The Frank Peretti Collection

by Frank E. Peretti

  Pete and his whittled-down crew worked their way slowly up the drainage from the site of last night’s camp raid, somewhat refreshed from a short night’s sleep but not encouraged by today’s progress.

  They did have a plan: Joanie and Chris, with two armed searchers, were working the area above where they found the backpack, hoping to pick up a trail again. Pete and his crew were tracking backwards from the campsite, hoping to meet up with them coming the other way. If it worked, the two teams would have covered the creature’s trail from the first location to the second. It was along that trail that they hoped to find whatever remained of Beck Shelton.

  But the plan wasn’t coming together. Some of the hunters had bowed out—for no good reason, as far as Pete was concerned— and because of the apparent danger and Sheriff Mills’s order to carry firearms, the searchers who weren’t comfortable with weapons had to stand down. Don, one of his key flankers, had called early that morning to express his disinterest in tracking “Indian legends” and to tell Pete that he was staying home. Medical personnel were on standby.

  That left Tyler to help with the tracking, one searcher— Benny—to keep an eye out for any signs of Beck, and only one designated hunter, the bald guy named Max Johnson. Both Pete and Tyler had to carry rifles on their backs, which were becoming a real nuisance during the bending, crawling, and crouching that tracking required.

  On top of all that, the trail of this creature, whatever it was, was unpredictable and rambling, cutting through thick serviceberry, syringa, and bracken fern that cluttered and confused everything. Sometimes the trail joined with established game trails, where it became obliterated by elk and deer prints. Unlike hoofed animals, this creature moved about on soft, padded feet that left little disturbance and no claw marks. An occasional impression in soft soil helped, but trying to find the next track, and then the next, and then the next, in constantly changing environments, was exhausting.

  The searchers were feeling it too. Pete could tell by their conversation in the trees just a few yards downhill.

  “Can’t they make this hill any steeper?” Benny asked, puffing a little.

  “I hope we don’t have to go clear to the top,” said Max. “I mean, just between you and me, we’re never going to find her. She’s table scraps by now.”

  “So what about the bear? How are Fish and Game going to bag that thing if we’re up here chasing it off?”

  Pete was wearing out from the tracking and wearing thin from the whining. “Gentlemen, let’s keep the noise to a minimum, shall we?”

  Beck didn’t realize she was asleep until Rachel stirred, rolled, and woke her up. At first Beck groped for that same comfortable spot on Rachel’s belly so she could rest her head there, but daylight hit her eyes and she realized it was midmorning. She and Rachel had slept quite a while, considering they were on the ground again and having to cope with rocks, bumps, and a limited menu of not-quite-comfortable positions. A few feet away, the rest of the family lay fast asleep on Rachel’s nest, awkwardly entangled but clearly comfortable, enjoying the fruits of her labor.

  Rachel rolled again, then sat up, alert, silent, sniffing the air and listening.

  From the hairy, leggy mass on the nest, Jacob raised his head, eyes stern, nostrils flaring as he sampled the air. Whatever was bothering Rachel was bothering him.

  Max said something funny, and Benny started laughing.

  Pete straightened up, not wanting to be a babysitter. “Tyler, perhaps you can clue these guys in?”

  Tyler faded back to have a word with them.

  Jacob rolled off the nest with liquid grace, his hands and feet contacting tree trunks, branches, and the ground with a silent, cushioned sureness, bearing him through space as if he weighed nothing. Remaining crouched in the shadows of the grove, he peered down the slope, nostrils still sampling.

  Rachel had found her own little window through the firs to the outside. She crouched in that spot, riveted to whatever was happening below. Beck copied her, finding another gap in the branches.

  Was that a voice she heard in the valley? It could have been a coyote, or maybe a bird.

  Or maybe a human.

  Benny slipped on a smooth log and fell over, hollering as he went down.

  Whoosh! Up the slope, a dozen finches fluttered out of a tree.

  Beck saw birds flying just above the trees in the valley below. So that’s what it was.

  Unless something else had scared them.

