Karl Johnson, the man who tended Guadalupe's stock, had been with the Park Service for fifteen years yet he'd never been promoted higher than GS-5, the grade of a beginning seasonal. His love of these mountains had cost him a lot. Sometimes Anna wondered if it wasn't worth it. Personally, the dashing from place to place made for unsettled lives; professionally, for duplicated paperwork and unfinished projects.

And the death of Sheila Drury, was it finished? Anna had been amazed at how little time the official investigation had taken. Benjamin Jakey, a sheriff out of El Paso and one of his deputies-a Pillsbury Doughboy look-alike who'd never stopped puffing from the hike in-had done some perfunctory poking around. "Yep. Lion got her. Surprised it don't happen more often," Sheriff Jakey said and the deputy puffed portentously. Jakey had looked through the grass, gone over the sketches Anna had made of the scene. The deputy shot a couple rolls of film and told Anna they wouldn't need hers.

That had been about it. The Feds would have it now-the park was federal land. But they would rubber-stamp it, Anna assumed.

Everyone would be surprised, here in the "wilderness," that lion kills didn't happen more often. "More often," Anna said aloud. More often than what. More often than never? Than once a decade? What? She must remember to find out come morning. And come morning, she had to write a witness statement for the county coroner, Nina Dietz.

It was she they had delivered the body to. Looking more like Aunt Bea than the keeper of the dead, she'd been waiting with the ambulance in the McKittrick Visitors Center parking lot. She'd ridden with Paul as he'd driven the body away.

No more Sheila Drury.

And, one day, no more Anna Pigeon. It was a sobering thought. Anna took a deep drink of her wine.

The front door opened, then clicked softly shut again. Piedmont slunk away to hide under the kitchen table. Anna heard a tape drop into the boom-box: Guy Clark's "Rita Ballou."