Blind Descent Read online

  The desert was not good country for finding sign. The earth was hard-baked and covered with stones, though recent rains had softened it somewhat. On that Anna pinned her hopes. That and the shooter’s mind-set. He hadn’t planned on leaving any witnesses. Maybe he’d not bothered to cover his trail. With her escape, he’d been thrown off balance. The glimpse she’d had of him, he’d been running. Runners left good prints.

  Two hours’ careful traverse of sand and rock turned up little besides weathered litter and game trails. Cold drove the life of the desert underground, and she hadn’t seen so much as a jack rabbit or a horned lizard. Three times she’d come across recently made footprints, and three times the trails turned away from her objective: shooting distance to Big Manhole. Anna remained unconcerned. Tracking was slow business, two hours scarcely a beginning.

  Wind, cutting in an endless blade across the exposed skin of her face, was an irritant, but she chose to use rather than fight it. This time of year it blew unwaveringly from the northwest. By keeping it first to one quarter, then, when she turned and began tracking in the opposite direction, to the other, she could stay on course without bothering to lift her eyes from the ground.

  Two more hours passed without producing results. Anna found a fold in the earth to deflect the wind and lunched on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Doritos, and the orange soda. From her niche she could see what she believed was the hill that housed the entrance to Big Manhole. In an unending landscape of fawn-colored hills it was hard to be sure without digging out the binoculars she’d pilfered from Zeddie’s mantel. Beyond the hill a valley had been carved by a now-dry watercourse. The riverbed writhed like a snake through scabby hills and up under cliffs of white limestone. In an ancient oxbow, dry for centuries, was a pipe sticking out of the ground, a “dry hole” marker, where a well had been. A quarter of a mile beyond was another well, this one up and running. A black speck, followed by a comet’s tail of white, barreled down the road toward the wells. A truck fighting the same choking dust that had engulfed Anna.

  She retrieved Zeddie’s field glasses. A cement truck, no doubt laying a well pad somewhere in the hills. She followed the trail of dust back to where the rutted dirt to Big Manhole forked off from the gravel, then traced it up to the bald hillock where she’d found Brent’s Blazer. A cream-colored pickup was parked there. Because of its protective coloring she hadn’t noticed it with the naked eye.

  Interest rejuvenated, she moved the glasses slowly down the hill till she rested them on the entrance to the cave. Brent’s blood, black now, stained the rock, but the body was gone. The sheriff would have taken care of that. Big Manhole was locked, or at least closed. The driver of the pickup was nowhere in sight.

  A minute’s watch, and he appeared. Walking up from the gully separating Anna from Big Manhole came the rangy weathered form of Oscar Iverson. He was in uniform and so on duty. This wasn’t a recreational jaunt. Probably he was there for the same reason she was: to see what he could find about the shooter who’d killed Roxbury. He’d driven around to the cave to backtrack.

  Anna deliberated on whether to show herself or not. Laymon had made it abundantly clear that she was persona non grata in these parts, and the previous night, Oscar had seemed none too pleased with her either. From her protected crevice she would be all but invisible unless she purposely called attention to herself.

  In times past she’d learned a good deal more from watching people than from talking with them. Words were used to obfuscate as often as to communicate. She decided on the role of unseen spy and cupped both hands around the end of the binoculars lest they catch the sun and flash out her whereabouts.

  Oscar wasn’t a tracker. He moved quickly, his long legs eating up the terrain. She guessed he was following a fairly clear trail and cringed as his great booted feet slapped down, obliterating traces of the shooter. Halfway up the long slope, not more than fifty yards from where she hid, Iverson came to a stop and squatted down, his long green-clad legs poking out at the knees in a fair imitation of a praying mantis. For a while he stared at the ground, then he poked at something with a stick he found nearby. Whatever it was that he had unearthed, he picked up gingerly with two fingers and dropped into a plastic bag that he tucked away in the pocket of his coat. That done, he straightened up again and appeared to be searching the area.

