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 running," Anna said without much enthusiasm.
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 connect him to the victim in some substantial way or prove he'd committed like incidents in the past, all they could do was talk to him and let him go.
"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, Anna. I'm not. I'll get a couple of my backcountry rangers over there tomorrow. But you and I both know what they'll find."
"What I found," Anna agreed, "less half a peanut."
"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."
Anna didn't like it. Intuition told her there were connections, somehow, somewhere, between the seemingly unconnected events, that if she could find the right vantage point she would be able to see how a Florida con man, a promiscuous Seattle divorce lawyer and amysterious young man with a chain-link belt and a beautiful smile, were related to punctured water bottles, army cutworm moths, glacier lilies and murder.
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.
This was one of those times.
Carolyn Van Slyke's murder was very probably going to slip through the cracks, along with a staggering number of other homicides that would never be solved.
"What I'd like you to do," Harry said, "is keep at it for a while. Joan will be up there for another five days. I can't see any point in you turning around and going right back unless you just want to for the DNA study. She's got Buck with her to fetch and carry, and that's more than she's used to. Why don't you make use of Joan's office and her computer? See if you can't dig up something, anythingthat might tie some of this together. If you don't come up with anything, you can consider yourself off my duty roster and go back to work for Joan."
"Sure," Anna said. She'd start in the morning. In the bookcase under Joan's television she'd seen a video collection including such classics as Die Hard, End of Days, and Aliens.Tonight she was going to enjoy a little vicarious kicking of ass.
Chapter 20
The following morning Anna took possession of Joan's office. On her way in she'd been greeted with a few friendly hellos and had the coffee machine pointed out to her, but there'd been no questions about the murder or anything related to it. Researchers were wonderful in their dedication. If it wasn't about bears, virtually no one in the great rambling building gave two hoots about it.
With Ruick's blessing, she had taken copies of every report generated, every piece of evidence gathered and any and all lab reports returned. Joan's office was devoid of clean flat surfaces. Every inch of space was covered in folders, papers, pamphlets, books and pieces of bears gathered over the years. Knowing this well-feathered nest was as Joan wished it to be, the sprawling form dictated by her professional needs, Anna chose to disturb nothing. The relics of her investigation she placed carefully on top of Joan's piles. She sat in the midst of them and opened her mind to let plans and patterns form if they might.
Carolyn Van Slyke's autopsy report was to the right of the computer on a half-consumed bag of gummi bears. Anna reread it, looking for any connection to McCaskil. Other than the coat, there was nothing. As a matter of course the body had been checked for sexual assault. None. If Carolyn had been involved with McCaskil, the sex had been consensual and a condom had been used.
Anna had only Lester Van Slyke's word that Carolyn had been adulterous. Though she believed him, there was a remote possibility he'd been inspired by the army jacket, seen the accusation as a way of casting suspicion on McCaskil, not realizing in doing so he was giving himself yet another motive for killing his own wife. Since Anna had no positive leads, she took the negative.
Having found Carolyn Van Slyke's work number and address in Seattle, Anna called her place of business. Francine Cuckor, Carolyn's assistant, was happy to answer questions. Whether divorce attorneys were more open than most about adultery or whether Francine just liked to talk, Anna would never know, but according to Ms. Cuckor's bawdy tales, a few of which sounded apocryphal and bordered on admiration, Carolyn not only had sex with a large number of men but was open about it. Francine did say that Carolyn was an ethical practitioner of the law. Her exact words were: "She'd never fuck a client or a client's husband until the case was settled." From the way Ms. Cuckor said it, Anna guessed she pretty much thought Carolyn a candidate for the Lawyer's Hall of Fame on grounds of self-control.
Francine went so far as to offer Anna the names and phone numbers of others who could confirm her stories. Anna declined. She was merely fact-checking, not gathering material for letters to Penthouse.
She hung up and filched a gummi bear to cleanse her palate. She was not a prude. She'd enjoyed her share of fornication. Still, she was old-fashioned enough to feel adultery should be done on the sly, in great secrecy, and that it behooved the adulterers to feel ashamed and guilty. The libertine sentiments of Ms. Cuckor and the late Mrs. Van Slyke left her with a sense of sleaze that was unsettling. Anna had never cheated on Zach. A cynic had once told her it was because he died before their marriage reached the philandering years. Anna chose to believe otherwise. If she married again she would bring to the new union that same Pollyanna belief in fidelity.
If she married again.Thinking that startled her. Several years earlier she'd finally extinguished the torch she carried for her first husband. It had never crossed her mind that she might marry again.
She ate another gummi bear and picked up the reports generated by a computer search on one William Adkins McCaskil, a.k.a. Bill McLellan, Bill Fetterman, and Will Skillman. It was a point in the man's favor that he had registered for a backcountry permit under his own name. That he'd registered for a permit at all suggested that either his pursuits were innocent or, given he was well versed in the ways of crime and law enforcement, he knew in obeying the minor rules one was far more apt to get away with the major infractions. A significant number of felons were rotting in the federal penitentiaries because they got pulled over for failing to signal on a right turn and then one thing led to another.