Tortoise Soup (7 page)

“Annie McCarthy.”

Noah kicked the ground. “Son of a bitch. I knew it.”

“Knew what?” I was back on the quiz show and going for the gold.

“Knew that ornery old witch would kick the bucket some day,” he said without any remorse.

“You didn’t like her?”

Noah took off his glasses and glared. “I didn’t like the fact that she was staking every claim on the land out here and that she could sell all her rights to some big fucking mining company some day. There ain’t nothing to like about that.”

I wanted to keep him on a roll. “What’s wrong with big mining companies?”

Georgia Peach walked away as Noah continued his tirade. “You tell me what’s right about them! Look at those jerks on the other side of the mountain with their damn cyanide. They’re poisoning the land and every creature in sight. You want to do some good? You should be hauling their asses in for killing birds who stop to drink from their poisoned ponds and for running over every tortoise that gets in their way.”

He’d piqued my interest. “What mining company are you talking about?”

“The Golden Shaft. Their name says it all.” Taking out a bandanna, Noah wiped his face, which had turned beet-red in anger. “You can carry your little tin badge and your gun, but unless you put your ass on the line, Porter, you ain’t doing shit.”

I bristled at his assumption. “Listen, Noah, you’re sitting out in the middle of nowhere griping about what’s wrong. Have you ever put yourself on the line to make a change?”

Noah looked at me a moment. “How the hell do you think I ended up here?”

Turning on his heels, he climbed up the ladder that led into the ark and disappeared from sight. I was left facing Suzie Q, who stared at me in silence. Two down and one to go. There was nothing to lose in questioning her as well.

“That was quite a chase you led me on the other morning in your pickup,” I began.

Suzie Q leisurely tore the cellophane off another Twinkie as I watched Frank Sinatra—who, I imagined, was watching me as well.

She slowly took a bite and then licked her fingers. “It must have been someone else. I rehearse in the mornings.”

I had to ask. “What were you rehearsing?”

Suzie Q put a finger on Frank and stroked his back. “My club act, of course.”

Of course. “What club do you play at?”

Suzie Q’s finger lingered in one spot as Frank arched his back. “Any club that will have me.”

I imagined that knocked the number down considerably.

“I hear Annie McCarthy was involved in the reptile trade. Ever have any dealings with her?” I asked, trying my best to ignore the fur ball with eight giant legs.

Suzie Q finished her Twinkie and held her hand up in front of Frank to let him gather the crumbs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I was beginning to wonder if Suzie Q and Annie might have been competitors in the trade. It could have been reason enough for Suzie Q to have knocked the old woman off.

“She collected lots of things to sell—like lizards and snakes, and that thing sitting on your shoulder,” I said, pointing.

I could have sworn that Frank Sinatra reared up on his hind legs and hissed at me as Suzie Q left, too. I’d have to watch what I said from now on.

My boss Sam Morrell, senior resident agent and cowboy extraordinaire, sat poised at his easel, wire-rimmed glasses balanced low on his nose and a paint brush held high in the air. He was dressed in his usual outfit of neatly pressed jeans and down-home plaid shirt. His full head of white hair had been carefully combed, matching an impeccably trimmed mustache as soft and white as a lamb’s tail. All in all, the man could have just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I stuck my head inside his office door. Without turning around, Sam knew I was there.

“What do you think?” His voice, soft and melodious, wafted across the room, settling on me as light as a blanket of down.

I walked in and glanced over his shoulder at yet another portrait of a cow. “Looks good.”

All of his paintings looked exactly the same, but I knew better than to ever say so.

On a countdown to retirement, Sam lived for the day when he could move to his cattle ranch in southern Idaho. His wife was already living there along with his son, who ran the place. It was obvious that the ranch was never far from Sam’s thoughts. His office walls were covered with his paintings, each one a meticulous portrait of a different cow from his herd. A small plaque nailed to the bottom of each frame identified its subject by name. It was the only way I could tell them apart.

“This one is Maizie. Ain’t she a beaut?” Sam asked, beaming proudly at his newest creation.

