Had she accidentally or otherwise been photographing a Glacier bear researcher doing something for, against or to a grizzly that they oughtn't, and then was killed because of it and the telltale film stolen?
The train of thought, rattling along the track at breakneck speed, derailed suddenly, upset by the same old questions: Killed her with what? Carved her face why? And what could a researcher be doing that was so vile that an observer must die lest she tell? People could harass the bears but it was the harassers that came out the worse for wear. For a chilling moment Anna was jerked back into the tent in the dark, the bear destroying the camp. The shallow, almost healed scratch on her shoulder began to itch.
Murder by bear? Could someone who knew what he was about creep into a camp at night and salt it with love scent or blood lure in hopes of enticing disaster?
Sure.
Could Rory have done it?
Easily.
Joan Rand, huddled in the night, matching Anna scream for scream, was blessedly free of suspicion. She had the only genuinely ironclad alibi: she'd been with the investigating officer at the time of the incident.
A bear could be attracted in that manner. It wasn't guaranteed but definitely possible. That the bear would kill anybody was a long shot, and that it would kill a specific target so long as to be preposterous. It followed, then, that if the bear had been intentionally attracted to their camp and if the individual responsible for it was sane, the bear had been meant only to frighten or, with luck, injure one of them. If universal malice was ruled out as a motive, the only things left were revenge on Anna, Joan or, maybe, Rory-if he wasn't the perpetrator-or a desire to frighten them off from what they were doing.
Because in doing what they were doing they would discover what hewas doing.
Anna laughed out loud, startling herself with the sudden noise. "What the hell were we doing?" she asked the rocks and bugs. "Collecting information on bears," she answered herself.
Like Carolyn Van Slyke was with her camera?
Like Anna appeared to be doing right now?
The wind grew a little colder, the cirque a little more isolated. Anna waited for a cloud to pass over the sun to complete the picture, but the clear summer sky wouldn't cooperate. Breathing deeply of air so cool and thin and pure it seemed to negate the possibility of deceit in any who breathed it, she stared down the talus-raddled cirque and across the green and black summit of Flattop. What on earth could a bear researcher need so desperately to hide?
The puzzle she'd been so assiduously working on began to deconstruct. How, if at all, did Bill McCaskil with his borrowed coat and his history of financial fraud fit into the picture? There was money in research. Where there was money there could be con men trying to get it. Those sorts of evils transpired in offices over phone lines. The perpetrators didn't actually go into the woods where the work was being done. There was no money at that end of the stick.
Thinking was getting her nowhere, and sitting motionless in the wind, she was getting cold. Anna returned to her task. The rocks were soft enough that in many places marks had been left on their surfaces by the claws of the grizzlies. Of the bear family, the grizzly was one of the most perfectly adapted to digging. The four-inch claws were virtually unbreakable and the characteristic hump on the shoulders, a silhouette that struck fear into the human observer rather like that of a shark's fin cutting through the water, was a lump of muscles that provided the bears with tremendous power in their forelegs. The better for digging up moths.
Anna saw residue of that power in the claw-scored argillite and the upheaval of tons of rock in the width of the cirque. Of the habits of the bears, she learned a great deal over the next couple of hours. Of the person who had visited an aggregation in the last few days she found nothing, not so much as a gum wrapper.
The magic hour was approaching. Bears sicsta'd from thirteen hundred to eighteen hundred hours, Joan had said. Anna knew the numbers were approximate, varying, one would assume, from bear to bear. Still, as the minute hand on her watch closed the gap between five-thirty and six o'clock, she grew increasingly nervous.
Earlier, from her elevated perch, she had spotted five oval excavation areas. She'd inspected three. Alert for signs of returning diners, she hurried toward the fourth. She never got there. Halfway between the third and fourth was a bear dig of a very different aspect. It was linear, the rocks turned over in neat rows and not as deep, six to eight inches at most.
Things natural tended to eschew straight lines. Lines were a mathematical construct taught to the disordered minds of children until, in adulthood, people favored them, writing, digging, planting and, when possible, walking in them.
On hands and knees, Anna crawled along the linear upset of talus. Rocks had not been dug per se, but pried loose and overturned. On closer inspection she could see marks in the stone; not the evenly spaced scrape of claws but sharp, angular scratches that had to have been made with a shovel or Pulaski. A person, most probably the person Anna sought, had been to the cirque for the same reason as the bears: to dig up army cutworm moths.
Sitting on her heels, eyes roaming the edges of the depression for interlopers of any species, she thought about the strange young man, Geoffrey Mickleson-Nicholson. The day they'd seen him, before the grizzly had come to their camp, they had passed a field of glacier lilies, another preferred food of the Glacier bear population. Someone with a spade had been digging them up. Most likely the obvious choice: Geoffrey Whoever. At the time it seemed of little importance. Illegal certainly, but one man with a shovel and a backpack was not going to dig the lilies to extinction.
There was nothing to indicate the digger of moths was the same person as the digger of lilies except that people pilfering the natural food of bears was an oddity. Rare to catch one doing it; statistically improbable to find two. The young man with the lovely smile and the suspicious habits was not a bear researcher; Joan would have known him. At least he wasn't a bear researcher in Glacier.
Could an adolescent rogue researcher be murderously messing about with Glacier's grizzlies? The concept was absurd but Anna didn't throw it out entirely. She merely consigned it to the heap in her brain where other absurdities connected with this case lay.
Because it was cold and she was tired and the sun was going to be down in a couple of hours, she thought of werewolves. As a rational westerner, Anna didn't believe in the existence of the mythical monsters. As the sister of an eminent psychiatrist, she knew there were nutcases wandering the moonlit streets who sincerely believed they were werewolves. People suffering from lycanthropy. On rare but recorded occasions these individuals lived out their psychosis to the point of killing, ripping out throats and drinking blood as they believed they must in their wolf-like state. Was it possible a person could believe himself a grizzly? Why not? People believed they were Napoleon, the Virgin Mary, the reincarnation of Michelangelo. In Mississippi, Anna'd dealt with a woman who believed herself to be the mother of eight children, all penguins.
Why not a bear?
Like those suffering from lycanthropy, could the psychosis go so far as to drive the sufferer to seek to live as a bear would live, eat as a bear would eat and kill as a bear would kill?
Anna thought back on the night she and Joan had been visited. Neither of them had seen an animal, merely heard what they believed to be an animal. They had only Rory's word for it that there'd been a bear and Rory was not exactly the poster boy for mental stability.
A deep and rotten core of fear opened in Anna, making her nauseated. She and Buck had been siphoned off to assist Ruick. Joan was alone in an isolated camp with Rory Van Slyke, an excellent candidate for the Bear Boy.