CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  For Judy Delton,

  enthusiastic writer and teacher,

  whose encouragement started it all…

  Prologue

  January 11

  After

  Snowflakes fell like shooting stars coming unglued from the midnight-black sky. They brushed the van’s windshield with regularity—ice-cold butterfly kisses from the winter night.

  The bluff top lay white and deserted except for the oblong of the van, silent except for the van’s slow idling cough, motionless except for the stream of exhaust that oozed from the van’s tail pipe.

  The temperature wasn’t much warmer inside the van, despite the idling motor. The man and woman within it huddled loverlike against the cold.

  She wore a fur coat, her feet curled under her on the passenger seat. She shivered anyway—a dark-haired young woman with a lost look.

  He crouched in the well between their bucket seats, his arms around her, a tattered down vest like some scarecrow’s hand-me-down barely disguising his staccato shudders.

  The van’s side windows were cracked just enough to admit thin slabs of almost tangible January cold. The couple’s breaths wove fog castles in the air, and their teeth chattered.

  “Can we go?” she asked at last.

  “Go? Sure. Where—I don’t know.”

  “Home?” she suggested in a husky, tentative voice.

  He laughed, a bit bitterly. Her expression sharpened.

  “Kevin? Have you… changed?”

  “Me? Me, change? Hell, no. I’m the same lovable, slightly insane shrink I always was. It’s all the same—the world, I mean. You’re the same. Maybe.”

  “The same…” She withdrew inside herself to see, then nodded gravely. “The same but different. I don’t know how, in what way; I don’t know what… they… left me—”

  “They left you—that’s the main thing!” He squeezed her shoulders encouragingly, blew his warm breath across the fur collar until its ruddy hairs tickled her pale cheek.

  She smiled as palely. “There’s so much I don’t know—”

  “Me, too.” He hugged her again, not seeming to want to talk about it, about anything.

  His clothes snapped like cracking ice as he pushed himself away and into the driver’s seat. Her hand clung to his withdrawing arm.

  “Keep your hands warm. It’s going to be a long, cold drive.” Kevin pushed her hand deep into the fur’s side pocket, softening the gesture with a smile. “I hope you kept some of your—talents. They may follow us,” he muttered.

  She wrenched forward to press her face to the windshield and stare up at the bottomless well of night. “They might come again?”

  “No! Not them. My masters. Bureaucratic bloodhounds with their own secret ways. Men on the road beside us, at the filling station pumps, in the city streets.”

  “Like the ones… behind us?”

  He nodded grimly.

  “But they—”

  “Forget it.” Command and plea interwove in his tone.

  A smile brushed her tense features, turning her briefly beautiful. “Once, you wanted me to remember.”

  The van was churning into serious operation now, and warming. Random snowflakes kissing the windshield dissolved into tear tracks. Kevin’s expression melted, too, then hardened. He thrust the woman’s bare foot back under the swath of fur.

  “You’re living in a real world now, Jane. You’ve become real, too. Some things are too dangerous to remember.”

  “But… I remember everything I see. Except—”

  “Forget it.”

  Kevin twisted the van’s stiff steering wheel in a slow circle. The vehicle’s tires dug into the drifts, squeaking as they tamped down snow. He braked at the mouth of the steep road leading down from the bluff, then looked back.

  A feathery dusting of fresh snow was already riffling across the tonsure of bare rock at the bluff top’s center.

  “It’ll look the same by morning,” he said. “Just empty snow under an empty sky. As if it had never—”

  “The same,” Jane agreed, “but different.”

  Kevin’s foot pushed the pedal, pouring gas down the engine’s chilled throat.

  The van lurched down into the dark and the deep snow, spiraling along the corkscrewed road, headlights slashing at a passing background of identical-seeming snow-hooded trees and bushes. Now and then the lights pinned a single snowflake in the glare of their yellow eyes. For an instant before shattering on the thick headlight glass, the snowflake went nova.

  Jane winced and blinked her eyes.

  Kevin steered them down into the rough, bucking dark —away from the naked bluff top and back to civilization, back down to the placid Minnesota town of Crow Wing, where a January night came as cold as God can make it and man can take it.

