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.”