Plunking herself down on the rock, Anna looked back toward the cave's mouth. A number of possibilities occurred to her. The shooter might not have left any tracks, or the tracks had been destroyed by Iverson. The shooter could have been wearing fire boots. They were common enough. She owned a pair. Zeddie probably did. Holden would. Curt, Peter, and Sondra wouldn't. But then she was wearing Zeddie's clothes. Borrowing or stealing wasn't out of the question.
An extremely unpleasant thought intruded. Maybe the shooter had worn Iverson's boots. Oscar had come directly up to the sniper's lair. Was he tracking, or did he know precisely where to come? The stomping and shuffling: insensitive investigation or intentional destruction of evidence? It wouldn't have been difficult to discover where and when Anna was to meet with Brent. Everyone at Zeddie's had known. They might have told. It wasn't a secret. Brent's choice to leave the message could be telling. Was it that he trusted the members of the core group, knew they had nothing to do with the killing? Or was he careless, overwrought, or overconfident?
The first attempt on Frieda's life had failed. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that Oscar Iverson had gone down into Lechuguilla not to rescue Frieda but to finish the job. If Brent had started to kill Frieda, then lost his nerve and decided to spill the beans to Anna, it made sense. Would an experienced caver like Oscar start an avalanche? Maybe. There was no way of knowing the whole side of the Pigtail would come down. With Holden watching every moment of the rigging, it would have been easier than sabotaging the ropes.
Unless Holden did that himself.
The thought made Anna physically ill. With a surge of relief, she remembered his broken ankle. He'd been at the bottom of the rock slide, not the top. And the person she'd seen scurrying away after the shots were fired was not lame. Suddenly she felt tired and scared.
One person to trust, and a cripple at that.
15
By early afternoon Anna was back in Zeddie's house. To her delight, but for Calcite, it remained uninhabited. The hike had taken a toll on her weak ankle. Some of the swelling had returned, and she was glad to put her foot up and rest. Trust in one's fellows is like the net beneath the highwire. The act can be done without it, but the effort becomes considerably more taxing. Considering that, the ankle, and the cold, the morning's work had been tiring. Anna was feeling her age, measured not in years but in acquired cynicism and human frailty.
The message light on Zeddie's answering machine was blinking. Brazenly, Anna played back the messages. None was from Sondra. One was for her from Rhonda Tillman. Either a terse or a careful woman, Rhonda said only, 'Call me.'
Full of good intentions, Anna dragged the cordless phone, along with a cup of hot tea, to the sofa. Wrapped in the ghastly pink-and-green afghan, she sipped her tea and contemplated the instrument. There were several people she would have liked to talk with. Of course, her sister Molly. Jennifer, a friend of hers and a ranger at Mesa Verde. It was Jennifer who was looking after Anna's cat, Piedmont, and the newly orphaned Taco. Frederick the Fed, her ex-whatever, crossed her mind. After two years' silence he'd intruded back into her life. Knowing he'd fallen for her sister didn't lower him in her estimation. To her way of thinking, Molly was quite a catch. But it did render Frederick off-limits forever. Without knowing he was doing so, Frederick Stanton had banished himself from the affections of the Pigeon sisters. Molly would never touch a man Anna was interested in. Anna wouldn't dream of a man interested in her sister.
Besides, she had nothing to say to him.
She had nothing to say to anyone.
Words not related to the deaths of Frieda or Brent balled up and slid off her mind like liquid mercury. Sick as she was of the subject, it consumed her. Rhonda Tillman was the only person with whom she could trust herself to maintain a coherent conversation.
