Blind Descent Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  PRAISE FOR

  WINTER STUDY

  “Chilling…Barr’s visceral descriptions of the winter cold nicely complement the paranoia.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Strong, evocative writing…frigid winds blow through Winter Study as the suspense heats up.”

  —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “Barr skillfully uses archetypal images of the wolf to deepen the suspense.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Fast-paced, intricately plotted, and filled with foreboding.”

  —St. Paul Pioneer Press

  “Riveting.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  RESOUNDING PRAISE FOR NEVADA BARR, ANNA PIGEON, AND

  ENDANGERED SPECIES

  “Barr is a splendid storyteller.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “In Anna Pigeon, author Barr may have created the most appealing mystery series heroine to come along since Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Vivid…skillful…Barr, a park ranger herself, has the tools to make the island seem real, from the wicked insect life to the glow of the moon on the Atlantic.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Despite the many plot complications that claim Anna’s attention in this intricate mystery, Ms. Barr makes sure that she also has eyes for the eerie beauty of her isolated surroundings. No less than her heroine . . . the author seems to have immersed herself in everything strange and lovely about this place.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Nevada Barr’s fifth Anna Pigeon is an Americanized, natural history version of the English country murder. . . . While the mystery in Endangered Species is expertly rendered, keeping us guessing most of the way, the strength of the novel lies in Barr’s host of deftly sketched and offbeat supporting players . . . and her striking depictions of the island’s environment.”

  —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “[An] estimable series . . . Barr writes evocatively about nature’s pleasures and perils, astutely about those who would protect the wilderness from those wishing to exploit it. . . . Anna continues to be a character to care about, flawed but resilient.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Nevada Barr has carved out her own fictional fiefdom, creating a body of work like no other. To her intriguing depiction of the U.S. Forest Service, its mission and its members, she adds a storytelling skill that makes her Anna Pigeon novels tops in entertainment.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A nifty thriller . . . Barr’s one heckuva writer. . . . Her tales read like Patricia Cornwell exploring the great outdoors.”

  —The Clarion-Ledger

  “Anna Pigeon is an outstanding example of the contemporary woman detective. She is smart, determined, and able enough to compete with anyone in the mystery business.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Nevada Barr’s mysteries keep getting better and better.”

  —Susan Isaacs

  “Anna Pigeon, Barr’s down-to-earth heroine, is a delight, with her no-nonsense approach to crime solving and her commonsense approach to life.”

  —Booklist

  “No one delivers the thrill better than Nevada Barr. . . . Fans of the current crop of women mystery writers will love Anna Pigeon. . . . For those who read mysteries to figure out whodunit before the end, be warned: Barr will stump you almost every time.”

  —The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph

  “Poetically written and exquisitely clued.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A refreshing change from the brash, wisecracking order of female PIs, Barr’s thoughtful and sensitive heroine rings true on every page.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Nevada Barr is an accomplished storyteller. She understands about plot twists, narrative drive, comic relief, and the various other elements vital to the mix . . . she also has a feeling for the solidity of mountains and the relentlessness of rivers, and what it is that can make a brilliant, star-filled desert night so scary.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The book abounds with unusual and colorful characters and is imbued with Barr’s wonderful sense of place and the details of a park ranger’s daily life.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Gals don’t get much tougher than Forest Service ranger Anna Pigeon. . . . Barr is as precise a craftswoman as Agatha Christie. . . . She’s made the genre her own.”

  —The San Jose Mercury News

  “Anna Pigeon is one of the top female sleuths today. . . . Endangered Species is a fabulous read.”

  —The Blood-Letter

  Titles by Nevada Barr

  WINTER STUDY

  HARD TRUTH

  HIGH COUNTRY

  FLASHBACK

  HUNTING SEASON

  BLOOD LURE

  DEEP SOUTH

  LIBERTY FALLING

  BLIND DESCENT

  ENDANGERED SPECIES

  FIRESTORM

  ILL WIND

  A SUPERIOR DEATH

  TRACK OF THE CAT

  BITTERSWEET

  Nonfiction

  SEEKING ENLIGHTENMENT…HAT BY HAT

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  BLIND DESCENT

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Avon Twilight edition / April 1999

  Avon mass-market edition / August 2001

  Berkley mass-market edition / October 2009

  Copyright © 1998 by Nevada Barr.

