Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

Persaud smiled. “Not very good, I’m afraid. Thousands and thousands of applications come in every year just for residents of the state. Not very many winners. Am I right, Karl?”

  The senior Jansen confirmed her story. “I’m seventy-six years old. I’ve been tossing my hat in for a sheep tag since I was fourteen, and I’ve never gotten one.”

  “What’s the other way to hunt—or, shall I say, harvest these creatures?” I asked.

  “What do you think a big-game hunter would rather have, Alex?” Persaud asked. “Season tickets to a box at Yankee Stadium, right over the dugout, or a chance to find a bighorn—a ram with some age on him?”

  “I’d even take a box at Fenway, given that choice. But your folk think otherwise.”

  “Every January, in a ballroom at the Bellagio in Vegas, there’s a dinner for a hundred or so people. Black tie,” Persaud said, slipping her hands into her pants pockets. “It’s an auction, actually, to sell four sheep tags—permits, if you will—to the highest bidders, to hunt for bighorn in Montana.”

  “So these beautiful creatures, with their enormous curly horns, are peacefully grazing out here on your land, while some high rollers are standing around at cocktail hour in Vegas, looking to spend money to take out the biggest and oldest in the pack,” I said. “Am I close?”

  “Close enough.”

  “And how much does a Montana ram go for?” Prescott asked.

  “This year’s top bidder paid over five hundred thousand dollars,” Persaud said.

  “Half a million dollars?” I said. “To shoot a sheep?”

  “At least that. The number goes up every year,” she said, “and it all goes to our conservation efforts, like I tried to explain earlier. We have teams of employees who collar every one of the animals so we can track them and check them for disease. We hire workers whose jobs are sheep-specific—care and control. We’ve really brought the number of bighorn sheep in this region back way up.”

  “So the hunter gets a tax write-off to a charitable wildlife foundation of some sort,” Prescott said, “and a chance to bag the big kahuna.”

  “The Rocky Mountain Bighorn Foundation,” she said. “That’s what we fund.”

  “Collar or kill ’em. That’s quite a contrast,” I said. “Where’s Longmire when I need him? Aren’t these the Absaroka Mountains?”

  “Walt Longmire has Vic. He’s got no use for you,” Prescott said to me, before turning to Persaud. “Who won the auction this year?”

  “I don’t go, James. This is my backyard,” she said. “I’m sure you can find the names of the top bidders online.”

  “What makes this kind of hunt so tough?” I said. “Those sheep in the valley look like sitting ducks down there.”

  The older Karl Jansen spoke up. “The big money don’t buy much for an amateur hunter,” he said. “Any fool can get himself a bear if he sits alongside a trout stream out here long enough. Could be half-blind and still get lucky hitting a big elk or a turkey. Hell, I could bag those from my easy chair.”

  “Comforting to know,” I said.

  “What you’re looking down on is not where the bighorn spend their time,” Jansen said. “Like Junior told you, that herd must have been spooked off a ridge. Maybe a helicopter or something came in real low.”

  “Why? Where do you usually have to go to find them?” I said.

  “Follow my son,” Jansen said, pointing off in the distance, to the northeast. “He’ll show you why it’s so difficult. Bighorn live in steep terrain, above the timberline. Places not many folks have been to or care to go. It’s not like standing still behind a duck blind and shooting one out of the sky. You can stalk these sheep for weeks till you get them.”

  Good for the sheep, I thought.

  Chidra Persaud and James Prescott disappeared out of sight, behind the tall rocks, following Junior. I didn’t like that three of the people in our group of five had guns. I didn’t like the idea of being one of the two who were unarmed.

  Karl Jansen brought up the rear.

  “Paul Battaglia made this climb?” I asked, trying to scramble over some brush that had blown onto the path.

  “Slower than you,” Jansen said. “With a tall walking stick. But he stayed on it most of the way.”

