A Beast in the Streets
“The thing that had once been human paused to sniff suspiciously at the cool breeze. In the silver light of the crescent moon, the two wicked fangs that protruded beyond its lips gleamed with a malevolent beauty.
“Anna huddled in the concealing brush, her breath caught, frozen …”
Allen Blake Corbett expelled a long, immensely exhausted sigh and took off his glasses. His watering eyes seemed to have become huge enough to fill the front of his head, and no amount of careful massaging was of the slightest value. Anna Marcus, Anna Marcus, let’s see, she bit into the pulsing neck of—no, you idiot! Anna was the heroine, not the villain!
Corbett cursed quietly to himself and downed a glass of iced soda water, the strongest beverage he allowed himself when working. Not everyone was Edgar Allen Poe. The sudden flooding of coldness through his chest and into his midsection threatened to incite a swift revolution against such treatment by his only half-awakened body. But he fought back the sensation and concentrated on the sharp stimulus that the water effected in him. He replaced his glasses, flipped the switch on the upper face of his typewriter, and smiled with slight satisfaction as the machine hummed into life.
“Blake,” called a sleep-fogged voice from the bedroom door to his left.
“Hmm?” he grunted distractedly.
“What are you doing at … six-thirty in the morning, for heaven’s sake?” The sleepy and perturbed voice belonged to Beth Corbett, his ex-wife.
Corbett jabbed ineffectively at a typo with the wand of a bottle of corrective type before replying, “My dear, I am toiling away manfully in order to earn your alimony. Any objections?”
He could hear her rolling slowly over, back into the deep warmth of the bed. “Well, why at six-thirty?”
“Why not? When the mood strikes, one—”
“… writes or waits until the next one, I know, I know. I had seven years of that routine, remember?”
Corbett laughed shortly. “Seven years, three months, and twelve days. In fact, next Monday would have been our ninth anniversary.”
“Doesn’t that make you all warm and sentimental?” Her tone was playful, yet there was a hint of genuine spite buried beneath it, if one cared to search.
“Not when I consider that Monday is also the anniversary of my nineteenth alimony check. I’m sure you see my point.” Blake ran one short-fingered hand through his still solid black hair.
“You took me to love, honor, cherish, for better or worse, in sickness and in health—”
“Forever and ever and ever.”
“Amen.”
Corbett pushed his chair away from his desk and stretched the various bunches of muscles that regularly become so cramped by his lifestyle as a writer of fiction.
“Now, come to bed and let mama rub those poor, tired fingers,” Beth said enticingly.
But he resisted her this once. “Listen, darlin’, I’ve really got to finish this novel. My billfold could use some more bills to fold.”
She suddenly reverted to teasing once more. “A.B. Corbett? The only man ever to write three thousand books in fifteen years? The man who is so successful and famous that his publishers list his pseudonyms and his real name on old reprints?”
That did conjure a few memories: “The Voice of the Lingering Spirit by A.B. Corbett Writing as Wes van Nets. “Dark Rampage by Ed Stens (A. Blake Corbett).”
“Yep,” he answered, “that A.B. Corbett, who has sold a lot of copies but somehow skillfully missed out on the Big Time financially. And now he’s depending on A Beast in the Streets to rescue him and his beautiful ex-wife from the poorhouse.”
“But not now, Blake. I have to leave this afternoon for New York, so come back to bed with Bethany.”
This time, he couldn’t resist. He was roadblocked with A.B.i.t.S., anyway, so he left Anna Marcus with her breath frozen in her exquisite lungs and retreated to the bedroom.
A telephone has its own set of laws, laws which place it beyond the wrath and retribution of most conventionally civilized people. The first and most sacred of these laws is, “Thou shalt answer.”
Day or night, in foul weather or fair. The simple bell built into the plastic box becomes a powerful sword of proclamation when stimulated by an outside force, and the struggle to refuse to respond to the call is one made almost impossible by years of conditioning.
Also, the news to be received by the person who has again responded to Pavlovian training can be either tragic or wonderful, news which will be cause for grief or celebration, but the sound of the bell never varies. The powerful telephone never gives clues.
