The Nature of the Beast

by GM Ford

  “Nice to know I’m not the only one who lies to themselves,” Audrey said.

  “Excuse me?” He tried to sound offended but failed to pull it off.

  “You’re trying to tell me that your lack of a long-term committed relationship is because of your hand.”

  “Not entirely,” Craig quickly hedged. “But certainly…you know…a woman has a right to expect…”

  Audrey cut him off. “I think it’s kinda sexy,” she said. “And I’m betting a good number of my girlfriends would too.” His discomfort was palpable in the darkness. “All kinda kinky post-industrial gothic like,” she purred.

  Embarassed, Craig staged a conversational counter-attack. “Did you know that your file suggests that the opposite sex might not be your gender of preference. Says the grad assistants referred to you as the Cooler or the Igloo.”

  She laughed out loud. “I guess that’s the price of refusing to be groped in the back of Subaru Outbacks,” she said. “Seems like if a girl just doesn’t fall for some idiot’s line of patter, the only possible explanation is that she’s a lesbian. Couldn’t possibly be that the doofus is crude and obvious and doesn’t brush his teeth on a regular basis.” She waved away the thought.

  Craig staged another surprise segue. “You took the Behavioral Analysis course at Quantico?”

  “Yep.”

  “Top of your class. Invited to join the unit, but turned it down.”

  “Too much of that stuff’s bad for the soul.”

  “But you’re a believer.”

  “It’s a proven tool,” Audrey said matter-of-factly.

  “As long as it never replaces solid police work,” Craig cautioned.

  She turned her attention back to the cabin. Her expression was incredulous. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those Luddites who doesn’t believe in profiling?”

  “Of course I do,” he said quickly. “As you said, it’s a proven tool. And we have a moral obligation to use every tool at our disposal.”

  “But?”

  “But, on occasion…” He stopped himself. “Let me put it this way, a profile is a preconceived notion and preconceived notions are damn near the opposite of solid police work.”

  “Where you start with an open mind and let the facts and the science dictate the profile.”

  “Exactly,” Craig said. “Which makes Behavioral Profiling the art of reconciling opposites…which, in my mind anyway, makes it a bit iffy.”

  “Part art, part science,” she said. “That’s the very thing that makes it interesting to me.”

  “I was involved in a case once,” Craig began. “Justice was called to consult on a series of child abductions in Cincinnati. Boys between seven and ten. Half a dozen of them gone missing in a five year span. Snatched right off the street in broad daylight. Never seen again. The press put two and two together. The city was in an uproar. The Bureau worked up a profile. Male, thirty-five to forty-five, lives alone, drives a van or a pickup truck with a shell, works in some menial capacity, spotty employment record.…” He shrugged. “You know the rest of it.”

  “Sure,” Audrey said.

  “Turned out to be a fifty-seven year old woman whose son had been killed in an automobile accident twenty-five years earlier. She’d slipped a cog somewhere along the line and decided that her dead son was lonely and needed some playmates. She buried the missing boys in a circle around her son’s grave so they’d all be together in eternity.”

  “Bizarre.”

  “She took three more victims before we figured it out.”

  Audrey could sense his residual discomfort.

  “We’d already interviewed her a couple of times,” Jackson Craig said after a moment. “So had the Cincinnati PD. The woman was an obvious nut case but we were all so tied into the Bureau’s profile that we just couldn’t see the obvious.”

  “It also happens, “ Audrey said. “that sometimes the profile is dead on and leads directly to the perp, like that serial murderer in Cleveland… “ She snapped her fingers. “Jenkins. The one who killed all those elderly women. First time the CPD showed the bureau profile around the neighborhood where the killings had been happening, three different neighborhood people went: “Oh that’s gotta be Odell Jenkins. He lives over on K Street.”

  Jackson Craig didn’t say anything for a moment. The plane banked hard left. The lights along the aisle flickered like candles.

