The Night Crew

the guy at one of those places. We’ve assumed it was with Jacob, because of the drugs. We were probably wrong.’’
    Anna frowned, took the pistol out of her jacket pocket, flicked out the cylinder, spun it once, looking at the little undimpled primers. ‘‘We talked to two guys, really, at the animal rights raid,’’ she said, snapping the cylinder shut. ‘‘One of them was wearing a mask, but he had this voice. I was thinking, maybe someday he could go on TV. Jesus, this guy—it could be him! I mean, he was a little strange, his attitude, I didn’t pay much attention because we run into lots of strange people . . .’’
    ‘‘All right,’’ Harper said. ‘‘Where do we look him up?’’
    ‘‘I don’t know—Jason was the contact. But I could find out.’’
    Harper was absently juggling the empty Coke cans: ‘‘Okay. But before we get too enthusiastic . . . you said there were two guys at the animal rights raid.’’
    ‘‘Yeah,’’ she nodded, thinking about it. ‘‘The other one, he was just a kid, kind of wimpy.’’
    Harper found a dirt ledge for the cans, and set them up. ‘‘I saw him on TV—you mean the kid who tried to fight them off.’’
    ‘‘Not a violent type, like me,’’ Anna said. ‘‘He was crying about getting a bloody nose.’’
    ‘‘Doesn’t sound like our guy,’’ Harper agreed. He pointed at her plastic muffs: ‘‘Pull down your earmuffs, you’re too young to lose your hearing.’’
    Harper stuck his fingers in his ears, and Anna pulled down the earmuffs and pointed the gun at one of the cans. Then a thought struck her and she pulled the muffs back and said, ‘‘I just thought of something else.’’
    ‘‘Yeah?’’ He took his fingers out of his ears.
    ‘‘Creek noticed that there was only one guy on the raid, all the rest were women. And they were, I don’t know, kind of busty . Creek said it looked like a harem.’’
    ‘‘So maybe the guy’s a freak.’’
    ‘‘God . . .’’ She pulled the muffs down again, and Harper stuck his fingers back in his ears and Anna pointed the pistol at the first can, jerked the trigger. She missed by two feet.
    ‘‘Settle down,’’ she said aloud. She relaxed, brought the pistol up, fired again and the can flipped up the dirt wall, and clattered back down again, a neat hole punched in the center of the white C-for-Coke. Anna pulled the muffs up and said, ‘‘I just thought of something else: He had this pig and it knocked him down . . .’’
    ‘‘I saw that,’’ Harper said. ‘‘He must’ve been humiliated.’’
    ‘‘Yeah.’’ She pulled the muffs back down, emptied the gun. She hit the cans twice more, and the rest of the shots were bunched around them.
    ‘‘You ain’t going to the Olympics,’’ Harper said, as she shucked the empty shells out. ‘‘But they’d all hit between the nipples.’’
    ‘‘That’s all I need,’’ she said, reloading. She stopped with a shell still in the palm of her hand and said, ‘‘You said if it wasn’t a coincidence, all of this starting—you said you had some ideas about that, too.’’
    ‘‘One thing at a time,’’ Harper said.
    She pushed the last shell home. ‘‘Let’s go find this guy.’’ Louis found him, running down names on the letterhead press release.
    ‘‘His name is Steven Judge. He and two or three more of them live at what they call the Full Heart Sanctuary Ranch, and it’s not far from where you are,’’ Louis said. ‘‘It’s up in Ventura, just on the other side of the Santa Susanas.’’
    ‘‘Half an hour,’’ Harper said, when Anna told him. He glanced at his watch: ‘‘We’ve got time.’’ The countryside of Southern California was rarely empty, not this close to L.A. and the coast, but the Full Heart Ranch was on a gravel road up a washed-out dirt canyon, about as isolated a place as could be found. The sign at the entrance to the canyon was neat and businesslike, a metal plaque that said, ‘‘Full Heart Ranch,’’ and below that, in smaller letters, ‘‘Animal Sanctuary.’’ A hundred feet up the trail was another sign, this one resembling the signs in national forests, yellow burnt-in letters on brown-painted boards: ‘‘Welcome. Please register at the ranch house. Do not leave your car before registering—some of our animals are sensitive to the scent of humans.’’
    ‘‘Probably got tigers out there,’’ Harper said. ‘‘And when they say ‘humans,’ they