BLIND DESENT Page 25

  "I won't tell him," Anna promised. "I wouldn't have anyway. I just need a break on this Frieda thing. It's making me crazy."

  "So I noticed. We studied people like you second semester."

  Anna laughed. "Will you look up Roxbury for me?"

  Jewel thought about it. Anna had called her own bluff and waited without much hope. "What the heck," Jewel said after Anna had suffered a sufficient length of time. "It's not like the guy's not dead."

  Armed with Brent's SF-171, the list of cavers with whom Sondra had presumably flown out, and her AT&T credit card number, Anna settled down at Zeddie's dining table for an afternoon of telephonic sleuthing. Midmorning on a weekday it took her thirty minutes before a real live human being answered in place of a machine. Stan Daggert, the long-bearded caver from Kentucky, worked the graveyard shift at a plant producing electrical cable. Anna dragged him out of a sound sleep and had to talk a minute till the fog cleared. Once he was oriented to time, place, and task, he was very clear. Sondra had not been with the group on Jewel's list. She'd not ridden down the hill with them; she'd not flown with them. He remembered her, "a leggy looker." He had not seen her when leaving Lechuguilla or at any point thereafter.

  Lisa, the lady with the looping braids, was Anna's next success. She was at home in Palo Alto, grading papers. With the exception of describing Sondra as "a looker," she echoed Daggert's words. Sondra had not been with them. Lisa, like Daggert, insisted she would have remembered Sondra but for entirely different reasons: "Sondra was a royal pain in the patootie."

  Of the five others on the list, Anna tracked down the phone numbers of four and left messages asking them to call her at Zeddie's. Their ratification of events would be nice, but she didn't need it. Sondra had not flown home or anywhere else.

  Brent's SF-171 was next. From it she verified everything Amy Roxbury had told her and filled in some of the blanks. Brent was born in Black Gap, Pennsylvania, and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia. He'd been drafted in 1971. As a private in the army he was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, a base in Missouri. He'd served seventeen months. The dishonorable discharge box on his application was checked. Beneath, in the meager space allotted for explanations, he had written "conscientious objector." A good choice. It explained nothing yet came off sounding morally righteous.

  Tracking down a fact a quarter of a century old, even one that was a matter of public record, proved harder than anticipated. During the military downsizing of the early nineties, the army base in Missouri was decimated. Personnel, already nomadic by profession, had been scattered all over the world.

  Anna was forwarded, patched through, brushed off, put on hold, and disconnected until she finally landed in an office of records in Washington, D.C. A mealy-voiced man went to some length to let her know that, though he worked for the army, he wasn't an army man. Why she was supposed to care was beyond her, but she made a few appreciative noises so as not to alienate the fellow. His civilian status established, he was willing to look up the information she requested. Seconds ticked by like dimes clinking into a pay phone while he muttered and fiddled with his computer. "Got it," he said at last. Anna was not yet allowed to relax. Hemming and hawing, he fussed, pretending the matter might be sensitive or classified. He was bored. He was unimportant. He wanted to be cajoled. Pepper-spraying him being out of the question, Anna grasped the ragged edge of patience and cajoled.

  Brent Roxbury had been discharged for conduct unbecoming an enlisted man. He'd been caught exposing himself. Local law enforcement suspected he'd been at it for some time. Reports of a man fitting his description flashing women in parks and on bike paths near the base had been coming in for a year and a half—roughly the amount of time Roxbury had served. When he inadvertently flashed Lieutenant Marsha Coleman of the military police while she was jogging with her cocker spaniel, she arrested him. Securing him with the dog's leash, she delivered him to the town's constabulary. Dog tags were found, military connections noted, and he was turned back over to the army for discipline.

  Anna thanked her informant, withstood a couple minutes more of his voice, then got him off the line. Her right ear was sore from being pressed so long against the receiver, and she had the beginnings of a headache that strenuous games of phone tag always engendered.

  A brief raid on Zeddie's medicine cabinet produced two Advil. Anna washed them down with cold coffee and returned to the SF-171. Evidently Brent had liked the area. After his discharge his home addresses all had been in Missouri. The last was in Springfield, where he'd met and married Amy.

