The Straw Men

by Marshall, Michael

  Except for me. I went to the trouble, one summer when I didn't have a lot else to do, of learning where the pond was. I would have been fifteen, I think, a couple of years before the night in the bar with my father. I applied scientific method, which I was very impressed with at the time. I methodically worked through all of the route alternatives until I'd found where the pond was—and how to get there. I got very lost a few times, but it wasn't a bad way of spending a few weeks. When you know where you're going, a forest is a nice place to be. It feels safe, and you feel special. The problem was, once I'd successfully made the journey maybe ten times, I realized I'd ruined it for myself. There's no point in a lost pond that isn't lost. It becomes just a pond, and I stopped going. By that time I was getting more interested in knowing about places to go necking, and you couldn't get a girl to go walking in the forest after dark—certainly not in search of some patch of water that you might or might not be able to find. That's not the kind of thing that appeals to most girls. Or I didn't. One or the other.

  Bobby and I were walking in single file, following a tributary of the creek. It had been over twenty years, and the environment had twisted and changed. The cover overhead was patchy, and cold shafts of sun came down to throw shadows.

  We soon came to another intersection in the creek network, steep banks where it had cut down deep into the earth. I stopped at the top of one of the banks, momentarily unsure. The area didn't look familiar. There was some muttering in the ranks.

  'And we're doing this because the guy said that he was considering putting up a hunting shelter, about… oh, twenty years ago?'

  'You can go home now if you want.'

  'Without my faithful native tracker?'

  After another slow look around, I understood the way the vegetation had changed. One of the trees I had used for a marker had fallen down in the intervening years. Some time ago, too: the remains were moss-covered and rotten. I reoriented myself and headed into the gully.

  The sides were steep and slick with leaves, and we were careful on the way down. When I reached the bottom I turned left and took us along the slight incline.

  'We're nearly there,' I said, pointing up the way. About two hundred yards ahead, the gully banked steeply to the right. 'I think it's just around that kink.'

  Bobby didn't say anything, and I assumed that, like me, he'd become absorbed into the experience. Forests are one of those things that you lose for a while, until you have your own kids and start to appreciate certain things again, see them reborn through a child's eyes—like ice cream and toy cars and squirrels. I spent some time considering if this had something to do with why I liked hotels. Their corridors are like routes between trees, their bars and restaurants like little clearings for assembly and eating. Nests of varying size and prestige, all held within the same structure, a private forest.

  The Upright Man's manifesto had gotten into my head more than I'd realized.

  •••

  'Somebody's watching us,' Bobby said.

  'Where?'

  'Don't know,' he said, glancing up at the sides of the gully above us. 'But he's up there somewhere.'

  'I don't see anyone,' I said, keeping my eyes forward. 'But I'll take your word for it. So what do we do?'

  'Keep walking,' Bobby said. 'If it's him, he's either going to wig out or stay put and make a decision on whether to come talk. He sticks his head far enough above the parapet, I'll go after him.'

  We covered the last hundred yards quietly, resisting the urge to look up. At the turn in the gully the floor rose sharply, and we scrambled up a couple of feet.

  And there, in front of us, was the Lost Pond. Maybe a hundred yards by sixty, steeply banked for the most part, but with a couple of muddy little beaches. A few ducks floated in the middle, and trees overhung much of the shallow water. I walked up to the edge and looked into it. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing myself as I was when I was fifteen.

  'You know where the hide was?' Bobby asked.

  'All I know is that he was planning one. He mentioned it twice, maybe three times. Not to hunt. Just somewhere to hang. Ed was a bigtime loner.'

  'Plus a pervert, maybe?'

  'No.' I shook my head. 'No one comes out here to make out. It's kind of spooky at night.'

  He looked around, checking out the terrain. 'If I was going to put up a shelter, I'd do it over there.' He pointed at an area of trees and thick brush that extended over the slope on the west side of the pond. 'Prospect- and refuge-wise.'

  I led the way round the pond, peering ahead to where Bobby had indicated. Could have been my imagination, but it did look as if an area in the middle was thicker than the rest, as if materials had been gathered and heaped up.

  It was then that the first shot rang out. A sharp crack, following a whiz and then a whine.

  Bobby yanked me back from the edge of the pond and started running. Another shot swished through the leaves a couple of feet above us. When we were behind the trunks I twisted my head round, trying to see where the shots were coming from.

  'What is with this guy?'

  'Wait,' I said. 'Look over there.'

  I pointed at the thicker area of undergrowth. A head was now poking out of the brush—the head of an old man, one who was nowhere near the place the shots were coming from.

  'Shit,' Bobby said, a gun now in his hand. Two men in fatigues were running down the side toward the pond. Another man in denim was approaching from the other side.

  'That's the guy from the bar last night,' I said. 'The one who boxed us in.'

  The men in khaki had reached the opposite side of the pond. The larger of the two dropped to a kneeling position, and fired directly at the stand of trees: measured, unhurried shots. The other was heading fast round the other side of the pond, banking it high to get round the top. Denim man was also shooting.

  'Who the fuck are these guys?'

