Wild Instinct

19

Fresh off Winderling, Gale drives his Explorer through the Caspers Wilderness Park entrance off Ortega Highway, just a few miles from San Juan Capistrano.

Parks again in an open Cottonwood Creek Campground space, gets his binoculars and puts on his straw Stetson against the bright October sun, locks up. Notes the campground restrooms, in which Vito Pesco had probably heard Bennet Tarlow and possibly Vernon Jeffs making their way from Tarlow’s Last Supper to his final rendezvous with a very large owl feeding her young on a dark night.

He skirts the homeless encampment almost hidden in the dense cottonwoods, sees the glimmer of shopping carts and the blue of tarps within trees.

Gale climbs a hill that gives him a view east, raises his binoculars to where an OC Sheriff’s Department Expedition raises a cloud of dust as it lumbers toward the massacre site of the three Laotian cannabis slaves. Still working the crime scene, Gale thinks.

He wonders again at the recent violence here, lobbed into this beautiful wilderness from the surrounding 3.17-million-people-strong Orange County. Land of the Acjacheme and the Juaneños and the Luiseños, he thinks. Land of deer and mountain lions. Later, land of the Spanish and the Mexicans. Much of it owned since the Civil War by the Tarlow Company. Land to someday become a utopian city, born in the eyes of Bennet Tarlow III. Land, too, of dope grows and murders. His friend Detective Peters is heading up that case, and Gale is not envious.

He comes to the kill site in the wash of the seasonal creek. Sees the hole the CSIs have left after digging soil samples heavy with Tarlow blood. Feels the hush he always feels, looking at a place fresh with the dead.

In his detective years, Gale has revisited crime scenes many times, sometimes more than once, hoping to shine new light on what had happened there, and why, and how. The light is, of course, his own. It’s not always present. But once in a while he sees what he hasn’t seen before, recognizes a bit of truth he’s overlooked, makes a connection.

Kneeling now, he rakes his fingers through the loose soil of the hole and rubs the dirt between a thumb and a forefinger and lets his thoughts wander.

If Jeffs is a hired gun, who did the hiring?

A man or a woman with something valuable to lose, if Wildcoast gets built? A competitor. Another builder. Someone who is part of Tarlow’s rarified world of the very rich, or at least adjacent to it, or maybe willing to kill to become a part of it.

Norris Kennedy thinks so.

Norris, a gently jilted lover, too. Strong and loyal and beautiful. What if she’s wrong about motive? The fury of a woman scorned?

If Jeffs killed Tarlow on his own, why?

Revenge? Jealousy? Himself a jilted lover of Tarlow? Seems unlikely.

What was Jeffs to Tarlow?

Something more than a guy who could lead him to a large owl not usually found within hundreds of miles from here, so the eccentric developer and utopian dreamer could photograph it?

Gale knows his search warrant request may well be turned down by Honorable Carl Schmidt.

The chance that a judge, even a law-and-order judge like Carl, would issue a warrant based on a statement from a woman who claims to have seen Jeffs — whom she does not know and has only seen a few times in her life — in Tarlow’s Newport home the evening of the murder?

Slim, thinks Gale.

Unreasonable search and seizure.

Probable cause.

So Gale ponders his alternatives:

Knock on Jeffs’s door and ask to come in and talk? Hope to see the .22 in plain sight?

Jeffs would punch me in the face before he’d do that, Gale thinks.

Gale stands, rubs the tacky soil off his thumb and forefinger, and heads back to his vehicle.

He drives the dirt road, leaving Caspers Park, heading east toward the Santa Ana Mountains. A rider on an e-bike behind him glides past. Gale thinks of the previous Orange County mountain lion killing here — twenty-one years ago — a fit bicyclist just like that guy, fixing a blown tire, kneeling, making him appear small to the lion who killed him and dragged him into the trees.

Gale shifts into four-wheel drive to climb a narrow, rocky two-track certainly used by deer and rabbits and mountain lions, motoring through country he’d biked and hiked and hunted as a boy.

At the top of a rise, standing on a big boulder and panting, Gale lifts his binoculars to the Wildcoast building site below. It’s five square miles of hills and meadows. Wooden grade and survey stakes mark roads and buildings-to-be. Hot pink flags wave from elevation stakes.

He’s surprised by the size of it. Half the size of the city of Laguna Beach, he thinks, according to the miniaturized Wildcoast model in Tarlow’s home office.

Two white pickup trucks with Empire Excavators emblems on their doors are pulled off a wide dirt road that looks recently graded. Neat berms of earth packed down on either side to form gutters. Two men with jackhammers toil away in deep holes, the domes of their yellow hard hats just visible from here, the clatter of their hammer blades windblown and distant. Between them and the trucks, a man and a woman who look dressed for a safari watch them.

Gale arrives after a bumpy downslope ride, steps out.

