The Fresco (28 page)

“What about me?” Benita asked. “Will they keep coming after me?”

Long silence. “We will try to protect you, dear Benita,” said Chiddy. “So long as you are in your home or at work this should be fairly easy. We could always find you, of course, you or any other individual, but it would take time, so keep us apprised of your whereabouts.”

Thanks a lot, she grumbled to herself. She reported to Chad; he thanked her, sounding irritated, though she felt it was irritation at the situation, not at her. She could visualize all those eager hunters, stocking up on ammunition and dehydrated food and buying tickets to…where? India? Brazil? Or would they stick mostly to the U.S? Chiddy and Vess hadn't specifically mentioned the killings in the U.S. So far, nobody had publicly tied Oregon, New Mexico, and Florida to alien predation.

FRIDAY

The retaking of the Morningside Project from the dealers was considered completed on the Friday afternoon when the wagon and attendant patrol cars drove to Morningside, as they had each day for the past several weeks, but returned empty for the third consecutive day.

Sergeant McClellan got down from the passenger seat side of the cab and shook himself, settling his trousers into their customary sag and his face into an unaccustomed grin.

“Any?” asked the captain from the precinct steps.

“Not one,” replied the sergeant. “The Fourth Floor Women's Circle baked a cake. We had coffee and muffins. The kids sang. It was a party.”

“You did a sweep inside every vacant apartment?”

“There're only a few vacant ones, and they're being rehabbed. This last two weeks, the place's filled up. All the people that wanted to get out, they've stayed in. The place even looks better. Somebody donated paint and rollers, and the tenants are painting the halls themselves. A nursery donated some trees. The city's fixed the elevators. Some teachers and some of the kids from over at the school came over. They gave us thank-you cards the kids made.”

“Thank you, ETs,” breathed the captain. “What do you think? Have a patrol go by there a couple times a day, just to check?”

“I'd say that isn't necessary.” McClellan eased himself up the steps and down the hall to his desk, the captain close behind. “The people there, they'll call us if anything goes wrong. You know, we're gonna have a new problem, Boss.”

“What's that?” asked the captain, following along, beaming from ear to ear.

“I read last night the traffic into the States from Mexico is moving right along. All it takes is a touch of the causometer to let somebody through. No more searches for no reason, no more stops with no evidence. It's working. So, we're looking at a problem actually solved here. What're we supposed to do now? No real drug busts for a week. Almost no burglaries for…what, six days? The drug gangs have disappeared. We've had no little kids caught carrying weapons. No shooting incidents, drive-by or school yard. Our problem's going to be finding stuff to do.”

“We still got domestics,” snarled the captain, attempting severity. “We got murders. We got muggings. We got some nut up on Alta Vista trying to get little kids into his car to pet his weenie. It's not coming up all roses. You haven't died and gone to heaven yet, McClellan!”

McClellan shrugged. “Hey, let me gloat a little. Let us feel good. Tomorrow somebody'll figure how to fool the causometer, we'll be back where we started…”

“We are back where we started,” said the lieutenant, from the other side of the room where he'd been tied up on the phone. “We've got five people disappeared from the university, three male students, one coach, one woman student, all of them taken from the sports center up on Cañoncito, twenty hundred block…”

“So? Send a car,” said the captain, looking puzzled.

The lieutenant came across the room to murmur into Riggles's ear. The captain frowned, shook his head, then said, “McClellan, take Burton with you, go up there and find out what's happening.”

“Something weird?” asked McClellan, accurately reading his boss's expression.

The captain shrugged. “Ah…remember that
Enquirer
article? And the ETs on TV, talking about predators? Maybe this isn't something for a patrol. We'll bypass patrol and find out, okay?”

Burton, a husky youngster only three years on the force, drove, lights and siren on. McClellan watched the streets flee by as they swerved through evening traffic, counting to himself. After today, three more days until his last day. And wouldn't you know, the job was just getting worth doing again when he was getting ready to leave it. These last couple weeks had been fun, like the old days, putting the bad guys away and doing it without walking a tightrope the whole time, doing it honestly, no cheating, no faked evidence or any of the stuff some men fell into when their patience wore out. If he were a churchgoing man, McClellan thought maybe he'd go to services and thank God for the ETs.

