rain woke me up and the sweatshirt was gone and the water bottle was just there. After a while I guess I got to thinking I must have brought it from camp, but I didn't. Not really.'
Anna could understand that. The brain's job was to make sense of the world. When the world refused to fall into line, the brain was perfectly capable of rearranging memories until at least the appearance of order was restored.
'Let me get this straight,' Anna said. 'While you were napping in the woods at dawn, lost to friends and family, someone or something stole your dirty sweatshirt and left you a bottle of much-needed water in its place. And all this without waking you up, asking if you were alive or dead.'
'That's it,' Rory said, the stiff neck returning. 'My sweatshirt wasn't all that dirty.'
'A kind of good fairy or guardian angel?' Anna asked, just to see if anger would shake anything more loose from the boy.
Rory stared at the table, his lips pressed shut, undoubtedly to keep language unsuited for adults in authority shut behind his teeth. Danger past, he unlocked his jaws. 'Maybe it was exactly that. A guardian angel. I needed water pretty bad, and all that day and the next I never came across any. Maybe I'd've died without that happening.'
Anna'd learned not to argue with magic. In her years of law enforcement, whenever a wizard had been pointed out she'd always been able to find the little man behind the curtain pulling levers. She suspected there'd be a mortal with feet of clay behind Rory's miracles as well. Maybe Rory's own size tens.
'I must have had two water bottles with me,' Rory said suddenly, clearly pleased with the idea. 'And I brought one out of the tent with me. I just don't remember doing it.'
Anna's eyes narrowed. 'You just said an angel gave it to you.'
'Yeah. Well. That's stupid. I must've had it with me before.' Rory's voice turned sullen and mulish. 'I took it with me when I left camp. I'd just forgot. There was the bear and all and I didn't feel so hot.'
Anna decided to let the matter go. For now.
She turned off the tape recorder, dragged out a map and for the next twenty minutes nudged, badgered and cajoled Rory into approximating as closely as he could his journey during his thirty-six-hour hiatus. Every attempt ended the same. Rory knew where he'd started and he knew where he'd ended up. The hours and miles in between were a kaleidoscope turning timelessly through forest and scrub and burn. When it became evident he could not or would not be more specific, Anna backed off. If he wouldn't tell her, there was no way to force him. If he really couldn't tell her and she kept pushing, eventually he'd make something up to get her off his back.
Convinced she'd gotten all she was going to at this juncture, she declared the interview at an end. Back in Harry's office she and Rory rejoined the chief ranger and Lester Van Slyke. A brief consultation convinced Anna and Ruick that an interview with Van Slyke, father and son, would not be a productive use of time. There'd been ample opportunity to watch the two of them interact when emotions were raw. By now defenses would be in place. They were excused with proper words of thanks and Anna was alone with Harry.
Civilization diminished him. In the backcountry with a life and death situation to put his back into, he'd appeared younger and stronger than he did behind his desk, awards and diplomas arrayed around him.
Anna caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his window. She was no great shakes either. Her short hair had more gray in it than she remembered noticing in the mirror and her age was beginning to tell its ever lengthening story in the marks under her eyes and in the softening at her jawline.
'For the family of the dearly departed these boys are behaving in a decidedly strange manner,' Ruick said. 'Les is still determined to go on with his damned camping trip and he said Rory's still dead-set on finishing up the DNA project.'
'Rory talked to him?'
'Called him last night at the hotel.'
Not having spent much time with Rory, Harry wouldn't know how peculiar that was. Maybe the death of Mrs. Van Slyke was bringing father and son together.
'No sense letting a little thing like murder spoil your vacation plans,' Ruick said cynically.
The Van Slykes' decision to remain in Glacier had its upside from a law enforcement point of view. Though they might have their suspicions, there was no evidence on which to hold Les or his son. In park crimes, there was always the added difficulty of perpetrators and witnesses dispersing to faraway places before the investigation could be completed.
'What do they mean us to do with the body?' Anna asked. 'Leave it at the morgue in Flathead County till it's time to go home?'
'Sort of. Les has that all worked out. Soon as the autopsy's done he wants it cremated locally. He'll pick up the ashes after his camping trip.'
'No funeral, memorial service, nothing?'
'Apparently not. He seemed to be genuinely grieving for his wife. He teared up a few times, if that means anything. More than that, though, he seemed angry at her.'
'That's natural enough,' Anna said, remembering her sister's lectures when she'd turned angry at her husband, Zach, after he'd died. Abandonment was as universal a fear as fear of falling. Fear had a way of turning inward. In women it usually manifested itself as depression, in men, anger.
'Nah. Not like that,' Harry said dismissively. 'I'm no shrink but this felt different. There was an element of spite in it. Like old Lester might kick his wife's corpse a good one if he thought nobody was looking.'
'Rory intimated his folks were not experiencing unremitting wedded bliss, but he declined to elaborate,' Anna said.
'Les didn't say anything outright against the missus and, like I said, he managed a few tears. What set me off was the way he was ordering up the cremation of the corpse. Sort of slam-bang and take that.'
'Do you think he killed he?'
'He's got no alibi, of course. Things happen in the wee hours, and unless you sleep with somebody, you're not going to have anybody to vouch for your whereabouts. He's got some real mixed feelings about her being dead, that's for sure. But no, I don't think he killed her. If he did he'd be playing the grief card a little harder. And he'd probably want to get the hell out of here, post haste.'
'Unless there was something here that needed doing,' Anna said slowly. 'Maybe something Carolyn stood in the way of.'
They mulled that over for a time but came up with nothing. What could an old man and a boy want in the Glacier wilderness? There was ho gold, no silver, no oil or natural gas, no buried Aztec treasure that anybody knew of. Glacier lilies had been dug up and spirited away but they were worthless, financially speaking.
Thinking of the lilies, Anna told Harry of Geoffrey Mickleson-Nicholson. Harry wrote down the name.
'No way to trace him without numbers,' he said. 'Social security, driver's license, date of birth-but I'll see if anybody with those names filed a backcountry permit.'
'I don't know if he's even old enough to have a driver's license,' Anna said. 'But while you're at it, check for a Bill or William McCaskil. He was camped at Fifty Mountain when the Van Slykes were. He lied about how well he knew Carolyn.'
Ruick wrote 'McCaskil, William' on his legal pad. 'What else?' he asked.
Anna couldn't think of anything.
Ruick stared out the window, tapping his pen absentmindedly, top then tip, like a tiny baton.
The clock on his desk said it was quarter till five. The day had slipped away. Indoors, cooped up with people, Anna had missed it. Afternoon light, strong and colorless, the sun high with summer, striped the parking lot with the shadows of the surrounding pines. A fantasy of a hammock and a good book teased up in Anna's brain. Unthinkingly, she yawned, her jaw cracking at maximum distention.
Harry looked at her and laughed. 'Tomorrow is soon enough. I expect we've all earned an early
