Track of the Cat (19 page)

When she did find it, there was not a doubt in her mind that she was at the right place. Training binoculars on the stone below she found traces of blood marring the limestone, the iron deposit that had saved her life, and the crack-chimney she had shinnied up.

Walking uphill a hundred yards or so, Anna retraced her steps down the trail to where she'd gone over the edge. The path was rocky, but level.

Lining up the tree she had been planning to throw a line to just before the rock had hit her, Anna was able to locate exactly where she'd stepped into nothing.

The trail was flat, well-maintained. Having divested herself of pack and rope, Anna began to dig. Gravel came away easily at first, then she hit a stone. When she'd cleared away all the dirt, she could see a rock about the size of a basketball set in a trough on the trail. Along with smaller rubble, it plugged a ditch a couple feet wide and half the trail deep.

Anna worked it loose and rolled it down the cut and over the cliff. It followed the path she had taken on the way down.

She swept away the sand. Smooth bites of a shovel and the sharp scoring of a pick marked the sides of the hole. A trough a foot deep and canted steeply toward the cliff had been carved out of the trail. Crawling on hands and knees, Anna examined the path for fifteen feet in either direction but found nothing more of interest.

She buckled on the climbing harness and, using an upslope juniper as anchor and belay, began rappeling slowly down the cliff face searching every ledge and crevice, every tuft of grass that clung to the stone.

Against the trunk of a stunted madrona she found what she was looking for: four tangled sticks. Anna tied them carefully in a kerchief, knotted it to her belt, and began the slow and painful task of pulling herself back up to the trail.

By the time she stood again on level ground she was certain she had unraveled every stitch her collarbone had knit in the two weeks since the accident. For several minutes she rested, drank in the air. Then she examined her find.

Four sticks, three broken but one over a foot long. Gravel was stuck to the sticks in several places, affixed by the same white paste Anna found on the magic rock. The sticks were woven in and out of one another as if someone had started a basket.

She laid the longest stick across the trough cut in the trail. It just reached. Someone had built a tiger trap and she had fallen into it. They had dug a ditch on the outside of the trail wide enough it wouldn't be stepped over. A mat of sticks had been woven to cover the hole and pebbles glued to the mat to make it look like the rest of the trail's surface.

Anna's radioed itinerary had been heard by the entire park. All anyone had to do was put the camouflage mat over the hole and wait. There was a good view of the trail below and above. If another hiker happened along, all they need do was remove the stone-covered mat. The hiker would see the hole, step over, and continue on.

That meant someone had watched as she fell. The same someone had rolled a rock down on her when it looked as if she would save herself. Her second slide had taken her so far down they must've trusted to luck-their good and her bad-that she would fall to her death. They wouldn't have wished to remain in the vicinity any longer than necessary. The sticks could've been picked up in minutes, the trail repaired almost as quickly and what few sticks tumbled down would be washed free of library paste with the first good rain. They had planned it well.

"Not they," Anna said to herself. "The murderer." Someone had tried to kill her. The thought frightened her. And it pissed her off.

Anna spent the night annoying Piedmont and fretting out lists in her head. Paul, Marta, Christina, Corinne, Harland, Karl, Manny, Craig, and Cheryl all worked with radios. All of them could've heard her radio in her backcountry itinerary. Christina had called in sick: she was free to lay traps. Harland had mentioned he was in Carlsbad buying lumber. Cheryl was in McKittrick Canyon on day patrol. It was she the tourist had reported the accident to. Karl, Paul, and Corinne were unaccounted for.

Marta was off the hook. She never left her desk.

Too many personal calls to make, Anna thought uncharitably. Lord knew where Mrs. Drury-Sheila's mother-was. And Erik Walters was in the park.

Since sleep was proving elusive, Anna got up and switched on the desk lamp. On a bit of scratch paper she made another list. Craig Eastern was at the top of this one. He knew the policies of the park as well as anyone. The aliens, the backcountry jaunt, lieu days, the grace period: if he were running away it provided a very convenient five-day lead.

