Monster (16 page)

If someone wished to find the county sheriff, the directory would send that person next door to the newer building meant to serve as an expansion of the old one. This building was white concrete block, one story, plain and practical, intended for a specific purpose, which was to house the county sheriff’s office and the county jail. Inside the front door was a reception counter; behind that were four desks, a fairly neat one for the secretary and three generally cluttered ones for the deputies; to the right was Sheriff Patrick Mills’s private office, a separate room with a door he usually kept open. To the left and through an archway was the examining station for driver’s licenses, complete with two testing booths, an eye chart, a camera, and two green footprints painted on the floor to show the applicant where to stand for his or her photo.

In a corner behind the counter and past the four desks was the computer station. There were other computers in the building, but this was the “department” computer, the one strictly devoted to law enforcement, available to any member of the staff for the performance of his or her duty. Some months ago, a flight simulator and a commando game had cropped up in a coded folder on the computer’s desktop, but these were not openly discussed and only discreetly used.

Right now, with everyone gone but the night jailer and all calls forwarded to the central dispatcher, Reed sat at the computer in the light of a single desk lamp, the blue glow from the monitor on his face, an overlapped clutter of windows and boxes on the screen. He was tapping and clicking his way through the multiple levels and links of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, a networking tool used by law-enforcement agencies all around the country in tracking criminals and sharing investigative information. The program had subgroups for different categories of crime, regions of the country, and types of criminals, with subgroups under those, and side links from those. Sifting downward through all the levels could have been tough for someone who hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours, but Reed knew what he was after and pushed away sleep as he pushed through the program.

Maybe Jimmy and the others—including bigmouth Kane from Missoula—did know the woods and had good reason for their opinions. They were outdoorsmen and Reed was a cop; so maybe Reed was a little out of his realm of competence.

He tapped the keys, hammered the backspace and tried again, clicking the mouse.

But then again, maybe they didn’t know everything, and maybe he did know something. Just standing around and letting them tell him what to think wasn’t going to resolve the question, nor was it going to expedite the process. Enough of that. Reed had a brain and skills of his own. He was going to do cop stuff, whatever it took to find Beck.

Was there a pattern? Whatever this beast was, had it attacked anyone else, anywhere else? If so, when? Where had it come from, and which way was it going? Was there anything more they could find out about it?

Reed finally clicked his way into a subgroup that linked and compared known homicides with unexplained deaths, a program intended to help law enforcement detect homicides that may not have been recognized as such. In a few more mouse clicks, he narrowed the time frame down to the last two weeks, and the region to his own and the three neighboring counties. The pickings were slim: a hit-and-run outside a tavern, and a logging accident. The tavern was far to the west, in another county, and took place a week ago.

The logging accident . . .

Reed read the entry again, carefully noted the location, and then checked a map.

Ooookayyy.
He clicked, nearly
banged,
the “print” command and then fidgeted while the paper slowly rolled out of the printer. By the time it had finished, he had his coat on. With the printout in his hand, he turned off the lamp and got out of there.

With a slightly gentler drop than the last time, Beck landed back on the nest in the grove, limp and despondent. She’d given up trying to understand. The big red female, moving stiffly from her own bruises, had brought her back and now hunched over her, nudging, stroking, fussing.

Beck grunted and pushed her hand away.
I’m going to die anyway, thanks to you. What’s left to fuss about?

Her eye was on the alpha male as he shared the dead deer with the other two just outside the grove. He slurped blood, ripped flesh from hide, tore the meat with his teeth and hands, and chewed, his mouth and chin bloodied. He looked her way only once as he chewed, just long and intensely enough to send a message of loathing, making sure she knew she didn’t belong. After that, for as long as Beck watched him, he paid her no mind; he just kept eating.

Beck looked away. Maybe that was the end of it. Maybe for now, her captor “mother” had gotten her way and the male had relented—grudgingly, of course. But he’d sent his message loud and clear.

