The Wolfen

by Whitley Strieber

  “Why do you say that?” She was examining the photographs as she talked. Why had he handed her one of the less grisly shots?

  “The dogs—I’ve seen them. They’re little, like cockers or something, and they’re shy as hell. And by the way, I wonder if you could autograph that picture for my daughter.”

  He paused, then added shyly, “She thinks the world of you.”

  Becky was so pleased by his admiration that she didn’t notice Wilson standing behind her.

  “I thought we weren’t going to give out any more autographs,” he said curtly.

  “When did we decide not to? I don’t remember that.”

  “Right now. I just decided. This isn’t some kind of a game.” His hand moved toward the picture but Ruiz’s was quicker.

  “Thanks, Miss Neff,” he said, still smiling. “My daughter’ll be thrilled.”

  Becky gathered the rest of the photographs and picked up the box of prints to lug to the car. She knew without asking that Wilson wouldn’t touch it, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him to.

  “By the way, it’s Sergeant Neff,” she said over her shoulder to Ruiz, who was still standing there staring.

  “Let me help you,” he said.

  Becky was already out the door and putting the box into the back seat of the car.

  Wilson followed, got in, and slammed his door. Becky settled herself into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition.

  “I just don’t want this to be a circus,” he said as they headed toward Manhattan. “This case is going to be the most sensational thing we’ve ever worked on. Reporters are gonna be crawling out of your nightgown in the morning.”

  “I don’t wear a nightgown.”

  “Whatever, we’re gonna have ‘em all over us. The point is, it’s a serious case and we want to treat it serious.”

  Wilson could be sententious, but this was ridiculous. She forced herself not to say she knew how serious the case was. If she did he would then launch into a tirade about lady cops, probably ending with a question about her competence or some new criticism of her work. She decided to ignore him and make him shut up as well. To do this she drove like a madwoman, careening down the streets, making hairpin turns, weaving in and out of the traffic at fifty miles an hour. Wilson at first sat with his shoulders hunched and his hands twisted together in his lap, then started using the siren.

  “Rilker give you some kind of deadline?”

  “No.” She had forgotten to call Rilker, dammit. If he wasn’t there she’d have to suffer more flak from Wilson.

  She lit another cigarette. Smoking was one pleasure that she had really begun to enjoy since the doctor had made Wilson stop.

  His response was prompt. “You’re polluting.”

  “Draw an oxygen mask if you don’t like it I’ve told you that before.”

  “Thanks for the reminder.”

  She wished that she smoked cigars.

  Chapter 2

  Tom Rilker stared at the pictures the two detectives showed him. His face registered disbelief and what looked to Becky Neff like fear. She had never met him before and was surprised to discover that he was old, maybe seventy-five. From her husband’s description she had assumed he was a young man. Rilker’s hair was white and springy like frayed wool; his right hand shook a little and made the pictures rustle together; his brows knit, the salt-and-pepper eyebrows coming close together, heightening the expression now on his face. “This is impossible,” he finally said. The moment he spoke Becky knew why Dick always portrayed him as young—he sounded like a much younger man. “It’s completely incredible.”

  “Why is that?” Wilson asked.

  “Well, a dog wouldn’t do this. You’d have to train it. These men have been gutted, for God’s sake. You can train a dog to kill, but if you wanted it to do this to its victims, you’d have to train it very, very well.”

  “But it could be done.”

  “Maybe, with the right breed and the right dog. But it wouldn’t be easy. You’d need…

  human models for the dog to work on if you wanted it to be reliable.”

  “What if you just starved the dog?”

  “A dog would eat muscle tissue—ma’am, if this bothers you—”

  “No,” Becky snapped. “You were saying, a dog would eat muscle tissue?”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t actually—gut somebody. That isn’t the way they feed, not even in the wild state.” He picked up the pawprints and shook his head. “These all the prints?”

