Fatalis (23 page)

"We know things you don't," Grand said. "Things you need to know."

"Do I?"

"If you want to find who did this, yes," Grand said. "Your lab team wouldn't have run the same tests that I did."

"Such as?"

"Radiocarbon dating."

Gearhart looked from Grand to Hannah. He continued walking. "Talk," he said to her.

"As the professor said, we've been doing a little research on our own," Hannah told him. "Professor Grand was down in one of the caves this morning-the one where he found the engineer's flashlight-and he discovered something down there. Fur from a large predator."

"And?"

"It was from a big cat," Hannah replied. "Possibly the same one that attacked the fish truck."

Gearhart reached the shattered Hobie Cat. He squatted and looked at the gashes with his flashlight. "We're looking into that possibility."

"Not this possibility," Hannah said.

Gearhart looked up. "I'm listening."

"Without doing the carbon-14 test you wouldn't have thought to go to the same database we did to find a DNA match," Hannah said. "Sheriff, this is going to sound weird, but the fur comes from an animal that is supposed to have died out about eleven thousand years ago. I say 'supposed to' because the samples Professor Grand found came from a living creature. The spacing of the gashes on the catamaran and the size of the footprints in the sand seem to corroborate the identity of the animal."

"Which is?"

Hannah just blurted it out. "A saber-toothed tiger."

Gearhart didn't flinch or roll his eyes. He looked from Hannah to Grand. "Do you believe that?"

"Until a theory can be discounted I always keep an open mind," Grand told him.

"That isn't exactly an endorsement," Gearhart said.

"No. It's a possibility."

"But I notice that you're not dismissing it either," Hannah said. "Why, Sheriff?"

"Ms. Hughes, today I've listened to explanations ranging from UFO abductions to actors wearing movie monster makeup to people who change into tigers to attacks by angry Chumash spirits," Gearhart said.

"What makes you so sure there are no spirits?" Grand asked.

"I've received offers of help from psychics, exorcists, and even a lion tamer," Gearhart went on. "Now you're saying that prehistoric cats are using the beach as a litter box. Off the record, I don't believe any of it. But until I find who or what is responsible for the disappearance of these people, I'm going to listen to any respected professional."

"This isn't about ghosts and space aliens and you know it," she said. "
Why
didn't you dismiss the idea of these tigers?"

Gearhart excused himself and started toward the car. Hannah followed and Grand went after her.

"Why won't you
talk
to us?" Hannah demanded.

"Ms. Hughes, this is why I hate these little discussions. Because everything turns into a goddamn interview, a negotiation for information."

"But we can help!" she said.

"How?" Gearhart asked.

"Like we just did," she said. "Gathering information, talking to people-"

"Your kind of help can also cause panic," Gearhart said. "Or it can inform a perpetrator about what we're doing so he can plan his next crime."

"Animals can't read!" she said.

Before the sheriff could say anything else there was a call on the patrol car radio. Gearhart jogged over.

"Look," Hannah said to Grand. "The call is out of range of his personal radio." They hurried after him. "It's either from the mountains or another town. Something's up. I can feel it."

Gearhart reached the car, opened the door, and removed the handset from the console under the dashboard. "Gearhart here. Go," he said as he slipped into the vehicle and shut the door.

Hannah and Grand arrived a moment later. The car window was up and the voices were muffled inside. A moment later he started the engine and revved it. The voices were lost entirely.

The Wall had finished taking his pictures and ambled over. "Did he offer to put us in for a responsible-citizenship medal, being here before the critical evidence was obliterated?"

Hannah said nothing.

"Then the answer is no," the Wall said. "If nothing else you've got to admire Gearhart's consistency."

A moment later Gearhart turned on his flashing lights and drove off.

Hannah watched for a second and then ran toward Grand's SUV.

"Come on," she said. "Something's up."

Grand and Hannah got into the SUV and the Wall jumped into his Jeep.

"Let the Wall go first," Hannah said. "He's done this before. If we lose Gearhart he'll call me."

