Spider mountain

3

The following morning, I decided to drive over to Robbins County and make a formal call on the notorious Sheriff M. C. Mingo. Mary Ellen had been undecided about following up on Janey’s cryptic information, as the Park Service had officially closed the investigation and her boss most definitely wanted the whole incident to stay in its box. She said she’d talk it over with some of the other rangers and call me later that day.

M. C. Mingo was in a meeting, so the desk officer asked me to come back in an hour. I went to a local diner for breakfast and then took a windshield tour of Rocky Falls. That didn’t take long. The town had sprung up along a two-lane road that paralleled the Roaring River as it cut its way down toward the Chance Reservoir. The river was about fifty feet wide as it ran noisily through Rocky Falls, dropping nearly five hundred feet in elevation along the two-mile notch occupied by the town. On one side of the road were most of the businesses and gas stations, with a single street of homes above and behind that. On the river side of the road were larger homes, interspersed with whitewater rafting outfitters, restaurants, B and Bs, and two motels. Across the river, the shoulders of Blue Home Mountain rose dramatically above the town, where they faced the slopes of Scotch Blood Mountain on the other side. There was a single rusted steel-trussed bridge crossing the river, and where it intersected the main street of town stood city hall and the sheriff’s office. I parked in the visitors’ area, opened the windows for the shepherds, and went back in.

The desk sergeant asked me to take a seat and then made a phone call. A few minutes later a young woman came out of the sheriff’s private office. She was very pretty in a disco-trashy fashion, tall, black-haired, lots of lipstick, sloe-eyed, and amply endowed in all the right places. She was wearing painted-on jeans, a straining halter top, and bright red cowboy boots. She smiled at the sergeant, who was unabashedly locked on to that lush body, gave me the once-over, and then sashayed out the front door with a very deliberate, traffic-stopping walk. An invisible stratum of flowery perfume lingered in the air behind her.

“That there’s Rue Creigh,” the desk sergeant announced, proudly. “Ain’t she somethin’, though.” The phone on his desk rang, and the sergeant, after clearing his throat, told me I could go in now.

Sheriff M. C. Mingo was in his early fifties and was about as plain a man as I had ever seen in a sheriff’s uniform. He was five-eight or -nine, wore large bifocal eyeglasses, and had the soft, round, mealy-mouthed face and superior churchwarden expression I usually associated with Carolina politicians, all smiling eyes and teeth with just a hint of B’rer Fox glinting behind the glasses. His hair was dyed an unnatural dark brown. He had tiny hands, but his grip when he shook hands with me was surprisingly hard. He wore a perfectly pressed khaki uniform, which could not disguise a tiny potbelly. He had a. 357 Magnum chrome-plated revolver on his hip, and his badge positively gleamed. I gave him points for not wearing one of those ridiculous four-star-general collar devices beloved of so many police chiefs these days. He indicated a chair for me and sat down behind his desk, which was piled high with neat stacks of paperwork.

“You’re that cat dancer fella, aren’t you,” he said in a mild, high-pitched voice. “Up from Manceford County, right?”

“I’m retired from the sheriff’s office there,” I said. “Doing some private work these days.”

“A private eye,” the sheriff said dramatically. “My gracious. Right here in Robbins County. Who’da thunk it. What can we do for you there, Lieutenant?”

The mention of my old rank spoke volumes. Someone had made a call during my hour-long wait to see the sheriff. I thought I could detect that bighaired bombshell’s perfume lingering in the air.

“A friend has asked me to look into what happened to a probationer ranger assigned to the Thirty Mile ranger station over in Carrigan County,” I replied.

“A friend,” the sheriff repeated encouragingly. His expression was pleasant, but those crinkly eyes had not lost their hard edge.

I smiled. “One of the rangers at Thirty Mile. She was Janey Howard’s mentor. Apparently, the Park Service has put the case into a let’s-move-on box.”

The Sheriff nodded. “Didn’t happen in Robbins County, that much I know,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I understand that nobody knows very much about what happened.”

“Now, now,” the sheriff said. “You weren’t listening. I said: It didn’t happen in Robbins County. See, if it had, I’d have known all about it, and we’d have some guilty bastards sweating bullets out in the back cells. Whatever did happen, it must have happened in the national park. That would be on federal land.”

“Bastards, as in plural?” I asked.

M. C. Mingo sat back in his chair and showed some teeth. “Lord love a duck,” he said. “Aren’t you the quick one. Bastards. Plural indeed. Figure of speech, that’s all. Bastards tend to come in small herds in this part of the state.”

“Of course,” I said. “So: Would you have any objections to my asking some questions around here in the county?”

“Why don’t you ask me your questions, Lieutenant? Or should I say mister?”

“Definitely mister,” I said. “I’m not a lieutenant anymore.”

“That’s right, you’re not,” Mingo said. “So: What are all these questions?”

I hadn’t prepared for this. I’d assumed that I would just start asking around to see who knew what, if anything, about the case. This was supposed to have been a simple courtesy call. A little voice in my head was saying maybe I should have listened to Sheriff Hayes. “Oh, I just want to see what folks have heard about the case,” I said. “Maybe spark up a name or two. I mean, a park ranger raped and beaten? That must have been news.”

“Even up here in backward old Robbins County, that what you’re saying?” the sheriff said. “As in, that kinda thing doesn’t happen here more’n, what, once a week? Is that it?”

I leaned forward. “Sheriff, I didn’t come in here to sass anybody. I just thought it basic professional courtesy to let you know I’d be walking around town asking questions. I have a Section 74 PI license, so I think I could do all that without seeing you.”

“Well, now, you’re both right and wrong there, Mister Richter,” the sheriff said. All the pleasantness, whether faked or real, had drained out of the conversation. “You were absolutely right to come see me. But you’re no longer a law enforcement officer, so you can forget all that professional courtesy business. And you are absolutely wrong to think you can come into my county and do one goddamned thing without my permission. And you know what? I do not give my permission. In fact, I invite you to get back in your vehicle and get out of my county before I throw your licensed ass in jail and pitch said vehicle into a mine shaft.” He leaned back in his chair and pasted his smiley face back on. “Anything else, there, Mister Richter?”

