Ill Wind (19 page)

“Maybe—but from a big distance.”

“Does it scare you or the girls?”

Patsy laughed again. “I suppose it should but it doesn’t. It’s sort of comforting, like that old song ‘Someone to Watch Over Me.’ ”

Tom’s behavior struck Anna more in the stalker than the guardian-angel mode. “He doesn’t talk to you or the girls, he just sort of skulks?”

“Doesn’t talk. In fact he seems to be avoiding us. A couple of times we’ve responded, you know—like friends—and Tom acted like he wanted to get away.”

“Well, holler if he starts scaring you,” Anna said, because she could think of nothing else to say. She looked at her watch: seven fifty-seven.

Adept at taking hints of dismissal, Patsy stood and arranged her purse on her shoulder. “Waiting for Hills,” Anna explained. “I’ve been summoned for God knows what.”

“Oh.” Patsy brightened. “I bet it’s to go to Durango. The FBI man is arriving on the ten-eleven from Albuquerque. The superintendent had me book it.”

“That’s it then. Pigeon’s taxi service.”

Patsy picked up on her annoyance. “Hills thought you’d want to go. It turns out the investigator is an old friend of yours, a Frederick Stanton.”

“You’re kidding! Frederick the Fed? I’ll be damned.”

“He’s not an old friend?” Patsy had such a practiced look of concern Anna would’ve pegged her as a mom even if she hadn’t known of the girls.

“We worked together once,” Anna said. “We’re more like old acquaintances.”

Hills strode up looking lean and marvelously rangerlike with his blond bulk and tight pants. Her assignment was, indeed, to fetch Frederick Stanton from the Durango airport ninety miles to the east.

The drive between the park and Durango wound down off the mesa and through the Mancos Valley nestled between the snow-topped La Plata mountains to the north and the red mesas to the south. Fields were carpeted with dandelions, and blue irises lined the streams. Several hundred sheep, herded by men and boys on horseback, stopped traffic for twenty minutes, making Anna late to the airport. Fortunately, the flight was even later.

Abandoning the terminal for the out of doors, she sat on the concrete with her back against the warm brick of the building and passed the time remembering Frederick the Fed.

Isle Royale had been a while ago but she still remembered the gory details. The FBI agent was a tall gangling man with well-cut features a size too large for his face. Anna estimated his age at thirty-five. Dark hair, cut in the inimitable style of a third-grader, class of fifty-eight, flopped over his forehead; skin showed white around the ears where the clippers had cut too close.

Stanton had a vague and bumbling manner but was usually a step or two ahead at the end of every heat. Too much Columbo, too much Lord Peter Wimsey, Anna thought. Or, perhaps,
Revenge of the Nerds
and “Saturday Night Live.” Stanton didn’t fit the mold. It made him hard to type and impossible to predict. Which was, Anna guessed, exactly why he did it.

He used people. He’d used Anna and he’d done it effortlessly; that was the part that rankled.

A twin-engine prop plane, the commuter out of Albuquerque, roared in from the taxiway and came to a stop on the ramp beyond the chain-link fence.

Anna eased herself up.

The fourth passenger off was Stanton. Anna laughed at how like himself he looked. Same haircut, even the same clothes. He wore a short-sleeved madras shirt he must have unearthed from a vintage clothing store, rumpled khaki shorts, white socks, and brown lace-up shoes. As he came down the metal steps that folded out from the fuselage, he kept looking behind him, swatting at his posterior.

Absorbed in this activity, he ambled across the ramp. When he reached the fence he looked up. If he was surprised to see Anna, he didn’t show it. “I think I sat in something ooky,” he said, wrinkling his long nose. “Anything there?” He turned to give her an unobscured view of his backside.

There was perhaps a speck of something on his right hip pocket but Anna wasn’t in the mood to enter into a discussion of it. “Looks fine to me.”

Stanton craned his neck and looked down over his shoulder. “Okay then,” he said. “I’ll have to trust you on this one. Sure felt sticky for a minute.”

“Luggage?” Anna said to get things moving.

“Got it.” He shook the strap of an oversized leather shoulder bag he carried.

“You must be planning on wrapping this one up in record time.”

“I heard you were on the case so I only brought one change of underdrawers.”

