Track of the Cat (21 page)

Craig's car was parked along the boundary fence. Looking at the Pattersons a couple of miles distant, it was easy to guess the direction he had probably taken.

Across the flats, to where the desert began to wrinkle back on itself, mesquite and ocatillo etched the arid soil with dusty green. Low cacti, invisible at that distance, replaced the greenery as the hills folded into sharp ridges and ravines. The Pattersons were scattered in a pattern clear only to geologists and the gods. To anyone else they formed a hell of a maze.

One wash cut deep enough to erode a valley into the flank of a tall hill.

Eastern would've walked up that wash, Anna guessed.

Paul radioed the base station. "Seven-two-five," Christina's voice replied. A moment's checking discovered Betsy and Nosy less than half an hour from Kanavel's.

They waited.

The policewoman and Harland with the horses arrived at the same time.

Betsy chose to walk. Paul climbed on Pesky, Anna on Gideon. Harland rode Jack, one of the mules. Jack was the strongest, smartest animal in the park but he was a treacherous mount. Under Harland's hand he was the soul of decorum. Jill, the smaller mule, followed on a lead.

Nosy never hesitated. So great was her dedication, even in canvas booties, her tongue and ears flopping, she didn't appear ridiculous.

Betsy followed behind the dog. Six or seven yards back, so they wouldn't interfere, rode Anna and the two men.

The golden retriever led them across the flatlands toward the wash. Under Betsy's direction, the dog was made to stop and drink every five or ten minutes.

The sun was merciless. Anna half believed she could see the life of the desert floating upward like the ghost from a slain body, but she knew it was only distortions in the air caused by the heat. Despite hat and sunblock, she could feel her flesh burn. At thirty-nine she had age spots at her temples and on the backs of her hands.

The horses plodded on with the fatalism of all slave races.

The dry wash provided no relief: no breeze, no shade, only the hard light of the sun reflected back from three sides. Anna drank constantly. So much moisture was sucked up by heat and wind that it was almost impossible to keep hydrated. In the Pattersons there were days a human could not carry enough water to survive, regardless of personal strength.

The policewoman, though game, was unused to the rigors of backcountry desert travel. Paul was the first to notice she was flagging. Under flushed cheekbones, her skin was slightly pale. In her concern for the dog, she wasn't drinking enough or pacing herself.

At the District Ranger's insistence, she climbed onto Jill's back and directed Nosy from there.

A mile and a half in, the canyon petered out. A hill of cactus and scree rose up at a forty-five- or fifty-degree angle above them. They dismounted and hobbled the stock. Betsy leashed Nosy so she wouldn't go over the crest and out of sight. Fanning out, they each found their way up as best they could. Anna wished she'd had the sense to bring her leather work gloves. The only way to make the ascent was on hands and feet. Rocks were hot to the touch and small barrel cacti poked their round heads up where they were least expected.

Topping the hill first, Anna stood catching her breath, sucking the air in through her nostrils in the hope they still had some power to moisten it.

The hill was round on top and sloped steeply away on all sides like the hump of a camel. Opposite from where she stood, about a quarter of the way down, a web of desert joined this hump to the next hump over. The bridge of land flattened out along the spine, then dropped off on either side into deep ravines.

Anna hoped Craig had hiked across that land bridge. Scrambling up these hills would get old very quickly.

Paul puffed up beside her, stood a moment, then looked back down.

Watching out for other people seemed second nature to him. Anna followed his example. Betsy McLeod and Nosy were about three-quarters of the way up. Harland was with them. Betsy was drinking from his canteen. In the excitement of the chase she'd forgotten or lost hers. Harland waved and smiled. Betsy looked beat; a good candidate for heat exhaustion.

Anna turned back to her fruitless study of the terrain.

"There," Paul said.

Anna's eyes followed his finger where it pointed to the crown of the little hill on which they stood. She saw nothing. "Where?"

"There," he said again.

Feeling a fool, Anna stared. Into the nothing a shape began to form. A mottled sand- and gray-colored canvas tarp was stretched tightly between two poles and pegged down close to the ground on both sides. Hidden in its shade was a two-man tent with a top of open mosquito netting. "Desert camo works," she remarked.

