KnockOut

by Catherine Coulter

  Savich clearly heard a woman’s voice say, “Autumn, sweetie?”

  And Autumn said, “Mama, I’m talking to Dillon like I told you.”

  He heard nothing else. Autumn said, Mama doesn’t want to believe I’m really talking to you, Dillon, but she says hello.

  Hello to your mom too.

  Will you get Blessed?

  I’ll do my best.

  Thank you, Dillon, and she was gone.

  28

  “THAT WAS AUTUMN?”

  “Yes.” Savich looked up into Sherlock’s face, then turned off the bedside lamp. Her face was shadowed, since there wasn’t much of a moon to light their bedroom. He touched her hair and smiled. “She and her mom are in Titusville, Virginia, with Sheriff Ethan. She didn’t tell me his last name. They’re in trouble, according to Autumn. At least they’re staying at the sheriff’s house, deputies everywhere.” And he told her everything Autumn had told him.

  “You never mentioned this Tollie Tolbert—what a name. He really knew your dad?”

  Savich nodded. “He’s been retired quite a while now. Last time I saw him was at my dad’s funeral. I’d feel a whole lot better if he were there, but Autumn said he was visiting the Everglades. The sheriff sounds like he’s doing all the right things—of course, this is all from a seven-year-old’s perspective.

  “I’m thinking given this special ability she has, Autumn has had to be growing up a lot faster than normal. She was pretty cogent, Sherlock, she spoke really well, but you know what, when I looked at that beautiful little face of hers, I wanted to drop everything and pluck her out of harm’s way fast. She’s in fear of some very strange relatives.”

  “As strange as Blessed?”

  “Yep. There’s Shepherd Backman, Blessed’s mom, and Grace, his brother.”

  Sherlock tilted her head at him.

  “What is it?”

  She said, “I thought Blessed’s name sounded familiar, but I let it go. But those three names.” She ducked her head down to tuck against his neck. “I’ve seen those names. Where was it?” She reared up and smacked herself on the head. “Okay, I remember now. I was doing online research for that cult case we’ve got going out in Idaho, reading about religious cults, what they do, how they operate, how they indoctrinate their members.”

  Savich eased his hand beneath her short pajama top and began rubbing her back. “What’d you find?”

  “There were hundreds of blogs written by the cults themselves—recruiting, I suppose—and there were newsletters, some out every month, subscription only. I found one that had to do with the supernatural power of the mind, and it talked about three people who had names like that—Shepherd, Blessed, and Grace, I think. First names only.”

  He gave her a huge kiss. “You’re incredible,” he said, rolled her off him, and got out of bed. She grinned as he grabbed a pair of sweats and pulled them on.

  “Tell me the name of the blog.”

  “Something about sunset, sundown—something like that. It’s in my files. Wait, I remember—it’s ‘Children of Twilight.’”

  He shook his head at that. “I’ve got to take a look at this. Thanks, sweetheart. Go to sleep.”

  29

  TITUSVILLE, VIRGINIA

  Tuesday morning

  Ethan woke up at six o’clock in the morning. He knew better than to get up or the animals would begin pretending they were starving with barks and loud meows punctuated by cat storms, Big Louie in pursuit, all through the house. He didn’t want Autumn or Joanna to wake up that early.

  So he lay there, listening to Lula snore lightly, watching Big Louie twitch in his sleep. As for Mackie, he cocked an eye open at Ethan, stretched, and went back to sleep. Ethan lay there, wide awake as soon as he thought about Blessed.

  Blessed was still here, had to be, lurking somewhere, probably in the wilderness, waiting, biding his time to get Autumn. He wondered if somehow Blessed had gotten himself into Autumn’s head without her knowing it, and that was how he’d found her. Joanna had mentioned this, but this was the first time Ethan had let it into his brain as a real possibility. He shook his head. He was beginning to think as if he actually believed everything Joanna had said. Well, maybe he did. There was one thing he was doing, though, that wasn’t good—he was building Blessed Backman up to be an omniscient monster.

  Where are you, Blessed?

  He nearly leaped off the bed when his cell phone rang. “Merriweather here. What’s up?”

