Extinct (16 page)

“No, doctor. Look like—with your eyes.”

“You didn’t observe it before you sent it over here?”

“Of course I did. I want to hear what it looks like to you.”

“Well, it’s laying on the counter right over here. But you know as well as I do that there are all kinds of reasons why one tooth will look one way and another—”

“Answer me, damn it, Kurt—look at it.”

There was a moment of silence.

“It shows no obvious sign of pitting, Admiral. No sea organisms have penetrated the enamel that we have been able to determine with the preliminary testing. It’s not crusted or brittle in any way.”

Vandiver nodded. “Kurt, it’s as smooth and silky as I remember a little cheerleader’s stomach many years back, isn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know about that, Admiral.”

“I do. Couldn’t be any smoother if it dropped out of a megalodon’s mouth in the last few weeks.”

His intercom buzzed.

“Sir, Ensign Williams is on line two. He told me to break in on your call.”

Vandiver cut Tegtmier off without saying a word.

“Douglas.”

“Sir, you’re not going to believe this.” His voice sounded high-pitched. “There’s a depression not far from the remnants of an old reef, sir. It’s as if it were made by something lying on the bottom. You can see where it wallowed grass under the sand. It’s several feet wide. And there’s another depression.…

“Sir, I think it was made by the tail.”

Vandiver’s pulse surged.

“Sir, there’s nothing else that would make a long depression, is there? Do whales ever lie on the bottom, sir?”

“How long a depression, Douglas?”

“Counting the … if it were a tail … over fifty feet. Sir, at the same place the longer depression ends and the gap starts, to each side of the depression, at that spot I found a barely detectable disturbed area out to the sides—as if something similar to the rungs of a ladder, several ladders, pressed down in the sand at an angle leaning back toward the trench. Doesn’t a shark … a white shark … have some small fins coming from his lower body there?”

“A depression over fifty rungs long,” Vandiver mumbled to himself.

“Sir, does a shark have—”

“Yes. Yes. What about the slashes on the boat?”

“I have someone coming to check on it.”

“Who?”

“A forensic specialist.”

“A forensic specialist?”

“In teeth marks, sir—in rape cases.”

*   *   *

The two boats drifted sideways down the river. The four youngest boys on the team sat back-to-back straddling the lead boat’s center seats, their life preservers lying beside them and their fishing poles held straight out from the sides of the craft, their corks trailing in the brown water passing alongside the boat. Armon sat at the bow, the only one not fishing, his pole leaned against his shoulder.

Fred looked back over the outboard motor to the second boat trailing twenty feet behind and off to the side. San-hi sat in its stern seat with his elbow resting on the throttle arm of the motor and one hand holding his fishing pole out over the side. Paul, after asking if he could ride in the same boat with Edward, sat back-to-back with his newfound friend on the seat in front of San-hi. The remaining member of the team, the older blond brother, sat in the seat past theirs, beyond Fred’s backpack that lay in the bottom of the boat between them, and the cooler of sandwiches and Cokes. Nobody was moving around; everybody sitting still like he had told them. Nevertheless, he cautioned them again: “Be careful now about yanking any of those hooks back in the boat. They’ll snatch an eye out in a second.”

The boats drifted slowly forward.

The sun had already dropped behind the trees on the west bank.

A cork jerked under the water.

Edward yanked up on his pole. A bare hook jumped into the air and plopped back into the water. He said something under his breath and Paul looked over his shoulder and grinned.

“Give them time to take the bait,” Fred called.

Edward lifted his pole and caught the hook swinging back toward him.

A few seconds later, baited again with a minnow, the hook disappeared into the water. The cork ran out away from the side of the boat, tugged twice, then slowly came back in line with the others.

*   *   *

Alan, a pair of cotton pajamas under his arm, a bottle of perfume in one hand and a box of candy in the other, stopped at the glass counter and looked over its top at a woman with blond hair who appeared to be in her early fifties.

“Do you wrap things?” he asked.

She nodded and held her hands out for the items. He handed her the candy and perfume and slipped the pajamas out from under his arm, laying them on the glass. “For a birthday,” he said.

The woman looked at the pajamas. She noticed he didn’t wear a wedding ring. “Not for a wife?” she said.

