The Chimera Secret Page 9

  Jesse went abruptly silent as he realized perhaps for the first time that his brother was truly dead.

  ‘Then what did it do?’ Lopez asked softly.

  ‘Beat ’im up real bad,’ Jesse uttered. ‘Was shaking him about and breaking all his bones. Didn’t care that he was dead already. Then it came at me.’

  Ethan leaned forward. ‘But you got away.’

  Jesse shook his head, but his entire body was shaking just the same as he replied in staccato tones, his words broken by fear.

  ‘No, I ran but it caught me just as easy as if I’d stayed right where I was.’ He looked at Ethan in confusion. ‘Then it let me go. It had me, was standing right over me. I must’ve passed out or something, and when I came around it was just walking away like I wasn’t worth the bother.’

  Ethan leaned back and looked over at Earl Carpenter.

  ‘That sounds like a conscious decision,’ he said. ‘Not the kind of thing a bear would do.’

  ‘Bear probably wouldn’t kill more than once out of rage either,’ Earl admitted. ‘Sure, they take hikers from time to time and chew on them a bit, but this doesn’t sound like a bear attack.’

  ‘It was no bear,’ Jesse snapped. ‘Cleet was a fine shot, one of the best. If it had been a bear he’d have killed it long before it reached us. All I can think is that he was as scared straight as I was and didn’t make a clean shot.’

  Ethan glanced across at Earl.

  ‘If there’s some dangerous animal out there in the mountains, wouldn’t the ranger’s office have posted warnings by now or sent teams out to track this thing down? Technically, it’s a man-eater, right?’

  ‘So are bears,’ Earl replied. ‘This is big bear country, Mr. Warner, and those critters don’t have much issue with hunting humans, especially unwary tourists who dump trash around their camp sites. It’s virtually a welcome sign for a hungry bear.’

  ‘They’ve been known to smash their way into cars,’ Lopez agreed, ‘because somebody’s left a window open and food on display inside.’

  ‘No way any ranger’s office could track all the bears at once, much less prevent them from crossing paths with people in the woods,’ Earl said.

  Jesse MacCarthy looked at Ethan, his fists clenched and tears staining his cheeks.

  ‘Like I said, this weren’t no bear. It’s smarter, bigger and more dangerous, and it sure don’t like people.’ Jesse leaned in toward Lopez. ‘Whatever it is, don’t be goin’ after it. Get the goddamned marines out there, they might stand a chance.’

  ‘Would you be willing to lead us out there, Jesse,’ Lopez asked, ‘maybe help us track this thing and—’

  Jesse recoiled from her, the cuffs on his wrist snapping taut. ‘No way,’ he choked, ‘no fucking way. I’m not goin’ out there ever again.’ He looked up at Earl, panic in his eyes. ‘Don’t make me.’

  Earl unlocked Jesse’s cuffs and led him back toward the holding cells as Ethan and Lopez made their way out to the station’s lobby.

  ‘What do you think?’ Lopez asked him as they stepped outside.

  The sun was out again, the soaring hills around the Salmon River looking like an idyllic haven for nature lovers, not the shadowy domain of some murderous beast.

  ‘Tough to know. We’ve still got one missing body, that of Cletus MacCarthy, but from what Jesse just said that could have been smashed to pieces and eaten by now.’

  Earl Carpenter stepped out of the station office and joined them, pulling a Lucky from a packet in his shirt pocket and offering one to Ethan and Lopez. They both declined. Earl lit the cigarette and puffed a billowing cloud of blue smoke into the air.

  ‘So, what you want to do now?’

  ‘I want to talk to Jesse’s mother,’ Ethan said. ‘There’s got to be something we can follow up on here. Two brothers die on the same night, one out in the woods and one in his own garage. I don’t care if there’s a monster prowling the hills, it’s too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘You think you can connect the two killings?’ Earl asked in surprise. ‘With what?’

  ‘We’ll find out when we get there,’ Lopez said.

  Her dark eyes brooked no argument, and Earl shrugged as he flicked the butt of his cigarette away into the parking lot and headed toward his truck.

