The Shadowkiller (15 page)

As the young waitress delivered Kris's shot of tequila and lime wedge, she asked sweetly,“Does your…husband want anything?”

Kris had noticed the waitress's attraction to Mac and decided to give her a quick lesson in reality. “Oh, that guy? He's gone.” She picked up the salt shaker, licked the back of her hand, and tapped a little salt onto it. “Anyway, he's not my husband.”

Then, without taking her eyes off the waitress, she licked the salt, knocked back the shot, and bit into the lime. “He's just a cop I'm gonna have to fuck for a story.”

Kris handed the shot glass back to her stunned server and flashed a dazzling set of teeth. “Thanks.”

M
ac lied to Kris that he was working the day before Thanksgiving. He had planned to take the day off to do some research. That morning after spending a few hours online in his home office, he decided to stretch his legs and go down to the library. He had uncovered some interesting source books on various sites and wanted to see if he could find them in the library. The footprint casting had given him a possible answer and now he wanted to understand the question.

Searching through the aisles, Mac dug into a number of increasingly esoteric archeological and anthropological tomes. He read about the fossil remains of beings that were neither ape nor man.
Gigantopithecus
seemed to be the direct antecedent of whatever might have made Mac's footprint.
Gigantopithecus
had been reconstructed by anthropologists using the teeth, jawbone fragments, and a few other fossil relics. Said to be well over nine feet tall, its place in evolution fell somewhere between humans and the other great apes.

Anthropologists had traced
Gigantopithecus
back to within a few hundred thousand years, in China. What struck Mac was that here were nine-to twelve-foot-tall manlike creatures that had really existed and—in terms of the record of living creatures—within very recent memory. And the land bridge that had connected Asia and North America at the Bering Strait during the last ice age could have given such beings an opportunity to cross over and evolve over the intervening forty or fifty thousand years.

A rational case began to gel in Mac's mind for the existence of large humanoids living deep in the forests along the West Coast, from California up into British Columbia. He was surprised to discover that whole skeletons of humanlike beings had been unearthed in the Southwest, some more than ten feet tall. Yet in almost every book, anthropologists insisted that modern humans, called
Homo sapiens,
were the only hominids—that is, upright-walking primates—remaining on the planet. Mac smiled to himself.
Maybe not.

As he delved into sightings, one continuing theme in most of the firsthand accounts was that these creatures were generally shy and harmless. He even found a few instances where they had saved people. But he also read enough stories to indicate they weren't always gentle. Some women in Southeast Asia had apparently been kidnapped and partially eaten back in the early fifties. The tale also grimly related that one village woman had been raped by a pack of nine-foot-tall beings that walked on two legs.

After a while Mac logged on to the library's computer and took a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was the code number for his department's LexisNexis account. He punched in the numbers and surfed related newspaper articles. He found several concerning a Snohomish man a few years back who claimed he was chased by Bigfoot while vacationing in Idaho. What interested Mac was that the guy had been an exec with a major software company and not some fringe crackpot. Ty Greenwood's reception from the media reinforced Mac's concerns about making a big deal about the footprint. Mac printed out the articles to show to Carillo, thinking that Greenwood might be of some help.

Ty entered the
Snohomish Daily News
office clad in his freshly cleaned uniform. He was ready to continue his official charade in the interest of gathering more information. He asked for John Baxter, who appeared a moment later.

Ty extended his hand. “I read about the missing lawyers and was wondering if you had any further information—”

John Baxter, his face set in anger, didn't take Ty's hand. “Why have you been bothering Lori Wylie?” he demanded.

Ty was taken aback. “I only made a few calls…”

Baxter stepped closer, despite Ty's considerable height and age advantage. “Look, the woman is distraught enough about her husband disappearing, then you start wigging her out. You got her number from my file. Lose it.”

“I just wanted to—” started Ty.

“Lose it.” Baxter walked away.

