“We can check his alibis with Gonzalez,” Rosen said, picking up the autopsy pages and scanning them. Eileen knew he wasn’t reading a word.
“Okay. I really need some food.” She stood from her chair and reached for her coat.
“I’ll go with you,” Rosen said immediately, starting to rise from his own chair.
“No, don’t bother,” Eileen said. “I’m just going to run down to the sub shop. Why don’t you get on the phone to Gonzalez and clear this up? I hope.”
“Okay,” Rosen said doubtfully, sitting back down.
Eileen wrapped her coat around her and put her gloves on. The rushing sound was back, like the way her A-10 jet airplane used to sound at idle, the way it sounded before takeoff. It was called the Warthog, the ugliest plane the Air Force had, and she loved it. Warthogs cruised very close to the ground, carrying heavy antitank cartridges in a chain gun that ran the length of the plane. Eileen had never seen combat, and was glad. She loved to fly, but she’d never loved to shoot. She’d never wanted to kill anyone.
“What was that?” Rosen asked.
“Nothing,” Eileen said, trying to keep a small, hurt smile from her face and failing. “I was just thinking that it would only make sense.”
“What would make sense?” Rosen asked, real concern flaring in his eyes.
“That my father would turn out to be a murderer too,” Eileen said bitterly, and turned to find her way to the stairs. She could hardly see, the light from the windows was so mercilessly bright and glaring.
While she was warming up her Jeep, there was a knock at her window, nearly scaring her to death. It was Rosen, and he was pointing at the other side of her car. He wanted to get in. She smiled and gave him a friendly wave, and pulled away from the parking lot and out into the street with what she hoped was nonchalance. As she drove away, she caught a glimpse of Rosen standing, coatless, staring after her.
His figure receded in her rearview mirror, receded like the events of her life, as though being a detective were a dream she had once before she woke up. She felt nothing but the roaring sensation, heard nothing but the pounding blood in her ears. She made a slushy, muddy turn onto the entrance ramp to the Interstate, and headed south toward Pueblo and, eventually, the San Luis Valley.
She was going to confront her father. She was going to learn the truth. And if it killed her, if he killed her, then that was okay too. Her whole life felt like a dream, the dream of a dying three-year-old child, perhaps, as the wheels spun in the crushed car and her mother lay dead beside her. What lay between that moment and the coming one was unimportant, as meaningless as a mote of dust drifting in the air. As she accelerated onto the nearly dry highway, she began to hum tunelessly.
Kim’s Place, Alamosa, Colorado
Kim’s Place was almost deserted in the hush between lunch hour and the dinner rush. Alan saw Marcia Fowler immediately. She was sitting in a booth with her back to him. A tendril of steam rose from a cup of coffee in front of her.
“Have you been waiting long?” he asked, sliding in to sit across from her. She looked up and smiled and tilted her cup toward him.
“Just poured,” she said. “I nearly got stuck getting out of Crestone. The roads are dry here, though.”
“Menu?” the waitress asked. Alan noticed that her nametag said “Kay.” She was a hard-looking teen but she carried a glass of water, a cup of coffee, and a menu with competence. Marcia smiled at the girl as though she were a fresh-faced country girl with rosy cheeks instead of a pale-faced thing with too much makeup.
“Yes, please,” Alan said, taking the menu. His body was settling down and he was ready to refuel. “Coffee, too, thank you.”
“So tell me all and I’ll tell you all,” Marcia said with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Alan realized for the first time that she was pretty, with curly gray hair framing a face that carried lines that all curved up, as though she’d spent a lifetime being cheerful. Her eyes were dark, framed by lashes as black as soot. They were poker eyes, those, revealing nothing. Her hands, older than the rest of her, rested quietly around her coffee cup.
“I remembered the name of the Air Force officer that Krista was working with up in Colorado Springs,” Alan began. “So I drove up to the Springs to talk to him, and found out that he was dead, too . . .”
Alan talked through two glasses of water and a turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich. Marcia was a good listener, her dark eyes intent and interested. She lost her poker expression when Alan finally got to Nikola Tesla and the earthquake machine. Her eyes widened and she mouthed something that looked to Alan like “arp.”
