by Bob Mayer
Riley pulled out the ID the pilot of the chopper had given him, identifying him as a special agent of the FBI. "Agent Riley. This is Doctor Merrit. She works with my team."
The woman didn't offer her hand. "I'm Lieutenant Giannini, Chicago homicide. This is a real pile of shit."
Riley stepped up next to her. "Can I take a look?"
Giannini shrugged. "Yeah. I wouldn't take the doc in, though, unless she's got a strong stomach." She pointed at a black van with Coroner stenciled on the side. "I gotta move the bodies soon. Would've had them outta here by now if the chief hadn't called and said you were coming."
They ignored Giannini's comment and climbed into the back of the trailer. Riley took in the bloody scene. He glanced at Merrit; she seemed detached, gazing at the bodies without expression. He walked through the trailer, noting the droppings near the front end among the straw. The Synbats must have ridden up there, hidden in the bales. No sign of the backpacks — not that Riley had expected to find them. Something had caused the two men to stop and open up the back. Had they heard something, or seen something in the rearview mirror? Maybe they spotted the Synbats trying to get out.
Riley hoped that the Chicago Police Department would assume that the feces were from horses and not investigate too thoroughly. He kicked some straw over the pile with his foot before he went out the back to rejoin the female detective. "You find anything in there?"
Giannini shook her head. "Just the two stiffs." She flipped open a notebook. "Wallets ID them as Jeremiah and Louis Sattler. The rig is Louis's." She closed the book. "The chief said you have some idea who did this and that I'm to cooperate with you." Her shoulders squared up and she looked Riley in the eye. "So what do you have, and why are the feds taking this over?"
"I work with the bureau's serial-killer task force. We've been tracking two men who we believe are responsible for some killings down in Tennessee. We think these two might have hitched a ride in this trailer and come up here."
Giannini reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of gum. She popped two pieces in her mouth without offering any. "Quit smoking last week. It helps a little." She chomped on her gum for a few seconds. "All right. What about you, Doc? What do you do for a living?"
Merrit turned slowly and looked at the police officer. "I work with Agent Riley. I do psychological profiles on killers."
"A shrink," Giannini nodded. "OK. Well, it don't matter much to me. The chief said this is your case now. I'd prefer not to have any of the citizens of my city killed, so I'll help you as much as I can. What now?"
Riley looked around. "Where was the truck found?"
"I'll take you there." Giannini gave some orders to a few uniformed cops and then led the way to an unmarked car. Riley got in the passenger side and Merrit sat in the back.
"These two guys — they must be pretty damn mean. I've seen some fucked-up bodies, but these about take the cake." Giannini glanced over her shoulder at Merrit. "I hope my language doesn't offend you, Doc."
Merrit appeared not to have noticed.
"Well, anyway, the weird thing is, are these guys cannibals or what? I mean those poor stiffs in there were missing some flesh."
Riley nodded as they pulled out of the parking lot. "Our suspects have done the same thing before to other bodies."
"Uh-huh." Giannini roared down the on ramp to the freeway and expertly cut her way through traffic then she clamped a small blue bubble onto the roof and pulled off the highway. "This is it. The truck was parked off the road right here."
Riley got out of the car and looked around. Buildings pressed up on all sides of the highway. "Do you have an estimate on time of death?"
Giannini watched the cars speeding by. "Rough guess is about an hour before the bodies were found. The coroner might be able to give us a little more accurate time." She popped her gum. "Hell, your suspects might've hitched another ride and be in another state by now."
Riley thought about the backpacks and the thousands of hiding places in the city, along with the ready supply of food. "No. They're here."
Giannini frowned. "How do you know that?"
"I can feel it." The words were out before he realized what he'd said.
Giannini looked at him closely. "A fed with feelings. That's a new one on me."
Riley ignored the comment. "Let's drive around a little."
They got back in the car, and Giannini took them off the interstate and cruised the surrounding neighborhoods. With a sinking feeling Riley took in the vast number of abandoned buildings and warehouses.
