The Chimera Secret (3 page)

‘He knew about Randy’s hanging?’

‘
No, he’s saying that Cletus MacCarthy is dead too. You’d better get down there right away
.’

Earl muttered a profanity under his breath as he walked back to his truck. Nothing happened in Riggins for months at a time, and then every man and his dog turns up dead.

‘I’ll be back soonest,’ he said to Sally, avoiding meeting her eye, as he climbed in and started the engine, wondering how he was going to explain this all to her.
‘Forensics are on their way, just don’t touch anything.’ Earl sighed as he drove back down Main Street and turned off down a track toward the river. He pulled up a few minutes
later outside the hunting lodge of Charlton Meister, one of the old-school trappers who’d gotten too rickety to trek the woods anymore and too damned old to get on with the locals in town. A
fierce-tempered old goat who went everywhere with a scowl behind his ragged beard, Meister had built the lodge and settled on the banks of the Salmon River a couple of miles out of town. Earl knew
him well enough. Every few weeks they’d get called out to the lodge after local kids harassing the old man went squealing to their folks after Meister had gotten his hands on them and cracked
their heads together or taken a horse whip to their legs.

Earl strode down a narrow track that wound its way along the banks of the Salmon River and the lodge, and glanced at the frigid waters. Breakfast might have settled in Meister’s nets,
providing him with yet another way of avoiding going to the grocery store in town. But Meister wasn’t beside the nets. Instead, the old man was kneeling on the shoal bank over a body lying on
its back, covered in blankets.

Earl hurried over, his boots crunching on the shoal alerting Meister to his approach. The old man turned, and for the first time in decades Earl saw concern creasing his features.

‘This boy needs a hospital, and I mean right now, Sheriff.’

Earl looked down at Jesse MacCarthy as he lay on the shoal at his feet.

His clothes were torn ragged, stained with mud and grime. One of his boots was missing, his bare foot bloodied and filthy, while the remaining boot was torn to shreds. His hunting jacket was
hanging from his frame, one arm torn off at the sleeve, but it was his face that enraptured Earl.

Jesse looked like a zombie from one of those old flicks from the seventies, his eyes wide and staring, his jaw hanging slack and his lips flecked with dried saliva and mud. From somewhere came a
feeble, keening cry of despair as Jesse’s eyes settled onto Earl’s and registered the faintest signs of recognition.

‘Jesse?’ Earl knelt down alongside the kid. ‘Can you hear me?’

Tears began spilling from Jesse’s eyes as he mumbled an incoherent stream of noise that might once have been words. Earl frowned and looked at Meister.

‘Where’d you find him?’

‘I din’ find nobody,’ Meister replied. ‘I was emptying my nets when he just walked out of the woods and collapsed right here.’

Earl looked back down at Jesse. ‘Where were you, Jesse? Where’s Cletus?’

Jesse’s trembling lips spurted a quivering reply.

‘Fox Creek. Cletus is dead. It got him.’

‘What got him?’ Earl asked.

Jesse’s sobs grew louder as he jabbered incoherently.

‘It got him. The monster got Cletus.’

Ethan Warner was not a nervous kind of guy. He had known fear, and plenty of it. Ethan had stared death in the face several times and, so far, had survived to tell the tale.
But the corrosive, gnawing anxiety grinding through his guts right now was far worse for him, especially as it was entirely irrational.

The restaurant looked out over the glittering expanse of Lake Michigan, slate-gray waves flecked with white crests rolling their way south. A pair of cutters were carving their way north against
the blustery wind, tacking hard to make any progress. Watching them helped to distract Ethan from the impending confrontation. He spent several minutes wishing the moment would arrive, and then
when it did he wished he had more time to prepare.

‘You’re looking good, Ethan.’

The brunette who strode confidently toward his table was a couple of inches shorter than he was, her long hair flowing across her shoulders, but there was a familiar arrogance to the set of her
frame and a recognizable icy-gray gleam in her eyes as though they were reflecting Lake Michigan’s frigid waters.

Ethan stood and hugged her. Some of the anxiety thawed inside him.

‘Natalie.’

He hadn’t seen his sister in four years. Natalie Warner had studied politics in New York City while Ethan had been working overseas as a journalist. An internment at the White House had
followed after her honors degree, and now she worked as an analyst for Congress at the Government Accountability Office in Washington DC.

