"Lester's?" she asked.

"Les doesn't know where she got it. Come on into my office. I'll let you in on any details you haven't already found on Maryanne's desk."

"Thanks," Anna said sincerely.

Ruick muttered something that sounded like "skin of a rhinoceros," but, accustomed to the idiosyncrasies of the brass, she politely pretended not to notice.

As it happened, there was no more to tell than she'd discovered through her snooping. No leads on to whom the jacket belonged or why Carolyn was wearing it. Les told Harry that his wife had a habit of appropriating anything belonging to nearby males for her own use and thinking nothing of it. Had she been cold when she'd left that night, she might have snagged some camper's coat off a tree or rock.

"Les was careful to point out that his wife would never steal," Harry said. "That she just 'borrowed without permission.' "

"If the jacket's owner hiked on, we'll never know whose it was. Shoot, he might not even be a hundred percent sure where he lost it," Anna said.

"Follow it up," Ruick ordered.

"Sure." Mentally Anna added another forty miles hard hiking to her list just to chase down this wild goose for the chief ranger.

Army jacket dispensed with, she settled into the task of telling Ruick of her interview with Rory concerning the spousal abuse. She'd not taped it because she'd been afraid of inhibiting the boy's narrative on such a sensitive issue. She taped her recounting of it now while it was fresh in her mind.

When she'd finished, Ruick didn't say anything. Rocking himself absently in his chair he stared into the parking lot. Lunch was over. Cars were coming in. Even in a national park on a beautiful summer's day most folks drove the half-mile to work. No wonder America was the fattest nation on earth.

"The marks on his arms and legs. Bruises, cuts in various stages of healing. I'd have spotted it on a kid in a second," he said finally.

Anna made no comment. She would have too. On a child it would have set off all the alarm bells. One didn't expect it on a grown man.

"I've heard of course of wives beating their husbands,"

Ruick said. "I've just never come across it before." Neither had Anna. She must remember to ask Molly just how rare the phenomenon was.

"It doesn't make sense," Ruick said. "Les is no Tarzan. I mean he is- was-what? Eighteen years older than his wife?"

"Eighteen," Anna confirmed from the birth dates on the notes she had with her.

"And in bad shape. Still he outweighed her by a good thirty pounds and is six or eight inches taller. What did he have to be afraid of if he fought back?"

"Being abandoned," Anna said with certainty. She remembered how it felt when Zach had died. What would she put up with not to feel that again? "It was like we'd been living in black and white and all of a sudden our world got colorized," Rory had said. Lester was scared to death to go back to that black-and-white world. Even black and blue must have seemed an improvement.

"Give me abandonment any day of the week," Harry said.

Anna guessed none of his wives had ever up and died on him. If he'd ever been married. She looked around his office past the ubiquitous NPS certificates and awards. No pictures of wives or kids.

"Are you married?" she asked apropos of nothing but her thoughts.

"Twenty-seven years. I played it safe. Eilene is a little bit of a thing who wouldn't hurt a fly. What do you say you and me go have another chat with Lester?"

Lester was doing what depressed and grieving people traditionally do: everything wrong. The curtains of his second-floor motel room were drawn. The room was overwarm and stuffy. He'd not showered or shaved or dressed. In a plaid flannel bathrobe he'd probably had since before his son was born, he'd been sitting in an unmade bed watching television.

When he opened the door to Harry Ruick's knock Anna was taken aback at how much he'd deteriorated since she'd seen him last. The thinning gray hair stood out in bed-wrinkled strands and colorless stubble highlighted the crease and sag of his cheeks. Puffy eyes rimmed with red attested to the fact he'd spent much of the intervening time weeping. That or he suffered from allergies.

Eyes watering at the sudden exposure to light-or reality-he said absurdly, "May I help you?"

"We'd like to talk with you for aminute," Harry said. He pulled off his straw summer Stetson and held it in front of him like a steering wheel. Anna didn't know if he did it from respect or good manners. Either way she liked him for the gesture. Her Stetson was at home on a peg in the closet in Rocky Springs, along with her service weapon and other needful things. Today she wore the goofy-looking green NPS billed field cap. It crossed her mind to snatch it off in deference to age or grief but the rules regarding women, manners and the wearing of hats had become blurred. One never knew, anymore, what was proper.

She left it on. Beneath its polyester squeeze her hair probably looked as bad as Lester's.

Mr. Van Slyke was baffled for a moment. Then his face cleared somewhat and he said, "Of course. Won't you please come in? Please excuse the mess. I…"

The brittle safety of polite platitudes fell away and his words dried up. Sidling by ahead of Harry, Anna looked closely at him. His skin hung loose over muscles devoid of elasticity; his was the face of a man who'd had a small stroke or was in shock. Taking his hand she shook it as if they'd just been introduced. "Good to see you again," she murmured. His skin was dry and warm. Not shock. Probably just old-fashioned depression. She shied away from a sudden memory of the weeks and months after Zach died when she'd moved in slow motion, pushing through a life grown thick and suffocating as Delta mud. But then Zach never beat her. Zach was the kind of guy who put mice out, then left the door ajar in case it got cold and they wanted back in.

Even without Carolyn's ghost, the room would have been enough to depress Anna. As Les had warned, it was a mess. The contents of a backpack and a suitcase were disgorged over the available surfaces, along with the remains of an uneaten fast-food supper. There was a single chair of that sterile motel hybrid between kitchen straight-back and easy chair beside a round table piled with the soiled and disorganized guts of Lester's day pack, and the bed.

Out of deference to rank, Anna left the chair for Harry. Sliding loose change and motel brochures to one side, she perched on the low dresser beside the television. Lester hadn't turned it off when he'd answered the door. Garish colors and rude noises emanating from the set proved the only life the room had: distorted, invasive, inconsequential.

Anna composed herself to let Harry take the lead and watched the men settle, Harry, hat in hand, at the small cluttered table and Les Van Slyke on the edge of the unmade bed, his bruised and bony knees sticking out from under the battered flannel robe. She was put in mind of Rory's image of Les as a whimpering dog. It was not a pretty picture, particularly of a boy to have of his father.

"Mr. Van Slyke-" Harry began.

"Lester, Les," the old man begged, and the humility on his face made Anna want to deliver a swift kick to his nether regions.

"Les," Harry amended. "We-or rather Anna here-has been talking with Rory. He suggested your relationship with your wife, Carolyn, was not as smooth as you painted it."

Lester tweaked at his bathrobe, arranging it demurely over his knees. As soon as he let go it fell away again. He left it alone. After enough time had passed that Anna had to actively clamp a lid on herself to keep from jumping in with questions of her own, he said, "All couples have their little troubles now and again.Carolyn was quite a few years younger than I am. I suppose she got restless sometimes."