Ill Wind (32 page)

“Howdy, Bella, Hattie,” Frederick called.

“Fred and Anna!” To Bella, Hattie said: “I told you this was going to be a good walk. So far we’ve seen three deer, a chipmunk, a park ranger, and an FBI agent.”

“An’ a Abert squirrel,” Bella added, clearly more impressed with the long-eared rodent than the last two sightings on her aunt’s list.

Hattie left the footpath and forged through the high grass toward the picnic table. Ryegrass was beginning to plume and bright yellow mustard flowers dipped gracefully in her wake. Bella followed a few steps then stopped, hanging back.

“There’s no snakes,” Frederick assured her. “I made Ranger Pigeon check.”

“Only babies are afraid of snakes,” Bella returned. Anna forbore comment but bumped Stanton’s knee with her own. “I don’t want to get any stuff on you.” Bella held the party-colored basket up like a dangerous offering.

“Is it full of nitroglycerin?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know,” Bella replied. “But probably not.”

“Nitro’s a liquid but it explodes like dynamite,” Anna told her.

Clearly Bella didn’t believe a word. “That’d be silly.”

“You’re right,” Anna conceded.

“Battery acid,” Frederick guessed.

“This is a basket,” Bella said with a touch of impatience. “It’d leak out.”

“Spiders,” Anna tried.

Bella looked like that wasn’t a bad idea but she shook her head. “It’s sad thoughts.
Really
sad thoughts. Me and Aunt Hattie thought up all the saddest thoughts and we put them in the basket and we’re going to dump ’em in the canyon when the winds go down.”

“The winds aren’t up,” Anna remarked, noting the stillness of the evening.

“They are. Drew said. The winds go up in the morning and down at night.”

Anna grabbed Frederick’s arm. “Bella’s right. You’re right,” she said to the child.

Slightly mollified, “Up at day, down at night,” Bella reiterated. “We gotta go,” she told her aunt.

“Gotta go,” Hattie echoed, and, “Take care.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Anna said to Frederick as they watched the woman and girl pass out of sight behind a stand of piñons. “Firefighters always watch the winds. When the sun warms the air in the mornings it begins to rise and a wind blows up canyon. In the evening, as the cool air settles the wind shifts, blows down canyon. In the still of night it settles in low areas. That’s pounded into your head with a Pulaski in every fire class.

“You dump the sad thoughts at night, they blow down canyon, away, out to the wide valleys, and are dispersed. You dump them in the morning, when the sun rises, they blow up canyon, into the alcoves, settle into the ruins.”

“Holy smoke,” Stanton said. “A blinding flash of the obvious.”

CLIFF PALACE LOOP WAS CLOSED; THE GATE AT THE Four-Way closed the road and the starless night closed down the world. Clouds obscured a fledgling moon. Trees, crowding close to the road, seemed impervious even to headlights. Shadows were sudden, long, and unnatural.

“This whole place is one big graveyard. Doesn’t that give you the willies?” Stanton asked.

“Only when I think about it.” The Ford’s beams were on low. If Anna’d had her druthers she’d’ve driven without lights but the night was too dark for that.

When the road widened into Cliff Palace parking lot, she switched them off.

“Yikes! What have we here?”

From the dim glow of the dashboard Anna could see where Stanton pointed. Along the split-rail fence separating the parking area from the trees were dozens of tiny glowing eyes, as if a herd of rats or other small night predators waited for the unwary.

“Glowworms,” she told him. “Want to catch one?”

“No thanks. Wow. As in ‘Glow, little glowworm, glow’? I’m disappointed. Not a ‘glimmer glimmer’ in the lot.”

“Poetic license.”

Again the road was enclosed by darkness. Anna slowed but didn’t switch the headlights back on. From here to the Ute reservation the road ran along the canyon’s rim. Though in most places there was a fringe of trees between the road and the canyon, any stray light could give them away.

At the Navajo taco stand on the tiny piece of reservation land accidently surveyed into the park, Anna pulled off.

Around the souvenir and taco stand the land had been leveled and graveled in. Beyond, a dirt road led back into the brush and trees. There’d once been a barrier across it to keep out adventuresome tourists but it had long since fallen into disrepair. For several years no one had been caught camping back there so there had been no impetus to get it fixed. Brush made a quick and dirty barrier, a solution often employed to make a track or trail less desirable.

