Madden chose to stay in Bullfrog. It had been a decade or more since he had practiced hands-on law enforcement, and Steve did it every day. Jenny was impressed by the decision. She’d thought his vanity greater than his intelligence.
Steve took the right seat. Anna and Jenny buckled themselves in back.
Nearly a week had passed since Jenny saw the man now cooling his heels—and the rest of his anatomy—in Beatrice’s examining room. Houseboats were allotted two weeks on the water with any given group. If she’d met up with the partiers during their second week, by now they would have dispersed, back to wherever home was. Conceivably, the boat could be cleaned and back on the lake with another group, but Jenny didn’t think so. From Anna’s description of Kay, someone, somewhere, was waiting for her to come home, and as yet there’d been no alarm raised. So, instead of enjoying the beauty of the landscape as seen from the air, Jenny searched the surface of the lake for the old-model houseboat. Judging by the cant of their heads and the concentration on their faces, Anna and Steve were doing the same.
At a quarter of five they landed on the small strip the NPS maintained on the outskirts of Page. Awaiting them was a 1979 Jeep Cherokee, painted Park Service green, with the bison badge on its doors and the Wahweap district ranger behind the wheel. Doug Schneider was in his early fifties, well muscled, his iron gray hair worn in a brush cut that had been fashionable when Jenny was in grade school. The soothing gray and green of the NPS uniform did nothing to soften the military look he cultivated. Jenny was willing to bet his wife had to iron all his permanent-press uniform shirts. Simply plucking them from the dryer in a timely manner couldn’t create the crispness of Doug’s pleats and creases.
As they climbed into the Jeep, Steve made introductions. Again Anna and Jenny took the rear seat. The moment the doors were closed the two rangers began to talk.
“I think we’ve found your boat,” Doug said as he backed out of the gravel lot behind the hangar. “According to Dream Vacations—the outfit that rents it out—their last day on the lake is tomorrow. They have to be back in Wahweap by nine A.M. I sent out an APB. A boat that fit the description was spotted in Padre Bay around two thirty. With luck, it is headed in and will moor at Wahweap tonight. By now they’ve got to be running low on beer.”
Doug Schneider smiled grimly. Doug Schneider always smiled grimly. Jenny guessed it was probably the same smile he used when watching lambs play or Donald Duck cartoons.
“We’ll need to do a stakeout,” Schneider said.
“Sure,” Steve replied easily. “Let’s stake out in the fancy dining room overlooking the bay and get something to eat.”
Doug Schneider’s smile grew grimmer. When he raised his eyes and caught Jenny watching his reflection in the rearview mirror, she winked at him. He blinked as if she’d spit in his eye. Anna elbowed her in the ribs but didn’t look at her. Not good to be giggling girls at the district ranger’s expense.
“Who’s the boat rented to?” Steve asked.
“The guy that signed the check was a Trey Benton out of Fort Collins, Colorado. I got hold of his mother. She said he and a bunch of his buddies from a paintball club sold tickets on campus to raise the money for the boat. Kids could buy in either for one week or both. Other than her son and his best friend, an engineering student named Leo Sackamoto, she didn’t know who had bought into the deal.”
“That’s just nifty,” Steve said. “The third man could have cleared out by now. We got a dead girl on the plateau. We got the two boys dead in the slot. Pretty little line of corpses from point A to point B. The third kid, the one we assume stayed alive long enough to mess with Anna, is unaccounted for.”
“Unsub three looks good for it,” Doug said.
The cop-speak sounded silly to Jenny. It was just wrong to hear park rangers say “the perp” or “scenario” or “unsub.” It was like hearing small boys practicing saying “fuck,” like they were pretending to be bigger or tougher or more experienced than they were.
“I guess he’d look good for it if we could see him,” Steve said.
At the end of hour two at the restaurant, the rangers ran out of speculation and small talk. In their capacity as potential witnesses, females, seasonals, and subordinates, neither Jenny nor Anna had the energy to speak. At least Jenny hadn’t. Anna might have been keeping quiet for her own reasons. It was Jenny who broke the last dragging silence in over an hour of dragging silences.
“There it is,” she said, pointing out the window toward Wahweap’s mooring area. A majority of the boats on the lake did not dock but tied up to buoys and used smaller runabouts or skiffs to get to shore.
The houseboat was silhouetted against water turned silver with evening. The stone-and-sand landscape beyond had the dull glow of antique gold. Square-bowed and riding low, the houseboat drove a wide vee through the molten water.
“Vamos,” Steve said. “We don’t want anybody scattering before you girls get a chance to look at their shining faces.”
From another source Jenny might have taken umbrage at the “girls.” From Steve Gluck, she didn’t. He was an equal-opportunity kind of guy and often called visiting mucky-mucks he was shepherding around “you boys.” Jenny sensed that, in some indefinable way, Steve felt older than all other living humans.
Doug Schneider pulled up next to the houseboat as Steve threw the bumpers over the side to cushion the hulls from one another. Jenny leaped neatly over the gunwale onto the party boat and began lashing the NPS boat to the houseboat’s cleats.
Music played loud. Their arrival didn’t even make a dent in the chatter and laughter of the kids on board.
“Hey, man, it’s Smokey the Bear,” someone called down from the upper deck. “Where’s your Smokey Bear hat, Ranger Rick?”
Jenny stepped back to see who was doing the talking, caught her heel on a battered boogie board, and fell on her ass in an undignified fashion. Pratfalls were clearly considered high comedy by this stratum of society. The entire upper deck burst into raucous laughter. Someone shouted, “Not Ranger Rick, Ranger Rita!” and “Ranger Grace,” and more hilarity was enjoyed by all.
Having washed aboard on the gale of laughter, Anna held out her hand to help Jenny to her feet. Pretending not to see it, Jenny rose in one smooth motion. It was bad enough to make a fool of herself in front of people whose shit she had hauled. To make a fool of herself in front of Anna made her want to send each and every über-rich spoiled kid to sleep with the fishes. Instead of giving in to this tempting tide of pique, she made herself laugh. Helpless adult anger would delight the drunken little sots. She refused to give them that pleasure.
Doug and Steve followed them on board, and the partiers crowded back into the cabin to make room. The Wahweap district ranger gave Jenny an irritated scowl as he stepped around her. Probably feeling she’d shamed the entire Park Service by landing on her rump.
Schneider stepped to the center of the small deck in the stern and held his hands up for quiet. “No one is to leave this boat,” he ordered in a voice that had been born to shout orders to the troops from horseback.
For a second the gabble faded to a dull roar, and Jenny thought Doug had the buggers cowed. She was wrong.
“Oooh,” came a taunt. “Hey, we better not leave town or the sheriff will shoot us!”
“Who shot the sheriff?” several girls sang and leaned over the rail from the upper deck, breasts spilling from tiny bikini tops.