Shoggoths in Bloom (44 page)

“We live in the woods,” Matt said, stubbornly proud. “We wouldn’t get eaten by an animal.”

Dr. Klopft smiled. “Yes, you’re obviously both very smart and knowledgeable children. Now I need you to use those smarts and that knowledge to help me. So think very carefully, please. About the last time you saw your father.”

Martha closed her eyes to think better. It wasn’t hard to pull up the memory: it was still there, crisp and perfect, just like all her other memories. It shone in her head as if she could reach out and touch it.

She wanted to. She wanted to run into the memory and hug Daddy. But if she tried she knew her arms would go right through him.

Matt was remembering too. She didn’t open her eyes to look, but she could tell by his voice. He said, “Dad said he had somebody to meet. And that he’d be home in a couple of hours.”

“A couple of hours? You’re sure?”

“He was always very—very punctual.” Matt pronounced the long word carefully. “He was always where he said he would be.”

“Except for that time,” Martha said. “He didn’t come back.”

Dr. Klopft was frowning. “But he was fine when he left you. He didn’t seem worried?”

“No,” Matt said.

But Martha knew better. She’d seen something while Matt was outside.

She said, “He took his gun.”

“So that’s why you have to involve a geneticist in an endangered animal trafficking ring,” Sanchez says, as she and Brown begin packing up the camp. He has more stuff than she does, but he is folding it all away exactly as if he intends to move on and never come back to this little clearing. “Because it’s not just trafficking in endangered animals. It’s genetically engineering imaginary ones?”

“That’s all I’ve got,” Brown says. “Figure the octopus is an escapee. It might be as happy here as an invasive anaconda is in the Everglades.”

“But that’s not illegal,” she says. “I mean, people used to create unicorns by surgically altering goats, didn’t they? What’s to stop them from doing the same thing with an octopus? I bet plenty of people with more money than sense would buy one. So why do you keep it secret that you’re making them?”

Hell, she thinks. I would buy one. If I had the dosh, because you know something like that doesn’t come cheap.

From the expression crinkling his face, he’s thinking the same thing. Maybe even word-for-word. “Because some people will pay top dollar for something when they thing it’s unobtainably rare.”

“But it’s cryptozoology. Who’s gonna believe in a tree octopus?”

“So,” he says. “Do you know what all the weird animals that live in Malaysia are?”

“Oh.” She hadn’t even thought of that. Whatever somebody will pay for a cool genetically engineered pet, there’s some collector who would pay ten, twenty times more for an authentic wild-caught Pacific Tree Octopus. Klopft isn’t just engineering a cool new pet. He’s forging a criticallyendangered species. “That’s fucked up.”

Brown smiles again, like he likes her. He reaches out and taps her shoulder, too. “And you know it. Come on, Sanchez. Now that I have you for backup, there’s something I want to try.”

He won’t tell her where they’re going, but as they stride along deer trails, having hidden the bulk of their gear, he does tell her to watch out for traps.

“Like punji sticks and tripwires?”

“Like wire loops and deadfalls to kill squirrels.” He points, carefully, leading her gaze to a flat rock balanced across a triangle of sticks. It’s set just a little off the trail. “They’re tricky to set, and it would be rude to trigger them. Not to mention the potential damage to your toes.”

“Ow,” Sanchez says, feeling the tingle of imagined pain. “So why was your guy setting traplines?”

“Not my guy,” he says. “They started showing up about a week and a half ago. But I haven’t had the chance to follow them back. Now that you’re here—” He shrugs. “Two are better than one.”

“I’m not armed,” she says.

He gives her a sideways glance. “You’ve got eyes.”

Indeed she does. And because she’s looking for traps, and still scanning the trees for signs of a murder scene, she spots the bright gouge in an umbertree-trunk, just a little above head height.

“Brown,” she hisses, instinctively dropping her voice.

He hears her and freezes. “Yeah?”

“Look here.” She gestures to the tree.

His long face smooths out with surprise. “That looks like a bullet hole.”

“I know,” she says. “How about that?”

Sanchez doesn’t have her camera anymore, but Brown is armed. He photographs everything she suggests, and a few other angles besides, while she examines the scene. There are, in point of fact, two bullet holes, though somebody has dug out one of them.

“Why only one?” Brown asks.

