Hard Truth Read online

  “Sound does funny things in the mountains,” Anna said. “It was a still night and, Lord knows, I wasn’t sleeping all that soundly.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on,” Rita said. “I usually don’t come into the pen. I don’t want them associating people with lunch.”

  Anna looked at her watch. “More like high tea,” she said.

  Rita disappeared through the narrow entrance to the pen. The pups, seeming to sense that these intruders were departing, began to scuffle and growl happy little puppy growls. Knowing she’d probably only see them again in cages, Anna squatted down for a last look at these predators in the making.

  The little guys were in a three-way tug-of-war over what must have been a particularly tasty morsel. The fourth pup, the smallest one, sat at the edge of the fray, watching intently. An opening presented itself and the runt was in quick as a cat and out again with the prize. So intent were the wolves on the hunt, they had forgotten Anna’s existence.

  In a tumble of downy soft fur—or so Anna imagined, she dared not move lest they remember her and end their game—they rolled out from beneath the lip of granite, tiny teeth clamped on stubby tails, cushion-fat ears laid back. The runt was rolled by a tremendous pounce from a fatter sibling and the coveted morsel fell from its jaws half a yard from Anna’s knee. Most of the flesh was eaten away but Anna knew that ingenious articulated arrangement of bones existed nowhere in the body of an elk.

  It was a finger. A small human finger.

  Venison wasn’t the only thing Rita and Robert Proffit had been feeding their little friends.

  twenty-one

  Mrs. Sheppard—Mrs. Sharon Sheppard, as opposed to her pregnant fourteen-year-old sister, Mrs. Alexis Sheppard, and the dumpy middle-aged Mrs. Dwayne Sheppard—had left Heath’s RV home in a panicked fluster of “I’ve got to get back. He’ll wonder where . . .” eighteen hours before. During those hours Heath had not been idle. Nor had she been noticeably productive, though that was not for want of trying. She’d made a dozen calls to Idaho, starting with Lewiston, in an attempt to track down Alexis and Sharon’s father, Rupert Evan Dennis. The closest she’d gotten was a vague suggestion from a Robert Dennis—no relation, or admitting to none—that he thought there were some Dennises in Pocatello.

  Several times Heath had called Anna’s cell phone number and cursed the ranger each time the message beep answered. Cell phones had done a good deal of damage not only to the viability of the callee’s excuses but the patience of the caller. In a few short years it was as if it had become de rigueur for everyone to be instantly available to everyone else.

  Anna Pigeon was unavailable to most people whether she answered her phone or not, Heath guessed. Still, it pissed her off. Weren’t park rangers public servants? So give me some fucking service, Heath thought uncharitably.

  The only two calls that had proved satisfactory were those she’d placed to her Aunt Gwen. Having been in the business of caring for women and children for nearly fifty years, Dr. Littleton knew most everybody in Colorado similarly engaged. She’d promised to find what could be done for the three Dennis sisters in the way of services and inalienable rights.

  Gwen cautioned Heath not to be overly optimistic, particularly for Beth. Because Mrs. Dwayne was the oldest of Sheppard’s known “wives,” it was a possibility that she was legally wed to Mr. Sheppard. Short of proving abuse—which wasn’t easy to do in a community as close as that of New Canaan, even when one knew for a fact it was occurring—there was no reason the daughter could be removed.

  Indeed, Heath didn’t know if Beth wished to be removed. Perhaps Mr. Sheppard drew the line at incest—or incest with blood relations.

  Alexis was a good bet for proving abuse because she was carrying proof that Sheppard had had sexual intercourse with a minor. Even if neither she nor her elder sister would testify to that to a legal system they’d been brought up to demonize, the threat of it might be enough to twist Sheppard’s arm into letting them make their own choice whether to stay or go. A choice Heath wasn’t convinced they had the strength to make. Both had been trained to helplessness before their God and their husband who, like as not, they were encouraged to regard as two parts of the same being.

