Claws (15 page)

Twenty-Eight

Stan Ely was on the phone trying to talk an aging Hollywood actress into donating money when a young woman with boyish hair and body appeared in his office doorway. Stan motioned for her to go away, but Nancy Punter didn’t budge. “You will? Great,“ Stan said. “The baby ligers thank you and I – Huh? Yeah. I did. You were great.” When Stan signed off, he told Nancy who he had been talking to and said, “She’s still making movies? Really?”

Nancy ignored him and waved a sheaf of papers. “The judge is ruling tomorrow. Want to know what she’ll say?”

Nancy Punter had a small trust fund and an older sister who worked at the courthouse. Both things made her valuable to Stan and ARK. She gave the papers to Stan and continued talking until he shushed her so he could read.

A few minutes later, Stan said, “Holy shit!”

“You can thank me with an ounce of your stash.”

“Half ounce. And get everybody in gear. Tell them I wanna roll out of here tonight. We’re going to Idaho.”

When the searchers returned to the campground, they were met by microphones and bright television lights. Jackson halted everyone out of sight. He watched the interview spectacle unfold, and moments later, he sent the search team back to town after telling them not to mention the backpack. Jackson had examined the bag but found nothing inside it. In the woods they had marked the site where it was found so the police could return in daylight.

Jackson remained behind the corner of an RV while Rene Stutz delivered a tearful plea for the safe return of her son. Neither Rene nor Rodney did or said anything other than what Jackson would expect from grief-stricken parents, and yet something about the interview struck him as wrong. A policeman learns to read people. It’s how he knows the teenager pulled over on the highway isn’t just nervous about getting a ticket or that the wife-beater is about to escalate the violence or that the gun-toting robber is armed for show and not for shooting.

Once the TV interview finished, the media people packed up, and Rodney and Rene returned to their trailer. Jackson snuck to the door unnoticed. Both parents identified the Batman backpack as Eric’s, but neither of them knew what the little boy might have taken.

By the time Jackson reached the Elk’s Club, the parking lot overflowed with media trucks. He passed a gauntlet of reporters on his way in. His only reply to the barrage of questions was to say that he would have a statement shortly.

Sheriff Paul Midden was waiting inside. Jackson had phoned Midden earlier and asked to see him before Midden went home to St. Anthony. First, Jackson gathered the search teams and heard their reports – nobody but the Green Team had found anything helpful. He then told the searchers to meet again at 6 A.M. Friday.

When he finished, peopled crowded around Jackson, full of questions and ideas. Jesse eventually pushed her way through them to hug her dad. Jackson had seen her serving food when he entered. The crowd then drifted away and Jesse said, “It’s so awful, Daddy. That little boy must be scared to death. When I was chased, I, I –”

“I know. I know,” Jackson said while stroking her hair. “We’ll find him,” he said and hoped it was true.

Paul Midden sidled quietly to a side exit, and catching Jackson’s eye, nodded to him. For the past hour Jackson had thought about the best way to approach the sheriff. Unless a better idea came along fast, he would go with what he had – a little honesty, a little flattery, and a lot left unsaid. He asked Jesse to
fix a plate of food for Katy, who had remained at Green State Park, and then followed Midden outside.

Jackson began by detailing the interview with Rodney and Rene Stutz, moved on to the search, and ended with the discovery of little Eric’s backpack in Green State Park.

After that, Jackson told Midden what he had in mind. He did not mention knowing that the media would feed on the story of a little boy lost in a woods full of monster cats like sharks in a frenzy. Midden would know that already. Jackson also did not mention that he knew the limelight would appeal to Paul Midden, an elected official. Nor did he say that relinquishing the search to Midden would leave him free to pursue a different angle. “I know you’d never take the search away from me, Paul, even though you could, but I’m asking you to. I’ve got sixteen killer cats out here and five hundred hunters and more unsolved mysteries than a Sherlock Holmes’ book. You’d be doing me a big favor.”

