The Chimera Secret Read online

  Jesse ran straight across the trail, darting left and right between trees and hurdling dense tangles of foliage. Don’t look back. Jesse’s legs began to falter, his vision blurring and twinkling with tiny pinpricks of light as his body began crashing. His labored breathing fluttered as he stumbled desperately through the darkening forest, and in a moment of hope he glanced over his shoulder.

  Straight into a pair of fearsome red eyes that towered over him.

  The creature was moving with incredible speed as though it were gliding through the dense woods, its huge legs adapting to the terrain with each stride.

  Jesse’s cry caught in his throat and he gagged. Something huge and heavy swiped across his legs and hurled him off of his feet. He span in midair and slammed down hard onto the ground amid a flurry of fallen leaves and twigs. Jesse rolled onto his back, his arms held out defensively as he looked up into the darkened sky and saw it loom into view.

  The immense bulk of the creature filled the sky above him and Jesse felt his bowels loosen and spill beneath him to soak the ground. Those terrible red eyes glared down at him and blinked once. In a moment terror seared through every fiber in his body and he saw there the face of a man upon the body of a beast.

  And then Jesse’s consciousness slipped away from him into darkness.

  2

  RIGGINS, IDAHO

  ‘We’ve had a what?’

  Earl Carpenter’s eyes widened as he looked across his cluttered desk to where his assistant, a primly dressed spinster named Marjorie Bird, clasped one hand over the telephone. As the Riggins Police Department Sheriff, Earl was used to hearing bad news, but this was unusual.

  ‘A suicide,’ she repeated. ‘One of the MacCarthy kids.’

  Earl puffed out his cheeks and blew a gale of air across his office as he glanced up at the official notices board in the lobby outside. The station was tiny, harbouring a handful of cells that hadn’t held a serious convict in thirty years. In a town of barely five hundred people, there weren’t many crimes a man could commit in the morning that wouldn’t be common knowledge before the sun went down.

  Earl dragged himself out of his seat and picked up his hat.

  ‘Who found him, and where?’

  ‘His mother found him in the garage,’ Marjorie said, relaying what she was hearing down the line. ‘Strung himself up from the rafters in the dead of the night. No witnesses.’

  Earl glanced around the office. Nothing moved fast in Riggins, not even law enforcement, so he did not immediately leave. Filing cabinets that hadn’t been opened in months stood beside a board to which were tacked images of local felons wanted for minor crimes. A couple of big fish wanted by the FBI stood out, supposedly seen hiding out in the woods up near Crooked Creek by a couple of rafters, but that was the extent of the excitement. An acoustic country number spilled lazily from a radio on Marjorie’s desk.

  ‘Suppose I’d better have me a look, then,’ he said finally.

  ‘Suppose you should,’ Marjorie replied, her eyes fixed back on the well-worn pages of a romance novel.

  Earl waddled out of the office, grabbed the keys to the Ford Ranger parked outside and opened the front door. The bright morning sunshine blazed down from a perfect blue sky, soaring hills and ragged canyons forming a dramatic backdrop to the tiny town. Nestled deep in a valley just south of Hell’s Canyon, Riggins had been built along the banks of the Salmon River and its tributary, where the mountains formed the confluence of the rivers. The nearest major towns were twenty miles in either direction on the only access road to Riggins, the US-95, and with only a couple of full-time officers available for duty, the department came under the jurisdiction of Idaho County Sheriff’s Department.

  Earl pulled out of the station lot and drove north down Main Street past the diner and gas station. The nearby river glittered brightly in the sunlight between the trees that hugged its banks. He didn’t have to drive far. The MacCarthy family lived just off the 95 where a dead-end sign gave way to a small collection of sun-bleached clapperboard single-stories. The truck kicked up clouds of dust as Earl mounted the ramp and cruised slowly up to where Sally MacCarthy stood on the porch of her house, her face devoid of emotion, her eyes dark orbs that didn’t reflect the bright sunlight. Earl killed the truck’s engine and climbed out just in time for Sally to fall into his arms as the grief finally hit her.

