"Blood lure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barr Nevada)

Chapter 6

Despite the fact there seemed to be a bear in Glacier with Anna's name on it and a lunatic who sliced off women's faces, she slept very well. Harry Ruick woke her just after five by clanging around with stove and coffeepot.

Having only the truly vile clothes she'd worn the day before, Anna had slept in nothing but her shirt and had to spend an awkward minute struggling into underpants and shorts in the narrow confines of a sleeping bag. Trained in backcountry etiquette, Ruick did not deign to notice her until she was decent.

Joan had selected their camp with foresight. Two downed logs, fallen at right angles to one another, formed a natural seating area. Having stuffed the borrowed sleeping bag into its sack, Anna made herself a cup of coffee from a flow-through bag and joined the chief ranger where he sat on a log.

"Buck got to the Van Slyke boy's dad up at Fifty Mountain yesterday afternoon, so the folks know the kid's missing," Ruick said in lieu of "good morning."

Anna nodded. Buck was probably the backcountry ranger from down toward Waterton Lake.

"The helicopter will be able to land as soon as it's light. If I remember right, there's a good flat spot on the burn less than a mile from here. We'll need to go check it and flag it."

Harry wasn't so much talking to Anna as planning his operation. She was content to serve the passive role of sounding board. Till Harry Ruick arrived on horseback the day before, she'd never met him. He struck her as the new breed of administrator-infused with a genuine love of the resource but a political animal for all that, with an eye to the next rung up the ladder. Old-school park rangers-or at least the lingering myth of them-would have it that they put the needs of the park before their own. Enlightened self-interest was the current trend.

"You're here sort of apprenticing on Kate's bear DNA project, that right?" he asked. Despite the time they'd spent together floundering around in the shrubbery, Anna had the feeling this was probably the first time he'd really seen her.

"Yes," she said. "My home park's the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi."

"You know John Brown?"

"He's chief ranger there."

"John and I went to FLETC together," Ruick named the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which NPS enforcement rangers filtered through at some point in their careers. "Tell him I said 'hey' when you see him."

Anna promised she would. She wasn't surprised the two men knew each other. The National Park Service was spread over a lot of real estate but there weren't that many full-time employees. The game of "who do you know" was played successfully from Joshua Tree to Acadia.

Amenities observed, he returned to the issues at hand. "We're going to do double duty today. Split our forces. You and I will go over the crime scene this morning. Two of my district rangers and about a third of my field rangers are in California on the Angeles National Forest. The damn annual pilgrimage to keep the movie stars from being burned out of house and home. Talk about a prime location for a 'let burn' policy. But be that as it may, I'm short-handed. So if you wouldn't mind playing step-'n'-fetchit for me, I'd appreciate it."

In one sentence he'd managed to give Anna the illusion of a gracious request and at the same time let her know her official status in the investigation was that of a gofer. A manager's manager.

"Glad to help any way I can," she said, and meant it.

"Good girl."

The "girl" offended Anna not in the least. Being a woman of a certain age, she'd learned to pick her battles. That, and she'd been called a whole lot worse.

"Gary, Vic, the others'll continue searching for the Van Slyke boy. As soon as the body"-he pushed his jaw at the plastic-wrapped lump of bear bait hanging in the tree at the far edge of their camp-"is taken to West Glacier, the helicopter will join the search. If the kid is up and around we ought to be able to find him today."

He didn't add the obvious, that if Rory wasn't up and around it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of difference whether he was found today or a month from today.

They sipped their coffee in companionable silence awaiting the sun. Anna was cold. Her green uniform shorts and short-sleeved gray shirt offered little in the way of warmth. In a minute, when she was more awake, she would get her raincoat from her day pack.

"Have you ever had a murder at Glacier before?" she asked.

"You mean since it's been a national park?" Harry thought about that for a bit. "Glacier was made a park in 1910. We joined up with Canada in 1932. There's bound to have been some foul play but nothing in recent history," he said finally. "They used to be rare as hen's teeth."

Used to be. Anna was thinking of the beheading in Yosemite a few years back, the death of the child in her own park only months before.

Population was at an all-time high. Park visitation was up. Anna remembered reading Future Shockin college, the experiments crowding too many rats in too small a space. Now, nearly thirty years later, it was happening in the parks. The rats were starting to kill each other.

