Wild Instinct

32

The young woman behind the counter eyes the detectives skeptically. Brunette, a black suit. Her countertop nameplate says BELLA.

“Help you?”

Gale introduces himself and Mendez, who holds up her badge.

Bella squints at it. “Orange County.”

“We’re here to see Kyle McNab,” says Gale.

“We don’t actually open for another hour. Mr. McNab came in early but is in a conference right now. Have a seat if you’d like. Coffee there, at the end of the counter. Is this about Bennet Tarlow?”

“Very much so,” says Gale. “Did you know him?”

“Not really, but he was here a few times. His father and mother have been here, too. And Hal Teller, the projects director.”

Behind the counter is a glass wall etched with the PacWest logo — snowcapped mountains and a broad lake — through which Gale sees Vernon, Mindy, and a husky man seated around a table in a spacious, low-walled cubicle.

Jeffs laughs, a muted bray from beyond the glass. Then stands and brandishes his cane in one hand, like a very long-barreled pistol.

Mindy stands and raises an AR-15 to her shoulder and swings it like she’s tracking a bird.

Gale studies the husky man, still seated. He’s got a red leather moto jacket and a black T-shirt. He’s smiling and handling a matte stainless-steel semiautomatic pistol. Gale recognizes Kyle McNab from the PacWest website. A black aluminum briefcase lies on the table. Gale sees the rifle and handgun cases resting on the carpet next to Mindy’s harness boots.

Gale and Mendez pour coffee and sit in the lobby. The walls are cedar plank, hung with vintage skis, snowshoes, and ski posters. Gale knows from the PacWest Mining website that owner Kyle McNab is a Colorado native and an avid big-game hunter. Has a Boone and Crockett elk. His warrants check — which Gale ran the same day that McNab’s name came up twice on Bennet Tarlow’s home-office calendar — had come up clean. No criminal record.

Gale had found it interesting that Kyle McNab is a skilled hunter. Big game no less and obviously handy with a gun.

Now, based on Tarlow’s and Jeffs’s shared relationships with McNab, Gale adds McNab’s hunting and gun skills to the strange brew of coincidences, connections, conspiracies, deceptions, and seductions that underlie the life and death of Bennet Tarlow.

Through the glass, Gale sees Mindy putting the AR back into its case.

The men shake hands, and Mindy hugs McNab.

Bella strides across the lobby, fashion boots on hardwood, followed by Jeffs, who stops when he sees the detectives, sets his cane.

“Not you losers,” he says. “What did I do now?”

“We don’t care what you did, Vern,” says Gale. “You’re a free man. We came here to see Mr. McNab.”

“I didn’t see you behind me in all that fog.”

Mindy rounds big Vern, carrying the black briefcase, long-legged and skinny as an egret in the harness boots, followed by McNab.

“Damn you cops,” she says. “Vern, we have a police harassment lawsuit on our plate now.”

McNab looks wider and older than in his pictures, and unimpressed.

“What do you want?” he asks Gale.

“We want to talk about Bennet Tarlow. But since we saw you back there buying and selling guns, maybe you should start with that.”

“I’m a federally licensed dealer,” says Mindy. “I do the background checks, make ’em wait the ten days, deliver the goods, and collect the money. ATF loves me. Legal and fun!”

Which explains why none of Vernon Jeffs’s guns made the ATF radar, thinks Gale. They’re hers.

“Perfectly legal,” says McNab. “Unless the guns are stolen, the numbers filed or modified. Mindy can show you the ATF forms if you want. I just bought a used AR-15 and four handguns, great condition. I hunt. I collect. This is not a straw purchase that’s going to end up in Mexico. Occasionally I sell, which is not a crime. I use the same ATF forms every gun store does.”

“But no twenty-two-caliber semiautos,” says Mindy. “Just in case you’re curious.”

“Open the briefcase,” says Gale.

“You’ll need a warrant,” says Mindy.

“Open the damned case, honey,” says Jeffs. “We got nothing to hide.”

She lifts the case to a lobby coffee table, clicks open the spring-driven latches, and raises the lid.

Gale sees the bundles of cash.

Mindy closes the case and heads for the door.

“All ours and all legal,” says Jeffs, pointing his cane at Gale. “See you around, shit birds.”

Mindy turns and flips off the detectives.

“It’s all in my book,” she says, headed for the exit.

“I’ve only got a few minutes,” says McNab. “I’m sorry what happened to Bennet Tarlow. But I’m still mad at him for taking us off the project. Come on back. I’ll explain.”

McNab leads Gale and Mendez past the warren of low-walled cubicles where the gun buy had taken place. The overhead lighting is fluorescent and nervy.

Through a window Gale watches the white Econoline lumber out of the lot.

And sees the first employees climbing out of a luxury tour bus with the PacWest Mining logo across the side.

Kyle McNab’s office is upstairs, with expansive views over the city of Lake Elsinore.

Kyle hangs his moto jacket on a hatstand and sits behind a large desk made of a single marble slab. Gale notes the white and silver marbling in the black rock, as the morning sun hits it through a window.

“Why are you here? For Jeffs or for me?”

“Jeffs is a suspect,” says Mendez. “Our DA declined to charge him, so he walked. I’m sure he filled you in on all that.”

“He sure did.”

“He spun us a murder-for-hire story about some guys he never really saw,” says Gale. “Steve and Curtis, propositioning him in a white Lincoln Navigator with a blackout screen between them.”

“Sounds weak,” says McNab.

“Vern put some good spin on it though,” says Gale.

