The Montauk Monster (3 page)

By four a.m., there wasn’t much left for Dalton to do. It was too early to play crowd control. Local PD had created a barrier the two news crews couldn’t cross. More would be on the way. A couple of vans with heavy, white satellite dishes on the roof were parked in the Sand Stone Motel’s lot. The ME was with the bodies. All emergency responders were ordered to steer clear of the remains until they could determine if the weird smell coming from the bodies was toxic or not.

He sat in his car with the door open, listening to a succession of animal disturbance calls from dispatch. After the fourth call, he went to look for Sergeant Campos. He found him talking to the fire chief.

“Do we have anyone from Animal Control here?” he asked Campos.

The sergeant narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. “Someone should be here. I asked them to send Anita over about an hour ago. I’d rather this be some kind of animal attack than the work of a psychopath. I haven’t seen her, though.”

Anita Banks had worked for Animal Control on this end of the island for over twenty years. She was so good at her job that other counties, even neighboring states, brought her in for difficult situations. She’d helped remove several bears from New Jersey suburbs, put down a crazed chimp in upstate New York and handled more cases of rabid animals than anyone could count.

“Why do you ask?” Campos said.

“We’ve got four complaints about animals going through garbage and knocking things down in the past hour. The last one was at Shorey Road. If we have a rabid animal on the loose, I want to follow up. I was hoping to grab someone from Animal Control for the ride.”

Dalton looked over the row of parked vehicles, hoping to spot another county car toward the rear. He was relieved to find not one, but two. Now all he had to do was locate Anita.

The ME shouted from behind the dune for the sergeant. Campos turned to Dalton and said, “Do it, but be careful. If you find something, take your cues from Anita.”

“Got it.”

Now, if I were Anita, where would I be?

He walked through the crowd of cops, EMS and firemen. Gallows humor was in full effect. People on the outside would be appalled if they could hear the laughter, see the smiles while two people were laid out in pieces just yards away. They’d never understand. If you let the horror creep under your skin, it could destroy you.

Anita wasn’t among the throng.

Of course not. Knowing her, she couldn’t stay away from the crime scene. She’d be as close as she could, determining whether or not an animal could have caused such destruction, her mind formulating a case to either protect innocent creatures from being pulled into a dragnet or to humanely put down an animal that had crossed a very hard line.

Dalton circled back around the dune, away from the flashing lights and out of reach of the blinding brightness of the temporary crime scene lights. He found her sitting behind a stand of waist-high reeds. She’d parted them with a hand and observed the hazmat team as they took pictures.

“Busted,” Dalton said.

Anita fell backward, covering her mouth to suffocate a startled shout.

When she saw Dalton, she shook her head and smiled.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack, Gray.”

“Better than leaving you here breathing in God-knows-what. You up to taking a ride?”

“I was planning to wait until I got the all clear to get closer to the scene, though it seems gruesome enough from here.”

Dalton looked over at the guys in white suits, taking great care not to step their booted feet into any remains.

“Trust me, you’ve gotten a good enough view. Your next best bet will probably be in the ME’s office where you can check the bodies for bite marks.” He left out the part about the flesh dissolving from the bones.

He offered a hand to help Anita to her feet. She tied her long chestnut hair in a ponytail and wiped the sand from the seat of her pants. She was in her late forties, dressed in her everyday uniform of tan slacks with a forest green polo shirt. Her soft, gray eyes could get hard as steel if the moment called for it.

Anita said, “One thing I can tell you is that no single animal did that, unless we have a starved, half-mad lion on the loose. The closest would be at the Central Park Zoo, and I can’t see an escaped lion making it all the way out here without being spotted—or reported missing.” She took out a pack of gum and offered him a piece.

“I want to follow up on some other animal disturbance calls that have come in since I found the bodies. I thought you might want to tag along. Maybe we can stop this thing, or things, before someone else gets hurt.”

Anita took one last look at the crime scene and shook her head. “Lead the way, Officer. I’m all yours. I just need to stop at my van to pick up my tranquilizer gun.”

When Dalton got to the county squad car closest to the road out of the state park, he talked to Jerry, an EMS driver, who had been driving the car.

“I think I saw Mickey get out. He was just here talking to Jack a minute ago.”

Dalton spied Mickey Conrad, a vet on the force, jawing with Jack Brand, a longtime EMS attendant. Dalton couldn’t wait until he was no longer the new kid. It seemed every first responder on this end of the island had been on the job forever.