We had a basic understanding where my job was concerned. Sam didn’t much care what I did so long as I didn’t make any waves that might jeopardize his retirement. I filled him in on Annie McCarthy’s death, but it was already old news to him.

“Brady called me last night. Understand it was a suicide.” Sam looked at me with an expression I had come to know. He arched his eyebrows and tilted his head as if he knew to expect trouble.

“That’s how Brady chose to read the scene. I believe it was murder,” I stated matter-of-factly.

Sam continued to paint without saying a word. I was used to my old boss Charlie Hickok’s ways: he’d rake me over the coals whenever I said something he didn’t agree with. I could live with that. I enjoyed duking it out and arguing to get my way. It was the silent treatment that killed me. And Sam was a master at it. I had become determined to outwit him at his own game, staying silent as long as he did. My cool lasted all of two seconds until I crumbled.

“Did you know that Annie was illegally dealing in reptiles?” I demanded in a rush.

Sam carefully shifted his weight back in his chair and slowly studied the painting in front of him before bothering to answer. “Sure did. Never could catch her, though.”

It was a common problem. The reptile trade tends to be fast and furious, with both critters and people in and out quicker than you can snag poachers in the act. At one time, I had suggested that we set up a stakeout, anxious to make my mark and nab a few bad guys. But Sam had nixed the idea, claiming, “We don’t have enough bodies to carry it out. Besides, nobody gives a damn anyway.”

I offered another idea on Annie’s demise. “Could it be that she got knocked off by a competitor in the trade?”

Sam chewed on that for all of a moment. “Nah. Don’t sound right to me.”

Sam clearly didn’t want any uncalled-for investigations on my part. He considered himself a realist where wildlife crime was concerned and had more than once voiced the opinion, “I just try to do the right thing and forget about the fact that it’s hopeless.”

I still wasn’t willing to buy in on hopeless as an option. Charlie Hickok had taught me to be a one-woman kamikaze hit team, to set my target straight for the jugular and not let go.

I tried another approach. “What about the fact that Annie had staked so many claims? Maybe she really did find a stash of gold and the wrong people found out about it.”

Sam touched up a brush stroke on Maizie’s muzzle. “Those claims ain’t worth the fees she paid for them. Any fool knows that.”

“Then what about those imprints of tortoises that I found both at the Center and at Annie’s?”

Sam squinted at the painting and added a dash more blue to the sky. “Don’t see no basis for a murder case there.” He put down his brush and turned to look at me. “Forget about Annie McCarthy. That’s Metro’s business. What have you got on those missing torts?”

I let the subject of Annie drop for now and filled him in on my meeting with Cammo Dude.

Sam chuckled as he wiped spots of paint off his hands. “That crazy old codger runs around dressed in camouflage trying to make everyone think he was napalmed in ’Nam. Truth is, he used to run a meth lab up in an old shack back in those hills.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“You know, the fifty-fifty drug?” Sam continued. “Take it and you got a fifty percent chance of living and a fifty percent chance of dying. Well, Cammo got a dose of both. He had a batch of meth cooking up there one day when the damn shack blew up on him. The fumes knocked him down to his knees and he hit a meth oil spill. Burned the skin right off his face.” He lit up a Marlboro and studied his boots. “What wild goose chase did he send you on?”

I suddenly felt foolish. “He told me about a group of burned-out scientists up in the pass. He thought they might have something to do with the tortoises’ disappearance.”

Sam’s head jerked up. “You been out there yet?”

His interest caught me off guard and I was suddenly cautious. “I was out there early this morning.”

“Who’d you meet?” An ash from his cigarette fell onto the tip of his boot, but Sam barely noticed.

“A wildlife biologist who used to work with Fish and Wildlife by the name of Georgia Peach,” I said, gauging his reaction.

Sam looked away, as if judging how much to reveal. “The boys back in Washington fired her a while ago.”

Georgia had made it sound as if she’d left on her own. “Why was she fired?”

Sam picked at his plaid shirt, his finger twisting a piece of loose thread on one of the buttons. “She didn’t agree with the Service’s decision to put the desert tortoise on the endangered list. She made it enough of an issue that they asked her to leave.”

Something didn’t strike me as quite right about Sam’s explanation, but I decided to let it slide.

