'Right. One covered with his murdered stepmother's fingerprints,' Harry said warningly.
Looked at in the harsh light of reason, the benevolent bear spirit that brought drinking water to lost souls was pretty irrational.
'Just a thought,' Anna said and let it go at that.
'This guy who brought the water shot at you?' Ruick asked skeptically.
'Yes.' Anna'd done elaborating. Harry was as frustrated as she.
'You're sure? You saw the gun?'
'Heard the shot.'
The chief ranger drummed his fingers on his desk pad and gazed out his window. 'Before the rock was rolled, or after?'
'After,' Anna said. 'During.'
'So the shot came at the same time the rock was crashing down?'
'That's right.' Anna could see where the rock Harry was rolling was going to come crashing down too, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. She couldn't even find it in her heart to blame him. The murder was nine days old. Trails were cold. Witnesses, what they had of them, had scattered. There were no leads but Bill McCaskil, and the case against him was paper-thin. Harry would not want a reason showing up that would demand he pull his already depleted ranger force from their primary duties for the chasing of wild geese on Cathedral Peak.
'So you could have heard something else,' he said, as Anna knew he would. 'The boulder could have busted some smaller rocks or snapped a tree limb. That can sound like a gunshot.'
'I could have heard something else,' Anna agreed. Harry looked at her with what might have been a hint of apology in his eyes.
What he said was, 'Could you have been mistaken about a person rolling the rock? Could it have been dislodged by accident? Someone hiding behind it, knocked it loose, that sort of thing?'
Anna thought about it for a moment. 'No,' she said at last. 'It was pushed.'
'Okay.' Harry accepted her statement at face value and Anna was relieved.
She watched the sun creep up her thighs. Harry watched the maintenance vehicles come and go from the cluster of buildings down the road beyond the parking lot.
'We're pretty much up against it,' he said finally. Anna realized then she'd been waiting for the subtle blame-placing, when lesser men begin the slippery process of easing fault off their own shoulders onto the shoulders of others. Ruick was not a lesser man.
'We don't have much to go on,' he said. 'I agree with you that Les probably is in the clear. His motive, even if the missus was flaunting McCaskil in his face, is too old. Les has been there too many times. If we had a straw-and-camel's-back situation with Mrs. Van Slyke's latest adultery, Les would have snatched up a rock or whatever. It would have been a crime of passion occurring at the scene, and more likely than not Les would have remained with the body and confessed to the first person who showed up. He wouldn't steal film, move the body, defile the corpse and cache the flesh.'
'He'll be staying in a motel till Rory's done,' Anna said, just to contribute something.
'Thank God for that. When he keels over from a heart attack they can damn well dial nine- one-one and let the police take care of it.'
Harry sounded so callous toward human life Anna laughed.
'If I'd ever thought Rory was worth much as a suspect, I'd never have sent him back up with Joan,' Harry said. 'Even though we don't have enough for an arrest, there are ways.'
Anna took the opening and outlined the story that had been haunting Lester Van Slyke, that Rory had run to Fifty Mountain after the bear attack on their camp, caught Carolyn in flagranteand killed her. On the hike out, Anna had given the theory a good deal of thought. In the end she'd found it flawed. She repeated it now because which information was valid and which was not was Harry's call, not hers.
He considered it much as she had, and in the end rejected it for the same reasons. Rory'd had no knife, no blood on him. Did he run to Fifty Mountain in his slippers, bumble into the wrong tent, catch Carolyn with McCaskil, then Carolyn dresses, hikes three miles, he follows and kills her? Or did he accidentally meet Carolyn on the trail in the dead of night in the arms of her lover and strike her down? With what? He was strong but slight. The story didn't hold together.
'William McCaskil's still in the running,' Anna said without much enthusiasm.
Ruick just grunted. McCaskil might have had sex with the victim, might even have lent her his coat, but neither of those things were illegal. What made him interesting was the fact that he had run, but there were lots of reasons for that. McCaskil was a convicted felon. It made sense that he wouldn't want to be mixed up in a murder investigation, especially if he was involved in something shady that he didn't particularly want to talk about. Unless they could connect him to the victim in some substantial way or prove he'd committed like incidents in the past, all they could do was talk to him and let him go.
'We'll get McCaskil,' Ruick said. 'His car is still here and we've got an APB out on him. He'll turn up. If you run across him, don't mess with him. He's got a history of minor violence. More than that, he's been convicted twice on felony charges. If he's the one who took a shot at you, he's facing his third strike. That'll be a hell of a lot of years. McCaskil's probably long gone and good riddance. Until my rangers get back from the fires, I don't have the manpower to keep this up. I'm not blowing off the attack on you, Anna. I'm not. I'll get a couple of my backcountry rangers over there tomorrow. But you and I both know what they'll find.'
'What I found,' Anna agreed, 'less half a peanut.'
'We're not giving up,' Harry said, mostly to save face. 'The investigation is ongoing. We've just got to figure whoever killed Mrs. Van Slyke has left the park. Until we find something more to go on, I can't see any point in committing my people to this at the height of the season. They're needed elsewhere.'
Anna didn't like it. Intuition told her there were connections, somehow, somewhere, between the seemingly unconnected events, that if she could find the right vantage point she would be able to see how a Florida con man, a promiscuous Seattle divorce lawyer and amysterious young man with a chain-link belt and a beautiful smile, were related to punctured water bottles, army cutworm moths, glacier lilies and murder.
Because she could not find her way to that vantage point, she said, 'What do you want me to do?'
Ruick brought his gaze in from the parking lot and let it rest on her. Harry Ruick was as uncomfortable as she was with backing off the investigation. Unlike her, he was responsible for the safety of the entire park. National Park Service law enforcement was designed to keep tourists from damaging the resource and each other. It was not set up to conduct long-term in-depth investigations. Parks were federal lands. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was the department used to that end. But, on occasion, the FBI had bigger fish to fry-or fishes closer to home-and the investigation was left to the park where the incident had occurred.
This was one of those times.
Carolyn Van Slyke's murder was very probably going to slip through the cracks, along with a staggering number of other homicides that would never be solved.
'What I'd like you to do,' Harry said, 'is keep at it for a while. Joan will be up there for another five days. I can't see any point in you turning around and going right back unless you just want to for the DNA study. She's got Buck with her to fetch and carry, and that's more than she's used to. Why don't you make use of Joan's office and her computer? See if you can't dig up something, anythingthat might tie some of this together. If you don't come up with anything, you can consider yourself off my duty roster and go back to work for Joan.'
'Sure,' Anna said. She'd start in the morning. In the bookcase under Joan's television she'd seen a video collection including such classics as Die Hard, End of Days, and Aliens.Tonight she was going to enjoy a little vicarious kicking of ass.
Chapter 20
The following morning Anna took possession of Joan's office. On her way in she'd been greeted with a few friendly hellos and had the coffee machine pointed out to her, but there'd been no questions about the
