John Saul (45 page)

Seven years, after which Joey Wilkenson could be declared legally dead.

“We can sort it all out after things have settled down a bit,” he went on. “You’re sure you don’t want me to drive you into town?”

MaryAnne shook her head. “I can do it. And I think Alison and I need to be alone for a while.”

She got into the Range Rover, and Alison climbed into the passenger seat next to her. The car was already warmed up, and she put it in gear, turning it around to start down the narrow driveway, certain that she would never return again.

As they left the house forever, neither she nor Alison even glanced back at it, wanting only to forget the terrible things that had happened there.

Rick Martin stared out at the sling dangling from the winch fastened to the outside of the helicopter. Did they really expect him to climb out of the cabin, fasten himself into that sling, and be lowered to the ground fifty feet below? They must be nuts! He glanced over at the pilot, who was grinning wickedly, then heard his voice coming through the headset clamped over his ears. “It looks a hell of a lot worse than it is! Try it—you’ll like it!”

“Did you ever try it?” Rick yelled into the microphone suspended in front of his mouth.

“Hell, no!” the pilot cracked. “I’m scared shitless of heights!”

Glaring darkly at the pilot, Rick unfastened his seat belt, took off the headset, and pulled on a thick knitted cap, then finally slid the door open. Instantly, a gale of freezing wind, driven by the rotor above him, slashed through the cabin. All his instincts told him to slam the door shut again and have the pilot take him back down to the valley, where at least they could set the chopper down on solid ground. But if they did that, it would only mean that he and the two men in the back of the helicopter would have to set out on foot, and after the snowfall of the night before, the trek up the mountainside to Shane Slater’s cabin would take most of the day, assuming they could make it at all. Resigning
himself to the inevitable, he took a deep breath, then reached out and grabbed the sling, pulling it in next to the seat and carefully transferring himself into it, securing the harness. He let himself swing outward, and the pilot began lowering him to the ground. A few seconds later, as his legs sank into the soft snow and his feet touched solid ground, he realized that the pilot had been right—the anticipation of the drop had been a lot worse than the reality. Releasing himself from the sling, he gave the pilot a thumbs-up, then waded through the snow toward the cabin, twenty yards away.

By the time the two deputies from Challis joined him, he had already begun his search of the cabin. Joey Wilkenson had been here. He had left tracks through the snow when he’d abandoned it.

They had been clearly visible from the air. The pilot followed them as far as he could, until they’d neared the crest of the mountains and begun to feel the effects of the wind that was blowing in from the west. As the chopper began to bounce around in the wind, the tracks in the snow had also begun to peter out.

“Snow’s blowing down there,” the pilot had called over the headset. “No point in trying to follow those tracks any farther, and if we go any higher, I’m not going to guarantee we’ll get back down again!” A moment later they swung around, returning to hover in the air above the structure in which Rick Martin now stood.

Once again he marveled that anyone could have survived a winter in the shack, yet it was obvious that Shane Slater had. Though the fire had all but burned out, the stove was still warm, and a few embers still glowed inside, embers that Rick fanned back to life, adding wood until the fire blazed up once again. Not that it would do much good, even if he closed the shutters and door, which he wasn’t about to do, given that they were his only source of light.

“Jesus Christ,” Tom Singlefeather breathed as he stepped through the door. “This looks like something the feds would give us for the reservation! Why the hell would anyone live up here?”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to find out,” Martin
told him. He glanced around the cabin. He’d searched it only twenty-four hours ago, but this time he was determined to find something—anything—that he might have missed before. “If we have to, we’ll tear this place apart. There’s got to be something here that will tell us what the feds won’t!”

He pulled the suitcase he’d found yesterday out from under the wooden bed, opened it, and began going through the contents one more time. “Damn it,” he muttered as he realized there was nothing there he hadn’t seen the day before, “there’s got to be something—”

“What about this?” Tom Singlefeather asked. He was kneeling on the floor, prying up a loose floorboard.

A floorboard Rick Martin had missed completely yesterday. The board came up, and Singlefeather reached down into the hole it had exposed and felt around the space beneath the house. A moment later he pulled out a brown metal box, its paint peeling and the underlying steel rusting. It looked like a small filing box, and there was a wire handle on top, by which it could be carried. The clasp on the front was locked, but Martin pried it open easily with a bent knife that Singlefeather found on the counter that had served as Slater’s kitchen.

Inside, Rick found a small book, its leather cover worn, its pages beginning to mold from the years in the box beneath the house. The book, he realized as he carefully opened the crumbling cover, was Shane Slater’s diary.

He needed only to scan the first page before he knew that he’d found what he was looking for, for the first words told it all:

Rick Martin carefully turned to the last page of the book. Shane Slater’s handwriting had changed. No longer the easily legible script of the first entry, it was now a barely readable scrawl:

At the very bottom of the metal box, there was one more envelope, containing a copy of the release Shane Slater had signed more than fifteen years earlier when he’d agreed to take part in the experiment in the prison hospital.

It had authorized the injection into his system of a serum containing the DNA of “a nonhuman species,” DNA that would hopefully merge with his own, strengthening his resistance to certain kinds of disease.

But it also might possibly—and the release italicized the word
possibly
—permanently alter the structure of his own genes.

The “nonhuman species” specified for Shane Slater was
canis lupus
.

The timber wolf.

C
lark Corcoran gazed at the documents on his desk, barely able to believe what he was seeing. Yet there was no question of the validity of the test results performed on tissue taken from various parts of Shane Slater’s body. Two labs had run the tests, not only on samples of Slater’s blood, but of his sperm, as well.

