High Country- Pigeon 12 (31 page)

Anna said nothing. She was thinking.

"I've got to make some calls," he said. Assuming it was a dismissal, she rose to leave. He waved her back to her seat and reached for the phone.

While he dialed and talked, Anna sifted through her mind, picking out pieces of information. Blood. A used syringe. Her first thought should have been AIDS. Had she been thinking in her capacity as an emergency medical technician she would have. Because her mind was full of the drug connections, she'd overlooked the obvious.

The syringe had been meant to scare a nosey obstructionist waitress into quitting, not to shut up a law enforcement ranger. Scott had seemed-at least for a moment, till he recovered himself-to know something about the needle when she'd first shown it to him.

Scott had met Jim Wither in the penitentiary. Wither had been teaching there so he might be near a good friend of his, a friend who had died of pneumonia. AIDS victims died of opportunistic diseases that invaded their compromised immune systems. Many died of pneumonia. The blood in the syringe had come from an infected person. Jim Wither was an old bachelor, no sign of wives, ex-wives or girlfriends, ex or otherwise. Jim's pal in Soledad was most likely his lover. If that was true, the blood had probably come from the head chef. Scott Wooldrich roomed with Wither. Both men had access to her locker. Jim had been furious with her. Could he have believed she knew of his illness and would tell, thus getting him removed from his dearly loved position as chef?

She pondered that while George Kastner hung up, dialed again and began talking. Why would he use his own blood to kill, infect or frighten her? If he was trying to keep the knowledge of his disease under wraps, sticking a sample of his blood in a place it might be sent in for analysis was insane.

Accepting that Jim would use his own blood against her for whatever reason was mad, the next step in her reasoning had to be that someone else had used Wither's blood, planted it in her jacket, then said something to the chef that would make him behave inhospitably, thus making him the prime suspect, and, after a DNA match, the fall guy.

"Okay," Kastner said, dragging her thoughts back into the room. "The cavalry is on its way. The Navy is sending a helicopter and a SWAT team to help us out. I doubt we'll need anything like that kind of firepower but the Navy boys could use the practice and I love a good show. The helicopter should be here around eleven o'clock. Why don't you plan on going up there with us?"

"Sure." She'd not expected to be included. When high adventure called in the guise of a helicopter ride and a drug raid, the usually peaceful park rangers hated to miss out on it. There was nothing like arriving on scene in a big military aircraft to make one feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger. A lowly import like her could expect to be bumped down.

"Anything on the downed plane?" she asked.

"Nope. It's being looked into. Naturally enough, no flight plan was made and no one called to say it hadn't come in at the estimated time of arrival. Once we get the plane out of the lake we'll have more to go on, but that'll have to wait till spring thaw. We can get a couple divers down but won't be bringing anything up till April at the earliest."

The radio on a narrow table behind the acting chief ranger squawked out his call number. "That'll be my guys," he said, and answered, repeating his call number, then: "Go ahead."

In the terse language of radio protocol one of Kastner's rangers reported they had found the place where Anna left the trail and followed her track fifty or so yards into the trees. There they'd discovered the remains of the burned sleeping bag, the camp stove and the flashlight. A second set of what might be tracks paralleled those Anna had left.

"I forgot," Anna interrupted.

"Stand by," Kastner said into the radio. He nodded to her to finish.

"I forgot to tell you. Before I left their camp up at the lake, I burned their boots. Mark-the one who came after me-had his feet wrapped up in sweaters or whatever."

"You burned their boots," he repeated, blank of face and voice.

"Yes."

"Roger that." Into the mike he repeated the part about the clothbound feet.

"Could be those tracks then," the ranger replied. "They led to the burn but not away. Not unless they came back to the trail. There were a mess of tracks. We couldn't sort them all out."

"No 1144?" Kastner said. "Corpse," he said, for Anna's edification.

"Nobody living or dead. Should Kenny and I go on up to Lower Merced?"

"No," he told her. "Head on out. Stay at the trailhead. Don't let anybody go up it, and stop and detain anyone hiking out.

"Is there anything else you forgot to tell me?" the acting chief asked Anna when his radio conversation was done.

She thought back over her report. "Well, I pretty much burned everything at their camp that I could get my hands on but, other than that, no, I don't think so."

"Did you burn that other man-what did you call him? Phil-before you left?"

"No!" Anna was shocked he would think her capable of such a thing. "He was out cold but breathing when I left."

"Did you maybe accidentally catch the tent on fire where the other man was sleeping? You know, when you were burning everything? A spark get away? An accident?"

Anna looked hard into Kastner's eyes. The compassion was lurking in the depths, but she saw something else too. Fear maybe.

The acting chief ranger was wondering if she was a homicidal pyromaniac who burned unconscious felons and drug dealers curled up snug in their sleeping bags.

Denying one was a lunatic tended to sound insane. Anna didn't know why that was true, but it was. Rather than risk it she simply restated the truth.

"I knocked out Phil with the blunt side of an ax blade. I burned what I could of their gear to keep them from pursuing me."

Kastner said nothing. For a moment he studied her. She sat quietly, dreading that he would see what it was he was looking for. Finally he said: "Lorraine tells me you intend to stay on at the Ahwahnee."