  Interior map copyright © 1998 by
Jackie Aher.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14514-2

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Andrea, Jim, and Andrew Goodbar. Without their expertise and generosity not only could this book not have been written but I would never have been lured into the beauty of the underground.

  With deep appreciation of the staff of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, particularly Dale Pate, Paula Bauer, Harry Burgess, and Frank Deckert. Among them, they educated, enlightened, amused, advised, and kept me safe on what turned out to be some of the most amazing journeys of my career. People like those at Carlsbad Caverns make me remember that the hackneyed phrase “our National Parks are our greatest heritage” is the simple truth.

  1

  ANNA HADN’T SEEN so much dashing about and popping in and out of doors since the French farce went out of fashion. Given the pomp and posturing surrounding her, she felt like a walk-on in Noises Off.

  Anna Pigeon was on the overhead team, the second wave to hit CACA—the official if unfortunate National Park Service abbreviation for New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, home to two of the most famous caves in the world, the original cave, known and exploited since the late 1800s, and Lechuguilla, discovered in the 1980s and yet to be fully explored.

  Though Carlsbad was less than an hour’s drive from the Guadalupe Mountains, where Anna had worked some years back, she’d been down in the cave only once. The parts of Carlsbad open to the public were highly developed: paved paths, theatrical lighting, named formations, benches to sit on while changing film. At the bottom, some seven hundred fifty feet underground, there was a snack bar and souvenir shop. When hot dogs and rubber stalactites had been brought into this pristine heart of the earth, their ubiquitous companions came as well: rats, cockroaches, and raccoons.

  It could be argued that the open areas of the caverns felt as much like a Disney creation as Space Mountain. There were no dangerous mazes, no precipitous heights, no tight squeezes. Still, it was a cave, and so Anna had passed on repeat trips. Given the inevitable nature of things, she would spend much of eternity underground; no sense rushing on down before the grim reaper called for her. Her love of bats might have overcome her fear of enclosed spaces, but if one waited, the splendid little creatures were good enough to come out and be enjoyed in less stygian realms.

  This December she had been sent to CACA from her home park in Mesa Verde, Colorado. Trained teams consisting of park rangers from all over the region responded to catastrophes that ranged from hurricanes to presidential visits. This time it was the injury of a caver.

  Had the caver been hurt in Carlsbad Cavern, extrication would have been simple: pop her in a wheelchair, roll her down to the snack bar and onto the elevator. She’d have been home before her mother knew she was missing.

  But this caver had been injured in Lechuguilla. The cave was on NPS lands near CACA’s headquarters. Lechuguilla was closed to the general public for the protection of both the cave and the visitors. Nearly ninety miles of the cave had been explored but it would be many years before it was fully mapped. Lech was a monster man-eating cave, dangerous to get into and harder to get out of.

  Two days into Lechuguilla, a member of the survey team had been hurt in an accident. Not surprisingly there’d been a contingent of experienced cavers at Carlsbad at the time, a small but dedicated group given to squeezing themselves into dark holes and living to write home about it.

  Before Anna and her teammates had descended on the park, the cavers had begun doing what they did best: getting one of their own back. Procedures in place from the last, well-publicized rescue from Lechuguilla, in 1991, the NPS had mobilized in record time. Within four hours of the report, Anna had been on a plane to El Paso. By the time she reached Carlsbad more than two dozen others from the southwestern region had arrived.

  With the overhead team came the inevitable Porta-Johns, food trucks, and power struggles.

  On duty less than three hours, Anna was happy to sit out the political squabbles in Oscar Iverson’s snug little office. There, far from the madding crowd, she manned the phones in her official capacity as information officer, doling out approved statements to a press already panting for another media glut like that generated by the Baby Jessica case in Texas. When she was eight hundred feet below the surface of the earth and two days’ travel from the light of day, a grown woman in a limestone cave was almost as good as a baby in a well shaft.