Blake Corbett was a frustrated man that Thursday morning, July 21, because even another two hours of Beth and her conciliatory attitude toward ex-husbands could only temporarily shut out the screaming fact that he was stuck, stymied, and generally roadblocked with the adventures of Anna Marcus and her lusting animalistic admirers. Anna Marcus—good god, he was writing a gothic! Then the phone began its shrill command.
“Hullo,” he muttered into what he hoped was the receiver.
“Hey, Corbett? That you?” inquired the voice of someone fractionally familiar.
“There are bookmakers in Las Vegas who would fix disputing odds as to that possibility.”
“Yeah, I thought it was you. This is me, Louie.”
Corbett’s eyes opened a degree wider. Louis Angelini was the coffee boy (man? person?) at a nearby police precinct, and in such a capacity, he had the full run of the stationhouse. This freedom made him valuable to Corbett as an informant dealing in very specialized data.
“Okay, Louie, what’s up?” Blake replied, propping himself on an elbow and searching the nighttable for his glasses.
Angelini’s normally swift (and somewhat insubordinate) early-twenties-aged voice became suddenly conspiratorial. “It’s about your … you know, about your ‘inspirational’ tips that give you book ideas.”
Corbett grinned. Perhaps Anna Marcus would be shunted into the multi-colored mists that never cleared from the back of his mind if this tip were truly inspirational—and what if the idea turned out to be something as simple as a killer shark, yet as incredibly successful in the commercial market as Jaws? “You’ve got my attention,” he said to the coffeeboy.
“Well, you’re interested in unusual murders and stuff, right?”
“That’s why I pay you, Louis. Give.”
“Okay, uh, one of the boys here just caught a call from the local P.D. over in Lynnview. It was about two stiffs found inside—and splashed over most of—a house located about five miles on the other side of the town; the Lynnview cops want some big city investigators and forensic quacks to check out the remains before they move them.”
By that time, Corbett was seated on the right side of his bed and dragging his trousers to him by the toes of one foot. He was interested, but not completely convinced. “Get to the unusual part, Louie, and make it worth my time. Your tips have been less than awe-inspiring lately.”
“Give me a break, Corbett,” Angelini sighed. “How was I supposed to know that the Matusic dame did commit suicide with a meat clever? Anyway, this sounds for real. It’s a man and a woman, they think, and it definitely ain’t no murder/suicide. Not the way both of them were beat to sludge.”
“With what weapon?”
“Forget weapons. All that they can determine is it was done with teeth, claws, and maybe blows from a fist carrying the power of an overhead swing with a ball-peen hammer.”
Corbett whistled, though only mentally. “Sounds strange, all right, but how do you know it wasn’t an animal?”
“The evidence of about five thousand bloody human footprints scattered all through the place. Marsh is leading the charge on this one, and everybody around here is convinced that those tracks belong to a psycho A-One. First Class. A real star dodger.”
“You’ve sold me, Louie.” Corbett realized that his morbid interest in the most savage of murders said something rather uncomplimentary about him, but one genuinely weird (and not necessarily grisly) crime could shock him out of the valley of Anna Marcus-type hackwork and back into the range of vibrant, gripping fiction. He’d encountered such useful real-life inspiration only a handful of times in ten years.
“If it’s good, how about a ten spot this time?” Louie asked.
“I’ll have trouble coming up with the usual five,” Blake answered.
The young informant chuckled. “Come on, Mr. Corbett; you could turn this little tidbit into a million dollar novel, if you get to the house before the meatwagon carts off the evidence. Which is something I can help you accomplish, since I know the street address.”
Corbett slowly shook his head. It was his own fault, of course, for getting involved with this ‘corpseline’ in the first place. “If you can wait until tomorrow, it’s ten.”
“Glad to do business with you, and, oh yeah, one more thing, Mr. Corbett,” Angelini said after delivering all of his information.
“Yes?”
“You really are one sick man, you know that?”
Click.
Aside from the fact that his car’s air-conditioning system was out of action again, there was nothing unusual about the drive from Los Angeles to Lynnview. No black clouds blocking out the sun, no eerie music drifting out of nowhere to chill the flesh on the back of his neck, and certainly no icy wind washing over him to counteract the July heat. In A.B. Corbett’s tales of horror, some sort of warning was generally provided for those unsuspecting men and women who were on the verge of being swept away with the approaching tide, but reality seemed to lack the same sense of fair play.