"At least we know for sure he was here," Paul said. From the camp they would follow scent trails out. At the end of one of them Nosy would find a corpse.

"Craig!" Paul called. Neither of them expected an answer.

The District Ranger started toward the tent and Anna followed. Craig's pack materialized. He'd covered it with sand-colored burlap. Ever the minimum impact camper, Anna thought. She made a mental note to buy all fluorescent orange gear. If she were injured in the Pattersons, she wanted to be found. Being dead had its attractions. Dying did not.

"Craig!" Paul called again, but Anna suspected he was just cheering himself, making a noise because he was alive. At Craig's pack he stopped and folded back the burlap carefully. Anna was reminded this, like all deaths-assuming it was a death-that did not take place under a physician's care, was considered a potential crime scene.

Alert for anything that was not as it should be, she walked over to the tent and reached for the zipper on the flap. As her thumb and finger pinched the hot metal of the pull, she heard the tiniest of sounds; a mere whispered rustling. It froze her in her tracks.

"What?" Paul demanded.

Afraid even to shake her head, Anna listened.

"What is it?" he asked again and, when she didn't answer, he too fell into a listening attitude. Gravel crunched: Betsy and Harland topping the hill. The desert creaked faintly in the heat. Nosy's tongue slopped over her paw. Then Anna heard it again; a faint rattling almost at her feet.

Fear older than the Bible caught at her stomach.

Seeing a rattlesnake was one thing. Hearing one and not knowing where it was, was another altogether.

Keeping absolutely still, holding her now slightly comic stoop, she searched the area around her feet. The rattling subsided but she was not relieved. The sound had not crept away on a slither of sand and scale, it had stopped. The snake was still there. Anna's eyes moved up, over the tent. Bent close as she was she could see through the netting. Before, the shadow of the tarp had rendered it virtually opaque.

"Whoa..." she breathed. The rattling began again. Inside the tent lay a bloated, monstrous figure. Not human, though human-like. Its head and neck were swollen and black. The features of the face had been destroyed by puffed and stretching flesh. The left arm was four times the size of a human being's arm. Big and glossy as waxed cucumbers, the fingers had burst open on the ends. The rest of the creature was pathetically human: pale legs, shrunken genitalia, flat white belly and hairless chest.

And all around, on the sleeping bag, like the ancient Greeks lounging on couches at a feast, were rattlesnakes.

Slowly Anna straightened, backed away.

"What is it?" Paul asked softly. Training or good instincts had kept them all quiet till Anna was clear of the tent.

"It looks like the snakes have collected Craig," she managed. Paul started to come forward and she held up a hand. "Somehow they got loose.

His collecting buckets are overturned. There's half a dozen snakes in there with him, maybe more."

"Dead?" Paul asked.

"Not the snakes."

The tarp was easily dismantled leaving only the snake-filled tent. It was supported by two flexible poles forming a large arch for the head and a smaller one for the foot. Plexiglas rods were pushed through sleeves in the fabric and hooked into rings to keep their shape. Guy lines pegged down in opposite directions pulled the arches upright, stretching the nylon between them.

Using pocketknives affixed with surgical tape to long sticks, Anna and Paul cut the nylon down the center and sides like opening the foil around a baked potato. When the cuts were complete, they peeled the nylon back, keeping the distance of the sticks.

There were seven rattlesnakes: three blacktails and four western diamondbacks. Eventually the snakes would have departed of their own volition. It was much too hot for them to survive long without shade. But no one cared to sit and watch the macabre tableau longer than they had to. Under the gentle urging of tossed pebbles, the snakes were induced to slither away. When the last tail had vanished into a crevice between some stones, Anna, Harland, and Paul approached the body. Paul gave Anna a camera and, while she snapped pictures, Harland sketched the layout of the camp and the corpse.

The aridity of the West Side had desiccated the body. What had appeared black and monstrous through the filtering gauze of mosquito netting was actually discolored and prune-like, the swelling only half what it had originally seemed. Craig had been virtually mummified within the convection oven his tent had become, the moisture in his body sucked out, escaping through the netting. That accounted for the lack of a warning odor of decay.

