Chimera

CHAPTER 33

Conference Room, Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab

At fifteen minutes after eight in the morning, Gedimin Bulatt and Achara Kulawnit entered the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Lab’s conference room where they found Renwick, Hager and Reston waiting.

“Have a productive evening?” Renwick asked as he glanced meaningfully at his watch.

“You might say that,” Bulatt said as he placed a satchel he’d been carrying on the table and then sat down at one of the empty chairs; Achara taking the adjacent chair. “Sorry we’re late. Achara and I had to stop by the Windmill Inn this morning to help some fellow agents deal with a few loose spiders.”

“Which you are going to keep, and not bring back here, like you promised?” Hager reminded.

Bulatt nodded. “That was the agreement; but it looks like I’m going have put them back in the bug room, temporarily, until the indictments get filed,” he added apologetically. “After that, we’re going to ship the little guys back to Mexico where they presumably came from. Achara and I will take care of the details.”

“Thank god,” Hager whispered.

“Indictments?” Reston said, her eyebrows rising curiously.

“There was a little altercation in the parking lot earlier this morning,” Bulatt explained. “A couple of our special ops agents managed to get themselves assaulted by some fellows who claimed to be federal law enforcement officers, but who couldn’t explain why they were in possession of illegal wildlife — our little red-legged friends — and some possibly-bogus federal government travel cards. Sounded like a pretty confusing deal; probably have to be worked out at the Washington Office level.”

“But it was very exciting to watch,” Achara added. “Lot’s of police cars and ambulances with flashing lights, tow trucks, the works; just like you see on American TV.”

“’Lots’ of police cars — meaning more than one — in Ashland, that early in the morning?” Hager looked skeptical.

“It helps to plan your altercations ahead of time,” Bulatt explained. “Gives the locals plenty of time to get their coffee, call in extra back-ups, and get a good front-seat view of the proceedings.”

“Ah.”

“And our Mr. Smith?” Renwick asked.

“According to the EMT’s, his prognosis looks fairly good. They said he’ll probably be back on his feet in a few days without any serious complications, if you don’t count the assault complaint our agents will be filing with the local U.S. Attorney,” Bulatt said matter-of-factly. “In any case, I don’t think he’ll be bothering us for a while. The guy who pulled a knife on Stoner is another issue entirely; he won’t be up and moving around quite so soon.”

“What about my children?” Reston asked, looking tired and even more grumpy than usual from working all night. “Please tell me they weren’t involved in this… planned altercation.”

“Your sons spent the entire night in their hotel room, presumably working their little typing and mouse fingers to the bone,” Bulatt said, raising his hand in a ‘Scout’s honor’ gesture. “They were sound asleep when their father picked them up a four-thirty this morning. He seemed like a nice fellow.”

“If you happen to like big, ornery and aggressive federal law enforcement types,” Reston said with a shrug. “George had to fill-in on a stake-out last night. You and Achara saved us the expense of an overnight baby-sitter.”

“You actually leave those boys alone, overnight, with a baby-sitter?” Achara said, blinking in surprise.

“Not very often; their grandmother charges too much,” Reston said, keeping her reddened eyes focused on Bulatt. “You didn’t tell them I had access to your laptop, did you?”

Bulatt shook his head. “I didn’t figure that was something they needed to know.”

“Well, they didn’t believe you; that much was obvious,” Reston said. “But I have a feeling they were too busy showing off for Achara to make a thorough check. They found three of the worm programs I inserted, but missed the other two — one of which they should have found. And they really should have opened up the case and spotted the back-up transmitter. I thought I’d taught them better than that.”

“We might have clogged up their brains a bit with all that pizza and the chocolate chip cookies,” Bulatt suggested.

“More likely their brains are just starting to migrate south, which may or may not be a good thing,” Reston said. “Which reminds me, did you bring that laptop in?”

“Yep, right here.” Bulatt reached into the satchel, pulled out his laptop computer, and handed it to Reston who turned it over, examined the serial numbers on the back; then held it out at arm’s length and allowed it to drop to the floor with a loud crash.

“Oops,” Hager said casually.

Bulatt blinked in surprise. “Aren’t you being a little rough on my equipment?”

“Look who’s talking,” Reston muttered as she reached down, picked up the laptop, opened it up, turned it on, watched the computer screen flicker to life, frowned, then held it up higher and let it drop to the floor a second time.

Unable to resist, Bulatt looked around the edge of the table and saw that the computer screen was cracked but still glowing brightly.

“Impressive,” he commented. “I didn’t realize they were making computers that tough these days.”

