Homing (38 page)

"Jan?" she broke in. "Look, a call just came in that I really have to take, so I'm going to give you to Roberto-believe me, he knows every bit as much about this as I do."

"But Sara's-" Jan McLaughlin began again, determined not to be put off.

"Tell Roberto," Ellen said, then punched the flashing button that would connect her to the caller from Cal Poly.

"Hello? This is Ellen Filmore."

"Harry Matson here," a man with a deep, resonant voice replied. "I've been looking at some blood samples you sent to-"

"My God," Ellen interrupted. "You have no idea what's going on here. Both the kids those samples came from are missing." Realizing she was sounding very much like she was panicking mothers she'd been trying to calm all morning, she cut herself short. "Do you have any idea what kind of bacteria we're dealing with here?" she asked, deliberately shifting into her most professional tone.

"From what I can see so far, we're not dealing with a bacterium at all," Harry Matson replied. "A bacterium generally reproduces by transverse fission, although in some varieties-"

some of them transfer nucleic acid between two cells," Ellen cut in, more impatiently than she'd intended.

"I mean, I did go to medical school, Dr. Matson. But if it's not bacteria in those samples, what is it?"

Matson hesitated, and when he spoke again, his ton had lost some of its resonance and taken on a note of worried uncertainty. "I wish I could be sure," he said. "So far, my best guess is that it's a parasite."

"Best guess?" Ellen Filmore echoed. "For God's sake, Dr. Matson, I got a best guess from the lab last night.

What I need now is an answer."

"And I'd like to give you one," Doctor Matson replied sharply. The hard edge softened somewhat as he went on, "But it's just not that easy, since what's in that blood is something I've never seen before. But I can tell you what it looks like. It looks exactly like some kind of insect larvae, but on a microscopic scale."

"insect larvae," Ellen repeated. "That's what Barry Sadler said, too."

"The question is," Matson continued, as if she hadn't spoken, "what is it doing in blood? That's where the best guess that it's a parasite comes in. The whole thing is fascinating, from a scientific standpoint. The larvae are starting to die, but until I can actually look at one of your patients, I can't be certain why. What it looks like, though, is that the larvae feed on the blood, but need some other environment to metamorphose into adults. There don't seem to be any adults at all in the samples you sent to me.

If you can get some samples from some other parts of these patients' bodies-"

"I can't," Ellen broke in. She was just beginning to explain that both the patients had disappeared, when she saw Roberto frantically signaling her. "Look, I'm going to have to call you back." Quickly writing down Harry Matson's phone number, she jabbed at the second line just in time to hear Mark Shannon's voice.

be there in five minutes or so. Just tell her we need her to look at them."

"Mark?" Ellen said. "Mark, it's Ellen. I'm here." See

"It's okay," Shannon told her. "Roberto can explain.

"See you in a few minutes." He hung up, and as she was about to punch the first line, which was again flashing, Roberto called out, "I'm shutting them both off."

Putting both lines on hold, Roberto Munoz got up from his desk, paused to pour her a cup of coffee from the pot on the table in the waiting room, then dropped into the chair next to her desk and scanned a pad full of notes.

"Most of this is just bullshit," he told her. "You can look at it all later. Two things are important. I told Mrs. McLaughlin to bring Sara in. From what she says, it sounds like the same thing you had with the other three kids. I told her not to let Sara argue, not to let her out of her sight, and not to stop for anything. I did my best to scare the shit out of her.

That okay?"

Ellen Filmore nodded. "Perfect." She ripped the top sheet off her own notepad and handed it to Roberto. "Call Matson back and tell him I may have some more samples for him, and ask him if there's anything specific he wants me to look for. And line up an ambulance, just in case we have to get Sara over to San Luis Obispo in a hurry."

"Got it." He paused only a split second, then went on.

"The other thing is Shannon. He's on his way over here with something he wants you to take a look at."

"Something," Ellen repeated in a tone that let Roberto know he'd better tell her exactly what it was that Shannon was bringing.

