Cold Quarry (13 page)

“Yeah, and how is that? You just going to wave a magic wand and the bad guys will surrender and tell all to you?”

He said nothing.

“You’re planning to arrest some people soon then?”

Another smile. Expensive dental work. His teeth were large and white and almost perfectly straight. “We just need you to relax for a couple of days, okay, Frank? Maybe head on back to Charlottesville. You can read about it in the paper. Watch it all on the eleven o’clock news.”

“What about Betty and Jason Carew?”

“We’ll get around to that eventually. One part of the puzzle.”

“So you just want me to trust you,” I said.

“You pay your taxes, don’t you? ‘To protect and to serve.’ You know the drill.”

“What if you’ve got some of it wrong though?”

“I don’t think we have any of it wrong, Frank. And if we do, well, we’ll be the ones to suffer the consequences, won’t we?”

You and everybody else associated with this whole mess, I thought.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Good.” He pulled out a business card and passed it across to me. “But don’t take too long. My personal cell phone’s written on the back. I’d like to hear from you before the day is over.”

“I work long days.”

He shrugged. “I’m open twenty-four seven myself.” He bent down and pulled on the handle, shouldering open the door as he did.

I slid across the seat and followed him back out onto the pavement.

“Oh, and one other thing,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“This is very important, Frank.”

“What’s very important?”

“Be careful who you trust,” he said.

14

By midafternoon the sky had cleared to a cold blue. The dry air smelled of moss and pine. The green Jeep Cherokee with the brown-and-yellow West Virginia Department of Natural Resources Conservation Officer emblem on the door came up the dirt road into the Carews’ acreage and pulled in to park between my truck and Damon Farraday’s Scout.

Gwen Hallston opened the door and climbed out.

“So you guys ready to do a little more hunting today?” She nodded toward the Scout, the backseat of which was now occupied by the giant hood containing Farraday’s red-tailed hawk, Tawny.

“That’s right,” I said. “But like I said on the phone, I thought you might want to help us keep an eye out for Elo while we’re at it, not to mention make another walk-through of the area around the crime scene, see what we might turn up.”

“The sheriff’s people and others have already been through here looking, haven’t they?”

“Yeah, but they’re not necessarily outdoorsmen. We might notice something they missed.” I decided not to mention how Toronto’s and my earlier visit had been cut short.

“Where’s your other friend?”

“Toronto? He’ll probably join us a little later.”

“I assume your paperwork’s up-to-date, West Virginia out-of-state hunting license and all that?”

“Yup. In the truck if you’d like to see it.”

“I would, in fact, if you don’t mind.”

She accompanied me to the other side of the Ford, then examined the paperwork I produced from my glove compartment before pronouncing it okay. Farraday was busy preparing Tawny for hunting. We went over to watch him make his final preparations with the bird.

“Getting back to Elo, did you know he’d been sick a couple of weeks ago?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” she said. “Chester called me when it happened.”

“Chester brought him down to see a local veterinarian, Dr. Winston.”

“Greg Winston. Yeah, right. He’s a good man.”

“Apparently Winston told him Elo might’ve come in contact with some kind of hazardous materials or something.”

“I don’t know if anything’s been determined for sure on that.”

“You heard of any other cases of that happening with wildlife here in the area?”

“Nope. Not that I know of. But maybe we should keep an eye out for things with Tawny, just in case.”

“Oh, I’ll keep a close eye on her, you can bet on that,” Farraday said. He’d been listening in on our conversation while he was taking Tawny from her hood. He slammed shut the back door of the Scout with his free hand and walked over with the big bird on his glove. Her eyes were keen and she was already beginning to scan the terrain, looking for quarry.

I turned back to the officer. “Let me ask you something else. What do you know about a group around this area calling themselves the Stonewall Rangers Brigade?”

Her face darkened. “What, those idiots? What’ve they got to do with any of this?”

I gave her the highlights of my encounter with the masked man in the woods, what Toronto and I had been able to find out so far, and my conversations with the sheriff’s department and the ATF agent.

