The Forest Prime Evil

by Alan Russell

  PRAISE FOR ALAN RUSSELL AND THE STUART WINTER NOVELS

  “Chilling . . . satisfying . . . offers up tasty tidbits of San Francisco lore . . . [Russell] has a gift for dialogue, slyly using it to reveal character.”—New York Times Book Review

  “Polished and provocative . . . a California mystery of the hard-boiled school . . . very well written, with a corking good plot and fine characters.”—Booklist

  “Smoothly plotted, deftly written, and thought provoking.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Remarkable . . . [hops] from avant-garde theater to a deaf school, from winos’ alleys to an artist’s studio, to a double-twist conclusion.”—Armchair Detective

  “A well-written, excellently paced mystery.”—Rendezvous Reviews

  “An excellent book with a fine plot of modern conflicts. You’ll love the mystery.”—Macon Beacon

  “A shocker . . . a genuinely original PI novel.”—Jeremiah Healy, Shamus Award-winning author

  “A wise book, distilled from a life’s understanding of the human animal: its limits, excesses, and, on occasion, its surpassing beauty.”—Loren D. Estleman, author of the Amos Walker Mysteries

  THE FOREST PRIME EVIL

  BOOKS BY ALAN RUSSELL

  Gideon and Sirius Novels

  Burning Man

  Guardians of the Night

  Lost Dog

  Gideon’s Rescue

  L.A. Woman

  Hotel Detective Mysteries

  The Hotel Detective

  The Fat Innkeeper

  Detective Cheever Novels

  Multiple Wounds

  The Homecoming

  Stand-Alone Novels

  Shame

  Exposure

  Political Suicide

  St. Nick

  A Cold War

  Stuart Winter Mysteries

  No Sign of Murder

  The Forest Prime Evil

  THE FOREST PRIME EVIL

  Alan Russell

  Three Tails Press

  New York, New York

  Copyright © 1992, 2019 by Alan Russell

  All rights reserved. Please comply with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of this book in any form (other than brief quotations embodied in critical reviews) without permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Sequoia Summer is a fictional movement created by the author and has no relation to any of the Redwood Summer activities that occurred in Humboldt County in 1990. The author has also taken some literary license with the geography of Humboldt County, creating several nonexistent cities. The redwoods, amazingly enough, exist. No author would have imagination enough to create them.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 91-37240

  Three Tails Press, New York, New York

  For author contact and press inquiries, please visit alanrussell.net.

  To the young man and the “old man”—my son, Luke, and my father, Mark. And to Janet and Barb, the “other” women in my life.

  CONTENTS

  PRAISE FOR ALAN RUSSELL AND THE STUART WINTER NOVELS

  BOOKS BY ALAN RUSSELL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  POLITICAL SUICIDE SNEAK PEEK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  THE STAIRWAY LEADING to my walk-up office on Geary sometimes attracts the homeless, but this was the first squatter I had ever seen in the lotus position. Drawing nearer, I recognized Josh Needleman. It had been five years since I had seen or talked with him. I called his name softly, and he opened his eyes. They were as dark as I remembered them, maybe a shade less brooding than Rasputin’s. He rose with a yogi’s grace, which probably explained a few years of his disappearance. Josh didn’t bother with the conventional handshake, or inquiries about how I had been doing, just acted as if I should have been expecting him. Naturally, he didn’t have an appointment. As I remembered, Josh had never been much for appointments. He once told me he never wanted to be a “prisoner of time.” By his appearance, it hadn’t taken him captive yet.

  He was wearing homespun, still apparently believing it wrong to use any leather or animal product for clothing. Josh had once told me that it was not one of “man’s higher purposes” to enslave and kill animals. His major quandary, I think, was trying to find what all man’s higher purposes are. But, in the course of a sentence or two, I learned that he hadn’t yet achieved sainthood. He was still human enough. He wanted revenge.

  “We have made a vow,” Josh told me, “to find Christopher Shepard’s murderer, and exact justice upon those who killed him. This is a sacred pledge, one to which we have bound ourselves.”

  Christopher Shepard, better known as the Green Man, had thought that planting trees could solve the ills of the world, could cure pollution, end global warming, and help give new life to a tired planet. For twenty years the Green Man had quite literally worked at the grass-roots level, getting down on his hands and knees to plant seeds and seedlings in the earth. A month ago, he himself had been planted in the ground.

  Shepard’s death had brought more notoriety to Sequoia Summer than three months of active protesting. The summer-long gathering had attracted a small army of mostly young, mostly irreverent protesters to Humboldt County. In an effort to stop old-growth deforestation, the activists had linked arms against bulldozers and defied chain saws by tree sitting. David with a monkey wrench against Goliath.

  Shepard was found dead in the middle of a controversial primeval forest he called home, a branch through his skull. One of his favorite quotations had been “He that loves the tree loves the branch.” The proverb took on a new, and perverse, meaning in his death.