“Oh, c’mon, Sheriff-what grounds would you have for putting me in jail?”

“Trying my patience? Disturbing my office routine? Interrupting me when I was in a meeting?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I saw the meeting. I guess that would be a crime, interrupt that kind of meeting.”

I’d made a mistake. The sheriff stiffened, picked up a ballpoint pen, and began tapping it on the table in a slow four-beat rhythm. His face settled back into a cold mask. “I suppose I’ll just let that pass, Mister Richter,” he said finally. “I’ll lay it down to your being ignorant of how things work up here in the western mountains, you being of the urban persuasion. But we can cure that ignorance lickety-split, and we will, if you’re anywhere in my county in the next thirty minutes. Good day, sir.”

I didn’t linger. I drove back down the two-lane toward Carrigan County, my rearview mirror filled with the image of a Robbins County cruiser practically riding my Suburban’s bumper. Wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned, I thought. The shepherds, sensing my mood, kept looking back at the cop car behind them.

The deputy turned around about three miles out of Rocky Falls, and I relaxed a little. The sheriff could not legally arrest me for simply asking questions, but I knew damn well that I was in the very western, and very remote, end of the state, where one annoyed a county sheriff at his peril. I recalled Sheriff Hayes mentioning FBI agents going into a mine shaft. Come to think of it, Mingo had also mentioned a mine shaft. I wondered who the black-haired bombshell really was.

Ten minutes later, as I slowed down to negotiate a hairpin curve to the left, I suddenly hit the brakes. At the bend of the curve a mountain stream went under the road through an old redbrick arched bridge and dropped into a deep ravine. At the bottom of the ravine, I’d spotted a man running wildly down the creek bank, flailing through the underbrush, falling as often as he covered ground. He was a fat man with a full black beard, and he was being pursued by a pack of baying dogs. I pulled over and got out of the Suburban. The shepherds had heard the other dogs and started barking. I shouted at them to shut up. By now the man was a hundred yards down the bank.

I ran over to the guardrail in time to see the first and biggest dog catch up with the fleeing man and grab an ankle in his teeth. The fat man yelled in pain and went down heavily, landing with his head and shoulders in the creek and the rest of him still on the bank. The remainder of the pack arrived and, to my horror, swarmed all over the man until he was no longer visible from the road. Even from my distant vantage point, I could hear the snarling, see the bloody jaws tearing from side to side. When I saw the whitewater in the creek turn red I backed away from the guardrail.

I thought about getting my. 45 and seeing what I could do, but the scene below was out of effective range, and, judging from the blood in the water, it was already too late. I looked back down and saw that the dog pack was still going to town and the creek was still running red. Then movement caught my eye high up on the slope above the bridge, right at the tree line. A very tall, thin man was standing up there, dressed all in black, with what looked like a very long, antique rifle crooked over his arm. The man was watching the carnage below through a set of binoculars. I saw a glint of light on lenses as the binoculars swung around to train on me. I backed away from the guardrail toward my Suburban. The watching man put the glasses back on the dog pack, as if to say he didn’t much care if there had been a witness. Then I saw a small group of men, maybe five or six, standing above the lone watcher on a nearby ridge. None of them seemed to have binoculars, but they did have rifles. I decided it was definitely time to get the hell out of there as fast as I could safely drive.

Back at the lodge, I placed a call to my old boss, Bobby Lee Baggett, high sheriff of Manceford County. He called me back in fifteen minutes.

“What in the world are you doing up there in black-hat country?” he asked.

I told him, and then described my conversation with M. C. Mingo and what I’d witnessed out on the mountain road. “Normally,” I concluded, “I’d have called that mess in to the sheriff’s office. However…”

“Yeah,” Bobby Lee said. “I see your problem. You think those dogs killed that guy?”

“Several times over, based on the runoff. Then I think they ate him.”

“Wow. Maybe you should do just what M. C. told you to do-get out and stay out of Robbins County. Sounds like they have their own rules up there.”

“What can you tell me about M. C. Mingo?” I asked.

“Not much, Lieutenant. As I recall, he’s not a member of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, and, of course, here in Triboro, we hardly ever have any contact with Robbins County. Heard some stories, but you know how that goes.”

“Well, now you’ve heard a new one.”

“But that wasn’t the sheriff up there on that tree line, was it?” Bobby Lee asked.

I had to admit that he was right. Bobby Lee was often right. I asked if I should make a call to the North Carolina SBI and report what I’d seen. Bobby Lee said he’d make the call and get someone from the SBI to contact me up there in Marionburg, which was exactly what I had hoped for. I gave the sheriff my number at the lodge and thanked him. He suggested I also make a report to Bill Hayes.

When I got back from lunch, there was a message from Mary Ellen Goode. I got her on the phone at the ranger station.

“I have to make a trip up to Crown Lake this afternoon,” she said. “Park Service business, of course. Want to come along?”

“What’s Crown Lake all about?”

“Red rocks?”

It took me a moment, but then I remembered. “Of course it does,” I said. “Where do you want to meet?”

Ninety minutes later we drove into a scenic overlook pullout and parked. I had followed Mary Ellen’s Park Service SUV so that I could bring the shepherds along. She had thought that was a wonderful idea. The view was spectacular indeed, which is typical of the Smokies. Most people came up there to do stuff but spent a lot of time just looking at it. The air was clear and cool, and Crown Lake spread out in front of us in a silvery expanse of lightly rippled water, reflecting the lower end of the Smokies in the distance. The opposite shore was easily a half mile away.

“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.

“Maybe she heard something up here on the fire lane,” I said, “but there’s no sign of what it was.”

We continued uphill for fifteen minutes and then retraced our steps, passing where we’d come out of the pines and going down the fire lane an equal distance. We came to a switchback in the lane that widened out into a small plateau. A huge old oak stuck thick limbs out over the bend, but again, there were no recent vehicle signs. The sun was slanting down toward the western mountains, whose ridgelines were backlit by an increasingly orange sky. The trees were starting to throw long shadows, and the shepherds flopped down along the side of the fire lane, panting.