16

AT ten till eight the following morning Anna's disability leave came to an end. She was back in uniform. Along with Paul, Corinne, and Cheryl, she sat in the conference room in the Administration building. At the head of the long, well-polished oak table, Corinne blinked benignly from behind aviator-style spectacles. It was a habit Anna had learned not to be comforted by. The sleepy, rabbit-eyed winks meant nothing. It was just a facial gesture the Chief Ranger adopted when she was waiting; a disarming, feminine version of the poker face.

Harland Roberts came in and the waiting was over. Corinne looked pointedly at the wall clock but the minute hand still held at two minutes till eight. He was not late. Inspired by the assumption of guilt, he apologized anyway and Corinne accepted it.

"I don't want this dragging on," Ranger Mathers began the meeting without preamble. "What've you got, Paul?"

Paul Decker, head of Search and Rescue for the Guadalupes, quickly adopted her manner: clipped, no frills. "Every search is an emergency,"

he began. "But we don't know yet whether we've got a search. Craig went into the backcountry on the West Side on July fifteenth-five days ago.

From what I understand, mostly from conversations he had with Manny, he'd planned staying two days and two nights. The next two days, the seventeenth and eighteenth, were his lieu days. He didn't report to work yesterday and he didn't return to the housing area.

"We've no way of knowing whether he's still in the backcountry or if he came out when he told Manny he would and went someplace for the weekend and got hurt or delayed there.

"Yesterday I called the University in El Paso and followed up on a few leads they gave me. No one has seen him. I doubt there's any cause for panic but, by the same token, there's no excuse for delay.

"All we know is he was collecting on the West Side but not precisely what or where. He had gathering permits for the entire park and left no itinerary. We need to locate his vehicle and narrow the area of the search. I'll go into William's ranch house near the escarpment. Anna will drive around the far western boundary to PX Well and a couple of other places where he may have parked and walked in. Cheryl is going to hold the fort down here. You'll be the only law enforcement within hailing distance so keep in touch with the Visitors Center," Paul said to Cheryl and she nodded. "Harland will head over to Dog Canyon and drive around to Marcus to see if Craig left his Volvo outside the fence on that old access road. It's unlikely Craig would walk in over Cut Off Mountain but who knows what he was looking for. Anybody?"

Corinne looked at each of them expectantly, almost a nonverbal demand.

Maintaining, as always, a low political profile, Cheryl Light stared at her finger-ends.

"Martians," Harland said gently when the Chief Ranger's gaze raked across him. The sadness of his smile disarmed the remark's cruelty.

When Corinne came to her, Anna just shook her head. She had been interested in the reptiles Craig was collecting but wasn't informed enough about his project to know any particular animal or habitat he might've been studying this trip.

Paul started to speak again but before he could, Harland raised his hand a few inches. A habit very few people shake regardless of how many years have elapsed since they were in third grade. Paul waited.

"He might not have been delayed or injured," Harland said slowly. "He may have just taken off. Craig is ..." He caught Anna's eye and she looked back without expression, curious to see if he would give away Craig's secret to the staff. ". . . spontaneous," Roberts finished and Anna was relieved. Not so much because Craig Eastern had been protected but because Harland hadn't proved a cad.

"That's a possibility," Paul conceded. "Let's hope that's the case. Then nothing is lost but a little time and sleep. Still, we've got to search."

"Of course," Harland agreed.

Before the meeting broke up the search plan had been established. If the car was found they would begin at that point. Meanwhile, Christina Walters would be detailed to conduct a phone search of the usual places: police, hospitals, Border Patrol, family, friends, etc.

Anna fell into step beside Harland as he walked out the back door to the employee parking lot. Remembering the sad "Martian" smile, she stopped at his truck, rested her elbows on the tailgate.

One hand on the door handle, he waited politely for her to speak.

"Have you got any particular reason to think Craig just ran off?" she asked. For a moment she thought he wasn't going to answer. Behind his gray eyes, she could see a small struggle taking place. When he finally did speak, she felt he was choosing his way carefully, censoring his thoughts before they became words.

"Nothing I can prove in a court of law," he said with a feeble attempt at lightness. Even that tiny spark vanished with the next sentence. "Not even something I'd want bantered around, run though the gossip mill."

