Endangered Species (16 page)

and confusion.  Her eyes narrowed and she drew down her brows and the

corners of her mouth.  Something clicked in her mind, Anna could see it

in the sudden opening of her face.

"I heard the shots," Marty declared ." And I can just about tell you

where.

Anna didn't believe her.  It was too pat, too aggressive.  And Shawna

said there'd been but a single shot ." When?" Anna asked.

Schlessinger looked blank ." When what?"

She was stalling for time ." When did you hear the shots?"

Shawna pulled her face free of her hands ." We think it was about-"

"Not now," Anna snapped ." When did you hear the shots, Marty?  And how

many were there?  Best guess."

Marty gave Anna a long slow look and this time there was malice in it ."

I can't recall," she said evenly, gunned the ATV, and was gone, leaving

them to roll their windows up hastily to shut out her dust.

The line for the phone was longer than usual-Alice taking precedence

with a series of business calls.  Anna went next.  Neither Frederick nor

Molly was home.  Feeling bereft, she left snippy messages on their

machines and joined Alice Utterback on the concrete stoop to wait while

AI called his family.

The air was warm and soft and black.  Moonrise wouldn't be for several

hours and the low wattage of stars couldn't burn through the moist air.

Alice was sitting on the concrete, legs crossed tailor fashion,

apparently at ease alone in the dark.  Anna curled down beside her,

unconsciously aping the other woman's pose.

" Soaking in the silence," Alice said after a moment.

Anna felt no need to respond and they sat in quiet companionship for

several minutes.  Cumberland's stillness was impressive; a living

silence deepened by the gentle stirrings of night creatures, minute

cracklings and scuffling not diluted with so much as a breath of a

breeze.

Unfortunately this cloak of peace was not adequate to sedate Anna's busy

mind ." If the wound was as deep as Shawna said, it had to be a

forty-five-caliber bullet or maybe a shotgun slug.  My money'd be on a

slug.  A forty-five would tear the flesh, not just blow it away."

Since Anna was obviously waiting, Alice replied ." Shawna might have

exaggerated.  She was rattled."

"might have," Anna said, but she didn't think so.  Answers so carefully

thought through were more than likely fairly accurate .

"We'll probably never know.  Whoever did it is long gone by now .

Shoot, we don't even know exactly where it happened.  Statements will be

taken, et cetera, but nobody'll even go look.  It'd be a waste of time.

Look for what?"

"Poachers?" Alice offered.  In her voice Anna could hear that weary

acceptance of the necessity for conversation.  The considerate thing to

do would have been to leave her to her reverie but Anna was in a mood to

chat.

"Poachers don't lean toward handguns , she said ." And there's no game

on this island big enough to require a shotgun slug.  Even the pigs are

just pigs, not wild boars or anything."

" Mmmm," Alice murmured noncommittally.

Anna continued to ignore the other woman's desire to enjoy the lush

Georgia night ." People do strange things.  Especially hunters.  I could

see somebody hunting pigs with a shotgun.  Not a sportsman-as if

outsmarting a pig was a challenging sport-but somebody who liked the

killing."

" Now there's a cheery thought."

"When I lived in Texas, hunters there had what they called a sound shot,

as in, 'I didn't see anything but I got in a sound shot." Meaning they'd

heard something in the brush and just blasted away at it.  Maybe

Guenther was shot by a hunter of that ilk-the poacher never even knew he

hit anything.  Let alone a person.

"Shawna said Guenther yelled."

"Okay.  A deaf, quiet Texas pig poacher with a shotgun."

Alice said nothing and Anna turned the unlikely possibilities over in

her mind.  Unwelcome thoughts of Molly, of the threats, of Frederick and

the future hummed like bees in a jar but she chose not to let them out.

Working on the leg wound puzzle was an excellent distraction.

"A shotgun's an up-close and personal kind of a weapon," she said, and

heard a tiny sigh of exasperation escape her companion .

"It's hard to shoot with any accuracy at more than fifteen yards or SO.

AI pushed out through the office door and Alice jumped up with an

unflattering alacrity ." It's way past my bedtime," she declared, and

led the way to the truck.

Before noon the following day the mystery of the plastic bags and

Guenther's assailant was pushed from everyone's mind.  The six of

them-Alice, Anna, Rick, Wayne, Shorty, and Norman Hull-were at the site

of the airplane wreck finishing up the investigation.

Wayne, the maintenance specialist, had spent the morning following all

the control linkages from the cockpit to the controls themselves:

cables, rods, hinges, attach bolts.  It was standard procedure and this

time it bore fruit.

Alice Utterback understood the mechanic's findings immediately.  Due to

their technical nature, Wayne dragged out pen and paper and mapped out

the sequence of events for the chief ranger .

Anna hovered over Wayne's left shoulder soaking up information.

The flaps-moveable portions on the trailing edge of the wings-were used

to slow the plane or to increase lift.  They were operated by control

rods running from the fuselage out the wing and to the flaps themselves.

