The Mad and the MacAbre (14 page)

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

—
George Bernard
Shaw

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was
convincing the world
he didn’t exist.

—
Charles Baudelaire, The
Generous Gambler

The great enemy of truth is often not the
lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent,
persuasive and unrealistic.

—
John Fitzgerald
Kennedy

October 29th, 2010

Saturday

Rand Armstrong had picked up the tracks in the fresh
dusting of snow two miles east of the edge of his property on Rocky
Mountain National Forest land. There had been no mistaking them:
three-lobed heel pads; teardrop-shaped toes in uneven lines; no
appreciable claw marks; and the feathery halos surrounding the
prints from the fringe fur. No doubt this was the mountain lion he
was after. Damn prints were nearly the size of a tiger’s. No way
this wasn’t the bastard that had snuck over his fence and torn
apart his huacaya alpacas. He’d already lost three in as many
weeks, and he wasn’t about to risk losing any more. Breeding those
fluffy llamas may have sounded like a pathetic way to eke out an
existence, but he was pulling twenty grand a head. Even with that
kind of income, he sure as hell wasn’t about to blow another ten
thousand bucks electrifying nearly five miles of fencing like the
Forest Service suggested. If they weren’t going to come out and
relocate that blasted cat, then he was just going to have to take
care of the problem himself.

He’d been hunting big game in these very
hills his entire life, but he had to admit the mountain lion posed
more of a challenge than his standard prey of deer and elk. The
cougars were more like big horn sheep in the sense that rather than
skirting rock formations and seeking the route of least resistance,
they just as often went up and over. There were points where he
lost the tracks entirely under the dense canopy of pines where the
snow didn’t reach the ground and in the clusters of scrub oak where
the lion could wriggle through and under the branches while he
couldn’t, but it never took him very long to pick them back up
again. Best he could figure, the prints were about two hours old,
which put the mountain lion passing through here right about half
an hour before sunrise. It would have been back in its den before
first light, so he had to be getting close.

A steep embankment rose about a mile ahead.
The Rockies beyond were all gray rock and snow above timberline,
where only sporadic pines grew at severe angles from the slope.

Rand paused to rub the blood back into his
stubbled cheeks and stomp some feeling into his toes. His Gore-Tex
camouflaged jumpsuit may have helped him blend into the forest, but
it was useless against the frigid wind, which knifed right through
his skin and into his bones. He imagined how red his hands must
have been inside his gloves. His trigger finger still worked just
fine though. A pull from his hip flask and he was on the move
again.

He slung the Remington Model 70, Sporter
Deluxe .30-06 off his back and carried it across his chest.

Not much longer now.

One quick shot and the deed would be done.
Dragging the carcass back down to the ranch would be a bitch, but
he looked forward to incinerating that infernal cat for all the
trouble it had caused him. Maybe he’d even cut a chop or two off
its flank. It did butcher his alpacas after all. Turnabout was only
fair.

He lightened his tread on the detritus and
advanced at a crouch. Mountain lions weren’t as cumbersome as elk.
They could distribute their weight on those fat paws to such a
degree that they could practically float across the snow. He was
going to need to hear everything he possibly could. And unlike a
deer, if he cornered it without knowing, it could blindside him
with a barrage of slashing claws and sharp teeth.

More likely than not, it was curled up in
its den licking alpaca blood from between its toes, but he wasn’t
about to take that for granted. The walk back was more than long
enough to bleed to death.

A skeletal aspen tree bore the telltale
gouges from the cat’s claws. Twenty feet up there was a smear of
dried blood on the trunk to mark the passing of a squirrel.

The forest faded to the left as the valley
wall rose to the right, growing steeper with each step. Large
boulders had fallen from the lip above to line the base of the
embankment, creating dark crevices and caves, any one of which
would have proven a suitable temporary den. At least mountain lions
were solitary creatures by nature and he didn’t have to worry about
stumbling into a dozen of them. Besides, he only wanted the
one.

He pulled back the bolt silently, chambered
a round, and eased it back home. Seating the butt against his
shoulder, he slowed his advance and scoured the hillside along the
barrel of the rifle. The wind tapered and the world around him
assumed an unnatural calm.

Movement drew his eye from up the rocks to
the right. He knelt behind a boulder and made himself small.
Nuzzling his cheek against the stock, he looked through the scope
and traced the contours of the haphazardly assembled rock slope
with the crosshairs.

A flash of white, and then it was gone.

Slowing his breathing, he steadied the scope
on the spot where he had seen it.