  Since coming to New Mexico he'd eked out a living by working with the various agencies and the oil and gas companies. His SF-171 had the required three names to call for references. They were all people from the petroleum industry. The last was the man responsible for managing the Blacktail. Anna circled it. Seldom was a shooting brought on by something in the distant past. Long planned and finally executed revenges or a sudden irresistible opportunity to redress an old wrong did happen, but usually the reason was closer to home, closer to the now. People had long memories, but they had short fuses.

  Rarely did anyone exhibit the patience and discipline of the Count of Monte Cristo.

  Like a kaleidoscope, each time the information spun, the pieces created new patterns. Chances were good Brent had outgrown his antisocial form of self-expression—or gotten terrifically good at it. A few calls to the police departments of the previous Missouri addresses assured Anna there'd been no further arrests on that score. Unless one was psycho, flashing was hardly a killing offense. Certainly not for Amy. Brent's early career as a pervert for Uncle Sam further exonerated her and her dentist. Few courts would quibble over giving Mom custody when Dad was a convicted sex offender, even of the most benign variety.

  Brent's indiscretions got his ex off the hook and in no way linked him to Frieda, or to Oscar as his shooter. Yet, try as she might, Anna couldn't let go of the subject. Something niggled in the back of her brain wanting to link Roxbury's military history with events in New Mexico. Maybe it was just that she was so sick of questions she was beginning to hallucinate answers.

  There would be another skeleton, she promised herself. She just hadn't looked in the right closet.

  In the case of Sondra McCarty, Anna had no doubt she was in the appropriate closet. The form the skeleton would take remained to be seen. At the start of the investigation she had considered the possibility that Sondra didn't survive the rock fall. After Jewel assured her the woman was alive and well and winging her way homeward, she'd dropped the idea. Now evidence was mounting that Sondra had never left Lechuguilla, had never gotten any farther than Katie's Pigtail.

  Zeddie and Peter wrapped together in the darkness; such a sudden coupling after the separation of husband and wife spoke of great need or great assurance. Anna had assumed it was the wall of dirt between Peter and his spouse that gave them the confidence to turn to each other so publicly. A wall of dirt on top of that same spouse would be just as reassuring and a whole lot more final.

  Trying to tie them to Frieda was what had kept them on the back burner of Anna's mind. Both had had ample opportunity to kill her. Peter was her physician for the first forty-eight hours after the rock had struck her. Their culpability in her eventual death was too great a stretch. Factoring out the original attempt on Frieda's life—an opinion held by nearly everyone but Anna—and putting Sondra in the place of the corpse du jour, it was no stretch at all. Brent's shooting could be explained as well. Peter and or Zeddie arranged for Sondra's death in the ill-begotten rock fall. Brent saw something. Brent was silenced. Zeddie made a much better suspect for desert stalking and sharpshooting than either Amy or the boyfriend.

  "Damn." Anna had only just been forgiven for accusing Zeddie and Peter of murder. To do it again was liable to get her thrown off her couch. Or killed. Shoving herself up from the table, she stared at the winter-bleak patio. Wandering through the kitchen, she blindly looked into the refrigerator. Hopeful, Calcite
swished around her ankles. Anna picked her up and set her abstractedly on the kitchen counter. The cat twitched her tail, and Anna caught it. Loose ends. The Zeddie-McCarty-Sondra triangle tied up a lot of loose ends.

  Calcite jumped to the floor when a sigh gusted from Anna's lungs. The solution didn't sit well. The sequence of events rendered Frieda's death so unnecessary, so peripheral. Was that what was bothering her? The idea that her friend's death had been meaningless, a by-product? Anna shook off the thought. No one else had seen Frieda's face, heard the tremor of certainty and horror as she described looking up, seeing her headlamp flash over a gloved hand rolling down a stone, the fear and the sadness born of knowing someone wished to take her life from her.

  Anna cleared her mind. Like it or not, she would have to tackle Zeddie.