“Hey Mick, I need to use your car. Mine’s trapped.”

Mickey rolled and cracked his neck. His normally salt-and-pepper hair flashed blue and red under the strobing lights. Strong-jawed with an aquiline nose, Conrad looked every bit the hard-line cop, even though he could goof off with the best of them. “What for?”

“Sergeant Campos wants me to check out some animal disturbance calls, see if they’re what’s behind this.”

Mickey shot him a long, hard look. His regular shift ended at midnight. He didn’t want to be stuck out there any longer than need be, especially since there was little to do at the moment.

“Bring it back in an hour or you owe me a steak.”

Mickey was a notorious carnivore. When he said
steak
, he meant a twenty-ounce porterhouse at a good restaurant. No Sizzler or Outback Steakhouse for him.

“I will. I don’t make Mickey-steak kind of money.”

Dalton opened the door for Anita, who commented on his being a gentleman, and made a U-turn out of the park.

Officers Winn and Henderson pulled up to Randy Jenks’s small cottage. It had powder blue shutters in need of a paint job. Postage-stamp yards with healthy, well-tended lawns were in the front and back of the house. The windows were dark, but that was normal for this time of night. Randy’s curbside mailbox was full.

“Maybe he’s out of town,” Norman suggested as they walked to the front door. The neighborhood was silent as a tomb. Even the feral cats were tucked away.

“Let’s hope,” Jake said and pushed the bell.

The chimes echoed inside the house, but nothing stirred. He tried again and waited ten seconds.

Norman gave the door a few hard raps. He wanted to roust Randy if he was in a deep sleep, but he didn’t want to knock so hard he woke up everyone on the block.

“I’ll check the back,” Jake said, using his flashlight to lead the way around the side of the house.

A cooling breeze made the tops of the trees sway, carrying the scent of salt and pine. Henderson tried the bell again. He shined his flashlight through the front window into the living room. There was an empty couch, easy chair, a stack of magazines scattered across a glass coffee table, wrestling a pizza box for space. He pressed his face to the glass and pointed the light into the kitchen, sweeping it to the doorway of what must be the bedroom.

Another light pierced the dark from a different angle. Winn had gone to the bedroom window and must have been trying to peer through the gaps in the blinds.

He came back shaking his head. “He’s not in there.”

Henderson felt a knot tighten in his stomach, staring down the road leading to the Montauk Highway and ultimately, the beach. “For his mother’s sake, I hope he’s not back there.”

Dalton’s first stop didn’t yield much intel. An older woman had called in saying her cat had been chased up onto the garage roof by a wild dog with no collar. By the time he got there, the cat was still on the roof, mewling.

“Priscilla won’t come down, even when I opened a can of food,” the woman said. She wore a white housecoat and a hairnet. She stood by the garage in her bare feet, trying to coax the cat down.

“Do you have a ladder?” he asked.

“In the garage. Let me open it so you can get it.”

Dalton looked back at Anita, who was still in the passenger seat of the squad car. “You want to take this one?”

She smiled. “It’s just a scared cat. I’ll let you be the hero.”

He chuckled. Saving cats from trees and rooftops. He couldn’t remember what chapter that had been at the academy.

The woman came out with the key and pulled the door open. The segmented wooden door made enough noise to wake the dead. “It’s right there,” she said, pointing to the back of the garage. He maneuvered his way around the old Buick that took up most of the space and carried the ladder over his head.

“What did you say the cat’s name was, ma’am?”

“Priscilla.”

He leaned the ladder against the garage and climbed several rungs.

“Hey, Priscilla. Come on, let me help you get down.
Psss, psss, psss.
Come on.”

The cat, a gray-and-black-striped tabby, looked at him with wide, emerald eyes, and hissed. When he reached out to get her, she swatted his hand, raking his fingers with her claws and backing up. Dalton drew his hand back sharply.

Damn, that hurt!
He’d heard that cat scratches burned so much because of the urine under their nails. Another reason to be a dog lover.

He wanted to say,
I don’t like you as much as you don’t like me, Simba. Now get off the damn roof before I have Anita hit you with a tranq.

Instead, he climbed another rung, calling her name softly. The cat wasn’t going for it. No matter. As soon as he got close enough, Dalton snagged the cat with both hands. She struggled mightily, hissing and trying to get at his arms with her hind claws. Midway down the ladder, she broke free from his grasp, hit the ground running and didn’t stop until she had dashed into the woman’s open back door.

