Wild Instinct

5

Early morning at the Caspers kill site. Frost on the grass and lilacs under a pale blue sky.

Lew Gale hands Detective Sergeant Daniela Mendez a to-go coffee cup with a heat sleeve.

This is their first job as official partners, Mendez having aced her “homicide school” courses over the months and gotten assigned to Gale just last week. They’ve only talked a few times since then — coffee in the county courthouse cafeteria — which is how Gale knew to put half-and-half in hers.

Gale agreed to her as a potential partner because of her reputation for hard work, and for captaining the OC Sheriff’s pistol team. He liked that because, in his experience, deputies good with guns seemed calmer and more peaceable on duty, though he knew this might not actually be true. He also liked the idea of her as his partner because she struck him as solitary, like himself.

Mendez comes from the Special Investigations Bureau — Vice/Human Trafficking. At thirty-eight, she’s a single mother, hard-faced, dark-haired, and gym-fit.

She wears black jeans, an OCSD windbreaker over a work shirt — hiding the gun on her back — and black athletic shoes.

Gale touches his paper cup to hers.

“Two bullets,” she says. Her voice is crisp. “Still inside his skull. Our luck.”

“I want to see the kill site again,” he says.

“If that’s even what it is,” says Daniela.

“Exactly,” says Gale. “A big cat can easily drag a man around.”

“And so could another man.”

In the fortysomething hours since Gale was first here, the patch of blood-darkened soil and oak leaves hasn’t changed much. A few red ants, and two yellowjackets buzzing low but not wanting to land.

The crime scene barriers and tape are gone and there’s a faint trail of trampled leaves in the direction of the campground. Crime scene looky-loos, Gale thinks, coming and going.

Mendez hunkers beside the bloody ground, balanced on the balls of her feet to keep her pants clean.

“When I first saw the pictures of this, I didn’t think it looked like enough blood,” she says. “A gallon and a half for a man Tarlow’s size? That’s three milk cartons. The coroner says he bled to death. I don’t think he died here.”

“No,” says Lew Gale. “What caliber were the bullets?”

“Twenty-two. Mushroomed out and still inside him.”

“That’s a close-up execution load,” says Gale. “Quiet and it does big damage, bouncing around like that.”

“They didn’t see the entry wounds at first because his scalp was torn up so bad.”

“Shot from behind?”

“Yes,” says Mendez. “Near the center of his head.”

They sit side by side on a cold concrete bench of a long, stained picnic table oddly positioned here, well away from the nearest campground.

Mendez briefly checks her phone, then brushes away the acorns and sets her laptop down in front of them. Finds the coroner’s report and cues up a video clip of Bennet Tarlow’s body on an examination table.

Gale can almost smell the formaldehyde and the bleachy stink of the autopsy room. Always hated those places.

The drastic Y cuts have already been sawn from Tarlow’s armpits to his sternum, and converged into one, straight down his middle toward where his navel no longer was. Ribs rudely splayed, revealing all.

Mendez lets Gale move forward at his own pace, the autopsy progressing through its painstaking stages, the body parts photographed, removed, and weighed, beginning at the top of the chest cavity by the masked coroner himself, Dr. Jerry Bachstein.

“Time of death?” asks Gale.

“The evening before the hikers found him,” says Mendez. “Plus or minus eight hours. The lion pretty much destroyed whatever forensic evidence Tarlow’s body might have held. Except the bullets.”

“Drugs or alcohol in his system?”

“The serology was iffy,” says Mendez. “Because the blood was in short supply and contaminated. A blood thinner and blood pressure meds, probably. Jerry couldn’t say much about his heart because it was mostly gone. Ditto his liver, one kidney, and both lungs.”

“Any DNA that wasn’t Tarlow’s?”

“They’re still running random samples. Jerry says low chance of anything but the cat’s. He apologized. He’s trying.”

“Stains? Fibers? Anything trace?”

“Bits of oak leaves and lilac. Soil. His watch, wallet, and car keys were still in his pants. A small Swiss Army knife. A pendant around his neck. All at the lab. No phone, unfortunately.”

“A pendant the cat didn’t tear off?” asks Gale.

“An owl,” says Mendez. “Silver, on a stainless chain. Here.”

“An owl in flight,” says Gale. “Native Americans almost always saw them as messengers of death.”

Mendez finds a close-up of the pendant, a two-inch owl, wings spread, roundheaded. Both owl and chain clotted with blood.

Gale nods, scrolls through the next stills: blood and guts and the remains of a man.

“Let’s go find the rest of Bennet Tarlow’s earthly blood,” he says. “I worked for him a few times, years ago.”

“Moonlighting to pay the bills?”

“Yeah. He was a nice guy.”

“Somebody disagrees.”

Circling outward from the alleged kill site, they find blood — lots of it — less than a hundred yards away, in the bed of a seasonal creek nearly hidden by a big oak tree.