Roberto sighed. "It's a skeleton. It's human, and he's pretty sure it's fairly . . ." He hesitated, but saw no way to avoid the word. ". - . fresh," he finished. "He wants you to take a look at it." Dismissing the rest of his notes as being nothing that couldn't be put off until later, Roberto stood up again. "Great day so far, huh?" he said, then headed for his own desk to begin taking care of the details, leaving Ellen Filmore to sip her coffee and gather her thoughts for a moment or two before the next onslaught.

Her cup was still half full when she saw Mark Shannon's squad car pull into the parking lot, immediately followed by Russell Owen's pickup truck, and finally a small four-wheel-drive vehicle she didn't recognize. Car doors slammed, and a moment later Mark, Russell, and two other men stepped into her office.

Mark Shannon placed a large plastic bag on her desk.

"Roberto tell you what we've got here?"

Ellen nodded and stood up, forcing a thin smile. "Let's take it into one of the examining rooms, all right? No sense putting it on display for anyone who might walk in here."

She led Shannon into one of the examining rooms behind her office, closing the door to shut the others out.

Then she opened the bag and carefully removed the bones, laying them out on the counter that ran the length of one of the walls. Working silently, she listened as Shannon explained that the skeleton had been found intact except for the missing leg, and that the bones had still been lightly attached to each other by a few fragments of cartilage. "But they came apart as I was bagging them up," he finished.

Ellen nodded, first picking up the pelvis, then turning her attention to the skull. Her own mind was putting together an identification as rapidly as had Russell Owen's, but she struggled Against the urge to jump to quick conclusions. "Well, there's no question it was a girl, and a fairly young one, too."

"How young?" Shannon asked, fairly certain he knew what was coming.

Ellen Filmore frowned. "Teenaged, I'd say. Anywhere from thirteen to fifteen." She pointed to the intact teeth in the skull and jaw. "It shouldn't be too hard to get a positive identification from those," she said quietly. Now there was no longer a way to postpone putting a name to the skeleton. "I think you might want to start tracking down Julie Spellman's dental records.

Flicking on his portable radio, Shannon spoke rapidly into the mouthpiece, then turned back to the doctor. "Am I right that they haven't been out there very long?"

"No more than a day or so, at most." Ellen sighed.

"Maybe possibly only a few hours."

"Any idea how they got so clean?" Mark asked. "It doesn't look like they've been gnawed on."

Ellen's jaw tightened. "Call me in an hour or so, all right? And you might want to check with Roberto about our other patients' dentists," she said. "I'm not about to positively identify this as Julie Spellman."

"Got it," Mark said. "I'll have a listing of every missing girl in the area by the time I get back to my office." A few minutes later the examining room cleared out and Ellen set to work, measuring the bones, taking samples from them to send to the lab, and trying to discover how they might have been picked so clean while suffering no apparent damage.

A grisly thought came into her mind as she remembered what had been found a few years earlier in a Milwaukee apartment, yet as she examined the bones, they didn't appear to have been boiled.

Rather, the matter that would normally have been clinging to the bones appeared to have been carefully picked off, down to the last fragment.

Suddenly an image came into her mind.

One day a year ago she'd been out hiking and stumbled across the remains of a small animal. Most of the larger bones were already gone, and all that were left were a few vertebrae, picked fairly clean by the scavengers that fed on carrion. Yet even what was left was still serving as a feast, for the vertebrae had been covered with ants-thousands of them-reaping a final harvest of the last fragments of meat the larger scavengers had left. A few hours later, when she returned along the same route, she'd stopped to look at the bones again.

The ants were gone, the bones having been picked clean.

As clean as the bones on the counter in front of her.

she stared at the bones, and the words of Harry Matson came back to her.

... the larvae feed on the blood But what did the adults feed on?

A thought began to form in her mind-a hideous thought.

Was it possible that Julie Spellman had been totally consumed by something that had been living inside her own body?

Her thoughts were interrupted by the intercom, and Roberto Munoz's voice. "Mrs. McLaughlin and Sara are here, Doc."

Grateful for the distraction from her ruminations, Ellen Filmore turned away from the bones on the countertop.

"It's not Julie!" Karen said, her voice louder than she'd intended it to be.

