Bearskin Read online

  Rice loaded the debris from the cabin into his truck and drove to the Dumpsters where Sara Birkeland had been abducted. He stood in the bed and tossed broken paneling and heavy plastic trash bags and tried to picture what had happened. The place was far from any house, and the Dumpsters were screened from the highway by a line of trees, but Route 212 was relatively busy and there was always a chance of someone driving in. Probably happened after dark, and they must have got her into a vehicle and out of here pretty fast. Were they waiting in ambush for someone, anyone, or did they follow her here? He started running scenarios and felt his pulse jump, told himself to quit thinking about it. He hadn’t even met the girl.

  Instead of heading back to the preserve, he turned left on 212 and drove another half hour into Blakely, parked on the street near the Blue Bean. Inside, college students slouched at tables and on the sofa, ignoring each other and staring into their phones; a long-faced guy about Rice’s age with a frizzy ponytail sat by himself near the window; a fit-looking couple with matching shades of gray hair traded sections of the New York Times. He’d brought the slightly antiquated laptop from the office, and after buying an extra-large regular coffee—there were no pretentious size designations at the Bean—he set up at a small round table near an outlet in a corner. As always, he opened an onion-routing program to hide his IP address before he went online.

  He sent an email to his boss, the board chair of the foundation that owned the preserve, attaching spreadsheets with August’s cost accounting and the current and historical biological data he’d entered over the past month. He was supposed to report “immediately” any illegal activity on the preserve, so he noted offhand that he’d found a bear carcass and was looking into who might’ve killed it, hoping he wouldn’t trigger any drama but knowing he probably would. After he sent the files, usually he would have a look at the Arizona Daily Star and check a handful of websites and blogs that reported on the Mexican cartels and violence along the border, but today he wanted to see about the bear poaching.

  Within a few minutes, Boger’s mafia theory didn’t seem as far-fetched as he’d thought. As most markets legit and otherwise had globalized over the past few decades, illegal traffic in wildlife and their body parts had become the fourth-largest black market in the world, behind narcotics, counterfeiting, and human trafficking, generating billions of dollars every year and attracting the participation of terror groups and “traditionally drug-oriented criminal enterprises.”

  More searching turned up a post on a Virginia environmental blog about a recent surge in the poaching of bears for their gallbladders after years of low prices:

  Bear bile is used in a variety of traditional Asian medicines, and the growth of a relatively affluent middle class in China and other Asian countries led to unprecedented consumer demand. News reports from the nineties and early aughts often compared bile and bile salt prices to that of cocaine and gold. Given the near-extinction of every Asiatic bear species, dealers looked to the American black bear, and a lucrative black market in their gallbladders briefly caught the attention of U.S. news media and law enforcement officials. Around the same time, the gruesome and inhumane practice of “bear farming” in China, Korea, and Vietnam began scaling up, eventually providing bear bile in industrial quantities. Poaching in the U.S. fell off, and black bear populations in Virginia have increased dramatically.

  Recently, though, we’ve heard unofficial reports that hunters in some areas are being offered up to two hundred dollars for bear gallbladders and paws. The paws, which (unlike bile) can’t be extracted on an ongoing basis from captive bears, are used to make soup and other delicacies—these are featured in trendy East and Southeast Asian restaurants popular with the newly affluent and a certain type of tourist.

  A particularly troubling trend in some counties sees payment more often in kind than cash: meth, prescription opioids, and heroin are offered in exchange for bear parts as drug gangs move into the business. The game department officials we contacted declined to comment, citing ongoing investigations.

  He also found a wildlife law forum where a professor from Montana was describing the counterfeiting of bear galls back in the 1990s, with a significant fraction of the “bear galls” confiscated in some markets turning out, upon testing at the federal wildlife forensics lab in Oregon, to be pig galls. Bear galls were either frozen or dried for sale, and while an expert might be able to identify frozen pig galls, desiccated pig galls looked identical to desiccated bear galls. This presented a problem for law enforcement and prosecutors, as apparently the laws in most states prohibiting trafficking in wildlife parts made it impossible to proceed with prosecutions when the evidence turned out to be counterfeit.

