Cold Heart (19 page)

After the motor of the four-wheeler died she lay there on her back trying to breathe naturally, gripping the bed frame to still the tremors that wracked her body. She watched the bedroom door like a hawk, waiting for El to return.

She heard the front door open. Felt a draft stir the spread where it hung just barely covering the frame. She waited and waited but there was no sound from below.

Finally, she heard him.

He was talking to himself again but his voice sounded weird and amplified. She knew from the direction and the sound that he was inside the phone room with Rita. The small ceilingless cubicle acted as a megaphone, sending his voice up the stairs.

He was talking to Rita again. “You're not going to follow me around.”

Dawn stared at the dusty metal bedsprings inches from her face, listening.

“My mother followed me. The bitch. But I stopped her. Now I'm going to stop you.”

Dawn could hear him grunting and something scratching.

“I should have known,” said El. “But you won't follow me now.”

Dawn slid slowly out from under the bed, careful not to snag her clothes or make a sound. She crawled silently out the door onto the landing, dreading the open space. She felt like a mouse, crossing a wide kitchen floor.

“That's one.”

There was a nasty sucking sound and Dawn didn't really want to know what was happening. But a macabre hand pushed her forward. She slid along until she could just see the back of El's head over the balcony, between the raw spruce limbs that Clive had barked and then varnished and bolted along the landing as a railing. El was moving his head this way and that and Dawn bravely lifted her own head to see better.

El straddled Rita's body and all that Dawn could see of Rita was her blue jeans. El was working at something near her head and the ugly sucking sound continued. A bolt of nausea engulfed Dawn and she bit her lip until she tasted blood in order to keep from throwing up.

“There,” said El.

As always, his voice sounded dead. No satisfaction. No thrill. Just a flat reminder that a task had been completed. As he shifted position Dawn saw the big knife, dripping blood.

What was he doing to Rita?

What had Rita done to him that had singled her out for special treatment?

Something caught El's attention and he turned.

Had he heard something?

Or were her eyes on him enough to alert him to the presence of another living person in the room?

If she moved a fraction of an inch, he would spot her in his peripheral vision.

He pushed himself to his feet and, as he stepped over Rita's corpse, toward the open door to the phone room, Rita's upper body came into view and Dawn fought down a scream.

Her imagination had conjured horrors, visions of madness. But this was real. And the reality of it stunned. Rita's empty sockets stared up at her just as Clive's had, and at that instant, Dawn was certain that Rita was about to speak. That she would say something to draw El's attention.

But it wasn't Rita's missing eyes that left Dawn paralyzed. It was Rita's arms.

One of them hung from El's hand.

The other was missing.

Dawn knew she was losing it. Soon she would be as insane as El. Terror would drive the last vestiges of sanity from her mind and she would give herself up to him gladly to have this horror over and ended forever.

El stretched, the bloody knife swinging from his right hand. He twisted his head slowly back and forth like a hawk after a kill. It occurred to her that that was what he was. An animal. He wasn't killing everyone out of anger or hatred or fear.

He was killing them because that was what he did.

He felt no pity or satisfaction.

And that made it all the more terrifying. But something deep inside told her that, just then, she was as close to understanding El as she would ever be.

El took a deep breath and tossed Rita's arm onto the floor, pausing briefly to study his handiwork. He cocked his head to one side, then dropped back down onto Rita's body, facing her feet this time.

He lifted the bloody knife high overhead and plunged it down into Rita's thigh, just above the knee.

Dawn's nausea was wiped away by solid terror once more. This time she wasn't going to gag. She was going to pass out.

But not yet.

Not while he's here.

He'll see me or hear my head hit the floor.

And then he'll come for me.

He'll do to me what he's doing to Rita.

And then another realization struck like a physical blow.

I know where he's going next.

Rita wasn't singled out.

She was just the first.

El hacked and sawed, wiping sweat out of his eyes, smearing blood from the back of his hand across his face.

