Buck was to meet them at Fifty Mountain. They would overnight there. In the morning he'd go with Rory and Joan to work hair traps. Anna and Ponce would be on their own for the most part but, when feasible, would camp with the DNA research team. Harry had insisted on this not only for Rory and Joan's security but for hers. Anna'd not put up a fight. Much as she liked camping alone, she was not one-hundred-percent sure their lady-killer had left the park.

Despite the best Zen intentions, her mind did not remain uncluttered during the hours of the hike to Fifty Mountain. In the burn her thoughts turned to the peculiar Mr. Mickleson-Nicholson and his digging of glacier lilies. As they neared the place in the trail where Rory had met up with the hikers, visions of extraneous water bottles danced in her head. No revelations were forthcoming, and by afternoon's end, she plodded on as dull as Ponce and was nearly as glad as he when they reached camp.

Buck was there to greet them and lend a beefy hand and a strong back to unloading and feeding the horse. Grazing was much frowned upon, and along with their gear, Ponce carried pellets for himself.

William McCaskil was still at Fifty Mountain-or at least his tent and pack were in the far campsite where they'd been two days before.

Tent pitched, Anna allowed herself the luxury of a cup of hot tea before getting on with business: finding and again chatting with the felon, McCaskil.

The sun slid behind the mountain, dragging the day's warmth down with it. In this clashing together of day and night, nature chose to unleash one of her showier moments. As Anna drank her tea, fog white as drugstore cotton began pouring down, feather-light liquid in stasis, from over the jagged mountain face to the east. Slow and silent in sinister majesty it cloaked the crags, slipped between them and flowed toward the meadows. In an instant so perfect as to seem eternal, the drift turned from white to wild flamingo.

In its feeble human way, Anna's brain sought to categorize the sight: lava, chiffon, whipped cream, frozen fire. Her puny metaphors exhausted themselves and, for a blissful while, she sat in mindless appreciation.

Pink faded to gray. Tea grew cold. Wind breathed up from some damp mountain lung and she stirred herself. Dusk was long. She had at least an hour of half-light left in which to find and annoy at least one of her fellow campers.

McCaskil had returned from a day hike. When Anna trickled into his campsite he was shrugging out of his pack. His thick wavy hair was tangled and particles of high-country flora were caught in the nest. He'd been hiking cross-country in boots so new they blistered his feet. Anna could tell by the ginger-wincing way he pulled the footwear off. A confidence man, a city slicker, a greenhorn pushing his urban body through the thickets in search of what? Spiritual renewal? By the sour look on his face, it didn't look as though he'd found it.

"Howdy, howdy," she said, just to be irritating.

"Oh. It's you," he said repressively.

Anna took this as an invitation and settled herself comfortably at the base of a struggling pine tree. Fog flooded the camp. The evening had gone from chilly to cold. Pulling the hood up on her fleece jacket, she watched McCaskil, in shirtsleeves and shivering, glare at her from under well-shaped eyebrows.

"You're cold," she said pointedly. "Why don't you put your coat on?"

"I like being cold. And I like being alone. Nothing personal." He smiled then as if belatedly remembering some age-old warning about women scorned. "Except when there's a good-looking woman around." The first statement had come from the heart. The second blew out like a smoke screen.

Whatever he hoped to hide with it remained hidden. Anna was no match for him. She'd had a number of years to learn the art of ferreting out information. McCaskil had probably had twice that to practice fraud, deception and misdirection.

Flirting was the tool he chose this evening. Every query of Anna's was met with compliments, her remarks turned aside with double entendres. Fifteen minutes into the fruitless exercise, she realized she'd been lucky the first time and caught him off guard. For whatever reasons, his guard was up now. She would get nothing useful from him till she had a bigger pry bar. It crossed her mind to try and crack open the playboy facade with her knowledge of his conviction for fraud but she didn't know to what end. And she strongly suspected he knew she knew, was ready for it.

Several times she managed to shove Carolyn Van Slyke into the conversation. With the passage of time McCaskil's association with the deceased became ever more fleeting. When she'd first talked with him three days before, he'd referred to her as "the blond" and used her first name. Now she had been relegated to "that woman the bear ate." Since Carolyn had been murdered by a human hand, Anna wondered at McCaskil's seeming conviction that she'd died of natural, if fearsome, causes. When questioned he waved it away. "Whatever," he said callously. "I guess I wasn't paying all that much attention."

Cutting off the chitchat, Anna excused herself. Having walked well out of earshot she radioed Ruick. He'd been off duty for several hours but he was the kind of guy she figured would leave his radio on twenty-four hours of the day. She was right.

"I've got a hunch," she told him. "Run the prints on the second topographical map found on Van Slyke's body. The one in the pocket of the army surplus jacket."

The chief ranger said he would and didn't ask why. Being cagey and mysterious was an occupational hazard in law enforcement. Either Harry accepted that or was convinced Anna's hunch was as uninteresting as it was unimportant.

Grateful not to have to expose her fledgling theory to the harsh reality of nouns and verbs, Anna didn't care which.

The fog was not, as Anna had feared, a precursor to another day's cold rain. By sunrise it had moved on, moved up or simply vanished. The day was exquisite as only a high mountain summer can be: cool and warm at the same time, with breeze on one cheek and unfettered sunshine on the other. There was nothing in the air but air. Not the cloying touch of the moisture of the south, not the putrid undercurrent of a city's stink, not the bracing tang of salt from the seashore. Air so clear Anna felt if she stopped breathing she could soak it in through the pores of her skin.

Joan was gone with Rory and Buck, trudging back down West Flattop Trail to set up camp once more in the small meadow with the great flat boulder. On the surface it seemed unwise. Bears, like lightning, frequently struck twice in the same place. Joan had chosen to camp there again for a couple of reasons. One, Anna was sure, was a bad case of selective memory brought on by a prejudice in favor of Ursus horribilis.She couldn't help but notice that in Joan's conversations the bear had no longer ravaged, savaged or destroyed their camp but merely upset it. The rest of the researcher's logic was sound. There was no better campsite near where they were to dismantle and move the hair trap they'd been aiming for when life intervened with other plans and, too, the bear had found nothing in the way of a food reward. In the bearish sciences this meant it probably would not return.

Not being burdened with a scientific mind, it occurred to Anna that the bear, this bear, their own personal bear, had not been looking for food reward. What else a wild animal, not yet tainted by contact with the human race, might be seeking she wasn't ready to say, but the story of "The Ghost and the Darkness" came to mind. A true story of two lions- solitary hunters, according to scientists, naturally chary of human settlements-who had teamed up apparently for the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of creating terror and taking human life.