Blood Lure (17 page)

Girl Friday was a significant promotion from step-’n’-fetchit, but this time Anna was offended not by the word “girl,” but the concept as a whole. She said nothing, giving him a slow count of ten in Spanish to save himself. She’d reached
seis
when he did.

Horror dawned as her silence brought home the inexcusably sexist remark he’d just made. A political and personal
faux pas
that not only brought the blood burning to his face and neck but must have scared the bejesus out of him as well. In such opportunistic and paranoid times, a statement like that could get him dragged into court were it to fall into the wrong ears.

Anna waited for him to dig himself out. The hole was pretty deep. She rather looked forward to a circuitous round of creative half-excuses that, like air freshener, would alter but not eradicate the stink. She underestimated Harry.

He rubbed his face with both hands and for the first time she noticed how tired he looked. With his people gone to fight fire there was a good chance he’d been up late on a call-out chasing poachers or settling visitor disputes.

“Let me start with an apology. That comment surfaced from when I was a dinosaur and didn’t know any better. That doesn’t excuse it but—”

“Not a problem,” Anna interrupted, sensing he’d merely been careless in his approach and was genuine in his remorse. Beside, there were those questions she wanted answered and it sounded like she was about to get carte blanche to ask them.

“I’m your girl,” she said.

Ruick laughed. “Why do I doubt that?”

9

The remainder of
the morning was dedicated to working out the details. It had never seriously crossed the chief ranger’s mind that Anna might say no. “No” was not a real option for district rangers. He’d called Anna’s boss, John Brown, and made sure he was clear to borrow her. Should the murder investigation interfere with the DNA project, Anna’s stay would be lengthened and she would enter into the next phase of paper-pushing instead of fieldwork and learn what she could.

Matters settled to his satisfaction, Harry filled Anna in on the plans of the relevant parties. After the autopsy was completed and Lester could attend to the business of disposing of his wife’s body, he was hiking back into Fifty Mountain. Harry had argued against it. Les was frail, inexperienced and, one might assume, emotionally distraught. An ideal recipe for disaster. But legally he could not be stopped. Suicide was a crime, stupidity was not.

Rory would be allowed to continue working on the bear DNA project with Joan Rand. Anna was not pleased with this turn of events. Weak as the case might be, Rory was a murder suspect. Because she felt she’d be betraying a confidence, Anna didn’t tell Harry of the Rory-Luke connection in Joan’s mind, but she was afraid it would color the researcher’s view of the boy. She would not be careful enough of Rory and would respond to him more as a surrogate son than a potentially dangerous man. Ruick listened respectfully to Anna’s concerns but, as she couldn’t come up with any concrete ideas to better run the show, he stuck to the status quo.

Nominally Anna would still be working with Joan. She would accompany her and Rory into the backcountry, but her first priority would be the murder of Carolyn Van Slyke.

“Today I want you to interview Rory. I’ll take his dad,” Harry said. “Something’s not kosher with those two but damned if I can figure out what.”

 

Both Van Slykes
arrived shortly before three o’clock. Anna met them in the foyer, a plain, barely decorated area just inside the glass doors where the receptionist’s desk sat. A much older looking Lester occupied the only chair. His son, hands thrust deeply in his pockets, stood before a black and white photo of the old headquarters building studying it as if its architecture was going to be on a test they were about to take.

Anna sent Les down the hall to the chief ranger’s office. She took Rory to the conference room. Joan was gone and Anna missed her. She’d not consciously admitted that she wanted Joan there for the interview but she found she did.

“Mind if I tape this?” Anna asked and put a recorder on the table.

“Whatever.”

Anna pushed the Record button.

“You want anything?” she asked as he slumped into Joan’s vacated chair and began mindlessly spinning it in slow circles on its axis. “Coke or coffee or anything?”

“Nothing. I don’t want anything.”

Anna was relieved. She’d made the offer out of habit. She had no idea where these amenities were to be found in Glacier’s headquarters. “Me neither,” she said and sat down. For as long as a minute, an exceedingly long time for silence between two people not long acquainted, she watched him, waiting to see what he’d do, which way he’d break under pressure.

