Anna Pigeon - Track of the Cat Part 14

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. .h.i.t 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.

The others were already gathered around the conference table. Christina Walters had joined them. She smiled faintly when Anna caught her eye and Anna walked around the table and took the chair next to hers. The glower of the Chief Ranger, shorn of its amiable sheep's clothing, filled the room with a silence too active to allow for conversation.

Paul sat across the table poring through a sheaf of forms. Looking busy, Anna speculated. Corinne's silences clamored too loudly to allow for reading.

Cheryl was lost again in her finger-ends.

Shifting her revolver and radio so they didn't bite into her ribs quite so hard, Anna settled in to await Corinne's signal that the meeting could begin.

Through the door connecting the conference room with the offices came an irregular tattoo of m.u.f.fled thumps and slaps, as though in the adjoining room a confession were being beaten out of some uncooperative suspect. Marta, huffing through books and manuals, telegraphed sullen disapproval that Christina was asked to the meeting and she was not.

A pointed look from Corinne Mathers sent Christina to close the door.

As she resumed her seat, Harland Roberts came in from the hall. His dark hair was ruffled like a boy's, one lock falling over his forehead as if he had driven with his window rolled down.

Corinne glanced at the wall clock: 4:34. He was late. This time he didn't apologize. Apparently, the actuality of his guilt satisfied the Chief Ranger. Her face relaxed and she smiled; the meeting could begin.

No trace had been found of Craig's vehicle: no tracks, nothing. There were six gates in the fence around the boundary, most were the dead ends of rutted gravel roads leading into old wells and stock tanks left over from when the Guadalupes had been used for sheep and cattle grazing. The Volvo hadn't been found at any of them.

Next, Christina gave her report. There had been no official recognition of Eastern in the past seven days: no traffic violations, accidents, hospitalizations, arrests, or parking tickets concerning a Craig Eastern anywhere in a one-hundred-and-fifteen-mile radius of the park. Nor had any of the names and numbers she'd followed up from the University of Texas at El Paso proved fruitful.

Anna wondered whether or not Harland had given her the phone number of the mental inst.i.tution in Austin. As if her thought cued Roberts's voice, he said: "Austin?"

"I followed up on the number you suggested, Harland," Christina replied carefully. Anna was not surprised at her natural sensitivity. She'd come to expect it. "The information had to be pried out of them, but I finally found a nurse who would talk with me. They've not seen Craig for two years."

"Nurse?" Corinne pounced on the word. "Does Craig have a physical problem?"

Christina looked uncomfortable. This was not her secret to tell. In truth, it wasn't Harland's either, but somehow it seemed he'd earned a right to it.

"Not a physical problem, Corinne," he replied.

The Chief Ranger waited, both of her small capable hands palm-down on the blond wood of the table.

Anna was put in mind of Piedmont: alert, casually deadly, waiting for a mouse to run out from behind the stove.

Sure as death, the mouse panicked.

"It's a personal matter, Corinne," Harland said when the pressure got to him. "Not something I feel I can discuss without Craig's permission."

"I understand your reticence to tell something you might have learned in confidence," Corinne said reasonably. "But any information we get could save Craig's life. It will not leave this room." She didn't look at any of them for compliance. She didn't have to. The implied threat was clear in her tone. If the story worked its way back to her in any form there would be h.e.l.l to pay.

Harland caved in. Anna didn't blame him. The information was relevant. And Corinne demanded it.

"I'm in a position to know that Craig has, in the past, suffered from a mental illness severe enough to get him inst.i.tutionalized on more than one occasion."

A silence as deep as the one Corinne imposed before meetings developed on the conference table in front of them. To Anna it felt as if it were comprised of one part guilt and nine parts embarra.s.sment. Mental illness was still taboo. They felt guilty because they'd thought Craig was crazy. Now they were embarra.s.sed because they knew he was. If he came back to work, the first few days they'd all tiptoe around glad-handing him as if he were the most regular Joe they'd ever met.

"Hunting Martians," Corinne muttered and shook her head. "Christina, after the meeting get me that clinic on the phone. They'll talk to me." To Harland, she said only: "I should have been informed."

Paul screwed himself around in his chair like a drill-bit emerging straight and true out of soft pine. "We don't know where Craig is, but we can infer from what information we do have that he may be in trouble. I'd like some air coverage. If we could borrow a helicopter from the Forest Service we could try and locate his camp. See if he left the backcountry."