  This gave him an idea. He found a discarded copy of the Turpin Weekly Record, opened to the classifieds page, and scanned the Agriculture section. Most of the ads were for farm fresh eggs and compost, but right there under “P” he found a simple listing, “Pork for sale.” He tore out the ad and pocketed it.

  He refilled his coffee and spent a few minutes studying the current hunting regulations online, then looked up the sections of the Code of Virginia relevant to poaching and trespassing. These he saved on the laptop. Before he left he checked his email account again. As expected, his boss had already replied, asking him to call right away. The Bean had an actual functioning pay phone in the back, meaning he could call now and get it over with. He closed the laptop and filled his to-go cup a third time before retreating into the dark-paneled back room where no one ever sat. He dropped a few quarters and dialed, turned and stood with his back to the wall.

  “Where are you calling from?” No hello, no how are you.

  “Coffee shop.”

  “You’re feeding quarters into a pay phone again.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Even drug dealers have cell phones, Rice.”

  “I’m not a drug dealer.”

  “You know what I mean. Tell me about the bear.”

  This was Starr, of the unfashionably hyphenated surname Traver-Pinkerton. Back in February, he’d driven to her sprawling hacienda in the Catalina foothills for his interview after a particularly rough few weeks, and had hesitated at the massive carved mesquite doors, obviously antique, real Colonial Mexican. He was looking for a doorbell when both doors folded inward and there stood Starr, a rich old hippie, X-ray skinny in a flowered cotton dress, salt-and-pepper hair, clear blue eyes. She looked him up and down, introduced herself, and led him to a sandstone-paved courtyard where she’d set out iced tea, lecturing him along the way about the history of the property—her industrialist great-grandfather Marshall P. Traver had swooped down from Pittsburgh and assembled the property through a series of purchases in the late 1800s, the family had left the place untouched after he died until they’d contributed it to a family foundation in the 1970s, and so on. She’d already decided to give him the job, citing his impressive college transcript, his experience as a field biologist, his self-sufficiency. Now he suspected there were other aspects of his unique background she’d found attractive. Like Boger had said, they hired the muscle this time.

  As briefly as he could he described the mushroom picker and the bear carcass, what Dempsey Boger had said about finding others, and what he’d just learned on the Web about the black market, the overlap with narcotics. When he’d finished, she suggested halfheartedly that he call the game warden. She knew of his allergy to law enforcement.

  STP, as he’d come to think of her, had turned out to be a decent boss, idealistic and a little scatterbrained, but more than fair, tolerant of his idiosyncrasies, and willing to conspire in his disappearance. To avoid tax filings, she let him draw his pay in cash “for Turk Mtn. Preserve expenses” at the foundation’s local bank in Blakely—he kept his savings in a small fireproof lockbox in the attic above his bedroom—and she put up with his usual state of incommunicado, contenting herself with monthly phone calls and emails from the Bean.

  He told her he’d
rather not call the game warden now. He had some ideas about who it might be, and after he’d looked around some, if he found anything, then they could involve the game warden, maybe the sheriff, too.

  “Why the sheriff?”

  “Because why didn’t you tell me what happened to Sara Birkeland?”

  She said “Oh,” but then she took a long breath and exhaled before replying. Twice. It sounded like she was smoking. A Gila woodpecker chirred in the background. It was still morning out there in the shadow of the Catalinas, STP sitting in her courtyard with coffee and a newspaper, a thirty-foot saguaro peering over the wall.

  “You think there’s a connection,” she finally said.

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “I should have told you before now. I’m sorry. I’m fond of Sara, and I was trying to respect her privacy. Also, believe it or not, I was trying to be sensitive. After what had happened to your girlfriend.”