Corbett had been through Lynnview on a number of occasions. When he stopped at a gas station for further directions (Louie’s ten dollar tip hadn’t included a map of the rural outskirts), it became clear that the double murder was the biggest thing to hit the small town since the Second World War. The gas jockey avidly re-summarized the details that had been released to the public and pointed out the correct backroad for him. Blake repaid the favor by buying a few gallons of gas, no mean feat considering his financial position.
Once he left downtown Lynnview, the drive deteriorated swiftly. He moved onto a rutted, dirt-surfaced trail that passed for a road and was abruptly faced with the choice of either gasping for air in the steamroom that was the car with its windows up or choking on the clouds of dust created by his slow passage along the dirt path. Luckily, it was a short trip.
The murder house was the only residence for miles in every direction. It seemed well-kept from the outside, and in the driveway sat a red Toyota that was four years newer than Blake’s car. He knew at once that getting close enough to the scene to investigate would be difficult: five marked police cars (two from LA), two medical vans, a TV news truck, and at least two dozen vehicles belonging to gawking locals ringed the small house like a life preserver, and a line of blue uniforms appeared to be doing an adequate job of holding back everyone without official permission to view the decidedly deceased remains.
Blake parked well away from the congested area and took his only equipment—a pad and pen; photos would have been too sick for his neurotic inner self—and hiked to the outer crust of the circle. He searched for any chink through which a casually inconspicuous fellow such as he might slip unnoticed, but the prospects didn’t look good.
“If you people do not move back, I’ll have to order you to disperse entirely until this area has been cleared for public traffic!” shouted an officious cop who was standing on the front bumper of an auto in the manner of a politician on a soapbox.
“By that time, it’ll be last year’s news, Hagen!” responded a reporter who looked vaguely familiar to Blake. “At least allow the press inside before the place is cleaned up!”
Hagen stared fiercely at the man, and it was obvious that a lot more convincing would be required to sway him. Corbett drifted through the assembly next to the naggingly familiar newsman and tried to place his face. He was around six feet tall, a couple of inches more than Blake himself, and is dark hair and hooded eyes gave him an expression of suspicious moroseness. He looked as if he had gone through similar battles with authorities a number of times before.
Another, much larger man stood next to him balancing a portable minicam on his shoulder and peering at the darkened house.
“Hell, Doug, by the time Sherlock Holmes and company satisfy their arrested feelings of godship, it won’t be last year’s news, it’ll belong in the annals of crime next to Lizzie Borden’s solution to the population problem,” the second man muttered.
He was something of a behemoth, at least six-four and around three hundred pounds, primarily in the area of his waist. The camera and backpack containing other electronic equipment marked him as a television photographer.
“I know, Brad,” replied the first reporter. “I’m sorry to pull you away from your crew like this, but it’s just that if you can give me a few instant copies of the victims, I can teleprint them to New Hampshire and find out if they match the wounds on those corpses that washed up six months ago. If I can convince these Neanderthals to let us inside, that is.”
‘Doug’, Corbett’s inner voice repeated slowly. Doug, but Doug Who? As the hot sun began to bake his scalp, he drew on his memory to place the face of the man as a photograph in a newspaper, a column heading, actually, and this allowed him to read the byline just below the picture. He snapped his fingers triumphantly and stepped up to the simmering man.
“Pardon me, but aren’t you Douglas Morgan, the columnist for the Los Angeles Chronicle?” he asked.
The reporter turned to glance at Corbett, but his expression showed no trace of gratification at being recognized. “That’s right,” he responded. “Or so it is three times a week.”
Morgan’s column was called (over his protests) “Eye On the Unusual”, and it concentrated on those news stories which were routinely dismissed by “serious” journalists or termed “Silly Season” and “Goofus” pieces. Flying saucers, Bigfoot, sea monsters, and things of that nature. “Eye” appeared on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays and was quite popular.
Morgan turned away from Corbett without further acknowledgement, and Corbett felt the sting of the snub. But, he decided, the man was doing his job and had little time for compliments from a regular reader.