  The death had been ruled accidental, the result of a limb that had fallen from one of the towering redwoods. No landscape is without its inherent dangers. Around the redwood forest are visible reminders of its hazards. When limbs fall several hundred feet, they frequently embed themselves deep in the forest floor. To the uninitiated, these limbs are often mistaken for trees. Over the years, the local folk have had reason to give them a name: widow-makers.

  Some creative journalists had suggested that Shepard’s body was found in a Christlike pose, supported by the wood. It wasn’t like that, but none of the environmentalists had asked for retractions. What they wanted was an investigation. In Humboldt County, “cover-up” was being shouted almost as loudly as “timber.”

  I had grieved over the Green Man’s death but hadn’t paid much mind to those who claimed a murder had been committed. These days it’s rare for a well-known person to die without an accompanying conspiracy theory, and usually a TV limited series. I had followed the controversy, but I hadn’t expected it to show up on my doorstep. Josh’s talk of vows and pledging and binding sounded right out of the Middle Ages.

  “Who,” I asked, “is ‘we’?”

  “The Committee for Justice,” he said.

  “That doesn’t tell me much.”

  “The Committee for Justice,” Josh said carefully, “is a
collective.”

  I waited patiently. He finally produced. “A collective,” he proudly said, “made up of Sequoia Summer campers and members of EverGreen.”

  I might have told Josh his pride was misplaced. EverGreen wasn’t exactly the Junior League. Members described themselves as rebels with a green cause, but others weren’t so charitable. Eco-thugs, they said. Mainstream conservation groups were less than enamored with EverGreen’s tactics and treated the organization as a pariah. EverGreeners didn’t lead nature walks or circulate petitions to save the auk. They advocated ecodefense and justified their tactics by saying that everything they did—including monkey wrenching, tree spiking, sabotaging heavy equipment, and undertaking disinformation campaigns—was for the protection of Mother Earth. One national magazine had described their membership as “postpubescent Girl and Boy Scouts gone anarchic.” The EverGreeners didn’t sell cookies door to door. But if you had a hankering for smoke bombs, they could deliver faster than Domino’s.

  “I told them about you,” Josh said. “I vouched for you.”

  Some endorsements you can live without. I had met Josh in a birding class seven years ago. He had been enrolled but only flirting with the idea of being an undergraduate at Berkeley. Even then, Josh’s outside interests were more important to him than academics. The ornithology course was one of those Saturday University of California extension classes that attract a lot of older couples looking to share a new hobby. Odd men out find each other, and that’s how Josh and I had hooked up.

  Over time, I became his sounding board. We continued to see each other after our class was concluded, bird watching being the centerpiece of our relationship. Josh was better at birding than I, could make identifications more surely and quickly. He knew not to chatter out in the field, and he was more at ease there, less tense and vitriolic than elsewhere. But when the binoculars went down, his rigid rectitude and anger always returned. Josh railed against those who had eliminated our wetlands and eradicated the open spaces, the villains who had left the world fit only for “people, rats, ice plant, and pigeons.”

  I envied Josh his youthful passions, which is another way of saying I thought him naive. Sometimes I argued with him, but mostly I listened. I suppose he took my silence as consent; in most cases it was. But then, as now, I wasn’t of the opinion that two wrongs make a right, or that seeking compromise is necessarily wrong. Josh had drawn lines and wasn’t about to make any quarter with his many enemies, which seemed to include most of San Francisco, if not the world. I had figured he would ultimately mature and realize that everything isn’t black and white, but it seemed he now saw only black and green. Even though I hadn’t seen him for years, I had assumed Josh would turn up sometime. Today was my lucky day.

  “Why did you have to vouch for me?”

  “We needed someone we could trust,” he said. “Someone not in bed with the lumber barons and their political machine. We know they murdered him. It shouldn’t be hard for you to prove that.”

  My mental alarm always goes off when anyone tells me how easy a job is going to be. Normally, you want to run away from cases like that. The rule of thumb in most murder investigations—and Shepard’s death hadn’t even been ruled a murder—is that if you don’t have a pretty good idea who the killer is in the first forty-eight hours, the odds are it will never be solved. I tried to tell this to Josh, but he wasn’t inclined to listen.

  “The murder hasn’t been solved,” he said, “because those in power don’t want it solved.”

  The Green Man had died in River Grove, a three-thousand-acre stand of old growth. River Grove was a rallying cry for both lumber interests and conservationists and offered about as much middle ground as abortion. The land was owned by Trans-Mississippi, one of the largest lumber companies in the county. Trans-Miss contended they had a right to “conduct business as usual” on their own property, while the environmentalists were convinced that any business that pursued the “murder of national treasures” was both immoral and illegal. The Green Man had arrived in the middle of the controversy and promptly made his home in the contested forest. Living in a hollowed redwood tree, he had become a notorious and much publicized squatter of River Grove.

  Christopher Shepard was usually described as a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, but his pasture far surpassed John Chapman’s. From Harlem, New York, to Haarlem, the Netherlands, the Green Man had planted trees. He visited every continent except Antarctica and in his wake left a trail of green. Every day was Arbor Day for him. In his lifetime, he had planted more than 2 million trees. He often said nothing would ever interrupt his life’s work, but he forgot that trees are not the only things sometimes cut down in their prime.

