"You think? I don't notice what my wife wears, much to her annoyance."

Anna explained her rationale.

"Good point," he conceded. "Supposing he does know where she got the coat. To give him the benefit of the doubt, let's say he didn't remember yesterday and he's figured it out since. Why not just tell us? Who's he protecting? If the jacket was his-and Les doesn't strike me as an army surplus kind of guy-it wouldn't prove anything. Wives take their husband's coat all the time. First time around he said she had a habit of 'borrowing' things."

"Maybe it belongs to Rory. Maybe he thinks the two of them did get together and Rory killed her, made the coat swap at the same time he got that second water bottle," Anna suggested. She didn't remember ever seeing Rory in an army jacket, and given the new polypropylene microfleece nature of his backpacking wardrobe, a bulky heavy coat seemed out of character, but she couldn't remember for sure. "I'll ask Joan," she said.

Not because the coat question concerned her overmuch-Anna would have noticed if Rory had lugged a heavy army jacket into the woods- but to have something to do, she sought out Joan at the resource management office.

Joan was in a tizzy. The DNA lab at the University of Idaho had screwed up on the hair samples sent in from the bear trap they'd harvested before unpleasant adventures interrupted their research. There'd been a mix-up, Joan told her distractedly. The lab had sent back DNA results from Alaskan grizzlies, not those of the lower forty-eight. Though the same species, grizzlies in Alaska were considerably larger-thirty to fifty percent-and had enough other evolutionary and environmentally based differences that the tests could tell one from the other. Till she sorted out her bits of hair and scat, Joan was useless for any other topic of conversation.

Anna left, her departure unnoticed, and walked back to the employee housing area. Though she'd wanted to share the day's findings and frustrations with Joan, it was reassuring that not everybody spent every waking hour thinking about who killed whom and why.

The rest of the afternoon she dedicated to the familiar chore of packing for the backcountry. It was something she had done so many times in her life she found the Zen-like sameness of laundry and sorting and putting things into small plastic bags as freeing as a walking meditation.

Around five o'clock, as she was contemplating a nap in reward for her labors, Harry rapped on the screen door. The autopsy results had come. Northern Montana was not rife with murders and the medical examiner had worked up Carolyn Van Slyke's corpse first thing.

Much of it they already knew from observation: no defensive wounds, no sexual assault, no skin beneath the fingernails, no bullets in the body, no knife wounds but the filleting of the front upper quadrant of the skull where the

M.E. approximated two to three ounces of flesh had been excised.

The cause of death was severing of the spinal cord between the first and second cervical vertebrae. That surprised Anna. Given the cutting on the face, she thought head injury would be the cause, that the removal of the flesh might have been done in part to hide the nature of the blow.

"Did he just twist her head till her neck snapped?" she asked. She'd seen it done in a dozen movies but never come across it in real life. For some reason the image made her queasier than the slicing and dicing.

"Nope," Harry said. "Weirder yet." He handed her the report he'd been reading from and she scanned the last half of a page.

Carolyn Van Slyke had been struck on the side of the head with such force her neck had snapped, not just crushing the cord but knocking the skull so fast and hard that it was propelled over the opposite shoulder and down toward the clavicle, pulverizing the outer edges of three vertebrae and hyperextending the muscles and tendons of the neck.

"She must have been hit with a tree trunk to get that kind of torque," Anna said.

"No tree trunk," Ruick said. "What's missing?"

Anna didn't like to be quizzed. Then again, she loved a challenge. For half a minute she skimmed what had been read to her and read again the final paragraphs. "Ah!" she said as the light finally dawned. "No injury to the skull. No point of impact, cracking, etcetera."

"She was hit by something soft," Ruick said.

"Like a man's forearm?"

"I've never met a man who could hit that hard."

"Kicked, hit with a booted calf, Jean Claude Van Damme style?"

"It would have to be one heck of a kick."

"What if she was already unconscious and the killer forced her head back and down?"

"That was the best I could come up with," Ruick admitted. "But Dr. Janis, the M.E., said doing it slowly like that would have squashed the spinal cord. The severing suggests a single, sudden, hard blow."

"That's helpful," Anna said dryly. "Did Dr. Janis have any suggestions?"

"One. She said a boy she'd seen in Helena had been killed that way. The kid was seven years old. His nineteenyear-old brother and his buddies got drunk and were swinging around a heavy padded boxer's punching bag on the end of a chain. The kid stepped out, caught the full force of it above his left eye, his head snapped back and down, producing injuries like those of our pet corpse."

"At least we know what to look for now," Anna said. "A guy in the backcountry with an oversized bolster. Shouldn't be too hard to track down."

"Wish I had something more tangible but this is as good as it gets."

They talked of Anna and Joan's return to the backcountry. Anna was against Rory going. They hadn't enough to arrest him for the murder of his stepmother. With him now claiming he may have had the two water bottles all along, he was barely a suspect, no proof to take to a grand jury. Ruick had reservations as well but wanted to keep the Van Slykes in the park; allowing Rory to continue with the DNA project would keep not only him in the area but Les as well. Rory's father was determined to return to Fifty Mountain Camp and finish his stay so he and his son could return to Seattle together.

"It's as if neither will leave till the other one does and both of them are hot to get back up on Flattop Mountain," Anna said. "Why?"

"That's what we've got to find out, I guess."

They struck a compromise. If Joan Rand said no, the deal was off. If she said yes, Buck, the stalwart backcountry ranger, would be detailed to go along as insurance.

Joan said yes.

As it turned out, hiking into the wilderness with a potential murderer was not what grated on Anna's nerves. It was hiking with a teenager seesawing unpleasantly between sulkiness and petulance. Gripping tightly to her hard-won adulthood, Anna managed not to engage. Armored with genuine compassion, Joan seemed impervious to the sporadic adolescent barbs. Anna was not. The best she could do was appear to be. Rory, like most teenagers she had met, could be the best of company. And the worst. Like heat-seeking missiles, people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen had an uncanny ability to sense weak spots and hit them with unnerving accuracy.

Has to be hormonal,Anna thought as she meticulously refrained from wincing when he wrote off a generation of the finest rock-and-roll musicians ever to overdose as "overrated bubblegum salesmen." There was a spark of hope to be gleaned: perhaps at menopause, when she underwent reverse adolescence, she, too, would become uniquely dangerous, even if for only a brief period of time.

Till then, she relied on the grainy endurance of middle age to out-walk the strength and suppleness of youth. As the ascent to Flattop grew steeper and hotter and dustier, she picked up the pace and soon walked alone. Almost alone. Drooping along at her heels, nearly as sullen as Rory Van Slyke, was Ponce, the ten-year-old gelding the park used as a pack-horse. Doing double duty as DNA flunky and Harry Ruick's flunky, Anna had too much ground to cover on foot. Out of kindness of heart or weakness of mind she'd volunteered to walk the first twelve miles, four of them nigh onto vertical, so Ponce could carry Rory and Joan's packs.