“How about opening up if we promise to be good little boys and girls?” called a woman reporter from the mob. Hagen merely grunted.
A break in the hot vigil came less than a minute afterward, however, when sounds of hurried activity within the house were followed by the uninhibited cursing of a man in a voice that Blake knew. Captain Richard Marsh of the L.A.P.D. was somewhere in there.
“Hagen, goddamn it, who told you to let the press inside?” Marsh demanded.
The patrolman looked about in confusion and answered, “Uh, nobody, Captain. I mean, nobody’s gotten in from out here!”
“Look again, Officer!” Marsh continued. “I’ve got two photogs from the Banner in here right now!”
Hagen kicked angrily at the tire of the nearest car. “Hell, sir, they must have slipped in around back somewhere! Kendricks, Poplar. Go in there and escort—”
“Never mind, Hagen, the damage is done now,” Marsh said with dripping sarcasm. “We’re finished, anyway. Send in the rest of the defenders of freedom before we’re castigated in print for showing favoritism.”
A short cheer danced through the assembly.
“Hot dog, we’ll get some shots before the wagon gets the bodies,” Brad the photographer said with unsettling glee.
And I thought I was cold-blooded, Corbett observed silently. To Morgan, he said, “Why are you covering this? Your column’s never been strongly into murder and gore.” Like most of the others, the reporter was hurriedly readying his credentials for the trip inside the house, and he answered in a distracted tone, “This is no ordinary double homicide, bud. My sources say that the way in which these poor folks were killed very closely resembles the fashion in which four people who disappeared following the sinking of a yacht were later found to have died: that sinking came close on the heels of a CE2 UFO report.” Under his breath, he sighed, “Not all indications are that the people from Out There are friendly.”
“Then you think a flying saucer might have something to do with this?” Blake asked what seemed to him to be the obvious question.
“I didn’t say that, friend. Now, if you’ll excuse me …”
Hagen and his men swiftly passed those men and women who displayed the proper press identification, but the common people were not allowed onto the front porch. Corbett had no form of news badge and quickly found himself relegated to the ranks of the turned aside. He felt sure that he had made a long, dusty trip for nothing until he saw Captain Richard Marsh step into the front doorway.
“Rich!” he shouted. “Hey, Rich, how about a pass?”
The tall, slim policeman stepped from the porch and shielded his eyes from the brilliant early-afternoon sun. He was dressed in what would have passed as a decent plainclothes disguise in 1947. When his gaze fastened on Corbett, he grunted shortly.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Blake went on. “Tell your underling to let me in!” He ignored Hagen’s ugly reaction to the tag.
Marsh opened his mouth as if to reply. Before he spoke, however, he took another glance at the scene he had just left and broke into a cruel smile. “Let him through, Hagen,” he said.
While Hagen stepped aside, muttering, Corbett hurried after the reporters with his pen and pad in hand. He had met Richard Marsh on several prior occasions while gathering background material for his novels, and the policeman had seemed somewhat amused by the association in the beginning. Now, though, he usually reacted to the writer’s presence with indifference more than anything else.
As he passed Marsh, Corbett quickly asked, “Do you think this is a case of murder?”, meaning, of course, in opposition to assault by some wild animal. The only reply he received was a shrug that advised him to decide for himself. Jeeze, Blake thought when he reached the steps, this is going to be a lulu.
Two uniformed policemen were throwing up next to the porch.
Corbett had a strong stomach and a handy talent for disassociating himself from whatever he happened to be viewing, as he had proven to himself in several instances. These qualities were not able to prepare him for his reactions when he moved blindly from sunshine into shadow and stepped on a human hand. A man’s hand ending at the wrist, covered in dried blood, and outlined in white chalk on the floor. “My god!” he gasped.
“Watch it!” whined a medical examiner. “That’s evidence, you know! I don’t know why you people have to stomp around in here, anyway, but be careful!”
“Sorry,” Blake managed to whisper as he carefully stepped over the grisly object. He tried to move away from it, but there was no escape to be found within the gloomy and reeking room: it looked like a slaughterhouse.
Parts of human beings were scattered carelessly about the interior. Limbs from two people lay in the floor and atop the overturned furniture. In a far corner, Corbett could see a nude, blood-encrusted human trunk which appeared to have been mutilated with a power shovel, and it was so terribly disfigured that he was literally unable to tell if it had been a man or a woman.
