Blood Lure Page 13

  Nominally Anna would still be working with Joan. She would accompany her and Rory into the backcountry, but her first priority would be the murder of Carolyn Van Slyke.

  "Today I want you to interview Rory. I'll take his dad," Harry said. "Something's not kosher with those two but damned if I can figure out what."

  Both Van Slykes arrived shortly before three o'clock. Anna met them in the foyer, a plain, barely decorated area just inside the glass doors where the receptionist's desk sat. A much older looking Lester occupied the only chair. His son, hands thrust deeply in his pockets, stood before a black and white photo of the old headquarters building studying it as if its architecture was going to be on a test they were about to take.

  Anna sent Les down the hall to the chief ranger's office. She took Rory to the conference room. Joan was gone and Anna missed her. She'd not consciously admitted that she wanted Joan there for the interview but she found she did.

  "Mind if I tape this?" Anna asked and put a recorder on the table.

  "Whatever."

  Anna pushed the Record button.

  "You want anything?" she asked as he slumped into Joan's vacated chair and began mindlessly spinning it in slow circles on its axis. "Coke or coffee or anything?"

  "Nothing. I don't want anything."

  Anna was relieved. She'd made the offer out of habit. She had no idea where these amenities were to be found in Glacier's headquarters. "Me neither," she said and sat down. For as long as a minute, an exceedingly long time for silence between two people not long acquainted, she watched him, waiting to see what he'd do, which way he'd break under pressure.

  He stopped his spinning and occupied himself by staring out the window watching the maintenance vehicles going by the parking lot to the maintenance yard beyond. There was a stiffness to his neck and shoulders that suggested he could play this game till the metaphorical cows came home. Evidently, in his young life, he'd become accustomed to protecting his inner world from outside storms.

  Anna let another thirty seconds crawl by to make sure. Looking at Rory, the deceptively fragile frame, the thick sandy hair, coarse and falling like hay across his unlined brow, the deep-set blue eyes, she didn't think he looked like a boy who'd kill his mom. But then what did a matricide look like? In the imagination they were sly, sinister, horned and hairy. In reality they were just people. Kids. Whatever was broken was deep inside, out of the public view. Children murdering their own parents was uncommon but by no means unheard of. Often it was the "good" boys who did it. With the possible exception of Lizzy Borden it was always boys, Anna noted. She could call to mind three incidents in the past two years. Sons murdering Mom and Dad. But never mutilating them.

  "I'm real sorry about your stepmother," she said.

  Reluctantly, Rory brought his gaze back into the room. It settled not on Anna, but on the table between them.

  "Yeah . . . well... it happens."

  Anna breathed out slowly. It happens? Jesus. "How does it happen?" she asked neutrally.

  "People die."

  Anna could tell by his tone he was shooting for a matter-of-fact delivery. An underlying bitterness ruined the effect and she remembered his biological mother had died as well. This was a double trauma for Rory. The new coupled with the inevitable reliving of the old. Mentally, she readjusted. This upwelling of the severest of childhood wounds could account for any number of incongruent behaviors.

  "Can't argue with that," she said and Rory's eyes met hers. In the blue depths she saw that spark kids get when adults surprise them by not being unutterably obtuse.

  "Who'd want to kill your stepmother?" Anna made no attempt to soften the question.

  If it jarred him, he didn't show it. His eyes strayed again to the parking lot, unseeing as he searched inside his skull for an answer. Anna thought she saw one briefly illuminate his eyes then fade. It appeared not to be so much rejected as hidden. Finally Rory said, "There's a few, but none of 'em here. I mean, who'd be here? Why not just run her over in a crosswalk at home in Seattle?"

  Rory was nothing if not pragmatic about homicide.

  "A few?" Anna pressed.

  "Carolyn was a divorce lawyer," Rory said.

  "Oh. Right. Anybody specific?"

  "Maybe her ex-sister-in-law. Barbara something. She hated Mom."

  "Mom" and "Carolyn" were running neck and neck. Some unresolved conflicts there. Anna dearly wished Molly were at hand. Rory's world was definitely psychiatrist country.