  Where everything was always the same. Everlastingly the same.

  The Retracing

  January 8

  “…the anguish of the marrow…”

  —T. S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality

  Chapter One

  * * *

  Jeez, they look like burnt toast… what coulda done it?”

  Turner winced visibly.

  “Blowtorch maybe, you think?” The local sheriff stuffed wind-chapped hands into his parka pockets to dig out battered gloves.

  Beneath them, snow squeaked as the men stuttered from booted foot to booted foot, tamping down the once- pristine surface.

  Besides Turner and the sheriff in his teddy-bear parka and flap-eared red-plaid wool cap that made him resemble a cartoon hound dog, five other men had gathered in the deep woods clearing. Six were out-of-state government troubleshooters with cold-rouged ears and noses.

  Then there were the two dead bodies sprawled across the hood of a heat-blistered government-issue Ford. Only months before, the automobile had left a plant assembly line painted a lackluster bottle-green; now its husk was singed to the color of tobacco spit.

  “Burnt toast,” the sheriff mourned again, shaking his head. “Musta been some heat wave.”

  Turner looked away into the low steady whine of the January wind. The worst were the fingers—swollen, split, char-broiled. They didn’t look quite human, the bodies, Turner thought. His job came easier when the dead had the decency to look human.

  “Go right ahead and do your stuff,” the sheriff urged. “I like to see how the big-city boys do it.”

  The sheriffs name was Leonard Kustovich. Turner knew his type—red-neck, blue-collar rube. This particular model was a third-generation Slav who should have been mining northern Minnesota’s Iron Range taconite strips like his immigrant ancestors. Instead, the world’s need for taconite had blown south down Highway 61 twenty-five years earlier, leaving with a harmonica-toting hitchhiker from Hibbing who called himself Bob Dylan.

  Now northern Minnesota beer joints thronged with unemployed men stewing in the stench of wet wool and sour expectations. Leonard Kustovich, being smarter than he looked, an advantage for a low-level public servant, had gotten a job as sheriff.

  “Don’t see much in the way of capital offenses up here,” Kustovich remarked. The sheriff eyed the team of technicians documenting the trampled snow around the burnt car. “Nothin’ that calls for six men. What department badge you flash again?”

  Turner patiently tugged off his new wool-lined leather gloves and flashed a discreet identity card in a small, two-sided case.

  The brown leather cracked audibly in the subzero cold; so did the brittle clear plastic entombing his name, rank and serial number. Goddamn world’s end of a place to end up in, Turner swore to himself, the only person he allowed to overhear his own profanity. Fucking foolish place to die in. To start a manhunt from, with a trail as cold as all outdoors.

&
nbsp; Kustovich’s seamed face waggled from side to side. “CIA. FBI. ATF. Now here’s the PID. Never heard of you guys.”

  “We like it that way.”

  Turner stared at the sky, a stonewashed denim expanse speared by dark, jousting pinetops. Along a route demarcated by fluorescent pink string, the recording crew was videotaping the evidence—or rather, the absence of it.

  Turner paced along the path, leaving behind two of his men, Kerr and Frakowski, but not the local sheriff.

  “You kin see they had some sort of oversized vehicle here.” Sheriff Kustovich’s heavy-duty gloves, the fingers thick and stiff as the dead men’s digits, traced a lopsided circle of footprints wading through the knee-high drifts. Nearby ran the deep parallel impressions of tire ruts. “Not equipped for back country snow, though.”

  “A van,” Turner said flatly. “Beige ’78 Chevrolet.”

  “Those boys of yours we picked off the highway ravine last night; they must be doin’ okay in the hospital, if they kin remember that,”

  “Not really. But they’re alive and probably’ll stay that way. Watch where you’re walking!”

  “Hey, I know how to tippy-toe around a crime scene.” Kustovich twisted to survey the ruined car shrinking into a blot of black on the white-washed winter landscape.

  Snow sparkled in the brittle noonday sunlight. The tech team clicked and panned away, black boxes masking their faces. They didn’t look quite human, Kustovich thought a little creepily, but then, neither did the dead men, and they were all stamped out from the same, government-issue cookie cutter.

