Blind Descent

'Then you know what I mean.'

Anna did and was duly honored to be on Rhonda's shortlist with her husband and sister.

'You doggone well better appreciate this,' Rhonda said. 'I haven't gossiped this much since high school. There's got to be ears burning in three states. And, if gossip is a sin like Andrew's Foursquare Baptist grandmother says, I'll burn in hell for the next zillion years.'

'I went to Catholic school,' Anna told her. 'I know nuns. They know people in high places. I'll get them to intercede for you if the gossip is good.'

'It's good,' Rhonda promised. 'Unless you're Dr. Peter McCarty.' A gulp of something was imbibed, and Rhonda went on, 'Old girlfriends love to talk, and your darling Peter has his share. Miss Sally poked around for me-well, not for me. I had to promise I'd say 'hi' to Holden for her which I won't, but she doesn't know that. I found out what the dropped charges were all about. Rape.'

'You're kidding.' Anna was taken aback. Rape was a power crime. Armed with charm, good looks, and money, McCarty had such built-in power over women, rape seemed redundant. Rape was also about hatred, and much of McCarty's appeal came from the fact that he genuinely seemed to like women.

'Not rape rape,' Rhonda told her once she'd gleaned the drama from her announcement. 'Statutory rape. Of Sondra. She was a patient of his, not quite eighteen, and they had an affair. Her daddy went ballistic, as you might imagine. From what Sally said it took a sizable chunk of McCarty's money to smooth the ruffled feathers. Sondra kind of banged around after that-'bang' being the operative word. All her beaus were older and had money. It sounds like she was shopping for a sugar daddy. She was all set to marry a college professor about twenty years older than her, but something went wrong. He left her at the altar. This was more than two years ago. Peter was in an on-again off again relationship with Zeddie at the time. Then bingo, bango, bongo, six months later he's walking down the aisle with Sondra at a Barbie-doll dream wedding with yards of white lace and three or four hundred close friends. Weird, no?'

'Blackmail, you think?' Anna asked.

'Either that or an old statutory flame fanned into a sudden blaze.'

Anna remembered the conversation she'd overheard as she lay squashed in the long passage out of Tinker's Hell. Sondra said she knew things about Peter that could get his medical license revoked. Had she been talking about a twelve-year-old rape case? Anna doubted it. Those charges were dropped. Given that Sondra had taken his money, then married the man, if she made a stink it would be she, not the doctor, who would end up looking the fool.

Sondra, at seventeen. Frieda at twenty-three or -four. Zeddie at the same age. Dr. McCarty had a history of seducing his young patients. If Sondra had discovered she wasn't the only one, that McCarty was continuing the pattern, and she had gotten her hands on proof, that might do it. Whether or not McCarty lost his medical license, the publicity would damage his practice or lose him his position if he wasn't in business for himself. As Rhonda had said, this was good. Anna assured her she'd receive absolution for the sin of gossiping.

An impatient wail cut over the phone line. 'Oops. Gotta go,' Rhonda said. 'Andrew is awake.' The line went dead. Anna wasn't done talking. She needed to bounce these new thoughts off another brain. Expose the obvious flaws. Air off her thinking lest it become circular and self-perpetuating.

The empty house, so recently a boon, began to chafe on her nerves. Where was Curt? Had he made the calls? Where was Iverson? What had he done with the rifle shell? Had there been an autopsy of Brent Roxbury? Anna was out of the loop, out of her park, out of her jurisdiction, and possibly out of her league.

For a quarter of an hour she stalked from room to room, gazed out over tracts of desert, of street, of employee housing. Able to stand her own company no longer, she put on a coat and limped down to headquarters to see if she couldn't mooch a ride into town.

Jewel was typing furiously as Anna let herself into the chief of resource management's office. Her face was screwed up as if she went for a speed record. Loath to break her concentration in case she was training for the secretarial Olympics, Anna closed the door softly and walked soundlessly across the room on moccasined feet. She was at Jewel's desk before the secretary noticed her.

