Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  I ducked beneath the surface, hugged my knees and tried to let the current take me. But the piercing cold made me gasp and my throat filled with water. As I was flailing, the spotlight found me. Gunshots rang out and bullets hit the water. I felt the current quicken, snatching me away from the insistent beam, the bottom dropping away as a thundering noise approached. Waterfall, my brain had time to register. Then with a sickening rush I was falling through the darkness, my stomach in my throat.

  The impact drove the air from my lungs. My injured ribs were on fire. The water solidified around me like cement, pounding me against the fine pebbles at the bottom of the pool, where I was pinned for a helpless second, my need to breathe like a scream. I popped loose and slammed into one rock, then another. The river widened and lost its momentum, leaving me half-floating in a foot and a half of swirling water, spinning from rock to rock until my knees gained purchase and I staggered coughing through the shallows to my feet.

  I expected the spotlight to locate me again but I didn’t see it. Of course they couldn’t drive their truck down here. My breath came fast, every muscle in my body tight with cold and fear and the bruising I’d taken over the last five days, my ribs a searing mass of pain, the injuries from my motorcycle accident reinflamed. Cho was dead. Lydia likely was, too.

  Too cold to stay where I was, I decided to follow the current. The only way forward seemed to be ahead. I had a vague idea that staying in the water was my safest bet. I could only take two or three steps at a time before I had to stop and steel myself against the pain, the stillness of the mountains seeming to dissolve my being each time I listened for pursuit. I was deliriously certain there’d be dogs, or copters. If there were helicopters I was screwed, but everyone knew dogs couldn’t track in water. My feet were numb, indifferent to whether I was walking in the current or on the spits of sand that appeared on either side, broken by sheer rock walls that forced me again and again back into the water. I could no longer feel my hands, and even my face and lips had lost sensation. The sentient part of me seemed to have shrunken to a core of protothought. I knew I couldn’t go on.

  Luckily this realization seemed not to have reached my legs, and I kept walking, throwing one foot in front of the other, moving in and out of the water, my shoes heavy, my eyes steady on the gap in the trees ahead. The gorge widened, the trees on either side growing more distant, the mountains again coming into view. I came to a large bar, stretching perhaps a hundred yards between the current and the trees, the silvery glint of river stones showing against the dark sand. I’d gone perhaps a mile and knew I was at the limit of my endurance.

  I veered inland, walking on the relatively flat surface, though in my fatigue the going seemed no easier than before. About two-thirds of the distance to the trees I tripped over a stone and heard something light and metallic skitter away in the darkness. I stumbled forward and tripped again, my foot coming down this time with a crunch. I was standing in someone’s fire ring, surrounded by empty beer cans. Nearby stood a twisted heap of branches and driftwood.

  Whoever had been here had chosen the site because a large tree still bearing its roots was half-embedded in the sand, forming a natural bench. I huddled against it and drew my knees to my shoulders. This brought no warmth. But the shivering had stopped. My head nodded and I forced my eyes open. I didn’t know much about the outdoors but it’s undoubtedly true that to sleep in such a situation means certain death.

  I ran my hands over the smooth log, stripped of its bark, then started feeling around on hands and knees. Lots of beer cans, other garbage. Cigarette butts. At last my hands closed on what felt like a flattened cylinder. A disposable lighter, but when I shook it there was nothing inside. Confirming the fluid was out, I struck the wheel with my thumb and was rewarded with sparks but no flame.

  I stumbled stiff-legged to the woods for something small to burn and found an armful of last year’s pine needles and a long-dried snag of dry grass and brush. I brought these back to the fire ring and dumped them on the sand near the firewood the partyers had left. I stuck the lighter in my pile of dry grass and moss and thumbed the wheel again and again.

  Finally a pair of sparks landed, fizzing in the nest I’d built for them. I grabbed the nest in my fist and balled it up, wrapping my fingers tightly around the grass and moss to make a sealed, crucible-like chamber with the spark at its core, and blew through the hole my thumb and forefinger made, like I was trying to inflate a balloon. After a dozen puffs the heat burned my palm and I had to drop the flaring ball of moss.

