Deep South (24 page)

Anna parked on the opposite side of the road and crossed over to join Steve where he loitered. At her arrival, Randy extricated his bulk from the other vehicle and walked importantly over. Like many heavy men, he leaned back to compensate for the weight of his gut, digging the heels of his shoes into the soft grassy earth. "Glad to see you made it," Anna said dryly. "It's a problem on the Trace.

Understaffed. Turns out you're always fifty miles from wherever you gotta be," Thigpen lied without a tremor.

Practiced, Anna thought and, in his own mind, for his own ends, justified. So mad she was spitting tacks, Anna'd never known precisely what that meant, but she did now. She could feel their pointy ends poking her tongue, a metallic taste in her mouth. She felt she could spit words like a pneumatic nail gun and nail Thigpen to the nearest tree. Instead she said: "Find anything?"

"A little of everything. Not enough of anything for a good case.

These boys around here are a little wild, but most of them are harmless." Anna let the dig pass unremarked and walked over to the rear of the Thunderbird. Barth was mumbly and fidgety and wouldn't meet her eye. He, at least, had the decency to be ashamed of himself. "I'm glad you're okay," he said, and sounded more or less sincere.

"Why, thank you, Barth." Anna clapped him on the shoulder just to watch him flinch. "I feel a whole lot safer knowing you're looking out for me." A creepy cold edge that was making even her twitchy had come into Anna's smile. She changed the subject. "What've you got?"

"A couple six-packs. Half a dozen empties, three unopened, three opened, partially consumed. There were a couple roaches in the ashtray. No stash. They weren't selling."

"Too bad," Anna said unsympathetically. "This little bitty vial," Barth pointed to a clear glass screw-top container about the size of his thumb and half filled with white powder. "Probably coke," Anna offered. "Did you field-test it?" They hadn't. Barth was on the verge of admitting somethingprobably that it had been so long since they'd field-tested suspicious substances they'd forgotten how-when Randy jumped in with: "We figured you'd want to do that. You being the boss and all." Anna stared at him long enough he began to shuffle his feet then said, "Nah.

You go ahead. I'm off duty. I'll watch." For a couple beats, Thigpen was nonplussed, then said: "Well, our kits are pretty out of date...  "

"Ah.

I didn't know those chemicals had expiration dates." Some people might have hopped in with an offer to do the honors just to pour oil on the waters. Not Steve Stilwell. He appeared to be enjoying himself. "Leave it on my desk," Anna said. Anger fading, the game lost its appeal. "What else?"

"Two guns," Barth said. "A thirty-eight under the driver's seat, a twenty-two squirrel gun in the trunk. That's about it." It wasn't much.

Not enough to hold anybody on. Anna'd probably use it as leverage to see if she could scare one of the Doolittle boys into telling her something interesting about Mike Posey. Whether she could prove it or not, he'd meant to hurt her and, with the exception of Stilwell, every single man mixed up with the traffic stop-Randy, Barth and the Doolittles-had been prepared to let him. Sometimes it was best if a girl went well-armed.

T he Thunderbird would be towed to the impound lot, and the evidence would be placed in a locker at the ranger station. Anna left Thigpen and Dinkin to deal with it and turned to go. "Steve," she said. "If you've got a minute, stop by the house."

"Right behind you." She didn't miss the knowing look Randy shot his cohort, but there was nothing she could do about it. Long ago she bad accepted the fact that the park service not only attracted more college graduates than any other agency but was equally irresistible to gossips.

There wasn't a coffee klatch in the country that could hold a candle to a gathering of the men in green and gray.

She meant to talk with Stilwell about Randy and Barth, his take on their refusal to provide backup, but she found herself unable to bring the subject up. So she drank a little of his Scotch, thanked him for driving down at breakneck speed, and resisted the urge to flirt.

Stilwell had a way of looking at her that made her feel valuable.

Probably a trick that served him well. She didn't have to ask to know that he wasn't married. He dropped that bit of information into the conversation early on, referring to himself as "between divorces." Anna smiled at the memory of him even as she was glad he'd left.

