CLAN

by Harry Shannon

  "Goodnight, cop."

  "Night, perp."

  The tattooed body builder had vanished. Kelly said goodbye to the brothers and hugged the bearded old man, then returned to sit with Case. He offered the last of the soda but she passed.

  "This is going to sound weird, but that was actually fun."

  The moonlight was glaring and cast odd shadows that made it difficult to read her expression. Still, Case would have sworn Kelly looked happy for the first time in their chaotic couple of days together. Surprisingly, that pleased him. He cleared his throat. "Good. Maybe you needed a break."

  They watched the others pack up. Finally, Case said: "They were here."

  Her head snapped up. "Are you sure?"

  "I got a look at the guest register, and Bobby just made up a half-assed pseudonym. It was them."

  "Is that good news or bad?"

  "Bad, I'm afraid." Case got to his feet. "Let's move around."

  She hopped up. "Tell me. Please."

  He took her hand. "We have to make this look right," he said. "Let's go for a romantic walk in the moonlight." Not that it's a bad idea…

  When they were several yards away from the nearest person, he continued. "Like I said, I went to the room. Someone had scrubbed everything down, but I found some flecks of dried blood in the bathroom."

  "Damn."

  "I think we have to assume the worst. That someone killed them for the money."

  "I feel sick," she said. "But Case, why not just figure that one of them killed the other?" And then it hit her. "Because of the thorough cleaning."

  "Yeah, that and the fact that no one seems to have called the police or reported any crime."

  She sagged into him and Case put his arm around her waist. He liked the feeling. "I'm as good as dead," Kelly said softly. "The money is gone."

  Something moved in the brush. Instinctively, Case paused. A bright-eyed raccoon emerged and began to raid a trash can. "No, I think we can safely assume the money is still around here somewhere." The bold raccoon didn't flinch when they walked by, just continued rummaging. "Whoever killed them hasn't had much time to think about what's next."

  They went up a long, winding path into the hills. Kelly lagged a step or two behind. "So what do we do?"

  "The first thing I'm going to do is get to know Jennifer a bit better."

  "Of course. She would have to have seen or heard something."

  "Well, she doesn't have to be directly involved, but she probably knows something, even if she doesn't realize it. Someone changed their routine, or asked her for a special favor, whatever, but she has information. The trick will be getting it out of her without arousing suspicion. We don't want to do that."

  They walked off the path, into the darker woods. Kelly hugged herself against the cold. "I'm beginning to follow you."

  "Yeah," Case said. "Because anyone who would murder two people for money would also cheerfully murder us too, for asking too many questions."

  Kelly rubbed her temples. "I can't believe this. What a mess."

  "Try to relax."

  "That's easy for you to say. You're a cop. This is all new to me. In forty-eight hours my life has turned totally upside down. I'm with a stranger in the middle of nowhere, hunting somebody while somebody else hunts me."

  "Hey," Case said, "maybe you can sell this concept as a Bruce Willis movie."

  "Oh, screw you."

  The cloying scent of fresh pine enveloped them. The path leveled off, so for a while they sped up, lost in thought. Then the path grew steeper and they walked higher into the cluster of black sentinels.

  "What do we do next?"

  "Play rough. Look, you could always go back. I'll get you a bus ticket under another name. Go directly to a friend of mine with the LAPD and tell him the story. Maybe that's the smart play anyway." But even as he said it, his stomach clenched with fear for her safety. Case knew it would never work.

  "I can hear it in your voice," Kelly said. "You don't believe that's what I should do. But why not?"

  "Because the mob, or whoever it was, they think you still have the money."

  "And I'll never be safe until its found, will I?"

  Case stepped over a large rock. He grunted from the effort, helped her up. "No," he said, sadly. "Probably not."

  Kelly jumped down, stopped. "Case, where are we?"

  He looked around. "About a mile and a half southwest of the motel grounds, I'd expect. We came uphill the whole way. Why?"

  "I don't know," she said. "I'm just getting a bad case of the creeps."

  "Okay, let's go back then."