  ‘Jesus, Earl.’

  Earl wrapped his arms around her waif-like shoulders and held her for a long time.

  He’d known the MacCarthys since he’d been knee-high to an elk. Old man MacCarthy had been a former prospector who’d thrown what little he’d made from the beds of countless rivers into a small diner on the southern edge of town. Three kids, all sons. Old Tom had gone to his maker six years previously, an early visit courtesy of smoking sixty Luckies a day for the better part of forty years. All Sally had left was her three boys: Cletus, Jesse and Randy.

  Earl eased himself free of Sally’s embrace and looked down at her.

  ‘Tell me what happened, right from the start.’

  Sally wiped away the tears from her face, her skin aged beyond her years like rocks weathered by decades of exposure, and spoke in a voice that sounded tiny to Earl’s ears.

  ‘He went out last night with some friends,’ she said. ‘I went to bed early but I din’ hear him come home. He wasn’t in his bed this morning but that ain’t unusual, so I just got ready for work. I found him when I came round to the garage for the truck.’

  Earl looked across to the right of the tired-looking house to where the open car shelter stood. Little more than some timber beams surfaced with opaque corrugated plastic, stained with the dust of years. He could see an aged flat-bed parked out front.

  ‘Is he still there?’ Earl asked as gently as he could.

  Sally nodded once, struggling to hold back more tears.

  ‘I left him in case your people wanted to do all those forensic tests on him, like I’ve seen on the TV. There’s no doubt he’s gone. Besides, I couldn’t have got him down even if I’d wanted to. I couldn’t bear to.’

  Earl stepped away from Sally and approached the car shelter. As he rounded the corner he saw the body of Randy MacCarthy hanging from the central crossbeam. Beneath him, an old wooden stool lay on its side.

  His hands hung limp by his sides, his boots a good three feet above the dusty floor of the shelter. Randy was twenty-three years old, best as Earl could recall. His two older brothers were well-known local woodsmen who often supplemented their meager incomes by taking tourists out into the wilderness on hiking trips. Randy had no criminal record, just a few minors for possession of marijuana, and worked at the hardware store.

  Randy’s jaw was pitched steeply by the tight rope, but Earl could see that his neck was not broken. Asphyxiation then, from the noose. Inch-thick hemp cordage, double-looped over the crossbeam above. Earl looked up at the roof of the shelter, then at the parked flat-bed, and then at the dusty floor of the shelter. He unclipped his radio from his belt and keyed open a channel.

  ‘Marjorie, you there?’

  ‘I gotcha, Earl, what’s the story?’

  Earl scanned the scene before him one last time.

  ‘You’d better get Grangeville down here with forensics,’ he said. ‘Randy’s definitely dead. I’ll photograph the scene here and get it cordoned off.’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Marjorie replied, ‘that’s not good news for Sally MacCarthy.’

  ‘A death in the family’s not good news for anybody, Marjorie.’

  ‘I mean that Randy’s not the only one of her boys in trouble. One of the others, Jesse, just turned up at Old Meister’s lodge. The old man’s sayin’ Jesse’s brother’s been killed.’

  ‘He knew about Randy’s hanging?’

  ‘No, he’s saying that Cletus MacCarthy is dead too. You’d better get down there right away.’

  Earl muttered a profanity under his breath as he walked back to his truck. Nothing happened in Riggins for months at
a time, and then every man and his dog turns up dead.

  ‘I’ll be back soonest,’ he said to Sally, avoiding meeting her eye, as he climbed in and started the engine, wondering how he was going to explain this all to her. ‘Forensics are on their way, just don’t touch anything.’ Earl sighed as he drove back down Main Street and turned off down a track toward the river. He pulled up a few minutes later outside the hunting lodge of Charlton Meister, one of the old-school trappers who’d gotten too rickety to trek the woods anymore and too damned old to get on with the locals in town. A fierce-tempered old goat who went everywhere with a scowl behind his ragged beard, Meister had built the lodge and settled on the banks of the Salmon River a couple of miles out of town. Earl knew him well enough. Every few weeks they’d get called out to the lodge after local kids harassing the old man went squealing to their folks after Meister had gotten his hands on them and cracked their heads together or taken a horse whip to their legs.

