She scrabbled through the papers in front of her, plucked up a sheet. I saw her eyes juggling information. “We received information at six forty.”
My rational side lost out to my hand slamming the table. “But you people didn’t arrive until almost seven thirty!” I barked. “Ten minutes after I did, even though you were notified before my call. Did you stop for breakfast along the way?”
Her jaw clenched and she looked away. “Our notification wasn’t by, uh, traditional means. It took some time to, uh, deal with.”
“The message came by carrier pigeon?” I asked.
“Not your business.”
“The hell it isn’t. Someone called me with your voice and sent me to a crime scene and now I’m halfway to being accused of the murder.”
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Ryder,” she said, adding: “Not yet.”
“Then I can escape the Donna Cherry Memorial Madhouse, right?”
The eyes blazed, the jaw clenched. She stood stiffly and nodded toward the door.
“You’re free to go.”
I stood, started to walk away, paused in the doorframe. I turned round and lit my eyes with false bonhomie.
“The next time you know I’m in the neighborhood and want a consultation with the hotshot hard-on from Mobile, Detective Cherry, just call and use your real name. It won’t be hard …” I made the thumb-pinkie phone sign, wiggling it beside my cheek. “You’ve got the number, right?”
I winked and walked out the door.
The next morning I awoke to birdsong and the cackling of crows, the sound so full and rich it pushed aside the weirdness of the preceding day’s events. The air through my open window smelled of pine and rising dew. The clock showed 6.23. Mix-up scampered out for the performance of his morning duties.
After showering and dressing and gulping down my coffee, I met Gary for a two-hour lesson on the cliffs. I returned feeling pumped and happy at half past ten, noting a man sitting in one of the rockers on the porch, patting my dog’s head.
It was the ranger who had been with Sheriff Beale the day before I’d been summoned to the murder scene. He smiled and stood as I pulled up. I stepped to the porch and shook hands with Lee McCoy, senior ranger for the Red River Gorge area of the Daniel Boone Forest.
“I heard about what happened yesterday,” McCoy said, producing a zip-locked bag with a two-inch stack of pink ovals inside. “I figured it’d be good to give you a more proper mountain welcome.”
“Country ham?” I asked, studying the package.
He grinned. “Pepper-rubbed, cob-smoked, finished off with a year’s hanging. Fry a minute in hot butter starting to brown, flip over for another minute. Your mouth’ll think it’s stepped into heaven.”
I cradled the ham to my chest like a cache of diamonds and ran it to the fridge. The best country hams rarely see store shelves but are traded in the shadows by cognoscenti. I poured coffee and we sat on the porch, chatting about weather and light topics. Something seemed a bit amiss in the proceedings – I was, after all, a man with an unknown connection to a dead body, but McCoy seemed oblivious to my conflicts, more concerned that I was having a good vacation experience. But perhaps his loyalties rested with the tourism industry. I asked McCoy how long he’d been with the Forest Service.
“Twenty-seven years. All in the Daniel Boone Forest, a good half stationed here in the Gorge. I grew up in Clay City fifteen miles west. I used to ride my bike here before I could drive.”
“You must know every step in the Gorge.”
He winked. “The Gorge keeps a few places hidden. That’s its nature. Today I’m heading into the backcountry to check a stand of white-haired goldenrod.”
Maybe it was something in me that harkened to childhood, Smoky the Bear and Ranger Rick or whatever. Maybe it was McCoy’s spiffy, hard-creased uniform, or the cool wide-brim hat, but my cynicism melted and my heart skipped a beat at the prospect of hiking alongside a for-real forest ranger.
I sighed like a jilted teen. “Jeez, I’d give my eyeteeth to tag along.”
He smiled. “We’ll be out for a few hours. Best to pack a sandwich.”
I grabbed my daypack and a canteen before McCoy had a chance to change his mind.
“You bringing your pup?” McCoy called through the door. “Dogs aren’t allowed in Natural Bridge Park, but they’re fine in the Gorge.”
I whistled Mix-up to my side and we jumped into McCoy’s official Jeep Cherokee, driving out of the long valley, coming to the split where the road wandered back to the only other cabin in the hollow. McCoy nodded toward the cabin as we passed.
“Had a chance to meet Doctor Charpentier, the fellow who lives there?”
“Never seen him.”
“He spends hours in the forest, hiking and thinking. If you see him, stop and say hello. A brilliant man. I’ve never known anyone to absorb information so quickly.”
“Charpentier is a medical doctor?”
“A psychologist from Montreal who took early retirement. He moved here for the climate, finding Canada too cold, the South too hot. Doctor Charpentier thinks Kentucky has the perfect temperature, and our forest reminded him of Canadian woodland.”
McCoy pulled up out of the hollow and drove north. He entered the national forest and wound down to the bottoms, the Red River to our left as we angled southeast. Whenever the canopy of trees opened, I saw looming cliffs studded with pine on the ridges.
“Beautiful view,” I said.
“Depends on your perspective.” McCoy nodded at a cliff face thirty stories above the valley. “We’ve got a problem with people falling off cliffs. Doped-up locals and drunked-up college kids, mainly. They camp on the ridges for the view, forget where they are, walk over the edge. Last week a man took a two-and-half gainer from the top of that cliff to the bottom. I was on the rescue team. Or maybe body-recovery team is a better term. I’ve personally recovered over two dozen.”
McCoy slowed as a huge recreational vehicle moved toward us in the other lane, crowding the centerline. McCoy slipped past, pulled off the road and stopped the engine. We’d reached the trailhead. It was after we’d exited and gone to the rear to grab our packs that McCoy made his first mention of the grisly events of yesterday.
“I heard you had to spend some time with Detective Cherry,” he said. “She was surprised at your appearance.”
“It was a surprise to us all,” I said.
McCoy cleared his throat. “Did Detective Cherry mention there’d been a death prior to the man in the shack? A very similar event?”
“No, Lee,” I said, more interested than my face let on. “We never quite got around to police chit-chat.”
“It was a week back. Sonny Burton drove a snack truck, chips and pretzels and such. He went missing for two days. His truck was found in a hollow, Sonny underneath it, hands frozen on to the front tire parked on his chest. Even though he was dead, his mouth was open, like he was screaming. There were a couple boot prints on the ground, what you noticed me looking for the other day. I guess you’re tuned to stuff like that.”
I nodded. “Two murders in a short span of time is probably unusual around here, but not freakishly odd anywhere, unfortunately. What makes you sure Burton is connected to the guy from yesterday?”
“The way the police received notice of both crimes.”
The point Cherry hadn’t discussed.