Blood lure

Owl-eyed behind the oversized spectacles, Joan studied her as if she was a scat specimen. "How do you walk around like a normal person with such creepy thoughts in your head?" she asked finally. "It must be like being Stephen King but without the money."

"I guess," A

"Name one," Joan challenged.

A

A

Again the laughter. When it had subsided, somberness reclaimed Joan, and A

"Do you think Rory did it?" Joan asked.

A

They were saved from wandering too far down that darkling road by a knock on the door.

"I'll get it," A

Ron, the bear-team guy who'd given them a lift to the bottom of Flattop Trail four nights before, let himself in the front door. Those four nights had stretched into years in A

Big and bearish himself, Ron was well-suited to his profession. Descended from some sturdy sun-drenched people, he was of middling height with thick black hair, a glossy close-cut black beard and rambunctious black chest hair that sprang out of the vee of his uniform shirt.

"Joan has all the fun," he said seriously as he flopped his two hundred pounds into an aging Barcalounger with childlike disregard for the load limits of its infrastructure. "Then I was off when the search team was called out so I didn't even get in on that.

"Let's see. What did you guys miss down here at Adventure Central? Tom up at Polebridge ranger station"- Ron named the station on the northwest boundary of the park-"got to tow a gutted horse trailer from where it'd been illegally parked. Lord knows what they were hauling. The drug dogs didn't like it much but didn't hit on anything.

"On the east side Alicia had a lady she thought had symptoms of a heart attack-shortness of breath, bad color-and had her taken out by helicopter. Turns out the lady wasn't having a coronary. She was eighty-three years old and tired. Poor old gal will keel over when she gets the bill.

"And while you guys were out finding bodies, right here in the megalopolis of West Glacier, crime capital of the world, yours truly was called on to risk life and honor shooing a chipmunk out of some lady from Virginia's tent."

More laughter from Joan; too much for the nominally amusing chipmunk incident. Joan laughed a lot. It was how she let the pressures that built up inside her skull escape since her i

The change was short-lived.

"Tell me everything," Ron said. "I'm on till midnight so take your time."

Trading the conversation back and forth effortlessly A

"Wow," Ron said when they'd finished. "Could be anybody. But why would anybody do it?"

"That's it in a nutshell," A

Dead ends summarily reached, the conversation limped on for a while, Ron dragging his visit out as long as he could. The four-to-midnight shift could be deadly dull. A

At eight a.m. both women were in a conference room down the hall from Harry Ruick's office. A

She'd come with A

The chief ranger's office was several doors down on the right. His window opened onto an uninspiring view of the back parking lot.

As in Joan's house, A

Ruick was behind a gray metal desk working through the pile of papers that had accumulated in his IN box during his excursion to the field. His door was open. A

"Come in," he said as he glanced up to see who it was. When he noted it was her he stopped what he was doing and gave her his undivided attention. Since getting the full bore of his administrative persona was rare, A

"I've got a little problem I'm hoping you can help me out with. I'm short-handed at the moment. As you know, two of my district rangers and four other law enforcement rangers are out in California on the Miranda fire."

A

Ruick was looking at her. Dutifully she said yes to whatever it was he was expecting her to agree with.

"Thing is the fire was contained, burning itself out. The crew the Glacier rangers were on was to be demobed. I expected them today or tomorrow at the latest. Yesterday, while I was on Flattop with the Van Slyke thing, Miranda blew up, jumped the lines and took in another eighty-five hundred acres." There was just a hint of self-condemnation in his tone that led A

"Looks like they'll be out another week or ten days. The FBI hasn't got any interest in this murder-in-the-outback kind of thing when it's got no drugs or gun overtones. We'll keep it single jurisdiction. The long and short of it is, I'd like you to work with me on this. Sort of Girl Friday."

Girl Friday was a significant promotion from step-'n'-fetchit, but this time A