  “Thanks. But it’s common knowledge around here, and I just got blindsided.” Another pause, filled with more evocative Sonoran birdsong. He missed the desert. He wondered when he would be able to go back. He’d still been traumatized the day he drove away from Tucson, and the landscape itself had come to seem tragic, a little melodramatic, tens of thousands of saguaro arranged there on the rocky slopes above the city, dusky green in the last light of a winter afternoon, tall, humanoid, resigned, holding up their arms. In his rearview mirror it looked like the people who lived in the city had climbed up on the hills and were just standing there watching, waiting for the end of the world.

  “I flew to Virginia as soon as I heard,” STP said. “She was unconscious for a few days. They had to induce a coma until the brain swelling went down. She still doesn’t remember much about what happened, but she’s better now, teaching classes, working on her lizard project again. You’ll meet her soon. She wanted to stay on as caretaker, you know. As soon as she was out of the hospital, she was raring to go back. I’m not sure she was altogether rational at that point, and we had to insist. It wasn’t safe.” She stopped, probably realizing the implication of what she’d just said but unwilling to retract it.

  “No idea who it was?”

  “No,” she said. “They wore masks. And all the likely suspects had alibis. Sheriff Walker thinks it was out-of-towners.”

  “Right.”

  She inhaled some more. He grinned, completing the picture.

  “Starr, are you smoking?”

  “No.”

  “A fatty-o on the patio?”

  She actually giggled, but she got herself back under control quickly. He guessed she’d had a lot of practice. Now she sounded serious.

  “You’ll be careful with the bear hunters? They can be rough folk.”

  “I’m only going to talk to them. If I catch them I’ll take their picture with that little camera you sent me. Criminals hate it when you take their picture. Then we can call the law.”

  She warned him again to be careful, and they said goodbye and hung up before he thought to ask what she’d meant when she’d said he would meet Sara Birkeland.

  Nine

  The directions he’d copied down from the pig farmer were vague to the point of nonsense, and he made several wrong turns and had to backtrack when a gravel road terminated at a washed-out bridge, crumbling concrete abutments clinging to the steep streambank, a single rusted cable strung across to keep drunkards and lost out-of-towners from driving into the creek. He stopped at a newish trailer home where a teenage boy knelt as if in supplication before an inverted dirt bike. His head was bowed, and a motley of engine parts, wrenches, bolts, and dirty rags had been scattered on the gravel in frustration. He looked up when Rice got out of his truck, brightening for an instant as if Rice were the wizard of motorcycle maintenance come to help, but he turned surly and taciturn when Rice began asking directions. After that, Rice tried a systematic approach, investigating every side road he came across, and thirty minutes later he stumbled upon the mailbox with the faded SENS. hand-painted in red.

  He turned onto the rutted dirt driveway. The land in the southern part of the county was poor—patchy overgrazed pasture and cedar thickets, multiflora rose grown up in a ragged hedge along the drive. Past a warped wooden gate and over a weedy concrete cattle guard stood an old bank barn and several tin-roofed sheds. Beyond those, a two-story wood-frame house, its clapboard walls holding a faint wash of ancient white, as if it had been scraped for new paint and then left to weather.

  He parked and got out of the truck. Nothing moved in the late-morning heat. A single cicada sang in a grove of sycamores leaning over the creek, its thin burr rising and falling hypnotically.

  At one end of the barn, a wooden sliding door hung from its metal track by one rusted wheel. He shoved it open and stepped into the obscure aisle, waiting a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. The first stall was crowded with old motors and defunct farm implements, but in the next he found slop buckets and straw bedding strewn on the floor, a smell of urine and rancid garbage. Outside, a dead mule lay near a fence at the far end of a dry grassless paddock, one stiff hind leg saluting the sky.

  Past the stall he opened a newer door, reached in and found a wall switch. Fluorescent lights flickered on and he entered a concrete-floored room with steel hooks hanging from the ceiling, the air too still and smelling of raw meat, a long table pushed against the back wall. Two pristine chest freezers flanked a white upright refrigerator from the 1950s, squat with rounded corners and a fat chrome door handle. In the fridge he found a hot dog bun bag tied at one end. He held it up to the light: three greenish, blood-streaked sacs, smaller than he’d expected, each tied at the end with thin white cord. Three might not be enough. The guy had said there would be seven. He had another job off the farm during the day but he’d said his dad would be here.

