Predatory Instinct: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  They were approaching the investigation was though they had two distinct scenes: the first where the man was killed; the second, where he was found. Uniformed officers scoured the vacant lot across the street for any sign of where the victim had come from and what had caused his frenetic flight. Half of the CSRT unit was underground, the other half here around Porter. Galiardi moved back and forth between the two, supervising and coordinating. The man’s fingerprints had already been loaded into the system in hopes of ascertaining his identity through the IAFIS database. Of course, unless he had a criminal record or a history of government employment, they were going to have to wait on his dental records, assuming that a homeless man had even maintained his oral hygiene regimen and that someone had missed him enough to forward those records to the authorities. Unfortunately, he didn’t imagine anyone was going to go out of their way to get an ID on this guy. Even if they did, he had to wonder if that information would ever see the light of day or if the man who had nearly been decapitated would wind up in a pauper’s grave under an anonymous placard.

  There was one positive, if he were truly searching for one.

  At least whatever had killed all of the men aboard the two vessels hadn’t gone far.

  “Tell me something—anything—that might help us figure out what we’re dealing with here.”

  Galiardi rounded on him, face flushed, teeth bared, ready to explode, but paused and took a moment to collect herself before speaking.

  “Let me show you something,” she finally said, beckoning him into the field with a sweep of her hand.

  She was obviously taking their lack of progress personally. He was going to have to watch his phrasing. Right now, she and her team were just about the only allies he had in the cover-up he could positively feel coming.

  “Look right here.” She crouched and directed her penlight at a clump of ferns that had been squashed flat, the stems bent and broken. “And over here.” She turned her beam on a crushed patch of wild grass. “And here.” Again, another flattened fern.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Our killer’s footprints. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof.” She stood and sighed. “As far as we can tell, every single one of his—or its—footfalls were deliberately placed where they wouldn’t leave prints. Sure, we can tell exactly where it stepped, but there’s no way of pulling an impression from a clump of grass.”

  “You can’t possibly be implying that every one of its tracks landed right on a patch of thick grass to mask its passage.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “So while this thing is running in pursuit of this man, it had the presence of mind to avoid leaving a single print—”

  His cell phone chirped under his jacket. He held up a finger to indicate he needed a minute and removed the phone from his pocket.

  “Scary thought, isn’t it?” Galiardi said.

  He turned away from her and distanced himself from anyone who might overhear his conversation.

  “Porter,” he said.

  His SAC spoke for nearly two full minutes without taking a breath that Porter could exploit to interrupt or attempt to clarify what was being said. His orders were punctuated with a quick click and then dead air. He stared down at the darkened screen on his phone for a long moment before tucking it back inside his jacket.

  He didn’t like this development.

  Not one little bit.

  A pair of headlights flashed at the curb on the other side of the chain link barricade.

  “That was fast,” he said out loud as he walked toward the nearest gate.

  As if things weren’t interesting enough already.

  NINETEEN

  Seattle, Washington

  Friday, October 19th

  2:42 a.m. PST

  Sturm looked into the man’s shamrock-green eyes clear up until the point that they ran the zipper up between them. They had strapped the body bag to a backboard in order to carry it out of the underground maze since there was no way a gurney would fit. The whole experience had been maddening and surreal. Since she was still on her patrol job, she’d been unable to participate in the collection and documentation of evidence. She’d been forced to stand back with her hands in her pockets and watch the same CSRT unit she’d worked shoulder-to-shoulder with for so many months doing the things she knew she should be doing. Never in her life had she felt so ineffectual. And now that the body was gone, the cameras no longer flashed, and the physical crime scene had been cordoned off and closed down, she was expected to go right back to work, clearing the warrens of whatever derelicts might somehow still be sleeping down here.

  She stared down at the chalk outline of the body and the dark smears of blood and was reminded of a child coloring outside the lines.

  “I guess we’ll be missing the early bird specials,” Henley said from behind her.

  She nearly jumped at the sound of his voice. She hadn’t heard him enter the room.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” It took conscious effort to raise her stare from the ground to meet his.

  “I can tell you what we don’t have to do now.” He smiled. “I just got word that we won’t be doing any paperwork on this one.”

  She shook her head and looked back at the ground. The blood was a testament to the fact that a human being had died here, even if no one else chose to acknowledge it.

  “Come on,” Henley said. “Let’s just cruise through this so we can get out of here. I’m ready to put this night behind me.”

  He struck off in the opposite direction, his footsteps fading until she was again alone in her own head. She realized her hand had fallen to the grip of her service pistol, her thumb primed under the snap of the holster. Maybe Henley had no idea what was potentially down there with them, but she did. She knew all too well what the monster that had done this was capable of. If it was still down here, she and her partner were in grave danger. She couldn’t believe that any of the agencies that had been involved from the start, that had seen the carnage on the Scourge and the Dragnet, would simply abandon the scene of the crime while whatever had killed so many was still on the loose.