All things considered, this should be bearable. It beat being thrown against a tree or having her head ripped off. Beck glanced at her aching feet and the recent scratches on her hands from all those dry, prickly branches in the dark. This was the worst that had happened to her. She was alive for one more moment, maybe one more night. She should be glad.

She broke down and cried.

The big female sank onto the nest beside her with a quiet groan and pulled her in close, an act of affection that only worsened Beck’s despair. Beck was too upset to say it; she could only think it:
Why can’t you just let me go?

The beast got a message—the wrong message. She immediately extended her hand toward the others and pig grunted.

They ignored her, so she grunted more insistently, rocking back and forth.

The male finally looked her way as if doing her one more additional, very troublesome favor, then regarded what was left of the deer. With indifference, he took hold of the head in one hand and the shoulder in the other, and wrenched the head and neck from the body. When the female grunted imploringly one more time, he tossed it to her.

It flopped at her feet, throwing blood. She picked it up, obviously glad to get it. With slow, lazy-fingered deliberation, she turned it over and over, sniffing and studying as if she’d never seen one before, and then, breaking the jaw open, she yanked out the tongue and bit the end off.

Beck looked the other way, feeling sick. How could God create such creatures? And even worse, how could He throw her in with them? She never asked for this. She wouldn’t have been able to conceive such a horror to ask for.

The female grunted and nudged her. She winced and would not turn her head. The female nudged her again, grunting, and Beck ventured a timid look with one eye.

The ape was offering her a string of meat. Beck couldn’t recognize where it had come from, which was a good thing. She shook her head, her mouth clamped shut.

The lady dangled the meat in front of her face and wiggled it so it thumped against her lips. It reminded Beck of when she tried to feed worms to a baby robin. The robin wouldn’t eat and soon died.

Thump! The meat hit her face again. Beck reached up and took it as the female intensely, relentlessly watched.

It’s a strip of bacon,
Beck told herself.
It’s like sushi. It’s rack of lamb without the rack,
really
rare. It’s steak on the platter right before the barbecue.

Building up to the moment, Beck put the slightest tip of the meat between her teeth and nipped it off. As she pressed it against her tongue, the flavor came through, and really, it wasn’t half bad. It was raw and tasted a little “wild,” but it was meat. A little salt would have helped, she supposed, but . . .

She bit off another piece and chewed it slowly on one side of her mouth and then the other. She swallowed it, and then, of all things, she wondered if there might be more. She was hungry.

Her female captor was still working on the tongue but found a nice strip from the back of the neck and bit it off to give to her.

I’m eating,
Beck thought. That was nothing unusual in itself, but it taxed her sanity to think she was taking part in this meal, in this setting, with these creatures. They were bloody, fearsome carnivores who were sharing a deer’s head with her, but she was eating it. They had blood and grease on their fingers, but so did she. They were disgusting to watch, but she was gaining an appreciation for how hunger could supplant politeness; she could relate—sort of.

The female handed her another strip of flesh, and Beck received it gladly, chewing it down. That seemed to please the beast. She reached down and fingered the fringes on Beck’s brown buckskin coat. Then with her index finger, she hooked and twirled a strand of Beck’s reddish-brown hair.

Beck dared to take hold of the hand and give it a furtive stroke, an action she knew worked on dogs, cats, and horses.

It communicated. The lady gave a grunt, then another. The tone wasn’t angry, but seemed comforting.

Beck couldn’t speak it, but the big red lady—and her hot-tempered gray rival—reminded Beck of Rachel and Leah, Jacob’s two wives in the Bible. Leah could bear children, but Rachel could not. Beck didn’t know if that was the case here, but she felt sorry for the red lady anyway. She gave the hand a little pat and looked up into that quizzical, leathery face. “R-roo-Rachel
.
”

“Hmmph,” Rachel replied, rotating the deer’s head in search of another bite.

Beck watched the others who were still eating, wolfing down the heart and liver and gnawing on the ribs. She’d made their acquaintance, she realized—they’d sniffed and studied her excreta and she’d eaten from their deer’s head. Naming them would be appropriate. The other female’s name would have to be Leah, the biblical Rachel’s rival for the favor and attention of . . . Jacob. And the brat? Well, the biblical Jacob’s firstborn son was named Reuben. It was difficult to give a name she liked to a creature she didn’t like, but it would have to do.

