Hard Truth- Pigeon 13 (9 page)

Raymond's personal things were on a single shelf to one side of the dining table. Clothes were folded with factory precision. A laptop and compact high-tech sound system with extra batteries were neatly covered in clear plastic. Shoes were polished and set toes out. Books, of poetry mostly, were captured between two exceedingly clean rocks.
Everything painstakingly mouse-proofed.
Now that he'd opened up, Ray proved a surprisingly good companion, adept at drawing out those with whom he talked. By the time they'd con-sumed a fairly decent spaghetti dinner and the dishes were washed, Anna realized she'd told him just about everything but her bra size and still knew next to nothing about him; an unusual and not unpleasant state of affairs.
In the quiet aftermath of dinner she sat at the plank table and, by the light of a Coleman lantern, read through the journals. Rangers and visi-tors, firelighters and skiers, had been writing their thoughts down since the 1970s. Nearly thirty years of history told from hundreds of points of view, yet what caught Anna's fancy was the shared human experience, the timelessness of a life that didn't change hour by hour with the shock of the new: buildings going up next door, playgrounds razed, internet spin-ning its sudden cyberweb, cell phones piercing.
Along with the usual chatter of the hike and the weather, nearly every entry had two things in common: glowing reports of the landscape and scathing denunciations of the mice, some with drawings of the little crea-tures committing all manner of mousy depredations on the humans who intruded into their cabin.
Anna skimmed the first twenty-five years of the history more for her own enjoyment than anything else. Because of the girls who'd turned up on her professional doorstep, she was mostly interested in the entries for the previous month, those of the SAR (Search and Rescue) rangers who'd stayed at Fern.
Rita Perry, Anna's law enforcement seasonal, had written half a dozen or more times. It was no wonder she'd grown close to Robert Proffit. On at least four occasions during the search for the girls, they had bunked together. On a search-and-rescue or a wildfire, though the intensity of these activities spawned more than their share of romances, "bunked together" hadn't any sexual connotation. There was more a sense of mili-tary camaraderie, a flopping down of like-minded soldiers at the end of the day. Though with young people-any people if it came to that-sex was a powerful undercurrent, Anna had found far less gender politics when the work was hard and physical, and civilization far away.
She paged forward and read on. As the search ground down, the names of the participants grew fewer. Rangers still came but volunteers had either given up hope or run out of time. The entries became shorter, dispirited. For the last week or so, no one mentioned the search or the children. Anna stopped reading but left her eyes on the pages of the open journal, a habit so ingrained she was no longer aware she did it. Years in and out of camps and other group living conditions, she'd found if she pretended to read, fewer people felt compelled to talk to her when she needed to think. With Raymond Bleeker the ruse was probably unnecessary. Across the table from her, he seemed content leafing through a four-month-old Seventeen magazine left behind by some ranger's teenage daughter.
Taken singly, the entries illuminated fragments of the search, like snapshots from a roll of film shot over four weeks. There was nothing that wouldn't be covered in greater detail by reports filed in the frontcountry. Taken as a whole, the entries painted the ebb and flow of hope and strength and outlined the players who'd dabbled, those who'd given it the old college try and those few who had stayed on till the bitter end: the rangers and Robert Proffit. The youth group leader's visits had only tapered off in the last week.
Perhaps his employers told him if he didn't stop this futile searching and join them in the real work of wearing down God with endless prayer, he was out of a job.
"Looks like you've got some days off coming to you," she said to Ray. From the varied mentions he'd gotten in the journal it looked as if he hadn't taken many lieu days since the girls went missing.
"I needed the overtime," he said, but Anna knew it was more than that. After a few weeks in the backcountry even she was ready to forgo hard cash for a hot shower and a couple hours of TV.
"I get out," he said as if reading her mind. "Lots of afternoons, some-times overnight, to get fresh clothes, that kind of thing."
"Why don't you take a few days? Rita will be more than happy to cover. I've gotten the idea road patrol is not really her thing."
"Rita's one gnarly ranger," Ray said with a grin. Gnarly. Anna had heard that adjective before. In Rocky Mountain it seemed a compliment suggesting skill and machismo. Or, conversely, if referring to cliffs or other nonhuman objects, a reference to difficulty and obstacle.
"You can hike out with me," she said and rose. It was past ten, time for bed.
