John Saul (24 page)

Standing silently, staring at her.

She’d been talking to Mrs. Wickman about him.

Spying on him …

Rick Martin stared at the report from the lab in Boise in disgust. “What the hell is this?” he demanded rhetorically, but Tony Moleno, the only other person in the two-room office on the second floor of the firehouse, glanced up from the paperwork he was laboring over on the theft of a T-shirt from Francine Schildhauser’s clothesline.

“A
pervert
!” Francine had insisted. “We have a pervert loose in town. The children won’t be safe!” Seeing no point in arguing with her, Tony had dutifully taken notes, and
was now stuck with the multitudinous forms the sheriff’s department required.

“What’s what?” he asked, glad for the diversion.

“This!” Martin spat, tossing the report to his partner. “Can you believe this?”

Moleno quickly scanned the document, an analysis of the minute quantities of matter that had been recovered from the tent and sleeping bags from Coyote Creek Campground and from the body of Glen Foster.

“ ‘Unidentified animal hair’?” Moleno read, his brows arching. “What do they mean, ‘unidentified’? Their whole fuckin’
job
is identifying stuff like that!”

“No shit,” Rick Martin muttered, grabbing the receiver of the phone on his desk in his left hand as he jabbed angrily at the keypad with his right. “This is Rick Martin, up in Sugarloaf,” he barked when a harried-sounding woman finally picked up his call on the tenth ring. “Let me talk to—Hold on a minute!” He reached for the report, snatched it out of Moleno’s fingers, then spoke again, reading the name of the investigator from the bottom of the form. “Henry! Henry Henry!” He rolled his eyes at Moleno as he was put on hold. “Henry Henry? What the hell kind of name is that? Sounds like—Hello? Henry Henry? This is Rick Martin, up in Sugarloaf. I’m looking at your report on that stuff we sent you, and I’m not going to pretend I’m real happy with it. What the hell do you mean, ‘unidentified animal hair’? What kind of crap is that,
Henry Henry
?”

In his office in Boise, Henry Henry took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. He’d been expecting this call ever since he’d given the report to his secretary an hour ago, ready to be faxed up to Sugarloaf. “You got all your steam blown off yet, or do you want to rant some more? It’s your nickel, so either way is fine by me. Oh, and by the way,” he added. “My name’s Hank—my dad was a very sick man.”

Rick Martin chuckled, his frustration at the report already dissipating. “Okay,
Hank
! Sorry I got cranky. But that still doesn’t tell me what the hell’s going on. What does ‘unidentifiable animal hair’ mean? In simple English, please.”

“It means the hairs we recovered were animal—that’s as
opposed to nonanimal, I presume—and that we don’t know what kind they are. Is that simple enough for you?”

“But you guys have samples from every kind of animal in Idaho down there, don’t you?”

“And Oregon, Washington, Montana, British Columbia, and a lot of other places, too,” Henry agreed. “But what you sent up doesn’t match any of them. Closest thing is wolf, but it’s not a match. Too thin, and too curly.”

“All right, so where does that leave us?” Martin asked, already wondering what he was going to tell Milt Morgenstern when the editor and publisher of the local newspaper inevitably called him. “ ‘Unidentified animal’ sounds awfully close to Sasquatch to me, and the last thing this place needs is for the tabloids to pick up something like that. You got any idea what it could do to our ski season?”

In the privacy of his office in Boise, Hank Henry shrugged. “But what if it
is
a Sasquatch you guys have got up there?” he asked with an air of exaggerated concern that slid across the line into parody. “Shouldn’t the public be warned?”

“Come on, damn it,” Martin replied. “You’re going to have to do better than that, and you know it!”

“All right.” Henry sighed. “You’re right—it isn’t good enough, and it’s pissing me off as much as it is you. I’ve already sent the samples to the FBI lab. They’ve got the equipment to do a DNA analysis, and I put a rush on the job. With any luck, we should have an answer within twenty-four hours.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?” Martin demanded.

“Stonewall it,” Henry suggested. “Tell ’em we’re running behind and haven’t gotten to it yet.”

“This is a death we’re talking about,” Martin objected. “Not to mention the woman in the hospital down there! If I tell the newspaper guy up here that, he’ll be on you so hard you’ll feel like you got a yellow jacket in your jockstrap!”

“I’ll try to bear up under the pressures of the fourth estate,” Hank Henry observed dryly before he hung up.

