Devoted, page 18
She wondered where he was, thought of how he’d gone out the window and landed on all fours in the yard, his eyes like burning coals in his moon-pale face. Her imagination brought her a mental image of him climbing the house wall with the alacrity of a spider, raising the double-hung window from outside and entering the bathroom behind her.
Help was on its way, armed deputies, although not likely just around the corner, still a few minutes away, when a few minutes was an eternity.
Suddenly Shacket rattled the doorknob but only for a moment, then fired two shots at the lock, disintegrating it. He tried to shove the door open, but the highboy was heavy. He pushed harder, and the door arced an inch, two inches.
She was at an angle to the gap, couldn’t see him, but she fired at the jamb, fired again, and saw the pressure on the door relent.
She had five rounds left.
How many did he have—six, eight?
Again he shoved hard on the door, moving the toppled highboy another inch, two inches. If it came to a firefight, maybe his aim would be as uncanny as his animal physicality. The solid-core door was two inches thick. Trying to shoot him through it was likely a waste of ammunition.
The door moved two inches, then another two. Soon he would force entry. Judging by his rabid behavior thus far, he’d enter fast and low, firing as he came, and he would expect her to be where in fact she was, defending the entrance to the bathroom in which her troubled boy lay immobile.
Megan shrank back, using the doorjamb for what little cover it might offer, the pistol in a two-hand grip, aiming at the widening gap across the room, where the sonofabitch would soon appear.
The distinctive waffling wail of a patrol-car siren spiraled through the cacophony of wind and shrilling alarm, sooner than she had expected and swelling fast.
“They’re coming!” she shouted at Shacket. “They’re coming, you asshole, you’re finished, they’re coming!”
Shacket heard them, too, and he ceased forcing his way into the room, maybe only for the moment, maybe permanently.
Megan stood ready, acid rising in her throat, vision pulsing with the violence of her heartbeat.
60
Shacket in a fury, so strong in his becoming that he believes he can kill them all, the two cops responding and the bitch and the boy. He starts boldly toward the front stairs, but cunning tamps his fury down into rage, tamps rage down into mere anger, and instead he pivots and hurries along the hallway to the back stairs, plunges down them two at a time.
The response to the alarm might involve more than two cops. Even if there are only two, they’ll have pistols and shotguns, and they can call for backup. He’s better than any of them, but a pack of wolves can defeat a single tiger.
Across the kitchen, through the back door, onto the porch. The tempest welcomes him, as does the night, and he leaps off the porch, over the steps, into the yard.
They will mount a search. He might not be able to go directly to his Dodge Demon on the forest-service road and flee the area before they begin stopping cars on the highway, looking for him. He must be indirect.
There are no deer, no dummy boy feeding them apple slices, no moonlight emanating from things instead of being reflected by them, just the rampaging wind with the first chill of autumn on its breath and all around the forest, a citadel from which the night arose and to which it will return at dawn. He races across the deepest part of the yard, toward the woods in the west.
They will come into the forest with bright Tac Lights, seeking his spoor. But in his becoming, with his increasing night vision and enhanced sense of smell, guided by an intuitive understanding of the wilderness that no other man has ever known, he will be fleet when they are fumbling, confident when they are uncertain, and he will leave them far behind, lose them, and send them home defeated.
Among the trees, both by sight and smell, he quickly finds the wandering paths that generations of deer have beaten through the underbrush, their route marked by the scent of their shed hair and musk and urine and fecal droppings. The winding trail leads through pine, cedar, fir, buckeye, soon ascending to an outcropping of rock smoothed by millennia of weather. Beyond the rock, the trail resumes and in time descends toward a stream, where the crisp night air is redolent of sedges, mosses, wild onions.
What once would have been an arduous trek does not for a moment test his resources. His muscles stretch and flex with ease. As he moves through the wilderness, he is lithe and limber as he’s been before only in the dreams of his youth. He fears nothing, neither bear nor mountain lion, and he senses that his passage spreads fear through the hearts of all the creatures that live here, paralyzes the small animals that might be his prey if he chose to take them.
Wind rages less here on the floor of the forest than in its higher boughs, shaking down dead needles and pine cones and birds’ nests, the primeval equivalent of confetti to celebrate his passage.
His sense of dominion, of sovereign authority over all that he surveys, might be expected to slake the anger that has burned in him through the previous day and now into another. Instead, the farther he gets from his humiliation at the Bookman house, the deeper into the gothic spires of cedars and pines, the more the postmidnight darkness infuses itself into his blood. Anger escalates once more into rage, rage into fury. Escape accomplished—or the need for it forgotten—he stalks the night in hope of repeating the experience that had been more exciting and more satisfying than anything else in his life, sniffing the air for the wealth of information it carries, licking the darkness as he remembers that singular taste, gnashing his teeth and wishing they were sharper.