  Jacob didn’t make a sound, nor did he move from where he was crouching; he only turned and, with long and powerful arms, reached and yanked Leah and Reuben off the nest and slapped the sleep out of them. Leah muttered and Reuben whined, but their first focused look at Jacob’s face stung them silent.

  Leah squatted, and Reuben leaped upon her back. She rose to her feet and followed Jacob stealthily, hurriedly, out of the grove.

  Beck wasn’t ready to leave, not at all. She pushed forward through the trees for a better view of the valley.

  Rachel, seeing she was left behind, was so alarmed she couldn’t remember how to pick Beck up. With a sudden lurch that knocked Beck’s wind out, she grabbed Beck from behind and snatched her out of the trees.

  Beck wanted to scream but struggled to breathe first. Rachel had her around the hips instead of her torso, and Beck, despite a frantic effort to remain upright, flipped over, head down, her legs kicking in Rachel’s face. Rachel let go of Beck’s hips to grab one kicking leg, fumbled that leg in her effort to grab the other, and finally dropped Beck altogether.

  Beck landed in Rachel’s nest and rolled right side up, her stomach reeling as if someone had punched it. Shadows of a blackout clouded her vision. Rachel, you klutz!

  Rachel began to whine, rotating and stamping in one place, flustered.

  Beck finally found a precious breath, then another. Not wanting to die of manhandling, she waited until Rachel turned her back toward her, then she grabbed onto fistfuls of hair and pulled herself up, pushing with her good leg, until she could get her arms around Rachel’s neck as she’d seen Reuben do.

  Rachel finally quit stamping and turning and bolted out of the grove, racing to catch up with the others.

  Had Beck heard a human voice in the valley? Wondering about it would drive her crazy.

  By now, Pete’s crew had made enough noise to alert every creature on the mountainside. Pete paused to breathe, to rest and calm himself.

  Tyler offered, “Well, it’s not like we’re actually hunting . . .”

  Pete responded, “Not today, we aren’t.”

  When Sing returned with her mobile lab—a thirty-foot motor home outfitted for remote forensic and crime-scene work—she didn’t drive to Abney. Reed caught her on her cell phone while she was still en route from Spokane and gave her a new place to rendezvous: behind the Chapel of Peace funeral home in Three Rivers, a lumber town about thirty miles of winding highway to the northwest of Abney, just outside the national forest. The side trip took her an extra hour and a half.

  She arrived in Three Rivers just as the whistle at the sawmill signaled the end of lunch break. She drove past the big yard where sprinklers sprayed acres of stacked logs, and the sweet smell of sawdust came through the RV’s air vents. The funeral home was right where Reed said it would be, on the main drag, one block down from the grade school and kitty-corner from the Three Rivers Grocery and Laundromat. It was an attractive, cedar-sided structure with a shake roof, stained-glass windows, tall firs all around, and a decorative totem pole out front, obviously carved by a white man.

  “Turn in where you see the brown hearse,” Reed had told her. She swung a wide, easy turn into the parking lot, coasted past the hearse, and came to a stop at the end of a long row marked on the blacktop with white paint: FAMILY. Had there been a funeral, she would have been first in the procession.

  When she swung the RV door open, Reed was standing right there waiting for her, far more awake than he should have been. She couldn’t imagine that he�
��d slept much, but he had obviously showered, shaved, and gotten into his uniform. He carried a Forest Service map in his hand and some big, exciting notion in his eyes. “Sing! You’ve got to take a look at this guy!”

  She looked around. “What guy?”

  Reed was already walking. Sing assumed she was supposed to follow, and she did. They were heading for the rear entrance. “Allen Arnold. He was a logging foreman working a clear-cut up Road 27 off Highway 9.” Reed unfolded the map and stopped so abruptly Sing almost ran into him. “Look at this.”

  She looked as he pointed.

  “Okay. Here’s Three Rivers. Now here’s Abney, right in the middle of the national forest, about thirty, thirty-five miles southeast of here. Here’s the Abney trail up to the cabin, here’s Lost Creek, and here’s about where the cabin is. Now: Here’s Kamayah, and here’s the location of the young couple’s campsite.”

  Sing easily followed the marks Reed had made on the map. “Right. The campsite is about six miles southeast of Abney.”