  "I guess somebody could have followed her here." Rory sounded hopeful, and why not? He wasn't stupid. He'd know they'd be looking hard at both himself and his dad. Television had done a thorough job of destroying naivete and replacing it, often as not, with misinformation.

  "Could be," Anna said, but didn't believe it. Too intricate. Too much trouble. Rory was right, a crosswalk in a city would be a lot more likely.

  Anna changed direction. "Tell me what she was like."

  Rory flashed her a look of alarm that Anna didn't understand, then settled into a careful recitation of facts: height, weight, color of hair, occupation, educational background. Not the usual stuff a kid would choose to describe what a deceased parent was like. Anna didn't think he'd misunderstood the question. He was avoiding it.

  "How'd she get on with your dad?" Rory's face hardened slightly. "You'd have to ask him."

  Anna let that lie between them for a while. Then she said, "So. You going to tell me where you got that water bottle?"

  A blank look from Rory did more to convince her he'd not snatched it from the dying hands of his stepmother than a mountain of protestations would have done. The look cleared as memory returned. The transition was too natural and held too many shades of awakening to be feigned. "The one I had when you guys found me after the bear tore up our camp?"

  "That very one. Where'd you get it?"

  "I don't know," Rory said.

  As improbable as that was, Anna found herself inclined to believe him. "Where'd you get it?" she repeated anyway.

  "I can't tell you." He was beginning to sound desperate.

  "Try."

  "I didn't have it I don't think—no, I know I didn't because I got thirsty—real thirsty—by the time the rain started."

  Anna thought back. That would have been just after sunup when she and Joan were gathering their wits and what was left of their bear-ravaged camp.

  "So you were thirsty," she prompted.

  "I was hot. I'd been running," he admitted. "I'd taken off my shirt. I lay down for a minute. The rain woke me up and the sweatshirt was gone and the water bottle was just there. After a while I guess I got to thinking I must have brought it from camp, but I didn't. Not really."

  Anna could understand that. The brain's job was to make sense of the world. When the world refused to fall into line, the brain was perfectly capable of rearranging memories until at least the appearance of order was restored.

  "Let me get this straight," Anna said. "While you were napping in the woods at dawn, lost to friends and family, someone or something stole your dirty sweatshirt and left you a bottle of much-needed water in its place. And all this without waking you up, asking if you were alive or dead."

  "That's it," Rory said, the stiff neck returning. "My sweatshirt wasn't all that dirty."

  "A kind of good fairy or guardian angel?" Anna asked, just to see if anger would shake anything more loose from the boy.

  Rory stared at the table, his lips pressed shut, undoubtedly to keep language unsuited for adults in authority shut behind his teeth. Danger past, he unlocked his jaws. "Maybe it was exactly that. A guardian angel. I needed water pretty bad, and all that day and the next I never came across any. Maybe I'd've died without that happening."

  Anna'd learned not to argue with magic. In her years of law enforcement, whenever a wizard had been pointed out she'd always been able to find the little man behind the curtain pulling levers. She suspected there'd be a mortal with feet of clay behind Rory's miracles as well. Mayb
e Rory's own size tens.

  "I must have had two water bottles with me," Rory said suddenly, clearly pleased with the idea. "And I brought one out of the tent with me. I just don't remember doing it."

  Anna's eyes narrowed. "You just said an angel gave it to you."

  "Yeah. Well. That's stupid. I must've had it with me before." Rory's voice turned sullen and mulish. "I took it with me when I left camp. I'd just forgot. There was the bear and all and I didn't feel so hot."

  Anna decided to let the matter go. For now.

  She turned off the tape recorder, dragged out a map and for the next twenty minutes nudged, badgered and cajoled Rory into approximating as closely as he could his journey during his thirty-six-hour hiatus. Every attempt ended the same. Rory knew where he'd started and he knew where he'd ended up. The hours and miles in between were a kaleidoscope turning timelessly through forest and scrub and burn. When it became evident he could not or would not be more specific, Anna backed off. If he wouldn't tell her, there was no way to force him. If he really couldn't tell her and she kept pushing, eventually he'd make something up to get her off his back.

