Wild Instinct

1

This cat is a big male.

Mountain lion, Puma concolor.

He’s old and weather-bleached, with a scarred face and a chewed ear, and shoulder muscles shifting like saddlebags under a thick beige pelt. Tan eyes. He pads along with slouching confidence. Swaying, like he’s had a couple.

This security video is surreal, and by now, almost a week old: The cat saunters northbound on the Coast Highway sidewalk in Laguna Beach, window-shopping, maybe, or checking his look in the storefront glass. He considers Diane’s Leather Boutique, the Hair Affair, Pacific Vibrations Surf Shop, from which a guy in a black hoodie and red Jams steps out, sees the mountain lion not six feet away, scrambles back inside, and slams the door behind him.

The cat moves up Coast Highway and off camera.

Here in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department headquarters, Detective Lew Gale studies the video. He’s a brawny man, half Acjacheme Indian, with a face like carved mahogany and unexpected gray eyes.

He looks away from the video and considers his boss, Undersheriff Elke Meyer.

Her radio is tuned to the helicopter deputies now trying to find a cat that has killed and partially eaten a man in Caspers Wilderness Park, near Laguna. This, just hours ago.

Gale, an experienced hunter, knows if they haven’t found the mountain lion by now, they probably won’t.

“I saw this video online in the Laguna News last week,” he says to Meyer. “He’s old.”

“Too old to be our man-eater?” she asks. “Don’t the old ones do that kind of thing?”

“No,” says Gale. “The lion that killed the biker in Caspers Park twenty-one years ago was a young cat.”

“Well, as of two hours ago, we’ve got another man-killer in Caspers Park,” says Meyer. “What is it with that place? A public park in Orange County, California? Two killings, and that terrible mauling of the little girl? Wilderness, no kidding.”

Caspers Park and its nearby Santa Ana Mountains are where Gale as a boy used to hunt and hike with his father and sister. He was born in San Juan Capistrano, a mission town not far from the wilderness, and grew up there.

“It’s good lion country,” says Gale. “Hills with big boulders and thick underbrush. Lots of deer. It’s a lot like the New Mexico country where I tracked man-killers.”

“Why can’t our helicopter guys find him? They’ve got good scopes.”

“Elke, the choppers just scare the cat. He’ll hunker until dark, then go about his business.”

The radio voices are loud, and crackling with static.

“Pete, we’re circling the campground again. In case he’s sticking near his kill. What’s your ten-twenty? Over.”

“Southeastern tip of Caspers, Connor, near the private property line and Roberts Road. The cover is thick down there. Unless he comes out and stands on a rock to see what our commotion is about, we won’t find him. Over.”

“Elke, where’s Gale? Over.”

“He’s on his way with Mike Carpenter and a dog. Over.”

“Rough country for man and dog. Over and out.”

Meyer goes to the radio and turns the volume down. Sits, gives Gale a worried look.

“This Laguna vid was shot six days ago,” says Meyer. “Twelve and a half miles away from where the hikers found the body this morning. So, if this is our bad boy, he had time enough to get from Caspers Park to Laguna Beach, and back to the park again.”

“Easy,” says Gale. “They range for miles and they move all night.”

Gale, in his days as an Orange County helicopter deputy, has flown over the rough country surrounding Caspers Park scores of times.

Now he looks out the third-floor window on this October Friday morning and sees not the drab concrete complex of the Sheriff’s Department headquarters in Santa Ana. Closing his eyes, he imagines the route that a mountain lion might take from Caspers Park to Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, and back again. He pictures the eastern expanse of chaparral that funnels down to a sycamore-studded gap leading directly into the Laguna backcountry hills, and eventually to Aliso Creek Beach, which abuts Coast Highway south of the city. A stealthy lion could follow the dense greenbelt north toward town and suddenly find itself on the Coast Highway sidewalk, watching those big, shiny things roaring by.

There’s also the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, where Lew Gale hiked and camped as a boy as well, twenty thousand acres of uninhabited hills and canyons that could offer an ambitious — and very lucky — cat access to Coast Highway.

