Sturm eased deeper into the structure, sweeping her flashlight beam slowly from side to side and across the brown puddles of rainwater and urine on the cracked paving stones and bare earth. The sheer tonnage of debris braced tenuously overhead on slanted iron girders, warped wooden planks, and jagged sections of concrete, through which the occasional pebble or stream of dirt cascaded, weighed heavily on her mind. Bare bricks, exposed wiring, and damp-rotted timber showed through the collapsed sections of yellowed plaster on the walls. She passed leaning doorways that barely offered enough space to squeeze into smaller rooms full of antique equipment with rusted pipes and cracked gauges. Empty liquor bottles had been smashed in the corners near piles of rumpled newspapers and threadbare blankets. Some of the walls were scored black with carbon where fires had been built, the smoke vented through natural channels in the rubble. The realization that people were actually living down here hit her like a fist to the gut.
So where were they all now and how would they react to her intrusion?
“They’re like roaches,” Henley said. “The moment you hit them with your light, they scuttle off and hide.”
Sturm rounded on him.
“You refer to them as roaches or rats again, and I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”
His face flushed red and the muscles in his jaw bulged. The weak aura of her flashlight beam left his eyes in shadow, but she could feel their glare like the lick flames.
She turned away before he could respond and headed deeper into the warren. He mumbled something from behind her about partners needing to have each other’s backs. She again reminded herself that it was only a matter of time before she would be off the streets.
The smell intensified and she heard a whispering sound. She swung her beam toward the source as she passed through a crumbling brick orifice into the adjacent building. There was a heap of blankets and jackets against the wall to her right. They were ragged and dirty, and at first she thought they’d been abandoned, until she saw the filthy faces staring back at her.
Sturm froze. Her eyes met those of a little girl who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.
“All right, Morlocks,” Henley bellowed. His voice reverberated in the confines. “Rise and shine. Gather your shit and hit the bricks. You have sixty seconds before I break out the pepper spray.”
She watched in shock as more than a dozen men and women stood from the covers she had at first mistaken for refuse and shuffled off into the shadows. Her eyes tracked the young girl, who carried a naked plastic doll by the leg in one hand and rubbed sleep out of her lashes with the other, until she vanished through a dark channel in the wall, presumably to wander the streets until dawn or bed down on a park bench until she was again forced to move along.
Sturm stood in silence for a long moment before a smell she recognized far too well resolved from the comingling aromas of excrement and body odor.
“Keep moving or we’ll be down here all night,” Henley said.
“Give me a minute.”
Sturm tilted her head, sniffed the air, then directed her flashlight toward the back corner to her left. She tromped over broken two-by-fours and cracked cement until she reached a mound of dirt and debris that had been swept up against the exposed bricks. Her approach disturbed the flies, which rose and swirled around her head in an insufferable buzzing cloud. Blackened flesh and gnawed bone showed through the furrows the rodents had carved to reach the source of the smell. She crouched and brushed away the detritus to reveal a face. The open mouth and eyes were packed with dirt, the facial wrinkles crisp with grime. The features were definitively female, the long gray hair tangled and knotted. Maggots squirmed through the flesh and bodily dissolution. She had to cover her mouth and nose against the powerful stench. Based on the level of decomposition, Sturm guessed the woman had been dead somewhere in the neighborhood of a week.
And these people had been living down here with her. In the same room. All this time.
Her heart ached at the realization that these men and women must have buried the woman. Had they done so out of respect, out of love, or simply to avoid being cast out of their home if the authorities ever found out?
“We find them like this from time to time,” Henley said, his voice softer. Sturm glanced back at him and saw through the chink in his armor. “You have to steel yourself against it.”
He turned and walked away. She heard a burst of static and his mumbled words as he called in their discovery.
A tear crept from the corner of her eye.
There was no way she could steel herself against something like…this.
No one should have to live like this. No one should have to end up down here, interred in an unmarked grave. Unwanted. Unremembered.
No one.
THREE
Altai Mountain Range
Siberia
2:26 p.m. NOVST
(1:26 a.m. PST)
Straps of yellow nylon flagged across the snow on the furious wind. Retired US Air Force Brigadier General Franklin Spears, now Chief Executive Officer of Phobos Biodefense, the global leader in threat assessment and countermeasure implementation for both the private sector and international government agencies, knelt and tugged on one of the straps until he encountered resistance, then started shoveling the snow away with his gloved hands. His men were mere shadows beside him through the sheeting ice crystals, which blew straight up the canyon on the gusting gales. Even the stands of pines clinging to the steep slopes offered precious little protection. The storm had been raging since before they even set out from Aktash, knowing full well what they would find. If they found anything at all. The last communication from his son’s party had been more than six days ago now. Within forty-eight hours, he had assembled a rescue party and chartered a plane across the Pacific. Now, after nearly three days of searching, they had finally found sign of Nelson’s passage.
The tent had been shredded and nearly buried under the accumulation. Had they arrived a day later, they might have walked right over it without knowing.
