Kathy Reichs - Bare Bones

“How?” I was so repulsed I could hardly form questions.

“Hunters tipped officials to poaching in and around Shenandoah National Park. Agents ultimately infiltrated the ring, posed as middlemen, accompanied poachers on hunts, that sort of thing. I worked a similar sting up in Graham County about ten years back.”

“Not the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest?”

“The very same. The trees may be lovely, but the bears are profit.”

The line hummed as Zamzow sorted through recollections.

“One couple up there had been in business seventeen years. Jackie Jo and Bobby Ray Jackson. What pieces of work they were. Claimed to sell three hundred galls annually to customers up and down the eastern seaboard. Claimed they got their galls from hunt clubs, farmers, and by their own hunting and trapping.”

Zamzow was on a roll.

“Some of these poachers are as blatant as Seventh Avenue hookers. Leave a business card at a hunting lodge saying you want to buy bear gall, they’ll phone you right back.”

Ricky Don Dorton. Wilderness Quest. Cocaine. Bears. Exotic birds. Random particles of thought were again seeking each other’s company in my head.

“How do these rings operate?”

“Nothing complex. Contact is made by a poacher via word of mouth or a phone call to a buyer. The buyer meets the poacher in a parking lot, maybe at an isolated location, and the transaction is made. Poacher gets thirty-five, maybe fifty bucks for each gall, middleman gets seventy-five to a hundred. Street value skyrockets in Asia.”

“Where do the galls leave the country?”

“A lot traffics through Maine, since that’s one of the few states where it’s legal to sell black bear galls to Asia. But, again, it’s illegal to sell bear parts killed in North Carolina in any state. Lately Atlanta’s become a big gateway.”

“How are the galls preserved?”

“Poacher freezes them intact ASAP outta the bear.”

“And then?”

“He turns them over to his Asian contact. Since freshness determines value, most galls are dried in the destination city. But not always. Some Asian contacts do their drying in the United States so they can transport larger quantities. A gall is about the size of a human fist and weighs less than a pound. Drying shrinks it to a third that size.”

“How is it done?”

“Nothing high-tech. The gall is tied with monofilament line and hung over a low heat. Slow drying is important. If a gall is dried too fast, the bile is ruined.”

“How are they smuggled out?”

“Again, no mind-bender. Most are transported in carry-on luggage. If the galls are spotted on a security scanner, the carrier claims he’s bringing dried fruit to his mama. Some grind the galls up and put them in whiskey.”

“Less risky than smuggling drugs,” I said.

“And very lucrative. A single preserved gall usually brings about five thousand dollars in Korea, but prize galls have sold for as much as ten thousand. That’s U.S greenbacks we’re talking.”

I was stunned.

“Ever hear of CITES?” Zamzow asked.

“Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.” That was the second reference in as many days.

“Bear galls have been classified under Appendix Two.”

“There are bears in Asia. Why come all the way to North America for gall?”

“All five Asian bear species, the sun, sloth, Asiatic black, brown, and giant panda are threatened. Only fifty thousand bears are thought to be left in the wild in Asia, from India all the way across to China and down into Southeast Asia.”

“Because of the demand for bile.”

“With the exception of the giant panda, bears are the only mammals that produce significant amounts of ursodeoxycholic acid, or UCDA.”

“That’s what people are paying thousands of dollars for?”

“That’s it.” Zamzow snorted in disdain. “At least twenty-eight different forms of packaged medicines purporting to contain bear bile are legally available in China. Singapore has banned the sale of products extracted from bears, but shops still sell bear bile pills, powder, crystals, ointments, and whole dried galls. Crap like bear bile wine, shampoo, and soap hit the market every day. You can find them in Chinatowns across the United States.”

Disgust tightened my stomach.

“Can’t bears be raised domestically?”

“China began bear farming in the eighties. It’s almost worse. Animals are crammed into tiny cages and milked through holes cut into their abdomens. Their teeth and claws may be filed down. Sometimes their paws are even chopped off. Once the animals stop producing bile, they’re killed for their galls.”

“Can’t UCDA be produced synthetically?”

“Yes. And many botanic alternatives exist.”

“But people want the real thing.”

“You’ve got it. Popular thinking is that artificial UCDA isn’t as effective as the natural form. Which is ass backwards. The amount of natural UCDA in a bear gall can vary from zero to thirty-three percent, hardly a reliable source of the drug.”

“Long-held cultural beliefs die hard.”

“Phrased like an anthropologist. Speaking of which, why are you interested in Spix’s macaws and black bears?”

I sorted through the events of the past week. What to share? What to hold back?

Tamela Banks and Darryl Tyree?

Possibly unrelated. Confidential.

Ricky Don Dorton and the Cessna crash?

Ditto.

Yesterday’s cyber threats?

Probably irrelevant.

I told Zamzow about the findings at the Foote farm, excluding only the part about Tamela Banks’s license. I also told him about the Lancaster County skeleton.

For a full thirty seconds I listened to nothing.

“Are you still there?” I asked, thinking we’d been disconnected.

“I’m here.”

I heard him swallow.

“You at the ME office?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be working awhile?”

“Yes.” Where the hell was this going?

“I’ll be there in three hours.”

22

ZAMZOW ARRIVED JUST PAST NOON. HE WAS A HEAVYSET MAN,probably in his forties, with thick, bristly hair cropped very short. His skin was pasty, his eyes the identical ginger of his hair and freckles, giving him a pale, monochromatic appearance, like someone who’d been born and lived his whole life in a cave.

Seating himself in the chair opposite my desk, Zamzow got straight to the point.

“This may be nothing, but I was going to be passing on my way to the Pee Dee Wildlife Refuge in Anson County this morning, so I thought I’d divert over to Charlotte and lay it on you in person.”

I said nothing, completely at a loss as to what was of such importance that Zamzow felt it needed a face-to-face.

“Five years back, two FWS agents disappeared. One worked out of my office, the other was in North Carolina on temporary assignment.”

“Tell me about them.” I felt a shiver of excitement ripple down my spine.

Zamzow drew a photo from a shirt pocket and laid it on my desk. In it, a young man leaned against a stone bridge. His arms were folded and he was smiling. On his shirt I could see the same badge and shoulder patch that Zamzow was wearing.

I flipped the picture. Brian Aiker, Raleigh, 9/27/1998 had been handwritten on the back.

“The agent’s name was Brian Aiker,” Zamzow said.

“Age?” I asked.

“Thirty-two. Aiker had been with us three years when he went missing. Nice fellow.”

“Height?”

“Tall guy. I’d say six-one, six-two.”

“He was white,” I said, flipping back to the front of the photo.

“Yeah.”

“And the visiting agent?”

“Charlotte Grant Cobb. Odd duck, but a good officer. Cobb was with the service more than ten years.”