  Earl strode down a narrow track that wound its way along the banks of the Salmon River and the lodge, and glanced at the frigid waters. Breakfast might have settled in Meister’s nets, providing him with yet another way of avoiding going to the grocery store in town. But Meister wasn’t beside the nets. Instead, the old man was kneeling on the shoal bank over a body lying on its back, covered in blankets.

  Earl hurried over, his boots crunching on the shoal alerting Meister to his approach. The old man turned, and for the first time in decades Earl saw concern creasing his features.

  ‘This boy needs a hospital, and I mean right now, Sheriff.’

  Earl looked down at Jesse MacCarthy as he lay on the shoal at his feet.

  His clothes were torn ragged, stained with mud and grime. One of his boots was missing, his bare foot bloodied and filthy, while the remaining boot was torn to shreds. His hunting jacket was hanging from his frame, one arm torn off at the sleeve, but it was his face that enraptured Earl.

  Jesse looked like a zombie from one of those old flicks from the seventies, his eyes wide and staring, his jaw hanging slack and his lips flecked with dried saliva and mud. From somewhere came a feeble, keening cry of despair as Jesse’s eyes settled onto Earl’s and registered the faintest signs of recognition.

  ‘Jesse?’ Earl knelt down alongside the kid. ‘Can you hear me?’

  Tears began spilling from Jesse’s eyes as he mumbled an incoherent stream of noise that might once have been words. Earl frowned and looked at Meister.

  ‘Where’d you find him?’

  ‘I din’ find nobody,’ Meister replied. ‘I was emptying my nets when he just walked out of the woods and collapsed right here.’

  Earl looked back down at Jesse. ‘Where were you, Jesse? Where’s Cletus?’

  Jesse’s trembling lips spurted a quivering reply.

  ‘Fox Creek. Cletus is dead. It got him.’

  ‘What got him?’ Earl asked.

  Jesse’s sobs grew louder as he jabbered incoherently.

  ‘It got him. The monster got Cletus.’

  3

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  Ethan Warner was not a nervous kind of guy. He had known fear, and plenty of it. Ethan had stared death in the face several times and, so far, had survived to tell the tale. But the corrosive, gnawing anxiety grinding through his guts right now was far worse for him, especially as it was entirely irrational.

  The restaurant looked out over the glittering expanse of Lake Michigan, slate-gray waves flecked with white crests rolling their way south. A pair of cutters were carving their way north against the blustery wind, tacking hard to make any progress. Watching them helped to distract Ethan from the impending confrontation. He spent several minutes wishing the moment would arrive, and then when it did he wished he had more time to prepare.

  ‘You’re looking good, Ethan.’

  The brunette who strode confidently toward his table was a couple of inches shorter than he was, her long hair flowing across her shoulders, but there was a familiar arrogance to the set of her frame and a recognizable icy-gray gleam in her eyes as though they were reflecting Lake Michigan’s frigid waters.

  Ethan stood and hugged her. Some of the anxiety thawed inside him.

  ‘Natalie.’

  He hadn’t seen his sister in four years. Natalie Warner had studied politics in New York City while Ethan had been working overseas as a journalist. An internment at the White House had followed after her honors degree, and now she worked as an analyst for Congress at the Government Accountability Office in Washington DC.

  She sat down opposite him. Although only twenty-five years old she was already wrapped in a cloak of authoritative confidence that belied her years. Ethan could picture himself in her from years gone by, the same determination they shared that had gotten him into the US Marines as an officer and later through the greatest tragedy of his life. Natalie’s clear eyes and flawless skin were only marred by the wide jaw she shared with Ethan, making her attractive if not beautiful.

  ‘So,’ she began, her voice husky like his own, ‘to what do I owe this honor?’

