Free Track of the Cat by Nevada Barr Page B

bothered her till she got up and checked them out. The carpet was glued down tight, the paneling all of a piece.
    Even with the windows open, the trailer was hot. Anna divested herself of all but her underpants-lacy peach confections, the last vestige of a former clothes horse. Having folded her uniform trousers over the pipe in the closet, she lay back down.
    "Pretty damn mysterious," she said to herself and laughed. "No shit, Sherlock. Go to sleep." Clicking off the lamp, she closed her eyes.
    When she was in college, she remembered trying to hide her stash from the fabled Narcs. Every place she put it would suddenly seem glaringly obvious and, in a fit of paranoia, she'd move it.
    Some enterprising authors had described the phenomenon perfectly. Anna wracked her brain but she couldn't recall their names. They'd written a clever book about marijuana cultivation. Anna recalled very little of it, only the introduction. "We've never tried marijuana," it said-or words to that effect. "We got all our information from our friend, Ernie. Ernie keeps his stash in the shower rod. Sorry, Ernie, we don't need you anymore."
    Shower rod.
    The clothes rod.
    Anna clicked on the light. The clothes rod in the closet was a length of iron pipe dropped into two U-shaped brackets. She padded over and lifted it out. Her trousers slid to the floor as she peered in. A roll of paper corked one end.
    Careful not to tear anything, Anna coiled it smaller and eased it out. A dozen snapshots, curled from their incarceration, sprang apart. She carried them to the bed, knelt on the rug, and spread them in the circle of light.
    These were the pictures that had been sought. A naked woman laughing, her hair soft around her shoulders, posed on the slickrock in Middle McKittrick about a mile downstream from where the body had been found.
    Christina Walters, her white breasts full and round, catching the sun, her knees coyly together, invitingly apart.

    Sheila had set the timer for the last three: she and Christina making love, the tight brown wire of Ranger Drury's body close against the soft cream of the other woman's.
    Anna gathered them up, sorry, almost to have pried. The pictures did not repulse her. They were, in their way, beautiful. Certainly Sheila Drury's best effort.
    They might be a reason to kill. Anna didn't know. It seemed melodramatic.
    But sometimes people died. And sometimes people killed them. People killed people for all sorts of reasons.
    Like many rangers, Anna chose Law Enforcement not because she wanted to bust perpetrators but because the Protection Divisions in most parks did all the search and rescue and emergency medicine. The serious cop stuff most rangers preferred to leave to the police.
    This was beginning to smack of serious cop stuff.
    Fear licked around Anna's ankles. She wished she had brought her .357.
    Rangers were required to carry defensive equipment whenever on duty. Not for the first time, Anna wished she paid a little more attention to the rules.

    7

    ANNA closed the heavy binder. Her back and neck ached but she couldn't straighten up. Piedmont was draped around her neck fast asleep. Picking up his tail, she brushed its feathery-soft tip across her eyelids.
    There's been nothing much of help in her Law Enforcement notes from FLETC. All the Scene of the Crime materials- evidence gathering-had presumed the officer knew there'd been a crime committed. Lots of detailed diagrams for roping off the area, controlling the flow of traffic, protecting the chain of evidence so it wouldn't get thrown out of court.
    Nothing pertained to half-eaten rangers in saw grass swamps.
    I should have gotten suspicious earlier, Anna thought. She comforted herself with the idea that Jakey, his deputy, and Paul hadn't been suspicious either.
    They still weren't.
    As far as anyone else was concerned a crime had not been committed and the culprit had been caught and executed.
    "Not dispatched, executed."
    Piedmont opened one orange eye at the