  “Pretty good for a man his age,” I said. “I bet he talked a lot. I bet he asked a ton of questions.”

  I was interrogating a man who was parsimonious with his words.

  “Did that,” Jansen said.

  “What kind of things?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at him.

  “Keep your eyes forward, ma’am. Keep moving.”

  I pulled myself ahead by grabbing the bare branch of some sort of scraggly tree.

  “What did Battaglia ask about?”

  “Names, mostly. Wanted to know more about Miss Chidra, but that shouldn’t have been any of his business.”

  “What other kind of names?” I said, cresting that slope, until I realized there was another crest—even higher—right around the bend.

  “He asked fewer questions than you,” Jansen said. “Move on. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  We spiraled upward and onward. I finally caught up with the others, who were standing on a flat boulder, high enough over the valley to make me dizzy when I looked down.

  Chidra Persaud put her fingers to her lips to signal me to be quiet, and passed me the binoculars, pointing to a craggy ledge across the river. We were on the back side of the hill that we been climbing, facing across to a low part of a mountain range instead of the valley.

  I looked through the glasses but saw nothing. Rocks, dirt, cacti, and brush. Nothing moved.

  I lowered them and held up my hands.

  Karl Jansen came up from behind and raised the binoculars in front of me again, training them on a specific spot. The shiny objects like the ones I had seen below, earlier, came into sight. I adjusted the lenses. Now I could see a dozen or so sheep—some of which were rams, with long curly horns.

  I nodded to Chidra and the others.

  She walked back to me and whispered in my ear.

  “Do you see the very large ram? Much bigger than the others?”

  I squinted into the binoculars and fine-tuned my focus. “Yeah.”

  “That’s Horace,” Persaud said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Is it like you thinking you’re Diana?”

  Chidra Persaud bit her lip. She had obviously been brought up to be more polite than I had.

  “Junior Jansen has been following Horace for five years now, all up and down these mountaintops,” she said. “We figure he’s close to fifteen years old.”

  “You can pick Horace out from the other rams, year after year?”

  Persaud smiled. “It’s like parental instincts, separating identical twins who would fool the rest of us, at any distance,” she said. “Junior uses a hunting scope. He can recognize Horace by the details on his horns—the battle scars, if you will—from years of head butting. Horace has been broomed.”

  “Did you say ‘groomed’?” I whispered back. “These guys get groomed before you kill them?”

  I don’t know why I kept my voice so low. I would have been happy for the sheep to scatter and run away; I wasn’t going to let anyone shoot at a living target while I was around.

  “No. It’s called ‘brooming,’” Persaud said. “It happens to them naturally. They lose the tips of their horns in battle. It shows that Horace is one of the old boys, king of the hill. He’s a real prize.”

  I handed back the glasses. “Why not just transplant Horace?” I asked. “Airlift him in one of those wildlife slings and send him off to the rez. Let him out to stud, like he deserves. Seems like the right thing to do.”

  “You don’t understand his value, Alex,” she said. “If one of the Montana permit auction winners comes here
to shoot, and Junior can help him get Horace—who is really a prized animal—well, that can save a lot of other sheep. It gives us half a million dollars to work with.”

  Naming the poor beast—identifying him and tracking him for years—made me feel even worse about the doomed Horace.

  “When’s the hunt?”

  “It starts in another ten days,” Persaud said. “November first is when the season begins. I doubt Junior will take his eyes off Horace between now and then, no matter how far that trek takes him.”

  “You knew that Horace would be here today?” I said.

  “He likes that bluff across the way,” she said. “Seems to come back to it all the time.”

  “Till he hears the first rifle shot,” Junior said. “Then he’s in the wind. So I like him to get used to the sight of me over here, with no sound at all. He’s gotten to trust me after all these years. Me and Frank, we’ve gotten to know Horace real good.”

  I wanted to signal a warning to Horace. He looked so majestic, standing tall on the silent peak.

