But twenty-five years of fieldwork had taught him that the best evidence came from the encounter itself, and in cases like this, that meant going to the crime scene photos.
So he pulled those out, thinking he’d make his own judgments first, before reading the opinions of detectives and pathologists, and immediately realized he’d been screwed.
There were only about sixty photographs in the file.
Any decent police investigation into the murder of a child, not to mention five children, should have included thousands of photographs.
Marsh, he thought. Goddamn Charles Marsh.
With that man, no amount of trickery was off the table. He’d probably paid the deputy to keep the really important pictures out of the file.
Except that that wouldn’t be Marsh’s style, would it?
Maybe Marsh had paid to make sure Ed saw only this specific information. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d taken advantage of Ed’s knowledge for his own ends. In fact, that had pretty much defined their relationship these past fifteen years, dating all the way back to the publication of Ed’s first New York Times bestseller, American Nightmares, back in July 1996.
Marsh came out with his own debut bestseller two months later, Vampires of America, and as they were both publishing with Simon & Schuster, Ed thought nothing of it when Marsh came to him for help on a new book he was writing. The idea, Marsh explained, was to show how real-life professionals would handle a confirmed sighting of a cryptid—in the case of Marsh’s next book, a lake monster.
Intrigued, Ed had answered all of Marsh’s questions, the result totaling some eighty pages, almost twenty thousand words. Marsh had gushed with thanks and promised Ed would be properly and prominently recognized for his contribution.
And then the book came out.
Operation American Nessie got starred reviews from all the trade journals. It was an instant New York Times bestseller. Several actors and other celebrities, many of whom contributed little more than a two-sentence comment or a modest sidebar about their involvement in some ridiculous horror movie, were billed as featured contributors. Bestselling author Ed Drinker, meanwhile, whose total contribution came to about one-fourth of the book, was barely given credit. There were several ads that named a bunch of celebrities and then somewhere down near the bottom a single line that read, “and many other noted experts.” That, and a mention in the acknowledgments section at the front of the book, was all the recognition Ed received for his trouble.
He was furious, and over the next year, at several conventions, Ed voiced his contempt for Charles Marsh. Never in public, of course, because that wasn’t his style; just up in the con suite, where most of the attendees were drunk and supposedly off-duty. A friendly word of warning to colleagues here and there.
Still, word got back to Marsh.
A bitter and (if Ed was absolutely and ruthlessly honest with himself) one-sided feud developed between the men. Ed’s books got more scholarly and less popular, while Charles Marsh, who could talk the shine off a new penny, got one lucrative publishing deal after another. Soon the man even made the jump to TV, and his show, American Monsters, became one of the most popular reality adventures on cable.
The thing was, and this was what really galled Ed, Charles Marsh wasn’t a two-bit hack. If he’d really been nothing more than a talking head, Ed might have been able to dismiss him, and maybe even gotten over the Operation American Nessie incident. But Charles Marsh could actually do some really solid work when he put his mind to it, and that royally pissed Ed off, because the man rarely did his own thinking anymore. He made his living off the research of others.
Still, Ed had these sixty photographs, and he’d paid dearly for them. They were a foot in the door, if nothing else, and that was all he’d ever needed. Charles Marsh be damned. He could make his own way from here.
He opened a beer and started flipping through the images.
The first series was of a young girl named Amanda Valdez, age eight, who was found in the weeds next to Farm-to-Market Road 474 with her skirt bunched up around her waist. She was on her back, her head obscured by some tall weeds. Looking at her skirt, Ed’s first thought was that the girl had been sexually assaulted, and a sickening knot formed in his gut. But thankfully there was no mention of that in the autopsy report, and if he needed any more reassurance, the little girl’s underwear was still on. That made looking at her autopsy photos a little easier, but not much. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and went back to studying the scaly white skin on the girl’s hips and thighs. A few of the close-ups made her skin look like the surface of a head of cauliflower.
There was identical patterning around the front of her neck.
The pictures of Amanda’s six-year-old brother, Hector, who was found eighty feet away, facedown in two inches of ditch water, showed the same scaly patterning on the back of his neck and on his right wrist.
Ed had become something of an expert on sarcoptic mange the last time he was in Cuero, and the patterning on the kids looked an awful lot like the skin he’d seen on the alleged chupacabra specimen they’d shown him.
But this was not the same thing.
The mite that caused sarcoptic mange did so by burrowing under the skin and laying its eggs to hatch. They could be seen with the naked eye, so the fact that there was no mention of them in the autopsy report made it highly unlikely they were the culprits here.
Plus, it usually took weeks for that scaling to show up, and neither child had a history of scabies, the human version of mange.
The pathologist who had performed the autopsy wasn’t able to explain the skin condition. She couldn’t link it to cause of death, which was listed as cardiac arrest due to extreme dehydration, even though she indicated that such a connection was “extremely likely,” as much of the fluid loss appeared to have traveled through the affected areas.
Ed put the photos down and drained the rest of his beer as he thought about the implications of that last part. Conspiracy theorists would have a field day with that. Proof, they’d say, of vampirism. The chupacabra was real!