As Jackson expected, Midden acted hesitant, but then agreed that the Fremont County Sheriff’s Department would head up the search. Ten minutes later, Jackson and Midden faced the reporters in the Elk’s Club parking lot and announced the change. Once they had finished, Jackson ate dinner and then returned to Green State Park.

He found Katy at the campground talking to Ester Faye and her husband, a tall, skinny, bald man. She joined him, and they sat in a pair of borrowed lawn chairs. Katy picked at her food, and Jackson drank coffee. She said little. After a while Jackson asked her if something was wrong, and she lied to him and said, “No. Nothing.”

Katy knew she should tell Jackson that she had found Kali’s track by his corral. She should tell him about the dead liger cub in the tall grass. She also knew that if she told him, and Jackson sent in an army of hunters, she would lose her chance to save Kali and her cubs. So instead of alerting Jackson to Kali’s presence, she said, “Kids are the hardest for me. And half of the time when I help the police in Afica, it’s to search for children.”

“Do you find them? Alive?”

“Usually.” But that also was lie. She mostly found nothing more than a piece of bone or chewed up belt or tuft of scalp. Katy sat the food plate aside, gathered up her .375, and said, “I’m going to search the perimeter for the three-legged cat again before I leave for the night.”

Two trucks and a van left Boulder Thursday evening. One truck, a Peterbilt 379 outfitted to haul large animals, came from a bankrupt Florida circus. It required a special
license to drive. The other truck was a twenty-foot U-Haul purchased at auction. The name and the Dreamsicle color were gone, but the pedigree of the truck was as evident as a bad facelift. All three vehicles were dark green now with Animal Rescue Kingdom, a web address, phone number, and a mural of animals entering Noah’s Ark painted on the sides. The U-Haul held portable cages and equipment, while the 18-wheeler had permanent cages and carried more equipment.

The caravan took Interstate 25 north out of Boulder, picked up Interstate 80 in Cheyenne, and drove west across the moonscape of southern Wyoming. They were headed to U.S. 30. From there they would zigzag north into Idaho.

Stan started off in the twenty-footer but switched to the van after Cheyenne. Because she was sweet on him, Nancy also changed to the Ford. For a while they stayed with the trucks, but after a food and rest stop, Stan sped on ahead. Nancy was a chatterbox, and it was not until Stan shared some kick-ass marijuana with her that she dropped off to sleep, allowing Stan time to think.

So much had happened since he first heard about the baby ligers. Had it not been for Eagle Cassel, employed by the Fish and Game Department in Idaho, Stan still wouldn’t know about the liger cubs. He had met the puffed-up Native American at a sweat-lodge
encampment in Colorado six months earlier and hadn’t particularly liked him. Stan only reluctantly had taken Cassel’s phone call, but the man’s information was invaluable. Not only had he learned that Katy was playing him, keeping the baby ligers a secret, but Cassel’s information also unlocked the donor’s checkbooks. With the survival of rare, purebred baby ligers at stake, Stan quickly raised the funds to mount a rescue operation.

A second big break had come when he read the judge’s ruling. He had known ARK would lose, but what he hadn’t expected was the way the judge would support her ruling. All he had to do now was use the ruling to his advantage.

Jackson arrived home shortly before midnight and found Katy sprawled on the couch. Her hair was damp and her face freshly scrubbed. She had on white pajamas with black leopard spots, all of it with a light rose wash that made the pajamas look sexy instead of silly. The body beneath them looks fine too, he thought. Katy had opened a bottle of red wine and poured him a glass.

For a while they talked about the search for Eric, but tiredness soon sent Jackson and his wine glass upstairs. He looked in Jesse’s room before recalling that she had
stayed in town at her mom’s house. He then changed into sweatpants and an old sweatshirt that said
Grand Canyon,
sat on the edge of the bed, and thought about the way Katy’s breasts moved beneath the faux leopard pajamas.

The next thing Jackson knew it was Friday morning. The wine glass was gone. The lamp had been turned off. He looked out a front facing window of his bedroom. His Ford pickup was gone too. He wondered where Katy was off too so early. In the bathroom he peered in the mirror and saw a man who looked ten years older than a week ago.

