Bloodletting (16 page)

Hawthorne and Locke sat in the chairs at the table, each holding a slice as they studied the screen on a laptop. They acknowledged Carver from the corners of their eyes, but said nothing.

Ellie took two slices from the box on the dresser and handed one to Carver.

"Why don't you see if you can find out what they're saying on the news," Carver said, releasing her hand with a squeeze.

Ellie appeared ready to voice her protest, but after meeting his eyes, removed another slice and slipped off into the adjoining room.

Carver inhaled his slice and waited until he heard the sound of the television behind him before he crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed beside the other men.

"It's time I got some answers," he said, producing his cell phone.

Hawthorne sighed tersely and turned to face him, raising his eyebrows in an impatient gesture to proceed.

"I'm no use to anyone unless we're on the same page. It's obvious you know far more than you're letting on, so how about we just put all our cards on the table so none of us have to waste any more precious time."

Wolfe paced behind him. Locke finally raised his eyes from the monitor. None of them spoke.

"All right," Carver said, his frustration mounting. This was going to be like pulling a lion's teeth without sedation. He held up his phone, displaying the photograph of Edgar Ross. "Talk."

Hawthorne's eyes narrowed and his lips tightened into the awkward semblance of a smile.

"I see you've been doing your homework," he said. "You know who that is. Edgar Ross. Abducted two families from campgrounds and slaughtered them in his basement. Shot eight times in the chest while attempting to escape. Case closed."

"Don't patronize me."

Hawthorne appeared amused. "You want to know details? How about this? It took us nearly two months to track Ross to his house. When we found him, he was in his basement. He had cleared out the room, stacking the wreckage of a pool table and shredded furniture in the living room against the front door. The only thing down there was his kitchen table, crusted with ridges of blood and scarred by the rusted saw laying on it. Body parts hung from the ceiling by electrical wires nailed to the exposed joists. Mainly arms and legs from the elbow or knee down. Apparently they weren't the choice cuts. There was a pile of bones in the corner, above which a cloud of flies buzzed so loudly that he didn't hear us break in through the kitchen door or descend the stairs. Rabbit bones, squirrel, raccoon, chicken...human. Like a bear's den. He was crouched in the middle of the floor gnawing on the bruised stump of a thigh, surrounded by blood, flies swarming around his head, crawling over the leftovers in his beard."

"Jesus," Carver whispered, scrolling to the image of Charles Grady. He held it up. "What about this guy?"

"Charles Grady killed twenty-two--"

"No," Carver interrupted. "I want to hear it from him."

Locke met his stare, then turned to Hawthorne, who nodded his consent.

"Certainly was a good looking guy, wasn't he?" Locke said, baring a grin overstuffed with teeth. "What do you want to know? Do you want to know that when we found him in a boxcar in a rail yard he was peeling the skin off a man's face with his fingernails? Or how about the fact that he had bitten through the man's right common carotid artery and consumed his blood? There were arcs of it all over the dirty walls, all over him. He'd been sleeping in a filthy pile of his victims' clothing in the corner, living among his prey. Traveling from city to city, hunting the homeless. Peeling off sections of the skin and meat that he dried out and ate like beef jerky."

"How did that not make the news?"

"The last thing we needed was a copycat. His victims were indigents. There was no one to miss them, no one to claim their bodies, so they were incinerated."

"And why does he look so much like you?"

Locke's smile broadened and Carver suddenly imagined him crouching over a screaming man and tearing out his throat with those teeth.

"Get to the point," Hawthorne said, his smile vanished. "You're digging in the wrong grave. What you have is old news, and we have a live killer here in the present."

