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"Wait!" Gideon stopped, looked back over his shoulder. "That doesn't work. Anybody in the park would have known I was on lion transect down Middle McKittrick on the seventeenth. In Guadalupe's eighty thousand acres it would be any thinking villain's last choice as a place to hide the body." Unless someone wanted the body found; wanted her to find it on a lion transect. That was where people assume the lions were. In reality, lion transects were simply places chosen to look for lion sign to find out, often, where the lions were not. If someone wanted the body to be found and wanted it to be found on a lion transect it followed that they wanted it to appear that a lion had done the killing.
Which meant the lion scratches, the strange tracks, were not a coincidence made after the fact by an opportunistic cougar. They had been put there for her to find.
A
And the scratches and bites? Could they have been dug into Ranger Drury's flesh with something other than a feline claw? Knife? Ice pick? Fondue skewer?
Gideon, showing sudden energy, trotted down the dry bank of the creek that cut through Pine Canyon. Already, half a mile away from Guadalupe Peak, they could hear shouting. For the moment, A
People of all ages were swarming up Guadalupe Peak. Overweight men, women and girls in dresses, nobody in hiking boots, very few carrying food, many carrying no water at all or a quart to be shared by a family of four when every man, woman, and child would need at least a half gallon to make it comfortably-and safely-the ten miles and 3,000 feet to the top of the mountain and back.
"Half gallon," A
The opiate of the people was fueling the righteous.
By noon, after she had given nearly all her water away to feverish-looking children dragged along in the religious fervor, A
Near three o'clock, as she led Gideon down the trail, a thirteen-year-old girl with a sprained ankle rigid in the saddle, as pale as if she rode on the back of Lucifer himself, A
"Praise the Lord," the girl said.
"Go down," A
"If we suffer, we'll offer it up. Christ suffered on the cross for us," her husband said. He looked to be all of nineteen or twenty.
A
"There's no safe way for you to get past this horse," A
"Honey…" The girl laid a hand on her husband's arm. A
The boy looked up from his wife's face.
"No way," A
"Next year," the boy promised.
"Next year," A
With a truly beautiful smile, he handed her back the empty water bottle. "Thank you for the water, sister."
"You're welcome," A
In June, in the desert, no one, least of all an experienced hiker, carried a heavy pack eight miles without water. It couldn't be done. Not in June. Not with the heat and the wind. A
Sheila had not been lured down Middle McKittrick. She had been forced. Or carried. Probably on short notice. The pack was just a prop-like a stage prop-to make it look as though she'd gone on her own.
"Holy smoke!" A
"What's wrong? What's happening?" the girl squeaked from Gideon's back and A
"Nothing, Mary. You're okay. I just remembered something I need to do." A
"That's an interesting theory, A
It had been on the tip of A
"The FBI-" Paul began.
"Fuck the FBI!" A
Paul said nothing.
"Sorry," A
"I know you're wound up over this thing, A
A
"I don't think that's going to happen, A
"Much as I admire your concern, I don't think your pursuing this is going to help, A
A
"Did Cori
"We both did, A
"What if-"
"What if," Paul cut her off, his famous patience finally exhausted, "I get you the autopsy report. If it says lion kill, no poisons, no signs of other violence, then you let go of this thing and get back to the business of being a park ranger?" The phone rang and he snatched it up. "Frijole," he barked.
A
Small triumph, she thought as she stopped outside under the pecan trees, listened to the soothing chatter of a spring that had whispered the incomprehensible secrets of the desert for a thousand years. She was becoming a thorn in Paul Decker's side. A boil on his neck. A pain in his butt. Not a good way to beef up one's year-end evaluation.