“Why did you drop her?” the woman cried. She looked as upset as the cat.

“She wasn’t easy to hold on to,” he replied, putting the ladder back in the garage.

“You could have hurt her. Who’s your supervisor?”

He couldn’t believe it. Here he was, climbing up on a roof to get a vicious cat and the woman was threatening to complain to his supervisor. No good deed ...

After giving her Sergeant Campos’s information, realizing the laugh this would give him when and if she did call, he asked if she could describe the dog that had run Priscilla up the roof.

“I just happened to look out the window because I heard Priscilla crying. She does that when she’s scared. I didn’t see much, but I could tell it was big. Like a pony.”

“A pony is considerably larger than a dog. Are you sure about the size?”

“I
know
it wasn’t a pony, but you could put a saddle on it if you wanted.”

“Could you see the type of dog it was, the color of its fur?”

“It was too dark.”

“But you could see it had no collar?”

“People around here think there are no laws. They walk their dogs without collars or leashes and let them poop on my front lawn without picking it up.”

She droned on for a couple of minutes while Dalton looked for a way out of the conversation. It took another ten, fruitless minutes before he got back in the car. Anita couldn’t stop tittering.

“I take it you’re not a cat person,” she said as he keyed the ignition.

“Or a cat
lady
person. Next stop is someone who said he was attacked by a couple of dogs in his yard. I hope he’s quick. I don’t want to have to buy Mickey a steak.”

Benny Franks shivered under a sheet, two blankets and a comforter. Even though the night was humid, he’d turned off the air-conditioning in his room. His stomach had been queasy all night, but it looked like whatever illness had crept into him was taking things to a whole new level. Bubbling noises percolated from his abdomen. His nose had started to run an hour ago and he burned through a box of tissues at NASCAR speed. A pair of sodden hand towels lay draped across his blanketed chest.

Maybe it’s food poisoning
, he thought. The pulled pork sandwich he’d had at Summer’s barbecue had tasted a little off. Leave it to his girlfriend to make him sick. She was always experimenting with different food. Just because she watched the Food Network, she thought she was a chef. He remembered the time she’d fed him homemade sushi—though she left out the
homemade
part at the time—that had landed them both in the ER the next day. He’d shit himself three times before adding a fourth in the car ride to the hospital. They laughed about it now, but it wasn’t funny at all at the time.

Or maybe his stomach was just repulsed by what he saw at the beach. Holy God, that was awful.

Summer had asked him to stay the night, but the way his stomach had been cramping, he’d rather be home alone. Sitting on his couch, watching
Gladiator
for the twentieth time, he’d started feeling woozy and desperately needed some fresh air. Sitting on the porch only made things worse, so he went for a walk. That seemed to settle things down, so he kept on walking. It was a nice night and the moon gave him plenty of light to see by.

Tired of looking at the same weather-battered homes on his block, he’d jumped in his car and headed for the beach. The state park was closed after dark, but no one really cared if you dipped inside for a bit. He’d pulled in at the western edge of the beach. The ocean air made things even better.

He was just getting back to normal when he spotted what looked like heaps of garbage past a stand of reeds.

Fucking slobs
.

It wasn’t like he was about to clean the beach himself, even though there was a trash bin nearby. Let the parks people do it. It’s what they got paid to do.

Only, the closer he got, the more he realized it wasn’t someone’s picnic refuse.

It was
someone
!

Then he saw the heads. It was
two
someones.

Stepping onto a matted-down section of reeds, he knelt down to get a closer look at a gelatinous stack of human ruin. Did they blow themselves up? No way. People would have heard it and the beach would be clogged with morbid onlookers.

Whatever comfort he’d restored to his stomach was turned on its head. He gagged. The pulled pork lodged in his throat.

The last thing he wanted was to be connected to this scene. He’d had enough trouble with the law and despite what most people thought, he’d put those days behind him. He ran to the water and let his dinner fly. The Atlantic could have his DNA, not the Montauk PD.

Head reeling, he stumbled back to his car.

Just go home and forget you saw it. Someone will find it soon enough and call the cops.

He started the car, putting his hand on the gearshift.

What if some little kid looking for shells finds them in the morning? That kid would be scarred for life.