  “What evidence do you have that the Green Man was murdered?”

  Josh shook his head, acted as if he was disappointed by my questions. “Doesn’t a head full of wood make you suspicious?”

  I refrained from telling him I encountered those every day. “The way he died was not unprecedented, I understand.”

  “Neither is the rape of the ancient woods. The lumber companies are happy now because they’ve gotten just what they wanted: a cozy death.”

  “Whereas you’d prefer a martyr,” I said.

  For just a moment, I caught that look in his eyes, the one that made me feel unclean, and unenlightened, that spoke of my inferior sensibilities. And maybe, just maybe, threatened me. But the look changed, just as Josh’s spiel did.

  “Are we supposed to let them get away with murder, Stuart? They do every day, you know. They cut down history. They kill living monuments, trees that were around before Christ, and Socrates, and Buddha, and Aristotle, and Mohammed, trees that predate the major religions and philosophies of this world. Those are the real martyrs, every prehistoric tree that is struck down. They kill these ancient beings, some as big, and every inch as sacred, as the Statue of Liberty. I’d like to bring them to trial for those murders, but they’ve rigged the laws. I’m told, though, that flesh-and-blood murder still isn’t allowed. You aren’t supposed to be able to fell what’s human and get away with it.”

  “That’s right,” I said pointedly. “No one is supposed to profit from murder.”

  He was a fanatic, but he wasn’t stupid. He caught my double meaning and momentarily looked abashed. “Yes,” he said, “we want to stop those saws permanently, and maybe we see this as our opportunity to do that, but most of all what we want is justice. They should have to pay for what they have done. And, if they do, the Green Man will not have died in vain.”

  I preferred a bellicose Josh to one who was sanctimonious. In pursuit of a cause, thinking tends to get colored. But, green flags notwithstanding, I was interested in the case. There was still the matter of proceeding on something other than suspicion and hearsay, though.

  “Without violins,” I said, “offer me some reasonable evidence that he was murdered.”

  Josh reached into his shirt and pulled out a rolled-up piece of paper. He removed a rubber band, solemnly unfurled the paper, then silently handed it to me. It was a wanted poster, not exactly the type you see in a post office, but one more closely resembling those that had come out of the Wild West. The Green Man’s was the featured portrait. Above and below him, in large print, were the words WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE!

  “Not long after Christopher arrived,” Josh said, “we found these plastered all around the county.”

  “There’s no bounty offered,” I said.

  “None was offered on the spotted owl posters either,” he said, “but some of the owls turned up dead anyway, nailed in public places.”

  I had heard about those posters, and the response to them. The impaling of owls harkened back to older times. Hundreds of years ago farmers used to nail birds to their barns. The displays were believed to ward off storms. Maybe that same fearful mind-set had come to the fore again, the desire to stave off storms of change. The possibility of the northern spotted owl being granted protected species status threatened Pacific
Northwest logging interests. The presence of the Green Man might have similarly threatened them.

  “What else do you have?”

  “They’ve rewritten the dirty tricks manual,” Josh said. “They’ve circulated incendiary communiqués supposedly written by us, letters on Sequoia Summer letterhead detailing plans to abolish the timber industry in its entirety and declaring a need for a complete ban on all logging. They’ve also been big on creating violent images.”

  He reached into his shirt for more paperwork and handed it to me. The general theme was environmentalists getting spiked or chain-sawed. Most of the victims were being violated in their anal regions. The majority of the cartoon renderings were crude, but a few of the sketches looked capable, almost professional.

  “You think the cartoons incited someone to murder?”

  “What you call cartoons, I call hate and pornography. And, yes, I think it’s quite possible.”

  “Beyond indignation, what do you have?”

  His lips tightened. With an effort, Josh restrained his anger. “I have the names of those responsible for circulating the posters, and I know where they work.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “They work for a lumber company.”

  By the expression on his face, it appeared that even saying the words pained him. “Trans-Mississippi,” he spat.

  I didn’t immediately respond, allowing myself the luxury of a few seconds of thought. The Green Man’s death had considerably shortened my list of living heroes. You’d think with over 5 billion potential applicants, I would have been able to scare up a few more names, but this hasn’t been the best era for heroes. We’ve been pulling the pedestals down faster than we can erect them.

  I pictured the Green Man in my mind’s eye. His mop of hair had generously been described by some as a Prince Valiant cut, but it was apparent his stylist was a kitchen bowl. He was often portrayed with his crooked smile, which announced his friendliness, and hinted at some touch of mischief. Most symbolic were his trademark bare feet, extremities photographed more than any Madison Avenue model’s. Shoeless, he never yielded to the elements but walked through the snow and the cold across earth and hard rock. Shoeless, he was now making his way through the Valley of Death. He had said he remained unshod “so as not to lose contact with Mother Earth.” Now she had him in her embrace. His death didn’t seem fair; death never does. But murder is the most unfair death of all. I wondered if there was anything to Josh’s claims.