Demon Driven (9 page)

She looked at me closely as she said this,
but my poker face was on lockdown and I simply turned and moved
toward the attack site. I didn’t miss her questioning look in
Gina’s direction. Whatever sign Gina gave her must have reassured
her, as she turned back to her covey of agents.

I hadn’t gone more than a dozen feet when the
vision hit. Unlike my demon visions, this one was slower and
without a sense of urgency. I quickly saw, as well, that it was
also a vision of the past, not the future. I stopped and dropped to
one knee, the other leg folded under me, while I dug out the sketch
pad and pencil.

About five months ago, I had the first of
these new type visions. It was the scene of a vampire attack, and
the events of that attack played on my mind’s movie screen and then
across the pages of my sketch pad, detailing the assault like a
movie director’s storyboard.

My hand started drawing of its own accord and
I watched to see what it revealed.

This one had six scenes laid out. The first
showed a skinny middle-aged guy with too-large glasses walking on
the side of the road, a small mixed-breed dog on a leash. It seemed
to be late afternoon by the shadow of the speed limit sign. I
looked ahead and slightly to my right, spying that very sign about
twenty-five feet away. Looking back at the rapidly evolving
picture, I could see three pairs of eyes that peered from the
forest edge behind him. The next showed the dog looking back in
fear, the man (I assumed this was Lassiter) staring myopically at
the dark forest. The third scene showed a huge blur, streaking
across from the wooded shadows, where the other two sets of eyes
remained. Lassiter was in the midst of dropping the leash and the
little dog was bolting ahead.

Number four was filled with a wolf the size
of a black bear, Lassiter’s thigh in its mouth, the animal holding
him off the ground as it savaged the leg. Scene five had the man on
the ground, with both legs torn up, the wolf now chewing an arm.
The final scene showed the wolf moving off to the woods, only one
pair of eyes still waiting, Lassiter unconscious.

My hand stopped drawing and I became aware of
an audience. I smelled Gina, Duclair, Adler, the female – Balls –
and the male technician; all looking over my shoulder at the
carefully detailed, cartoonish drawing.

“That’s…amazing!” Duclair said in a
thoughtful voice.

“Yeah, they are incredibly useful,” Gina
said.

I handed the sketch up and over my shoulder
to Gina, then stood up and shook out my leg which was just a little
stiff from sitting. The five were all crowded around the sketch,
studying it for clues or just fascinated. Gina and Duclair both
looked up at me. I directed my comments to Gina.

“I’m gonna look in the woods where the wolves
were standing, see if there are any old tracks or anything.”

* * *

The ground at the edge of the forest was
thick with leaf litter, too thick to hold any kind of track, but
knowing where
they
had stood made a good starting point for
starting an arc search. I moved in ever increasing semi-circles,
scanning for any sign, until I finally found a print. It was about
sixteen or so yards back, pressed into soft earth and well hidden
by leaves that had blown over it in the month since it was made.
The very leaves that had hid it had protected it from the elements.
First I laid a six-inch flexible ruler from one of my vest pockets
next to it to add size perspective and then snapped a couple of
pictures of it with the digital camera in my cell phone. It was
almost as big as a salad plate and perfect in detail.

Next, I laid my gloves over it to mark it and
then searched for more, but was ultimately unsuccessful.

I went back to the vehicles and raided a
crime scene kit for dental plaster, a mixing bowl and a wooden
spatula. Back at the track, I mixed the powder with water from my
Camelback hydration pack and worked it smooth with the spatula.
Holding the spatula down into the print cavity, I poured the
pancake-batter like plaster down the length of the spatula and into
the print. Doing it this way protected the print from impact damage
by the heavy plaster. Then I marked the casting with a couple of
sticks pushed into the ground and crisscrossed over the track.

I found Gina with Duclair, the sketch spread
out over the hood of an SUV, a small army of agents studying it and
then moving to the real locations to search for possible evidence.
Gina looked up at me and raised her eyebrows in question.

“I found one track, about fifty feet in. I’ve
got a cast drying in it as we speak,” I said, holding out my cell
to show her the picture. She reached for the phone, but Duclair got
it first, snagging it from my hand. She did
allow
Gina to
look over her shoulder at the picture.

