10

USUALLY Anna's morning walk from the housing area to the Maintenance Yard where the NPS vehicles were kept was a pleasant part of her day. The air was clear and cool. The desert's perfume, released by the morning dew, was at its most heady. Cottontails, mule deer, and, if she were lucky, a coyote, flickered through the gray branches of the rabbit brush.

This morning all those ingredients, save the coyote, were in place but her mind was so filled with the rubble of human emotions, she never saw them.

Life changed the moment one began to stalk one's fellow man. Apparently in much the same way it would if one were to take up a life of crime. Perhaps because that, too, was a form of stalking. Someone had stalked and killed Sheila Drury. Now Anna stalked them, dug through their secrets. Murder required so many secrets and secrets were isolating things.

How lonely a life of crime must be, how tempting to tell someone-anyone-just to break the icy silence. How one might find oneself hinting at the possibilities, talking in What-Ifs and hypothetical questions. The world was designed for people who had no secrets, nothing to hide. One would go through life paying cash, telling lies, and twitching every time the doorbell rang. And, surely, feeling as transparent as glass.

Anna marveled that anyone would choose to be so vulnerable, so nervous. Then it crossed her mind that perhaps it came about not by choice, but simply by failing to say "no" to each sweet and terrifying betrayal till finally there'd be no turning back. Always wanting a little more and a little more till the deed was done, the Rubicon crossed, the die cast.

After a while the crime would take on a life of its own, grow, form partnerships, expectations, financial dependencies until, even should one want out, the sheer inertia would carry them on.

And Anna knew there was a breed of men-and women- who craved the challenge, the adrenaline rush of night actions. The way Rogelio loved ecotage: partly fighting the good fight, partly playing at commandos. There was a breed of criminal who got high on the smell of fear, the warm wet touch of blood.

She stepped off the asphalt and walked the narrow dirt path toward the chain link fence that surrounded Maintenance.

Was Craig Eastern that crazy? Anna dismissed him from her thoughts. This morning's mission was to investigate Karl Johnson-or, at any rate, his truck.

Karl felt he had been cheated out of the ranger position in Dog Canyon, believed he had been betrayed, that something he had earned and deserved had been snatched away. The National Park Service had very few women in middle or higher management. Women held the lower-paying clerical and seasonal jobs. Word had come down from on high to promote women and people of color whenever possible. The Good Old Boy contingent thought Karl was just another victim of the plot against white males. Maybe Karl thought so, too.

A lot of people went through life feeling they'd been ripped off. The money, the good jobs, the beautiful women, the rich husbands, had been snatched away from them, given to the wrong people.

How many crimes were committed because somebody felt the need to get "some of their own" back? Just to feel, for once, that they had a little control, were a little smarter than the rest?

Human crimes seemed more sordid, yet at the same time infinitely more forgivable, than crimes that were just business as usual; all the profits neatly laundered, washed clean of the victim's blood and vomit before reaching the lined pockets of the three-piece suits.

As she slipped through the gate into the Maintenance Yard, her mind set on a little breaking and entering, Anna wondered if there were a crime she wouldn't commit under the right circumstances. Murder certainly. In fact she was keeping a list of Those Better Off Dead. If she were hungry she would steal. There were betrayals of the heart.

She'd never be cruel to an animal and she wouldn't litter.

"That's as good as it gets," she said to the sun, just edging above the eastern desert; to whatever powers might be listening.

Just after six-thirty a.m. she let herself into the Maintenance building through the shop door. The Roads and Trails crew wouldn't come on duty till seven.

The place smelled of new paint and automotive oil. A smell that she usually found comforting. It put her back in her father's auto shop where she'd played endlessly with nuts and bolts and cotter pins. This morning it only served to remind her she was on alien ground. Technically she had a right to be in the building. The key she'd been issued was an indication of that. Half a dozen times a week she was in and out of Harland's enclave. But this time she'd come to rifle through his files. That shed a different light on the matter. One she didn't much care to be seen in.

Soundlessly, Anna crossed the concrete floor of the shop and tried the door to Harland's office. It was locked. Squinting to cut through the gloom, she peered into the crack between the door and the jamb. The bolt was not thrown. Quick as a cat, she ran to the scrap bin in the carpentry shop and dug through the bits of wood and metal. A triangle of tin caught her eye. Anna grabbed it out of the heap and trotted back to Harland's office.

The tin was better even than a credit card for slipping the catch. In less than a minute, she was inside. There was no point in closing the door behind her. The two windows of Harland's interior office looked out on the auto shop to one side and the carpentry shop on the other. He worked in a fishbowl. Fortunately there were only two filing cabinets. Anna pulled open all six drawers. Too dark to read. "In for a penny…" she whispered and flipped on the overhead light.

Harland Roberts was an organized man and Anna blessed him for it. Each hanging file was labeled and color-coded. Aptly enough all pay, overtime, annual leave, and sick leave requests were under money-green tabs.

Anna pulled out the overtime file. The requests, signed in Harland's neat, military hand, were in chronological order, most recent first. She flipped back through them to the seventeenth of June. Nothing. On the fifteenth the mule packer had worked six hours overtime packing fence materials into the backcountry and on the twenty-first Karl had worked two and a half hours overtime fixing a broken water main. No one had worked the night of June 17. There were no extenuating circumstances, no last-minute changes. Karl was in McKittrick Canyon that night on personal business.

Leaving everything as she'd found it, Anna left the office and relocked the door.

Johnson drove a small blue half-ton pickup with metal toolboxes on either side. The truck was parked across the yard near the building where the ambulance and fire truck were housed.

Staring at the mundane little vehicle, Anna realized she wasn't exactly sure what she'd come to look for. Buttons? Threads? Flakes of skin? Soil from Dog Canyon? Hairs? Given the hand-me-down nature of government vehicles, the truck was bound to be a regular treasure trove of human artifacts.

The temptation to turn around, go home, and have another cup of coffee before starting up the Tejas on backcountry patrol was strong. But she had promised Christina she would check it out and she'd risen ninety minutes early to do it.

"Just look," she told herself. "Don't look to find."

Armed with half a dozen plastic sandwich bags she'd grabbed on the off chance something promising did turn up, Anna started with the bed of the little truck.

For a vehicle used primarily for hauling garbage, Karl's truck was quite clean. As she peered at the collection of aluminum pop-tops, cigarette butts, and plastic tent pegs her sweep had turned up, she tried to picture how the pickup, seen-allegedly-in the McKittrick Canyon parking lot from five to ten p.m. on the night of Sheila Drury's murder, the night Karl said he was in Van Horn lifting things down from garage shelves, could have been used.