There wasn’t much to say to that so Anna merely nodded.

With what seemed a maximum of fuss and fiddling around, she got the federal agent buckled into the passenger seat of the patrol car and started the trip back to the park.

As they drove to the main highway, Stanton waved graciously at passing traffic. “Boy, I love riding in cars with lights and sirens,” he said. “Everybody waves back. They think they did something and you’re not stopping them for it. Kind of makes you pals.”

Anna laughed. “I wondered what it was.”

Stanton made idle conversation, the kind she’d grown used to working with him on the island. During the weeks of that investigation she’d come to look upon it as his personal music, the kind designed to soothe the savage beasts; charming in its whimsy, disarmingly inane. When one became complacent, convinced he was a complete boob, he’d pounce.

“Okay,” he said as she pulled out onto highway 160. “Tell me the good-parts version.”

Anna switched off the radio and pulled her thoughts together. As succinctly as possible, she recounted the disappearance, the discovery of the body, the widow’s whereabouts the night of the murder, and Rose’s casting blame in the general direction of the pipeline contractor.

Stanton sat for a while humming “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” under his breath. The patrol car crawled up the long slope out of Durango. Anna unfettered her mind and let it wander over the now-green ski slopes of Hesperus and the fresh new-leaved poplar trees skirting the mountain ravines. The sky was an impossible blue, a blue seen only on hot midwestern summer days and high in the mountains. Cornflower blue—the phrase flickered through her mind, though she’d never seen a cornflower.

“That’s no fun,” Frederick said finally. He twisted around in his seat till the shoulder strap pushed his collar up under his right ear and his bony knees pointed in Anna’s direction. “Tell me the gossip, innuendo, lies, suppositions, weird happenstance. Dead guys are pretty dull without some good dirt. Do dish me.”

“The dead guy was a friend of mine,” Anna replied irritably.

“Oops.” Stanton looked genuinely contrite and she was sorry for such a cheap shot. She’d thought of Stacy as the dead guy not three hours earlier. She’s almost made up her mind to apologize when Stanton spoke again.

“Callous, that’s me all over. How about this: Deceased individuals, however meritorious in life, lack the essential spontaneity to generate interest. So those left living must keep their spirits alive through the practice of the oral tradition.”

Anna snorted. “Callous is right. The dirt.” Out of spite—or self-defense—she told Stanton everything she could think of that occurred in the park, or in anyone’s imagination in the park, around the time of the murder: Jamie’s chindi, the pipeline, medicals, evacuations, the superintendent’s secretary’s marital problems, the monkey-wrenching, the dorm, Piedmont’s foster home, Bella’s dwarfism. She got bored before he did, running out of words as they passed through the tiny town of Mancos.

“And the meritorious deceased?” Stanton pushed.

Anna was torn between a desire to snub the fed for his flippancy and a need to talk of Stacy. The need to talk won. She’d used that need a dozen times to pull information from people. Mildly, she cursed herself for giving in to it now. To retain some vestige of self-respect, she culled all emotion from her tone. Dispassionately, she recounted Stacy’s sensitivity, love of the parks, his attachment to Bella and addiction to Rose.

At the word “addiction,” Anna realized she was being catty. Hoping it had slipped by Stanton, she made a mental note to talk to Molly about it.

“Rats,” he summed up when she’d done. “Sounds messy and domestic. Widows and orphans and who’s divorced and who’s dead. Any drug dealings, you think?”

He sounded so hopeful Anna laughed as she shook her head. “Doesn’t seem like it.”

“Too bad.” Stanton screwed himself around in the seat, draping one long arm over the back and looking down into the valley as the car climbed the winding road cut in the side of the mesa. “Drug dealers make such satisfying bad guys. Not so good as Nazis or Hell’s Angels, but then who is? Hate doing the widows, especially when they’re all fresh and weepy.”

 

 

HILLS Dutton was waiting for them in the CRO. In the past Anna had often found rangers loath to turn an investigation over to an outside agency. Some hated surrendering the power, others suffered a natural discomfort at letting anyone not a member of the family paw through the dirty laundry. Lord knew what they might choose to air.