“Damn big track! How big would the wolf be
that made it?” Briana asked.

She knew damned well how big werewolves were.
She was sucking up to me, making me feel important, trying to undo
the damage she had done earlier. I wasn’t gonna play that game.

“Bigger than a bread box,” I said with a
snort, then turned toward the scent of donuts. I could feel her
eyes boring into my back, but I ignored it and instead hunted down
the tantalizing odor of coffee and donuts.

Someone had set up a little break area on the
folded-down tailgate of a Bennington Police SUV. Two state troopers
were chatting with their hands full of coffee and donuts. They took
in my tactical appearance and I could tell the exact moment that
the first one spotted my empty holsters. He elbowed his companion
and moved ever so slowly out of my way.

“Hey, nice rig you got there. Maybe when
you’re old enough, they’ll let you carry a gun!” he guffawed, his
friend joining in.

Great! More stupid cop games. Not in the
mood.

I smiled in turn, then snatched my knife from
behind my back, jabbed a hole in the bottom of each of their paper
coffee cups and re-sheathed the big blade, all before they could
react. I kept it slow enough for them to see the knife, but just
faster than their reaction time.

They froze and coffee spattered on the
ground, splattering their shiny shoes with mocha colored drops.

“Guns are for pussies! No sport!” I said.

The comment maker came back to himself, and
covering his fear, started to bluster. I took off my glasses and
looked at him long and level. Apparently, they didn’t like the
color purple, because their faces went ashen gray and they stumbled
away without another word.

That left me alone to wreak havoc and
destruction on the donuts. A moment later another presence joined
me, but I recognized the footsteps before she spoke.

“You’re getting pretty reckless with your
displays, don’t you think?”

I gave Detective Sergeant Velasquez my
coldest stare.

She held both hands up in a placating gesture
and said, “Just sayin’!”

She wasn’t really intimidated by me. I
suspect she knew I wasn’t capable of harming my friends. Despite my
generally piss poor mood, I still liked that she never smelled of
fear around me. Smell is such a good indicator of true feelings.
She pointed at my mouth and offered me a napkin. I realized that
the powdered sugar around my mouth from the jelly donut
might
have ruined the effect of my glare.

“Chris, I realize a lot has happened in the
last twenty-four hours and from your perspective it’s really bad,
but it might not be as it seems. When you’re ready, I have some
information that you don’t.

‘Kay? ‘Kay,” she said, grabbing a donut and
coffee and heading back into the fray, before I could respond.

I grabbed a coconut flake and a Boston crème
donut and refilled my cup with cocoa – who ever heard of cocoa at a
crime scene? Then I crossed the road to the non-busy side and sat
on a big glacial boulder that had been there since the Ice Age.
Sitting cross legged, I studied the swarm of agents while I ate.
Gina’s words forced themselves back into the forefront of my
thoughts. I
was
displaying too much of the wrong kind of
ability in front of the wrong kind of people. If I wasn’t careful,
Briana would try to put me in a lab somewhere to study me. The
operative word would be try. Even Gina didn’t know
all
my
abilities and nobody (except Lydia and Tanya) knew that Okwari was
never very far away. I wondered at the cryptic comment about
information that I didn’t have. What more did I need to know? Tanya
had chosen another – a vampire more to her liking.

Something else was pushing for attention,
another thought that had been prickling the back of my mind for
awhile now. The image of the crime sketch popped into my head and
my internal eye focused on the little dog. The dog! What had
happened to the dog?

The third scene had shown the dog bolting
ahead. The final scene had shown only one pair of eyes waiting on
the attacking wolf. Had the other wolf gone after the dog?

I popped the last bite in my mouth, drained
my cocoa and hopped off the rock. I wandered up the road, away from
the crime scene, in the direction the dog had gone. I watched the
shoulder of the road, where years of road sanding by snow plows had
left alluvial type deposits. Lots of tracks in that moist,
compacted silicone. Bird, deer, a fisher track, running shoe
imprint and finally, small canine prints. In a C-shaped gallop
pattern, with the hind prints in front of the fore-feet prints.
Little dog moving fast! Bingo!

