“I’ve got to go.” She levered herself up from the porch floor.
“You gonna talk to Dad?” Rory asked without opening his eyes.
“I thought I would.”
“If Dad killed her I hope you never can prove it.”
Anna didn’t say anything. Had it not been for the butchery, she might have shared the sentiment. The act of cutting away Carolyn’s face was anger gone so insane its perpetrator had best be caught and removed from society.
Sudden light-headedness reminded Anna she’d not eaten since the night before, and she set off on foot to walk the half-mile to Joan’s house. Expecting to spend the day in the resource management office, she’d not thought to ask Harry for the use of a vehicle. After food, transportation was next on her list.
Rarely did Anna find it a burden to walk instead of ride. This afternoon was no exception. The mere act of putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward completely on one’s own will and strength, gave life a sense of purpose and control. And there was that adage about regular movement of the legs that stimulated orderly progression in the brain.
Houses, trees, cars, gopher holes and thimbleberry bushes flowed by externally. Internally Anna pondered borrowed shame—Rory’s for his dad—abandonment, fear, self-worth, violence, childhood trauma, family roles: scapegoat, victim, hero, mascot. The bits and pieces of codependency theory that she’d picked up from listening to her sister, Molly, had a place in the shattered family dynamics that Rory had grown up in the midst of.
His natural mother had abandoned him via death when he was five. According to Rory’s account, Les had abandoned him over the next two years via depression. Then Carolyn came on the scene and the neuroses and psychoses really started to roll.
That sort of thing didn’t make people into murderers. But it was bound to help. The circumstances of Rory’s thirty-six hours missing had, at first, seemed to make his murdering Carolyn remote to the point of ludicrousness. Taken with this new information, Anna was seeing it in a new light. Rory is traumatized by the attack of the bear slashing at a person—Joan—for whom he cares, and threatening, indirectly since the bear did not see or approach him, his own safety. Rory runs, panicked. Then, quite by accident, he meets another frightening figure, Carolyn, who for much of his life played the same role as the grizzly. Under the influence of fear, opportunism and post-traumatic-stress disorder, Rory strikes out, kills her.
That was as far as Anna could spin her tale of Rory Van Slyke’s mental gyrations. Hiding the body—sure, anybody who didn’t want to get caught would do that. The same went for stashing the cameras and taking the exposed film if pictures had been snapped by the victim. Slicing off face-steaks and carting them away were something else again.
Joan wasn’t home and Anna was disappointed. Not only did she want to lighten her load of slime by sharing it with her friend, but after the exposing of a wound Rory’d kept resolutely bandaged for so long, Anna figured he’d need a shoulder to cry on. Since her own were too bony and prickly for wailing-wall duty, she’d hoped Joan would volunteer to check on the boy.
Joan’s office number got Anna through to voice mail. The tale was too convoluted to deal with electronically and she hung up without leaving a message.
The refrigerator grudgingly offered up a piece of cheese the mold could easily be cut off of and a handful of miniature peeled carrots in a sandwich bag. Having rid the cheese of alien life forms, Anna shoved the lot into a piece of pita bread and ate as she walked back toward park headquarters.
Harry was out. His secretary, Maryanne, was out. It was lunchtime and everyone but the receptionist had gone elsewhere. Effectively stopped for the moment, Anna dumped herself in Maryanne’s swivel chair outside the chief ranger’s office to wait on her betters.
Snoopy was not how Anna chose to characterize herself. She much preferred the term “inquisitive” or, at worst, “impatient.” Working on other people’s timetables, waiting docilely until they were ready to feed her items of information, seemed a waste of time and good spirits. This theory went a long way toward happily blinding her to such crimes as trespass and invasion of privacy.
While she waited she sifted through the papers on Maryanne’s desk, careful not to disarrange anything overmuch. Considering herself absolutely justified, still Anna chose not to get caught. Copies of the 10-343s and 10-344s—case incident reports and criminal incident reports—were stacked to one side of the computer. Harry Ruick was a hands-on sort of guy and had the park’s reports come across his desk, even at the rarified level of management to which he had risen.