Blake leaned against the wall and released a disbelieving sigh. His heart seemed to have doubled its beat since entering the awful scene, and there was a tingling veil of unreality—something like a déjà vu quality—misting throughout his mind. The totality of slaughter brought the thirty-five year old writer to within degrees of collapse.
Don’t faint, don’t faint, you weak-hearted patsy! he ordered himself while staring at the dozens of red, obviously human footprints which stained the hardwood floor.
“You seem to be forgetting to take notes, Author,” observed Marsh in a pleased voice. “I thought that you liked to capture the images while they were fresh and powerful.”
Corbett turned away from the butchery toward a smashed window, hoping to catch a breath of the clean air that was flowing languidly through it. “I don’t need to write any of this,” he replied thickly. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget any of this.”
Marsh’s smile was hard and humorless. “The demons of your imagination aren’t strong enough to stand up to the real stuff, huh?”
By breathing quickly and evenly in the hot breeze, Corbett was regaining control of himself, but he was still glad that he had skipped breakfast. “Maybe you’re right, but I’ll live through it, Rich. Which may be more than can be said for a couple of your prize performers out front.”
“Rookies,” answered Marsh, as if that single word excused all forms of incompetence. “I’ll have to admit, though, you’re holding up better than some of your buddies.”
Corbett looked around the room again to find that almost half of the hardened, experienced newspaper and television reporters were reacting to the carnage as violently as he had. Some were already ill and rushing for the doorways, others were merely staring with glassy eyes at the remains of the two people who had lived in this house, and one woman was even weeping, quietly. The rest were outwardly untouched by their surroundings, however. Brad, the huge TV photographer with Douglas Morgan, appeared to be quite contented as he sprayed various points of interest with a powerful camera lamp and filmed the gruesome details.
Blake wiped his forehead with the back of his left hand. “What in the name of heaven happened here, Rich?” he asked.
“Give us a little time, Corbett; we were only called in on this case a couple of hours ago.” Much of the sarcastic triumph had vanished from his tone. After a short pause, he continued, “We’re pretty sure of the identities of the pair—Victoria and Stanley Gretler. His body’s in the next room with the neck practically eaten away. Her head is still missing. Both were in their late forties.”
“But who … or …?”
“… ‘what’ could have done this? Right now, we have to consider this the work of a human being, due to all of the hand and footprints scattered throughout the house; as well as we can tell, they don’t match those of either victim.” Marsh was speaking freely to Corbett—if in a low voice—because, basically, he liked the man. He knew from past experience that none of the imparted information would leak to the press before he was ready for it to do so.
“Couldn’t the prints belong to some other man or woman who was attacked?”
“We considered that, but the tracks lead out of the rear of the house, and the blood disappears before they’ve gone twenty feet, which seems to mean that the man wasn’t wounded himself.”
“You’re sure it was a man, then?”
“That’s what the sizes of the tracks indicate.”
“And he did this with his hands?”
“Forensics will have the final say, naturally, but we have no evidence of any weapons other than hands, nails, and teeth. This son of a bitch must have been as strong as an ape.”
Blake slipped his pad and pen into his shirt pocket and then lightly mopped his face with his handkerchief. “Have you followed the trail into the woods, yet?”
Marsh laughed grimly as he watched his men frantically attempting to keep the crime scene from becoming trampled by the eager reporters. “We’re going to do that, just as soon as the dogs get here. But don’t even think about mentioning that to your colleagues, yet. I don’t want the scent ruined before we get started.”
“Isn’t it taking an unusually long time for the tracking dogs to arrive?”
Marsh shrugged. “Hunting season.”
Corbett found that his urge to visit the site of a fresh murder was quickly exhausted.
After speaking with the police captain for a minute or so longer, he left the hot, ugly interior of the death house for the hot but more palatable surroundings outside it. He waited in the sunlight trying to work the raw elements of the experience into something that might be salvageable in his fiction for fifteen minutes more before the tracking hounds arrived, baying like unfaded echoes from chain gang days.
