Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) (8 page)

He backed down and closed the stairs, then spent some time in the master suite. The bed had been slept in, but it was cold now. The master bath revealed that this had been Doctor Hoffman’s room. It also revealed missing items. There was no toothbrush in the holder and a shelf of the medicine cabinet was empty.

There were too many clothes in the closet to tell if any were missing, but the way that the hangars had been pushed back, it looked possible. He observed no luggage, so that was another question.

He went down the hall to Gail’s room and found a similar situation. The bed was undisturbed, but there was evidence that cosmetics had been removed from the bathroom.

In the hallway, he found a closet that held luggage, but it was unclear if any had been taken.

Still, the evidence was sufficient to at least suggest that these people had left of their own accord. Nobody was going to believe that, though, because their cars were still going to be in the garage and there were no tracks around the house.

He knew damn well what had happened here. The Hoffmans had been taken. No question, it was exactly the same as all the other cases. So the kidnapper had managed to take the third sister right out from under the noses of a stakeout team, which was damn well amazing.

That most criminals were stupid was part of the shorthand of police work. The vast majority of them were going to be too dumb to get away, but also too dumb not to shoot. Catching the average crook was like herding a bull—dangerous, but not exactly what you’d call an intellectual challenge.

What they had here was a lurid genius with a bizarre imagination. To even think of training a big cat the way he had was extraordinary. To succeed was phenomenal.

He went downstairs and looked out the back door. He needed to locate the remaining members of the team. He observed the snow-packed back garden carefully, but saw no sign of any human presence. But he wouldn’t, not from here. They’d be back in the tree line.

That damn cat was probably still out there, but he had to do this. He unlocked the kitchen door and drew it open.

The wind-driven snow slammed him so hard that he lurched off balance and had to grab the doorframe to keep from being swept backward.

There were major gusts in this thing, fifty, sixty miles an hour.

Lowering his head, he pushed his way out into the storm.

CHAPTER NINE

The brief shafts of moonlight that had helped him earlier were now gone, replaced by scudding clouds and a literal wall of snow being driven directly in his face by the brutal wind. Out much more than five feet, he was blind. So what about the cat? Was it blind, too?

Despite this, the perp had come in here and taken his victims. Flynn knew when, too. It had happened just after Gail had stopped playing the piano and just before he’d entered the house—when Flynn had been dealing with the puma. It had disappeared because the kidnap had been accomplished and the perp had called it back.

The whole thing had taken roughly ten minutes and had been accomplished without a sound, without a trace of anything being left behind and without a hitch.
In this
.

He reached the garage and shone his light through one of the small windows that lined the two doors—and felt a shock with the power of a fist in the face. There was blood everywhere, blood and ripped clothing. He saw a hand, a leg—pieces of two people, maybe three.

The Hoffmans? The team? All of them?

He raised one of the doors, which came up with a massive creaking and a tinkle of shattering ice.

This door hadn’t been opened in at least an hour, and the other one was caked with ice. So who were these people?

Stepping in, gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, he went to where a bloody jacket lay against the door of an old pickup.

North Face, black. High-intensity penlight in the right pocket.

Mike had worn a black North Face. The light was the same one all the team members carried.

Against the back wall, there was an old-fashioned pitchfork. On it was a rounded mass of bloody hair. It was Charlie, his distorted face just barely recognizable in the mess.

The perp may have originally intended to take the Hoffmans in the usual way, leaving behind evidence that they’d departed on their own. Flynn’s best guess was that these two men had somehow succeeded in surprising him—whereupon they had paid the same price as Louie.

So this was now a major crime scene. There could be forensic studies done here. Maybe there would be prints, bits of hair, even blood. DNA, even.

Looked at one way, this was a scene of extraordinary violence and tragedy. Looked at another way, it could be a treasure-trove of evidence, the first one in the history of this case.

A quick survey of the remains turned up evidence of only the two men. Diana was not here. He made a quick decision to report this crime first and worry about her later. His guess was that she was beyond saving anyway, probably back there in those woods right now, in the form of frozen remains.

His duty was very clear. He had to get out of here alive and give the state criminal investigators all the help he could.

But how to accomplish that? The perp was going to definitely want him dead. He had effective weapons, including the lion, and probably skills and capabilities that Flynn knew nothing about. Given that he was able to train a wild animal to near-human hunting skills, it had to be assumed that he was well provided with extraordinary assets.

Could Flynn manage to walk out of here? No, the perp would not let that happen. At some point, the lion would reach him or something else would reach him.

Even if he did reach the Cherokee, which was half a mile back along the road, he didn’t have keys. So he would need to wire it. Not difficult, but it would take a few minutes that he was unlikely to have.

He was trapped here, that was clear. But he wasn’t going to give up. That was also clear. The odds were against him though, seriously against him. In fact, he didn’t really think he had any measurable odds. So what he had to do was to leave a record behind, giving all the details of the crime as he had observed them.

A moment’s thought brought him an idea. He set about searching the ruins of the two men for a phone. He could use it to record a detailed account of the crime as he had seen it unfold. He’d return it to the pocket it had come from. At some point, forensics would find the recording and listen to it.

Handling the corpse of a person who has just died is as intimate an experience as there is. Not many people do it—nurses, policemen, emergency medical service personnel—and those who do never get used to it. It’s as if a living person has surrendered himself to you so completely that he is lost to your touch.

Largely because Charlie’s corpse was the least maimed, Flynn approached it first. He’d taken a shattering blow to the head and sustained deep gouges. A man had delivered the blow, but the rest of it had been done by the lion.

The body lay at a twisted angle, its face turned away as if in some eerie excess of modesty. One arm lay across the chest, the other angled backward, obviously broken. Long gouges had reduced his heavy parka to rags that bulged with tufts of white wool insulation. Mike felt in the pockets, soon coming across the familiar shape of an iPhone. Grasping it, he withdrew it and turned it on.