Anna loosed her flashlight from beneath the dash and climbed out of the car. Hands deep in pockets, Stanton followed. “The mesa runs out there in a big finger of land with cliffs on all sides.

“You can see where the brush has been dragged back and forth.” Anna shone the light on the bottom of the makeshift barricade. Twigs were snapped and dusty. “Not much in the way of tracks but we’ve not had rain for a while. Dry, this soil’s like concrete.”

“Here.” Stanton had walked around the pile and poked a toe into the spill of her light. “Truck track. Old but still pretty clear.”

Together they moved the brush aside. It took only a minute; the barricade had been culled down to three good-sized bitterbrush bushes so dry they weighed next to nothing.

“A real deterrent,” Anna said dryly. “I’m surprised we haven’t had wild packs of Bluebirds and Brownies rampaging around back here.”

She drove the patrol car through, then they carefully replaced the brush the way they had found it.

The one-lane dirt road was rutted and, though she drove at a footpace, the car jounced from side to side. Without headlights, the trip put Anna in mind of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in Disneyland. Three quarters of a mile and it ended in a wide turnaround where dirt and rock had been scraped away to help build roads in the park. On the far side of the tree-shrouded clearing was a pile of slash fifteen or twenty feet high.

Anna eased the Ford around behind it, forcing the car over the rubble of limbs. “I feel like a cat hiding behind a blade of grass, like there’s bits of me sticking out,” she said as she turned off the ignition.

Stanton laughed. He was at the same time more relaxed and more alive than she’d ever seen him. “You love this, don’t you,” she said.

“So do you, Anna, admit it. Cops and robbers.”

Anna wasn’t admitting anything.

Stanton tapped the long-lensed camera on the seat between them. “The Colorado Highway Patrol is on standby. We watch, we take pictures for the judge. We call Frieda. Frieda alerts the Highway Patrol. They nab our perpetrator at the entrance station. We’re heroes. What’s not to like?”

Anna thought of Stacy with his warm brown eyes and passionate love of the natural world. “I’d rather beat a confession out with a rubber hose,” she said.

“You may get your chance. Odds are our sniffing around has set the alarm off and we won’t get a thing. So far our evidence is pretty thin.”

“It’s Monday. For whatever reasons the veil was always on Mondays,” she insisted. “If it was worth killing for twice, it’ll be worth a last run or two. My guess is this particular chindi doesn’t scare off easily.” She turned off both her belt and the car radios. “It’s got to happen because basically we’ve got zip.”

“We know zip but we can’t prove zip,” Stanton corrected. “I hate these last-minute assignations.”

“It’s Monday night,” Anna defended herself. “Maybe the last Monday night load.” Clicking free of her seat belt, she let herself out of the car, taking the flashlight with her. A yellow circle of light joined hers as Stanton walked around the back of the vehicle. Familiarizing themselves with the area, they played their lights over the slash heap and around the car. The slash pile was comprised of the limbs and rounds of trees cleared from near the buildings by the hazardous fuel removal crew. The idea was that, should a wildfire break out on the mesa—a common occurrence during the thunderstorm season—there wouldn’t be enough dead and down wood to carry it to any of the historic structures, a theory as yet not tested and not inspiring of much faith among firefighters. But it kept the stoves supplied all winter and a crew of high school and college students busy all summer.

Anna walked one way and Stanton the other till they’d circumnavigated the pile and satisfied themselves that the settled weave of pine and juniper branches was dense enough to hide the patrol car. Then Anna turned her attention to the clearing. Red soil, garish in the flashlight beam, was torn up by the tracks of heavy equipment. Most were run over so many times the tread was indecipherable.

“There’s enough for some good casts,” Stanton said. He was down on hands and knees examining the dried mud.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Flunked plaster casts?”

“I don’t remember being taught that. I thought it was a Sherlock Holmes kind of thing.”

“
Au contraire
. We still do it. It’s getting to be a lost art, though. Crime has come out of the closet. They do it right out in the open, then we just arrest ’em. Don’t have to finesse much these days. Or else they do it all with computers and mirrors and we never know what hit us until we read about it in the
Tribune
.”

