“Yes,” Anna admitted.
“This is State Senator Billy Wilson.”
The senator, a lean handsome man with a whiff of Iago about him, and dressed down for the event in gray linen trousers and a pale pink Izod shirt, stepped out from the wall, hand extended, canvassing for votes over the dead.
Anna nodded politely but pretended not to notice the outstretched hand. Nothing in his behavior offended her; she just didn’t want to touch the man.
“Let me see the corpses,” she said.
“Are you sure you are okay with this?” Nurse Beatrice asked solicitously. The presence of important men evidently improved her bedside manner.
“If it’s not, be it on my head,” Anna returned, remembering the phrase from when she’d refused to let the nurse ship her off to Page because she’d had a concussion. To her surprise Beatrice laughed.
“I guess it’s not just your head that’s hard as a rock,” the nurse said good-naturedly. Reaching across the lump on the bed, she delicately pinched the top edge of the sheet between her thumbs and forefingers. Before she unveiled the dead man’s face she looked at Jenny. “Steve, Jenny doesn’t need to see this, does she?”
“No. You want to wait outside, Jenny? Beats freezing to death.”
Jenny shook her head, her eyes on Anna’s face. Anna appreciated the support.
“Okay,” the nurse said and peeled back the sheet. A puffy, white, but surprisingly unaltered face was exposed. Fine, curling dark brown hair framed eyebrows that darted toward the aquiline nose like seabirds going into a wave. The eyes were closed.
“I recognize him as one of the bodies we found in the slot canyon,” Anna said. “I don’t recognize him from the assault up on the plateau. Could I see his back?” She stepped closer and leaned in. Her braid fell against the sheet. She snatched it back and tucked it through her belt where it wouldn’t get tainted.
None of the men stepped in to help Beatrice roll the corpse. Anna doubted she would have welcomed the assistance. Expertly, she rearranged the body without ever endangering the dignity of the dead man, if the dead had dignity, then tipped it up onto its side.
On the back of the right shoulder was a tattoo of a sea turtle about six inches long from head to tail and five inches wide.
“I recognize the tattoo from the attack,” Anna said. “The shape and placement of it anyway. I was right. It was a turtle.”
“Tortoise,” Jenny corrected her automatically. “Sorry. Hazard of the profession.”
“Show me the other guy,” Anna said.
While Beatrice redraped the tattooed corpse, Steve stepped up and efficiently folded the sheet back from the face of the second body.
The hair was the right color, and, judging by the form under the sheet, he was big enough to be the man who hit Kay. “Sorry,” Anna said. “I don’t know for sure that I’ve seen him before.”
“I have,” Jenny said.
FORTY
The bodies in Panther Canyon’s end were recovered by the dive team, sans Jenny Gorman. Jenny was Lake Powell’s best diver, but Steve hadn’t wanted her back in the cold water after her bout with hypothermia. Regis guessed there were psychological reasons as well. Steve hadn’t said as much. Since anything that smacked of psychotherapy got Gorman’s hackles up, he wouldn’t have.
Regis spun his office chair in a full circle just to feel he was moving. He’d played every angle he could think of to be in Panther during the recovery. He wasn’t law enforcement, or a diver, or high enough in the pecking order to stick his nose anywhere he wanted, so he’d failed. Pushing harder—or simply going AWOL from headquarters and showing up—would have looked peculiar. Since he and Bethy had stayed in Page on their lieu days, it was more difficult to keep abreast of things without calling attention to himself.
Best scenario, they’d think he was a ghoul with poor work habits. Worst scenario? He didn’t want to think about that. The brief high he’d gotten from playing cat-and-mouse was burning out. Would they find telltale marks on the bodies? God, he hoped not.
“It was an accident,” he said firmly. Not firmly enough. It sounded like he was trying to convince himself. Trying again, he said, “It was an accident.” Better. Accidents did happen. People died. It wasn’t that far-fetched. Canyoneering was a dangerous sport. Inexperienced—even experienced—climbers died every year. These two could very well have died by accident.
The logic of this argument lowered his blood pressure a few points. In the parks, deaths were nearly always accidental. During the six years he’d been at Lake Powell he couldn’t remember a single homicide.
“It was an accident,” he said for the third time. Perfect. It sounded true.
God damn, but he hadn’t bargained for this. The thrill of feeling alive, of knowing he was fully in the world, that his life was not being measured away in meetings and memos and conversations that never changed, had gone into overdrive. Nerves accelerated from charged to jangling. Excitement became fear. He felt like a man flayed alive. Every word spoken, every movement made, crashing against raw flesh.
Regis hadn’t been able to worm his way into the viewing of the bodies either. He knew Anna identified one of the bodies, more or less. Not as anybody specific but as one of the attack boys. Jenny’d recognized the other as a partier on the houseboat that defiled Panther’s grotto. College-age men accidentally dying in the slot canyon that led up to the plateau where, a few days before, college-age men had assaulted a woman was not a coincidence anybody would swallow. Poetic justice was even more rare than the ordinary prosaic justice occasionally available in the courts.
Even the dullest law enforcement type—and neither Steve nor Jim was a dullard—would know these men had been murdered.
Regis rose from his desk and closed his office door so he could pace without being observed. Three steps, turn, three steps, turn. The office was cramped, but pacing was better than sitting.
He sensed killing could become an addiction. Having once taken a living creature that was There and changed it into a chunk of meat, rendering it Not There by an act of will, if one was not horrified by the act—or perhaps even if one was—the power of the act would eventually draw the killer back. A need to kill again would build, to see if it was the same, see if it was different, got better, harder, or easier.
What had never crossed his mind, in all of the hours he’d spent thinking of Anna and the jar, Kay and the assault, was that killing could become an act of indifference. Taking a life should be a passionate interaction, not a whim or a matter of convenience. It chilled him to think death and life were no different, that There and Not There were equally insignificant, equally banal.
The perfect crime.
He remembered thinking of the ultimate seduction of a life without consequences. There was no such thing. Webs were woven and flies were caught in them. Threads snapped until everything was in ruins. A need to confess, pour everything out in a putrid flood before a priest or a ranger, was building. The need was so great, membranes in his mind grew thin with the desire to burst, let secrets spew like pus from a suppurating wound.
Shaking his head, he paced three steps, turned, paced three, and turned.
He was in too deep for confession. Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly. It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.
Too late for confession.
Maybe not too late to end it.
FORTY-ONE
Steve and the chief ranger wasted no time. The senator was abandoned to amuse himself as best he could until Hank and the plane had time to come back for him. Chief Ranger Madden debated whether it should be he or Steve flying back to Wahweap with Anna and Jenny. The need to be in charge vied with the need to do what was best. At least that’s what Jenny thought as she watched inner shadows flit across his face while Hank walked around the plane doing a preflight check. Regardless of the fact he’d flown in only a few hours earlier, Hank erred on the side of caution. Once he’d told Jenny his goal in life was to die a very old pilot.