The Night Crew

'Probably got tigers out there,' Harper said. 'And when they say "humans", they mean, "meat".'

'Probably,' Anna said.

The canyon was a tangle of brush, with an occasional glimpse of trails leading through it; they crossed a low ridge on the way up, and saw the ranch house just below them, in a bowl. A half-dozen outbuildings surrounded the main house, and three cars faced the front of it.

'Pretty nice spread,' Harper said.

'The way this kid looked, the way he actedhe might have some money,' Anna said.

'You think he owns the place?'

Anna shrugged: 'He was the boss that night.'

They parked the car, stepped out, and looked around: They could hear an odd goatlike sound, and they both stepped off to the right to look past the house. A tall, fuzzy-headed animal looked at them over the top of a high board fence, pursed its lips, made the noise again.

'A camel?'

'A llama,' Anna said.

A door banged, and a woman in jeans, a Western shirt and cowboy boots came out onto the ranch house porch.

She looked like a ranch woman, in her early forties, with wide shoulders, a round, moon face, deeply tanned with a scattering of freckles. Her sandy hair was pulled back in a ponytail. 'Can I help you?'

'Yeah, hi,' Anna said. 'We were just looking at your llama. Where'd you get him?'

'We. found him,' the woman said, pleasantly. 'He was rather badly abused, or, rather, neglected. The former owner had ideas about breeding llamas. When it didn't work out, he just turned him out and left him in the desert. He would've died, if one of our members hadn't found him.'

'Terrific,' Anna said cheerfully. Harper followed her as she walked up on the porch. 'My name is Anna Batory, and this is my friend Jake Harper. We filmed the raid at the UCLA medical center and Steve mentioned the possibility of doing another piece. Is he around?'

The woman shook her head and said, 'Steven,' and then said, 'I'm sorry you missed him, but he should have told you that he wouldn't be around, He won't be back for another two weeks.'

'Where is he?' Anna asked. 'Can I call him?'

'Sureor, I think so. He's up in Oregon, at the Cut Canyon Ranch. He went up there the day after the raid, to help organize it. And probably run the river a few times.'

'Cut Canyon?'

'Yes, it's a new ranch that some people are putting together up there. They just got a phone. c'mon, I'll get a number. I'm Nancy Daly, by the way, I'm the ranch fore-woman.'

Harper said, 'How do. Like the boots.'

'Genuine vinyl,' the woman said smiling at him.

They followed her inside, where another woman was working at a computer; the other woman turned and smiled briefly, then went back to her work. Daly said, 'Steve has got that square chin and all those teeth. Somehow, it makes him seem a little more organized than he really is.' She was shuffling through the papers on her desk: 'I don't know, I don't seem to have it. God, I've got to do something about this desk.'

'Think it'd be on directory assistance?' Ann asked.

'Should be,' Daly said.

'No problem,' Anna said. She took her cell phone out of her pocket, but the woman shook her head. 'We're too far out. You can use ours. The area code, I don't know, it's probably in the phone book.'

'It's five-oh-three,' Anna said. 'I've got friends up there, they run a pottery.'

She dialed directory assistance, asked for a new listing for Cut Canyon Ranch, got the number, and punched it in.

'Cut Canyon.' Another woman.

'Is Steve Judge there?'

'Yes, somewhere. Can I tell him who's calling?'

'My name's Anna Batory.'

'Hang on. I'll put you on hold. I've got to go find him.'

'Okay,' Anna said.

Harper asked Daly, 'Does Steve. own this place, or what?'

'Oh, no,' Daly said. 'His parents provided some seed money. Steve is active with the group, but he avoids bureaucratic entanglements, so to speak. He's a little.' She looked at the other woman. 'What is he, Laurie?'

Laurie never looked away from the screen. 'Hippie,' she said.

'Ah.'

At that moment, Judge came on the phone: 'Yeah, Steve Judge.'

The voice wasn't the killer'shigher than she remembered, not squeaky, but nasal, rather than full. Anna looked at Harper and shook her head, as she said, 'This is Anna Batory. I stopped by the ranch to see if we might put together another piece on this animal thing.'

'Oh!' Judge said. Then: 'You know, I wasn't too happy about the way the raid thing came out, I think it made me look foolish, with the pig and all.'

'Wellthat happens. The stations cut the tape the way they want. We didn't have anything to do with that,' Anna said.

'Okay. I guess I'm willing to give it another shot,' Judge said. 'We're just finishing things up here, I was going to head back tonight. When do you want to get together?'

'Couple days, next week,' Anna said, now in no rush.

But Judge rambled on, eager to make another movie. 'The, neatest things we've got right now is a vet who's made a specialty out of fixing bird wings,' he said. 'We're gonna start rehabilitating raptors, you know, hawks, eagles. You can't just fix them up and let them go. You have to rehab the wings; people shoot these poor birds.'

She let him go, throwing in a couple of questions about the raid, until she was sure it was really him. When she was sure, she looked at Harper and shook her head.

'Damn it, I thought he was a possibility,' Anna said, as they went down the road from the ranch. The afternoon was sliding into the evening.

'Might still becould be something tricky going on.'

'I suppose,' Anna said. But she yawned and shook her head. The morningwhen she crunched down that highway cut and looked at China Lakeseemed a lifetime back. She yawned and said, 'Let's go see Creek.'

'Fuckin' vinyl cowboy boots,' Harper said. 'You show me a woman who wears vinyl cowboy boots and I'll show you a woman whose.' He trailed off, glanced at Anna, and then concentrated on the road ahead.

'Whose what?' Anna demanded.

'Never mind,' Harper said.

Anna took the phone out of her pocket and tried it; still out of range. 'Wait'll we get over the hill,' Harper suggested. 'Two minutes.'

Two minutes, and they were back in range: She had a message waiting, but called Louis and asked him to locate the other kid at the animal raid. Then she punched in the message, and got Wyatt's voice.

'We've got a proposition for you,' he said. 'Call me.'

'Wyatt,' she said to Harper. 'He's got a proposition.'

Wyatt was in the office: 'Things are gonna get out of control pretty soon,' he said, his voice tinny in the little phone. 'We haven't had an O.J. case or anything else for the media assholes.'

'Excuse me?' Anna said.

'. Uh, sorry. Anyway, this whole thing is gonna leak, two days, three days, maximum,' he said. 'So one of the task force guys came up with a proposition: We've got a couple of undercover guys who are pretty good with video cameras, they do a lot of surveillance. So you check one of these guys out, and then you go out on the street with him. He could fill in for your friend, Creek. And we put a net around you.'

'Huh. Not bad. Let me talk to Jake about it.'

'There'd be a chance we could spot the guy,' Wyatt said. 'We'd have an undercover video van covering you and even if nothing happens, we could analyze every face in every crowd, every place you go. If he's tracking you, we could spot him.'

'Let me talk to Jake.'

'Okay, but we want to go tonightfour hours from now.'

Harper was adamant: 'No! No fuckin' way. They're so desperate they're willing to turn you into a bull's-eye.'

'When you were working homicide, did you ever use a civilian as a decoy?'