Primal Fear (7 page)

And he felt his stomach take a nauseating lurch.

All of the girls in the photos, every last one that he took the time to train his eyes on, had been chosen for a single similar trait: their innocent, youthful appearance.  Small-breasted and thin-hipped, many of the girls had been made up to appear even younger than they obviously were.  Ponytails and barrettes appeared in abundance, girls posing with a gleam of innocent curiosity in their eyes, sometimes clutching teddy bears or sucking on lollipops, but always achieving the same result.  The overall impression of this collage was that each of its subjects was a juvenile; for all intents and purposes, a child.

But surely they couldn’t be.  For a minor to be photographed in such a manner would be an act of child pornography, and no newsstand magazine in the country would ever dare to stoop that low.  But that certainly didn’t mean they would shy away from suggesting it.

Harry knew for a fact that many of those same publications made a concerted effort to appeal to every sort of fetishist they could.  An extra touch of make-up to strengthen the illusion of youth was just as much a carefully calculated strategy as a photographer moving his model into an overtly evocative pose.  Such a strategy would fire the reader’s imagination, allowing him to fantasize more easily about whatever sexual act it was that brought him the most pleasure.

But this . . . this went well beyond harmless.  Harry knew enough about psychology to understand that a collection this massive—and one displayed so prominently, spread out as though to surround its creator—could no longer be considered an outlet of one’s personal preference.  This collage of images spoke of something that was nothing short of an obsession, one whose very subject matter hinted at a very disturbed and possibly dangerous mind.

He moved towards one of the walls, taking a closer look at a number of the photos.  He couldn’t be sure, but he felt fairly certain that none of them were the real thing.  A good number of them had achieved an impressive level of illusion, but a close look into the model’s face gave away her true age in every picture he took the time to examine. 

He thought about Ben’s reaction and wondered if his deputy understood that the photos were all just fakes.  The idea of such a depraved obsession was chilling, of course, but surely not horrible enough to send one of his best deputies stumbling from the room.

He turned to Ben, who was still in the corner by the door, apparently unwilling to re-enter the room.  “What is it?  What’s the matter with—”

Harry broke off, finally picking up on the direction of Ben’s stare.  It wasn’t the walls themselves that Ben was looking at, it was something beneath the table set up opposite the door.  Harry let his own gaze fall there.

A number of cardboard boxes had been pulled partially out from under the table, probably while Charlie had been guiding Harry down the steps and into the room.  Harry moved toward them, his heart beginning to beat faster.

He pulled the covers off of the first three boxes, peering carefully inside.  They were filled with what looked like old blasting equipment, the caps and detonators thrown into each box in a careless heap.  Reels of red wire lay on top of everything else, apparently the only new addition to the contents of the carton.

“How the hell do you suppose he got his hands on all that?” Charlie asked from behind him.

“Most likely it’s all from the quarry.  But I don’t know how he got out with so much of it.  What’s bothering me more is what he was planning on
doing
with it.”

“It’s in the other box,” Ben muttered.  He sounded as though he was about to be sick, his eyes still downcast.  “Harry, I—”

Harry took a deep breath, reaching towards the last carton.  A sudden instinct sparked within him, a deduction based in part on the photos that lined the walls, kindled by Ben’s strong reaction.

And a part of him suddenly knew what he’d find inside. 

He tried to deny it, as if a simple act of denial could negate the truth.  It was whatever Ben had seen inside of the box that had forced him from the room, and Harry held his breath as he tugged it out into the light.

He hoped he would be wrong, that his suspicions would be proven untrue, but he couldn’t deny the gut feeling that was already gnawing at him.  And all the hope in the world couldn’t change what he saw inside the box, and never in his life had he felt so poorly about his instincts being so right.

The cardboard box was filled with articles of clothing, some of them torn, some of them in perfect condition, as if they’d just been plucked off of the rack at a local department store.  But old or new, each piece of clothing had two things in common: they were all the garments of a child, and all of them had been designed for a girl.

Harry pulled one of them out, his stomach churning.  It was a small red dress, tiny white hearts printed up and down the sleeves, its collar torn and pulled out of shape.  A dark stain had dried upon the back of the dress, a stain Harry knew at that moment would turn out to be blood.

“Oh, no,” he whispered.  “Oh, dear Jesus, no . . .”

