“You.” Porter pointed at the tech with the camera. “Give her your digital.”
Sturm took it from him and shouldered past Porter into the hallway.
Her face was flushed red when she rounded on him.
“Don’t you ever whistle for me like I’m some kind of—!”
“Save it, Layne. I need someone who can watch my back and give me a preliminary forensics analysis at the same time. You fit the bill.”
“All of the others have field training in addition to—”
“You already have a gun on your hip and I don’t have the time to argue.”
He turned and strode away from her.
“Where are we going?”
He stopped at the darkened mouth of a stairwell and looked back at her.
“Down.”
Porter directed his flashlight beam toward the hold, and, leading with his pistol, started his descent.
Sturm removed her Maglite from her utility belt and drew her sidearm. Holding them in tandem, she followed Porter down the metal stairs, their footsteps echoing like the beating of tin drums. Every other step, she turned back toward the upper level to ensure that their retreat remained unobstructed. She nearly backed into him at the bottom of the stairs, where he had paused to survey the pitch-black corridor. Water trickled down the staircase with a sound like a toddler urinating, into shin-deep standing fluid that smelled uncomfortably of bilge, brine, and motor oil. The cold bit through her clothes and straight into her skin. Her heartbeat accelerated and she felt the claustrophobic sensation of the walls closing in on her, a sensation with which she was becoming increasingly familiar. Her beam twitched in her trembling hand. She blamed it on a combination of exhaustion and caffeine, and willed her hands to steady before Porter noticed, if he hadn’t already.
The slick floor canted beneath them as they advanced into the hallway, their beams reflecting from the water, unable to penetrate its inky depths.
“Keep your eyes open,” Porter whispered.
“You think that whatever attacked them is down here?”
Porter didn’t answer. He veered to his left into some kind of processing room, sliding his feet as though walking on ice to keep from making the water splash. Sturm did the same as she cleared the room to her right, which smelled as if she were crawling into the slit gut of some massive fish. She exposed the shadows behind the heavy equipment and above the thigh-thick pipes that traversed the ceiling. Porter was already moving deeper into the hold when she exited the room.
They each opened one of the opposing freezer doors. The water pulled at their ankles as it rushed into the formerly sealed rooms. Both were empty, except for the reek of rotting fish that must have leeched into the rust-stained metal walls.
She was just about to open the second door on her right when Porter whispered behind her.
“There’s a body in here.”
She turned to see his silhouette framed in the doorway of what appeared to be a storage closet. Metal racks glinted from the walls past him. She peered in both directions down the corridor before backing into the room behind him.
“Keep an eye on the corridor while I clear the room.”
He sloshed away from her while she worked her flashlight and pistol from left to right and back again, her finger taut on the trigger in anticipation of squeezing at the first hint of movement. She pictured the savage wounds on the necks of the victims upstairs and tried not to wonder what kind of creature had inflicted them. If something capable of overwhelming and butchering an entire crew of roughnecks was down here with them now, it was going to take more than her little department-issue nine-millimeter to bring it down.
“Jesus,” Porter whispered.
“What?” Sturm asked, fighting the urge to turn and look.
“Switch with me. I’ll watch your six. You tell me what you see.”
Sturm cautiously backed past him and turned to face the room. She traded her gun for the camera and snapped off several shots, then slowed to evaluate the details with her own eyes. The contents of the shelves had fallen into the water. A molehill of rehydrated potato flakes filled the corner to her left, where the screen of a laptop computer broke the surface behind heaps of fabric, soggy boxes, and random detritus. The body floated facedown, arms spread at its sides, toes dragging on the floor with a grating sound. The man’s neck was bloated like a pale white water wing, his hands swollen to the point that they looked ready to burst. She had to nudge him with her toe to turn him enough to see the gash across the anterior portion of his neck.
“There’s one too many,” Porter said.
“What do you mean?”
“The men. There are twelve bodies when there should only be eleven.”
“It’ll take time to identify them. Once we do, you can compare the names to the list of—”
“I already know which one doesn’t belong.”
“How can you possibly…?”
She lost her train of thought when she shined her beam to the right and discovered why Porter sounded so confident in his assertion. There was an iron cage bolted to the back wall, the door closed and latched. Water passed through the rusted bars like the tide sluicing between the legs of a pier. The corpse inside it had been shoved into the corner. She caught a glimpse of the face and had to look away.
The other men had all been killed in the exact same fashion: a brutal, yet surgical strike to the anterolateral neck to tear out the common carotid. The bloodletting would have been swift and fatal, almost clinical, if such a trait could be ascribed to an animal.
This man…this man’s death was the complete opposite. It was a display of passion, of ferocity fueled by a blinding red rage.
“Talk to me, Layne. What do you see?”
She scoured the walls and the ceiling with her flashlight, which showcased the copious amounts of blood and spattered arcs she would have expected inside a slaughterhouse.
