And she wouldn’t have, if not for a heart inked inside a souvenir matchbox.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
A Soft Spot to Fall
The last time Sean had crossed the bridge over the Wise River, he’d had to go four-wheel to negotiate the snowed-in road that wound up Swallowtail Creek. The snow was a month gone, but the rig fishtailed in the mud, and finally he set the brake and got out to lock the hubs.
It was while squatting by the left front tire that he noticed the tread marks in the mud. He had assumed the tread pattern he’d been following belonged to Blake’s Land Rover, for even from behind the wheel he had noted that they were similar to the pattern of tread he’d seen on his first visit to the yurt months earlier. He had not automatically made the leap in judgment to conclude that the tread looked similar to the tire tracks that he and Martha had seen at the trailhead only two days earlier. Those tread marks had been rained on and were largely washed out.
Now, though, his eyes were closer to the ground, and he noticed that the Rover’s tread partly obscured narrower tire marks left by a trailer, and that the tires were distinctly mismatched. This confirmed that it had been Blake’s rig at the trailhead.
Sean should have stopped then. He should have turned around and driven back into cell range to consult with Martha. He told himself to stop, even told Choti to stop him. But he had never listened to his own advice. Knocking on the spider-cracked dash, an old habit for luck, he drove to the locked gate and left Choti in the Land Cruiser with the window cracked. He began to climb through the trees. The yurt came into view. He saw the Rover parked in front, where it had been on his first visit. No horse trailer, though. It must be around back.
No smoke pigtailed from the chimney. The aspen tree that had been skeletal on Sean’s first visit was newly minted with leaves. The only sound was a faint flapping from the tattered prayer flags fluttering from the branches.
He knocked, feeling the emptiness within that he had felt when standing before the herder’s tent.
“Hello—it’s Sean Stranahan. Anyone there?” Echoing silence. He turned the knob. Inside, the tidy ship that had been the Blakes’ home was not in evidence. The vestiges of a breakfast congealed on a plate on the couch, a half-full mug of coffee set on the arm, begging to be tipped over. Seam dipped an index finger. The coffee was as cool as the morning. The acrid sage odor of the lynx permeated the room. Books, magazines, clothes, whatnot, all strewn across the floor.
Sean lifted his eyes to the shelf that ran the perimeter of the room. The skulls were there, including the tigress’s skull in the plexiglass cube. Also a dead soldier that had been a bottle of rum.
One hard day’s night? Or a life falling apart?
Sean riffled through papers stacked on the end of the table that served as an office. Business dealings, records of sales of Scarlett’s wildlife videos, nothing stood out. The laptop was shut, asleep but not turned off. Sean touched the space bar. He needed either the right fingerprint or the password. He keyed in lion. The little round icons shook their heads. He played around with words—Scarlett, Tatiana, Zahara—as he tried to recall his time with the man. What was it that the guides in India had called him?
“Keeten”? Something like that. “Keesan”? Closer, Sean thought. “Kessan.” The icons vibrated. No cigar. “Kesin”? He was in.
In, but where to go? Documents? Photos? That would take time he didn’t have. He found the email and dragged it up. The most recent messages were innocent enough—correspondence with wildlife organizations, a request for a radio interview, nothing that caused Sean to pause. He scrolled down to see if there were any emails during the window of Garrett’s disappearance. He told himself it was too much to hope that he’d find a correspondence with Garrett, and he was right. Nothing popped up. Sean took a long shot and opened deleted messages.
And there it was. Blake had deleted an email correspondence with bgarrett45/[email protected] on the night that Garrett had gone to his wife’s house to pick up his best hound. Blake had moved the message to trash, but had failed to empty his trash folder. He had written:
Zahara called 8 p.m. Receiver places her in vicinity where Simba killed the prostitute. She has come into estrus and is looking for love in all the old places. If you can get a nose on her, we still might be able to end this before the next one.
Garrett had responded at 10:07 p.m.
Ninety minutes out. U need a horse?
