'Well,' the operator came back on the line. 'We've got something.'
'Let's have it,' Anna said. To prove she was paying attention, she sat up straight and held a pen at the ready over a sheet of scrap paper she'd nearly obliterated with doodles.
'Fetterman's Adventure Trails on Highway Forty-One.'
Anna repeated it back to her. A name had been found, the operator seemed to feel at last her job was done and she could leave Anna in good conscience.
Rubbing the ear she'd compressed into the phone receiver for so long, Anna looked at the words angled in amongst the rococo permutations of bear tracks inked on the page. The name Fetterman had rung a bell. Fetterman's Adventure Trails set half a dozen clanging. Leaving the office in its state of productive disarray, she jogged the half-mile back to the headquarters building.
Harry was out to lunch. Maryanne was eating at her desk, delicately holding a sandwich in one hand away from the keyboard while she hunt-and-pecked corrections with the other. Anna hoped Harry knew how lucky he was.
The sandwich and the typing were set aside while Anna was settled in Harry's chair and copies of the past three weeks' 10-343s and 10-344s case and criminal incident reports were lifted from the files and placed before her.
On a case incident report submitted ten days earlier by the district ranger on the northwest side of the park, Anna found what she was looking for. No crime had been committed; it was the report of the truck and trailer abandoned off-road within park boundaries. The truck was registered to a Carl G. Micou out of Tampa, Florida. Anna rechecked the report on the abandoned truck. The only phone number on the vehicle registration turned out to belong to a business phone that had been disconnected, the phone number of Fetterman's Adventure Trails on Highway 41.
Anna had what she wanted but she didn't know what she had. For the next hour she read reports from the time the truck and trailer were found to the present but there was nothing else pertinent. A call to the Polebridge ranger station and another to dispatch let her know that no one had come forward to claim the vehicles. Anna photocopied the 10-343, thanked Maryanne and walked back to the resource management office.
The secretary's sandwich reminded Anna it was lunchtime but she was too preoccupied to take time hunting and gathering. Back in Joan's office she made do with candy. She was going to owe the researcher a bag of gummi bears before the day was through.
To impose order where none naturally suggested itself, Anna rearranged her papers atop those left by Joan Rand: Carolyn Van Slyke's autopsy report; the list of items found on the body, including the coat with McCaskil's topographical map in the pocket; then what information they had on Bill McCaskil a.k.a. Bill Fetterman; Anna's much-doodled-on notes tracing Fetterman to Fetterman's Adventure Trails; and, last in this papered line of thought, the 10-343 connecting a truck and horse trailer abandoned near the northwest corner of Glacier to the defunct business on Highway 41 outside Tampa, Florida.
Too much for coincidence, not enough for sense. Could the truck and horse trailer belong to McCaskil or have been borrowed or stolen by McCaskil? Sure. But then why was his own legally registered vehicle parked in a frontcountry parking lot? Who was Carl Micou? Did McCaskil have a confederate and, if so, a confederate in what?
None of this brought Anna any closer to a connection between McCaskil and the murder victim; still, she was pleased with herself. The morning had not been wasted.
Back on the phone, she reconnected with Francine Cuckor. Ms. Cuckor had her own brand of professional ethics. She'd been only too happy to share in gory detail the fact that her boss had had sex with all creatures great and small. When asked to say yea or nay to names of clients, she got cagey. Eventually Anna was bumped upstairs to Claude Winger, a junior partner in the firm.
It was not advisable to spin tales for a past master at the art of professional dissimulation, so Anna told him, as her father would have said, 'the whole truth, nothing but the truth and damn little of that.'
'I'm Officer Anna Pigeon investigating the death of Carolyn Van Slyke. Could you answer afew questions for me?'
A pause, then a careful voice as devoid of regional inflections as that of a radio announcer said, 'Ask your questions.' Anna noted the lack of commitment to answering them.
'We have a couple leads, both weak at this point. We're trying to establish any prior connection between Mrs. Van Slyke and our possible suspects,' Anna said, using frankness like bread upon the waters.
It was not returned tenfold. 'And you want me to…,' the voice came back.
'Answer a few questions, if you would.'
'Ask your questions.'
There would be no softening up or slithering around Claude. Anna cut to it. 'Has or was Carolyn Van Slyke working on any case involving a Bill McCaskil, Will Skillman, Bill McClellan or Bill Fetterman?'
'We can't divulge any client information.'
'The fact that a person has engaged the services of an attorney does not fall under attorney- client privilege,' Anna said. So often the attorney, doctor, priest and whoever-else client privilege was claimed for wasn't for the protection of clients. It was claimed, legally or not, because people were either too lazy to bother giving information to help out the police, or harbored vague worries that to cooperate would open up their own activities to scrutiny. Anna suspected Claude claimed it as a matter of course to avoid involvement and work. She thought of threatening to subpoena his files but knew it was an empty threat. The rank-and-file investigated and reported. It wasn't for the likes of her to go throwing around legal ultimatums. Claude Winger would know that.
She waited through a clearly audible sigh breathed out in an office in Seattle. 'I'll put you through to the secretary. Give her the names. She will tell you if any of them have engaged the professional services of Carolyn Van Slyke in the past year. She won't go back further than that and she will not tell you anything else.'
'Thank you,' Anna said but he'd already put her on hold. Minutes later, when she was beginning to think she'd been put on hold to grow old and die, Francine came on the line. Winger had evidently spoken to her firmly. She was businesslike to the point of rudeness. Anna read off her list of names, adding Carl Micou as an afterthought. She was answered by the huffy snicking sound of fingernails on a keyboard.
'No persons by those names have contacted Ms. Van Slyke in her professional capacity,' Francine said mimicking an automaton.
Had the sentence with its convoluted precision come from someone else, Anna might have suspected them of hiding something. From Francine it just sounded petty and pompous.
'Thank you,' Anna said again and pulled her soul back from the black and voice-filled void of the telephone to Joan's homey office.
No cheese down that hole,Anna remembered one of her field rangers, Barth Dinkins, saying. 'No cheese,' she said aloud.
Carl G. Micou, registered owner of the abandoned truck and trailer, the man who'd given the Florida motor vehicles department the number of Fetterman's Adventure Trails as his home number, remained a mystery. Anna turned back to her electronics.
Mentally apologizing to Joan for a phone bill she would probably have a devil of a time getting her department reimbursed for, Anna called Information and, throwing caution to the winds, charged the extra fifty cents and let them dial the Tampa Better Business Bureau for her. A pleasant young man, at least he sounded young and handsome and virile but may well have been a nasty old poop with a nice voice, told her Fetterman's Adventure Trails was a licensed business owned and operated by Woody Fetterman. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had operated at the same location for twenty-six years. The only address for Woody was that of Adventure Trails. There had been no complaints against Fetterman's from either the buying public or other businesses. Fetterman's Adventure Trails had recently closed its doors but he did not know why. He suggested she call the Tampa tourism department, as he thought Adventure Trails was a theme park with rides and so forth. They might be able to help her.
The department of tourism could tell her little more. The woman who answered the phone offered to send Anna a brochure, then couldn't find one. They'd gone out of business, Anna said, possibly the
