The Dark Need (2 page)

Matt spent an afternoon at Arlington’s public library Googling for any clue that might help him anticipate and track this killer. He’d nearly been ready to give up when he stumbled on a news story of a similar killing six months earlier, two hours’ drive south in King County.
A little more hoofwork, and he found three more killings from that same month, all of them in King County. The police had never caught the killer; he’d cleaned up too well after the kill, left the crime scene too pristine. And stopped after several victims.

On impulse, Matt looked up a map of the county. He noticed something immediately.

The towns the killer visited made a straight line, from coast to mountains, like an arrow aimed at the pass. The killer hadn’t crossed over. He just murdered his way right up to the mountains, until he reached some place quiet and without people. Then stopped.

Matt stared at the computer a few moments. All around him the hushed murmurings of patrons in a small-town library. Then his fingers clattered over the keyboard.

Six months ago, King County. Two months before that, a string of towns in the grain fields near Chehalis. Again, an arrow aimed at the Cascades. That time, there had been eight murders. The killer’d had a longer way to travel before he reached the silence of those high peaks.

Matt leaned back, fighting the onset of a headache. Thinking.

He pulled up a map of Snohomish County, a topographical map overlaid with roads and towns, and printed it. Got a pencil from a librarian who peered at him over her glasses with a “You’re not from here” look, then went to sit against one of the low glass windows near the children’s books. A mother sat with her back against the stacks, a small girl in her lap, reading to her. Two boys flipped pages in an illustrated guide to dinosaurs. Another girl with two pigtails ran back and forth, back and forth, across the carpet, from one end of the children’s stacks to the other, her arms spread, making muted airplane noises. A young woman, blonde, probably in her early twenties, stood at the windows looking out, a frown written deep into her face. Her features were vaguely familiar, but Matt couldn’t put a name to her. After a moment
he ignored her, and the children, and peered at his map. He penciled in
X
s over the towns that had been hit in the past few days. Then drew a line through them.

Almost a straight line.

An arrow pointing east.

With gathering excitement, Matt followed the old county road with his finger, noting towns: Oso, Trafton, Darrington. Elevations appeared near them in tiny print, telling the story of a narrowing road climbing steep foothills.

Matt folded up his printed map, stuffed it in his jeans pocket. Slipped out the back door.

Matt hitched a ride up to Darrington on a logging truck, listening to the driver grouch about the state of the lumber industry, old complaints that he knew quite well. He gazed out at the thickness of cedars to either side, marveling at the riot of ferns and underbrush crowding the road’s narrow shoulders. Years spent harvesting timber, yet he hadn’t thought there were this many miles of old-growth forest left anywhere in America.

Matt arrived less than an hour after the local police found the body. He didn’t risk getting close enough to look, but from the astounded faces of the cops at the door of that house, he was sure it was the same as the others: a tiny puncture wound in the throat, the victim bled dry. No sign of breaking and entering.

Matt watched the police put up crime tape from the window of a ma-and-pa coffee shop a couple of blocks down the street. He’d hidden his ax behind a rusted dumpster out back. The barista stood by his table, watching too. She was a round, middle-aged woman, and possibly
the owner—there were no other customers at this hour, and no other staff. Looking out at that house and the flashing police lights parked outside it, she shook her head. “Old Grettinsen,” she said quietly. “Always knew he’d come to a bad end.”

Matt sipped from a ninety-nine cent mug of black coffee and tapped the pencil lightly against the 8 1/2-by-11 printer-paper map he’d spread out on the table, flattening its creases. He was feeling the fatigue of the chase, and the tiny inked lines of that picture of this corner of the world were blurring, but he was unwilling to crumple it up and toss it in the trash by the door. There were people dead, and he’d seen the murderer the day before they began dying. Had seen the maggots in his face. That made this his responsibility.

But here he’d found only yellow police tape, and no sign of the killer. Probably already skipped town.

To go where?

There were no more towns labeled on that map, and the county road clearly ended here. In the Chehalis and King County murders, the killer had stopped once he reached the mountains. Matt glanced out the window at the giants of ice and snow that stood against the eastern sky. Surely he couldn’t have lost the killer. Not after three days of pursuit. He’d banked on getting to Darrington before the killer struck. What he would do when he got here, he hadn’t been sure. Watch faces, he supposed. The town wasn’t large; he could have just rambled through, trusting to luck, alert to any scent of rot on the chill air. But he hadn’t been quick enough. Someone else dead, one more life eaten away, a prey to the dark need of one man to overpower and destroy others, to own their lives and their deaths, if only for the briefest of hours.

If there were no more victims to the east, then Matt had lost his quarry. He had no idea where, or when, the killer would loose his eastward arrow again.