“Give me a hand with this!” he shouted.
Two of his men crouched beside him and helped pry the outer nylon and the inner polypropylene layers of the Arctic Oven tent from the snow to reveal a jumble of sleeping bags and camping gear. There was no sign of Nelson or the others. Their rucksacks were conspicuously absent.
“What’s that?” the man to his right asked. Beneath their balaclavas, goggles, and fur-fringed hoods, it was impossible to tell one man from the next until he spoke. Rodney Poole, Phobos’s chief Search and Detection Specialist, stripped off his gloves and chiseled at a frozen blotch on one of the Vaude Arctic sleeping bags. He melted it between his fingers and dabbed it on his tongue. His expression told Spears everything he needed to know.
“Over here!” Daniel Abrams, Spears’s Threat Intelligence Solutions Specialist, called.
Spears could barely see the man’s silhouette a dozen paces away through the blizzard. He rose and tromped across the crust to where Abrams dug at the snow. A blue hand, rimed with ice, stood above the ground as though crawling out of the grave. He threw himself down beside Abrams and frantically scooped aside mounds of powder and ice to expose the length of the arm, the shoulder, the back of the head and the torso. The jacket was crafted from animal hides stitched together with thick black twine like a medical examiner’s sutures, the hood rimmed with what could only have been the fur of a husky. Tears of relief froze in Spears’s lashes at the realization that this wasn’t his son’s body.
“Help me turn him over,” Spears commanded. His son was still out there somewhere, quite possibly freezing to death at this very moment. They had no time to waste.
The frozen corpse made cracking sounds as they rolled it onto its back. The man’s face was a block of ice, his eyes and mouth stuffed with snow. His broad face and high Asiatic cheekbones identified him as the native Kyrgyz guide his son’s party had hired to lead them up Katun Valley to the foot o
f Mt. Belukha. What at first looked like a necklace of unrefined rubies poked out over the man’s heavy-knit scarf, which Spears shoved out of the way. The crimson crystals weren’t gemstones. He chipped away the blood until he could clearly see the wounds. They were sloppy and deep, the frozen edges demarcated by the ridges of teeth. Something had torn out this man’s throat.
“What the hell could have done that?” Abrams said.
“Bear?” Cameron Bristow, a promising young field agent, said from behind them.
“A bear could have taken his whole damn neck in its mouth.”
“You got a better idea?”
Spears jumped back to his feet.
“Keep looking!” he shouted.
He thought back to the last email he had received from his son, a single rushed paragraph sent almost as an afterthought to pacify an overprotective father.
After three days of waiting, it looks like the storm is finally breaking. We plan to climb the southwestern face at dawn. I can see you shaking your head from here. Quit worrying already, would you? You know me. I’m like Spider-Man up there.
Spears removed his field glasses from his rucksack and turned them upon the sheer face of the mountain. The blizzard made it nearly impossible to see, but he eventually found the dark orifice.
He prayed his son had made it that far, and that his party was merely holed up out of the elements, waiting for the storm to pass. It was the prayer of a desperate man, he knew. After six days, any food reserves would have been long since consumed and without their SubZero Mummy sleeping bags they would have been lucky to survive more than a single night.
Of course, that scenario was predicated upon the assumption that they had survived whatever attacked the camp.
Spears and his team needed to clear the area around the base camp as quickly as possible. Unless they found his son’s remains nearby, they had a long and perilous climb ahead of them.
FOUR
Seattle, Washington
3:53 a.m. PST
(4:53 p.m. NOVST)
Elena Sturm leaned against the side of a brick building that had once been a shipping warehouse. From where she stood in the shadows, she watched the coroner’s people drag the woman’s body out of the hole in the rubble on a skiff. The rain made a dysrhythmic clapping sound on the body bag. There were no swirling cherries, no spotlights directed toward the orifice. No media crews jostled for the best shot of the men loading the remains into the van. Nary a single reporter hounded her for details. Not only had the woman lived and died in exile, but now they were sneaking off with her body like thieves in the night. As though her death meant no more than her life had.
Sturm felt a soul-deep sorrow as an ache in the marrow of her bones.
This was why she had nearly killed herself getting first through undergraduate, and then graduate school, why she worked these unholy hours so she could survive the unpaid internship with the Washington State Patrol, why she had wanted to be a criminalist in the first place. Everyone needed to be remembered. Everyone needed to have their story told.
Someone needed to speak for the dead.
