Ill Wind (15 page)

Anna didn’t know. Three times in her career there’d been bodies to deal with, but the crime scenes had been so unstable, they’d needed to be moved. “Secure the scene, collect evidence, maintain the chain of evidence,” she said, parroting a list from her federal law enforcement training.

“Right,” Hills said. “We’ll stay out of the kiva and call the feds. Stay here,” he ordered. “I got to make some calls.”

He scrambled down the wall into the alley and headed for a place open enough he could radio Dispatch. Anna felt abandoned. “Shee-it,” she echoed.

For a moment she just stared out through the junipers, watching a scrub jay scolding an invisible companion. Scenes from old movies and books came to mind: wives, mothers, grandmothers, dressed in widows’ weeds, sitting in darkened rooms knitting or crying with no company but one another and death personified in the body of the man they’d bathed and dressed and powdered, lying in state on the bier. Unbidden a picture from Dickens’
Great Expectations
took over: the moldering wedding feast, mice and maggots the only partakers.

“Not your bridegroom,” Anna said aloud, narrowed her mind to the task at hand, and turned to face the deceased.

There were a few tracks and scuffs on the stones around the kiva: hers, Hills’, probably Claude Beavens’ or the stabilization crew’s. The surface was too hard to make any inferences. No buttons, threads, dropped wallets, white powder, semen, or anything readily identifiable as a bona fide
clue
was in evidence.

Keeping to the stones topping the kiva wall, she walked around till she stood over the ventilator hole, looking down into the southern recess, then to the deflector wall, then the fire ring with its cold tinder.

No obvious signs of violence were apparent, at least not on the side of the body that was exposed. The soft layers of dust that had accumulated on the floor of the kiva were freshly raked.

It was customary for interpreters to rake out human tracks made in closed areas. Both so the footprints wouldn’t entice others to trespass and to retain an illusion of freshness, of the first time, for those who would come next.

One line of footprints crossed the raked dirt. It led from below the banquette on the west side of the kiva to the fire pit.

Stacy reached away from her with one long bony arm that was looking more spectral every moment she was left alone with it. With him, she corrected herself. The flesh was pale, life’s blood pooled on the underside of his arm. Near his sleeve, on the upper side, was an old bruise, a reminder that once this flesh could feel.

“Wait,” Anna whispered. Stacy’s shoes were off, lying untied very near where his feet were tucked up by his hip pockets as if he’d kicked them off to get more comfortable. Something about the stockinged feet was so vulnerable, so human, Anna felt an unaccustomed pricking behind her eyes.

She forced herself to continue the study. Except for the shoes and the hat on the deflector wall, Stacy was immaculately dressed. If, as Bella said, Rose dressed him, she would find nothing to be ashamed of. His shirt was crisply ironed, his trousers neatly creased, his duty belt firmly buckled on with gun and speedloader visible.

Anna continued her circuit, viewing the scene from every angle. Nothing more of interest turned up. She was relieved when Hills finally hauled himself out of the alleyway and crossed to join her.

“Frieda got the federal marshal out of Durango on the line. They’ll send somebody up. This won’t keep.” He waved a hand toward what had once been a man. “We got to get what we can, bag it, and take it down to the morgue. I’ve got Drew’s boys coming.”

Hills crossed his arms and stared down into the kiva. “What’d he do? Just walk in, curl up in the fireplace, make hisself comfy, and die?”

“Looks that way.”

“Jesus.” The district ranger blew a sigh out through loose lips. “This is a hell of a note. Solstice. Some of the seasonal interps are gong to make hay with this.”

Remembering the strange spark in Jamie’s eyes as they passed her by the gate, Anna didn’t doubt it one bit.

THE GLASS HAD STARTED GETTING IN THE WAY SO she’d left it behind and drank straight from the bottle. Never had the Rambler driven so smoothly. Green eyes of a deer or a coyote flickered in Anna’s peripheral vision as the headlights picked them out of the night. A vague and uninteresting idea that she was driving too fast crossed her mind. The proof of it, the squealing of tires as she made the ninety-degree turn into the Resource Management area, made her laugh out loud.

When she’d recovered control of the car, she felt between her legs. The wine bottle was still upright, its contents unspilled.

“All present and accounted for, officer,” she said. “No casualties.” The Rambler rolled to a stop in front of the square stone building. “Car in gear, brake set,” Anna said. Then: “Whoops. Key
off.
Too late!” As she took her foot off the clutch, the car hopped and the engine died.

For a time she leaned back against the seat, glad to be still. “Nights in White Satin” played on the oldies station out of Durango. Through the open window the air blew cool, smelling of juniper and dust. Overhead, without the pollution of the glaring intruder lights that had become epidemic even in remote areas during the last decade, the stars were fixed in an utterly black sky. Small night sounds kept the dark from being lonely. Anna could hear scufflings of some nocturnal creature digging in the pine needles, the sigh of a breeze approaching through the forest’s crown, clicking and snapping as tiny twigs or bones were broken.

Only humans, cursed with the knowledge of their own mortality and that of those whom they loved, were truly alone; each trapped in an ivory tower of skull and bone peeking out through the windows of the soul.

 

 

THE body recovery, as sanitized language would phrase it, had gone on till afternoon. The packaging of the meat that had once called itself Stacy Meyers had taken only a few minutes, but the attendant crime-scene recording and preservation had worn on so long even Hills’ deep-seated nerve endings had become frayed.

Hills had even less experience than Anna with foul play in the form of park corpses, and his plodding methodical-ness took a definite turn toward the anal retentive. Pictures were taken and retaken from every angle.