Sanchez holds up the second, pinched between a pair of pliers. “Because we’re supposed to figure out which gun this one came from.”

“And not the other?”

She drops the rifle bullet into a plastic baggy. “Bingo.”

She examines the litter along the line between the two scars. Halfway through, she finds a spatter of blood, dark droplets that by chance struck a peeled branch and so stand out, even three weeks later. She calls Brown over.

“Damn,” he says. “That looks like a crime scene to me.”

“I know,” Sanchez says. “Just doesn’t it?”

Some of the trails Brown leads Sanchez down are so narrow—so negligible—as to be more the concept of a trail than the actuality. They must be made by deer. The trails wind inconveniently through rhododendron stands, forcing Sanchez and Brown to duckwalk. They plunge down steep clay banks and scramble up mossy slopes. Deer apparently had not yet developed the technology of the switchback.

Leaf-mold compresses spongily under each footstep, except where bare wet earth wants to shed her footsteps entirely. Sanchez and Brown go single-file. She learns to watch where he places his feet and imitate him.

A half-day hike brings them to the edge of a clearing, or at least a gap between the trees. Sanchez’s personal idea of clearing includes visible sky; perhaps this is more a glade by those standards. Whatever it is, the overhanging boughs bower and shade a little ramshackle cabin that—by virtue of its lack of straight lines and shaggy lichen-covered exterior— almost vanishes among them.

Brown holds out an arm to stop her, but she’s already paused, one foot still half-lifted, her right hand pressing aside a whippy branch.

“Damn,” says Brown. “Do you suppose anybody lives here?”

The door of the cabin is wedged open, one home-made hinge broken so it droops to the ground on the outside corner. They approach cautiously, Sanchez taking point because she is unarmed except for her hiking stick, and if something jumps her Brown has a better chance of taking the assailant out. It’s Sanchez’s own plan—but that does nothing for the cold prickles spidering up and down her neck—some of which have to do with the ease with which she has found herself trusting Brown.

For all the hammering of her heart, however, the cabin lies empty, humming with a cold abandoned air. An overturned pail beside the woodstove has spilled palm grubs across the rough concrete pad—but they are freshly dead, Sanchez judges, which means somebody brought them in here in the last day or so. A pair of small beds sit against one wall, the covers rucked up into dirty, damp-looking squirrel nests sized for big dogs or human children. There is no place in the cabin that anything bigger than a rabbit could hide.

“Clear?” Brown asks from the doorway.

“Clear,” she answers.

He enters, gives the room a once-over, and crouches by the door to examine something. For her part, Sanchez steps closer to the woodstove, drawn by a smear on the floor.

“Partial footprint,” she says. “Somebody squashed a grub.”

“Pair of men’s boots,” Brown says. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen these on Darwish. Look like they haven’t been touched in a while.”

“There’s a gunrack over the stove,” Sanchez says. “There’s no gun in it. It’s less dusty than some of the other stuff over here. Also, this stove hasn’t been well-cleaned in a while—”

“I think there should be a couple of kids here.” Brown rattles drawers and a chest. “There’s some toys, and kid-sized clothing. Say an eight year old girl and a ten year old boy?”

Sanchez turns. “You have kids?”

“Grown now.” He sighs. “Their mom and I split up when they were about this age.”

“I’m sorry.” She turns her head and studies the peeling bark on the rough and ready doorframe. “I’m divorced, too. My ex is a cop.”

He straightens up, tight graying curls brushing the crumbling boughthatched roof. “Sorry to hear it,” he says—the low-key sympathy of somebody who’s been there, and knows firsthand the identity-shattering wreck of a failed marriage. “How long?”

“About a year,” she lies.

“Any kids?”

She shakes her head.

He twists from the waist to look out the door. “Can you track?”

“You’re supposed to know my rep,” she says, glad for the diversion. “Do we call in a warrant now?”

He whistles between his teeth. “We have a kidnapping linked to a murder victim who was involved in an illegal animal smuggling ring, and a more-or-less hot trail. Now, or after we track them back to Klopft’s compound?”

“You’re confident that’s where the trail will lead us?”

He shows her a crooked mouthful of teeth. “Be awfully coincidental if it didn’t.”

“Now,” she says. “It will take the squad time to get here, and we’ll want them.”