The woman strides purposefully toward him, aviators on, her hands raised in a stop-right-there command; the man stays where he is.

Gale runs her stop sign, raises his badge, and introduces himself.

“Thank god, I thought you were another damned reporter,” she says. She’s tall and looks strong. “Kate Hicks, Empire Excavators.”

“Detective Lew Gale, Orange County Sheriff’s.”

She gives him a long look. “So, how can I help?”

“I’m investigating the murder.”

“He was killed way back there near the Cottonwood Creek Campground. You’ve overshot it by three miles.”

“I came here to see how Wildcoast is coming along.”

“Well, here she is,” says Hicks. “Only about two hundred permits and fifty public hearings away from a county green light. I don’t think they’ll ever get it passed.”

She smiles and nods. “Okay, you do look familiar. You’re the sniper from Afghanistan. Took out the wrong guy and got blown up for your trouble. I read that article in the Times. Great piece. I was in Helmand, one tour.”

“I’m glad you made it home.”

“Came this close to tripping an IED.” Hicks shows him her thumb and finger, almost touching. “Hid in a pile of trash along the road.”

Gale sees Private Guy Flatly, blown up on a morning patrol not twenty feet ahead of him. The whop, the chunks of flesh and bone blown into the air, the mist of the blood on Gale’s sunglasses, the sudden fire in his own legs and groin. A flash. A moment that became eternal, that reshaped him, that warped his body and his mind and his marriage, and drew him to the bourbon and the painkillers and the antidepressants. Now, with the years, this eternal moment overwhelms him less frequently and with less clarity, and the pills are gone, and the bourbon is almost controlled, but a comment like Hicks’s can be enough to bring the moment back to him.

He feels the pain again. Flatley’s and his own. Then they are gone.

He looks over at the jackhammer men. “Why dig there?”

“Perc test. We’re trying to see if septic is right for Wildcoast, or if we’ll have to go full sewer. Big cost difference.”

“Can I have a look?”

“Suit yourself, sir. Don’t fall in. McNab’s in charge and you’ll have to leave if he says.”

Gale walks toward the clattering electric jackhammers, trading nods with McNab, remembering that Velasquez mentioned him that night at the Grove. As he nears the pit he sees the shovel stuck upright in the ground, the sharp white bedrock fragments and freshly loosened soil thrown from the hole.

He stands over the first test pit, sees the Day-Glo-green-vested man in his yellow hard hat, his shoulders and arms throbbing as the rocks crack and the dirt flies. The pit is almost six feet deep. As if sensing Gale, the digger glances up at him, then turns back to his work and presses on.

The second pit is deeper. Gale stands back in the rubble of broken bedrock and loose soil. A red-handled shovel stands upright, its shadow on the ground reminding him of his three o’clock appointment with Supervisor Kevin Elder.

Then the clatter of the jackhammer stops, and the man looks up at Gale.

“Shovel.”

Gale hands it down. “Hard work. What are you looking for?”

“Gold.”

Gale smiles, remembering the legend of Spanish gold buried near the mission where he was baptized. His great-grandmother and — father were fountains of legend: Dana Point waves so big they blotted out the sun; a monstrous winged rattlesnake that could fly down from the clouds and carry you away; the white grizzly bear and her den of white cubs; the ancient lake that gave birth to the Acjacheme people and still lies just below the earth, where the souls of the Acjacheme rest.

The man, short and stocky, hurls a shovelful of broken rock and dirt over his shoulder.

Gale ducks it and moves to a safer place near the pit.

“Looks too hard to percolate,” he says.

“No perc here.”

The red shovel flashes and another load of rock and dirt clears the hole.

“So you’ll have to go with a sewer system, right?”

The man stops, drives his shovel into the hard earth, and looks up at Gale.

“Sewer. Sí.”

He picks up a shard of bedrock the size of a cantaloupe in his gloved hands and shot-puts it out.

Then another. The next one looks about the size of a truck battery and just as heavy. But the digger gets it up and out on his first try. Three more and his dirt-covered face is running with dark sweat.

He unties a red bandana from around his neck and wipes his brow. Hands the shovel up to Gale.

“Look for crystals.”

“For what?”

“Big crystals. Mucho dinero.”

Gale remembers a dramatic crystal-and-lapis pendant favored by Marilyn. “For jewelry and chandeliers?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is your company a good place to work?”

The worker shrugs, then stoops, choses another big piece of bedrock and heaves it out of his hole.

“Mucho trabajo, pero no mucho dinero.”

“I’m a policeman investigating the murder of Bennet Tarlow.”

Another shrug, then a grunt, and another boulder launched from the pit.

“I don’t know.”

He slaps his gloved hands together and takes up the jackhammer.

“Vaya con Dios,” says Gale.

Checks his watch and hustles back to his plain-wrap.