The "girl" offended Anna not in the least. Being a woman of a certain age, she'd learned to pick her battles. That, and she'd been called a whole lot worse.

"Gary, Vic, the others'll continue searching for the Van Slyke boy. As soon as the body"-he pushed his jaw at the plastic-wrapped lump of bear bait hanging in the tree at the far edge of their camp-"is taken to West Glacier, the helicopter will join the search. If the kid is up and around we ought to be able to find him today."

He didn't add the obvious, that if Rory wasn't up and around it probably wouldn't make a whole lot of difference whether he was found today or a month from today.

They sipped their coffee in companionable silence awaiting the sun. Anna was cold. Her green uniform shorts and short-sleeved gray shirt offered little in the way of warmth. In a minute, when she was more awake, she would get her raincoat from her day pack.

"Have you ever had a murder at Glacier before?" she asked.

"You mean since it's been a national park?" Harry thought about that for a bit. "Glacier was made a park in 1910. We joined up with Canada in 1932. There's bound to have been some foul play but nothing in recent history," he said finally. "They used to be rare as hen's teeth."

Used to be. Anna was thinking of the beheading in Yosemite a few years back, the death of the child in her own park only months before.

Population was at an all-time high. Park visitation was up. Anna remembered reading Future Shockin college, the experiments crowding too many rats in too small a space. Now, nearly thirty years later, it was happening in the parks. The rats were starting to kill each other.

Twenty minutes after first light, before the sun had scraped over the jagged cliffs rising from the eastern edge of the mountain, camp was broken, gear was stowed. Joan and the rest of the bear team headed southeast to mark the helicopter landing area, their sad cargo belly down across a saddle like a gunslinger's trophy. Needing the full light of the sun to properly examine the shrub-choked crime scene, Anna and Harry decided to first walk West Flattop Trail.

The woman had been butchered after death. The kind of precision knife or hatchet job that had been done on her face was the work of ten or fifteen minutes, maybe more considering the flesh cut away had been removed from the site. Butchering was a job requiring privacy. Consequently the body had been carried off the trail, as the drag marks attested. Corroborating this theory was the fact that the body had none of the scratches or scrapes that might be expected on the arms of a healthy live woman forced through a thick alder copse.

Had the murder occurred any distance off trail, most likely the killer would have had all the privacy needed to mutilate in peace and would have had no need to move the victim after death. Logic dictated that the murder had been committed on or near West Flattop, and fairly near where the body had been dumped. In August, with visitation at its peak, the killer would have wished to get the body out of sight as quickly as possible.

The burn covered both sides of West Flattop but for the small patch of green bordering the trail above where the body was found. It was an educated guess that the kill had occurred in the burn zone, where the perpetrator had little or no cover. He'd carried the victim till he found enough undergrowth he could hide in.

Anna and Harry walked, one to each side, three to five yards off the trail in search of the place the original violence had taken place. Just under half a mile from where they started, they found what was probably the victim's backpack. It was forty feet into the burn, stuffed under a downed tree. Char and ash had been hastily pushed over it. The scorched soil would have proved an ideal surface for tracking if it hadn't been for the rain the day before. What prints there might have been were melted into amorphous depressions that would keep their secrets.

Anna stood by, notebook in hand, while Harry photographed the pack and log with a different 35-mm camera than he'd used the night before. This one had been brought in by the helicopter. The other was his own. He'd come to the high country for a search and rescue, not to investigate a murder.

That done, he and Anna made a series of measurements so the exact location and lie of the pack could be reconstructed later on paper, should that prove necessary. Then Ruick pulled on latex gloves, carefully swept the debris off the pack and pulled it from where it had been stashed. He handled it as if protecting possible fingerprints, but it was just good form and training. The stained gray canvas, soaked with rain and grimed with soot, wouldn't hold any latent prints.

From the way the pack moved, Anna could tell it contained something heavy. Harry emptied the zippered front pouch. "Mosquito repellent, tissues, topo-careful woman, carried two topographical maps."

"Not careful enough," Anna remarked as she wrote down the items he'd removed.

"No. I guess not. Let's see what we got here." He unzipped the main pocket of the day pack and lifted out three cameras and four lenses. "A photographer. From what little I know about camera equipment, my guess is this is pretty expensive stuff."

"Rules out robbery," Anna said. Robbery had never been a motive she'd considered seriously. Robbers took things and ran away. They didn't drag corpses around and slice their faces off. Why would anyone slice off a face? "Maybe he didn't want her recognized," she said, seeing again the single eye staring out of the mess.

"If that's the case he didn't do athorough job of it. I don't know about you, but I'd recognize those near and dear to me if half their face was still there. It doesn't take that much."

That was true. With dental work, fingerprints, medical records and DNA it was nearly impossible to hide the identity of a corpse for any length of time. Unless it was a corpse nobody cared about, and hadn't for a long time. Judging by the cameras, this woman was too well-to-do to be completely unloved.

"No film in any of the cameras," Harry said after a brief inspection. He handed Anna the stuff to hold. Arms full, she abandoned the role of secretary. Ruick reached into the pack and took out four boxes of unopened film and three empties. "No exposed film," he said. "These boxes must have been in here awhile. I guess she hadn't gotten to wherever she was going to shoot before she was killed."

"Or she was taking pictures of something the killer didn't want recorded for posterity," Anna said.

The chief ranger shot her a look of surprise. "Good point," he said, and again she had the odd sensation that he was seeing her. It was as if underlings only existed as nameless cogs in a green and gray machine. Because Ruick was good at his job, he kept that machine clean, fueled and maintained, but scarcely expected the moving parts to show signs of initiative above their station in life.

Item by item he retrieved the cameras and lenses from Anna and restowed them in the pack. Another ten minutes were spent circling out from the log, studying the ground before he said, "This vein's mined out," and they moved on.

For the next couple of hours they continued to comb both sides of the trail east and west, but found no other trace of the woman or anything to indicate who killed her or why. With the sun high and bright, they returned to where the body had been and searched the path down and the area around where it had lain, but again found nothing. If the meat cut from the face had been tossed into the brush, something had dragged it away and eaten it. Gruesome as that image was, Anna preferred it to the idea that the killer was hiking around with human flesh packed along with his peanut butter and pork and beans. More measurements were taken, notes made. Anna sketched the crime scene. So tangled was it with branches and leaf litter that, as good as the sketch was, it still looked like the doodlings of an idiot.