She listened, but said little.

“No one’s spoken to you about Chester’s death?”

“No. Not directly. I mean, I gave the deputies what I knew about the hunters and wildlife in the area. That was about it.”

“Anybody from the ATF or FBI contact you?”

“Look, Pavlicek. You know I’m not supposed to talk about stuff like that. You used to be a cop too, right? I know Chester was a good friend of yours and all and you had this little run-in with a guy in the woods, but maybe you ought to just back off and let the sheriff’s department, the FBI, or whoever else is involved do their job.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Don’t you think they’re as interested as you are in finding out who killed Chester?”

I said nothing.

“Of more immediate interest to me, right now, is what’s going to happen to those two remaining birds of his. Do you know if Chester ever stipulated in writing where he wanted his birds to go if something happened to him?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Betty, although I’m not sure now would be a good time. The hawks are kind of an important link to Chester, I think, especially for the boy.”

“I understand that, but if anything happens to them while I’m—”

“Listen, Jake Toronto and I are staying there for now and the birds are being well cared for. Maybe you could just cut them some slack for a while? No one’s taking them out to hunt or anything where they might get injured.”

She looked at me for a moment. “All right,” she said. “I’ll give it a few more days.”

“Thanks. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it.”

“But you should let Mrs. Carew know she’s going to have to come to a decision on the birds, barring anything found in writing from the permitee, Mr. Carew. Since her son is still a minor, and unless Mrs. Carew is interested in acquiring her falconry licensure. I’m afraid we may have to intervene and take temporary possession of the birds in order to seek a permanent home for them.”

“Sure.”

We still had about three more hours of daylight, but the bright afternoon sun was already beginning to angle down toward the horizon.

“Well, aren’t we going hunting?” she asked.

For the next two and a half hours the conservation officer trooped along with us while Tawny swooped from tree to tree and we circled deep into Carew’s woods. I carried Chester’s spare telemetry unit, holding the yagi high in the hope I might get lucky and catch some sort of signal from Elo. But after five days I knew it was a real long shot.

After an hour or so, Farraday said he’d run out of tidbits for his bird so the agent and I surveyed a part of the acreage I hadn’t been on before while he and the hawk went back to his truck to retrieve his spare bag. Upon his return, we went back to the hunt.

Farraday’s big redtail caught nothing, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. A squirrel tumbled from the treetops, barely escaping her talons before scrambling to safety inside a hollow tree. She also put a rabbit to cover in a dugout den beneath a stand of fallen logs and made point to it. Try as we might, however, neither Farraday nor I was able to flush the bunny to her again.

Along the way, we all kept a lookout for any signs of hazardous materials or any agitation or other problem among the wildlife in the area, or in Tawny for that matter. There was no evidence of nasty stuff, Tawny looked healthy and keen, and as for the wildlife we saw, including a few deer, all appeared to be normal. There didn’t seem to be a large number of small game present, but that was typical with a hawk in the woods—most potential prey would’ve bugged for cover at the first sensing of the raptor.

We were unable to serve anything else to Tawny until, finally, as we were heading back toward the trucks, she swooped after a field mouse only to check to a flight of doves taking the air from the branches of a jack pine about a hundred yards in front of us. I was about twenty yards ahead of the others with my beating stick and had the best view.

The chase didn’t last long though. Killing smaller, quicker birds was not totally impossible, but rare for the big buteo, and they soon outflew her. All, that is, except for one that seemed to sky up irregularly, twirling and zigzagging as if it were injured. Tawny had a bead on the dawdler, but the bird seemed to right itself and was soon making steam after the others. The redtail, sensing this, broke off to alight in the branches of the pine from which her erstwhile quarry had just departed, maybe in hopes of pouncing on any other hidden stragglers.

“You see that?” I asked.

“What, she try to hit on those doves?” Farraday was making his way toward me. Hallston hung back checking out a dried-up streambed for any evidence of chemicals.

“Yeah.”

“Should’ve stayed on the mouse, she might’ve at least caught her dinner.”

