“Everything but California, Oregon, and Washington State,” Harben said. His eyes glittered. “Of course in the western states we mostly have blizzards and the occasional tornado. Mitchell doesn’t have a whole lot to do as a FEMA director, which is why he’s got himself a job at Peterson. Still, the FEMA director carries a lot of clout.”
“Why?” Eileen asked. She was honestly puzzled. She’d grown up in Wyoming, a place where disasters were dealt with at a very local level. The only time she’d ever seen anything to do with FEMA was when they rescued people out of trees during midwestern floods. Seemed pretty harmless to her.
“The FEMA director can suspend the Constitution and impose martial law, did you know that?” Rosen said. “They control all police, fire, ranger, and National Guard units during the duration of the emergency, whatever that might be.”
“So if the earthquake had been really severe, Mitchell might be our temporary boss?” Eileen found the thought horrifying.
“I find it horrifying as well, Eileen,” Harben said dryly. “But Colorado is a place where natural disasters on a large scale just don’t happen. So Mitchell has a pretty title and not much else. The FEMA association doesn’t worry me as much as his power with the state government. And he’s bearing down hard on us right now.”
“Can you hold them off?” Eileen asked. “And for how long?”
“I can keep this open for three days, detectives. You’d better have a tight case by then.”
“Deal,” Rosen said. “We’ll have it for you, boss.”
“See to it,” Harben said. He waved a hand at them to shoo them out of his office, and turned to his computer. Eileen and Rosen shared a look, then heaved themselves up and exited quickly.
“Are you pissed?” Rosen said conversationally, as they headed for their desks.
“I am pissed,” Eileen said. “I hope being pissed off is enough to get us what we need.”
“What about Joe?” Rosen asked. “Did he let you know anything about the disks?”
“Still looking at them,” Eileen said. “Hey, you know if Harben got pressure from the commissioner, you think the coroner might change his verdict on Leetsdale from murder to suicide? There wasn’t much doubt to me, but—”
“Good thought,” Rosen said. “I think I’ll pay a visit to Doctor Durland. If he’s getting pressure from one side, I’ll apply it from the other.”
“I’ll get Joe on the line,” Eileen said. “We’ll see what he says.”
“Detective Reed?” the secretary asked. She was holding out a slip of paper. “Major Bandimere called. She said she got a call from a man who wants to talk to Jim Leetsdale. He’s coming into town and she wants to know what to do.”
Rosen looked wolfish. “Go gettum,” he said. “I’ll go twist Doc Durland’s arm. Be careful, et cetera.”
“Of course,” Eileen said absently, looking at the slip of paper. The name was Alan Baxter, which sent an odd shiver down her spine. It was a perfectly ordinary name, and nobody she’d ever heard of before.
“He said he’d be into town at six o’clock or so, and he’d call after he checked into a motel,” the secretary said. “That’s about half an hour from now.”
“I can tell time,” Eileen snapped, and turned toward her desk. She felt bad about the snap even as she walked away. She felt worse after getting Joe’s answering machine at work and at home. He was probably in his chair in the Gaming Center, his hair bristling on end and his eyes red, lost to the world. She wanted him desperately right now, not for his work on Leetsdale’s files but simply because he was Joe, and he was hers, and he was good. She sighed and looked out the window at Cheyenne Mountain, then heaved herself to her computer screen and started working on her earthquake reports.
The phone rang promptly at six.
“Hello, this is Detective Reed,” Eileen said crisply.
“This is Alan Baxter,” a man’s voice said. “I’m calling about Jim Leetsdale. I called his office and they referred me to you.”
“Why did you want to speak to Jim Leetsdale?” Eileen asked.
“Well, it’s hard to explain,” the man said, hesitating. “My friend Krista Lewis was working—”
“I think we need to meet, Mr. Baxter,” Eileen interrupted, feeling a jolt run up her spine. Krista Lewis! Right in her lap.
“Should I come to the police station?”
“Where are you staying?”
“At the Rodeway Inn, off Bijou Street.”
“There’s a Perkins right across the street. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes,” Eileen said, glancing at her watch.
“Okay,” the man said doubtfully. “Will you be in uniform, ma’am?”