"What we have is four dead girls in Colorado with animal genes spliced into their chromosomes and two dead serial killers who appear substantially less than human. We have a potential retrovirus capable of reverse transcription, of infecting a host and inserting its DNA in place of the original. But you already knew that, didn't you? You were able to determine as much from the corpses of Ross and Grady. That's why you told Special Agent Manning to test for viral load, even before I received any information from the forensics lab. You're just leading me along, making me bust my ass to discover things that you knew from the start, and to what end? We're no closer to catching whoever did this--again, a man you seem to have already identified--and I'm just bumbling along uselessly behind. You want to catch this guy? From here on out, I need to know everything. Everything! No more deception. No more--"

"Are you through?" Hawthorne interrupted, the muscles in his jaw bulging. He was obviously unaccustomed to being addressed in such a manner.

"Yeah," Carver said. "I'm through with all of this. You guys are on your own."

He rose and started toward the other room. All he could think was to grab Ellie and get them both the hell out of there.

"Wait," Hawthorne said.

Carver hesitated in the doorway, listening to the sound of Hawthorne's grinding teeth. The act of calling out to him seemed to have adversely affected Hawthorne on a fundamental level. They needed him. Carver turned to face them again.

"Come look at this." Hawthorne leaned back over the keyboard and manipulated the mouse on the screen. After a moment, he sat back and gestured to the monitor.

Carver stood his ground for a moment, but curiosity drew him back across the room.

"You can't run without learning how to walk first," Wolfe said as he passed.

Hawthorne scooted back from the table to make room. Carver locked eyes with him, then turned the laptop so he could see it. There were two bar codes displayed vertically on the screen, but fuzzy as though out of focus. Beside each line was a lowercase letter, followed by a number. Horizontal lines were drawn between matching segments of the bar code to the left and the one on the right. The first column was labeled E. Ross, the second
Ursus arctos middendorffi
.

"The Kodiak bear," Hawthorne said.

Carver looked from the screen to Hawthorne.

"Now that you understand what we're up against," Hawthorne said, "it's time to get back to work."

VII

28 Miles East-northeast of

Flagstaff, Arizona

"We should have forced the issue," Benally said from the passenger seat. He checked the clip on his 9 mm for the umpteenth time and slammed it home.

"We had no reason to," Begay said, confident his own sidearm would function when the time arrived. "People come to the desert to disappear, and generally they stay that way."

"Should have made him show us the smokehouse. I told you, damn it. We should have made him open the stupid thing up. Who puts a lock on a smokehouse anyway?"

Begay was tired of hearing it. They were police officers, two lieutenants in a department of only twelve full-time officers. It was their job to uphold the law. When they had been called out to the house originally, nearly a decade prior, there had been no legal reason to attempt to force a man on his own land to open a locked door. No probable cause. The ranch house had sat vacant for more than five years before that, the
land for sale
sign long since faded, visible only from a dirt road no one had any reason to travel. So long in fact that when Ernest Deschiney had first smelled smoke on the wind from his trailer fifteen miles upriver on the Little Colorado, he had immediately called the police.

Begay and Benally had been fresh out of the academy, and had thus been handed the short straw. Deschiney was always calling to complain about something or other, reporting violent trespassers who turned out to be nothing more than mangy coyotes. Their dispatch had only been to pacify him. When they had arrived at the house, following the two mile packed-sand drive from the road, the new owner had been waiting for them in front of the small dwelling. The windstorms had stripped the paint nearly down to the bare wood, and littered the whole area with shingles. The man had held up his hand in greeting and approached them with a friendly smile, his pale face stubbled with a couple days' growth. He had been wearing a flannel shirt open to mid-chest and jeans smeared with blood where he had repeatedly wiped his hands on his thighs. His cowboy hat had been pulled down so far his eyes had been lost in shadow. Winn Darby had introduced himself and invited them inside, where they had shared a pitcher of heavily sweetened lemonade and a chuckle at Deschiney's expense. Winn, as he had insisted they call him, had made a small fortune in the burgeoning internet, but the constant stress had left him physically and emotionally spent, even though he couldn't have been out of his early twenties. Nice problem to have, Begay remembered thinking. So Winn had abandoned the rat race and moved back to nature, where he could breathe the fresh air, relax, and not be tempted to start plotting on the computer again. His aim had been to survive on the land, though he had professed his total inexperience, stating with a shrug that by curing his meat he would be able to make it last if he proved completely inept. Maybe if he got good enough he might even try to sell some. Who knew? The smokehouse had come with the land, so why not give it a whirl?

