So, instead of enjoying the beauty of the landscape as seen from the air, Jenny searched the surface of the lake for the old-model houseboat. Judging by the cant of their heads and the concentration on their faces, Anna and Steve were doing the same.

At a quarter of five they landed on the small strip the NPS maintained on the outskirts of Page. Awaiting them was a 1979 Jeep Cherokee, painted Park Service green, with the bison badge on its doors and the Wahweap district ranger behind the wheel. Doug Schneider was in his early fifties, well muscled, his iron gray hair worn in a brush cut that had been fashionable when Jenny was in grade school. The soothing gray and green of the NPS uniform did nothing to soften the military look he cultivated. Jenny was willing to bet his wife had to iron all his permanent-press uniform shirts. Simply plucking them from the dryer in a timely manner couldn’t create the crispness of Doug’s pleats and creases.

As they climbed into the Jeep, Steve made introductions. Again Anna and Jenny took the rear seat. The moment the doors were closed the two rangers began to talk.

“I think we’ve found your boat,” Doug said as he backed out of the gravel lot behind the hangar. “According to Dream Vacations—the outfit that rents it out—their last day on the lake is tomorrow. They have to be back in Wahweap by nine A.M. I sent out an APB. A boat that fit the description was spotted in Padre Bay around two thirty. With luck, it is headed in and will moor at Wahweap tonight. By now they’ve got to be running low on beer.”