  Then it hit her.

  They wouldn’t.

  Not while there was a chance they had the monster cornered.

  They were emptying the site as inconspicuously as possible, and then they were going to come in after it. The entire waterfront was probably already surrounded. They had probably formed a perimeter and were even now in the process of tightening the net. And yet she and Henley were still down here, isolated in the darkness under tons of debris. What role were they expected to play, especially considering that neither of them had been briefed about the operation and Henley was completely oblivious?

  “Son of a bitch,” she whispered.

  They were bait.

  Two beat cops crawling around beneath condemned ruins? Any number of accidents could befall them, and could be justified easily enough. Were their lives worth less to the city they faithfully served than its investment in a goddamn real estate development?

  Sturm heard a skritching sound ahead of her.

  She drew her pistol and assumed a shooter’s stance.

  Again, all she could hear was the settling of the building around and above her. It was undoubtedly just a rat, or maybe nothing at all. She was so tired that she couldn’t trust her senses, let alone her judgment.

  She held her breath and listened. The movement of air through the rubble made the building sound as though it were breathing.

  Another scraping sound, like nails across concrete.

  Then silence.

  The sound had definitely come from directly ahead of her, beyond the recess where the body had been mere minutes ago, somewhere out of sight behind the canted timber and mounds of bricks.

  She crouched and shined her beam past the bloodstains into a small gap in the rubble barely wide enough for her to wiggle through. Maybe just wide enough—

  Moveme
nt at the edge of her beam’s reach. A blur of bluish-white. The skritching sound.

  She hadn’t gotten a good look at it, but she’d seen enough to know that it wasn’t a rat.

  “Henley,” she whispered into her transceiver. “Henley.”

  She feared speaking any louder.

  The weight of the silence pressed down on her to the point that she felt the rubble might collapse and bury her alive. She was spooking herself, she knew. There could be any number of animals back there, seeking refuge in the dank caverns. She hadn’t seen whatever it was well enough to convince herself that she had seen anything at all. Had it just been the movement of her light across a chunk of concrete?

  Cautiously, she lowered herself to the ground and eased forward on her knees and elbows, holding her flashlight against the side of her Beretta. The mouth of the small tunnel yawned before her. She could see maybe a dozen feet into the orifice, to the point where the tunnel terminated against a section of brickwork still held together by mortar, furry with some kind of fungus or mold. Motes of dust sparkled like glitter in her column of light. She tried not to think about the man’s dried blood flaking off onto her uniform as she squirmed right up to the point where her arms entered the hole and her shoulders wedged against the sides.

  Decision time.

  She watched for any sign of movement, any change in the air current to disturb the settling dust.

  Nothing.

  She should just back out and get the hell out of there. Let the FBI and whoever else was out there handle this operation—whatever it was—on their own. Screw them if they wanted to use her to draw out whatever might be down here. If they wanted this thing, they could come down here and get it—

  A scraping sound. Mere feet ahead of her and around the bend to her right. Just out of sight.

  The sparkling motes billowed to the left.

  There was definitely something back there, something much bigger than a rat.

  She leaned her head against her shoulder and pressed the button on her handset with her cheek.

  “Henley.” She had barely spoken loud enough to hear it herself. He was probably already nearing the exit to the outside world from the adjacent building. Still, she waited for a response that never came. “Damn it.”

  Sturm couldn’t even turn her head far enough to glance back over her shoulder to make sure there was nothing creeping up behind her. In her current position, she was a sitting duck. Time to either press on or cut her losses. She drew a deep breath to steady her nerves, gritted her teeth, and squirmed deeper. The tunnel tapered as she went. By the time she reached the bend, her arms were pinned in front of her. She rolled onto her side so she could see to the right. The scratching sounds became frantic. She swung her beam toward the source in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the bottom of a dirty, bare foot, a swatch of pasty white skin, and what she could have sworn were the stiff legs of a naked, grime-coated baby doll clutched in a small, filthy hand.

  TWENTY

  Seattle, Washington

  3:11 a.m. PST

  Spears crouched in the high weeds that had grown up against the weathered wall of one of the construction company’s trailers and watched the two uniformed officers face off beside their cruiser through his thermal vision goggles. The woman was animated, repeatedly gesturing back toward the ruins with both hands, while the man patted the air between them in what was meant to be a calming gesture. After several minutes, he raised his face to the sky, threw up his arms in exasperation, and plopped down into the driver’s seat. The woman stared at the rubble for a long moment before she finally walked around the rear of the Crown Victoria and eased into the passenger seat. Spears studied the surrounding area, praying for even the slightest hint of thermal color or movement, until the cruiser backed away from the building and bumped across the overgrown lot. Once the fence was again closed and the patrol car was nothing but a distant red glow of brake lights, he gave the signal for his men to converge.