Jackson showered and shaved and while he did he thought about the dream that had awakened him. He had dreamed about a battle between the Creator and the Destroyer. According to the Bible, God created the world and then rested. Jackson thought maybe this difference explained why things so often went wrong. The Creator takes a day off, while the Destroyer never rests.

He had just finished shaving when his cell phone rang. Moments later, Jackson was in the Jeep speeding to town.

Jackson found the downtown square jammed with vehicles and people. Two of his officers were trying unsuccessfully to unclog traffic. He saw trucks from the network news agencies, from CNN, and from other television outlets. There was even a media truck from Canada. But none of these held his attention as much as a green semi and a twenty-footer belonging to ANIMAL RESCUE KINGDOM.

Jackson skirted wide of Iris, surrounded by microphones, and headed toward a portable stage bearing the CNN logo, where Katy was arguing with a man. The man was average size, mid-thirties, and wearing jeans and a jean jacket over a T-shirt that mimicked the logo on the green trucks. Katy introduced the man as Stan Ely.

As he shook hands with Stan, Jackson said, “Katy didn’t mention you were coming, Mr. Ely.”

“Because Katy didn’t know,” she said.

Stan grinned. “I wanted to surprise her.”

“Mind if I ask why you’re here?” Jackson indicated the truck with the animal cages. “And what these are for?”

As though she overheard Jackson’s question, a woman seated behind a table on the nearby CNN platform answered it. She had lacquered blond hair and droopy eyes. Jackson recognized her as a legal shill on CNN, a pretend expert who specialized in tragedies that involved children.

The blond announced that a federal judge in Colorado had issued a ruling declaring that the current public hunt to be illegal.
The ruling stated that – and here the woman began to read directly from the court papers – “neither the town of Buckhorn nor the county of Fremont nor the State of Idaho has the authority to sell licenses and limit the public’s right to bear arms and to hunt if to do so threatens public safety.”

They blond woman milked the next moment, playing to her TV audience. “The Idaho Lion Hunt is free, America,” her shrill voice announced. “The first lion and tiger safari ever held in the United States, and all you need is a gun.” A few seconds later the woman said, “By tomorrow night at least five thousand people are expected to arrive in the tiny hamlet of Buckhorn, Idaho to hunt down these lions and tigers and monster cats that are killing people while they’re out searching for poor little Eric Stutz.”

The fact that the information was confused and misleading didn’t matter to anyone, not even to Jackson. All hell was about to break loose. That’s what mattered.

Twenty-Nine

Jackson sat in the Jeep staring at the bricks of the old Tapper Elementary School. He had been staring at the red bricks for five minutes while pondering the events of the morning and asking: what now? The bricks still failed to reveal a single answer. He gave up and went inside.

As soon as he entered, Iris began the meeting. All of the town council was present. Everyone looked stressed or angry or both except for Pamela Yow. She looked ill.

Iris was a small woman, but she seemed to Jackson even smaller today, as though her hopes and dreams had been squeezed out of her, leaving her deflated. Jackson felt sad for her. Iris began by reviewing the federal judge’s ruling. After she had deciphered the legal language for them, Dell, Neil, and Fred took turns raging against the federal government. As usual, Clancy didn’t say much. He didn’t even ask Jackson where his police uniform was. If he had done so, Jackson would have told him that it was in the Grand Cherokee, along with a dark blue suit and black dress shoes. Wade’s memorial service was Friday afternoon.

An hour later, after reviewing all the options, the town council concluded the obvious: if the lion hunt was free and the money the town had received selling hunting licenses returned, Buckhorn was broke. The town had used the little cash it once had to promote the event.

A public gathering was scheduled for Friday evening in the high school gym to explain the return of license fees and the status of the prizes offered. The announcement was fed to radio and television stations, and hundreds of printed flyers were posted around town. Jackson spent the next two hours trying to calm the irate hunters and locals who came to the police station. Some of them demanded that he arrest Iris. Others called for Dan Tapper’s scalp. One woman, wearing a Tea Party button, blamed President Obama and demanded he be impeached. From there it got worse.