  ‘You suit yourselves,’ he said. ‘Sally MacCarthy lives up off the main road. I’ll drop you there on my way through.’

  14

  RIGGINS, IDAHO

  Ethan stood in front of the lean-to garage and looked up at the heavy crossbeam from which Randy MacCarthy’s body had been hanged as Earl Carpenter drove away down the dusty track toward the main road.

  Lopez stood next to him and gestured up at the beam.

  ‘One person couldn’t sling a dead body over that beam unless they fashioned some kind of rig. If they’d hauled the body up and over, the rope would have scored the beam.’

  Ethan nodded.

  ‘We’re looking for more than one person but right now the mother’s going to be the prime suspect in the eyes of the law.’

  ‘Earl didn’t think so,’ Lopez pointed out, ‘and he knows the family better than us.’

  ‘That’s not evidence,’ Ethan said, ‘it’s bias. In the absence of any other known players I can’t see where else to take this.’

  The voice that came from behind them was quiet.

  ‘I didn’t kill my boy.’

  Ethan turned to his left, where a frail-looking woman watched them from behind the porch door, half in shadow as though she was afraid of the light.

  Lopez took a pace toward her.

  ‘Mrs. MacCarthy? We’re here from the Sheriff’s Office on behalf of—’

  ‘I know who you are,’ Sally MacCarthy replied as she turned from the door and vanished into the house. ‘In a small town, word travels. Won’t you come in?’

  Ethan followed Lopez into the house and pulled the porch door shut behind him.

  Homes always had a feeling to them, that first impression: a mixture of sights, smells and instincts that flood the senses, and in an instant Ethan felt an odd mixture of warmth and tragedy. Pictures of a family across a mantelpiece. The lounge, clean and uncluttered, well looked after. Warm colors on the walls. Soft carpet underfoot. A small, floppy-eared dog napped in a basket beneath a stairway. Sunlight beamed through from the kitchen.

  But the faces in the pictures were of Sally MacCarthy’s sons and deceased husband. The dog’s eyes were open and it was slumped listlessly. The house was silent, perhaps for the first time in decades. Sally moved with weary steps that dragged her feet across the carpet, as though every step was now a labor that she would rather not undertake.

  ‘You from the government?’

  Her voice called from the kitchen above the sound of a kettle, her tones a little brighter now. Ethan caught a knowing glance from Lopez. Denial was a difficult emotion that they had both witnessed in the relatives of murder victims and those of tragedy. Sally’s movements suggested resignation to the fate that life had dealt her, while her voice was laden with the stubborn defiance of a woman who has suffered and yet refuses to quit.

  ‘Contracted,’ Lopez replied as Sally returned from the kitchen with a pot of coffee and three ornate cups. ‘We’re trying to figure out what happened here.’

  Sally set the cups down on a small table and sat down, Ethan and Lopez taking a seat opposite her on the couch.

  ‘So is everybody,’ Sally replied, and picked up her cup. ‘But they’re all one step forward and two steps back. Two of my boys are dead, one’s in a cell likely to be charged with their murder and I’m here on my own wonderin’ how the hell this could have happened.’

  Ethan saw the cup trembling in her hand, beads of coffee spilling from the rim.

  ‘You said that you found Randy in the garage and that he had already passed away,’ Ethan said as gently as he could. ‘Did you notice anything else out of place?’

  Sally looked at him over the rim of her cup.

&nbs
p; ‘I was kinda focused on my boy, mister.’

  ‘We know,’ Lopez replied. ‘But we believe this may have been a homicide. Forensics haven’t turned anything up and there aren’t any other leads. We just want to know if something has been missed, anything at all.’

  Sally stared into the middle distance for a long beat before speaking.

  ‘I don’t know, it was just a—’

  ‘A what?’ Lopez pressed. ‘Anything could be helpful.’