It all added up, everything he’d seen this morning coming together in a sudden thunderclap of realization.  Slater’s note, his pleas for forgiveness; the thousands of pictures of young women that had been carefully selected and pasted to the walls of the shelter; even the silent privacy of Slater’s life, his reputation of living almost as a hermit. 

It all made terrible, tragic sense.

And pushing it all home was the State Police update Harry had received only three days before, a report that had come in from the police barracks in Concord.  Five missing children, all of them female, all of them between the ages of nine and thirteen, all of them reported missing within the past three weeks. 

And all of them within a two-hundred mile radius.

There had been no indication that the epicenter of activity had been Slater’s house, and Harry began to wonder even then whether he’d missed some tell-tale remark or action on Marty’s part that would have tipped him off.

“Call the state boys,” he ordered quietly, not daring to make eye contact with either of his deputies.  He knew his own expression would betray his fear, his revulsion; he felt no desire to share such apparent weakness with his men.  “Tell them to high-tail it out here.  I think we might have found their kidnapper.”

He let the tiny dress fall back into the box, and when he raised his empty hand to wipe away the cold sweat breaking out of his brow, he noticed with some dismay that his fingers had begun to shake.

Chapter Five

John zippered his duffel bag and cast a final glance around his apartment, hoping he’d remembered everything. 

He thought about calling Dr. Morris again, but how could he explain why he had to leave so suddenly?  In the end, he understood that Morris would never believe him, not completely.  Hell, he’d barely come to terms with it himself.

Could he even really call it belief, if it was founded on the dreams he’d had the night before, dreams he was convinced had been somehow planted in his thoughts by Mahuk?  He wished he could be certain that the dreams had really been revelations, confirmations of the facts Mahuk had told him the day before.  Because if he was wrong, and this leap of faith he was taking turned out to be a wild-goose chase . . .

Well, then so be it. 

He would slink back to the university with his tail between his legs, looking like a fool.  But the chance to find out the truth about the old legends, to know for sure whether they were real or not . . . that was something John could not afford to pass up.

He hadn’t told Morris all of the things the old man had said in their second conversation, despite his promise to share everything he learned.  Holding back hadn’t been an intentional attempt at deception, but rather a cautious decision to protect Morris from danger.  Because if the legend did come to pass, if the prophetic sequence of events that the old man had shared with him had truly occurred, then the less people involved, the better. 

And of course there was still a nagging doubt—even now—after all he’d seen and felt, both at Mahuk’s bedside and in the dreams he’d had.  It was the same stubborn skepticism that had made him question the beliefs of his people for so many years at college.  He supposed it would always be a part of him, a part of his nature.  He’d always wanted to believe in himself and his modern knowledge, to deny the possibility that his father had been right all along.

But it had all come back to him with the arrival of the old man at the hospital.  All of the guilt, all of the uncertainty.  Worst of all, all of the same questions that had first arisen to challenge his own faith.

In the cold sterility of the hospital room, John had listened intently to a story that hadn’t been told in generations, a tale only an Eskimo shaman could know.  His own studies had never revealed the second legend to him, making only vague references to its existence, and he’d never placed any credence in it.  But now, after hearing the old man whisper fearfully of those same beliefs, John understood he could no longer sit idly by and let his own faith slip away to die forever.

It hadn’t only been the words themselves, though.

It had been later, when Dr. Morris had convinced him to talk to the old man again, that he’d truly begun to see the importance of their meeting.  And it was only then that he’d begun to feel the cold bite of fear come to life in his belly.

What he’d seen and felt in the visions he’d suffered at Mahuk’s bedside still echoed vividly in his thoughts.  But who could say whether any or all of it could truly be considered prophetic? 

Either way, whether he could believe in what he’d seen or not, those images had served a vital purpose for him.  He’d used their strength to push him through his final lingering doubts.

He’d called the airport immediately, placing his trust in the shaman’s words, booking a seat on the next flight out to New Hampshire.  The closest they could get him was Logan Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts, just thirty miles south of the New Hampshire border.  Unwilling to risk a longer delay, John had agreed and bought the ticket.

It was the only way to know for sure, to satisfy the sudden need to complete the shaman’s quest.  A part of him knew he would also be doing it for his father, to somehow repair the rift he’d created in their relationship so many years before.  They’d never been able to come to terms before his father had died, but an effort now—particularly one of such importance—would at least alleviate some of John’s guilt over how he’d let things go so far between them.