The response came a minute later.
Already saddled. See you at the turn-around.
The next one, Sean thought, must mean the next victim. Going back to the in-box, Sean found that the two men had checked in with each other irregularly, dating back to the previous November. Mostly it was a where-to-meet-up-and-when kind of back-and-forth. The gist Sean took away was that the two men had teamed up to search for the cats, starting shortly after Clarice Kincaid’s death, with Garrett doing most of the hunting and Blake checking in with advice and asking for progress reports.
Sean had left the door open so that he could hear anyone approaching. He felt like he was pressing his luck, and closed the screen of the computer. Feeling hyperalert, as if he were walking on a cushion of air, he went around to the side where the galvanized tub squatted on the deck. He stepped onto an overturned crate that served as a stool. A skim of ice rimmed the tank. Peering at the surface, he saw his face in the reflection of the water, his visage as shaky as his nerve.
He straightened up. Where to now? Behind the yurt was a large barnlike structure he’d noticed on his prior visit. Tire tracks skirted the yurt, passed by the horse trailer, and headed toward the sliding double doors. He’d check it out, but the enclosure was closer. As Sean approached it, he half expected to hear Tatiana greet him with a snarl.
The chain-link door was closed, but the padlock’s shackle hung loose. No reason to go inside, he told himself. None at all. And perhaps one good reason not to.
“It’s just me,” he said aloud, as he stepped into the enclosure. “Anybody else here?” His voice had a quaver.
He began to walk toward a copse of trees where he’d seen Tatiana disappear when carrying away the rabbit. Beyond the pine saplings, and striped by their tightly spaced trunks, something white was lying on the ground. A patch of old snow? But the only snow he’d seen had receded to the peaks. Here and there were great boulders of white quartz colored with rose lichen, and as Sean stepped past one of the rocks, he felt a puff of wind and felt a prickling sensation that made his right thigh momentarily tighten. Then, in front of him, an apparition rose from the ground. The apparition was white, and as it was covered with pink blotches, he at first took it for one of the quartz rocks. But how could it be a rock if it moved? It looked like the shrouded figure of a woman. She was swaying in a breeze. Sean found that his mind was traveling in circles and then the circles began to slow and then to slow some more. The apparition was coming forward. At its side, he saw a blue-white creature the size of a dog.
“It’s you,” Sean said.
He felt a second puff of wind and a sharp sting like a bee. He turned his head. Two small pink flowers had blossomed on the back of his right thigh. Again he saw the apparition, but this time it was behind him and had taken the form of a man. The man was animal-like, with one long arm that looked to be made of leather. Points of light glinted from the hand. A mane of dirty hair fell across the face. Sean’s nostrils drank in a heavy odor. He turned back toward the first figure and stumbled, almost falling. It was as if an oxen’s yoke had settled onto his shoulders. Gasping for breath, he put his hands on his knees.
“Who are you?” he said. “What are you?”
Sean’s mouth was dry and it was hard to form words. He craned his neck to see what had become of the flowers. They were still there. He heard a scream then. It seemed to reverberate off the rock walls of the canyon. Far away. Some other world.
“Do you hear her,
Sean?”
Was someone speaking? Or was it in his head? Then he heard the scream again. But fainter, like echoes fading.
And once more came the voice. “That is your Bangtail Ghost. But you will see soon enough that ‘ghost’ is wishful thinking.”
Sean stumbled forward. One step. His knees wobbled. Another.
“Go. Run if you can, but take my advice and find a soft spot to fall.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Language of Love
By the time Martha reached the Wise River, the blackbirds that had strung the telephone wires had flown, though she was lost in thought and wouldn’t have seen them had there been thousands.
A quick phone call had established that Buster Garrett and Scarlett Blake had indeed stayed at the same hotel during the symposium, and that Scarlett’s room was in fact 407. That plus the matchbox was strong if circumstantial evidence that the relationship between the two went beyond the professional. Then, too, she recalled Sean’s description of the scars on Scarlett’s body and her cryptic warning to be aware of all predators, which he’d taken to include her brother.
