High Country- Pigeon 12 (30 page)

"Don't leave the park," Leo said. "You'll be wanted for questioning."

He grabbed his coat and preceded her out of his house. Just like that she'd been demoted from investigator to suspect. At least that was the way it felt. From the bullish set of the deputy superintendent's shoulders and the crimped line of his lips, Anna guessed now was not the time to pepper him with questions.

Taking the line of least resistance she said, "Yes, sir," and headed back toward the concession dorms.

By quarter after eight she was in the Ahwahnee's fine lobby armed with her credit card. Getting this particular call reimbursed by the NPS might prove tricky, but if she could get hold of Lorraine it would be worth it. After a few minutes wrangling, she browbeat a harassed-sounding fellow into pulling the chief ranger out of the class she was teaching.

Feeling a bit of a whiner and a bit of a tattletale, Anna told Lorraine of her adventures to date and Johnson's lack of support or assistance.

When she'd finished, Lorraine didn't hesitate. "Look. Stay out of Leo's way. He'll get a couple rangers up the trail and, if your story proves out-which I have no doubt it will-he'll call in the Navy." Anna was grateful for this; she'd been with the Park Service long enough that she was not accustomed to being blown off when she reported a double homicide. "Yosemite has an understanding with them. They've been very good about lending us support-particularly air support.

"While he carries that end, you get in contact with George Kastner. He's acting chief ranger while I'm gone. He knows everything that's going on. I'd left word for you to be notified, but it must have slipped through the cracks."

The cracks were in Leo Johnson's brain-or his ego-but Lorraine hadn't risen to the position of chief ranger in one of the crown jewel parks by venting to underlings.

They talked a while longer. Lorraine wanted Anna to give up the undercover business and turn the investigation over to Kastner. Anna argued against it. She appreciated the sentiment-it was clear Lorraine Knight was putting her health and welfare above the need to catch the bad guys. But though Anna's nights in the wilderness had apparently left her without feelings for her fellow men, they had engendered a finely honed desire to get to the bottom of things. In the end she prevailed. After talking with George Kastner, she would face Tiny Bigalo and see if she still had a job. Lorraine promised to put in a call to Dane Trapper, the Ahwanee's general manager, to make sure Tiny would be in a forgiving mood by the time the interview rolled around.

George Kastner was in his mid to late fifties. A barrel-shaped man, he carried his weight in chest and shoulders. Anna guessed he'd been devilishly strong in his youth and could still impress the new rangers when he had to. Snowy hair topped a face as craggy as any mountain. He'd been born to fit Yosemite. That, or the Sierra had carved him in its likeness.

He ushered Anna into his office as if he'd been expecting her, which it turned out he had.

"Lorraine called and gave me a heads-up," he said as Anna crossed to the traditional visitor's chair by his desk. "First thing she told me to do was to find out how bad hurt you really were and if you'd been sugarcoating it for her.

"So. How are you really?"

Instead of retreating behind his desk he perched on the corner looking down at her, the heel of his shoe knocking softly against the wood. Anna suspected, even in repose, there would be some small part of him that tapped, twitched or fidgeted. Before the years had gentled his energy, he must have filled rooms.

"I'm good," she said. "The ankle hurts, but it's braced. I can walk on it. The burns and frostbite are superficial."

"Good. Good. Let's get on with it then." He circled around his desk and sat down. The office chair with its high back looked as if it had been made for a child. Kastner chose not to be scary, and Anna was grateful. She expected intimidating people could be part of how he got things done. And she didn't doubt he was a man who got things done. Not a visionary, perhaps, or even a creative thinker, but the sort of sergeant-at-arms who keeps the great slothful beasts bureaucracies grow into from drowning in their own fat.

"Okay. Here's where we are. Leo's sent two rangers up the hill. They'll try to find the man who attacked you. Do you think this guy is dead, this Mark?"

Before she could answer, he'd flipped through a stack of Post-it notes stuck in an overlapping fan-shaped pattern near his left elbow. "Mark Bellman. At least Bellman's the name we got from the guy sharing Dix's tent with him. Without a date of birth or driver's license we haven't had much luck tracing him. By the time we got word of your incident on the Illilouette Trail they'd cleared out of the park.

"You think you killed Bellman?"

Anna thought about it a moment, pictured the fire, suddenly voracious, leaping up from his fuel-soaked feet to snatch and lap at his face and hair. She recalled the screams trailing after her in the darkness as she fled. She waited a moment to see if an all-consuming grief or repentance would overwhelm her. Nothing. She shook her head. "I can't say for sure. The man was not a seasoned hiker. He was tired, probably dehydrated, badly injured"-she broke off this thought to tell Kastner about the eye-gouging part of the evening's entertainment. Describing the actual gore, the gush and the dangling, she braced herself for an onslaught of remorse. Nothing.

She resumed where she'd left off answering his original question. "He was bound to be suffering some shock before the burning. With another man I'd be pretty sure the cold had finished him off. With this guy I'm not betting on it. He was one of those cockroach kind of guys, quick, creepy and almost impossible to eradicate."

"Eradicate," Kastner echoed her last word. Before he'd had a chance to change the expression on his face, Anna thought she saw horror there-or revulsion-and wondered if it was of Mark, the incident or her.

"We'll get word back from the rangers soon." He glanced at his watch. "They left shortly after eight o'clock. It's nearly nine-thirty. They should be up the trail to where the incident occurred."

