Blood Lure Read online

  "You want to get a coat or something?" Anna asked. It wasn't so much that she hated to see a fellow human being suffering as that she wanted his full attention.

  She got it.

  "A coat?" He met her eyes with sudden suspicion. "Why?"

  Anna shrugged. Maybe vanity made him prickly about his outerwear.

  "It's getting cold. Looks like the mosquitoes are eating you up. I thought you'd be more comfortable."

  He relaxed. "No. I'm fine. You want to sit down? Pull up a chair." He laughed, the hollow angry sound of a man annoyed Glacier National Park didn't see fit to furnish their campsites. "These mosquitoes are awful. I thought you weren't supposed to have mosquitoes up here. God's country and all that."

  "I've got some mosquito repellent in my pack you can use," Anna offered as she folded herself neatly on the packed ground near his tarpaulin.

  He took the insect repellent readily enough and smeared it on his face and arms. "Bill McCaskil," he introduced himself as he handed it back. Sans bugs he was more personable. Anna got down to the business of interviewing.

  "Did you meet a Mrs. Van Slyke around camp at all?" she asked.

  "No, like I said, I keep to myself."

  Anna waited. His answer had come too fast. Sure enough, pressured by silence, he amended it.

  "Carolyn Van Slyke? Was she the blond lady, kind of beefy around the hips? I might have talked to her a couple of times."

  Anna'd figured that. The other couple had mistakenly assumed Carolyn was married to Bill McCaskil. The only reason strangers would assume that is because they saw the two of them together. It occurred to Anna that she'd only referred to the deceased—or at the very least, the missing—woman as "Mrs. Van Slyke." McCaskil had called her Carolyn. The two of them had been on a first-name basis. Not necessarily telling. Campgrounds were informal places.

  "Did you eat together, hike together, anything like that?" Anna asked.

  McCaskil shot her a sharp look. "We may have eaten at the same time, I guess. There's only that one place to do it." He didn't like being questioned. Maybe he hated to get involved. Maybe he just didn't like being messed with. Still, there was something about him that set Anna's teeth on edge. She watched for a moment trying to put her finger on what it was.

  He was good-looking enough. The determinedly reddish hair had a natural wave to it. A lean face and strong hooked nose over a well-shaped month lent him strength. The effect was marred but not ruined by acne scarring on his checks and chin. His body was attractive: tall and lean and gym-buffed. The kind of fit that doesn't look fit for much but mod-cling clothes.

  Thinking that, it came to her why she felt a wrongness. He didn't want to be here. Didn't like the wilderness. Didn't like camping. His repeated desire to get away from people didn't ring true under the circumstances. He struck her as the sort who, if wanting solitude, would go to the clubs on an off night when the crowds were thinned. So why was he on a solitary backpacking trip in Glacier National Park?

  Anna decided on the direct approach: "So why did you decide to come on a solitary backpacking trip in Glacier National Park?"

  For most visitors this was not a trick question. It was one they were dying to answer in great effusive gusts. McCaskil acted as if she'd asked for the solution to a complex algebraic problem.

  "Why does anybody decide to go anywhere?" he countered finally.

  Anna went on to ask the questions she'd come to ask but unsurprisingly Bill hadn't noticed when or where Carolyn Van Slyke was at any given time. The one piece of information he did throw out was that Mr. and Mrs. Van Slyke's marriage wasn't made in heaven.

  "You wouldn't believe the way she talked to that old boy," was how he put it.

  "Did they fight?" Anna asked.

  "Not fight. I don't think there's any fight left in that man if there was any to begin with."

  "What then?"

  "She was a carper. Carped on him all the time. Snide little comments about his paunch, his bald head. He couldn't do anything right. The poor bastard. A woman talked that way to me would get a fat lip. Not that boy: 'yes dear, no dear.'" Bill laughed, showing big white teeth, the two front incisors turned in toward each other giving him a jagged animal bite. The laughter was derisive and aimed, it seemed to Anna, not at Mrs. Van Slyke but at the poor bastard who'd married her.

