Nevada Barr - Track Of The Cat

A gray canvas daypack was dumped in the corner of the closet. Anna grabbed it to put the boots and shoes in. The pack wasn't empty. When she poured the contents onto the bed one hole of the fledgling mystery was filled: Sheila's camera, a pocket 35mm, was in the bottom of the pack with a pair of NPS binoculars and the remains of a salami and cheese sandwich. Sixteen of the thirty-six pictures on the roll had been taken.

A noise made Anna look up. Mrs. Drury stood in the bedroom doorway, a dish towel between her hands.

"I found it," Anna said, holding up the little camera. On impulse she said: "I'd like to keep the film if I may."

"Those little cameras are worth a lot of money," Mrs. Drury said and Anna was both irritated and embarrassed. She wasn't going to steal the damn thing.

"Not the camera," she said evenly. "Just the film. Maybe it will tell me something."

Mrs. Drury nodded. She'd lost interest. Flicking the dish towel in the direction of the uniforms, she said: "You can have that book-bag thing, too, and her park outfits. I'd just throw them out." Without saying what she had come for, she left and it crossed Anna's mind that she'd just been checking up on her. Quickly, she clicked through the last twenty pictures and tossed the exposed film into the daypack.

All of Ranger Drury's worldly goods fitted easily in the back of Paul's patrol vehicle, a fact Mrs. Drury remarked upon unfavorably more than once. She seemed to think a person should leave a bigger pile of consumer goods behind when they died.

Anna declined comment. In the hope it would take the edge off the night, she drank a third Old Milwaukee as she lashed a tarp down over the back of the pickup. It wouldn't rain, probably not for weeks, but it was an excuse to stay outside for a few minutes more. Mrs. Drury had retreated to the solace of Channel 9.

It was after ten p.m. when Anna came in. The beer was a failure: the Drury Problem was not alcohol-soluble. Mrs. Drury was pale and crumpled-looking. Anna took pity. "We'll stay here tonight. I'll drive you back first thing tomorrow."

The old woman-for now she looked older than her years- nodded. "I'll sleep in the little room," she told Anna, meaning Sheila's spare room.

Anna fetched the suitcase full of linens from the truck and made up the bed. Mrs. Drury seemed to expect it. And it was something to do.

When Mrs. Drury finally went to bed, Anna was relieved. Not wanting to leave her alone, Anna had stayed up watching a late-night local talk show with her.

It felt like a reprieve to go into the bedroom and close the door. Anna realized she had not spent that much time with anyone-other than occasionally Rogelio-in years. It was exhausting.

Having unrolled Sheila's sleeping bag-a new North Face from the cache-she lay down on the double bed. Her muscles twitched she was so tired but she was hardly sleepy at all. Staring up at the acoustical tile ceiling, she let her mind wander.

Somebody was looking for pictures. Somebody had either found them, not found them, or somebody was a figment of her imagination.

If the pictures were dangerous, Sheila would have hidden them. Everything she owned had been dismantled, packed into boxes, and removed from the trailer. There were no alarming photographs found.

Where, Anna asked herself, would she hide something in a mobile home? Mattress? Under the wall-to-wall? Behind the fake wood paneling? The ideas bothered her till she got up and checked them out. The carpet was glued down tight, the paneling all of a piece.

Even with the windows open, the trailer was hot. Anna divested herself of all but her underpants-lacy peach confections, the last vestige of a former clothes horse. Having folded her uniform trousers over the pipe in the closet, she lay back down.

"Pretty damn mysterious," she said to herself and laughed. "No shit, Sherlock. Go to sleep." Clicking off the lamp, she closed her eyes.

When she was in college, she remembered trying to hide her stash from the fabled Narcs. Every place she put it would suddenly seem glaringly obvious and, in a fit of paranoia, she'd move it.

Some enterprising authors had described the phenomenon perfectly. Anna wracked her brain but she couldn't recall their names. They'd written a clever book about marijuana cultivation. Anna recalled very little of it, only the introduction. "We've never tried marijuana," it said-or words to that effect. "We got all our information from our friend, Ernie. Ernie keeps his stash in the shower rod. Sorry, Ernie, we don't need you anymore."

Shower rod.

The clothes rod.

Anna clicked on the light. The clothes rod in the closet was a length of iron pipe dropped into two U-shaped brackets. She padded over and lifted it out. Her trousers slid to the floor as she peered in. A roll of paper corked one end.

Careful not to tear anything, Anna coiled it smaller and eased it out. A dozen snapshots, curled from their incarceration, sprang apart. She carried them to the bed, knelt on the rug, and spread them in the circle of light.

These were the pictures that had been sought. A naked woman laughing, her hair soft around her shoulders, posed on the slickrock in Middle McKittrick about a mile downstream from where the body had been found.

Christina Walters, her white breasts full and round, catching the sun, her knees coyly together, invitingly apart.

Sheila had set the timer for the last three: she and Christina making love, the tight brown wire of Ranger Drury's body close against the soft cream of the other woman's.

Anna gathered them up, sorry, almost to have pried. The pictures did not repulse her. They were, in their way, beautiful. Certainly Sheila Drury's best effort.

They might be a reason to kill. Anna didn't know. It seemed melodramatic. But sometimes people died. And sometimes people killed them. People killed people for all sorts of reasons.

Like many rangers, Anna chose Law Enforcement not because she wanted to bust perpetrators but because the Protection Divisions in most parks did all the search and rescue and emergency medicine. The serious cop stuff most rangers preferred to leave to the police.

This was beginning to smack of serious cop stuff.

Fear licked around Anna's ankles. She wished she had brought her.357. Rangers were required to carry defensive equipment whenever on duty. Not for the first time, Anna wished she paid a little more attention to the rules.

ANNA closed the heavy binder. Her back and neck ached but she couldn't straighten up. Piedmont was draped around her neck fast asleep. Picking up his tail, she brushed its feathery-soft tip across her eyelids.

There's been nothing much of help in her Law Enforcement notes from FLETC. All the Scene of the Crime materials- evidence gathering-had presumed the officer knew there'd been a crime committed. Lots of detailed diagrams for roping off the area, controlling the flow of traffic, protecting the chain of evidence so it wouldn't get thrown out of court.

Nothing pertained to half-eaten rangers in saw grass swamps.

I should have gotten suspicious earlier, Anna thought. She comforted herself with the idea that Jakey, his deputy, and Paul hadn't been suspicious either.

They still weren't.

As far as anyone else was concerned a crime had not been committed and the culprit had been caught and executed.

"Not dispatched, executed."

Piedmont opened one orange eye at the sound of her voice but he was not awake, his third eyelid remained half closed.

"Somebody done her in, Piedmont. Miss Scarlet did it in the library with the pinking shears. Colonel Mustard did it in the kitchen with a cougar."

The snapshots from Sheila Drury's clothes rod were facedown on the desk. Turning them over one by one, she looked through them slowly. They'd been taken not far from where she had found Drury's body. Less than a mile downstream where the creek flowed from one emerald pool to the next over a wide smooth floor of stone.