"What are you looking for?" Giannini asked.
"Just taking a look," Riley replied. "I've never been here before."
"You sound like you're from New York," Giannini noted.
"Yeah. The Bronx," Riley replied, his eyes flickering over the neighborhoods as they drove through.
"You Italian?" the detective asked.
"No. Irish and Puerto Rican."
"Hmm" was Giannini's only comment.
"What's that over there?" They had almost forgotten that Merrit was in the backseat. She pointed between the two of them.
"That's Soldiers' Field, where the Bears play," Giannini told her.
"The bears?"
Giannini looked at Riley with a raised eyebrow as she turned the corner and headed toward the large stadium.
"A professional football team," Riley explained.
"Stop here," Merrit said. Giannini stopped the patrol car at the start of an overpass that crossed a Gordian knot of railroad tracks running next to the stadium. A park stretched out on the far side of the overpass, leading to Lake Michigan. The landscape was well groomed and Riley doubted that the Synbats would be able to stay hidden long in there, although it was the only open area he'd seen since landing.
"What about the park?" Merrit asked, her thoughts obviously echoing his own.
Riley winced as Giannini swung her head from Merrit to him. "You think two nutcases would try to hide out in the park after slashing a couple of people?"
"They like nature," Riley explained lamely. "But you're right. They wouldn't go in there."
"Why are you so sure they haven't moved on? You said they moved here from Tennessee. Seems to me they'd be used to moving, and if they got any brains at all they wouldn't want to hang around here."
"Maybe they have," Riley said wearily. He was tired of playing games. He needed to dump the cop — she was asking too many questions. "Let's go to your headquarters. My boss should have arrived by now."
Giannini pulled a tire-squealing U-turn. The rest of the drive was made in silence.
Colonel Lewis was waiting in the police chief's office, neatly attired in a three-piece suit. He had been wooing the police chief and making sure that all information on the killings was kept from the media. The chief was more than happy to have the case taken off his already overburdened officers. A gone file was a cleared file.
"Anything you need, we'll be glad to give you a hand," the chief said as the meeting broke up. "I'm assigning Lieutenant Giannini full time to be your liaison. You tell her what you want and she'll get it for you."
Riley glanced sideways at the detective and saw her jaw set in a tight line. Lewis gave Riley directions to the safe house he'd established in the city, then Lewis took Merrit with him, leaving Riley with the detective to give her the list of information they required. Giannini led the way to a small cubicle that was piled high with file folders.
"Grab a seat," she said as she slumped down behind her desk. She sat there for a long minute, her dark eyes quietly assessing Riley, then she grabbed a notepad and pen. "All right. Give me the laundry list of what you want. Your boss must have some pull to get the chief to be so cooperative."
Riley had been thinking about what he needed the entire time they were in the car. "We need to know about any killings, particularly if the circumstances are similar to what we had in the horse rig — mutilated bodies and all that."
"Of course," Giannini replied,
making a note.
Riley ignored her sarcastic tone. "I'll be by twice a day to get all this stuff. We also need to know about missing persons, broken down by areas last seen."
Giannini frowned. "That won't be easy. People have to be missing for forty-eight hours before we list them officially. By then it's usually 'cause they don't come home and someone reports them, so it ain't like we got this long list of where they were last."
Forty-eight hours. Riley cursed silently. That was a dead end. "All right. We also need to know if anybody reports seeing something strange."
"Something strange." Giannini put down the notepad. She didn't bother masking her tone anymore. "Like what strange? This is Chicago, for chrissake. There's always something strange going on."
"These two guys were last seen wearing animal skins — fur and all that," Riley explained lamely. "If someone reports something like, say, a werewolf or something, I need to know ASAP."