He stopped his spinning and occupied himself by staring out the window watching the maintenance vehicles going by the parking lot to the maintenance yard beyond. There was a stiffness to his neck and shoulders that suggested he could play this game till the metaphorical cows came home. Evidently, in his young life, he’d become accustomed to protecting his inner world from outside storms.

Anna let another thirty seconds crawl by to make sure. Looking at Rory, the deceptively fragile frame, the thick sandy hair, coarse and falling like hay across his unlined brow, the deep-set blue eyes, she didn’t think he looked like a boy who’d kill his mom. But then what did a matricide look like? In the imagination they were sly, sinister, horned and hairy. In reality they were just people. Kids. Whatever was broken was deep inside, out of the public view. Children murdering their own parents was uncommon but by no means unheard of. Often it was the “good” boys who did it. With the possible exception of Lizzy Borden it was always boys, Anna noted. She could call to mind three incidents in the past two years. Sons murdering Mom and Dad. But never mutilating them.

“I’m real sorry about your stepmother,” she said.

Reluctantly, Rory brought his gaze back into the room. It settled not on Anna, but on the table between them.

“Yeah . . . well . . . it happens.”

Anna breathed out slowly.
It happens? Jesus.
“How does it happen?” she asked neutrally.

“People die.”

Anna could tell by his tone he was shooting for a matter-of-fact delivery. An underlying bitterness ruined the effect and she remembered his biological mother had died as well. This was a double trauma for Rory. The new coupled with the inevitable reliving of the old. Mentally, she readjusted. This upwelling of the severest of childhood wounds could account for any number of incongruent behaviors.

“Can’t argue with that,” she said and Rory’s eyes met hers. In the blue depths she saw that spark kids get when adults surprise them by not being unutterably obtuse.

“Who’d want to kill your stepmother?” Anna made no attempt to soften the question.

If it jarred him, he didn’t show it. His eyes strayed again to the parking lot, unseeing as he searched inside his skull for an answer. Anna thought she saw one briefly illuminate his eyes then fade. It appeared not to be so much rejected as hidden. Finally Rory said, “There’s a few, but none of ’em here. I mean, who’d be here? Why not just run her over in a crosswalk at home in Seattle?”

Rory was nothing if not pragmatic about homicide.

“A few?” Anna pressed.

“Carolyn was a divorce lawyer,” Rory said.

“Oh. Right. Anybody specific?”

“Maybe her ex-sister-in-law. Barbara something. She hated Mom.”

“Mom” and “Carolyn” were running neck and neck. Some unresolved conflicts there. Anna dearly wished Molly were at hand. Rory’s world was definitely psychiatrist country.

“I guess somebody could have followed her here.” Rory sounded hopeful, and why not? He wasn’t stupid. He’d know they’d be looking hard at both himself and his dad. Television had done a thorough job of destroying naiveté and replacing it, often as not, with misinformation.

“Could be,” Anna said, but didn’t believe it. Too intricate. Too much trouble. Rory was right, a crosswalk in a city would be a lot more likely.

Anna changed direction. “Tell me what she was like.”

Rory flashed her a look of alarm that Anna didn’t understand, then settled into a careful recitation of facts: height, weight, color of hair, occupation, educational background. Not the usual stuff a kid would choose to describe what a deceased parent was like. Anna didn’t think he’d misunderstood the question. He was avoiding it.

“How’d she get on with your dad?”

Rory’s face hardened slightly. “You’d have to ask him.”

Anna let that lie between them for a while. Then she said, “So. You going to tell me where you got that water bottle?”

A blank look from Rory did more to convince her he’d not snatched it from the dying hands of his stepmother than a mountain of protestations would have done. The look cleared as memory returned. The transition was too natural and held too many shades of awakening to be feigned. “The one I had when you guys found me after the bear tore up our camp?”

“That very one. Where’d you get it?”

“I don’t know,” Rory said.

As improbable as that was, Anna found herself inclined to believe him. “Where’d you get it?” she repeated anyway.