Craig had died of snakebite, that much was obvious. The characteristic double puncture wound of the pit viper was unmistakable. He'd been bitten seven times: twice in the face and twice in the neck, with three bites on his left arm, one directly into the artery at the wrist.

From the disarray, it appeared he had kicked over the two specimen buckets as he slept, knocking the lids off. The snakes, frightened, confused, had begun to strike. Craig's thrashing attempts to escape had only excited them to further attacks.

That was the picture Paul pieced together from what little evidence they had.

As a matter of course, they searched the area and made notes of condition and location of all items found. Then Harland and Paul folded Craig Eastern's mortal remains into the ruined nylon tent and, slipping, smothering irreverent curses, carried the body down the slope.

Anna shouldered Craig's backpack and followed Betsy McLeod and Nosy down to where the stock waited.

Like an old-time cowboy slain on the range, Craig was tied across Jill's saddle. Betsy, her dog in her arms, rode pillion behind Harland.

Seven bites, Anna thought as Gideon plodded, head down through the curtains of super-heated air. Pesky, too worn out even to bite the mules'

butts, slogged ahead.

"Death: accidental by snakebite."

Seven. And why was Craig sleeping with his collection buckets inside the tent? A bizarre form of suicide? No. Had Craig chosen to die by snakebite, he would have freed the reptiles after they had performed the chore. He loved them; he would not have left them imprisoned in the tent to die. If not suicide, how hard must he have thrashed in his sleep to overset both buckets with such violence the lids popped off?

A lot of questions.

Only one answer: Craig hadn't killed Sheila Drury. His "accident," like hers, had been carefully orchestrated by the same hand.

The hand that had sent Anna reeling off McKittrick Ridge.

17

THE coroner's report was brief.

Time of death: between midnight and six a.m. on July 16. Cause of death: accidental, by snakebite.

Drury's read: "Death: accidental, by lion kill." Anna would have been

"Death: accidental, by falling." Too many accidents. Just as on Eastern there were too many bites. Unlike sharks, rattlers, even dumped out of bed in the middle of the night, did not go into feeding frenzies.

Anna was sitting at her desk in the Frijole Ranger Station going over the 343 Case Incident Report on the Eastern snakebite incident. It looked like hell. The entire thing needed to be retyped. For the moment, she shoved it into her briefcase and pulled out the list she'd made the night before the search began.

Craig's name was still on the top of it. Neatly, Anna drew a single line through the letters. The next names were "Christina/Erik" and "Karl."

Christina: a friend, a confidante, a shoulder to cry on; Anna repressed a sigh and looked further down. The names remaining were of people she had come to think of more as "extras" than suspects. First she would rid her mind-and her list-of them.

She dialed Minnegasco in St. Paul, Minnesota. Some pleading and much fabrication led to the information that, but for one trip to Texas when her daughter died, Sheila Drury's mother had not missed a day's work in twenty-three years and was not due to take her vacation until December 11. On the day Anna fell and the day Eastern died, Mrs. Drury had been at her desk on the second floor above St. Peter Street in St. Paul.

Almost in Heaven, Anna thought wryly, glad to have the troublesome and troubled woman off of her lists and out of her thoughts for good. On impulse, and because she wanted to hear a kindly voice, Anna called her mother-in-law in White Plains, New York. Usually she called only on the first Sunday of every month-Edith led a regulated life and Anna couldn't bear to talk of Zachary more often than that. This time Anna kept the conversation general. Edith didn't even flinch at the mention of grapefruit spoons. Anna thought of calling Rogelio, though she knew intimately where he had been the day Eastern died. But he would ask questions she did not want to answer.

She drove the mile to the Visitors Center and, with Manny's help, went back through the backcountry permits issued for July 2, the night before she fell; June 17, the night Drury was killed; and July 16, the night Craig died.

Both Sheila and Craig had been found miles from any of the designated camping areas in the park and there had been no special permits issued.

It was unlikely the killer would fill out a permit for any area that was not regularly patrolled- the odds of getting caught would not outweigh the exposure of getting a permit. July 2 had a possible: an E. Wheelan driving a white Toyota with California plates had been permitted to camp at the McKittrick Ridge campground.