William Bernhardt - Dark Justice

You have a unique opportunity here, Maureen had said. You could make all the difference.

Ben rolled over, buried his face in the pillow, and closed his eyes. But he felt certain he wasn’t going to get any sleep.

Tess O’Connell rushed back to her hotel room and slammed the door shut behind her. With lightning speed, she turned the deadbolt, slid in the chain lock, and pulled a dresser in front of the door.

She wasn’t taking any chances.

This was the first time she had ventured out of her hotel room since the night of the murder. When she looked back on it now, the whole episode seemed like one extended nightmare-far too chilling and extraordinary to be real.

Except it was. She knew it was. Every time she closed her eyes, it came back to her, insistent and unbidden. Like a nightmare.

She still wasn’t sure how she managed to elude that monster who had chased her away from the scene of the explosion. He had to have known the forest better than she did. All she did was run, not stopping, not checking directions, just running. Maybe he hurt himself, maybe he had to stop to do something. She didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that somehow, against all odds, she had managed to give Sasquatch the slip.

Whoever he was. Behind the mask.

When she finally made it back to her hotel, she had locked the doors, crawled under the covers, and holed up for days. She hadn’t even let the maids in to clean. She made room service leave trays outside her door. She was that scared. She didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want anyone to come near her. Her boss at the Whisper kept phoning, leaving messages, but she didn’t return the calls.

It was almost a week before she regained some semblance of the patented O’Connell chutzpah, before she felt she might be able to venture into the hallway without meeting Sasquatch at the first corner. Slowly, as the days passed, her terror began to fade, replaced by something altogether different.

The scent of a story.

For once in her life, Tess had the inside track on something big, maybe even bigger than anyone realized. She had seen what no one else had seen; she knew what no one else knew. What’s more, she had evidence.

The videotape.

Unfortunately, when she replayed the tape in the camera it was too dark to make out, and the rooms at the Magic Valley Holiday Inn did not come equipped with VCRs. The hotel management wasn’t able to provide her with one, either. Here she was, a reporter holding critical evidence in her hands-that she was unable to view. She realized that if she was going to see this, she was going to have to leave the room.

It hadn’t been easy. But eventually, as the panic eased, she began to think about her station in life and what this tape could do to improve it. She had never meant to end up stuck at some low-rent tabloid. She had studied journalism at UCLA. She’d had ambitions, visions of Pulitzers. She wanted to be known as a serious investigative reporter. But at the time of her graduation, there had been a hiring freeze at all the newspapers. The industry was in a slump. It was beginning to look as if her only career opportunity would involve “hold the pickles, hold the lettuce.”

Until she found the opening at the Whisper . And so she began her career of stalking celebrities and searching for the truth about crop circles and cow mutilations.

And Sasquatch.

She had seen the job as temporary, a stopping place until other prospects opened up. But when positions at the real papers did open up, she found herself tainted by her contact with the Whisper . “Oh, you’re that kind of reporter”-and the interview would come to a swift conclusion. After a while, she developed evasive responses, but to no avail. The journalistic community was small and close-knit. Secrets were hard to keep.

And so her temporary stopover became an eight-year stint. With no end in sight. Eventually she had resigned herself to her fate.

Until the tragic last night of Princess Diana. Tess wasn’t involved in that tragedy, thank God, but afterward the thought of having anything to do with this sort of journalism made her sick. Problem was, she still had to eat. And she couldn’t figure out a way to make a name for herself in legitimate journalism.

Until now. If she could crack this murder, everything could change. This story had it all-murder, mayhem, sex appeal. This could be the lucky break that transformed her from Tabloid Mary to Diane Sawyer.

And so she took the plunge, left the safety of the Holiday Inn, and sought out the nearest place she could rent a VCR. Hadn’t been hard, as it turned out. Even a one-horse town like Magic Valley had a video store on every block, and they all rented out VCRs. They even had a gizmo that converted the Video-8 tape from her recorder to a regular VHS tape.

It had taken her ten minutes to install the damn thing, to disconnect the rip-off pay-per-view machine fused into the hotel TV and connect her VCR, but at last she had everything ready. She could feel her anxiousness; her mouth was dry and her hands were wet, both from anticipation of what might lie on that strip of magnetic tape.

She pushed the Play button and the images flickered to life. The TV screen was bathed with vivid yellow and red. The tree cutter had already exploded; it was now just a raging mass of twisted, melting metal, fused together like the core of a nuclear furnace. The victim had already collapsed on the ground, all charred flesh and cinders.

She watched for almost a minute as the camera panned and scanned the horizon, showing the devastation of the clear-cut forest, brought into sharp and haunting highlight by the raging inferno. Several times she thought she detected a trace of movement in the distance, but it was hard to be sure. Was there really someone there, or was it an illusion created by the flickering of the flames? It was impossible to be sure.

Impossible-up to a point. Shortly thereafter, a large hairy figure began moving in a direct line toward the camera. It was tiny at first, barely discernible except as a point of movement. It came steadily closer until, even in the darkness, she could tell it was Sasquatch-or more correctly, someone dressed as Sasquatch. Sasquatch with his mask removed.

She couldn’t make out the face yet, but he kept running closer, closer and closer, faster and faster. She could almost see it and then-

And then the picture changed. The camera moved every which way at once, moved so quickly she could make out nothing. And then all she saw was the ground, moving fast.

Tess knew what had happened. She had seen Sasquatch coming toward her and panicked. She had turned and fled for her life-just an instant before the monster’s face would have been visible on the tape.

She punched the Stop button, cursing under her breath. And so, when all was said and done, she had nothing. Her big chance for success, her opportunity to bolt from the sleaze market, had dissipated.

She felt a stinging in her eyes. It had been stupid to let herself fantasize. She should have known something would go wrong-didn’t something always go wrong? Face it-she was going to be spending the rest of her life with the ninety-five-year-old grandmother who gave birth to twins. There was no escape.

She slapped herself hard on the side of the face. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, damn it, and think ! Suddenly she realized she knew a hell of a lot more than anyone else did about this case. She was the only living eyewitness-not counting the killer. She was the only one who knew exactly how it had happened. And she was the only one who knew there had been a fight preceding the explosion.

A fight. That was the key-it had to be. She had read in the paper that the victim was a logger, which made sense, since he knew how to start the tree cutter. If he was a logger, then who would be fighting with him? Who would be having an argument in the dead of night, at the site of a massive clear-cut?