Leafing through them Anna got a dim sum of the crimes du jour in Glacier National Park. Taking her time, she read of littering, campfires out of bounds, a horse trailer towed up by Polebridge Ranger Station, two fire rings recently rehabilitated in the northwestern quadrant of Flattop Mountain, petty thievery in the campground, food improperly stored. She’d been in law enforcement too many years not to sweat the small stuff. Felons were consistently caught because they were speeding, loitering, littering and parking in front of fire hydrants. Except in the movies, criminals could usually be counted on to be careless. There was a logic to it. Who, if willing to commit robbery or murder or mayhem, would have any qualms about driving with a taillight out?
From the incidents, she moved on to the crimes. Nothing leapt off the pages at her. It was pretty standard stuff: driving under the influence, smoking dope in the campgrounds. One stolen car, one statutory rape—both allegedly committed by concessions workers in West Glacier.
The only report of any interest—and that only because she’d heard it mentioned on the radio a couple of times—was the abandoned horse trailer found on the northside. She flipped back till she found it and read through it again. Parked off the road, its location obscured imperfectly by brush dragged over the tracks, was a 1974 Ford pickup truck, blue, with Florida plates. No insurance or registration papers inside. Attached to it was an old horse trailer, no plates, gutted and used to haul something other than a horse. Drug dogs were brought in. No hits. The truck was registered to a Carl G. Micou of Tampa, Florida. The plates were run: no wants, no warrants. An address was found for Mr. Micou but the phone number given had been disconnected, no new number listed. The old number had been traced to a business, Fetterman’s Adventure Trails on Highway 41 outside Tampa. Fetterman’s had closed its doors about the time the phone was disconnected.
Odd but not pertinent. Anna put the report back where she’d found it and looked around for something else with which to pass the time. Maryanne’s computer was only mildly tempting. Anna was convinced that computers, like horses, could smell fear and turn on the operator when mishandled.
A manila folder marked “C. Van Slyke” offered itself up from the “Out” basket. Within were Harry’s notes from the Les Van Slyke interview, of which Anna had already been given a copy. The transcription from the tape of her interview with Rory was there, she noted, and was struck by Maryanne’s efficiency. The remaining papers were new to Anna. The secretary had stuck a Post-It note on the paper-clipped pages that read “cc to A. Pigeon.” Anna felt a sense of failure. In her home park, the Natchez Trace Parkway, she’d not been able to command the cooperation from her field rangers that was being accorded her in Glacier as a matter of course.
The lab report had come back on the water bottle found in Rory’s possession after his unplanned hike. The crime lab used by Glacier National Park was the Montana State Lab in Missoula.
It had been less than twenty-four hours since Harry had turned the thing over. Anna was impressed at the turnaround time. Harry Ruick obviously had clout.
The majority of the fingerprints on the bottle were Rory’s, but four clear prints of thumb, index and middle finger had been lifted from the plastic. They belonged to Carolyn Van Slyke. To Anna’s mind it was proof positive Rory had, if not killed his stepmother, at least been in close enough proximity to her the night he’d gone missing to obtain her water bottle. Though this was obvious enough to real people, Anna’d been around long enough to know it would mean little to a jury were Rory brought to trial. Any defense attorney would be able to argue that of course Mrs. Van Slyke’s prints were on the bottle; she was Rory’s mother. They could have been put there at any time before the boy’d taken the bottle camping with him. And could Anna swear, under oath, that he’d not had two bottles with him on the trip? No.
Had she not marked it when she took it into evidence, Anna would have had a tough time swearing that water bottle was
the
water bottle he’d had when he’d been found and not the one he’d used prior to the bear attack. The bottles were identical.
Two other partial prints, belonging neither to Rory nor Carolyn Van Slyke, were also on the bottle. At a guess they belonged to Lester, but they could be from anyone to whom Carolyn had given a drink. The hikers that found Rory could have held it for him. Still they’d be run through the AFIS, the automatic fingerprint identification system, as a matter of course.
The next page ended Anna’s waffling. Traces of blood had been found on the bottom of the water bottle. As of the date of this report, the lab was unsure whether there was enough for DNA testing.