“This happened a month and a half ago?” I asked.

She nodded, knowing what I was thinking. Looking for tracks was pointless.

We went back up to the point in the pine woods where we’d first come out and started back down toward the lake. I kept looking for any signs that the probationer had come this way, but there were none. The woods were thick enough to be getting dark, and I wondered what might be watching us. Halfway down through the woods, Mary Ellen stepped into a stump hole hidden by the pine needles and turned an ankle, so we had to stop and let her rub the soreness out for a few minutes. I held her hand while she hobbled the rest of the way to the edge of the trees, but when we stepped out onto the hillside, she pointed excitedly down at the lake.

“Look,” she said. “Red rocks.”

I saw what she was talking about. Where a spine of the big ridge came down into the lake, there were three large boulders about twenty feet offshore. The setting sun was painting them dark orange, if not red.

“Okay,” I said. “But what are we looking for?”

“Beats me, but let’s go down there,” she said. “I’m ready for some flat ground.”

The two shepherds started down with us but then stopped and looked back up into the woods. I noticed and turned around. Both dogs were looking intently into the tree line, but the advancing shadows made it impossible for me to see anything. I called them to come on, and they turned around and rejoined us, albeit reluctantly.

When we finally reached the rocks, they weren’t really red anymore, even though the western sky was. They were just three twenty-foot-high boulders that had rolled down the slope ten thousand years ago and stopped here, probably many years before the lake had been created by the TVA dam at the other end. A dead tree created a bridge of sorts from the shore out to the first rock, and I, using my stick for balance, went out on the trunk to look into the water.

Where something glinted on the bottom. I bent down to see what it was and then swore softly.

“What?” Mary Ellen called from the shore.

“This lake belongs to the power company, right?” I asked. “Not Robbins County?”

“Right,” she said. “What do you see?”

“I think it’s a body,” I called back to her. “All wrapped up in chains.”

I got back to the lodge just after ten o’clock that evening. I let the dogs run around for a few minutes while I fixed myself a scotch and then called them back in. Carrigan County deputies had been the first responders to our report of a body in the lake, followed by the Park Service. Mary Ellen and I had managed to extract ourselves from the fun and games around eight. We’d had a quick dinner in town, and then she’d gone home. I had the sense that discovering the body had upset her, and that I’d resumed my role as harbinger of death and destruction. She hadn’t said anything, but I’d felt it.

Sheriff Hayes had given me a head-shaking look when he arrived on scene. Typhoid Mary’s older brother was back in town. No one had recognized the body, because the fish had been at it for a while, so identification was going to take some time and applied organic chemistry. The sheriff hadn’t been happy when he found out why we’d gone up there looking. Mary Ellen hadn’t quite understood that, until I pointed out that our getting the girl to talk and then reveal a solid lead might just possibly make the Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office look bad. I had called Bobby Lee Baggett back in Triboro to tell him what we’d found. Bobby Lee pointed out that if the girl had witnessed a murder, then discovery of the body put her in danger. I hadn’t thought of that, but I got Mary Ellen to say something to Sheriff Hayes. It turned out that he had thought of that, so now Mary Ellen was on his shit list as well. I called Baby Greenberg’s number and told the voice mail what we’d found and where. I decided not to add to my reputation by telling Sheriff Hayes what I’d witnessed on the road to Rocky Falls.

The single malt was a welcome relief, and, as best I could tell, the shepherds weren’t mad at me. I walked out to the screened porch that stuck out over the creek bank. The night was cool and clear. A million tree frogs were chirring in the darkness, and the creek splashed pleasantly under the cabin. I was about to sit down when the shepherds woofed from the front porch. Then someone knocked on the screen door.

I hadn’t left any lights on, but there were some solar sidewalk lights out front and I could see that a slender, dark-haired woman was standing out there. The shepherds were sitting up, but they’d been trained not to execute a canine feeding frenzy display just because a stranger showed up at the front door. They made their presence known, and that usually took care of the Bible salesmen and prospective intruders.

“Yes?” I said from behind the screen door.

“Lieutenant Richter?” she said in a husky, low-pitched voice. I couldn’t see her features. “I’m Carrie Harper Santangelo, SBI. Sheriff Baggett made a call? If you can turn on a light I can show you my ID.”

I laughed and opened the screen door for her. “I would but I don’t know where the switch is. Come on in. Don’t mind them-they’ve been fed.”

“That’s good,” she said, eyeing the two big shepherds as she came in. “I’m told that it’s the ones who don’t go nuts when the doorbell rings that bear watching.”

“All dogs bite,” I recited. “I’m having a scotch on the back porch-care to join me?”

“Sure,” she said. She was five-seven or -eight, jet black hair, with a classical, aquiline nose. She was of either Italian or American Indian descent. She was wearing jeans, a white blouse, and a loose-fitting, lightweight blue blazer. Once in the kitchen she presented her creds, which I dutifully examined. I got her a drink, and we went out onto the back porch. I brought the bottle. I saw her eyeing all the wedding suite accoutrements.

“Which office?” I asked.

“Raleigh. I’m an inspector in the professional standards division at headquarters. I drove out today. If this is the bridal suite, I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“All I could get on short notice. Plus, if I drink too much, a bed’s never farther than about five feet away.”

“You don’t look like a man with a drinking problem,” she said. Her complexion was very smooth in the light spilling out of the kitchen. She had dark, almost black eyes, and she looked right at me when she spoke. Professional standards work, known as internal affairs in some jurisdictions, encouraged the direct approach.

“No, I guess not,” I said. She kept her blazer buttoned even though she was sitting down. I could make out the lump of a shoulder rig just under her left shoulder.

“So,” she said. “M. C. Mingo. I understand you’ve met?”

“Today,” I said. I then explained what I was doing up here in Carrigan County, my prior relationship with the Park Service and Mary Ellen Goode, and why I’d touched base with Bobby Lee. She listened without interrupting. I had the impression that some part of that dark-eyed brain was recording my every word. Or the other lump in her pocket was a voice-activated recorder.