Glancing up from his map, Matt saw two cops talking outside the house of the dead. He recognized one’s face from the Stanwood PD and looked down at his coffee quickly—though the chances of that cop glancing his way, or even knowing he was from out of town, were unlikely. He reached for his wallet, plucked out a dollar and loose change for a tip, while he thought about what it meant that the Stanwood cop was here. It must mean the police knew—and had probably known before he did—that this killer had a history and an MO that followed the compass east each time. Yet the cop’s face had been full of frustration, the face of a man who had run out of options. He probably didn’t know the killer’s face or his name, and he hadn’t saved this last victim.

Nor had Matt.

He stood up to leave. He was probably the only person for miles who wasn’t from here, and if someone other than his taciturn barista noticed him, there’d be questions and suspicion—the last thing he needed when there were dead bodies around. He shrugged his jacket on. Something was chewing at the edge of his mind, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Something about the killer’s vector of travel. Thing was, killers were always predictable, just as Mr. Dark was predictable. Evil was simple, good was complicated; that was what Matt had come to realize in these past years of bloody ax-work. Serial killers and supernatural horrors liked to see the world in easy patterns, see human lives in easy patterns, easily defined, easily sorted, easily eaten. Real people weren’t simple, and the real world defied patterns. Real events—births, marriages, deaths—were like rocks thrown against a sheet of ice, creating a
wild chaos of cracks around them, a geometry of beauty and destruction that might hold all winter or shatter at a touch.

Idly, Matt set the tip of the pencil against the end of the line he’d drawn, here at Darrington on the map. He drew it further, extended it out over the line of foothills toward the peaks. Stopped at the nearest. Nothing. Not a single town there.

Wait.

Matt caught his breath.

There was something along that line. Quite a ways higher up, though maybe less than ten miles east. A lake, a mile-long blue crescent in the lee of a tall hill. Acres of old-growth cedar around it.

Human beings are drawn toward water as deer toward grass, and not everyone in the mountains marks their place on a map.

It was only a hunch, but Matt had saved lives based on hunches before.

“Yeah, there are people up there,” the barista said, frowning. Talking to her was a risk, but Matt needed information. “Here.” She tapped the paper with her fingernail. “It isn’t on your map”—her voice oozed contempt for maps—“but there’s a road. Forest service road. And also a gravel road, here. If you follow Hickson’s Street, it turns into that one. Mail goes up there, oh, once a week.”

“Who lives up there?” Matt said.

“Quiet folk. People trying to get away. Or people with something they want to forget. Jacksons used to be a big logging family up that way, so there’s still a few grand houses on the lake. Broken down a bit, but some of the old houses have kept their lights on.” Her eyes narrowed. “Those people, they don’t like strangers heading out to pry in their business.”

“Just as well,” Matt said. “Have to get back to Arlington.”

“You’re not from this county.”

“No, my wife is.” He flashed a grin. “She told me to drive up here, see the mountains. Thought it would help me get used to our new neighborhood.”

The barista brightened, her suspicion at nosy strangers burning away before the bright light of an opportunity to praise her home ground to a new arrival. “She’s right. You’ll like it here. People out here have common sense. You just need to stay clear of Everett. You can’t account for city people.”

“I’ll remember that.” He folded up the map, slipped it back into his pocket. “Thank you.”

There was no one to hitch a ride with, and even if there had been, Matt didn’t want to interact with anyone else from the town, didn’t want to leave any more traces that he’d been there. Small-town cops might just as likely shake their heads and toss back a few beers at the bar to forget the evil of the day as start a full-scale investigation, but that depended on the town. Some rural cops were more dogged than any black-suited federal agent. And there were several jurisdictions involved in this case. The police might question the barista to learn if
anyone from out of town had stopped by, or if they didn’t, they might think to do so later. He just didn’t know, but he couldn’t waste energy worrying about it. If his hunch was right, there were still lives at risk.

Ax in hand, heavy boots on his feet, a baseball cap that did little to warm his head, and a winter jacket that would not have seemed out of place at his old lumber mill, Matt climbed the winding gravel road. It was a cold walk, his breath visible on the air, and the country grew wilder the farther he went. The trees up here were ancient and quiet and gave Matt uneasy thoughts of wolves, though he was sure it had been long years since any had lived in this state. Dusk came early and it came dark, but before the light went entirely, a car passed, the only one Matt saw the whole way. A sports car a violent hue of yellow, roaring past and chewing up the gravel. A flash of blonde hair glimpsed through the driver’s side window. The driver ignored his lifted thumb. Probably just as well. As Matt watched her car swerve in the loose grit, he figured that the way she was driving, they’d both end up in the lake. For one brief, chilling moment as the car vanished behind a screen of trees, Matt wondered if that had perhaps been the killer, racing ahead of him. But no. He’d picked up no scent of decay, had seen no rot in that half-glimpsed face, and he was certain the driver had been a woman, whereas the rotting one Matt had seen in Anacortes had been a man.