Ed scoffed aloud at that and then forced himself to change gears. Suppose Marsh was responsible for limiting the contents of the police report. Suppose Marsh was allowing him to see only the parts of which he couldn’t make sense. Ed could certainly see why his rival was stumped. Something usually popped out during these investigations, something obvious. The last time around, it had been the animal itself. Witnesses claimed it was a classic chupacabra, with short forelegs and long, lanky hind legs. What Ed had seen on the video, though, was a marginally misshapen animal that ran very much like every other dog he’d ever seen. And when he actually sat down to examine the half-rotted remains of the specimen a local rancher had shot three days before his arrival, he saw the obvious features of a coydog, the offspring of a male coyote and a female domestic dog. Such hybrids were rare, but they did happen, and when the scourge of sarcoptic mange was thrown into the mix, one got a creature very much like the legendary chupacabra.
And that was fine, within the original context.
Prior to his first visit to Cuero, local ranchers had reported several instances of slaughtered goats, all of which showed signs of a canid attack. That was the chupacabra MO. Attack goats, suck them dry. That was how they got their name, after all.
But not this time around. None of the five murdered children appeared to have been killed by anything like a dog. They had no open, tattered wounds, no bite marks, no obvious injuries like you’d expect from a dog attack.
Instead, they had cauliflower skin and massive fluid loss. The latter certainly offered a suggestion of vampirism, and the skin condition was scaly enough to call to mind the reptilian flesh of the chupacabra. Plus, all five children had been killed in the same general area where the poor mangy creature was spotted last time around.
Which, to Ed’s mind, was more than enough to suggest an affirmative link between the dead children and the mythical ch
upacabra.
That’s what Ed wanted to believe, anyway.
He was still thinking of the chupacabra when one of Amanda Valdez’s autopsy pictures slid from the bed to the floor.
Ed reached down to retrieve it, and froze.
It showed the little girl’s face, her eyes open and vacant and dead, and yet haunted with more pain than any eight-year-old should know. Her cheeks were sunken, her lips puckered and wrinkled and dark, like dried fruit. Ed swallowed hard and sat up, the picture staring at him from the floor. Something Deputy Kohler said came back to him.
Nobody ever talks to the wetbacks . . . It’s their kids getting murdered.
Maybe, he thought, it was time he changed that.
Ed got in his Suburban early the next morning and headed down to the southern part of DeWitt County.
The last time he’d been down this way was in 2010. The people of Cuero had decorated every shop and pickup truck with cartoon drawings of something that looked like it had escaped from the set of a fifties-era creature feature. They had visions of the chupacabra doing for their town what the little green men and their spaceships had done for Roswell, New Mexico, and the whole county, it seemed, had turned out to hunt the thing down. Pickup trucks had lined the shoulders of the little dirt road for miles. Parking was impossible. Squads of men with shotguns and orange hunting vests turned out for the hunt, some from as far away as Tulsa, chewing tobacco and hurling curses like marine drill instructors; yet there was an air of fun to the gathering, everybody laughing and joking about what they were going to do when they finally caught the goatsucker. They even had news crews to cover the spectacle. It had been like a day at the fair.
But there was none of that spectacle now. There were no pickups, no cartoons, no news crews. Just a lot of flat, open ranch land and sweet potato crops stretching as far as the eye could see, the view broken only by a series of crosses next to the road.
Five of them, strung out over about a quarter of a mile.
He pulled over.
The first cross he came to was made of fence planks that had been painted white and fastened together with a great deal of care. A bouquet of black-eyed Susans and Indian paintbrushes rested at its base with a jumble of sweet potatoes and corn and a cooked rabbit carcass, perhaps three hours old. The ants hadn’t even gotten to it yet. Colored plastic beads were strung over the bar. Nailed to the center of the cross was a picture of a little girl in a blue dress, maybe four years old. He hadn’t seen her picture in the case file.
He glanced down the road, toward the old abandoned church that stood at the intersection of Farm-to-Market Roads 474 and 3008. In between, there were four more of the little crosses, each similarly decorated.
Five little lives cut savagely short.
When he’d headed out that morning he’d been so excited, so ready to make scientific history. But now, he felt uncomfortably sober. This wasn’t a joyride he was on. This was bigger than his career. Bigger than his feud with Marsh. Bigger even than the quest for the truth that had propelled him for so many years. It was all about this little white cross, this one little life that had no voice. Maybe he could change that.
He got back in his Suburban, drove down to the intersection, and parked behind the old abandoned church. The tarpaper shacks where the five dead children had lived were across the road. He saw smoke rising from cooking fires and a few figures moving in between the houses, but more goats than people.
Ed crossed Farm-to-Market Road 3008, another dirt track that passed for a highway in these parts, and entered the little village of the murdered children.
He saw a girl of seven or eight, sitting on a black rock, surrounded by goats. She wore an ochre-colored blouse and a white skirt, and though she didn’t smile when she saw Ed approach, he could see a jumble of white teeth, big as pebbles in her mouth. Ed tried to say hello, but before the girl could answer, an old woman darted out of a nearby shack and pulled her inside.
Alarmed by the sudden appearance of the woman, Ed stopped and looked around. There were many children standing there, watching him, but within seconds, cautious mothers and grandmothers were hustling them inside.
