‘ Well, so that was our first round,’ Desault said, as they talked on the phone. ‘There’s going to be some of that, and I’m sure you’ve thought about it.’
This was cheerleading. This was having a direct supervisor, but that was part of the deal and he was getting a feel for Desault. He liked Desault’s candor and that he wasn’t afraid to take a chance. They talked over the Indonesia trip and how much the world had shrunk since they both had started in law enforcement. Marquez had thought plenty about that on the ride home. A decade ago he chased poachers into Oregon or Nevada or tried to cut off poached abalone coming in from Mexico, but now they talked in terms of shipping points and global routes.
As Desault revisited Stoval’s bighorn hunt and the failure to apprehend him in Vegas, Marquez’s thoughts floated back to the nineteenth century when skin hunters in the US slaughtered the great herds of buffalo, antelope, and bighorn. A naturalist named Ernest Thompson Seton recorded it. He watched species that once had no fear of man taken to near extinction, but he couldn’t do anything to slow it. It took the Lacey Act of 1900 to do that. Seton wrote that the bighorn had no fear of man in those days. He wrote that we have to acknowledge that animals have rights. He meant the right to exist and have habitat. He wrote stories about animals to try to make his point, to try to bridge the disconnect. He wrote about an angel of the wild, a guardian that watched over the wild creatures, and if they ever needed one it was now as we crossed another threshold of extinctions with more or less the same excuses, the same fear that giving animals space risks necessary economic development of increasingly scarce resources. In truth, it risked something more threatening than that. It risked changing our view of how we inhabit the world.
On the flight home from Indonesia Marquez turned off the overhead light and around him most in the half-full business section were sleeping. Many had their window shades down. The engines thrummed, but the cabin was still. The long trip was a failure, yet he had made something of it by going to the Pramuka Market and taking in the scale again, the systematic marketing of life, the stacked cages.
It was an opportunity Desault had given him. It was a small window barely open, an idea forming. He felt in his coat for the maroon passport, took it out and held it in his hand for several minutes, gripping it like a ticket not to be dropped, and in some new way it was. Desault used the old-school slang name, redback, for the passport, and like him, Desault was long into a law enforcement career and trying to adapt to a changing world where criminals had gone global. This passport symbolized a new opportunity, one Marquez knew wouldn’t come for him again.
He had to make everything of the moment. Some inward fire relit in him as he walked the Pramuka Market. He did not see the way yet, but he knew this was his last best chance to make a difference.
‘We scoured Vegas looking for Stoval,’ Desault said. ‘We put effort into it. We ran that alias, Patrick Maitland, through everything and everybody.’
And they did the same in Alaska and believed they had a bush pilot with a sideline helicopter scenic tour business, who had yet another sideline that was bear hunting from the copter. In Phoenix there was a credit card used in the name of Patrick Maitland, and again in Houston, and from informants there, whispers of Stoval meeting with Zetas in Texas.
‘He may have come back through California and he may have returned to California again recently. We had a call this morning that he’s here, right now.’
‘That’s where you’re going with this?’
‘Yes. I’m wondering if there’s a hunting reason he’d return to California. He wouldn’t be after more bighorn, would he?’
‘No.’
‘You can’t think of anything?’
‘Not offhand.’
‘Are you on your way in?’
‘Yeah, I’ll see you soon, and I’ve got to tell you something, Ted. I passed a message through Rayman yesterday. I want Stoval to know that if anything happens to anyone in my family, I’ll turn in my badge and then I’ll be coming for him.’
‘You told that to Raymond Mendoza?’
‘I asked him to pass it on.’
Desault muttered something he couldn’t hear and hung up.