Monster (27 page)

Sheriff Mills’s body had been hurled against a tree and now lay wrapped around the trunk, crumpled and contorted like a broken doll. The earpiece lay in the grass, still connected by wire to the GPS on his left arm. Mills’s rifle lay in the grass, the stock broken off. Except for a few remaining sinews and dripping arteries, the head was all but separated from the body.

Reed’s mind was paralyzed, but only for a moment. Without a conscious thought, he positioned his rifle and turned his full attention to the surrounding forest.

For several seconds, with tendons tightened to their limit, sweat dripping down their faces, and every breath controlled, Reed and Pete rotated slowly about a common center, back to back, eyes, ears, and rifles on the dark, concealing forest that encircled them.

At their feet, Max slumped to the ground, vomiting and moaning.

“Max, shh,” Pete whispered.

Max tried to finish as silently as he could.

Sing came over the radio. Her voice was frantic. “Pete? Reed? Please report.”

Without taking his eyes off the forest or his hand away from the trigger, Reed spoke quietly, slowly, and deliberately, the way Sheriff Mills would have. “Sing, get hold of yourself. Sheriff Mills is dead, same as Allen Arnold and Randy Thompson.” He thought he heard a faint “Oh
no
,” but after that, nothing. “Sing? Acknowledge.”

Her voice was controlled. “I’m here. Sheriff Mills is dead.”

“Call Deputy Saunders. Tell him to evacuate all the search teams, every last one of them. And have him contact the Forest Service. No civilians go into the woods, not campers, hikers, anybody— and that’s by order of . . . well, me. Guess I’m the county sheriff for now.”

“What are you going to do?”

Reed kept his voice steady. “I want you to get hold of Jimmy. Tell him we need him and all of his hunters up here, and if he can scare up any more from the Forest Service, we can use them too.”

“Reed, are you secure until they arrive?”

“Get us the medical crew, somebody to take Sheriff Mills out of here.”

“Reed!”

He got firm. “Sing, are you copying this down?”

She was trying to. Her hand shook so badly her writing was nearly illegible. “Dave Saunders, evacuate the search parties. Jimmy Clark, relocate the hunters. Get the medics here to take out . . .” Emotion overcame her.

Reed’s voice was so steady it was almost mechanical. “Remain where you are so you can meet them. I’ll leave Sheriff Mills’s GPS with his body so you can guide them in.”

“Got it.” She listened to several seconds of radio silence and finally asked, “Reed. What are your intentions?”

Reed exchanged a look with Pete, who gave him a slight but definite nod. “This is as close as we’ve ever been to finding her since Lost Creek.”

“We’ll be all right,” Pete concurred.

Sing asked, “What about Max?”

Max lay on the ground, still recovering from shock and nausea. Discreetly, while Max wasn’t looking, Pete crouched to examine the soles of Max’s boots, quickly referring to the blue cards in his vest pocket. With a quick look and a barely discernible head shake in Reed’s direction, he radioed Sing, “Max can come with us if he’s up to it.”

Max pushed himself off the ground and breathed a moment. He nodded at Pete and Reed, then slowly struggled to his feet. “I’m in.” He was still shaking, and he kept his back toward Mills’s body.

Reed and Max stood guard as Pete quickly found signs: scuffed earth, bent grass, broken twigs, one impression, and a few drops of blood. “He took off south again, uphill. If we can keep him up against those rocks, we’ll have half the battle.”

Reed radioed, “Sing, you got us on your screen?”

“Good to go,” she replied.

“Pete, I’ll check this out,” Reed said. He showed Pete the waypoint he’d entered and told him about the toilet paper.

Pete shook his head in wonder. “Either Beck was there or something she had a run-in with. It’d be a good place to start; you’re right about that.” He then suggested, “If I were you, I’d duck downhill to that open country where you can make better time and get south of there. Then you can climb uphill again and close in from the south, maybe head ’em off. Max, you work your way from here, parallel to those rocks, and do whatever it takes to keep ’em up there.” Pete nodded toward Mills’s grotesque form. “It only took one of ’em to do this, so don’t wait to shoot. I’ll try to put the cork in the bottle, come in from the north. And, Reed . . .”