“No, ma’am.”

She looked at the perfume and box of candy. “I think lingerie might go better with those than pajamas,” she said.

“Not in this case,” he answered, and looked down through the glass. “I need something else special, too.”

She waited.

“For an aunt.”

“Oh.” The woman nodded. “What kind of special?”

“I don’t know. Something nice.”

“But for an aunt—how old?”

“Sixty-two today.”

“Let’s see,” she said, “Perfume, candy, and pajamas—what about some houseshoes?”

He nodded. “And a robe—cotton. Do you have any long earrings—silver that sparkles a lot?”

*   *   *

Ten minutes later, Alan stepped from the front entrance of the Edgewater Mall and walked toward his Jeep. In addition to the gaily wrapped packages, he also carried a thick book on gardening he had bought in the Bookland store. His phone rang as he piled the items on the Jeep’s backseat. He reached to the glove compartment.

“Uh-huh.”

“Sheriff Stark here. I’ve been trying for … never mind. You’ve heard about the latest attack.”

“Sharks?”

“Or one damn big one. In the Sound this time. Not far from Ship Island. Coast Guard found the body. What was left of it—the foot. Medical examiner said it was severed at the ankle by one tooth.”

“Tooth?”

“The shark was that big, he said. He said it had to be a white. I know he’s not a marine expert, but he seemed pretty damn certain of what he was talking about. But whites don’t go up rivers. So do we have bull sharks
and
a white?”

“I want to see the foot.”

“It’s over at the morgue. And, Alan, deputies called in from the Pascagoula. They’ve been out there looking for an Eddie Fuller and Luke Crenshaw, missing after a fishing trip a couple of nights ago. I haven’t talked to the deputies yet. My dispatcher says they’re on the way in. But they found Fuller’s boat and they told the dispatcher it had a line of punctures across its stern. The way he described them I wouldn’t bet they’re not teeth marks. And, Alan, if it is teeth marks, then whites do go up rivers. The way the dispatcher repeated what they said, the marks would have had to come from something with a mouth big enough to swallow an eighteen-wheeler tire whole—bigger.”

“Can you get them on the radio?”

“Hell, I’m not on my radio. I’m at my house. Stopped by to get a hot dog. Hang up and let me get out to the car and I’ll patch us together. Hell, I can’t do that either. The boat they used needed a trailer one of my deputies owned. He’s in his truck. He has a cellular phone with him but I don’t have his number. Hell, hang up and I’ll get it from the dispatcher and have him call you and you can meet me down at the morgue.”

Alan had been so taken aback by the news of another attack and what the sheriff had been saying that he hadn’t taken time to think. But he did now.

“Jonas.”

“Yeah, Alan, I’m getting ready to call him right now.”

“No. Tell him to not worry about calling me. Tell him to get his boat back in the river and find Carolyn’s father. He’s camping out there with a bunch of kids tonight—and they’re going fishing.”

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later Alan turned his Jeep off the interstate onto the frontage road leading toward the blacktop in front of Carolyn’s house.

His phone rang.

“They were in a frigging Quick Stop drinking coffee!” Stark exclaimed. “Left the phone in the truck. They said they know right where Herald and the kids are. At an old beaver dam about two miles upriver from Carolyn’s. They’re on their way. It will take them about fifteen or twenty minutes to get back to the landing and get the boat in the water. Another ten minutes or so to the dam. They should have them on their way out of there in a half hour or so.”

Alan shook his head. “Call your deputies back and tell them to stay where they are. I’m not five minutes from Carolyn’s now. She has a boat. I can be to them in ten minutes. There’s no reason to have anybody else out on the water. You need to get everybody off the water. Don’t ask—order them if you have to.”

“I did that a couple of hours ago. I hate it, but I didn’t even know Mr. Herald was at the dam until Fairley just told me they found some poles there.”

“Poles?”

“There was a rod and reel and a fishing pole left there. Probably belonged to the missing men because Fairley said Fuller’s wife told him her husband fished with a cane pole and the other man with a rod and reel.”

Stark paused a moment.

“Alan, I was thinking they were fishing and the boat capsized and they went into the water and maybe the sharks got them. But they wouldn’t get back in the boat to fish the river, and leave their rod and reel and pole … would they?”

