Ill Wind Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  PRAISE FOR ILL WIND

  “Ill Wind is a breath of fresh air in the crowded mystery field. . . . Anna is delightfully human . . . Barr’s writing is magical.” —Orlando Sentinel

  “Her characters are complex and three-dimensional, nicely drawn with just the right combination of good and evil tempered by quirkiness. . . . But it’s Barr’s descriptions of the park, its history and natural beauty that most delight.”

  —USA Today

  “A winner... wherever Anna Pigeon goes, she’ll bring along a big group of fans.” —Arizona Daily Star

  “Fun... magnetic... 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 stolidity 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

  “Fascinating... a spirited tale... a solid mystery ... With Barr’s skill at description, Mesa Verde comes to life.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A spine-chiller... a haunting tale of murder among the ruins.” —New Woman

  “Nevada Barr is a beguiling storyteller with a gift for making fiction appear more real (and more entertaining) than fact. Her people, especially the complex Anna, ring true, and her evocation of the wilderness she knows and loves ranks among the best nature writing anywhere. Barr’s first two novels gained her an enthusiastic following, her third will not disappoint.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Barr writes with a naturalist’s keen eye for detail and an environmentalist’s passion for the outdoors.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Anna is a pure joy.” —The Denver Post

  “In Anna Pigeon, author Barr may have created the most appealing mystery series heroine to come along since Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone... A character who’ll be around to entertain us, hopefully, as long as Nevada Barr doesn’t run out of national parks.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Unforgettable... immensely satisfying... a book the reader never wants to end... Barr proves once and for all that she belongs among the most exalted names in the mystery field—Tony Hillerman, Sue Grafton, Dick Francis. She is, on every level, their equal... A book this good is not only a great treat, it’s also a rare and wondrous privilege. Don’t miss out.” —The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

  “An outstanding novel... As much a personal journey of self-discovery as it is a mystery.” —Booklist

  “Nevada Barr writes with uncommon sensitivity, style, and polish. She is indeed a rare talent you should not pass up.”

  —Mystery News

  “Nevada Barr is an expert guide... She will leave you yearning to read more about Anna Pigeon.”

  —John Lutz, Edgar Award-winning author

  PRAISE FOR

  NEVADA BARR

  and the award-winning Anna Pigeon novels . . .

  “Nevada Barr is one of the best.” —The Boston Globe

  “A constant source of pleasure.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Nevada Barr writes with a cool, steady hand about the violence of nature and the cruelty of man.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A true original... like a combination of Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Sherlock Holmes, and Maureen O’Hara, the engaging character of Anna Pigeon is the only reason most readers will need to return to this series again and again. But it doesn’t hurt that Barr can write rhapsodic passages about America’s beautiful parks and cobble up page-turning whodunits.” —The Denver Post

  “Nevada Barr can take the most improbable plot and turn it into a fascinating foray into the human psyche, then dress it up with eloquent descriptions of the great outdoors she so obviously adores... She’s also one of the more eloquent mystery writers around, having the ability to make you feel the chill of the night, smell the smoke of a campfire, experience the isolation of the wilderness. She’s worth reading just for that alone.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Barr combines primo mysteries with what always feels like a virtual reality tour of one of the parks... There is beauty here. Still, Anna never loses her edginess in a world where your life depends on having a backup light for your backup light.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “There truly is no finer writer in the realm today, and her descriptive prose in observance of the natural world is always stunning.” —Pages

  “From the fabric of fiction she creates real worlds, sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying, but always convincing.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  Titles by Nevada Barr

  FICTION

  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

  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.

  ILL WIND

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Avon special edition / November 1995

  Avon edition / April 1996

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / May 1997

  Berkley edition / June 2004

  Copyright © 1995 by Nevada Barr.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without

  permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via

  the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher

  is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized

  electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic

  piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s

  rights is appreciated.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04223-6

  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 and the “B” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Deb and Ed, without whom . . .

  Well, frankly, I shudder to think.

  ONE

  NO GRAVEYARDS; THAT BOTHERED ANNA. PEOPLE died. Unless you ate them,
burned them, or mailed them to a friend, the bodies had to go somewhere. In any event, there would at least be bones. A civilization that lived and died for six hundred years should leave a mountain of bones.