Shaken, Ty left. Baxter returned to his office. Passing his secretary, he paused.

“Sally, get me the number for the Forest Service regional office,” he said. “I want to know why they're so concerned about missing people.”

The name Ty Greenwood still stuck in his mind and Baxter remembered his plan to check the man out on the Internet. Just as he was about to log on, Sally buzzed him.

“John, it's the
National Investigator,
” she said with a smirk.

Baxter picked up his phone, assuming she was joking. “Baxter.”

“Mr. Baxter, Joyce Hyde with the
National Investigator.
We monitor papers all over the world and we found an interesting piece in yours and I was wondering if you'd elaborate on it?”

First Greenwood, now this.
“Which one?” he asked.

“The one about the overturned truck.”

“What about it?” he asked, wondering why anyone would give a hoot about some guy's toppled sport utility.

“Well,” she continued, “according to our research, that vehicle weighs five thousand three-hundred and thirty pounds, yet your article says the victim didn't hear anyone in his yard.”

“Probably a big yard.”

“But the son only heard the truck tip over, not who did it. We estimate it would have taken fifteen to twenty men to put that truck on its roof. We also checked the weather reports and there was no wind in your area that night.”

Judas priest, and this is a tabloid? I wish my people were that thorough.
Then he remembered his reporter saying something about the victimized family being reluctant to talk. He didn't need to fuel the fires by mentioning that.

“What's your point, Ms. Hyde?” he asked.

“It sounds very strange. Do you have any thoughts on this?”

He was too old to be coy or even overly civil. “No. How will you characterize it? Aliens or Satanists?”

“I'm just trying to do my job,” she said defensively.

“And I'm asking, What is that job? Irresponsible speculation? You're not a reporter, you're a fiction writer.”

“Thanks for your time,” she said curtly, then hung up.

John Baxter shook his head.
Whatever happened to the good old days of news gathering?

Sally entered and handed him the number for the Forest Service. Baxter nodded and picked up the phone. He was in a feisty mood and looked forward to chewing someone out about invading people's privacy.

Ty stopped by the 7-Eleven to reimburse Todd Shelton for the “loan.” Todd wasn't in, so Ty gave the clerk an envelope containing a note and a twenty-dollar bill. Then he drove over to Everett to the sheriff's department and asked to speak with Deputy Bill Alexander. Deputy Bill was out, so Ty left a message including his cell and pager number. Sitting in his truck, he flipped through a copy of the day-old
Snohomish Daily News
he'd grabbed from their office.

He read a brief police blotter entry about a vandalized truck. It merely gave the name of the victim, the fact that the truck was a Chevy Tahoe, and a quote by the victim's teenage son, who said he didn't hear anything until the truck hit the ground. Also, the truck hadn't just been turned over on its side but was found resting on its roof. And again, Snohomish County Sheriff's deputy Bill Alexander had responded.

Ty thought back many years to when, as a freshman at the University of Southern Mississippi, he and some drunken buddies had turned over an old truck in a field. A postwar Ford that weighed nowhere near what a dreadnought like a Tahoe weighs, and still twelve shitfaced frat boys needed all their strength to put it on its side. Ty remembered it was a very noisy process and took a while. How did this happen with the family sitting nearby in the house? Unfolding his laptop, he searched the Internet for the address of one Donald R. “Deke” Allison.

B
y the time the librarian passed by and quietly informed him it was closing time, Mac was beginning to fully embrace the notion that he might be dealing with something extraordinary. The only thing he had to do, the last step in his chain of matching evidence to reality, was to confirm or disprove the footprint. He didn't want it to be real because that opened up a can of worms he didn't want to try and imagine. He assured himself that Carillo was right and that the print was a great fake. But another voice within told him to get a second opinion.

