19

Lyndon Station

John Bear’s cell phone rang, pulling him out of a deep sleep. It had been midnight when the forensics people had finished processing the Wendigo’s larder and close to dawn before he and Murphy had finally arrived home. He glanced at the clock beside his bed and saw that he’d been asleep less than three hours. At first he tried to ignore the iPhone, but it was insistent and rang, went to voicemail, and then rang again. He gave up and answered it. “Bear.”

“There’s something you might want to see,” Bob Pelky said.

“What?”

“It looks like your boy’s been busy. I think it left us another body—at least parts of one.”

John became alert. “Where?”

“St. Francis, Back Settlement.”

“Give me an hour.”

“Hurry up, the CSI team is here. I’ll try and hold the body.” He paused and then added, “What’s left of it anyhow.”

_____________

St. Francis

John Bear parked his DIF&W truck across from the trailer home. Like many homes in the area, what was once an aluminum mobile home was now half-metal, half-wood. He walked toward the group of men who stood before the door and nodded when he reached them. “Is Sergeant Pelky inside?”

“That you, John?” Pelky called from the interior.

“Yeah.”

“The crime scene team has already worked the house, come on in.”

John stepped out of the bright, sunny day into a world of carnage and horror. What remained of the victim was spread across the kitchen tabletop.

Pelky was standing to the left of the door. “Ain’t nothing left of him but a pile of bones and guts.”

John could not take his eyes off the table. The victim’s thorax was ripped open from his neck to his crotch. Intestines, partially digested food, body waste, and fluid coated the floor immediately around it. Pelky handed him a jar of Vicks VapoRub and said, “Use this, it’ll help … somewhat.”

While John spread the Vicks across his upper lip, Pelky said, “I tried to reach you all day yesterday. Where were you?”

“Viverette Settlement. Murph and I found an old root cellar—full of this.” He pointed to the evidence of the Wendigo’s latest act of butchery.

Pelky shook his head and said, “Christ, this is like something from Jack the Ripper.”

“Worse. The Ripper didn’t eat his victims. Who found him?”

“A passerby noticed that something looked wrong and called 9-1-1.”

“Someone must have heard something.”

“If they did we haven’t found him or her.”

“You got any idea when he was murdered?”

“Nope. Sometime last night I’d guess, but I got no idea how they’re gonna determine time of death. It was so frigging cold last night everything in here is frozen. The crime scene technicians had to take tissue samples by scraping them off the tabletop with putty knives.”

John forced his eyes away from the table. “Damn Bob, you look like shit. How long you been here?”

“I got the call around seven this morning and arrived here around eight thirty.”

“Anyone else live here?” John Bear asked.

“His wife passed away about five years ago. Don’t know about kids. We’ll know more once we check out a few places. He worked at the pellet factory. They’ll know.”

John Bear stared out the window for a second and then said, “So, once again we ain’t got a damn thing to work on.” John looked at the empty platform where the woodstove had stood. “Where’s the stove?”

“The killer threw it, fire and all, out the door and through the windshield of Jackson’s pickup.”

John shook his head. “Bob, we got to figure out how we’re goin’ to get this piece of shit.”

“We don’t even know how it got here.”

“I do,” John said. “It ran here from Viverette Settlement.”

“That’s insane.”

“Have we found one thing about this case that wasn’t? All I know is that we saw it from the plane. It was there about ten yesterday morning.”