“What was that?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, waving her hand. “Finish your story.”
Finally he wound down, poking his french fries one by one into his ketchup and eating them as he finished with his own lonely vigil in Joe Tanner’s house. No murderers attacked, no assassins tried to stage suicides, no explanations came to Alan Baxter as he read through Internet pages spit out by Joe’s smelly laser printer. Nothing tied the whole story together for him.
Marcia, who had ordered a piece of pie somewhere during his story, stirred the crumbs with her fork after he stopped.
“Well,” she said. “That certainly explains a lot.”
“What about you, then?” Alan asked. He felt confused all over again. Telling about the events of the past few nights didn’t seem to make much sense now. People were setting off earthquakes? It was fantastic, impossible.
“Don’t go running away screaming, now,” Marcia said. “I don’t want to be left with the bill. I’m on a fixed income, you know.”
“I won’t run away,” Alan said, smiling.
“Okay, then,” Marcia said calmly. “I belong to MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. So I’m one of your friend Joe Tanner’s freaky alien believers. I was convinced that aliens murdered Krista Lewis when I first saw the body. There was a lot that seemed similar to cattle mutilations, but a lot that didn’t seem similar as well.” She glanced up beneath her black eyelashes to gauge his reaction and must have seen something in his face. “What?” she asked.
“The cattle,” Alan whispered. He swallowed hard, seeing the cattle in his mind’s eye with perfect clarity. The round brutal holes punched into the tough hide, the missing organs, the perfect blackness of the injuries, and the uncaring light of the night sky. He could almost smell the sage and the gasoline.
“You’ve seen a cattle mutilation?” Marcia said eagerly. “You have? Where? Was it here?”
“I can’t tell you about it,” Alan said, blinking the image away. “But—I was told that Krista Lewis was raped. I saw those cows—” he stopped.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Marcia said, though she obviously wanted him to. “Our conclusion—MUFON, that is—is that this is a human murderer. The whole UFO frenzy going on is just a smokescreen. Your ideas make so much sense to me!”
“What do you mean?“
“I can tell you,” Marcia said slowly. “If you want to hear.”
“I want to hear,” Alan said. He’d heard about UFO nuts and had watched television shows about aliens, but had never heard anyone explain the phenomenon in any coherent way. If someone could do that, it would be Marcia Fowler. He could hardly believe this very intelligent, sane-looking woman was a UFO believer.
“All right, then,” Marcia said. “Here’s the explanation in as few words as I can make it. You know about the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico saucer crash?”
“Sure.”
“It was a crash, and there was a survivor. He was what we call a Gray, and they’ve been visiting our planet for a long time. The crash was an accident, and the original cover-up was just an automatic reflex, from a government that was essentially still in World War Two battle mode. But then the cover-up became something more.”
“Why?”
“Because the Grays struck a deal with our government,” Marcia said calmly. “They are a species on the way out, on the far en
d of their evolution. Their birth rates are almost nonexistent, their life-forms increasingly frail. They have incredible technology, though, far in advance of our own. So, more or less by accident, our captive became their emissary. Our government agreed to allow genetic testing of animals and limited, nonharmful abductions of humans.”
“What for?” Alan asked. He took a long drink of water. The worst part of this was it sounded plausible to him. Who believed the Air Force when they came up with their lame explanation about Roswell? Alan thought the crash-test-dummies-in-balloons idea was hilarious. And ridiculous. And unbelievable.
“We share some parts of our DNA,” Marcia said. “I’m a Christian, lots of serious UFOlogists are. God created us all, we believe, so why wouldn’t we share a common ancestry? Anyway, the Grays believe they could re-infuse their species with our younger DNA. The deal was that the Grays give us technology, our government gives them some medical subjects who wouldn’t be harmed, who wouldn’t even remember that they’d had eggs harvested or sample materials taken—”
“That’s horrible,” Alan said thoughtfully, and Marcia nodded back gravely.