Reed knew what Pete was going to say. Pete eyed the mountains above. “Those footprints down below told a story, and I thought we had it right. But this . . .” He looked—unwillingly— at Mills’s twisted body. “This is the real story. There’s no mistaking this.”

Reed was more direct. “You’re saying Beck is dead?”

Pete glanced away a moment, waiting for words. “This might be more of a hunt than a search.”

Reed weighed that, then replied, “So don’t let them get past you.”

Pete answered, “You neither.”

That was enough for now.

Cap was considering, only
considering
, his next move, when Sing called and told him of Sheriff Mills’s death. Her last words before “I love you” were, “Cap, we
really
need to know what this is. Please.”

That locked his decision and his resolve. After a quick trip home to change into presentable clothing—black slacks, a plain almond shirt, conservative tie, navy sports coat—Cap drove back to the Corzine campus and went straight to the Bioscience building. He used the front door this time and walked boldly down the hall to the cherry-paneled office of Dr. Philip Merrill, dean of the College of Sciences, former department chair of Molecular Biology, an ice sculpture in a suit— and Cap’s former boss.

“Do you have an appointment with Dr. Merrill?” his secretary asked.

Cap glared down at Judy Wayne, the same lady Cap had said good morning to and mooched doughnuts from for the entire six years he worked there. “Judy? You know I don’t need an appointment. I need to talk to Phil.”

She tilted her head condescendingly. “If it’s about your severance package, you need to talk to accounting.”

“What if I told you it’s a matter of life and death?”

“I wouldn’t believe you.”

“Is he here?”

“I’m sure he’s busy.”

“You can tell him you tried to stop me.” He skirted around her desk and went to Merrill’s door. She ran after him, of course, protesting, citing policy, afraid for her job.

He knocked gently, then turned the big brass knob and opened the door.

Merrill was still Merrill: hair combed straight back and in place, suit jacket neatly hung on a wood valet in the corner, necktie conservative and tightly knotted under his Adam’s apple. His desk was a squeaky-clean battleship, and he was the admiral. He was on the phone, which was actually a good thing because it forced him to watch his language when he saw who barged in. His eyes went frosty cold, but he held his demeanor, putting his hand over the receiver. “Cap, you must know this meeting isn’t going to happen!”

“I tried to stop him!” Judy squeaked.

Cap held up two fingers. “Two minutes. Please.”

Merrill glared at him for a long moment, then spoke to the phone, “Uh, got a snafu here at the office. Can I call you back?” He hung up.

“Shall I call security?” Judy asked.

Cap gawked at her in disbelief but told Merrill, “Phil, this concerns you, not me. It’s in your interest.”

Merrill processed that, then waved Judy away. “Hold off on that. Just, uh, just leave us alone—for two minutes.”

Judy walked out.

“And close the door.”

She closed the door.

Merrill leaned back in his chair and silently gestured,
Well?

Cap expended a few precious seconds taking a seat on the fancy leather couch. This wasn’t going to be easy, but what the heck, he was already fired. “I thought you’d want to know that the Whitcomb County sheriff was just found up in the national forest with most of his bones broken and his head nearly torn off, just like a logging foreman from Three Rivers who died in exactly the same way on Monday morning.”

Merrill showed no reaction. He simply said, “And why would I need to know that?”

“There’s a trail guide missing, and then there’s also a woman missing, a gal who’s married to a friend of mine—a deputy sheriff. Sing and I have been trying to help out, trying to track down the
animal
responsible.”

Merrill steepled his fingers under his chin. “I thought you said this concerns me.”

“I ran a Fluorescent In Situ Hybridization on stool, saliva, and hair samples from the thing. I found chimpanzee DNA with human DNA present.”

“Hm. Contamination. Too bad.”

“The human DNA was juxtaposed with adenovirus.”

Merrill processed a little more and then tried not to laugh. “You can’t be going where I think you’re going.”

“I just thought you’d be interested.”

“And you were hoping to get a reaction, I suppose.”

“Considering what Adam Burkhardt’s been working on all these years, and—hey, you know what? He isn’t even around. I checked at his office and he’s on sabbatical . . . again. How can he possibly make any money for the university when he’s never here?”

Merrill’s gaze was mocking. “By producing results, Cap. He produces results.”