By this time, Captain Marsh had realized that the situation had deteriorated to the point where it would be impossible to deny the well-represented press further participation; he certainly couldn’t invent some ridiculous fable explaining away the presence of the dogs, so he gave in to them. With certain stipulations.
“Only those people with proper credentials will be permitted to accompany the tracking team,” he announced from the front porch. “You will all stay well back from the dogs, and you will respond to all requests made by any of the officers. If any encounters are made in the course of the operation, you will all fall back instantly so that you won’t interfere with the police.”
From among the cluster of men and women before the house, someone responded, “Yas suh, boss,” in a low voice that made him impossible to identify.
The dogs were penned in the rear of an aged, blue pickup truck, and when their handler released them, the four huge, brown and reddish bloodhounds bounded forward, straining at their leashes and practically bursting with the energy of their breeding. The handler kept them far away from the assembled people and the miasma of scents they represented so as not to confuse the animals as he led them around the house to the rear door, where the exit tracks had been located.
Corbett followed the dogs eagerly. He had written this very scene in at least three of his horror novels, and now he was living it; the empty-gut sensation that had almost overcome him inside the Gretler home vanished, and the déjà vu returned, in an excited form this time.
At the rear of the house, the four dogs encountered the area where the blood-soaked man had slipped away into the forest, and they reacted to the scent in wildly dissimilar fashions: one, the largest of the group leaped straight up, as if propelled by springs, and began snapping and howling at twice the level of its former fury; a second hound began whirling madly in place, completely obliterating the bloody tracks nearest the house and almost strangling itself; the third dropped to the ground as if it had been stunned by a hammer blow, and it refused to move even when roughly prodded by the handler; and the last dog darted away from the spot with such suddenness that it was able to jerk free of the hold the man had on its leash and scramble beneath the house, where it retreated too far into the shadows to be reached.
“Longley, what the hell is going on here?” demanded Marsh with barely controlled rage. Nothing about this investigation had gone well so far.
The trainer and handler of the dogs was clearly confused by the events. “Why, I don’t—I don’t know, Captain!” The lead dog’s desire to be after the prey nearly pulled the man from his feet. “They’ve never … acted this way; this bad, I mean, I swear!”
“Well, are we going to get any use out of them today?”
“Sir—of course, we are! Big Red here’s trying to eat up the Devil hisself right now, and Cholly will come along, too! I’m sure I can get the other two back on their feet if you give me—”
“Forget the other two!” the policeman snapped. “Leave them here. We’re at least half a day behind this maniac now!”
A small, owlish-appearing woman near Marsh’s elbow spoke up, “Then, may I quote you as saying that you believe the person who left the premises last night is the murderer, Captain?”
Marsh glared down at her for an instant, and Corbett laughed to himself. “Let’s get going,” the policeman ordered. “Hagen, leave a man behind to watch the house and the two dogs.”
So the company of dogs, police officers, reporters, and Blake Corbett (who again had used his status with Marsh to get around his lack of press credential) moved away from the silent house as the men from the Lynnview morgue removed the ripped and scattered remains of two human beings from it. The tracking team headed into the heavily wooded hills directly behind the site.
Left behind at the command of his superiors was a confused rookie patrolman, who held the leash of one apparently comatose bloodhound while peering into the darkness beneath the floor of the house for any sign of a second.
“It gets curiouser and curiouser,” commented Brad the photographer as he marched next to Corbett and Morgan. It was an apt quotation.
Once the party had left the yard and pushed into the forest, the noise had almost vanished beneath the high canopy created by the big trees. This canopy shaded them from the harsh, midday sunlight, but for a man with Corbett’s imagination, the cooler dimness was less welcome than the starkness of the open afternoon. Maybe the creature they were chasing wasn’t a monster in the strictest definition of the word—or in the fashion of his fictional monsters—but any thing that could do to a man and a woman what he had just seen had to be considered a thing other than human. Blake wasn’t certain that he was ready to face such a human monster even with a spearhead of armed police before him.
The darkened forest began to resemble the gloomy recesses of his childhood fantasies.
As they tracked, it become clear that the man who had left the house had been wandering through the woods without a specific destination when he made the invisible trail that the dogs’ keen noses were following. Only minutes into the search, a sense of sharp disappointment swept through the group when the tracks crossed upon themselves and left the hounds baying in confusion. But Longley quickly cast about with the animals like a fisherman with a pole and was able to locate a new trail heading deeper into the forest.
