Keeping absolutely still, holding her now slightly comic stoop, she searched the area around her feet. The rattling subsided but she was not relieved. The sound had not crept away on a slither of sand and scale, it had stopped. The snake was still there. Anna's eyes moved up, over the tent. Bent close as she was she could see through the netting. Before, the shadow of the tarp had rendered it virtually opaque.
"Whoa…" she breathed. The rattling began again. Inside the tent lay a bloated, monstrous figure. Not human, though human-like. Its head and neck were swollen and black. The features of the face had been destroyed by puffed and stretching flesh. The left arm was four times the size of a human being's arm. Big and glossy as waxed cucumbers, the fingers had burst open on the ends. The rest of the creature was pathetically human: pale legs, shrunken genitalia, flat white belly and hairless chest.
And all around, on the sleeping bag, like the ancient Greeks lounging on couches at a feast, were rattlesnakes.
Slowly Anna straightened, backed away.
"What is it?" Paul asked softly. Training or good instincts had kept them all quiet till Anna was clear of the tent.
"It looks like the snakes have collected Craig," she managed. Paul started to come forward and she held up a hand. "Somehow they got loose. His collecting buckets are overturned. There's half a dozen snakes in there with him, maybe more."
"Dead?" Paul asked.
"Not the snakes."
The tarp was easily dismantled leaving only the snake-filled tent. It was supported by two flexible poles forming a large arch for the head and a smaller one for the foot. Plexiglas rods were pushed through sleeves in the fabric and hooked into rings to keep their shape. Guy lines pegged down in opposite directions pulled the arches upright, stretching the nylon between them.
Using pocketknives affixed with surgical tape to long sticks, Anna and Paul cut the nylon down the center and sides like opening the foil around a baked potato. When the cuts were complete, they peeled the nylon back, keeping the distance of the sticks.
There were seven rattlesnakes: three blacktails and four western diamondbacks. Eventually the snakes would have departed of their own volition. It was much too hot for them to survive long without shade. But no one cared to sit and watch the macabre tableau longer than they had to. Under the gentle urging of tossed pebbles, the snakes were induced to slither away. When the last tail had vanished into a crevice between some stones, Anna, Harland, and Paul approached the body. Paul gave Anna a camera and, while she snapped pictures, Harland sketched the layout of the camp and the corpse.
The aridity of the West Side had desiccated the body. What had appeared black and monstrous through the filtering gauze of mosquito netting was actually discolored and prune-like, the swelling only half what it had originally seemed. Craig had been virtually mummified within the convection oven his tent had become, the moisture in his body sucked out, escaping through the netting. That accounted for the lack of a warning odor of decay.
Craig had died of snakebite, that much was obvious. The characteristic double puncture wound of the pit viper was unmistakable. He'd been bitten seven times: twice in the face and twice in the neck, with three bites on his left arm, one directly into the artery at the wrist.
From the disarray, it appeared he had kicked over the two specimen buckets as he slept, knocking the lids off. The snakes, frightened, confused, had begun to strike. Craig's thrashing attempts to escape had only excited them to further attacks.
That was the picture Paul pieced together from what little evidence they had.
As a matter of course, they searched the area and made notes of condition and location of all items found. Then Harland and Paul folded Craig Eastern's mortal remains into the ruined nylon tent and, slipping, smothering irreverent curses, carried the body down the slope.
Anna shouldered Craig's backpack and followed Betsy McLeod and Nosy down to where the stock waited.
Like an old-time cowboy slain on the range, Craig was tied across Jill's saddle. Betsy, her dog in her arms, rode pillion behind Harland.
Seven bites, Anna thought as Gideon plodded, head down through the curtains of super-heated air. Pesky, too worn out even to bite the mules' butts, slogged ahead.
"Death: accidental by snakebite."
Seven. And why was Craig sleeping with his collection buckets inside the tent? A bizarre form of suicide? No. Had Craig chosen to die by snakebite, he would have freed the reptiles after they had performed the chore. He loved them; he would not have left them imprisoned in the tent to die. If not suicide, how hard must he have thrashed in his sleep to overset both buckets with such violence the lids popped off?
A lot of questions.
Only one answer: Craig hadn't killed Sheila Drury. His "accident," like hers, had been carefully orchestrated by the same hand.
The hand that had sent Anna reeling off McKittrick Ridge.
17
THE coroner's report was brief.
Time of death: between midnight and six a.m. on July 16. Cause of death: accidental, by snakebite.
Drury's read: "Death: accidental, by lion kill." Anna would have been "Death: accidental, by falling." Too many accidents. Just as on Eastern there were too many bites. Unlike sharks, rattlers, even dumped out of bed in the middle of the night, did not go into feeding frenzies.
Anna was sitting at her desk in the Frijole Ranger Station going over the 343 Case Incident Report on the Eastern snakebite incident. It looked like hell. The entire thing needed to be retyped. For the moment, she shoved it into her briefcase and pulled out the list she'd made the night before the search began.
Craig's name was still on the top of it. Neatly, Anna drew a single line through the letters. The next names were "Christina/Erik" and "Karl." Christina: a friend, a confidante, a shoulder to cry on; Anna repressed a sigh and looked further down. The names remaining were of people she had come to think of more as "extras" than suspects. First she would rid her mind-and her list-of them.
She dialed Minnegasco in St. Paul, Minnesota. Some pleading and much fabrication led to the information that, but for one trip to Texas when her daughter died, Sheila Drury's mother had not missed a day's work in twenty-three years and was not due to take her vacation until December 11. On the day Anna fell and the day Eastern died, Mrs. Drury had been at her desk on the second floor above St. Peter Street in St. Paul.
Almost in Heaven, Anna thought wryly, glad to have the troublesome and troubled woman off of her lists and out of her thoughts for good. On impulse, and because she wanted to hear a kindly voice, Anna called her mother-in-law in White Plains, New York. Usually she called only on the first Sunday of every month-Edith led a regulated life and Anna couldn't bear to talk of Zachary more often than that. This time Anna kept the conversation general. Edith didn't even flinch at the mention of grapefruit spoons. Anna thought of calling Rogelio, though she knew intimately where he had been the day Eastern died. But he would ask questions she did not want to answer.
She drove the mile to the Visitors Center and, with Manny's help, went back through the backcountry permits issued for July 2, the night before she fell; June 17, the night Drury was killed; and July 16, the night Craig died.
Both Sheila and Craig had been found miles from any of the designated camping areas in the park and there had been no special permits issued. It was unlikely the killer would fill out a permit for any area that was not regularly patrolled- the odds of getting caught would not outweigh the exposure of getting a permit. July 2 had a possible: an E. Wheelan driving a white Toyota with California plates had been permitted to camp at the McKittrick Ridge campground.
Anna would talk with the Walters. She no longer believed Christina would kill-at least not her. But if she knew something about the accidents, Anna wasn't sure whether she would have the courage to report it. Especially if she were afraid of the perpetrator.