  “This is the spot where the accident happened,” Persaud said, breaking the spell of the moment with a reality check. “Right where I’m standing.”

  “You wouldn’t let any of the men use their guns?” Prescott asked Karl Jansen, who had been along with Battaglia that day.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Neither would Frank. The season hadn’t opened. Wouldn’t have been fair.”

  But any day now it would become “fair” to put one through Horace’s heart.

  “The other man—the Arabian fellow—thought he could get one of those rams from over here with a bow and arrow?” I asked.

  “Don’t know nobody except Junior and Frank who could have done that,” Jansen said. “But the fool was stubborn. Frank told him it wasn’t yet bow season either, but he brought the damn thing along claiming he might use it on some other animal. Then he saw Horace and just picked up the bow and aimed.”

  “Not at Frank, though, did he?” I said.

  “Course not,” the older Jansen said. “It was your boss who got mad at him.”

  “Battaglia?” Prescott asked. “What’d he say?”

  “It wasn’t anything so much as what he said. It’s what he did,” Jansen went on. “The DA grabbed the Arab by his arm and tried to turn him away from the herd.”

  “So Paul didn’t want to kill animals after all,” I said, triumphant about Battaglia’s moral compass, but still in the dark about his reasons for trekking out here.

  “Can’t speak to that,” Jansen said. “He didn’t mean to kill Frank either, but that’s where the arrow went.”

  “You mean, because Paul Battaglia pulled on the man’s arm, that’s the reason the arrow hit your nephew?” Prescott said.

  “Paul must have been saving Horace,” I said.

  “I’d correct that, Alex,” Chidra Persaud said. “The truth is that Paul was saving Horace for himself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Your boss had booked a return visit here to the preserve,” she said. “He was coming back on November first, for the hunt. He told me he was bringing a high roller who’d pay even more to kill the trophy ram.”

  “Who?” I asked. “What’s the name of the man he was bringing?”

  “He didn’t tell me the name. He told me not to worry, that it would be worth my while,” Persaud said. “That this hunter could buy Montana without blinking.”

  “But who—?” I said, looking at Prescott.

  Chidra started to retrace her steps. “When you two figure it out, do let me know. Otherwise, I’ll have two spots to fill before the season starts.”

  I stood at the highest point for a few minutes longer, letting Persaud and Prescott walk slowly downhill with Junior.

  Karl Jansen waited beside me, taking in the view with what seemed as much appreciation as I had for it, though he had seen it thousands of times before.

  “You must have been curious about who Mr. Battaglia was bringing out here for the big hunt,” I said to Jansen. “That high roller must mean a lot to you—to your family.”

  “Money’s money, Miss Alex. Didn’t much matter who it was to me.”

  I grabbed onto the side of a boulder to steady myself as I took some baby steps down the side of the mountain. I figured I could play to his emotions.

  “I bet Frank cared,” I said. “I bet Frank wanted to know who was going to get Horace. He and your son have such a connection to that animal.”

  “Watch your footing,” Jansen said. “You got to think like a billy goat when you’re walking down these slopes.”

  “Even if Chidra wasn’t along for your hunt that Saturday, I knew my boss well enough to know that he would have been bragging to you, bragging to Frank, about how he was bringing someone fancy with him when the season opened.”

  “Lordy, that man could brag all right,” Jansen said, stopping to offer me his gnarled, weathered hand as the hill steepened. “Boasted all day about his cases and his career and his fancy friends. You got that right about him.”

  “I won’t give you up, Mr. Jansen,” I said, taking his hand and resting my other one on his shoulder. “Chidra doesn’t have to know, I promise you. It would make me feel a lot better if I could know who he wanted to shoot with. It’s just—well—just kind of personal for me.”

  “I’d help you if I could, young lady.”

  Jansen dropped my hand when I got level with him. He turned his back to me and kept on walking down.

  “I thought I could tell his wife something that would ease her pain a bit,” I said, pressing the family angle. “I was sure he’d have boasted about his hunting companion, but I guess I’m wrong.”