  If only I weren’t trapped in this goddamn chair, Heath thought, and not for the first time. This time a second thought followed on the heels of the much-used lament. If she were again a functioning biped, what could she do that she wasn’t already doing? Storm New Canaan commando-style and abduct the Dennis sisters and Beth? Arm wrestle Mr. Sheppard for dominance over their minds and hearts? There was nothing. Most of life’s battles in the modern world weren’t fought with legs and feet, muscle and sinew, but with the mind. Since she’d lost the ability to climb, Heath had been forced to refocus. In the past she’d used her considerable intellect to find climbs, prepare for climbs, strategize climbs, remember and discuss and critique climbs, boast and hobnob about climbs old and prospective.

  Now she concentrated on finding that easy chute, that safe traverse for a woman and three girls who needed to get off a ledge on which circumstances had marooned them. In a sudden insight that was as unpleasant as it was unsettling, she felt the absolute self-centeredness of her former pursuit and, other than the joy and athleticism, the ultimate futility of scaling peaks where there was nothing to be had at the top but a fleeting sense of glory and a self-serving memory.

  In truth, had she been free of her chair, she wouldn’t have made time for Beth and the Dennis girls. She wouldn’t have had the patience to pursue the tedious business of tracking down people by phone, or waiting in the tacky RV park for a communication from Sharon.

  Before the woman had skittered away like a terrified creature who knows it inhabits a low link on the food chain, she had promised Heath she’d e-mail the following day. Phoning was out of the question. New Canaan had service, several lines in fact, but the only telephone proper resided in Mr. Sheppard’s office, the door to which was kept locked when he wasn’t in.

  The Internet was nearly as rigidly controlled but Sharon was one of the community’s several clerks. She had been sent to a training course at a junior college when she was eighteen so she might be of greater service to the commune. Mr. Sheppard would have been appalled had he known how much she had built on this rudimentary training in computer skills. Both she and Alexis had e-mail to keep in touch with friends in Canada.

  Eighteen hours and seven minutes and Heath had yet to hear from her. She glared at the laptop on the kitchen counter. Computers had never captured her imagination. As a consequence she used them when necessary but had never become fast friends with the things. The cell phone and laptop set up in the RV struck her as the ultimate in Buck Rogers, George Jetson magic but she knew it worked. She and her aunt e-mailed several times each day.

  As if its ears were burning, the laptop emitted a suitable here-comes-Tinkerbell strumming sound.

  “Come on,” Heath said as she pivoted her chair toward the counter. “Hallelujah.” The sender’s address was “ssdennis.” The message was short and to the point.

  “Come get us.” No salutation, no “Love, Sharon.”

  Though Heath had been awaiting a communication for so many hours her anticipation muscles—and she swore such anatomical oddities existed, she could feel them at the base of her skull and between her shoulder blades—fairly ached with the burden, her hand shot out and closed the laptop, shutting it down. She should never have gotten tangled up in these crazy people’s twisted schemes. While cursing herself for a sucker and a coward and a fool, her mind raced with plausible, or even merely possible, excuses she could use to get herself off the hook: never got the e-mail, computer down, cell phone not working, batteries dead. Crippled.

  The last smacked her upside the head as smartly as her dad’s second wife had been in the habit of doing when she’d had too much cheap wine.

  How very handy this being paraplegic could become if she l
et it. How easy to blame character flaws, spiritual emptiness or sloth on the fact that she no longer walked. Seductive not to be challenged, differently abled or disabled—appellations she’d earlier scorned as mere semantics—but to be crippled as in broken, less than, excused from having to compete, cope and strive like everybody else.

  “Damn,” Heath whispered. This epiphany didn’t leave her feeling any less cowardly, suckered or foolish. It merely spoiled the escape plans she was busily hatching. Quickly, before she could change her mind and choose to be a victim and the abdication of responsibility that road offered, she opened the laptop and sent off two quick e-mails. The first was to her aunt informing her she was leaving for New Canaan. The second to “ssdennis”: “I’m on my way.”

  twenty-two

  Before Anna could recover and snatch up this macabre trophy, a pup pounced on it with a ferocious growl, snatched the bones up and ran back beneath the rock overhang, the other three little wolves in plump and gangly pursuit. No wonder they were so fat, Anna thought. Elk and Homo sapiens. She couldn’t but hope they preferred elk as she lay on the wet ground, Maglite in one hand, and reached into the furry fracas to retrieve what might be the only evidence of a girl’s murder.