  They turned, started down. "Look, we'll ask some more pointed questions come morning. I made some inroads with the lady Doc. I think she'll help out."

  "Whatever you say," Kelly replied. Her voice was melancholy. "I just wish we could get this over with."

  That's when they heard it: ArOOOOoooooOOOOOo a sound that split the trees apart, floated down to earth like poison gas. Again. OoooOOooooo…

  "Damn."

  "Case?"

  Case pulled her arm. "Let's move."

  "Joe?" Her voice had a high, brittle edge. "What was that?"

  Case hurried her along. "I don't know."

  "They're just coyotes, aren't they?"

  "No," he said. "I don't know what the hell they are, but I'm pretty sure they're not just coyotes."

  The screaming came next; the male and female voices overlapping, ebbing and flowing; Case placed them maybe a half-mile away, through the brush and thickly clustered pines. Then the howling came again OOOOoooooOOOOOo followed by a strange, deep snarling. It sounded like a pack of wild dogs was attacking someone in the nearby woods.

  Case had never heard dogs that sounded quite so big.

  Case made Kelly run.

  "No! Please!"

  It was a woman crying now. More growling and snarling. Case was running full tilt, suddenly aware that whatever was happening was taking place between them and the motel. They were not going to reach safety without coming closer to the slaughter. He praised himself for remembering to bring the gun. He let go of Kelly and gripped it with both hands as he ran.

  "Stay behind me."

  "Oh, Lord," Kelly cried. "What's happening?"

  ArOoooooooOOooooo… They ran on through the brilliant moonlight, patches of shadow and green, the pallid lunar death mask leering down above them…

  "Ah! Ah!" The woman again, sounding almost orgasmic as something gleefully ripped at her. They were closer now, almost there. Her thin voice went too reedy and high to be human, before going abruptly guttural and low; then came a dying moan, life hissing out of her throat like air from a deflating balloon.

  They heard odd, snuffling noises from the snickering dark. Wet sounds.

  Moments later, a panting Case burst out into the picnic ground, gun up and ready. He heard Kelly stumble up behind. Her sharp intake of breath.

  "Don't look."

  But she had already looked. "Oh, my God." Her vomit splattered inky in the already bloodied grass.

  Case kept the gun up, arms extended in a modified Weaver stance. He searched the night with his eyes. He saw no wolves, only paw prints. The size astonished him; some were as large as a man's shoe. He stayed on the outer perimeter of the mess. The woman had been eviscerated. Her entrails stretched across one picnic table like pasta. Her upper body had been chewed to a pulp; all that was left was the pretty little panties and two long, shapely legs. So fast. Must have been a dozen of them.

  Kelly was still vomiting. Case moved closer.

  The male had nearly been chewed clean of flesh within minutes; gnawed like the leg bone of a Thanksgiving turkey. His lower body was bare bone and ragged sinew in places, but his face was still recognizable. It was the arrogant tourist, the man who had just checked in.

  What kind of predator could do this, Case thought; move so rapidly, pick the bodies so clean and vanish into the mist? What the hell?

  A bright light struck his eye
s. Case flinched.

  "Drop the gun. Do it now."

  Case read the tone, reacted instantly. He knelt down, lowered the .38 and raised his hands. "I'm not the bad guy, Sheriff," he said. "We just got here."

  Sheriff Whitley kept the light on Case, but not directly in his eyes. Moved it around the crime scene. Case watched. The big lawman stood at the edge of the picnic grounds, eyes wide and mouth open. Finally he just shook his head. "You have the slightest idea what the damn hell happened here?"

  "A pack of wild dogs, beasts of some kind anyway," Case said, softly. "We could hear them. We got here too late."

  "Heard them too. Christ. I haven't seen anything like this since the war."

  "That makes two of us."

  "Mr. Case, how come you're carrying?"

  "Used to be on the job."

  The sheriff holstered his gun and moved closer. "Well, maybe that's a good thing. I do believe I'm going to need some help with this one."

  "Can I get up now?" Case was still on his knees.