  “So check this out.” Reed traced a line with his finger, moving northwest from the campsite attack, through the cabin attack, and to an X he’d marked near a squiggly, dashed line labeled 27. “Start at the campsite above Kamayah, go northwest ten miles, and you’ve got the cabin at Lost Creek. From there, go another eight miles northwest and you’ve got the logging operation where Allen Arnold was found dead—Monday morning.”

  Sing studied the map, tracing the line the other direction. “Monday morning,” Sing said, “Allen Arnold the logger is found dead . . . about sixteen miles southeast of here. Monday afternoon, by our best guess, Randy Thompson is killed at the cabin on Lost Creek, about twenty-four miles southeast of here. Monday night in the same place, Beck is attacked . . .”

  Reed jumped in, “Tuesday night, the campers get raided another ten miles southeast. What do you think?”

  Sing cocked an eyebrow and nodded, impressed. “Is Mr. Arnold inside the funeral home?”

  “He is.”

  “Then I think we’d better see him.”

  Cap watched, smiling but impatient, as the brown capuchin— commonly recognized as an “organ grinder’s monkey”—ran after the rubber baton and brought it back to Nick Claybuckle, the trainer, or rather, the researcher.

  “Good boy,” Nick exclaimed in a pet lover’s tone of voice, handing him a grape through the bars of the cage. “That’s my Sparky!”

  The little monkey gobbled the grape down, shooting little side glances at his cage mate, a male of similar size, age, and appearance.

  “Now watch this,” Nick said over his shoulder to Cap.

  He said to the second capuchin, “Okay, Cyrus, go get it! Go get it!” He tossed the baton to the far end of the cage.

  Cyrus sat on his haunches, his eyes shifting unhappily from Nick to Sparky and back again.

  Nick held out a slice of cucumber as an incentive. “Bring me the baton and you get a cucumber!”

  Cyrus turned, walked away, and sat against the wall, pouting.

  Nick looked at Cap, sharing the landmark moment. “Do you see that, Dr. Capella? Inequity aversion, pure and simple!” He straightened, beaming at the results, and grabbed his clipboard to jot some notes. “You know how it is with capuchins. Cucumbers are, ehhh, okay, but grapes, wow, they’re to die for! Cyrus’ll trade the baton for a cucumber if Sparky gets a cucumber, but if Sparky gets a grape, hey, No fair. I’m not playing!”

  Nick, rotund and bespectacled, would have made a great nerd in high school. Come to think of it, he made a great nerd as a graduate student.

  Cap smiled and hinted, “Should I have brought a grape?”

  “Huh?” He caught on. “Oh, sorry. I was just, you know, the experiment, I was really into it. Yeah, I turned in your samples.”

  “And?”

  Nick casually scanned the room, his fingers drumming his clipboard. Halfway down the row of cages, within earshot, a young female undergraduate was observing how a capuchin reacted to its reflection in a mirror.

  Nick whispered, “Um, that’s Carol. She’s doing a perception analysis—you know, cognitive processing of nontypical sensory inputs.”

  Cap whispered, “So?”

  “Does she know you?”

  Cap stole another look. “I don’t believe so.”

  “Eh, let’s walk around anyway.”

  They turned and walked casually out of Primate Lab 1, went one door down the hall, and peeked into Primate Lab 2. This room was like the other—long, clean, and well lit, with a bank of cages along each side. These cages housed rhesus monkeys, some playing, some sleeping, some just staring through the bars. There were no humans in the room at the time, so Nick stepped inside and Cap followed.

  When the door clicked shut, Nick took a CD from his pocket and handed it over. “The bottom line is the results came back inconclusive.”

  Cap winced. “That was quick.”

  “No, no, I think the lab really did the sequencing, but the sample was contaminated.”

  “Oh, come on! I brought a whole truckload of hair samples. There would have been more than enough DNA present—not to mention the PCR amplification.”

  “Hey, I’m a behaviorist. All I know is what they told me.”

  “Well, can I get the samples back?”

  “They tossed ’em.” Cap was incredulous. “Hey, Dr. Capella, come on, that’s what they do!”

