“This is a very brutal one,” she says.
The room is cold and smells of alcohol, but now, in the slipstream of the removed sheet, Gale smells the meaty human insides of mankind.
Tarlow’s tattered body and clothes are stuck tight with oak leaves, mountain lions often hiding their kills.
His face is half-gone and his scalp and forehead are badly lacerated, but his teeth and skull are intact.
So Lew Gale recognizes approximately half of him.
Tarlow’s shirt and blue jeans are torn away. His ribs are extant but his chest and stomach gape, raggedly asunder. No heart or lungs, Gale sees, no liver or kidneys. No innards. All of them presumably eaten or left on the ground. Blood and tan oak leaves are stuck to his pants and boots.
A reeking mess.
In all his years in law enforcement, and his months of combat in Afghanistan, Gale has never seen a human killed as food.
He remembers having coffee with Tarlow and a lady friend, bodyguarding him at a prizefight in Las Vegas. Another Fury-Wilder rematch. The woman was a redheaded beauty — Laguna Beach by way of Fort Worth, he remembers — suddenly ashamed of himself for picturing her in front of her companion, the painfully butchered and half-devoured Bennet Tarlow.
The woman had a funny name. Norris something.
“When is the autopsy?” he asks.
“Later today,” says the assistant. “The sheriff knows the media will blow up when we identify him.”
“It’s blowing up already,” says Undersheriff Meyer. “People don’t like the idea of being killed and eaten in a county park.”
2
At the kill site, Gale, Predator Tracking Unit K9 handler Mike Carpenter, and Mike’s burly German shepherd, Knight, cross the plastic crime scene barriers under the watchful eyes of two uniformed deputies.
The men shrug off their backpacks and set their rifles across them. Knight stands leashed amid the oak leaves and acorns, whimpering and trembling, riveted by Mike’s pack. Here the ground is shaded by the big oaks that grow just east of the Ortega Flats campground.
Two sheriff’s SUVs preside from the dirt road nearby, lights flashing. From a camp clearing, a den of uniformed Cub Scouts and two supervising adults watch from atop a picnic table. Knight, taut on his lead, sizes them up for just a moment, then turns his quivering black nose to his handler’s backpack again.
One of the deputies leads them down a narrow game trail that wends through the shade of the oaks and to a patch of acorn-strewn dirt roughly ten feet square enclosed in yellow tape. The black, oily dirt appears wet.
Knight surges for the black patch but young Carpenter yanks back hard and cusses him.
Gale kneels just outside the tape, where a dusty shaft of sunlight slants through the trees and touches the earth in front of him.
He sees that the dirt and leaves and acorns aren’t black at all, but deep, drying red. Notes the pale scraps of gut and bone and sinew. And the intestinal fragments oddly purple now in the sun.
Carpenter orders Knight to sit down and stay, then pulls open a locking evidence bag from his backpack and gives Knight a whiff. Knight tries to take the red shop rag dampened with mountain lion pee bought on a hunting website, but Carpenter is ready for this, and he whips the bag up and away.
“Stay,” he says, easing the still-opened bag down for the dog to smell. Knight’s hackles flare, and his body trembles like a tree in the wind. Carpenter slaps the bag gently to Knight’s black snout, then seals it and puts it back in his pack.
Unleashes Knight, who bounds into the oak grove.
“Hunt ’em up, boy,” says Carpenter.
Knight works meticulously, quartering the meadow ground, nosing the hills of boulders sprouting dense manzanita and sage, and the matilija poppies blooming their last in the mid-October warmth.
Carpenter uses neither a whistle nor voice commands, animal tracking being a stealthy pursuit. Knight stops and looks back to his handler often.
Gale, who as a boy hunted quail and doves and sometimes deer not far from here, feels strange with the ponderous sniper’s rifle now in his hands instead of the trim 20-gauge bird gun his dad gave him for Christmas one year. The rifle is a Barrett MK 22, weighing just over fifteen pounds, with a range of two thousand yards. Gale had killed a fellow sniper at 1,275 yards in Sangin Valley, Afghanistan, as a Marine private, age nineteen. His target was ninety-two years old, according to his grandson, a Taliban informer.
Gale’s fifth, confirmed.
He stops for a moment, takes a slug of water from a canteen on his belt, listens to the far-off cars on Ortega Highway, watches a FedEx cargo jet easing down toward Orange County’s John Wayne Airport. He notes how little this land has changed since he was a boy, although the humans have stepped up their invasion by air, land, and sea. Just north of here, thousands of trucks on a dozen freeways daily belch to and from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, the busiest in the country. Tonight, he’ll see satellites gliding through the stars.
He trades out his canteen for his Zeiss binoculars and scans the ridgelines of the hills, alert to the boulders into which the big cats blend when waiting for deer. The binoculars collapse a thousand yards into an optically pure circle in which a fence lizard basks on a south-facing rock.
The day cools into late afternoon as Gale, Carpenter, and the dog climb in elevation.
Nearing the base of the Santa Ana Mountains, Knight alerts in a thicket of toyon and lemonade berry, goes into that slinky, butt-down German shepherd crawl, and slowly follows a game trail into the darkening bushes.
Carpenter gives Lew Gale a respectful nod. Gale is his senior, and his skills as a department SWAT marksman and a Marine sniper put him first in line to shoot, on the very real chance that the lion has taken cover in the brush, curious, as most mountain lions are, or even considering an ambush of Knight, an easy kill.
Reversing his SWAT cap for an unimpeded view, Gale follows the dog into the thicket, hunches his shoulders through the high brush, hugging the Barrett to his chest. He thinks of patrol in Sangin, minus the constant, low-grade fear of being shot by a sniper from so far away he’d be dead without hearing the shot.
Which was how he’d killed nine men.
The copse opens into an arroyo lined with sycamores, their white branches heavy with yellow and brown leaves the size of dinner plates.
Gale listens to the crunch of his boots on them. Within his Acjacheme/Juaneño blood, he retains an ancestral talent for quietly stalking game here in these wooded hills.
The arroyo widens into a large meadow that rises gently into the Santa Anas of Cleveland National Forest.
No cat.
Knight turns and looks hopefully at Gale, who raises both hands palms-up and shakes his head, letting the sling have his rifle for the moment. Knight continues, his urgency gone but his movements still optimistic.
The meadow climbs toward the mountain but as Knight disappears over a rise and Gale makes its summit, he sees that the valley below is larger and deeper than he’d expected, and heavily wooded with oaks and sycamores and the pine.
White hoop buildings are tucked beneath the trees, dozens of them, and the strong, skunky smell of cannabis hangs in the cooling air.
No movement there, that Gale can see.
“Not again,” says Carpenter, coming up just behind him. “Some of these shitheads keep guard dogs. Pit bulls and other good killers, you know?”
So he blows three sharp notes on his Acme Medium Thunderer. Knight reverses direction and strains uphill, tongue flapping.
Rifles slung and handguns drawn, Gale and Carpenter put twenty feet between each other and start down into the dense woods, the stink of weed, and the eerie buzz of insects.