“Of course. But so was incarcerating Japanese-Americans, right? And the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on black men. It seemed like a pretty good deal at the time to men who were still reeling from World War Two and the rise of Communist Russia. Now here’s the really horrible part.”
“What’s that?”
“The Grays reneged on the deal. They abducted far more than they agreed to, they harmed animals and humans, and they didn’t deliver on the warp drive, or whatever it was they were supposed to give us humans. This, to me, is the part that makes the most sense. Why won’t the government come clean on Roswell?”
“Because they’d have to admit they offered up their own citizens as medical guinea pigs,” Alan said. “Of course.”
“We’re in a war, you know,” Marcia said. “A very covert war, but a war just the same. That’s what I believe. That’s why you see Air Force jets trying to intercept UFOs; that’s why they never admit that’s what they were doing. And all of that has very little to do with Krista Lewis, except she doesn’t fit into the pattern. She was raped. That’s a human thing.”
“So her murder has nothing to do with aliens.”
“I don’t think so,” Marcia said. “But I do think there might be someone in the government involved. There’s a lot of government activity in the San Luis Valley. That may or may not be why there is so much UFO activity here too. But when I found Krista’s body I heard the Taos Hum, the tone, right before the earthquake.”
“They set it off. They set it off right next to you,” Alan said in wonder.
“Good thing it wasn’t right next to me,” Marcia said matter-of-factly. “Or I would be dead like Krista. But don’t you see? The hum proves your story. The Tesla machine makes a sound.”
“And it’s gone off before,” Alan said.
“Enough to have a name. Enough to attract the attention of the MUFON. It’s going to go off again, Alan. Eventually, they’re going to kill lots more people than Jim Leetsdale and his wife and baby and Krista Lewis. They’re playing with forces they do not understand. This time they have to be stopped.” Marcia stopped, breathing hard. Then she laughed and a blush climbed her cheeks.
“I sound like an idiot,” she said.
“Not an idiot,” Alan corrected. “Like a person who knows right from wrong. They don’t, these earthquake people. They think it’s okay to rape and kill. They think it’s okay to set off earthquakes that might hurt more than they help. They can’t have this kind of power.”
“So how do we stop them?” Marcia asked. “Do you want to come back to Crestone with me tonight? There’s some people you could meet—”
“No,” Alan said. “I’ll tell Sheriff Gonzalez what we know, and I’ll let the Colorado Springs detectives know too. I think if we get the word out to the police, they might be able to handle the rest.” He smiled at her, a great big reassuring smile, because he knew who was going to stop this madness.
He was. He hoped.
Interstate 25, Southern Colorado
Memories clamored outside the windshield like ghosts pressing against the glass. Eileen couldn’t keep them out, not entirely. For a while she could concentrate on the road, on the slushy spray thrown up by the big trucks she passed, on the brilliance of the sun as it fell to the horizon. Then she would find herself remembering how it was to be hugged by Tracy Reed, how it took her a year to allow herself to be cuddled and kissed without turning into a fearful wooden doll. She was four years old before she returned one of Tracy’s carefully casual hugs. She remembered how Tracy had burst into tears when she put her arms around her adoptive mother’s neck and gave her a tentative little squeeze. They’d been making cookies in the kitchen and the air smelled wonderful, full of vanilla and chocolate chips. Eileen had cried too, startled and afraid she’d done something wrong. Tracy tried to keep from weeping but she couldn’t. So she sat down on the floor of the kitchen and rocked Eileen and held her until they were both calm. That was the beginning of trust.
Eileen put her turn signal on to pass a lumbering old Winnebago. She didn’t want to remember any of that. She wanted to remember the ten-year-old Eileen. She hadn’t hit puberty yet so she was slim and strong as a willow wand. She was chasing a cow that was trying to cut back out of the herd and head back to the creek bed, where there was shade and water. The herd had eaten all the grass in the area, so Eileen and her dad were moving them into the upper pasture. Eileen and her cowhorse, Redbone, had dashed after the cow, and when it abruptly disappeared Eileen had only a second to realize that the cow had fallen into a brushy, narrow ravine. Then she lifted herself over Redbone’s haunches and lifted him into the air with all the force of her will. They’d jumped the ravine and saved both their lives, and even when Eileen had to put down the poor injured cow, she kept remembering how it felt to jump, how she knew she could leap over anything, anything at all.