He wondered if that was the meaning behind the vision of his father’s face, the one he’d had under Mahuk’s influence.  Had it only been his own subconscious, breaking through the barriers of the hold that the P’oh Tarhei had had over him?  Or was there more to it than that, some connection he couldn’t quite put together yet?

There were so many questions, so much left to ponder.  And for each piece of the puzzle that was revealed to him, he felt three more going unanswered.

Now, slinging his bag over his shoulder, John thought he could sense the dark power of the artifact, packed safely away in one of the bag’s many zippered pockets.  And though he tried to convince himself it was only a bad case of nerves, the sense of dread he’d felt ever since going over the old man’s story wouldn’t go away.  It gnawed at him like a rabid animal, tearing at his thoughts, chipping away at his confidence.

But what Mahuk had told him about the P’oh Tarhei rose again in his thoughts, and he kept it in mind as he locked his apartment door behind him and set out for the airport.

“
The thing that is most evil is also the most protection against it
.”

He considered the words, hunching his shoulders against the frigid winter air.  Surely the shaman wouldn’t have implied the necessity of bringing the artifact along on his journey if it could not serve some practical purpose.  But what if including it in his luggage proved to only make a potentially dangerous situation even more deadly?

He stopped himself, shaking his head.

It would be easier if he could treat the expedition as just another field study.  A search for facts.  An examination of cultural artifacts and their place in the beliefs of his people.  If he could look at the situation in those terms, then he felt sure he could see this thing through.

Despite the clinical approach, however, he still couldn’t dispel the sense of foreboding that hung over him like a shroud.  Whether he believed in what the shaman had said or not scarcely mattered. 

Because truth was immune to belief. 

And belief was not immune to danger.

Chapter Six

The closing of the Stratham Granite Quarry two years earlier had devastated the town of Glen Forest.  Its population of 2700—over half of which had been dependent on the quarry in one way or another as a means of employment—had found themselves in the grip of a regional recession that rendered their township virtually powerless to overcome.

Those residents industrious and financially secure enough to invest in a small business operation of their own managed to thrive for a short while in the wake of the closing, but soon they too began to feel the bite of economic collapse.  Their newly opened hair salons and diners soon suffered a loss in clientele as even their most faithful customers were forced to tighten their belts.  Only the town’s outdated video store enjoyed a semblance of success, providing the only media of entertainment still readily affordable to a steady flow of customers.  This alone could be seen as a tell-tale sign that the town’s people, for many years quite active as a community, were being forced into an attitude of disassociation with one another, forsaking social gatherings to remain in the relative security of their own homes.

Even the normally profitable owners of Glen Forest’s single grocery store were not beyond feeling the present financial crunch, having to cut both their inventory and their employees by a third as more and more of their loyal customers learned to stretch their food dollars more effectively.

Dozens of families, many of which had called Glen Forest their home for generations, were forced to pull up their roots and search for greener pastures, where a greater opportunity for employment would provide both financial survival and a sense of personal worth.  Most of their former homes had gone unsold, and stood empty and dark, testimony to the severity of the local economy.

Only the most resilient and resourceful of the township remained behind in an attempt to breathe life once again into the struggling community, but even they could not deny that perhaps their battle might be a futile one.  Without the solid foundation of the quarry to support the economy, there seemed little hope of restoring Glen Forest to its past productive health.

One empty house after another lined the streets, windows dark and cold, each standing like a lonely sentinel left behind to watch over the desolate streets.  Most of the homes had a sign from one of the local real estate agencies posted in their front yards, proclaiming FOR SALE or AVAILABLE NOW, but Harry knew of two or three that had simply been abandoned.

He wondered once more if Marty Slater’s suicide could be traced back to the quarry’s closing.  After all, Marty had once been the second shift foreman at the Stratham Quarry.  When he’d lost his job before the shut-down, maybe he’d suffered what Harry imagined would be a kind of nervous breakdown.  His wife Marie hadn’t hung around much longer after that, vanishing in the night with her jewelry and checkbook and leaving mostly everything else behind.  It was Harry’s private suspicion that Marty and Marie’s marriage had been bad even before the Stratham’s closing, but could it have been the final straw that had simply pushed him over the edge?