Mercifully, as the crying of the wind increased, Dawn could barely hear the awful sucking noises.

M
ICKY SPLASHED ACROSS THE
icy creek. The water stung like needles where it soaked into her boots and nipped at her ankles. The rocks were slippery and the snow—now beginning to whiten the ground and cling to the branches— turned the trees on the far shore flat and featureless.

She searched for and finally found the opening in the brush, the one Terry Glorianus used when she went down to the Fork for water. Micky clawed her way up the bank. She was staring at the closed door of Terry's cabin when a staticky warning shocked her. She snatched the radio from her jacket pocket and was about to click the transmit button.

“Don't call back,”
said Dawn.

Micky turned the volume up and pressed the radio close to her ear. The wind was moaning through the trees and the girl was whispering. It occurred to Micky that had she pressed the send button there was the possibility that Dawn's radio might have squealed. If Dawn was still inside the store and El was in there with her, then that would have been a very dangerous mistake.

“He's cutting Rita up now.”

Micky knew that there were numerous cases of serial killers who removed their victims’ body parts for various reasons. Chickatillo in Russia had done so under the mistaken
idea that his image would remain in his victim's eyes and he might be identified in that way. Others just seemed to get satisfaction from the mutilation.

But something told her that it was neither fear of discovery nor satisfaction that motivated El.

El was acting methodically.

Why was he doing this?

“He keeps saying ‘You're not going to follow me around,’ ”
whispered Dawn.
“He cut off Rita's arms and legs.”

Jesus Christ.

You're not going to follow me around?

Did he think the dead could get up and walk?

Micky wanted desperately to reply to Dawn, to ask how she was doing, to find out how close El was, to urge the girl to hide and wait. But she didn't dare call back until she was certain that El was out of hearing range of the radio. Now she kept the volume turned up full blast and headed back up the trail toward El's cabin.

The snow settled into a satiny layer of white beneath her feet. It reminded her of the silk lining of Wade's casket. Of the sheen of her father's blood against the clean tile floor. To Micky, white would always be the color of death.

M
ARTY AND
S
TAN STOOD
on Howard's porch, peering inside the empty cabin. They were still arguing. The door was wide-open and snow had begun to stick to the cabin floor.

“Shut up, Stan,” said Marty.

Stan started to reply but Marty had already stepped into the cabin.

“Maybe you shouldn't go in there,” murmured Stan.

Marty scowled.

Normally he would have considered it the height of effrontery to enter someone else's home without their permission. A man's home was his castle. Of course, if a man was caught out in the weather and needed shelter, that was a different matter. Go on in, use what you need, replace it when you can. Everyone in the Alaskan bush knew that was okay. But this wasn't a blizzard and they were just passing by.

“Something's not right,” said Marty, glancing around the cabin.

“Looks all right to me,” insisted Stan, still refusing to cross the threshold.

Marty tested the stove with a bare hand. “Warm.”

“Probably gone hunting.”

Marty glanced at the gun case beside the bed. “Must be planning a long trip,” he said, walking over to it.

“What do you mean?” said Stan, taking a tentative step inside.

“He took all four guns.”

Stan shook his head. “That doesn't make sense. Why would Howard pack all those guns?”

“Yeah. And the lock on the case is broken.” Marty pointed to chipped wood where the door had been jimmied.

“Maybe he lost his key,” said Stan.

“This stinks,” Marty said, giving Stan another of those looks.

“Come on,” said Stan, no longer interested in arguing. “Let's go find Clive and see what the hell is going on.”

But Marty didn't move. He glanced slowly around the cabin, then back at the empty gun case.

“I can't figure it,” he said. “Unless there was a bear and everyone came here to grab a gun.”

But that made no sense. Unless everyone just happened to be meeting at Howard's at the time.

Marty looked out at the snow, wishing it had started earlier so whoever had been at the cabin would have left tracks.