Twenty minutes after first light, before the sun had scraped over the jagged cliffs rising from the eastern edge of the mountain, camp was broken, gear was stowed. Joan and the rest of the bear team headed southeast to mark the helicopter landing area, their sad cargo belly down across a saddle like a gunslinger's trophy. Needing the full light of the sun to properly examine the shrub-choked crime scene, Anna and Harry decided to first walk West Flattop Trail.

The woman had been butchered after death. The kind of precision knife or hatchet job that had been done on her face was the work of ten or fifteen minutes, maybe more considering the flesh cut away had been removed from the site. Butchering was a job requiring privacy. Consequently the body had been carried off the trail, as the drag marks attested. Corroborating this theory was the fact that the body had none of the scratches or scrapes that might be expected on the arms of a healthy live woman forced through a thick alder copse.

Had the murder occurred any distance off trail, most likely the killer would have had all the privacy needed to mutilate in peace and would have had no need to move the victim after death. Logic dictated that the murder had been committed on or near West Flattop, and fairly near where the body had been dumped. In August, with visitation at its peak, the killer would have wished to get the body out of sight as quickly as possible.

The burn covered both sides of West Flattop but for the small patch of green bordering the trail above where the body was found. It was an educated guess that the kill had occurred in the burn zone, where the perpetrator had little or no cover. He'd carried the victim till he found enough undergrowth he could hide in.

Anna and Harry walked, one to each side, three to five yards off the trail in search of the place the original violence had taken place. Just under half a mile from where they started, they found what was probably the victim's backpack. It was forty feet into the burn, stuffed under a downed tree. Char and ash had been hastily pushed over it. The scorched soil would have proved an ideal surface for tracking if it hadn't been for the rain the day before. What prints there might have been were melted into amorphous depressions that would keep their secrets.

Anna stood by, notebook in hand, while Harry photographed the pack and log with a different 35-mm camera than he'd used the night before. This one had been brought in by the helicopter. The other was his own. He'd come to the high country for a search and rescue, not to investigate a murder.

That done, he and Anna made a series of measurements so the exact location and lie of the pack could be reconstructed later on paper, should that prove necessary. Then Ruick pulled on latex gloves, carefully swept the debris off the pack and pulled it from where it had been stashed. He handled it as if protecting possible fingerprints, but it was just good form and training. The stained gray canvas, soaked with rain and grimed with soot, wouldn't hold any latent prints.

From the way the pack moved, Anna could tell it contained something heavy. Harry emptied the zippered front pouch. "Mosquito repellent, tissues, topo-careful woman, carried two topographical maps."

"Not careful enough," Anna remarked as she wrote down the items he'd removed.

"No. I guess not. Let's see what we got here." He unzipped the main pocket of the day pack and lifted out three cameras and four lenses. "A photographer. From what little I know about camera equipment, my guess is this is pretty expensive stuff."

"Rules out robbery," Anna said. Robbery had never been a motive she'd considered seriously. Robbers took things and ran away. They didn't drag corpses around and slice their faces off. Why would anyone slice off a face? "Maybe he didn't want her recognized," she said, seeing again the single eye staring out of the mess.

"If that's the case he didn't do athorough job of it. I don't know about you, but I'd recognize those near and dear to me if half their face was still there. It doesn't take that much."

That was true. With dental work, fingerprints, medical records and DNA it was nearly impossible to hide the identity of a corpse for any length of time. Unless it was a corpse nobody cared about, and hadn't for a long time. Judging by the cameras, this woman was too well-to-do to be completely unloved.

"No film in any of the cameras," Harry said after a brief inspection. He handed Anna the stuff to hold. Arms full, she abandoned the role of secretary. Ruick reached into the pack and took out four boxes of unopened film and three empties. "No exposed film," he said. "These boxes must have been in here awhile. I guess she hadn't gotten to wherever she was going to shoot before she was killed."

"Or she was taking pictures of something the killer didn't want recorded for posterity," Anna said.

The chief ranger shot her a look of surprise. "Good point," he said, and again she had the odd sensation that he was seeing her. It was as if underlings only existed as nameless cogs in a green and gray machine. Because Ruick was good at his job, he kept that machine clean, fueled and maintained, but scarcely expected the moving parts to show signs of initiative above their station in life.