  'Bobby—one's heading around toward Ed.'

  'I'm on it,' he said. 'Let's have some cover.' He sprinted off. I pulled my gun, stepped out from the side of the tree, and started firing.

  The kneeling man executed a neat roll to the side and slipped behind the remains of a large fallen tree. I cut sideways through the trees. I was shooting into cold and slanting light, flickered across my face by the uprights of twisted trees, half my mind on avoiding roots so I didn't go flying. Within ten seconds there was a cry, and the denim man spun around and fell onto his back.

  Bobby was ploughing into the undergrowth ahead, firing at the guy coming down the rise, having cut up around in the high ground. The man was ignoring Bobby and me altogether, despite the fact that Bobby was firing at him; he was concentrating on shooting at Lazy Ed's shelter.

  I stopped, steadied, and fired.

  The first bullet hit him in the shoulder. One from Bobby followed half a second later, and the man was punched backward against a tree. But he kept shooting, and still not at us.

  I fired again, twice, getting him plumb in the chest. Bobby had stopped running too now, and three shots of his followed. The man disappeared from sight.

  I took a step forward but Bobby flapped a hand back at me, indicating that I should stay where I was. He moved ahead cautiously.

  'Ed?' I called. 'Are you okay?'

  Suddenly the man in khaki came into view again. He'd slid a little way down the hill, under cover of the undergrowth. As Bobby and I watched, astounded, he pushed himself to his knees, still holding what I now saw was a machine pistol.

  Before I could think of moving, the man started firing again. He was dying in front of our eyes, but he had time to put maybe another fifteen shells into the undergrowth. He didn't consider taking us down. It was like we weren't even there.

  Then he slumped forward onto his face and was quiet for ever.

  Bobby turned on his heel and doubled back, reloading. I ran forward, kicked the dead guy over to check, and shoved my way into the undergrowth.

  Right in the middle were the remains of a hide
. A loose collection of weathered wood, dry brush, twisted old branches. Unless you were looking for it, you'd probably think it was natural, at most the remains of something from long ago, rather than something a man had put together for shelter because he just liked sitting out in the woods and looking down at a pond. Lying in the middle of it was Lazy Ed.

  I knelt beside him and knew that he wouldn't be leaving the forest. You couldn't count the holes. His face was least affected, though one ear was gone and you could see the bone.

  'What's going on, Ed?' I said. 'What the fuck is happening? Why is someone killing all of you?'

  Ed swivelled his head an inch or so, looked up at me. It was hard to see the man I'd once slightly known, among the wrinkles and burst blood vessels.

  'Fuck you,' he rasped, quite clearly. 'You and your fucking family.'

  'My family is dead.'

  'Good,' he said, and died.

  •••

  There was nothing to find in the shelter. A few empty cans, a stash of tobacco, a half-full bottle of very cheap tequila. I thought about closing Ed's eyes and then didn't. Instead I turned round and walked back out of the bush.

  By the time I reached the pond, and the body of the man in denim, Bobby was heading back down a hillock toward me.

  'Got away,' he muttered.

  'He looked like he knew what he was doing. You okay?'

  'Yeah, except I nearly got lost on the way back.'

  'It's a lost pond,' I said. My hands were shaking. 'Jesus.'

  'They dealt the play,' he said. 'We weren't looking for this.'

  'I know,' I said, overcome with the bizarreness of being back in a childhood environment, this time with a gun. 'But what difference does that make? Someone will always be shooting somebody.'

  Bobby squatted down next to the denim man's body and felt through his pockets until he found a wallet. He flipped through it in front of me. There was no driver's licence, no stamps, no receipts, no photos—none of the standard wallet detritus. Nothing except for about forty dollars.

  'Did you look at the other dead guy?'

  'Only for long enough to make sure he wasn't going to start shooting again,' I said. 'He was wearing a vest, but I'm still impressed at how long he kept going. That guy showed real dedication to his task. Which was nothing to do with us. They could have taken us out easily. They were after Lazy Ed. We were just in the way.'

  Bobby nodded. 'There was no identification on him either,' I said. 'At all. I turned back the collar of his sweater, and looked in the back of his pants. No labels. They'd been cut out.'

  'It's The Straw Men,' he said. 'They're taking them out one by one.'

  'But why? And how did they find us?'

  He shrugged. 'The Fed chick did. Maybe they did it the same way. It's their Web page: they'd have immediate notification of any access, without waiting for some hacker to intercept it. Or they could have been on the case before we were, Ward. There's evidence that some sort of cleanup is in operation.'

  He looked up at me, looking tired and pissed off with our failure. 'Either way they got the job done. There's nothing left for us here except trouble, and we already got enough of that.'

  Without another word we started walking.

