“He’s kinda cute.”
Doug Schneider’s hard-boned face was getting harder, his thin-line lips thinner. If he could have gotten away with it, Jenny didn’t doubt that he would have pulled his gun and fired it into the air to get their attention.
Steve ambled into the space where Schneider was affixed like a land mine waiting to be stepped on. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the box of drunken kids wearily. Scratching his head the way Jenny’d seen him do so many times over the years, pushing his ball cap back, exposing a slightly receding hairline, he said quietly, “We got us a couple of dead bodies. We think they might be friends of yours.”
Those in the front lines who heard Steve’s words passed them back. Quiet and attention flowed out from the stern until it had snuffed the jeering and the drunken fun from the entire boat.
When the transformation was complete, Steve fumbled in the left breast pocket of his shirt, saying, “We’d sure appreciate if you guys could give us a hand with identifying them so we can get hold of their folks.” He fished out a packet of Polaroid snapshots.
“These were taken postmortem and they’re going to be pretty hard for some of you to look at, but I’m asking you to try.”
A girl in her very early twenties, if that, stepped out from the wall of flesh that had formed outside the sliding patio doors to the cabin.
“How do you want us to do this, Officer?” she asked with complete sobriety.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” Jenny murmured to Anna.
Anna nodded. “Twenty years and twenty pounds ago he’d have been a great Marc Antony.”
“Ouch,” Jenny said.
“What?” Anna looked mildly confused. “Marc Antony wasn’t old and fat,” she said matter-of-factly.
Theater people were more pragmatic than Jenny would have thought. Maybe one had to see oneself realistically before she could know what had to be done to play someone else with any insight. As good an actor as he was, Brian Dennehy would probably be wasting his time auditioning for the part of Tinker Bell.
“Are you okay with this?” Jenny asked Anna.
“Yup.”
“Are you scared?”
“Nope.”
“Am I annoying you?”
“Is that a trick question?”
Jenny smiled both to herself and her housemate.
“Shall we?” Jenny asked. She and Anna moved apart and began amiably circulating through the boaters as they’d been instructed to during the ride out, making no challenges, asking no questions, just searching faces. Anna was looking for the third man who’d been present during the assault on Kay. Jenny was just looking, hoping something she saw—or something she failed to see—would trigger a flash of brilliance. At this point, even a spark would be reassuring.
The high spirits, or imitation thereof, leached from the gathering by Steve Gluck’s plea for assistance, the milling kids looked more like kids, tired sunburned kids who’d eaten too much, drunk too much, and secretly wanted someone to order them to go to bed early. Their densely packed bodies mumbled and shifted or asked questions Jenny pretended not to know the answers to as she swam through the human pond. She saw kids fondling each other in a desultory way. She saw kids smoking dope and shooting her challenging glances as if she were DEA and not NPS. She saw one kid puking over the rail. She saw kids who looked vaguely familiar. She didn’t see anything that helped sort out the quagmire that had culminated in the deaths of three young people and the scarring of Anna Pigeon.
Having stared into every bleary-eyed face she could find, she stopped mingling at the stern end of the upper deck and rested her forearms on the rail, looking over the now dark water to the lights of Wahweap. Jim and Steve were no longer in sight. Undoubtedly working their way through the crowded cabin and foredeck.
After a few minutes, Anna came and leaned beside her. “Anything?” Jenny asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
For a moment they stood without speaking. With what sounded like a contented sigh Anna said, “Dark is very dark out in the wilds. Dark is safe here. In the city, at night, if you find yourself alone in the dark—on an empty street or in the hall of a building—that’s when your antennae are out. There’s safety in light and crowds in a city. Out here, it’s just the opposite. Dark is good. Alone is safest.”
“Unless you’re in a solution hole,” Jenny said and immediately wished she’d bitten her tongue off. Why on earth had she felt the need to drag out Anna’s nightmare and shove it in her face? It was Anna saying, “Alone is safest,” she realized. The words had shut Jenny out.
Fortunately Anna seemed unfazed by her lack of sensitivity.
“Even in the jar. I was trapped, sure, but alone was safest. Darkness was my friend.”
Jenny bumped shoulders with Anna to let her know, safest or not, she was not alone. Anna returned the pressure, and they stood in the velvety night in companionable silence, looking over the water until Steve stepped out on the stern deck and waved them down.
Doug was in his boat by the time they squeezed and excused their way down the narrow stairs and through the main cabin.
“Any luck?” Steve asked as they came aft to meet him.
“Nothing,” Anna said.
“Nada,” Jenny added. “How’d you guys do?”
“Three positive I.Ds,” Steve said. “Not bad for an hour’s work. Get the lines, would you?” he asked, then stepped over the space between the two boats and jumped heavily on deck. Jenny made short work of loosing the bow and stern lines from where she’d secured them. This done she followed him, then turned to make sure Anna was coming.
She wasn’t. She was standing in the houseboat’s stern staring at the deck, a look of concern on her face.
Jenny held the boats together while Steve stowed the lines. “Anna?”
Anna shook her head as if answering a question she asked herself, then stepped over the gunwales and into the district ranger’s boat. He chugged away at little better than idle speed. Jenny pulled up the bumpers. Anna seemed distracted. Jenny fought down the desire to pester her with any more uninvited concern. Still, she watched her from the corners of her eyes, worried that the visit to the houseboat had upset her more than she was willing to admit.
Doug piloted the boat up and docked with military precision. A feat anyone could perform on still water, Jenny observed, but she kept her petty observation to herself. Anna was first off the boat. She didn’t stay to tie lines to cleats or even say where she was going. She trotted to the shore end of the NPS dock and stopped. Hand on hips, she appeared to be searching the beach. The grounds of the hotel and marina were well lit—tastefully, Jenny admitted, but up to OSHA standards.
Anna jumped from the end of the dock and jogged away from the marina toward the dark of a ravine that cut up from the lake toward the employee housing near the road.
“Where’s she running off to?” Steve asked.
“Beats me,” Jenny said, “but I’m going to find out.”
Jenny traversed the dock and was partway down the beach. Anna had stopped at the ravine. Hearing Jenny’s approach, she looked up.
“Jenny,” she called. “Come take a look at this.”
Hoping it wasn’t anything too grisly, Jenny broke into a jog. Anna was staring into a clump of sage bushes. As Jenny reached her she pointed into the shadows beneath.
“Is that the boogie board that caused the comic interlude during our entrance?” she asked.
It was—and there were tracks leading away from it up the ravine toward the highway.
“Damn,” Jenny whispered.
Unsub three had jumped ship.
FORTY-TWO
The boy who escaped the houseboat on the boogie board was found two days later smashed at the bottom of an escarpment below Glen Canyon Dam. There were no signs of violence on the body that couldn’t be accounted for by a sixty-foot dive onto rocks.