Item by item he retrieved the cameras and lenses from Anna and restowed them in the pack. Another ten minutes were spent circling out from the log, studying the ground before he said, "This vein's mined out," and they moved on.

For the next couple of hours they continued to comb both sides of the trail east and west, but found no other trace of the woman or anything to indicate who killed her or why. With the sun high and bright, they returned to where the body had been and searched the path down and the area around where it had lain, but again found nothing. If the meat cut from the face had been tossed into the brush, something had dragged it away and eaten it. Gruesome as that image was, Anna preferred it to the idea that the killer was hiking around with human flesh packed along with his peanut butter and pork and beans. More measurements were taken, notes made. Anna sketched the crime scene. So tangled was it with branches and leaf litter that, as good as the sketch was, it still looked like the doodlings of an idiot.

Having done what they could, they hiked east toward Fifty Mountain Camp. Given the sinister goings-on since Van Slyke's disappearance, Harry felt it behooved him to speak to the lost boy's parents personally.

Three miles shy of Fifty Mountain they received news of Rory. Returned from hearse duty to search, the helicopter had flown over several times but it wasn't from that source that they finally had word. The call came from dispatch in the valley town of West Glacier. Hikers northbound on Flattop Trail, two miles south of where it intersected with West Flattop near Fifty Mountain Camp, had called park headquarters on their cell phone. They'd met a young man, naked from the waist up and wearing slippers. They said he was distraught. He knew his name, Rory Van Slyke, but otherwise seemed disoriented and claimed to be seeking help for two women who had been savaged by a giant bear. Except for a bad sunburn on his chest and shoulders, he appeared unhurt. The hikers would stay with him till a ranger arrived.

On receiving the news, Harry radioed the rest of the search party to stand down. After a night of bears, a day of rain, and a defiled corpse, Anna'd not realized how starved she was-everybody was-for good news. The searchers fairly chortled and glowed over the airwaves. Everyone needed to quip, joke, to say some clever thing. Understanding this phenomenon, Ruick let the good times effervesce at the cost of radio discipline for exactly two minutes. Anna saw him look at his watch timing it. Then he cut it off with orders.

Since he and Anna were closest to where Rory waited with the hikers, they would cut cross-country from West Flattop to Flattop Trail, bypassing Fifty Mountain Camp, and collect their truant Earthwatcher. Joan and Gary were to hike to Fifty Mountain and tell Mr. and Mrs. Van Slyke that Rory had been found unhurt. Buck, the backcountry ranger Anna had yet to meet, was to join them at the camp to assist Ruick in the murder investigation.

Two law enforcement men in two million acres seemed to be giving the murderer adefinite edge, but there was little else to be done. A massive manhunt could be mounted if they had any idea who they were looking for. Till then it would only breed panic and ill will.

One of the great enduring joys of wilderness travel was that, in America at least, it did not require that one have one's papers in order. Campers were supposed to have backcountry permits, but hikers didn't need even that. When in the backcountry one could go to bed when tired, rise when rested and wander where the heart led, unidentified and untracked. Even had they pulled every backcountry permit issued, there was no way of knowing where the permittees might be at any given moment. No one wanted to admit it, but in a killing such as this, the murderer was likely to get away with it. If he or she-a woman could just as easily bone a chicken or filet a person as a man-was apprehended, it would have as much to do with dumb luck as good police work.

Their cross-country trek was short-lived, scarcely more than half a mile, but all of it uphill. They rejoined Flattop where it ran parallel to West Flattop. Back again on an improved surface, they made good time and reached the waiting threesome just after two o'clock; hardly more than an hour after dispatch radioed that Rory was found.

In the day Anna'd spent with the young Earthwatcher, he'd not seemed a particularly demonstrative lad; but when he saw her rounding a clump of trees behind the chief ranger his face actually appeared to light up, as the cliché would have it. His eyes, dull and downcast, crinkled and came to life. His face, slack to the point of idiocy, firmed into a boyish smile that ripened quickly into laughter. For a second Anna thought he was going to rush over and hug her. She braced herself but his inner light flickered and began to fail. Like a robot suffering a power interruption, his movements faltered. Anna realized that, though he had been glad to see her, the major wattage was reserved for the person he thought was going to round the trees in her footsteps.