"Craig's tent is desert camo," Harland said. "He was bragging about it to me the other day. It'll be a b.i.t.c.h to find in broken country."

Corinne jerked her chin at Christina. With a certain awe of Chris's telepathic powers, Anna watched her quietly leave the conference room.

Several minutes later she returned in the midst of a discussion of Craig Eastern's probable itineraries. Corinne looked at her and everyone stopped talking.

"Due to the fires, all helicopters in the Southwest region are in use. Highest priority. It will be a week or ten days before they can guarantee us one for this search."

"Paulsen's got one," Anna said, remembering suddenly.

"Jerimiah D.? That's right," Harland added. "He has."

Christina went without the nod, and returned to report that Paulsen's helicopter was undergoing repairs. The rotor was in Sante Fe being worked on. As soon as it was running, he'd be glad to lend it to the National Park Service.

The meeting adjourned at five after six. Search dogs had been promised by the El Paso Police Department in two days' time. At present all their dogs were in use searching for a ten-year-old boy lost in the Gila National Forest.

Tomorrow Anna and Paul would begin a manhunt, starting with the most likely points of entry: Williams Ranch and PX Well. Anna would ride Gideon; Paul, Pesky. Harland was to coordinate transportation for the rangers and the livestock.

It was, Paul pointed out, better than sitting on their hands.

Christina would continue her search by phone.

Harland was waiting at PX Well when Anna and Gideon rode out the next evening. She was late, nearly two hours. Always, as she rode, was the nagging sense that just a little farther, just over the next ragged, rocky hill, she would find something. She'd blown her shrill plastic search whistle till her ears were buzzing and Gideon had begun to flinch as if she laid a lash to him. Between the two of them they'd consumed forty pounds of water-five gallons-and would've consumed another gallon if they'd had it.

The sight of the waiting horse trailer gave the old horse back his youth. Then he saw Roberts and began to flag. Gideon stumbled half a dozen times in the last quarter-mile. He was putting on a show for Harland.

A long drink of water was waiting for the horse and a cold Milwaukee Black Label for Anna, courtesy of Harland Roberts. She was popping the top as she said: "I'm in uniform, I really shouldn't."

Harland opened a can for himself, sipping to her gulps. More of a promise never to tell on her than a serious drinking of beer. Anna slid to the ground in the shade of the horse trailer, her back against the fender.

"Not a d.a.m.n thing," she said to his questioning look. "Davy Crockett couldn't track a tank over this kind of country. Yours Truly was totally baffled. We played it by ear. Followed the obvious animal trails, sought out the snakiest-looking country. Not so much as a gum wrapper. Maybe the Martians did beam him up." She leaned her head back against the warm metal of the trailer and poured another quarter of a can of beer down her throat. It was the finest beverage she'd ever tasted. Heaven was just h.e.l.l in the shade with a cold beer.

"Maybe tomorrow," Harland said.

"Maybe tomorrow."

Tomorrow brought the dog from El Paso and the policewoman who worked with her. The dog's name was Natasha Osirus. Her handler, Betsy McLeod, called her Nosy. Nosy was an eleven-year-old golden retriever trained to search. Serious, almost grave, she was terribly dedicated until Betsy produced a well-chewed Raggedy Ann doll, then she was the silliest of puppies. Like Nosy, Betsy was blond, though Anna suspected it was due more to Lady Clairol than the desert sun. Both had a loose-jointed unkempt look that put Anna at ease immediately. They also shared a warmth and a brown-eyed sincerity that gave one faith.

Noon found Paul, Anna, Betsy, and the dog on the porch of the Williams ranch house. A plain wooden building, it had been constructed at the turn of the century for a new bride who took one look at the desert stretching barbarous miles out from her very doorstep and fled back to civilization.

The next woman had loved the place, the land, the house. Anna'd never read any official doc.u.mentation to that fact; she simply felt it. Love was there in the choice of wallpaper in the entry hall, in the careful border prints along the ceilings, and the neatly nailed tin gliders on the threshholds.

Now the paper hung in colorless ribbons. Collared lizards peeked unfathomable eyes up through gaps between the floor-boards. Black-throated sparrows nested under the elevated porch. Some days, on West Side patrol, Anna would take her lunch onto the porch and, in her mind, redecorate and inhabit this graceful little home on the skirttails of the Guadalupes with all the deserts of Texas rolling away.

