Painfully, Les pulled himself together, or as much together as he would ever get. A handkerchief was found, eyes dried, nose blown. Water was sipped, housecoat readjusted. Then he settled himself to answer honestly.
They didn't get anything in the way of revelations. Honesty is an individual perception. If Les had ever been able to view his situation objectively-or, more to the point, as others would view it-the ability had been lost. The need to feel okay about himself and still to stay with Carolyn had to be balanced. The only way to do that was to create a new truth, one where being a victim was acceptable, even admirable. Telling them now of his wife's transgressions, Lester could not go outside the reality he had made for himself. "She had a temper" and "sometimes she got carried away" were the best he could do. The broken collarbone, the ruptured eardrum were accidents. She didn't mean it. Lester had zigged when he should have zagged, etc., etc., ad nauseam. The blow from the metal kitchen stool that had scarred his face he simply slid over as if it wasn't worth mentioning. As if it had never happened.
Of Rory, for whom the sudden tears had presumably been shed since they clearly were not for his own miserable situation, he said, "The boy shouldn't have taken it so much to heart. I never minded."
The words came to Anna's ear not in Lester's confused, sad voice but the desperate wail of his son when he'd said the same thing earlier in the day.
Harry gave Lester a few minutes more than Anna would have to collect himself then said, "We're just about done here Mr… Les. We understand this has got to be a rough time for you. Real rough. We're sorry-"
For an instant Anna was afraid he would parrot the empty phrase in vogue in TV cop shows, "We're sorry for your loss," but he didn't.
"-to have to put you through more questions, but in cases like this we can't wait on good manners."
"I understand," Les said. He pulled the handkerchief from the pocket of his robe where he'd stuffed it and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. "Go ahead."
"You said earlier that the army surplus jacket your wife was wearing when we found her was not hers. Do you have any idea who it belonged to?"
Les kept his face down and blew his nose again though it didn't need it. "I guess it could have been Carolyn's," he said. "She was always getting new clothes. I never paid much attention." He was lying. A husband might not notice if his wife bought a different shade of lipstick or a new blouse but if she suddenly started sporting oversized U.S. Army fatigues he'd probably sit up and take note.
Ruick nodded slowly. "I see," he said and Anna wondered if he was seeing the same thing she was: a skittering of weasel tail vanishing down a secret hole.
"We thank you for your time." Harry rose and reclaimed his Stetson. "We'll talk again before you make any decisions about what to do next."
Back in Ruick's pickup, painted white with the standard green reflective NPS stripe down the side, as she and Ruick buckled their seat belts, Anna said: "Our suspects stink."
"Kind of hard to picture that particular worm turning, isn't it?"
"Rory doesn't fit the bill much better."
"There's always the homicidal stranger just passing through." "Fortuitous accident?" "Could be. If it is and our murderous Mr. X has moved on, we're pretty much guaranteed a segment on Unsolved Mysteries,"he said sourly. "He was lying about that army jacket," Anna said.
"You think? I don't notice what my wife wears, much to her annoyance."
Anna explained her rationale.
"Good point," he conceded. "Supposing he does know where she got the coat. To give him the benefit of the doubt, let's say he didn't remember yesterday and he's figured it out since. Why not just tell us? Who's he protecting? If the jacket was his-and Les doesn't strike me as an army surplus kind of guy-it wouldn't prove anything. Wives take their husband's coat all the time. First time around he said she had a habit of 'borrowing' things."
"Maybe it belongs to Rory. Maybe he thinks the two of them did get together and Rory killed her, made the coat swap at the same time he got that second water bottle," Anna suggested. She didn't remember ever seeing Rory in an army jacket, and given the new polypropylene microfleece nature of his backpacking wardrobe, a bulky heavy coat seemed out of character, but she couldn't remember for sure. "I'll ask Joan," she said.
Not because the coat question concerned her overmuch-Anna would have noticed if Rory had lugged a heavy army jacket into the woods- but to have something to do, she sought out Joan at the resource management office.
Joan was in a tizzy. The DNA lab at the University of Idaho had screwed up on the hair samples sent in from the bear trap they'd harvested before unpleasant adventures interrupted their research. There'd been a mix-up, Joan told her distractedly. The lab had sent back DNA results from Alaskan grizzlies, not those of the lower forty-eight. Though the same species, grizzlies in Alaska were considerably larger-thirty to fifty percent-and had enough other evolutionary and environmentally based differences that the tests could tell one from the other. Till she sorted out her bits of hair and scat, Joan was useless for any other topic of conversation.
Anna left, her departure unnoticed, and walked back to the employee housing area. Though she'd wanted to share the day's findings and frustrations with Joan, it was reassuring that not everybody spent every waking hour thinking about who killed whom and why.
The rest of the afternoon she dedicated to the familiar chore of packing for the backcountry. It was something she had done so many times in her life she found the Zen-like sameness of laundry and sorting and putting things into small plastic bags as freeing as a walking meditation.
Around five o'clock, as she was contemplating a nap in reward for her labors, Harry rapped on the screen door. The autopsy results had come. Northern Montana was not rife with murders and the medical examiner had worked up Carolyn Van Slyke's corpse first thing.
Much of it they already knew from observation: no defensive wounds, no sexual assault, no skin beneath the fingernails, no bullets in the body, no knife wounds but the filleting of the front upper quadrant of the skull where the
M.E. approximated two to three ounces of flesh had been excised.
The cause of death was severing of the spinal cord between the first and second cervical vertebrae. That surprised Anna. Given the cutting on the face, she thought head injury would be the cause, that the removal of the flesh might have been done in part to hide the nature of the blow.
"Did he just twist her head till her neck snapped?" she asked. She'd seen it done in a dozen movies but never come across it in real life. For some reason the image made her queasier than the slicing and dicing.
"Nope," Harry said. "Weirder yet." He handed her the report he'd been reading from and she scanned the last half of a page.
Carolyn Van Slyke had been struck on the side of the head with such force her neck had snapped, not just crushing the cord but knocking the skull so fast and hard that it was propelled over the opposite shoulder and down toward the clavicle, pulverizing the outer edges of three vertebrae and hyperextending the muscles and tendons of the neck.
"She must have been hit with a tree trunk to get that kind of torque," Anna said.
"No tree trunk," Ruick said. "What's missing?"
Anna didn't like to be quizzed. Then again, she loved a challenge. For half a minute she skimmed what had been read to her and read again the final paragraphs. "Ah!" she said as the light finally dawned. "No injury to the skull. No point of impact, cracking, etcetera."