"A werewolf?" Giannini took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling for half a minute. "All right, Agent Riley. Why don't you level with me? Who the hell are you? You're not FBI, that's for damn sure. They always wear three-piece suits and carry clipboards. And even they know that missing persons reports are forty-eight hours old. No disrespect intended, but you don't know diddly about law enforcement. And you don't know diddly about Chicago. I can't help you if you don't help me."
Riley continued, ignoring the questions. "The fugitives will probably come out of hiding at night, if they come out at all. They won't be going to motels or bars or any of that — they don't like people much." He met her glare. "That's the kind of strange I'm talking about."
Giannini's lips were pursed together and her voice dropped the temperature in the room. "All right. Strange. You got it. Anything else?"
Riley stood. "No." He handed her the card that Lewis had given him. "This is my number. Call me if anything happens."
"Uh-huh."
9:04 P.M.
"We've got two unmarked panel trucks downstairs at our disposal," Lewis said. "We've got eight portable phone lines. It's just a question of waiting."
"Waiting until the Synbats kill someone," Riley replied.
"Or get spotted."
"What about reaction from the police when we open fire in the city?" Riley asked as he watched the members of his team lay out their sleeping bags on the wood floor. Their weapons were racked against the wall ready for use. They were occupying a warehouse in south Chicago that was used by federal agencies such as the DEA and the FBI whenever they conducted operations in the area. The other personnel from Riley's team had arrived several hours ago, all looking uncomfortable in their civilian clothes. They'd all been issued papers and cards identifying them as federal agents.
"Don't worry about the police. That's my job," Lewis said. A half dozen of his men were also in the building, ready to react. They had a command post set up not only to man the phones, but also to listen in with scanners to all emergency frequencies.
Riley shrugged. It was Lewis's problem, and as far as Riley was concerned, he hoped the lid did blow off this whole operation. He was concerned for the safety of his men.
Doc Seay was the acting team sergeant; he'd taken Riley aside a half hour ago to brief him on the close-out down in Tennessee. The local media had bought the story of escaped prisoners. The deaths of Knutz and T-bone had been explained away by placing them on board the helicopter, which had been described as crashing during a training exercise. Seay said that Colonel Hossey was more than a little upset with the DIA, but the commander of the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg had personally flown up and intervened between Hossey and General Trollers.
Another mess had been swept under the rug in the name of national security. Riley preferred to think of it more as career security for most of the people involved.
"I want your men ready to move out with five minutes' notice," Lewis ordered Riley. "If we get anything off the scanners, we're going in right away."
"Yes, sir."
11:35 P.M.
Holly's nose was buried in a cardboard box of rotting vegetables thrown away by a produce truck on its way out of the city. The dog ate ravenously, teeth crunching on some carrots, when she suddenly paused and lifted her head. She looked from side to side, eyes training to penetrate the shadows in the deserted street. A lone streetlight more than a hundred meters away cast a feeble glow, reflecting off broken glass. The roar of traffic from the more populated part of the city was muted here.
It wasn't the noise or the light that had caught Holly's attention, though. Above the smell of her decaying meal, she'd caught a whiff of something else, something that her mind said was danger. She slunk farther into the darkness near a dumpster and crouched down, peering out. Then she heard the noise of glass breaking. Something was moving, coming closer from the dark end of the street. Deep, raspy breathing echoed off the warehouse walls.
Holly's head twitched from side to side. A low whimper started deep in her throat but her mouth clamped shut in an instinctive sense of self-preservation.
A figure lurched into the dim light, thirty meters away. The sight of the drunk relaxed Holly slightly. But in a second she was tense again as two figures appeared behind the man, moving fast. She barely had time to register their presence before they were on the hapless human. He uttered one brief yelp of surprise before his throat was torn out. The figures began dragging the body away toward the darkness.
Suddenly, one of the creatures halted and turned, golden eyes peering back up the street, searching. Holly froze, her breathing halted, instinctively knowing that she was in danger. The blood-covered muzzle of the creature turned in Holly's direction and bared large fangs as it growled.
Holly bolted for the opposite end of the street, deep-throated howls following her escape.