Vultures hop and squabble in the sandy, brush-tangled wash. Yellowjackets flicker and chew the clots and clods. The blood looks to Gale as if it could have been poured, spreading out in a neat, round pool. In a way it was, he thinks: a gallon, maybe more, pouring from the holes in Tarlow’s pressurized skull, his heart pounding away in confusion, his thoughts in ruins, as he stared into the night sky, unable to do anything but tremble. Private First Class Battaglia died that way on Gale’s drenched lap in Sangin, a fellow sniper caught by an Afghan sniper.

Lying in the bloody tableaux, like a clue dropped by the Patron Saint of Detectives, is a black camera with a long white lens connected to a folded aluminum tripod.

“You always this lucky?” asks Mendez.

“I just make it look easy.”

They photograph and shoot video of the crime scene, then Daniela Mendez calls in the CSI unit.

“So how did Tarlow get from here to the bogus kill site?” she asks. “By Killer Cat or Killer Human?”

They follow a trail lightly specked with dried blood, but trampled by something large and heavy.

The CSI van rolls toward them through the trees.

In a small dirt clearing Gale sees a body-width imprint framed by enormous lion prints, which point to the now discredited location where Bennet Tarlow was once believed to have lost his life.

Back at the updated kill site, triangulating with the slope of the streambed and the dense cover along it, and assuming a right-side ejection port that most semis have, Gale and Mendez estimate which direction the gun was pointed when the bullet hit Tarlow from behind. And where the fired casing might land.

He remembers from his hunting days that semiautomatic guns often threw the empties farther than he’d think. Just like fallen birds were often farther away in the field than where they seemed to land. Which never fooled the dogs’ noses.

Gale sees a brassy flash in the green and finds a spent .22 casing in it. No wonder the shooter didn’t find it, he thinks. Maybe he didn’t even try. Maybe, of course, he wasn’t a he.

Of course there might be another.

“Nice work, Detective,” says Mendez. “But I’ll call your bet.”

She holds up a stick with another .22 casing wobbling lazily on top. A small smile on her hard face.

Gale smiles back. She shoots the casing with her phone, then picks it up with a small, clear plastic bag.

Nearby, they find two sets of footprints coming through the wash from the direction of Cottonwood Creek Campground, where their plain-wrap Sheriff’s Department Explorers are parked. But only one set leading back, with the longer stride of a large man, running.

Mendez shoots those, too, then they follow.

The sandy soil is too loose to capture anything but general, nonspecific prints, but their locations and distances apart indicate to Gale two adult Homo sapiens walking pretty much side by side. Familiar with each other. Not one with a gun to the other’s head. Tarlow’s recovered and blood-drenched wallet contained credit cards and $140 in cash. Friends? A lover? A Tarlow Company associate?

“These prints want to say they knew each other,” says Mendez. “Doing what out here, after dark?”

“Oh boy,” says Gale, his standard response to questions he can’t answer, or doesn’t want to.

“That’s what my son says when he’s not going to answer me.”

At the campground they talk to everyone, but none of them were here the night of the murder. One of them confesses that he and his two girls — both visible in a clearing, trying to get a kite to fly — had gone to the crime scene yesterday and looked at the blood. But they hadn’t touched anything or crossed through the tape, though others had.

“Anybody suspicious?” asks Mendez.

“No one,” says Dad. “Just campers and bike riders and runners.”

“Anyone with a camera with a big white lens?”

“No cameras, just smartphones.”

Gale watches the girls sprint across the little meadow, squealing, one of them trailing a kite with the face of Taylor Swift on it, but Taylor just bounces along the ground and won’t take off.

From the other side of the clearing a man watches the girls, too, a dark figure almost hidden in the trees.

“Daniela.”

They walk the meadow’s perimeter, Gale alternatingly watching the kite girls and keeping tabs on the man in the trees. The girls finally get Taylor airborne and when Gale looks back to the man, he’s gone.

“Looked like he was wrapped in a blanket,” says Mendez. “Tall.”

Gale finds the spot where the man was standing and follows him through cottonwoods. The path is well-worn and wider than a game trail. The cottonwoods are still in leaf, and rods of sunlight illuminate the dew on the damp ground.

Blanket Man watches them from amid the white trunks as Gale approaches and waves.

The man is wrapped in a black blanket, and, Gale sees, camo combat boots not unlike his own in Sangin. Blanket Man’s hair is long and dark, his face lined, and his beard and mustache gray. Six five, Gale guesses.

“Sheriffs,” says Blanket Man. “You’re not gonna clear us out, are you? We got nowhere to go.”

“No. I’m Gale and she’s Mendez. We’d like to talk if you have a minute.”

“I believe I do.”

“And you are?” asks Gale.

“Bingham. I go by one name. I’m honorary head of security here.”

The man stares at Gale, who knows the look. “You serve?”

“One MEF out of Pendleton.”

“Don’t mess with MEF,” says Gale.

“No, sir, don’t. You?”

“Three-five. Sangin, Afghanistan.”

“Ouch.” Bingham nods with some respect, Gale sees, then turns in to the trees. Gale and Mendez follow.