Watchers (19 page)

“Sure stinks in here,” Cliff Soames said.

“You should’ve smelled it before we got the stiff in the bag,” Walt said. "Ripe.”

“Not just . . . decomposition,” Cliff said.

“No,” Walt said, pointing here and there to stains that were not caused by blood. “Urine and feces, too.”

“The victim’s?”

“Don’t think so,” Walt said.

“Done any preliminary tests of it?” Lem asked, trying not to sound worried. “On-site microscopic exam?”

“Nope. We’ll take samples back to the lab. We think it belongs to whatever came crashing through that window.”

Looking up from the body bag, Lem said, “You mean the man who killed Dalberg.”

“Wasn’t a man,” Walt said, “and I figure you know that.”

“Not a man?” Lem said.

“At least not a man like you or me.”

“Then what do you think it was?”

“Damned if I know,” Walt said, rubbing the back of his bristly head with one big hand. “But judging from the body, the killer had sharp teeth, maybe claws, and a nasty disposition. Does that sound like what you’re looking for?”

Lem could not be baited.

For a moment, no one spoke.

A fresh piny breeze came through the shattered window, blowing away some of the noxious stench.

One of the lab men said, “Ah,” and plucked something from the rubble with his tweezers.

Lem sighed wearily. This situation was no good. They would not find enough to tell them what killed Dalberg, though they would gather sufficient evidence to make them curious as hell. However, this was a matter of national defense, in which no civilian would be wise to indulge his curiosity. Lem was going to have to put a stop to their investigation. He hoped he could intervene without angering Walt. It would be a real test of their friendship.

Suddenly, staring at the body bag, Lem realized something was wrong with the shape of the corpse. He said, “The head isn’t here.”

“You feds don’t miss a trick, do you?” Walt said.

“He was decapitated?” Cliff Soames asked uneasily.

“This way,” Walt said, leading them into the second room.

It was a large—if primitive—kitchen with a hand pump in the sink and an old-fashioned wood-burning stove.

Except for the head, there were no signs of violence in the kitchen. Of course, the head was bad enough. It was in the center of the table. On a plate.

“Jesus,” Cliff said softly.

When they had entered the room, a police photographer had been taking shots of the head from various angles. He was not finished, but he stepped back to give them a better view.

The dead man’s eyes were missing, torn out. The empty sockets seemed as deep as wells.

Cliff Soames had turned so white that, by contrast, his freckles burned on his skin as if they were flecks of fire.

Lem felt sick, not merely because of what had happened to Wes Dalberg but because of all the deaths yet to come. He was proud of both his management and investigatory skills, and he knew he could handle this case better than anyone else. But he was also a hardheaded pragmatist, incapable of underestimating the enemy or of pretending there would be a quick ending to this nightmare. He would need time and patience and luck to track down the killer, and meanwhile more bodies would pile up.

The head had not been cut off the dead man. It was not as neat as that. It appeared to have been clawed and chewed and wrenched off.

Lem’s palms were suddenly damp.

Strange . . . how the empty sockets of the head transfixed him as surely as if they had contained wide, staring eyes.

In the hollow of his back, a single droplet of sweat traced the course of his spine. He was more scared than he had ever been—or had ever thought he could be—but he did not want to be taken off the job for any reason. It was vitally important to the very security of the nation and the safety of the public that this emergency be handled right, and he knew no one was likely to perform as well as he could. That was not just ego talking. Everyone said he was the best, and he knew they were right; he had a justifiable pride and no false modesty. This was his case, and he would stay with it to the end.

His folks had raised him with an almost too-keen sense of duty and responsibility. “A black man,” his father used to say, “has to do a job twice as well as a white man in order to get any credit at all. That’s nothing to be bitter about. Nothing worth protesting. It’s just a fact of life. Might as well protest the weather turning cold in winter. Instead of protesting, the thing to do is just face facts, work twice as hard, and you’ll get where you want to go. And you must succeed because you carry the flag for all your brothers.” As a result of that upbringing, Lem was incapable of less than total, unhesitating commitment to every assignment. He dreaded failure, rarely encountered it, but could be thrown into a deep funk for weeks when the successful conclusion of a case eluded him.

