Blind Descent

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. A

An impatient wail cut over the phone line. "Oops. Gotta go," Rhonda said. "Andrew is awake." The line went dead. A

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? A

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 A

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

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

"Sorry," A

"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."

"Not this time," A

Sixty-five minutes later she was outfitted with a Dodge Neon the color and stature of the average aphid, along with a full tank of gasoline. Credit cards were wonderful things. A

Behind the fabric-covered partition that marked out his work space in a room of like spaces, Tillman was packing to leave. "Hey, A

"Bad timing," he went on. "You caught me on my way out the door. What with one thing and another I got swamped. I'm in the field this afternoon."

"Can I ride along?" she asked on impulse.

Holden acted glad of the company. Foot encased in a walking cast, he took a BLM truck with an automatic transmission and drove out of town on the highway A

Holden told her everything he knew about the Roxbury Incident, as he now called it, a name to depersonalize uncomfortable memories. Along with the sheriff and the county coroner, Holden had gone out to Big Manhole. They'd arrived around eight o'clock, full dark, so there hadn't been much to see. The coroner pronounced Brent dead of a gunshot wound. A deputy recovered the rifle slug that killed him. The shot had ripped through Roxbury at a shallow angle and emerged where jawbone met ear. Much of its power spent, the slug lodged in the limestone lip above the cave entrance. As evidence it was of little value. Rock and bone had worked on it until it was simply a misshapen hunk of lead sporting fragments of Roxbury's flesh. Any rifling that might have been used to match it to the murder weapon was destroyed.

A

Turning in the shell didn't mean much. If it produced the killer's prints, it might be telling. If it had none there would be no way of knowing whether the shooter had wiped it before he loaded his weapon or if Iverson had wiped it clean of fingerprints before turning it over to the police.

"That's BLM land," A

"It's only a few hundred yards from the park boundary. The superintendent wanted to know if any damage had been done, that sort of thing."

"Makes sense." A

Tillman laughed. "Captain Lightfoot. We kid him that he'll never get lost. That boy could leave tracks in concrete. Old Laymon won't let him anywhere near the more delicate crystal formations. Scared his feet'll hit high enough on the Richter scale it'd shatter anything within a fifteen-foot radius. He wouldn't have found much anyway. That whole ridge is nothing but one big rock."

"So I discovered." Holden didn't ask her what she had been doing there, and in her heart, she thanked him. Justifying herself was becoming a habit she'd just as soon break.

Because she needed to talk to someone and Holden was the only person whom she didn't suspect and who was still speaking to her, A

"I'll have to think on this," he said in his slow, deliberate way. "I don't believe Oscar's got it in him to kick a cat out of the middle of the di

A

"Not unless you want to. I was headed out to the Blacktail to go over some reports."

A

The Blacktail was like many other gas wells dotting the landscape of the Southwest. The Bureau of Land Management was not dedicated to conservation. Like the United States Forest Service, they were a multiple-use organization. Public lands were not only used for recreation and wildlife preserves but were leased to ranchers for grazing livestock, miners seeking precious metals, lumber interests, hunters, and companies drilling for oil and gas. By some estimates, 30 percent of the gas reserves in the lower forty-eight states were located under New Mexico. It was a boom and bust economy. The doomsayers predicted the petroleum would be pumped out by the year 2040. Advocates of preservation used these predictions to push for the development of alternate energy sources. Oil interests used them to try to force Congress into opening wilderness areas in Alaska to drilling. So far the oil interests were wi