Airship Hunters (6 page)

Walker had said little on the ride out except for a grunt or a hum in response to each of Cabot’s remarks. The Treasury agent found the policeman’s dry recounting a good fit for the personality he’d shown so far. “What else?”

Walker pointed into the fenced lot. “Head and torso in there. Still connected. No cow, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“We learned from neighbors that both murder victims had recently bought cows. One cow, each family. The cows were gone when the bodies were found. We think rustlers or somebody—maybe the killer—stole the cows after the murders.”

“When did this happen?”

Walker glanced at the cabin’s roof line. “Six weeks ago, give or take a day or two. Left leg was found up there.”

“And the other murder?”

“Two weeks after that.” He gestured with his chin. “Right leg was on the other side of the cow lot. Never found the left arm.”

Cabot looked around the lot. “May I go inside?”

Walker didn’t answer, but retrieved a claw hammer from a saddle bag on his horse. While Cabot waited, he examined the door. Walker pulled out the few nails holding it in place.

Cabot whistled. “This has been flat-out knocked off the hinges. Look here, the screws pulled out of the door. Wood split against the grain. Latch broken in half. Was the door found in the house or outside?”

The policeman frowned. “In the yard.”

Cabot entered. The place had three rooms, and each one was wrecked. Furniture overturned and broken, the stove knocked over, crockery shattered.

“You said a family lived here?”

“Smith and his missus, two boys. Five and nine.”

“Smith was the victim?”

“Yes.”

“The others?”

Walker shook his head. “Don’t know. No one’s seen them.”

“Since the murder?”

“Boys were at school until two days before the murder. Teacher said they both were ailing, so she wasn’t worried when they didn’t show up the next couple of days. Best we figure, Smith was killed the day before he was found. Mrs. Smith was at a neighbor’s house day before the killing. Trading milk for eggs, so we know the cow was still here then.”

“No sign of the wife or boys since?”

“Not a stitch or splinter.”

“What about the coin?”

“I found it,” Walker said with some pride in his voice. “In a pocket of what was left of Mr. Smith’s britches.”

Cabot stepped back outside. He paused and didn’t move a muscle. He searched for some sign of his mentor’s voice in his memory.

Cabot began walking a circle around the cabin. He spiraled around the lot, his circle enlarging as he went counterclockwise, his gaze scouring the ground. Walker watched from the doorway.

Cabot’s track eventually took him beyond the outbuilding and fence. He stepped more slowly through the garden plot behind the cabin. “Here,” he called. Walker trotted to the agent’s side. Cabot plucked a scrap of fabric from a stalk of okra. “Look.”

Walker studied a stain on the scrap. “Might be blood.”

Cabot pointed to the ground. In the six weeks since the death of its owner, weeds had sprung up in the rows that had gone without a hoe’s bite. “You can make out tracks. Deep at the front, like someone running. Away from the house. Maybe Mrs. Smith?”

Walker scanned the ground. “No sign of anyone following.”

“Wouldn’t have to run through the garden just because you’re chasing someone.” He nodded toward a wooded area. It was roughly a hundred yards away, and stretched in an irregular line north and south. “What’s over there?”

“Creek.”

Cabot headed in that direction, continuing to scan the ground. He entered the trees about twenty feet from the creek, Walker trailing. The racket raised by birds in the trees covered the sound of their shoes crackling through leaves and briars and the low-growing plants. At the water’s edge, Cabot stopped. The creek was about eight feet at its widest point; according to Walker, it was three at its deepest.

“The water’s receded from its highest point.” Cabot pointed at the dirt-caked litter along the banks. “When was the last rain?”

Walker examined the gap between the water and the start of the undergrowth. “Some light showers during the past few weeks. Last soaking rain? Maybe two months ago.”

“So, right around the time Smith was killed.” Cabot began walking north along the creek. He pointed south. “That way—look for prints in the mud.”

The Treasury agent soon kneeled. “Here we go.” Two marks made by booted feet running in the mud, charging toward the water. Distorted by the force of the runner’s movement and the mud’s pliability, the marks—now dried and stiff in the area left behind by the dropping water level—still were recognizable to Cabot.

He examined more closely the area to the sides of those prints. And received a shock.

He found another footprint. But much larger, wider than the span of his spread-open hand and nearly as long as his forearm. The foot was unshod—Cabot could hardly imagine a shoe that size—and the great toe actually wasn’t in the lead position, but rotated farther to the side, in the way a primate’s great toe acts like a thumb.

A brief thrill ran up his neck as an image flashed through his memory: that of the villain from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

He shook his head. Perhaps the print had been distorted first by the malleable nature of the wet mud and then by the process of drying.

Just then he caught the sound of Walker calling him over the noise of the birds and of the moving water. He joined the policeman, who had found another print. Like the one Cabot found, this one was grotesquely misshapen, but not so large. Both were pointed toward the water, suggesting each was made by separate people—creatures?—and not by one returning to the banks after venturing into the water.

Two?

Cabot stood. “The other side, then.”

He removed his boots and carried them. With Walker’s help, he found a way across the creek by stepping on some large stones. On the other side, he resumed sweeping the ground for clues. Several yards to the north, he made a discovery.

He picked up a small dirt-covered boot, a woman’s shoe, and waved it for Walker to see. “She must have made it across the water.” But search as he might, he found no footprints leading from the creek. None for the woman nor for the strange feet whose prints they’d found on the other bank. He cast about in wider arcs from the spot he found the shoe. After several minutes he paused and considered.

He lifted his gaze, looked into the tree canopy overhead. The leaves swam with birds.

Like a rag doll tossed into the trees, there hung Mrs. Smith, clutched by branches.

