Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (29 page)

  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 directly 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 shortlist 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 quite 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?"

  "Blackmail, you think?" Anna asked.

  "Either that or an old statutory flame fanned into a sudden blaze."

  Anna remembered the conversation she'd overheard as she lay squashed in the long passage out of Tinker's Hell. Sondra said she knew things about Peter that could get his medical license revoked. Had she been talking about a twelve-year-old rape case? Anna doubted it. Those charges were dropped. Given that Sondra had taken his money, then married the man, if she made a stink it would be she, not the doctor, who would end up looking the fool.

  Sondra, at seventeen. Frieda at twenty-three or -four. Zeddie at the same age. Dr. McCarty had a history of seducing his young patients. If Sondra had discovered she wasn't the only one, that McCarty was continuing the pattern, and she had gotten her hands on proof, that might do it. Whether or not McCarty lost his medical license, the publicity would damage his practice or lose him his position if he wasn't in business for himself. As Rhonda had said, this was good. Anna assured her she'd receive absolution for the sin of gossiping.

  An impatient wail cut over the phone line. "Oops. Gotta go," Rhonda said. "Andrew is awake." The line went dead. Anna wasn't done talking. She needed to bounce these new thoughts off another brain. Expose the obvious flaws. Air off her thinking lest it become circular and self-perpetuating.

  The empty house, so recently a boon, began to chafe on her nerves. Where was Curt? Had he made the calls? Where was Iverson? What had he done with the rifle shell? Had there been an autopsy of Brent Roxbury? Anna was out of the loop, out of her park, out of her jurisdiction, and possibly out of her league.

  For a quarter of an hour she stalked from room to room, gazed out over tracts of desert, of street, of employee housing. Able to stand her own company no longer, she put on a coat and limped down to headquarters to see if she couldn't mooch a ride into town.

  Jewel was typing furiously as Anna let herself into the chief of resource management's office. Her face was screwed up as if she went for a speed record. Loath to break her concentration in case she was training for the secretarial Olympics, Anna closed the door softly and walked soundlessly across the room on moccasined feet. She was at Jewel's desk before the secretary noticed her.

  With a start and a squawk, Jewel banged the screen button and blacked out her computer. She wasn't fast enough, and Anna smiled.

  "Aren't you the sneaky snake," Jewel said, and tried to regain her composure by preening hair-sprayed wings with porcelain nails.

  "Sorry," Anna said.

  "You here to be chewed out too?" Jewel asked with evident satisfaction.

  "Too?"

  "George told me Oscar was in hot water, messing over at Big Manhole. Seems you're a girl who can't resist hot water."