Soon she would call. Till then she would rest, drink her tea, and order her fragmented thoughts. The demographics of the suspect pool had broadened. Caving's isolated nature had blinded her to other possibilities. Even for an imagination as willing to invent monsters as Anna's, it stretched credibility to think of someone creeping deep into the earth over forbidding terrain to kill Frieda when she could be so easily run over in a parking lot or gunned down at the mall. That had left only the core group. Iverson's activities today opened a new line of thought. A member of the core group had to have pushed the rock that had landed Frieda in the Stokes. Given that, Anna had been pursuing her investigation from the angle that something that happened in the cave had fomented an opportunistic attempt on Frieda's life. But there had been a second and successful attempt. Oscar had been there, and Anna and Holden. They'd come down knowing Frieda was helpless. Completion of a failed murder attempt could have been decided upon before the expedition went underground.
For the life of her, Anna couldn't imagine why anyone would want to kill Frieda. Frieda Dierkz wasn't even the sort of woman a stalker would fancy. She was a solid, straightforward, midwestern farm girl who had intelligence without cunning, discretion without guile. Her favorite drugs were legal. She didn't gamble, steal, smuggle weapons, or traffic in illegally obtained artifacts. She was dispatcher and secretary to the chief ranger at Mesa Verde. Professionally she was indispensable, but she was not in a position to give or withhold anything worth killing for. If she had slept with married men, she had been as silent as the tomb. Anyway, Anna would have known. Everybody would have known. Parks made fishbowls look like the heart and soul of privacy.
Murder insisted on a motive. Because Anna couldn't find it, or couldn't understand it, didn't change the fact. For the moment she would set aside motive and paint mind pictures in hopes of seeing something new. Assuming Brent had pushed the stone onto Frieda in Tinker's Hell cleared up a number of things. Roxbury had been unnaturally perturbed by the injury and subsequent death of a woman he ostensibly didn't know. Guilt over his part in her death might account for that. Had that guilt preyed on him significantly, he might have lost his nerve after the first attempt and refused to try again. So Frieda lay helpless, yet unharmed, till assistance arrived in the persons of Anna, Oscar Iverson, and Holden Tillman.
Other cavers had cycled in and out during the rescue. How many, Anna didn't know. None of them had been in place when the avalanche started. It let them off the hook.
But Oscar had been there.
If Brent was bent on killing Frieda, he had plenty of opportunity. He didn't do it. Therefore someone else had to be factored in. Who did Brent have any opportunity to communicate with other than Holden, Oscar, and Anna? So: Oscar comes down. Brent refuses to finish the job. Oscar finishes it for him. Brent can't live with the guilt and decides to tell Anna. He leaves a message on Zeddie's machine. One of the group mentions it to Oscar. He hikes out from the park, shoots Brent, and tries to shoot Anna for good measure. The next day he drives out to Big Manhole, covers up his trail, and retrieves the rifle shell he left behind.
On the surface the story held together, but, without knowing the why of it, Anna remained unsatisfied. There was no reason for Oscar to want Frieda dead that badly. Unless he was one hell of an actor, Anna was sure he didn't know Frieda except as a name on a research list.
The other aspect of this scenario that bothered her was personal. Oscar Iverson didn't strike her as the murdering kind. She was well aware that to spout that philosophy on the witness stand would get her crucified in any court in the country. Ted Bundy, criminologists were fond of pointing out, struck everybody as a heck of a swell fella. Anna wasn't so deluded as to think she'd know a murderer if she saw one. A few had crossed her path, and she'd not felt a cold wind on the back of her neck or sensed a darkness entering the room.
Under the right pressure anyone could become a killer. For someone to kill with this premeditation bespoke either great vanity, overriding fear, or both. Oscar Iverson exhibited neither. At least not to Anna. Still waters and all that, she told herself, and decided to leave Oscar in the running.
Picking up the cordless phone, she punched in the Tillmans' number. The machine answered. Anna was halfway through her message when Rhonda picked up.
'Sorry,' she said. 'I was hiding.'
'Who from?'
'Oh. Everybody but you, Holden, and maybe my sister. No reason. I just get this way. If it makes people crazy, tough.'
Anna laughed. 'Get that way? I was born that way.'