  When Rice approached the house, a dog crawled out from under the porch and ran to the sagging woven-wire fence. It stood quietly, wagging its tail. Rice called out.

  “Hello? Mr. Sensabaugh?”

  The dog barked once and pranced its front paws. It was gaunt, long-haired like a collie, black with a white star on its chest. Through the screen door an excited male voice narrated a professional wrestling match on television. Rice unlatched the gate and the dog barked again and crept up to him whining and cringing, wetting dark puddles in the dust, a female. He let her sniff his hand, his pant legs and boots. He scratched her head, the ruff on her shoulders.

  An old man walked out of the house and let the screen door slam. The dog ran to him.

  Rice forced a smile, raised his hand in a slow wave. “Mr. Sensabaugh?”

  “Yep.” The man stood on the porch, working his jaw, mending a wad of tobacco in his bilged cheek without spitting. A line of brown sputum leaked from the corner of his mouth. He was short and bent and wore faded blue coveralls. The big skinny dog lay across his feet, her head on her paws.

  “I’m John Tolley.” He’d picked the name from the phone book because he didn’t want to use his real fake name. “I talked to Wister, he said to come by today and pick up the gallbladders from some pigs he was butchering, and there was a bag of three in the refrigerator.” He held up the bun bag by the tied end and it swung back and forth for a moment. This interested the dog. She got up and approached Rice, expectant. “But he said there was seven hogs y’all were butchering. Do you know if he saved out the other gallbladders?”

  “How many’d ye want?” He gave a short cackle and moved his lips again, showing his gums, whitish and flecked with tobacco.

  “Well, I thought he said seven?”

  Mr. Sensabaugh nodded absently. “You don’t want no piglings?”

  “No, sir, just the gallbladders. Your son said y’all were butchering seven hogs this week.”

  “He kin butcher ’em. They a mite small.”

  Rice squinted at the man. He’d known this was going to be a long shot. His telephone conversation with the son had been a comedy of miscommunication.
r />   “I didn’t see any pigs in the barn.”

  Mr. Sensabaugh considered, blinking slowly. His eyes were small, rheumy, set deep in his wrinkled face. He pointed a crooked finger toward the paddock.

  “Go’n look about thet horse,” he said.

  Rice turned and glanced back the way the man was pointing. He’d parked his truck so it couldn’t be seen from the house. A hot breeze, heavy with carrion stench, was beginning to move among the buildings.

  “The dead mule?”

  Mr. Sensabaugh nodded once, an almost imperceptible dip of his chin. Rice opened the yard gate to go, but the man called out. “Y’all kin to ol’ Stevie? Come out Ar’sh Crick?”

  Rice turned. “’Scuse me?”

  “Your name’s Tolley.”

  “That’s right, but I’m not from around here. No relatives here at all.”

  He walked to the paddock and leaned against the unpainted board fence. The lot was empty except for the mule. He opened a gate and went in, breathing through his mouth. As he approached the carcass, greenbottle flies swarmed and then quieted. Yellowjackets were working on the dried meat where the belly had been slit, tearing off tiny gobbets and flying with them toward the barn. There was a scuffling sound, and the upraised leg twitched.

  He reached with his boot and kicked the mule’s dusty back. A thousand flies lifted into the air with a noise like singing. Muffled squeals from inside. The mule’s face was unreadable, its eye plucked out by crows and the lips drawn away from big square yellow teeth in an ambiguous expression, not grin or grimace but something else. As if some final, unexpected wisdom had come at the end. He kicked again, harder, and four shoats smeared with blood and shit came out shrilling as if birthed from the mule’s open belly and ran across the paddock to the stall.

  They quieted once they were inside and for a moment he stared after them, stared at the dark stall doorway as the flies settled again on the carcass.