The Chimera Secret Page 7

  Earl raised an eyebrow and smiled apologetically at them. ‘I guess that’s good enough for me.’

  ‘What’s the story so far?’ Ethan asked. ‘You’ve got two dead bodies, another supposed dead but still missing and a kid who swears that his brother was killed by an animal, right?’

  ‘To cut it short,’ Earl agreed, ‘but there’s a whole lot about this that doesn’t fit right.’

  ‘Tell us,’ Lopez said.

  Earl puffed his cheeks and blew the air out as he drove.

  ‘Hard to know where to start. I get me a call about a local lady whose son’s been found hanging in the garage.’

  ‘Randy MacCarthy,’ Ethan said.

  ‘So I goes down there,’ Earl went on, ‘and I check out the scene before the county coroner gets called in. Sure enough, Randy’s swinging in the wind. There’s a stool underneath him and he’d been dead for a few hours.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Body was cold,’ Earl replied. ‘His neck weren’t broken, so he died on the rope.’

  ‘Any history of prior convictions?’ Ethan asked. ‘Anything that might motivate this kid to take his own life?’

  ‘He’d been busted a couple of times for possession but nothing serious, got held by the local police department for forty-eight hours but no charges were filed as he wasn’t dealing,’ Earl replied. ‘Made a lot of claims about conspiracies and said that he had evidence of government agents working in and around Riggins. Watched too many TV shows, you ask me. But there’s no evidence of foul play. I took some photographs before forensics moved in, and Randy’s post-mortem confirmed death by asphyxiation.’

  ‘You got copies of the photographs on you?’ Lopez asked from the rear seat.

  Earl reached down into the side pocket of his door and pulled out a manila envelope before passing it to the back seat. Ethan watched as Lopez pulled out a wad of six-by-eight images and began sifting through them. If there was anything unusual about the crime scene, she would notice it soon enough.

  ‘What about the other brothers?’ Ethan asked. ‘And the ranger who was killed?’

  Earl Carpenter rested one arm on the sill of his door as he drove. Ethan noticed that the hills around them were getting steeper as they traveled, thickly forested with pines or coarse grass, and the roadside flanked by occasional shacks and game crossings.

  ‘Well, that there’s a mystery. Cletus and Jesse go off huntin’ out in Nez Perce Forest, and it turns out that the ranger, a local man called Gavin Coltz, spotted them tracking a game elk. Season’s out right now so he decided to follow them and catch them in the act. He was a tenacious soul, Gavin, and he stuck with them for almost four hours before they tried to take their shot out near Fox Creek.’

  ‘Then they get attacked?’ Lopez guessed.

  ‘By a bear,’ Earl confirmed. ‘Gavin is killed, so is Cletus, and Jesse runs for his life. Turns up next morning in Riggins lookin’ for all the world like he was dead already.’

  ‘You don’t believe his story about a monster killing his brother?’ Ethan asked.

  Earl Carpenter looked Ethan in the eye.

  ‘I’ve been working out here since I was a boy,’ he said, ‘and I’ve seen a lot of people come close to dying after attacks by bears and cougars. This kid, he din’ have no reason to claim what he did, that some kind of other creature had at them. In all my years I’ve never seen fear like that in the face of a man, but then if he’d just killed two members of his family then I’d guess he’d be all shook up. Truth is, I don’t know what to believe.’

  Ethan glanced up at the foggy mountains looming either side of the car as it drove between the steep hillsides. ‘It’s a mystery all right.’

  ‘It’s not the only mystery,’ Lopez said from the rear seat.

  ‘What you got?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘You say you found Randy MacCarthy hanging just like this?’ Lopez asked Earl Carpenter. ‘And you hadn’t touched him at all?’

  ‘Exactly like that,’ Earl confirmed. ‘I only touched him once to search for a pulse. Needless to say I din’ find one, and his body was cold.’

  Lopez nodded.

  ‘Then this isn’t a suicide, Sheriff, it’s a homicide.’

  Earl’s old eyes flicked up to meet hers in the rear-view mirror. ‘You shittin’ me, lady? The boy’s a suicide for sure. There’s nothing that suggests foul play in my book.’

