Revenant (24 page)

“I understand.”

“Here is a run-down of the most important things you need to know about that cursed stone. In order for it to function effectively, the heart of the deceased must be stored inside the ceremonial wooden box. It must be placed directly next to the stone. Whoever possesses the box then controls the actions of the deceased, also known as the revenant. The revenant’s body takes on great strength, much greater than what the person would have maintained while alive.”

“I can testify to that,” Mike said. “I had a run-in with a revenant just a couple of hours ago.”

“And you’re still alive? You should consider yourself extremely fortunate, Chief McMahon.”

“I do,” he agreed. “But here’s what I really need to know: despite the fact he’s up and walking around, the revenant is still technically dead, correct?’

“Yes.”

“And as such, isn’t the revenant’s body subject to the normal decomposition process? How long will it be before his body decomposes to the point it will simply stop functioning?”

“If your plan is to wait until the revenant’s body decomposes and he falls over, you might want to reconsider, Chief. The normal decomposition process does not apply. Oh, sure, the skin will begin to slough off and the revenant will smell like last week’s garbage, but part of the stone’s effect on the body is to slow that natural process. It doesn’t stop entirely, and yes, eventually the body
will
simply give out, but in the meantime, the revenant can and will do a lot of damage if not stopped.

“You see, Chief, the problem is that the brain of a revenant is affected differently than the rest of the body, at least that was what Don told me. After the heart is taken from the corpse and united with the stone, reanimating the body, you have an abomination: an unnatural, undead being. But for all intents and purposes, it is still the victim—the revenant’s personality initially will be more or less true to what it was before he died.

“However, as time passes, the decomposition of the brain’s tissue causes changes in the revenant, and none of them for the better. He becomes more aggressive, less subject to the normal tendencies we all have to curb our animalistic side. Mood swings will become more and more pronounced, and behavior less predictable, until eventually, before the body breaks down, the revenant will devolve into a killing machine, wreaking havoc, destroying anything in its path.”

Kai Running Bear stopped talking and Mike remained silent. Finally she said, “Are you still there, Chief?”

“I’m here, ma’am, I’m just trying to comprehend the impact of all of this. It’s a pretty bleak picture, if what you just told me is all true.”

“Oh, it’s true, all right, but that’s just the bad news. And while I’ll admit the bad news is quite horrific, there is good news as well.”

“What might that be?”

“The good news is that no matter how badly the revenant’s brain devolves, he
still remains
completely under the control of his master, the person who victimized him and who controls the sacred stone. The revenant is compelled to comply with his master’s wishes, fully and to the best of his ability, to the exclusion of all else. So, while he may be uncontrollable and unstoppable on his own, the way to shut him down is to find and control the master, the person who retains the sacred stone. That is the key to stopping your nightmare, and mine, Chief McMahon.”

“Oh my God,” Mike muttered under his breath.

“What is it?”

“Earl Manning—that’s the name of the revenant—is in control of the stone. He somehow managed to kill his master and gain possession of the box containing the stone and his heart. We believe he still has it in his possession. How do we stop him in that scenario?”

“The revenant is controlling his own actions?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Then, may your God help you, Chief McMahon. To my knowledge, that scenario has never occurred. I don’t believe it will be possible to stop the revenant now, short of dropping a bomb on his head, and I’m not even certain that would do it. The blood will flow, Chief, and lots of it. You are going to have a virtually unstoppable killing machine on your hands very soon, if you don’t already.”

Again the silence dragged out, sadness and regret evident on Kai Running Bear’s end of the line, desperation and fear on Mike’s. “I just have one last question for you, Mrs. Running Bear, and then I’ll let you go,” he said softly.

“What is it?”

“If your husband knew how dangerous this stone was, why didn’t he get rid of it? Why didn’t he bury it somewhere in the desert where it could never be found? Why take on this enormous responsibility?”

“We don’t always choose our responsibilities, Chief.” She paused. “Sometimes they choose us.”

