Primal Fear (5 page)

Chapter Three

Glen Forest, New Hampshire

The booming echo of gunfire rose in the still January air, shattering the morning silence like a sudden clap of thunder.  Its sound carried across the early stillness, rousing a pair of crows from a nearby treetop.

Harry Cronin fell into a protective crouch, one hand still clutching the keys to his Chevy Tahoe, the other falling instinctively to the service revolver at his right hip.  He pressed himself closer to the truck, his senses alert, his nerves afire.

He let the echo of the shot die away, counting out the seconds in silent anticipation of another.

But none came.  Whoever had triggered the shot, they’d only felt the need to fire once.

Harry rose slowly, his eyes struggling to pierce the veil of darkness around him, trying to pinpoint the source of the gunshot.  He remained behind the sheltering hulk of the Tahoe for another ten seconds, holding his breath in the hope of detecting some tell-tale sound from the borders of his property.  The snapping of a twig, or the crunch of dry leaves beneath an intruder’s foot.

Nothing.

Harry straightened, his six-foot frame unfolding easily as he glanced quickly back at his house at the end of the driveway.  The door stood tightly closed, and no lights burned in the windows.  For all its racket, the sound of the gunshot hadn’t roused his wife, and for that he was grateful.  In this darkness, in the silent wake of an unknown weapon discharge, he could at least be sure she was in no danger. 

Dropping the keys into his hip pocket, Harry made his way around the Tahoe, his breath coming in great plumes of vapor in the frigid winter air.  One fist remained tightly curled around the butt of his gun.

His eyes swept the wide expanse of open land that bordered his property to the west.  He sensed no movement in the field, nor could he perceive any motion in the blackness of the woods beyond it, a half mile away.  There were no other homes in that direction; Harry’s was the last house on this stretch of Carriage Road, the last house before the Dutton River marked the town line, four miles away.

So where the hell had the shot come from?  It wasn’t deer season, and, as Glen Forest’s sheriff, he certainly would have heard reports of any poaching activity in the area.

He swung his gaze towards the east, where the first gray light of dawn was just beginning to breach the gloom.  Beyond a small rise in the otherwise flat land, he could just make out the squat shape of Marty Slater’s house, nestled within a small stand of trees less than 100 yards away.  A single light burned in a window at the back of the house; a soft curl of smoke rose from Slater’s chimney.

The likelihood that the sound had come from Slater’s property was slim.  The old man despised guns, and his frequent outbursts against hunting had interrupted more town meetings than Harry could accurately remember.  But still, the light in Slater’s back window seemed odd enough in itself.  If there was one thing on earth that Marty disliked more than firearms, it was morning.  In all the years that Harry had lived on the plot of land beside Slater, he’d never seen the old man up and around before noon.

Or maybe the shot had woken him.  Maybe he was just as curious as Harry, peeking out of his back window even now to spot the gunshot’s source.

Harry considered the notion for a moment and then dispelled it.  Something in his gut told him Slater’s light had been on long before the sound of the gunshot.  It was a feeling he couldn’t precisely put his finger on, but one he’d become strangely familiar with over the years, considering it to be nothing more than the strong intuition that most career law enforcement officers could feel after many years of service.  The hunch, as his wife Laurie preferred to call it, never failing to raise her fingers and provide air quotations for the word whenever she used it.

Whatever the feeling could be called, it filled him now with a cold sense of dread, an unshakable suspicion that something was wrong.  Was it possible the gunshot had come from inside Slater’s home?  Just because Slater despised firearms, Harry couldn’t rule out the possibility that someone else might have intruded on his property this morning, someone who had no qualms at all when it came to handling a gun.

Harry moved away from his truck, trudging silently across the frozen ground between Slater’s house and his own.  The uneasy feeling in his gut intensified, and by the time he reached the side of the old man’s house, he was somehow positive he wouldn’t like what he found there.

He tried the front door first, climbing the worn wooden steps and crossing the porch as carefully as he could.  Slater was somewhat of a pack-rat—had been for as long as Harry had known him—and his front porch was cluttered with all manner of worthless debris, items both new and old which Marty had deemed too important to throw away.  Winding his way through the chaos, Harry squinted through the dirty front windows, hoping to detect some sign of movement within the house.

Not even the flutter of a curtain betrayed any motion inside. 

“Marty?” he called, knocking lightly on the storm door.  “Hey, Marty?  You all right in there?”

There was no answer and he tried once more, raising his voice.  It wouldn’t do him any good to go poking around the old man’s property without making at least an honest effort to wake him first.

“Marty, it’s me, Harry.  You in there?”

Again, nothing; not even the creak of a floorboard to signal Slater’s approach to the door.

Something was wrong, he was sure of it now.  For all Marty’s faults, his hearing was as sharp as a dog’s.  If the shot itself had failed to get him out of bed, Harry’s intrusive knocking surely would have by now.  Swallowing hard, and unsnapping the leather strap on his holster, Harry stepped off the porch and made his way to the back of the house.

A bright wash of light spilled out onto the bare ground behind the house, more light than Harry would expect from a single small window.  He approached carefully, staying as close to the side of the house as the shrubbery that bordered it would allow. 

The back door stood wide open. 

A rusted security chain hung uselessly from its inner hook, and a quick inspection of the door revealed no sign that it had been forced.  A trail of muddy footprints had been left on the stoop and continued in a straight line across the faded linoleum of the kitchen floor.

“Son of a bitch,” Harry whispered, and drew his gun.