As for what these creatures were, the time had come to settle on that as well. Like most anyone else, Beck had heard some snippets of the Bigfoot legend; she’d heard some of the stories, seen a poster for a Sasquatch monster movie, even recalled seeing Bigfoot as a cartoon character. In close-up reality, these creatures were so different from their legend that it was difficult to relate the two, but legend and myth weren’t difficult to discard when sharing a meal with the real thing.

These were Sasquatches—real ones.

Beck accepted another string of venison from Rachel’s hand and chewed on it thoughtfully, feeling just a little more oriented now that she’d named and identified everybody. The group almost felt like a big, hairy family, not entirely dysfunctional, but having some issues, to be sure, and Beck was one of them.

Had she been observing all this from her own little world at home, it would have been entirely too bizarre.

Wednesday morning, Jimmy Clark stood beside the sorry, splintered cabin and took a 360-degree look around the ravine, nodding to himself. “Yeah. He’s out there, and we’re gonna bring him in.” He unknotted the top of the black plastic garbage bag he’d brought all the way up the trail from Abney and let the contents— four dozen day-old doughnuts—rumble and tumble into the bottom of a sawed-off steel drum.

“Okay, let’s mix in the scraps.”

That was Steve Thorne’s job. He, Jimmy, and Wiley Kane had tossed coins that morning, and Steve was the odd man. That gave him the privilege of packing in the bacon grease, kitchen scraps, and dish scrapings from Arlen Peak’s café, sealed inside a five-gallon plastic pickle bucket. Steve poured the mixture in with the doughnuts.

Jimmy spoke to the forest, “Okay, big guy, come and get it!”

“So what now?” Kane asked while Steve trotted in search of breathable air.

Jimmy pointed up the hill to a spot not far from where Reed and Beck had camped that first horrible night. “As long as the air’s moving up the draw, you take that ledge. It’ll make a good blind, and the angle ought to give you a clear shot through the heart and lungs. When night comes and things cool down . . .” He pointed to another high spot down the ravine from the cabin. “I’d set up in there and break out the night scope.”

Thorne asked, “Aren’t we gonna get relieved?”

Jimmy wasn’t happy about his answer. “Some of the guys have gone home. I’ve got four hunters left to man the bear stands, and the sheriff has whoever’s left going with the trackers.”

Kane ventured, “It wouldn’t have anything to do with all that ‘Bigfoot’ talk, would it?”

“What do you think? No man with better things to do wants to be out here day and night on a snipe hunt, and some of them think that’s what this is.”

“Should have brought a book to read,” Thorne muttered.

“Well, the other two are no better off—no, they’re
worse
off. That campsite’s on level ground, so they have to sit up in a tree all day and all night, just the two of them.”

“Well, all the more bear for us four,” said Kane.

“
If
the search crews don’t scare the thing off.” Jimmy shook his head. “Well, that’s none of your concern. Take turns relieving each other and sleep when you can. You’ve got your radios. Check in every even-numbered hour.”

Pete and his whittled-down crew worked their way slowly up the drainage from the site of last night’s camp raid, somewhat refreshed from a short night’s sleep but not encouraged by today’s progress.

They did have a plan: Joanie and Chris, with two armed searchers, were working the area above where they found the backpack, hoping to pick up a trail again. Pete and his crew were tracking backwards from the campsite, hoping to meet up with them coming the other way. If it worked, the two teams would have covered the creature’s trail from the first location to the second. It was along that trail that they hoped to find whatever remained of Beck Shelton.

But the plan wasn’t coming together. Some of the hunters had bowed out—for no good reason, as far as Pete was concerned— and because of the apparent danger and Sheriff Mills’s order to carry firearms, the searchers who weren’t comfortable with weapons had to stand down. Don, one of his key flankers, had called early that morning to express his disinterest in tracking “Indian legends” and to tell Pete that he was staying home. Medical personnel were on standby.