Paskagankee (29 page)

A door opened loudly behind Sharon, wrenched back with more force than necessary and then slammed shut. She closed her eyes and lay completely still, not that she had much choice in the matter with two useless arms and quite possibly extensive internal injuries.

After a few seconds, Sharon's innate cop curiosity overcame her fear and she opened her eyes just enough to peer across the room toward the door without revealing, she hoped, the fact that she was alive. Her entire body was shaking from fear and shock, and she hoped that fact wouldn't be obvious to whomever or whatever had just entered the wrecked interior of this prison.

Shambling into the room, moving in a manner that appeared almost but not quite aimless, was the most frightening sight Sharon Dupont had ever experienced. Her bowels loosened, and she nearly screamed but somehow managed to keep herself quiet by biting hard on the inside of her cheek. The coppery taste of blood filled her mouth but Sharon barely noticed.

It was ex-Paskagankee Police Chief Wally Court, moving with all the grace of a three legged milk cow. Or, more accurately, it was some sort of abomination that at one time had been Wally Court, for this present version resembled Chief Court in only the vaguest general sense. The size was right—huge, he had always been a very large man—but nothing else even came close to resembling the person Sharon had come to know as a mentor and friend.

The Wally Court who had mentored Sharon as a troubled teen and saved her from her darkest tendencies was a disciplined dresser. He wasn't flashy in any way but would never dream of being seen without sharply creased trousers and a meticulously ironed button-down dress shirt.

This man, or rather, this Wally Court-
thing,
appeared not to have bathed in days, maybe weeks. Muddy grass, twigs and straw were matted into tangled and greasy hair. A red-checked wool hunting coat hung loosely off a skeletal frame, covering a shirt haphazardly buttoned. The breast pocket was torn almost completely off the shirt and hung by a few threads. Both knees of the thing's pants were ripped open and dried blood crusted the fabric surrounding the right knee. The razor-sharp crease Wally Court was so insistent upon was nowhere to be seen and a stench filled the room as this Court-thing moved across the room, without so much as a glance at Sharon, and stumbled into another room.

The shock of this utterly unexpected sight almost caused Sharon to forget the intense pain from her injuries. There was no question in her mind that what she had just seen was Chief Wally Court; she had known the man for years, and he had been more of a father to her than her real one ever thought of being. It was him.

At the same time, though, it wasn't Wally Court. That man had moved with a grace and an economy of motion hard to imagine from such a large man. This thing barely seemed able to remain upright, slouching and sliding rather than walking with a normal gait and actually slamming into the door jamb before falling/crashing into the next room and out of sight.

It's true,
she though feverishly to herself.
It's all true.
Professor Dye's story, which she had believed on one level but not fully understood or appreciated, was one hundred percent accurate. Because, really, what other explanation could there be for what she had just seen? She hadn't been able to look directly into the Chief Court-thing's face, but she knew that the bright spark of life shining in the old Wally Court's eyes would have been gone, replaced by what she could not imagine.

Loud crashing noises exploded out of the room the thing had entered only a few seconds ago, and Shari's excruciating pain returned with a vengeance. Had she not already been lying crumpled on the floor, the severity of the pain would have knocked her down. Nausea flooded through her again, and she felt lightheaded and woozy. Blackness crowded the edges of her eyesight in what was becoming a dependable ritual, rapidly covering more and more of her already limited field of vision. Her last thought before losing consciousness again was that she had to figure out some way to warn Mike and Professor Dye about what she had just seen.

Then there was nothing.

48

THE FOG HUNG OVER Warren Sprague's empty field like a death shroud, cloaking everything in a damp grey mist that writhed and twisted on unseen breezes as if possessed. As Mike McMahon parked the Explorer, the hulk of burned brush, limbs and small trees—remnants of last night's bonfire—loomed out of the mist, thick smoke still curling off the blackened top.

The silence was oppressive, broken only by the sucking/crunching sound of the two men's boots as they walked over the partially frozen ground in the early morning stillness.

“How do you want to do this?” Professor Dye asked, his voice sounding thin and reedy, swallowed up by the mist.

“Well, splitting up would allow us to cover more ground faster, and we do have the walkies, but under the circumstances I don't see how we can take that chance,” Mike replied.

They stopped and warmed their hands at the still-hot remains of the bonfire. “I guess we just start on the western edge of the field and work our way clockwise, walking along the boundary where the field joins the woods. Hopefully we'll uncover evidence of what went down here last night. There has to be something, we just need to find it.”

Mike started off slowly toward the edge of the clearing, the forest still pitch-dark beyond the ten feet or so adjoining the field. The steam rising from their Styrofoam coffee cups mixed with the cool, damp air, trailing behind them as they moved like smoke from an old-time steam engine.

“I feel completely useless,” the professor said softly. “I don't even know what I'm looking for.”

“Anything,” Mike replied. “You're looking for anything out of the ordinary. It might be a piece of cloth torn off a jacket or a shirt and left hanging on a branch. Or it could be something as obvious as footprints leading into the woods or maybe blood or some other sign of a struggle. I can't say for sure what it might be, but I guarantee you'll recognize it if you see it.”

They approached the edge of the clearing, the massive Douglas firs towering majestically in front of them, materializing out of the gloom like gigantic sentries lined up to protect some unknown treasure hidden inside the forest. Mike shivered, not only from the damp cold but from a rising sense of disquiet, from the feeling that Sharon was somewhere close by, probably dead thanks to his miscalculation but maybe, just maybe, still alive, injured and in desperate need of help.