  Lopez handed the photographs to Ethan. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with the picture,’ she said.

  Ethan looked at the six-by-eights one after the other. Randy dangling from the noose, his tongue swollen and poking from his mouth, his eyes half-closed and lifeless. The toppled stool three feet below him. Ethan shook his head.

  ‘I’m not seeing it,’ he admitted.

  ‘The body was cold,’ Lopez said. ‘Been there a few hours. What’s missing?’

  It took only a moment for Ethan to realize what she meant. Images from his service with the marines in Iraq and Afghanistan flashed through his mind, of the shameful sight of the dead lying in the streets or in bitter, lonely caves in the mountains.

  ‘The body hasn’t voided,’ he said finally. ‘Randy didn’t die where he was found.’

  ‘That’s my boy,’ Lopez smiled.

  ‘Crap,’ Earl Carpenter uttered, and slapped a hand across the steering wheel, angry with himself. ‘Should’ve realized that.’

  ‘When a person dies their sphincter muscles give way and they void their bowels,’ Lopez said. ‘This kid had been hanging for some time but there was no residue beneath him from the moment of death.’

  ‘So he died elsewhere and was moved,’ Ethan said. ‘Any further clues here?’

  ‘None,’ Earl shook his head. ‘Whoever hanged him there was careful enough to sweep the floor, which covered their tracks but I guess also proves they were there.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Lopez said. ‘That was my next point: they cleaned up after themselves, which means premeditated homicide.’

  ‘I’d better call ahead to Grangeville,’ Earl said, and reached for the patrol car’s radio. ‘Inform them of what you guys have figured out.’

  ‘Can you think of any likely suspects?’ Ethan asked Earl.

  ‘Only Randy’s ma, Sally, who found him,’ Earl said. ‘But I don’t think she’s on the cards for this. She had three sons and loved them all. Besides, there’s no clear motive. Randy had no life insurance and no savings. The mother’s penniless and all three of her sons contributed to the upkeep of their household from their own pay checks, all of which were from menial jobs in town.’

  Ethan mentally scratched a financial motive to the killing from his list.

  ‘So it’s a homicide disguised as a suicide, and done badly,’ Lopez said. ‘That suggests somebody inexperienced, maybe a local person who doesn’t know much about crime.’

  Earl Carpenter chuckled bitterly.

  ‘Sure does, which means most all folk in Riggins. Our population work in local business or make the run over to McCall and Grangeville for work. Anybody wantin’ bigger cahoots in life gets out of the county altogether.’

  ‘Anything from forensics or the coroner’s office?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Nothing much,’ Earl replied. ‘Randy died of asphyxiation by the same rope that was found around his neck, that much is for sure. So whoever did this, they had a vehicle to transport him and there was probably more than one of them. Hard to carry and hoist a body on your own.’

  Ethan struggled to get his head around it.

  ‘So they’re dumb enough to botch the apparent suicide, yet smart enough to leave no trace of their presence at the scene or on the body? Were there any tire marks or tracks?’

  ‘None but my own vehicle when I arrived,’ Earl replied. ‘Which means they cleared their own trail out of there.’

  ‘We were told that the ranger’s body had been recovered,’ Lopez informed him. ‘Anything you guys have learned there?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Earl replie
d. ‘We’ll head up past Riggins to Grangeville first. I’ll let the doctors fill you in about that, because I don’t even like talking about it.’

  11

  IDAHO COUNTY CORONER, GRANGEVILLE, IDAHO

  Ethan stood in the clinical surroundings of the autopsy room and looked down at the corpse before him. The body was that of a young, athletic male, probably no more than thirty years old. Broad chest. Narrow waist. Long, strong legs and muscular arms. Only one thing was missing.

  ‘Where’s his head?’ Lopez asked, her normally olive skin pale and her eyes wide with horror.

  The body of Gavin Coltz ended abruptly at his neck. A bloodied stump of bone protruded from the flesh, the remains of where his spinal column and vertebrae had been snapped off with unimaginable violence.

  The consulting pathologist, Dr. Jenny Shriver, gestured to a nearby box concealed beneath a sheet of blue plastic.

  ‘It was found fifty feet below where he died, in the bed of a shallow creek. It’s not in good shape.’