Trouble was, my sand deposits were
intermittent, so I ranged forward until I found another set and
then another. The little guy had run along the edge of the road,
panicking and following familiar territory. He would have done
better in the thick forest, where the underbrush and trees would
give his small size an advantage. On a straight run, the bigger,
faster wolf would probably catch him….there! A huge canine print in
the sand intersecting the little dog’s, then no more little dog
prints.

The wolf track came in at an angle from the
road. Acting on a hunch I searched the ground in direct line with
the vector of the track. Sure enough there was a partial print
heading back into the forest. I noted the vector on my compass and
followed the line. Thirty feet into the woods I found another
partial and then a fluff of white and black fur. Lassiter’s dog was
white and black in the sketch, or I should say,
had
been. I
followed the line for a mile, hitting tracks intermittently.
Suddenly, I could see daylight through the trees ahead. I came out
on Route 9, east of the Harbour Road turn-off. A long black streak
ran on the concrete into the road from the shoulder, about like the
track from a motorcycle smoking its tire. My cell phone has one of
the GPS applications so I made note of the exact coordinates in my
little notebook.

I tracked back toward my starting point and
about a third of the way back I found another track – a man’s size
nine or nine and a half walking shoe. It crossed the line of the
wolves and headed northwest, which gave me an idea. I noted its
location in my little book before trudging back to the attack scene
and helping myself to the big terrain map laid out on the lead
SUV’s hood. Our location was marked, as was Lassiter’s house. I
rough guessed the GPS coordinates on the map and noted the
direction that the shoe print had been heading. It almost lined up
with Lassiter’s house.

Next I looked through the report folder on
Lassiter. George Lassiter was thirty-eight years old, lived alone,
worked as a salesman at a men’s store in Bennington. The hospital
report had a detailed list of his possessions when he was brought
in by ambulance. Bingo – size nine men’s Rockport walking shoes
were listed.

“Gordon, you find anything?” Eric Adler asked
from his spot in a group that included Duclair and Gina. I
nodded.

“I found where the wolves left their
motorcycles on Route 9,” I offered.

The entire cluster of people came over and I
showed them on the big topographical map. One of the technician
types popped open a PC on the hood and snagged the coordinates from
me. He plugged them into the laptop and then let the program draw a
more exact map. Duclair took one look, then detailed Adler to take
some agents and check out the Route 9 location.

“What else?” Briana asked, looking at me.

“I want to go check out Lassiter’s house. I’m
starting to get a feel for him and I think his home will help me
dial in.”

She nodded and motioned one of the drivers
over. “Take Gordon here, up the road to the house.”

“I’ll go with you,” Gina said, climbing in
the back seat.

Chapter 11

Lassiter’s house was small, with wooden
clapboards in need of fresh white paint. The trim was a dark green
that had seen better days. But overall, the house was fairly tidy.
The yard was well groomed and a large garden plot had been laid out
with care, freshly tilled, with cold weather broccoli and cabbage
already planted. George was a gardener, a plant lover.

Gina moved into the house while I prowled the
back. The property rose almost immediately behind the house,
climbing to become Maple Hill, with a summit above 2600 feet,
according to what I remembered of Briana’s map. A path from
Lassiter’s back door headed straight for the back of his lot, but
stopped at a fairly sheer cliff face that rose about thirty feet
above the yard. There was no obvious way up it and the foot path
just sort of ended.

After glancing around to be sure no one was
watching me, I jumped to the top of the cliff. Cool? It’s sooooo
freaking cool! Still can’t get used to being able to do that.

I looked around my perch. The top of the
cliff was bare granite, but dirt and moss started just a few feet
back from the edge. A narrow little trail was pressed into the
moss, heading straight up into the forest on the mountain's side. I
glanced back down the face of the clifflet and noticed something –
a nine-inch-wide ledge of rock angling up the face of the cliff,
just big enough for a person to climb. I hadn't seen anything of
the sort from the ground and my vision is sharp.