“Tell me something, if you don’t mind,” she said, when I’d finished. “What was the deal with your not testifying in that mountain lion case?”

I sighed. Inquiring minds always wanted to know, especially if they were cops. “How much time you got?” I asked warily.

“How much scotch you got?” she replied.

“That much time,” I said. “Okay, let’s do the abridged version.”

When I’d finished, she nodded and sipped some scotch. “And now you’re private and working for the district court. What’s that like?”

“It’s not like being boss of the MCAT in Manceford County.”

“What’s the Park Service think about your being here?”

“Less and less,” I said. “Apparently their headquarters wanted this mess with the probationer all to go away. Bad for park business. After today, it’s probably going to reflash. So: M. C. Mingo?”

“Right,” she said. “M. C. Mingo. Sheriff of Robbins County for the past twenty-odd years. No opposition at election time. Ever. Related to the evil hag who runs most if not all of the drug trade in Robbins County.”

“That would be Vivian Creigh.”

“The one and only Grinny. Our intel is that she runs it like a Mafia don-stays up on Spider Mountain and controls every pound of meth, grass, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and even the damn ginseng. She has soldiers, and they work for a capo, her son, Nathan. Her father ran it before her and reportedly invited his three grown sons to settle who’d be in charge when he checked out. One brother died exploring an old gold mine, which caved in following a mysterious explosion. A second brother accused Grinny of having a hand in the matter, and then he died after being set upon by a pack of wild dogs.”

I nodded. “I’ve seen those bad boys.”

“Probably not,” she said. “This all happened when Grinny was eighteen. She’s fifty now, or thereabouts.”

“Then their descendants, maybe.” I told her about watching the dog pack take down the fat man. She whistled quietly.

“What happened to the third brother?” I asked.

“He became the sheriff of Robbins County.”

“Ah-ha!”

“Yes, indeed.”

“So-then there’s Nathan. Grinny was married?”

“Probably not. There’s Nathan and a daughter, Rowena, who are reportedly by different fathers, who have themselves long since gone into the cold, cold ground. A Creigh family tradition, apparently.”

“Spider Mountain. As in black widow.”

“That’s what some of the locals call it. Interestingly, nobody in law enforcement has ever seen her. We know where her place is, but that’s about it.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “I mean, you and the DEA guys seem to know a lot about the Creigh clan. Why hasn’t some state or federal task force gone in there and hauled the whole bunch in for questioning?”

She tinkled the ice in her empty glass, and I poured her a refill. “You know how it is,” she said. “The SBI comes in only when we’re invited in. M. C. Mingo declines to invite. The DEA prefers to work alone. The Bureau comes in only if it’s big enough and there’s positive PR potential. Right now they don’t consider western North Carolina as having positive PR potential, especially after the Eric Rudolph fiasco. Homeland Security is obsessing with grubbing out crazed Muslims. The state attorney general has his hands full with urban crime. The sheriff is related to the kingpin. That’s why not.”

“Amazing.”

She shrugged. “Personally, I don’t think anyone cared all that much until the meth epidemic began. Hillbillies running ‘shine, maybe some grass, whacking each other out with nineteenth-century rifles over some hundred-year-distant insult-big deal, as long as they kept it in the hollers.”

“But meth is changing all that?”

“Yes. There’s a river of the stuff coming out of these hills, all under the control of Grinny Creigh. We think. We just can’t prove it.”

“Big money?”

“At the retail end, yes. But we don’t believe it’s all about the money for her. I mean, hell, you’ve been to Rocky Falls. What would big bucks get you there-a double helping of grits? She lives on the side of a mountain in a log cabin with a privy, for crying out loud. No, it’s about control. The Creigh clan has run the dark side of things in Robbins County for decades. Grinny Creigh is a spider: Step out onto her web and here she comes, fangs and all.”

“So it’s the sheer quantity, not just the basic crime?”

“Yes. That’s supposedly why Greenberg and his crew are working up here.”

“Why do you say supposedly?”

“Because they don’t seem to do much. On the other hand, that’s a secretive bunch, so nobody really knows.”

“I met him the other day.”

“We heard,” she said. I thought I saw the ghost of a smile cross her severe face.

I grinned back. “They got uppity around my shepherds. What can I say?”

“Baby’s a city boy,” she said. “A little jumpy and aggressive. But as far as we know, he’s a good cop.”

“He’s a frustrated cop right now,” I said. “Says he can’t figure a way into Robbins County, either. He was interested in the fact that I might be able to go up there and shake some bushes.”

“Well, there you are,” she said. “Work a deal. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some feds behind you.”

“Only thing is, I think they’d be way behind me,” I said, recalling Mary Ellen’s comment. “Besides, I didn’t come up here to solve the meth problem. I came to help Dr. Goode find out what happened to her probationer. And I think we got closer today.”

“Interesting that you’re helping her but not the Park Service.”

I nodded. “True, but they’re apparently scared shitless of getting into a blood feud with the Creigh clan, who probably know the park better than any ten rangers. I guess I can see their point.”

“I can’t,” she said. “You let a bunch of crooks, even colorful ones, know you’re scared of them, they get bolder and bolder. What we need up here is a SEAL team. Send them into Robbins County and let them start cutting some prominent throats in the night until all this meth crap stops. Unfortunately, they’re all otherwise engaged these days.”

I laughed. “Don’t remember ever meeting a bloodthirsty SBI agent before,” I said. “Usually you guys are all about the paper chase.”

She didn’t smile back at me. “There’s another thing,” she said. “One we don’t understand at all. The state police collared a guy for vehicular homicide in Robbins County. Basically, a case of serious road rage. Nudged a tourist minivan off a cliff with his pickup because they were going too slow. At one point he implied that they better not mess with him because he worked for Grinny Creigh.”

“The state guys just love to be intimidated.”

“It’s almost as good as resisting arrest. Anyway, long story short, their detective bureau tried to turn him, without success. In the process of questioning him, though, he dangled a tidbit, saying that Grinny was a ‘florist.’ The cops were baffled, and when this guy realized they didn’t understand the code, he stopped talking.”