Corcoran had run his own tests, too, over the last two days, tests it had never occurred to him to perform in all the years that Joey Wilkenson had been in his care. With every test result he’d studied, the evidence became clearer. No matter how his mind might resist the facts, the facts simply could not be denied. He sighed and leaned back in his chair, scanning the faces of the three people gathered around his desk, then taking off his glasses to polish them, knowing that the gesture was merely a way of giving himself a few extra moments to organize his thoughts.

MaryAnne Carpenter was sitting between Charley Hawkins and Rick Martin, her face pale, her fingers twisting at a handkerchief that had already been crumpled in her hand when she’d come in with Hawkins ten minutes ago.

Hawkins himself, his face drawn, was doing his best to maintain a certain judicial impassivity, but Corcoran wondered exactly what thoughts must be going through the attorney’s mind this morning. It was obvious that Hawkins hadn’t slept much the night before. Not, he suspected, that anyone in Sugarloaf had slept well last night. This morning it was apparent that all clay yesterday, and through the night, rumors had been flying.

The Sugarloaf werewolf.

Corcoran had first heard the term when he’d switched on
the radio this morning and listened to Sam Gilman talking about the events at El Monte Ranch. Though the disk jockey’s facts were sketchy at best, it had been no trick at all for “Sugarloaf Sam”—an appellation that had always vaguely annoyed Clark Corcoran—to inflate the story into a tale of proportions large enough to make everyone in town feel he had been lucky to survive at all. To hear Gilman tell it, Shane Slater had been prowling the village every night for years, searching out victims to satisfy his “blood lust.” The fact that until a week ago there had apparently been no victims at all seemed to have occurred to nobody. Finally Corcoran, fed up, had called in himself, suggesting that Gilman switch his nickname to the “Sugarloaf Ghoul.” Gilman, uninterested in talking to anyone who wouldn’t feed the flames of his rumor-mongering, had promptly cut Corcoran off, and the doctor had retaliated by shutting off his radio—a pyrrhic victory at best, since whether he listened to them or not, the rumors were going to go on. And once the reports on his own desk were made public, which he knew they would be, it was only going to get worse.

A lot worse.

Rick Martin, his eyes rimmed with red from lack of sleep, finally stirred in his chair. “Well?” he asked. “What’s the verdict?”

Corcoran cleared his throat, then leaned forward, choosing his words carefully. “I’m not sure what to say,” he began, though he knew all too well that there was no way of avoiding the truth. “I wish I could tell you differently, but there’s no question that MaryAnne was right. Shane Slater was Joey Wilkenson’s biological father.”

MaryAnne nodded grimly. “I got the impression from Olivia that Audrey felt really stupid about the whole thing. Apparently she had no idea about ‘Randy Durrell’ at all. She didn’t even know his real name, but she was crazy about him, according to Olivia.”

“Except it turns out Slater was the one who was crazy,” Rick Martin said. No one in the room even chuckled.

“I suppose that’s why she fell in love with Ted so fast,” MaryAnne went on. “She was on the rebound, and at least
she knew exactly who Ted was. I thought she’d made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but—”

“She did,” Clark Corcoran interjected. “She’d already gotten pregnant by Shane Slater.”

MaryAnne’s gaze slowly lifted from the faded photograph of Audrey and the man who had called himself Randy Durrell. “But you said Joey is all right,” she whispered. “You said—”

“I was wrong,” Corcoran told her, his eyes dropping to the open file on his desk. “From what I’ve seen, there is no possible way Joey can be all right. When they experimented on Shane Slater, they actually succeeded in altering his genetic structure. His genes aren’t those of a normal human being, MaryAnne. A great deal of them are, but there are differences, too. There are strings in his DNA that simply don’t match anything human at all.” He flipped to another page of the file, then another. “The same DNA is in his sperm. The reports are all here, and they don’t leave any room for doubt. Almost certainly, he passed some of his—” Corcoran hesitated, searching for the right word, unwilling to use the one that came instantly to mind.

A man of his education simply didn’t use the word
werewolf
.

“He would have passed some of his
mutations
on to Joey,” he finished.

MaryAnne’s lips tightened, but she said nothing.

“Which ones?” Charley Hawkins asked. “Are you saying we have to consider him to be as dangerous as Shane Slater was?”

“For Christ’s sake, Charley, we already know he killed Olivia Sherbourne!” Rick Martin shouted.

“But Clark said—” the lawyer began, his voice taking on an edge of desperation.

“I know what I’m going to do,” Rick stated, standing up. His eyes went to the window, narrowing as he saw the thick layer of snow that was not yet showing any signs of melting. “As soon as this thaws out, I’m putting together a team. We’re going to search those mountains until we find him, and when we do—” He cut his own words short just in time, knowing that if he’d uttered them, they not only
would have sounded like a line from a grade-B movie, but they would have incriminated him as well.

Officers of the law, he knew, simply did not set out to gun down a thirteen-year-old boy on sight.

But that was exactly what he intended to do.

And it might happen a lot sooner than anyone thought, if the hunch that had been growing in him all morning long was right.

As the meeting in Corcoran’s office broke up, Rick Martin got into his Jeep and headed up to El Monte Ranch.

Joey would come back there, he was almost certain of it.

He might be Shane Slater’s son, but he wasn’t like his father yet.

He didn’t know how to live in the woods, didn’t know how to take care of himself in the wilderness.