  ‘It was just a feeling,’ Sally replied. ‘Right before I found Randy I came through here and it just felt like somebody had been here. I can’t explain it, nothing was out of place and yet nothing seemed quite the way I’d left it. I felt sure that somebody had searched our home – that’s why I went straight out to the truck. I thought that maybe somebody had stolen the keys.’

  ‘And there was nothing about Randy’s behavior that struck you as unusual in the days leading up to now?’

  She sighed.

  ‘I’ve told the sheriff and the rangers everything. Randy was a complicated boy, always into everything. He din’ get out much, unlike his brothers. Last time he made wild claims about government agents at work in Riggins he was locked up for forty-eight hours by the sheriff. But mostly he preferred to stay in on his computer.’

  ‘Could we see his room, please?’ asked Ethan.

  Sally’s eyes closed for a moment and then she nodded and stood up. Ethan knew that the chances of her having set foot in that room since Randy had died would be minimal. The door would have been kept closed, everything left as it had been. Perfect for an investigator – perfectly miserable for Sally MacCarthy, the room forever a shrine to her lost son.

  Sally led them down a hall to the rear of the home and a series of doors, all shut. Only the last one, to the bathroom, was open.

  ‘That one,’ she said, pointing to one of the doors. ‘I’ll wait for you out here.’

  Ethan nodded and took the lead. He opened the door and stepped inside with Lopez behind him.

  The room was dark, thin curtains glowing with the sunlight from outside. The room smelled stale, devoid of fresh air. The walls were black, painted roughly by hand with a broad brush that had left visible strokes. Randy had clearly decided to redecorate, the gloomy walls and worn carpet giving the room a neglected air.

  ‘Jeez,’ Lopez whispered, ‘what does this remind you of?’

  The black walls were covered with images of UFOs, sea serpents, posters of movies like Independence Day and Star Trek. Plastic models of weird alien creatures adorned hastily erected shelves.

  ‘It’s Fox Mulder’s holiday home,’ Ethan replied softly, not wanting Sally MacCarthy to hear him. ‘Randy got himself a slice of science-fiction city.’

  Lopez moved across the room to the wall opposite the bed, where a computer sat atop a table cluttered with headphones, discarded mugs and potato chip packets. She reached out and turned the machine on, the hard drive whirring into life. Within moments a password request appeared.

  Lopez walked to the door and peeked out at Sally.

  ‘Do you know the password to your son’s computer, ma’am?’

  Sally nodded as a glimmer of a smile touched her lips.

  ‘Randy liked to think that he was very careful covering his tracks, but he always forgot that he was my boy and that I knew him too well. His password was RandyLucPicard.’

  Lopez smiled. ‘A wise choice.’

  Ethan tapped the name into the password bar, and the screen changed to an image of Scott Bakula and Jolene Blalock in their full Starfleet regalia. Surrounding the screen’s wallpaper were dozens of files and programs.

  ‘This could take a while,’ Lopez said as she scanned the files over Ethan’s shoulder.

  ‘We’re not exactly in any hurry,’ Ethan pointed out. Fact was, this was pretty much the end of the road as far as any investigation they could make. The only remaining avenue after Randy MacCarthy was an attempt to locate the remains of Cletus, and Ethan had serious doubts that they would find anything larger than the scattered bones of the unfortunate hunter.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Lopez pointed at a file folder entitled, ‘Research’.

  Ethan double-clicked on the folder, and a window opened with dozens of documents all labeled by date and time. The earliest went back at least four years. Ethan scanned the scrupulously named documents, and then glanced around at the room. Under the bed were shoved old clothes and discarded games consoles, while little pieces of junk littered every available surface. Randy had not been an organized sort of person, yet here on his computer was evidence of a long and systematic project of some kind.

  Ethan clicked on one of the documents, dated two years previously.

  An image flicked up in a new window, a high-resolution shot of a muddy riverbed or creek, and in the center of the shot a huge footprint. A ruler placed alongside the print showed a length of some fifteen inches.

  ‘That’s like the cast we saw in Chicago,’ Lopez said.

  ‘A little smaller, but otherwise identical,’ Ethan agreed.