  “Ethan, this is Chip Iverson, Titus Hitch ranger district.”

  Ethan had known Chip for two years. The man sounded like he’d had his brains shot out of his head. No, he sounded like he was in shock. Ethan slowed his voice. “Chip, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Ethan heard the rock-solid Chip draw in breaths, knew he was trying to get himself together, and Ethan felt his own heart kick up, felt the jump in adrenaline.

  “Sheriff—Ethan, we’ve got a bad thing here.” Chip’s breathing broke off and Ethan heard him gagging, then vomiting.

  Ethan waited. He heard Chip gasping for breath, heard a man say something behind him, heard him chug down some water, spit it out. Finally Chip came back on the line. “Ethan, it’s a dead man, he’s been savaged by a bear, but it’s not right, just not right. Please come fast.”

  Ethan drove his Rubicon as far as he could into the wilderness on the fire road, Big Louie in the passenger seat, his head out the window. Then he and Big Louie ran the quarter mile to the southern fork of the Sweet Onion River.

  It had taken fifteen minutes, and every one of those minutes, Ethan was thinking, A man savaged by a bear? How was that possible? There was plenty of game, no reason for a bear to seek human prey. It didn’t make sense. It happened rarely, but sometimes some brain-dead idiot would bait a black bear, just to see what happened.

  “I don’t think so, Big Louie,” Ethan said, petting his head as they neared the sound of muted voices. “I don’t believe in coincidences, way too convenient. It’s Blessed, Big Louie, I know it.”

  Everyone in uniform within fifty miles was looking for Blessed Backman. Ethan had spoken personally to as many of them as he could and had given out the facts he had, that Blessed had tried to kidnap a young girl and had shot at several police officers. He also told them Backman was a powerful hypnotist, so you couldn’t look him in his face, told them the safest course was to shoot him on sight. If some of them doubted that, they didn’t say so. He knew they would use deadly force, and whatever the legal rules, he knew it was righteous. It was the only way to bring the man down.

  Big Louie began to whine, low in his throat. He pressed against Ethan’s leg. The four people, rangers all, stood in the water reeds that grew wild beside the Sweet Onion River, two of them actually in the water up to their ankles.

  Big Louie whimpered.

  Chip Iverson called out, misery in his voice and in his eyes, “Over here, Sheriff. We haven’t touched anything.”

  The four rangers moved aside for him. Ethan looked down at the devastated remains of a man who’d probably been alive and laughing twelve hours before. His body was sprawled beneath a huge willow tree. He indeed looked like he’d been savaged by a bear.

  Big Louie backed away, then stopped, threw back his head, and yowled. One of the rangers went onto her knees and hugged him to her, and spoke to him, tried to calm him.

  Ethan swallowed the bile that rose in his throat, accepted the handkerchief a ranger handed him, and tied it around his face against the overpowering stench. He went down on his haunches and forced himself to study the man’s face, what was left of it.

  Chip was right. This man had been torn apart. One of his eyes was gone—ripped out by teeth or claws—and his other eye stared up at Ethan, sightless, filled with black blood. His throat was torn open, his chest flattened, his entrails ripped out. His clothes were shredded.

  “This isn’t right,” he said aloud, twisting back to look up at the four faces. “You can see for yourself—track
s, claw marks, a bear for certain, but here’s the thing. A bear ripped him apart, but why would he do that without devouring him? There are no major parts of him missing.”

  Four voices, hollow, terrified, sickened, agreed this wasn’t right. A moment later Ethan saw the tangled threads of a skinny rope beneath one of the man’s mangled wrists. A rope? No animal he knew of could tie a man’s wrist, except the two-legged variety. Blessed, he thought again. Of course it was Blessed.

  Ethan looked at the man’s feet and nearly dry-heaved. The man’s feet and lower legs were mangled nearly beyond recognition. The rest of him was bad, nearly unendurable, but not like his feet and lower legs. Thing was, they weren’t feet any longer, but gore and bone, the ankles nearly gnawed through as—what? As the bear pulled and jerked his body down. Ethan heard Big Louie still whimpering, heard a soothing voice. He continued to breathe lightly into the handkerchief. He said aloud, “Look at his feet. Why would a bear do that?”

