be itinerants or even illegals, in which case we might never be able to
ID them."
Neat, Sam thought grimly, as he leaned back in his chair and took a long
swallow of Guinness.
Three people had died violent deaths, been certified victims of an
accident, and cremated before their relatives were notified, before any
other authorities could step in to verify, through the application of
modern forensic medicine, whether the death certificates and police
report in fact contained the whole story.
The Bustamantes and Sanchezes were suspicious of foul play, but the
National Farmworkers Union was convinced of it. On September 12, the
union's president sought the intervention of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation on the grounds that antiunion forces were responsible for
the deaths of Bustamante, Bustamante, and Sanchez. Generally, the crime
of murder fell into the FBI's jurisdiction only if the suspected killer
had crossed state borders either to commit the act, or during its
commission, or to escape retribution subsequent to the act; or, as in
this case, if federal authorities had reason to believe that murder had
been committed as a consequence of the willful violation of the victims'
civil rights.
On September 26, after the absurd if standard delays associated with
government bureaucracy and the federal judiciary, a team of six FBI
agents-including three men from the Scientific Investigation
Division-moved into picturesque Moonlight Cove for ten days. They
interviewed police officers, examined police and coroner files, took
statements from witnesses who were at the Perez Family Restaurant on the
night of September 5, sifted through the wreckage of the Chevy van at
the junkyard, and sought whatever meager clues might remain at the
accident site itself. Because Moonlight Cove had no agricultural
industry, they could find no one interested in the farm-union issue let
alone angered by it, which left them short of people motivated to kill
union organizers.
Throughout their investigation, they received the full and cordial
cooperation of the local police and coroner. Loman Watkins and his men
went so far as to volunteer to submit to lie-detector tests, which
subsequently were administered, and all of them passed without a hint of
deception. The coroner also took the tests and proved to be a man of
unfailing honesty.
Nevertheless, something about it reeked.
The local officials were almost too eager to cooperate. And all six of
the FBI agents came to feel that they were objects of scorn and derision
when their backs were turned-though they never saw any of the police so
much as raise an eyebrow or smirk or share a knowing look with another
local. Call it Bureau Instinct, which Sam knew was at least as reliable
as that of any creature in the wild.
Then the other deat had to be considered.
While investigating the Sanchez-Bustamante case, the agents had reviewed
police and coroner records for the past couple of years to ascertain the
usual routine with which sudden deaths accidental and otherwise-were
handled in Moonlight Cove, in order to determine if local authorities
had dealt with this recent case differently from previous ones, which
would be an indication of police complicity in a cover-up. What they
discovered was puzzling and disturbing-but not like anything they had
expected to find. Except for one spectacular car crash involving a
teenage boy in an extensively souped-up Dodge, Moonlight Cove had been a
singularly safe place to live. During that time, its residents were
untroubled by violent death-until August 28, eight days before the
deaths of Sanchez and the Bustamantes, when an unusual series of
mortalities began to show up on the public records.
- 93 In the pre-dawn hours of August 28, the four members of the Mayser
family were the first victims Melinda, John, and their two children,
Carrie and Billy. They had perished in a house fire, which the
authorities later attributed to Billy playing with matches. The four
bodies were so badly burned that identification could be made only from
dental records.
Having finished his first bottle of Guinness, Sam reached for a second
but hesitated. He had work to do yet tonight. Sometimes, when he was
in a particularly dour mood and started drinking stout, he had trouble
stopping short of unconsciousness.
Holding the empty bottle for comfort, Sam wondered why a boy, having
started a fire, would not cry out for help and wake his parents when he
saw the blaze was beyond control. Why would the boy not run before
being overcome with smoke9 And just what kind of fire, except one fueled
by gasoline or another volatile fluid (of which there was no indication
in official reports), would spread so fast that none of the family could
escape and would reduce the house-and the bodies therein-to heaps of
ashes before firemen could arrive and quench it?
Neat again. The bodies were so consumed by flames that autopsies would
be of little use in determining if the blaze had been started not by
Billy but by someone who wanted to conceal the true causes of death. At
the suggestion of the funeral director-who was the owner of Callan's
Funeral Home and also the assistant coroner, therefore a suspect in any
official cover-up the Maysers' next of kin, Melinda Mayser's mother,
authorized cremation of the remains. Potential evidence not destroyed
by the original fire was thus obliterated.
"How tidy," Sam said aloud, putting his feet up on the other
straight-backed chair.