The minutes following this delay grew into an hour, and that became two, causing Blake to wonder just how Marsh intended to get them all out of those hills. To an inexperienced woodsman such as himself, one tree looked pretty much like the next. The banner headline of the next day’s newspaper had already formed across the screen of his mind—”FAMOUS AUTHOR VANISHES ALONG WITH ENTIRE LYNNVIEW POLICE DEPARTMENT IN FOREST”—when he realized that Longley’s dogs were certainly talented enough to backtrack along the trail that had been left in the springy, decaying carpet of vegetation below the tall trees.
The silent anticipation exhibited by most of the group also began to evaporate when it became clear that they were not going to run into a blood-crazed murderer behind the next clump of bushes.
Even Douglas Morgan, whose tense expression had relaxed for hardly an instant throughout the day, wound down enough to start a muted conversation with Blake. “How did you manage to tag along on this excursion? You’re not a newsman, are you?”
Corbett had sampled Morgan’s indifference earlier, and he made no great effort to be amicable when he answered, “I’ve got influence with the L.A.P.D.”
Morgan scratched his chin absently. “Okay, I realize that I’ve been acting like the south end of a northbound horse, and I apologize. See, in my line of research, I seldom get to check out reports firsthand. I was so determined to squeeze every detail out of these murders and then check them against incident, that I forgot to try to act civilized, Mr. …”
“Corbett, Blake Corbett.”
Recognition lit in the columnist’s face. “The novelist? I’ve read several of your books. Excellent work, for fiction.” He extended his hand, and Corbett decided that he had been mollified enough by the compliment to accept the invitation. They shook hands briefly. “I can guess what you’re doing on this outing,” Morgan continued. “Plot groundwork, right?”
“So it started,” Blake admitted. “I thought that a little on-the-spot observation might help to stimulate the creative juices, but after what I saw back in that house … well, I’ve always written about such things, but actually looking at them, close up, is an entirely different matter. It makes you think twice.”
Morgan nodded. “I know what you mean; I’m in the same boat. Most of my work deals with the unknown and unexplainable: UFO reports, Sasquatch sightings, intriguing, wonderfully mysterious, and safe subjects, not slaughters. But there are those strange deaths in New England, which don’t seem to be at all related to these now.” He drew in a deep breath. “I’m afraid it’s been a wasted day.”
“And the queasy stomachs display their true colors,” the big cameraman said abruptly from behind the two of them, “Id est, the bright shade of spilled blood is more powerful than the greatest of printed curiosities.”
Morgan looked back at him and asked with a sort of tired amusement, “Brad, shouldn’t you be over there with your TV crew?”
“Doing what? Filming mating redwoods? Excuse Doug’s lousy sense of social manners, Mr. Corbett. My name is Bradley Ferguson, and I’m the ace camera jockey for LA station KXLR most of the time and freelance still clicker for this distinguished newspaperman the rest. Today, I’m pulling double duty.”
Blake wasn’t sure what to make of this large and apparently affable man. His sharp observations seemed to be employed indiscriminately, possibly in response to the comments that someone of his dimensions was forced to endure each day. “I believe you must have overheard my previous introduction,” the writer said.
“Yep; not much slips by these large, economy-sized ears. Glad to meet you, Corbett. I’ve read some—hello!—what’s this?”
Following Ferguson’s sudden reaction to something ahead of them, Blake turned to see the lead bloodhound, Big Red, who had been acting hyper throughout the hunt, practically convulsing in his efforts to drag his handler to a spot a few yards ahead of the group. “We finally seem to have stumbled across something,” Corbett commented uneasily.
“Yeah,” added Morgan, though in that one word was a depth of eager anticipation rather than dread.
What the dog had located turned out to be a wide, rough circle where the deep natural duff carpet had been tossed about wildly, as if a huge bear had dropped to the forest floor and worked desperately to relieve a tormenting itch. A sort of depression had been created by the action, and near its center lay a long, slender object that was covered half in dead leaves and half by a black swarm of insects. Blake couldn’t decide what it was, at first.
