By the time I returned to the living room, Chidra Persaud had seated herself in a ladder-back chair, next to an older man who was standing sideways to her, staring out the window. He was dressed for an outdoor trek—weathered jeans, hiking boots, a flannel shirt, a beat-up jacket, and a three-day growth of beard. He had a rifle tucked comfortably under his arm, resting on his right hip.
“Alex, that was quick,” Persaud said, getting to her feet. “Did you have trouble with the phone? We sometimes have issues out here in the wild.”
“Phone?” I knew my voice hadn’t been loud enough to carry back to this room.
She pointed to the large telephone on a desk at the end of the room, with a dozen plastic buttons on a panel. “It lights up when in use. I was afraid you needed something.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to act less surprised than I was. “Just checking in with my boyfriend.”
My paranoia was on high alert. I didn’t trust anyone.
“I’d like you to meet Karl—Karl Jansen. Karl runs the preserve for me.”
We shook hands as Prescott entered the room right behind me, and Jansen offered each of us a cool “howdy.”
“Before we go out and look around, I assume you want Karl to talk about what happened the weekend Paul Battaglia was here,” she said.
“We do,” Prescott answered. “Have a seat, Karl.”
“Rather not. I’m fine standing.”
So we all stood.
“How long have you known Mr. Battaglia?” I asked.
“Met him for the first time on a Saturday morning, two weeks ago, ma’am. He left on Sunday evening and I never saw him again.”
“Did he stay here, at the lodge?”
“Nope. There are eight cottages on the property,” Jansen said. “He had one of them, the way I understand it.”
“Did you organize the hunting party?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. That would be my nephew, Frank.”
“I see. Were you along for the hunt?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I was there.”
“So it was you and Frank, the district attorney and Chidra,” I said, “and two others.”
“Excuse me,” Persaud said. “Paul was my guest for the weekend, as were the other pair of hunters, whom I’d never met before.”
“Never met?” I asked. “But they were your guests?”
“Yes, people pay dearly for the right to shoot here, as Karl will explain,” Persaud said. “But I was not along for the hunt that day. Saturday.”
“I don’t understand. Then why did you arrange it for Paul?”
“I had planned to shoot with him, of course,” she said. “He had a very competitive streak, as you both probably know.”
Prescott smiled. “That’s an understatement.”
“It turns out the club member who was present, Anderson Groves—do you know him?”
“I don’t,” I said, as Prescott shook his head.
“It probably doesn’t matter,” Persaud said. “Anderson owns oil wells in Texas. He was a founding member of the Diana Hunt Club.”
“Not enough endangered species for him to shoot down there?” I asked.
“They certainly don’t have Rocky Mountain bighorn in south Texas. That’s one of our major attractions,” she said, unfazed by my snarky remarks. “Anyway, Anderson’s been doing business in Dubai, and he happened to invite one of the oil royals for the weekend. I’ll have the man’s name for you shortly. I’ve just called the office out here to get all the names and dates, but they’re not answering yet. Unfortunately, that gentleman—the prince from Dubai—refused to shoot with a woman—with me.”
“Because his religion forbids it?” I asked.
“Perhaps that,” she said. “Perhaps he just thought it was bad luck, as many people do.”
“Even though you are ‘the’ Diana of this club?” Prescott said, sucking up in an entirely unctuous way.
Chidra Persaud waved off his concern with a good-natured laugh. “Not worth a flogging or a stoning to challenge his beliefs. I busied myself with paperwork for the day.”
“Who was the sixth man in the party?” I asked. “Did Paul have a partner to shoot with?”
“He did,” she said. “Another club member staying in one of the cottages on the river. He actually enjoys fly-fishing more than shooting. My manager will have all the names and contacts for us in an hour or so, as I mentioned.”
“Did Paul know him?”
“Not before that morning. He’s a young West Coast guy. Runs a tech start-up,” Persaud said. “Paul was happy to have him along, but he seemed far more interested in getting to know the prince from Dubai.”
“Your office must also have a log with contact information for all the participants.”
“Oh, yes,” Persaud said.
The two agents were making notes of the conversation.
“You want to see the cottage where Paul stayed?” Persaud asked.
“I do,” Prescott said.
“Good. And I thought it would be useful for Karl to tell you as many specifics about the day as he can.”
“Yes,” Prescott said.
“In order to hunt for certain species in Montana, one has to hire an outfitter,” Persaud said. “The Jansens have made their living for quite a long time that way—as outfitters—before I set up the preserve. They know many more hunters—more visitors—than I do. Isn’t that right?”
Karl Jansen gave her a nod.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Does that mean that there are hunters who come here—who come on your land to shoot—but they don’t stay with you?”
“That’s right,” Persaud said. “But they can’t do that without paying Karl or Junior—or someone with their kind of credentials.