  “Stomp, stomp, stomp,” Anna whispered. Iverson’s boots were falling with the oblivious regularity of the non-tracker. Once the obvious had been snatched up, the scene was treated like dirt. There’d be precious little left to see by the time she got there. She wished she’d not stopped for lunch, not commenced her tracking on the far end. Railing against past decisions petered out the way it always had to: when she reached Eve wishing she’d not played with the snake, regret vanished. There are no alternate life paths.

  Finally Iverson moved on, and Anna allowed herself to exhale. He didn’t go much farther. On higher, drier ground he lost the trail. After a few stabs into the brush, he gave up and returned the way he had come, over the same trail.

  “Stomp, stomp, stomp,” Anna lamented.

  Briefly he stopped at the mouth of Big Manhole. Bowing his head, he dragged off his hat, a green billed cap with earflaps that tied beneath the chin. Ridiculous-looking garment, but Anna wished she had one. The wind was causing her ears to ache.

  Iverson stood combing his straw-colored hair with his fingers till it stood out in the wind. Anna wondered if he was paying his respects to Brent Roxbury’s ghost or merely cooling his brains the better to think with. Whatever the phenomenon, it was short-lived. Pulling the hat back on, he made short work of the walk up to his truck and drove off. Anna waited till a plume of white told her he was headed out toward the main highway, then she packed up the leavings of her lunch and started down the hillside to see if anything was left of the shooter’s trail.

  In minutes she reached the place where Iverson had stopped, a small clearing ringed with low growth and boasting a line of sight to the cave, an ideal place to lie in wait with a rifle. Anna paused just outside the clearing and hunkered down on her heels to study the ground. It didn’t look as if the sheriff’s men or any BLM people had visited the scene. Darkness would have prevented any serious investigation when they’d come to fetch the body the previous night. Either they’d be out later in the day, or they’d already come and gone but had failed to track the sniper.

  Iverson’s prints were all over the clearing, the easily identifiable marks of a corrugated lug sole, the kind found on every pair of firefighting boots made by White’s, the choice of elite wild-land firefighters from every land-management agency in the country.

  To one side of the clearing she could see where he’d crouched down and gouged the earth with his twig. In the dirt was a smooth indentation about an inch long with a slight T-shaped mark at one end. A rifle shell, overlooked by the gunman, had left its impression in the soil. That was what Oscar had bagged and pocketed. Several minutes’ careful study was unproductive. If the shooter had left other tracks, Iverson’s overlay them. With a snort of disgust, Anna turned her attention to the trail Iverson had followed up the slope for such a short distance. Again lug-soled footprints were all she found. Either they all belonged to the heavy-footed Iverson, or the shooter also had been wearing White’s boots. Near the ridge she lost the trail. The crown of this hill and the next were stripped bare of earth. Polished limestone remained, untracked and untrackable.

  Plunking herself down on the rock, Anna looked back toward the cave’s mouth. A number of possibilities occurred to her. The shooter might not have left any tracks, or the tracks had been destroyed by Iverson. The shooter could have been wearing fire boots. They were common enough. She owned a pair. Zeddie probably did. Holden would. Curt, Peter, and Sondra wouldn’t. But then she was wearing Zeddie’s clothes. Borrowing or stealing wasn’t out of the question.

  An extremely unpleasant thought intruded. Maybe the shooter had worn Iverson’s boots. Oscar had come direct
ly up to the sniper’s lair. Was he tracking, or did he know precisely where to come? The stomping and shuffling: insensitive investigation or intentional destruction of evidence? It wouldn’t have been difficult to discover where and when Anna was to meet with Brent. Everyone at Zeddie’s had known. They might have told. It wasn’t a secret. Brent’s choice to leave the message could be telling. Was it that he trusted the members of the core group, knew they had nothing to do with the killing? Or was he careless, overwrought, or overconfident?

  The first attempt on Frieda’s life had failed. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that Oscar Iverson had gone down into Lechuguilla not to rescue Frieda but to finish the job. If Brent had started to kill Frieda, then lost his nerve and decided to spill the beans to Anna, it made sense. Would an experienced caver like Oscar start an avalanche? Maybe. There was no way of knowing the whole side of the Pigtail would come down. With Holden watching every moment of the rigging, it would have been easier than sabotaging the ropes.

  Unless Holden did that himself.