38

The plan had been for Sharon to wait at the hospital. Mike would put Pete Kendall in charge of the investigation at the scene of the murder as soon as he could and then drive to Orono to interrogate their prisoner.

It was a simple plan.

But the way Sharon saw it, there were two problems with that plan: 1) There was no way of knowing how long it would take for Kendall to get to the crime scene, and thus no way to know how long it would take Mike to leave for Orono, and, 2) She could not stand the idea of cooling her heels away from the action while there was real police work to be done.

A young, movie-star handsome doctor had examined Raven Tahoma and informed Sharon that while the young woman’s injuries did not appear life-threatening, she had suffered a fairly serious concussion and per hospital policy would be admitted overnight for observation.
Sure,
Sharon thought, looking the man up and down cynically.
I know how this works. She batted her eyelashes at you and complained about how the bad old police were out to get her, and now you’re playing knight in shining armor.

The last thing Sharon wanted was to sit here accomplishing nothing. But she knew someone who wouldn’t mind hanging out in Orono doing guard duty for their beautiful and sexy prisoner: Paskagankee Police Patrol Officer Harley Tanguay. While Tanguay was a marginally capable officer, Sharon knew he would have no problem sitting inside the comfortable confines of Mercy Hospital, camped outside their prisoner’s door reading a newspaper, sipping coffee and flirting with nurses.

She knew she should have checked in with Mike and gotten his okay before calling Harley. But the chief had plenty of things on his plate right now, all of which were higher on the list of priorities than swapping out officers assigned a boring duty like babysitting their witness/suspect while she dozed in a hospital bed.

Besides, asking permission meant giving the boss the opportunity to say no, and Sharon had long subscribed to the theory that it was better to apologize later than to ask permission now. So she had called Harley, and he agreed to take her place outside Raven Tahoma’s room, just as she had known he would. Forty minutes later, about the time the patient was settling comfortably into her bed, TV remote in one hand and plastic cup of ginger ale in the other, Harley came strolling into the hospital and Sharon was free.

Now she piloted her cruiser north, anxious to get back to Paskagankee but thankful for a little time to think. The story told by Raven was a wild one, one she would have dismissed out of hand just a year ago as the nonsensical raving of a drugged up or delusional idiot. Now, thanks to the benefit of personal experience, she knew events of a paranormal or supernatural nature actually could happen; that the world was far from being as cut-and-dried as most people were comfortable believing.

She left the Orono city limits behind and the road gradually began to narrow, funneling from a wide, well-maintained avenue inside the thriving college town, down to a crumbling testament to overtaxed state and municipal budgets before she had made it halfway to Paskagankee. Thankfully, though, vehicular traffic also began to dry up, leaving Sharon free to drive without having to worry too much about the conditions around her, giving her the opportunity to scrutinize their prisoner’s bizarre account.

A sacred Native American stone, bestowing on its owner the ability to reanimate the corpses of the recently deceased. A shocking betrayal, allowing a power-hungry con man to steal the stone and then attack and kidnap one of the richest men in the world. The law of unintended consequences, rearing its ugly head and allowing the reanimated corpse to strike back against his tormentor, killing the man and then escaping with a hostage.

It was a bizarre story, as far-fetched as it was horrifying.

And Sharon believed all of it. Why wouldn’t she? She had known Earl Manning for a brief period in her life when, as a teenage girl, she was adrift and rudderless, using alcohol and drugs to escape a reality where she felt unwanted and unloved, her adoring mother dead and her uninterested father too lost in his own grief and his own struggles with addiction to care for a confused daughter.

She had lost her way, growing into the prototypical wild child, trading sex for drugs and booze, concerned only with scoring her next high. She knew now it was a miracle she hadn’t died or been infected with HIV or some other communicable disease. She had been saved from herself by Paskagankee Police Chief Wally Court, a man who had seen something worthwhile inside her, giving her guidance and setting her on a path which would eventually lead to her present career in law enforcement.