Well, it certainly could be possible. A possessive man who was blind to betrayal, perhaps, until he wasn’t; a proud woman who had taken too much abuse at his hands; and a flawed rogue who took her heart and hid it in the buttstock of a rifle. A love triangle. A story as old as the mountains in the window. A story, and this she knew well, that could precipitate into violence.
“Sean,” she said aloud, as she followed the directions he’d given her in his message. “You don’t know the trouble you’ve driven into.”
* * *
• • •
SEAN STRANAHAN HEARD the scream as if from a great depth. He seemed to have traveled to the bottom of a lake that glimmered with lights, like the phosphorescence of a cresting wave. He tried to move toward the lights, and then pulled back into himself, where all was dark. Again he heard the scream. This time he tried to bend to it, but was restrained. He couldn’t lift his arms and something rough was pulled over his face. It itched and made him feel like sneezing. Then the roughness was gone and the phosphorescence danced closer as his pupils drew to points in the glare.
Vaguely, he remembered being half carried, half dragged from the enclosure, remembered his head banging off stones and downed timber.
Where am I?
He opened his eyes and found that he was sitting with his back to a tree. He saw movement. Then the same apparition he’d seen before loomed over him. Not the woman’s image, but that of the man. The image was shot with sun, hazy, and then, in a heartbeat of resolve, he saw it clearly.
“I know you.” Sean’s voice was thick. “Your sister says you tried to grow whiskers.”
He became aware of a burning sensation and looked down at his legs. On the side of his right thigh toward the back were the two pink flowers. He could see now that they were tufts of fiber on thin metal shafts. He tried to grasp the nearest and found that his hands were bound behind the trunk. He bent forward from his waist, trying to reach the tufts with his teeth.
Blake’s voice cut through the fog. “You are quite flexible, Sean. But here, let me help you. The dart is barbed. It takes a hard yank.” He reached with his right hand, which was thick with hair, and Sean felt a sharp, jabbing pain.
“You shot me,” Sean said.
Drick Blake moved a few feet away and squatted down. He rolled the dart in his fingers. “The dosage is the same as I use for an adult mountain lion. A combination of zolazepam, ketamine, and xylazine. You needed two. The first didn’t take the proper effect, and then I had to sedate you for the drive up here. It will be undetectable in your bloodstream in a few days, should you have a heartbeat.”
“Where are we?”
“At the beginning, Sean, if you must know. Where the circle started.”
“You mean where you collared Zahara.”
“Yes, near enough. Simba too, not far from there. How did you know?”
“It’s in the paper trail. Buster kept records. Don’t do anything stupid. I’m not the only person who knows what you’ve done. The sheriff knows, and she knows where I am.”
Blake smiled. “You and I, we are men who follow our gut. We do not pause to inform others.” But the smile seemed forced.
Just keep him talking, Sean thought. This is someone who likes to talk, who wants to be noticed, to be flattered.
“Here, I have something to show you.” Blake began to paw through a backpack. He pulled out a takedown rifle, then a recording device with a small bullhorn.
“Is that what you shot me with?”
“No, I shot you with a gun that uses a CO2 cartridge. That is why you didn’t hear the shots. This rifle makes more of a bang. It shoots the same darts, but at a much higher velocity.”
He began to thread the recording device onto the bullhorn. “I taped the mating call of a female cougar a few years ago,” he said. “The recording can be broadcast at a hundred and forty decibels. That is louder than the loudest scream registered by a human woman. Some biologists believe that only the fairer of the sexes is capable of caterwauling. That is only because they haven’t heard it. I assure you tomcats can and will scream, if not as often as females, and in a lower register. Scarlett can imitate the caterwauling using only her vocal cords. Uncanny. Of course her rendition is not so loud. My opinion is that regardless of Zahara’s interpretation of the call, she will respond. She will come to the call of a male cat, but she is just as likely to investigate the call of another female, thinking that if that cat is coaxing a male, she might steal him away. Imagine her courage, as damaged as she has been by man and nature.”