The remainder of the pages were just inventory lists: contents of the pack they’d found wedged under the log and the belongings of the deceased. Anna started to put the borrowed pages away and noticed the inventory of Carolyn’s belongings wasn’t duplicated. There were two lists: items belonging to the deceased and items found on the body of the deceased. At first they appeared identical. Then Anna’d noted the “belongings” list was short one item.
“I see you’ve made yourself at home,” Harry said acidly.
“Yeah.” Anna was too absorbed to notice the intended reprimand. “So the army jacket Carolyn was wearing wasn’t hers?”
Ruick shook his head disgustedly. Since Anna’d not been aware of his implied rebuke, she also missed its annoyed follow-up at her obtuseness and took the headshake as a negative about the jacket.
“Lester’s?” she asked.
“Les doesn’t know where she got it. Come on into my office. I’ll let you in on any details you haven’t already found on Maryanne’s desk.”
“Thanks,” Anna said sincerely.
Ruick muttered something that sounded like “skin of a rhinoceros,” but, accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the brass, she politely pretended not to notice.
As it happened, there was no more to tell than she’d discovered through her snooping. No leads on to whom the jacket belonged or why Carolyn was wearing it. Les told Harry that his wife had a habit of appropriating anything belonging to nearby males for her own use and thinking nothing of it. Had she been cold when she’d left that night, she might have snagged some camper’s coat off a tree or rock.
“Les was careful to point out that his wife would never steal,” Harry said. “That she just ‘borrowed without permission.’”
“If the jacket’s owner hiked on, we’ll never know whose it was. Shoot, he might not even be a hundred percent sure where he lost it,” Anna said.
“Follow it up,” Ruick ordered.
“Sure.” Mentally Anna added another forty miles hard hiking to her list just to chase down this wild goose for the chief ranger.
Army jacket dispensed with, she settled into the task of telling Ruick of her interview with Rory concerning the spousal abuse. She’d not taped it because she’d been afraid of inhibiting the boy’s narrative on such a sensitive issue. She taped her recounting of it now while it was fresh in her mind.
When she’d finished, Ruick didn’t say anything. Rocking himself absently in his chair he stared into the parking lot. Lunch was over. Cars were coming in. Even in a national park on a beautiful summer’s day most folks drove the half-mile to work. No wonder America was the fat-test nation on earth.
“The marks on his arms and legs. Bruises, cuts in various stages of healing. I’d have spotted it on a kid in a second,” he said finally.
Anna made no comment. She would have too. On a child it would have set off all the alarm bells. One didn’t expect it on a grown man.
“I’ve heard of course of wives beating their husbands,” Ruick said. “I’ve just never come across it before.”
Neither had Anna. She must remember to ask Molly just how rare the phenomenon was.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ruick said. “Les is no Tarzan. I mean he is—was—what? Eighteen years older than his wife?”
“Eighteen,” Anna confirmed from the birth dates on the notes she had with her.
“And in bad shape. Still he outweighed her by a good thirty pounds and is six or eight inches taller. What did he have to be afraid of if he fought back?”
“Being abandoned,” Anna said with certainty. She remembered how it felt when Zach had died. What would she put up with not to feel that again? “
It was like we’d been living in black and white and all of a sudden our world got colorized,
” Rory had said. Lester was scared to death to go back to that black-and-white world. Even black and blue must have seemed an improvement.
“Give me abandonment any day of the week,” Harry said.
Anna guessed none of his wives had ever up and died on him. If he’d ever been married. She looked around his office past the ubiquitous NPS certificates and awards. No pictures of wives or kids.
“Are you married?” she asked apropos of nothing but her thoughts.
“Twenty-seven years. I played it safe. Eilene is a little bit of a thing who wouldn’t hurt a fly. What do you say you and me go have another chat with Lester?”
13
Lester was doing
what depressed and grieving people traditionally do: everything wrong. The curtains of his second-floor motel room were drawn. The room was overwarm and stuffy. He’d not showered or shaved or dressed. In a plaid flannel bathrobe he’d probably had since before his son was born, he’d been sitting in an unmade bed watching television.