That had been two and a half years ago, and now the Slater house would stand dark and silent as well, filled with the furnishings and belongings of a broken family.

Harry shook his head.  Thank God the Slater’s hadn’t had children.  The entire episode would have seemed doubly tragic if that had been so.  Especially in light of what they’d found in Marty’s bomb shelter.

Now, as he wound his way through the town’s deserted streets towards his office, Harry wondered why he’d remained here himself.  Was it out of some subconscious sense of loyalty to the town or its people?  Or did it go deeper than that?  At times like this, he wondered if perhaps his father’s choice to join the local sheriff’s office rather than the state police might have played a role in the path he’d chosen.

Admittedly, he’d never wanted to be anything but a career police officer, and that could clearly be attributed to the fine example his father had set in that arena.  But Harry’s own decision to serve the smaller community—
his
community—was another matter entirely, and any attempt to trace its roots ended only in an ongoing series of unanswered questions.

Had he served here too many years to ever hope to change his career goals?  Had he become complacent—a term and a possibility that he despised—in his role in the Glen Forest community?

God, he hoped not.  Granted, sometimes he couldn’t help but feel he’d reached his peak upon accepting the post as sheriff, that any further advancement in his line of work would only involve the politics and business end of police work.  But those were areas of the job he held absolutely no enthusiasm for and he liked to believe he would resign before he followed that road.

He felt a strange surge of guilt, as he always did when this line of thought reached its inevitable conclusion.  Could he flatly deny Laurie a better life by refusing to keep his eyes open for advancement?  True, they weren’t exactly facing eviction, but he could remember a time when their financial situation had been much less stressful.  These days, with a recession gnawing away at the county budget, he’d allowed his own post to go without a pay raise in order to filter a few extra dollars over to his deputies.  They didn’t know that, of course, but Laurie did.  And while she’d understood his motives and supported him in his decision, he couldn’t help but feel that he was somehow letting her down.  It was an opinion she’d never voiced, but he found himself wondering how badly the financial bite was affecting their relationship.

They’d taught themselves to go without for so long, to pass up so much, that even the occasional night out seemed like an extravagant expenditure.  Through it all, Laurie stood faithfully by him, and he certainly felt as if the tough times had only strengthened the bond between them, but he knew inside there was one tender area of tension he could never fully heal.

Simply put, Laurie wanted to begin a family, and he didn’t.

And it wasn’t that he didn’t
want
children.

He knew someday he would love to be a father.  It just seemed that there was always another reason not to take the leap into parenthood.  Ten years ago, when he’d first married Laurie, he’d wanted the two of them to have an opportunity to enjoy each other as newlyweds before having children.  After that, he’d landed the job as sheriff and his obligations to the force had tripled, leaving him little time for all the added responsibilities that came with fatherhood.  And finally, as he’d come to hone his department into a finely tuned machine, the Stratham Granite Works had closed and economic hardship had set in. 

Now, it was a financial situation that kept them childless, and he knew Laurie was not taking it well at all.  The tension between them each time they breached the subject of a family was quite genuine and grew more heated with every discussion.  It was, in fact, the only thing he and Laurie had ever fought about in their entire ten years of marriage.  At thirty-six, Laurie had reminded him, he wasn’t getting any younger, and soon enough, she said, it would soon be his age he would use as an excuse.  She was four years his junior, and her impatience to experience motherhood had become a tangible area of friction in their lives.

“No one’s ever ready to be a parent,” his brother Mike had once told him.  “Emotionally, financially, none of it makes a difference.  But once you start having kids, you make yourself ready.  It just happens.  You find ways to provide for them, you make the time to be with them.  It never gets any easier, not for a second, but believe me, it’s always worth it.  There’s nothing like it in the whole world.”

Of course, it was easy for his brother to talk that way.  He had four children, and another on the way.  But he lived in North Carolina, where the economic climate was considerably stronger, and the financial future considerably brighter.  Harry felt that he didn’t have that luxury.  He’d even heard rumblings of a county-wide reduction of police officers.  If the axe fell on his department—or worse, his job—he couldn’t bear to drag a child through that sort of hardship.  Bad enough he would have to put Laurie through it; he despised the thought of having a child go without the comfort of a good home and a secure future.