The instant it came together in her mind, she jumped in to put the boy out of his misery. "Joan's fine," she said quickly, speaking overloud to penetrate the fog of trauma hovering around him. "Neither of us was hurt. Joan's gone to Fifty Mountain to tell your folks you're okay. Joan's fine," she repeated, making sure the salient fact soaked in.

"Hooray," he said. "Hooray, hooray, hooray." And he hugged himself, sunburned arms around a chest that was just beginning to show the breadth of manhood. He rocked slightly and Anna was put in mind of a cartoon dog she'd delighted in as a kid, Precious. Precious would hug himself and levitate whenever given a dog biscuit. Rory looked like he'd just been treated to Purina's finest.

When he settled back to earth he began to chatter. "I thought you were dead. You and Joan. I heard that growling and I came back-honest to God I came back. But the bear was huge. I mean huge. Like a polar bear. So I-I knew I had to get help-"

"Easy, son, time for that later. You've had the whole park looking for you for nearly two days. A lot of people are going to be real glad to see you." Harry didn't sound like one of those glad individuals. He came across as brusque and crabby. Anna noticed the hikers, not yet properly thanked for their heroic role in the saga, exchange a glance of disapproval.

Maybe Harry was a heartless s.o.b., but Anna didn't think so. At least not entirely. She recognized the unpleasant task of leadership: Harry's work wasn't done yet. Happy as he might be that Van Slyke was alive and well, there were new plans to be laid now.

The less altruistic side of the NPS leadership mantle was the deep-clown belief that virtually every ranger harbored- only idiots and greenhorns got themselves lost. Purists even espoused the idea that the money and man-hours used to find them could be better spent. Anna would have been in favor of that radical view of no-rescue wilderness had she not found search and rescue work so satisfying. Enlightened self-interest; if the corporations and bureaucracies could get away with calling selfishness that, surely a private citizen could try it on for size.

"Anna," Harry called her out of her thoughts. "Are you an EMT?"

"Yes."

"Do your thing." He nodded in Rory's direction. As she led the boy alittle way away from the others, she heard Ruick click into politician mode and begin to say the right things to the hikers. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when she would have quietly rolled her eyes and indulged in a small sniff of superiority. No more. Since she'd become a manager, she'd been made acutely aware of how important a part of the job being a good politician was. And what a joy it was to be a lowly flunky again for a few days.

She sat Rory on a stump, dug out the first-aid kit and, while he told his story, ran through a standard field check.

"I'd got out of my tent and gone into the woods just a little way behind that big rock. Something must've kind of upset my system or something and it wouldn't wait till morning… you know?"

He looked to Anna to validate that diarrhea was an acceptable reason to leave one's tent in the dead of night.

"I know," she said agreeably.

"So I was out there awhile and I kept hearing things, getting real nervous like, you know? But I hadn't finished my, uh, my business. My insides-"

"What kind of things did you hear?" Anna interrupted, having no desire to learn about Rory Van Slyke's insides.

For a moment he didn't answer. He just watched her wrap the blood pressure cuff around his upper arm with an expression of contentment on his face. Anna guessed he was comforted by the trappings of modern medicine, civilization. The things that he'd been raised to believe would keep him safe from the monsters.

She pumped up the cuff and he looked away, suddenly squeamish, as if she were sticking a needle in his vein. "What did you hear?" she asked again.

"Animals, I think. You know, maybe just little ones, though they could have been something else. Maybe mice or rabbits or coyotes or something. I know you're supposed to make a lot of noise when you go out into the woods like that, to scare the bears off. Joan told me that. It wasn't that I forgot, but you guys being asleep and all-"

"That's okay," Anna said. "Right around camp nobody makes noises. Usually just the fact we're there and stinking like humans'll make the bears give us a wide berth."

"Anyway, I don't think that stuff I first heard was the bear. Maybe it was but I don't think so. Then I heard what sounded like footsteps. It scared me pretty bad. I was, uh, done then…"

Anna bet he was. Probably every sphincter in his body slammed shut when he heard a grizzly bear headed his way.

"Maybe I should have shouted," he said. "Maybe it would have scared him away."

