Blind Descent-pigeion 6 by Nevada Barr

good looks and instant attentiveness, she could guess part of his wife's problem. The man was a natural flirt. Or a habitual one. She doubted he meant anything by it; the response had just become ingrained into his patterns. Squatting on Frieda's other side, she trained her headlamp not on the doctor's face but on his hands.
      "Frieda," he said, "Anna and I are going to fit you up with a catheter so you don't have to go traipsing off to the loo. It will be a wee bit uncomfortable for just a minute." His voice was reassuringly conversational. Anna would have liked to have absolute faith in the man, but it was a luxury Frieda couldn't afford.
      Together they cut away the injured woman's trousers. They were lined with soiled toilet tissue, a homemade diaper the doctor had taken care to provide till his equipment arrived. At each step in the procedure, Peter explained what he was doing, dividing his remarks between Anna and the unconscious Frieda. His hands were ungraceful-looking, the nails chewed down to the quick, but his movements were sure and gentle.
      When the catheter was in place, McCarty pulled an oversized handkerchief from his hip pocket and shook out the square of cotton. A baseball was printed in the middle, the words "I do believe in the Twins, I do!" stenciled in a semicircle around it. "Not exactly sterile," he said, "but clean and unbesnotted." Draping it carefully over Frieda's lap, he secured it with safety pins to preserve her dignity.
      Their patient was settled, as comfortable as they could make her. McCarty began gathering up his supplies, and Anna asked him how the accident had happened. Her light was on his face now to see if muscles might betray something voice had been schooled not to. Watching for lies was a professional habit and, though Anna was a fairly decent practitioner of the art, she had learned not to count on it overmuch. Some liars were just too good, some honest people just naturally twitchy. Still, it was a place to begin.
      McCarty glanced over his shoulder. The move was not precisely furtive; maybe he was only judging the time left till they moved Frieda out. Anna had noted that quick, unfocused glance before. It was the one crack in his armor of charm. Though seemingly attentive, one sensed he checked to see if anyone more interesting was in the room before committing his time.
      Either Anna won, or she'd imagined the game; McCarty turned back to her.
      "Nobody knows for sure," he said. "Possibly not even Frieda. The brain has a way of protecting us from memories that are too painful to be relived."
      "Did anyone see it happen?"
      "Nope. We'd split up to explore possible leads out of Tinker's. Most of us were fairly close to camp. Brent thought he had a going lead in the upper quadrant. There." McCarty picked up his hard hat, switched on the lamp and used it to point out a crack seventy or eighty feet up the back wall. "He and Curt climbed to that ledge. Brent went inside. Curt waited on the ledge, sketching. Sondra was photographing a broken formation. Zeddie and I had been pushing a lead behind that mountain of breakdown." Again he used the light to point. The vastness of the chamber swallowed the beam before it reached its objective.
      "So you were with Zeddie. Who found Frieda?"
      "No. It got kind of squirrelly. Our lead petered out. Zeddie was headed back to camp and I was going to collect Sondra when I heard a yell-high, like a bird or a stepped-on cat. There was no way to tell where it came from, but it sounded enough like a cry for help that I think everybody pretty much started trying to get to wherever they thought it was. We ran around like the proverbial headless chickens. Then we all started shouting at each other, so if Frieda called a second time there was no way to sort it out from the general hubbub.
      "Zeddie was the one who found her. She'd known where Frieda was going. Neither of them thought the lead had much promise, it wasn't blowing to