On Friday afternoon Wade Placett’s memorial service was held in All Souls Unity Church on Antler Street in a building that previously housed a hardware store. All Souls was the most liberal church in Buckhorn where, like most of eastern Idaho, the Latter Day Saints dominated religion. Both Wade and Mandy were raised Mormon but had
chosen not to yoke their children with its conservative dogma. All in all, Mandy thought Wade would have approved.

Jackson arrived late and slipped into the rear pew. Sadie Pope and most police officers attended with their families. Tucker was there with Eileen Stevens. Jackson spotted Iris and Dell, Stilts and his wife, and all of the town council except for Pamela. He did not see Jesse and Shane seated with Katy in a middle pew until much later. Most of the locals out looking for Eric Stutz had taken time away from the search to pay their respects. Mandy, her children, and assorted relatives sat up front, facing a photograph of Wade instead of a casket.

Jackson had worn his navy-blue suit today. His shield was in his pocket, and an ankle holster held the snub-nose .38. Before Tuesday, he couldn’t recall the last time he had worn the ankle rig.

Mandy Placett cried throughout the service. She wasn’t alone, but her tears mattered the most. When the closing prayer began, Jackson slipped out of the church. On his way to the Jeep, parked in the very rear, he heard someone behind him. He looked back and saw Eileen Stevens.

He backtracked to her, and when they met, they hugged, and she said, “Thanks. I was trying to catch up, but you
walk fast.” Eileen then wagged a head of thick, gray hair and added, “That poor, poor family in there.”

Jackson agreed with the wrongness of Wade’s death and said, “I’m sorry I haven’t come by to see you.”

Eileen made a sound that might have been a laugh a week ago. “Jackson, I was a cop’s wife for forty-two years. With what’s going on, don’t even think about it.”

Jackson mumbled a “thank you,” while Eileen reached into her pocketbook, brought out a letter, and gave it to him. He tucked it away in his suit coat without looking at it. A few minutes later Eileen left to join the mourners.

People had crept from the church while Jackson and Eileen were talking. He had glimpsed Katy among them but then lost sight of her. As Jackson weaved through cars and pickups, he wondered again about her role in Stan Ely’s sudden appearance. Katy was waiting for him at the Jeep Grand Cherokee. She was wearing a black dress too nice for Buckhorn, where black was worn for funerals rather than for style. “I didn’t know if you’d come,” he said to her.

“Of course I came. I’ve been to their house and gotten to know Mandy and her children, and I feel –” Katy stopped as suddenly as if she had used up her word allotment for the day. Her eyes dampened. “I just spoke to Mandy. She invited me to this – this whatever it is.”

Without an actual body, no procession to the cemetery was planned. Wade’s remains would be buried quietly and privately. Instead, people would gather at the grieving widow’s house to eat, drink, and offer condolences. “It’s a country thing,” Jackson said. “Sort of like a wake.”

“In Botswana they don’t say a person is dead. They say someone is ‘late’. I know it refers to the departed, the late so-and-so, but I think of it meaning that the person will show up any moment but just hasn’t arrived.”

“Never thought of that. But like you said, things work differently in Africa. Good and bad, truth and –”

“Ask me, Jackson. You want to.” Katy paused, but Jackson said nothing. “Okay then, I’ll just tell you. I did not know about the court ruling or ARK coming here today.”

Jackson studied her face and her body posture.

“Stan didn’t tell me about it, because I didn’t tell him about Kali being pregnant.” Katy shuffled her feet as she spoke. She had on black spike heels. “I knew if I told him, he’d rush up here to capture Kali and the cubs. And I was right. When he found out, he came running.”

“And how’d he find out if you didn’t tell him?”

“A man named Eagle Cassel.”

Oh hell! Jackson had told Stilts Venable about Kali, and Stilts must have told Eagle. “Eagle Cassel?”

“He’s letting ARK set up their cages on his land. I guess he found them motel rooms somewhere too.”

