The trail followed Symmes Creek, crossing it several times before making a long switchbacking climb up through trees and rock, rising twenty-four hundred feet to a saddle that looked across at the big granite face of Mount Williamson. Many of the chutes had already melted off and the rock was dark. It was the earliest melt Marquez could remember, but he was glad it was as warm as it was this morning and after the climb up from Symmes Creek, it felt good to sit in the sun and take a break.
They slept at Anvil Camp that night and at first light Muller spread a topo map and marked the route he thought they should follow. Half a mile along that route they stowed their gear and hiked five miles through loose talus and the occasional stand of limber pine, both climbing and descending as they followed sheep trails. On the steep talus slopes they sent loose rock sliding with each footstep as Muller worked off a hand-held GPS unit and they moved toward the coordinates the biologist had given.
When they got closer they smelled the carcasses. It happened just as they crossed under a small outcropping of rock. The wind carried up the mountain and on it the dead. Then it was easy to find them, two male bighorn, both decapitated, and not just horns but the heads gone as well. Not easy to carry a head out from here and Marquez stopped and thought about that. The body of one lay with its hind legs in the flow of a small snowmelt stream, the other in the sparse brush. Coyote and birds had fed on both.
‘Let’s look around for the heads,’ Marquez said.
‘They took them.’
‘Let’s look anyway.’
As they searched they found the radio collars lying side-by-side on a flat piece of granite and as Muller reached to pick one up, Marquez stopped him.
‘Let’s videotape first.’
The collars weren’t thrown down; they were displayed on the rock. Someone making a statement. They videotaped and then collected the collars before returning to the carcasses and studying the bullet wounds that had killed them and decapitating cuts that must have been made with a surgical saw. They were that clean.
Terri Delgado warned of a trophy hunt, but Marquez hadn’t accepted that. These horns sold for fifty to sixty thousand a pair on the black market, yet the fact that the shooter or shooters may have carried the heavy heads out suggested Delgado’s tip was right.
He took a last long look before leaving. Bighorn herds had once roamed much of the west. He remembered reading an account by John Muir of bighorn following each other one after another off a one hundred fifty foot cliff, skipping off tiny ledges to slow their fall, and then bounding away. That they existed or didn’t hardly mattered anymore. That fluidity and grace Muir witnessed had no context in our urban world. At best they that might make an entertaining YouTube to forward to friends. But they once had been common in the American west. But that was before they were ever described as elusive and shy. That was before they had run into us.
On the hike out they pushed hard, Marquez and a young man half his age who was determined to upbraid Marquez for not recommending him for the SOU. They came fast down a trail together in the late afternoon, and if you were coming up you might not have heard them coming, but your instinct would have been to step out of their way as they passed, though going by you they wouldn’t have made much noise.
When they got back to Bishop they had a beer together and Muller said, ‘I had sniper training before my first tour. I learned enough. I’ll hike back up there and try to figure out where they shot from.’
‘Good. Call me if you learn anything.’
Muller nodded and asked, ‘What’s going on with the SOU?’
‘There’s an investigation under way.’
They walked outside, shook hands, and Marquez got in his truck. He lowered the window and asked, ‘If the guide was a local, do you have anyone in mind?’
‘I might.’
They left it there and that night Marquez stayed in Bishop. He checked into the Creekside Best Western and called home before remembering that Katherine was in a meeting in San Francisco until later tonight. He turned the TV in the motel room on but the conversation with Desault weighed on him and he couldn’t relax. The room felt too small.
After clearing his messages he walked out to his truck and drove up the long grade from Bishop to Lake Sabrina where it was empty and the sky bright with stars and the white arch of the Milky Way. He took an old metal thermos cup and a half pint of Scotch over to a rock and sat down. It was cold and his body was tired from the hike. He zipped his coat, turned the collar up, but the cold seemed to come from inside until he poured half an inch and drank it down. Across the valley above the desert floor was the black silhouette of the White Mountains. He looked at the lights of Bishop below and the dark road falling as things that happened eighteen years ago returned to him. He heard the voices of the dead, Brian Hidalgo talking about street food in Saigon and the panic in the last days as the US left. He saw Billy Takado standing drinking a beer at a fish taco stand near the concrete plant in Ensenada, and then flashed on Jim Osiers’ body in the truck and thought about the article on the Zetas and Stoval and Sheryl’s warning.
Desault was right. He was made for this offer, but at what cost? Taking Desault up on the offer would leave Katherine angry and sad, and it was in many ways a betrayal of a future they had many times talked about. He poured another drink into the metal cup. Going after Stoval wasn’t just going after an animal trafficker or illegal trophy hunter. It was wading back into the violence. It meant becoming a Fed again. It meant things he thought he’d left behind forever.
He stood and walked back to the truck. In fifteen minutes he’d be in the motel room. At dawn he’d meet Muller. Tomorrow, he should call Desault and tell him no, but he knew he wouldn’t. The book was still open. It was about honor and a promise made the dead and tonight under these stars in this mountain there was no line between living and dead. He saw their faces so clearly they might as well be here with him.
THIRTY-FOUR
Anderson sounded like a brittle academic lecturer as he said, ‘Stoval prefers to buy, coerce, or use law enforcement officers. He avoids killing law enforcement whenever he can. That’s not to say he won’t. He may have bought or blackmailed his way into the FBI task force.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
That agitated Anderson. He didn’t like that and his voice quickened as he continued.
‘I’ve got other information on my desk this morning that can only be explained by internal leaks. Not at the FBI but within Federal agencies, including my own. I can’t give you specifics but it’s all about Stoval and his influence or possible influence.’
‘You’re making him bigger than life.’
‘He is bigger than life. He’s very dangerous. The cartels did twenty-four billion in business in the US last year. Stoval is continually funding some fraction of that. He has interests to protect. Buying into our law enforcement agencies is a fact of life. The phone intercept with Stoval mentioning you can only be explained that way.’
‘I’m not on the Stoval task force.’
‘Just your name triggered a response. You can read it as respect for you. Maybe you got closer to him years ago than you thought, or it’s because of what happened with Kline.’
‘You told me five years ago that he wanted Kline dead, that he’d had a falling out with him.’
‘John, I’m just trying to give you answers. I do analysis of actions. I keep track of roughly a hundred truly bad guys who are out there operating as we speak. For the right price half of that one hundred would help a terrorist group smuggle nuclear weapons into US cities.’
‘Let’s keep the conversation on Emrahain Stoval.’
There was quiet on the other end and then Anderson said, ‘I have to go. I’m late. I’m sorry.’