Sean heard the first distant chimes of Blake’s intentions toward him.
“How has she been damaged?”
“I have not physically seen her for some years. Her track shows that her right foot is turned inward. I have my suspicions as to the cause, but we shall see shortly enough.”
“What happens to me? What will she do when she finds me instead of a mate?”
“That we find out.”
“Is this what happened to Buster? You tied him to a tree and the cat killed him? I know you had a hand in it.”
“If you know, why did you come alone? No, you came because you thought you knew something, not because you did. Soon you will be departed from this Earth. The least you can do is leave it with dignity. Buster did, almost until his last breath.”
“The sheriff is on her way.”
“I’ll make you a promise, Sean. If you quit asking so many questions, I’ll tell you some of what you don’t know. Promise?”
“Yes.” Anything to keep breathing, Sean thought.
* * *
• • •
“FIRST, I CAN ASSURE YOU that Zahara had nothing to do with Buster’s death. It was his own guilt that sealed his fate. He and I go back a long way. Very early on, I recognized the ruthless qualities that made him valuable. Let no bleeding heart tell you otherwise—but a good houndsman is more important to a predator study than the biologist drawing blood. Without the houndsman, there is no lion to collar, no DNA to test. Buster was like other houndsmen I knew, rough and ready, not really giving a damn about how he came across to the world. But where others drew lines, he saw opportunities and stepped over those lines. I had use for such a man. I, too, was a crosser of lines, although for different reasons.
“You asked me if I had ever considered returning Tatiana to the wild. I did, though briefly, as she has a genetic condition that compromises her vision, and would have made her ability to secure prey doubtful. You saw how long it took her to spot the hare. But the concept of rewilding has long fascinated me. I have a far-seeing eye and my travels studying the big cats of the world have revealed one indisputable fact, that they are vanishing from the Earth at a startling rate. I foresee a time when they disappea
r completely from former habitats, and that when those habitats are restored—if they are restored—there will be a need for rewilding captive-bred predators into their former ranges.
“Specifically, what will be required is a blueprint for introduction. You can’t just open a cage door. That would be sending an animal to certain death. The rewilding must be gradual. You introduce the animal to its new environment, keep it safe from other predators, and supplement its diet as it learns to hunt. You have to wean it from its dependence upon you, and yet at the same time encourage its instinct. You must refrain from interference. A tall order. If the animal imprints upon you, or begins to view humans solely as providers of food, the line you walk becomes fine indeed. It is, in fact, possible that the cat would come to see humans as more than providers of protein. It would begin to see them as composed of it. That has happened. A tigress in the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, in India, that was raised from a cub and rewilded ate two dozen people before she was killed.”
Blake shrugged. “Personally, I am willing to sacrifice lives to the experiment. After all, man has been persecuting the cats for thousands of years. Why should he not suffer for his acts, when the cats suffer so greatly for theirs?”
“Is that what you have done,” Sean said, “rewilded a cat that turned man-eater? Created a monster?”
“That word, ‘monster.’ I refuse to acknowledge it. Only humans are capable of monstrous deeds. A man-eater is simply an animal that has been forced to prey upon the one species that can feed its hunger. It has not broken any law of nature, only of man. Did Buster tell you that he sold Zahara to me, when she was only a cub? Or that she had a brother we named Simba, and that I rewilded both of them, starting when they were three? No? Buster told me that you knew. But then I think he was trying to postpone the inevitable. Those who are staring at death will say anything. It is what you are doing now. Keeping me engaged, wondering where the key to your escape may be found. I will give you a clue.” He touched his breastbone. “It is under my shirt, safe and sound.” Then he laughed. “There is no key. You are tied by a rope with Boy Scout knots. I have a leg iron and shackle, but it is being deployed elsewhere.”
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