With a start and a squawk, Jewel banged the screen button and blacked out her computer. She wasn't fast enough, and Anna smiled.

'Aren't you the sneaky snake,' Jewel said, and tried to regain her composure by preening hair-sprayed wings with porcelain nails.

'Sorry,' Anna said.

'You here to be chewed out too?' Jewel asked with evident satisfaction.

'Too?'

'George told me Oscar was in hot water, messing over at Big Manhole. Seems you're a girl who can't resist hot water.'

'Not this time,' Anna said, and told her why she'd come. A few phone calls, and Jewel found a maintenance man who was driving into town to get machine parts. He picked up Anna on his way out of the compound. Being a pariah had its upside; Anna doubted Jewel would have been so forthcoming had virtue's reward not been the removal of Anna Pigeon.

Sixty-five minutes later she was outfitted with a Dodge Neon the color and stature of the average aphid, along with a full tank of gasoline. Credit cards were wonderful things. Anna drove to the BLM building on the eastern edge of town and again presented herself to the receptionist. Sans blood and dust, he didn't recognize her until she asked for Holden. Without bothering to phone ahead, the young man walked her back to Tillman's desk. On the way he asked questions about the shooting: How loud? How much blood? Color? Texture? Just as Anna was writing him off as a ghoul, he explained he was an amateur filmmaker-documentaries, mostly-but he wanted to make movies a la the Coen brothers in Minnesota. He was studying visual images. Anna laughed, not because she found his ambition amusing but because with that information she'd instantly forgiven him his prying. He was an artist not a busybody-as if that mattered one whit in the giant scheme of things.

Behind the fabric-covered partition that marked out his work space in a room of like spaces, Tillman was packing to leave. 'Hey, Anna,' he said. He was pleased to see her. It took her by surprise. She'd begun to think she'd alienated every living soul in New Mexico.

'Bad timing,' he went on. 'You caught me on my way out the door. What with one thing and another I got swamped. I'm in the field this afternoon.'

'Can I ride along?' she asked on impulse.

Holden acted glad of the company. Foot encased in a walking cast, he took a BLM truck with an automatic transmission and drove out of town on the highway Anna had taken to Big Manhole. She found it hard to believe she'd made the journey only the day before. Corpse, bullets, wind-it felt as if it had happened years ago, or perhaps in a dream.

Holden told her everything he knew about the Roxbury Incident, as he now called it, a name to depersonalize uncomfortable memories. Along with the sheriff and the county coroner, Holden had gone out to Big Manhole. They'd arrived around eight o'clock, full dark, so there hadn't been much to see. The coroner pronounced Brent dead of a gunshot wound. A deputy recovered the rifle slug that killed him. The shot had ripped through Roxbury at a shallow angle and emerged where jawbone met ear. Much of its power spent, the slug lodged in the limestone lip above the cave entrance. As evidence it was of little value. Rock and bone had worked on it until it was simply a misshapen hunk of lead sporting fragments of Roxbury's flesh. Any rifling that might have been used to match it to the murder weapon was destroyed.

Anna told Holden of watching Iverson take the rifle shell, and he nodded as at old news. 'George Laymon called and told us. The shell will be fingerprinted as soon as the park gets it to town. The sheriff wanted his own guys to do the work.'

Turning in the shell didn't mean much. If it produced the killer's prints, it might be telling. If it had none there would be no way of knowing whether the shooter had wiped it before he loaded his weapon or if Iverson had wiped it clean of fingerprints before turning it over to the police.

'That's BLM land,' Anna said as a thought occurred to her. 'What was Oscar doing over there anyway?'

'It's only a few hundred yards from the park boundary. The superintendent wanted to know if any damage had been done, that sort of thing.'

'Makes sense.' Anna wondered why she used that phrase whenever she was particularly confused. 'Oscar really trampled the scene,' she said after a while.