“Big-time,” Mike said. “What was the bank, Coop?”
“BCCA,” I said. “I’m sure you read about it last year. Battaglia prosecuted the men who ran the Bank of Commerce and Credit of Arabia. Major jail sentences and a hundred forty million dollars in restitution.”
The tabloids had a ball with the case. They came up with an alternate explanation for the lettered acronym: the Bank of Crooks and Criminals of Arabia. When James Prescott had been too slow to move on the international banking scheme, Battaglia had clawed back jurisdiction by virtue of a handful of transactions that had occurred in Manhattan. It had ratcheted up the tension between the two prosecutors so badly that they didn’t speak for weeks.
“That’s one place you should look, then,” Liebman said. “If the district attorney uncovered any of the wildlife-smuggling schemes in the bank records of the oil royals, that might have put him deeper into the quicksand.”
Mercer and I exchanged glances. We might be able to narrow the focus on a suspect, but the wide reach of the manner of the crime was beginning to seem overwhelming.
Stuart Liebman was as droll as he was brilliant. He moved his finger out of the Red Sea, around the peninsula, and over to India.
“Then there’s walking gold, as we call it,” he said. “Did your office have any ongoing investigations in India?”
“Not for lack of trying,” I said. “But the US attorney got the jump on the most recent one. The biggest that I can think of.”
“What’s that?” Mike asked.
“Cybercrimes. Child porn,” I said. “The cops brought the matter to me.”
“At the same time,” Mercer said, “as the FBI put it on Prescott’s desk.”
“Because of the strength of their tech industry,” I said, “the Indians have developed very robust cyberlaws, much like our own. The FBI was working with the Indian government on a huge hacking case. Password hacking, actually. And it led to a massive child porn operation out of Delhi, linked to Thailand.”
“Did you try to keep the investigation for Battaglia? For your unit?” Mike asked me.
“Yes.”
“But the feds raked it in?”
“You bet. They had much greater resources available to deal with witnesses abroad,” I said. “Unlike the banking improprieties, which are mostly paper chases.”
“Did Battaglia go batshit when Prescott took it over?” Mike asked.
“He didn’t seem to care at all,” I said. “He was distracted by something at the time. He just told me to let it go.”
“Really uncharacteristic of him, wasn’t it?”
“This Prescott fellow you keep mentioning,” Liebman said. “Do you trust him?”
I didn’t have a ready answer. I had never questioned his integrity before.
“He’s straight,” I said, speaking softly. “I’ve known him a long time. He’s a true public servant. I trust James Prescott.”
“Very well, then,” Liebman said.
“What’s walking gold?” Mike asked.
“Tigers, Detective. Tigers are being slaughtered across India,” he said. “For their skin and for their bones. And none of that is the work of small-town poachers.”
“All organized gangs?” Mercer said.
“Yes, the same kind of syndicate that’s wiping out elephants and rhinos in Africa.”
“Shooting tigers, too,” Mike said.
“They’re not shot,” Liebman said. “You can’t sell those pelts if they’ve got bullet holes in them, can you?”
“How, then?”
“Jaw traps, Detective. Large iron contraptions about a foot in diameter—rusty, most of them—with serrated teeth, anchored to the ground by a thick chain.”
I winced at the thought.
“There are more than a dozen tiger reserves—protected areas—in Central India, but the syndicates get into them and secure the jaw traps, usually near watering holes. Once the trap clamps down in the tiger’s mouth, it’s far too powerful for the animal to escape. Best to do it when the moon is full,” Liebman went on, “so that there’s no need of flashlights to give the traffickers away in the dark of night.”
“And the dead tigers?” I asked.
“It’s like a surgical strike, Ms. Cooper. The gang surrounds the dead animal and can have all the parts ready to go within a couple of hours,” he said. “And it’s usually the women who carry off the skin and the bones, because they’re far less likely to be searched.”
“The skins are purely decorative,” I said. “And Americans buy as many of them as anyone else in the world, am I right?”
“You are. Luxury ornamentation.”
“And the bones?”
“They’re smuggled almost exclusively to China,” he said.
There it was again. There was that country in which the trafficking seemed to be centered, no matter how many detours along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
“Traditional medicine?” I asked.
“Tiger bone wine, Ms. Cooper. A very traditional, very expensive tonic believed to impart the tiger’s great strength and vigor to all who drink it,” Liebman said. “It’s not medicine at all. It’s centuries of superstition.”
Superstition, I thought. All of these species—and so many others—killed because of human ignorance, for beliefs in magical fixes and supernatural protections.
Mercer knew trade routes from the collection of maps that his father had given him all throughout his youth. He stood up next to Stuart Liebman and studied the world chart.
“Get us to China,” he said. “It’s still a long way off.”
Liebman threaded his finger from the ocean past the Bay of Bengal, between Malaysia and Indonesia, and brought it to a rest on the southern tip of Vietnam.
“Did Battaglia have any business here?”
“In Vietnam?” I said. “Not that I know of.”
“Well, it’s the weakest link on the path to China,” Liebman said. “You can bring your goods in anywhere along the Vietnamese coastline, because what the smugglers are searching out is the easiest place to make the border crossing.”
“And it’s well-known for that purpose?” Mercer asked.
“Completely. It’s a place right here in North Vietnam,” he said, putting his fingertip on the spot. “Called Mong Cai City.”
Mercer leaned in to see it.
“Why?” he asked. “What’s there?”
“More corrupt government officials than you can count on all your collective fingers and toes run Mong Cai,” Liebman said. “Gambling casinos create a great diversion, as do all the tourists and shoppers looking for counterfeit goods. They keep the border guards wide-eyed and hungry for bribes of every kind. Most smugglers can slip across into China—into Dongxing City—as though the bridges had been greased with oil to ease them over. If there’s one arrest for every three hundred attempts to get across the border, I’d be surprised.”
“So the traffickers go where the government is most corrupt and least regulated—” Mercer said.
“And where the profit margins are the greatest,” Liebman said. “For every kind of wildlife that’s traded, getting to China is the goal. That’s where the stakes are highest.”