From the sketch Wayne was drawing it looked very mechanical.  The pilot

pushed a lever, the flap motor turned, an actuator arm twisted, pushing

rods out, and the flaps were forced down.  Anna was surprised it wasn't

more high-tech, with electronic goodies and computer confusions.

The control rods were bolted to the flap motor arms in the belly of the

airplane.  When Wayne tracked them in from the wings, he discovered the

bolt fastening the right rod was missing and the rod and actuator arm

were separated.

Without that bolt in place, when the pilot activated the flaps only the

left one would extend.  The left wing would elevate suddenly and the

plane would roll sharply to the right.  Flying low and slow as they

surmised Hammond had been, there would be no room to recover.  He'd have

corkscrewed right into the ground.

Wayne finished his lecture and they all continued to stand around

staring at his rude sketch as if more information would be forthcoming.

"Could it be an accident?" Hull asked finally.  His voice was ripe with

hope.  Accidents, acts of God, required less paperwork than felonies.

"Yup," Wayne replied ." Some brain-dead mechanic might've forgotten to

replace the bolt, or replaced it but neglected to put a nut on it. Maybe

he did the nut and left off the cotter pin that secures it.  It's not

likely the nut vibrated off but I suppose it could happen .

We'll need to get hold of Hammond's aircraft logbooks, see when it was

last in the shop, who the mechanic was.  This isn't something that could

just toodle along unnoticed.  It'd have to have happened between his

last flight and this one."

"I don't think his logbooks were in the airplane," Alice said .

"Maybe they were-reduced to ash.  Usually maintenance logs are kept

separate from the airplane for exactly that reason.  The papers in the

glove box weren't bound and there wasn't any sign of a flight bag."

"We'll check his house," Hull said.

"Could anybody else get at the actuator arm?" Anna asked.  Norman Hull

gave her a look of irritation.  There were enough cans of worms around

without her prying open another.

"Anybody," Wayne said ." There's a little metal plate in the plane's

belly.  Take out six screws and, bingo, you're there.  You would have to

know a little about airplanes and it'd help to know the pilot .

Some use flaps a lot, some don't.  A flap-using pilot probably would

have tripped this little booby trap fairly early on and maybe not have

got himself killed.  But my money's on the mechanic.  Incompetence is

more common than murder."

"Whatever the case," Hull said, "this information is confidential .

On a need-to-know basis." He looked directly at Anna and Rick .

"There is nobody you know who fits this description.  Are there any

questions?"

There were none.  Pecking order was established.  Anna and Rick were

merely migrant workers.  For some reason Hull wanted them to remember

that.

U"""Eli!3A(,K had all the answers the Beechcraft's remains gwould

afford.  The police tape was taken down, the equipment packed, the

Cumberland Island maintenance division alerted to start the cleanup.

Rick was released back to the fire crew and Anna dispatched to the

maintenance shop to pick up a key to Hammond's place so she could get

his logbooks for Alice.

The pilot had been renting park housing on the island for the duration

of' his assignment.  After a modest amount of gossip was proffered in

exchange for the key, the maintenance man gave Anna directions.

Hammond's house was about one third of the way north between the dock

and Plum Orchard.  In that two-mile stretch, there were a number of

homes of both park personnel and island inhabitants who still retained

the right to live there.

With the dense screen of oak and palmetto, only thin dusty tributaries

to the main road hinted at the existence of these dwellings.  Some of

the drives were marked with the name of the homeowner, some with the

name of the road, and some not at all.

Hammond's house was in the last category and Anna enjoyed a good bit of

sight-seeing before she finally found it tucked back in the trees.

Slated for demolition as soon as time and funds were allotted, the house

had been allowed to deteriorate into earth tones .

The unpainted board siding had weathered to a velvety gray and fallen

leaves and pine needles drifted up to the foundation and over the low

porch slab.  Several of the windows had lost their screens and the

flotsam of a series of renters littered the bare yard: an old stovepipe,

the skeleton of a kitchen chair, rusted coffee cans.  Anna parked the

truck beside a shed housing an unidentifiable piece of machinery and sat

for a moment letting the heat coalesce around her.

Feral pigs had rooted a crooked trench to an old watering trough set

under a live oak.  Gray beards of Spanish moss hung to the ground.  If

any sound existed beyond the green enclosure, it was absorbed by the

foliage.  On this tiny populated island Anna felt more isolated than she

had miles into the backcountry of west Texas.

"Logbooks," she said to motivate herself, and climbed from the truck.

Hammond's door was unlocked.  Perhaps in an urban setting that might

have tripped some alarm, but Anna took little note.  In the parks,

people were lax about security.  It was one of the joys of living there.

Inside, the place had the bleak look of the itinerant bachelor .

Seedy brown light leaked through old paper shades pulled all the way

down.  If there was an air conditioner, Hammond hadn't left it on.  The