Anna did gossip, loved a good gossip, but seldom with anyone in the park.

Her reputation for being able to keep her mouth shut was better than it deserved to be. Evidently it was about to pay off. Harland continued.

"It crossed my mind that Craig might be running away from something. It would be true to form. He's not a psychopath. When he commits . . . when he does something maybe he shouldn't, he's aware of it. He has a conscience. It hurts him. If he'd done something he felt pretty bad about, I don't think he could deal with his feelings, or with being found out. I think he'd run away. Like a little kid."

"What do you think he might have done?" Anna prodded but Harland was done confiding.

"Could've been anything," he replied easily. "Something we might even think was silly. It only needed to be important in Craig's mind." With that, he opened the door of his pickup and Anna took it correctly as a dismissal.

On the long drive around the western boundary of the park to PX Well, Anna pondered the crimes Craig could be running from: guilt at slandering Drury, maybe even Sheila's death, the attempt on her own life.

Craig was passionate, dedicated. And insane. It didn't take a great stretch of the imagination to picture him killing to keep the developers out of the park, the bulldozers and concrete mixers out of Dog Canyon.

Not only would he be fighting against the destruction of the fragile canyon when the RV sites were put in, but against the ongoing degradation of the area as the great roaring, gas-guzzling beasts rolled in with their baggage of humanity. People who had no intention of meeting Nature on her own terms but who must travel to the wilderness in a motorized hotel room replete with TVs, VCRs, showers, toilets, and growling generators.

Then would come the demands that inevitably followed RV invasions: sewage dumps, water and electric hookups, and, finally, the cry of "Why can't we drive through the park? How are people supposed to see it?"

Anna could envision Craig committing murder to save the Guadalupe Mountains from such defilement. With very little effort, she could picture herself helping him.

And then trying to kill her because she wouldn't leave Drury's demise well enough alone? Eastern couldn't have known she'd reached enough dead ends, was shaken enough from her fall to drop the investigation. Maybe he thought when she came back from Mexico she'd begin to dig again, with twice the energy now her life, too, had been threatened.

So he ran.

He'd left his pet snakes behind. Paul had noticed when he checked Craig's apartment. Snakes, though, could live for weeks without food. Anna couldn't imagine they would suffer undue psychological trauma from the loss of Craig's companionship.

According to Paul, he'd not taken any clothes or books or anything, either. But then Craig was crazy. Maybe he'd run from everything-murder, snakes, laundry, phone bills.

Anna sighed and switched on the radio. Trying to second-guess lunatics, drunks, or the Office of Personnel Management was an exercise in frustration. Their logic totally eluded her.

Jarring bones and rattling teeth drowned out any thought for a while as she forced the truck over the broken rock of the rutted road. So bad was the surface, even ten miles an hour was too fast to maintain control.

Anna doubted Craig's old Volvo could make it over such rugged terrain, but she'd seen cars in stranger places.

The heat grew oppressive. The plastic steering wheel burned her hands.

Her feet, in their regulation boots, felt as if her socks had been dipped in kerosene and set on fire.

Mentally excusing herself to Rogelio's environmental purism, she rolled up the window and cranked up the air conditioner.

Eastern's Volvo was not at PX Well. While she was there, Anna checked the rain gauge. Dry, as she'd expected. Not a trace of rain had fallen on the West Side since February and very little more than that in the entire Southwest. The region was in its fourth year of drought. Fires burned out of control in Arizona, Nevada, and all over New Mexico. Every morning in the ranger report was news of another fifteen-, twenty-, thirty-thousand acres burned. Even Yosemite was on fire.

Close to four-thirty Anna arrived back at Park Headquarters. Harland's Roads and Trails truck wasn't in the lot but Paul's one-ton was there between the jeep Cheryl was driving and the Chief Ranger's van.

Climbing out of the air-conditioned cab, Anna was hit by the heat. For a few seconds it felt delicious. Then the caress grew heavy, gluing her clothes to her body. Escaping up the cement steps, she let herself in the rear door of the building.