“The man in the cage was viciously worked over to inflict a high level of pain, unlike the others we’ve found so far.” She lowered her beam to the cage. “Based on the proportions of the enclosure, I speculate we’re dealing with a single animal, and it’s definitely smaller than an adult great cat.”
“Unless there are more cages down here.”
“Correct.”
“Keep going.”
She finally mustered the nerve to bring the light to bear on the man in the cage. His face was disfigured with countless lacerations that stripped him of his humanity. It was as though his skull were merely coated with chunks of flesh haphazardly hurled from a distance. She could see his spine through his neck and his ribs through the tattered meat on his chest.
Again, she found herself assigning a human characteristic to whatever beast had done this.
“The attack appears almost…personal,” she whispered.
“Great. A beast with a grudge,” Porter said to himself. “It has to still be down here somewhere.”
Sturm shivered at the thought.
“You’re sure it wasn’t on any of the upper decks,” she said.
“I cleared them myself.”
“And there’s no way it could have gotten off the ship?”
“You’re stalling, Layne.”
He was right and she knew it.
“After you then.” She readjusted her grip on her pistol and tried to slow her racing heart. “Lead on.”
Porter spun without a word, returned to the hallway, and advanced slowly, his beam scouring every inch of the walls and the floor. Sturm guarded their rear, conscious of the tremble in her cone of light as she swept it from side to side. Despite their cautious progress, their splashing footsteps echoed up and down the corridor, masking every sound other than the groaning of the hull and their harsh breathing.
Neither of the remaining freezers held anything more than the stench of fish, which followed them down the dark passage like an apparition. The engine room was inhabited by long shadows that stretched away from their lights, c
ast by bilge, oil, and fuel pipes the size of tree trunks. All of the machinery was silent, the gauges flatlined, the computer terminals lifeless. Ribbons of water trickled from the ceiling, traced the lines of conduits, and pattered the standing water like a spring rain. Only their black reflections moved across the water.
“Could it be outside the ship on one of the catwalks?” Sturm whispered.
“There’s a chopper circling it and two Coast guard vessels painting it with their spotlights. They would have seen it.”
“It isn’t down here. Is it possible that you missed—?”
“No,” Porter snapped.
Their transceivers crackled at once. Galiardi’s disembodied voice echoed in the stillness.
“There’s something you need to see up here.”
“Did you find it?” Porter asked. He whirled and sprinted back into the hallway before Galiardi could reply.
“No. But I think I know how it might have gotten off the ship.”
Water flew from Sturm’s knees as she ran to catch up with Porter. He was already vanishing onto the landing above her when she hit the stairs and climbed out of the water. Galiardi was waiting for them outside of the doorway to the mess when they reached her.
“How did the Coast Guard know this ship was here?” Galiardi asked. The tone of her voice hinted that she already knew the answer. “Who called it in?”
“It was an anonymous tip from a prepaid, disposable cell phone.”
“And you weren’t able to trace it.”
It was a statement, not a question.
“Not for lack of trying,” Porter said. “Why? What do you know?”
Galiardi raised a handheld blacklight and led them into the mess toward the bodies. She stopped near a smear of blood on the floor, looked back at them, and then knelt and shined the bluish glow across the floor. A telltale pattern appeared in the dried blood. It disappeared again when the light passed.
“Son of a bitch,” Porter whispered.
It was the print from the bottom of a boot. Someone had stepped on the puddle of blood after it had dried. The impression of the damp tread was as clear as day under the ultraviolet light.
“Whoever came across this vessel boarded it,” Sturm said.
“And if they got close enough to get onto this boat….” Galiardi said.
“Damn it!” Porter said. “We need to find that ship!”
II
Cruelty has a human heart,
And jealousy a human face.
Terror, the human form divine,
And secrecy, the human dress.
—William Blake
FOURTEEN
Seattle, Washington
Thursday, October 18th
3:53 a.m. PST
Two days later…
There was nothing left in the tank. Sturm felt as though she hadn’t slept in weeks. Her hands shook and she could barely keep her eyes open. The sheer amount of caffeine was burning a hole through the lining of her stomach and her head ached like she’d taken a baseball bat upside the skull. The human body had been built for endurance, but she was seriously testing its threshold now. Between the full-time hours on the job and the added rigors of her internship at the CSRT, she was sleeping in hour-long spurts whenever and wherever she could steal the time. Her diet consisted of bitter fast food coffee to wash down the grease from the fried meat and powdered eggs, which coiled in her bowels like a stone serpent. She had taken to wearing sunglasses to hide the tears that spontaneously burst from her eyes, precursors to the breakdown she had begun to view as an inevitability. She was stretched too thin and she knew it, but she was so close to the finish line now…so close. In less than a month, she would be a full-fledged criminalist. There was already a job waiting for her. All she had to do now was survive the interim. It helped that one day slowly bled into the next, but it felt like waiting to bleed to death from a paper cut.