  Leaving his camp, threading her way down the footpath past the other sites, Anna resisted the urge to break into a run. Bill McCaskil had a dark indrawn tension about him that made her uneasy. A mean streak, if his response to Lester's humiliation was any indication.

  She stopped again at the camp where the midwestern couple was staying. The woman, as domestic as you please, was neatly hanging socks from a tent rope.

  "One more thing," Anna said, feeling so much like Columbo she was immediately self-conscious.

  "Yes?" the woman said politely.

  "Do you remember why you thought the blond woman was married to the tall man camped back up there?"

  The woman paused a moment, a sock held before her in two hands. "It's just that they were always together, I suppose. Not holding hands or huggy-kissy but just together. Here and there. I do remember seeing the little man, her husband I guess he is, but not so much with her."

  "Thanks." Anna went on her way. McCaskil had a closer relationship to Carolyn Van Slyke than he had admitted. Why not say so? There were no laws against socializing in the backcountry. If he knew she'd been murdered, it would make sense. No one wants his vacation taken over by the tedious machinery of law enforcement. In the wilderness, no neighbors, coworkers, political opponents or extended family to focus on, there was a definite lack of much in the way of suspects. Because he was there and an unsavory type, Anna filtered McCaskil through her mind. Had he known Carolyn before, followed her or met her here at her invitation? Was he, so obviously uncomfortable away from the amenities of civilization, merely here on a hunting trip and Carolyn was unfortunate enough to be the game?

  Anna found it much easier to imagine Bill McCaskil crouched over a kill, elbow deep in blood, than the unassuming Lester Van Slyke. McCaskil told Anna there was significant friction between Les and his wife. Merely a ploy to cast suspicion on Les by providing him with a motive for killing Carolyn?

  Unaware she did so Anna shook her head. It hadn't felt that way. McCaskil called Lester "old boy" and "poor bastard," remarking that there was no fight left in him. That was not the portrayal of a man capable of violence. Not unless Bill McCaskil was so infernally clever and torturously subtle that he painted the picture of the quintessential worm in hopes Anna would make the leap to the idea that the worm had turned, and in a big way.

  "Anna? Are you in there?"

  Anna came out of her self-induced trance to see Joan peering at her from a foot away. Wrapped tight in her own thoughts, Anna hadn't realized she'd come to a stop in the middle of the trail half a dozen yards from the food preparation area.

  "How many fingers am I holding up?" Joan asked.

  "Sorry," Anna apologized and followed Joan's lead down the path.

  "I've heard of people being in a brown study," Joan said. "I'd just never seen anybody get locked in before."

  "My powers of concentration frighten even me," Anna replied.

  Joan laughed. "Well, concentrate on walking. We need to get back before dark. If you remember, Mr. Bear left our campsite at sixes and sevens."

  Sixes and sevens hardly described the utter ruin of their camp. Twilight was settling toward night as they arrived. The three of them stopped on the edge of the little clearing, no one in a hurry to go into it. Overhead the sky was the sea green peculiar to mountain dusk. No shadows fell, they merely gathered beneath the trees, growing stronger as night neared.

  An anxiousness as cold as the sweat of sickness balled behind Anna's breastbone. Days busy with the search and then the body recovery, bustling with people and helicopters, had driven out the rending visceral fear she'd felt the night the grizzly had come for them. In te
lling and retelling, the tale had grown unreal, like a war story borrowed from someone else's battle. It was real now.

  The tents she and Joan had piled up were ragged with great tears. Fragments of cloth and clothing littered the grass. It was way too easy to believe the bear was nearby, just waiting for darkness.

  "He's moved on by now," Joan said, as if the same fear raked her insides. "They have a huge range and he didn't get any food reward here."

  "Maybe he wasn't looking for food," Anna said.

  "What?"

  Anna didn't repeat her comment. It didn't make sense even to her. It was just a remark the subconscious had smuggled past her censors to her tongue.

  "There're the new tents." Rory pointed to two undamaged blue stuff sacks set by the boulder that dominated the green.

  "Let's get to it." Anna forced herself to move. "We'll feel better after we're situated and fed."