He punched the steering wheel, silently debating with himself. He opened his cell phone, then snapped it shut. If he called it in, the cops would have his cell number and easily trace it back to him. He remembered the old phone box beside Hanson’s thrift shop on Main. It was like a tiny monument to another time, before even five-year-olds had their own iPhones.

Would it still work?

When he pulled in front of Hanson’s, he grabbed some quarters out of the console. The phone was nicked with scratches and deep gouges. Some kids must have taken a knife to it for shits and giggles. To his complete surprise, a dial tone sang in his ear when he lifted the phone off the hook.

At least something went his way tonight.

He put his shirt over the mouthpiece and did his best to alter his voice when he connected with the police. He kept it brief and urgent and hung up before they could ask any questions. Then he went back home and crawled into bed, where his stomach decided to pick up right where it had left off.

Revulsion at the bloody mess wouldn’t explain the chills, sweats and runny nose. Of course, every time he thought about the moment he reached down and touched the mass of flesh and red meat, bile would hit the back of his teeth and the chills would deepen.

Why the hell did I do that? Seeing it wasn’t enough
?

He always had to take things a step further. It’s what landed him in jail when he was nineteen.

Sure, he’d done some good by calling the cops, but what on earth possessed him to even go near that?

Benny sneezed, filling the hand towel. He’d call Summer in the morning and see how she felt. It was probably the pork. His nighttime discovery just added fuel to the fire.

Dalton and Anita pulled up to a tidy Cape house on Herkimer Street. All of the downstairs lights were on.

Dalton looked at his notepad. “This house belongs to Brian Ventura. He said two really big dogs were going through his garbage. When he went to scare them away, they turned on him and chased him into the house.”

Anita got out of the car. “Let’s hope he got a good look at them.”

Ventura opened the door before Dalton could ring the bell. He looked to be in his midthirties with dark, curly hair and tired eyes. His Mets robe was worn, the ends of the sash tattered. He was slightly stooped over and holding an ice pack to the small of his back.

“Please, come in and have a seat,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure if I should even call and make a big deal of it at first, but there was something way off about the way those strays acted.”

Dalton eyed the ice pack. “Are you all right?”

He shook his head. “I tripped over one of my garbage pails. Took a nice spill. Nothing some ice and Motrin can’t handle.”

Dalton introduced Anita, who shook his hand.

“If you came to get them,” he said to her, “they’re long gone. As soon as my neighbor turned on his floodlights, they took off like a shot. They were like mini-Thoroughbreds.”

Or very fast ponies
, Dalton thought. He asked Ventura to take them through what had happened, which he happily did, complete with plenty of hand gesticulations. Whatever he saw, it had put a damn good scare into him.

“When the lights came on, were you able to see the dogs?” Anita asked. With anxious fingertips, she worried at the end of her ponytail.

“Not really. I’m telling you, they zipped back down my alley way faster than I thought a dog could run.”

“You didn’t catch anything, like an approximate size, color, if they had long or short hair?” Dalton prodded.

Ventura winced when he settled back into his chair and paused to think. “Look, I know they were big, kinda like that dog from the comics.”

“Snoopy?” Dalton said. He wasn’t much of a comics-page guy and Charlie Brown’s beagle was one of the few dog comic characters he knew.

“No, the huge one that gets in all the trouble.”

Anita said, “You mean Marmaduke?”

Brian snapped his fingers. “That’s it.”

“That would be a Great Dane,” Anita said. “They can get pretty big, scarily so for people who’ve never seen one up close before.”

Dalton took down notes. Ventura added, “I think they were short-hair dogs because I would have seen a lot of hair, you know? It happened so fast, I couldn’t tell much. I just know this.”

He stopped to adjust the ice pack. Dalton glanced at Anita, who looked concerned.

“These dogs, they weren’t afraid of me one bit. I didn’t surprise them. I
pissed them off
. If you find them, you better be real careful.”

Dalton thanked him for calling it in and left a card to reach him if they returned to the yard. He advised Ventura to stay in the house should they come back. He didn’t need to be told twice.

Back in the car, Dalton looked at his watch and said, “I better get back to the beach. What’s your take?”

Anita tugged on her hair. “I can see one dog, a stray Dane or mastiff, with a bad temper. But two working in tandem? I don’t like it.”

Neither do I
, Dalton thought as he turned the car back toward Shadmoor State Park.