Prey (32 page)

After pausing to look at an oddly twisted piece of sculpture, he wandered back to his seat with a relaxed smile on his face.

"Ceratotherium simum,"
he said to Marie as he settled back into his chair, feeling more relaxed now.

"Cera what?"

"Ceratotherium simum,"
Lightstone repeated. "That's the scientific name for white rhino."

"You think that we're being watched by a white rhino?" Marie Pascalaura asked suspiciously.

"No, not watched. More like we just happened to cross paths." Lightstone winked. "No big deal."

"I see," Marie nodded skeptically.

Probably a felony because the boots looked brand new, Lightstone told himself, vaguely proud of his knowledge of wildlife parts and products. But even so, he wasn't about to arrest someone for wearing a pair of rhino-hide boots. Not today anyway, he smiled, watching casually as the group shuffled up to the baggage-screening area. They stood just under the split-view overhead TV monitor that showed the two X-ray scanner screens and the flow of people through the two rectangular metal detectors.

Then, as Lightstone blinked in surprise, two of the men in the group did something completely unexpected.

Walking around to the side of the hand-carry X-ray unit, they casually displayed small, black-leather badge cases to the security officer standing in front of the walk-through metal detector. Then, as Lightstone continued to watch, all five of them walked around the side of the X-ray machine, past the metal scanner, and proceeded to the desk of the "C"-concourse duty officer, where they presented their three-page forms.

"Well, I'll be damned," Lightstone whispered.

"What is it?" Marie Pascalaura asked.

"I think I just figured out what it was that jarred my antennas. The five people I pointed out to you are cops."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm positive that at least two of them are," Lightstone nodded. The other three members of a group took the yellow and pink copies of their forms back, then picked up their bags and started walking down toward the "C" concourse.

"I'm pretty sure the other three are carrying concealed weapons, but I'm not sure that they're any kind of law- enforcement officers," Lightstone added.

"How do you know that?"

"They were careful to walk around the metal detector, as if they didn't want to set it off. But then they didn't show the security guards any badges. That's the first thing you've got to do when you try to bypass the screening system," he explained. "Otherwise, everybody gets real upset."

"Who would they let on an airplane carrying a gun except a cop?" Marie asked curiously.

"I don't know," Lightstone shrugged. "Maybe drug dealers, snitches, CIA agents, terrorists, people like that."

Marie Pascalaura stared at him for another long moment. "Anybody ever tell you that you've got a warped imagination?" she finally asked.

"Just about every supervisor I ever had," Lightstone admitted.

"Are you
sure
you're mentally fit to get married?"

Henry Lightstone blinked in surprise and then smiled. "You mean you changed your mind?"

"Not necessarily," Marie Pascalaura hedged as she stood up and reached for her carry-on bag. "Let's see if anybody starts shooting at us before we get on that plane. We probably ought to worry about getting married
after
we get to Anchorage."

"I just talked to the pilot," Shoshin Watanabe said as he watched the attractive woman on the other side of the security check stretch to give her boyfriend a long, lingering kiss. "The plane is refueled and ready to go."

"How much time?" Gerd Maas grunted as he dropped his carry-on bag next to his expensive rhino-skin boots. He stared out through the window at the approaching private jet that they would be boarding. The pilot had received special permission to pick up passengers at the Horizon gate while the plane was being refueled for the long flight.

Standing beside his team leader, Shoshin Watanabe continued to watch Marie Pascalaura and Henry Lightstone as they picked up their carry-on bags and walked to the end of the security check-in line. Typical Americans, he thought. No sense of shame when it came to fondling each other in public.

Then he looked down at his watch and smiled. "In about four minutes," he said, "it will all begin."

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Monday September 13th

The call came in at seventy-thirty that Monday morning. Carl Scoby tried to beg off because he had planned to spend the day with the resident-agent staff of the Marana Law Enforcement Training Center on a tour of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation.

But the woman was insistent that
someone
had to show up. She knew where twenty-four bear carcasses had been buried after their paws had been cut off, and she could show him where at least fifty bear gallbladders were being dried in preparation for sale.

Scoby tried to explain that he was new to the area, already had plans for the Indian reservation, and would much rather make an appointment to talk with her on the following day.

"But don't you see," the informant said, "the bears are from the reservation." The woman, who sounded like she might be German, added with a nervous edge to her voice: "My boyfriend is planning on making a big sale this evening, and if the bastard ever finds out I've squealed on him, he'll
really
beat me up bad the next time."

Scoby finally agreed to meet the woman at ten-thirty that morning at her cabin on the Simon River. If it turned out to be something worthwhile, he told himself, he and the other resident instructors at the Marana Training Center could always set up a surveillance and track the boyfriend back to his customers.

So at exactly ten-thirty that morning, Carl Scoby drove his Jeep to the cabin, got out, and looked around briefly at the surrounding forest.

"Mrs. Hoffstedler?" he asked when an attractive young woman opened the door slightly and looked out over the stretched chain latch.

"Yes, I am Carine Hoffstedler," Carine Mueller acknowledged in a thickly accented voice. "Who are you?"

"I'm Special Agent Carl Scoby of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ma'am," Scoby said, holding out his badge and credentials to the visibly nervous woman. "Is your, uh, husband home?"

"No, my boyfriend and his friends, they are not here," Mueller said as she unlatched the chain and then stepped far enough outside for Scoby to see the large, purplish bruise on the side of her cheek. "But I was afraid you might be one of their friends, checking up on me. Please, come in."