“No,” Eileen said, amused. “Just find a seat and I’ll find you.”
Eileen hung up the phone and found herself twisting a lock of her hair with her finger, a nervous habit from her childhood. She thought she’d broken the habit long ago. Odd. And there was no reason to be this nervous, either. Even odder.
11
Crestone, San Luis Valley, Colorado
Daniel Grantham’s house was agreeable, obviously built from a log home kit and added to over a period of years. The large center room was open to the ceiling, with a stone fireplace at one end and a bank of windows at the other. The furniture, huge and overstuffed, looked comfortably used. A television sat unapologetically atop a set of bookshelves crammed tight with books. Books in stacks surrounded the television. Two stacks of library books were piled on top of the set itself. More books sat in untidy piles on the floor. The air held the tang of woodsmoke and the smell of some sort of evening stew. In one corner a staircase rose to the second story where Navaho rugs hung over the railings. Marcia was examining the rugs with pleasure when she saw a flash of movement behind one. A little figure suddenly darted down a hallway and disappeared. Marcia flinched, startled.
“That’s my daughter, Sara,” Daniel said, stepping from the kitchen with two glasses in his hand. He shrugged. “She might come down later. She’s going through a shy period right now. Or maybe she’s playing at being a super spy. It’s hard to tell, with Sara.”
“Might we sit down, Mr. Grantham?” Marcia asked, smiling. “Do you have some time?”
“Time enough for conversation and supper, too, if you don’t mind stew,” Daniel said, gesturing to the couch. “We have stew a lot. My lady Jane is a weaver and she doesn’t cook. She’s in Alamosa tonight, so she won’t be back for supper.”
“She did the rugs?” Marcia asked, settling herself on the couch. It embraced her with well-worn cushions. The edge of a paperback rose out of a crack as her weight pushed the cushion down. Marcia picked it up and set it on the side table.
“Yeah. She doesn’t make a whole lot of money or anything, but they are really beautiful. And it makes her happy.”
“They are beautiful,” Marcia said. “Is Sara yours, hers, ours?”
“Originally hers, mine too since she was two,” Daniel said without offense, drinking from his glass. “Crestone attracts people, Miz Fowler. Some people feel the call when they get here, some when they read about it. Jane was here when I came here, with little baby Sara and her loom and not much else. She was staying with some friends, and we met at a party the school held for me. Took me a year to romance her, never have gotten her to agree to marry me.” Daniel frowned. “Eight years now, and she’s my Lady Jane and our Princess Sara and that’s all that matters to me. So what enchantment do you have, ma’am, to make me tell you these things?”
“I’m nothing but an old schoolteacher,” Marcia laughed. Then she stopped smiling, wanting to be honest with this lean young man, wanting to convince him that she was worthy of trust. “I wanted to find out about you, Mr. Grantham. I’m willing to tell you all I know about the girl on the dunes. I need to know if you’ll be open with me, too.”
Daniel nodded gravely. “Done. First of all, I’m Daniel, not Mr. Grantham.”
“Marcia,” Marcia said, and they nodded
heads. It wasn’t even a handshake, but they didn’t need to shake hands or sign documents. They had made an agreement, and it would bind them both as though it were written in blood.
“Tell me about the girl, first,” Daniel said. Marcia took a deep sip of her water, and started.
“I was trying to see the dawn from the dunes,” she said. “I’d been hiking for about forty-five minutes when I thought I saw something on the sand . . .”
When she finished, the water was gone from her glass and her voice was a little husky. Her ankle throbbed a little, as though remembering the pain from her story. She’d soaked it well and wrapped it tightly in an Ace bandage, but it was grumbling.
“More water?” Daniel asked, and Marcia nodded. When he left, Marcia leaned back in the couch and stretched her arms above her head, feeling her back crackle a little. She worked the ankle in circles and rotated her head backward to relieve the stiff tension in her shoulders.
She stared directly into a pair of wide brown eyes, peering at her through the banister.
“Hi,” she said softly.
“Hi back,” Sara said, in a deliberately scornful voice.
“Your stew smells delicious,” Marcia said, and Sara broke into a surprised grin.