  No graveyards and then no people. Inhabitants cooking, weaving, farming one day, then, the next, gone. Pots still on cold ashes, doormats rotting in doorways, tools lying beside half-finished jobs.

  So: an invading army swooped down and massacred everybody. Then where were the bashed-in skulls? Chipped bone fragments? Teeth sown like corn?

  A plague: the American version of the Black Death, an antiquated form of Captain Tripps, killing two out of every three people. The survivors abandoning a desolated community, carting thousands and thousands of dead bodies with them? Not bloody likely. Not in a society without benefit of the wheel.

  Once people got factored into an equation all bets were off; still, there ought to be corpses. Anna couldn’t think of any civilization that couldn’t be counted on to leave corpses and garbage for the next generation.

  A hand smacked down on the Formica and Anna started in her chair.

  “Where were you?” hissed Alberta Stinson, head of Interpretation for Chapin Mesa.

  “Anywhere but here, Al,” Anna whispered back. She dragged a hand down her face to clear it of dreams and looked surreptitiously at her watch. The staff meeting had been dragging on for two hours. The coffee was done and there never had been any doughnuts.

  Stinson poked Anna in the ribs with a blunt forefinger. “Stay awake. The Boys are on a rampage.” Al always referred to Mesa Verde’s administration rather disdainfully as “The Boys.” Stinson was fifteen pounds over what the glossy magazines recommended, with salt-and-pepper hair that looked as if it had been cut with pinking shears. Leading tours, giving programs, wandering the myriad ruins on the mesas, she had a face creased by the weather from forehead to chin, and the skin around her eyes was crinkled from squinting against the sun’s glare. Near as Anna could tell, the woman had but two passions in life: discovering why the Old Ones had vanished and seeing to it that any despoilers of their relics did likewise.

  Anna pulled Stinson’s yellow pad toward her. Beneath Al’s sketches of nooses, guillotines, and other means of mayhem, she scribbled: “No help here. I’m a lowly GS-7. No teeth.”

  Al snorted.

  Thirty minutes had elapsed since Anna had mentally checked out and still the debate raged. Money had come down from Congress, scads of the stuff, allocated for the digging up and replacing of the antiquated waterline serving the homes and public buildings of Mesa Verde National Park. Since May heavy machinery and heated arguments had roared over the ancient land. Meetings had been called and called off on a weekly basis.

  The resultant acrimony clogged the high desert air like dust from the ditcher. As always in small towns, toxins trickled down. When the powers that be waged war, the peasants took sides. Even the seasonals gathered in tight groups, biting assorted backs and sipping righteous indignation with beer chasers.

  New to the mesa, Anna’d not been drafted into either army, but the constant dissension wore at her nerves and aggravated her hermit tendencies.

  Around a table of metal and Formica—the kind usually reserved for the serving of bad chicken at awards banquets—sat the leading players: a lean and hungry-looking administrative officer with a head for figures and an eye for progress; the chief ranger, a wary whip of a man determined to drag the park out of the dark ages of plumbing and into the more impressive visitation statistics additional water would allow; Ted Greeley, the contractor hired to pull off this feat in a timely manner; and Al Stinson: historian, archaeologist, and defender of the dead. Or at least the sanctity of science’s claim on the dead.

  When the Anasazi had vanished from the mesa, their twelfth-century secrets had vanished with them. Stinson was determined to stop twentieth-century machinery from destroying any clue before it was studied. Since the entire landscape of Chapin Mesa was a treasure trove of artifacts, the digging of so much as a post hole gave the archaeologist nightmares. The contractor had been brought on board to trench seventeen miles of land six feet deep.

  Theodore Roosevelt Greeley of Greeley Construction had a job to do and was being paid handsomely to do it. Though Greeley had a veneer of bonhomie, he struck Anna as a hard-core capitalist. She suspected that to his modern Manifest Destiny mentality, the only good Indian was a profitable Indian.

  Fingers ever-tensed on the purse strings, the chief ranger and the administrative officer leaned toward Greeley’s camp.