The person she really needed to talk with about her management dilemma was Molly. Since her sister's engagement to Frederick Stanton, Molly could no longer be counted upon to be at home evenings and, childlike, Anna crossed her fingers as ringing sounded on the line. "Hello?" Molly said breathlessly, answering on the third ring. Gone were the days when she answered with the perfunctory "Dr. Pigeon speaking," after the sixth or seventh hall. a r r "Hah!" Anna said. "You're expecting Frederick to call." Molly laughed. "I'm always expecting Frederick to call, and bless his little federally employed heart, he always does. But you're just as good." Anna accepted this as high praise indeed. Molly and Frederick's courtship had been whirlwind, but in the ten months of their engagement Anna had seen both of them settle deeply and comfortably into love. "I have a question for you in your role as psychiatrist and administrator," Anna said and told her sister of the situation with Randy Thigpen and Barth Dinkin. "Those slimy, cowardly sons of bitches," was Molly's diagnosis. Her prescription followed: "They ought to be strung up by their thumbs or made to walk the plank or whatever they do to national park rangers who have become a danger to society." Vindication, in the form of anger on her behalf, warmed Anna and melted the tears that fear and pride had kept frozen for the past three hours. "Here's the weird part," she said, her voice ragged and pathetic. "I feel so embarrassed and ashamed. Like a kid who doesn't get picked or who has cooties."

"Like a rape victim," Molly said coldly, and Anna was brought up short.

As good fortune would have it, Anna bad never been raped, but over the years she had dealt with nearly a dozen women who had. Hearing her sister's words, she remembered the deep sense of guilt and shame the women carried. How hard it had been to turn that shame into anger, to make them see that it didn't matter where they were, what they said, how they dressed, who they trusted, a terrible crime bad been committed against them. The crime was what mattered. The perpetrator was the one who was guilty. "Holy smoke," Anna breathed. "You think?"

"Yes, I think, for Christ's sake. I wouldn't trivialize rape by suggesting this was the same thing. You did not suffer the invasion of your person that is so devastating. You did not suffer actual violence.

And you managed to retain your power-you won. But most of the elements of rape are there: power, man over woman, violence-do you think they cared what happened to you? The desire to hurt, to degrade. Fear of you.

Resentment of your power. It's not quite classic, but it Is most assuredly comparable. You called for backup. They hid out. All else is irrelevant: whether those jackasses really would have killed you. Lord!

You cannot let this pass."

"I won't," Anna said.

"The park service does have a watered-down bureaucratic version of flogging. I can't remember the disciplinary procedures, but this being the government, it's in a manual somewhere." Chances were good she had it on one of her bookshelves, a relic of some long-forgotten management class she'd stumbled into before she'd even considered getting out of fieldwork. "I hope the consequences for those individuals are dire," Molly said.

The formalized venom made Anna laugh. "They won't be. The NPS tends to make bold disciplinary statements along the lines of:"If you ever do this again, we'll tell you never to do it again." But you get enough of those in an employee's file and eventually they can be fired.

Usually it takes years." Feeling much better, Anna let the talk run on more pleasant subjects. The wedding date was set, September thirtieth.

The hall was booked: an exquisite little B&B two hours north of New York City.

The party would be small and formal: tuxes all around. Anna felt echoes of her wedding to Zach, twinges of envy and nostalgia, but mostly she felt joy and hope: joy for Molly, hope that she, too, might be inspired to cross over matrimony's state line in the next twenty or thirty years.

Sure enough, the standard operating procedures were rife with disciplinary guidelines. Anna bad her choice of a formal discussion with a written report that would go into the personnel files, a verbal warning that would be from her lips to their ears, or something in between: a verbal warning with a written chaser, a report that went into her personal management files so, should the situation be repeated, she would have documentation that the employees had been warned and counseled.

This was to include a description of what had transpired and what the corrected behavior would consist of, and a warning as to what consequences could be expected if the undesirable behavior should be repeated.

Much as she was tempted to pull out the big guns and wreak as much havoc in her rangers' lives as was humanly possible, Anna opted for choice number three.