Rick Martin got up from his desk, walked over to the window, and gazed down on the quiet street below.

Quiet for now, anyway.

But as soon as the first snow fell, the town would fill up, all the condominiums rented, the restaurants busy, the stores selling ski clothes as fast as they could ring them up. Though he had only a vague idea of how much of Sugarloaf’s economy was currently based on winter sports, he knew there were a lot of people in town who wouldn’t be able to survive a failed winter.

And every one of them would blame him for any rumors of an unidentifiable creature loose in the mountains.

For now, he decided, he’d do nothing at all about the strange report he’d gotten from Boise.

After all, there was no sense causing a panic, for surely there was nothing to panic about.

By tomorrow, he was certain—or the day after—they would know exactly what had killed Glen Foster. And only when he knew would he speak to Milt Morgenstern, or anybody else.

“Okay, you’re doing fine,” Olivia Sherbourne told MaryAnne. She glanced at her watch, then took the shotgun out of MaryAnne’s hands and began reloading the magazine. “I’ve got just about enough time for one more magazine, then I’ve got to go back to work.”

“Why don’t we quit now?” MaryAnne suggested. “I just stopped in to say hello—I wasn’t really expecting a shooting lesson.”

“No time like the present,” Olivia replied. “Next time, you’ll load the shells yourself. A gun you don’t know how to load is a pretty useless weapon.”

MaryAnne looked with distaste at the shotgun. Made entirely of metal, plastic, and hard rubber, it looked nothing like the ornately carved weapons she had occasionally glanced at in museums and sporting goods stores. This gun looked exactly like what it was—an instrument for cold-blooded killing.

“There’s no point in even having a gun out here if it won’t stop a grizzly,” Olivia had told her when they’d
brought the gun out to the pasture behind the large house that served the veterinarian as both home and office.

“But I’m not even sure I want a gun,” MaryAnne protested.

“You’ve already got one,” Olivia pointedly replied. “It’s just like this one, and it’s locked in the gun cabinet in your den. Audrey and I bought them at the same time, and you should know how to use it.” Though she didn’t mention the killing in the campground, both of them knew exactly what she was talking about.

“Why do I wish you’d been cleaning the oven when I arrived, instead of the gun?” MaryAnne groaned. “If you hadn’t already had it out—”

“But I did have it out,” Olivia cut in, “so let’s just get to it, all right?”

She’d gone over the shotgun carefully, showing MaryAnne each of its parts and how it worked. “Never, ever, leave it loaded,” she’d begun. “When you’re done using it, empty the magazine, empty the chamber, and then fire it. Then try to load another cartridge into the chamber, and try to fire it again. Only when you can’t make it fire—no matter what you do—do you put it away. Understand?”

MaryAnne had nodded, almost wishing she hadn’t stopped in to say hello to Olivia at all, but at the same time knowing that her new friend was right—if she were going to live out here, she should know the basics of shooting. Reluctantly, she’d taken the gun, put it up to her shoulder, sighted along the barrel, and fired.

The kick of the gun had almost made her lose her balance.

“That’s all right,” Olivia had assured her as she steadied herself. “Just keep the stock hard against your shoulder. If you don’t, it could break it when it kicks. The idea is to absorb the shock, not have it slam into you. Let’s try it again.”

And so, for almost half an hour, MaryAnne had practiced shooting, and slowly the weapon had begun to feel less alien in her hands.

“With a laser sight, it’s hard to miss,” Olivia explained.
“As soon as you squeeze the button, the laser comes on, and wherever you see the red dot is where the shot is going to hit.”

Now Olivia handed her back the reloaded shotgun, and pointed to a bale of hay about fifty yards away. It was the farthest target she had set up. From this far, MaryAnne didn’t think she had a chance of hitting it. “At night, you’ll see the red dot even from this distance,” Olivia told her. “What you’d do is aim the gun at the ground in front of you, and just walk the spot up to the target. During the day, it’s actually trickier, harder to see the red dot. Take a shot.”

MaryAnne shot the bolt, injecting a cartridge into the chamber, then lifted the weapon to her shoulder, her right forefinger curling around the trigger. Bracing the gun with her left hand, she pressed the button to light the laser.

No dot appeared on the target, so she concentrated, carefully lining the target up with the sights on the barrel. Finally she squeezed the trigger, pulling it with a slow, steady motion, preparing herself for the gun’s kick.

As the shot exploded, the target suddenly appeared to have developed freckles.

