“Sophia,” he began.
“No. Don’t placate me. I’ll take the heat but we brought you evidence of kills just like that all over the country.” She threw up her hands. “The world, even. You want hard evidence I’ll give it to you. But let’s get everything on the table first.”
“Children, children, children.”
Without fanfare the rest of the team had arrived and was filing into the room. Scott Mooney, one of the CIDs, looked around at everyone. “Play nice in the sandbox. What’s the problem?”
No one spoke for a long moment. Sophia stood with her hands on her hips while Logan and Rebecca waited to see what would happen next.
“I didn’t blame you for finally leaving when you did,” Bobby said at last. “Hell, I’m surprised the whole family stuck around.”
“Blacks aren’t quitters,” Rebecca said in a harsh voice. “You know that, Bobby. And Sophia left because she had a great job offer. Period.”
Bobby held up one hand, palm out. “No offense. Didn’t mean to pick a scab on a sore.”
“It’s an old sore and that’s not why I asked the question.” Sophia stared across the table at Bobby.
“Hell. Sorry, sorry. Ask away.”
Sophia took a swallow of the bitter coffee. “And on the other two that occurred around the same time?”
Bobby slid his chair back and rose from the table. “I’ll get those files,” he said in his Maine twang. “You’re right, Soph. Let’s lay it all out on the table. We may not be right but you might not, either. The answer might lie somewhere in between.”
“Fine,” she shot back at him. “And we’ll all have our say.”
The previous night had been tedious but not more than with any normal case. Logan thought the staties had been pretty accepting of the theories and material he and Sophia had brought with them. But as Bobby carried in a storage box filled with case files, set it on the table and opened it, he definitely got the message through body language if nothing else that they all thought he and Soph were nuts. That they were going to humor them until the two of them gave up and went back to Texas and let them get on with their business.
“You know,” he drawled, “it doesn’t seem to me that any of you have made any headway in this at all. Even if it’s a serial killer, as you all seem to think, you haven’t got a clue as to whether it’s a man or woman, where he or she came from or went to, or why these particular victims are chosen. So.” He sat forward and leaned his arms on the table. “I say, crazy as it sounds, let’s all keep an open mind here. We’ll look at your theories, you look at ours.” He looked directly at Bobby. The signals would come from him. “What do you say?”
He watched Bobby look at his people one at a time, then at Rebecca, and finally at him and Sophia.
“Fine,” he sighed. “I’ll listen. How’s that.”
“Fair enough.” Logan looked at Sophia now. “Okay with you, Soph?”
She shoved her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “Fine. Let’s just get to work.”
As if daring anyone on the team to argue with him, Bobby dug the folders out of the box and opened each one, spread its contents out for them all to see. The first set of pictures was of a man in his thirties. He’d been found lying outside his barn, still in jeans and heavy jacket but with a gaping hole where his stomach should be. Logan blinked and swallowed hard. It reminded him instantly of the way his brother Evan had been found. The body of his sister-in-law Valerie had been discovered on the back porch of their house in the same condition. Even now he had to tamp down the nausea as the memories flood him. He had no idea how Sophia managed to handle it being back in the old environment. Especially when they got to the pictures of her nephews.
When he saw the color leech from her face he quietly got up, refilled her coffee mug and put the hot liquid into her hands. She looked up at him with haunted eyes.
“Thank you.”
“No sweat.” He pitched his voice low. “You okay with this?”
She swallowed hard. “I can do it. Don’t worry.”
Bobby and the others were looking at the old photos and comparing them with those of Darrell Franklin. Scott Mooney leaned back in his chair and rubbed his jaw.
“I have to agree on a couple of points,” he said almost reluctantly. “These are all the same work of one creature human or otherwise. And it’s not like anything we’ve seen before or since.”
“Don’t tell me you’re buying into the idea that this is some mythical beast on a bloodlust hunt,” one of the other CIDs snorted. “That makes as much sense as believing that old Indian chief came back from the grave and keeps killing the white man to avenge the death of his infant.”