  The thought made Anna physically ill. With a surge of relief, she remembered his broken ankle. He’d been at the bottom of the rock slide, not the top. And the person she’d seen scurrying away after the shots were fired was not lame. Suddenly she felt tired and scared.

  One person to trust, and a cripple at that.

  15

  BY EARLY AFTERNOON Anna was back in Zeddie’s house. To her delight, but for Calcite, it remained uninhabited. The hike had taken a toll on her weak ankle. Some of the swelling had returned, and she was glad to put her foot up and rest. Trust in one’s fellows is like the net beneath the highwire. The act can be done without it, but the effort becomes considerably more taxing. Considering that, the ankle, and the cold, the morning’s work had been tiring. Anna was feeling her age, measured not in years but in acquired cynicism and human frailty.

  The message light on Zeddie’s answering machine was blinking. Brazenly, Anna played back the messages. None was from Sondra. One was for her from Rhonda Tillman. Either a terse or a careful woman, Rhonda said only, “Call me.”

  Full of good intentions, Anna dragged the cordless phone, along with a cup of hot tea, to the sofa. Wrapped in the ghastly pink-and green afghan, she sipped her tea and contemplated the instrument. There were several people she would have liked to talk with. Of course, her sister, Molly. Jennifer, a friend of hers and a ranger at Mesa Verde. It was Jennifer who was looking after Anna’s cat, Piedmont, and the newly orphaned Taco. Frederick the Fed, her ex-whatever, crossed her mind. After two years’ silence he’d intruded back into her life. Knowing he’d fallen for her sister didn’t lower him in her estimation. To her way of thinking, Molly was quite a catch. But it did render Frederick off-limits forever. Without knowing he was doing so, Frederick Stanton had banished himself from the affections of the Pigeon sisters. Molly would never touch a man Anna was interested in. Anna wouldn’t dream of a man interested in her sister.

  Besides, she had nothing to say to him.

  She had nothing to say to anyone.

  Words not related to the deaths of Frieda or Brent balled up and slid off her mind like liquid mercury. Sick as she was of the subject, it consumed her. Rhonda Tillman was the only person with whom she could trust herself to maintain a coherent conversation.

  Soon she would call. Till then she would rest, drink her tea, and order her fragmented thoughts. The demographics of the suspect pool had broadened. Caving’s isolated nature had blinded her to other possibilities. Even for an imagination as willing to invent monsters as Anna’s, it stretched credibility to think of someone creeping deep into the earth over forbidding terrain to kill Frieda when she could be so easily run over in a parking lot or gunned down at the mall. That had left only the core group. Iverson’s activities today opened a new line of thought. A member of the core group had to have pushed the rock that had landed Frieda in the Stokes. Given that, Anna had been pursuing her investigation from the angle that something that happened in the cave had fomented an opportunistic attempt on Frieda’s life. But there had been a second and successful attempt. Oscar had been there, and Anna and Holden. They’d come down knowing Frieda was helpless. Completion of a failed murder attempt could have been decided upon before the expedition went underground.

  For the life of her, Anna couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to kill Frieda. Frieda Dierkz wasn’t even the sort of woman a stalker would fancy. She was a solid, straightforward, midwestern farm girl who had intelligence without cunning, discretion without guile. Her favorite drugs were legal. She didn’t gamble, steal, smuggle weapons, or traffic in illegally obtained artifacts. She was dispatcher and secretary to the chief ranger at Mesa Verde. Professionally she was indispensable, but she was not in a position to give or withhold anything worth killing for. If she had slept with married men, she had been as silent as the tomb. Anyway, Anna would have known. Everybody would have known. Parks made fishbowls look like the heart and soul of privacy.

  Murder insisted on a motive. Because Anna couldn’t find it, or couldn’t understand it, didn’t change the fact. For the moment she would set aside motive and paint mind pictures in hopes of seeing something new. Assuming Brent had pushed the stone onto Frieda in Tinker’s Hell cleared up a number of things. Roxbury had been unnaturally perturbed by the injury and subsequent death of a woman he ostensibly didn’t know. Guilt over his part in her death might account for that. Had that guilt preyed on him significantly, he might have lost his nerve after the first attempt and refused to try again. So Frieda lay helpless, yet unharmed, till assistance arrived in the persons of Anna, Oscar Iverson, and Holden Tillman.