CHAPTER 19

Fred looked at the lights shining from the rear windows of his daughter’s house. If it had been any other time he would have had the boys join with him in serenading her loudly as they drifted past, bringing her laughing outside the house. But he didn’t want to embarrass Paul.

He looked at his grandson, sitting with his back against Edward’s, ignoring the house as it began to pass out of sight behind them. Paul had looked at it only once, and then with his face down toward the water and only his eyes rotating up toward the bank. And then he had looked across his shoulders to make certain none of the boys had noticed.

Fred smiled and flicked the switch that turned on the red stern light mounted on a short aluminum shaft at the rear of the boat. Behind him, San-hi flicked on the stern light of the other craft. A mile back, they had left the part of the river where trees rose from each side of the channel, and now to their east the marshland stretched out seemingly endlessly to their side in the moonlight.

“Can we go into the channels, Papaw Fred?”

Fred looked toward the tall grass. The brackish water in the narrow passageways winding through the marsh did provide the ideal nesting spot for freshwater shrimp, and they in turn attracted everything from bass to saltwater fish, and the large predators like the gar and the alligator who fed equally on the shrimp and the fish attracted by them. It was a place where it was hard not to catch something. But there were problems in fishing there, especially with a bunch of young boys. Fred looked back at them. “I guess we can, if everybody will be careful about not hanging their hooks in the grass. You’ll be jerking them around trying to get them loose and the next thing you know we’ll have a hook stuck in somebody’s ear. Maybe mine.

“And,” Fred added, “if everybody keeps sitting quietly like they’re supposed to. If not, then I’m going to make you put your life preservers back on—whether it’s hot or not.”

*   *   *

Alan forced himself to sit a brief moment in the Jeep after he stopped it in Carolyn’s driveway. He didn’t want to scare her to death. It would be so rare for something big enough to leave teeth marks that size to swim up rivers that an attack could almost be ruled out. The boat had become hung on something that had caused the damage. Something. He stepped out of the Jeep to the pavement and walked toward the front of the house.

Carolyn smiled when she opened the door. She said in a slow voice: “I hope you’re happy … and Daddy, too. I know Paul is—I let him go.”

A nervous sensation passed through his stomach.

Carolyn’s expression changed. “What?”

“It’s nothing to worry about, but—”

“
What,
Alan?”

“There’s been another attack.”

Her face turned ashen.

“Not in the river,” he quickly said. “Out in the Sound. But to be safe I’m going to get Fred to bring the boys back in. I need to use your boat.”

She turned and walked hurriedly toward the telephone at the bookcase. At his questioning expression she said, “I’m going to call him and make sure they’re not already fishing.”

He walked up beside her as she punched in a number. “He keeps his cellular phone with him when he takes the boys camping in case there’s an emergency,” she said.

She lifted the receiver to her ear, listened a moment, and frowned. She lowered it and began rapidly punching in the number again. Alan noticed her hand tremble, but she finished the number and lifted the phone back to her ear. A moment later she lowered it again and shook her head.

“It keeps saying it’s not in use.”

He took the receiver from her. “What’s the number?” She told him and he punched it in, taking care to go slower than she had with each digit.

“We’re sorry, the cellular customer you are attempting to reach is either not available or not in the service area. Please try your call again later.”

“You certain that’s the right number?”

She nodded. “Let me call Mother.”

In a moment Carolyn had her on the line. “Mother”—she closed her eyes as she forced her tone to sound normal—“did Daddy take his phone with him this time?”

It was several seconds before her mother finished with her answer. Carolyn said, “No, I thought I might call and check on Paul. Yes, Mother, I let him go. No, I’m not worried, I … Mother, a friend of mine is at the door. I’ll call you back later.” She replaced the receiver without waiting for a response.

“Mother said he leaves it off unless he has to use it,” she said, starting toward the back door as she spoke. “She said he’ll call before they go to bed tonight. She obviously hasn’t heard about the attack today.” She shook her head as she pushed the screen door open and started out into the yard. “I’ve been catching up on my bookwork all day. I usually have the TV on but I…” She was walking so fast she was nearly running. “How are we going to know which way they went?”