“If you wanted to go that route,” Bobby put in, “you could almost imagine these wounds cause by a very sharp tomahawk. Only…”
“Only what?” Scott demanded.
“Only it’s been a few hundred years since that episode. Even if we agree that the vendetta was handed down from generation to generation, why wait until now? And why these particular people? It’s almost as if they were chosen at random.”
“They were,” Sophia insisted. “Animals don’t choose their prey with a plan in mind except to kill. Either for food, revenge or protection. And you can be sure whatever we’re dealing with is part animal. Whoever or whatever did this drained the blood from the bodies but left the entrails lying there. Anyway, I thought we went over all this last night? That you all at least agreed to look at this with an open mind.”
There was a very long moment of silence, which Bobby finally broke.
“I’ll be real honest with you, Soph. Last night we were all on our best behavior and everyone was trying to be careful of your feelings. But you have to admit the story is really out there.”
Logan set his mug down and leaned forward. “I saw what the creature did to my brother and sister-in-law.” His voice was edged with a mixture of pain and anger. “And the destruction it left in Alabama. Whatever this is, it’s left bodies all over the country and no one’s been able to identify a known breed of animal that kills this way.”
“A couple of people have even trapped what they think is the creature but it got away. They did, however, get pictures of it. I’m going to call back to our home base and have them emailed up here to me.” She looked around the table at each of the faces one at a time. “I know you all thought I was crazy when the twins were killed but I spent hours on the internet researching similar killings. I didn’t just pull this out of thin air.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Bobby held up his hands. “Let’s focus on what we need to do here. We have a dead body and that’s what we need to get on top of. Let’s do what we said last night. Be open to what Sophia and Logan have to say. Hell, I guess anything is possible.”
Rebecca, who had been silent through the exchange, looked at Logan then cleared her throat. “Why don’t we follow our usual routine, something we should have done last night. Only this time let Logan or Sophia do the white board. Then we’ll troop out to Darrell Franklin’s and see what we can figure out.”
“Logan will do it.”
He was surprised, sure that Sophia would want to do this herself after the tense conversation. On the other hand, he was a stranger, coming here without history as far as they were concerned. Neutral, so to speak. He pushed himself up from his chair, walked over to the board on the wall and picked up a marker.
“Okay, let’s start with the patterns as we know them,” he began.
* * * * *
The beast poked its nosed out of the warmth of the snow cave and looked around, blinking at the bright sunlight reflected off the pristine blanket on the ground. Its belly was still full, its lust still sated from the fresh kill three days ago. But the warning signs were there. The signals in its brain were telling it that the time was approaching for the next prey to be selected.
The beast loved the openness of the landscape and the isolation of the inhabitants. It made hunting so much easier. T
oday it would find a small inhabitant of the wooded area to take the edge off its appetite. They were so easy to kill there was almost no pleasure in it. But for the devil beast it was as much about amusement as it was about eating, and drinking the blood so essential to existence.
It lifted its misshapen snout into the wind, sniffing. A scent drifted on the air.
Human!
Here? Now?
No. Far away. And more than one. Not a target for hunting.
A sharp pain stabbed through the creature’s head at the blend of smells and it slunk back into the cave, curling in on itself on the ground. Later, when the breath-stealing pain was gone, it would scout the area for its next victim.
Later.
Nearly blinded by the pain, it closed its eyes and reached for the relief of sleep.
* * * * *
They split up outside the barracks. Bobby sent the other four members of the team off in pairs to begin questioning people within a ten-mile radius of the crime scene.
“They’ll bring you back reports,” he said as Sophia opened her mouth to object. “But you know how much snow we got and how hard it’s going to be to get around. Annie and Ray are taking the big pickup and hauling snowmobiles with them to get to some of the folks who aren’t plowed yet.” He took off his hat, rubbed his head, put it back on again. “This snow has fucked everything up.”