  In five minutes, I had a small fire. My palm was blistered badly, but the pain told me I was alive. I was aware of the likelihood it might lead my pursuers to me, but it was either freeze to death or take the risk of being shot. With any luck, they’d think I’d been killed in the stream, raked by the bullets that had strafed the current around me. Besides, if they had helicopters and night-vision goggles, the fire wouldn’t make much difference. And if they were determined to find me, they would. Why not be comfortable?

  I sat close enough to the flames that steam rose off my clothes. When those on my front side were stiff and dry, I turned and roasted my back. I fed the flames but tried to keep the fire small. Warming at last, my body was a solid mass of pain. As the flames faded to embers, I eased onto the sand in a fetal position, pillowed my head on my arm, and dozed.

  Chapter 21

  I woke frequently through the night to feed the fire, and at first light I was slowly, painfully on the move. A Jeep track from the gravel bar led me to a logging road, which ended a few miles later at the main highway along the Trinity River. I had to stop frequently to rest, leaning against a tree or simply lying down beside the road. By 9:00 AM I was walking the shoulder of the highway toward Weaverville. I wasn’t sure what I’d do, but I knew I couldn’t hide in the woods for six months like Gary Cho.

  The grades were steep and the curves frequent. A few cars passed, but none was going my way. I had to rest again and sat down on the shoulder, then eased onto my side. I was still lying in the fetal position ten minutes later when a sheriff’s patrol car approached.

  The eyes of the uniformed man at the wheel met mine and he slowly reversed to a stop on the shoulder beside me. I rolled onto my back as his passenger window slid down. I sat up and shakily got to my feet, my eyes filling with tears at the pain this effort brought. Standing, I had to lean on his car for support.

  Sipping from a coffee mug, he balanced it carefully on the dashboard as he regarded me. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, and he seemed to notice this with a faint smile. “You’re a long way from home,” he said with easy humor, as if he had nothing better to do than stop and talk with me.

  At first I thought he already knew who I was, and that I was from San Francisco. A stunned moment passed before I realized anyone walking on this road would be a long way from home, wherever home happened to be.

  “Got stuck in the woods last night,” I told him.

  “ ‘Stuck’ covers a lot of ground. We’ve got a phone at the office you can use to sort out what you need.” He seemed to take it for granted I didn’t have a cell, or he knew that, if I did, there’d be no service here.

  When he reached across to open the door, I sat down. “Todd Burke,” he said, shaking my hand. He retrieved the coffee mug from the dash as he pulled forward. “I’m the sheriff here.”

  I wondered if he knew anything about last night’s events, if the car had been discovered in the stream with Cho’s body in it. I didn’t dare ask, of course. When I introduced myself, all he said was: “Must have been a cold night for sleeping on the ground.”

  I didn’t know how to explain what had happened, so for now I said nothing. In twenty minutes we were at his headquarters. He fed me coffee and donuts and showed me to an empty desk with a phone. Then he went into his own office and closed the door. A few uniformed deputies were at their desks, and a female dispatch officer sat behind glass. Not surprisingly, I was the object of their curiosity. />
  I didn’t know where to start. Probably, what I needed most was a lawyer. After yesterday’s events, it seemed to me I had as little chance of walking away from the situation as I did of pitching in the World Series. It would be vital later that I not be seen as having hidden information. Besides, Lydia Cho might still be alive—lost or wounded in the forest.

  Feeling a sudden determination, I rose and knocked on the sheriff’s door. He called, “Come in,” and I did. “You make your calls?” he asked. I told him I hadn’t, but that I’d realized there were a few things I needed to discuss with him. With a gesture, he invited me to sit.

  It was a strange story, I said, and I asked him not to stop me until I’d told it through. Throughout my narrative, his demeanor held neither belief nor disbelief. He sat regarding me with the weary look of a man precisely calculating in his head the vast amount of paperwork my tale was going to generate for him. When I’d finished, he opened his computer, found the number for the San Mateo County sheriff, and connected the call. He asked me for the Chos’ address, repeated it into the phone, and requested the house be checked for a possible shooting victim. He replaced the phone, rose, and said, “Let’s go.”