She sat at the kitchen table, flanked by Russell and Mark Shannon, who had just come back from town.

Karen had listened in silence, her jaw setting stubbornly, while a scream built in her brain. No! it was not Julie, could not be Julie.

"It simply can't be Julie," she said again, pushing away from the table and moving to stand, arms tightly crossed to stop herself from shaking, at the counter across the room.

"If it was, I'd know. I'd-I'd feel it." She ignored the furtive glance Russell and Shannon exchanged. "You'll see," she went on, hearing the desperation in her own voice, which made her wonder if she truly believed what she was saying, or if she was only trying to convince herself. "As Soon as Julie's dental records arrive, you'll both see."

Russell stood up and came to put his arms around her. For a moment Karen leaned Against his chest, but as her eyes began to moisten with tears, she knew that if she let herself give in to the impulse to collapse into his embrace, her emotional control, already stretched, would snap.

"You'll see," she said again, pulling away from Russell.

Once again Russell and Shannon exchanged a glance, and this time Karen knew there was something they hadn't yet told her. "What is it?" she asked, her gaze holding on her husband for a moment, then shifting to the deputy, Mark Shannon hesitated, then handed Karen a sheet of paper.

She found herself staring down into the face of a girl.

A girl who looked to be the same age as Julie.

A girl who had long dark hair.

Hair like Julie's.

"Wh-What is this?" she asked, though in her heart she already knew what Shannon was going to say.

Her name is Dawn Sanderson," Mark said. "She disappeared from Los Banos a week ago. Last seen walking out of town, heading toward 1-5. Presumably a runaway, and her friends seem to think she m-might have been heading to L.A. She wanted to be an actress."

"And you think this might be the girl whose skeleton . - ." She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.

"We're checking her dental records, too," Shannon said.

"We should have them by late this afternoon. But the thing is, even if the bones are Dawn Sanderson's, we might have a real bad problem. If it's a serial killer-2'

"No!" Karen burst out, her voice rising. "That's not what's happening! It's not! I mean-what about Jeff and Andy? You thought they were all together, didn't you?

And if they're all together?"

"We don't know what to think," Mark Shannon said.

"All we're doing right now is exploring possibilities, and one of the possibilities we have to be prepared for is that." He cut off his own words as Karen's face paled.

"Well, we just have to be prepared for whatever we might find," he finished.

"I think they're together," Karen said. "I think that Jeff and Julie and Andy Bennett are all together, and that we're going to find them." She forced a smile. "For all we know, Kevin is finding them right now."

Karen and Russell both remembered the note on the refrigerator door, in which Kevin had assured them that he would be home by noon.

It was already nearly one. Nothing had been heard from Kevin; no one who had come down from the search in the hills reported seeing him.

Neither Karen nor Russell was willing to speak the thought they both shared, but each could read it in the other's eyes:

Another of their children was gone.

Vic Costas crested the rise and paused to catch his breath, gasping from the unaccustomed exertion. Pitching hay was one thing, but tramping through the hills was another. Still, he'd come to like Jeff Larkin in the months the boy had lived on his farm, and if he could help find him, he'd keep on hiking, out of breath or not. A minute or two to catch his breath and he'd set off again.

Swabbing the sweat from his forehead with an ancient red bandanna, the old Greek farmer surveyed the valley below him. He could not remember having been up here before, for surely he would remember the sight of a valley as pretty as this one, with a stream meandering across its floor, oak trees studding its hillside, and what looked like a cave on the opposite side, A cave ...

When he was a boy back in Greece, he and one of his friends had found a cave in the hills behind their village, and used it as a place of refuge, a place to hide from their parents.

Costas frowned, an idea forming in his mind.

Could it be?

Stuffing the bandanna back in his pocket, he started down the hillside, half running, half sliding as he struggled to prevent himself from losing his footing. Coming to the bottom of the steep slope, he paused to catch his breath once more, this time dropping to his knees to Scoop water up from the stream and poured it over his sweat-soaked head. The dust cleaned from his face, he scooped up more of the clean, fresh water, sucking it thirstily from his cupped hands.