The trail, it turns out, is easy to follow. This is a good thing, because Brown’s casual personal confidence and her own response to it have left her rattled. Rattled, and thinking about Doe again, when she took this job in part so she wouldn’t have to think about Doe.

Something else seems to be bugging Brown, though, because after an hour in which she follows the trail of churned leaf mold and chipped roots, he says, “You’re probably wondering why I waited to move on this.”

She hadn’t been. She shakes her head. “No, I know. If he were holed up in here, you could have scared him off for good, and you needed him. There wasn’t any time pressure. What if he caught the scent?”

“What if I led Klopft down on him?”

“Ouch,” she says. “Yeah, okay, I see that. So I’ve been meaning to ask— Klopft must have front offices all over the world, right? Why the hell aren’t we partnering this with Hawaii PD? Or Shanghai?”

“We are,” he said. “Klopft isn’t even the top of the food chain, which is why I haven’t moved against him, either, so long as Darwish was feeding me. I’ve been gathering intelligence so that Shanghai PD could set up a sting. The smuggling syndicate’s big man is Laurence Chien—Chien Liáopíng—and he never comes into North America or Europe if he can help it. This complicates matters.”

“If you want him, you have to link him unequivocally to this operation.”

“It would be best if we could get him into Cascadia. If we arrest him here, if we can link him definitively to the operation and through the operation to your murder, there will be federal charges—in addition to anything China and Interpol can throw at him. We might actually send him up with more than a slap on the wrist. The murder—” he sighs, reluctant as any good cop to say it “—will help.”

Sanchez knows this. The fact that Brown knows it too, and is willing to share that knowledge, reassures her. And so here she is, her suspicions keep chasing each other in circles through the moist, bird-mad morning. She’s very aware that she’s deciding to trust Brown because she doesn’t have a good reason to doubt him.

Fortunately for her distraction, it had been a big party—six at least—heavily burdened with unwilling children and moving fast. They left a lot of evidence of their passage. This is even easier to interpret than the crime scene.

And something is bugging her. Brought on by thoughts of Doe, no doubt, and thoughts of confidences.

“Earlier,” she says, “when I said I’d been divorced about a year, that wasn’t exactly the truth.”

“I see,” Brown says.

“We’ve been on the rocks for a year. I moved out six weeks ago. But I just decided to file last week. And I haven’t yet, because he’s on a license— and I can’t tell him until he gets back. He was already gone a week when I packed up. I’m a coward, I guess.”

“What’s he like?”

Sanchez fights the bitter grin at first, then lets it curl her lip anyway. “He was my partner.”

“You mean professional partner. Not just life partner.”

“I do.”

“So what caused the break?”

She wishes they had a campfire, so she could poke it, busy her eyes and her hands. Instead, she has to look up across the camp stove and meet Brown’s steady gaze. “You’re a cop,” she says. “It would be a bad idea to tell you.”

“I’m a cop,” he says, like it bothers him. Like he’s swallowing the words, for now. “And yeah, if it’s bad, I probably won’t keep it to myself.”

She sighs. Presses her knuckles to her eyes, which are already swimming anyway from trying to pick out the tiny details that a fast-moving group of men dragging two children have left in the soil and vegetation. She straightens up, easing her back. “I found out something about him—and something about myself when I was with him—that I couldn’t live with. So I left.”

“And you still can’t live with it.”

She huffs. “Yeah. But I can’t talk about it either.” There—a bright chip of bruised root showing through chipped bark. The pale moist patch leads her another three feet, where she finds scuffed leaf mold further on. Their quarry are sticking to trails, more or less, but the trails themselves are hardly self-evident.

“I cheated,” Brown says. Flat-out and even. She looks at him. He shrugs. “It is what it is. I did wrong and I paid for it. It was a long time ago.”

What do you say to something like that? “I kind of went the opposite way,” she says. “I was loyal over being true to myself, and it turns out that doesn’t work out so good in the long run.” She gestures at the trail before them, a convenient change of subject to get herself out of trouble. “Look, I’m willing to gamble that they’re going back to the compound. What else is there in this direction?”

“Mountain lions.” Brown squats to tighten his laces. He slips his pack off and conceals it off the trail, keeping out his hunting knife and his sidearm, worn openly in a hip holster now. When he stands again, his arms swing. “Come on. Let’s go.”