"That's right."

"If your theory about the missing kids is correct, if they got wind of this thing and were killed for claim jumping, it seems to me your work is done."

"There are loose ends."

"Like the bloody syringe."

"Yeah." There were other things too, but she wasn't sure what they were; mostly they were just stirrings in her gut. She didn't elaborate.

"Eleven o'clock, then."

This time he was dismissing her.

Anna decided to put off her crow-eating session with Tiny Bigalo a few more hours. With a bad ankle, Tiny would likely stick her at the receptionist's desk. Because Tiny was angry at her for missing a shift, she might very well put her on for today's lunch rush, and Anna had a helicopter to catch before noon.

At eleven o'clock Anna, Kastner and a half-dozen rangers waited on Crane Flat, a snowy meadow above the valley's rim. A cruel wind cut down from the northeast, stinging the tips of Anna's frostbitten fingers through the quilting of her gloves. Other than that it was ideal flying weather. The sky was the translucent blue of winter. The sun, painfully bright and cold, reflected off a burnished crust of snow. Grasses, usually hidden beneath a thick blanket of white this time of year, pushed through the shabby covering, each blade separate, frosted and glittering like the blades of a new-honed scythe.

Hunched against the cold, back to the wind, Anna shut out the bass chatter of the men and drank in the vast and impossible distances. Light and space, a horizon so far away the eye had to reach; everything she loved about the mountains poured into her. The sightless nights on the Illilouette Trail were just a vague memory of one of Dante's seven levels, read about in high school then forgotten.

The thump of helicopter blades reached them long before the aircraft came into view. When it did, Anna was suitably impressed. They'd sent the heavy artillery.

Yosemite's fire cache provided the rangers and Anna with fire-retardant flight suits, helmets and ear protection. She was accustomed to aircraft of various kinds and always looked forward to flying. From the air she got a true sense of how the land lay, the rivers flowed. From ten thousand feet the world spread out with all the detail and intricacy of a living map.

Mostly she'd flown in small planes-Cessna 182s, Aztec twin engines, Comanches, Piper Cubs-the planes flown by local airport operators who contracted out to the parks to help with drug interdiction, fire fighting or search and rescue. The helicopters she'd had occasion to fly in had also been small and brightly colored, with bulging Plexiglas windows that made her think of dragonflies.

The Navy's Sea Ranger, painted in bright red and white, looked to be the mother of all dragonflies. The pilot never shut down but waved to Kastner, and he, Anna and several other rangers climbed aboard. There was the sudden feeling of weightlessness, then the machine was airborne and hatcheting its way to LowerMercedPassLake.

It was offensive how quickly and easily the Sea Ranger covered the miles that had cost her so dearly three nights before. Under perfect skies, illuminated by a glittering sun of ice and fire, mirror-bright granite and snow-clad evergreens unfolded beneath them like a Christmas card. Anna allowed herself to be transported by the beauty. Instead of engendering the deep calm she'd come to expect when immersing herself in the majesty of wild country, the purity below, untouched by the grisly events she'd been part of, made her feel sordid by contrast. Little and mean and dirty, as if she'd committed unspeakable acts in the sanctuary of a church. The feelings she'd worried about not having-horror, guilt, fear-began to rise within her.

Not now, she thought, and the last paragraph of Gone With the Wind, a piece she'd memorized for a freshman drama class, rose complete in her mind . . . "tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then."

"Holy smoke, will you look at that!" Kastner's voice in the earphones snatched her back to the present. Craning to see out the side window, she looked down. They'd come over a small shoulder of the mountain, and the lake lay suddenly beneath.

"Holy smoke," she echoed on a breath. Where she had expected an unpeopled expanse of ice, a busy excavation was taking place. Ten, maybe fifteen people, in bright-colored winter parkas, were out on the ice worrying at as many holes. Equipment lay scattered about: backpacks, shovels, axes, even a chainsaw.

As one the miners looked up, faces blank and white turned toward the sun. Arms began to wave, then they scattered like cockroaches when the light is turned on. Leaving their finds, their packs and their tools, they ran for the woods.

The Sea Ranger hovered. The last man vanished into the trees. The pilot set down gently and switched off the rotors. Doors opened. Rangers poured out. Not wanting her bad ankle to slow the others, Anna went last. Rangers were shouting. Rotors chuffed to a stop. Then nothing. It was if time had been arrested, there was no forward movement, no tick of the clock, no beat of a heart.

Silence came down like a blessing.

Into this a ranger said: "Should we go after them?"

"No," Kastner replied. "I don't think they are our guys. They're probably just opportunists. Guys looking to make a quick buck off an unexpected windfall. Radio Diane at the trailhead that she might expect company in a few hours. Tell her to get some backup."

They spread out then, Anna going with George Kastner. There was little to be done but photograph the depredations of the miners and the debris left by the crash in hopes of finding something with which to identify it.

That and look for bodies.

Phil was where Anna had left him, slumped over in the ruin she'd made of their camp. His throat was cut and she wondered if it was wrong to feel glad at the sight of the wound. Not glad he was dead-she didn't care one way or another about the man's continuing existence-she was glad it wasn't she who had killed him. At least not directly.