  18

  Sondra was, as advertised, a royal pain in the patootie. Possibly not above blackmailing a man into marrying her. An ambitious woman who wanted to do it the old-fashioned way, climbing the ladder one man at a time. From what Rhonda had uncovered, she had used her evil wiles to snatch another woman's beau. Plenty of reasons to hate her. More than enough never to have her over for dinner. But murder? Intelligent people—at least sane intelligent people—realized that murder was doing it the hard way. Zeddie and Peter were worldly enough to know things could be lived through, faced down, or bought off with less backlash than murder. Breaking that strongest of taboos was usually a step taken in desperation. Adultery, fornication—the stuff of love triangles—just weren't that big a deal anymore. Photos on Zeddie's mantel indicated she and Peter had been together since his marriage. Clearly it was not necessary to do so over his wife's dead body. Either they were not as sane as Anna presumed, or there was something she was missing.

  Why had McCarty allowed himself to be blackmailed into matrimony? Why had he gone on vacation with his wife, girlfriend, and ex-girlfriend? Did he like the fireworks? Was it a game, one that had taken an unexpectedly ugly turn?

  Tawdry questions, half answered with half-truths, jammed Anna's brain like sand poured into a piston engine. Before she blew a gasket, she decided to stop thinking. Her stomach reminded her it was past lunch. Her watch told her it was one thirty. Zeddie, Peter, and Curt should have crawled out of the arteries of New Mexico by now. Curt and Peter would be home shortly, eager for hot showers and clean clothes. They would probably spend the afternoon watching a ball game. December: Anna couldn't remember if it was baseball, football, or basketball season, but undoubtedly Madison Avenue had arranged for one sport or another to peddle beer and cars on a Sunday afternoon. Mere fire and brimstone, a murder investigation couldn't compete. She would have to postpone Peter and start with Zeddie. She had a feeling the "something more" she sought lurked in that quarter.

  Due to a small flu epidemic thinning the ranks of interpretive rangers, Zeddie said she had "one bitch of a day." Closing her eyes, Anna focused on the morning's breakfast banter. Like children on holiday, Zeddie and Peter had milkshakes for breakfast. Shoulder to shoulder, they sipped through candy-cane-striped plastic straws. Each time Zed-die looked away, Peter snaked his straw over at an angle and snorkeled up her ice cream. The picture triggered something, but not the information she wanted. What was it Zeddie had been saying while Peter pilfered her milkshake? "Off-trail in the morning and the Urinal in the afternoon."

  From the scuttlebutt, Anna had deduced that the Urinal was a stretch of trail above the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns. It was so named by the interpreters because it was about ninety minutes into the cave, the length of time the male bladder could comfortably transport a couple cups of coffee. A dark and twisty portion of trail afforded an irresistible temptation.

  Years had passed since Anna had been in Carlsbad Caverns. Walking out of the twilight zone, she smelled the musty breath of the underground home of a dwindling but still impressive population of Mexican freetail bats. After the initial unpleasantness of leaving behind real air and the light of day, she was overwhelmed by the intricacy and immensity of the cavern. Wide and well kept, with discreet lighting, the path curved down through glossy formations and vaulted ceilings dripping with icicles of stone. Long buried, a statistic floated into her mind. Someone had once told her that more than two thousand formations a year were destroyed or stolen by visitors. On some level, she'd been expecting the cavern to appear tired, more shopworn than she remembered. The opposite was true. The park had rejuvenated the cave and the trails. Along the way she saw teams of volunteers unobtrusively tending to the resource. Four women in soft-soled shoes painstakingly tweezed lint from the rugged rock faces. Tons of lint and hair from tourists circulated on air currents. Without constant intervention the innards of the cave would take on the aspect of an overused clothes dryer. Another group, armed with sponges, brushes, and pails, erased muddy footprints of those insensitive enough to walk off the paved trail.

  The expected pinch of claustrophobia failed to materialize, and Anna enjoyed the trip. After the suffocating confines of parts of Lechuguilla, the light, airy cavern felt like what it was: a walk in the park. Spiraling ever downward, each turn producing a view more splendid than the last, Anna considered the words she would use to share it with Molly. Inadequate metaphors were all she could muster: a cathedral, a ballroom, a whale's belly, a set for The Phantom of the Opera. In its uniqueness and magnificence, Carlsbad paupered the imagination. Unremitting opulence jaded the eye until it became possible to wander this unsung wonderland without seeing any but formations so stupendous they forced one away from the conversation of one's fellows or the contemplation of the dinner to be had when one returned to the world above.