What was left of her.

They found no trace of the boys.

Walker urged a return to town. He wanted to send some men out to retrieve Mrs. Smith’s body before dark.

They had been riding a few minutes when the policeman said, “I’m surprised we didn’t find that shoe the other day.”

“May have fallen just recently. The... state of decomposition may have caused it to fall after a few days.”

Walker nodded as the hurt to his professional pride eased a bit. “Where did you learn to track so? An Injun teach you?”

“No, all I know about investigating crimes I learned from Yankee Bligh.”

“Bligh—didn’t he nearly catch Jesse James?”

Cabot nodded. “He was quite the policeman. I grew up in Louisville hearing about his exploits. I was inspired to join the police force. I was fortunate to catch his eye and to be mentored in his methods of detection. He encouraged me to strive beyond my career in Louisville, and I was emboldened to seek a position in the Treasury Department.”

“Guess that worked out.”

“It did. I was very surprised that my desires turned out in my favor. As if a dream too good to be possible came true.”

Cabot supposed Walker was about his own age. He saw his companion’s brow knotted in thought.

“A good policeman will be welcomed anywhere,” Cabot said. “It’s still a big country. The law needs good men on its side.” Walker looked at him. “You might think about that.”

Walker nodded. “I will.”

In Broken Toe, Walker directed the undertaker and two recruits to the Smith farm. Then Cabot and the policeman reported to Barker. Afterward Cabot retired to his hotel, sank into a hot tub of soapy water, and finally settled into bed.

The next morning, Walker guided Cabot to the second murder scene. The Smiths had lived two miles east of Broken Toe. The Kellys lived two miles west of town.

The house was little more than a shack. James Kelly, a widower of ten months, had been found in a state similar to that of Smith. His daughter, Dorothy, fourteen years old, had not been found. Walker reminded Cabot the crime had been discovered two weeks after the Smith murders.

The signs of destruction were like those Cabot had studied yesterday. Walker pointed out the places he’d located Kelly’s scattered parts. Again, no cow or other livestock had been found at the scene. Barker had been here with him that day, and the Police Chief had found the gold coin with some other money in a broken sugar crock.

The tatters of a ripped-apart dress on the floor of the wrecked kitchen held Cabot’s attention for several minutes. He found no strange footprints as he had at the Smith home. After two hours, the Treasury agent gave up looking for further clues.

He collected the reins of his rented horse and asked, “What else can you think of I should know?”

Walker shrugged. “Other than that third scene...”

“
Third
scene? A third murder?”

Walker nodded. “You didn’t know?”

“Barker only said two.”

“These two—the Smiths and Kelly—they’re close enough to town the Chief was willing to consider them under his jurisdiction. But Rash Howard was found fifteen miles away, and that’s Sheriff Brohm’s territory, and he works out of the county seat. Barker let him have that one.”

Cabot questioned Walker for whatever information he could pull out. Then the Treasury agent mounted and rode north. Walker headed back to Broken Toe after saying he was sure his boss wouldn’t want him tinkering with county business, no matter Washington’s interest.

Cabot followed Walker’s directions to the Howard home, where he interviewed Mrs. Howard. She wore black and, over that, her widow’s grief.

She knew very little. Only what her husband had told her about Samuel Brecker’s story involving a remarkable cow and a gold coin.

“I don’t know why someone did that to my Rash,” the woman said. “He wasn’t just killed, he was—was—
destroyed
.” Cabot saw the meek spark that still animated the woman’s eyes dull a fraction more. “Mizzus Gaines told me something. She didn’t want to, I could tell, but she couldn’t keep it from me, either. She said the gossips talk about something—a
thing
, out there running loose in the county. Something like a man, but not. Bigger, on two legs, or four. The people out on the farms, their stock gets spooked at night. If they see anything, they can’t make it out in the bad light of the evening. But they find signs in the fields, on the prairies in the morning. Maybe around their barn-lot, and maybe a chicken or a pig is gone missing.”

She stopped and peered at Cabot as if hoping to hear him say something that would make sense come back to her world.

Cabot had nothing to offer her. He expressed his condolences, left behind a card with his name and address, and rode his horse toward the Brecker homestead.

Walker’s directions were accurate. Cabot followed the same trail Rash Howard had taken the day of his death.

As he rode into the dooryard, the agent felt Walker’s absence like an acute pain. He was alone here, where a man had been murdered—torn apart, ripped from life. The woman who lived here with her son—both were missing. The structures that once had been a home imparted a tremendous sense of loss to Cabot. He felt very alone.

And he thought about Mrs. Howard’s words. Her description of a monster that wandered the wilderness, terrorized farms, and killed unsuspecting people like her husband—the rise of such tales was normal after the sort of horrible events that had shaken the scattered inhabitants of this community. Not so long ago, this had still been the frontier. Violent death wasn’t unknown here; Barker had noted how grudges left from before the War Between the States still broke out among people in this part of the country. But the inexplicable savagery inflicted on the bodies of the murder victims would make anyone wonder if some wild thing still existed hidden yet alongside the works of civilization.

Cabot shook his mind away from this line of thought. From the saddle, he surveyed the scene. He didn’t have Walker to point out where Rash Howard’s parts had been found, but he knew the man had met a violent end. The particular details about locating limbs weren’t really important. That Howard’s mule also had been slain and gutted was a point Cabot noted, but didn’t dwell upon.

He stepped down from his mount. It was a piebald, the same horse he’d ridden yesterday. He watered the horse and hitched her to a fence rail so she could crop grass while he looked around. Clouds had been filling the sky during his trip from the Howard home, and the light would be failing soon. Best look for clues, then return to town.