  Convinced she'd gotten all she was going to at this juncture, she declared the interview at an end. Back in Harry's office she and Rory rejoined the chief ranger and Lester Van Slyke. A brief consultation convinced Anna and Ruick that an interview with Van Slyke, father and son, would not be a productive use of time. There'd been ample opportunity to watch the two of them interact when emotions were raw. By now defenses would be in place. They were excused with proper words of thanks and Anna was alone with Harry.

  Civilization diminished him. In the backcountry with a life and death situation to put his back into, he'd appeared younger and stronger than he did behind his desk, awards and diplomas arrayed around him.

  Anna caught a glimpse of herself reflected in his window. She was no great shakes either. Her short hair had more gray in it than she remembered noticing in the mirror and her age was beginning to tell its ever lengthening story in the marks under her eyes and in the softening at her jawline.

  "For the family of the dearly departed these boys are behaving in a decidedly strange manner," Ruick said. "Les is still determined to go on with his damned camping trip and he said Rory's still dead-set on finishing up the DNA project."

  "Rory talked to him?"

  "Called him last night at the hotel."

  Not having spent much time with Rory, Harry wouldn't know how peculiar that was. Maybe the death of Mrs. Van Slyke was bringing father and son together.

  "No sense letting a little thing like murder spoil your vacation plans," Ruick said cynically.

  The Van Slykes' decision to remain in Glacier had its upside from a law enforcement point of view. Though they might have their suspicions, there was no evidence on which to hold Les or his son. In park crimes, there was always the added difficulty of perpetrators and witnesses dispersing to faraway places before the investigation could be completed.

  "What do they mean us to do with the body?" Anna asked. "Leave it at the morgue in Flathead County till it's time to go home?"

  "Sort of. Les has that all worked out. Soon as the autopsy's done he wants it cremated locally. He'll pick up the ashes after his camping trip."

  "No funeral, memorial service, nothing?"

  "Apparently not. He seemed to be genuinely grieving for his wife. He teared up a few times, if that means anything. More than that, though, he seemed angry at her."

  "That's natural enough," Anna said, remembering her sister's lectures when she'd turned angry at her husband, Zach, after he'd died. Abandonment was as universal a fear as fear of falling. Fear had a way of turning inward. In women it usually manifested itself as depression, in men, anger.

  "Nah. Not like that," Harry said dismissively. "I'm no shrink but this felt different. There was an element of spite in it. Like old Lester might kick his wife's corpse a good one if he thought nobody was looking."

  "Rory intimated his folks were not experiencing unremitting wedded bliss, but he declined to elaborate," Anna said.

  "Les didn't say anything outright against the missus and, like I said, he managed a few tears. What set me off was the way he was ordering up the cremation of the corpse. Sort of slam-bang and take that."

  "Do you think he killed he?"

  "He's got no alibi, of course. Things happen in the wee hours, and unless you sleep with somebody, you're not going to have anybody to vouch for your whereabouts. He's got some real mixed feelings about her being dead, that's for sure. But no, I don't think he killed her. If he did he'd be playing the grief card a little harder. And he'd probably want to get the hell out of here, post haste."

  "Unless there was something here that needed doing," Anna said slowly. "Maybe something Carolyn stood in the way of."

  They mulled that over for a time but came up with nothing. What could an old man and a boy want in the Glacier wilderness? There was ho gold, no silver, no oil or natural gas, no buried Aztec treasure that anybody knew of. Glacier lilies had been dug up and spirited away but they were worthless, financially speaking.

  Thinking of the lilies, Anna told Harry of Geoffrey Mickleson-Nicholson. Harry wrote down the name.

  "No way to trace him without numbers," he said. "Social security, driver's license, date of birth—but I'll see if anybody with those names filed a backcountry permit."

  "I don't know if he's even old enough to have a driver's license," Anna said. "But while you're at it, check for a Bill or William McCaskil. He was camped at Fifty Mountain when the Van Slykes were. He lied about how well he knew Carolyn."