“You know I’m going to want to do some scouting myself,” she told him.
Bobby made a sound of frustration. “Sophia, that’s a lot of miles to cover. That could take days.”
“I need to see for myself where the creature could dig in and hide. Where it could hunt for its next victim.” She planted her hands on her hips. “Bobby, don’t get in my way on this. Please. You’ll be damn upset if someone gets killed because you do. This creature kills in a pattern of three. You want to wait for the next two bodies?”
“Fine, fine.” He shook his head, exasperated. “Whatever you want, okay? But you said the first thing you wanted was to see the crime scene so that’s where we’re going.”
“Fine,” she snapped back. “Good. Then let’s get going.”
Sophia was happy to note that the plows had obviously been busy after the snowfall of the previous night. The streets of Houlton were pretty clear as was Route 1. She hoped the same could be said of the driveway at Darrell Franklin’s fish camp which, according to the map, was off Highway 227 west of Presque Isle.
She needn’t have worried. Someone—Bobby or Rebecca—had apparently been on top of it. Three state police vehicles formed a line in the freshly cleared narrow path that left just enough room for someone to walk by them. Bobby Lacroix was waiting for them in front of the lead car, the others in the team gathered around him. Everyone’s face was carefully blank.
The fish camp sat in an ocean of snow punctuated by the stark skeletons of trees. Next to the house itself was a huge barn and beyond that a row of cabins stretched down to Alder Pond. The pond was frozen over now and the cabins closed until spring.
“This place is really at the ass end of nowhere,” Logan commented as he looked around.
“Like I said yesterday,” Sophia said as she and Rebecca exited the SUV right behind him, “I’m guessing it’s not much different from a lot of Montana.”
He gave a mirthless chuckle. “Yeah, you got that right.”
Rebecca led the way to where the others waited. “Thanks to whoever remembered to shovel a path to the doorway,” she told him.
“Paul Maquire, the campground owner who found him, took care of all this for us,” Bobby told her. “In fact, he should be along any minute. I figured your sister and her friend would want to talk to him.”
Sophia stepped up next to her sister. “Thank you, Bobby. We appreciate anything you can do to facilitate this.”
“Yeah, well, that still doesn’t mean I’m buying into your theory. But what you put up on the board back at the barracks at least makes me want to take a look at all the possibilities.”
She opened the folder she’d brought with her and pulled out eight-by-ten pictures of the crime scene. “I know it was impossible to preserve any of the scene with the snow and all,” she said, “but can one of you just walk us around it?”
“Scott and I will,” Rebecca said and led the way toward the house.
The porch ran full length across the front of the building. Two benches flanked the front door and a large wooden chair filled a corner. Sophia stood on the top step, Logan next to her, and watched as her sister paced out the crime scene diagram.
“He was found here,” Bec said as she drew an outline with her feet in front of one of the benches. “He only had his long johns on and a pair of jeans.”
“Not what you’d step outside in when the temp hovers near zero,” Logan commented.
“Right. He was still holding his shotgun. Actually, as cold as it was, by the time Paul Maquire found him it was frozen in his hand.” She took the pictures from Sophia and shuffled through them. “He was stretched out like this,” she pointed to the top photo, “as if he’d just stepped out of the front door and was dead in seconds.”
“If it was the Chupacabra,” Logan said, “that’s most likely the way it happened.”
“His body was drained of blood,” Bobby said from behind them. “But if he was killed while it was still snowing we figured the snow had washed away whatever blood there was.”
“There wasn’t any blood when my nephews were killed,” Sophia reminded him. “Or at the other bodies back at that time.”
“Or at the ones Night Seekers have looked into since then,” Logan added.
“Okay, okay, okay.” Bobby shook his head. “I’m just saying there are a lot of explanations for this.”