One of the names that surfaced repeatedly in the reports was of a potentially sympathetic scholar at the University of Washington. Back at his condo Mac phoned the school's anthropology department. After he explained to the secretary that he needed to consult with Dr. Wade Frazier as soon as possible about police business, she put him on hold a moment, then returned, informing him he had an appointment in two days, the day after Thanksgiving.

His gut as a cop told him the mountain trail was where he should continue his search, but a stirring uneasiness made him rationalize a reason to put that off.

Ben's nephew David and his family lived in the approach path for Sea-Tac, and with jetliners drifting overhead every few minutes, the noise was disturbing what little otherwise undisturbed sleep Ben could get. Ben was also feeling a pull to be closer to the mountains. He couldn't put his finger on the feeling but knew it was his instinct talking. Ben studied maps of the area and settled on Bellevue, which had all the amenities of a decent-sized city and also gave him relatively close access to the forests to the northeast.

He packed his bags and made his excuses to David, who pledged to help him any way he could. Ben did not use a computer but recognized the benefits of research on the Internet. When they parted, Ben asked David to poke around online and fax him whatever he might find on the subject. His nephew was a fellow believer and Ben trusted him to be discreet with the family.

Ben gave Doris a call from his new hotel to inform her of the change. She was disappointed that he was going to miss Thanksgiving with the family.

“Honey, what're you doin'?” Doris asked plaintively. “The agent called, then the movie people called, and they all wanted to know where you were. I said I wasn't sure.”

Ben was slightly annoyed she hadn't followed his instructions to simply say he was away tending to personal business.

“When you comin' back, Benny?”

The worry in her voice caused Ben's heart to ache for taking off so abruptly and not explaining anything to her.

“I don't know. Maybe it'll be soon,” he said, then added, “I miss you, Dorrie.”

“You too, Benny,” Doris said, sounding depressed to the point of tears. “I love you.”

“You too,” said Ben, who had always been uncomfortable responding to that declaration. In all their years together he had told Doris he loved her once or twice but regretted not saying it more. They wished each other happy Thanksgiving and hung up. As Ben unpacked his things, he wished he could have spent Thanksgiving with Doris. Then he regretted not telling her outright that he loved her, knowing it was something she longed to hear.

A
fter the extensive background check on Greta Sigardsson came up spotless, Ronnie phoned the agency to approve her as the new live-in supervisor of her children. She had already prepared one of the bedrooms in the south wing—down the hall from the kitchen and TV room—a nice ground-floor room with tall bay windows. She hoped Greta could start that evening. Greta had boasted of her advanced cooking skills, which Ronnie planned to put to the test the next day. Ronnie left work early and the agency called on her way home to inform her Greta was very excited and would be dropped off by seven.

Ronnie arrived home excited to get things ready for Thanksgiving. She was spinning the logistics of the next twenty-four hours when she punched the button on the answering machine. There were six messages, four of which were from Ty's boss. Three were from that morning and one was from early in the afternoon and in all he expressed his concern that Ty had not shown up and was not answering his cell or pager. After that she assumed he had given up or found Ty. Either way she was curious what Ty would say about it.

Deputy Bill Alexander got Ty's message at the start of his shift. He looked at the message and tossed it. If there were two subjects Bill didn't want to talk about, one was the “missing lawyers” and the other was the “incident with the vandalized truck.” He assumed this Ty Greenwood fella was probably some kook looking to interview people for some sort of
Stranger than Fiction
cable access show or something stupid like that. Bill wasn't going to end up in a damn sideshow. No way.

Clinging by one hand nearly twenty feet up an aluminum extension ladder, Ronnie lost her grip on an elaborate wreath, sending it plummeting to the floor of the entry. The crashing wreath caused the kids to titter and Ronnie to fume. As she was about to punish her kids for laughing by sending them upstairs for a box of more Christmas flotsam, the doorbell rang.

Chris opened the door and Greta was thrust into the middle of this small emergency. Seizing control, Greta calmed Ronnie, made a joke to the kids, and was cleaning up before Ronnie could get down the ladder. In moments the crisis was over and Greta even managed to resurrect the shattered wreath. Ronnie took this as a good omen.