“Next right,” he said to Burton, grabbing for support as the car swerved at the corner. “Slow down. We're not chasing anybody.” Wouldn't that frost your cookie! Killed in a speeding police car, chasing nobody, three days before retirement.

The street ended at the back of a tall, blocky gymnasium, separated from the street by a row of bollards. Burton eased around the bollards and parked as close to the front of the building as he could get. An unlocked gate in a high fence opened on a wide stone terrace extending across the building front. Three shallow steps outside the double doors of the building were occupied by a cluster of young men and women students gathered around a hunched over, weeping figure.

McClellan fumbled for his notebook and approached the group. “So, what happened?”

The tear-stained person at the center of the group looked up and cried, “They disappeared. Right in front of me!”

“Okay, okay, miss,” murmured McClellan. “Now, who was it who disappeared?”

“My brother,” the young woman cried. “Carlos Shipton. And some other people. I don't know who. They were out there…” She waved toward the oval track below them, separated from the terrace by a wide, shallow tier of bleachers. “There were two other guys, and a coach, and…a girl in running shorts walking along the track, and…” She looked up, her mouth squared into an agonized mask of tragedy.

“And then?” murmured McClellan.

“They were gone. One minute they were there, the next minute they were gone.” She dabbed at her face with the backs of her hands, smearing the tears.

“There was a smell,” volunteered one of the students. “When I came out of the building, there was a strange smell.”

Two others nodded, yes, there'd been a smell.

One of the building doors banged open to a hurrying youth, who called out, “It was Coach Jensen. Coach Jensen, and he was out there with three guys, Turley, McClure, and Shipton.”

“Who was the girl?”

The young man shook his head. “She was just somebody out there running. I came over here to see Carlos. He owes me money from when we roomed together last year, and I need it. When I got here, I saw he was busy with the coach, so I waited for him. Then I saw the girl, and at first I thought she was Carlos's sister, so I walked down there and called to her and waved. She looked up, and then I saw she was somebody else.”

“You were here when they disappeared?”

The youth looked flustered. “I didn't actually see them disappear. I thought the girl was Angelica, so I yelled ‘Hey, Angelica,' but it wasn't her. The real Angelica was standing right there,” he pointed, “at the top of the stairs, and I said something like, ‘Oh, there you are,' and she screamed. She was looking past me, down there, and when I turned around, they were gone.”

“Coach Jensen, and three students?”

“That's who the coach's assistant says. And the girl,” said the youth.

“Your name is?”

“Mack Dugan. I roomed with Carlos last year. That's how I knew him and his sister.”

“Is that what happened?” McClellan asked Angelica. “Did he tell it the way it happened.”

She nodded, wiping at her eyes. “That's what happened, yes. They just weren't there anymore. Just gone. Like…vanished.”

“Why were you here?” McClellan asked. “Do you usually meet your brother—”

“No,” she cried. “Somebody came to my place late this afternoon looking for him,” she flushed, not wanting to mention the FBI, “and I said I'd…I'd let Carlos know.” Actually, the FBI man was now standing over by the fence, talking rapidly into a cell phone and waving his free hand in frustration. “I know he has a late phys ed class, so I thought he might be here…”

“What about this smell?” asked McClellan. “What did it smell like?”

“Like welding,” said one of the male students. “I heard her screaming, and I came out from inside, and I smelled it. Like welding. Kind of a hot smell.”

Another of them said he'd smelled something also, but he couldn't identify the smell, though he said it reminded him of blood.

“Show me where people were,” McClellan said to Mack, leading the way down the stairs at the center of the bleachers. There Mack turned to the left and walked about thirty yards to bring them even with the starting blocks.

Mack said, “Here! Right here. The three guys were at the starting blocks of the three inside lanes, Ron Turley on the inside, then Carlos, then McClure. Coach Jensen was standing in the next lane, leaning over, telling them something.” He turned to his right. “The girl was twenty or thirty feet that way, walking along the outside lane toward the bleacher stairs.”

McClellan turned, peering in all directions. Concrete posts had been set into the slope with canted steel els protruding from them. Thick wooden slats making up seats and backs were bolted to the els. The rows were separated by
flat, graveled paths. There was no place to hide; everything was wide open. You could see every gum wrapper. There was nothing below but the starting blocks, the lines marking the lanes, and the hurdles set up at intervals.