  Where the long-gone van had paused, the trail lurched toward a dark fence of surrounding tree trunks. Footprints —confused enough to indicate the coming and going of more than one person—pocked the snowdrifts.

  “Who are these fugitives, anyway?” Kustovich probed. “Don’t tell me we got Russky spies slippin’ through the Mapieleaf Curtain? Or ’Nam draft dodgers finally comin? Home? Hey! Undeclared aliens? Drug smugglers, maybe?”

  “Maybe.” Amusement crisped Turner’s cold-cracked lips. Time had taught him that denying local authorities the pleasure of speculation created more stir than letting them pursue any number of wild tangents.

  Kustovich eyed the city man, sizing him up as he himself had been so swiftly typecast. He liked to play into off-iron Range prejudices, but wasn’t half so dumb as he looked. Neither was the taut-lipped Turner. Mid-forties, without that beefy, hungry look you found among Iron Range men. Smooth in a way that didn’t mean slick. Invisible. Except here.

  The sheriff let his bright brown eyes carom off the busy men—all duded up in their nylon-shelled this and down- filled that with nothing on their heads but what hair God left ’em and with their exposed, note-taking, picture-taking hands turning lobster-scarlet in the icebox that was a Minnesota mid-January.

  Amateur experts, he scoffed to himself. Still, he followed Turner to trail’s end. At a clearing fenced by whip-thin brush, the footsteps ended in a cul-de-sac of drifts.

  “How many perpetrators, you figure, Mr. Turner?”

  “Just… two.”

  “—and whatever weapon fried those stiffs back there.”

  Turner winced without showing it this time. “And whatever.”

  “Musta been big, somethin’ to do that kind of damage.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Kustovich’s eyes narrowed hungrily, but Turner gave the sheriff his back as an aide plodded over for a whispered consultation.

  Kustovich, not one to hide his weaknesses, eavesdropped openly.

  “It’s a puzzler, sir,” the subordinate was saying.

  Kustovich envied that “sir.”

  “We knew that when we came up here,” Turner said.

  “I mean.,. This. These marks in the snow.”

  Turner and Kustovich looked where the man pointed.

  “Someone fell,” Turner dismissed the discovery.

  “Fell.,. Maybe, sir. But why that? That… blurring around the impact point? It just grazes the snow’s surface at torso level but it’s deeper by the legs, like it was made deliberately. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Turner would have answered, but Kustovich loosed a laugh reminiscent of a stalled snowmobile engine. As many big men do, he gargled his mirth like raw razor blades, making quite a show of it.

  “What’s so funny?” Turner clipped out, annoyed at last.

  “‘Weird.’ ‘Puzzler.’ Jesus H. Christ, where you boys come from originally, anyhow?” Kustovich sputtered amiably.

  “My parents and Michigan,” Turner snapped.

  “Nevada,” said the other man.

  Kustovich’s ear-flapped head wagged roguishly. “Hell, I can see why a desert rat might be snowed by this, but a Michigan man… didn’cha ever play in the snow in Michigan, Mr. Turner?”

  “Play?” Turner’s enunciation made it evident that he never had played—then… or now.

  “Didn’cha kids make winter snow forts years ago? Make icicles outa clothes poles by pouring water from the house down ’em? Didn’cha drag your feet through clean-fallen snow and make big pie shapes to play tag in?

  “Hell, there ain’t nothin’ weird about that mark! It’s a snow angel, that’s all. We see ’em around here all the time, usually on the neighborhood lawns after a fresh fall.”

  “Snow angel?” The underling from Nevada echoed Kustovich’s bizarre phrase when Turner wouldn’t.

  “Snow angel.” Kustovich’s laugh subsided to a chuckle. “Lead me to a safe mussing spot and I’ll show yah how it’s done.”

  The Nevada man gestured him beyond the staked-out string. Turner followed.

  Before their eyes, Kustovich plopped ass-down in a virgin snowbank. He lay back in the bright white blanket of undented snow, chuckling with Santa-like glee, and began windmilling his arms and legs, sweeping them up and down, in and out, like a demented traffic cop.