This was her first management challenge. If there was any hope of making a working team out of the rangers in her district, she wanted to salvage it. Should the gods be in a mood to be fair, Randy and Barth would feel gratitude that she was choosing not to give them a permanent black mark.

Should the gods be feeling generous, Thigpen and Dinkin would respect her for facing their gross dereliction of duty headon and dealing with it in an open manner. "Not bloody likely," she told Piedmont as she switched off the light.

Schedules in many parks were worked on a rotating basis. A ranger worked an early shift on his "Friday" and a late shift on his "Monday." The upside was the weekend was thus maximized. The down side was one tended to work a different shift every day. At this juncture it worked to Anna's advantage. Barth was on early, Randy at four Pm. She wanted to talk with Barth first and get his reactions before his partner in crime had a chance to work on him. At a guess, she didn't figure Dinkin for a stand-alone guy. Without Thigpen involved, she suspected he'd be more receptive.

She had no intention of seeing or speaking to either of them till afternoon. The rain and clouds were gone. Sun shone with a new fierceness, as if burning away the last vestiges of the kindly weather of spring and getting down to the serious business of a Mississippi summer. Feeling like a kid playing hooky, Anna left gun, cuffs, pepper spray and long trousers behind. Clad in uniform shorts, with hiking boots so old they resembled cordovan-colored lumps on her feet, she went around the loop of the campground. Walking purposefully lest she be sucked into conversation, she quickly reached the hillock at the west end and went down to the beginning of the Old Trace.

Partly she was just goofing off-the rain would have obliterated any sign Thigpen and the others hadn't pulverized with their elephantine tread-but still it was worth another look. Sad snapshots of Danielle Posey in death haunted Anna. Symptomatic of post-traumatic stress, so she knew it would pass. Most of it would pass. After each incident she carried away one or two pictures that became hardwired into her brain.

At odd times they would flash behind her eyes, bringing with them emotion so strong it was as if they had happened again, in that moment.

The image of the Posey murder that triggered the deepest compassion was that of Danielle's feet. Little feet, soft and rounded, the prettiness of childhood not yet callused, clothed in their grown-up shoes. Strappy, sequined, high-heeled sandals-shoes Anna's generation in crass moments would have called "fuck-me pumps." On the feet of a sixteen-year-old girl they had spoken such innocence, a playing at the seamy side, posing as a woman of the world.

The harmless charade of the very young, when aping evil is just a thrilling game and sophistication is achieved with paste jewelry and phony accents.

Those feet, those shoes, had plucked at Anna's heartstrings. Then they'd lodged in her mind. Like Heather's, the sandals had three-inch heels, cut square. The ground was soft. If Danni had fled her attacker, she would have made holes in the ground deep enough the rain might not have washed them away.

On the day Anna'd found the body, she'd not been able to pick up Danni's trail. Today, like a search dog ordered to track, she intended to circle wider, try and pick up the trail farther out.

Retracing her steps to the hollow where Danielle had been dumped wasn't as easy as she thought it would be. Unlike the desert, Mississippi healed itself with astonishing rapidity. Moving slowly, examining leaves and mold and twigs to acclimatize herself to the kind of surfaces she must learn, Anna noticed small branches, broken off by the traffic of policemen and rangers, had already sprouted new shoots.

Crushed leaves had bounced back, regained their original strength, and near as she could tell, a redoubled robustness.

After an hour she took a break from her crash course in Southern tracking and sat on a log. Sweat soaked her shirt and the waistband of her shorts. According to the locals, it wasn't hot yet: eighty-five degrees and seventy-two percent humidity. Anna poured half a quart of tepid water down her throat to even up the moisture content between body and air.

The log was soft. The ground was soft. The air was soft. She was sinking into the geography. Moving was becoming more and more of an effort. "No wonder they used dogs in all those old prison movies," she said to a box turtle trying to pass himself off as part of the forest floor. "Nobody can track in this stuff. It'd be easier to track a duck across a pond." A praying mantis joined them, sitting wisely on a fungus ruffled and tinted into a sculpture of poisonous beauty. Had she not found a tick crawling on the back of her knee, Anna might have stayed to be sociable.