It took a long time, but finally the opening screen appeared. Charlie didn’t use a password, which was useful but not smart for a man who obviously dealt with a lot of classified material.

As Flynn pressed the logo of the recorder app, he found himself watching the battery indicator with increasing amazement. The phone got hot, quickly becoming almost painful to hold. He tried to turn it off but it was no use. He watched helplessly as the battery indicator moved across the face of the thing, reducing it in a matter of seconds to a dead, useless brick. Immediately, he pulled out his own cell phone and found it to be hot, also, its battery drained.

He went to Mike’s shattered remains, dug his fingers into a blood-soaked pants pocket, but did not find his phone. He patted the other pocket. Same result. Had it been lost in the battle that had taken place in here? He shone his light around the room.

Mike’s jacket was so badly ripped apart that the contents of the pockets had been strewn all over the room. After a few more moments of searching, he found his MindRay under the truck. On the far side of the vehicle was a small black object, which proved to be not his cell phone, but an old Police Special. Flynn pocketed it.

At that moment, he heard a sound, a fluttering in the rafters.

He braced his pistol, but saw nothing. He used his flashlight. Still nothing. Could have been a possum or a coon. Not a lion, though, thank God, not up there.

Continuing his search, he soon located another pistol, this one a Magnum. At least one of these guys had been decently armed. The pistol had been fired until it was empty.

Charlie and Mike had fought for their lives in here. He hadn’t heard the shots, so the battle must have taken place while he was still on the rise overlooking the house. That would have been at least half an hour ago.

He thought the situation over. Louie had been done by a big cat that had been expertly trained. Best trained animal in the world, no question. It hunted like a master tracker of the human kind, not like an animal. What had happened in here was that the lion and its human minder had worked together.

The shadow dropping down from above was almost on him by the time he saw it. There were eyes—huge, glaring—and he was firing his pistol again and again, aware that he was emptying it just like Mike had.

Then silence. Nothing was there but a wreath of smoke.

He took a long step toward the truck—and saw something moving on the far side. Reflex made him brace the empty pistol.

No more movement. No sound.

He went closer, then around to the front of the truck. Shining his light into the darkness between the vehicle and the wall, he saw a mass of something on the floor. A closer look revealed that it was feathers.

“Shit,” he said quietly. He’d shot at a poor damn barn owl. Fortunately for the owl, all he’d done was to separate it from part of its tail.

It was time to get out of here. He had one hell of a dangerous journey ahead. Reluctantly, he approached Mike’s body again and felt for a reload for the Magnum. He didn’t find one. He’d never know if the guy failed to bring extra bullets, or used more than one cylinder. Not that it was that important. Dead is dead, and they certainly hadn’t been killed by any barn owl.

It was time to do this, maybe lose his life and maybe not, but the longer he waited the more certain he felt that whoever had done three experts to death would find a way to kill a fourth—or was that a fifth? Diana had yet to be accounted for.

He turned out his light, went to the door, twisted the handle, and raised it onto the storm.

The wind was roaring steadily now, the snow gushing out of the sky in a horizontal cataract. He took his compass out of his pocket and oriented himself, then turned and closed the door.

He started off, pushing his way through snow that was two feet deep at a minimum. When he reached the road, he consulted his compass again, then turned and headed toward the town.

He’d find the Cherokee. He’d survive. He’d get this perp and see him take the needle.

The wind howled around him, clutching him, shaking him with the full power of nature at its most wild.

He struggled off toward the town, his compass his only guide.

CHAPTER TEN

Flynn’s struggled to stay on the road, to see any possible attacker, to somehow make progress against a storm that was like a living creature. He timed himself, hoping that he could get at least a rough idea of when he might be approaching the jeep. He also watched as best he could for the puma or for any other sign of danger.

When a flicker lit the snow, his first thought was that it was lightning. There was no thunder, though. Then, for the briefest moment, a neat pool of light crossed a drift to his right.

He reacted by dropping and rolling off the road. He let himself sink into the snow. Face up, he lay absolutely still, breathing as lightly as possible. Heat sensing equipment worked particularly well in conditions like this and he did not want his breath to reveal him to infrared detectors.

He reached for the Glock with his right hand, Mike’s Special with the left. He’d worked for years to shoot effectively with his left hand, and was able to hit targets firing from it at eighty percent of his right-handed proficiency.

If anything came at him, he was going to do his best to shoot it and the hell with the police self-identification mandate, this was kill or die. As always in moments like this, he took his attention away from his mind and even his problem, and concentrated it on his body. You’d think that paying attention to the problem was what you needed. But what you needed was a hunter’s form, and that was a physical discipline. As he emptied his mind, cocked silence filled him. His breathing became deep, his heartbeat slowed.

After a moment, a more intense light appeared, growing at first brighter, then slowly dimming. It was moving up the road, and it seemed to be coming from above, like a searchlight shining down from a helicopter.

As had been the case at the Hoffmans’, there wasn’t the slightest sound of an engine. A helicopter produces noise in two ways. There’s the engine sound, but the distinctive chopping is caused by the rotor, or wing, breaking the sound barrier for a moment each time the engine drives it forward.

There was no engine noise. There was no chop. So could this be one of the rumored silent wing choppers the air force had been working on?
Was
it the air force, then? Could it therefore mean safety?

No, this same type of aircraft had been used to kidnap the Hoffmans.

So the perp had a trained lion and a helicopter with a silent wing.

He waited, breathing evenly, letting the snow settle around him. He was freezing cold but must not allow himself to shiver. His face burned from cold, but he would not move to push the snow away.