“I told the other officers. Detectives. Whatever. We were…scouting.”
“Just a bunch of Boy Scouts on a camp-out?”
“No, uh, we’re green.”
“I guess!”
“We’re for animal rights.”
“So.”
“You must know what goes on at that ranch.”
“We’re just ignorant city police. You tell me.”
“It’s a head-hunting place.” Mr. Limp Noodle was turning into Mr. Barbed Wire before her eyes. “They collect de-accessioned once-wild animals, like excess zoo stock, illegal exotic pets that have been confiscated from all over, anything that used to be wild and free and has a beautiful coat of fur or a handsome set of horns.”
Molina nodded to show comprehension. He would never tell from her expression that she was also nodding agreement with his indignation.
“These animals are not wild in any sense of the word. They’ve become dependent on humans. They’re domesticated, fed, watered like sheep or cattle. And then they bring in these wealthy weekend ‘hunters’ who don’t have time to go to authorized hunting areas, these weekday lawyers and doctors who want heads for their office walls, and let them take potshots with bows and arrows and rifles and bullets at the animals until they kill them. It may take a while. These ‘professional men’ are lousy shots, and they don’t want to mar the heads and shoulders before they’re stuffed.”
“I get the picture. So, if Van Burkleo was this…pimp for canned hunters”—Sprague’s pale eyes glittered at the word she’d armed him with—“why couldn’t your dedicated group have turned a leopard loose, thrown Van Burkleo on the antelope horn, and clawed him somehow, leaving a dead body with no suspect but a dumb animal, with which the community outrage is usually satisfied if it’s put down for the sin of touching a human. Case closed. The leopard was doomed anyway.”
Sprague practically leaped up from his chair at her throat.
“That’s just it. We subdue, brutalize, imprison, abuse these wonderful beasts that nature has given us, and let one—one—raise a paw in protection or protest or plain animal instinct, and we kill the animal. We are the animals that deserve killing!”
“Exactly,” Molina said coolly. “Which of your compatriots was the mastermind?”
“None! We didn’t do it. We protest peacefully. We disrupt the hunt.”
“You risk getting yourself skewered with an arrow or a bullet. Killed yourselves.”
He took a deep breath. “If so, it shows what kind of ‘recreation’ this sort of hunting is.”
“Then you don’t object to sanctioned hunting on designated preserves in season?”
Another deep breath. “Those people observe the law, and at least give the prey a fighting chance. But I still wonder why they have to kill something when it’s no longer necessary to survive.”
“I hunt killers myself,” Molina said suddenly, quietly, leaning closer. “There’s nothing worse than someone who violates another creature’s right to live. But I’ve never shot my firearm in tracking a killer. I let the laws levy justice. Did your group decide to levy justice for the law this time, in this case, for this man?”
“No! We protest. That’s what we do.”
“Who was to watch your protest, way out there? Those ‘security forces’ could have shot you all and buried your bodies hipbone-deep in sand for decades, eternity, and no one would have ever known. Just as no one would have ever known your group was out there to kill Van Burkleo if you hadn’t been spotted.”
“Who spotted us?” He was suddenly belligerent. “Not the security guys. They were looking for vehicles, and we hiked in. We’re good at subterfuge; have to be to spring ‘surprises’ on the killers. Who was it? That guy who claimed to be on his own out there?”
“Guy?”
“He dove into the same wash with us to avoid being spotted by a patrol. Somebody else must have mentioned him. You want a suspicious character, he was it.”
“I haven’t talked to the other suspects yet,” Molina said, “and I’m not interested in any lone wolf your imagination dreams up. I bet they don’t mention any such person when I get to them.”
“They will! He wasn’t one of us. We have no reason to protect him.”
“Glad to hear it. So tell me about this guy.”
“Well, he dives right on top of us. Broad daylight. Doesn’t want to be seen, all right, but he’s wearing black from head to tail. Foot, rather.”
“Black?”
“Yeah. Midday on the desert. Says there’s always a shadow so it’s a good cover. Black. He doesn’t know at first what we’re doing out there, but he figures it out real fast. Acted like he was sympathetic to the cause, but Alyce wasn’t buying any of it. We didn’t argue too much with him; any uproar would draw the patrols, but we never bought his lame story for being out there. And he got mad at us. Said we were fools and risking our lives. That the security forces would have us for barbecue. Well, they didn’t catch us. Your people did.”
“City slickers,” Molina said, pleased.
“That’s what this guy was. A city slicker. He had a lot of nerve to be out there with us.”
Molina was struck by the last sentence. A city slicker with a lot of nerve. All in black.
“What did he look like?” she asked blandly.
Sprague rolled his eyes as if the gesture would jump-start his memory. “Tall guy. I think. Lean as a whipsnake. Dark hair. Eyes…not sure. Thirty-four or -five maybe. Maybe younger. Acted…seasoned. We were kind of dazzled when he was there, and when he took off, we wondered what kind of line he was handing us.”
Molina leaned her head on her hand. Turned off the tape recorder. “Can you just sit here for a minute?’
Sprague looked startled to death at her question. What the heck else could he do until someone told him he could leave or bailed him out?
She left the room, peeked in on the detectives. “Hang on,” she told them. Then she did a straight-line dive back to her office and a certain manila folder in her bottom file drawer.
In four minutes she was back, sitting across from Evan Sprague and flipping open the folder.
“Look anything like this?” she wondered. Idly.
Sprague frowned at the single sheet of paper inside the open folder. “Bad hair. Worse jewelry.”
“Can’t argue with you.”
“I guess it could be him. Yeah. The face structure is the same, but the effect is…way different.”
“Can I call that a strong maybe?”
“Maybe.” He frowned at Janice Flanders’s sketch of Vince from Secrets. “Like the same person inside a way different skin, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes,” Molina said, spinning the sketch to face her. “I do.”
Snakes shed their skins all the time…. And at last one of them had done it on the scene of a crime in her jurisdiction.
Chapter 22
Likely Suspects
Max was waiting in Temple’s living room when she schlepped Midnight Louie up from the car in his carrier.
“Just in time,” she announced, not a bit startled to find Max arranged like an art deco print (Big Black Panther on Big White Sofa in a Big White Hollywood Set from the ’30s) in her locked condo. “Let the revels begin! Louie and I have triumphed in the courts of justice.”
Max sat up to watch Temple liberate the cat from his grille-front carrier. “I thought Louie the Wonder Cat was such a good traveler that he didn’t need a carrier.”
“He doesn’t. But courts of law require animals to be ‘contained,’ unlike even the worst human criminal, even just to show up to collect a judgment. It makes me boil. Did you know that animals are legal nonentities? Mere property! Like they didn’t have feelings, and we humans didn’t have feelings for them. Would you believe this magnificent cat has a courtroom value of thirty-two dollars?”