She would always remember the look in her father’s eyes when he told her they were losing the farm that had been in her family for more than a century, the tears that had shimmered in her mother’s. How glassy they had looked when she buried them. The medical examiner had ruled her father’s death a myocardial infarction, but no such simple explanation could describe how he had dropped dead in the orchard while trying to draw what little blood he could from the failing soil that would soon belong to an unsympathetic bank, which would rather let the acreage rot than allow a man to eke out his subsistence on it. Her mother had passed a year later at her aunt’s house in Tacoma. Sturm didn’t care what the official cause of death had been ruled. Her mother had wasted away from a broken heart and the lack of the will to persevere without her soulmate at her side. Meanwhile, their former homestead, where her great-grandfather had planted the first seeds, had gone feral and the house that had once contained only love and laughter had fallen into disrepair. The few apples that still grew were riddled with worms. Her parents were dead. And the only mark of their passing was a weather-beaten “Prime Acreage For Sale” sign staked at the edge of the property on the side of a road no one had any reason to drive.
It was a common tale and yet one that deserved to be told, regardless of whether or not anyone cared to listen. Not because of the callous government or the unfeeling bank. Not because of the injustice of it all, but because her parents had mattered.
If only to her.
The rear doors of the coroner’s van slammed closed with the sound of twin gunshots that echoed across the forlorn waterfront, where once countless fishermen had earned their living from the sea. Before the advent of corporate fishing fleets, before day trading and the internet and men who made fortunes without producing tangible products or contributing to the welfare of society. She wondered how many of them, how many of their wives and children and grandchildren, now lived in the bowels beneath her feet. How many of them had she evicted from that warren so that none of the partygoers would have their fancy dinners ruined by the sight of that child with the one set of clothes and the filthy, naked doll?
The taillights of the van flared red. She watched as it bounced over the rutted earth toward where a lone officer held open the chain link fence at the sidewalk, in its bed, a nameless woman secreted away so that none of the politicos would have to give a second thought to her circumstances while dropping two grand on the plate of food that might have saved her life.
And then the van was gone.
Sturm sighed and lifted her face to the sky. The cold rain drummed on her closed eyelids and streamed down her cheeks. She allowed it to wash over her until she could take it no more, but it wasn’t enough to cleanse her. Not even close.
“You were the one who found the body,” a deep voice said from directly behind her, startling her from her thoughts. It was a statement, not a question. She hadn’t heard the man approach, not so much as the clap of a single footstep in a puddle or the squish of mud beneath transferred weight. She turned toward the source of the voice and found herself staring up into the face of a man she’d never seen before. The brim of his ball cap cast a shadow over his features. She could only see the outline of his granite jaw and the tip of his nose, but she could feel the weight of his unseen eyes appraising her. He was a good foot taller than she was, with broad shoulders that tested the strength of his navy blue windbreaker. She could only assume that the letters on the back of it matched those on the front of his hat.
“Since when does the FBI care about the death of a single indigent?” she asked.
“Officially, it doesn’t. Not unless the mayor calls the governor, who in turn wakes up my SAC and demands that he send out the best agent he has.” He gave a slight bow and she saw his sharp brown eyes, his dark bangs plastered to his forehead by the rain. “And voila…here I am. Special Agent Grey Porter, at your service.”
She shook his proffered hand and introduced herself in return. So this was how the situation was going to play out. She suddenly felt sick to her stomach.
“You’re here to make this inconvenient little problem go away.”
“Quite the contrary, my dear. We’re going to ID this woman with all due haste and make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen to anyone else so that the city can sleep easy at night.”
“You mean so that no one gives a second thought to this taxpayer-funded deathtrap? A woman lost her life here. Those people living down there? They’re human beings. Someone’s children. Possibly spouses, parents—”
“Let’s leave the squabbling to the politicians.” Porter offered his most disarming smile. He couldn’t have been out of his early thirties. “You and I still have a job to do.”
“Tell me we aren’t sweeping this under the rug.”
“It’s a politically sensitive situation, Layne.” His use of the nickname only her father
used infuriated her. “Sometimes things are simply outside of our control.”
“Don’t give me that crap.” The words were out of her mouth before she knew they were coming. She visibly recoiled, but there was no taking them back now. She could only forge ahead. “If that had been the mayor’s wife down there, the entire place would have been crawling with cops and reporters and you’d be able to hear the public outcry all the way from Vancouver.”
He smiled. There was no condescension in it, only an element of what might have been sorrow. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.
“Look, there are two ways this can play out,” he said. “She can end up in the city morgue, waiting endlessly for someone to come along and claim her remains, or we can do everything in our power to identify her and find someone who cares enough to give her the proper burial she deserves. Either way, it’s already been decided way above either of our heads that she wasn’t found here. Do you follow me?”
His eyes locked onto hers for so long that it made her uncomfortable. She was the first to look away.
“No one should have to die down there like that,” she whispered.
“You do your job and no one else will.”
Sturm was thankful for the rain, which masked the tears on her cheeks.
Not much longer now, she thought. And then maybe she could do something that might actually make a difference.
The weight of his hand settled upon her shoulder. When he spoke, his words were soft.
“You have to fight the battles you can win, Layne. Don’t let them beat you. And don’t let them change you. There will always be more battles.”
She felt foolish for exposing her weakness to him, even worse for allowing him to console her. And in compromising her principles to play a game she wanted no part of, she felt a small portion of her soul die.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 3