“If Mayor McCheese there has his way,” Dean groused, “the whole town could end up shish-kabobbed, and as long as the mall opens on time he’ll be happy.”
“It’s kind of his job to be a booster,” Sam said.
“But not a moron. And I’m not sure Barney Fife is much smarter.” Dean was back behind the wheel, tooling toward downtown Cedar Wells again. “So what do you think that was? Spirit?”
“That’d be my guess,” Sam said. “Especially with the phasing in and out of visibility, and the old clothes.”
“Yeah,” Dean agreed. “Which means we have to figure out why it keeps coming back at these forty-year intervals, and how to make it stop. Looks like we’ve got some bones to dig up and burn.”
“If we can find out whose bones. There was nothing promising in the library that I saw.”
“There’s got to be someone around here with a long memory. Or a diary that hasn’t been scrubbed.”
“What are we going to do?” Sam asked. “Knock on random doors until we find one?”
Dean shot Sam an angry glare. Sometimes the old resentments cropped up—the resentments that Dad had encouraged, it seemed, after Sam decided to go to college—and he suspected Sam of being a quitter, willing to stay in the fight as long as the going got easy but ready to bail when things were tough.
In fact, he knew that wasn’t true. There had been plenty of tough times since their reunion, plenty of chances for Sam to take off if he wanted to. The fact that Sam was still in the passenger seat, thumbing through his cassette tapes, meant that he was in this for the long haul. That certainty softened Dean’s expression and his response. “If that’s what we have to do,” he said. “I’d rather find a more immediate solution, since I don’t think the sheriff has much experience hunting spirits.”
Any death from supernatural assault was too many, but Dean especially hated for victims to fall while he was in the area and on the case.
Two had already happened while they’d been in Cedar Wells. If they didn’t get a handle on the situation soon, who knew how bad it could get?
Brittany Gardner loved the snow. Not all the time, not every day, but a few good snowfalls a year made her feel like she was part of the world. All day, the sky had been thick with clouds, blocking out the sun and threatening (promising!) precipitation. The air had a crisp, cold, still quality, suggesting that if the clouds did open up, the snow would fall steadily for a good long while. She had moved to Arizona’s high country from the Phoenix area because she wanted to feel snow on her face more than once every decade or so, and today she kept looking out the living room window of her small cottage hoping to see the flakes coming down. She worked at home, editing technical manuals on a freelance basis, but today the work paled in comparison to the snow she wished for, and she had barely made it through three pages in the last hour.
Beside her computer—far enough away that if she dumped it, the mess would flow elsewhere—she kept a cup of Lapsang Souchong tea. Every now and then she carried it into the kitchen to refill it or heat it up in the microwave. A jazz station played softly on her satellite radio, and the cottage was warm and cozy. A perfect morning—or it would have been if the white stuff would fall.
Brittany tried to work for twenty minutes straight. After thirteen minutes she gave up and went back to the window. The day had darkened, as more layers of cloud, she supposed, passed in front of the sun. Still nothing falling, but she was more convinced than ever that it would.
Turning to go back to her computer, movement attracted her attention. Someone passing through the trees across the street. She knew the people who lived in the little house over there, the Sawyers, an elderly couple who rarely ventured outside. The person in the trees was neither of them, but he seemed to be skulking toward their house. Brittany backed away from the window a bit, pulling the sheer curtain between herself and the man. He looked like an old guy, grizzled and stooped. His coat was leather, she thought, and he wore tall boots pulled up over his pants, and on his head he had one of those hunting caps with the earflaps you could pull down.
As she watched, he closed in on one of the Sawyers’ windows. He looked old for a Peeping Tom, but then again she wasn’t sure if there was a particular age range for that kind of thing. Either way, she didn’t like the looks of him.
Then he turned a little and something in his right hand swung into sight. He was carrying a rifle!
Brittany released the curtain and dashed to her phone, beside her computer. She dialed 911. A moment later a dispatcher came on the line.
“There’s an old man across the street, in the woods, and he has a gun,” she said quickly. “By the Sawyers’ house.”
“Do you know the address, ma’am?” the voice asked.
“He’s across the street, not here. I don’t know their address offhand.”
“I understand, ma’am. I have your address, and I’m dispatching a sheriff’s officer out there right away. Has the man seen you?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Stay indoors, ma’am. Officers will knock on your door and identify themselves, but don’t let anyone in until they do.”
“Okay,” Brittany said. “Don’t worry, I won’t.”
“Do you want me to stay on the line?”
“That’s okay,” Brittany said. “I don’t think that’s necessary.” Hands shaking, she put the phone down and cautiously returned to the window. When she got close, she lowered herself to her knees and crept the rest of the way, peering out with only her eyes and forehead exposed.
Snow had started to fall, big white flakes of it drifting slowly earthward.
It wasn’t fair. She had been waiting for this moment, for the first falling snow, to go outside and revel in it.
Across the way, she couldn’t see the man with the gun anymore. She hoped he wasn’t already inside the Sawyers’ house, terrorizing those nice old people. In the distance, she could hear an approaching siren. The sheriff’s car, already on the way. She allowed herself a smile. They’d be here soon enough, and the whole thing would be over, a strange adventure, and she could go out and luxuriate in the day, more alive then ever.
A noise from behind startled her. Brittany spun around, rocking on her knees, barely able to keep her balance. Had he come into her place?
But no—there was someone inside her living room, but it wasn’t the old man. The intruder looked like something out of a movie, an Indian, but old-fashioned, wearing leather leggings, bare-chested, with bands around his arms and legs and a red cloth wrapped around his head. He glowered at her through small, dark eyes.
The most disturbing part was not his fierce gaze or even the tomahawk clutched in his fist, but the gaping wound in his broad chest, as if he’d been cleaved open by his own weapon. The sides of the wound were pale, not red, as if the wound was old. No blood ran from it, although she could see what must have been bone and muscle inside.