  The four voices were silent.

  Chip said, “We found pieces of his boots. They were ripped off his feet and chewed to bits, covered with blood.”

  Ethan nodded, then leaned down to gently remove the threads of the rope beneath the man’s wrist.

  “What’s that?” Chip asked, staring down at that frayed rope, wet and black with blood.

  Ethan showed him. He rose to look up into the thick branches of the willow tree. It didn’t take him long to find the branch someone had tied the man up to. The branch was hanging low, nearly broken off, because the body that had hung from it had been pulled and jerked down. He could picture it happening. Someone tying his wrists together, throwing the rope over a low branch, and hauling the body up, but not too high up, no, only high enough so a bear would have to stretch himself to grab at his feet and ankles, to pull him down.

  This was what the killer wanted to happen, what Blessed intended to happen.

  Chip said, “The bear must have jerked and pulled until the rope tying his wrists gave way. See, the bear pulled him nearly to the water’s edge, about ten feet from the tree.”

  “A bear doesn’t feed like this,” said Primo, a ranger from Montana who’d been at Titus Hitch six months. “Animals eat what they kill. If the bear wasn’t ready to eat him, he wouldn’t have mauled him like that. He’d have just come back later. The sheriff’s right, this doesn’t make sense.”

  Chip was shaking his head. He said, “What doesn’t make sense is why anyone would do this to another human being. I mean, what’s the point? Only a monster—”

  Chip broke off as he studied Ethan’s face. “You think Blessed Backman did this, don’t you? He went to all this trouble to kill this man and set him up for the bear to obliterate him?”

  Ethan stood up. He still held the rope. “Oh, yes, Blessed did this.” He looked at each of the rangers. “Have any of you ever seen an animal wreak this kind of damage on a human being”—he forced out the words—“without some sort of encouragement?”

  Paulie Burdett had been in the Park Service for twenty-four years, and was usually unflappable. But not now. Now he was mad. “In the Serengeti I remember a guide was savaged like this, but he’d been reduced to bones. I’ve never seen animals who went to the party but didn’t eat the cake.”

  No one laughed.

  “Thanks for that image, Paulie,” Chip said.

  Ethan checked the man’s pockets. No ID.

  Ranger Junie Morgan said, “We’ll have to check the camps, see if he was out hiking, whatever. So far we haven’t had a report of anyone missing. Listen, Sheriff, if you don’t need all of us, I’d sure like to get started tracking that bear.”

  “He had to be dead, didn’t he?” Chip asked all of them and no one. “I mean, no one would haul a guy up and tie him to a branch, then eviscerate him so the animals would come and finish the job…No, I can’t believe that.”

  Ethan said, “There’s so much devastation, I can’t even guess the cause of death. The ME will have to tell us that.”

  Ethan got the man covered, called his deputies to the crime scene, called the county ME. Then he pulled out his cell and called the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. He was surprised when he was put right through to Special Agent Dillon Savich. He’d expected—what? To be told to leave another voice mail, since the big man was too busy?

  A man’s deep voice said, “Savich.”

  “Dillon Savich?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Sheriff Ethan Merriweather from Titusville, Virginia, and I’ve got myself a huge problem here.”

  “Hello, Sheriff. I gather you’ve already spoken to Autumn this morning?”

  30

  ETHAN STARED AT HIS cell phone, felt his flesh ripple. “Ah, no, I got called out early. I haven’t seen her yet this morning. I was out of the house before she and her mom were even awake. I, ah, gather you’ve met her?”

  “Let’s just say we spoke. She told me what’s going on out there. She even told me about Big Louie, Mackie, and Lula. What’s happened, Sheriff?”

  No, he couldn’t accept this, he couldn’t, but Autumn’s ability was staring him right in the face. “Well, what’s going on right this minute is that I’m looking at the mangled body of an unidentified man in his sixties, in torn hiking clothes, lying beside the Sweet Onion River in the Titus Hitch Wilderness, about fifteen minutes from my house. The body’s an ungodly mess. For whatever reason, a bear savaged it. If Autumn told you anything about Blessed, you know why I think he was responsible for this.”