  Chapter 26

  Nina had assumed Zandt would explain to her what was on his mind, but from the moment the other two guys had left, he'd clammed up. When he'd turned up at LAX in the cab, though he hadn't been particularly friendly, he had at least seemed to be present. As soon as they'd established that the men at the Holiday Inn in Hunter's Rock—whatever they might have been up to, and she still had questions about that—were nothing to do with The Upright Man, it was like he'd retreated again. She felt stupid about hauling them upstate, but making a mistake was better than doing nothing. She was very aware of the passage of time, aware of it as acutely as if someone was pulling her skin off her face. In her it bred a desire to talk, to try to do or say something, anything, almost as if they could vocalize a solution into existence. In Zandt it seemed to have the opposite effect. It would not be long, she believed, before he became utterly mute.

  The plane was mostly empty and yet he hadn't even sat next to her. He was across the row, studying some old files he'd taken from the house. She called the office in Brentwood, and established that nothing had changed there, while not making it clear that she wasn't exactly just around the corner.

  Then she turned back to the window, and stared down at the land passing below as they flew over it back to LA, wondering if they were passing over the very place, the hidden house or cabin, whatever The Upright Man called his own. The knowledge that they might be, that Sarah Becker might be under her somewhere, was impossible to bear. Instead she yanked the in-flight magazine out of the pouch and tried very hard to read it.

  Zandt was barely aware he was on a plane, and he wasn't even thinking about Sarah Becker. Instead he was considering four disappearances, spread over the country in a three-year period. There was little to tie them together except that copies of the case files were now on his lap. But if there was some kind of brokering service, the usual rules of serial investigation might no longer apply. If you had a series of disappearances or bodies within a tightly confined geographical area, it was a fair assumption you could limit the search for evidence or corollary events to within that same space. Most killers had their hunting grounds, a few square miles in which they were confident. Some would limit their field of activity to a few blocks, even a couple of streets—especially if preying on sections of society that didn't inspire committed interest from the authorities. Zandt remembered watching footage of the demolishing of the house that had held Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, the place where young black and Asian men had been dismembered, worshipped, and eaten, in one order or another. Families of the victims watched the event, most mutely, some merely sobbing—but a few demanding an explanation from anyone who would listen, trying to elicit some reason to accept the fact that their children had been taken from them and murdered without anyone seeming to care very much.

  Disappearances on opposite sides of the country were seldom judged against each other, even after the FBI became involved, especially if they took place within a similar time frame. You didn't snatch someone from San Francisco on Tuesday night and then grab another in Miami in the small hours of Thursday morning.

  Not, at least, if the same man was involved. Zandt had been looking for disappearances that shared characteristics with those connected with The Upright Man, and that also had taken place in the same years. He was not expecting to find other instances of little keepsakes with a girl's names embroidered on each of them. The Upright Man was clever enough to seek to imply that the LA cases were unconnected with any in other parts of the country.

  This was the realization that had been nagging at him when the cab had arrived to take him to LAX: that the sweaters were showy. That they might have little or nothing to do with the killer's pathology, and instead be a way of fencing off a small group of cases by making them appear unrelated to anything else. That The Upright Man might have judged that the police were as likely to be impressed by such a touch as were the audiences for films where chrysalises were left in corpses' throats, or TV series where each week a man caught killers who wore their innermost psychoses on their sleeve. You got a sweater with a name on it, it's one of ours. You haven't, then it isn't, and we're not interested in hearing about it. Our guy's got a pathology. That's what we're looking for. It's one of the few tools we've got, we're sticking by it and can't you see how busy we are already?

  Zandt believed it was all too possible that The Upright Man might not have a pathology at all, that he might not be susceptible to profiling. He could be out there doing it, taking victims culled from anywhere in the country. Maybe even anywhere in the world. Just because he wanted to.

  The subjects did not constitute a clearly distinguishable group. We covet beauty because beauty makes people recognizable, makes them look famous. Zandt did not conside
r the long hair to be a reliable indicator either. If he was right in thinking that the sweaters were a false trail, then the length of the girl's hair might simply be a means to an end. There were only two distinguishing features. The first was age. Many young children disappear, and a number of old men and women are battered in their homes. Both unwittingly put themselves in the path of statistics by virtue of their physical weakness. Of the remainder, the majority of women who disappear are in their late teens or early twenties: sufficiently young (and not too old) to have independent lives; women who can be found walking home late at night, who might live alone, who have the youthful confidence to come to the aid of an affable man with his arm in a sling and his face just in shadow in the corner of a parking lot late at night. Women of all ages disappear, but the big spike in the graph came in this range. The Upright Man's known victims, however, along with the missing girls in the files on his lap, had been in their middle teens. Girls who were old enough to present a physical challenge to their abductor, but too young to often be found in the most vulnerable environments. This didn't mean that Zandt could simply batch any girl between the ages of fourteen and sixteen and call them possibles. There were plenty of places all over the country where a girl of that age might well be out on the street at night, plying a trade. If The Upright Man or his procurer had been concerned with age alone, he could have driven a truck to the right part of the right town and loaded it up to standing-room only. Instead he selected not only from a group who were circumstantially less vulnerable than average because of their age, but who also came from social backgrounds that mitigated against easy availability. Elyse Le-Blanc's family had been a little less well-off than the others, but still firmly middle class. The rest were verging on wealthy. The Upright Man wasn't just looking for meat. He was looking for what he perceived to be quality.