A scream caught in her throat, and only the faintest squeak emerged. She could hear the sirens now, just outside. She had dropped to one knee, with one hand on the ground for support and the other clamped over her mouth, and she was frozen to the spot. The Indian walked toward her, stumbling a little, head lolling to the side. For an instant he seemed to change, to shift into something the same shape but made of glowing black light, then into a bone-and-muscle version of himself, but when she blinked he looked as he had at first. Brittany had the sense that he was already dead, that his wound was fatal, but he hadn’t figured out that it was time to lie down.
“What do you…are you…?” She couldn’t figure out what to ask him, and her voice sounded distant, barely audible through the blood rushing in her ears. If he heard her, he gave no indication of it. She could hear wind whistling in and out of his chest wound as he breathed.
When he reached for her, Brittany finally thawed, trying to break and run. He surprised her with his quickness, though, and got a fistful of her curly red hair. He yanked on it. Her feet went out from under her and she sprawled on the hardwood floor of her living room, breathing fast now, working toward a really good scream, the kind that would raise the rafters of this old place and bring the police running. Either they’d shoot the Indian or tell her that she had gone insane, and at the moment that seemed the likeliest prospect, because only madness could explain what she faced.
The knee against her belly felt real enough, pressing her down against the floor, and the smell of the man, sour, like meat left too long in the sun, that was real too, and when he brought the tomahawk down against her chest, in the same place where his wound was, for just the briefest instant that felt staggeringly real too.
“This is a mess,” Jim Beckett said. “A godawful mess, no two ways about it.”
Deputy Trace Johannsen nodded soberly. “You’re not kidding about that.”
Beckett looked at Brittany Gardner’s body again. She had suffered a massive chest wound, as if an unskilled doctor had cracked her open to perform emergency heart surgery but hadn’t bothered to close her up again. Until her heart had stopped beating, it had pumped blood out through the gaping wound, soaking her sweatshirt and pooling on the floor.
Three bodies in less than twenty-four hours. He liked Cedar Wells because it was a quiet town, close to good hunting and fishing. The Grand Canyon was a bonus, although he rarely visited it; simply knowing it was there was good enough.
Suddenly it wasn’t so quiet. Instead it looked like Detroit during its worst days, or Washington, or maybe L.A. when the Bloods and Crips went at it with knives and guns. Beckett was old enough to remember the good old days when youth gangs armed themselves with little switchblades and bicycle chains. Not that this looked like a gangster killing, but there was a principle involved, and the principle was that people in his town shouldn’t kill each other. Nor should strangers kill the locals, not near a national park that drew somewhere around five million visitors a year. He just wanted his old town back, the one where people rarely died violently.
“Dispatch said she reported a prowler across the street,” Trace explained. He had already gone through the story once, but seemed compelled to tell it again, and listening to him was easier than thinking. “An old geezer carrying a gun. I checked over there, but the Sawyers hadn’t seen anyone. I knocked over here to ask her about it, and she didn’t answer. I knew she had been home just a few minutes before, so I looked in her window and saw her here.”
“But no sign of an intruder?” Beckett asked. “No old man with a gun?”
“Nothing like that. Anyway, if he had a gun, why would he open her up like that? Why not just shoot her?”
“I wish I knew the answer to that. Did you find any footprints or anything, either here or by the Sawyer place?”
“Some over there, across the street. Good one right outside one of their windows, like someone raising up on tiptoes to look in.”
“Figure that’s our geezer?”
“That’s my guess.”
“I had a call on my way over,” Beckett said. “Another sighting of the old man, less than a block away from here. I drove around for a couple minutes, didn’t see anything, and I don’t have enough bodies available for a full-on search.”
“You think he’s looking for another victim?”
“At this point, I don’t necessarily like him for the murder at all. Like you said, he’s got a gun. This lady wasn’t shot. I don’t know what opened her up, but that’s no bullet hole.”
Trace fell silent. That was okay with Beckett. He didn’t want to have to think, but sometimes there was just no avoiding it. Mayor Milner didn’t want anything getting in the way of the mall opening, and he understood Milner’s position.
But a man didn’t live for a long time in Cedar Wells without hearing whispers of a murder cycle, as that young reporter had called it. Especially when he made his living in law enforcement. People talked about it after a few drinks over at the Plugged Bucket, or at backyard barbecues in the summer when the beer came out of ice-filled coolers and the smoke was thick and nobody listened to anyone else’s conversation. And sometimes a sheriff could just be walking down the street and one of the town’s oldsters would call him over, summon him with that imperious attitude the truly ancient sometimes assumed when dealing with whippersnappers who were merely in their forties or fifties, and whisper to him that it was this year, wasn’t it? Come summer, or spring, or whenever they got it in their head the fortieth anniversary was, people would start to die again. That, finally, was what had convinced him that it was all a local legend—the fact that none of the people who had been adults here forty years before seemed to agree on when it was supposed to happen.
If he was wrong, though—if it was real, and the forty years was up, and it was all beginning again—then he would be in for a bad week or two, however long it would last. And opening a mall during that time would be a heroically bad idea. Bad enough when there were a few victims spread around the area. How much worse might it be if there were several thousand inside the mall, and whoever or whatever was behind the murder spree decided to try some kind of terrorist stunt? A bomb, a small plane flown into the mall, something like that. The death count could easily rise into the hundreds in a matter of minutes.
The thing was, could he convince the mayor and the mall management to call it off?
Not without more evidence than he had so far.
He had to find that old man. Or the soldier from the mall parking lot. Or whatever had torn up Ralph McCaig. Ideally, they were all the same guy. Jailing one man was a lot easier than jailing a figment or a legend.