Mike reached the edge of the forest and turned south. He began inching his way along the vague demarcation between plowed field and virgin forest, saying nothing, his concentration intensely focused on the task at hand. Professor Dye followed close behind. Mike knew the older man still felt like a useless appendage, but he had other things to worry about at the moment.

***

FORTY MINUTES INTO THE search, Ken Dye began to gain a sense of appreciation for real police work. Unlike on television shows and movies, in which the good guys seem to spend the majority of their time shooting it out with the forces of evil or speeding through congested cities locked in thrilling car chases, the bulk of real-life police work seemed to consist of the patient examination of often uncomfortable crime scenes, searching for evidence without any idea what that evidence might be, or even whether it existed at all.

He had passed Mike and was methodically working his way down the line of trees thirty feet or so in front of the chief. Whether because he was naturally more impatient than the trained law enforcement officer or simply because he didn't know what to look for, the professor found himself moving more rapidly than Mike and had tired of cooling his heels behind him. The lack of intellectual stimulation had given him too much time to think and the resulting images filling his head were less than reassuring.

By midmorning the daylight was not much more prevalent than it had been at dawn. Professor Dye wondered absently if he would ever see the sun again—not this pseudo-sunlight, which felt more like dusk and didn't really get the job done, but strong, warming, good-cheer-inducing solar activity. His eyes were beginning to tire from the constant strain of searching and he found his mind wandering.

He picked his way a few feet into a small break in the trees—perhaps six feet across and slightly less overgrown than the rest of the tangled mass of brush and uncontrolled under
growth—and tripped over a fallen tree branch. He stumbled to his knees and swore under his breath, annoyed and now wet and cold as well. Without a conscious thought, the professor reached back and grabbed the branch to toss it into the woods and out of his way.

The texture of the branch was spongy and for the first time Professor Dye actually gave it a look. Seconds later his coffee came up, gushing out of him in a rush of stomach acid and unidentified, partially digested food, splashing onto the frozen ground as Ken Dye retched and vomited. The acid burned in his gullet and he fought another round of nausea.

He didn't want to look at it again. He refused to look at it again. He couldn't stop himself from looking at it again, from glancing down in horrified fascination. This time, in an unexpected display of self-control, he managed to avoid puking up anything else, not that there was much left in his stomach, anyway.

Lying on the dirty snow, where he had dropped it in his initial burst of panic and fear, was a severed human arm.

49

MIKE KNEW RIGHT AWAY it was bad. He hadn't known Professor Dye very long, but it had been enough time that he could detect the barely contained panic in the man's voice. It sounded unnaturally loud as he called out, and Mike thought the professor might be on the verge of bursting into tears.

Icy fingers of dread clamped onto Mike's internal organs as he walked slowly into the woods where Ken Dye was standing bent over, hands on his knees, a string of yellowish gunk hanging from his open mouth and stretching elastically toward the ground. It was a pose eerily similar to Harley Tanguay's from a couple of days ago. Mike tried to imagine how he would react when he saw Sharon's lifeless body lying on the forest floor, battered and torn apart just as the other victims had been.

This feeling was identical to the despair that had gripped Mike on that fateful Revere evening eighteen months ago. The weather then had been the complete opposite of today—a sweltering afternoon under a relentlessly blazing sun—but he had felt the same frozen lump in his gut he could feel forming right now.

He steeled himself for the worst and shouldered past Professor Dye, looking down onto the dirty snow. It wasn't Sharon. In fact, it wasn't a body at all. At least, not a complete body.

Rust-colored dried blood speckled the snow and mud a few feet from Professor Dye. A lot of rust-colored dried blood. Lying in the middle of all the blood, looking small and incongruously out of place was a human arm. Or at least what was left of a human arm.

Mike breathed deeply. He hadn't even realized until now that he was holding his breath. The sense of relief he felt from not discovering Sharon Dupont's corpse in the forest was tempered with the knowledge that there was now at least one more victim to add to this awful killing spree. It was technically possible, of course, that the person to whom this arm belonged was still alive, but that was unlikely in the extreme and Mike knew in his heart it was not the case.

He kneeled in the muddy, bloody snow to take a closer look, careful not to disturb the scene. The arm had been torn out of its shoulder; the ball-like portion of the humerus wrenched free, with stringy muscles and stretched-and-torn ligaments trailing on the ground, serving as grisly testimony to its owner's last agonizing moments.

Covering the appendage—more or less—was a light blue shirt sleeve and the sleeve of a heavy winter coat which had been torn off its owner along with the arm. The sleeve looked familiar, and Mike began to feel queasier. He looked up to see Professor Ken Dye standing alongside him, apparently done puking, at least for the time being. Mike had to give the man credit for not taking the easy way out and abandoning the mess here in the forest for the open spaces of Warren Sprague's field.

“You know who it is, don't you?” the professor asked.

Mike nodded, swallowing hard. He was determined not to let his stomach get the best of him. He was a law enforcement professional, for crying out loud. “It's Detective O'Bannon.”

“O'Bannon? But he left for Portland last night.”

“No,” Mike reminded him. “You assumed he left for Portland when we didn't see him after that first meeting at the bonfire around seven p.m.” He looked back down at the gruesome evidence. “Obviously, that was an incorrect assumption.”

Ken Dye was silent for a moment, then said, “But that means—”

“Yes, I know,” Mike interrupted. He couldn't bear to hear the professor say it. “Shaw must be here somewhere, too. If something had happened to O'Bannon and Shaw was uninjured, he would have contacted us by now. He would have let us know something was wrong. Obviously, he's unable to do that.”

Mike stood slowly, his knees cracking and popping. He felt like he had aged fifty years in the past week. “We need to search the area. Now. These two men could still be alive,” he said without much conviction, knowing it was not true.