  The struggle was quick and fierce. Anna got one painful nip on the heel of her hand but emerged the victor. If one couldn’t take candy from babies, taking fingers from puppies had to be the next best thing. From a habit of many years in law enforcement, she always carried a couple of small evidence bags in her shirt pocket. If used for nothing else, during the long idyllic spells when the parks were quiescent, the bags were handy for storing cigarette butts found along the trails.

  “Sorry, guys,” she whispered as she dropped her gory acquisition into one and sealed it up. “Have a hoof.” By way of restitution she tossed a well-chewed elk’s foot gently into the growling darkness.

  The gnawed finger she stowed in a side pocket of her pack. She was rising to her feet when Rita reappeared in the narrow gateway flanked by the rocks.

  “We really can’t be getting the pups used to human—” Rita began in the half-exasperated, half-apologetic voice people adopt when admonishing a superior officer. She stopped when she noticed Anna’s bedraggled, mud-soaked clothes, needles from elbows to boot heels.

  “What happened?”

  “I fell.”

  “We’ll walk out slow,” Rita promised. Anna could sense that, had Rita been a Boy Scout, she would have harassed perfectly good old ladies in her zeal to help them across streets.

  Anna said nothing, just followed her out. When she had passed the homemade wicket gate, she picked it up and turned to Rita. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Hold this for a second.”

  Dutifully Rita took the gate in both hands. Anna reached under her rain jacket and drew her service weapon from its pancake holder on her belt.

  “Get mud in your gun?” Rita asked.

  For a perpetrator of murder and dismemberment, she was breathtakingly unconcerned. Either she was innocent, a psychopath or a fine actress. Anna wasn’t sure which of the three was the most dangerous and was in no position to gamble.

  “Back up a tad,” she said.

  Rita did. When there were a couple of yards between them, Anna moved out from the tight embrace of the granite and leveled the gun at Rita’s middle.

  “What are—”

  “You can go ahead and put the gate in place,” Anna said. “Keep the pups from getting away. Carefully. Hands where I can see them. Roll the rocks in place with your foot. Good.”

  “This isn’t necessary,” Rita said, somewhere between shock and righteousness. “I doubt it’s a felony. You’d shoot me for doing something that the park needs so desperately?”

  “Take your weapon off. You know the drill. Carefully. Don’t scare me into pulling the trigger.”

  With a “Humph!” that struck Anna more as that of a snotty teenager than a raging homicidal maniac, Rita complied.

  Anna then had Rita hug a good-sized pine and cuffed her wrists together. Cuffing suspects to inanimate objects was against regulations, but no other solution came to mind. With every minute of delay, evidence was being devoured by wolves. Dogs eating my homework, Anna thought.

  “Where do you keep your handcuff key?” Anna demanded.

  “Watch pocket.”

  Anna took it. “Where’s your spare?”

  Rita said nothing.

  “Bugger all,” Anna muttered and began searching her seasonal. The spare was in her right breast pocket. Anna took it as well.

  The sun was close to setting and the sky overcast, making it difficult to pick and choose between one lump of meat and the next, but it appeared as though, had more of the finger’s original owner ever been in the enclosure, it was now transformed by the alchemy of digestion into sharp teeth and warm fur coats. Not a bad end, Anna couldn’t help thinking. Burial was barbaric and cremation struck her as clean but wasteful.

  To be on the safe side, she bagged every gruesome bite that wasn’t clearly elk meat, then returned to her prisoner, unlocked her from her forced romance with the tree and recuffed her hands in front so she could steady herself on the hike out and so the cuffs would be hidden in the sleeves of her rain parka. It wouldn’t do to have the public see a ranger marched out of the wilderness in chains, so to speak. During the process Rita complained with scathing bitterness that she should be treated like a common criminal, ready to tear out Anna’s throat merely because she fed an already dead elk to a few needy puppies. Throughout this diatribe Anna didn’t catch so much as a whiff of remorse or guilty knowledge that she was being arrested, not for a resource violation, but for murder.

