Gerd Maas surveyed the bloody kill site one last time, noting that the now empty. 45 SIG-Sauer lay in the blood-splattered weeds a few feet away from Paul McNulty's outstretched hand. He was pleased to see that Shoshin Watanabe had already collected all of the cut tape and gauze and placed the materials in one of the backpacks.
As far as Maas could tell, the scene looked perfect.
Walking over to the sprawled body of Butch Chareaux, he placed the empty stainless-steel Ruger revolver in the Cajun poacher's bloody palm, and with gloved hands, wrapped Chareaux's lifeless fingers around the rubber grip and trigger guard of the gunpowder-and-blood-smeared weapon. Then, after tossing the still-warm pistol a few feet away from Chareaux's limp hand, Maas looked up at Shoshin Watanabe with his deadly cold-blue eyes.
"Tell Parker and Bolin to be ready."
Chapter Thirty-Three
Apart from the cries of distant eagles, there was no sound.
And no movement.
Nothing.
"Why don't we hold it right here for a couple of minutes?" Henry Lightstone suggested quietly as he lowered the binoculars and stared out across the glistening turquoise water at the still, quiet, and seemingly unoccupied landscape. Set before a backdrop of snowcapped mountains, low cliffs stretched out across the long, rocky, tree-and- shrub-covered shore.
"Sounds good to me," Refuge Officer Sam Jackson nodded as he throttled the powerful outboard motor down to a rumbling idle.
"What's the name of this place again?" Lightstone asked as he readjusted the binoculars and continued his methodical search.
"Lupus Island, though it's not actually an island. There's a narrow spit of shale-covered sand that connects it to the shore."
To Special Agent Henry Lightstone, it looked like the point of land could easily conceal several hundred drunk, camouflaged, and potentially trigger-happy hunters. But if all of that shooting had been done by legitimate hunters, there should be at least an occasional flash of camouflage clothing. A hat, or a vest, or laughter, or loud voices.
But there wasn't.
The idea of being a sitting duck out on about twenty-four thousand acres of glassy-smooth, subarctic water didn't appeal to Lightstone.
"Still nothing?" Jackson finally asked.
"Nope. Nothing at all." Lightstone shook his head. "What do you say we try that little cover straight ahead, work our way west?"
"Sounds good to me," the orange-suited refuge officer nodded as he throttled the thin-skinned aluminum boat on a new course roughly parallel to the shoreline. When they reached the shallow cove, Sam Jackson turned the small patrol craft perpendicular to shore and then gave it one last nudge with the powerful outboard engine.
"How deep do you figure the water is?" Lightstone asked, setting aside the binoculars and getting ready to jump out and protect the boat from the sharp-edged rocks.
"Well, out here we usually go by the rule of ten," Jackson said as he cut off the engine and brought the prop up out of the water. "About ten feet out from shore, you can figure that you're going to be standing in about ten feet of water that's just about ten degrees Celsius."
"Christ," Lightstone muttered as he held his hand in the ice-cold water for a moment, then quickly brought it back out.
"Personally, if I was you," Sam Jackson advised in his slow Georgia drawl, "I'd stay in the boat until we run up on shore. We can always get the government to spring for a new boat every now and then."
Taking the bearded refuge officer at his word, Lightstone remained in the bow of the boat until the thin, insulated hull scraped loudly against the shale-covered shore. Jackson double-tied the bowline to a pair of tire-sized boulders.
"No one in his right mind ever goes swimming after a loose boat in these waters," Jackson said as he pulled a packset radio out of his backpack and looked over at Lightstone. "Are we ready? "
"I am, but you might want to get out of that Day-Glo suit first."
Sam Jackson looked down at the bright orange Mustang suit that was supposedly guaranteed to keep him alive for at least an extra four or five minutes if he ever had the misfortune to get dunked into the frigid subarctic waters of Skilak Lake.
"You really think we're going to get into some kind of confrontation with these folks?"
Lightstone hesitated for a moment. "Let's put it this way," he finally said. "Given the choice, I'd rather swim halfway across this lake after your boat than try to sneak in on some trigger-happy idiots in a getup like that."
Lightstone waited while Jackson worked himself out of the bright survival suit, then led the way as they climbed to the top of the fifteen-foot cliff. Once there, they slowly worked their way through a nearly impenetrable barrier of waist-high scrub brush, irregular moss-and-lichen-covered outcroppings, and ten-to-fifteen-foot spruce trees.
"Christ, how the hell can anybody hunt in stuff like this?" Lightstone muttered as he noisily pulled himself through a tightly grouped clump of white spruce trees, only to find himself blocked by the sharp, poking branches of a dead and partially dropped cottonwood.
"What they do is look for the bare spots, usually around the big patches of salmonberries," Jackson said. "Saves a lot of wear and tear."
"Like those over there to the right?" Lightstone asked hopefully.
Sam Jackson looked up, squinting against the glare of the low sun. "Yeah, I'd say that's a likely spot."
Two minutes later, the two federal wildlife officers were kneeling down beneath a large clump of berries, examining the still-warm, carcass of the maliciously killed mother Kodiak. One of the first things that Lightstone observed was the radio collar around the bear's thick neck.
"You know this one?"
"Oh, yeah." Sam Jackson nodded sadly. "We named her Molly. Found her as an orphaned cub over on Kodiak Island. Poacher killed her mom. Decided to transfer her over to the Killey Valley as an experiment. It seemed to be working out just fine, but I guess some goddamn bastard just couldn't wait to get his bear."
"Out of season?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah, I guess that, too," Jackson confirmed. "Not that it really matters in a situation like this."
"Why's that?" Lightstone asked, distracted by the curious details that his homicide-trained eyes were starting to pick up.
"Number-one rule in bear hunting out here. Can't hunt a female with cubs, no matter what. Christ, look at those teats. It should have been obvious to anybody with eyes that she was still nursing. She had two, and they're probably not far away. They'd stay fairly close to their mother,"
Sam Jackson muttered in frustration as he stood up and looked around. "Not that any of that will matter much, even if we find the guy. He'll just claim it was self-defense, like they always do."
As Jackson started to poke around in the nearby brush, Henry Lightstone pulled a sharp folding knife out of his pocket and began to cut and probe the massive left front shoulder of the huge bear.
"The cubs were late-born," Jackson said half to himself as he slowly extended his search out into the surrounding brush and trees. "Probably running around here, scared half out of- Oh, for Christ's sake!"
"What's the matter?" Lightstone brought his head up from where he had been examining the bear's massive front paws, instinctively reaching for his pistol as he looked around quickly.
"Well, at least the bastard didn't leave the poor damn thing out here to starve," Sam Jackson muttered as he reached into the brush with gloved hands. Using the length of berry juice-soaked rope that was still looped around its neck, he pulled out the carcass of the young male cub.
"Must be a hell of a sport, tying up baby bears and taking potshots at them." Lightstone shook his head, checking the surrounding hillside one more time before he resecured the. 357 in his hip holster and went back to examining the huge mother Kodiak.