  Jenny Shriver was a middle-aged woman whose features might once have been considered attractive but had been creased by years of seeing human bodies tragically mutilated or decayed to the point of being unrecognizable. Ethan guessed that no matter how detached a person might become to death, it still left its somber imprint on their faces.

  ‘Did the water accelerate the rate of decay?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘No,’ Shriver replied. ‘The impact shattered the skull like a bag of chips under a car tire. The jaw was broken in fifteen places and both of the eyeballs had been blasted from their sockets. We weren’t able to recover them.’

  Ethan looked at Gavin Coltz’s corpse. The skin was a pallid white but the upper chest was stained with huge purple bruises, each the size of Ethan’s hand and surrounded by a halo of sickly yellow skin.

  ‘What are those?’ he asked, gesturing to the marks.

  ‘Compression fractures,’ Shriver identified them. ‘Caused by blunt trauma.’

  ‘So he was attacked by another human and not an animal?’ Lopez suggested. ‘Somebody must have hit this guy with a truck to cause that much hemorrhage.’

  Shriver did not reply, simply casting a serious gaze in Lopez’s direction before she rested one gloved hand on the body.

  ‘He was not attacked by a human being, Miss Lopez.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Ethan asked, eager to cut to the chase. ‘We have a man locked up in a cell in Riggins under suspicion of murder who swears that he didn’t do it, and there’s still one other person missing. We need to know what we’re up against here.’

  Shriver lifted her hand from the corpse, took a deep breath and gestured to the various lesions lacing the body as she spoke.

  ‘The victim was killed by a single blow to the head that resulted in decapitation, the neck severed between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. That blow was sufficient to send the severed skull flying more than thirty feet through the air to land in the creek bed.’

  Ethan ran what she had said through his head for a moment.

  ‘But you said that the skull landed in the creek, causing the massive damage.’

  ‘The impact that blew this man’s eyeballs out of their sockets was caused by the blow that killed him,’ Shriver corrected. ‘The skull hit the water below but not with enough force to cause this kind of damage. All of the major fractures were caused by that first, single, lethal impact.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Lopez said. ‘Nobody could hit a man that hard, certainly not Jesse MacCarthy.’

  ‘Correct,’ Shriver replied as though congratulating a schoolgirl. ‘The amount of force required to physically tear a man’s head from his shoulders via a single impact is the equivalent of being hit by a thirty-pound sledgehammer traveling at sixty miles per hour. No human being can produce that kind of physical power.’

  Ethan looked down at the bruised, battered corpse.

  ‘So something hits him so hard that it kills him instantly, and then it continues striking him?’

  ‘The sign of a frenzied attack,’ Shriver acknowledged. ‘A crime of rage.’

  ‘So maybe it’s a bear attack, a mother protecting its young or something?’ Lopez suggested.

  Shriver walked across to the box beneath the blue plastic. She lifted the sheet off and picked the clear acrylic box up. The head within the box was a macabre visage, the empty eye sockets black and lifeless, the tongue poking fat and bloated from a slack mouth. The once-clean line of the man’s jaw was crumpled and bulky, shards of shattered jawbone trying to push through white skin. But it was the impression on one side of the skull that instantly caught Ethan’s attention as Shriver set the box down on top of the corpse’s chest.

  Gavin Coltz’s head had been stoved in on one side, the skull crushed almost flat but the skin unbroken. Shallow depressions ran from the rear of his skull across the side of the face, like channels beneath the skin.

  ‘We made a scan of the face and skull,’ Shriver informed them, ‘to digitally preserve the details of the impact. One of my lab assistants reversed the image to try and deduce the shape of whatever hit this man.’

  ‘What did they find?’ Lopez asked.

  Shriver turned and picked up a glossy black photograph, then pinned it to the wall nearby. Ethan felt something squirm through his guts as he looked at the image, like a primal fear seldom felt but never forgotten.

  ‘Jesus,’ Lopez whispered.

  The image was that of the base of an enormous clenched fist, the channel-like depressions crunched into Coltz’s skull formed by broad, fat fingers with an opposable thumb folded beneath them.