  Rita once again secure in bracelets, Anna told her to lead the way out. Not cross-country the way they’d come, but down around Loomis Lake on the improved trail.

  The younger ranger refused to budge. “Take the cuffs off me. This is stupid. I only did what somebody had to for the park. I won’t be made to go in in handcuffs when all I did was feed wolf pups.”

  Anna lifted the first evidence bag she’d taken from the man-made den. “You’re not cuffed because you fed them but because you fed them this.” She held the clear plastic bag out so Rita could see the contents.

  Removed from mud and puppy jaws, the finger looked more pathetically human than it had when it first came to Anna’s attention. The bones were crooked slightly from the remaining knuckle joints, giving it the aspect of a spectral and rotting hand beckoning one to the unspeakable.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Rita murmured.

  Anna was pretty sure that qualified as taking the Lord’s name in vain.

  “It’s a finger,” Rita said.

  “Your pet wolf pups were chewing on it.”

  Rita didn’t answer. Turning she stumbled, righted herself, and led the way down the trail.

  She hadn’t gone more than a dozen yards before she suddenly sat down with a thump.

  Thinking she had slipped, Anna stopped and waited for her to get up. She didn’t so much as try. “You okay?”

  “Other than being under arrest for murder?” Rita said without turning to look at Anna.

  “Other than that,” Anna replied with more patience than she felt. Floundering about in the wolves’ den, fighting for scraps of human flesh, had gotten her wet. With the closing of the day she was getting cold and cranky.

  “Yeah. Fit as a fiddle.” Still Rita didn’t look back.

  “Get up. We’re losing the light.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’?”

  “No. I won’t get up. I won’t hike out. I didn’t kill anybody and I won’t do it. No.”

  Damn, Anna thought. She’d always dreaded this moment, waited for it. By some miracle she’d managed to avoid it for a long time. She remembered when she’d first gone to seasonal law enforcement training in an abandoned women’s prison in Santa Rosa, California, asking one of her teachers, a strapping park policeman from the Presidio in San Francisco,
“What do you do if people don’t do what you say?”

  “They’ll do what you tell them to,” he’d said smugly. “You’ve just got to tell ’em the right way.” There’d been a titter of masculine laughter as the men in the class pretended they weren’t worried about the same thing.

  From that Anna learned two things: not to admit weakness in front of the boys and that the big park policeman hadn’t the faintest idea what to do in the face of a refusal that couldn’t be met with brute force.

  It was the secret of passive resistance.

  Rita was too big to drag or carry. Much as she was tempted to at the moment, Anna couldn’t shoot her and Rita knew it.

  “Damn,” Anna voiced her thought. “Just sit here all night freezing half to death?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Rita never once looked over her shoulder at the captor she was effectively taking captive. Anna didn’t need to see her face, she could hear the calm finality in the words. Nothing better to do, she sat as well, her back against a kindly tree, and ran through her options. Once again she could cuff Rita to a tree, hike out and bring back help. That wasn’t only against park regulations but was dangerous. A stunt like that would get her fired.

  She could try and radio to request backup, backup that wouldn’t arrive till way after dark, in which case they could all spend the night by Loomis Lake. Carrying out a good-sized woman at night was too risky to try if it wasn’t life or death. Not to mention that nasty part where Anna would have to broadcast over the airwaves that her prisoner—her seasonal employee, for heaven’s sake—wouldn’t obey her and could some big, strong somebody please come make her.

  This being the twenty-first century, it might be expected that a helicopter could be called on to swoop down and carry them both to civilization, but Anna knew that wasn’t the case. Night landing, no lights, roving storm cells wreaking havoc with the air currents: pilots weren’t willing to risk their lives nor owners their machinery under such conditions. Possibly not even if it were a life-and-death situation.