“A florist? As in, say, hallucinogenic botanicals?”

She shrugged. “Who the hell knows? Street slang morphs daily. Nobody’s ever heard the term. But if you do get involved in Robbins County and hear that word, we’d love to know what kind of new and original evil shit that is.”

She fished in her pocket and produced a business card. “Keep this handy,” she said. “You find a hole in Robbins County that regular law enforcement can drive through, please call me. If I can’t talk my bosses into exploiting it, I’ll take some leave, come up here, and go after it myself.”

“That sounds like there’s a personal angle,” I said.

She looked right back at me. “Anything’s possible, Lieutenant. By the way, I haven’t informed the local law that I’m here. I’d appreciate your keeping that confidence. In the meantime, be careful. The hills really are alive and all that good stuff.”

After she’d left, I slipped on a jacket and took the dogs out for a last call among the defenseless trees. The cabins were mostly dark and the shepherds had ranged ahead down a creekside path. This was getting interesting, I thought. First a DEA agent, and now an SBI agent, both complaining about not being able to penetrate Robbins County, and both offering to partner up if I should succeed. And why should I succeed where law enforcement had failed? All I’d done was to prize some useful information out of the injured probationer. We’d found a body, but there was still no direct evidentiary tie to Janey Howard. I wondered if that “grinning hangman” business meant the guy in the lake, assuming it was a man, had been hanged. It certainly hadn’t been your usual park excursion.

And what in the world was this “florist” stuff? The druggy world came up with more interesting code names for their addictions than even the government. But I’d come up to find out what happened to Janey Howard, not to chase druggies. I think that chasing druggies has become a form of white-collar welfare for law enforcement. As far as I’m concerned, drugs ought to be decriminalized and sold at government outlets for tax revenue. Let the addicts shoot up and die if they want to-meth, heroin, ‘ludes, coke, tranks, ups, downs, you name it, they are all just manifestations of Mr. Darwin’s theory of natural selection. I just wanted to quit finding the miserable bastards climbing through my basement windows.

The dogs had gone out of sight down the creek banks. My boots were crunching through pea gravel, so I knew I must still be on the lodge grounds. I noticed a side path that branched away from the main path to my right. I wondered what personal connection the handsome SBI agent had with Robbins County and the Creighs, and I made a mental note to check that out before I called her, if I ever called her. Her not checking in with the local sheriff’s office was not only unusual but outside of standard procedure. The SBI was usually called in by local law, but occasionally they were investigating said local law.

Then I saw the two men standing on the path, pointing shotguns at me.

I stopped in my tracks, just barely restraining myself from saying something stupid like What do you want? Both of them wore dark pants and shirts, and they were sporting full beards. No black hats, but definitely a pair of faces born to decorate a wanted poster. One of them stepped forward and motioned with his shotgun for me to come with them. I hesitated, hoping the dogs would reappear, but when the second man reversed the shotgun in his hands to form a club, I said all right and went with them. Both of them looked perfectly capable of clubbing me senseless and then dragging me to wherever it was we were going.

We walked quickly down the narrow path toward a pickup truck, with one of them in front and one behind me. Their clothes smelled of wood smoke and pine needles. I thought of a dozen different escape moves, but none of them stacked up well against shotguns at three feet. If they’d meant to kill me, they could have already done that and then thrown my body into the fast-moving creek.

Once we got out to the parking lot, one of them got in on the driver’s side while the other motioned for me to get into the bed of the truck. The man jumped up behind me, told me to lie down on my belly, and then clipped my wrists and legs to chain manacles welded to the corners of the bed of the truck. He prodded me in the back with the shotgun.

“Lookin’ to go see the Baby Jesus?” he whispered. His accent was mountain, but not tree-stump ignorant. The pine scent from the man’s clothes was really strong up close. Which was why the dogs had missed them, I realized. It was an old deer hunter’s trick. They’d double back eventually and then go nuts when they couldn’t find me.

“Not especially,” I said.

“Then keep still,” he growled.

Thirty minutes and a gear-grinding climb later up a very dark mountain road, the truck slowed, turned so hard I thought we were going to tip over, bounced over some serious ruts and then choked to a stop. I felt tenderized after all that time on the steel bed of the truck, and I had no idea of where we were, except that it was up. They got me out of the bed and marched me along a crooked path leading still farther up, one of them again leading, one behind. I stumbled a few times as I worked the kinks out, but they didn’t restrain me. After a ten-minute walk through the trees and out across a mountain meadow, I saw dim lights above, where a long log cabin was perched on the hillside.

They marched me up the slope to the cabin, where I could see two people sitting in rockers on the front porch, flanked by lanterns hanging on the front wall. One of them had to be Grinny Creigh. She was a heavy woman, with short, graying red hair cut in a surfer bowl, a broad forehead, a round, florid, double-chinned face, narrow-set eyes, a down-turned, thin-lipped mouth, and a pug nose. She wore a shapeless black dress to cover her ponderous body. There were massive fat rolls on her upper arms, but plenty of muscle, too. Her ankles had cuffs of fat above them and were indistinguishable from her calves, but she had small feet. In her left hand she held an old-fashioned paddle fan with which she was keeping her face cool. Her right hand held a sweating glass of what looked like tea.

Sitting next to her on the porch had to be Nathan, Grinny’s son. Even sitting, he was very tall, well over six feet, with elongated arms and legs, massive hands, and an oversized, bony head. He had a pale, square forehead and a long-bearded lantern jaw that made him look like a caricature of Frankenstein’s monster. His beard was long enough to rest on his chest. He wore loose-fitting blue denim overalls over a long-sleeved white cotton shirt and canvas-topped, size really-large Army surplus tropical combat boots. There was a deerskin bag at his feet from which the handles of several knives projected. He watched me with calm eyes while whittling on a piece of wood.