  “How big a dog would it have taken?” Wilson asked. Becky noticed that his questions were becoming gentle but insistent; he must sense that the sight of the pictures had put Rilker under a considerable strain. The man’s face was indeed getting flushed, and a band of sweat was appearing on his forehead. He kept giving his head a little toss as if to knock a wisp of hair back. The hand was shaking harder.

  “A monster. Something big and fast and mean enough to accept this kind of training.

  Not all breeds would.”

  “What breeds?”

  “Close to the wild, huskies, German shepherds. Not many. And I’ve got to tell you, in all my years I’ve never seen anything like this done by dogs. I think its—

  He grabbed a cast of some of the pawprints and peered at it, then fumbled with the lamp on his desk and looked closely in the light. “These are not dog prints.”

  “What are they then?”

  “I don’t know. Something very strange.”

  “Why so?”

  Tom Rilker paused, then spoke with exaggerated calm. “These prints have circules, like human hands and feet. But they are clearly pawprints.”

  “Some kind of animal, other than a dog?”

  “I’m sorry to tell you that no animal has prints like this. In fact nothing does. Nothing that I have ever heard of, that is, in fifty years of working with animals.”

  Becky had to say it: “Werewolves?” She resigned herself to the inevitable scoffing that would come from Wilson later.

  Surprisingly, Rilker took some time to dismiss the question. “I don’t think such things are possible,” he said carefully.

  “Well—are they or aren’t they?”

  Rilker smiled sheepishly. Becky realized that he was being kind. She could see the glee in Wilson’s eyes. It was all her partner could do not to whoop with laughter, damn him.

  “I don’t believe in werewolves either, Mr. Rilker,” Becky said. “Frankly, I wanted to know if you did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you had, we wouldn’t have to trust the rest of what you’re saying. As it is, you look like a creditable expert who’s just given us a very nasty problem.”

  “A nasty problem in what way?”

  Now Wilson did scoff—but at Rilker. “Well, for one thing, we must proceed under the assumption that these two fully armed police officers were killed by animals. OK, that’s not so good. But we’ve also got to assume that the animals are of an unknown species.

  That’s pretty bad. And now, to cap it all off, we’ve got to believe that this unknown species of man-killing animals is running free in Brooklyn and nobody knows about it.

  That I cannot accept.”

  Becky’s mind was racing—this new theory plugged holes but it also had some great big ones of its own. “If it’s true, we’ve got to move fast. Brooklyn’s a crowded place.”

  “Come on, Becky, stop it. Let’s get out of here. We’ve got real work to do.”

  “Wait a minute, Detective, I’m not sure I like your tone.” Rilker stood up and thrust one of the casts in Wilson’s face. “Those pawprints were not made by anything that I have ever heard of. By nothing whatsoever. Not even by a species of monkey—I already thought of that.” He fumbled for his phone. “I’ll call a friend up at the Museum of Natural History. He’ll tell you these prints weren’t made by any known animal. You’re dealing with something highly unusual, that’s for damn sure.”

  Becky felt her heart sink. Wils
on had angered Rilker. Rilker’s voice rose as his fingers fumbled at the telephone. “Maybe my word isn’t good enough for you sharpie cops—but this guy up at the museum’s a real expert. He’ll tell you bastards I’m right!”

  Wilson jerked his head in the direction of the door. ‘We don’t need any help from a museum,” he muttered. Becky followed him out, carrying the pictures but leaving the pawprints behind because Rilker seemed to have taken possession of the box. The door to his office slammed behind them with an ear-shattering jolt. His voice rose to a frustrated screech and abruptly ended.

  “I hope we didn’t give him a coronary,” Becky said as they returned to the street.

  “You did good, kid,” Wilson said. “If you hadn’t asked him about the werewolves he would have pulled it off.”

  “I can hardly believe that was the Tom Rilker I’ve heard Dick talk about. But I guess he must be a little senile.”