Maybe it would have. Before Anna could be judgmental, she remembered that neither she nor Joan had done any shouting once the attack began. Perhaps if they'd screamed their bloody heads off, the bear would have run away. Instinct had taken over and they'd cowered in silence, gripped by the surety that the only safety lay in being invisible, playing dead.

"Footsteps?" Anna asked. The word seemed inappropriate for the sounds a large omnivore would make lumbering through thick ferns.

"No, it soundedlike footsteps," Rory amended. "At first. But then it broke something, a stick or something, and I heard it growl. I've been to zoos and all and I saw that movie The Bear,but I thought they'd mixed things to get that noise-lions or trains or whatever, like they mixed noises to get Tarzan's yodel to come out big enough. That's why little kids can't do it right."

Anna turned away on the pretense of tucking the blood pressure cuff back in its plastic case so he wouldn't see her smiling at the image of a scrawny little Rory Van Slyke pounding on his bony chest and calling to herds of imaginary backyard elephants.

"I guess they didn't have to fake anything," he concluded. "That roar was about the most awful sound. That bear was immense. I could hear it ripping into the tents. That's when I figured I'd better get help."

The scene played out in Anna's mind's eye: a terrified boy in sweats and slippers, alone in the night as every horror he'd nursed for two days in the wilderness-and for who knew how many before he arrived-took form from the darkness. Nightmare made real in fur and teeth and claws and "most awful sound." Rory had panicked, blindly, brainlessly turned and ran into the trees, Anna would have bet on it. She didn't blame him. That might very well have been the course she would have adopted had she been given any choices. If he was able to sell himself on the fiction he'd gone for help, he'd be okay. If not, this wretched indication of cowardice would scar him. Anna wasn't sure she could help, but she'd talk to Joan about it. Being a mother of boys, she might have accrued some wisdom along those lines.

"You're in fairly good shape for a man who's been without food or shelter for thirty-six hours," she told him.

"The hikers gave me fruit and granola bars," he said. "They'd've let me eat everything in their packs-and I could have-but it didn't seem polite."

"We'll see about replenishing their stores," Anna promised. "And get you some serious food. Let me see your feet." She squatted in front of where he was seated on the stump and he lifted his foot like a compliant child on a trip to the shoe store.

The Chinese cloth slippers had held up remarkably well. Though they had been pulled and squashed and pounded till they resembled third base after an eleven inning game more than they did shoes, the seams had held. The flat rubber soles, pierced through in several places, had not split.

"You sure got your four-ninety-five's worth out of these things," she remarked as she unbuckled the Mary Jane strap on the right shoe and slipped it off. His feet were coal-black from his dusty tramp through the burn. Until he had washed, there was no telling what was bruising and what was dirt. She found one cut on his heel that lined up with a tear in the slipper's sole, and no blisters.

Gently she palpated the right foot, then the left. "What happened after you went for help?" she asked. "You still owe me thirty-five hours' worth of story."

"Not much," he said vaguely. Anna couldn't tell if he was being evasive or if the hours' had run together in his mind. "Just walked, you know. Got lost. Then came out on this trail and ran into the hikers." His voice was drifty and soft.

"Did you take any falls? Hit your head or anything?"

"No. Like I said, I'm fine."

Head trauma, then, did not account for this sudden fog. Evasive, Anna decided. If, after some distance had been put between him and bear, the panic had not subsided, and come morning he'd neither tried to find help nor returned to camp to see if Anna and Joan were injured, if he'd holed up, cowering somewhere, the evasiveness made sense. Shame was as great a fogger of memory as a blow to the skull.

The faceless face of the dead woman flashed behind Anna's eyes and another reason for evasiveness came to mind. Maybe Rory didn't want her to know precisely what had transpired during the day and a half he'd gone missing because it was something he'd rather keep secret. Like murder.

She snorted abruptly, an aborted laugh gone up her nose. Rory had run off in his slippers and pj's, pursued, at least in his own mind, by a bear. Then he meets a stranger by accident, kills her for no reason, stashes her pack, finds an edged weapon, drags her into the undergrowth and cuts her face off, all without getting a drop of blood on his person. Even for Anna, suspicion had to have at least a rudiment of logic to buoy it up.