“Talk to you outside a minute?” Walt asked, moving to the open rear door of the cabin.

Lem nodded. To Cliff, he said, “Stay here. Make sure nobody— pathologists, photographer, uniformed cops,
nobody
—leaves before I’ve had a chance to talk to them.”

“Yes, sir,” Cliff said. He headed quickly toward the front of the cabin to inform everyone that they were temporarily quarantined—and to get away from the eyeless head.

Lem followed Walt Gaines into the clearing behind the cabin. He noticed a metal hod and firewood scattered over the ground, and paused to study those objects.

“We think it started out here,” Walt said. “Maybe Dalberg was getting wood for the fireplace. Maybe something came out of those trees, so he threw the hod at it and ran into the house.”

They stood in the bloody-orange late-afternoon sunlight, at the perimeter of the trees, peering into the purple shadows and mysterious green depths of the forest.

Lem was uneasy. He wondered if the escapee from Weatherby’s lab was nearby, watching them.

“So what’s up?” Walt asked.

“Can’t say.”

“National security?”

“That’s right.”

The spruces and pines and sycamores rustled in the breeze, and he thought he heard something moving furtively through the brush.

Imagination, of course. Nevertheless, Lem was glad that both he and Walt Gaines were armed with reliable pistols in accessible shoulder holsters.

Walt said, “You can keep your lip zipped if you insist, but you can’t keep me totally in the dark. I can figure out a few things for myself. I’m not stupid.”

“Never thought you were.”

“Tuesday morning, every damn police department in Orange and San Bernardino counties gets an urgent request from your NSA asking us to be prepared to cooperate in a manhunt, details to follow. Which puts us all on edge. We know what you guys are responsible for—guarding defense research, keeping the vodka-pissing Russians from stealing our secrets. And since Southern California’s the home of half the defense contractors in the country, there’s plenty to be stolen here.”

Lem kept his eyes on the woods, kept his mouth shut.

“So,” Walt continued, “we figure we’re going to be looking for a Russian agent with something hot in his pockets, and we’re happy to have a chance to help kick some ass for Uncle Sam. But by noon, instead of getting details, we get a cancellation of the request. No manhunt after all. Everything’s under control, your office tells us. Original alert was issued in error, you say.”

“That’s right.” The agency had realized that local police could not be sufficiently controlled and, therefore, could not be fully trusted. It was a job for the military. “Issued in error.”

“Like hell. By late afternoon of the same day, we learn Marine choppers from El Toro are quartering the Santa Ana foothills. And by Wednesday morning, a hundred Marines with high-tech tracking gear are flown in from Camp Pendleton to carry on the search at ground level.”

“I heard about that, but it had nothing to do with my agency,” Lem said.

Walt studiously avoided looking at Lem. He stared off into the trees. Clearly, he knew Lem was lying to him, knew that Lem
had
to lie to him, and he felt it would be a breach of good manners to make Lem do it while they maintained eye contact. Though he looked crude and ill-mannered, Walt Gaines was an unusually considerate man with a rare talent for friendship.

But he was also the county sheriff, and it was his duty to keep probing even though he knew Lem would reveal nothing. He said, “Marines tell us it’s just a training exercise.”

“That’s what I heard.”

“We’re always notified of training exercises ten days ahead.”

Lem did not reply. He thought he saw something in the forest, a flicker of shadows, a darkish presence moving through piny gloom.

“So the Marines spend all day Wednesday and half of Thursday out there in the hills. But when reporters hear about this ‘exercise’ and come snooping around, the leathernecks suddenly call it off, pack up, go home. It was almost as if . . . whatever they were looking for was so worrisome, so damn top-secret that they’d rather not find it at all if finding it meant letting the press know about it.”

Squinting into the forest, Lem strained to see through steadily deepening shadows, trying to catch another glimpse of the movement that had drawn his attention a moment ago.

Walt said, “Then yesterday afternoon the NSA asks to be kept informed about any ‘peculiar reports, unusual assaults, or exceedingly violent murders.’ We ask for clarification, don’t get any.”

There
. A ripple in the murkiness beneath the evergreen boughs. About eighty feet in from the perimeter of the woods. Something moving quickly and stealthily from one sheltering shadow to another. Lem put his right hand under his coat, on the butt of the pistol in his shoulder holster.