“Neither did I,” Reston said, frowning. “I’ll take a sledge hammer to it later, and then run the parts through a metal shredder.”

Bulatt’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion for a moment, but then it came to him.

“They went too far — with my laptop — didn’t they?” he said, smiling hopefully.

“Much too far,” Reston acknowledged.

“Meaning?”

“Credit card and cell phone records; definitely forbidden territory for those two. Not to mention hacking into a local mainframe when they decided your computer was too small and too slow; which is why I don’t want any evidence hanging around for an IG investigator to poke at. I’ve got a replacement laptop for you in my office.”

“Which — if I was fourteen, and knew what I was doing — I’d probably open up and check for worms, transmitters and baby spider eggs right off the bat, correct?”

“You’re starting to catch on,” Reston said approvingly.

“I’ll have Mike check it out, just to be on the safe side,” Bulatt promised.

“So how did they approach it?” Achara asked, unable to contain herself any longer.

“That’s the amazing thing,” Reston said, “every now and then these kids still manage to surprise me. Their general approaches to probes and database links are still pretty unsophisticated; but they have this odd ability to make huge logic leaps at the most illogical moments. It’s probably a generational thing; but I would have started with the registration number for Hateley’s Gulfstream, and worked outwards in linear searches from there.”

“They didn’t?”

“No, they went straight into a seven-dimensional array with jet-fuel accounts and Gulfstream maintenance firm records in the first two positions, cross-linked to credit cards, cell phone calls, hotel bookings, national newspaper articles and CITES permits, and then ran the entire matrix through a Boolean logic deep-search with Hateley as the common factor. In effect, they ran forty-two comprehensive searches simultaneously, all of which were cross-linked. They should have set up a logic tree right away, anchored their roots, and covered their tracks better, but they were probably in a hurry to show their stuff; and I had the transmitter set for one second bursts every half hour, to keep them from picking up on the RAM usage, so I was always playing catch-up. But I was still able to follow their trail, clean up the log files and — ”

Bulatt saw that Achara was listening intently.

“Did you actually understand any single part of what she just said?” Bulatt asked Achara, interrupting Reston’s summary.

“Sure.” Achara shrugged, nodding her head. Bulatt looked around and discovered that Renwick and Hager were also nodding their heads.

“Oh.”

Bulatt decided that his head was definitely starting to hurt. “Uh, could we skip the technical details and go straight to the ‘oh my god’ part, assuming there is one,” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Reston said, motioning to Hager who reached over and thumbed a remote device. A glowing Powerpoint™ slide suddenly appeared on the far white wall, showing the faces of four men, all of whom appeared to be in their mid-fifties.

“And just who would these fellows be?” Bulatt asked.

“Starting from upper left hand corner and working clockwise, Michael Hateley, Dr. Stuart Jackson Caldreaux, Max Kingman, and Sam Fogarty,” Reston said. “The internationally-traveling CEO hunters we’ve been looking for.”

Bulatt blinked. “You’re joking.”

“No, actually, I’m not,” Reston said seriously. “I hate to admit it, but the kids pulled it off. You are looking at four extremely wealthy CEOs of relatively small corporations that profit handsomely from operating as subsidiaries to the much bigger war industry conglomerates. Interestingly enough, they all own Gulfstream G-fives that have a habit of landing at the same airports on the same days with amazing regularity. They also purchase national and international hunting licenses and file for trophy-import permits on a regular basis.”

“I assume there’s more?” Bulatt asked.

“A great deal more,” Reston said as she reached into a cardboard box beside her chair and pulled out four stacks of paper that someone had marked HATELEY, CALDREAUX, KINGMAN and FOGARTY on the top pages with a thick black marker, and placed them down on the table. Each stack was held together with a steel spring clip at the upper left edge, and appeared to be at least a half-inch thick

“This is what we know about them so far, in undigested form. I have a link analysis running now, but I thought you’d like to see the raw data.”

“I’ll be damned.” Bulatt said, shaking his head in amazement as he picked up the set labeled HATELEY and began to flip through the pages. Achara, Renwick and Hager picked up the other three. “Did the kids happen to trip across any hunting violations while they were at it?”

“I’m still running branched searches for additional information, and I haven’t had time to read most of what’s in those reports; but I do know that all four of these characters have had run-ins with state wardens, as well as with our federal agents. Mostly misdemeanor stuff, and mostly when they were a lot younger,” Reston said, glancing down at her hand-written notes. “Caldreaux was charged with a couple of Lacey Act violations nine years ago that his lawyers managed to get dismissed; but, as far as we know right now, that was the only time any of them have been charged with a felony.”

