Nevada Barr - Track Of The Cat

Some things are never forgotten: the smell of Jade East, the feel of a man, the sound of ambulance sirens, the taste of library paste.

Anna pulled the boots out into the light, dug every particle of rock and sand and thorn out of the soles and uppers. Nothing else was out of the ordinary. Just the two magic rocks.

Cross-legged on the carpet, Anna tried to recall her fall. She had been walking down the McKittrick Ridge Trail alone. There had been nothing unusual: no sound, no smell, no movement. Suddenly, she'd stepped into mid-air, overbalanced because of her pack, and fallen. She'd managed to break her slide till a stone, dislodged by her fall, had struck her.

Dislodged by her fall.

A minute, maybe more, had passed before the rock hit her.

Stepped into mid-air. Magic rocks. Library paste. Laboriously, Anna fitted the oddments together as she pulled on the boots, threw some cheese and bread and water into a daypack, kissed an ungrateful cat, and left the apartment in as much of a mess as she had found it.

At Pratt Cabin she liberated a climbing harness and rope from the small Search and Rescue cache kept there. By late afternoon she was above Turtle Rock. Finding where she fell was more difficult than she thought it would be. In memory every foot of rock she'd crawled up was clearly etched. When she'd finally climbed free, she'd evidently relaxed, shut down. The top of the trail was a blur.

When she did find it, there was not a doubt in her mind that she was at the right place. Training binoculars on the stone below she found traces of blood marring the limestone, the iron deposit that had saved her life, and the crack-chimney she had shinnied up.

Walking uphill a hundred yards or so, Anna retraced her steps down the trail to where she'd gone over the edge. The path was rocky, but level. Lining up the tree she had been planning to throw a line to just before the rock had hit her, Anna was able to locate exactly where she'd stepped into nothing.

The trail was flat, well-maintained. Having divested herself of pack and rope, Anna began to dig. Gravel came away easily at first, then she hit a stone. When she'd cleared away all the dirt, she could see a rock about the size of a basketball set in a trough on the trail. Along with smaller rubble, it plugged a ditch a couple feet wide and half the trail deep. Anna worked it loose and rolled it down the cut and over the cliff. It followed the path she had taken on the way down.

She swept away the sand. Smooth bites of a shovel and the sharp scoring of a pick marked the sides of the hole. A trough a foot deep and canted steeply toward the cliff had been carved out of the trail. Crawling on hands and knees, Anna examined the path for fifteen feet in either direction but found nothing more of interest.

She buckled on the climbing harness and, using an upslope juniper as anchor and belay, began rappeling slowly down the cliff face searching every ledge and crevice, every tuft of grass that clung to the stone. Against the trunk of a stunted madrona she found what she was looking for: four tangled sticks. Anna tied them carefully in a kerchief, knotted it to her belt, and began the slow and painful task of pulling herself back up to the trail.

By the time she stood again on level ground she was certain she had unraveled every stitch her collarbone had knit in the two weeks since the accident. For several minutes she rested, drank in the air. Then she examined her find.

Four sticks, three broken but one over a foot long. Gravel was stuck to the sticks in several places, affixed by the same white paste Anna found on the magic rock. The sticks were woven in and out of one another as if someone had started a basket.

She laid the longest stick across the trough cut in the trail. It just reached. Someone had built a tiger trap and she had fallen into it. They had dug a ditch on the outside of the trail wide enough it wouldn't be stepped over. A mat of sticks had been woven to cover the hole and pebbles glued to the mat to make it look like the rest of the trail's surface.

Anna's radioed itinerary had been heard by the entire park. All anyone had to do was put the camouflage mat over the hole and wait. There was a good view of the trail below and above. If another hiker happened along, all they need do was remove the stone-covered mat. The hiker would see the hole, step over, and continue on.

That meant someone had watched as she fell. The same someone had rolled a rock down on her when it looked as if she would save herself. Her second slide had taken her so far down they must've trusted to luck-their good and her bad-that she would fall to her death. They wouldn't have wished to remain in the vicinity any longer than necessary. The sticks could've been picked up in minutes, the trail repaired almost as quickly and what few sticks tumbled down would be washed free of library paste with the first good rain. They had planned it well.

"Not they," Anna said to herself. "The murderer." Someone had tried to kill her. The thought frightened her. And it pissed her off.

Anna spent the night annoying Piedmont and fretting out lists in her head. Paul, Marta, Christina, Corinne, Harland, Karl, Manny, Craig, and Cheryl all worked with radios. All of them could've heard her radio in her backcountry itinerary. Christina had called in sick: she was free to lay traps. Harland had mentioned he was in Carlsbad buying lumber. Cheryl was in McKittrick Canyon on day patrol. It was she the tourist had reported the accident to. Karl, Paul, and Corinne were unaccounted for. Marta was off the hook. She never left her desk.

Too many personal calls to make, Anna thought uncharitably. Lord knew where Mrs. Drury-Sheila's mother-was. And Erik Walters was in the park.

Since sleep was proving elusive, Anna got up and switched on the desk lamp. On a bit of scratch paper she made another list. Craig Eastern was at the top of this one. He knew the policies of the park as well as anyone. The aliens, the backcountry jaunt, lieu days, the grace period: if he were running away it provided a very convenient five-day lead.

AT ten till eight the following morning Anna's disability leave came to an end. She was back in uniform. Along with Paul, Corinne, and Cheryl, she sat in the conference room in the Administration building. At the head of the long, well-polished oak table, Corinne blinked benignly from behind aviator-style spectacles. It was a habit Anna had learned not to be comforted by. The sleepy, rabbit-eyed winks meant nothing. It was just a facial gesture the Chief Ranger adopted when she was waiting; a disarming, feminine version of the poker face.

Harland Roberts came in and the waiting was over. Corinne looked pointedly at the wall clock but the minute hand still held at two minutes till eight. He was not late. Inspired by the assumption of guilt, he apologized anyway and Corinne accepted it.

"I don't want this dragging on," Ranger Mathers began the meeting without preamble. "What've you got, Paul?"

Paul Decker, head of Search and Rescue for the Guadalupes, quickly adopted her manner: clipped, no frills. "Every search is an emergency," he began. "But we don't know yet whether we've got a search. Craig went into the backcountry on the West Side on July fifteenth-five days ago. From what I understand, mostly from conversations he had with Manny, he'd planned staying two days and two nights. The next two days, the seventeenth and eighteenth, were his lieu days. He didn't report to work yesterday and he didn't return to the housing area.

"We've no way of knowing whether he's still in the backcountry or if he came out when he told Manny he would and went someplace for the weekend and got hurt or delayed there.

"Yesterday I called the University in El Paso and followed up on a few leads they gave me. No one has seen him. I doubt there's any cause for panic but, by the same token, there's no excuse for delay.