"You go barefoot a lot?" she asked. The calluses on the bottoms of Rory's feet were thick and hard. He'd suffered less from his overland ordeal than most would.

"A fair amount," he replied. "Lots of times I run cross-country bare-footed. It drives Coach out of his mind. I only do it in practice. Never at a meet."

Anna put sonic lidocaine on his sunburn to help with the pain and, though the day had warmed to the mid-eighties, advised him to put a shirt on so the sun wouldn't do any more damage.

"I lost my sweatshirt," he said, sounding as if he was telling a lie.

Anna looked at him sharply. It was his sweatshirt. Nobody cared whether he'd lost it, burned it or given it to a passing elk. Why lie about it? Because he'd twitched, Anna was compelled to pounce. "How did you lose it?"

"I guess I must have dropped it or left it behind or something."

Vague again. Lying again?Maybe not. Maybe he didn't know how he'd lost his shirt and that lapse was scaring him. Maybe.

"It happens," she said neutrally.

"I guess."

The chief ranger came over to their outdoor clinic. "So. He going to live?"

"For a while," Anna said and gave Ruick a brief rundown of Rory's minor complaints.

"We need to figure out the best way down," Ruick said when she'd finished. "No packaging's called for. I can send the backboard down on the helicopter. We can either get him to the nearest good landing site for airlift or have Gary or Vic bring the pack horses over and ride on down the south side. From a medical standpoint, do you think it matters a whole hill of beans?"

"Half of one, six dozen of the other," Anna said.

Rory sat on his stump looking back and forth at them, apparently accustomed to being discussed in the third person when he was in the room. He came to life when Harry said, "We'll airlift you out, Rory. We've got the helicopter till sundown. May as well use it."

"I don't need to go down," Rory said, sounding alarmed at the prospect.

Ruick looked at him, cleared the irritation off his face and changed gears from logistics to public relations. Hunkering on his heels so he wouldn't be talking down, he explained, "You've been out a long time, Rory. Thirty-six hours up here is nothing to sneeze at. Your feet are battered, you've gone without food, bad sunburn, dehydrated-"

"I had water," Rory said defensively. Picking up the high-tech water bottle with the filtering system built in, the one Anna'd admired the first time she'd seen it, he shook it to prove his point.

"You still need to get checked out," Ruick said reasonably. "Your feet-"

"I only got that one cut and Anna says it's no big deal. I've run thirteen-K races with worse cuts than that. It's nothing." Rory was becoming agitated. His reaction struck Anna as excessive for the threat he faced: a free ride in a helicopter and a night or two in a comfortable bed.

Irritation revisited Ruick's face. He was not used to being thwarted. Probably he had no children. Anna had none but she'd spent the first spring in Mississippi embroiled with the students of Clinton High School. "Thwarted" was putting it mildly.

"You have to go down, son," Ruick said, striving for fatherly kindness and almost making it.

"No I don't," Rory returned. Anna was amazed that someone who could face down a chief ranger would be given the megrims by a mere grizzly bear. It wasn't that Rory had no fear of Ruick. He did. She could see it in the nervous flick of the eyes and a slight quiver at the corners of his mouth. She could also see that he had no intention of backing down.

She doesn't take shit off anybody. Anna remembered him saying that of his stepmother as if it was the highest praise he could bestow. Rory was more afraid of "taking shit," as he perceived it, than he was of what the chief ranger could do to him if he chose. Which was considerable, up to and including having him removed from the DNA project and the park if he deemed him a danger to himself, others or the resource.

What would make a boy so afraid of taking shit-Anna couldn't think of a less crude phrase that captured the essence of the phenomenon with such accuracy-off a grown man, and an authority figure to boot? Kids spent the first twenty years of their lives "taking shit" in the form of instruction, correction, insult, advice, manipulation, education and abuse by their elders. By sixteen most were past masters at the art of passive aggression. Anna wondered what Rory's parents, particularly his father to whom he referred scornfully as "Les," had done to circumvent the natural flow.

Ruick sighed, stood up and gazed around for a moment. His eyes lit on Anna and he made an executive decision. "You handle this," he said and stalked off.

Anna and Rory watched him go. Feeling suddenly weary, she sat down on a log next to the boy. "What have you got against going down, getting checked and resting up a bit?" she asked.