“He’s good at that. I’ve only known him a few weeks.”

“How did you meet?”

“At Muldoon’s in Newport. Tarlow introduced us. We hit it off — Vern and me — gun people, you know?”

An odd trio in a swank Newport Beach restaurant, Gale thinks.

“What did Tarlow introduce Vern Jeffs as?” asks Mendez.

“Well, a bartender, I guess,” says McNab. “We drank a bit. Stayed late. Vern and I have both fished and hunted Saint Bernard Parish in Louisiana. Vern had some funny stories about growing dope up in the mountains in Humboldt. Bennet — he’s a bird photographer, you know — somehow got Vern going on this big owl Vern said he’d seen up in Humboldt, biggest owl on the whole continent, the great gray owl, I think it’s called. Vern said the biggest one he’d ever seen was just a week ago, out at the Wildcoast site. Bennet didn’t believe him. Said Wildcoast is four hundred miles out of its range. Said it was a great horned owl. Vern bet Tarlow a thousand dollars it was a great gray, out of its range or not. More drinks. More Vern Jeffs tales.”

Gale thinks of the blood-encrusted Canon EOS mirrorless camera near Tarlow’s kill site. A birder’s camera to be sure.

Connecting it with Jeffs puts it in a much different light. His heart thumps and he gets that adrenaline-clear vision he got in Sangin when he had a kill in his scope.

“When was this?” asks Gale. “Be exact, if you can. It’s important.”

“Late September.”

McNab looks at his watch, which Gale sees is a big Rolex with lots of gold.

“Did you know him well, Bennet?” asks Mendez.

Kyle McNab shakes his head resignedly. “Not well. But it’s terrible. Tarlow was a good guy. A little eccentric, but whip-smart and bighearted. In a nutshell, the Tarlow Company picked us to do some exploratory excavation at the Wildcoast site. Months ago. They wanted a percolation test for the development, to see if they had to go with sewers, or build the whole thing on septic.”

“Why?”

“Cost. He said they were rethinking Wildcoast. Big hurdles with the County of Orange and the Cities of Laguna Beach and San Juan Capistrano. We had a handshake deal with the Tarlow Company, but Bennet unshook my hand. We had estimated the perc testing on a five-square-mile parcel would take six months and run about six million dollars. So, PacWest was very disappointed. No discussion, no negotiation, just out of the blue. Bennet pulled our plug. The not-so-funny thing is that I liked him and he liked me. I felt that he dropped my company under pressure. From who I can’t say. No idea.”

“And gave Wildcoast to Empire Excavators,” says Gale.

“Which finally broke ground on it just last week. Or so my soldiers tell me.”

“They’ve done a lot more than break ground,” says Gale.

“How deep are they?”

“Twenty, thirty feet. How deep until they hit groundwater?”

“In decomposed granite, fifty feet down,” says McNab. “If there is groundwater. But if they hit bedrock, then no septic, because the effluent can’t percolate down into the aquifer. So you add scores of millions of dollars to build a sewer system to accommodate a city of fifty thousand people. Raises the price of the homes, dramatically.”

“Bennet wanted to build affordable, Tarlow-subsidized homes for a full quarter of the Wildcoast population,” says Gale.

“That’s why sewer is a terrible idea,” says McNab. “Goodbye, affordable. Maybe even goodbye, Wildcoast, if you’re Bennet’s asshole father, Tarlow II. He wanted to put a fulfillment hub on that land. Warehouse space in the hundreds of millions of square feet. Sky-high leases. Smart development, high profit.”

“So sewer costs would be a nonissue, in a metropolis of warehouses,” says Gale. “There wouldn’t be anyone living there. Cheap septic would do it.”

Gale considers something that’s been bugging him since he first talked to the Empire Excavators guy digging the test pit.

“What if it’s not a perc test?” asks Gale. “What if they’re looking for something else?”

“Like what?”

“Gold? Crystals? What else is down there?”

McNab laughs. “They wish. But there’s nothing but trace gold in those mountains. So far as crystals, what kind? There’s worthless quartz to gem-quality tourmaline — pink to deep green — beautiful stuff. My wife’s got some.”

“Silver?” asks Mendez. “Oil?”

“Standard and Texaco perforated that whole area after World War II,” McNab says. “But nothing doing. The oil was north of there, from Huntington Beach up into LA County. Deputies, I have a seven o’clock.”

“Thank you for your time,” says Gale, rising.

“I hope you catch this guy.”

“Do you remember the night Tarlow died?” asks Mendez.

“Of course I do,” says McNab. “NLDS, Padres and Dodgers. Jennifer and I saw it at Petco Park in San Diego. She’d tell you the same thing, if that’s what you’re getting at. Because, yeah, Bennet Tarlow dangled a lot of money at me, then took it away. Cost us millions, if you want to look at it that way. But I sure wouldn’t kill him.”

“We have to follow up on this kind of thing,” says Mendez. “Just procedure.”

“Jennifer runs accounting here,” says McNab. “Gets in at nine, extension fourteen. Ohtani went three for four, but it wasn’t enough. Ask Jen. Pads won it, three-two.”

Gale and Mendez are halfway to the Explorer when Gale’s phone rings.

Amanda Cho:

“I’m returning your calls. Sorry to be not available.”

“Have you talked to Jeffs?”

“I saw him at Bamboo but he didn’t see me. I fear him. I’m with relatives now, in Chinatown.”

“Be alert. Pay attention. Stay around people.”

“I’m used to hiding,” she says, and hangs up.