“Why don’t you tell them the rest, Karl? We all had coffee together that morning, and then I stayed behind. I think it makes sense for you to tell them the reason for the hunt, and what you saw and heard on the way.”
Karl Jansen shuffled the rifle to his left side. “Hard for me to talk about, ma’am, but I’ll try.”
“Do your best,” she said.
Someone had died that day. We might as well start with that fact.
“Six of you went out,” I said. “Was it that day—or Sunday—when one of the men was killed?”
“Sunday morning,” he said. “Saturday we were all just fine.”
It wasn’t Paul Battaglia, nor was it Karl Jansen, who was on the short end of the arrow.
“Who was the victim of the murder?” I asked.
“It wasn’t no murder, lady,” Jansen said, his steel-gray eyes meeting mine. “It was Frank who took the arrow. My nephew. My sister’s boy.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”
Frank was in the family business too. An outfitter. A hunting guide. And if he had any secrets, they’d died with him two weeks ago.
“I’m sorry,” Persaud said. “I should have told you that.”
I thought it was bitchy of Chidra Persaud not to have given us the heads-up that it was Jansen’s nephew who’d been killed, before introducing us to him.
“Who had the weapon?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to call it. “Who fired?”
“The Arab. The guy they told me was a prince,” Jansen said. “Never held a bow in his hand before.”
“Had they fought about anything?” Prescott asked. “Had there been any disagreements the day before? Or during the evening?”
“Nothing I heard. Frank wasn’t the sort of man who disagreed with anyone. He just liked to be off by himself in the woods.”
“You didn’t see it happen, then, did you?” I asked.
“No, ma’am. I was a ways away.”
“Then how do you know it wasn’t inten—?”
“Accidents happen, Ms. Cooper,” Jansen said, stepping away from us, moving toward the door. “Sooner or later, everybody dies.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“Are you warm enough, Alex?” Persaud asked.
She and Jansen were ahead of us, walking down a trail toward a row of cottages that looked like miniature versions of the main house. I was ten feet behind, with James Prescott.
“Plenty warm. Thanks for the gloves.”
She turned her head and kept to the trail.
“What’s our timetable here?” I asked Prescott. “There’s something you haven’t told me.”
“I didn’t have time to think about much from the moment I got the call last night about the phone records,” he said. “Chidra offered to make the trip. The old guy—Jansen—has never left this corner of Montana. Refused to get on a plane and come to us. I thought he might know something.”
“Is your office backing us up?”
“Background going full speed ahead on everyone,” Prescott said. “Looking for links wherever we can, and we’ll have the guest names in an hour or so. You heard that.”
“Do you know what kind of case Battaglia thought he was building by coming out here?” I asked.
“If I did, I might not have dragged you out of bed. Let today play out and maybe we can figure what he walked into.”
If Prescott knew more than he was telling me, he had buttoned it down pretty tight.
“Tell them to run Persaud’s phone system from this end, too,” I said. “I just made a call to Catherine—”
“Without asking me?”
“Correct,” I said. “There’s a master phone pad in the living room, and undoubtedly one in Chidra’s bedroom or office, too. She knew I’d been on the phone in the guest room when I went in to use the bathroom. Your tech guys need to check the last few months of her records—these phones, New York, whatever else you can get.”
He didn’t like taking direction from me, but he had no choice. “Next time you can divert her, I’ll call.”
“You’ll be lucky if you have any cell service out here,” I said. “You might send Frist or Fisher into town.”
“They’re going to go over the cottage more thoroughly after she shows it to us,” he said.
“That’s fine.”
Persaud was already in Cottage 3—there was a large black number painted on the door panel—when Prescott and I caught up to her.
“This is where Paul stayed,” she said. “Quite by himself, I can assure you.”
“Why can you assure us?” I said, scanning the ceiling for signs of a minicamera and ending up with eyes on the kitchen counter. “Is it because you have video surveillance mounted in each cabin? Or maybe cameras in the microwave?”
“How funny you think you can be, Alex,” she said. “Look around. No one has stayed here since Paul left.”
The cottage had obviously been cleaned up and turned over. Sanitized. I left it to the two agents to snoop more thoroughly than I could.
“What next?” Prescott asked.
I followed Chidra Persaud outside, where Karl Jansen had waited for us.
“We’ll go on ATVs from here,” she said. “So you can see what Paul was after. Maybe get a sense of what he was doing.”
A pair of ATVs—two-seaters—were waiting in a garage between the fourth and fifth cottages. I climbed on to ride behind Persaud, while Prescott doubled up with Jansen.
It was a long, steep climb back past the main lodge and across the road, around and around the mountaintop till the path became so narrow that we had to get off the ATVs.
The land was barren, except for small bushes of sage and large craggy rocks, which formed the top of the peak.
Karl went off on his own, climbing higher and disappearing behind an enormous boulder, returning moments later with a younger man—about forty—who was his body double. It must have been his son.
