Destroying Angel (19 page)

“Rebecca,” he whispered. “If that’s your real name. You have ambition, don’t you?”

He was almost there. Beyond the mystery of the missing years in the diary, beyond Grandma’s battle with the dark angel in Witch’s Warts, told in vague, spiritual terms after a lead-up full of specific detail. Grandma Cowley called herself a prophetess.

It was after midnight, and the house lay still all around him. This could wait until morning, but he had to talk it out with
someone. He’d wake up Fernie. She’d understand. She’d help him puzzle it out.

But before he could nudge her awake, the front door banged shut downstairs. Jacob froze, heart pounding. Every night he locked the doors, drew dead bolts and bars across the windows until the house was a fortress. Even if their enemies penetrated the sentry points that guarded the valley, they wouldn’t find the Christianson house an easy target. Yet someone had just entered the front door.

His ears strained for any sound, for a voice or a footstep creaking on the stairs. He heard nothing. And then he noticed that his own bedroom door was open. His son’s sleeping bag lay empty on the floor. He hadn’t heard someone entering, he’d heard someone leaving.

Jacob threw off the bedding and ran to the window even as Fernie stirred in the bed. He yanked open the curtains and looked down as she called his name in a concerned voice.

A slender figure in pajamas walked barefoot down the front walk. As Jacob watched, he faded from the cone of light above the porch and disappeared into the darkness.

Daniel.

The moon was so full and bright overhead that Eliza scarcely needed the flashlight, but she liked the solid metal weight of the Maglite in her hand. If someone came up behind her, she could bash him over the head and then grab for her gun. But the three flashlight beams knifing across the plain sent shadows dancing and contorting over the horror show that lay all around them.

“Good Lord,” Krantz said. “This is creepy as hell. If anyone smells sulfur or anything funny, get those masks on ASAP.”

“How the hell can I tell the difference?” Miriam said. “It’s all I can do to keep from putting it on now. Or vomiting.”

Eliza considered Miriam relentless and without fear, but there was a queasy tone in her sister-in-law’s voice. David hadn’t wanted her to go, and Eliza had overheard them arguing from a back room of the half-built house while she waited awkwardly out front.
Miriam had won the argument, but Eliza, looking at her sister-in-law with her hand over her mouth, wondered if she regretted that now.

As for Eliza, she’d seen (and smelled) worse, but the sheer number of rotting carcasses, desiccated hides, and bleached skulls, along with the pervading stench, was enough to make her second-guess their timing. They should have waited until morning, for daylight and hopefully a cleansing breeze.

Eliza turned her flashlight on a sheep skull, then a dead horse, or maybe a donkey—hard to say, since the body had dried to a husk. “Whatever happened here happened more than once. What did Agent Fayer say again? She’s sure it’s not chemical or radiological?”

“I don’t think she was sure of anything,” Krantz said. “She couldn’t get straight answers from the Pentagon. But her hunch is that it’s environmental.”

“Hope she’s right,” Miriam said. “If this ground is hot and that’s what killed these animals, we’ve already taken a lethal dose of radiation.”

“Or what if Taylor Junior’s chemical weapons killed all these animals?” Eliza said. “Maybe this is where he got the lewisite.”

“Fayer doesn’t think so,” Krantz said.

Krantz had phoned Fayer again before they left Blister Creek to tell her of their plans and ask about the cryptic note at the bottom of her e-mail:
IMPORTANT—site may be contaminated. If you check it out, call me FIRST.
Fayer shared what she knew about the contaminated site and then made a few phone calls. By the time they got to Green River, she had SCBA gear waiting for them at the fire station, together with rebreathers and oxygen tanks. No questions asked.

They stashed the ATVs and hiked the last few miles, each carrying a mask, regulator, and frame. Krantz also hauled the pressure tanks in an oversize duffel bag, which he hefted by the straps in one massive hand as if it weighed little more than a bag of Styrofoam peanuts.