Standing just inside the front screen door was another woman, whom I recognized as the buxom hottie I’d seen at M. C. Mingo’s office. The two lanterns cast enough light to shadow the interior of the cabin, so I could barely see her expression, but I thought she recognized me. Now here’s an unholy trinity, I thought. For a moment I thought I saw some other faces, smaller, pale ovals bobbing around in the interior shadows behind the young woman, but I couldn’t be sure. I heard some noises off to either side of me and realized that there were other people out there in the shadows. Good deal. I heard some dogs stirring behind a fence made out of solid sheets of galvanized tin roofing nailed vertically to posts and boards.

“This him?” the fat woman asked.

“He’s the one,” said the girl from behind the screen door. She pressed her front up against it, creating two white circles against the screen in the shadow of the doorway. I’m sure I was supposed to get all hot and bothered.

Grinny Creigh leaned forward in her chair, making it and the porch floorboards creak. “Where you from, mister?” she asked.

“Manceford County,” I said. I’d decided not to waste energy protesting my abduction, hoping that, if I acted calmly, none of them would get violent.

“You been nosin’ around, askin’ questions down’ere in Rocky Falls?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I did talk to the sheriff.”

“You the one found that deader in the lake yonder?”

“That’s right.”

“How’d you know where to go lookin’?”

“I’m an investigator. I investigated.”

Grinny leaned back in her rocker and gave me an annoyed look. My sarcasm was apparently not much appreciated.

“Got a smart mouth on him,” Nathan said softly. His voice was high-pitched and nasal, like M. C. Mingo’s.

Grinny tilted her head fractionally, and I sensed the man behind me raise his fist to smack me on the head. I bent forward and whirled to his left, blocking the blow with an upraised left forearm and clubbing him in the groin with my stiffened right forearm. The man gasped as he doubled over, but instead of quitting, he bared his teeth and tried to bite my arm. I drove my right elbow into his temple, dropping him like a stone. My second captor, much older than the first, hadn’t moved yet, so I kicked him in the shin as hard as I could. He yelled, dropped his shotgun, and collapsed over his splintered shin. I extended my knee as he went down, catching him right under the chin in a tooth-clicking crack that knocked him cold. It all took less than fifteen seconds. I turned around to face the people on the porch and found myself looking into the bores of a double-barreled ten-gauge held by Nathan. The girl behind the screen was staring openmouthed at me. My left arm ached.

Grinny was looking down at me with a furious expression on her face. “You got some nerve, boy,” she growled, “comin’ up here and doin’ that.”

“I didn’t come up here,” I said angrily. “They brought me. That’s called kidnapping back in the World. You have a reason for doing that?”

“You ain’t kidnapped. You was brought here so’s I could ask ye straight: What’re you here for? Why you pokin’ around in Robbins County, askin’ folks ‘bout Creighs?”

“I want to know what happened to that park ranger, the one who was beaten and raped at Crown Lake.”

“What’s ‘at got to do with us?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “But we want to find out who did that and bring him in.”

“Who’s we?” Grinny said. Nathan and his shotgun had not moved one inch. The old man groaned on the ground, but the other one exhibited the stillness of the grave. I wondered if I’d hit him too hard in the temple. I hadn’t meant to hit him there, but those snaggly yellow teeth had looked both serious and toxic.

“The National Park Service,” I replied. “The Carrigan County Sheriff’s Office. The rangers at Thirty Mile station. And probably the decent, law-abiding people in this county, both of them.”

She snorted at this insult. “They hire you up?”

“That’s right,” I said. The truth would have been too complicated. Grinny leaned forward, and the heavily stressed rocking chair complained again.

“Well, you hear me, mister,” she said. “What goes on in Robbins County ain’t none of your bizness nor anyone else’s. If we got menfolk out in them woods doin’ that kinda shit, we take care of it, our way, not your way. Our lawyers come in two sizes: ten-gauge and twelve-gauge. You follow?”

“Well, that sounds good,” I said. “But a body or two delivered to the Thirty Mile station might be more convincing.”

Grinny raised her eyebrows, as if she hadn’t thought of that.

“You remember ’em dogs?” Nathan asked. “On the Rocky Falls road?”

I looked at him blankly for a second, then remembered the tall man up on the ridge with the binoculars. Had that been Nathan? I nodded.

“That convincing enough for ye?”

“That was the man who assaulted the ranger?”

“It was. You want meat for your lawyers’n such, you go on down there, pick up what’s left. Ain’t much, I reckon, but you’s the one needs convincin’.”

“Like I was sayin’,” Grinny said. “We take care’a things our way. You get on outta here now, and don’t you come back to Robbins County.”

I assessed my situation. The men in the shadows had gathered closer, but they weren’t doing anything except watching. Yet. The old man on the ground was crabbing his fingers toward his dropped shotgun. When he saw me watching, he withdrew his hand. The other one still hadn’t moved, although he did appear to be breathing now. Nathan’s shotgun still hadn’t wavered. I concluded that this was not the time for speeches. All this complex calculation took me a good three seconds.

“All right,” I said. I turned around and started walking down the meadow toward the tree line by the road. My back prickled in fearful anticipation, but I forced myself to simply walk away without a backward glance at all those shotguns. When I got down to the actual road, the cabin was out of sight. I turned across the hill to the road and picked up the pace. The road was a glorified dirt track, and the woods on either side were entirely dark. It was going to be a long night, I thought, as I rubbed the aching muscles, what was left of them, in my left arm. Then I heard a large dog start baying somewhere behind me, joined quickly by several others. An image of the pack tearing up the fat man crossed my mind and I cranked on a few more knots, although I could stumble only so fast down a rutted road in the dark. The dog noise kept up, but it didn’t sound like it was getting any closer. Grinny Creigh sending me one last message: Keep going, stranger, or worse things can happen than getting shot at. I pulled out my cell phone, but, as I’d expected, there was no service. Cell phone service seemed to be available in inverse proportion to how badly you needed it.

I had walked for almost forty-five minutes, still not reaching level ground or a paved road, when I heard a vehicle approaching from behind me. I stepped off the road into the trees and watched a pickup truck with too much engine come around the corner above me, showing only parking lights. When it drew abreast, the offside window came down and Rowena Creigh’s face appeared.

“Need a ride?” she asked.

I hesitated.