"How splendidly clean and tidy."
Body count four.
Then the Bustamantes and Sanchez on September 5. Another fire. Followed
by more speedy cremations.
Body count seven.
On September 7, while trace vapors of the Bustamante and Sanchez remains
might still have lingered in the air above Moonlight Cove, a twenty-year
resident of the town, Jim Armesput to sea in his thirty-foot boat, the
Mary Leandra, for an early morning sail-and was never seen again. Though
he was an experienced seaman, though the day was clear and the ocean
calm, he'd apparently gone down in an outbound tide, for no identifiable
wreckage had washed up on local beaches.
Body count eight.
On September 9, while fish presumably were nibbling on Armes's drowned
body, Paula Parkins was torn apart by five Dobermans. She was a
twenty-nine-year-old woman living alone, raising and training guard
dogs, on a two-acre property near the edge of town. Evidently one of
her Dobermans turned against her, and the others flew into a frenzy at
the scent of her blood. Paula's savaged remains, unfit for viewing, had
been sent in a sealed casket to her family in Denver. The dogs were
shot, tested for rabies, and cremated.
Body count nine.
Six days after entering the Bustamante-Sanchez case, on October 2, the
FBI had exhumed Paula Parkins's body from a grave in Denver. An autopsy
revealed that the woman indeed had been bitten and
clawed to death by
multiple animal assailants.
Sam remembered the most interesting part of that autopsy report word for
word . . . however, bite marks, lacerations, tears in the body
cavity, and specific damage to breasts and sex organs are not entirely
consistent with canine attack. The teeth pattern and size of bite do
not fit the dental profile of the average Doberman or other animals
known to be aggressive and capable of successfully attacking an adult.
And later in the same report, when referring to the specific nature of
Parkins's assailants Species unknown.
How had Paula Parkins really died?
What terror and agony had she known?
Who was trying to blame it on the Dobermans?
And in fact what evidence might the Dobermans' bodies have provided
about the nature of their own deaths and, therefore, the truthfulness of
the police story?
Sam thought of the strange, distant cry he had heard tonight-like that
of a coyote but not a coyote, like that of a cat but not a cat. And he
thought also of the eerie, frantic voices of the kids who had pursued
him. Somehow it all fit. Bureau Instinct.
Species unknown.
Unsettled, Sam tried to soothe his nerves with Guinness. The bottle was
still empty. He clinked it thoughtfully against his teeth.
Six days after Parkins's death and Ion before the exhumation 9 of her
body in Denver, two more people met untimely ends in Moonlight Cove.
Steve Heinz and Laura Dalcoe, unmarried but living together, were found
dead in their house on Iceberry Way. Heinz left a typed, incoherent,
unsigned suicide note, then killed Laura with a shotgun while she slept,
and took his own life. Dr.
Ian Fitzgerald's report was murder-suicide, case closed. At the
coroner's suggestion, the Dalcoe and Heinz families authorized cremation
of the grisly remains.
Body count eleven.
"There's an ungodly amount of cremation going on in this town," Sam said
aloud, and turned the empty beer bottle around in his hands.
Most people still preferred to have themselves and their loved ones
embalmed and buried in a casket, regardless of the condition of the
body. In most towns cremations accounted for perhaps one in four or one
in five dispositions of cadavers.
Finally, while investigating the Bustamante-Sanchez case, the FBI team
from San Francisco found that Janice Capshaw was listed as a Valium
suicide. Her sea-ravaged body had washed up on the beach two days after
she disappeared, three days before the agents arrived to launch their
investigation into the deaths of the union organizers.
Julio Bustamante, Maria Bustamante, Ramon Sanchez, the four Maysers, Jim
Armes, Paula Parkins, Steven Heinz, Laura Dalcoe, Janice Capshaw a body
count of twelve in less than a month-exactly twelve times the number of
violent deaths that had occurred in Moonlight Cove during the previous
twenty-.three months. Out of a population of just three thousand,
twelve violent deaths in little more than three weeks was one hell of a
mortality rate.
Queried about his reaction to this astonishing chain of deadly events,
Chief Loman Watkins had said, "It's horrible, yes. And it's sort of
frightening. Things were so calm for so long that I guess,
statistically, we were just overdue."
But in a town that size, even spread over two years, twelve such violent
deaths went off the top of the statisticians' charts.