Chapter 20
Friday, 10 April
Chicago
7:04 A.M.
"Anything?" Merrit asked.
"Nothing," Riley replied as he slid his 9mm pistol in the shoulder holster under his denim jacket.
"What's the plan for today?"
Riley pointed to the desk where Lewis was sitting, going through the reports gleaned from all sources. "We're going to the area where the Synbats left the rig and start searching outward, checking all the abandoned buildings. It's a shot in the dark, but it beats sitting here all day."
Merrit looked over at Riley's men, who were eating fast food brought in by one of the DIA agents. "How are you going to do that?"
"Civilian clothes. Armed only with pistols. We've got our FBI IDs, and Lewis will take care of the locals."
"It might work." Merrit pointed at the city map posted on an easel. "I don't think they've gone far from where they got out of the rig. If the timing on the brothers' deaths is correct, the Synbats had only a few hours at best before the pods activated. Once that happened they had to find a place to hide."
"How long before the young Synbats are able to move about?" Riley asked.
"Two to three days," Merrit answered. "A week before they'll have any chance at self-sufficiency by killing small game, such as rats, dogs, or cats, and scavenging garbage. They'll be eighty percent grown in a month. Able to mate in two months. Full grown at four months."
"When will they be a threat to humans?"
Merrit shrugged. "That's hard to say. Individually I would say in a month. But I'd hate to run into a pack of week-old Synbats working in concert."
"If we stumble onto their lair in the next four or five days, then we ought to get all the young ones, right?"
"We should, unless they've split forces and have more than one hiding place."
That stopped Riley for a second. It's what he would do if he were in the Synbats' position. "You think they'd do that?"
"I hope not, but they split up in Tennessee in order to survive," Merrit reminded him. "There's no reason why they wouldn't do it again."
Riley backtracked. "If we get all three adults in the next four d
ays and eliminate them, the young would starve?"
"Unless the old ones have left an adequate supply of food for the young ones."
"Damn," Riley cursed. "They already tried that once with the horses back in the LBL, so I guess they'll do it again."
Merrit nodded. "Now you're beginning to see the magnitude of the problem. Not only that, but don't forget that the adults are capable of breeding again. With only a ten-day gestation period, we could see another generation of Synbats born early in the week after next."
"I know all that," Riley remarked irritably. "I'm more worried about the fact that they always seem to be one step ahead of us. We need them to make a mistake, or we need a hell of a lot of luck, and I don't like working that way. The problem I'm having with all this — " He paused as Colonel Lewis strode up.
"Lieutenant Giannini just called. She says she has something you might be interested in. I'll take your men and start the search while you go downtown." He tossed a portable phone to Riley. "Stay in touch. Clear?"
"Yes, sir." He turned to Merrit. "Let's roll."
8:55 A.M.
Giannini was dipping a doughnut in a cup of coffee when Riley and Merrit appeared at her door. She waved the dripping pastry at them, gesturing for them to come in. "Grab a seat."
Riley glanced around, then stepped back out to drag in an extra chair, while Merrit took the only one available. A silence ensued, broken only by the sound of the detective eating her breakfast. Riley looked around, taking in the files piled here and there and the overflowing garbage can. There were a few plaques on the wall and Riley read the nearest, a commendation for bravery while breaking up a bank robbery. Riley returned his gaze to Giannini and she was looking at him. Their eyes locked for a long second.
Giannini broke contact first, pointing at the grungy coffeepot sitting on top of her filing cabinet. "Want some?"
Merrit shook her head, but Riley stood and poured himself a plastic cup full of the dark liquid. He took a sip and grimaced at the gritty taste. "What have you got?"
Giannini kicked back in her seat, sipping out of a cracked mug. "Nothing solid. Just been wandering around the station house that covers the district where your killers disappeared. I was there earlier this morning when the shifts changed." She grinned, laugh lines appearing around her dark eyes. "You want to find out what's happening on the streets, you just hang around the locker room."