“Don’t know when somebody’s going to pop up out of the woodwork saying how you should’ve done it,” he explained. “So by God we’re going to do it all. Hell of a note. Where are the feds when you need ’em? We forget something and our tit’s in the wringer.”

This and more of the same was muttered in an ongoing monotone as he directed the investigation. After the photographs, stones around the kiva were examined, swept, and the leavings collected in a plastic bag that Anna dutifully marked KIVA DUST with the date and her initials.

“Maintain the chain of evidence,” Hills said.

“It’s dirt,” Anna returned.

“You never know . . .”

The kiva floor was photographed, re-raked, all items bagged and marked. Then, finally, Stacy was photographed and zipped into the body bag. His hat and shoes wouldn’t fit in the narrow plastic shroud. Anna threw them in the trunk of her car to return to Rose.

The entire “dog and pony show,” as Hills termed it, had taken several hours. During most of it Stacy lay curled absurdly in the fire pit, reaching toward something the living couldn’t see, his beard growing ever blacker with flies.

It was odd how the human mind switched off an unpleasant reality. Moose slept seconds at a time, their brains clicking on and off like binary computers, allowing them to rest yet never be long out of a dangerous world in need of watching. Anna, Jimmy, Drew, Paul, Jennifer, they’d all clicked in and out of the reality of death in the kiva. Jokes were told, people laughed, measurements were taken, even mild flirting between Jennifer and Paul.

Interspersed with this flow of life were chalky looks, strained silences, and equally strained conversations as someone saw again Stacy’s face, remembered his wife, his child, recalled him as he had been in life, and woke to the realization that this fly-blown corpse was all that remained.

The schizophrenia wore Anna down. She had already needed a drink in the worst way when Hills dragged her to Meyers’ house to give condolences to the widow.

Blessedly he had foisted off the chore of informing Rose onto Frieda. Their visit was mere formality—courtesy, the East Texan said. “Leave any questions to the feds.”

“The feds” Hills relied on so heavily was a federal investigator the superintendent had called in. Mesa Verde was under exclusive jurisdiction, which placed it off local law enforcement’s turf.

The Meyerses’ house was shut up. Windows closed, blinds drawn like a Victorian house of mourning.

Hills knocked tentatively then stepped back, leaving Anna marooned on the welcome mat as Rose opened the door. She was neatly dressed in dark blue polyester pants and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Her short dark hair was combed and she wore pearl earrings, but her face was in disarray; dry eyes rimmed with red, her cheeks drawn and pale.

Anna looked to Hills but he was studying a crack in the sidewalk. “We just stopped by to tell you how terribly sorry we are, Mrs. Meyers,” Anna managed. “Your husband’s body is being taken to Durango.”

Rose waited. When Anna could find no more words, Rose closed the door. In the curtailed view of the living room there’d been no sign of Bella. For that Anna was grateful. The child would have been hard to face. She turned to Hills.

He shrugged. “That about does it,” he said, and: “You’re off the clock.”

“Overtime. You’re a real sensitive guy,” Anna groused as they walked back to the patrol car.

“Gotta be thinking of something,” he said philosophically.

ANNA raised the bottle from between her thighs and peered at it, measuring the level against the dull glow of the dashboard lights. One third left. Of how many bottles? she wondered. Surely this was only the second. Maybe the third.

She took a mouthful and speculated on any possible New Age numerological significance that one third of the third might have. “Got to ask Jamie,” she said. “Wart-hog.” This last descriptive was triggered at the memory of her housemate.

 

 

JAMIE had been hovering at the dormitory door when Hills dropped Anna off. Burke was decked out in the sarong, her hair, free of its braid, fanned into a crimped black curtain that fell past her butt. Kohl—or some modern equivalent—ringed her eyes and she wore a single gold earring beaten into the stylized shape of a lizard. Her face was somber but excitement radiated from her in tangible waves.

 

 

“LIKE a bitch in heat,” Anna told the wine bottle.

 

 

“WE’VE got to talk,” Jamie had said grimly.

“Not now.” Anna had tried to squeeze by but Jamie’d laid hold of her briefcase.

“Now.”

Anna dropped her hat and gunbelt on the nearest chair. “So talk.”

Jamie ignored her rudeness, or was too caught up in her own drama to notice it. With a sigh, she spread herself on the sofa. “Stacy and I were very close. Very.”

Anna doubted that, but the declaration in no way surprised her. The dead had more friends than the living. Especially those meeting an untimely end. It was as if knowing a murder victim invested one with some sort of celebrity. Jamie had wanted something to happen on solstice. Murder must’ve been beyond her wildest dreams.

Murder: Anna hadn’t said it to herself so bluntly. Suicide, accident, incident, those were the words Hills had resolutely stuck with all day. In thinking it, Anna believed it to be true. Stacy was too much a conservationist to defile the ruins with his twentieth-century corpse.

“We all know dead people, Jamie,” Anna said unkindly. Then: “Sorry. I’m beat.” She picked up her duty belt and turned to go. Again the interpreter stopped her.

“Claude saw,” she repeated her cryptic phrase of the morning, playing it like a trump card in her bid for attention.

Anna was almost too tired to ante up but she managed a mild show of interest. “Saw what?”

“The night Stacy was taken. He saw it.”

The spark of interest flickered and died. Anna was too tired to play. “Get him to write ‘it’ up on his witness report.” She dragged herself to the questionable sanctuary of her room.

The evening continued to unravel from there. Through the thin walls of the Far View dorm, Jamie could be heard holding court. Once—or maybe twice—Anna slunk from her lair to return with reinforcements in the form of alcohol. Finally, needing air, but unable to again run the gauntlet of avid faces greedy for details, she opened her window, popped off the screen, and climbed out, taking the last un-dead soldier with her.