  Periodically Anna drifted by a troglodyte in the green and gray of the NPS uniform: rangers roving the trail, providing information, assistance, and a watchful eye for a resource so domesticated it could no longer protect itself. Cloaked in darkness and civilian clothes, she passed with a nod or a wave, happy to be another faceless tourist.

  On a zigzagging segment where the path descended steeply toward the Big Room, a chamber the size of fourteen football fields according to the brochure, Anna found Zeddie Dillard. One foot on the low stone wall with which the Park Service bordered the asphalt—an attempt to keep people from stomping the entire cave floor into a likeness of a Safeway parking lot—she addressed a group of girls. Blue Birds or Brownies, something organized by age. Mellifluous in speech as in song, her voice hummed warmly in the dim cavern.

  They were stopped at a natural viewpoint. A thoughtful government had provided a tasteful stone bench by the trail. Anna sat, half listening to the lecture and marveling at the panorama. The trail was considerably above the Big Room. Several more twists, turns, and tunnels would have to be negotiated before reaching the promised land. The zig where Anna sat provided a sneak preview, a peek from the stone shrouded mountainside into the valley. Faint lights marked a sinuous path through a vast plain dotted with unimaginable monsters frozen for all eternity. Seen from above, it reminded Anna of flying into a strange city by night: pinpricks of light, canyons of darkness, mystery, unvoiced hopes and veiled threats.

  The gaggle of girls trickled downhill. Zeddie turned, the professional smile of the tour guide barely discernible even to eyes accustomed to the dark.

  "Hey, Anna," she said with what sounded like relief. Dropping heavily onto the bench at her side, she said, "Boy, am I beat. I've got half a mind to come down with the flu myself. I could use the time in bed."

  Both of them thought of Peter McCarty. Anna didn't so much as snicker, but Zeddie felt the vibrations. "Rest. Sleep. Hell . . ." Her words petered out. Then Anna did laugh.

  Sniffing audibly, Zeddie said, "Do I smell Plumeria?"

  "I've been playing with your toys," Anna admitted.

  "Good for the soul. Even Xena the Warrior Princess wears a little eye shadow. I'm bored with men who think strong and sexy is an oxymoron."

  "Heavy on the moron?" Anna suggested. Zeddie leaned over, bumping her with a shoulder that was no lon
ger cold. Anna was touched. She liked Zeddie, liked to think well of her and be thought well of in return.

  Two tourists, twined together like unpruned ivy, walked past. They smiled and nodded at Zeddie. The flat hat, the uniform, brought that out in people. Rangers, like firemen and comic-strip bears, were considered benevolent creatures. That as much as anything made Anna wince when she had to bust somebody. It was bad for the image.

  "I oughtn't to be sitting," Zeddie said idly. "It looks bad." She made no move to get up. The morning's tour would have taken a toll even on such a robust specimen as Zeddie Dillard. She was tired, vulnerable. Anna might not get a better opportunity.

  "Have you ever sung in the Big Room?" Anna asked, putting off the inevitable dissolution of their budding friendship.

  "'Ghost Riders in the Sky.'"

  Leaning her head back, Anna stared into a heaven eternally dark. Thunderheads, canyons, spires, defied gravity. Utah's Canyon Lands in a Salvador Dali nightmare. "Good choice," she said.

  Carlsbad, the destination of as many as three-quarters of a million tourists each year, had none of the baffling silence of Lechuguilla. She and Zeddie were no more isolated than two women on a bench at the Guggenheim on a Sunday afternoon. In exposing the visual grandeur of the cavern, the soul of the cave had been compromised, as outer space was compromised by the bits of metal flung into it. Once man intruded, perfect solitude was banished. In this instance, Anna felt it was an improvement. Safety in numbers.

  The comfortable quiet on the bench grew strained. Zeddie broke it first. "Dare I hope this is purely a social call?"

  "I wish it were," Anna replied wearily.

  "Are you going to accuse me of murder again?"

  "More or less."

  Zeddie snorted, but there was humor in the rude noise, and Anna took heart.

  "Well, let's have it," Zeddie said. "Jealousy? A fortune in jewels? An inheritance: Frieda was my secret twin separated at birth?"