She sat down opposite him. Although only twenty-five years old she was already wrapped in a cloak of authoritative confidence that belied her years. Ethan could picture himself in her from years
gone by, the same determination they shared that had gotten him into the US Marines as an officer and later through the greatest tragedy of his life. Natalie’s clear eyes and flawless skin
were only marred by the wide jaw she shared with Ethan, making her attractive if not beautiful.

‘So,’ she began, her voice husky like his own, ‘to what do I owe this honor?’

Ethan leaned back in his chair as the waiter poured sparkling wine into their glasses. The restaurant was out of town and half-empty, which was why Ethan had picked it. Most people were at work.
Ethan worked for himself, and Natalie was on vacation for a week to visit their parents.

‘Been a long time since I last saw you, and Pa said you were in town.’

‘You two are talking?’ Natalie’s eyes sparkled. ‘Did Mom pay you both?’

‘I called home a while back.’

‘Jesus, is it terminal?’

Ethan laughed. Natalie had a forthright way about her. The laugh faded away as he recalled why it had been so long since he’d been home.

‘It’s been a tricky couple of years.’

‘Want to talk about it?’

‘Kind of why I’m here.’

Natalie sipped some of her wine and set the glass down before replying.

‘You’re off the grid for four years, then you turn up when you want something? Ethan, you live in the same city as Mom and Pop yet you’ve barely spoken to them in all that
time.’

‘I wasn’t myself,’ Ethan said, keeping his voice even. ‘Things are better now. Kind of.’

Natalie merely raised a questioning eyebrow and sipped again at her wine. Ethan sighed heavily, not touching his drink.

‘Joanna might still be alive,’ he said.

Natalie froze in motion, her glass touching her lips and her eyes staring into Ethan’s. She set the glass back down.

‘And you know this how?’

‘Can’t say much about it,’ Ethan replied. ‘Some of the people we’re contracted to have access to high-level intelligence. I did some work for one of them and in
return I got information. They had footage of her, Nat. Not much, but enough.’

‘How old was the reel?’ she asked him.

‘No more than six months old at the time. Nearly a year now.’

Natalie stared at her glass for a long moment, and Ethan could tell that the sudden revelation wasn’t provoking the kind of excitement in her that he had hoped to see.

Joanna Defoe had been Ethan’s fiancée and business partner. Working as investigative journalists in some of the world’s most dangerous places, they had exposed corruption and
in the process saved dozens of victims of abduction and incarceration from lonely, unjust deaths. But their achievements had finally caught up with them in the sinister, sun-scorched alleys of Gaza
City. Joanna Defoe had vanished without trace four years previously, presumed abducted by militants. Ethan’s life had collapsed in the aftermath of her disappearance, all of his money
expended in a futile search for her across the Middle East. Distraught, broke and driven by little more than alcohol and bitterness, Ethan had been given the chance to search for her again in
Israel just a year previously by a friend who had been his commander in the US Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom. That had led to his work with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the
information that had recently identified Joanna as alive. Among other things.

‘What do you want?’ Natalie asked.

She wasn’t looking at him. Ethan chose his words carefully.

‘I need somebody to look into where she might be, do some digging in places that I can’t.’

Natalie kept her eyes on her wine glass.

‘Can’t you just ask your friend? Surely they would know where to begin better than I would?’

‘His help was a one-off,’ Ethan explained. ‘I can’t go back to him without having to risk my neck again for the chance of more information.’

Natalie finally looked up at him. ‘What the hell are you involved in, Ethan?’

‘It’s complicated. We’re bail bondsmen by trade, but we also do investigative work for the government.’

Natalie leaned forward. ‘Who?’

Ethan paused as he figured that there wasn’t much harm in telling her. Christ, she worked for Congress – she could probably find out herself with a single phone call.

‘Defense Intelligence Agency,’ he said. ‘We pick up cases that the other agencies write off as unworkable.’

‘Unworkable how?’

Ethan shrugged. ‘Budgets don’t justify the work, or the manpower’s not available because agencies are focused on counterterrorism. We get called in to investigate in their
place.’