  “They don’t think we’re going to pull this off,” Craig said into the darkened cabin. “They think the kids are already dead and they’re setting us up to take the fall.”

  “I thought you told me never to be guessing with those guys.”

  “This one’s plain as the nose on our collective faces. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t know when to quit and you don’t know when to shut up. This is a chance to kill several birds with one stone. “

  “Let’s do it for the family then,” she said. “They deserve the best we’ve got.”

  A muted bong sounded in the cabin. A red light appeared over the cockpit door. They tightened their seat belts and waited as the plane waffled downward, touched once, screeched like a panther and then settled onto the tarmac with a throaty roar.

  __

  Forty-three minutes later, Jackson Craig and Audrey Williams were sliding their backs along a rough cinder block wall, weapons drawn, wearing borrowed Kevlar vests. They crept up the worn concrete stairs leading to Unit 23 of Marsha’s Cozy Court, the warped and peeling door to which Utah State Police had followed the man who, thirty minutes earlier, had used the Arnold Jay Abrams’ VISA card to appropriate yet another five hundred dollars.

  Apparently he wasn’t spending the money on rent.

  Directly behind Marsha’s Cozy Court a rain-swollen stream rushed down from higher ground, running with such force that the rocks in the stream were moving, rolling, bouncing off one another in a symphony of chortling knocks above the boil and hiss of the water.

  At the top of the landing, a black-clad FBI tactical team was assembled and ready.

  A trio of Vader visaged tactical agents were backed against the opposite wall. The bruiser standing closest to the door held a one-man battering ram. Craig gave the nod to go ahead. The guy swung the ram once, gaining momentum, twice, really swinging it now, and three as the door frame exploded, sending the storm troopers shuffling single file into the void, automatics at the ready, shouting “FBI! FBI!”, shouting for everyone to get down, get down, to keep their hands in sight, not to move, “Down! Down!”

  Thirty more seconds of shouting and then “Clear,” sounded from the interior.

  Jackson Craig holstered his weapon. Audrey followed suit. She followed him into the room. The squad leader raised his visor. Big square face, red hair and mustache. “No kid,” he said around the toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

  Audrey looked around. Crack Cocaine Central. Overflowing ashtrays, overflowing trash cans. Couple of dirty glass pipes on the scarred coffee table, three or four little plastic bags, one containing three good sized rocks, walls so stained and mottled with human by-products that Audrey instinctively moved toward the center of the room.

  Two of them lying face down on the floor, hands held behind their backs with plastic restraints. The man was naked, skinny and white as a ghost. His scrawny ass cheeks clenched and unclenched as he lay shackled on the filthy carpet. The woman was sobbing, wearing only her bra and panties, the texture and color of which suggested they hadn’t been laundered this century.

  After accepting Craig’s thanks, the FBI tac squad shuffled back out of the room and rumbled down the outside stairs, leaving Craig and Williams alone in the room with the manacled pair on the floor.

  Craig crossed to the desk. Like nearly everything else in the room, the desk was burned, battered and bolted to the wall. Using a motel pencil, Craig flipped open the new black wallet, spilling its contents onto the desktop. Methodically, he scanned each piece of identification, front and back, until he seemed satisfied.
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  Craig walked over near the bed. “The wallet,” was all he said.

  “What wallet?” the guy asked.

  The sheets on the bed looked like a roadmap. Craig pulled the plastic bedspread from the floor and sat on it. “Where’d you get the wallet?” he asked again.

  Silence.

  The woman stopped sniffling. “The bus station,” she said. “He found it today at the bus station.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the man said.

  “What’s your name,” Craig asked the man.

  Silence again.

  “His name’s Larry,” the woman said.

  “What’d I tell you bitch?”

  “Larry…I need to know everything about that wallet.”

  “Fuck you too,” the man said. “I know my rights.”

  “I bet you do,” Craig soothed. “I’m betting you been down this road before.”

