the sad 'Martian' smile, she stopped at his truck, rested her elbows on the tailgate.
One hand on the door handle, he waited politely for her to speak.
'Have you got any particular reason to think Craig just ran off?' she asked. For a moment she thought he wasn't going to answer. Behind his gray eyes, she could see a small struggle taking place. When he finally did speak, she felt he was choosing his way carefully, censoring his thoughts before they became words.
'Nothing I can prove in a court of law,' he said with a feeble attempt at lightness. Even that tiny spark vanished with the next sentence. 'Not even something I'd want bantered around, run though the gossip mill.'
Anna did gossip, loved a good gossip, but seldom with anyone in the park. Her reputation for being able to keep her mouth shut was better than it deserved to be. Evidently it was about to pay off. Harland continued.
'It crossed my mind that Craig might be running away from something. It would be true to form. He's not a psychopath. When he commits… when he does something maybe he shouldn't, he's aware of it. He has a conscience. It hurts him. If he'd done something he felt pretty bad about, I don't think he could deal with his feelings, or with being found out. I think he'd run away. Like a little kid.'
'What do you think he might have done?' Anna prodded but Harland was done confiding.
'Could've been anything,' he replied easily. 'Something we might even think was silly. It only needed to be important in Craig's mind.' With that, he opened the door of his pickup and Anna took it correctly as a dismissal.
On the long drive around the western boundary of the park to PX Well, Anna pondered the crimes Craig could be running from: guilt at slandering Drury, maybe even Sheila's death, the attempt on her own life.
Craig was passionate, dedicated. And insane. It didn't take a great stretch of the imagination to picture him killing to keep the developers out of the park, the bulldozers and concrete mixers out of Dog Canyon. Not only would he be fighting against the destruction of the fragile canyon when the RV sites were put in, but against the ongoing degradation of the area as the great roaring, gas-guzzling beasts rolled in with their baggage of humanity. People who had no intention of meeting Nature on her own terms but who must travel to the wilderness in a motorized hotel room replete with TVs, VCRs, showers, toilets, and growling generators.
Then would come the demands that inevitably followed RV invasions: sewage dumps, water and electric hookups, and, finally, the cry of 'Why can't we drive
Anna could envision Craig committing murder to save the Guadalupe Mountains from such defilement. With very little effort, she could picture herself helping him.
And then trying to kill her because she wouldn't leave Drury's demise well enough alone? Eastern couldn't have known she'd reached enough dead ends, was shaken enough from her fall to drop the investigation. Maybe he thought when she came back from Mexico she'd begin to dig again, with twice the energy now her life, too, had been threatened.
So he ran.
He'd left his pet snakes behind. Paul had noticed when he checked Craig's apartment. Snakes, though, could live for weeks without food. Anna couldn't imagine they would suffer undue psychological trauma from the loss of Craig's companionship.
According to Paul, he'd not taken any clothes or books or anything, either. But then Craig was crazy. Maybe he'd run from everything-murder, snakes, laundry, phone bills.
Anna sighed and switched on the radio. Trying to second-guess lunatics, drunks, or the Office of Personnel Management was an exercise in frustration. Their logic totally eluded her.
Jarring bones and rattling teeth drowned out any thought for a while as she forced the truck over the broken rock of the rutted road. So bad was the surface, even ten miles an hour was too fast to maintain control. Anna doubted Craig's old Volvo could make it over such rugged terrain, but she'd seen cars in stranger places.
The heat grew oppressive. The plastic steering wheel burned her hands. Her feet, in their regulation boots, felt as if her socks had been dipped in kerosene and set on fire.
Mentally excusing herself to Rogelio's environmental purism, she rolled up the window and cranked up the air conditioner.
Eastern's Volvo was not at PX Well. While she was there, Anna checked the rain gauge. Dry, as she'd expected. Not a trace of rain had fallen on the West Side since February and very little more than that in the entire Southwest. The region was in its fourth year of drought. Fires burned out of control in Arizona, Nevada, and all over New Mexico. Every morning in the ranger report was news of another fifteen-, twenty-, thirty-thousand acres burned. Even Yosemite was on fire.
Close to four-thirty Anna arrived back at Park Headquarters. Harland's Roads and Trails truck wasn't in the lot but Paul's one-ton was there between the jeep Cheryl was driving and the Chief Ranger's van.
Climbing out of the air-conditioned cab, Anna was hit by the heat. For a few seconds it felt delicious. Then the caress grew heavy, gluing her clothes to her body. Escaping up the cement steps, she let herself in the rear door of the building.
The others were already gathered around the conference table. Christina Walters had joined them. She smiled faintly when Anna caught her eye and Anna walked around the table and took the chair next to hers. The glower of the Chief Ranger, shorn of its amiable sheep's clothing, filled the room with a silence too active to allow for conversation.
Paul sat across the table poring through a sheaf of forms. Looking busy, Anna speculated. Corinne's silences clamored too loudly to allow for reading.
Cheryl was lost again in her finger-ends.
Shifting her revolver and radio so they didn't bite into her ribs quite so hard, Anna settled in to await Corinne's signal that the meeting could begin.
Through the door connecting the conference room with the offices came an irregular tattoo of muffled thumps and slaps, as though in the adjoining room a confession were being beaten out of some uncooperative suspect. Marta huffing through books and manuals, telegraphed sullen disapproval that Christina was asked to the meeting and she was not.
A pointed look from Corinne Mathers sent Christina to close the door.
As she resumed her seat, Harland Roberts came in from the hall. His dark hair was ruffled like a boy's, one lock falling over his forehead as if he had driven with his window rolled down.
Corinne glanced at the wall clock: 4:34. He was late. This time he didn't apologize. Apparently, the actuality of his guilt satisfied the Chief Ranger. Her face relaxed and she smiled; the meeting could begin.
No trace had been found of Craig's vehicle: no tracks, nothing. There were six gates in the fence around the boundary, most were the dead ends of rutted gravel roads leading into old wells and stock tanks left over from when the Guadalupes had been used for sheep and cattle grazing. The Volvo hadn't been found at any of them.
Next, Christina gave her report. There had been no official recognition of Eastern in the past seven days: no traffic violations, accidents, hospitalizations, arrests, or parking tickets concerning a Craig Eastern anywhere in a one-hundred-and-fifteen-mile radius of the park. Nor had any of the names and numbers she'd followed up from the University of Texas at El Paso proved fruitful.
Anna wondered whether or not Harland had given her the phone number of the mental institution in Austin. As if her thought cued Roberts's voice, he said: ' Austin?'
'I followed up on the number you suggested, Harland,' Christina replied carefully. Anna was not surprised at her natural sensitivity. She'd come to expect it. 'The information had to be pried out of them, but I finally found a nurse who would talk with me. They've not seen Craig for. two years.'
'Nurse?' Corinne pounced on the word. 'Does Craig have a physical problem?'
Christina looked uncomfortable. This was not her secret to tell. In truth, it wasn't Harland's either, but somehow it seemed he'd earned a right to it.
'Not a physical problem, Corinne,' he replied.
The Chief Ranger waited, both of her small capable hands palm-down on the blond wood of the table.
Anna was put in mind of Piedmont: alert, casually deadly, waiting for a mouse to run out from behind the stove.
Sure as death, the mouse panicked.
'It's a personal matter, Corinne,' Harland said when the pressure got to him. 'Not something I feel I can