“Hey, asshole,” a man said from behind him.
Ed turned.
A group of men were standing there, some of them armed with metal pipes, others with knives.
“What the fuck you want, man?” one of the men said. He was about twenty-five, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt. His black hair was a thick mess, and the mustache on his face had yet to fill in, but he carried himself like the village tough guy. He pointed a knife at Ed. “What the fuck you want?”
Ed put his hands up. “My name is Ed Drinker,” he said in Spanish. He patted the air between them. “Easy, please. Easy. I’m with the Patterson Cryptozoological Institute. I’m here to help you.”
“You want to help, huh?”
“Yes. Please, I just want to ask you some ques—”
Before he could get the words out, somebody hit him in the back with something hard. Ed collapsed to the ground, dizzy, disoriented, and rolled over onto his side. A young woman was standing over him with a shovel.
“No, wait!” Ed said.
The woman raised the shovel over her head and slammed it back down, aiming for his head. At the last second, Ed shifted to his right, the shovel slapping the dirt where his face had just been. The ground was wavering beneath Ed’s feet, but he still managed to stand. The men were closing in on him, and he felt rough hands grabbing his shirt, trying to throw him back to the ground.
“Get off me!” he shouted.
He twisted and turned, slapped at the hands groping about his face, and somehow found himself running toward the road, an angry crowd gathering behind him.
They closed on him just as he reached his Suburban.
He ran to the driver’s side of the vehicle and stopped short. The back tire had been slashed and the Suburban looked to be kneeling in the dirt at the feet of the old church. He wheeled on the angry crowd, spit flying off his lips, his lungs burning, hands raised to defend himself. They circled around him, pipes and knives waving in the air, their faces twisted with rage and something deeper that Ed could recognize but not understand.
He had nothing left and he had come very close to begging for his life, when suddenly the crowd cowered and backed away.
Ed let go of the breath he’d been holding.
The villagers were retreating, but their attention wasn’t on Ed anymore. Rather, they were focused on the train of three black Cadillac Escalades closing in on their position. The Escalades skidded to a stop and a horde of cameramen poured out. With the cameras pointed in their faces, the villagers shrank back, with only a few hazarding an angry glance backward as they retreated.
Ed, who had collapsed to his knees from exhaustion, found cameras crowding around him. He tried to shield his eyes from the blinding white lights, but it did little good. He saw a heavyset man in a blue guayabera shirt and white linen slacks step out of one of the Escalades and he knew Charles Marsh had set him up.
Marsh pushed his way through the cameramen and knelt at Ed’s side. It was all very dramatic, all very obviously staged. Despite the heat of the morning, the fat man smelled of cologne.
“Goddamn lucky we came along when we did,” he said, and of course the cameras were right there to capture the whole exchange. “Are you all right, Dr. Drinker?”
Ed looked up at him.
“They almost had you, didn’t they?”
Ed just stared at him.
Marsh rose to his feet, turned, and addressed the cameras. “Well, that’s the risk field investigators face. This could have gone really bad, but luckily we were here.”
He turned back to Ed.
“Dr. Drinker, it looks like somebody has disabled your vehicle. If you want, we can give you a ride back to town.”
Ed glanced back at his Suburban, and that was enough to clear his head. He had a spare in the back. He could make it ou
t of here by himself, even if replacing the tire would cost more than he had to spend.
Which was exactly what Marsh wanted, wasn’t it?
“You son of a bitch,” Ed said.
Marsh shrugged. “Cut!” he said. He made several hand gestures to the cameramen surrounding him, motions that to Ed looked an awful lot like instructions to keep filming, and said: “Ed, seriously? Come on, man, this is good stuff. Think about it. All the dangers a field investigator has to go through, all the risks. It’s solid gold.”
“Fuck you, Charles,” Ed said. “You did this, didn’t you? You cut my tires.”
“What? No, you’re crazy. How could I have done that? We just showed up.”
“You did! Goddamn you.”
Marsh made a slicing gesture across his throat, and instantly the cameramen backed off.
“Ed, what are you doing?” Marsh said in a low voice. “This is good stuff here. Think of the publicity. Think of what this could do for your career.”
“What? As the stooge you rescued? You set this up, you bastard.”
Marsh backed away, not frightened, but looking sad, shaking his head as though in pity. It made Ed furious.
“I’m sorry,” Marsh said. “I really am. But none of that’s true. I’m sorry you’re so upset, but I haven’t done anything to hurt you. I’m trying to help you, if you let me.”
Ed was so mad he couldn’t even speak. He stared at the cameras ringed around him and he wanted to break something. Starting with Charles Marsh.
But he didn’t dare. That would ruin him for sure.
Instead, he glanced down at his fists and forced them to open. It took a long time for the color to flood back into his white knuckles.
“I don’t need your help,” he said at last.
Marsh nodded, turned to his film crew, and motioned for them to return to their vehicles. “Load it up, boys! We’re moving out.” Then, when the cameras were gone, Marsh closed on Ed again. “So tell me,” he said. “Why did you come here? What did you hope to learn from these people?”
Seize the Night Page 35