“What exactly did she say?” Eliza asked, hoping to parse Fayer’s words for something new.

“Just what I said. Some environmental contaminant kept making the base workers sick. It was abandoned in the mid-eighties.”

“Let’s keep going,” Miriam said. She swept her flashlight beam across the plain of dead animals. “I don’t know about you, but this rotting smell is making my stomach churn.”

It smelled to Eliza as if they were a few miles downwind of a rendering plant. It was the kind of odor that coats the tongue and clogs in the nostrils—awful, but nothing bitter or cloying that would suggest poison.

They continued on foot.

After leaving Blister Creek, they’d driven north through Panguitch and along Highway 89 until they connected with I-70 East toward Green River. For a time Eliza had almost forgotten the grim purpose of their trip. There was little traffic on the roads, except for one curiously long stretch of Utah National Guard trucks that clogged the freeway for several miles. The weather was clear, and the horizons wide and beautiful as they sliced through central Utah with snowcapped mountains and stunning sandstone reefs always in sight. Miriam sat in the back of the extended cab truck, like a chaperone, while Eliza and Krantz joked and flirted up front. He was in a good mood, full of corny jokes and amusing anecdotes about his time throwing the hammer at USC. He told
one story about sewage backing into the locker room and his best friend wearing a jockstrap like a gas mask that had both women laughing until they cried.

They stopped at a rest area east of Salina, and Eliza met Miriam outside the bathroom, plunking quarters into a vending machine. Miriam glanced at Krantz, who had spread the map across a picnic table about thirty feet away. “He’s crazy about you, you know.”

“Maybe. Sometimes I think he’s just flirting. Whenever I try to encourage him, he backs off.”

“Didn’t look like he was backing off to me. When we saw that dead crow on the side of the road and he made that pun…”

“We never did figure out the
caws
of death,” Eliza said with a smile.

Miriam groaned. “Yeah, that one.”

“It was funny.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was painful. He turns into a big goof ball when he sees you, and you laugh your head off at all his dumb jokes. And you left your hand on his knee.”

“For two seconds,” Eliza said.

“It was at least five. And he was blushing like crazy. He’s in love, Liz. Face it.”

“Maybe. I kind of hope you’re right.”

“That’s what I thought. So what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. It’s been almost a year since he moved to town. He’s terrified that this is the rest of his life. Blister Creek, Utah. Forever.”

“You could leave,” Miriam said. “Both of you, together.”

“You think we should?” she asked, surprised.

“No, you should both get with the program before it’s too late. But you
could
, that’s my point.”

Eliza didn’t know what to say. She’d tried leaving, but it wasn’t so easy to make your way in the real world, and if she moved away, she’d drift. These people she loved—Jacob, Fernie, David, Miriam—would turn into strangers. Forget whether or not she believed in the church, she believed in
them
. But was it fair to Steve to ask him to stay too?

And now, searching in the dark through the bones and hides of dead animals, Eliza thought about the warm, pleasant drive, and it felt like a dream, her memory hazy and with the edges buffed off. Instead, she focused on Miriam’s instructions. The woman had taught Eliza how to use the SCBA gear as Krantz took them south from Green River through an ever-deteriorating network of paved, gravel, and rutted dirt roads that snaked deeper into the desert. Eliza hoped she wouldn’t need it now, in this awful, deadly landscape.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “Let’s call it a night and pick up the search in the morning.”

“Sounds good to me,” Krantz said. “I’ve been thinking that since we parked the ATVs, but I didn’t want to be the first to call it quits.” He glanced down the slope at Miriam, who kept moving, her light sweeping back and forth. “You want to tell her?” he added.

“I heard you,” Miriam said. “We can stop, but I’m not sleeping here. The smell is getting to me.” She started to say something else and then stopped. “Oh, that’s not good. You guys better check this out.”

Eliza’s pulse quickened as she followed Krantz down the hillside, picking her way among the skeletons and rotting hides. Miriam stood in front of a scum-covered pond, her light shining on something dead, white, and bloated. It took Eliza a moment
to realize what she was looking at. When she did, she took a step back, alarmed and disgusted.