“C’mon, it’s fifteen miles back to Marionburg. I don’t bite, less’n I get really excited.”

I said okay and climbed in. The truck was not new, but there was obviously a huge mill under the hood. The interior smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. She was wearing a white sleeveless blouse knotted under her breasts, cutoff blue-jean shorts, and sandals. Her long legs gleamed in the light from the dashboard. She put the truck in second gear and let it roll itself down the road, the engine rumbling in protest.

“Better’n the way you came, don’t you think?” she asked.

“I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter,” I said. “But I do appreciate the lift.”

She laughed. “Grinny wants to see you, she’s gonna see you. One way or another. That’s how it is around these hills. You’d best believe that.”

“I saw a fat man get run down and torn to pieces by a dog pack the other day,” I said. “Those the same dogs I just heard back there?”

“Wouldn’t know anything about that,” she said, fishing a cigarette out of her blouse pocket and punching in the truck’s lighter. “That there’s menfolk business.” She looked across at me, a teasing look in her eyes. “I just live there.”

“Sure you do,” I said.

She lit the cigarette and returned the lighter. She took a deep drag and blew out a big cloud of smoke. “Uncle M. C. wasn’t too happy with you bein’ in Rob-bins County. You some kinda lawman, ain’t you?”

“He really your uncle?” I asked, avoiding the question.

“Hell if I know,” she said, rolling down the driver’s-side window to let a little of the smoke out. “Uncles, brothers, cousins, husbands-what’s it matter when the county phone book has only eleven different names listed?”

I laughed despite myself. The dirt track ended at a two-lane blacktop, and she turned right. She flipped on her headlights and put the hammer down. The truck jumped forward and I found my seat belt. She wasn’t wearing one. “Rocky Falls looks a little bigger than all that,” I said.

She grunted derisively. “Rocky Falls ain’t what I’m talkin’ about. I meant the county. You really a lawman?”

“Nope,” I said. “Used to be, but I’m retired. Now I do investigative work for hire. How about you? What do you do?”

“Me?” she laughed. “I’m Rue Creigh and I cause trouble. I drive around makin’ all the menfolk crazy and their women huffy. I smoke and I drink and, lemme see, there’s a third thing, but damned if it hasn’t slipped my mind just now. But it’ll come to me.”

I could just imagine, which was probably the object of the lesson. “Nice truck,” I said.

“Meanin’ what-how do I come to have it, seein’ as I’m just a layabout?”

“Interesting choice of words, but let me guess. Grinny Creigh got it for you.”

“Good guess, lawman. And Ym guessin’ you know how she manages that. But you need to be real careful if that’s what you’re really doin’ up here, ‘cause Grinny don’t abide strangers pokin’ into her business. Got her a regular hateon for that.”

“I told her why I was here, to find out-”

“That’s finished business,” she interrupted. “You want some sign of the old boy done that, you’ll need to get you a pooper-scooper.”

Suspicions confirmed, I thought. I saw a sign indicating we were crossing into Carrigan County and relaxed fractionally. The road paralleled a rushing mountain stream, with towering green hills on either side. There was no moon, but the air was incredibly clear. “That’s awfully convenient,” I said. “But we have only your word for that.”

“We?” she said. “Got a mouse in your pocket there, lawman? But, what the hell, if it’s proof you want, reach under your seat.”

Surprised, I felt around under the front of my seat and discovered a small, cold, heavy cylinder among the empty beer cans. I pulled it out. It was a law-enforcement-model pepper-spray canister. There was a decal on it saying that it was property of the U.S. Park Service and, if found, should be returned to the nearest ranger station immediately.

“This hers?” I asked.

“Ain’t no one knows, lawman. But the fat boy you saw doin’ the Alpo marathon? He had that thing in his truck. Y’all can make of that what you will. Convinced me. Good enough for them dogs, too.”

“Nobody from Robbins County has done anything like this to a park ranger before,” I said. “The cops are speculating she witnessed something, maybe even tried to interfere.”

Rowena shrugged and then readjusted her blouse before she fell out of it. “Where you stayin’ at?”

I told her, and she drove through the town going at least twenty miles over the speed limit. At this hour there was almost no traffic, but I did see a sheriff’s cruiser parked on a side street. They had to have heard that engine, but didn’t seem to be interested. When we pulled into the parking lot at the lodge, however, there were two police cars and a Park Service Jeep out in the middle of the lower lot. Rowena drove right into the middle of the cluster, put the truck in park, and leaned an elbow out her window.

“Well, here you are, lawman,” she announced, as several cops began to get out of their vehicles. Mary Ellen Goode climbed out of the Jeep, and my two shepherds came bounding out behind her.

“Well, thanks again for the ride,” I said. “I guess I probably won’t be seeing you again.”

She pushed both hands through her luxuriant hair, which did interesting things to her superstructure. “Not in Robbins County,” she said with a seductive smile. “But now that I know where you’re stayin’, who knows?”

Mary Ellen was close enough to the truck to hear that last bit, and I saw a pained expression cross her anxious face. I got out of the truck and closed the door. Rowena waved at me, smiled at all the staring cops, and thundered out of the parking lot. The two shepherds were all over me, but over their fuzzy shoulders I could see that the cops wanted some answers.

“Where did you get that?” Mary Ellen asked, pointing at the pepper-spray canister in my hand.

“It’s a long story. Let’s all go to my cabin.”

Once in the cabin, the senior Carrigan County sheriff’s deputy told me that a guest on the second floor had seen a pickup truck leave the parking lot with what looked like a body in the bed. He’d called 911, and the responding deputies found my two German shepherds racing around the parking lot looking for me and displaying just a bit of aggression, meaning no one in the lodge could get to a vehicle. It also kept all the cops in their patrol cars until their sergeant, who’d shown me into Sheriff Hayes’s office the other day, had called Mary Ellen Goode, a known associate of the possibly missing ex-lieutenant Richter, to corral the agitated shepherds. A ninety-minute search through the surrounding area had produced nothing but the facts that I appeared to be missing, my cabin was unlocked, and my car keys and wallet were in the kitchen. They also had a second witness statement about a woman seen leaving my cabin earlier in the evening. Mary Ellen had called her supervisor at Thirty Mile station, the redoubtable Ranger Bob, who’d brought along the senior law enforcement ranger from the station.

