Chapter 6
Despite the fact there seemed to be a bear in Glacier with Anna's name on it and a lunatic who sliced off women's faces, she slept very well. Harry Ruick woke her just after five by clanging around with stove and coffeepot.
Having only the truly vile clothes she'd worn the day before, Anna had slept in nothing but her shirt and had to spend an awkward minute struggling into underpants and shorts in the narrow confines of a sleeping bag. Trained in backcountry etiquette, Ruick did not deign to notice her until she was decent.
Joan had selected their camp with foresight. Two downed logs, fallen at right angles to one another, formed a natural seating area. Having stuffed the borrowed sleeping bag into its sack, Anna made herself a cup of coffee from a flow-through bag and joined the chief ranger where he sat on a log.
'Buck got to the Van Slyke boy's dad up at Fifty Mountain yesterday afternoon, so the folks know the kid's missing,' Ruick said in lieu of 'good morning.'
Anna nodded. Buck was probably the backcountry ranger from down toward Waterton Lake.
'The helicopter will be able to land as soon as it's light. If I remember right, there's a good flat spot on the burn less than a mile from here. We'll need to go check it and flag it.'
Harry wasn't so much talking to Anna as planning his operation. She was content to serve the passive role of sounding board. Till Harry Ruick arrived on horseback the day before, she'd never met him. He struck her as the new breed of administrator-infused with a genuine love of the resource but a political animal for all that, with an eye to the next rung up the ladder. Old-school park rangers-or at least the lingering myth of them-would have it that they put the needs of the park before their own. Enlightened self-interest was the current trend.
'You're here sort of apprenticing on Kate's bear DNA project, that right?' he asked. Despite the time they'd spent together floundering around in the shrubbery, Anna had the feeling this was probably the first time he'd really seen her.
'Yes,' she said. 'My home park's the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi.'
'You know John Brown?'
'He's chief ranger there.'
'John and I went to FLETC together,' Ruick named the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which NPS enforcement rangers filtered through at some point in their careers. 'Tell him I said 'hey' when you see him.'
Anna promised she would. She wasn't surprised the two men knew each other. The National Park Service was spread over a lot of real estate but there weren't that many full-time employees. The game of 'who do you know' was played successfully from Joshua Tree to Acadia.
Amenities observed, he returned to the issues at hand. 'We're going to do double duty today. Split our forces. You and I will go over the crime scene this morning. Two of my district rangers and about a third of my field rangers are in California on the Angeles National Forest. The damn annual pilgrimage to keep the movie stars from being burned out of house and home. Talk about a prime location for a 'let burn' policy. But be that as it may, I'm short-handed. So if you wouldn't mind playing step-'n'-fetchit for me, I'd appreciate it.'
In one sentence he'd managed to give Anna the illusion of a gracious request and at the same time let her know her official status in the investigation was that of a gofer. A manager's manager.
'Glad to help any way I can,' she said, and meant it.
'Good girl.'
The 'girl' offended Anna not in the least. Being a woman of a certain age, she'd learned to pick her battles. That, and she'd been called a whole lot worse.
'Gary, Vic, the others'll continue searching for the Van Slyke boy. As soon as the body'-he pushed his jaw at the plastic-wrapped lump of bear bait hanging in the tree at the far edge of their camp-'is taken to West Glacier, the helicopter will join the search. If the kid is up and around we ought to be able to find him today.'
He didn't add the obvious, that if Rory wasn't up and around it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of difference whether he was found today or a month from today.
They sipped their coffee in companionable silence awaiting the sun. Anna was cold. Her green uniform shorts and short-sleeved gray shirt offered little in the way of warmth. In a minute, when she was more awake, she would get her raincoat from her day pack.
'Have you ever had a murder at Glacier before?' she asked.
'You mean since it's been a national park?' Harry thought about that for a bit. 'Glacier was made a park in 1910. We joined up with Canada in 1932. There's bound to have been some foul play but nothing in recent history,' he said finally. 'They used to be rare as hen's teeth.'
Used to be. Anna was thinking of the beheading in Yosemite a few years back, the death of the child in her own park only months before.
Population was at an all-time high. Park visitation was up. Anna remembered reading Future Shockin college, the experiments crowding too many rats in too small a space. Now, nearly thirty years later, it was happening in the parks. The rats were starting to kill each other.
Twenty minutes after first light, before the sun had scraped over the jagged cliffs rising from the eastern edge of the mountain, camp was broken, gear was stowed. Joan and the rest of the bear team headed southeast to mark the helicopter landing area, their sad cargo belly down across a saddle like a gunslinger's trophy. Needing the full light of the sun to properly examine the shrub-choked crime scene, Anna and Harry decided to first walk West Flattop Trail.
The woman had been butchered after death. The kind of precision knife or hatchet job that had been done on her face was the work of ten or fifteen minutes, maybe more considering the flesh cut away had been removed from the site. Butchering was a job requiring privacy. Consequently the body had been carried off the trail, as the drag marks attested. Corroborating this theory was the fact that the body had none of the scratches or scrapes that might be expected on the arms of a healthy live woman forced through a thick alder copse.
Had the murder occurred any distance off trail, most likely the killer would have had all the privacy needed to mutilate in peace and would have had no need to move the victim after death. Logic dictated that the murder had been committed on or near West Flattop, and fairly near where the body had been dumped. In August, with visitation at its peak, the killer would have wished to get the body out of sight as quickly as possible.
The burn covered both sides of West Flattop but for the small patch of green bordering the trail above where the body was found. It was an educated guess that the kill had occurred in the burn zone, where the perpetrator had little or no cover. He'd carried the victim till he found enough undergrowth he could hide in.
Anna and Harry walked, one to each side, three to five yards off the trail in search of the place the original violence had taken place. Just under half a mile from where they started, they found what was probably the victim's backpack. It was forty feet into the burn, stuffed under a downed tree. Char and ash had been hastily pushed over it. The scorched soil would have proved an ideal surface for tracking if it hadn't been for the rain the day before. What prints there might have been were melted into amorphous depressions that would keep their secrets.
Anna stood by, notebook in hand, while Harry photographed the pack and log with a different 35-mm camera than he'd used the night before. This one had been brought in by the helicopter. The other was his own. He'd come to the high country for a search and rescue, not to investigate a murder.
That done, he and Anna made a series of measurements so the exact location and lie of the pack could be reconstructed later on paper, should that prove necessary. Then Ruick pulled on latex gloves, carefully swept the debris off the pack and pulled it from where it had been stashed. He handled it as if protecting possible fingerprints, but it was just good form and training. The stained gray canvas, soaked with rain and grimed with soot, wouldn't hold any latent prints.
From the way the pack moved, Anna could tell it contained something heavy. Harry emptied the zippered front pouch. 'Mosquito repellent, tissues, topo-careful woman, carried two topographical maps.'