  Ruick wrote "McCaskil, William" on his legal pad. "What else?" he asked.

  Anna couldn't think of anything.

  Ruick stared out the window, tapping his pen absentmindedly, top then tip, like a tiny baton.

  The clock on his desk said it was quarter till five. The day had slipped away. Indoors, cooped up with people, Anna had missed it. Afternoon light, strong and colorless, the sun high with summer, striped the parking lot with the shadows of the surrounding pines. A fantasy of a hammock and a good book teased up in Anna's brain. Unthinkingly, she yawned, her jaw cracking at maximum distention.

  Harry looked at her and laughed. "Tomorrow is soon enough. I expect we've all earned an early night."

  10

  The sound of claws came in the night. At first Anna thought she was camped in the high country and fought the claustrophobic blindness of an enclosed tent. Slowly it came to her that she was fighting the covers on the bed in Joan's guest room. The window to the left of the bed was open, only a thin screen between her and the out-of-doors.

  Panic opened Anna's eyes and, by the faint light of the few street lamps that polluted the night in the housing area, she saw a great shaggy hulk. As she watched, it blanked the light, took it like a black hole, then perforated it with the shine of ragged teeth.

  Open-mouthed, she couldn't scream. Not a sound came out. Her arms and legs lay heavy as deadwood on the mattress. The teeth slipped through the screen, a faint tearing noise, then a paw, clattering claws so long they struck the sill, came through the wire. Still Anna was paralyzed, a poison, a weight in her limbs.

  With a tremendous effort she fought to move. The resulting jerk woke her, freed her from the nightmare. For half a minute she lay in the bed reassuring herself that now, really, this time, she was awake, not merely dreaming she was, safe from the black quicksand of her subconscious.

  Then the sound of claws was repeated and the nightmare began again. This time Anna could move. Quick as a cat she was out of the bed, mother-naked, back against the wall beside the window. Her heart pounded and she felt half crazy but she knew she'd heard it: scratching.

  Joan had inherited the house with curtains. She must have. Anna could not believe a member of the female gender would purposely choose those that hung to either side of the window.

  Snaking her hand between the oversized geometric-patterned drapes and the wall,
Anna eased the curtain out far enough to afford her an oblique view of the screen. Time passed, measured by the beat of her heart: a minute, two, maybe three. Nightmare cleared from her eyes and she noted the faint silver sheen of distant light reflecting off the fine mesh, the darker shadow from the overhanging eve. Across the street at an angle, she could see the garage of one house and the front entrance of another. All was still. No monsters.

  Adrenaline subsided. Cold sank into her bare skin, worse where buttocks and shoulder blades touched the plaster of the wall, but she did not return to bed. Waiting was an art form. Seldom had she gone wrong with waiting, watching another minute. Another five minutes.

  Scratch. Scratch. A claw, a single claw, the sere black forefinger of a crone, crept up from beneath the sill and raked at the screen.

  Soundlessly, Anna backed away from the curtain. Crossing the bedroom in three strides, she snatched up shorts and shirt. In the hall she pulled them on. Her boots were by the front door near her day pack. She stepped into them and jerked the laces tight.

  Joan lived like a pacifist. The only weapon that presented itself in the shadow-filled living room was a three-legged footstool beside the Barcalounger where Anna'd left her day pack. She tipped it clear of the remote control and a Reader's Digest and hefted it in her right hand. Heavy hardwood, well made; it would suffice.

  Moving quickly, she let herself out the kitchen door at the back of the house and ran quietly around the garage, her boots nearly soundless on the lush summer grass. Bobbing like a duck for a June bug, she peeked around the corner then ducked back.

  A shape was crouched beneath her bedroom window. Given the real and imagined beasts that had haunted her nights, she forgot for a moment who took honors for the most dangerous species, and was comforted by its human contours.

  Whoever scratched at her screen had his back to her. Carrying the stool up against her shoulder, ready for defensive or offensive use, Anna stepped from behind the corner of the garage and moved slowly across the concrete driveway.