  ‘The hand was clenched into a fist but struck the victim flat on the side of his head,’ Shriver explained. ‘It’s a way of striking somebody without risking the damage to the hand that can be the result of punching in a more classic, knuckles-first way.’

  Earl Carpenter looked away from the gruesome imagery and caught Ethan’s eye.

  ‘Now you see why we didn’t want to deal with this alone,’ he explained. ‘The Bureau walked before we found Coltz’s body, and frankly I don’t see the need to bring them back in. Sure, we might possibly have the world’s largest fugitive on our hands, but my guts are telling me that this isn’t a human being.’

  Ethan stared at Coltz’s remains for a moment before replying.

  ‘You say that you didn’t find any other remains at the scene.’

  ‘Nothin’,’ Carpenter confirmed.

  Ethan looked at Shriver. ‘So this mystery animal kills Coltz with a single blow, beats the hell out of his corpse, then carries off another body without leaving a trace? Why attack one so savagely and then carry another away while letting the third, still-living witness, flee the scene unharmed?’

  Dr. Shriver shrugged.

  ‘It’s not my place to solve the crime, Mr. Warner. All that I can tell you for sure is that whatever killed Gavin Coltz was more powerful than any human being could ever be, and it most likely will kill again if it encounters people out there in the woods.’

  Ethan briefly recalled an image that had haunted his thoughts for months, when Jarvis had used Project Watchman to show him a glimpse of the future. Time had blurred his memory, but he remembered enough to know that whatever was hunting people in the forests of Idaho truly was something inhuman and that Lopez would inevitably find herself in danger.

  Ethan forced the images from his mind as Lopez gave the corpse one last glance and then turned to Ethan.

  ‘We need to talk to Jesse MacCarthy. He’s the one that witnessed Coltz’s death.’

  12

  GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE, UNITED STATES CAPITOL, WASHINGTON DC

  Natalie Warner swept into the GAO building. A barrage of security checks followed and she was scrutinised with handheld scanners before being cleared to enter the building.

  Natalie was an analyst and researcher at the GAO, a job she had obtained after her internship in the White House. Perhaps due to her fa
mily connection with the military through the Marine Corps, Natalie had found herself fascinated by the world of intelligence gathering since her childhood when her father had told her stories about presidents and foreign countries and the battles they had fought since the Revolution. Although she had possessed very little security clearance at the White House during her two years there, it had been readily apparent that all of the interesting stuff happened behind closed doors in meetings attended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the heads of the various intelligence agencies. Natalie had decided within the first six months of her tenure that she wanted to know what went on in those kinds of meetings. A job working for Congress had been her way of getting in on the act.

  Aside from legislative activities, Congress devoted a great deal of time to investigations that had uncovered wrong doing within the executive branch, from obscure agencies up to the president’s office. The GAO was the body through which investigative work was done on behalf of members of Congress. By uncovering this information and informing the public, investigations had often led to important reform legislation. Natalie knew that critics in the media often dismissed Congressional investigations as an opportunity for politicians to make headlines, and pointed out that many investigations produce no solid evidence and failed to lead to any legislation at all, but she figured that some investigative ability was better than none. Since 1792, Congress had kept an eye on the executive branch: it had the power to investigate anything related to legislation or oversight and the monitoring of the activities of executive agencies.

  Now, under Democratic Congressman Howard J. Faulkes, New York, Natalie was part of a Congressional investigation into the intelligence community’s alleged withholding of defense program budgets and details from Congress.

  The first shock upon arriving at her new post in the Capitol and visiting a CIA monitoring station had been the antiquated equipment. Far from being a hive of ultra-hi-tech computers and real-time satellite links, the intelligence agencies all preferred to use slightly older, tried and tested equipment that had proven its value and reliability in the field. That, and the painfully ordinary-looking ranks of offices and desks, was the reality of modern intelligence gathering. Her visions of valiantly dealing with Homeland agents while protecting Jack Bauer’s back in the field quickly degenerated into dealing with acres of paperwork, hours of mind-numbing computer files and long hours. But slowly, as her experience grew, she began to identify her small but essential role in the bigger picture of United States security, and with that recognition returned the enthusiasm and excitement of having a pivotal role in ensuring that those agencies remained within the laws they had sworn to protect.