Nosy, her snout full of Craig's scent-socks, a shirt, the EARTH FIRST! cap Paul had taken from Eastern's apartment-made short work of the house and, on Betsy's command, began to circle farther afield. At every other step the poor creature got sand burrs or mesquite barbs in her paws. Betsy, walking with her, pulled out the stickers and murmured comfort. The dog was too well trained to quit working, but it was easy to see her concentration was affected.

No trail was found. With the heat, the stickers, the varied smells of visitors who'd come to see the Williams ranch house, Paul was not confident Nosy could sort out one six-day-old track.

Betsy was sure. Nosy was loaded back into the jeep and Anna began the seven-mile, forty-five-minute drive out the guttered road. Betsy sat in back with the dog, fashioning little canvas booties from an old piece of tarp that had been covering the jack.

At four o'clock they reached PX Well. Nosy was more comfortable with her paws tied up in canvas, and the well had been so long in disuse that there were few human scents to sort through, but the end result was the same: no sign of Craig Eastern.

After supper that night, Anna went over to Christina's to visit. Erik-who Anna had a.s.siduously avoided meeting-had taken Alison into Carlsbad to see The The Little Mermaid. The two women talked little. Christina seemed to need the quiet and Anna found it soothing. They sat out in the garden, enjoying the heady scent of Chris's carefully tended exotics and sipping tiny crystal gla.s.ses of ice-cold peppermint schnapps. Little Mermaid. The two women talked little. Christina seemed to need the quiet and Anna found it soothing. They sat out in the garden, enjoying the heady scent of Chris's carefully tended exotics and sipping tiny crystal gla.s.ses of ice-cold peppermint schnapps.

The phone search, Christina said, had become so general as to be absurd. Craig had few friends and was a virtual stranger to his one living relative-a sister in Brownsville. Christina was down to calling his grammar school teachers and the night security guards at the University lab where he worked. No one had seen or heard from him.

The following day, at the Marcus entrance to the park, Betsy and Nosy sniffed out a tarantula, a great grand-daddy of a western diamondback rattler, and two Texas horned lizards. The three remaining entrance gates didn't produce even that much in the way of results. Come sundown, Betsy loaded Nosy back into her Camaro and headed for El Paso.

The next morning's Incident Command Meeting was glum. Nothing to report. The Forest Service, pressured by Corinne, promised a helicopter in three days. No one fooled themselves that, if Craig were indeed on the West Side, he was still alive. There were no springs. No one could carry in water enough for seven days.

Corinne had worked her way around to the all-important ch.o.r.e of placing the blame-or at least shrugging herself free of any taint of it-when the call came in.

Frank Kanavel, the rancher owning the property along the boundary between the gate to the Williams ranch road and PX Well, had let some "snake guy" from the park leave his car on his property for two days. More than a week later he comes back from his sister's wedding in Lubbock to find the d.a.m.n thing's there again. Did the park think they had an open invitation to walk over his land any time they wanted, trample down his fences, upset his cows?

Mr. Kanavel must've been shocked at the genuine joy with which his rambling grievance was met. The joy was short-lived. If Craig's vehicle was there, then Craig was lost or injured in the Patterson Hills. That meant Craig Eastern was dead. They had failed him.

Anna consoled herself with the thought that he was undoubtedly dead before they'd even known he was missing.

Paul put in a call to the El Paso Police Department and Betsy McLeod was dispatched back to Guadalupe. Paul gave the phone to Christina to provide the police with exact directions to Frank Kanavel's ranch. The rangers would meet her at the missing man's vehicle.

As they left the Administration building, Anna marveled at how language altered subtly as tragedy closed in. Words grew longer, more impersonal, forming a wall around the mind, holding out the less tolerable images. Craig's Volvo had become "the missing man's vehicle."

While Anna put their Search and Rescue packs in the back of the truck, Paul radioed Harland for horse backup.

Kanavel met them at the gate to his ranch. He'd been filled in on the particulars and his growling complaints had been replaced with genuine concern. In the deserts of Texas, to survive, one saved one's fellow man, then questioned him and hanged him later if the answers were wrong.

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 ocotillo 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 G.o.ds. To anyone else they formed a h.e.l.l 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.