“That’s just nifty,” Steve said. “The third man could have cleared out by now. We got a dead girl on the plateau. We got the two boys dead in the slot. Pretty little line of corpses from point A to point B. The third kid, the one we assume stayed alive long enough to mess with Anna, is unaccounted for.”
“Unsub three looks good for it,” Doug said.
The cop-speak sounded silly to Jenny. It was just wrong to hear park rangers say “the perp” or “scenario” or “unsub.” It was like hearing small boys practicing saying “fuck,” like they were pretending to be bigger or tougher or more experienced than they were.
“I guess he’d look good for it if we could see him,” Steve said.
At the end of hour two at the restaurant, the rangers ran out of speculation and small talk. In their capacity as potential witnesses, females, seasonals, and subordinates, neither Jenny nor Anna had the energy to speak. At least Jenny hadn’t. Anna might have been keeping quiet for her own reasons. It was Jenny who broke the last dragging silence in over an hour of dragging silences.
“There it is,” she said, pointing out the window toward Wahweap’s mooring area. A majority of the boats on the lake did not dock but tied up to buoys and used smaller runabouts or skiffs to get to shore.
The houseboat was silhouetted against water turned silver with evening. The stone-and-sand landscape beyond had the dull glow of antique gold. Square-bowed and riding low, the houseboat drove a wide vee through the molten water.
From another source Jenny might have taken umbrage at the “girls.” From Steve Gluck, she didn’t. He was an equal-opportunity kind of guy and often called visiting mucky-mucks he was shepherding around “you boys.” Jenny sensed that, in some indefinable way, Steve felt older than all other living humans.
Doug Schneider pulled up next to the houseboat as Steve threw the bumpers over the side to cushion the hulls from one another. Jenny leaped neatly over the gunwale onto the party boat and began lashing the NPS boat to the houseboat’s cleats.
Music played loud. Their arrival didn’t even make a dent in the chatter and laughter of the kids on board.
“Hey, man, it’s Smokey the Bear,” someone called down from the upper deck. “Where’s your Smokey Bear hat, Ranger Rick?”
Jenny stepped back to see who was doing the talking, caught her heel on a battered boogie board, and fell on her ass in an undignified fashion. Pratfalls were clearly considered high comedy by this stratum of society. The entire upper deck burst into raucous laughter. Someone shouted, “Not Ranger Rick, Ranger Rita!” and “Ranger Grace,” and more hilarity was enjoyed by all.
Having washed aboard on the gale of laughter, Anna held out her hand to help Jenny to her feet. Pretending not to see it, Jenny rose in one smooth motion. It was bad enough to make a fool of herself in front of people whose shit she had hauled. To make a fool of herself in front of Anna made her want to send each and every uber-rich spoiled kid to sleep with the fishes. Instead of giving in to this tempting tide of pique, she made herself laugh. Helpless adult anger would delight the drunken little sots. She refused to give them that pleasure.
Doug and Steve followed them on board, and the partiers crowded back into the cabin to make room. The Wahweap district ranger gave Jenny an irritated scowl as he stepped around her. Probably feeling she’d shamed the entire Park Service by landing on her rump.
Schneider stepped to the center of the small deck in the stern and held his hands up for quiet. “No one is to leave this boat,” he ordered in a voice that had been born to shout orders to the troops from horseback.
For a second the gabble faded to a dull roar, and Jenny thought Doug had the buggers cowed. She was wrong.
“Oooh,” came a taunt. “Hey, we better not leave town or the sheriff will shoot us!”
“Who shot the sheriff?” several girls sang and leaned over the rail from the upper deck, breasts spilling from tiny bikini tops.
“He’s kinda cute.”
Doug Schneider’s hard-boned face was getting harder, his thin-line lips thinner. If he could have gotten away with it, Jenny didn’t doubt that he would have pulled his gun and fired it into the air to get their attention.
Steve ambled into the space where Schneider was affixed like a land mine waiting to be stepped on. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the box of drunken kids wearily. Scratching his head the way Jenny’d seen him do so many times over the years, pushing his ball cap back, exposing a slightly receding hairline, he said quietly, “We got us a couple of dead bodies. We think they might be friends of yours.”
Those in the front lines who heard Steve’s words passed them back. Quiet and attention flowed out from the stern until it had snuffed the jeering and the drunken fun from the entire boat.
When the transformation was complete, Steve fumbled in the left breast pocket of his shirt, saying, “We’d sure appreciate if you guys could give us a hand with identifying them so we can get hold of their folks.” He fished out a packet of Polaroid snapshots.
“These were taken postmortem and they’re going to be pretty hard for some of you to look at, but I’m asking you to try.”
A girl in her very early twenties, if that, stepped out from the wall of flesh that had formed outside the sliding patio doors to the cabin.
“How do you want us to do this, Officer?” she asked with complete sobriety.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” Jenny murmured to Anna.
Anna nodded. “Twenty years and twenty pounds ago he’d have been a great Marc Antony.”
“Ouch,” Jenny said.
“What?” Anna looked mildly confused. “Marc Antony wasn’t old and fat,” she said matter-of-factly.
Theater people were more pragmatic than Jenny would have thought. Maybe one had to see oneself realistically before she could know what had to be done to play someone else with any insight. As good an actor as he was, Brian Dennehy would probably be wasting his time auditioning for the part of Tinker Bell.
“Are you okay with this?” Jenny asked Anna.
“Yup.”
“Are you scared?”
“Nope.”
“Am I annoying you?”
“Is that a trick question?”
Jenny smiled both to herself and her housemate.
“Shall we?” Jenny asked. She and Anna moved apart and began amiably circulating through the boaters as they’d been instructed to during the ride out, making no challenges, asking no questions, just searching faces. Anna was looking for the third man who’d been present during the assault on Kay. Jenny was just looking, hoping something she saw—or something she failed to see—would trigger a flash of brilliance. At this point, even a spark would be reassuring.
The high spirits, or imitation thereof, leached from the gathering by Steve Gluck’s plea for assistance, the milling kids looked more like kids, tired sunburned kids who’d eaten too much, drunk too much, and secretly wanted someone to order them to go to bed early. Their densely packed bodies mumbled and shifted or asked questions Jenny pretended not to know the answers to as she swam through the human pond. She saw kids fondling each other in a desultory way. She saw kids smoking dope and shooting her challenging glances as if she were DEA and not NPS. She saw one kid puking over the rail. She saw kids who looked vaguely familiar. She didn’t see anything that helped sort out the quagmire that had culminated in the deaths of three young people and the scarring of Anna Pigeon.
Having stared into every bleary-eyed face she could find, she stopped mingling at the stern end of the upper deck and rested her forearms on the rail, looking over the now dark water to the lights of Wahweap. Jim and Steve were no longer in sight. Undoubtedly working their way through the crowded cabin and foredeck.
After a few minutes, Anna came and leaned beside her. “Anything?” Jenny asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
For a moment they stood without speaking. With what sounded like a contented sigh Anna said, “Dark is very dark out in the wilds. Dark is safe here. In the city, at night, if you find yourself alone in the dark—on an empty
