Nevada Barr - Track Of The Cat

"All we know is he was collecting on the West Side but not precisely what or where. He had gathering permits for the entire park and left no itinerary. We need to locate his vehicle and narrow the area of the search. I'll go into William's ranch house near the escarpment. Anna will drive around the far western boundary to PX Well and a couple of other places where he may have parked and walked in. Cheryl is going to hold the fort down here. You'll be the only law enforcement within hailing distance so keep in touch with the Visitors Center," Paul said to Cheryl and she nodded. "Harland will head over to Dog Canyon and drive around to Marcus to see if Craig left his Volvo outside the fence on that old access road. It's unlikely Craig would walk in over Cut Off Mountain but who knows what he was looking for. Anybody?"

Corinne looked at each of them expectantly, almost a nonverbal demand.

Maintaining, as always, a low political profile, Cheryl Light stared at her finger-ends.

"Martians," Harland said gently when the Chief Ranger's gaze raked across him. The sadness of his smile disarmed the remark's cruelty.

When Corinne came to her, Anna just shook her head. She had been interested in the reptiles Craig was collecting but wasn't informed enough about his project to know any particular animal or habitat he might've been studying this trip.

Paul started to speak again but before he could, Harland raised his hand a few inches. A habit very few people shake regardless of how many years have elapsed since they were in third grade. Paul waited.

"He might not have been delayed or injured," Harland said slowly. "He may have just taken off. Craig is…" He caught Anna's eye and she looked back without expression, curious to see if he would give away Craig's secret to the staff. "… spontaneous," Roberts finished and Anna was relieved. Not so much because Craig Eastern had been protected but because Harland hadn't proved a cad.

"That's a possibility," Paul conceded. "Let's hope that's the case. Then nothing is lost but a little time and sleep. Still, we've got to search."

"Of course," Harland agreed.

Before the meeting broke up the search plan had been established. If the car was found they would begin at that point. Meanwhile, Christina Walters would be detailed to conduct a phone search of the usual places: police, hospitals, Border Patrol, family, friends, etc.

Anna fell into step beside Harland as he walked out the back door to the employee parking lot. Remembering the sad "Martian" smile, she stopped at his truck, rested her elbows on the tailgate.

One hand on the door handle, he waited politely for her to speak.

"Have you got any particular reason to think Craig just ran off?" she asked. For a moment she thought he wasn't going to answer. Behind his gray eyes, she could see a small struggle taking place. When he finally did speak, she felt he was choosing his way carefully, censoring his thoughts before they became words.

"Nothing I can prove in a court of law," he said with a feeble attempt at lightness. Even that tiny spark vanished with the next sentence. "Not even something I'd want bantered around, run though the gossip mill."

Anna did gossip, loved a good gossip, but seldom with anyone in the park. Her reputation for being able to keep her mouth shut was better than it deserved to be. Evidently it was about to pay off. Harland continued.

"It crossed my mind that Craig might be running away from something. It would be true to form. He's not a psychopath. When he commits… when he does something maybe he shouldn't, he's aware of it. He has a conscience. It hurts him. If he'd done something he felt pretty bad about, I don't think he could deal with his feelings, or with being found out. I think he'd run away. Like a little kid."

"What do you think he might have done?" Anna prodded but Harland was done confiding.

"Could've been anything," he replied easily. "Something we might even think was silly. It only needed to be important in Craig's mind." With that, he opened the door of his pickup and Anna took it correctly as a dismissal.

On the long drive around the western boundary of the park to PX Well, Anna pondered the crimes Craig could be running from: guilt at slandering Drury, maybe even Sheila's death, the attempt on her own life.

Craig was passionate, dedicated. And insane. It didn't take a great stretch of the imagination to picture him killing to keep the developers out of the park, the bulldozers and concrete mixers out of Dog Canyon. Not only would he be fighting against the destruction of the fragile canyon when the RV sites were put in, but against the ongoing degradation of the area as the great roaring, gas-guzzling beasts rolled in with their baggage of humanity. People who had no intention of meeting Nature on her own terms but who must travel to the wilderness in a motorized hotel room replete with TVs, VCRs, showers, toilets, and growling generators.

Then would come the demands that inevitably followed RV invasions: sewage dumps, water and electric hookups, and, finally, the cry of "Why can't we drive through the park? How are people supposed to see it?"

Anna could envision Craig committing murder to save the Guadalupe Mountains from such defilement. With very little effort, she could picture herself helping him.

And then trying to kill her because she wouldn't leave Drury's demise well enough alone? Eastern couldn't have known she'd reached enough dead ends, was shaken enough from her fall to drop the investigation. Maybe he thought when she came back from Mexico she'd begin to dig again, with twice the energy now her life, too, had been threatened.

So he ran.

He'd left his pet snakes behind. Paul had noticed when he checked Craig's apartment. Snakes, though, could live for weeks without food. Anna couldn't imagine they would suffer undue psychological trauma from the loss of Craig's companionship.

According to Paul, he'd not taken any clothes or books or anything, either. But then Craig was crazy. Maybe he'd run from everything-murder, snakes, laundry, phone bills.

Anna sighed and switched on the radio. Trying to second-guess lunatics, drunks, or the Office of Personnel Management was an exercise in frustration. Their logic totally eluded her.

Jarring bones and rattling teeth drowned out any thought for a while as she forced the truck over the broken rock of the rutted road. So bad was the surface, even ten miles an hour was too fast to maintain control. Anna doubted Craig's old Volvo could make it over such rugged terrain, but she'd seen cars in stranger places.

The heat grew oppressive. The plastic steering wheel burned her hands. Her feet, in their regulation boots, felt as if her socks had been dipped in kerosene and set on fire.

Mentally excusing herself to Rogelio's environmental purism, she rolled up the window and cranked up the air conditioner.

Eastern's Volvo was not at PX Well. While she was there, Anna checked the rain gauge. Dry, as she'd expected. Not a trace of rain had fallen on the West Side since February and very little more than that in the entire Southwest. The region was in its fourth year of drought. Fires burned out of control in Arizona, Nevada, and all over New Mexico. Every morning in the ranger report was news of another fifteen-, twenty-, thirty-thousand acres burned. Even Yosemite was on fire.

Close to four-thirty Anna arrived back at Park Headquarters. Harland's Roads and Trails truck wasn't in the lot but Paul's one-ton was there between the jeep Cheryl was driving and the Chief Ranger's van.

Climbing out of the air-conditioned cab, Anna was hit by the heat. For a few seconds it felt delicious. Then the caress grew heavy, gluing her clothes to her body. Escaping up the cement steps, she let herself in the rear door of the building.