Grand obliged. After the Jeep rattled over the train tracks and sped after the patrol car, Grand set out. Meanwhile, Hannah had her phone out, ready to take the call.

As they followed the Wall back onto the 101 and then up into the foothills. Grand realized that he had gotten this all wrong.

It was Hannah who was Douglas MacArthur.

As he raced to the Upper Santa Ynez River Canyon, Sheriff Gearhart thought about the call he'd just received. Screams and gunshots had been heard by a ranger near the Juncal campsite. It had happened less than a half hour before- probably a camper who had had too much to drink at dinner and went a little bonkers. Things like that had happened before. Though he wanted to be sure, Gearhart didn't see how this situation could be related to the others.

The highway patrol had checked out the Hobie Cat serial number and found that it was owned by a Patrick Vlaskovitz, a student at UCSB. He and two friends were seen going out in the late afternoon, so they were probably killed when they came ashore early in the evening and the beach was deserted. Poor guys at the wrong place, wrong time. But if other attacks were a model, the killer needed more time between kills than an hour or two. And the killer tended to tackle isolated persons, not groups. A campsite just didn't fit.

His flashing lights lit the surrounding slopes as he headed into the hills. The siren was muted by the closed windows and the whir of the air conditioner driving icy air through the vent. He needed the cold air to stay alert. He wasn't a young Marine anymore. Being on the go for two days straight with only a few hours sleep was rough. And it wasn't just the work itself that was exhausting. It was dealing with people like Hannah Hughes.

She had no idea
, Gearhart thought angrily.
She had no mortal foggy notion what it was like
.

Hannah Hughes ran a self-indulgent newspaper. If it failed, she still had her multimillion-dollar trust fund to live off. Even Professor Grand probably didn't get it. He taught college kids and solved mysteries that were thousands of years old. If he failed to figure them out, no one got hurt. Neither of them knew the burden of protecting lives and property, order and security, sanity and peace. And Hannah just didn't know how to cut him any slack.

Gearhart didn't particularly like either of them, but that wasn't the issue. As a Marine, he'd learned to look past personality and talent. What would help them realize a goal, complete a mission, and get out alive? Hannah and Grand were both smart, resourceful, and relentless and if Gearhart thought they could help he'd be happy to listen. But Hannah wanted to sell newspapers and Grand probably wanted to write papers. Whatever else Gearhart wanted, he wanted above all to perform the job he was elected to perform.

Yet as sprawling as Hannah's net tended to be-or because of that-she had managed to be right about one thing, though. Gearhart knew more than he was telling about this case. While he wasn't willing to buy the idea of a saber-toothed tiger, he wasn't dismissing the notion that some nutcase was murdering people in the fashion of a saber-toothed tiger. And that the killer was planting evidence to fool wanna-believers like Hannah and Grand. One of Thomas Gomez's lab boys had made that suggestion after examining the backpack they found in the creek sinkhole. The chemist had just taken his son to see the saber-tooth fossil displays at the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles. The boy had posed for a photograph with his head in the tiger's mouth; the depth and spacing of the gashes reminded the chemist of that mouth, so he had E-mailed the museum for exact measurements.

They fit.

The fur specimens the lab boys found in the fish truck supported the notion that someone was trying to emulate a saber-tooth, though Grand was correct about that. They hadn't radiocarbon-dated the sample or tested to see whether it came from a living creature. According to the experts at Page, there weren't any existing examples of saber-toothed tiger hair. The fact that Gomez and his team hadn't found a match meant that the sample in the truck probably came from some obscure animal like a platypus or wombat. As soon as the technicians got a spare minute they'd nail that down for sure.