“But then just one day later,” Walt said, “we find this poor son of a bitch Dalberg torn to pieces—and the case is peculiar as hell and about as ‘exceedingly violent’ as I ever hope to see. Now here
you
are, Mr. Lemuel Asa Johnson, director of the Southern California Office of the NSA, and I know you didn’t come choppering in here just to ask me whether I want onion or guacamole dip at tomorrow night’s bridge game.”

The movement was closer than eighty feet, much closer. Lem had been confused by the layers of shadows and by the queerly distorting late-afternoon sunlight that penetrated the trees. The thing was no more than forty feet away, maybe closer, and suddenly it came straight at them,
bounded
at them through the brush, and Lem cried out, drew the pistol from his holster, and involuntarily stumbled backward a few steps before taking a shooter’s stance with his legs spread wide, both hands on the gun.

“It’s just a mule deer!” Walt Gaines said.

Indeed it was. Just a mule deer.

The deer stopped a dozen feet away, under the drooping boughs of a spruce, peering at them with huge brown eyes that were bright with curiosity. Its head was held high, ears pricked up.

“They’re so used to people in these canyons that they’re almost tame,” Walt said.

Lem let out a stale breath as he holstered his pistol.

The mule deer, sensing their tension, turned from them and loped away along the trail, vanishing into the woods.

Walt was staring hard at Lem. “What’s out there, buddy?”

Lem said nothing. He blotted his hands on his suit jacket.

The breeze was stiffening, getting cooler. Evening was on its way, and night was close behind it.

“Never saw you spooked before,” Walt said.

“A caffeine jag. I’ve had too much coffee today.”

“Bullshit.”

Lem shrugged.

“It seems to’ve been an
animal
that killed Dalberg, something with lots of teeth, claws, something savage,” Walt said. “Yet no damn animal would carefully place the guy’s head on a plate in the center of the kitchen table. That’s a sick joke. Animals don’t make jokes, not sick or otherwise. Whatever killed Dalberg . . . it left the head like that to taunt us. So what in Christ’s name are we dealing with?”

“You don’t want to know. And you don’t
need
to know ’cause I’m assuming jurisdiction in this case.”

“Like hell.”

“I’ve got the authority,” Lem said. “It’s now a federal matter, Walt. I’m impounding all the evidence your people have gathered, all reports they’ve written thus far. You and your men are to talk to no one about what you’ve seen here. No one. You’ll have a file on the case, but the only thing in it will be a memo from me, asserting the federal prerogative under the correct statute. You’re out from under. No matter what happens, no one can blame you, Walt.”

“Shit.”

“Let it go.”

Walt scowled. “I’ve got to know—”

“Let it go.”

“—are people in my county in danger? At least tell me that much, damn it.”

“Yes.”

“In danger?”

“Yes.”

“And if I fought you, if I tried to hang on to jurisdiction in this case, would there be anything I could do to lessen that danger, to insure the public safety?”

“No. Nothing,” Lem said truthfully.

“Then there’s no point in fighting you.”

“None,” Lem said.

He started back toward the cabin because the daylight was fading fast, and he did not want to be near the woods as darkness crept in. Sure, it had only been a mule deer. But next time?

“Wait a minute,” Walt said. “Let me tell you what I think, and you just listen. You don’t have to confirm or deny what I say. All you’ve got to do is hear me out.”

“Go on,” Lem said impatiently.

The shadows of the trees crept steadily across the bristly dry grass of the clearing. The sun was balanced on the western horizon.

Walt paced out of the shadows into the waning sunlight, hands in his back pockets, looking down at the dusty ground, taking a moment to collect his thoughts. Then: “Tuesday afternoon, somebody walked into a house in Newport Beach, shot a man named Yarbeck, and beat his wife to death. That night, somebody killed the Hudston family in Laguna Beach—husband, wife, and a teenage son. Police in both communities use the same forensics lab, so it didn’t take long to discover one gun was used both places. But that’s about all the police in either case are going to learn because your NSA has quietly assumed jurisdiction in those crimes, too. In the interest of national security.”