  Whitley frowned. "Of course. Don't be an asshole." He glanced at Kelly. "Young lady, you going to be all right?"

  "Now that there's nothing left in my stomach."

  The sheriff played his light over the eviscerated remains. He whistled. "Son of a bitch." He stared up at the sky, thought for a moment and seemed to come to a decision. "I'm sorry, young lady, I forgot your name."

  "Kelly McCammon."

  "Well, would you be please run down to Doc Cherry's office and tell her what happened? She'll know to bring a camera and some crime scene tape."

  Kelly looked back and forth between the two men like a woman watching a tennis match. "All alone?"

  "Sure." Sheriff Whitley shrugged. "It's probably safer now than it was before the attack. Whatever they are, they ain't hungry any more." He smiled. No humor in that smile. None.

  Case said: "Stay here, Kelly. I'll do it."

  Kelly considered the concept of time alone in the moonlight with a stranger and two savaged bodies and shook her head. "No, give me the gun. I'll go." Case wordlessly handed her the weapon.

  "Know how?"

  "Took some lessons."

  "Okay. Hurry back."

  Kelly nodded and jogged away.

  Case met Sheriff Whitley's eyes. "You said crime scene tape?"

  Sheriff Whitley nodded. "We got several hours of work to do tonight."

  "You're not going to wait for the state police?"

  "Bunch of idiots. We'll handle this ourselves."

  "An animal attack of this size? Can you?"

  "Bad things up here too sometimes. But I'll tell you one thing. I haven't seen anyone get this messed up in a long, long time."

  Case thought of his family. He did not respond.

  Whitley finished his thought. "And never in a town as small as Salt Lick." Case paced the entire area, his mind working overtime. Time passed and by the time they heard Cherry and Kelly approaching he'd already knelt down again to examine the ground more carefully. A small breeze rustled across the picnic area. The smell of entrails and excrement was overpowering. Case found some tissues in his jeans and stuffed it up his nose.

  "Hang on a second," Whitley said. "Doc Cherry will bring along Vicks to rub on your upper lip."

  "Good trick." Case said, casually. Then he felt his heart thump a bit. "But I thought you said you didn't get many dead bodies up here."

  The sheriff's mind seemed elsewhere. "We don't, but we do find us some stiffs from time to time. Loonies that wander up here and maybe freeze to death, hunting accidents, stuff like that. It happens often enough that we've gotten pretty good at doing what needs to be done."

  "Oh."

  "Case, we got to clean this up before morning." Sheriff Whitley looked up. The harsh moonlight made his features a grim Halloween mask.

  "What's the rush, Sheriff?"

  "We need tourist dollars to survive, young fellow. Such as they are this time of year, in an armpit like this. Blood is bad for business."

  "Gotcha."

  "Good," Sheriff Whitley said. "Now, you going to help me out here, or what?"

  17

  Case thought that for a small-town lawman the Sheriff did a pretty respectable job of recording the crime scene. Working by moonlight and with lanterns, the four of them measured and took digital photos of every blood splatter and scrap of cloth, as well as every available footprint, although the huge activity of the previous day made any evidence obtained that way virtually useless. They also took digital photographs of the area from afar; notes, measurements and comparisons. The works.

  Although Whitley at first discouraged him, Joe Case took a flashlight and went very wide into the trees, looking for animal tracks leading down into the picnic grounds. He found several, but the earth was so trampled they were not helpful. Case moved closer to the clearing, his skin prickling at every movement in the brush and every rustle of the wind in the trees. Just north of the trail, he found several partial prints half onto and off a series of stones.

  As Whitley had already suggested, most tracks were a waste of time. The clear ones he found were abnormally large, but that seemed to fit the theory that a large dog or wolf pack had slaughtered the two tourists. Doc Cherry made plaster casts of the cleanest. Case wanted to ask her questions, but her attitude was chilly. When he pressed her, she just muttered, "Later."

  It was nearly three in the morning when they finally rolled the last of the body parts onto a sheet of canvas. And then it took all four of them to drag the corpses over to Cherry's office. Kelly stood outside while Whitley and Case lifted them up onto steel tables.

