Blood lure

If Ruick noticed that she looked or smelled better than when last they'd met, he was too much a professional to comment. Seated in a relatively comfortable chair in his office, the afternoon sun painting a warm square across her knees, A

It crossed A

"Remember Rory and the water bottle nonsense?" she asked. "He's since changed his story, but originally he said he lay down to sleep without one and woke with one beside him."

"Right. One covered with his murdered stepmother's fingerprints," Harry said warningly.

Looked at in the harsh light of reason, the benevolent bear spirit that brought drinking water to lost souls was pretty irrational.

"Just a thought," A

"This guy who brought the water shot at you?" Ruick asked skeptically.

"Yes." A

"You're sure? You saw the gun?"

"Heard the shot."

The chief ranger drummed his fingers on his desk pad and gazed out his window. "Before the rock was rolled, or after?"

"After," A

"So the shot came at the same time the rock was crashing down?"

"That's right." A

"So you could have heard something else," he said, as A

"I could have heard something else," A

What he said was, "Could you have been mistaken about a person rolling the rock? Could it have been dislodged by accident? Someone hiding behind it, knocked it loose, that sort of thing?"

A

"Okay." Harry accepted her statement at face value and A

She watched the sun creep up her thighs. Harry watched the maintenance vehicles come and go from the cluster of buildings down the road beyond the parking lot.

"We're pretty much up against it," he said finally. A

"We don't have much to go on," he said. "I agree with you that Les probably is in the clear. His motive, even if the missus was flaunting McCaskil in his face, is too old. Les has been there too many times. If we had a straw-and-camel's-back situation with Mrs. Van Slyke's latest adultery, Les would have snatched up a rock or whatever. It would have been a crime of passion occurring at the scene, and more likely than not Les would have remained with the body and confessed to the first person who showed up. He wouldn't steal film, move the body, defile the corpse and cache the flesh."

"He'll be staying in a motel till Rory's done," A

"Thank God for that. When he keels over from a heart attack they can damn well dial nine-one-one and let the police take care of it."

Harry sounded so callous toward human life A

"If I'd ever thought Rory was worth much as a suspect, I'd never have sent him back up with Joan," Harry said. "Even though we don't have enough for an arrest, there are ways."

A

He considered it much as she had, and in the end rejected it for the same reasons. Rory'd had no knife, no blood on him. Did he run to Fifty Mountain in his slippers, bumble into the wrong tent, catch Carolyn with McCaskil, then Carolyn dresses, hikes three miles, he follows and kills her? Or did he accidentally meet Carolyn on the trail in the dead of night in the arms of her lover and strike her down? With what? He was strong but slight. The story didn't hold together.

"William McCaskil's still in the ru

Ruick just grunted. McCaskil might have had sex with the victim, might even have lent her his coat, but neither of those things were illegal. What made him interesting was the fact that he had run, but there were lots of reasons for that. McCaskil was a convicted felon. It made sense that he wouldn't want to be mixed up in a murder investigation, especially if he was involved in something shady that he didn't particularly want to talk about. Unless they could co

"We'll get McCaskil," Ruick said. "His car is still here and we've got an APB out on him. He'll turn up. If you run across him, don't mess with him. He's got a history of minor violence. More than that, he's been convicted twice on felony charges. If he's the one who took a shot at you, he's facing his third strike. That'll be a hell of a lot of years. McCaskil's probably long gone and good riddance. Until my rangers get back from the fires, I don't have the manpower to keep this up. I'm not blowing off the attack on you, A

"What I found," A

"We're not giving up," Harry said, mostly to save face. "The investigation is ongoing. We've just got to figure whoever killed Mrs. Van Slyke has left the park. Until we find something more to go on, I can't see any point in committing my people to this at the height of the season. They're needed elsewhere."

A

Because she could not find her way to that vantage point, she said, "What do you want me to do?"

Ruick brought his gaze in from the parking lot and let it rest on her. Harry Ruick was as uncomfortable as she was with backing off the investigation. Unlike her, he was responsible for the safety of the entire park. National Park Service law enforcement was designed to keep tourists from damaging the resource and each other. It was not set up to conduct long-term in-depth investigations. Parks were federal lands. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was the department used to that end. But, on occasion, the FBI had bigger fish to fry-or fishes closer to home-and the investigation was left to the park where the incident had occurred.