“It’s elk. And I put morel mushrooms in the broth, and carrots that we grow in our garden. Potatoes, too. Dad makes biscuits, but they’re pretty heavy.” She stood up, revealing herself as a compact little girl of ten or so. Long brown hair spilled down her back. She was dressed in jeans and a thick wooly sweatshirt that contained a swirl of so many colors it hurt Marcia’s eyes.
“You listened to my story,” Marcia said. “I hope you’re not upset.”
Sara’s scorn intensified.
“Not me,” she said. “Dad gets all the calls from the valley. He keeps all the information. Cattle and horses all chopped up, and lights and fireworks and the Grays and the jets.”
“So you hear about it.”
“Yeah, and when he gets a live one we go out and see if we can spot it, too. Lots of times we do. We always see the jets come screaming by, trying to follow.” Sara was all the way down the stairs now, her face animated. She wasn’t shy at all, Marcia realized. Her father’s second guess must have been the correct one. Sara had been playing some sort of espionage game, with Marcia as the target. The game now forgotten, Sara strode into the room.
“This must be yours,” Marcia said, picking up the book she’d recovered from the couch cushions.
“Hey!” Sara said in delight and sat down with a solid thump at Marcia’s side. Sara was no pixie of a girl. Everything about her was steady, as though she could break down walls by walking right through them. She was going to be a formidable woman in a very few years.
“One of my favorites of all time,” Marcia said, handing Sara The Black Stallion. “But I never owned a horse in my life.”
“I have a horse,” Sara confided. “His name’s Dusty. He’s not like the Black, of course. He’s a quarterhorse, and Mom and Dad never let me ride without a helmet. But he’ll take a carrot out of my hand. You want to help me feed him?”
“After supper, Sara,” Daniel said from the kitchen doorway. He was wiping his hands on a dishtowel and looked very satisfied. “I put some biscuits in to go with Sara’s stew. About fifteen minutes. Marcia and I need to talk some more before supper.”
“Make sure you tell her all the parts,” Sara said, heaving herself up from the couch and stomping from the room. She was not angry. Stomping was her way of walking. She held her recovered book in one hand and when she’d disappeared upstairs, the lights seemed to dim a little.
“Wow,” Marcia said. “What a girl.”
“I know,” Daniel said smugly, and happily. He tossed the dishtowel over his shoulder and settled into his chair.
“I don’t like to talk about the Big Picture over supper,” he began, “so let’s get right to it. First of all, you’ve read about the SLV?”
“The SLV?”
“What we call the San Luis Valley.”
“Okay,” Marcia said with a nod. She leaned forward. “I know there are a huge number of sightings in the San—the SLV. Lots of cattle mutilations. The Taos Hum, the mysterious Great Sand Dunes that may not have been here as little as ten thousand years ago. That’s about it. Not a very coherent picture.”
“I’ll give you a list of books to read,” Daniel said. “Here’s the short version. The SLV is the largest alpine valley in the world. Mountains border it. The only entrances into the SLV are over mountain passes—Poncha Pass in the north, Cochetopa in the northwest, Wolf Creek to the west, and La Veta to the east. All of them close during heavy snows, which we get often during the winter months. The southern part of the valley closes up down in New Mexico. There are hardly any roads down there.”
“I came over Poncha Pass,” Marcia said. “The north. It was breathtaking to see the ranges on either side, opening out into the valley.”
“One of the best ways to come into the SLV,” Daniel said approvingly. “When you came in, the Sangres were to the east—your left. To the right was the San Juan Mountains. Over the San Juans is approximately twelve million acres of national and state forests. You could get lost in there for months and never find your way to Gunnison or any other town. To the east, over the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range, there is another deep valley, quite small, and then the Wet Mountains. Over the Wets you hit civilization—Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Interstate 25, and then the plains spreading out on into Kansas.”
“I see,” Marcia said. “Two mountain ranges to the east, wilderness to the west. You’re pretty isolated here.”
“A big empty playground,” Daniel agreed. “Now, I hope you’re not going to take this wrong, but I believe most of the playing down here is done by the U.S. government.”
Marcia raised an eyebrow.