  “I told you I wanted the surplus returned. Don’t you ever listen? No. You don’t. That’s why I almost flunked you.”

  “Hey, I was having problems with Maribeth back then. You remember that.”

  “So is that your problem now, your love life?”

  Nick brightened at the very thought of it. “Aw, no, it’s just great. It’s Susie Barton, remember her? She—”

  “Did you tell them the samples came from me?”

  Nick had to return to this world. “Well, yeah—”

  “Nick!”

  “They asked me. What was I supposed to do, lie?”

  That cooled Cap’s jets. “No. No, don’t start doing that. There’s enough of that around here.”

  Nick’s face held that same imploring look Cap used to see in biology class, right around midterms. “Listen, Dr. Capella, it was primate poop. No question. I ought to know. I got my bachelor’s cleaning out the monkey cages. I know my poop.”

  “That’s quite a distinction, Nick.”

  “Proud of it.”

  Cap softened, smiled, and patted him on the arm. “I owe you one.”

  “Eh, you did a lot for me, Doc. I wouldn’t have gotten into the graduate program without you. Hey. The droppings were diarrhetic. Did you notice that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your ape was ticked off about something.”

  “He has a bit of a temper.”

  “What are you working on, anyway?”

  Cap patted him on the shoulder. “I need you to help me find out.” He turned to leave.

  “Are you spying on Burkhardt?”

  That made Cap stop and turn. “Should I be?”

  “Well, somebody ought to do something. I don’t like having to cut back when he’s—” He shrugged it off—poorly. “Aw, never mind.”

  “Never mind what?”

  Nick backed away with a head shake of regret. “Nothing. Really. I mean, with all due respect, sir, if you’re going to make a bunch of waves again, I don’t want to get sucked into it. I’ve got a nice job here.”

  Cap cracked the door and looked to be sure no former associates would see him. “Well, I can’t tell a lie either, and you deserve to know: there are going to be some waves.”

  Eight

  “Mr. Arnold was well respected in the community, and certainly he had no enemies. I had no reason to suspect any foul play, but of course I had to be curious.” Milton Tidewater was an amiable, older gentleman, soft-spoken, highly cordial, well suited to his profession. A man of proper procedure, he’d already put on his green apron and surgical gloves
before opening the cold, walk-in storage locker.

  The first thing Reed and Sing saw were the soles of Mr. Arnold’s feet, jutting from under a white sheet on a wheeled worktable.

  “Oh, dear,” said Tidewater, readjusting the sheet, “I am sorry, Mr. Arnold.” He said to Reed, “Could you take that side?”

  Reed gave Tidewater a hand rolling the table out into the workroom.

  “Mrs. Capella, you may help yourself to Mrs. Tidewater’s apron and gloves, right over there.”

  Sing took a second green apron from a wall hook and put it on. She found a box of surgical gloves, size small, exactly one inch from, and parallel to, a box of gloves, size large, on the shelf above the work counter.

  Tidewater carefully, respectfully removed the sheet from Mr. Arnold, fold by neat fold, revealing the remains. “Now, you understand that I’ve already begun some restoration, so you’ll have to allow for that. Just imagine what he used to look like, right after the accident.”

  Reed didn’t have to do a lot of imagining. It was a good thing this guy was going to be wearing a suit and tie. “How’d this happen?”

  “A stack of logs rolled on top of him, just piled on top of him like jackstraws. It took his crew several hours to uncover him. Of course, he was long dead.”

  Sing spoke quietly, commenting as she observed. “Punctures and lacerations all along the front of the body. Bits of bark and pine needles embedded in the skin.” She took hold of the left arm and lifted it gently. The upper arm bent as if it were made of rubber. “Fracture of the humerus.”

  “You’ll find plenty of fractures,” said Tidewater.

  Sing rotated the arm for a closer view of some puncture wounds. “What do you think caused these?”

  “Sharp rocks on the ground? Perhaps the jagged stumps of branches on the logs.”

  “Uh-huh. Any evidence of bleeding?”

  “Oh yes. Certainly.”

  “What about these other injuries, these lacerations from the logs? Any evidence of bleeding before you cleaned them up?”