Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

Instinct took over and she fell away from the window, abandoning her attempt to close it in favor of reaching for the light and banishing the darkness. She fumbled, knocked the CD player to the floor, found the light.

The instant it went on, the room lit up and the window became an opaque rectangle of black. She heard a sudden grunt; a dull thud; a frantic rustling sound. And then, silence.

She waited, taking a few slow steps back from the black window. Her body was shaking uncontrollably, and her throat was very dry. She could see nothing outside now, nothing at all. Was it there, in the window, looking at her? A minute ticked off, then another and another. Then she heard, in the middle distance, what sounded like a cough and groan: very low, but so replete with terror and pain that it chilled her to the marrow. It cut off abruptly, replaced with a strange wet ripping noise, and then a sound like someone dumping a bucket of water on the pavement down the street. Then, silence: utter, total silence.

Somehow, the silence was even worse than the noise. She felt a scream rising, unbidden, in her throat.

Then, all of a sudden, there was a snap, a gurgle, and a hissing sound, which slowly subsided to a steady swishing murmur.

She slumped, her body abruptly relaxing. It was just Mr. Dade’s sprinkler system coming on, as it did every morning at exactly 2A .M.

She glanced at her clock: sure enough, it read 2:00.

How many times had she heard that sprinkler system cough and splutter and gurgle and make all sorts of weird noises as it started up? Get a grip, she thought. Her imagination was really working overtime. Not surprising, given all that was going on in the town . . . and given what she’d seen, with Pendergast, out there in the cornfields.

She returned to the window and grabbed the latch, feeling a little sheepish. This time, a single, brutal thrust was enough to close it. She locked the window and climbed back into bed and turned out the light.

The sound of the sprinklers filtering through the glass, the caressing patter of raindrops, was like a lullaby. And yet it wasn’t until four that she was finally able to fall back to sleep.

Thirty-One

T ad rolled over so hard that he fell out of bed. Staggering to his knees, he passed a hand across his face, then reached blindly for the ringing telephone. He found it, fumbled with it, lifted it to his face.

“Hello?” he mumbled. “Hello?” Through the sleep-heavy bars of his lashes, he could see that outside the bedroom window it was still dark, the stars hard in the sky, only the faintest streak of yellow on the eastern horizon.

“Tad.” It was Hazen, and he sounded very awake indeed. “I’m over on Fairview, near the side entrance to Wyndham Parke. I need you here. Ten minutes.”

“Sheriff—?” But the phone was already dead.

Tad made it in five.

Although the sun had yet to rise, a crowd from the nearby trailer park had gathered, clad mostly in bathrobes and flip-flops. They were strangely silent. Hazen was there, in the middle of the street, setting up crime-scene tape himself while talking into a cell phone propped beneath his jaw. And there, too, was the FBI man, Pendergast, standing off to one side, slender and almost invisible in his black suit. Tad looked around, an uneasy feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. But there was no body, no new victim; just a lumpy, irregular splotch in the middle of the street. Sitting next to it was a canvas bag, full of something. The uneasy feeling gave way to relief. Another animal, it seemed. He wondered what all the hurry was.

As he walked closer, Hazen snapped his phone shut. “Get back, all of you!” he shouted, waving the phone at the crowd. “Tad! Take over with this tape and get these people back! ”

Tad moved forward quickly, grabbing the end of the tape. As he did so, he got a much closer glance at the pile on the street. It glistened redly, pearlescent, steaming in the predawn light. He looked away quickly, swallowing hard.

“All right, folks,” Tad began, but his voice didn’t sound quite right and he stopped, swallowing once more. “All right, folks, back up. More. More. Please.”

The crowd huddled back, silent, their faces pale in the gloom. He strung the plastic tape across the road and tied it to a tree, wrapping it several times, completing the square that Hazen had begun. He saw that Hazen was now talking to the Goth, Corrie Swanson. Pendergast stood beside her, silent. Behind was her mother, looking like hell as usual, her thin brown hair plastered to her skull, a stained and frayed pink bathrobe wrapped tightly around her. She was chain-smoking Virginia Slims.

“You heard something?” Hazen was repeating. His voice was skeptical, but he was taking notes nevertheless.

Corrie was pale, and she was trembling, but her mouth was set in a hard line and her eyes were bright. “I woke up. It was just before two—”

“And how did you know what time it was?”

“I looked at my clock.”

“Go on.”

“Something woke me up, I wasn’t sure what. I went to the window, and that’s when I heard the sound.”

“What sound?”

“Like snuffling.”

“Dog?”

“No. More like . . . like someone with a bad cold.”

Hazen jotted notes. “Go on.”

“I had this sense there was something moving out there, right beneath my window, but I couldn’t really see it. It was too dark. I turned on the light. And then I heard a different sound, like a groan.”

“Human?”

Corrie blinked. “Hard to tell.”

“Then?”

“I shut my window and went back to sleep.”

Hazen lowered his notebook and stared at her. “You didn’t think to call me or your, ah, boss?” He nodded at Pendergast.

“I—I figured it was just the sprinkler system, which goes on every night around two. It makes weird noises.”

Hazen put away his notebook. He turned to Pendergast. “Some assistant you got there.” Then he turned to Tad. “All right, this is what we’ve got. Somebody dumped a pile of guts on the road. Looks like cow to me, there’s too much there for a dog or sheep. And that sack sitting next to it is full of ears of corn, freshly picked. I want you to check around all the local stock farms, see if anyone’s missing a cow, pig, any large livestock.” His eyes flitted back toward Corrie before returning to Tad. He lowered his voice. “This whole thing is starting to look more and more like a cult of some kind.”

Over Hazen’s shoulder, Tad watched Pendergast step forward and kneel before the pile of offal. He reached forward, actually prodded at something with his finger. Tad averted his eyes. Then he reached over and with one finger lifted the mouth of the canvas bag.

“Sheriff Hazen?” Pendergast asked without rising.

Hazen was already back on the cell phone. “What?”

“I would suggest looking for a missing person instead.”

There was a shocked silence as the implication sunk in.

Hazen lowered the cell phone. “How do you know these are . . .” He couldn’t quite bring himself to finish the sentence.

“Cows don’t normally eat what appears to be Maisie’s meatloaf, washed down with a glass of beer.”

Hazen took a step forward and shined his light into the glistening pile. He swallowed hard. “But why would the killer . . .” He paused again. His face was dead white. “I mean, why take a body and leave the guts behind?”

Pendergast rose, wiping his finger with a handkerchief of white silk. “Perhaps,” he said grimly, “to lighten his load.”

Thirty-Two

I t was eleven o’clock before Tad finally returned to the sheriff’s office. The sweat was pouring off his brow, and his uniform was soaked to the cuffs. He was the last to return: the state troopers and Hazen, who had also been conducting searches, were there before him. The inner office had been turned into a command center, and a large group of Staties were standing around, talking on cell phones and radios. The press, naturally, had gotten wind of it, and once again the street was lined with TV vans, reporters, and photographers. But they were the only people in sight: all the residents had shut and locked themselves in their houses. The Wagon Wheel was closed and shuttered. Even the shift at Gro-Bain had been sent home for the day. Except for the hungry gaggle of media, Medicine Creek had become a ghost town.