  “Damn right,” the man said. “I ain’t no virgin.”

  Craig leaned forward. “I can make this drug beef disappear,” he said. “The locals will turn the other way if I ask them to.”

  A long moment passed before Larry turned his head toward Craig. “For real?”

  “For real,” Craig assured him.

  “I walk?”

  “You walk.”

  Larry’s ass cheeks undulated like a lava lamp. “Ain’t nothing to tell. Wallet was just layin’ there in the stall. Lookin’ all brand new. Like nobody’d ever even used the fuckin’ thing before.”

  Craig took him through it. By the numbers. Had he seen anyone? Either in the john or out in the terminal. Somebody traveling with a small boy. Four or Five.

  Nothing.

  Craig got to his feet. He looked over at Audrey and gestured toward the wallet with his head. “Bag everything,” he said. “We’ll take it with us.”

  “I have the feeling,” Audrey said. “we’re being led around by the nose, like the whole thing is some sort of game.”

  “Follow the leader,” Craig said.

  The tack squad was already gone by the time Jackson Craig and Audrey Williams made it back to the parking lot. All that remained of the room raiders was a pair of county mounties and their own borrowed FBI driver.

  Craig jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “Possession of a controlled substance in room twenty-three,” he said. “Possession of drug paraphernalia, unauthorized use of a credit card, fraud, grand theft…” He threw a hand in the air. “All bundled up and waiting for you.”

  The uniformed officers expressed their appreciation and started to amble off. Craig put out a hand. “Take him,” he said. “Let the woman go.”

  The officers nodded, hurrying across the parking lot toward the free collar in room twenty-three. They started up the stairs. Craig turned away.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Craig said. The FBI driver didn’t have to be asked twice; he jogged off toward the car.

  Audrey raised her eyebrows. “I thought you told Larry…” she began.

  “I lied,” Craig said.

  They started across the rain-drenched asphalt, hunching their shoulders against a chill that somehow penetrated to the bone, no matter what you were wearing.

  “She was just as guilty as he was,” Audrey said as they hurried along.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Craig allowed.

  “Women aren’t victims, you know,” Audrey pressed.

  Jackson Craig muttered beneath his breath and picked up his gait.

  The FBI driver swung the car their way, saving them the rest of the walk.

  Jackson Craig opened the rear door and stepped aside.

  Audrey slipped into the seat with a nod of thanks.

  “No they’re not,” Craig said. “But they do like their car doors opened.”

  He closed the car door and started toward the rear of the car. Before he had managed to make his way around to the far side, his pager began to buzz. He sighed, reached for his belt and continued walking. As he bent his head to read the screen, several freezing drops found their way down his collar and onto his neck. His spine stiffened. He shivered violently. After a moment, he slid into the seat next to Audrey. “They’ve located the family car at the airport in Grand Junction, Colorado,” was all he could say before the shivering caused his teeth to chatter uncontrollably.

  24

  Becky came awake slowly. She opened her mouth to cry out, but found her throat so dry that what she had imagined to be a call for help turned out to be little more than a raspy cough. Force of habit swept her sightless gaze left and right. The effort made her head swim. She waited for her balance to return.

  And then… suddenly she remembered all of it. Remembered the fear in her father’s face when he’d told them to run. Remembered struggling up the hill in the darkness and the waiting and waiting and then him…whoever he was…dragging her from that awful little cave by her hair, heaving her into the darkness and then the sense of being in flight and Michael…Oh God where was Michael? She was supposed to…

  She moaned like a martyr’s mother and began to bawl. Whoever said crying never accomplished anything was sorely mistaken. The prolonged flow of salty tears proved too much for the coagulated goop holding her right eye closed. By the time she’d regained some measure of emotional control, she could make out the fine red dirt just beneath her nose, which, of course, was cause for further tears of joy.