“Come on,” said Stan, turning away.

Marty started to follow. Then he spotted Howard's coffee cup.

“Stan.” Marty felt the cup. It was cool to the touch but filled to the brim.

Stan moseyed over and touched the cup himself. But it was clear that he didn't get the significance.

“Why would he pour himself a full cup of coffee and leave it sitting here?” asked Marty, glancing over again at the busted gun case. “Howard left in one hell of a hurry. And he didn't haul four or five rifles out of here all by himself.”

“Probably a bear.”

“I don't think this has anything to do with a bear.”

“Well, what
do
you think?”

Marty shook his head. “I think we better go find out.”

M
ICKY
COULDN
T
BELIEVE
IT.

She stood at the edge of the trail and stared at El's cabin.

On the front porch, taking up nearly the entire stoop, sat a fat old grizzly.

The bear was tearing into a large black garbage bag with gusto. Her huge claws raked the soft plastic, her nose buried deep in the delicious-smelling refuse. She emitted that peculiar snuffling noise that grizzlies make, a sound between a belch and a snore. And each time she pulled her black nose out of the bag she had paper hanging between her teeth as she gnawed greedily on the odds and ends.

She had her huge butt pressed against the only door into El's cabin and Micky considered giving up her quest as a bad idea. But the bear stood between her and her only hope of finding a weapon with which to even up the odds. Somehow she had to get the bear to move.

The animal was clearly past her prime, mangy from years of wilderness living and a hard winter. But old bears got that way by being tough and Micky didn't underestimate this one. She probably weighed in at well over eight hundred pounds and her claws could slash through skin and flesh and cartilage like paper.

Aaron said that bears were smarter than people.

You shouldn't just shoot them. You had to learn how to negotiate with them.

There were still eight or ten garbage bags the bear had not yet gotten around to scattering about the clearing. Evidently the grizzly had spent the past hour or so opening one after the other, and then tired of the game and dragged a bag up onto the porch to sample at her leisure. Micky stepped out into the clearing where the snow was starting to cover the debris with a pure blanket of white.

The bear looked up curiously.

“I'm going to go over there and open you up another TV dinner,” Micky said, pointing toward the unopened bags. She didn't want to appear threatening. Her intention was to open a bag and toss the garbage onto the snow to entice the old sow off the porch. The animal's cold black eyes pierced the veil of thickening snowflakes, following Micky's every movement.

For all their bulk, the big bears were deceptively agile and swift. A grizzly could easily outrun a sprinter for a short distance and Micky didn't care to find out just how short a distance that was.

Micky took three slow, deliberate steps toward the side of the cabin. The bear cocked her head, keeping the ravished bag tightly wedged between her hind legs. She didn't seem disturbed yet. She emitted a grunt. A question in bear language.

Micky took another couple of steps and the bear stiffened. Micky could see the animal's thick brain churning, her eyes narrowing.

“Just getting you some more food!” Micky shouted over the wind.

No problem.

Without warning the words echoed through her mind and she knew that her subconscious must have realized before she did that there was a problem.

She froze in mid-stride.

The bear was no longer grunting.

She was growling.

T
HE STORE, SAID STAN
.

The rifle hung in his right hand and his left was fisted on his hip. Marty itched to smack him. He stood on Howard's stoop, glaring down at Stan, who reminded him, as usual, of a spoiled teenager.

“Someone shouted across the Fork,” insisted Marty, nodding toward the bridge to Terry Glorianus's cabin. They had both heard it. A woman's voice, distorted by the wind and the lowering snow. It had to be Terry or Dawn. But it was hard to tell how far away the voice came from. “The shots came from the Glorianus place first.”

“What about all the shells we heard popping? That came from the store. We need to get down there.” Stan glanced around, nervously. “You know what you're thinking. You know it.”

“We don't know anything for sure,” said Marty. “We heard shots.”

“And a shout.”