Sitting in his office chair, facing the window, staring grimly at the hazy yellow air of the blazing summer day, he said aloud, “Damn it, I’ve been trained to deal with human criminals. How the hell can I be expected to outthink a fugitive from a nightmare?”
A knock sounded at his door, and as he swiveled around in his chair, the door opened. Cliff Soames entered in a rush, looking both excited and distraught. “The Outsider,” he said. “We’ve got a new fix on it… but two people are dead.”
Twenty years ago in Vietnam, Lem’s NSA chopper pilot had learned everything worth knowing about putting down and taking off in rugged terrain. Now, remaining in constant radio contact with the L.A. County sheriff’s deputies who were on the scene already, he had no difficulty locating the site of the murders by visual navigation, making use of natural landmarks. At a few minutes after one o’clock, he put his craft down on a wide section of a barren ridge overlooking Boulder Canyon in the Angeles National Forest, just a hundred yards from the spot where the bodies had been found.
When Lem and Cliff left the chopper and hurried along the crest of the ridge toward the gathered deputies and forest rangers, a hot wind buffeted them. It carried the scent of dry brush and pine. Only tufts of wild grass, parched and brittled by the July sun, had managed to put down roots on this high ground. Low scrub growth-including desert plants like mesquite- marked the upper reaches of the canyon walls that dropped away to the right and left of them, and down on the lower slopes and canyon floors were trees and greener undergrowth.
They were less than four air miles north of the town of Sunland, fourteen air miles north of Hollywood, and twenty miles north of the populous heart of the great city of Los Angeles, yet it seemed they were in a desolation measuring a thousand miles across, disquietingly far from civilization. The sheriffs deputies had parked their four-wheel-drive wagons on a crude dirt track three-quarters of a mile away-coming in, Lem’s chopper had flown over those vehicles-and they had hiked with ranger guides to the site where the bodies had been found. Now, gathered around the corpses were four deputies, two men from the county crime lab, and three rangers, and they looked as if they, too, felt isolated in a primeval place.
When Lem and Cliff arrived, the sheriff’s men had just finished tucking the remains in body bags. The zippers hadn’t yet been closed, so Lem saw that one victim was male, the other female, both young and dressed for hiking. Their wounds were grievous; their eyes were gone.
The dead now numbered five innocents, and that toll conjured a specter of guilt that haunted Lem. At times like this, he wished that his father had raised him with no sense of responsibility whatsoever.
Deputy Hal Bockner, tall and tan but with a surprisingly reedy voice, apprised Lem of the identity and condition of the victims: “Based on the ID he was carrying, the male’s name was Sidney Tranken, twenty-eight, of Glendale. Body has more than a score of nasty bite marks, even more claw marks, slashes. Throat, as you saw, torn open. Eyes-”
“Yes,” Lem said, seeing no need to dwell on these grisly details.
The men from the crime lab pulled the zippers shut on the body bags. It was a cold sound that hung for a moment like a chain of icicles in the hot July air.
Deputy Bockner said, “At first we thought Tranken was probably knifed by some psycho. Once in a while you get a homicidal nut who prowls these forests instead of the streets, preying on hikers. So we figured… knifed first, then all this other damage must’ve been done by animals, scavengers, after the guy was dead. But now… we’re not so sure.”
“I don’t see blood on the ground here,” Cliff Soames said with a note of puzzlement. “There’d have been a lot of it.”
“They weren’t killed here,” Deputy Bockner said, then went on with his Summary at his own pace. “Female, twenty-seven, Ruth Kasavaris, also of Glendale. Also vicious bite marks, slashes. Her throat-”
Cutting him off again, Lem said, “When were they killed?”
“Best guess before lab tests is that they died late yesterday. We believe the bodies were carried up here because they’d be found quicker on the ridge top. A popular hiking trail runs along here. But it wasn’t other hikers found them. It was a routine fire-patrol plane. Pilot looked down, saw them sprawled here on the bare ridge.”
This high ground above Boulder Canyon was more than thirty air miles north-northwest of Johnstone Peak, where the young campers had taken refuge from The Outsider in their van and had later fired at it with a.32 pistol on June 18, twenty-eight days ago. The Outsider would have been reckoning north-northwest by sheer instinct and no doubt would have frequently been required to backtrack out of box canyons; therefore, in this mountainous terrain it had very likely traveled between sixty and ninety miles on the ground to cover those thirty air miles. Still, that was only a pace of three miles a day, at most, and Lem wondered what the creature had been doing during the time it was not traveling or sleeping or chasing down food.
“You’ll want to see where these two were killed,” Bockner said. “We’ve found the place. And you’ll want to see the den, too.”
“Den?”
“The lair,” one of the forest rangers said. “The damn lair.”
The deputies, rangers, and crime-lab men had been giving Lem and Cliff odd looks ever since they had arrived, but Lem had not been surprised by that. Local authorities always regarded him with suspicion and curiosity because they were not accustomed to having a powerhouse federal agency like the NSA show up and claim jurisdiction; it was a rarity. But now he realized that their curiosity was of a different kind and degree than what he usually encountered, and for the first time he perceived their fear. They had found something-the lair of which they spoke-that gave them reason to believe this case was even stranger than the sudden appearance of the NSA would usually indicate.
In suits, ties, and polished street shoes, neither Lem nor Cliff was properly dressed for a hike down into the canyon, but neither of them hesitated when the rangers led the way. Two deputies, the lab men, and one of the three rangers remained behind with the bodies, which left a party of six for the descent. They followed a shallow channel carved by runoff from rainstorms, then switched to what might have been a deer trail. After descending to the very bottom of the canyon, they turned southeast and proceeded for half a mile. Soon Lem was sweaty and covered with a film of dust, and his socks and pant legs were full of prickling burrs.
“Here’s where they were killed,” Deputy Bockner said when he led them into a clearing surrounded by scrub pines, cottonwoods, and brush.
The pale, sandy earth and sun-bleached grass were mottled with enormous dark stains. Blood.
“And right back here,” one of the rangers said, “is where we found the lair.”
It was a shallow cave in the base of the canyon wall, perhaps ten feet deep, twenty feet wide, no more than a dozen steps from the small clearing where the hikers had been murdered. The mouth of the cave was about eight feet wide but low, requiring Lem to stoop a bit as he entered. Once inside, he was able to stand erect, for the ceiling was high. The place had a mildly unpleasant, musty smell. Light found its way through the entrance and through a two-foot-wide water-carved hole in the ceiling, but for the most part the chamber was shadowy and twenty degrees cooler than the canyon outside.
Only Deputy Bockner accompanied Lem and Cliff. Lem sensed that the others held back not out of any concern that the cave would be too crowded, but out of an uneasiness about the place.
Bockner had a flashlight. He switched it on and played the beam over the things he had brought them to see, dispelling some of the shadows and causing others to flit batlike across the room to roost on different perches.