  The four of them had been stationed within the construction zone at the four points of the compass, hoping that the bait would draw their prey out into the open. It had been a long shot for sure, especially after the scene had been swarming with officers, but it had been a shot worth taking. The sooner they took this thing down, the better. They couldn’t risk arousing any more suspicion than they already had. As it was, Spears had been forced to tip his hand to his connections at the DoD in order to clear out the area so he and his men would be able to hunt. He hadn’t disclosed all of the details about the nature of their discovery in Siberia, but he had given them enough to whet their appetites for more, at least enough for them to order the FBI out of there, if only temporarily. The agent on the scene had been a challenge to shove out of the way. He already knew far too much, and the expression on his face and the tone of his voice hinted at his suspicion of Spears’s involvement. The agent’s SAC had remained firm and the agent had reluctantly vacated the premises rather than risk the consequences. The look in his eyes when he left hadn’t been one of acquiescence, though. Spears recognized the spark of determination and knew the agent wasn’t about to let this one go. He would be back, but Spears fully intended to have this business wrapped up long before then.

  He ducked low and dashed across the field toward the cluster of demolished buildings in the center. Flashes of midnight-blue and fuchsia emerged from his peripheral vision. Security Specialist Judd Ritter advanced on the middle building from where he had been hiding by the street to the left, while Lyle Barnaby dashed across the field from behind the decrepit pier. Paul Cranston would be rushing the ruins from the north, on the far side of the rubble from Spears. They were faceless grunts who had yet to distinguish themselves in his service, but since his most trusted men were no longer available to him, this was their opportunity to step up. All they had to do was access the subterranean level and rendezvous in the basement of the cannery. If they managed to survive long enough to do so, anyway.

  Their mission was simple: Take the enemy. Alive if possible, dead if necessary, and complete their extraction by dawn. Swoop in and out and leave no one the wiser.

  A strobe of lightning reflected from the ornate cultural center on the far side of the lot, then returned it to darkness. The whole idea of it mocked the culture it had unceremoniously displaced. He remembered when the wharves that had birthed this city, these very piers that had fallen into disrepair long ago, had pulsed with the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest. And now this bloody heritage center would stand over its remains like a tombstone. He could only imagine that his father, who had slaved on these docks his entire life, from before sunrise until long after sunset, would claw his way out of his grave to spit in the mayor’s eye if he could.

  Thoughts of his father steered him back to memories of his son. He had to force down the rage in order to focus on his mission. If left with no other option, he would revel in the prospect of kicking in the beast’s skull.

  He zeroed in on what was left of the basement window and pulled up just short. The ledge was still crusted with the dead man’s blood, but the rain would wash it away soon enough. It had already begun to sprinkle and the distant grumble of thunder promised a deluge. He knelt and peered through the window into the basement.

  No color.

  No motion.

  He quickly ducked his head and slithered through. The second he hit the ground, he popped back up to his feet, pinned the Colt IAR against his shoulder, and advanced into the darkness.

  * * *

  Porter lay flat on the wet ground, shrouded by ferns, peering through binoculars over the crest of a low hill in the vacant lot across the street from the development. His position wasn’t ideal for surveillance, but concealment had been his primary concern. He’d driven away like a good little boy when he’d been dismissed by this character who hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself, then cruised around the block, parked on the far side of the lot, and crawled on his belly across trash and broken glass and through
puddles and refuse to reach his current location. He had arrived just in time to see the police car turn out onto the main road, and then the black-clad men with their thermal vision goggles and automatic rifles rush the buildings.

  Now that all four of them were inside, he had a decision to make.

  What was he going to do about it?

  His directive had been clear and concise: Get lost. This operation was being handled far above his pay grade. The problem was the level of secrecy involved, and he didn’t like being cut out of his own loop. Whoever had leaned on his SAC obviously had some serious clout, enough to steamroll his investigation and unleash what appeared to be a team of mercenaries onto his crime scene, which led him to only one logical conclusion.

  Whoever was pulling the strings knew exactly what had killed the crews of the Scourge and the Dragnet, and had recognized the significance of the indigent’s death tonight. Hence, this unit had been dispatched under a black flag to resolve the problem before those of them investigating it were able to put the pieces together. So if he ever wanted to learn the truth, he was going to have to do so tonight.

  He watched what little he could see of the construction zone for several more minutes before he finally returned the field glasses to his jacket and started toward the street.

  * * *

  Spears advanced slowly through passageways with crumbling walls and a ceiling that felt as though it could come right down on his head at any second. Through the broken brickwork and the hollowed plaster, he saw only dark tunnels leading deeper under the rubble. This was far worse than he had expected. Their prey could have squirmed through any of the holes and wedged itself somewhere they would never be able to reach. He thought of the caverns inside Mt. Belukha and how the creatures had buried themselves under the dirt. Were it not for the thermal vision goggles that had detected their breath rising from the reeds, they would have unknowingly walked right over them. If this one lone predator chose to hide from them in that same manner, they might never find it.