  On our way out, he beckoned a deputy to join us. This time I rode in the back.

  At first, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find the place. Last night we’d arrived in the dark, and I’d been half-asleep as Lydia drove, my sense of direction left miles behind us. Now, by the light of a cool early autumn day, I wasn’t sure we had the right logging road until the cabin appeared at the end of it. The bicycle and the running shoes were gone from the porch, but, otherwise, nothing seemed to have changed since I’d last been there. Somehow, though, we’d evidently driven right past the wrecked car in the water without noticing it.

  Burke turned the cruiser around and proceeded more slowly back the way we’d come. On this second pass, I spotted the site easily enough. Multiple sets of ruts descended from the gravel road down the bank into the river, showing where Lydia’s BMW had been pushed over the edge. But it was gone now. The brush was flattened between the ruts, the leaves of the few broad-leaf plants just beginning to wilt, as the deputy pointed out. The current flowed without unnatural interruption toward the bend.

  “You can see the tracks,” I said.

  “I can see what I can see,” Burke answered, his friendly attitude now evaporated into a cop’s inquisitive suspicion. He made his way down the bank, holding on to the broken bushes for support, then stood scanning the water, hands on his hips. Something caught his eye and he rolled his sleeve, stepped with one foot onto a boulder at the edge, and stooped to thrust his hand beneath the current, coming up with a shard he studied in his palm. “Window glass,” he announced in a tone of personal affront.

  The deputy, kicking through grass at the edge of the road, bent and parted the stalks. “Shell casings here.”

  “You’ll find spent shells in every square foot within twenty feet of a passable road in this county,” the sheriff responded. “Seems like people around here have nothing better to do than get drunk and waste good ammunition on trees. Shell casings don’t tell me much.”

  I was astounded, my alarm growing by the minute. “There were two people with me in the car. A man named Gary Cho and his wife, Lydia. I saw Gary shot in the throat. He was in the driver’s seat. Lydia had made it out before the car went in the water.”

  Burke surveyed the stream. His cell phone rang and he held it to his ear, then said, “Any sign of the homeowners?” He listened again, his face betraying nothing. He pocketed the phone and climbed back up the steep bank. “Looks like we’ve got a missing person case, after all.” To the deputy he said, “Jim, we’re going to need everyone we can spare out here in river boots and waders.” To me: “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  “What’d they find in Portola?”

  “Nothing,” Burke said, snapping on the cuffs. “Same as here. There’s one consistent theme to your story, and that’s this woman, Lydia Cho. Her car is gone, and your rental’s still parked at the market near her house. That puts you on the scene. You’ve told me she was with you. We’re going to have to keep you around until we get to the bottom of this.”

  “Everything I’ve told you is the truth.”

  “Then you’ll be the first. My more immediate problem is I’ve got to search these woods for a missing woman who had no business here, but according to you this is where she was. I don’t think she’s anywhere near here, but I still have to look.” He studied me for another moment, seemingly giving me the chance to say something more, then signaled to the deputy. “Miranda him, drive him back to the station, and put him in a room.”

  The deputy’s mumbled warnings were hardly needed. Even if I hadn’t been a lawyer and, thus, fully aware of my rights, I had nothing to say as we drove back toward Weaverville along the mountain road. I’d dreaded having to explain my involvement in these killings. But that dilemma now seemed preferable to the murky netherworld into which I’d been plunged, one controlled by secretive forces that apparently had the power to erase events as if they’d never occurred—at least two killings and one wrecked car.

  My tale of shootings bookmarked by a three-hundred-mile drive for an interview with a man who’d committed suicide months before sounded crazy even to me. I didn’t blame Burke for not believing a word of it. I’d felt the same way listening to Cho last night.