“Bull’s-eye,” Olivia said. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

He had been asleep in his cabin when the first shot had roused him. Even before its roar had died away, he was fully awake and out of bed. He was half dressed when the second shot sounded, and by the time the third shot was fired, he was out of the cabin, moving quickly through the trees, following no path as he skirted the mountainside until he came to one of the massive outcroppings that commanded a view of the entire valley. Crouching in a shadowed cleft, invisible from below, he gazed out over El Monte Ranch, his eyes searching out the source of the gunfire.

As MaryAnne Carpenter began firing the second magazine, the man’s sharp eyes found the puff of smoke from the shotgun’s muzzle, and he left his hiding place, ducking low to the ground as he raced along the mountain’s flank, his bare feet silently carrying him closer to the veterinarian’s property.

At last he came to a ridge directly above Olivia Sherbourne’s pasture, where he crouched once more, still able to observe what was happening several hundred feet below him, invisible to the two women on the valley floor.

He cringed as yet another shot was fired, the blast of the shell resounding in his ears with a force that made him wince in physical pain. A moment later his flaring nostrils picked up the acrid scent of burnt gunpowder floating up from below. He saw MaryAnne pump yet another cartridge into the chamber, and he braced himself for the next shot.

Only when the echo of the last shell had died away and he saw the two women turn and head back toward the house, did the man leave the shelter of the ridge and start slowly back the way he came.

If she was learning how to use a gun, he would have to be more careful than he’d been before.

“You know what you need?” Olivia asked as they stepped through the back door into her large kitchen.

“I need a lot of things,” MaryAnne replied wryly. “What’s first on your list?”

“An evening out,” Olivia replied. “An evening out of that house, an evening away from your kids, an evening spent entirely in the company of adults.”

“And how do I arrange that?” MaryAnne asked. “Just call up some total stranger and ask him to invite me to a dinner party?”

“Not quite. All you do is come down here about six-thirty this evening. I’m having a few people in, and I think you should join us.”

Though the idea instantly appealed to MaryAnne, she rejected it just as quickly. “What am I going to do with the kids?”

Now Olivia burst out laughing. “Come on, MaryAnne! Alison’s old enough to be baby-sitting herself, and Joey’s the same age she is. Let them sit Logan, and just tell Sikes to keep an eye on them. You’re not going to be that far from home.”

“You’re on,” MaryAnne quickly agreed. Except for the reception after the funeral, she’d barely spoken to anyone
other than Olivia herself and Charley Hawkins. Olivia was right—it would do her good to get out of the house, even if it was only for a couple of hours. “What do you want me to bring?”

“Nothing,” Olivia told her as they walked out to MaryAnne’s car. “Just be here at six-thirty, and be ready to relax for a while. Deal?”

“Deal,” MaryAnne replied.

As she climbed into the Range Rover and started up the road to El Monte, MaryAnne realized she was already looking forward to the evening. But as she emerged from the winding driveway into the open yard in front of the house, she suddenly had the uncanny feeling that she was being watched.

She glanced around. Bill Sikes must be somewhere close by. But there was no sign of him. Parking the Rover in front of the house, she got out, glanced around once more, then decided she was being silly. Why would anyone be watching her? Determinedly shaking off the feeling, she went into the house, unaware that from the shelter of one of the escarpments far up the mountainside, she was, indeed, being watched.

Watched by a man, and a wolf.

A
ll afternoon the sky had grown steadily darker, and when night finally fell over the ranch, it wrapped the house in a heavy blackness that set Alison’s nerves on edge. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so quick to insist her mother go to Dr. Sherbourne’s for dinner, to assure her that she was old enough to take care of everything.

Her mother hadn’t really wanted to leave them alone—Alison herself had insisted on it. But now that night had descended on them, she was beginning to regret it. She moved through the lower floor of the big house, turning on lights in every room, trying to drive the shadows away. Still, whenever she even glanced at one of the windows, she found herself shivering at the inky gloom that surrounded the house. She tried to shake off the feeling of apprehension that had come over her, tried to tell herself that she just wasn’t used to having it so dark outside. Back in New Jersey, even on the darkest of nights, the streetlights still shined brightly and the neighbors’ houses were always lit. Even late at night, after most of the neighborhood had gone to bed, there was a steady glow in the sky from Manhattan, only a few miles away, and every now and then a car would turn the corner a few yards away, the beams of its headlights sweeping the wall of the room she had shared with Logan.