  Savich hummed a moment, then, “Do you have a good forensic team available to you, Sheriff? An experienced ME?”

  “We’ve never had the need before for a hotshot medical examiner. I called the county ME, and he’s okay, as far as I know. I guess the best ME would be in Richmond.”

  “I’ll make some calls, get some people up there. Don’t let your deputies trample on the crime scene, Sheriff, otherwise these folk from Richmond will kick your butt. They’re very serious about what they do.”

  “You got it,” said Ethan.

  “Is there something else you’d like to tell me?”

  “Yes. Blessed is still free. Since Saturday night we’ve been scouring the area for him, and believe me, everyone understands how dangerous he is. I know he’s here, hiding in one of the hundreds of caves that pock these mountains. And I know he won’t leave without Autumn, and that’s why I’m keeping the search parties in close to the house. But to find him out here in the Titus Hitch Wilderness—the chances aren’t that good.”

  “If he wants Autumn, he’ll come out. As I said, Autumn told me everything she knew about Blessed. The only thing is, she’s seven years old, so a linear presentation isn’t her forte. I’ve still got lots of questions.

  “I’m hoping Autumn’s mother, Joanna Backman, has more to say. If she’s having trouble facing it, I can’t say I blame her.”

  Ethan said, “Actually, I’m the one who can’t bring myself to accept it. Joanna’s been a trooper. She’s told me a great deal already I can fill you in on. And there’s Autumn, her actually calling you telepathically—well, I have lots of questions for you as well.”

  “I’ll be there sometime today,” Savich said. “Sheriff, you’re completely sure that Blessed Backman did this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t you find it strange he’d select this particular time to commit this gruesome murder, a murder, I might add, that isn’t all that close to Autumn?”

  Ethan exhaled a curse. “Damn me for an idiot. Blessed knew I’d be called right away, knew I’d be tied up with this mess. He wanted me out of the house. He had to be watching the house, waiting for me to leave. There are only two deputies there guarding her.”

  Ethan punched off his cell as he ran through the forest and back to his Rubicon, Big Louie barking and racing beside him. They jumped in and Ethan floored it, barreling down the rocky dirt fire road.

  He didn’t know Joanna’s cell number, so he called the landline at his h
ouse. There was no answer.

  He called again a minute later. Still no answer.

  Curse him for a moron. Blessed had delivered up a horror to him, and he’d been sucked right in. He’d gotten him away from Autumn.

  He called Larch’s cell. Three rings. Ethan was ready to panic when Larch came on, his good-old-boy voice deep and rich.

  “Larch, it’s me. What’s happening there?”

  “Nothing at all, Ethan. Everything’s quiet.”

  Ethan thought he’d pass out with relief. “Larch?”

  “Yo.”

  Typical Larch, the fewer words spoken, the better. Nothing hinky sounded in that “yo,” nothing of Blessed. “Put Glenda on.”

  “Can’t, Ethan. Glenda’s turn to check the house and grounds. Then I think she was going to the little girls’ room.”

  “She’s inside the house? How long?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, she’s been gone a good ten minutes. She’s probably talking to Joanna and Autumn. You want I should get her?”

  “Put a call out and get people into the woods around the house. I’ll be there in a minute.” Ethan turned into his driveway at that moment, spewing dust. Larch jumped out of his cruiser when he saw him.

  “What’s up, Ethan?”

  Ethan’s cell phone rang. He ignored it. “If you see Blessed, Larch—don’t forget—do not look at his face or what happened to Ox will happen to you. Get out your gun and stay behind me.”

  The front door was unlocked. Ethan quietly eased through, his Beretta at the ready, Big Louie behind him.

  He heard Larch whisper, “You think Blessed got to Glenda?”

  They heard a woman’s low, gravelly voice, Glenda’s voice. Ethan put his hand up, waved Larch back, and moved quietly toward the kitchen.

  Glenda yelled, “Stop trying to creep up on me, Sheriff. I know you’re out there; you made more noise than a herd of elephants.”

  Joanna called out, “Ethan, stay back. She’s got a gun.”