Winn had been somewhat eccentric and naïve, but he carried himself in a laid-back manner that made him impossible not to like. After a brief tour of the tiny, sparsely furnished house, he had led them back out to their cruiser. That had been when Begay caught the glint of sunlight from the brand new padlock on the old wooden structure back behind and to the left of the house. The building itself looked as though it had been stolen right out of a ghost town, horizontal slats of grayed wood forming the walls, the roof rusted aluminum capped with twin smoke vents at the pinnacle. Fingers of mesquite smoke had risen only so far before dissipating on the breeze.

"So what's cooking?" Begay had asked, tipping his head toward the smoking structure, noting that the hinges on the door were newly installed as well.

"I bought a whole side of beef from a butcher over in Phoenix," Winn had said, his smile never faltering. "It's my trial run."

"Probably would have been able to pick it up down in Winslow for half the price," Benally had said. "Out here, it's important to keep the money in the community, and it goes a long way toward building good will."

"I'll make sure to do that next time. I bet I'd probably get some leaner meat too."

"You want the fatty stuff," Begay had said. "That's what gives it the flavor."

"See how little I know?" Winn had said. "You've been a huge help, Officer Begay."

"You know, I'd be happy to check out what you have so far. My uncle used to--"

"You've already gone above and beyond. Don't let me keep you."

"It's really no trouble at all," Begay had said, taking a step toward the outbuilding only to have Winn block his path.

"Every time I open the door, either the fire dies or the smoke leaks out. And then the flies get in, and it's just about impossible to get them off the meat. I'm sure you must know what a headache that is."

"Yeah," Begay had said, eyeing the lock. What could Winn possibly be hiding in a smokehouse anyway? It wasn't like he could be growing weed in there or anything. All he could imagine storing in such a dilapidated old smokehouse was meat. And since no one had reported any missing livestock, there had been no reason to press the man.

He hadn't given it another thought until now.

They had dropped Lonetree off at his car and watched the man who had been preening for the camera only a few hours earlier scurry away from the reporters, and discreetly called the Sheriff's Department in Dresden. After briefly debating calling the FBI, they had decided against it. If they were wrong, then it would be an embarrassment to the tribe. Stupid incompetent Injuns and all that, but they still couldn't head off on their own given the nature of their suspicions, so they had formulated a plan. They would meet Deputy Kent at the end of the drive and head up together, flanking the house. If anything appeared amiss, then they would immediately call the Feds. If they were right and were able to collar the killer, they would be heroes and both the tribal police and local law enforcement would be celebrated. Maybe the FBI might even be so impressed they'd offer to send them to Quantico. Begay could always hope, anyway. And if they were wrong, they'd merely be disturbing a man who prized his privacy, but at least it wouldn't be an enormous public catastrophe in front of the Feds, who would promptly cut them out of the loop and undoubtedly banish them from their own jurisdiction.

Kent's old cruiser was waiting half a mile from the turnoff, down the shoulder against a stand of junipers and pinion pines. Begay pulled up beside him and rolled down his window.

"Joe," he said with a single nod.

"Good to see you, Jimmie. Arvin. What's the plan?"

"We go in dark. Slow. Don't even think about touching the brakes."

"You sure about this?"

Begay smiled nervously. "Nope."

"Then you're buying if you're wrong."

"I can live with that."

Kent leaned across the passenger seat and cranked up the window.

Begay pulled forward, killing his headlights before easing out from behind the screen of trees. The quarter moon cast long shadows from the spotted pines and cacti, but barely enough illumination to see the driveway. A barbed wire gate had been strung across the smaller road at some point, forcing them to downshift into neutral and pause long enough for Benally to hop out, unlatch it, and drag it back into the sage.