Now holed up in his office, Ty had been evasive when Ronnie mentioned his boss's repeated calls looking for him. When she asked where he'd been, he told her that as he was driving to work he'd decided to take the day off. He told her he'd later checked in with his boss and squared everything. Ronnie let it go but was worried. Ty had always been relentlessly responsible, but now, if you likened their family to a vessel with him as captain, he seemed to have cast off in heavy waters and gone down below deck to sleep off the storm.

Ronnie hated confrontations, but if the need arose, she could hold her own. She felt such a blowout was coming with Ty. He had taken his public lashing far harder than she expected. She had sought counseling for them, then full-blown therapy, but Ty had soon dropped out, saying he was fine. His current behavior was beginning to indicate otherwise.

Greta ushered the kids into the kitchen to start dinner.

“Oh, we were just going to order a pizza,” said Ronnie.

Greta waved her hand. “No, please, I was planning on cooking for you.” Just as Ronnie opened her mouth to resist, Greta's eyes twinkled. “Sorry, you have no choice. And contrary to popular belief, Swedes can cook more than meatballs.”

Down the hall toward the kitchen Ronnie pushed on the hidden door to the little-used wine cellar. It popped open, seemingly from a plain, uninterrupted wall. Descending the stairs into its cool recesses, she selected a '98 Dalla Valle Vineyards Napa cab and went back upstairs. Ronnie was disappointed Ty was not sharing festivities with the family, but as she looked for a corkscrew, she was philosophical.

What the hell, I'll have my own party.

Hours after Ronnie and the kids and the new au pair went to bed, Ty studied the USGS maps on his desk. He was searching for a relationship between the locations of the three missing men and the upside down truck. His visit to the Allisons had not gone well. Deke Allison was less than enthusiastic about talking, and when Ty began examining the damaged but now righted Tahoe, Allison exploded and told him to leave. He was convinced Allison was hiding something because he was too jumpy. Ty was also angry that other people weren't talking to him. John Baxter's scolding for calling missing logger Joe Wylie's wife jarred him. He was getting a run of people who were overly suspicious or easily antagonized. Yet he vowed to himself to keep pushing until he found out why.

He needed help holding it together, just a little longer; he knew that now. He was on to something. He felt he was about to answer the question that had haunted him for three years.

Ty thought back to that first year and how Ronnie blamed the circus atmosphere he had created for taking him away from her and the children. One night after his return from a five-week expedition to the Northern California counties of Humboldt, Del Norte, and Trinity, Ronnie sat him down in his office. Waving a massive stack of invoices and receipts for services and equipment totaling more than $1.7 million, she proclaimed that he was destroying the family. She admitted that what set her off was the discovery of the invoice for “that gun.” “Are you insane?” she yelled. Ty thought about that gun, now in the garage where Ronnie had banished it.

For her the dollars were tangible evidence of an obsession, but her real worry was the family. She told Ty she “hadn't planned on being married to Ahab.” Putting her foot down in no uncertain terms, she swore she didn't give a damn what anybody thought about Ty, she loved him, the kids loved him, and that's all that counted. “Stop this insanity right now,” she said. And then her exact words that followed were “You can't find it because it isn't there.” That sentence still haunted him.

The next day a chastened Ty called off all of his investigations and announced the withdrawal of the reward. First he'd been an obsessive nut; now he was an unstable, obsessive nut. Ty sulked for days, then sought a doctor's advice. The doctor started him on an antidepressant. When the Scotch and antidepressants went sideways on him, Ty found a doctor to write him a prescription for OxyContin. He dropped the antidepressants and used the combination of liquor and painkillers for about a year. When the prescription ran out, he found a Mexican pharmacy to supply his pills. Then one day he just went cold turkey. But after about a year the depression came back even stronger than before, and that's when he renewed his partnership with Oxy and fine Scottish whisky. He knew the mix was potentially deadly but he was a desperate man who required desperate measures.