  For the past half hour reporters had been getting short shrift. Anna was reading. By chance she’d picked Trapped!, the story of caver Floyd Collins, off Iverson’s shelves. It detailed the gruesome death and media circus surrounding the entrapment of a caver in the 1920s. Collins had become wedged in a tight passage; his attempts to wriggle free had brought down loose dirt and rock, entombing him from neck to heels, his arms pinned at his sides. For thirteen days, friends had made the dangerous descent to feed him, while up above concessionaires sold food and souvenirs to an ever-growing crowd of vultures gathered in curiosity, sympathy, and morbidity. On the fourteenth day rains so softened the earth that the access tunnel collapsed. Collins was left to die alone.

  Scrawled in the margin of the book were the words “fact: wedge victims die.”

  Transfixed by the same dread a woman in a stranded VW might feel watching a logging truck bearing down on her, Anna was glued to the book. Iverson, Carlsbad’s cave specialist, gusted into her sanctuary, and she dropped Trapped!, glad to be rescued from its bleak pages. He waved her back into his ergonomically correct office chair and folded himself haphazardly over the corner of the desk.

  Housed in an old stone building built in the 1920s, the office was small, crowded by two desks, the walls lined with metal shelving and stuffed with books. Sprawled over the cluttered desktop, Oscar looked as homey and leggy as a spider in his web. Long limbs poked out the fabric of his trousers at knee and hip. His arms, seeming to bend in several places along their bony length, were stacked like sticks on his thighs. Come Halloween it would take only a little white paint to pass him off as a respectable skeleton. A mummy of the sere and unwrapped variety would be even easier. The man looked made of leather, hide tanned by the desert, hair coarse and straw-colored from the sun. Anna guessed he was close to her age, maybe forty-five or -six.

  “Got some bizarre news,” he said, banging his heel softly against the metal of the desk.

  For whom the bell tolls, Anna’s mind translated the hollow ringing.

  “Now that the relatives have been notified we can release the name of the injured woman. Frieda Dierkz. And she’s asking for one Anna Pigeon.”

  Shit, Anna thought. It tolls for me.

  “Frieda?” she echoed stupidly.

  Iverson shot her a startled look. “Don’t you know her? From the intensity of the summons, I got the idea you two were best buds.”

  “Buds.” Anna’s mind was paralyzed, not so much by shock as by incongruity. Hearing Frieda’s name in reference to the victim of the rescue was akin to running into one’s old grammar school teacher in an opium den.

  “She’s the dispatcher at Mesa Verde,” Anna managed. “We’re . . . friends.” They were friends, fairly close friends, and Anna wondered why she’d sounded so half-hearted.

  “Dierkz was on the s
urvey team,” Oscar said patiently, his washed-out hazel eyes trying to read Anna’s face.

  It wasn’t an earth-shattering revelation. Most cavers led other lives. They were geologists and physicists, beekeepers and bums; regular folks who had been bitten by an irregular bug that compelled them to creep beneath the skin of the world every chance they got. Anna had seen the photos of a helmeted and mud-bedaubed Frieda grinning out from nasty little crevices Anna wouldn’t go into for love or money, and she’d listened with half an ear about her upcoming “vacation.” She’d just not put two and two together.

  “What does she want me for?” Without much caring, Anna noted the disapproval sharpening Iverson’s gaze. She could guess where it came from: cavers helped cavers. It was an unwritten law of survival. Who else was going to fish them out of the god-awful places they insisted on pushing their way into? Iverson stared, and Anna stared back, refusing to apologize or explain. A moment passed, and his look softened. Perhaps he reminded himself she was not a caver but a mere mortal.

  “The injury is worse than first thought.” He spoke slowly as if Anna had a learning disability. His voice was low, gentling. She would have been irritated at the condescension had she not known Iverson always talked that way. “The caver who hiked out said a broken leg. Painful but not life-threatening. Apparently the rock that smashed her kneecap struck a glancing blow to her left temple as it fell. She was knocked unconscious but only briefly. We just got a second report. It was brought out by a member of another team surveying in the Great Beyond. He met up with one of Dierkz’s team in Windy City and brought out a message. She’s been slipping in and out of consciousness and has suffered some disorientation.”