“I can’t tell you.” He was beginning to sound desperate.

“Try.”

“I didn’t have it I don’t think—no, I know I didn’t because I got thirsty—real thirsty—by the time the rain started.”

Anna thought back. That would have been just after sunup when she and Joan were gathering their wits and what was left of their bear-ravaged camp.

“So you were thirsty,” she prompted.

“I was hot. I’d been running,” he admitted. “I’d taken off my shirt. I lay down for a minute. The rain woke me up and the sweatshirt was gone and the water bottle was just there. After a while I guess I got to thinking I must have brought it from camp, but I didn’t. Not really.”

Anna could understand that. The brain’s job was to make sense of the world. When the world refused to fall into line, the brain was perfectly capable of rearranging memories until at least the appearance of order was restored.

“Let me get this straight,” Anna said. “While you were napping in the woods at dawn, lost to friends and family, someone or something stole your dirty sweatshirt and left you a bottle of much-needed water in its place. And all this without waking you up, asking if you were alive or dead.”

“That’s it,” Rory said, the stiff neck returning. “My sweatshirt wasn’t all that dirty.”

“A kind of good fairy or guardian angel?” Anna asked, just to see if anger would shake anything more loose from the boy.

Rory stared at the table, his lips pressed shut, undoubtedly to keep language unsuited for adults in authority shut behind his teeth. Danger past, he unlocked his jaws. “Maybe it was exactly that. A guardian angel. I needed water pretty bad, and all that day and the next I never came across any. Maybe I’d’ve died without that happening.”

Anna’d learned not to argue with magic. In her years of law enforcement, whenever a wizard had been pointed out she’d always been able to find the little man behind the curtain pulling levers. She suspected there’d be a mortal with feet of clay behind Rory’s miracles as well. Maybe Rory’s own size tens.

“I must have had two water bottles with me,” Rory said suddenly, clearly pleased with the idea. “And I brought one out of the tent with me. I just don’t remember doing it.”

Anna’s eyes narrowed. “You just said an angel gave it to you.”

“Yeah. Well. That’s stupid. I must’ve had it with me before.” Rory’s voice turned sullen and mulish. “I took it with me when I left camp. I’d just forgot. There was the bear and all and I didn’t feel so hot.”

Anna decided to let the matter go. For now.

She turned off the tape recorder, dragged out a map and for the next twenty minutes nudged, badgered and cajoled Rory into approximating as closely as he could his journey during his thirty-six-hour hiatus. Every attempt ended the same. Rory knew where he’d started and he knew where he’d ended up. The hours and miles in between were a kaleidoscope turning timelessly through forest and scrub and burn. When it became evident he could not or would not be more specific, Anna backed off. If he wouldn’t tell her, there was no way to force him. If he really couldn’t tell her and she kept pushing, eventually he’d make something up to get her off his back.

Convinced she’d gotten all she was going to at this juncture, she declared the interview at an end. Back in Harry’s office she and Rory rejoined the chief ranger and Lester Van Slyke. A brief consultation convinced Anna and Ruick that an interview with Van Slyke, father and son, would not be a productive use of time. There’d been ample opportunity to watch the two of them interact when emotions were raw. By now defenses would be in place. They were excused with proper words of thanks and Anna was alone with Harry.

Civilization diminished him. In the backcountry with a life and death situation to put his back into, he’d appeared younger and stronger than he did behind his desk, awards and diplomas arrayed around him.

Anna caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his window. She was no great shakes either. Her short hair had more gray in it than she remembered noticing in the mirror and her age was beginning to tell its ever lengthening story in the marks under her eyes and in the softening at her jawline.

“For the family of the dearly departed these boys are behaving in a decidedly strange manner,” Ruick said. “Les is still determined to go on with his damned camping trip and he said Rory’s still dead-set on finishing up the DNA project.”

“Rory talked to him?”

“Called him last night at the hotel.”

Not having spent much time with Rory, Harry wouldn’t know how peculiar that was. Maybe the death of Mrs. Van Slyke was bringing father and son together.