  Tents were pitched. By common, unspoken consent the shredded remains of those they'd slept in two nights before were bundled out of sight behind the rock. The "fed" portion of Anna's rehabilitative program had to be skipped except for what snacks they could find in their day packs. For reasons they could not fathom, when the bear team had dropped off the replacement tents, they had taken down the food from where it was cached and packed it out.

  "What the hell do they think we're supposed to eat?" Anna groused.

  "Maybe they were more concerned with what might eat us," Joan returned.

  Anna decided she wasn't all that hungry anyway. What she mostly was, was tired.

  Anna and Joan had shoved their personal things willy-nilly into a garbage bag the morning after the attack, when their organizational skills had been somewhat challenged. As night came on, they sat around the bag, flashlights trained upon it, like brigands dividing their spoils. Anna found herself wishing for the hissing glare of Coleman lanterns, something more substantial than a six-inch Maglight to keep the terrors of the dark at bay.

  From what she could observe, Joan wasn't doing much better and Rory was just about jumping out of his skin every time one of them shifted in their seat and made a scuffling noise that could be attributed to bears stalking. Cold was rushing in with the darkness; Anna's muscles tensed against it. They all needed hot food.

  The divvying up went on. Joan, like Mrs. Santa, disappeared head and arms into the bag and brought out the things one at a time.

  Moccasins for Anna, underwear for Joan, a single sock for Rory. Sweater for Joan, Levi's for Anna, water bottle for Rory.

  Anna suddenly broke out of the Christmas rhythm and jerked her spine straight. "Goddamn motherfucking water bottle," she growled.

  The other two looked at her as if she'd gone insane.

  8

  Anna chose not to explain her outburst. Under pressure she claimed chronic and fleeting Tourette's syndrome. The questions that the wretched water bottle brought to mind were not those she wished to pursue in the dark of night ten hours' hike from reliable backup.

  Though unasked, the questions were hot and sharp in her brain and they kept her from sleep. Beside her, snuggled into her navy-blue down bag, Joan snored gently. Women snoring was a well-kept secret. Not from the world at large or husbands and lovers and roommates with ears to hear, but from the women who did it. Idly, Anna wondered if she snored. No one had ever told her she did, but then they wouldn't, would they? It crossed her mind to wake Joan up, make her listen to scary stories. She seriously considered doing it on the "one little cloud is lonely" and "misery loves company" schools of thought. The snoring made her relent. Joan had such a happy, child-like snore. On an occasion less fraught with evil surmisings, Anna would have found it as reliable a soporific as Piedmont's deep and rumbling purr.

  Curling herself into a ball like a corkscrewed cocoon, her soft underbelly protected from the predators, Anna gave herself over to the lonely contemplation of the goddamn motherfucking water bottle. Or, to be precise, water bottles plural. There were three. Three unusual, mailorder-only, hot-off-the-presses water bottles, all with a built-in filter, all by the same manufacturer.

  Rory had one when they started their adventure. Rory had one when they found him after his thirty-six hours lost. Les had had one at Fifty Mountain. Now Rory had two. The only member of the family who did not appear to have one, who, indeed, had no water bottle at all, was Carolyn Van Slyke, the dead woman. Surely the bottles had been a family affair. Probably researched, ordered and disbursed by Carolyn herself. Lester didn't appear to know or care much about backpacking. Rory was new to it. But Carolyn was a photographer and her hiking boots, if Anna remembered correctly, were old and much used.

  Rory had not taken water with him when he fled the bear. It was here, in camp, in a garbage bag the whole time. Sometime in the day and a half Mrs. Van Slyke went missing, she'd lost her water bottle. Sometime during those same thirty-six hours Rory had acquired it, or one just like it.

  Anna reached behind her, running her hand along the floor of the tent where it met with the nylon wall. Her fingers found the slick folds of plastic-wrap draped loosely around a cylinder, and she was reassured the mystery bottle was still in her possession. She'd lifted it quietly first chance she got. Not the bottle from the garbage bag, but the one Rory had been carrying when he turned up unscathed from his sojourn.