He reached to his drawer, the one he kept locked, and inserted the key that always stayed with him. He opened it, took out the pill bottle, and tapped out three times his normal dose of OxyContin. He splashed some whisky into his glass to wash them down. Lately, he'd been upping his dosage since the drug wasn't working as well as before.

I'll get it together, I just need a little time. That's all.

He put the bottle of Oxy back in the drawer and locked it. He often recalled the remark his father reflexively spouted when things had gone bad for him,“No good deed goes unpunished.” Ty had long since realized he had inherited that gene of negativity from his father. “You can only fall
down
, son.”

Well, I sure as hell did, Dad.

Ty leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, and the dream tape of the chase in Idaho played yet again, and he felt the gooseflesh on his arms and neck. For a second or two he allowed himself to see the thing that had chased him in Idaho coming up his driveway. He shivered, set his drink down, and headed to the garage.

In the garage, at a tall storage locker off to the side, he pulled out a key from under a box and unlocked the padlock. Inside were some boxes and two tall, flat cases, one black plastic and the other, larger one, polished aluminum. He opened the plastic case. Inside was the tranquilizer rifle and another plastic case, about the size of a small first aid kit. Inside were six darts, whose bodies were tempered glass receptacles filled with a honey-colored, fast-acting sedative. As the large animal handler from whom he made the purchase said at the time, “These'll literally stop an elephant.”

He picked up one of the darts, examined it, then put it back in its slot. Then he sorted through one of the boxes filled with hardware, including state-of-the-art infrared monocular night vision goggles and some motion sensors. Ty spent a few moments refamiliarizing himself with the gear, but he was anticipating the real reason he opened the locker. He pushed the equipment aside and gazed at the large aluminum case for a very long beat before reaching for it.

The beautifully finished case was nearly six feet long, fifteen inches wide, and six inches deep. A small gold plaque impressed into the metal near the combination lock carried the inscription Holland & Holland, London. He worked the combination and flipped the lid back. He stared, almost in supplication, at what was inside, then reached in with both hands and removed a massive rifle, its English walnut stock like so much richly grained brown glass. The nearly twenty-pound rifle was cumbersome as Ty caressed the wood, then hefted it to his shoulder. He put the crosshairs of the 8x scope on a leaf blower hanging from the wall twenty yards away.

“Boom.”

He lowered the rifle and reflected on the trouble it had caused him. When he had begun his search for these creatures, he had strongly felt he needed a weapon. Several veteran searchers tried to talk him out of it, then just gave up, insisting that the beings were benign. Ty would hear none of their arguments, feeling he required practically supernatural protection like an Excalibur or the Spear of Longinus. Ty had settled on the gun maker's legendary Royal double rifle in .700 H&H Nitro Express. It was a gun intended for such robust game as bull elephants, Cape buffalo, and rhinos.

Ty had phoned the company and immediately put in his order for the spectacular bespoke firearm. Months later, not long after the hand-made gun had been delivered, Ronnie discovered that it had set the Greenwood finances back by a little over £115,000, that is, around $200,000. That was one of the few times Ty had ever seen Ronnie lose it. The firearm had immediately gone out to the garage, but worse for Ty, the incident had precipitated Ronnie's overall meltdown and the end to his quest.

Ty examined the only cartridge he had ever obtained for it, from a gun store in north Seattle. By chance he had gotten in a conversation with the owner and had mentioned he had the rifle. The guy gave him the single round, which he had purchased as a gag for his display case to dwarf other calibers. He had told Ty,“I think you need it more than I do.” Ty had never once fired the rifle. He cringed at the thought of Ronnie's reaction if she found out he'd brought the thing back in the house. He closed the case and picked it up. He remembered a space in the back of his office closet where it would fit perfectly.