“You can do this,” she whispered.
“What was that?” Henley asked. He slammed the driver’s side door, stepped away from the cruiser into the weed-riddled lot, and stretched his arms over his head. When he yawned, Sturm had to fight the urge to strangle him.
“Nothing.” She bit the inside of her lip and squeezed her hands into fists to feel the sting of her fingernails cutting into her palms. Anything to sharpen her senses and focus her mind on the task at hand. A task she dreaded more and more with each passing night. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“I hear ya. If we’re quick enough, we can probably still catch the first fresh batch of the day at Krispy Kreme.”
Sturm’s stomach flopped at the thought. She turned away from her partner so he wouldn’t see the green creep into her gills. Far to the north, she could see the outline of the Pacific Scourge at the southernmost edge of the commercial dock, where the Coast Guard had towed it. The Scourge now sat dark and silent behind a chain link cordon that prohibited access to the impound dock. She had spent the last two days scouring every surface in every room of that ghost ship with the CSRT team, for all the good it had done them. Whatever had butchered the crew hadn’t left a single identifiable track, fiber, or hair sample, and they were no closer to finding the man who had notified the Coast Guard of its whereabouts than they’d been forty-eight hours ago. All they had to go on was a cast of teeth that didn’t correspond to any known species. Based on the length of the canines and the protruding arrangement of the teeth, the mold reminded her of a silverback’s jaws, only far sharper, and smaller and narrower, as though designed to fit into a human-size mouth, which was one of the assumptions under which they now had to work. Several sociopaths during the course of the last two decades had used dentures to inflict bite marks on their victims in hopes of creating physical evidence that couldn’t be matched to them, so they couldn’t rule out the possibility. Swabs of the wound sites had also revealed the presence of an amino acid complex nearly identical to the glycoprotein Draculin—the most powerful anticoagulant on the planet—found in the saliva of vampire bats. It thinned the blood by impeding the coagulation response and accelerated the speed with which the victim potentially bled out. As a unit, they were reluctant to commit to the theory of a killer or killers wearing false teeth capable of injecting large quantities of blood thinners, but for now, it seemed to be the most promising angle. There was still the question of motive, of course, and until they found one, they had no choice but to continue chasing their own tails.
And then there was the cage and the dilemma it presented. Was whatever had been imprisoned inside of it the reason everyone aboard had been killed? Were they dealing with the elaborately staged abduction of an animal of some great worth? Or was it the elephant in the room none of them wanted to acknowledge? Was it possible that the ship had been transporting an unclassified or biologically engineered species with ferocious jaws, anticoagulatory venom, and an insatiable appetite for blood? A creature capable of overwhelming eleven full-grown men and dispatching them with practiced ease? Had the second boat arrived to extract the killer for a clean getaway, or had it chanced upon the Scourge and simply served as a convenient means of escape for whomever or whatever had slaughtered the crew?
If they wanted answers, they needed to find the second boat.
Coast Guard choppers and ships continued to scour the Washington coast, but in diminishing numbers. Enough time had passed for a seafaring vessel of any size to have reached any port in North America or along the Eastern Asian seaboard from the point where they had found the Scourge.
She chuckled out loud and shook her head.
They had a killer with fangs that exsanguinated its victims through a bite on the neck. No wonder the other techs had taken to calling themselves vampire hunters.
“What are you laughing at?” Henley asked.
The expression on his face suggested that for the first time during their partnership, they were actually thinking the same thing.
She was losing it.
Sturm turned her attention back
to the ruins that stretched away from them, down the incline toward placid Salmon Bay, and the dreaded nightly rousting.
She shouldered past him and approached the entrance to the subterranean warren.
“Are you coming or what?” she called back over her shoulder, and crawled into the vile, smothering darkness.
* * *
Sturm followed the same path she always took, ducking through holes in the crumbling walls, wending around support columns that creaked and released cascades of dust, and skirting mounds of refuse and excrement. She barely even noticed the smell anymore, which made her wonder if she ever truly rid herself of it or if she now wore it like a subtle, yet repulsive, perfume. The same sights passed to either side, the same shadows, the same overturned boxes, the same stretches of glinting shattered glass, the same puddles of stagnant rain water and urine. It wasn’t until she was crossing from one building into the next that she realized something was different.
The doll.
The filthy, naked baby doll that the homeless girl had lost a week ago during their initial rousting was gone. She paused and offered a prayer up into the fallen rafters and chunks of brick and concrete.
Please don’t let that little girl be back down here again.
A tear crept from the corner of her eye at the thought of an innocent child spending even a single night down here in this squalor, which positively stank of hopelessness and desperation.
She clung to the hope that the girl had simply returned to reclaim her sole precious possession and was now bedded down in one of the shelters on a small cot between her parents, and not shivering somewhere down here in this dark hell.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 9