I got everyone situated out on the creekside porch and held an impromptu debrief, leaving out only my visitation from the lady SBI agent. Then Sheriff Hayes himself arrived, and we had to go through it all again, while the other cops verified and added to their notes. When I had finished, the sheriff gave me a long look and then commented on my continuing propensity to instigate trouble.

“You are a regular shit magnet, Lieutenant,” he said.

I grinned. “Guilty,” I said. “But you have to admit, you know more about what happened to that girl than when I first came here.”

“And now that we do, will you be leaving soon?” the sheriff asked, sounding hopeful.

“That depends,” Mary Ellen said, provoking an annoyed look from Ranger Bob, who’d been about to speak.

“On…?” prompted the sheriff.

“Mrs. Howard called me earlier this evening,” she said. “After she heard about our finding that body, she sat down with Janey and had a heart-to-heart. She said Janey was ready to tell me what happened, although she did not want to talk to the police. So I went back to Murphy. I took along a tape recorder.”

She fished the recorder out of her bag and set it on the table. We all listened to Janey Howard tell her tale of witnessing the execution and being taken down, assaulted, and then driven away out into the woods dressed in only a blanket.

“So now we know what the word ‘hangman’ was all about,” Mary Ellen said.

“And that there were two men involved in it, not just the fat boy I saw getting eaten by a dog pack,” I said. “Grinny Creigh did not tell the entire truth.”

The sheriff just stared at me, until I remembered that I hadn’t told him about the dog-pack incident. I did now.

“Ain’t that something, now,” the sheriff mused, shaking his head. He turned to Mary Ellen. “We can’t use that tape as evidence, you understand. If there’s gonna be a prosecution, she’s gonna have to make a statement, ID a bad guy, and testify in court.”

“I understand,” Mary Ellen said. “I just thought you would appreciate finally hearing from the victim. At least you know where to look.”

“Yeah,” the sheriff said unhappily. “That’s not necessarily progress. Means I now have to call M. C. Mingo.” He turned to me. “You want to press charges?”

“I’ll think about it-it was more of a summons before the throne than a kidnapping. Will you need a formal statement as to what I witnessed out there on the road with those dogs?”

“Can you describe the victim?”

“Ragout?” I said, prompting suppressed grins among the other cops.

“Let’s see what M. C. has to say tomorrow morning,” the sheriff said. “In the meantime, give some thought to going back to Manceford County. Actually, give it a lot of thought; I can’t stand all this goddamned excitement.”

I promised I would, and the meeting broke up. Mary Ellen stayed behind, after having exchanged what I sensed to be a few tense words with Ranger Bob as he left the cabin.

“Your boss seems unhappy tonight,” I said.

“Let’s say he isn’t thrilled with developments,” she said. “I have been suitably cautioned about bringing outsiders into Park Service business.”

I thought about a scotch and then decided to make some coffee instead. Mary Ellen and I went back out to the porch.

“Given all the hostile vibes up here, maybe the sheriff is right,” I said. “I should back out and let you folks get on with your interesting lives.”

She gave me a wan look and nodded. “I really appreciate your coming,” she said. “I’m just sorry…”

“That it turned up yet another dead body and more violence?”

“That wasn’t your fault,” she said with a sigh. “But…”

“Yeah, but. It does seem to happen a lot. Like every time you and I get together. Maybe the sheriff was also right about my being a shit magnet. I wish things were different.”

“This is such a beautiful place,” she said, looking out at the creek rushing through the night below our feet. “The Smokies. The park. This whole end of the state. It’s sad to think there are people who come out here to hurt other people, make narcotics, hunt people down with packs of dogs. That’s the stuff that happens in big cities, not out here in God’s country.”

“Violence in these mountains was here long before Mr. Vanderbilt bought the Smokies and gave them to the government for a park,” I said. “I imagine it takes a hard individual to live off the land out here.”

“Who was the girl in the truck?” she asked, a little too casually.

“Rowena Creigh,” I replied. “Grinny’s daughter. She seems to think very highly of herself. She showed up in her truck after I’d been dismissed. It beat walking back.”

“Was she the one the man said he saw leaving your cabin earlier this evening?”

I was surprised, but then remembered that second witness. “No,” I said. I didn’t elaborate. I sensed that somehow all these unknown women had become important to Mary Ellen, although, superficially at least, she had no claims on my loyalty. And vice versa.

“There going to be formal repercussions from Ranger Bob?” I asked.

She smiled. “I don’t think so. I think he’s more upset about you than me.” She hesitated. “Bob’s carrying a bit of a torch, I think. I keep fending off, but someone must have told him persistence pays. One day I’ll have to get firm, I suppose. Mostly it’s harmless.”

I remembered the hostile looks Bob had been shooting my way during my little debrief. I wondered how harmless the guy really was. Mary Ellen was a striking woman who took her beauty in stride; she might be a whole lot more important to Ranger Bob than she knew.

“All the more reason for me to get out of Dodge,” I said, finishing my coffee. “I’m glad I could be of some help. I think.”

She smiled. “We’ll have a ton of paperwork to do after today. I’ll let you know what they find out about the victim and the second hangman.”

Once she’d left I thought about taking the dogs out for a final night walk. I decided against it. One unscheduled truck ride was enough for one evening. I decided on a nightcap after all. As I sat out on the porch in the dark, I wondered if my association with the lovely Mary Ellen Goode wasn’t drawing to a close on more fronts than just the Howard case.

We’d met by chance during the cat dancers investigation, and I’d been smitten, probably like every other normal man who saw her for the first time. But the fact was, the entire context of our time together had been violent and especially frightening for a park ranger with a Ph. D. A man and a woman may draw very close under those circumstances, but in the cold light of day, it was common ground you both wanted to go away.

Frack came out to the porch and flopped down on the rug. We both decided to sit there and listen to the creek go by.