She looked back on those years with a mixture of shame and disbelief, struggling to reconcile the person she had been back then with the person she was now. But it was during that period in her life that she had come in contact with Earl Manning, trading a night of sex for alcohol in what had been one of many one-night stands. Her recollections of that night were fuzzy, thanks to more beer than a petite high school junior should ever drink, but she felt certain she would have gotten some sense of the man’s innate evil if Manning had been comfortable with committing murder.

She remembered him as unmotivated and unclean, a typical small-town loser willing to ply an underaged girl with liquor to get into her pants. Her impression of Manning was as negative as her memories of that night, as her memories of most of her teen years, but still she had a hard time believing he was the type of person who would wind up involved in kidnapping and murder, at least not of his own volition.

Of course, people could change. Sharon knew that; she was a living, breathing testament to that fact. But morphing from a lazy, unmotivated drunken slob to a cold-blooded, calculating killer in the space of just a few years struck Sharon as too unlikely. She could believe he might get so trashed at the Ridge Runner he would drive off the road and kill himself or someone else—that was definitely believable, likely, even—but the scenario she had seen at the rental home, Max Acton lying in a pool of his own blood, throat torn out like he had been attacked by a rabid dog, just didn’t fit.

She remembered a discussion with Mike last fall, when she was instrumental in convincing his relentlessly logical mind to accept the possibility of a paranormal aspect to the murders plaguing Paskagankee. The clincher had been a line from a Sherlock Holmes story that seemed to fit here as well: Eliminate the impossible and whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.

Manning had been missing for well over a week, his whereabouts a mystery not just to his mother, but to his drinking buddies at the Ridge Runner, where no one could remember him going more than two consecutive days without holding down a barstool. A mysterious couple show up in town around the same time Manning disappears, renting a crumbling home whose only redeeming value is its remote location. Manning resurfaces at the scene of a grisly murder, and the only available witness tells a tale of the paranormal.

And the smell, that was the kicker. The stench of death permeated the basement of the home where Raven Tahoma had been found and where she had rescued Mike from the freezer. ton’s body could not have been responsible for such a smell, his corpse was fresh and had barely begun to decompose, and no other bodies had been discovered.

But a man who had been killed and then frozen a week before, only to be reanimated a couple of days ago, could certainly be responsible. And Sharon found herself believing that was exactly what had happened.

Her cell phone rang and she jumped. She glared accusingly at the phone lying on the seat next to her, then snatched it up and punched the “Send” button, seeing Mike’s name on the caller ID.

“Yeah?” It came out harsh and scratchy.

“Sharon, it’s Mike. Our witness-slash-prisoner resting comfortably?”

She thought about telling him she had switched places with Harley and was on her way back to town, but decided it would be too easy for him to send her back to the hospital if she mentioned it now. She would wait until she arrived at the crime scene to let him know. He might be angry—probably would be, in fact—but at least she would avoid babysitting duty.

“Yes, she’s fine,” she answered. “Is Pete there yet?”

“No, he should be getting here any minute.”

“You sound preoccupied.” Sharon had learned to read Mike’s moods pretty effectively over the last few months and it was clear to her that something was eating at him.

“You wouldn’t believe the conversation I just had.”

“Try me. You called Don Running Bear, didn’t you?”

“Yes and no. Don Running Bear is dead; he didn’t survive the raid Raven’s psycho boyfriend made on their home to steal the sacred stone. Acton either never told Raven her father’s friend was dead or he didn’t know. Either way, the guy’s gone and unless there’s a second sacred stone we don’t know about, he’s not coming back.”

Sharon’s heart sank. “So you didn’t get any answers to your questions about the stone.”

“Well, that’s not exactly true. It turns out Don had confided many, if not most, of the secrets of the stone to his wife over the years. She seemed to have extensive knowledge of it. Unfortunately, none of the information she passed along was encouraging.”

“What did she say?”