"My normal lieu days are Monday and Tuesday. Why don't I just finish up and take a long one?"
Given it was Wednesday night, Anna couldn't but admire his dedica-tion. But then he'd had a shower and a frontcountry fix the previous night. At twenty-seven, that was enough.
"Suit yourself," she said.
The great lack in even the most adorable backcountry cabins was indoor plumbing. Small cisterns and sinks with drains into a bucket served well enough for cooking and washing dishes, but the more basic bodily needs had to be taken to an outdoor privy.
These privies were dug by hand. And they were cleaned by hand, the human waste hauled out. Rangers in the wildernesses of the national parks smelled more than the roses.
While accepting their necessity in heavy-use areas, Anna loathed the things. She couldn't hold her breath long enough and usually ended up gasping and gagging. She'd been told many times to breathe through her mouth, and though logic told her it was impossible, imagination insisted, though she might not smell it, she could taste it.
When nature did not insist she add solid waste to the collection, she always opted for the outdoors and deposited only the paper in the privy pit. Following her flashlight beam down the well-worn path from the cabin's back door, she passed the horse paddock, now empty, and went behind the outhouse into the trees.
She was just exposing her delicate white flesh to the mosquitoes when she noticed it. Riding atop the reek emanating from the rear of the privy was the unmistakable odor of rotting flesh.
ten
The smell of death overrode nature's other calls. Denying the mosqui-toes their hoped-for banquet, Anna pulled up her trousers and buckled her belt. For a moment she stood in the crisp darkness and sniffed the air: pine, damp needles, the odor from the privy. Slowly she turned full circle. Faint but unmistakable, the sweet smell of decaying flesh was emanating from the direction of the outhouse. With the child, Candace, still miss-ing, Anna's mind conjured up ghastly images of human waste and human parts commingling. Surely the smell of the first would drown the smell of the second. But then maybe that was the point.
She clicked on her flashlight and pointed it toward the small wooden structure. "Jesus," she whispered. Relief and revulsion vied for predomi-nance in her brain. Not one death but nine, eleven, thirteen she counted as she traveled the few yards to the back of the privy.
Nailed to the cedar board, one nail to each like insects on a display board, was a baker's dozen of mice. The tiny corpses were in neat rows of four. The last row, with only one little gray body, looked as hungry and expectant as an open grave. The mice had evidently been gathered over a period of time. Those in the top rows were desiccated. The last one looked to be only a week or so old: a chronology of rodent death, a minia-ture body farm.
Anna's eyes adjusted to the macabre and she began to see past the obvious. Beneath the mice, on the cedar, were hairline marks in dark brown. Scratching. The mice had been crucified alive, their tiny claws scrabbling in their own blood till they died.
Having seen enough, sickened and ineffably saddened, she made her way back toward the cabin. Tears stung at the corners of her eyes and she cursed the sentimentality of middle age. Mice were routinely killed in the ongoing war between humans and rodents. It wasn't so much their deaths as the cruelty that hurt her.
Ray Bleeker was at the dining table where she'd left him. Against the chill of the mountain night he'd put on a shapeless gray cardigan. Perched on his nose were reading glasses. He looked like a young Mister Rogers presiding over the suddenly unsavory neighborhood.
"Put on your shoes," Anna said. "I've something to show you."
Hands bulging in the pockets of his sweater, Ray stared at the collection of tiny corpses. "What kind of sick bastard would do this?" he asked after a moment. His voice was flat to the point of monotone and Anna guessed he held strong emotions in check.
"You tell me." It wasn't a rhetorical statement. It was an order. He was the ranger. It was his privy, his mice, nailed up with government nails.
"My fault," he said in the same featureless voice. "He wanted a live trap. Said mice were God's creatures too, that the traps we had broke his heart each time they broke a mouse's neck. What bullshit." Ray laughed then, a jolting bark. Without warmth or humor, laughter is an ugly sound.
"Robert Proffit?'' Anna was remembering his entries in the journal, his stated desire to kill the mice that haunted his sleep in the cabin. Divine retribution with crucifixion to add a biblical flavor. "You're sure?"
"No. I like Robert. He seems like a sincere guy. He's a hard worker. You can't guess the hours he put in on the search. We'd have knocked off for the night and he'd go out in the dark with a flashlight to get in another hour or two. I don't want it to be Robert. I don't think more than a hand-ful of other people-maybe Rita, Ryan, I guess-even knew about the live trap. I mean it's bullshit. Catch 'em, let 'em loose. First thing they'd do is come home."