  “Like I told you, Mr. Battaglia wasn’t short on bragging,” Jansen said. “But all he’d tell us was that the man he wanted to bring wouldn’t spook the sheep.”

  “That’s what he said? I wonder why.”

  “Your boss told us he was bringing a ghost. And a ghost wouldn’t spook no sheep.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Did you hear me, Alex?” Prescott asked me, sitting at the dining table in the lodge.

  “Sorry. I spaced out. What did you say?”

  I was trying to concentrate on Prescott’s conversation, but my mind was on ghosts. Deirdre Wright, the development department worker at the Bronx Zoo, had called George Kwan a ghost. Mike had raised the connection between Kwan and the Asian gang that had terrorized Chinatown in the eighties—the Ghost Shadows. Why was Battaglia using that particular word to describe his hunting partner?

  “That must have tortured Battaglia, is what I said,” Prescott went on. “Even though Frank’s death was an accident, he had to blame himself for pulling the guy’s arm when he had a loaded bow in his hands.”

  It was almost one o’clock by the time we finished our descent and got back to the main lodge. We had finished lunch an hour later and were waiting for Chidra Persaud to sit down with us to give us information from the office at the preserve.

  “You knew him better than that,” I said. “Paul didn’t blame himself for anything. Ever.”

  “I guess. Frank shouldn’t have been standing where he was, the Arabian prince shouldn’t have picked up a bow and arrow—”

  “Horace shouldn’t have been so tempting a target. Like that,” I said. “But why did Chidra want to bring us out here? What does that do for her?”

  James Prescott couldn’t quite figure it either. “She brought us to the very spot where Frank—Jansen’s nephew—was killed,” he said, “and she implicated Battaglia in his death.”

  “Long way to come to do that,” I said. “My bet is that she’s trying to take your eye off the ball.”

  “What ball?”

  “Something going on back in New York.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
/>
  Nothing that I would suggest without telling Mike first. I was thinking about ghosts, about why Paul Battaglia wouldn’t have wanted the name of his hunting partner to go public yet. And I was keenly aware that if James Prescott had picked up anything on this trip, he would not have confided the fact of it to me. I did the same.

  Chidra was walking back into the dining room, where we were lingering over coffee.

  “I don’t have everything you need, but perhaps this is a start.”

  She had copied several sheets of paper and given a set to each of us.

  “You wanted names and addresses of guests who’ve stayed at the preserve,” she said. “Here you go.”

  I skimmed the names, but nothing stood out to me.

  “This is the note with Paul Battaglia’s request for a cabin starting November first, for the hunt, and a reservation for an adjacent cabin for a friend he wanted to bring.”

  “But you haven’t listed a name here,” I said.

  “Sorry, but he hadn’t given me one yet.”

  “How often were you in touch with him?”

  “As he needed me, Alex. I had little reason to call him,” she said. “In fact, most of our contact went through Charles Swenson.”

  I took a last drag on my coffee cup. “Did he ever tell you that he thought his life was in danger?”

  Chidra Persaud almost laughed. “Quite the opposite. Paul Battaglia seemed to think he was immortal. Talked about things ten years out, like it was nothing. Like he could control the future for as long as he could see it.”

  I sat back in my chair. She had spent enough time with the man to know that about him. It was part of the syndrome that allowed him to think he’d been elected DA for life.

  “If the two of you are about ready, we should get going,” she said. “I’ve got a fresh crew at the airstrip and if we take off by three—remember, it’s five in New York—you’ll be home in time to sleep in your own beds.”

  “Ready to go,” Prescott said.

  We traveled back to Mission Field the same way we had arrived. As we walked to the steps of the plane, I slowed down to talk to Prescott.

  “You get to sleep in your own bed,” I said. “Your incentive for hurrying home, James. May I just remind you that even murderers up at Dannemora get conjugal visits?”