Steve Martini: Prime Witness

They are the birds of darkness and noiseless flight, fierce and savage. On the dead fly the great horned owl can pick the eye from your head in the pitch black of a moonless night. On more than one occasion they are known to have attacked man.

It will take only three more nights to finish the job for which he’s been paid nearly a year’s salary. Though the risks are high, it is the easiest money he’s ever made.

As in the previous four nights he parks his car in the trees a half mile down the road. He takes Harvey from his cage, loosens the leather traces and removes the hood from the bird’s massive beaked head. He holds his arm straight, gloved fist elevated a bit, and sweeps it forward, the signal for the bird to take to the air. In a fluid motion a broad canopy of feathers opens overhead and the massive bird lifts skyward. It is a vision of flight, an analogy of animation perfect in its silence. He watches as Harvey disappears into the shadows of the trees and the half-moon-lit sky above.

Named for the six-foot fictional rabbit in a vintage Jimmy Stewart movie, Harvey is sheer stealth, six pounds of streaking death on the wing.

He listens, and after a few seconds, hears the telltale ruffle of folded wings, the only sound of flight Harvey ever makes. It is the sign that the bird has landed, ninety feet above, in the massive madrone on the makeshift perch. This place, high in the trees, will give the bird a better angle of attack.

He locks the car and checks to ensure that it is far enough off the main road so as not to be seen by some passing pain-in-the-ass motorist, or worse a county sheriff on patrol. But it is nearly a mile to the county highway, and nobody ever comes down the old abandoned gravel road, at least at night. He picked this place from an old plat map of the property gotten from the county recorder’s office. It was best not to ask the owner for too much help. The less he knew the better, for both of them.

He makes his way through the brush, across the shallow creek, to the base of the tree and begins his own ascent. This is made easier by the climbing gear erected on his first night, rappelling ropes and a harness called a leg-strap saddle. He sets the pin in the foot-cam that is fastened to his shoe and starts his climb.

Moving effortlessly through the branches of the blood-red madrone, ten feet up, twenty, the rope coils on the ground beneath him like some interminable serpent. For this he avoided the taller pines and stouter oaks, and picked the madrone. It has smooth bark, and no sap to foul the ropes.

In four minutes, hardly winded, he is up on the platform next to Harvey. The bird is perched on a limb a few feet away.

He checks his watch. It is nearly midnight. Moving swiftly, he frees himself from the entangling ropes and prepares to begin. At most there are five hours of darkness left.

Quickly he gives Harvey the scent, this from a small sack he carries on a tethered line from his belt, a little leather satchel marked by shiny metal studs. It contains blood, bits of flesh, pieces of vital organs from the previous night’s work. The body count now stands at four. With luck he will add to that tally tonight.

With Harvey the pattern of ritual is firmly established, first the scent, then the flight, then the kill. If he is true to form the bird will return in minutes, with blood on its talons.

With little ceremony he dispatches Harvey into the skies, then stands, stone silent and alert, facing the sheer basalt cliffs that rise a hundred feet from the valley floor to the west.

He is always uneasy when Harvey is on the wing. It is an anxiety born of the freedom of flight, the knowledge that after all, this is a creature that in the fickle flicker of a thought can disappear over the horizon never to be seen again. Like good fortune to the lucky, and the affections of a beautiful mistress to her lover, this bird of prey returns to its owner for a single reason-because it approves of the company. It is a chastening relationship, one which is always open to the question, who is master, and who is servant.

As his eyes strain for vision to the west in the dense night air, the bird issues from behind him an unearthly scream, high-pitched like a cornered cougar in agony. Though he knows this sound, it sends a chill down his spine.

Struggling for balance on the platform, he turns, his gaze cast down through the canopy of leaves to a spot two hundred feet below, across the winding creek. And for a fleeting instant his vision is fixed, the figures fused in his mind like the flash of a strobe in the moonlit night. Then Harvey is upon him, unwieldy wings, blood dripping from his talons, and in one claw the object of his frenzied flight.

With the bird balanced precariously on his gloved fist, he wrestles with the sharp talons of the closed claw. He coaxes the thing from Harvey’s grip, and it rolls upon his gloved and open palm. A bloodied remnant barely recognizable in form and shape, it sends a quick shiver of fear through him. And without thinking, he drops it ninety feet into the flowing waters of the creek below.

This place has the undiscerning smell of death about it. Horseflies and other buzzing things are thick in the noonday sun along the Putah Creek. I would have been here an hour sooner, but for the chaos out on the county highway, drivers rubbernecking, tourists getting a little extra on their trek from the Sonoma Valley.

We are perhaps five miles below the dam where the river is choked to a trickling creek among boulders and gravel the size of golf balls. The budding heat of the day rises off the rocks.

There are people here I recognize but cannot name, cops I have seen in the sheriff’s office in Davenport in the last few weeks. Some of these are tripping through weeds and brush up to their armpits, what police call the strip method for searching terrain, three cops walking at arm’s length combing an area in quadrants for anything unusual.

Across the creek, in the distance I can see soaring cliffs carved in the black lava rock by the river before it was tamed at the dam. Running up to these bluffs is a tangle of trees, oaks and a few tall poplars, their branches nipping at the promontories.

But the object of my interest is on this side of the creek, behind the yellow band of police tape wrapped around a group of small trees. Inside of this there is a single moving figure, hunched and low, scanning the ground. In a navy-blue police jumper with bright white lettering high on the back, the initials “DOJ.” It is a woman, short, a little stodgy, one of the criminologists from the State Department of Justice.

I walk from my car and move toward the taped area, stepping on strands of a broken barbed wire fence, stretched to the ground from rickety and rotting split rail posts. A small trashed metal “No Trespassing” sign is on the ground, rusted nearly beyond recognition, like perhaps it has been in the dirt and mud for a dozen years.

I circle, maintaining a good distance from the center of the search, until I have an opening, a clear line of sight through the trees and underbrush. There in a depression on the ground I see them lying on their backs, their arms stretched as if in crucifixion, faces to the blazing sun, two bleached and naked bodies, their midsections streaked in congealed blood, the color of rusted metal.

The flies and insects are thicker here, and the stench of death strong in the midday air.

The body closest to me, a male, has tightly clenched fists. Tied firmly with cord, these have turned the black-blue of death. The victim’s limbs are stretched to near dislocation at the joints, pulled taut by what appears to be a plastic-coated cord, similar to that used in the earlier murders. Metal tent stakes have been used for this purpose, driven deeply into the ground so that only a small portion of the L-shaped tip remains above the surface. There is some blood, not much, congealed on the lower abdomen. From this I assume that as in the earlier murders there is a fifth stake, driven hard, transfixing the victim to the ground. If true to form, this is the cause of death.