  Anna and Hills Dutton, the district ranger, were the only noncombatants present. Dutton’s impressive form was slouched in a folding chair near the end of the table. He’d removed the ammunition from the magazine of his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter and appeared to be inventorying it bullet by bullet.

  “Anna?”

  As was his wont, the chief ranger was mumbling and it took her a second to recognize her name.

  “What?”

  “Any input?” The chief was just shifting the heat from himself. None of this august body gave two hoots about what she thought. She and Hills were there only because the secretary refused to go for coffee.

  “Well, if all nonessential personnel were required to live out of the park the problem would be alleviated considerably.” Nonessential included not only seasonal interpreters, but also archaeologists, department heads, the administrative officer, the chief ranger, and the superintendent himself. Anna’s suggestion was met with annoyed silence. Satisfied she’d offended everyone at the table and it would be a good long time before they again bothered her for her “input,” Anna retreated back into her own world.

  WHEN visitors left for the day and evening light replaced noon’s scientific glare, she escaped the hubbub.

  It soothed her to be where the people weren’t. After working backcountry in wilderness parks—Guadalupe Mountains in Texas and Isle Royale in Lake Superior—Mesa Verde, with its quarter million-plus visitors each year, struck her as urban. During the day, when the ruins were open to the public, she couldn’t walk far enough to escape the hum of traffic and the sullen growl of buses idling as they disgorged tour groups.

  After closing time, on the pretext of a patrol, she would slip down into the new quiet of Cliff Palace, one of the largest of the Anasazi villages ever discovered. Climbing as high as was allowed, she would sit with her back to the still-warm stone of the ancient walls, around her rooms and turrets and towers, sunken chambers connected by tunnels, plazas with stone depressions for grinding.

  The pueblo hung above a world that fell away for a hundred miles, mesas, buttes, and green valleys fading to the blue of the distant mountain ranges that drifted into the blue of the sky. The air was crisp and thin. Without moisture to laden it with perfumes, it carried only the sharp scent baked from piñon and ponderosa.

  From her perch high in the ruin she would gaze down Cliff Canyon. Dwellings appeared singly, first one, then two, then half a dozen, like the hidden pictures in a child’s puzzle.

  Tiny jewel cities tucked in natural alcoves beneath the mesa stood sentinel over the twisting valleys. Nearly all faced west or southwest, catching the heat of the winters’ sun, providing shade through the summers. The towns were built with fine craftsmanship, the work of practiced masons evident in the hand-chipped and fitted stones. Walls were whitewashed and painted, and decorations of stars and handprints enlivened the sandstone. Doorways were made in the shape of keyholes. Ladders, constructed of juniper and hide, reached rooms built on shelves forty and fifty feet above the slate of the alcove’s floor.

  These were not tents for folding and slipping away silently into the night. These were edifices, art, architecture. Homes built to last the centuries. If the builders had been driven out, surely the marauders would have taken up residence, enjoyed their spoils?

  If the Old Ones had not died and they’d not left of their own volition and they’d not been driven out...

  Then what? Anna thought.<
br />
  Food for thought.

  Plots for Von Daniken.

  ANNA’S radio crackled to life and everyone at the table, including Al, looked at her as if she’d made a rude noise.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured.

  As she left the room she found herself hoping for something dire: a brawl at the concession dorm, another medical at Cliff Palace, a bus wreck—anything to keep her out of the staff meeting.

  “Seven hundred, three-one-two,” she answered the call.

  “Could you come by the CRO?” the dispatcher asked. Frieda, the chief ranger’s secretary and the park dispatcher, was always even-toned and professional. From her voice one could never tell whether a bloody nose or grand-theft auto awaited at the chief ranger’s office.

  “I’m on my way. And thank you.”

  “KFC seven hundred, fourteen-eighteen.”

  The chief ranger’s office was built from blocks of native stone and beamed-in logs darkened by time. Like the museum and the upper-echelon permanent employees’ houses, the CRO was a historic structure built in the nineteen thirties by the Civilian Conservation Corps when “another day, another dollar” was the literal truth.