Dutton was the exception; he couldn’t wait to dump this one in somebody else’s lap. Statements, paperwork, the photographs, and the autopsy—unopened and dated two days previously, Anna noted—had been stuffed into a manila envelope. Hills thrust it into Stanton’s hands the instant the introductions were over. Lest the abdication appear incomplete, he added: “This is our busy season and I’ve got a park to run so I’m giving you Anna for whatever while you’re here.”

“My very own ranger,” Stanton gloated as he and Anna walked back to her patrol car. “Just what I always wanted... well, next to a pony.”

Anna grumbled because it was expected of her but she was pleased with the assignment. Parking tickets and medical evacuations had begun to pall, replaced by an undoubtedly unhealthy obsession with Stacy Meyers, living and now dead.

She took Stanton, the envelope still clamped under his arm, to Cliff Palace and played tour guide as she led him down the steep path into the alcove where the village was built. During the descent a metamorphosis took place. By the time they stood before the ruin, Stanton had lost his puppyish ways. Even his physical appearance was altered. The angles of his bones had sharpened, his stride was no longer gangling but purposeful, and his step had softened till the leather soles fell with scarcely a sound. Anna was put in mind of the time they had sat on a rock overlooking Lake Richie on Isle Royale waiting for a murder suspect; the sense she’d gotten then of the wolf shedding its sheep’s clothing.

The ruin was packed with tourists moving through the ancient pueblo in a sluggish stream. At the base of the tower where Anna and Stacy had found the asthmatic child, people were backed up twenty deep waiting to stick their heads through the window to see the paintings.

“Like the Matterhorn at Disneyland,” a voice from above and behind Anna sneered.

Jamie Burke was seated high on a boulder in the shade. A silver counter rested in her right hand and she clicked off tourists as they came by. The usual questions: when? who? how? and where did they go? were all answered in the same way: “It’s in the brochure.”

Anna was not impressed. Unlike the wilderness parks, which she staunchly believed were for animals and plants dwelling therein, Mesa Verde was for the visitors. Humans paying tribute with curiosity and awe to human ancestry. On Isle Royale and in Guadalupe, law enforcement was there to protect and preserve. The main function of rangers on the mesa was to keep the flow of traffic orderly so the interpreters could bring this history to life.

“Hi, Jamie,” Anna said neutrally.

Ignoring her, Jamie slid down from the rock to land on legs strong as shock absorbers. “Are you the FBI guy?” she demanded of Stanton.

The agent stuck out his hand. The unhinged, bumbling look had returned, donned like a disguise. “Yes indeedy.”

Jamie didn’t shake his hand. Putting fists on hips, she squinted up at the walls filling niches high above the dwelling. “You’re too late. Too bad Stacy had to die. He was my closest friend,” Jamie said. “Maybe he’d still be alive if you’d listened to me.”

“You” was generic, as in “they,” and Anna didn’t bother to challenge it.

“How so?” Stanton asked politely.

“Al said this strip-mining was killing the sacred land. They’ve got to be given their home, their peace. Are you going up into the ruin?” she asked suddenly.

“That’s what us FBI guys do.”

“It’s a sacred place. Fragile. People aren’t allowed to go stomping around up there and for good reason.”

Annoyance was nibbling away at Anna’s already strained patience. She drew breath to speak. Stanton heard and shot her a look that shut her up.

“What’s the good reason?” he asked.

“Death.”

He didn’t react to the melodrama. “Wow,” he said with seeming sincerity. “Whose?”

“Stacy was not the first. You want him to be the last, then stop intruding.”

Stanton was mystified. Jamie was enjoying her part in this homemade theatrical and would play it out as long as she could.

Anna jumped in with the punch line. “Old Ones, Anasazi, chindi, ghosts, spirits,” she told Stanton. “Jamie believes—”

“Along with a lot of other people,” the interpreter stuck in.

“—that the ghosts or spirits of the original inhabitants of the mesa are popping up out of the underworld now and then, showing their displeasure at the modern tourism industry by striking down a select handful of the hundreds of thousands of people who pass through here every year.”

“Not exactly!” Jamie snapped.

“Girls, girls,” Frederick chided, and Anna quelled an impulse to bite him.

“We’d best get moving,” she said, glancing at her watch as if time was of the essence.

Jamie puffed out an exaggerated sigh. “I’d better go with you. That’s an easily impacted area.”