Anna turned the light away from the mice. The sadness was coming again and she had no intention of letting it show. First thing in the morn-ing she would take the mice down and bury them. At the moment all she wanted was to crawl into a sleeping bag and enjoy oblivion for a few hours. As they walked back over the ragged land to the cabin's back door, she sent an abrupt prayer in the direction of her husband's god that her sleep would not be filled with dreams of bloody, scrabbling little claws.
I he following morning, after the one-shovel funeral, Anna hiked out. Fern Lake Trail was a loop closed on the east side by Bear Lake Road. She took the shorter, more direct route that would bring her out below Moraine Meadow, the route Ray had taken when he'd hiked out in the rain. The day was a glorious high-octane mix of sunshine and pine-scented breezes, the trail superbly maintained. Trailcrew, none of whom Anna had yet been introduced to, was to be commended. There were late wildflowers, a deer with a fawn long out of spots, gaily colored hikers sweating under packs too big for them, even an inky black Abert squirrel twitching its silly long ears, yet Anna was unable to keep dead mice from nibbling away at her inner peace. She walked fast, scarcely seeing any-thing but the pictures in her mind.
This noon she and Chief Ranger Knight were driving out to New Canaan to talk with Robert Proffit. Anna wanted to get on with it. Kidnapping little Christians entrusted to one's care was a bad enough crime to be suspected of. Harassing, torturing and murdering the wildlife in a national park was nigh on unforgivable.
As she showered, changed, then gobbled a hurried lunch, she wished with all her heart she'd brought her old orange tiger cat, Piedmont, with her. He alone would truly appreciate the tale of wanton waste. Piedmont was a scrupulous and ethical hunter. Sure, he played with his food, but he always ate what he killed. Ate everything but the head, feet and guts. Those he traditionally left on the back step for Anna's culinary enjoy-ment. She'd never told the cat she didn't eat his offerings. Piedmont's feelings were easily hurt.
In a freshly washed and detailed Crown Victoria, gussied up with the NTS shield and a tasteful shotgun rack, Lorraine Knight picked her up at eleven o'clock.
Anna told her of the mice. "I bagged the live trap, one mouse and the nails and carried them out," she finished. "The hammer I left. Ray's been working on the horse paddock with it. He would have destroyed any prints on the handle."
"I doubt the rest will do much good either," Lorraine said.
Anna knew that. She'd gathered evidence more to be doing something than out of any real hope there'd be signs of the perpetrator. Murdering mice wasn't illegal. It was technically against park rules-mice were, after all, indigenous wildlife-but park employees did it all the time. Under normal circumstances the incident would have been reported but not followed up on, as with many after-the-fact resource depredations rangers encountered. There simply wasn't enough money or personnel to chase after small fry that would, in all probability, never be caught.
Circumstances at Rocky Mountain were not ordinary at the moment.
"I'll follow up on it anyway," Anna said. "What the hell."
"Keep me posted," was all the chief ranger said.
From Estes Park to Loveland was a drive of a little more than an hour. Beauty robbed Anna of impatience and she was almost sorry when they emerged from a chasm in the granite mountain range to find themselves suddenly facing the Great Plains. The front range had virtually no foot-hills but reared up out of the flatlands with stunning abruptness. Driving out from the embrace of great walls of stone at sixty miles an hour gave Anna a brief sensation akin to that of falling.
About halfway between Loveland and the mountains, opposite a for-lorn and treeless RV park with a dilapidated sign reading ROLLIN' ROOST, ROLL IN AND ROOST!, a bizarre rock formation disrupted the land. To either side of the road, running parallel to the front range, reddish-brown stone thrust through the soil like the spine of some impossibly huge beast buried long ago, only to be unearthed by the fierce winds of eastern Colorado.
Lorraine turned north on a narrow dirt road running in the shadow of the skeletal rocks. Anna saw no sign, no name. The road was as anony-mous as an old fire road.
"I had a talk with the dispatcher at Loveland PD. She gave me direc-tions to New Canaan," the chief ranger explained. "Actually what she said was, 'When you're pretty sure you're going exactly nowhere, you're on the right road.'"