  “I guess so. Where are the casts?”

  “Still in his office. You want them?” Becky dropped her purse in through the window of the car.

  “Yeah. We might need them.”

  “Fine, you go up and get them.”

  Wilson snorted. “We’ll get more from the Seventy-fifth Precinct. You know something?”

  “What?”

  “You’re losing your mascara. You’re sweating.”

  She laughed as she started the car. “I’ve got to hand it to you, George, you really know how to set a girl up. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in a year.”

  “Well… you’re… you know, when your stuff gets messed up I notice.”

  “Good for you. That’s the first sign you’re becoming human.” She pulled out into traffic, heading automatically for what she knew would be their next stop, the office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The autopsies were due to start in half an hour and it was now all the more important to be there. Unless a cause of death came out in autopsy they were going to be forced to conclude the impossible—that the killings had been done by dogs.

  And that is a very unlikely way for a policeman to die.

  Becky could not dispel the growing feeling of sick fear that this case was giving her. She kept imagining the two cops out there in the drizzle, facing whatever in the name of God they had faced . . and dying with the secret. At times like this she wished she and Dick worked more closely together. He would understand the source of her feeling in a way Wilson never could. She took her cases very personally, it was one of her worst failings (and also the reason she was often so successful, she felt), and each case affected her differently. This one, with its overtones of horror, was going to be unusually hard on her.

  What had happened to those two cops was the stuff of nightmares…

  “You’re muttering.”

  “I am not.”

  “You’re muttering, you’re getting crazy.”

  “I am not! You better keep your mouth shut.”

  “All right, but I’m telling you that this case is going to eat away at you.” He suddenly turned to face her. The movement made her swerve the car— she had the absurd notion that he was going to kiss her. But his face was twisted into a look almost of pain. “It’s eating at me is the reason I say that. I mean, I don’t know what happened out there but it’s really getting to me.”

  “You mean you’re pissed off about it, scared of it—what?”

  He considered for a moment, then said very quietly, “It scares me.” Never before had Wilson said such a thing. Becky kept her eyes on the traffic, her face without expression.

  “Me too,” she said, “if you want to know. It’s a weird case.” Extreme caution was called for in this conversation—Wilson could be telling the truth or he could be egging her on, trying to get her to reveal her inner emotions, to force her to admit that she was overinvolved in her work in an unprofessional way. Although she felt secure enough in their partnership she could never be certain that Wilson hadn’t concocted some plot to get rid of her. Not that it mattered —nowadays they were waiting in line to work with her, but somehow she wanted to keep the partnership going. Wilson was hard to take but the two of them were so good together it was worth preserving. “It’s hard but it’s good,” he said suddenly. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Us. You’re thinking about us, aren’t you?” The way he sounded they might as well have been lovers. “Yes, I am.”

  “See, that’s why it’s good. If it wasn’t so good, I never would have known.”

  She took a deep breath. “We’re here. Maybe we’ll find out they were poisoned and this’ll turn into a normal case again.”

  “We won’t.”

  “Why not? I don’t think we can assume—oh, of course, the dogs ate the organs and there are no dead dogs, therefore there was no poison in the organs, therefore et cetera.”

  “You got it, sweetheart. Let’s go up and watch old prickface pretend to be a master sleuth.”

  “Oh, Wilson, why don’t you let the poor man alone. He’s just as good at what he does as we are at what we do. Your whole thing with him is personalities.”

  “Can’t be. He hasn’t got one.” The Chief Medical Examiner’s office was housed in a gleaming modern building across the street from Bellevue Hospital. This “office” was really a factory of forensic pathology, equipped with every conceivable piece of equipment and chemical that could be of use in an autopsy. Literally everything there was to know about a corpse could be discovered in this building. And the Medical Examiner had been responsible for solving many a murder with his equipment and his most considerable skill.