Sophia got right in his face, her temper on a short leash. “Yes. You’re right. Remember that. Yours isn’t the only one.”
“Kids,” Rebecca said, stepping up to them. “We’ve got business to take care of, remember?”
Sophia stepped off the porch and took a long look around the area. Not much different from all the other kill scenes they had pictures of—or had seen personally. Isolated. Distant. A person living alone. Except in the case of her nephews who’d been caught sneaking off on a forbidden trail. This time, however, acres of snow covered the landscape, permanently eradicating even the tiniest possibility of a trace. And the cold effectively killing the remnants of any odor, such as turpentine. Well, hell.
“It would be really impossible for a human being to sneak up on this place,” she commented. “It’s so exposed, even with the trees. And when did this most recent snowfall start?”
“Four days before the body was found,” Bobby answered. “That’s one of the reasons the campground owner was concerned. He wanted to make sure Darrell was weathered in properly.”
“Then tell me, Bobby.” Sophia looked up at him, unsmiling. “How would a human being get in here to attack the man? And why would he? Or she? If the killer is human and looking for prey, there are a lot easier places to hunt than out here in the middle of nowhere. Places where someone could get in and out without detection.”
Bobby glared back at her. “He could have come in before the storm really got up a head of steam. Driven up the driveway while it was still clear. Taken care of business and gotten away before the weather settled in.”
“And that doesn’t seem like a lot of trouble to go to for one kill?”
“Less chance of being disturbed,” he said stubbornly.
“You don’t think Darrell Franklin would have been suspicious of someone showing up out of the blue?” Sophia asked. “I get the impression he wasn’t a person to let his guard down easily.” She rubbed her forehead. “Or it could be a creature that hunts for isolated prey so there’s no chance of detection,” she insisted. “One that doesn’t fit anything you’re familiar with.”
“You’re giving whatever you think that creature is a lot of brain credit.” He was obviously trying to hang on to his theory.<
br />
“Maybe it has more than we think.” Night Seekers was beginning to think more and more that the devil beast had reasoning powers far beyond those of normal creatures. “Bobby, you can’t rule out anything at this point. Think back to when my nephews were killed.” She swallowed back the sudden surge of nausea. “And the two others around the same time. You never found any trace of a human being. Not one. Those killings were never solved. And now we have another one just like those.”
“So you’re saying that this—whatever it is—is back again? That maybe it’s even been around here all this time?”
“I’m saying that you can’t just toss the possibility aside because it doesn’t compute in your brain. Logan and I are here because Night Seekers has been dealing with a lot of killings just like this. Why not at least accept the possibility our theory night be right?”
Before Bobby could say anything else they heard the whining sound of a snowmobile and everyone turned. A man wrapped in a fur-lined parka, waterproof winter pants and heavy boots climbed off a massive Sno-Cat snowmobile and trudged up to where they stood. He pulled up the ski mask he wore beneath his hood and held out a hand to Bobby.
“Detective Lacroix,” he acknowledged.
Bobby nodded at him. “Thanks for coming.” He introduced everyone around, then turned back to the much older man. “If you could walk us through it again I’d really appreciate it. I hope this will be the last time.”
“Me, too.” The man shook his head. “Not a sight that’s easily wiped from your mind.” He climbed up onto the porch. “Okay. Darrell and I see each other almost daily when the weather’s nice but he closes up in the winter. He’s pretty isolated out here so I have him call me every day, let me know if he needs anything. Sometimes I come over on the Cat and we play cards. Have a couple of drinks. You know.”
He paused and took a long breath.
“I hadn’t heard from him in three days. When he didn’t answer the phone I got worried and came on over. The snow had stopped by then but it was pretty deep and I had a little trouble getting in even with the Cat. But holy hell. There he was, on the porch. Guts ripped out, big puncture wounds in the neck. Shotgun frozen in his hand. And I’ll tell you, a look of fright on his face like I’ve never seen before. And Darrell wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything.”
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