“I also met a man by the name of Noah Gorfine.”

Sam’s eyes instantly locked onto mine. “Stay away from him, Rachel. The man’s nothing but trouble.”

I was surprised. “Why? What has he done?”

Sam’s attention traveled down to his boots, where he brushed away bits of cigarette ash. “I just know he’s considered a pariah by all the government hotshots. He used to work for the Department of Energy until he threw a monkey wrench into something big they were doing. Since then, anyone interested in a government career has been told to steer clear of him.”

Sam walked out to the Mr. Coffee machine in the hall. Bringing back two cups, he handed me one. “If you want to keep your nose out of trouble, forget you ever met the man. If you want to get ahead in this job, keep with the program.”

Keeping with the program was like asking me not to eat, sleep, or breathe. I learned early on that part of my problem as a Fish and Wildlife special agent is that I don’t fit into the mold. Higher-ups within the agency consider me one of those rare mutations that somehow manage to slip by without getting caught, bobbing and weaving, sliding in from the rear to kick down the door while no one’s looking. At first I had taken it as a compliment, proud that I had proven myself to be so exceptionally wily. But all I’d accomplished by kicking the door in so hard was to land myself ass-smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Assignment-wise, it was the equivalent of being sent to Hard Rock, Alaska.

I had just begun to sip my coffee when my phone rang. Leaving Sam’s office, I sprinted to my desk, knocking over a pile of unfinished paperwork as I reached for the receiver. I found myself faced with silence and then the sound of breathing. Along with no love life, I hadn’t had many dirty phone calls of late. I somehow doubted that my luck had changed.

“Anybody there?” I asked.

I was just about to hang up when a woman’s voice stopped me. “It would be worth your while to pay a visit to the Golden Shaft mine.”

“Who is this, please?” I questioned.

“All you need to know is that birds and tortoises are dying there every day and nothing is being reported,” the woman informed me.

It was my turn to be silent for a moment as I processed this information. “How are they dying?”

The voice on the other end snapped, “How the hell do you think? Birds drink from the cyanide pits. Haul pak drivers don’t stop to pick up desert tortoises that wander into their way. They’re being run over. Or even worse, they’re buried alive.”

“If you tell me your name, I promise that it will be kept totally confidential,” I offered.

The woman snorted. “Right. And good whisky is still a buck a shot. I need to keep my job, lady. You want to do something with the information I’ve given you? Be my guest. You want to sit on your ass like the State wildlife boys? Well, I can’t do nothing about that. Let it be on your head.”

Before I had a chance to respond, the phone clicked dead in my ear.

The Golden Shaft was the same mine Noah had complained about, and my mystery woman obviously worked at the mine.

Mines in Nevada ran on a self-reporting system that Sam likened to a fox declaring how many chickens he’s nabbed in a henhouse. All wildlife deaths connected to mining activities were supposed to be reported directly to the Nevada Division of Wildlife. It seemed that few were. And when they were, nothing was done. It was only when endangered critters were involved that Fish and Wildlife stepped into the fray.

“In Nevada, mining gets what it wants. It’s political suicide to go against the industry.” Sam had pounded that into my head since my first day on the job.

It was well known that the mines greased State palms to turn State heads the other way. That was one of the reasons Fish and Wildlife was so disliked in Nevada: so far, the Service had managed to remain incorruptible.

I filled Sam in on the call and told him that I planned to drive over and take a look around. It would be the first mine that I had officially visited since being out here.

Sam wiped off his brush and scrutinized his latest painting. “That should be quite a treat, though I don’t think you’ll find the Center’s missing tortoises there.”

Standing up, he took hold of his canvas and hung it on the wall behind his desk right below a sign that read, “
The Golden Rule in Nevada is: He who hath the gold rules.
”

I decided to play
it politically correct and head over to the Nevada Division of Wildlife, the state agency that is locally referred to as NDOW. Not only was it time that I introduced myself to the head honcho of the division; I also hoped that a courtesy call would smooth any feathers that might be ruffled over my impending visit to the Golden Shaft mine. Sam warned me that I would be greeted with about as much enthusiasm as a hooker on a sex strike.