Bella on the Wire
Dogs of the Mysterium needed less sleep than ordinary dogs. They even required less sleep than the average human being.
Bella rose hours before anyone else in the Montell family.
She considered herself something of a guard dog.
From time to time, she practiced baring her teeth before a mirror. She scared herself a little.
She preferred to sleep in one of her beds on the ground floor, to more quickly become aware of any smelly intruder forcing entry.
No intruder had ever breached the sanctity of the Montell home.
That didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.
Although Bella was an optimist like all of her kind, she also knew that the world was awash in evil.
She could remain an optimist because she understood that the world was made exclusively for the innocent.
Rooms to house the wicked weren’t included in the original architecture.
Eventually, the world would be remodeled to restore it to its original purpose.
Now, in the early hours of Thursday, she rose from her bed in the kitchen and went into the family room and stood on her hind feet and used the wall switch to turn on the lights.
She had been caught at this a few times. The family thought it was cute.
Larinda, the oldest of the children, had said, She’s afraid of the dark. I don’t blame her. Just look at the news!
Sam, the next to the oldest, said, Boys aren’t ever afraid of the dark, though he always slept with a night light aglow.
Dennis, younger than Sam, said, Maybe we have mice, and Bella needs light to catch them.
We don’t have mice, Larinda declared. And Bella’s not a cat. Anyway, she’s never produced a mouse.
Maybe she eats them, Dennis said.
Bella is every inch a lady, Larinda objected, horrified by her brother’s suggestion. Ladies don’t eat mice, for God’s sake.
Milly, the youngest, said, You’re all full of pishposh.
Bella wasn’t afraid of the dark. She just couldn’t read in it.
The Wire wasn’t merely a communications system. It was also an educational tool.
Other members of the Mysterium could share their knowledge of language with a young dog in mere minutes.
Solomon and Brandy, two of the more philosophical members of the Mysterium, called this ability “brain-to-brain data downloading.”
In the family room were shelves and shelves of books.
Although she was a big girl, Bella was pretty much limited in her reading to the volumes on the lower four shelves.
There was a wheeled ottoman she could push across the room and stand on to reach the fifth shelf, but she rarely used it because of balance issues.
She could paw a book off a shelf and return it with her teeth.
If she heard footsteps and needed to ditch a book quickly, she shoved it under a skirted chair or put it on an end table, to shelve it later.
Sometimes Bella forgot, in which case the children were blamed for leaving books off the shelves.
All but one child rightly denied it. On a few occasions, after favoring Bella with a long stare, Milly had taken the blame.
Milly suspected. One day, the girl might seek the truth.
Bella hadn’t decided what she would do then. Probably play it by heart when the time came.
Now, in the wee hours of Thursday morning, she was lying in the family room, reading The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo.
The story was funny and sad, magical and strange, but true.
True in the sense that, strange as it was, it described the matrix underlying life, a matrix of unsuspected connections among people, places, and moments widely separated in time.
Bella turned the pages either by snorting out a blast of air or by the careful brush of a paw, so as not to crinkle a page.
Stories were as delicious as food. As important as food.
Bella could not live without stories.
Stories were the greatest blessing of intelligence. They were food for the soul. They were medicine.
You could live a thousand lives through stories—and learn to shape your own life into a story of the best kind.
She had just finished chapter five and sighed with contentment when the most amazing thing happened.
A new voice came on the Wire.
He called himself Vulcan.
He claimed to be a three-year-old German shepherd.
Thus far the Mysterium had been limited only to retrievers, golden and Labrador.
Vulcan was of course telling the truth. He was a dog.
But there were other details even more astonishing.
He was transmitting from a great distance. He had been seeking contact for a year, straining ever outward.
Bella didn’t know how widely the transmission had been received throughout the Mysterium.
She returned The Magician’s Elephant to the shelves and composed an announcement for immediate urgent distribution.
Bellagram. Something exciting is happening out there. Until moments ago, no transmission on the Wire has ever been received from beyond a 120-mile radius of Sacramento. Vulcan, a German shepherd living in La Jolla, just north of San Diego, has broken through to us with the news that there is a community of our kind in San Diego, Orange, and Riverside Counties. Mostly German shepherds and Bernese mountain dogs. There are seventy-two of them, residing in various conditions. What we call the Wire, they call the Radio. They have no name for themselves, but we can hope they adopt the Mysterium for themselves. Where have we come from? Why are we here? Our story is at last unfolding. Our time seems to have come. Rejoice. Be true. Stay tuned.
61
In his first year of service, Sheriff Hayden Eckman had never before been in his office past midnight, in fact seldom after six o’clock in the evening. He was there now, and worried.
Still young and attractive, he could speak eloquently about the rule of law and public service, winning over any audience, but his current position was not his life’s work, only one step on the staircase of a career that would take him far.