Anna traced the mishmash of tracks toward the mesa’s edge. They formed a broken fan narrowing to a drop-off point where an opening about forty feet wide made the canyon accessible. To either side trees and sandstone slabs closed in.

Careful not to walk on any salvageable tracks, she made her way to the cliff. Blackness swallowed the feeble beam of her six-cell. Instead of vertigo, it gave her a false sense of security, as if the drop wasn’t there at all, as if it were solid and soft: black velvet.

“Don’t stand so near the edge.” Stanton’s voice at her elbow made her flinch.

“Don’t creep,” she retorted.

“Don’t shout.”

“Don’t snap.”

“Nerves shot?”

“Yours too?”

He laughed easily. “A little moonlight would help. Stars. Streetlights. Neon signs. Anything. It is way too dark out here.”

“The dark is my friend.” Anna flipped off her light. “The invisible woman.”

Stanton turned his off as well and they stood in the darkness and the silence. As her eyes adjusted, Anna began to see the faint light that lives in all but deep caves: a blush of peach on the underside of the clouds to the south over the town of Shiprock, a trailing edge of silver where a thunderhead thinned near the moon, a barely discernible difference in the quality of dark between earth and sky, cliff and treeline.

A cold breath of air, just enough to tickle the hair on her arms, was inhaled into the depths of the canyon; air settling as it cooled. Anna closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

“Almonds,” she said.

Stanton sniffed, seeming to taste the air in nasal sips. “Could be.” He turned on his flash and, in contrast, the night became impossibly dark again. The finger of light stirred in the dirt at their feet. Here the soil was more black than red and the truck tracks amorphous, as if made in soft mud. “Whatever it is, we’re standing in it.” With the light, he traced the discolored soil to where the canyon claimed it. “Whatever is being dumped goes over right here.”

Anna took a plastic evidence bag from her hip pocket and scraped a sample of the dirt into it with the blade of her pocketknife. Not anxious to get a snootful of anything unfriendly, she sniffed it delicately, then offered it to Stanton. “Almonds,” he confirmed.

Having rolled the dirt into a package reminiscent of a lid of marijuana, Anna stowed it in her shirt pocket. “Tomorrow we’ll get down into the canyon bottom. Cliff Palace is up there at the head of the canyon. From the top of it this spot’s clearly visibile. If every veil sighting was in reality a Monday night drop, that’d be at least four dumps. At least—on a night like this nobody would see a thing.”

“Upcanyon winds when the sun begins to warm and whatever gases this muck gives off drift to the Palace and pool in the alcove. Them what’s got weak hearts and lungs fall by the wayside,” Stanton said. “If the stuff’s heavy it’d settle in the lowest spots. Maybe it filled the kiva Stacy was in, overcame him. That’d account for the single set of tracks.”

“Burning prints from the flaming digits on Stacy’s arms,” Anna reminded him. “Marks like we found on his shoes and appeared on the radio case. I doubt Stacy’s murder was quite so second degree.”

For a minute longer they stood on the lip of the canyon, Anna feeling there was something more she ought to be doing but uncertain of just what.

“All we’re going to do tonight is mess up what evidence there is,” Stanton said finally. “Let’s find a front-row seat and wait for the curtain to go up.”

On the eastern edge of the clearing, they found a flat slab of sandstone partially screened by a thicket of juniper. Their rock was several yards above where the dirt road entered the clearing. Headlights of approaching vehicles wouldn’t find them.

For a while Frederick tried to keep the conversation afloat. When he’d exhausted stories about his kids, Anna’s pets, and ascertained that she had seen none of the recent movies, he fell silent.

Anna enjoyed the quiet. In complete darkness there was no awkwardness. Alone but not lonely; Stanton was there but invisible and, now, inaudible. Small stirrings as he shifted position, the crack of a joint as he straightened a knee, were comfortable, comforting. Sounds a man made in the bed as he slept beside you, Anna realized. It had been a while since those living human sounds had been there to lull her back to sleep when the nightmares woke her.

Within a couple of hours the meager heat the stone had collected during the day was gone. Beside her, Frederick’s deep, even breathing suggested he’d fallen asleep. She didn’t begrudge him a nap. Could she have slept, she would’ve made no qualms about waking him to watch while she caught forty winks.