He stepped into the doorway, his eyes flashing into every corner of the room within.  Empty.  But he could see another light burning from the room beyond.  A single line of brightness illuminated the crack beneath the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the den.

Crossing the room to stand beside the door, Harry took in the squalid conditions of the kitchen.  Dirty dishes were stacked on every available countertop, and what appeared to be a week’s worth of empty beer bottles littered the table at the center of the room.  A plate of food had been left to rot on a small sideboard beside the door, its foul odor filling the room.  Marty had never been the best of housekeepers, but never had he let his home become such a complete mess, at least in Harry’s memory.

Everything around him seemed to suggest an intruder had taken up residence here; a squatter, maybe, who’d found a way inside while Slater was out of town.  But hadn’t Harry seen Slater in the yard only two nights before, carrying an armful of stove-lengths in from the woodpile behind the house?

Sure he had, but that didn’t necessarily mean Slater had been alone here.  And if he’d gained an unwanted guest, then that would account for the mess that had recently been allowed to run rampant in the kitchen.

There was only one thing to do, and that was to finish checking out the house.  If he woke Slater in the process, so be it; at least he would know for sure the old man was all right.  On the other hand, if Slater needed help, if he was lying hurt somewhere in another room, it wouldn’t do to waste any more time debating about it.

Raising his gun to shoulder height, its barrel pointed straight upwards, Harry pushed the swinging door slowly inward on its squealing hinges.

At first, the room appeared to be empty.  But as his point of view widened with the slow swing of the door, he saw a lamp that had been knocked onto the floor from an end table beside the couch.  Its bulb was still intact, and a wide swath of light cast an eerie glow across the floor and walls.  He saw a small notebook, its open page filled with scrawled, uneven print.  He saw a half-filled bottle of Jack Daniels, lying on its side, its contents spilled out onto the rug beneath it.

And then, as Harry pushed the door completely open, he saw the blood. 

More blood than he’d ever seen in his life.  It was splashed across one wall, spattered onto the faded wallpaper in a pattern that looked to Harry like a giant hand, its fingers spread wide and reaching outward.  It was pooled on the floor in front of the wall, one thick tendril of it still running slowly and steadily towards a crack in the hardwood.

And in the center of that pool of blood lay Marty Slater, the upper half of his face sheared off, his dead hands clasped around a shotgun that had apparently been turned on himself.  His shoulders were propped against a worn and tattered sofa, his legs flat against the floor before it.

“Jesus.”

It was all Harry could think to say.  He stood frozen in the doorway, taking it all in, his eyes flicking around the room and absorbing a thousand tiny details.  His stunned mind recorded all of them, and the part of him that had somehow remained detached from the gruesome scene understood that anything he saw might become very important later.

The cop inside of him took over then, looking past the blood and the body to consider procedure, to examine possibilities.  He welcomed the intrusion, let himself be caught up in it.

While it certainly appeared Slater’s death had come at his own hand, Harry couldn’t discount the possibility that it had simply been arranged to look that way.  No one had been seen leaving the premises, which introduced the possibility that Harry wasn’t alone in the house.

He had to call it in.  He had to call it in and then search the house.

He reached into the kitchen, carefully lifting the receiver off of the wall mount telephone beside the door, his eyes sweeping the room once more as he punched out the number to the station house.

A search of the house turned up exactly what he suspected it would: nothing at all.  All of the windows and doors were locked from the inside, the only possible exit being the back door through which Harry had come in.  No more than three or four minutes had passed between the time he’d heard the shot and the time he’d found Slater; no one could have made a clean run from the house in that amount of time.

When he was certain no one else was in the house, he picked up the telephone again and dialed his home number.  His mind raced, trying to go back over everything he’d done, compiling a list of everything he’d touched since stepping into the house.  With the receiver pressed between his ear and shoulder, he reached into a pouch on his belt for a pair of surgical gloves and tugged them on while waiting for Laurie to pick up.

“Hello?”  Laurie’s voice was soft, dulled with sleep.

“Hi, hon.  Sorry to wake you.”

“What time is it?”  She paused, and Harry could hear the rustle of the covers.  “Are you at work already?”

“No, I just . . .  I’m already into something, but I haven’t even been to the station yet.”

“Where are you?  Are you all right?”  A hint of concern had crept into her voice.

“I’m over at Marty Slater’s.  Right next door.”

“Everything okay?”

He hesitated.  “Marty’s dead, hon.  There’s been . . . there’s been an accident here.”  He winced at his choice of words, knowing damn well that what had happened to Slater had been anything but accidental.  But neither could he call it a murder or a suicide.  At this point, it was too early to rule out either.

“Oh my God.”  He could tell by her tone she wanted to know more, but she’d learned over the years that he didn’t like to talk in uncertainties.  When he had a better handle on the case, he would fill her in completely.

“I just wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t worry when Charlie and Ben pull up in the squad car.  They’ll be here any time now.”

“Thanks.”  Another pause, this one shorter.  “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.  Just . . . a bit shook up, is all.  Kind of caught me by surprise.”

“I’ll put some coffee on, in case you want to pop back over before heading out.”

“Yeah, I probably will.  I’ll see you in a bit.  Love you.”

“Love you, too.  Be careful.”

Harry hung up and stood in the empty kitchen.  The frigid air from outside had begun to invade the house, flowing in through the open door, and he rubbed his hands together briskly to combat the sudden cold.

Something in the other room caught his eye, a flash of white against the pool of crimson on the floor.  It was a crumpled sheet of note paper, torn from the pad that lay open a few feet away.  A series of scribbled words had been etched across its surface, and Harry crouched beside the body to examine the scrap more closely.