Free Ill Wind by Nevada Barr Page A

till morning.
    “You’re drunk. Sleep on the couch. I’ll leave your keys on the table when I go to work. Good night.”
    A few minutes of murmuring came through the wall as Jamie dragged out bedding for the inebriated helitacker, then the house was blessedly quiet. Anna took two aspirins for her head. For her nerves she recited the only prayer she knew all the way through: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties/And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!”

FIVE
    AT EIGHT A .M., WHEN STACY PULLED UP IN THE PATROL car, Jimmy Russell was still curled up on the couch. He didn’t even twitch when Anna walked through. Without so much as a twinge of guilt, she let the door bang shut behind her.
    Usually Stacy’s aesthetic countenance was a welcome sight, but lack of sleep had left Anna surly. Evidently the night’s festivities had left their mark on him as well. In lieu of “good morning” he said: “Mind if we stop by my house? Rose’s going to Farmington and Bella needs a ride to Maintenance. Drew said he’d keep an eye on her till six.”
    Anna wanted to ask why Rose didn’t take the kid along, but she minded her own business. The radio was tuned to a Navajo station and a language that sounded like Chinese sawed at her nerves. With an abrupt movement, she switched it off.
    “Wrong side of the bed?” Stacy asked.
    “Tired. My housemates kept me up after our rendezvous in Maintenance. Jamie said she’d seen a veil or some damn thing. Chindi passing from the underworld to this one. They were out at Cliff Palace, drinking and scaring each other is my guess.”
    “I checked the book.” Stacy sounded alarmed. “There were no permits for Cliff Palace last night.”
    Any employee going anywhere—or anytime—the public was not allowed had to have a backcountry permit signed by the chief ranger. Cliff Palace after hours fell under that restriction.
    Anna wondered if Stacy entertained the same suspicions she did about possible monkeywrenching business. “If that’s really where they were then I doubt much harm was done.”
    “When I made my sweep at eleven I didn’t see any cars,” he said stubbornly.
    “Maybe they were on bicycles.” Leaning her head back against the seat, she closed her eyes and let the subject drop.
    At the housing loop, she fiddled with the radio while Stacy went in to fetch Bella. A little mental arithmetic told Anna that Bella was his stepdaughter. She was a first- or second-grader and he’d met his wife three years ago. Taking on the responsibility, not only of someone else’s child, but a child with a disability, spoke of powerful love—or powerful need.
    “Hello, my little pine nut,” she heard Stacy call when he was halfway up the walk. He disappeared into the house to reappear moments later with Bella. The child’s face was a testament to her mother’s youthful good looks. A rounded heart set off by a crop of carefully tended curls. Brown hair, several shades lighter than Rose’s, caught the morning sun and glinted with blond highlights. Wide-spaced eyes sparkled above a small straight nose. This loveliness made more pathetic the rolling gait and bowed legs, far too short for her upper body.
    Hand in hand with Stacy, Bella chattered up at him. For every glitter of hero worship in her eyes, there was an answering glow of adoration in his. Stacy’s slender frame shaped itself into a question mark as he curbed his steps, leaning down to hear her.
    What Anna had seen as a burden clearly lightened the load Stacy professed to have carried after his first wife left him.
    “You’re Anna Pigeon,” the child announced when they reached the car.
    “You got me there.” Anna leaned over the seat-back to shove briefcases and hats out of Bella’s way. Fleetingly, she wondered if Stacy had been talking about her.
    “I read your name tag,” the child explained as she swung herself into the rear seat. “That’s in case you thought I might be a