“And look over here,” Miriam said. She lifted up a set of white underwear. It was a single piece with the marks of the compass and square stitched over the breast, the horizontal navel mark over the belly, and another line over the right knee. And long underwear, not the shorter versions that the Salt Lake Mormons wore these days.

“That means polygamists, right?” Krantz asked. “Then we’re close. But I don’t see any sort of military base.”

“Good thing too, the way we’re waving these flashlights around,” Miriam said. “All the more reason to make camp and look in the morning. Let’s find high ground, away from the stench, where we can survey the area with binoculars as soon as it’s light.”

“Are we sure there’s still a base standing?” Eliza said. “Why haven’t we stumbled over any outbuildings? Maybe they tore it down years ago, after the Cold War.”

Krantz flashed the light on the dead man in the pool. “That tells me they didn’t.”

“Then where is it? Underground?”

“I’m calling Fayer,” Krantz said. He shrugged off his backpack and took out a satellite phone. He’d picked it up after the debacle in Dark Canyon, where they’d lost cell coverage for hours. You still couldn’t get a signal in a canyon or a place like Witch’s Warts. The satellite phone vastly increased their reach in the cell phone dead zones that blackened most of southern Utah.

Krantz stepped away. “Give me a minute, will you?”

As he walked away from Miriam and Eliza, it took Krantz a moment to realize why he wanted privacy.
You’re embarrassed, that’s why.

Look how far he’d fallen. Reduced to begging, and it was worse than the local badge flashers the FBI agents always mocked, because Krantz wasn’t just a small-town cop, he was a small-town cop in a fundy enclave, a broken-down ex-athlete, his instincts dulled, his judgment suspect.

My god, you’re only thirty. Don’t get carried away.

Still, he knew most of the guys in the agency lost all respect for him when he took the fall for the Kimball murders last year. Fayer claimed her share of the blame—she wasn’t the sort to weasel out of responsibility—but the agency threw the disaster on his shoulders, letting the media savage him like a terrier with a diseased rat. And plenty of people in the agency bought the official story too.

It was just his luck that Agent Sullivan picked up instead of Fayer, his voice crackly and delayed on the other end of the satellite call. “Hey, Sully, it’s Krantz. Fayer there?”

“Krantz? What the hell? We’re on stakeout, man. Who gave you this number?”

Fayer, he wanted to say, but that might get her in trouble. “Buddy in Washington,” he lied. “Put her on. It’s important.”

“How’s the desert? Chambers says you’ve gone Lawrence of Arabia.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve gone native. You’ve moved in with the tribe, learned the language, eaten their magic mushrooms, joined in their sacred dances. Forgot you’re an anthropologist, not a member of the tribe. So when the chief offers up his sweet, virginal, bare-breasted
daughter, marrying her sounds like the most logical thing in the world. What’s the chick’s name? Is she a Kimball or a Christianson?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Sully. Is Fayer there or not?”

He laughed. “Don’t get your magic undies in a bunch. They got you wearing that stuff yet? Oh, calm down,” Sullivan added, this time not to the phone. Krantz heard Fayer snarling something about the magic underwear. “He doesn’t care, do you, buddy?”

“Look, I only need her for a minute. Put her on the phone, will you? It’s an emergency.”

“Need to run a plate on some joyriders? Bust an underage kegger?”

“Sully…”

“Just yanking your chain, dude. Here she is.”

“Fayer here.”

“Sorry to interrupt the stakeout, but—”

She snorted. “We’re staking out Sully’s favorite pizza joint. Forget him, he’s being a jerk is all.”

Yeah, Sully was a jerk. Didn’t mean the guy wasn’t right. Was Krantz ready to spend his life in Blister Creek as a small-town cop? Besides, giving up cigarettes was one thing, but coffee? And some days he wanted to finish the day by tossing back a cold beer. What was wrong with that?