“Can’t blame her, can you, when there’s bigger meat in the air?”

“Nah, I guess not.”

“But one of that flight was flying funny, kind of dopey-like, until it righted itself and finally got under wing.”

“Huh. Maybe it was injured.”

“Maybe. Funny thing was, it looked a little different from the others too. I couldn’t make out the markings but the straggler didn’t have quite the same shape as the others.”

He shrugged.

“What happened?” Officer Hallston caught up with us.

“Just thought I saw a strange bird—part of a flight of doves she flushed out of that pine where she’s perched now. Tawny took off after it, but she broke off.”

“Really. Probably nothing, but let’s have a look.”

When we made it to the tree and took a look around, it did seem like nothing. There were no other birds in evidence, living or otherwise.

“What did you say you saw again?” the conservation agent asked.

I described it again, this time in more detail.

“Probably just a bird with an injured wing,” offered Farraday.

“Probably,” she said. “But I’ll tell you what—since we’ve got precious little else to show for our little outing so far, I think I’ll bag a few samples of droppings from down here in these pine needles.” She produced a few clear plastic bags and some latex gloves from inside her coat pocket and proceeded to scoop several handfuls.

“Great hunt,” Farraday said. “Now we’re out here skimming up bird shit.”

“Could be worse,” I said. “Nobody’s pointing a gun at me this time, or shooting at us the way they did Chester.”

“Not exactly a clean crime scene, eh, Detective?” Farraday said.

“You know I’ve thought of something else,” Hallston said. “What if someone were illegally storing chemicals or other materials out here without Chester’s knowledge?”

“Possible, I suppose,” I said. “You have anybody in mind?”

“No, but I could contact the EPA and see if they had any ideas.”

“Not a bad thought. Might as well cover all the bases.

Jake’s supposed to be talking to the vet too. Let’s see if anything comes of that.”

The sun had dropped below the trees and was dropping fast toward the horizon. We had a half hour, maybe less, before dusk.

Approaching the trucks in the gathering shadows, we saw that Toronto had finally decided to join us. Chester’s old Suburban was parked behind the conservation officer’s Jeep and my pickup. He had to have been there awhile since I hadn’t heard the sound of his engine.

Farraday and the conservation agent went to settle the redtail in the back of the Scout.

“What happened to you?” I asked Toronto.

“Got a little waylaid,” was all he said.

“You talk to the vet?”

He shook his head. “Sat in his waiting room for two hours. Emergency surgery—somebody’s dog got run over by a truck. Nurse said to try back later.”

“You ask if they’d gotten in any test results for Elo?”

“She said she didn’t think so. In any event, she said we had to talk to the vet about it.”

“Anything else?”

“I got a line on that phone number your masked bandit called yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

“Had a memorable conversation with another Stonewaller.”

“Who is it?”

He glanced at Farraday and Hallston. “I’ll tell you about it when we’re alone.”

We went over to the Scout. Hallston said she had to get going so she and I broke away and I walked her over to her Jeep.

“Thanks for coming,” I told her. “I thought we might stumble onto something more, but not for the moment, I guess.”

“It was worth a shot,” she said. “If there’s some foreign substance up here making birds sick, I’m as interested as you are in finding out what’s causing it. I’ll let you know if anything turns up on these samples.” She opened her rear hatch and stuffed her pack in next to the rest of her equipment, then slammed the door shut.

“I appreciate it. And thanks for holding off a bit on Chester’s other two birds.”

“You’re welcome.” As she came around the side of her vehicle, her gaze drifted back toward Toronto, who was holding something for Farraday.

“Chester’s told me a few stories about your friend over there.”

“There are a few to tell.”

“I guess he’s a bit more of a … colorful personality.”

“Right. I’m the one who specializes in drab.”

“Then again, he was Chester’s sponsor and all.”

“That must be it,” I said.

She laughed and climbed into the Jeep. She started the engine, turned the vehicle around in the grass, and waved as she headed off down the dirt road.