  The interview room the deputy led me to was more comfortable than most of its kind. The door locked from the outside, but at least it wasn’t a cell. There was a couch, or rather a loveseat, a stained and battered specimen that appeared to have been retired from a doctor’s reception room. The female dispatcher soon brought me a peanut-butter sandwich and more coffee. Then, when I knocked on the door, a deputy appeared to escort me to the restroom. In the early evening another deputy brought me a sack of McDonald’s.

  I asked to make a phone call, and he showed me to the same unused desk as before. I said I wanted to call my lawyer, and he hesitated, then let me use the phone in the sheriff’s private office. My first call was to my brother, who was stunned by the news and so upset that I quickly reassured him I was fine, even though I wasn’t certain this was true. Teddy promised to let our father know, despite the fact that neither of them could do anything to help me. My next call was to Nina Schuyler, my friend, who’d promised to defend me on the gun case.

  As I poured my voice into the silence on her end of the phone, I sensed she didn’t believe me, either. I was aware of the doubts she’d had about all of us back during my father’s trial.

  “Don’t say a word,” she advised me once I’d finished talking. “And don’t think you can talk your way out of it. You’ve said far too much already.”

  “All of it true.”

  “You’ve been in this business long enough, Leo, to know truth doesn’t matter. Truth is relative, and a mistake’s the same as a lie. They can’t use your silence against you, but I guarantee they’ll find a way to twist whatever it is you’ve told them into a hanging rope.”

  “I know, but I’ve got more than just myself to think about. My investigation of Jordan’s murder’s what brought me to this. I need to finish what I started. But in order for me to do that, you’ve got to get me out.”

  Her reply was grudging. “I’ll make a few calls and see what I can learn.”

  I thanked her, then went back to my little room.

  I was still there five hours later when the door flew open and three men walked in. The first, in muddy boots and a sweat-stained uniform shirt, was Burke. Behind him came a stocky, dark-haired guy in pressed blue jeans, a striped button-down, and a leather jacket with a badge and gun on his belt. Last came Detective Mark Chen, wearing a dark blue suit and no tie.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Burke said. “It’s been a hell of a day. Not that I want to make it any longer, but these men have driven up from the peninsula and need to start back first thing. Leo Max
well, Lou Suarez. He’s up here from Portola Valley. I understand Mr. Maxwell and Detective Chen are already acquainted.”

  With this, Burke lifted the suspect’s chair away from the table and moved it to one side of the room, sat, and tilted it against the wall, his arms folded as if signaling the end of his participation. I was on the couch. The guy from Portola took the interrogator’s chair, with Chen standing against the wall behind him. The room seemed to have shrunk to a tenth of its previous size.

  “Why don’t you start by telling us what brings you to Trinity County,” Burke suggested.

  “Investigating a murder,” I answered, letting my eyes rise to meet Chen’s. “I came here to speak to the last person who saw Jordan Walker alive the night she was murdered in San Francisco two months ago. In other words, I was doing Detective Chen’s work for him.”

  “You were the last person who saw her alive,” Chen said. “And now, according to you, you were also the last person to see Lydia Cho.”

  I shook my head. “The SFPD knows the man it’s arrested for Jordan’s murder may be innocent. They’re willing to let him take the fall if that means closing the case.”

  Suarez didn’t acknowledge Chen’s presence. “Sheriff Burke’s question was a good one. Why don’t you finish answering it? Care to explain why you thought the man you were looking for was here in Trinity County?”

  “His name was Gary Cho. He’s the owner of a construction company called Lizhi, and he’d filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against Kairos, one of the main subcontractors on the big Candlestick project. He claimed they were cooking their books and defrauding the taxpayers. Kairos hit back hard—and dirty. They had a phony video of Cho having sex with a fourteen-year-old kid in a Chinatown bathhouse. He faked his suicide to keep from being sent to prison. After a few months in hiding up here, he went back down to the city to see Jordan. She listened to him, and his story meshed with her own suspicions. But they killed her before she could pursue it any further. Cho hid himself successfully until he was killed in an ambush last night. I didn’t see what happened to Lydia after I escaped from the car.”