The Night Crew

'I saw that,' Harper said. 'He must've been humiliated.'

'Yeah.' She pulled the muffs back down, emptied the gun. She hit the cans twice more, and the rest of the shots were bunched around them.

'You ain't going to the Olympics,' Harper said, as she shucked the empty shells out. 'But they'd all hit between the nipples.'

'That's all I need,' she said, reloading. She stopped with a shell still in the palm of her hand and said, 'You said if it wasn't a coincidence, all of this startingyou said you had some ideas about that, too.'

'One thing at a time,' Harper said.

She pushed the last shell home. 'Let's go find this guy.'

Louis found him, running down names on the letterhead press release.

'His name is Steven Judge. He and two or three more of them live at what they call the Full Heart Sanctuary Ranch, and it's not far from where you are,' Louis said. 'It's up in Ventura, just on the other side of the Santa Susanas.'

'Half an hour,' Harper said, when Anna told him. He glanced at his watch: 'We've got time.'

The countryside of Southern California was rarely empty, not this close to L. A. and the coast, but the Full Heart Ranch was on a gravel road up a washed-out dirt canyon, about as isolated a place as could be found. The sign at the entrance to the canyon was neat and businesslike, a metal plaque that said, 'Full Heart Ranch', and below that, in smaller letters, 'Animal Sanctuary'. A hundred feet up the trail was another sign, this one resembling the signs in national forests, yellow burnt-in letters on brown-painted boards: 'Welcome. Please register at the ranch house. Do not leave your car before registeringsome of our animals are sensitive to the scent of humans.'

'Probably got tigers out there,' Harper said. 'And when they say "humans", they mean, "meat".'

'Probably,' Anna said.

The canyon was a tangle of brush, with an occasional glimpse of trails leading through it; they crossed a low ridge on the way up, and saw the ranch house just below them, in a bowl. A half-dozen outbuildings surrounded the main house, and three cars faced the front of it.

'Pretty nice spread,' Harper said.

'The way this kid looked, the way he actedhe might have some money,' Anna said.

'You think he owns the place?'

Anna shrugged: 'He was the boss that night.'

They parked the car, stepped out, and looked around: They could hear an odd goatlike sound, and they both stepped off to the right to look past the house. A tall, fuzzy-headed animal looked at them over the top of a high board fence, pursed its lips, made the noise again.

'A camel?'

'A llama,' Anna said.

A door banged, and a woman in jeans, a Western shirt and cowboy boots came out onto the ranch house porch.

She looked like a ranch woman, in her early forties, with wide shoulders, a round, moon face, deeply tanned with a scattering of freckles. Her sandy hair was pulled back in a ponytail. 'Can I help you?'

'Yeah, hi,' Anna said. 'We were just looking at your llama. Where'd you get him?'

'We. found him,' the woman said, pleasantly. 'He was rather badly abused, or, rather, neglected. The former owner had ideas about breeding llamas. When it didn't work out, he just turned him out and left him in the desert. He would've died, if one of our members hadn't found him.'

'Terrific,' Anna said cheerfully. Harper followed her as she walked up on the porch. 'My name is Anna Batory, and this is my friend Jake Harper. We filmed the raid at the UCLA medical center and Steve mentioned the possibility of doing another piece. Is he around?'

The woman shook her head and said, 'Steven,' and then said, 'I'm sorry you missed him, but he should have told you that he wouldn't be around, He won't be back for another two weeks.'

'Where is he?' Anna asked. 'Can I call him?'

'Sureor, I think so. He's up in Oregon, at the Cut Canyon Ranch. He went up there the day after the raid, to help organize it. And probably run the river a few times.'

'Cut Canyon?'

'Yes, it's a new ranch that some people are putting together up there. They just got a phone. c'mon, I'll get a number. I'm Nancy Daly, by the way, I'm the ranch fore-woman.'

Harper said, 'How do. Like the boots.'

'Genuine vinyl,' the woman said smiling at him.

They followed her inside, where another woman was working at a computer; the other woman turned and smiled briefly, then went back to her work. Daly said, 'Steve has got that square chin and all those teeth. Somehow, it makes him seem a little more organized than he really is.' She was shuffling through the papers on her desk: 'I don't know, I don't seem to have it. God, I've got to do something about this desk.'

'Think it'd be on directory assistance?' Ann asked.

'Should be,' Daly said.

'No problem,' Anna said. She took her cell phone out of her pocket, but the woman shook her head. 'We're too far out. You can use ours. The area code, I don't know, it's probably in the phone book.'

'It's five-oh-three,' Anna said. 'I've got friends up there, they run a pottery.'

She dialed directory assistance, asked for a new listing for Cut Canyon Ranch, got the number, and punched it in.

'Cut Canyon.' Another woman.

'Is Steve Judge there?'

'Yes, somewhere. Can I tell him who's calling?'

'My name's Anna Batory.'

'Hang on. I'll put you on hold. I've got to go find him.'

'Okay,' Anna said.

Harper asked Daly, 'Does Steve. own this place, or what?'

'Oh, no,' Daly said. 'His parents provided some seed money. Steve is active with the group, but he avoids bureaucratic entanglements, so to speak. He's a little.' She looked at the other woman. 'What is he, Laurie?'

Laurie never looked away from the screen. 'Hippie,' she said.

'Ah.'

At that moment, Judge came on the phone: 'Yeah, Steve Judge.'

The voice wasn't the killer'shigher than she remembered, not squeaky, but nasal, rather than full. Anna looked at Harper and shook her head, as she said, 'This is Anna Batory. I stopped by the ranch to see if we might put together another piece on this animal thing.'

'Oh!' Judge said. Then: 'You know, I wasn't too happy about the way the raid thing came out, I think it made me look foolish, with the pig and all.'

'Wellthat happens. The stations cut the tape the way they want. We didn't have anything to do with that,' Anna said.

'Okay. I guess I'm willing to give it another shot,' Judge said. 'We're just finishing things up here, I was going to head back tonight. When do you want to get together?'

'Couple days, next week,' Anna said, now in no rush.

But Judge rambled on, eager to make another movie. 'The, neatest things we've got right now is a vet who's made a specialty out of fixing bird wings,' he said. 'We're gonna start rehabilitating raptors, you know, hawks, eagles. You can't just fix them up and let them go. You have to rehab the wings; people shoot these poor birds.'

She let him go, throwing in a couple of questions about the raid, until she was sure it was really him. When she was sure, she looked at Harper and shook her head.

'Damn it, I thought he was a possibility,' Anna said, as they went down the road from the ranch. The afternoon was sliding into the evening.

'Might still becould be something tricky going on.'

'I suppose,' Anna said. But she yawned and shook her head. The morningwhen she crunched down that highway cut and looked at China Lakeseemed a lifetime back. She yawned and said, 'Let's go see Creek.'

'Fuckin' vinyl cowboy boots,' Harper said. 'You show me a woman who wears vinyl cowboy boots and I'll show you a woman whose.' He trailed off, glanced at Anna, and then concentrated on the road ahead.

'Whose what?' Anna demanded.

'Never mind,' Harper said.

Anna took the phone out of her pocket and tried it; still out of range. 'Wait'll we get over the hill,' Harper suggested. 'Two minutes.'