“Are we in the park or in Robbins County right now?” I asked, joining her at the low stone wall. The shepherds were running around the parking lot with their noses down. She was in uniform and wearing a sidearm, I noticed.
“This is the park,” she said. “Robbins County is over on the other side, down that shore maybe two miles. This is where we found Janey’s Jeep. We have no idea of which way she went after parking here, or where she was taking the water samples.”
“Why was she taking water samples?” I asked.
“We keep track of lake acidity to see how much damage the western power plants are donating, season by season. Mainly looking for sulfuric acid, mercury, and other heavy metals.”
“Nothing of interest to the DEA, then?”
“The DEA? Not to my knowledge.”
I saw a trail leading off to the right that roughly paralleled the margins of the lake. “Would she have taken the samples here or walked around?”
“The lake is twenty-seven miles in perimeter, so she would have walked around part of it but not all of it. She was supposed to concentrate on the outflow of streams into the lake, and they’re predominantly coming from that long ridge on the north side. Feel like a walk in the woods?”
“Absolutely,” I said, calling up the shepherds. “Do I need one of those?” I asked, pointing at her sidearm.
“Technically that would be illegal. Practically speaking…”
“Right,” I said, walking over to my Suburban. “Avert thine eyes, madam ranger.”
We set out on the lakeside trail, walking initially north and then curving around to the west once we turned the end of the lake. I carried my trusty SIGSauer. 45-caliber model P-220 in a belt holster, partially concealed by a light windbreaker. Within minutes we’d each acquired a walking stick from the debris along the shore. The dogs were loving it, ranging far ahead and then loping back to make sure the humans hadn’t quit on them. For the most part the trail stayed within fifty feet of the shore, and came right down to the water where spines of the big ridge plunged into the lake. Mary Ellen, like every ranger who goes into the woods, carried a plastic trash bag along for the inevitable litter.
I told her about my reception at the Robbins County Sheriff’s Office. I did not tell her about what I’d witnessed out on the road. She said that she had talked to some of the rangers in the office, but not to her boss, about what Janey had said. They’d all been in favor of her going to take a look. As she said, they were all behind her. Way behind her.
“And what if we turn something up?” I asked. “How are you going to explain that to Ranger Bob?”
“Um, well…”
“You could always tell him that going to see Janey Howard and then coming up here was all my idea. You only came along to keep the Park Service out of trouble.”
She laughed. “I may take you up on that, except I think he already knows I called you in.”
“You’re not afraid you’ll get in trouble?”
She turned to look at me. “You know what? Janey Howard was a nice young woman. She’s a college graduate. She wanted to be a park ranger for the best reasons. Maybe a little idealistic, but, hey, she’s young. And some knuckle-dragging, slope-faced, slack-jawed, drooling brute who can’t even speak English grabbed her, beat her, raped her, sodomized her, and then threw her down a ravine to fend for herself with the coyotes and the bears. I want him dead. I don’t want him arrested. I don’t want him to have a lawyer. I don’t want him to plead insanity. I want him dead. I want him gutted, and I want to film the scavengers eating his guts. And, no, I’m not afraid I’ll get in trouble.”
I stared at her. “Hello, Mary Ellen Goode,” I said.
She looked down at the ground and sighed. “Okay, that’s just me, venting. At some point, reality will intrude. And, sure, we may both get into trouble. You want to turn back?”
“Hell, no. It’s not like you or the Park Service has retained me to do anything. And if I want to ask questions, I can.” I grinned at her. She was embarrassed, but she gave me a defiant smile. The one I remembered. The one that lit up the ranger station. “How much farther to the red rocks?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” she said, surprising me. “I actually don’t remember any red rocks on Crown Lake. But we’ve got at least four hours of daylight left, so I say we walk for another ninety minutes or so. If we come up empty, we turn around.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, and called in the shepherds to make sure they didn’t roam too far or scare up a mama bear with cubs. “Did you ever find Janey’s water samples?”
“No, we didn’t. They’re white plastic one-liter bottles. And her uniform and pepper spray are missing, too. Her radio was in the Jeep, along with the usual gear.”
We picked our way through the wreckage of a large tree that had blown down over the trail. “So she left her gear in the Jeep, walked probably on this trail, taking her water samples. So where are they?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“If she took, say, six empty sample bottles, and began sampling at that last creek we just crossed, she wouldn’t then continue to carry the full bottles-she’d leave the full ones at each sample point and then pick them all up on the way back, right?”
Mary Ellen stopped and nodded. “Right-so we should be looking for sample bottles to confirm that she even came this way.”
I pointed up the shoreline to where a wide creek flowed into the lake from the ridge above. “Let’s take a look up there.”
It took us fifteen minutes to find the bottle, which had been wedged between two rocks in the lake itself. “Okay,” I said. “So now we know she did come this way. When we run out of bottles or find a pile of empties, we’ll know where she started her not-so-excellent adventure.”
The next creek gave us nothing, but it was also quite small. The one after that yielded a full bottle. By now we were almost two miles around the shoreline, and the western slope of the big ridge was flattening out. I thought I could make out a firebreak road above us running through the trees. The trail was getting increasingly wilder and difficult to negotiate. Even the shepherds were having to pick their way through the underbrush. Mary Ellen said that budget cuts had resulted in many of the park’s walking trails being neglected. Frick took off after a squirrel and ran up a game trail, with Frack right behind her. When they came back a few minutes later, each was carrying an empty white plastic bottle.
“Bingo,” I said softly, relieving the dogs of their prizes. “I’d say she went that away.”
“But why?” Mary Ellen asked.
“Saw something? Heard something? Went to investigate and found trouble. Let’s give it a try. We still officially in the park?”
“Not when we leave this trail. Actually, the lake belongs to the power company; there’s a fifty-foot margin around the shoreline that belongs to the park. Up there is your favorite county.”
“Terrific,” I said, and sent the dogs out ahead of us along the game trail. If there were black hats up there in the trees, the shepherds would find them first. I hoped.
We climbed up the rocky slope and into a stand of pines, where the game trail disappeared. The ground was covered in a thick carpet of pine needles. The shepherds ran silent zigzag patterns with their noses down, exploring all the woodland scents. The ground leveled off about a hundred yards into the trees, and then we broke out onto the fire lane that cut across the face of the larger ridge beyond. I inspected the ground but saw no ruts or tracks that looked at all recent. There were hoofprints and the multiridged striations of a tracked vehicle of some kind underneath the weeds. Rainstorms had cut some deep runoff grooves down the lane where deer tracks were visible.