Rory took a few seconds to downgrade from obstinate to sullen. "I'm not hurt," he said. "There's nothing the matter with me. I'm here to do that bear thing. We got more traps to set, don't we? I don't see why I've got to go down and be messed with because I got lost. He just wants to cover his ass in case I decide I got some big injury and sue, which I'm not going to do, and make like him calling out the troops and the helicopter and everything was a good idea. Why should I be punished because I accidentally got lost?"

Punished. A kid's word. Still, Anna could see the logic and had to admit she was impressed that a boy so green in years grasped the CYA mentality a pathologically litigious society had forced upon government agencies.

"That bear tore up our tents," she tried. "Shredded them like confetti."

"They were government issue. Don't tell me they don't have more tents."

Anna didn't. As a matter of fact, they'd already been replaced. The bear team had packed in two spares. They'd been left at Anna and Joan's camp.

"I'll sleep on the ground if I have to," Rory said.

His hands were clasped together in his lap, gripped so tightly the knuckles showed white. Rory'd been terrified of bears. Then a particularly aggressive member of that club had ratified his fears. If he was willing to face another night in the open despite that, more power to him. Maybe that was it, maybe he had to prove to himself he wasn't a coward.

"Okay," Anna said. "You stay. I'll tell Harry."

Harry was not pleased but he was practical. Legally he could not force Rory to accept medical transport, since the boy was neither mentally incompetent nor unconscious. Technically he was underage, but since his parents were close at hand and he clearly had no life-threatening emergencies, it would be inexcusably heavy-handed to play the minor card. Ruick also struck Anna as fair. She doubted he would mess with Rory's Earthwatch status on the DNA project.

"You're going to have to walk back to Fifty Mountain in those things," Harry warned, pointing to Van Slyke's disreputable footwear.

"I can do that, sir," Rory said, all good manners and boyish deference now that he'd gotten his way.

"You got a shirt or something you can put on over that sunburn?"

"Anna put sunscreen on me, sir."

The "sirs" were put to good effect. Ruick was sufficiently mollified to lose interest. "Lets go, then," he said. "I expect your parents at least will be glad to see you."

At Harry's suggestion the hikers who'd found Rory had gone on ahead. Ruick led, setting a pace that was geared to Van Slyke's sore feet, though he wouldn't have admitted it. Rory was in the middle and Anna last.

As she walked behind them it occurred to her that Rory had not asked if his parents were worried. Harry had told him up front that somebody had been sent to tell them he'd been found. Even so, it seemed peculiar. Had Anna been missing in the wilderness for thirty-six hours at his age, one of her chief concerns would have been how much hot water she was going to be in when she got home and her parents' intense relief had time to transform into anger the way it invariably did.

Fifty Mountain Camp was on the northernmost edge of the old burn scar. Trees were charred snags and tents were pitched on black soil. Forty yards further on, the fire had finally exhausted itself. Beyond were green rolling hills, meadows painted with wildflowers. Rich as velvet, the meadows lay between stones the size of houses and cars that had tumbled down from the ridge; a strange Stonehenge rolling away seemingly to the edge of the world.

Fifty Mountain had five sites, all of them full. Orange, blue and green bubbles of tents poked up between the coal black spires like poisonous toadstools. Backpacks leaned against stumps, and the inevitable laundry of backpackers, socks and old towels, hung limply from spindly branches.

As part of its bear management plan, Glacier's campgrounds were laid out differently from those in other national parks. A single area was set away from the tents and designated for cooking and consuming food. It served two purposes: to confine the excessive foot traffic food areas invariably suffered and to keep this most bear-attractive of activities separate from where the campers slept.

At Fifty Mountain the cooking area was between a creek winding a life of green and silver through the burn and the developed tent sites further up a gentle slope toward the edge of the fire scar.

Hiking up from the creek, Anna thought it looked as if a town meeting was being held in the food preparation area. The rough log benches were filled with behinds and half a dozen people stood around talking in low voices. Anna recognized Joan, Gary and Vic. With them was a tall, ruddy blond with the stringy good looks of a man who spends his days walking. He wore an NPS summer uniform, shorts, no gun. Anna guessed this was Buck, the backcountry ranger Harry'd called on to carry the bad news and then the good to Rory's parents.