She remembered the extra psychology courses she’d taken at the University of Wyoming, the extra reading she’d done to try and discover whether or not she would end up like her birth mother. She guessed her mother had been manic-depressive, or bipolar, in high school. She didn’t know if she would end up like her mother. She didn’t know who her father was or what he was, or even if he was still alive. She held herself back from humanity like a person in a glass jar. She always thought she was brave, but she wasn’t. She was an enormous coward.
Now she knew who her father was. She was trying to find him, now, to find out if her father was a murderer just like her poor damaged mother. What haunted her, the thought that couldn’t be kept entirely away, was Teddy Shaw. She was a killer now. Had Teddy Shaw’s death brought her father out of the past like some ancient, unlocked door? Was her father a killer?
Once she knew, she would find a way to live with it, she promised herself. Not knowing was the difficult part. She had to know.
The exit for La Veta and the San Luis Valley loomed up in the distance. Eileen flipped on her headlights in the coming dusk and took the exit.
Briargate Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
“Okay, run that by me one more time,” Joe said into the phone.
“Eileen’s gone. I think she’s heading down to the San Luis Valley after Alan.”
“Who might be a murderer.”
“Might be.”
Rosen’s voice was, like always, without emotion. Joe rubbed his forehead with suddenly cold fingers. He was sitting in his home office chair, where he’d been working all day on a refinement of his earthquake simulation. He’d had some ideas that he simply had to put into his program. Once Eileen, Rosen, and Alan Baxter had left, Joe had taken a seat in his chair and hadn’t moved except for an occasional trip to the bathroom. It seemed as though Eileen had just left. Alan, a murderer?
“Impossible,” Joe said flatly. “He couldn’t be.”
“I don’t deal in
impossibilities,” Rosen said coldly.
“In other words, we can’t take the chance that he could be the murderer,” Joe said, feeling a sinking sensation in his gut. He couldn’t, either. Could Alan be an imposter, a man pretending to be Eileen’s father? As soon as the thought materialized in his head, Joe rejected it. You couldn’t fake bone structure, placement of the eyes, the clever narrow hands. They were too alike to be anything but father and daughter.
But he could still be a murderer, Joe reluctantly admitted to himself. All murderers were someone’s son or daughter, sometimes a father or mother or uncle. Just because Alan seemed as transparently good as a pane of clear glass didn’t mean a thing.
“That’s right,” Rosen said, answering Joe’s thoughts.
“Well let’s go get her, then,” Joe said.
“That’s why I called,” Rosen said. “Harben released me to drive down and find her. He contacted Gonzalez. It’s my idea to bring you.”
“Where are you now?” Joe asked.
“About two blocks away,” Rosen said with infuriating calm.
“Well, shit, that doesn’t give me any time,” Joe said, and cast a glance at his Frankenputer. There was that one last change he wanted to make. Never mind. “Do you have hiking gear? Camping gear?”
“A change of clothes in a gym bag,” Rosen said. “I can’t go home, remember.”
“Good thing I have two backpacks,” Joe said, walking down the hallway toward what he’d dubbed his sports room. “And a tent. Knock when you’re here, I’ve got to—”
“I’m here,” Rosen said, and keyed off his phone.
“Get some stuff ready,” Joe said grimly. He spun on his heel and hurried back to the front of the house. He caught a glimpse of his bedroom, and his bed, striped with late afternoon sunshine. He hadn’t made the bed today and he could clearly see the imprint of Eileen’s head on a pillow. He could almost smell her, the sleepy soapy fragrance that clung to every inch of her skin. Underneath that she always smelled a little bit wild, a strong musky scent that must come from her adrenaline-charged lifestyle. Joe loved her a bit sweaty, a little bit tangy, when her natural scent threatened to overwhelm all the civilized coverings of soap and deodorant. The way she smelled after they made love. He bit back a strangled curse and looked away from the bed. He couldn’t lose her. He simply couldn’t.
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