McClellan moved across the track onto the grass at its center to examine the pole vault uprights and landing pad, one designed to be inflated during use but currently flat and wrinkled. He heaved up a corner, finding it was laid directly on the earth. The landing pit for the long jump had been freshly raked. There were no prints in it. The oval track was separated from the grassy slopes beyond by chain link fences with gates at either end and in the middle of the far side. McClellan trudged to each of them in turn, finding them securely padlocked. This entire area could be locked off by closing the gates on either side of the building, and anyone wanting to leave would have had to go through those gates. Or fly away.

He returned to Burton and the witness. “Did they all go at once?”

“You'd have to ask Angelica,” Mack responded. “They were all gone when I turned around.”

“And when you called to the woman you thought was Angelica, you called by name?”

“Yes. I called out, ‘Hey, Angelica.'”

“And you hailed her brother by name, also?”

“Yeah. I yelled ‘Hey, Carlos!'”

“So, whoever or whatever took them might have thought he was getting two members of one family?”

Burton shook his head. “Then why take the coach and the other two guys?”

McClellan stared at his shoes. “Maybe we all look alike to them.”

“Them, who?” asked Burton.

“The ETs,” said McClellan. “Maybe they can tell male from female, but we all look alike. Like we were deer or elk or something.” He beckoned. “Let's look over in those nearest trees.”

Since the bottom gates were locked, they went back up the bleacher stairs, across the terrace, through the open
gates and around the outside of the fence. The first grove of trees was a hundred yards down the hill, a clump of oaks with shadows lengthening eastward, toward them, trees that had been planted when the college was founded, if not before. The trees were big and old and created a welcome shade.

“Tracks,” murmured McClellan, pointing at an area of bare earth. “Remember the TV broadcast. The predators. That's what one set of tracks looks like. Wulivery. Like elephants.”

“Over here!” cried Burton. He was kneeling by a body, with another one beyond him. “They're alive!”

“That's the other two,” cried Mack. “That's Ron Turley, and Bamma McClure!”

“Bamma,” murmured McClellan to himself, wandering farther into the trees. “What did he do to deserve a name like that? Now where's the coach? If I'm right, we'll find him, but not the other boy, the Shipton boy.” He leaned momentarily against a tree trunk to remove a cinder from his shoe, then caught sight of a red shirt. “Here's the coach,” he cried.

The man was unconscious, but seemingly uninjured. As though he'd been anesthetized. In fact, all three of them seemed to have been anesthetized.

When the ambulances departed with the three unconscious men, McClellan sat down next to Angelica Shipton and waved her sympathizers away. For a time he didn't say anything. He was reflecting on his earlier euphoria, considering whether pride had had any part in it. It was pride that supposedly went before a fall, and oh, boy, was this going to be a fall. From blessing the ETs to damning them, in one easy circuit.

“Look, miss,” he said gravely. “They took your brother. And it looks like they thought they got you, too, because Mack Dugan called both of you by your names. And, it looks like it was done by those predators we heard about on TV, but it's not the kind of thing they've been doing. I mean, right here, in the open, on the campus isn't the way they've been operating. They've been more…sneaky than that. So, I got to ask you, why would these predator ETs want to come after you and your brother?”

Angelica stared at him from tear-bleared eyes, her head moving from side to side in baffled negation. “I don't know! I have no idea! Why would they? I mean, why us?”

“Your parents, miss. I'd like to get in touch with your parents.”

Angelica shook her head, and began to laugh hysterically. “You can't,” she said. “I can't. Carlos tried to call our father yesterday and couldn't find him. And Mother…she's moved. She calls me, but she doesn't have a number where we can call her yet…”

Back at the precinct, McClellan reported to the captain, only to have the captain murmur, “What's that stink, Mac?”

“Stink? I can't smell anything. I've got a cold.”

The captain rose and came around his desk, sniffing. He sniffed at McClellan, front and back, then said, “Take off your jacket and look at the back of it. It's all over goo.”

McClellan removed the jacket. It did have goo on it, like…something waxy or tarry. “I leaned up against a tree at the campus,” he remarked, wonderingly.