  She lay her forehead on her arm and picked at her eye. At some point, her hair had fallen across the eye and been welded in place by drying blood. She used her black-painted fingernails, separating the hair from the mix strand by strand and then clearing the eye of blood, one crusty flake at a time until she found herself squinting one-eyed into the clear white light of morning.

  Twenty feet below the place where she had come to rest, the incline vaporized into thin air. As she stared open-mouthed, the deadly nature of her plight slowly seeped into her sniffling consciousness. Her heart began to pound in her ears as the possibility of dying became real to her for the first time in her young life. She looked to either side of the bush for relief but found only terrifying vistas, then gazed upward, as if pleading for divine intervention.

  She raised her right foot as far as she was able and then used a hand to pull it further upward, moaning at the pain, pulling harder until she was able to force her foot onto the trunk. She rested for a moment and then used the power of her leg muscles to force her body upward.

  She stood sideways on the smooth wood, catching her breath before hoisting herself up onto the ledge, where she stood, feet together, back plastered against wall of the canyon, shaking like a palsy patient. She took stock. To her right, the path went up, toward the top of the butte. To her left, the path turned steeply downward, sometimes wide enough for two people, in other places no more than a foot wide. Every fiber of her consciousness called for her to go down rather than up. Anything but up.

  So she started down, inching along the ledge until the incline became too steep for her feet, then scooting along on her bottom, all the while chanting to herself: ‘Don’t look down. Don’t look down’, over and over as she worked her way along, moving from bush to bush, using their firm purchase as a lifeline.

  Despite her best efforts to remain positive, her mind overflowed with doubt. She had no idea whether or not this path went all the way to the bottom. What if it just ended? What was she going to do then? She’d already negotiated several sections she couldn’t hope to get back up. She kept moving, stopping at the wider sections to rest and reconnoiter. Assuming she did make it all the way to the canyon floor, what then?

  Late in the afternoon, long after her throat had closed and her feet had gone numb, as the hazy yellow sun hung above the western mountains like a dance club disco ball, she squeezed around a jagged chunk of fallen rock, rounded a blind turn and came face to face with the biggest deer she had ever seen.

  They stood for a moment, no more than six feet apart, taking one another’s measure, close enough for her to ma
ke out the bumps on his antlers and to smell his musky scent. Her sudden intake of breath startled the animal. He shook his antlers, stomped his foot and looked around. Assessing his survival options, the buck reversed field and hopped away. He cast a single disdainful glance back over his withers before shaking his tail and bounding from view.

  That’s when it dawned on her. The deer had managed to climb this far. If he could get up, she could get down. She forced herself forward.

  25

  The couple strolled across the airport parking lot hand in hand. The woman turned and gamboled backwards, playful, teasing, pulling her companion along in the classic manner of lovers. The tug of romance drew him inexorably to her side, where he swung her in a wide weightless arc before setting her gently back onto the pavement.

  They skipped between the rows of parked cars until the woman’s feet suddenly tip-toed to a halt. She bent at the waist and peered helplessly downward. Her body language made it clear; she’d dropped something. The young man put an assuring hand on her shoulder and then chivalrously squatted to retrieve whatever treasure his love had lost. After a moment of searching, he arose and handed the prize to the woman. He was favored by a kiss on the cheek before they ambled on.

  Special Agents Jackson Craig and Audrey Williams lowered their binoculars in unison. Audrey’s ear radio began to squawk. She used her index finger to push it deeper into her ear canal and moved quickly to the far side of the space.

  “Transponder’s in place,” a voice said. “The officer reports two large plastic containers in the rear of the vehicle.”

  Jackson Craig slid to his right; he bent at the waist and stared intently at the portable bank of video screens. He pointed to the bottom row, at a low angle rear view of the Browning family SUV. “Get me closer,” he said.

  Keyboard strokes clicked like castanets. The image size doubled. The focus automatically adjusted. The area behind the rear seats was filled with a pair of dark symmetrical shapes. “Again,” Craig said. And then again.