“I know, I know,” Daniel said, raising his hands. “There are cattle mutilations that defy any explanation. There are abductions and lights that travel across the SLV at better than a thousand miles an hour, silently. Those are inexplicable to me and fit the category of a UFO. However, there’s a big Army base up north, Fort Carson. There’s Peterson, and Schriever Air Force Base, which we believe is not a weather station at all but some sort of missile defense base. There’s NORAD, of course, which is extremely interesting to us not only in terms of what they do, but who they work with. NORAD—the North American Air Defense Command—works with every branch of our military and they act as the early warning system for the free world. So, in sum, we have a very large military presence to the north, and a very isolated valley with a small, rural population down here.”
“Missile defense?” Marcia said, puzzled. “I never even heard of Schriever Air Force Base. And wasn’t missile defense cancelled—”
“We don’t think it was,” Daniel said. “And we believe some of their technology comes from either bartered or captured alien spacecraft. Plain old American military pilots fly some of the craft that we see in the SLV. We knew all about the Stealth fighter long before the Gulf War. They flew it down here and over the San Juans, to try the fighter over something other than Area 51 desert terrain.”
“What an interesting aircraft that is,” Marcia murmured.
“Here’s a tidbit for you,” Daniel smiled. “The designers of the Stealth knew that it was going to work when they started seeing dead bats in the hangar. Every morning they would have to clean up dozens of bats.” He paused and looked at Marcia expectantly.
“The radar deflection is passive?” she guessed. “The bats couldn’t see the plane and ran right into it.”
“Bingo,” Daniel said. “We’ve got some pretty amazing technology without ever adding in Grays. I think that perhaps ninety percent of what we see is plain old American know-how.”
“And the rest?” Marcia asked, knowing the answer.
“We know the rest,” Daniel said. “Most UFOs are spotted close to or by military bases, sites of military activit
y, nuclear power and weapons plants. They aren’t here to gather soil samples. Military presence generates UFO presence, which generates more military aircraft, and so on. I’m surprised we don’t see them chasing each other in big circles in the sky.”
“The girl I found,” Marcia said. “What does her death mean?”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said soberly. “The Grays are usually much more careful in abductions. They usually don’t leave bodies behind. But the girl you saw was mutilated.”
“Large, rectangular cuts on her shoulder and arm.” Marcia said. “I didn’t try to roll her over and see if there were any underneath her, though.”
“Odd thing about muties,” Daniel said. “You always see mutilations on the up side of the animal. Hardly ever on the down side. As though they aren’t big enough to roll the creature over once they get it down.” He grimaced and Marcia hunched her shoulders. The image was all too clear—childlike Grays, with their instruments and probes in their three-fingered hands, and the rolling frightened eye of the doomed cow.
Marcia collected herself and swallowed past a dry throat. “These clues seem to point toward a human being, then.”
“Which is even more frightening to me,” Daniel agreed. “A human implies a sociopath, a psycho, someone who enjoys killing women and cutting them.”
Into the silence, the buzzer from a kitchen timer went off. Sara came striding out of the upstairs hallway, her book in one hand. She thumped down the stairs two at a time.
“Supper!” she yelled. “I’m starving! Come on, you guys. Marcia needs to taste my stew.”
Daniel met Marcia’s eyes as they stood from their chairs, and the fear in Daniel’s eyes was as apparent as a shout.
Perkins Restaurant, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Eileen Reed was nervous. For no reason. Something had lit up the lizard part of her brain and it was frantically alert. This reminded her of her one bungee-jumping episode, back in her teens. She’d had no problem going up in the balloon, and the tightness of the cuff on her feet was reassuring. She pushed off the platform built along one side of the balloon’s wicker basket and that was okay, too. The falling, though, woke the lizard part of her brain. No matter how much she tried to tell herself that she was safe and on an adventure, the ancient part of her screamed in fear and poured adrenaline into her body until she saw spots in front of her eyes. Her heart raced and her mouth filled with a coppery taste as a field of grass beneath her raced to meet her. Then the cord tightened around her ankles and she was jerked abruptly skyward. She shook for an hour after she was safely down, laughing in delight and fear.
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