Gearhart kept people like Hannah Hughes at a safe distance because he knew from his experiences in LA that all he had to tell her was that there might be a lunatic pretending to be a saber-toothed tiger. He could see the headlines now: COPY-CAT KILLER! Gearhart could live with that, but only after they'd found the perpetrator and any accomplices. He didn't need his investigators pressured by front-page yipping and editorial scare-mongering. That was how mistakes and wrongful arrests happened. There were thirty experienced police and search personnel in the field. They were just about finished searching the mountains and would be moving into the caves soon. They'd get whoever was doing this.

Get him and make him extinct.

Grand was accustomed to driving the hills and was having no trouble keeping up with the Wall. Not that there were many places the photographer or Gearhart could lose them, especially with his flashing lights bouncing off the slopes. In about a quarter of a mile, the Divide Peak RV Route would end and intercept a very short spur of East Camino Cielo. From there, they could only head west in the direction of the Painted Cave or east toward Pendola Road. Pendola Road ran toward the northwest and was the location of four campsites: Juncal, Mid-Santa Ynez, P-Bar Flats, and Mono.

"What makes you think Gearhart will let us stay?" Grand asked Hannah as they neared the end of the Divide Peak Route.

"He won't," Hannah said. "But he can't chase us away without a reason and, with luck, it'll take him at least a minute or two to get one."

The Wall reached East Camino Cielo and turned east.

"They're headed toward campgrounds," Grand said.

Hannah shook her head. "This is amazing."

"What is?"

"All of this," she said. "Discovery, a story unfolding, piecing things together, danger."

"Going nose-to-nose with Gearhart on his turf?"

"Busted," Hannah said with a guilty grin. "Yeah, that too."

"I guess it's different being part of the news instead of just covering it," Grand said.

"Totally."

"But I can't get it out of my head that people are dying out here. It puts a different imperative on the process."

"That's what I mean," Hannah said. "What we do can make a difference. It's the main reason I got into this business."

They started up Pendola Road and immediately turned off at the Juncal campsite. The site was located in the Santa Ynez river drainage. As Grand pulled up he saw seven campers parked well apart on the thickly treed grounds. There were four motor homes, two pop-up campers, and a large fifth-wheel trailer. The lights were on in some of the RVs, off in others. High, grassy hills rose beyond the site, blocking most of the moonlight.

Gearhart and the Wall were moving toward the campers. An officer from the Pendola Ranger Station was already there; Grand recognized the green Chevy truck. A flashlight was moving toward Gearhart. Grand pulled up near the fifth-wheel trailer, a thirty-six-foot Gulf Stream Conquest. He and Hannah got out. Hannah hurried after Gearhart.

"Sheriff," said the short, middle-aged, clean-cut ranger in a brown uniform.

"What've we got?" Gearhart asked.

"Blood," replied the ranger nonchalantly. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Looks like party night in 'Nam over there."

The men started walking into the heart of the camp. "How many victims?" Gearhart asked.

"So far I haven't found a one," the ranger said, "But I haven't gone into all the campers yet."

"You said there were guns."

"Two," the ranger replied. "They were different locations. Each one got off a round, but that was-"

The cry was small, thin, and high.

Everyone stopped talking, stopped moving, and listened.

The voice was coming from inside the Gulf Stream Conquest. Grand had stayed by his SUV and was the one nearest the trailer. The door was only ten feet away. He ran toward it.

"Grand, wait!" Gearhart shouted.

Grand did not intend to wait. Whoever was inside might be hurt. Seconds could matter.

The door was located in the front of the trailer. There was a large pool of blood to the left of it, large, ugly scratches on the wall beside it. Grand opened the door with the sleeve of his jacket so he wouldn't smudge any fingerprints. He stepped back and listened.

"Grand, dammit!" Gearhart shouted.

Grand didn't hear anything from inside the trailer. He went up the stairs and looked in.

The lights were on and the camper was relatively neat. There was part of a stuffed animal on the floor and uneaten dinner on the dinette. The drapes of the bay window were drawn. He moved down the center of the RV toward a side aisle. There was another room in back.

"Hello!" Grand said as he moved into the master bedroom. He stopped and looked under the queen-size bed. "Is anyone in there?"