The young one smiled more easily than his father and reached out to shake hands. “Good morning, Ms. Chidra. Welcome home.”
She thanked him and introduced us to Junior, as Jansen’s son was known. We expressed our condolences about his cousin, and he seemed grateful for the comments.
“Is it okay to talk here?” she whispered.
“Sure can,” Junior said. “The animals are pretty far off.”
Junior was holding a pair of binoculars in his hands. He raised them to his eyes and looked down and away—miles away, it seemed to me.
“Why don’t you tell Alex and James what you’ve been up to this last month?” Persaud said. “They want to know about hunting the bighorn.”
“Right, then,” Junior said. “From scratch?”
I smiled at him. “From scratch.”
“So, there are four primary kinds of wild sheep in North America. Here in Montana we’ve got the Rocky Mountain bighorn, which is where you might guess they’d be,” he said. “There used to be millions of these fellows just over a century ago. Millions of them. Lewis and Clark probably saw bighorn every day of their travels through here.”
“Hunted to near extinction now,” I said. “And pushed out by a growing human population.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “But then, people like Ms. Persaud, she’s helping bring ’em back. They’re coming back again.”
“But you’re hunting them,” I said. “You and your father are guiding people out here for the specific purpose of putting a bullet—or an arrow—into one of these sheep to kill it.”
Chidra Persaud took the binoculars from Junior’s hands and put them to her eyes. She looked over the landscape below, moving the set back and forth, until she came to a stop. She passed the glasses to me.
“There,” she said. “Can you see them?”
I looked through the lenses but saw nothing. I opened my eyes and looked again. “Dots in that field,” I said. “All I see are shiny dots, like they’re on a curved surface of some sort.”
“That’s it, Miss Alex,” Junior said. “When you see that glow against the browned-out field, that’s a bighorn. The curve is the horn itself, and for some reason, it shows up all shiny-like—the only animal I know to do that. There’s a pack of them down there in the valley.”
“They could be almost anything,” I said, passing the glasses to Prescott.
“Not when they’re curved,” he said. “Not many circular-shaped horns on wild animals.”
“Just how do you help save these creatures, when what you’re doing is bringing people here to kill them?” I said to Persaud, looking at the rifle she was holding, which seemed to me to be a newer model than Karl Jansen had.
“By transplanting scores of them, Alex,” she said.
“What do you mean by transplanting?”
“We capture them alive—tranquilize them and airlift them out in large canvas slings—and send them off to live on reservations all over Montana and the Dakotas.”
“Native American reservations?” I asked.
“Yes, there are seven of them in Montana. I send forty or fifty bighorn to Rocky Boy’s, up north, every year. It’s the reservation of the Chippewa Cree, on the Canadian border. They’re quite happy to have them.”
“Why would you possibly need a high-powered rifle to take sheep alive?” I asked. “And if that’s what you think hunters are doing to preserve a species—transplanting a few dozen a year—I’d be the first to say it isn’t quite enough, in my humble opinion.”
Junior walked away from us, back toward his perch behind the large boulders. Chidra Persaud followed, returning the binoculars to him, and we went behind her.
“Looking for others?” she asked.
“There was a group of about twenty on that ridge across the river, but I must have run them off a while ago,” he said. “Sheep have really sharp senses. They spook easy.”
Some days I f
elt like that myself.
“Are you looking for Horace?” Persaud said to him.
“Yes, ma’am,” Junior said. “Saw six rams in that herd this morning. Horace—well, he just jumps out at you.”
Persaud turned around to face us. “Let me tell you about Horace,” she said. “Let me answer you by explaining what we’re doing out here.”
“All ears,” Prescott said.
“Most people like you think that the great white whale of North American land mammals is whatever scares you the most—a giant black bear or a mountain lion, maybe a moose that charges when you get too close to its calves. You think those are the game that hunters want most to chase.”
“But you’re going to insist it’s these bighorns,” Prescott said. “And we want to know why.”
“It’s a rich man’s sport, hunting bighorn. It’s more expensive than you might imagine, for starters.” Chidra Persaud rested her rifle against a rock formation twice her height. “Secondly, the opportunities to participate are limited, because of where the animals live. The third thing is that the hunts are extremely difficult, in such remote areas in the West that they can last as long as three weeks without snagging a trophy.”
“How much does it cost for a chance to kill a Rocky Mountain bighorn?” I asked.
“We don’t use the word ‘kill,’” she said. “We call it harvesting.”
“Nothing like a quaint euphemism,” I said, “to make something sound more appealing.”
Persaud powered on. “There are two ways to hunt wild sheep.”
“Legally?” Prescott asked.
“Yes, of course legally,” she said. “There’s a lottery of sorts in Montana. I think it only costs about twenty dollars to enter, and the state raffles off a limited number of licenses—each restricted to a particular geographic area—to hunters.”
“What are the odds of winning?” Prescott asked.
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