  Bits of hair, flecks of saliva, fingernail-polish fragments—all had figured prominently in murder trials. A conviction had once been obtained on the basis of shoe polish left on the lethal bruises of a woman who had been kicked to death.

  The Chief M. E. excelled at making such findings. And if there was anything to be found in this case, he would surely uncover it. He and his men would go over the bodies inch by inch, leaving nothing to chance. Still, there was that fear…

  “They’d better come up with something or this case is going to drive me crazy,” Becky said on the way up in the elevator. It was new and rose silently with no sense of motion.

  “I hate this elevator. Every time I ride in it it scares the hell out of me.”

  “Imagine how it would be to be trapped in this elevator, Wilson, no way out—”

  “Shut up! That’s unkind.” Wilson was mildly claustrophobic, to add to his list of petty neuroses.

  “Sorry, just trying to amuse you.”

  “You tell me I’m such an s.o.b., but you’re really the nasty side of this partnership.

  That was a rotten thing to do to me.”

  The doors opened and they stepped into the odor of disinfectant that pervaded the M.

  E.’s office. The receptionist knew them, and waved them past her desk. Doctor Evans’s incredibly cluttered office was open but he wasn’t inside. House rules were that you didn’t go any farther into the complex without an escort, but as usual there wasn’t a soul to be seen or heard. They started toward the operating room when the receptionist yelled Wilson’s name. “Yeah?”

  “You got a message,” she hollered. “Call Underwood.”

  “OK!” He stared at Becky. “Underwood wants me? Why the hell does Underwood want me? I don’t remember trying to get you fired recently.”

  “Maybe you did and forgot.”

  “Better call, better call.” He picked up the phone in Evans’s office and dialed the Chief of Detectives. The conversation lasted about a minute and consisted on Wilson’s part of a series of yessirs and thankyous. “Just wanted to tell us we’re a special detail now, reporting directly to him, and we have the facilities of the department at our disposal. We move to an office at Police Headquarters in Manhattan.”

  “That’s very nice. We get carte blanche as long as some of the credit rubs off on him, and the Commissioner gets left in his ivory tower.”

 
Wilson snorted. “Listen, as long as it looks like this case is solvable every parasite from here to the Bulgarian Secret Service is going to try to horn in on the credit. But you just wait. If we don’t get it together, we’ll be all alone.”

  “Let’s go to the autopsy. I can hardly wait.” Her voice was bitter; what Wilson had said could not have been more true.

  “Come on, ghoul.”

  On the way to the operating room Becky wished to hell that Wilson would pull out a bottle of something alcoholic. Unfortunately he rarely drank, and certainly never while he was working—unless events called for it, which they often did about six p.m. But now it was after six.

  “I thought you people didn’t come back here unless you were invited,” Evans growled.

  He was on his way into the surgery. He stank of chemical soap; his rubber gloves were dripping. “Or don’t those rules count where you two are concerned?”

  “This is the man who invites us on his cases. How sweet.”

  “I only give you cases that are too easy for me to bother with. Now come on in if you want to, but it won’t do a bit of good. And I warn you, they’re fragrant.”

  Becky thought immediately of the families. When she was a child she had been at a funeral where you could smell the corpse—but nowadays they had things for that, didn’t they? And anyway, the coffins wouldn’t be opened. But still… oh, God.

  The two bodies lay on surgical tables under merciless lights. There was none of the haphazardness and confusion of the scene out at the auto pound; here everything was neat and orderly except the bodies themselves, which carried their violence and horror with them.

  Becky was struck by the sheer damage—this attack had been so unbelievably savage.

  And somehow she found that reassuring; nothing from nature would do this. It had to be the work of human beings, it was too terrible to be anything else.

  “The Forensics lab hasn’t found a single thing except dog hairs, rat hairs and feathers,”

  Doctor Evans said mildly. He was referring to the results of the examination of the area where the deaths had occurred at the auto pound. “No human detritus that didn’t belong to the victims.”