“A lion can cover ten, twelve miles a day,” says Gale. “The old ones, not so much.”

“The Laguna one sure did. I’ll bet this is him.”

“We don’t want to kill the wrong cat, Elke.”

“Then find the right one, Lew. If it’s not this Laguna cat, it’s going to be obvious. From the video. I know you have the skill set for this kind of work.”

Meaning his tracking years in New Mexico and his sniper months in Afghanistan. Both of which led him to a spot on the Orange County Sheriff’s SWAT team’s Predator Tracking Unit.

It’s a part-time gig that occasionally gets him outdoors and into some interesting action, such as this. The predator tracking unit nets him a monthly “special assignment enhancement” of $175.57, in addition to his sergeant-detective salary.

“Public Affairs will post about PTU tracking this man-killer,” says Meyer. “I told Daniela Mendez that she’ll have to wait to make her homicide debut with you. Your new partner. I think she’ll be a good one.”

“I think so, too.”

“How long do you think it will take to find this homicidal lion?”

“Two, three days.”

“Well, October is a good month for sleeping under the stars. Be careful.”

Gale turns off the radio and Meyer gives him an it’s-about-time look. “The buzz is the lion victim is Bennet Tarlow,” he says.

“The buzz is true, Lew. The third, that is. Bennet Evans Tarlow the Third.”

“Oh, boy.”

Great-great-grandson of the Tarlow Company founder Willard Evans Tarlow, Gale knows. Who built the family fortune on a vast Spanish land grant dating back to the eighteenth century. Two hundred thousand acres of SoCal mountains, meadows, and a generous slice of the coast. The Tarlow Company has developed residential, resort, and commercial properties in ten states and Puerto Rico, and, until just a few hours ago, Tarlow III was the handsome face of the organization. He was a fixture in the Los Angeles Times, The Orange County Register, Laguna Weekly, and on the PBS show Inside OC. A political donor, a titan of charity, and a bastion of the Orange County Diocese of the Catholic Church. Never married. Rarely photographed or filmed without a beautiful woman nearby.

During his lean patrol years, Gale did off-duty security work for Tarlow and liked the man.

Bennet Tarlow. Killed and eaten by a mountain lion, on land his family donated to the county for a park, Lew Gale thinks.

What a goddamned way to go.

Adding Bennet Tarlow’s death to his long list of things that make no earthly sense.

Let that one cook, Gale thinks.

But it’s going to blow up.

“Want to see him?” asks Elke Meyer.

The coroner’s assistant, a young Asian woman, wheels Bennet Tarlow III from the cooler vault, pulls off a white sheet specked with blood, and sets it on a stainless-steel table.

“This is a very brutal one,” she says.

The room is cold and smells of alcohol, but now, in the slipstream of the removed sheet, Gale smells the meaty human insides of mankind.

Tarlow’s tattered body and clothes are stuck tight with oak leaves, mountain lions often hiding their kills.

His face is half-gone and his scalp and forehead are badly lacerated, but his teeth and skull are intact.

So Lew Gale recognizes approximately half of him.

Tarlow’s shirt and blue jeans are torn away. His ribs are extant but his chest and stomach gape, raggedly asunder. No heart or lungs, Gale sees, no liver or kidneys. No innards. All of them presumably eaten or left on the ground. Blood and tan oak leaves are stuck to his pants and boots.

A reeking mess.

In all his years in law enforcement, and his months of combat in Afghanistan, Gale has never seen a human killed as food.

He remembers having coffee with Tarlow and a lady friend, bodyguarding him at a prizefight in Las Vegas. Another Fury-Wilder rematch. The woman was a redheaded beauty — Laguna Beach by way of Fort Worth, he remembers — suddenly ashamed of himself for picturing her in front of her companion, the painfully butchered and half-devoured Bennet Tarlow.

The woman had a funny name. Norris something.

“When is the autopsy?” he asks.

“Later today,” says the assistant. “The sheriff knows the media will blow up when we identify him.”

“It’s blowing up already,” says Undersheriff Meyer. “People don’t like the idea of being killed and eaten in a county park.”