The six-man Bureau team was unable to find one shred of evidence of any
local authorities' complicity in those cases. And although a polygraph
was not an entirely dependable determiner of truth, the technology was
not so unreliable that Loman Watkins, his officers, the coroner, and the
coroner's assistant could all pass the examination without a single
indication of deception if in fact they were guilty.
Yet . . .
Twelve deaths. Four cremated in a house fire. Three cremated in a
demolished Chevy van. Three suicides, two by shotgun and one by Valium,
all subsequently cremated at Callan's Funeral Home. One lost at sea-no
body at all. And the only victim available for autopsy appeared not to
have been killed by dogs, as the coroner's report claimed, though she
had been bitten and clawed by something, dammit.
It was enough to keep the Bureau's file open. By the ninth of October,
four days after the San Francisco team departed Moonlight Cove, a
decision was made to send in an undercover operative to have a look at
certain aspects of the case that might be more fruitfully explored by a
man who was not being watched.
One day after that decision, on October 10, a letter arrived in the San
Francisco office at clinched the Bureau's determination to maintain
involvement. Sam had that note committed to memory as well Gentlemen I
have information pertinent to a recent series of deaths in the town of
Moonlight Cove. I have reason to believe local authorities are involved
in a conspiracy to conceal murder.
I would prefer you contact me in person, as I do not trust the privacy
of our telephone here. I must insist on absolute discretion because I
am a disabled Vietnam veteran with severe physical limitations, and I am
naturally concerned about my ability to protect myself.
It was signed, Harold G. Talbot.
United States Army records confirmed that Talbot was indeed - 97 a
disabled Vietnam vet. He had been repeatedly cited for bravery in
combat. Tomorrow, Sam would discreetly visit him.
Meanwhile, considering the work he had to do tonight, he wondered if he
could risk a second bottle of stout on top of what he'd drunk at dinner.
The six-pack was on the table in front of him. He stared at it for a
long time. Guinness, good Mexican food, Goldie Hawn, and fear of death.
The Mexican food was in his belly, but the taste of it was forgotten.
Goldie Hawn was living on a ranch somewhere with Burt Russell, whom she
had the bad sense to prefer to one ordinary-looking, scarred, and
hope-deserted federal agent. He thought of twelve dead men and women,
of bodies roasting in a crematorium until they were reduced to bone
splinters and ashes, and he thought of shotgun murder and shotgun
suicide and fish-gnawed corpses and a badly bitten woman, and all those
thoughts led him to morbid philosophizing about the way of all flesh. He
thought of his wife, lost to cancer, and he thought of Scott and their
long-distance telephone conversation, too, and that was when he finally
opened a second beer.
Chased by imaginary spiders, snakes, beetles, rats, bats, and by the
possibly imaginary reanimated body of a dead child, and by the real if
dragon-like roar of distant trucks, Chrissie crawled out of the
tributary drain in which she had taken refuge, troll-walked down the
main culvert, stepped again in the slippery remains of the decomposing
raccoon, and plunged out into the silt-floored drainage channel. The
air was clean and sweet. In spite of the eight-foot-high walls of the
ditch, fog-filtered moonlight, and fog-hidden stars, Chrissie's
tried to breathe with as little noise as possible.
She listened to the night, and before long she was rewarded by those
alien cries, echoing faintly across the meadow from the woods to the
south. As before, she was sure that she heard three distinct voices. If
her mother, father, and Tucker were off to the south, looking for her in
the forest that eventually led to the edge of New Wave Microtech's
property, she might be able to head back the way she had come, through
the northern woods, into the meadow where Godiva had thrown her, then
east toward the county road and into Moonlight Cove by that route,
leaving them searching fruitlessly in the wrong place.
For sure, she could not stay where she was.
And she could not head south, straight toward them.
She clambered out of the ditch and ran north across the meadow,
retracing the route she had taken earlier in the evening, and as she
went she counted her miseries. She was hungry because she'd had no
dinner, and she was tired. The muscles in her shoulders and back were
cramped from the time she had spent in the tight, cold concrete
tributary drain. Her legs ached.
So what's your problem? she asked herself as she reached the trees at
the edge of the meadow. Would you rather have been dragged down by
Tucker and "converted" into one of them?
Loman Watkins left the Valdoski house, where Dr. Worthy was
overseeing the conversion of Ella and George. Farther down the county
road, his officers and the coroner were loading the dead boy into the
hearse. The crowd of onlookers was entranced by the scene.
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 13