Dean Koontz - (1989)

by Midnight(Lit)

  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
/>   claustrophobia abated. She drew deep lungsful of cool, moist air, but

  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.