Cap nodded. “And that’s why the department gets all that funding, all that money from those big corporations . . . uh, Euro-Atlantic Oil, the Carlisle Foundation—”

“So you’ve done some homework.”

“American Geographic and Public Broadcasting’s got their fingers in it too. He’s worth a lot of money to you, isn’t he? Come to think of it, you might owe him a debt of thanks for your promotion.”

“Jealous?”

“Bothered, for the same old reasons: it’s not
results
that get the funding—it’s
correct
results. Give ’em what they
want
and they’ll send the money.
Question
what they want and—”

“What they want is
science
, Cap. I could never get you to understand that.”

“But science prides itself on being self-correcting.”

Merrill looked at his watch. “I’m waiting for you to make your point!”

Cap leaned forward. “What if something went wrong? What if Burkhardt’s results weren’t ‘correct’? What if people got hurt? What if people got
killed
?”

“I must warn you, if you are in any way considering a violation of your confidentiality agreement—”

“What do you suppose would happen to the funding—or even your job?”

That hit home—finally. An old, cold look returned to Merrill’s eyes. “As you may expect, I will not abide what you’re suggesting, nor will I dignify it with a response.”

Cap knew this man; he was familiar with Merrill’s style of lying. He rose from the fancy couch and leaned closely over Merrill’s desk. “Self-correcting. I’ve brought you data of great interest, I’m sure—if you’re a
scientist
.”

Cap had what he came for. He walked out, leaving the door wide open.

Merrill followed just a few seconds behind and watched him go down the hall toward the front door. The dean was not quite as poised as before.

Judy looked up from her desk. “Everything okay?”

“He’s leaving.”

Merrill returned to his office, circled behind his expansive desk, unconsciously checked his hair, then consciously checked his desk, his way of assuring himself that his world was still stable, predictable, and under his control.

His eye was immediately drawn to a void in the fastidious arrangement of calendar, telephone, desk caddy, and pen set on his desktop. An allotment of desk space was now empty where he usually kept—

He burst from his office. “Call security!”

Judy got on the phone.

Merrill was trembling with indignity, looking up and down the hallway. “That weasel just stole my master keys!”

Sheriff Patrick Mills’s lifeless eyes gawked at the sky one last time as a paramedic placed Mills’s cowboy hat on his chest and zipped the black body bag shut.

Jimmy Clark respectfully removed his own hat as two paramedics carried the body out of the clearing. Wiley Kane did the same, exposing his long white mane. Steve Thorne, looking tough and military as ever, watched grimly, camouflage cap in place. Young Mariners fan Sam Marlowe tried to concentrate on familiarizing himself with a GPS unit. Janson—no one ever asked Janson his first name—chose not to watch at all. Not one man set down his rifle for any reason.

Jimmy had already strapped Mills’s GPS to his arm—a most regrettable task, but it had to be done. He carefully washed the blood off the earpiece with a handkerchief and water from his canteen, then put the earpiece in his ear and pressed the talk button. “Sing, this is Jimmy. How do you read?”

“Loud and clear.”

Sing was at her computer in the mobile lab, watching the same GPS blips in a new arrangement: Reed was south of his toilet paper waypoint and doubling back; Pete lingered to the north, waiting to hear from Reed. Max was roughly halfway between them and a quarter mile below the stone face of the mountain. They formed a very large triangle, and each man looked pitifully, frighteningly alone out there. Jimmy, now represented by Mills’s old blip, was still in the clearing where Mills had died, but that would change—soon, she hoped.

The hamlet of Whitetail had gotten busy. Two Forest Service vehicles, Jimmy’s Fish and Game rig, a medical emergency vehicle, and two private cars were now clustered around Sing’s mobile lab. A lot of firepower had gone into the woods, meaning there was a major chance something was going to come out dead. Sing was feeling hope and fear in equal proportions.

Another blip appeared on her screen right next to Jimmy’s. A voice crackled in her headset: “Sing, this is Thorne.”

About time!

“I have you on-screen, voice is loud and clear.”

Steve Thorne was satisfied he’d figured things out. He positioned the GPS on the underside of his left forearm so he could read it while holding his rifle, and he was ready.

Sam Marlowe just did what Thorne did and he was ready in half the time. “Sing? This is Sam Marlowe.”