The group spotted them, there was a moment of frozen tableau as new information was processed, then Joan shouted, "Back from the dead. That's my boy," and things began to happen.

A nondescript man, slightly stooped, wisps of thinning hair lifting in the breeze, stood, shaded his eyes, then smiled. The smile, accompanied by that illumination from within, identified him to Anna: Les, Rory's father. Joy made their faces alike. Les took a couple of steps around the edge of the log then the joy-light died. The dislike he'd seen in his son's face doused it. Anna watched Lester Van Slyke as she traversed the last few yards up from the creek. Rory, already being absorbed by the amoeba of people, had said only a couple of words to him before being enclosed by the crowd.

Les was left on the outskirts. Twice he sort of pushed himself up straighter, raised his chin and peered over shoulders as if steeling himself to the task of breaking through the ranks to his child. Hopelessness or cowardice stopped him both times. Finally he turned and busied himself with a day pack on one of the benches. Anna knew what he was doing. He was engaged in the occupation of being occupied, proving he had things to do, places to go, people to meet. Fooling himself or hoping to fool others into thinking that he hadn't been shut out. Or if he had, was too busy to notice the slight. Carolyn Van Slyke, the stepmother, Anna didn't see. Odds were good she was at the nucleus of the amoeba with Rory.

Though disinclined to like Lester Van Slyke for the simple reason that his son didn't, Anna nevertheless felt pity for him. "You must be Rory's father," she said and stuck out her hand. Les very nearly flinched, then recovered himself and shook hands with her. His fingers were soft and warm, his grip almost nonexistent. It was like shaking hands with a cat's tail or a draft from the furnace.

"I bet you're glad to get your boy back," Anna said, just to be saying something. Les acted a bit foggy, as if he had trouble thinking. He looked from Anna to the wall of backs to the pack he'd been fiddling with. His face was remarkably unguarded for a man his age, around sixty. Anna could almost read the choices being sorted. Continuing with the pack was rejected; trying to pry into the inner circle to present Anna was abandoned.

At length he got himself squared away. The fog lifted and Anna was treated to another one of those Van Slyke boy smiles. "Glad's not the half of it," he said. "I have been out of my mind with worry. Anything could happen to a boy out here. Just anything. You name it. And helpless? My! I wanted to go with the searchers but I guess I've let myself get out of shape some and… well…" He drifted off apologetically, spreading his arms in a half-shrug to show her his concave chest and rounded potbelly.

He was out of shape. Had Anna been in Buck's place she would have kept Mr. Van Slyke close to camp as well. He carried twenty extra pounds, all of it in the gut. The muscle tone in his arms was nil and his legs were white and spindly above the tops of brand-new hiking boots. Obviously not a seasoned backwoodsman. His forearms were grayish with old bruising and there were marks on the few inches of thigh Anna could see below his hiking shorts. Some old and a couple fresh and angry looking. She wondered if he had one of those skin or circulation disorders where the slightest bump will leave a bruise for weeks.

"Then there was the thing with Carolyn," he finished.

Anna wriggled out of her day pack, sat down by the one he'd been rummaging through and began unlacing her boots. They were old and, given they were great heavy lug-soled boots, comfortable enough, but her feet yearned for cool air and her toes for unfettered freedom.

"His stepmom pretty anxious?" she asked to be polite.

"I don't know. I mean, I'm sure she would have been. Didn't they tell you? Carolyn's been gone since yesterday morning."

That got Anna's attention. She looked up from her bootlaces. "Gone?"

"I woke up and she'd gone. She does that. I didn't think anything of it, but she hasn't come back yet."

An emotion flickered behind Mr. Van Slyke's pale clear eyes. It looked like relief for an instant then was clouded over with concern. A faint line, an old cleanly healed scar, traced white across his brow and down the side of his nose as his face muscles tensed.

"Usually she's not gone so long. Not overnight. At least not in a place like this. I mean, where would she go?"

"Have you reported it?" Anna asked cautiously.

"This noon when she still wasn't back, I got worried. I told that young fellow, that ranger, when he came with the news you found Rory. I kind of thought maybe she was with you guys."

"Not with us," Anna said, then realized that might not be strictly true. She replaced her boot. She needed to talk to Harry Ruick.