Natalie was watching him with a steady gaze as though trying to peer through the DIA’s veil of secrecy and uncover the bizarre things that he had seen.

‘Who’s
we
?’ she asked him finally.

‘Nicola Lopez, my partner. Former DC detective. She’s solid.’

‘She’d be solid if she was still a ranked detective,’ Natalie uttered. ‘She fall on hard times too?’

‘Partner got killed,’ Ethan replied as he felt his jaw tighten as it so often did when he thought about Lopez. ‘Corruption. I don’t blame her for leaving the force after
what happened.’

Natalie took a deep breath before speaking.

‘Ethan, the last time you went looking for Jo it nearly killed you.’

Ethan managed a ghost of a smile. ‘That’s why I’m asking you to do it instead.’

‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

‘I’m not doing any field work this time until I have a solid lead,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t need much, Nat, just a bit of time in the books seeing if there’s
anything that’s been overlooked. Congress might not know anything but it’s a good place to start. The National Security Agency might know something too.’

Natalie laughed.

‘Sure, no problem. I’ll just march into the most secure agency in the world and ask to borrow some coffee or something.’

‘It’s more than I’ll be able to do,’ Ethan replied. ‘I know Congress is about to start an investigation into the intelligence community. Your team will have
unprecedented access to files from the CIA, DIA, NSA and God knows who else.’

‘Do Mom and Pop know about this?’

‘No,’ Ethan replied quickly, ‘and let’s keep it that way, okay? I don’t want them worrying.’

Natalie’s eyes flickered with sheet lightning. ‘Like you didn’t want them worrying when you disappeared for four years? Jesus, Ethan.’

Her words sliced through his shame, but he did not try to avoid it. Like a victim of depression who cuts for the relief the pain brings, he faced it head on, sucked it in and let it settle in
his guts.

‘I’m back now,’ he replied, ‘and I’m not going to make the same mistake again, Nat, but I can’t let this go until I know what the hell happened to Joanna. I
need closure.’

Natalie’s gaze bore into him from across the table.

‘You lost her once, Ethan, and it tore you apart. You seem like you’re finally getting over it and now you want to dive straight back in like nothing’s happened. You ever think
that if she’s out there, she might have contacted you by now? You ever think that she might not want to?’

Ethan felt tiny pricks of pain in the corners of his eyes. ‘Every day.’

Natalie’s eyes softened.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ she said. ‘Just make sure that it’s what you really want, Ethan.’

She looked down at her menu. Ethan glanced out of the restaurant windows at the bleak surface of the lake and asked himself the same question he’d been asking himself for six months:
Is this really what I want?

The sound of his labored heart pounded in Ethan’s head as he jogged along the sidewalk of Lathrop, just off Thatcher Woods. He checked his watch as he swerved by reflex
around the occasional dog-walking pedestrian, glancing at perfectly manicured lawns fronting two-story condos worth more than he earned in a decade. Some even had turreted corner plots like
miniature castles.

Ethan frequently jogged the route, because like almost all people he liked to dream. Nobody who lived alone as he did had any need for five bedrooms, three cars and a bathroom the size of a
small apartment, but all the same it was something prettier to look at than the windy city’s north side. Kind of thing he’d once assumed that he and Joanna would have aspired to: kids,
a dog, big house, the whole nine yards. Instead his life, along with his aspirations, had ground to a halt when she’d disappeared. He’d lost contact with friends, become consumed by
grief and rage, embittered by life’s uncaring twists of fate.

He shook off the maudlin thoughts and picked his chin up along with his pace.

The cables of his earphones bounced as he checked over his shoulder and ran across the street, slowing his pace as he passed a large colonial-style house. Pure white clapperboard, broad windows,
high hedges blocking access to the rear. Worth a cool two million. Ethan’s practiced eye picked out a robust-looking drainage chute running down the north wall from the roof, part of the
hedge that was only four feet high, and a wrought-iron gate locked with a simple bolt and padlock.

Three routes of entry and egress. No, four. The southeast corner’s bedroom window opened out just above the slanted roof of the double garage below. An alarm system’s claxon was
attached to the wall beneath the eaves, a deliberately overt statement announcing the presence of a security system within. Not that Ethan would have to worry about that. He wasn’t looking to
break into the house.