They plod up the mountain with slow switchbacks through afternoon heat, stopping often to water Knight and themselves.
Knight alerts near a stand of toyon, red berries bright in the sun. The big dog heaves himself along a slender trail, then lurches into a tight chute between the boulders and disappears.
Ambush predator, thinks Gale. Ambush territory. They jump you from behind, crush your neck in unbelievably powerful jaws while their front claws clamp your shoulders and their rear claws rake open your back.
Gale again reverses his sheriff’s cap and ducks in after him, gun pointed down. Knight turns a corner, and by the time Gale rounds it, all he sees is the dog’s thick dark tail vanishing behind a rounded granite boulder the size and shape of a VW bug.
Gale follows Knight into a swale terminating at a stone rampart too vertical and tightly packed to climb without carabiners, ropes, and pitons.
Knight looks at Gale and whines, coat bristling, then takes off along the rocky base.
Gale catches up with him at a big rock, flat as a tabletop, on which the dog stands, looking up.
A mountain lion sits gazing high above them, framed by a V in distant rocks the same mottled tan as he is.
Gale can see the far-off dome of its head and little spikes of ears. If he hadn’t been looking for a lion, he wouldn’t have seen it. It could be looking at him. Known for their curiosity, Gale thinks.
Not to mention guile and stealth.
He swings down the monopod shooting brace, extends the leg to full length, and plants its foot firmly in the earth. Then raises the Barrett slowly to his shoulder. Knight watches him. The heavy gun balances perfectly on the brace, and Gale sets the distance for a thousand yards.
In the pure optics he sees the cat’s face as if it’s fifty feet away. The breeze moves a tuft of his chest hair. Killer Cat, no doubt. Gale sees the scarred face, the tan eyes, the tip-chewed right ear of the cat as on the security camera in Laguna Beach, taken a week ago.
He’s disappointed that he’ll have to kill this old cat.
He admires its boldness, endurance, and fortitude.
Admires how he padded from the Santa Ana Mountains to Pacific Vibrations Surf Shop on Coast Highway, and a week later back to the mountains behind Laguna to kill and eat the multimillionaire land developer Bennet Tarlow. Then dodged two professional hunters and an experienced tracking dog for nearly twenty-four hours and ten miles of the rough backcountry in which he was probably born.
Gale offs the safety, and the vibration shivers the scope out of focus for a split second, and when it resolves, the cat is gone.
Finger on the trigger, Gale scopes the rocks in a widening circle but no lion. Waits motionless and hears Carpenter crunching through the brush behind him.
“He’s up there, Carp. The big chewed-up one from Coast Highway.”
“Killer Cat. I will be damned. But I’m not surprised.”
“He was in that V above the boulders. Looking right at me.”
Carpenter swings up his Weatherby and peers through the scope. “What’s the best way around this mountain?”
“Knight can figure it out.”
Three hours later they’ve circumnavigated and climbed the mountain. Gale stands before the V where Killer Cat had been, the wind in his face.
Knight stares at Carpenter wild-eyed with scent, but he holds his handler’s commands to sit down and stay. He pants loudly, tongue lolling off the left side of his jaw, his flanks studded with sage pods and brambles, tail twitching.
“Hunt ’em up, boy! Hunt ’em up!”
Less than an hour later, weary Knight has lost the scent.
They hunt past dark and set up camp in a stand of digger pine. Gale looks forward to his bourbon again.
It’s Elke Meyer on the satellite phone.
“How’s my favorite lion-tracking detective?”
“I got a good look at him. Knight tracked him twelve miles from the kill site. It’s the big cat from Coast Highway in Laguna.”
“Did you shoot?”
“I offed the safety and he vanished.”
“How far out?”
“A thousand yards.”
“Wow.”
“Not much wind. It would have been a long but clean shot.”
“I’m glad you didn’t kill him, Lew.”
Gale can’t imagine why.
“Lew, um, the autopsy on Tarlow finished up just a couple of hours ago. He died from gunshot. Two bullets in the back of his head. Killer Cat chewed him but didn’t kill him. Tarlow had bled to death before the cat found him. Say nothing about this. So, get back to the kill site first thing in the morning and figure out who did this. Daniela Mendez — your new partner — will meet you. Do not tell anyone what I’ve just told you. Including Carpenter. That comes from Kersey, direct. A car registered to Tarlow was found parked in a campsite in Caspers — not far from where they found his body. It’s in impound now.”
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.