  Ethan leaned back in his chair as the waiter poured sparkling wine into their glasses. The restaurant was out of town and half-empty, which was why Ethan had picked it. Most people were at work. Ethan worked for himself, and Natalie was on vacation for a week to visit their parents.

  ‘Been a long time since I last saw you, and Pa said you were in town.’

  ‘You two are talking?’ Natalie’s eyes sparkled. ‘Did Mom pay you both?’

  ‘I called home a while back.’

  ‘Jesus, is it terminal?’

  Ethan laughed. Natalie had a forthright way about her. The laugh faded away as he recalled why it had been so long since he’d been home.

  ‘It’s been a tricky couple of years.’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  ‘Kind of why I’m here.’

  Natalie sipped some of her wine and set the glass down before replying.

  ‘You’re off the grid for four years, then you turn up when you want something? Ethan, you live in the same city as Mom and Pop yet you’ve barely spoken to them in all that time.’

  ‘I wasn’t myself,’ Ethan said, keeping his voice even. ‘Things are better now. Kind of.’

  Natalie merely raised a questioning eyebrow and sipped again at her wine. Ethan sighed heavily, not touching his drink.

  ‘Joanna might still be alive,’ he said.

  Natalie froze in motion, her glass touching her lips and her eyes staring into Ethan’s. She set the glass back down.

  ‘And you know this how?’

  ‘Can’t say much about it,’ Ethan replied. ‘Some of the people we’re contracted to have access to high-level intelligence. I did some work for one of them and in return I got information. They had footage of her, Nat. Not much, but enough.’

  ‘How old was the reel?’ she asked him.

  ‘No more than six months old at the time. Nearly a year now.’

  Natalie stared at her glass for a long moment, and Ethan could tell that the sudden revelation wasn’t provoking the kind of excitement in her that he had hoped to see.

  Joanna Defoe had been Ethan’s fiancée and business partner. Working as investigative journalists in some of the world’s most dangerous places, they had exposed corruption and in the process saved dozens of victims of abduction and incarceration from lonely, unjust deaths. But their achievements had finally caught up with them in the sinister, sun-scorched alleys of Gaza City. Joanna Defoe had vanished without trace four years previously, presumed abducted by militants. Ethan’s life had collapsed in the aftermath of her disappearance, all of his money expended in a futile search for her across the Middle East. Distraught, broke and driven by little more than alcohol and bitterness, Ethan had been given the chance to search for her again in Israel just a year previously by a friend who had been his commander in the US Marines during Operation Iraqi Freedom. That had led to his work with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the informa
tion that had recently identified Joanna as alive. Among other things.

  ‘What do you want?’ Natalie asked.

  She wasn’t looking at him. Ethan chose his words carefully.

  ‘I need somebody to look into where she might be, do some digging in places that I can’t.’

  Natalie kept her eyes on her wine glass.

  ‘Can’t you just ask your friend? Surely they would know where to begin better than I would?’

  ‘His help was a one-off,’ Ethan explained. ‘I can’t go back to him without having to risk my neck again for the chance of more information.’

  Natalie finally looked up at him. ‘What the hell are you involved in, Ethan?’

  ‘It’s complicated. We’re bail bondsmen by trade, but we also do investigative work for the government.’

  Natalie leaned forward. ‘Who?’

  Ethan paused as he figured that there wasn’t much harm in telling her. Christ, she worked for Congress – she could probably find out herself with a single phone call.

  ‘Defense Intelligence Agency,’ he said. ‘We pick up cases that the other agencies write off as unworkable.’

  ‘Unworkable how?’

  Ethan shrugged. ‘Budgets don’t justify the work, or the manpower’s not available because agencies are focused on counterterrorism. We get called in to investigate in their place.’

  Natalie was watching him with a steady gaze as though trying to peer through the DIA’s veil of secrecy and uncover the bizarre things that he had seen.

  ‘Who’s we?’ she asked him finally.

  ‘Nicola Lopez, my partner. Former DC detective. She’s solid.’

  ‘She’d be solid if she was still a ranked detective,’ Natalie uttered. ‘She fall on hard times too?’