49

MIKE KNEW RIGHT AWAY it was bad. He hadn’t known Professor Dye very long, but it had been enough time that he could detect the barely contained panic in the man’s voice. It sounded unnaturally loud as he called out, and Mike thought the professor might be on the verge of bursting into tears.

Icy fingers of dread clamped onto Mike’s internal organs as he walked slowly into the woods where Ken Dye was standing bent over, hands on his knees, a string of yellowish gunk hanging from his open mouth and stretching elastically toward the ground. It was a pose eerily similar to Harley Tanguay’s from a couple of days ago. Mike tried to imagine how he would react when he saw Sharon’s lifeless body lying on the forest floor, battered and torn apart just as the other victims had been.

This feeling was identical to the despair that had gripped Mike on that fateful Revere evening eighteen months ago. The weather then had been the complete opposite of today—a sweltering afternoon under a relentlessly blazing sun—but he had felt the same frozen lump in his gut he could feel forming right now.

He steeled himself for the worst and shouldered past Professor Dye, looking down onto the dirty snow. It wasn’t Sharon. In fact, it wasn’t a body at all. At least, not a complete body.

Rust-colored dried blood speckled the snow and mud a few feet from Professor Dye. A lot of rust-colored dried blood. Lying in the middle of all the blood, looking small and incongruously out of place was a human arm. Or at least what was left of a human arm.

Mike breathed deeply. He hadn’t even realized until now that he was holding his breath. The sense of relief he felt from not discovering Sharon Dupont’s corpse in the forest was tempered with the knowledge that there was now at least one more victim to add to this awful killing spree. It was technically possible, of course, that the person to whom this arm belonged was still alive, but that was unlikely in the extreme and Mike knew in his heart it was not the case.

He kneeled in the muddy, bloody snow to take a closer look, careful not to disturb the scene. The arm had been torn out of its shoulder; the ball-like portion of the humerus wrenched free, with stringy muscles and stretched-and-torn ligaments trailing on the ground, serving as grisly testimony to its owner’s last agonizing moments.

Covering the appendage—more or less—was a light blue shirt sleeve and the sleeve of a heavy winter coat which had been torn off its owner along with the arm. The sleeve looked familiar, and Mike began to feel queasier. He looked up to see Professor Ken Dye standing alongside him, apparently done puking, at least for the time being. Mike had to give the man credit for not taking the easy way out and abandoning the mess here in the forest for the open spaces of Warren Sprague’s field.

“You know who it is, don’t you?” the professor asked.

Mike nodded, swallowing hard. He was determined not to let his stomach get the best of him. He was a law enforcement professional, for crying out loud. “It’s Detective O’Bannon.”

“O’Bannon? But he left for Portland last night.”

“No,” Mike reminded him. “You assumed he left for Portland when we didn’t see him after that first meeting at the bonfire around seven p.m.” He looked back down at the gruesome evidence. “Obviously, that was an incorrect assumption.”

Ken Dye was silent for a moment, then said, “But that means—”

“Yes, I know,” Mike interrupted. He couldn’t bear to hear the professor say it. “Shaw must be here somewhere, too. If something had happened to O’Bannon and Shaw was uninjured, he would have contacted us by now. He would have let us know something was wrong. Obviously, he’s unable to do that.”

Mike stood slowly, his knees cracking and popping. He felt like he had aged fifty years in the past week. “We need to search the area. Now. These two men could still be alive,” he said without much conviction, knowing it was not true.

Professor Dye shook his head. “They were men, not women. They’re not still alive, Chief.”

“We can’t assume that,” Mike snapped. “We owe it to them to at least canvass the surrounding area.” He looked deeper into the tangle of thickly forested woods where a narrow path had been beaten down, presumably by the lethal monster that had caused the devastation. Ignoring it for the time being, he told the professor, “We stick together. Don’t wander more than five feet from me.”

The older man chuckled. The sound came out thick and raspy. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have no intention of wandering off into this haunted forest by myself.”