  Neither watching face betrayed reaction, but the Nevada man finally let his jaw drop enough to speak.

  “That’s the same shape, all right. You mean somebody laid down there in the subzero temperatures in the dark last night—with two men fried a few yards away—and did that?” He glanced incredulously to Turner.

  Kustovich grinned up from the snow.

  “I don’t know, Junior, but I do know that this is how to make those marks. It’s a kid thing. It’s what you do when you’re nine years old and you ain’t got nothin’ else to do and the snow is pretty and you feel like thumbing your nose at the cold. They do it all the time, kids. Have for years. Give me a hand up— Heck, if you don’t, I’ll ruin it,” the sheriff added plaintively. Kustovich extended big-gloved paws and waited.

  Turner and his associate froze for a disconcerted moment. Then each extended a gloved hand and levered the sheriff upright. He turned to admire his handiwork.

  “Not bad. Real nice, in fact. Haven’t done that for—oh, shit… years.” He yanked off a mitt and began flicking snow clods from inside his collar. “Whew, snow on your neck sure is cold. Forgot that. Now why do you suppose these perpetrators would want to fry your guys, then stop to make a snow angel? That’s what’s weird. What kind of hopheads we got here?”

  “ ‘We’ have nothing here. The PID’s work is classified.” Turner moved back to the original snow angel. “Shoot it, close-up,” he ordered. Camera-bearers swarmed forward.

  A sudden scream whined into the clearing, rising and falling mechanically. One glaring red eye flickered through the black fence of bare tree trunks, following the now-deep tire tracks.

  Shutters clicked relentlessly as Turner walked away, Kustovich behind him. The ambulance’s white-painted sides looked dingy next to the fresh snow.

  The driver, alerted, had stopped well beyond the roped- off area, but he left his emergency light on. It glinted hot pink through the snow flurries kissing past the charred car. Kustovich shivered in his warm winter woolens.

  “We don’t get many violent deaths up here,” he admitted. “Oh,
we get the fatal bar brawl now and again, or the occasional kid who wanders off and falls through the river ice. We don’t even find that many dead rape victims. Too damn cold even for that. Now in one day I’ve got three stiffs for young Doc Moudry.”

  “Three?” For the first time that cold, clear noon Turner’s voice betrayed interest.

  “Three.” Kustovich ticked off the morning’s toll on his still-bare hand. “Your two here and that old lady found dead in her cabin. One of those north woods hermits. Probably croaked of a sick ticker. Old Lady Neumeier. Guess she used to be someone down in the Cities. Natural causes, though. Not like this.”

  Turner’s face pinched tighter. Together the two men watched as the scorched bodies were lifted from their grotesque positions and laid on stretchers in even more grotesque postures. For once Kustovich said nothing.

  The attendants slammed the ambulance doors shut, mounted the cab and whined away with their spinning red light faint in the strong daylight. They reminded Turner more of clowns in some deep-freeze circus than angels of mercy.

  Angels. The word—and the recent demonstration— made Turner’s face sour. God knew the dossier was slim enough—a sketch of the woman, a smattering of medical records.

  Of course, there was a lot more on the man. A whole lifetime’s worth to sift through and enlarge under the microscopic eye that PID was so expert at exercising.

  “A snow angel.” Beside Turner, Kustovich mused into the distance, chuckling mildly. “Don’t that beat everything? Who’re you guys after, anyway, juvenile delinquents?”

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  You’re sure they fit?” Kevin stared down at Jane’s brand-new boots with something resembling parental anxiety.

  Clumps of snow wedged under her heels were weeping onto the venerable wooden floorboards, but the boots were less than an hour old.

  Jane stared down, too.

  The boots were quilted nylon, down-filled mukluks, pale blue. Kevin supposed they looked stupid peeping out from under the luxuriously long hem of Jane’s opossum coat, but he wasn’t a fashion expert. Neither was Jane. And the boots were warm. The saleswoman at the Midnight Loon, down the street, had assured him of that when he’d ducked in solo to buy them.