“Learned their lessons early in life,” Bulatt commented. “What about club memberships or private hunting areas?”

“All four have been members of several local, national and international hunt clubs; but, interestingly enough, they all cancelled their club memberships a little over eight years ago.”

“Why would they do that? It doesn’t make sense,” Bulatt said. “The main reason guys like these hunt is to brag about their trophies. If they dropped their memberships, who would they brag to?”

“Each other,” Achara whispered.

“What?” Bulatt turned to stare curiously at his beautiful associate.

“They must have set up their own club, so they could brag and compete with each other,” she said, staring at the four photographs with an expression on her face that was part loathing and part amazement. “After all, who else can they trust not to give them up at the first sign of law enforcement pressure?”

“Their own club, to hunt things like Clouded Leopards in Thailand; which presumably means smuggling their trophies back home, so they can show off their illegal kills to each other,” Bulatt said, nodding his head thoughtfully. Then he turned to Reston.

“You said these guys get together regularly?”

“Yes, they do. In fact, the last time was just a few days ago: in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Hateley has his primary residence. The timing corresponds with what appears to be a once-a-year meeting at one of their three home towns. And since none of them purchased a meal with their credit cards that night, we can reasonably assume they got together for dinner; probably at Hateley’s home.”

“Find the rest of that Clouded Leopard at Hateley’s place, and Juliana will be able to match it to the tissue from the bullet,” Renwick reminded. “She’s working up the statistical data now.”

“Getting hold of that two-four-three Magnum rifle would be nice too, while you’re at it,” Hager added.

“Unfortunately, a seizure like that is going to require a search warrant, and getting together for dinner once a year is not a violation of federal law,” Bulatt reminded. “In point of fact — or at least as far as we know for sure — none of these men have ever committed a serious crime against wildlife, much less murder.”

“But, at the moment, they are the only link we have to the men who killed our Rangers and shot my father,” Achara said.

“Yes, that seems to be the case,” Bulatt agreed. He tossed the report set down on the table and turned to Reston. “Do you have anything else on these guys?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. It appears that all four of them are making arrangements to fly to the state of Washington the day after tomorrow.”

“How do we know that?” Bulatt asked, now staring intently at the four faces displayed on the white wall.

“It takes a lot of coordinated effort and behind-the-scenes work to keep four Gulfstream G-Fives in the air,” Reston explained. “The pilots of these planes like to schedule maintenance checks when they know they’re going to be laying over for a couple of days at a major airport; especially if they’ve been flying in bad weather conditions. Turns out the pilots of all four of these planes scheduled routine maintenance checks at SEA-TAC two days from now.”

“Does that mean SEA-TAC is the probable get-together point?” Bulatt asked.

“Not necessarily, but I’m guessing the get-together point is probably within an hour’s flight radius of SEA-TAC. The pilots could drop their passengers off at a local airport, lay over at SEA-TAC, and be available for a pick-up a couple of days later. That would fit within their previous maintenance check patterns.”

“And now they are planning to fly to the same location again, in Washington State, only a few days later? Have they ever gotten together like that before, apart from their annual meetings?” Achara asked Reston

“Not according to the records we have now, but they could have used different planes.”

“So they must be going to Washington to hunt,” Achara said. “What else would bring these three together?”

“And if they’re all getting together to hunt for the first time,” Bulatt said thoughtfully, “my guess is they’re going to want to have their guides and helpers along. These characters don’t strike me as the types who like to do all the heavy lifting themselves.”

“So we have to be there, when the hunt takes place,” Achara said firmly. “Somehow, we have to be there.”

“Yes, we do,” Bulatt agreed. “The question is how we manage to pull that off. We’d need a federal warrant to satellite-track those planes; and, so far, just about everything we’ve got on these characters is either inadmissible in court or based on supposition. And I doubt that we’re going to be able to talk one of them into taking us along on their hunt.”

At that moment, Bulatt’s Blackberry began to vibrate on his hip.

“Excuse me for a moment,” he said after checking the Blackberry’s screen, “I’ll be right back.”

When Bulatt returned to the conference room, he found Achara looking over Hager’s shoulder while the latent print expert marked up one of the last pages of the report marked FOGARTY with a yellow highlighter; Reston typing away on a computer with Ferreira hovering over her shoulder in one side of the room; and Renwick talking on his cell phone over at the opposite side.

“You folks come up with something interesting?” Bulatt asked as he closed the door and sat down at the table.

“Could be,” Hager mumbled, still highlighting sections of the page with short sweeps of the pen. “Might have stumbled across one of those ‘good-news bad-news’ deals that could actually work in our favor.”