  Case called to Doc Cherry. "You okay in there?"

  "Yeah." Her voice drifted in through the open door. "I think I'm going to start smoking again tomorrow."

  Case found a refrigerator. "Mind if we have some soda?"

  "Help yourself."

  He opened some and handed them out. "Cherry, you're not going to do a full autopsy, are you?"

  "I'm not a coroner," she said. "But I can check lividity, make notes while they're still fresh and do some of the other fundamentals."

  "Mind if I hang around?"

  "Not a bit."

  Sheriff Whitley sighed and wiped his brow on his shirt sleeve. "I'm going back out there to turn on the sprinkler system," he said. "See if I can get rid of some of the blood and the stink."

  "I think," Kelly said from the porch, "that I'm going to puke again."

  Whitley paused in the doorway. "Ma'am, why don't I walk you back to your room? You can take a shower and relax while the rest of us finish up."

  "Thanks, but I'm not in a hurry to be alone."

  "Suit yourself."

  Sheriff Whitley wandered away, yawning. Kelly sat down on the porch. Case sipped some soda. "He seems to know his job."

  "That he does."

  "Still," Case said, casually, "I'm surprised he didn't want to call in the big guns over something like this. It's not your everyday occurrence."

  At first Cherry did not respond. She pinched the bridge of her nose as if coming down with a nasty headache. "It's not all that new, either."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "You heard me. This ain't the first time I've seen this kind of…mauling."

  Case risked a glance to make sure Kelly was well out of earshot. "I think you'd best fill me in."

  "In a minute," Cherry replied. "First, I want to know what you and the lady are really doing up here in Buttcrack, Nevada."

  Case considered. "Let me put it this way. Somebody stole something from Kelly, somebody I was looking for anyway. We need to find what they took."

  "Which is?"

  "What she lost was inside a package. Then. Now, who knows what it looks like."

  "Okay," Cherry said. "I guess that's fair enough. And now I'll answer your question." She sat down on a stool. "I told you I'd only been up here a while, right? Well, the first time I saw it was about a year ago. One of the local ranchers called us to
come see what killed one of his sheep."

  "It looked like that?"

  Cherry nodded. "So I put it down to a group of coyotes. The truth is we don't often get wolves out here,"

  "I know."

  "And then it happened again. This time a couple of cows got ripped to pieces. I figured it for some kind of feral animal again, something pretty large. Exactly the same weird circumstances and pattern."

  "Meaning?"

  "Partially eaten, but not fully consumed. Then left behind rather than dragged away. Look, Case, if I didn't know better, I'd say the beast killed for pleasure and then lost interest."

  "Nothing in nature does that."

  Cherry smiled wanly. "Except for man."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Never mind. You'll think I'm freakin' certifiable."

  "And why do you keep indicating it's one creature? I heard several, enough to be an entire pack."

  "I'll explain that in a minute, too."

  Case frowned and leaned closer. "Damn it, Cherry, stop beating around the bush and level with me. Do you have any idea what the hell really happened to these people?"

  "Maybe."

  Cherry produced the nearly empty pint of Jim Beam. She offered him some and for a few heartbeats Case considered having a drink. Then he shook his head. "You go on ahead, though."

  Cherry studied his face, dropped the bottle in the pocket of her smock. "What's with you, Case? You don't like booze or something?"

  "Or something. Let's just say I like it a little too much. Now, one other question before you fill me in. Have any other people been killed this way?"

  "Not that I know about."

  "That's not a very comforting answer." Case found another stool and sat next to her. He wiped his nose on his sleeve; it was still running from the application of Vicks. "Okay, talk. And I promise not to have you committed."

  Cherry efficiently gloved her hands in latex. She flipped back the blanket covering the woman's body. The doctor abruptly shifted gears. Now she was all business. "First, take a look at this bite mark, the size of the jaw." She produced a small tape measure; expanded it, whipped it along the chewed leg. "I measure these jaws at about ten inches at the widest point. Do you know any animal indigenous to these mountains that could do that?"