  Ideally, to preserve the fingerprints, the bottle would have been put in a paper bag. Having none, Anna had improvised. When she arrived safe and sound back in West Glacier, she would turn it over to Harry Ruick so it could be dusted for fingerprints and tested for blood residue. If it did turn out to belong to Carolyn Van Slyke, Rory was going to be in an awkward position.

  Cold swept down her spine from nape to nether regions as a Psycho-like image of a knife plunging through the thin nylon of the tent took over her consciousness: a picture of Rory, wild-eyed and hair awry, running amok in camp. Curling down more tightly, she suffered the craven wish that Joan rather than she slept on the side of the tent nearest Rory's.

  Pushing Hitchcock's genius for evil aside, she comforted herself with thoughts of murderers. Often, in prisons it was the murderers who were chosen as trustees. Not that rare bird the serial killer, but garden-variety one-corpse-type murderers. These men and women were in reality no longer a threat to society. They had killed the person they needed to be dead and were done. Usually these were people who had killed someone they knew and, in their own minds at least, killed them for a perfectly good reason.

  What perfectly good reason could Rory have for killing his stepmother? The butchery to the woman's face, done after death, suggested a desire to annihilate Carolyn Van Slyke as a person, hatred so great that merely taking her life was not adequate to slake it.

  Rory spoke as if he admired his stepmom and scorned his biological father. That fit the pattern if he was an abused child. Children have an uncanny ability to know that to survive they must please and placate the abuser. To an outsider, they appear to be genuinely attached. If Rory suffered at Carolyn's hands and his dad failed to protect him, he might understandably hate him for it, cleave to Carolyn.

  But Rory was no longer a little kid and, though not a beefy young man, he was strong and fit. Once the child was no longer a child the pattern shifted, fanned out. Any number of responses of the adult victim would be normal. Including a rage so long sublimated to the survival needs of a child that when it broke free it resulted in homicide.

  The theory hung together after a fashion, but Anna was unsatisfied. Too many unanswered questions. If Rory was the murderer, how did he set up the assignation with his stepmother? If he didn't and meeting her was simply a coincidence happening after he ran from the bear, what did he use to carve off her face? Only the exceptionally deranged—or the marvellously foresighted—slept with a cleaver secreted about their pajamas. If is not necessary that you think so much. Molly, in her role as psychiatrist and worried sister, had given that advice to Anna shortly after her husband died. Anna heard the words again now and resolutely c
leared her mind of boys and cleavers and high-tech drinking apparatus. Into this cleared space came the gentle rhythm of Joan Rand's snore. Anna let it lull her to sleep.

  The hike down was uneventful. They went back the way they had come, West Flattop Trail east to Fifty Mountain Camp then Flattop Trail south to the sheared-off edge of the mountain where the steep descent began. The country they traveled was beginning to look way too familiar to Anna. Walking through the common miracle of intensely green and living glacier lilies bursting joyously through exhausted black char, she found she looked mostly to the mountains rising above Flattop, and dreamed about new trails and new views. Cleveland, Merrit, Wilbur. Wilbur, for Christ's sake. Mundane names for objects of such staggering beauty.

  Rory was leading the way. Anna had made him point man on the flimsy pretext that it would be good for his orienteering skills—as if a blind three-year-old could get lost on the clear tracks of Glacier's main trails. He complied. Joan looked her questions but never asked them. The answer would have been that Anna just didn't feel comfortable with Rory at her back. She wanted the lad where she could keep an eye on him until a few wrinkles were ironed out.

  None of the three of them said more than a dozen words the entire trip, not even when they stopped and ate their meager lunches. Anna'd had too many words in her mouth over the past three days and was glad to be rid of the taste of them. Joan seemed lost in her own thoughts. From the expression on her face in unguarded moments, none of them were particularly jolly. Rory was silent as well but for what reasons, Anna could not fathom. He knew his stepmother, whom—if he did not kill— he presumably liked, was probably dead. Yet he did not grieve or fret in any of the ways Anna had come to expect. Perhaps he was in classic and total denial, but she didn't think so. That would require a veneer of high spirits. He appeared simply to be a man with a complex issue that drew his energies inward as he worked through the ramifications. Whatever it was it didn't seem to frighten or sadden him and it didn't slow his pace, so Anna was happy.