Free Blood Lure by Nevada Barr Page A

rockslide east of the weeping wall, but most of the talk regarded the search.
    The number one-oh-two came up repeatedly. “District ranger?” Anna asked.
    “Chief and, till we get a new one, acting superintendent.”
    Since her promotion and move to Mississippi, district ranger was the position Anna held. As was true in many middle management jobs, district rangers had tremendous responsibilities. It was they who were called upon to search, to rescue, to handle law enforcement situations beyond the field rangers’ capabilities. Though they were the ultimate authority available when the chips were down or the proverbial shit hit the fan, they had very little authority in the greater NPS hierarchy. The first hint of real power was reserved for the chief rangers.
    “He any good?” Anna asked.
    “Harry Ruick? He’s good,” Joan said. “Sides with the bears when the public isn’t clamoring.”
    “And when they are?”
    “Pours experts on them.”
    “Does he usually go out on searches?” Some chiefs stayed active in the field, but more often than not they didn’t. Several times a year they’d make some sort of publicized trek of the brass into the backwoods for management reasons but, particularly in the bigger parks, chief ranger had become an administrative position.
    “Not usually,” Joan admitted.
    The search wasn’t three hours old and already the big guns were rolling out. Harry Ruick was guessing Van Slyke was dead.
    By eight o’clock a light rain began to fall. August’s warmth was co-opted by weather and altitude. It had yet to reach sixty degrees. The low ceiling of clouds would keep out any assistance by air. Rain was light and the wind calm, but visibility on Flattop had dwindled to nothing.
    Joan radioed Ruick, who headed up the team, and told him they had nothing. He advised them to eat, rest, stay warm and meet the team on West Flattop Trail around noon, when horses and searchers should be arriving.
    “Rory’s father and stepmother are camped at Fifty Mountain,” Joan said into the radio. “Has anybody been sent to inform them?”
    “We’ll work on it,” Ruick promised and Joan left it at that.
    They followed directions, eating as much as they could, resting, then hiking down to the trail. The day shared its misery, cool and rainy: warm enough that rain gear left one overheated and sweating, cold enough to give a severe chill if one got thoroughly wet. A day without a whole hell of a lot to recommend it, as far as Anna was concerned.
    Shortly before noon they met up with the search party and led them the three quarters of a mile back to their camp.
    Ruick hadn’t wasted his time in the saddle. On the ride up he’d worked out the search area and the pattern to be used. The area around the clearing from where Rory’d disappeared was divided into quadrants. The search pattern, Anna noticed, was tight and intense. Ruick was looking for a body or an injured person, not a young man still able to cover any amount of territory.
    Anna and Joan went with the chief ranger on the section west toward Trapper Peak and south to the precipitous descent into McDonald Creek. As often as not, park higher-ups went soft. Some went down this road out of laziness; even more did so because in their mountain-climbing, water-rafting youth, they’d trashed knee and ankle joints. Like aging football players, they found themselves stove in and going to fat in their middling years. By midafternoon Anna was wishing one of those fates had befallen Harry Ruick. He was no wunderkind rocketed up to the exalted rank of chief while still a lad; Anna put him in his early fifties. His dark hair was grizzled, and through the open neck of his uniform shirt, it looked as if the thick pelt on his chest had gone completely white. He wasn’t a tall man, but built, as Anna’s father might have said when waxing uncouth, like a brick shit house: squat, thick and rock-hard.
    Ruick set a brutal pace and showed Anna and Joan the