Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

Going home . . .

Gasparilla’s camp was straight ahead, no more than a few hundred yards away. Cupping his flashlight so that just enough light escaped to make out the prints, the agent crept forward with excruciating slowness.

He paused, listening intently, then moved forward again. Ahead, all was dark. There was no fire, no light. When he was within a hundred yards of the camp, he turned off the tiny ray of light and approached blindly. The camp was silent.

And then he heard it: a faint, almost indiscernible sound. He froze.

A minute passed.

There it was again, louder now: a long, drawn-out sigh.

Pendergast left the trail and circled around to the right of the camp, moving with exquisite care. As he approached the downwind sector, he smelled no smoke or food. There wasn’t even a glow from a dying pile of coals.

And yet there was definitely someone, or something, in the camp.

The sound of exhaled air again. Wet, labored, almost a wheeze. Yet there was something strange about it: crude, animalistic, not quite human.

Careful to make no sound, Pendergast raised his gun. The noise was coming from the middle of Gasparilla’s camp.

The noise came again.

Gasparilla—or whatever was making the noise—was no more than fifty feet away. The darkness was absolute. Pendergast could see nothing.

He leaned down, picked up a pebble. He then tossed it to the far side of the camp.

Tap.

A sudden silence. And then a guttural sound, like the growl of an animal.

Pendergast waited as a fresh silence stretched on into minutes. All his senses were on the highest alert, straining to determine whether or not anything was moving toward him. Gasparilla had already proven himself adept at moving through darkness. Was he doing it again?

Slowly, Pendergast picked up another pebble, tossed it in another direction.

Tap.

Once again, an answering snort came back: short, very loud, and in the exact same place. Whoever—whatever—it was had not moved.

Pendergast snapped on the light and squeezed the grip of his pistol simultaneously, activating the laser sight. The beam of the flashlight illuminated a human being lying on his back in the dirt, staring upward with huge bloodshot eyes. His face and head were completely covered in blood.

The red dot of the laser jitterbugged across the hideous face for a moment. Then Pendergast holstered the gun and took a step forward.

“Gasparilla?”

The face jerked back and forth. The mouth opened, blowing a bloody bubble of saliva.

In a moment Pendergast was kneeling over the man. It was unquestionably Gasparilla. Pendergast moved the flashlight across his face. All of the man’s glossy black hair and heavy beard were gone, ripped out along with the scalp; the margins of flesh showed the cut marks of some crude implement: perhaps a stone knife. Pendergast quickly examined the rest of his body. Gasparilla’s left thumb had been partly hacked through and then yanked off with a brutal tug that left behind a white nub of bone, a shred or two of cartilage. Beyond that and the hair, however, the man seemed physically intact. Except for the scalp, there was little loss of blood. The damage appeared not so much of the body as of the mind.

“Uhmm!” Gasparilla grunted, heaving upward. The eyes were wild, insane. He blew a spray of bloody saliva.

Pendergast bent closer. “It’s all right now.”

The eyes roved wildly, unable to fix on Pendergast or anything else. When they paused, they seemed to quiver violently, then return immediately to roving, as if the mere act of focusing was unbearable.

Pendergast took his hand. “I’m going to take care of you. We’ll get you out of here.”

He leaned back, flashed the light around. There was the place of attack: forty feet away to the north of the camp. There was the scuffle, the riot of footprints mingling with Gasparilla’s own.

Pendergast stood now and approached the spot, licking the flashlight across the ground. There was the spot where Gasparilla had fallen, and from where—over the course of fifteen hours—he had dragged himself, in rolling fits, across the dirt. And there, on the far side of camp, were the footprints of the killer in the wet sand, well defined, heading into the creek.

The killer, carrying away his trophies.

The sand told the story.

Pendergast turned back and looked deeply into the wildly roving eyes. He saw nothing: no intellect, no memory, no humanity, nothing but the sheerest terror.

There would be no answers from Gasparilla; not now—and maybe not ever.

Twenty-Three

S heriff Hazen entered the basement laboratory and took an unwilling look around. There was the same old sour smell, made worse by the overlay of disinfectants and chemicals; the same cinderblock walls painted diarrhea-tan; the same buzzing fluorescent lights. Breathing through the mouth did no good—the surgical mask did nothing but introduce a smell of antiseptic paper to the mix. What he needed was a frigging gas mask.

He summoned a variety of comforting sounds and images to mind: Hank Williams ballads; the taste of the first Grain Belt of an evening; going to the Harvest Festival as a kid with his dad and older brother. None of it helped. Sheriff Hazen shivered, and not just because of the smell of death.

He moved toward the bright end of the lab, scrubs rustling. The medical examiner was already there, swathed like himself in blue, and Hazen could hear the murmur of voices. There was a second figure beside the M.E., and despite the softness of the voice he recognized the southern cadence. Pendergast.

Pendergast had been right. It was a serial killer. And he was probably right that the killer was local. Hazen couldn’t believe it, hadn’t wanted to believe it. He’d laughed out loud when he’d heard that Pendergast was spending hours closeted with Marge Tealander, knowing the old busybody would eat up his time and have him chasing down red herrings all over town. But now, in the wake of this new killing, he was forced to admit things did point to a local killer. It was damned hard to come and go from Medicine Creek without people noticing. Especially at night, when a set of car headlights in the distance was enough to send people to the window to see who was coming. No, this wasn’t the work of some drifter who killed and moved on. It seemed it was somebody who lived here in Medicine Creek. It was incredible, but there it was. Someone in town.

That meant he knew the killer.

“Ah, Sheriff Hazen, good to see you.” McHyde nodded politely, even deferentially.

The guy had really changed his tune. No more Dr. Arrogant. The case was big now, and the M.E. could smell the publicity. This was a ticket out of western Kansas for anyone who wanted to hop aboard the train.

“Sheriff Hazen,” said Pendergast, giving a little nod of recognition.

“Morning, Pendergast.”

There was a short silence. The body lay covered on the gurney. It seemed the M.E. had not begun his work. Hazen bitterly regretted arriving so early.

The M.E. cleared his throat. “Nurse Malone?”

A voice came from offstage. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Are we ready to roll?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Good. Run the video.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

They went through the preliminaries, each one giving their name and title. Hazen could not take his eyes off the shrouded corpse. He had seen it lying in the field, of course, but somehow seeing it in this sterile, artificial environment was different. Worse.

The M.E. grasped the cloth and slowly, carefully, raised the sheet. And there was Stott, bloated, the flesh literally falling off the bones.

Quickly, Hazen averted his eyes. Then, feeling self-conscious, he slowly forced himself to face the gurney again.