  Other cavers had cycled in and out during the rescue. How many, Anna didn’t know. None of them had been in place when the avalanche started. It let them off the hook.

  But Oscar had been there.

  If Brent was bent on killing Frieda, he had plenty of opportunity. He didn’t do it. Therefore someone else had to be factored in. Who did Brent have any opportunity to communicate with other than Holden, Oscar, and Anna? So: Oscar comes down. Brent refuses to finish the job. Oscar finishes it for him. Brent can’t live with the guilt and decides to tell Anna. He leaves a message on Zeddie’s machine. One of the group mentions it to Oscar. He hikes out from the park, shoots Brent, and tries to shoot Anna for good measure. The next day he drives out to Big Manhole, covers up his trail, and retrieves the rifle shell he left behind.

  On the surface the story held together, but, without knowing the why of it, Anna remained unsatisfied. There was no reason for Oscar to want Frieda dead that badly. Unless he was one hell of an actor, Anna was sure he didn’t know Frieda except as a name on a research list.

  The other aspect of this scenario that bothered her was personal. Oscar Iverson didn’t strike her as the murdering kind. She was well aware that to spout that philosophy on the witness stand would get her crucified in any court in the country. Ted Bundy, criminologists were fond of pointing out, struck everybody as a heck of a swell fella. Anna wasn’t so deluded as to think she’d know a murderer if she saw one. A few had crossed her path, and she’d not felt a cold wind on the back of her neck or sensed a darkness entering the room.

  Under the right pressure anyone could become a killer. For someone to kill with this premeditation bespoke either great vanity, overriding fear, or both. Oscar Iverson exhibited neither. At least not to Anna. Still waters and all that, she told herself, and decided to leave Oscar in the running.

  Picking up the cordless phone, she punched in the Tillmans’ number. The machine answered. Anna was halfway through her message when Rhonda picked up.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was hiding.”

  “Who from?”

  “Oh. Everybody but you, Holden, and maybe my sister. No reason. I just get this way. If it makes people crazy, tough.”

  Anna laughed. “Get that way? I was born that way.”

  “Then you know what I mean.”

  Anna did and
was duly honored to be on Rhonda’s short-list with her husband and sister.

  “You doggone well better appreciate this,” Rhonda said. “I haven’t gossiped this much since high school. There’s got to be ears burning in three states. And, if gossip is a sin like Andrew’s Foursquare Baptist grandmother says, I’ll burn in hell for the next zillion years.”

  “I went to Catholic school,” Anna told her. “I know nuns. They know people in high places. I’ll get them to intercede for you if the gossip is good.”

  “It’s good,” Rhonda promised. “Unless you’re Dr. Peter McCarty.” A gulp of something was imbibed, and Rhonda went on, “Old girlfriends love to talk, and your darling Peter has his share. Miss Sally poked around for me—well, not for me. I had to promise I’d say ‘hi’ to Holden for her, which I won’t, but she doesn’t know that. I found out what the dropped charges were all about. Rape.”

  “You’re kidding.” Anna was taken aback. Rape was a power crime. Armed with charm, good looks, and money, McCarty had such built-in power over women, rape seemed redundant. Rape was also about hatred, and much of McCarty’s appeal came from the fact that he genuinely seemed to like women.

  “Not rape rape,” Rhonda told her once she’d gleaned the drama from her announcement. “Statutory rape. Of Sondra. She was a patient of his, not quiet eighteen, and they had an affair. Her daddy went ballistic, as you might imagine. From what Sally said it took a sizable chunk of McCarty’s money to smooth the ruffled feathers. Sondra kind of banged around after that—‘bang’ being the operative word. All her beaus were older and had money. It sounds like she was shopping for a sugar daddy. She was all set to marry a college professor about twenty years older than her, but something went wrong. He left her at the altar. This was more than two years ago. Peter was in an on-again off-again relationship with Zeddie at the time. Then bingo, bango, bongo, six months later he’s walking down the aisle with Sondra at a Barbie-doll dream wedding with yards of white lace and three or four hundred close friends. Weird, no?”