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Experimentally A
To the detriment of the ruler's edge, she drummed it lightly against the chair arm as she thought. The minor cracking sound as she played startled her. Before and, she thought but wasn't sure, during the attack on their camp by the bear, she'd heard the crack of wood on wood. That same sound had awakened her from her troubled sleep in the rocks on the flank of Cathedral Peak. Both times she'd written it off to twigs snapping under the weight of real or imagined marauders. Whacking the chair's arm again she noted the distinct quality of the sound.
So what? So somebody was banging pieces of wood together while a bear ransacked the camp or, even less likely, while a bear thoughtfully returned A
"Damn," A
The rest of the reports had little more information to be wrung out of them. The lab report on the blue stuff sack had yet to be returned but she expected no surprises. From her intimate and prolonged traverse across the alpine talus with its moth-bearing rocks, she had no doubt the traces on the bag were just as Joan had said: rock and moth-wing dust. The bloody traces within might be other than that of Carolyn Van Slyke, but A
Because she was there and could think of nothing better to do, she filled out a BIMS, a bear incident management systems report on the sow and two cubs she'd seen feeding in the cirque below Cathedral Peak. After she'd finished, she thumbed through BIMS submitted since she'd come to Glacier. She didn't know what she hoped for.
"Validation," she said aloud. Since she had no hard evidence to base it on, she'd not bothered to put it into words for Harry Ruick, or even more damning, into writing on any reports, but she had an overweening sense of bear, a bear padding through the incidents in Glacier. The obvious was the tearing apart of the camp. Less so was the flesh of the victim cached out of reach of a bear. A man digging the food of and dwelling in the den of a bear. The water bottle with teethmarks of a bear.
Nothing striking presented itself. The BIMS that were totally bogus, the lavender ink describing the bear juggling the hedgehog and the report of the dancing bear, A
Shuffling the crazies back into the pile, A
She had done what she could. Her ear was hot from being pressed to a phone all day. Her stomach was full of complaining gummi bears and the light was going from Joan's window.
A
The next morning A
"We'll follow up on this Fetterman thing," he said. "I'll call Tampa and see if we can't get the local police to make a few inquiries for us."
He didn't sound overly enthused. A
"We got the lab reports back," Ruick said. "Rush job because I hinted it was part of the murder investigation but I think what you stumbled across on Cathedral Peak was an amateur entomologist with a dog off leash." He pushed the folder across the desk and A
"Dog food." Being a responsible pet owner she'd read the backs of dog food bags to make sure Taco got a balanced diet.
They sat for a bit. Marya
"Well," Harry said, "I hate to keep you tied up when there's no point in it. Not to mention when I borrowed you, Glacier started paying your salary." He smiled to let A
"I'll give him a call," A
"I'll see an official letter of thanks gets into your perso
"You can leave your gear with the receptionist any time today," Marya
"Will do," A