All of these thoughts crowded in on Harry as he pulled up to the Glen Forest Police Department and climbed out of his truck into the freezing afternoon air.  He managed to push them away, but he knew they would remain stubbornly at the back of his mind, just waiting to invade his thoughts again when the next introspective moment arrived.  For now, however, he forced the details of Marty Slater’s suicide to command his full attention.

He stepped into the station house accompanied by a blast of frigid air from outside.  The wind had picked up substantially, a prelude to the threat of inclement weather.  And if the weather reports he’d heard on the radio could be trusted, the coming storm was going to be a whopper.

Dana Tilton, the first-shift desk clerk, shivered as Harry pushed the door shut behind him.

“Make it snappy, Harry.  It’s already cold in here.”  She wrapped her arms around her petite form, offering him a half-hearted grin as he approached her desk.

“It’s an old building, Dana.  Not exactly built to hold the heat.”  He unzipped his jacket, eyeing the stack of messages on the corner of her blotter. 

“Tough morning,” Dana said.

“Toughest one in a long time.” Harry rubbed the bridge of his nose.  “How’s it been going here?”

“The phone hasn’t stopped ringing all morning.  Everybody from the news bureau over in Concord to the county D. A.’s office.  And guess what?”

“What?”

“They all want to talk to you.”

“Ain’t I lucky?”

“You sure are.”             

“Nothing from Delbert Hughes?”

“Not yet.”

After leaving Charlie and Ben to keep watch over the Slater house, Harry had returned to his own home for a short visit with his wife.  Just long enough to fill her in on a bit of what was happening and to grab a thermos full of coffee for his deputies.  After that, it had been a few long hours of making calls to the state police headquarters and fielding questions with what little information he’d been able to provide at the time.  Now, finally arriving at his office for the day, Harry was disappointed that the only call he was truly interested in taking, the one from the coroner’s office, had not come yet.

“Let me know the second he calls,” he told Dana.  “And as far as the state boys go, I only want to talk to them if they’re done asking questions.  I can’t take another round of Q and A with everybody and their brother from the state office.”

“Got it.”  Dana jotted something down on a note pad then turned back to Harry with a tiny grin.  “And what about the news people?” 

“I’m on vacation.  I’ll be back in six to eight weeks.”

“Sounds good to me.”  The switchboard came alive again, and Dana shook her head, reaching automatically for her headset.  “Here we go again.”

“Thanks, Dana.  I’ll see if I can get Mary Lyon to come in a bit early to help you out.”

Dana nodded, already picking up the first call.  “Glen Forest Sheriff’s Department, how may I help you?”  She rolled her big brown eyes once more at Harry and then turned back to her work.

Harry moved down the short hall to his office at the back of the building.  He could still hear Dana as he dropped into his chair and set his mind to the long day ahead of him.

He began by dialing up Marty’s house and speaking briefly with Charlie.  The State Police had shown up to go over the scene, but wanted to get together with Harry later.  They also wanted to get a look at the results of Slater’s autopsy, and wondered if Harry wouldn’t mind setting that up for them.

Harry did his best to keep the conversation short, quite aware that if one of the detectives at the scene discovered Charlie was speaking to him, he’d spend the rest of the afternoon on the telephone, answering the same questions he’d have to address later on anyway.  As it was, the bustle of activity Harry could hear in the background was clearly beginning to get to Charlie, and the deputy seemed as eager as he was to break the connection.

“I’ll get someone over to relieve you guys as soon as I can,” Harry told him.  “Until then, just do the best you can.”

Charlie sounded grateful.  “Will do, Chief.  Thanks.”

Harry had just begun debating whether he should call Delbert Hughes to check on the progress of the autopsy when Dana buzzed him with the news that the coroner was already on the line.

“Great.  Thanks, Dana.  Could you put him through?”

A moment later he was speaking to Hughes, uncapping a pen to take down any information the coroner might have for him.

“Hey, Harry.  Sorry to keep you waiting so long.”

“Comes with the job, Del.  What have you got?”

Hughes paused, as if unsure how to proceed.  Finally, just as Harry was about to ask him if anything was wrong, he offered a second apology and then continued from there.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve gone over everything I can think of, and I can’t come up with any more answers than we already had.  There’s a lot of lab work to be done, naturally.  We’re still going to have to run some tests on the blood and tissue samples we took, but . . . I don’t know.  I didn’t find anything much out of the ordinary.”