He had been a deputy, rising through the ranks for five years, and before that he’d been a lawyer with a less than grand practice. He still thought of himself as an attorney rather than a lawman. During the next three years, he intended to network tirelessly and take advantage of all the legal and quasi-legal ways a sheriff could enrich himself, and then run for the district attorney of Pinehaven County. With the ultimate goal of becoming attorney general of the State of California, he had already begun using the resources of his office to obtain information damaging to a list of public servants who he anticipated would be his competition in future elections.
Therefore, this business with Dexter Frawley—transferring the bodies of Painton Spader and Justine Klineman to Sacramento, that nest of vipers, and relinquishing jurisdiction in this case to the state—left him uneasy. On the one hand, the attorney general, Tio Barbizon, now owed him a favor. On the other hand, if this situation couldn’t be contained and if it blew up on them, Hayden might suffer some damage to his image for having acceded so quickly to Barbizon’s request.
What most disturbed him was that he couldn’t be sure he was getting the straight story from Barbizon. The AG claimed to be working in conjunction—unofficially—with the National Security Agency, which was eager to keep its connection to the case secret. But Barbizon withheld large parts of the story, and he had a reputation as a sharp operator.
There was reason to think the claim of NSA involvement was legit. When the wallet containing the Nathan Palmer driver’s license was found near the woman’s corpse, Hayden had gone to the NCIC website to check if there might be a criminal history or an outstanding warrant on the guy. The warrant had been issued by a court in Salt Lake City, at the request of the attorney general of the State of Utah, rather than by a court in the county or the town, Springville, where the crime had been committed. Palmer was wanted for suspicion of larceny, arson, and murder. While Hayden was reading what little was in the Nathan Palmer file, the screen of his computer had blanked to white, and a silhouette of his shoulders, neck, and head appeared in black. His screen remained locked for maybe three minutes before control was returned to him. He knew this meant his photograph had been taken and his location identified, which was a capability only of the nation’s major security agencies. One of them had a watch on the NCIC’s Nathan Palmer file, to see who might check it out.
Twenty minutes later, before he could contact the attorney general of Utah, Hayden had received the call from Barbizon, who surprised him by asking why he had been inquiring about Nathan Palmer. When Hayden described the double homicide and the horrific savaging of Justine Klineman, Barbizon put him on hold for five minutes while he conferred with others. When he returned, he’d suggested that in this matter he was a front for the NSA, which wanted the Pinehaven case against Nathan Palmer transferred to Barbizon for prosecution. He was permitted to reveal more than the details in the warrant issued by the Salt Lake City court: Palmer had been a highly placed executive employed by Refine with oversight of the Springville facility where ninety-three people died in the fire that had been big news for two days; the Palmer ID was in fact false, one of several that the man had obtained prior to events at Springville and thought were known only to him. Barbizon wasn’t permitted to reveal the fugitive’s real name. Nathan Palmer had bought a custom red Dodge Demon via an offshore shell corporation that he had formed; although he thought his employer didn’t know about the vehicle, he was wrong. Apparently after purchase, the Dodge had been stripped of its GPS, so that it couldn’t easily be tracked; that was something his all-knowing employer hadn’t known. Any lead that Hayden might develop on the Dodge would be welcome. Finally, this was a matter of national security, and Hayden was enjoined by law from repeating to anyone what little had been disclosed during this conversation.
Now that Frawley and Zellman had come and gone, Hayden Eckman sat in his office, working on a pot of black coffee, wondering why Nathan Palmer, under his real name, had thought it necessary to acquire false ID and a hard-to-track vehicle. It sounded as if he either planned to sabotage the Springville plant and go on the run or anticipated a disaster for which he might be blamed. Whatever work might have been underway there, it sure as hell hadn’t been the cancer research that the media reported, in which the NSA would have had no interest.
And why would Palmer’s boss, knowing of his preparations to go on the run in a crisis, have kept him employed at that facility? What a snake’s nest this seemed to be—a tangle of threats, yes, but also, for a man like the sheriff, a squirming mass of opportunities.
Now, following the departure of Frawley and Zellman with the bodies of the victims and all associated evidence, Sheriff Eckman had settled at his desk to write a memo describing that transfer, giving special attention to the behavior of Dr. Carson Conroy. The medical examiner had questioned the propriety of the transfer, had raised issues of protocol and ethics, infuriating the sheriff. If this ever ended up in a court, Hayden wanted a version of events, composed immediately afterward and time dated, that would diminish Conroy’s credibility. According to Hayden’s reimagining of events, the medical examiner hadn’t shown up uninvited, but had been called to assist in the transfer and had arrived inebriated; Conroy hadn’t questioned anything about the procedure, but in fact had been both confused and abusive toward the men from Sacramento.
Hayden enjoyed writing dialogue for the drunken medical examiner and inventing convincing details of his erratic behavior, careful not to make him unbelievably clownish. If ever he needed to present this memo in court, he would first share it with Frawley and Zellman, so that they could corroborate it in their testimony.