Responding to well-ingrained habits, Scoby entered the cabin cautiously, but it was immediately apparent that they were alone in the small two-room structure.

"Would you like some coffee?"

"No, thank you." Scoby smiled.

"Then let me take you there right now to show you the bears," she said as she strapped a small pack around her slim waist. She grabbed up a jacket and led Scoby out the back door to a narrow trail.

"This is one of my favorite places," Carine Mueller said as she carefully moved branches aside so they could pass. "I'm going to hate to leave it."

"Have you been here long?" Scoby asked, trying to concentrate more on the forest and less on the woman's tight jeans.

"You mean at this house?"

"No, I mean in the United States."

"Oh, not so long," Mueller shrugged.

"You speak English very well, but I couldn't help noticing your accent," Scoby said.

"Oh, yes. You like the way I speak?"

"Yes, I do," Scoby smiled. "It's very, uh, flavorful," he said, searching for the word.

Carine Mueller laughed, looking back at the agent. "I have never heard anyone say that before."

"
Well
..."

"My boyfriend thinks I am very sexy when I talk English, but then he is not so shy as most of you Americans," Mueller said. Scoby thought she had a great deal of composure for a supposedly nervous and abused woman.

"You think Americans are shy?" he asked.

Mueller nodded. "You Americans know the big talk, but not so much the gentle words. I think it is because you are too shy, and that is no way to impress a
Fraulein."

"You're German, then?" Scoby asked.

"No, not German, but you are very close," Mueller said as she continued to push forward through the narrow trail. "I was born in Germany, but my father is Swiss and my mother is French, so I am what you Americans would call a hybrid. Is that the right word?"

"I think we would call you someone who shouldn't allow her boyfriend to give her black eyes," Scoby said seriously.

"Yes, you are right. It was stupid of me to let him do that," Carine Mueller nodded, glancing back at Scoby again. "Sometimes we hybrids are foolish about our men. But did I not convince you to come here to take my boyfriend and his friends away so that I can have the cabin all to myself? So maybe I am not so stupid after all, yes?" With that, she turned her attention back to the trail.

After about five minutes of hiking through the dense woods, they came to a small clearing alongside the riverbank.

"Over there," Mueller said, pointing to the opposite side of the clearing. "See those shacks? The one on the right is where he stores the paws and the gallbladders until they're dried. The one in the middle is their processing shed. And the larger one on the left, the one with the chimney, is where they drink and have their poker parties."

"How many people usually work here?"

"Usually it is my boyfriend and his three partners. But sometimes there are one or two others when they decide to play cards."

"But you're sure none of them are here now?" Scoby asked as he scanned the wooden structures with his binoculars.

"I am very sure they are not here. If they were, we would have seen one of their cars back at the cabin, or one of their boats tied up at the riverbank."

"Is that how they come here, by boat?"

"The buyers always arrive by boat, but then they go away somewhere else to make the exchange," Carine Mueller told him. "Do you think you can follow them to the place where they do that?"

"I'm sure we can come up with something," Carl Scoby smiled. "Shall we take a look at the galls and the burial site?"

"Oh, yes, of course," she nodded. "But first I wanted to ask you something. How will you prove that they are doing something illegal if you don't actually see them killing the animals?"

"When we make arrangements to buy wildlife parts or products from a suspect, sometimes we can get them to brag about how they're outsmarting all the law-enforcement people," Scoby explained as they walked to the storage shed. "If there happens to be a hidden tape recorder nearby, we can always play the tape back to a judge or a jury."

"Would
you
do something like that?"

"It depends on the situation," Scoby said as he surveyed the three shacks.

"I think it is so strange that a person like you could do something like that."

"Oh, really? Why's that?" Scoby asked as he moved cautiously up to the side of a door, slipping his left hand inside his vest and releasing the safety strap on his shoulder holster.

"Because you look so much like a policeman."

"Yeah, I know," Scoby nodded as he reached for the door with his right hand. "A lot of people tell me that."

"Which I find fascinating, because I hate policemen so much," Carine Mueller said softly as she stepped forward into a semicrouched position with a .357 Magnum revolver she had withdrawn from her jacket extended out in two steady hands.

"What?" Scoby said, starting to come around when the first of six semijacketed hollow-points caught him square in the center of his chest.

As Scoby crumpled backward, Mueller continued to follow him with her sight pattern, smoothly triggering off five more high-velocity rounds into the rib-cage area of the agent's falling body.

None of the six bullets had actually penetrated Carl Scoby's Kevlar vest, but the sledgehammer-like impacts of the mushrooming .357 Magnum projectiles had cracked or broken at least half of his ribs, and the agonizing pain made it almost impossible for him to draw the heavy SIG-Sauer automatic from his shoulder holster.

Stunned and nearly unconscious, Carl Scoby might have given up then. But the sight of Carine Mueller calmly dumping the expended brass out of .357 Magnum, then reaching into her pack for one of her speed-loaders, gave him all the incentive he needed.

Functioning on instinct and training alone, Scoby had just brought his heavy automatic to bear on the blurry figure and was starting to squeeze the trigger when Kiro Nakamura stepped out of the shack and fired a single .357 round right into the side of his exposed head.

"I can't believe it," Marie Pascalaura whispered as she slid her head up against Henry Lightstone's shoulder and closed her eyes.

"What don't you believe?" Lightstone mumbled, nearly asleep because they'd been up half the night before, packing and chasing each other around the bedroom.