  The possibility that Randy MacCarthy was some kind of fantasist had not escaped Ethan’s awareness. The kid had clearly been a nerdy recluse, dreaming of science-fiction worlds while in reality he spent his days in self-imposed incarceration in a darkened room, locked away from the world outside. It would not have taken much for his imagination to overcome his need for reality, and that would naturally have left a need for the impossible to be made possible. Fakery was almost exclusively the reserve of con men and attention seekers, and Randy fit the second category like a glove.

  Ethan zoomed in on the image and scanned the very edge of the prints.

  ‘Dermatoglyphs.’ Lopez spotted the faint lines in the soft mud. ‘Hard to fake.’

  ‘Randy had time on his hands,’ Ethan shrugged. ‘An attention seeker will go to great lengths to achieve perfection in something like this.’

  Ethan began opening more of the files, and each held another image of a huge footprint compressed into soft mud, sand or even gravel. Any of them could have been faked, if not by Randy then by somebody else: maybe even local kids who knew of Randy’s obsessions and who silently taunted him from afar with their pranks.

  Ethan clicked on another image, this one showing a trail of prints crossing a creek and heading off into deep forests beyond. He was about to close it when his finger froze on the mouse and he stared at the photograph.

  Beside him, Lopez peered at the image.

  ‘That one’s got scenery in it,’ she observed.

  The photograph had been taken to show the trail of prints, and in doing so had caught the horizon line and soaring mountains beyond that dominated the sky in a row of jagged peaks. Ethan frowned, and turned to Lopez.

  ‘Where’d you think this was taken?’

  The answer came from behind them.

  ‘That’s the Pioneer mountain range,’ Sally said. ‘I’d know that skyline anywhere.’

  She walked over to join them, her arms folded protectively around her and her gaze fixed rigidly to the computer monitor’s screen, as though she didn’t want to look at the rest of the room around her.

  ‘How’d you know?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Cletus loved it down that way,’ she replied. ‘I recognize that mountain: Pyramid Peak. It’s near Fox Creek.’

  Fox Creek was where Jesse alleged that he and his brother had been attacked, and Gavin Coltz killed. Ethan scanned the image one last time as a new train of thought formed in his mind.

  ‘Randy was a recluse,’ he said, turning to Sally. ‘You said he didn’t get out much.’

  ‘He wasn’t a woodsman like his father and brothers,’ Sally replied.

  ‘Then who took this photograph?’

  Sally looked at the image for a moment and seemed momentarily surprised.

  ‘I hadn’t seen these pictures before on Randy’s computer.’

  ‘But you knew his passcode,’ Lopez said.

 
; Sally sighed and nodded.

  ‘I worried about Randy, not gettin’ out and all. It wasn’t healthy, him stayin’ in his room all hours of the day and night. I worried about what he might be getting up to, so I . . .’

  Sally broke off, and Ethan offered her a reassuring grin.

  ‘Parental concern isn’t something to be ashamed of,’ he said. ‘You were looking out for him is all.’

  ‘I was spyin’ on him,’ Sally protested, but her regret faded in the wake of a smile that briefly lit her features. ‘But I never found anything more incriminating than friends he’d chat to from other countries and science-fiction fans forums that he subscribed to. And those files, his research.’

  ‘You ever ask him why he had these images on his computer?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Couldn’t,’ Sally confessed. ‘I’d have had to tell him I was watchin’ on him. I couldn’t do that.’

  Ethan looked at Lopez.

  ‘Randy didn’t take those photographs. His brother Cletus must have shot them while he was out in the forests.’

  Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? Maybe Randy went wanderin’ now and again.’

  ‘Never,’ Sally said. ‘He’d have gotten lost before he’d set foot out of Riggins. The Pioneer range is at least twenty miles drive from here, most of it off-road, and Randy didn’t get his license yet.’ She looked at Ethan. ‘You think that they were working on something together?’

  ‘I’m hoping so,’ Ethan replied. ‘We’ll need to download these files so that we have a copy. We might find something else on them that could help us. Is there anybody else we could talk to who might be able to help?’