Jason Jack Wyatt supplied bears from the mountains. Harvey Pearce hunted on the coast and brought the bear parts to Dorton on his drug runs to Charlotte. Park prepared the gal s and hawked them in Asia, often exchanging them for drugs to supplement Ricky Don’s Latin American suppliers.
“Sunscreen?” Ryan waggled the tube.
“Thanks.”
Ryan applied lotion to my shoulders.
“Lower?”
“Please.”
His hands worked their way to the smal of my back.
“Lower?”
“Um.”
His fingertips slipped under the elastic of my bikini bottom.
“That’l be fine.”
“Sure?”
“The sun’s never shined that far down, Ryan.”
As Ryan dropped into his chair, another question occurred to me.
“How do you suppose Cobb uncovered the bear gal operation?”
“Cobb was looking into turtle poaching in Tyrrel County and made the bear discovery by accident when he was shadowing Harvey Pearce.” Anger wel ed in me as I thought of Harvey Pearce.
“The son of a bitch baited bears with Honey Buns, then blew their brains out, cut off the paws, cut out the gal bladders, and dumped the rest.”
“Maybe Pearce’s particular circle in hel wil be ful of bears, and Harvey without so much as a peashooter.” I thought of something else.
“That note in Brian Aiker’s wal et real y threw me.”
“Cobb’s note to Aiker.”
“Yeah. I assumed Cobb meant Columbia, South Carolina. I forgot Harvey Pearce lived in Columbia, North Carolina.” I shook my head at my own stupidity.
“I also thought Cobb was referring to Palmer Cousins as the person who was dirty.”
“He meant plural not singular, the Dynamic Duo from Sneedvil e, Tennessee.” After some grammatical stumbling, Ryan and I had agreed on the masculine pronoun for Charlotte Cobb.
“The Melungeon cousins.”
I watched a pelican swoop over the water, tuck its wings, and plunge toward a wave. Seconds later it came up empty.
“Do you suppose the Spix’s macaw and the goldenseal were just opportunistic sidelines?” I asked.
“Dorton may have asked Cousin J.J. to gather the goldenseal. He probably planned to persuade his regulars that the stuff was effective at masking drugs during urine tests.”
“And Harvey Pearce probably got the macaw the same way he scored the bird Pounder mentioned.”
“Probably,” Ryan agreed. “Tyree sold coke on the street for Dorton. Tyree, Dorton, Pearce, and Park met periodical y at the Foote farm. Pearce probably brought the bird to the farm on one of those trips. Sadly for al , it didn’t survive its ordeal.”
“But someone saved the feathers, thinking they might be good for a few bucks.”
Exactly as Rachel Mendelson had suggested.
“That would be my guess,” Ryan said.
Boyd spotted a kid on a bike, ran with him a few yards, then veered off after a sandpiper.