"Will they go all the way to the lake?" Anna asked. "There's no hurry. I'm pretty sure the guy I left up there is dead." As she uttered the words she was taken aback at how heartless they sounded, the ruminations of a sociopath.

Kastner wasn't deaf to nuance.

"Tell me about him." Kastner folded his hands together on the desk and looked at her from beneath bristling white eyebrows, giving the impression of a psychiatrist rather than a law enforcement ranger.

Anna didn't like it. Didn't like that she'd sounded so callous about Phil's being dead, so disappointed that Mark was not; she didn't like it that she felt precisely as callous and disappointed as she'd sounded.

In careful professional language she told him of hitting the man called Phil and of Mark's sinister assertion that Phil wasn't yet dead when he'd left him. Kastner asked her a lot more questions, but they were pertinent to the case rather than her mental stability. After Leo Johnson, Anna was relieved to at last be giving a proper report.

In closing she added her own conclusions: "I think you might want to get a helicopter up to Lower Merced. Even before I left there was buzz around Camp 4 that something was up, big money to be had. If I could figure out which lake this bonanza was at some of the climbers are bound to. If Mark . . . Bellman . . . is still alive back there or got out and his buddies are up the Illilouette, there could be trouble."

"More trouble," Kastner said.

"More trouble."

He took notes. When he'd satisfied himself she'd told him all she could, he sat strumming his fingers and jiggling his knee for a minute or more. Still and quiet in her chair, Anna waited.

Contemplations complete, he said: "Okay. I'll work with what you've given me. Here's what we've got. It's not much, but then we've not had much to work with."

Anna knew he blamed this on her, but since it was the sort of general ambient accusation superiors often threw out, she ignored it.

"We traced the license plate on the red Ford Excursion. I won't drag you through all the hoops, but we weren't able to tie it directly to Mark Bellman or whatever his real name is. The Excursion is owned by a subsidiary of a corporation. The pink slip must have frayed edges, it's filtered down through so many layers of obfuscation."

"So it told you nothing."

"On the contrary. It told us a good deal." Kastner responded with the verbal pouncing of a teacher who has elicited the response he wanted and is itching to make a point out of it. "Casual thugs or penny-ante drug dealers don't have the intelligence or the machinery in place to hide the ownership of a vehicle that completely. Your playmates on the Illilouette were, if not very big fish themselves, then in the employ of very big fish." Suddenly the joy of deduction and intellectual exercise drained out of Kastner's faded hazel eyes. Compassion replaced it. "You're lucky you are alive."

Anna had been more comfortable with intellectual joy. Compassion was an iffy thing. Had he compassion for all human life the look of horror and revulsion could return when he remembered at what costs she had managed this staying-alive business.

"Any results on the tox scan of the blood in the syringe?" she asked to stop Kastner's brotherly love before it could metastasize.

"Yup, as a matter of fact. Leo got that in pretty quickly. Hang on. No DNA of course. What's the point till you've got something to match it to? Besides the budget doesn't factor in the high tech unless its well warranted. Here we go." Kastner smoothed a multipage printout on the desk with the care of a master craftsman hanging wallpaper, then pushed his glasses up on his forehead the better to read the small print. "Nope to cocaine, barbiturates, some hallucinogens, though they don't test for a lot of them. Trace of THC-marijuana." He looked up. "Far as it goes, it doesn't look to be connected-at least materially-to our drug-dealing compatriots, but it was meant to kill you. The blood is not just HIV positive. The virus has matured into AIDS. There is little doubt that, had you injected the stuff, you would have gotten the disease."

A shudder went through Anna's insides, the kind that quakes the viscera and draws the blood from the skin. Dying in a fight, by a bullet to the brain, the crashing of a plane, a knife between the ribs, a Lexus between the shoulder blades-these held little terror for her. It had been a wondrous and glorious while since she'd looked forward to death as the antidote to a loneliness and grief that robbed life of its luster, but she'd lived so many years thinking of death as a friend that even now, when she wished to put off acquaintance with the grim reaper as long as possible, she still did not fear him.

AIDS she feared. Because Zach had been in the theater-or perhaps because they'd lived in New York-or maybe because both she and her husband had delighted in wit and irreverence, they'd known a lot of gays of both genders: the wild and the wonderful, the crazy, the coy. Then the eighties had come and people began to die. The sins of the sexual revolution coming to roost on just the one group while the rest had to watch, whisper, "There but for the grace of God," and live with the ragged holes left in the fabric of their lives.

Fearing hospitals, helplessness, sickness and pity, Anna doubted she could face such a death with any dignity or grace.

"Jesus Christ," she whispered. "Who'd do that to me? Who'd do that to anybody?"

Kastner was looking at her, that nasty debilitating compassion warming his gaze.

"Close call," she said, trying to brush away the heebie-jeebies. "Any fingerprints?"

"None."

"Could you trace the syringe?"

"Too common, and it didn't come from the clinic here. We use a different manufacturer. Lowest bidder of course."

"Of course."

"This doesn't strike me as a drug dealer's response," he said. Anna was pleased he'd once again become a man of business. "Guys who operate on a level where they can hide things in company-owned subsidiaries are usually more to the point. Giving someone AIDS might be a death sentence, but it's not quick-acting enough. If it was meant to shut you up, it wouldn't work. The walking dead have nothing to lose but their souls. Makes them too brave to be threatened much."