“Oh, how’s that?”

“You remember saying, just before you left, that we probably weren’t going to be able to talk one of these characters into taking us along on their hunt?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, it turns out that Sam Fogarty lives in Oregon with a twenty-four-year-old adopted daughter who apparently likes to bow-hunt deer in Idaho.”

“Okay, I’ll bite, why is she relevant to our problems?”

“It seems dear daughter likes to hunt with a bow; but doesn’t necessarily like to waste a lot of time trying to get close enough to her targets to make a fatal shot, or to pack her kills a couple of miles back to her truck. I’m guessing she probably takes after dear old dad in that category.”

“So you’re going to tell me she shoots the deer with a bullet first, from a more reasonable distance, and then stuffs an arrow down the bullet hole?” Bulatt guessed.

“Three bow seasons in a row,” Hager said. “Got caught at the check-points the first two years, pled guilty both times after the x-rays revealed the bullets up ahead of the broad heads, and daddy paid her fines. This year, when one of the wardens heard a gunshot in the range area reserved for bow hunts, went investigating on his ATV, and found her loading a buck with an arrow sticking out of its neck in the back of a old pickup, she must have decided she didn’t want to go through the hassle of getting daddy to pay up again, so she took off… and made it across the border before the warden could get the state patrols to set up a road block. The warden told the story to a local reporter who wrote a standard ‘rich girl cheats on bow-hunt and then runs from the law’ story; which is what I’m marking up right now.”

“Did Idaho Fish and Game follow up with a warrant?” Bulatt asked.

“No, unfortunately, they didn’t,” Renwick said as he hung up the phone. “Mostly because the warden recognized her, but didn’t get the license plate of the truck — which he assumes was borrowed from one of her friends, because she apparently gets a new truck from daddy every year. The warden and his supervisor talked it over, came to the conclusion that the fine wouldn’t be worth the cost to the State to take on dad’s legal firm and a likely mistaken-identity defense, and then decided to just wait and catch her dirty next bow season. But the warden did submit blood from the scene to our lab,” Renwick added with a smile, “and he said he’ll be happy to file for the warrant, right now, if we’re interested in following up on the Lacey Act violation.”

“We ran a quick mass-spec on the hemoglobin, confirmed the blood was mule deer; then extracted the DNA, and put a sample in the ultra-freezer pending any further work requests,” Ferreira said, looking up from the computer.

“Meaning you could match that DNA to a mounted mule deer head if I brought it in?”

“Sure. Or a little piece of dried hide would work just as well; whatever’s easier at your end. It makes no difference to us.”

“And where does Sam Fogarty and his daughter live?” Bulatt asked.

“In Bend, Oregon,” Reston said.

Bulatt looked over at Achara. “I think it’s time I paid Miss Fogarty a visit,” he said. “Want to go for a ride?”

“Absolutely.” Achara started to say something else, and then hesitated.

“Yes?” Bulatt said inquiringly.

“You’re planning on confronting her with the Lacey Act violation, and then using that as a twist on her father to make him take us to the hunt, right?”

“Something along those lines,” Bulatt said, nodding his head. “You have a better idea?”

“I was just thinking that if we were to call her up and identify ourselves as outdoor writers who want to do a story on her bow hunting adventures, she might be more helpful and cooperative than her father.”

“What, no violence? Just walk in and con her out of the information? There’s a novel approach,” Reston said sarcastically.

“Federal agents working covert assignments have certain limitations on posing as a member of the media,” Bulatt said hesitantly. “I’d have to ask for permission from the Washington Office, and I doubt that Fred or the Chief would say yes. It’s a touchy issue.”

“You’d have to ask permission, but I wouldn’t,” Achara said. “It just so happens that I’m an internationally published outdoor writer with two articles in print. I wouldn’t be role-playing, just engaging in one of my hobbies. And you could come along as a hired local photographer.”

“We’d even lend you a professional-looking camera, as long as you promise not to hit anyone with it,” Renwick offered.

“Sounds good to me,” Bulatt said with a shrug. “Do we have a phone number for the house?”

“That we do,” Reston replied cheerfully. “Here’s her address and phone numbers — residence and cell — and a map showing the way to her house.” She handed Bulatt a brightly colored map from her printer, and a second typed page. “Take I-Five to the Crater Lake Highway, and keep on heading north. You ought to be able to make it in three and a half hours, max, if the roads are still clear.”

“Or we could probably get Woeshack to fly us up there,” Achara suggested. “It might save some time.”

“Let’s not,” Bulatt said, “I try not to live quite that close to the edge.”