“What the hell is that?” muttered Longley, the handler, as he tried to hold back Big Red.
With cool professionalism, Captain Marsh surveyed the starkly white and deep red object and replied, “It’s a leg. Human. Half-cleaned. Now we know that our maniac has cannibalistic tendencies.”
The words rang harshly in Corbett’s ears and his insides were gripped again by that terrible nausea he had experienced in the house. “Oh, damn,” he sighed. “Will somebody please tell me why I came on this hunt?”
Ferguson was setting his shoulder camera for full coverage of the discovery with swift, agile fingers, but he paused long enough to answer, “Because you’re a seeker of truth, a man who grapples with the intangible ultimate. And maybe because you’re a little sick.”
“Everyone’s telling me that lately,” Blake whispered.
All of the official police procedures were carried out in the pit before the reporters were allowed close enough to the scene to gather their material. One of the policemen, while digging about in the disturbed ground, came upon a number of clumps of long, brown-colored hair covered with gummy and crusting blood. After taking several samples for evidence and analysis, he gave a handful of the material to Marsh for inspection.
“I’d say it’s human,” the Captain stated after several moments. “Looks a hell of a lot like those strands we found in the Gretler woman’s hand.” He squinted at the ends of the samples. “These weren’t pulled out, though. No roots. They appear to have been cut, shaved, or maybe broken off.”
Longley nodded as if he possessed some secret and infallible knowledge about the matter. “About what I figured. Some hippie done it, high on dope, and when he came to enough to understand what had happened, he used his switchblade to cut off his long hair and beard so he wouldn’t be recognized.”
Some of the reporters who had overheard chuckled quietly at the conclusion. Marsh dropped the clump back into the depression and replied, “He must have had a couple of decades of hair growth to leave this much behind. Can those animals pick up any other scents that we haven’t run to ground, yet?”
“We’ll give it a try, Captain,” Longley said.
The two dogs swiftly picked up a scent leaving the circle, and the party pushed ahead after leaving a second slightly bewildered young patrolman to guard the spot. As Corbett took a last look at the area in passing, his mood of boredom vanished to be replaced by a keen mixture of excitement and horror that was equal to the sensation he had experienced in the house. An incredibly savage murderer was something he could deal with as a regrettable outgrowth of modern society, but when the circumstances were complicated by the fact that the monster killed for food, human food …
He clearly understood only one thing at that instant: even if he had been trained by the community of Lynnview and were on its payroll, there was no way that he would have remained behind, alone, at that isolated site in the forest like the policeman, with only the demons conjured by his mind for company.
The trail ended soon afterward. Without the quarry.
Most of the authorities and many of the newspeople in the group were familiar with the area around the site of the murders, and they knew that a two-lane paved road ran somewhere among these hills. But everyone on the hunt was startled to some degree when the dogs burst through a thin barrier of underbrush and onto the shoulder of the road as easily as if they had stepped from one room into the next.
The highway was empty of traffic—not even the patrol cars which had scoured the backwoods for signs of the killer could be seen in either direction—and the sun overhead immediately resumed its steady baking effect once they left the protection of the forest.
The hounds led the police to a spot next to the road and stopped, obviously finished with their portion of the search.
“Keep everybody well back, Hagen,” Marsh ordered as he stooped to examine markings in the bare dirt of the shoulder. “We’ve got fresh tire tracks here, and I want casts of all of them before rain or feet wipe them out.”
“So it ends, not with a bang but an insult to the free press,” Ferguson said while setting up his shots of the markings.
“Anyway, this gives us one solid clue,” said Morgan.
“Which is?” Corbett asked.
“That, whether clean-shaven hippie, cold executioner, hunger-maddened cannibal, or wild-eyed voodoo cultist, the killer was a human being. No rabid mountain lion is going to get into a parked car and drive casually away from the crime while leaving the cream of California’s law enforcement stumbling around in the woods like Laurel and Hardy in a 1931 short.”
“Unless he’s a trained mountain lion, of course,” added Ferguson.
Blake Corbett glanced down at his watch and wondered just how this unpleasant outing was going to aid him in transforming Anna Marcus into a fictional work that would satisfy the pernicious tastes of one Rodney L. Witty, Agent.