Jackson nodded. He knew that one of Eagle’s cousin’s owned a little motel on the highway about twenty miles north. “So now you and Stan can team up to find Kali.”

“Stan’s mad at me,” Katy said. “Besides, he told me he already had some big plan, and it didn’t include me.”

“What plan?”

She shrugged. “Some way to get the baby ligers.”

“Which nobody has even seen yet.”

That’s not true, she thought. She had found a dead cub, and she knew Kali likely gave birth to more than one. Whatever she told him now about Kali, Jackson might not believe her; even if he did, he wouldn’t forgive her. But if she didn’t say anything … “Jackson,” she said, “I –”

“Great! You’re still here.” Jesse appeared from behind a pickup. She had on a black pencil skirt, charcoal gray sweater, and pumps that had a reputation. Jackson thought she looked fifteen going on twenty-five.

She smiled and Jackson said “Wow!” and then Jesse said, “Daddy, Shane won’t go to Mandy’s house so can I ride with you?” Jesse had babysat the Placett kids for the past few years, whenever Wade and Mandy had a night out.

“Your mother’s not going?”

“With Dell.” She screwed up her face to let the world know what she thought of riding with them.

“I have to stop by the police station first, Jesse.”

“Ride with me,” Katy said. “I’d like the company.”

Jesse smiled and said, “Sure. Great. Just say when.”

The police radio in Jackson’s Grand Cherokee squawked.

“How about now?” Katy said, and then looked at Jackson and added, “We’ll finish talking later, okay?”

Jackson watched them walk off together. Did he believe Katy? He wanted to. That was the problem.

There were two-dozen vehicles including his Ford 350 parked along the road leading to the Placett farmhouse. Jackson got lucky and found a spot close in when a big Dodge Ram pulled out. He noticed Dell’s Escalade parked next to the house, one tire in a flowerbed.

Jackson exchanged hellos with a group of men standing around smoking, saw Jesse and Katy talking together beside the house, and then he heard yelling from inside.

As he climbed the steps, he heard Mandy saying, “I can’t handle seeing either of you right now.”

Dell said, “We’re both so sorry, Mandy.”

Nobody paid attention to Jackson as he eased inside.

“Everybody’s sorry today, Dell.” Mandy looked daggers at Iris. “Sorry comes cheap at funerals.”

“Mandy,” Jackson said, drawing closer. “This isn’t going to help you or your children.” He caught Dell’s eyes and tilted his head toward the door.

“What’s wrong, mommy?” Josh said, coming up to her. Josh tried to wrap his short arms around Mandy’s hips but settled for what he could grab onto. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” Mandy said. She rubbed her son’s head, but she looked at Jackson. “I never expected much from those two.” She snorted something between a laugh and a scoff as Dell nudged Iris out the door. “But you should have stopped them. Stopped this crazy lion hunt plan.”

“I know,” Jackson said.

“You told me we’d be safe.”

“I know.” He reached out and touched her arm.

“Leave me alone!” she shrieked.

Josh burst into tears and flung himself at Jackson, his small fists pummeling Jackson’s thighs and belly and even his groin. “Leave mommy alone! Leave mommy alone!”

“What do we do now?” she said, peeling her son off Jackson and pressing him against her. “What do we do now?”

A few minutes later Jackson walked out of the house, stood on the porch beside Jesse and Katy, and watched Dell and Iris maneuver through traffic and drive off.

“Why is she being so mean to you and mom?” Jesse asked.

“Because she hurts more than she can endure,” Jackson said. He peered off in the distance at a cloud of dust moving rapidly toward them. Through the dust he could make out the swirling lights of a Buckhorn police car. Jackson felt like the man in this movie he once had seen where the same things happen to him over and over, the day repeating.

What now? Oh Christ! What now?

When the Dodge was close enough, he saw Tucker Thule behind the wheel. Tucker killed the swirling lights and slammed the cruiser to a stop. Jackson hurried to the car as Tucker climbed out, saying, “Chief, they found him.”

Jackson felt his stomach drop. “Little Eric?”

“No, no. Ronnie. They found Ronnie Greathouse.”