His finger found the trigger and gently
pressed it into the sweet spot. Even the slightest pressure now
would do the job.

He saw the black triangle lining the ear
first, and then the creature raised its head. Golden fur over the
smooth crown of the skull, a cold black eye, white muzzle—

Crack!

A spray of crimson raced up the rocks behind
the lion as it disappeared from view.

The report echoed through the valley over
the tinny ringing in his ears.

Rand rose, chambered another bullet, and
advanced cautiously. The scope never left his eye as he crawled up
and over the obstacles in his way. He attuned his ears to even the
slightest sound, but only heard his own tread. When he reached the
boulder, he leaned over it and looked down. The cat was sprawled on
its right side. Its left front paw carved at the ground in
twitching movements. Blood drained down the rock behind it toward
the crater where its left ear had once been. The better part of its
cranium was gone, and its left eye and the surrounding fur were
scorched.

It shivered and made a meek mewling sound,
then became still.

Rand climbed over the rock and pressed the
barrel of the rifle to the soft flesh behind its front leg for a
quick heart shot if it even flinched. He kicked its rear haunches,
but it made no effort to move. One more kick for good measure and
he lowered the rifle.

He smiled and slung the gun back over his
shoulder.

“
Sixty thousand dollar
cat,” he said. “Damn.”

He kicked it again…and again.

Momentarily satisfied, he shoved his hand
into his pocket and produced the big game strap he used to haul
deer up by their hooves to be gutted. He looped it around the
mountain lion’s back legs. It was nearly as large as a wolf, so he
was going to have to drag it.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the mouth
of a small cave barely large enough to accommodate a grown man in
fetal position. There was a collection of broken bones near the
opening, most likely from a rabbit. Beside them was another, much
larger bone. He felt a surge of anger again at the thought of it
belonging to one of his alpacas and stormed over to
investigate.

He bent over to grab it and froze.

It wasn’t an alpaca bone.

Not even close.

“
Son of a bitch,” he
whispered.

He was totally screwed now.

November 4th, 2010

Thursday

“
Office hours don’t start for
another twenty minutes,” Gabriel Hartnell said without looking up
from the following day’s lesson plan. He was going to have to
insert an image of staphylococcus aureus into the Power Point
presentation as an introduction to those depicting MRSA if he
expected his students to follow the lecture.

He heard the door close and again focused on
the task at hand. There was only so much depth he could provide in
a two hundred-level Intro to Pathology class, but he couldn’t glaze
over the actual pathology portion. Maybe he simply wasn’t cut out
for this teaching thing after—

An impatient sigh.

“
I said come back in—,”
Gabriel started, but his words died at the sight of the man, who
waited just across the chipped oak desk from him. Rather than a
timid undergrad with the fear of potential failure etched upon his
face, he stared into the eyes of a man in his early thirties with
thinning black hair and several days’ worth of stubble. He appeared
so sleep-deprived he could have passed for a grad student. Gabriel
hadn’t seen the man in more than a year, and honestly hadn’t
expected to ever again. The man’s mere presence elicited a fresh
wave of the pain Gabriel still struggled to hide, even from
himself.

“
Been a while, professor,”
the man said. He wore a charcoal polyester suit, the creases
betraying how long it had been since he had last changed it. His
pale blue tie hung loosely around his neck. A tuft of curly hair
peeked out over the unbuttoned collar of his shirt.

Gabriel rose so quickly he knocked his notes
to the floor and banged his hip in his hurry to get out from behind
the desk. He proffered his hand and the two men shook abruptly.
There were so many thoughts racing through Gabriel’s mind that he
couldn’t formulate any of them into words. He could only think of
one reason why Brent Cavenaugh would have driven all the way out to
Boulder to see him face-to-face. His stomach clenched and he felt
the room start to spin. He steadied himself against the edge of the
desk and ran his fingers through his shaggy, sandy-blonde hair,
slicking it back with the cool sweat beading his forehead.

“
Can we sit down?”
Cavenaugh asked. He gestured to the twin chairs in front of the
desk.

Gabriel nodded and they sat side by side. He
felt the heat of Cavenaugh’s hazel eyes upon him, but couldn’t
force himself to raise his eyes to match the stockier man’s stare.
Cavenaugh was with the Denver Police Department, a detective with
the Pattern Crimes Bureau of the Criminal Investigations Division,
and had a way of looking through a man rather than at him. While
Gabriel had an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the
University of Denver and a master’s in Cell and Molecular Biology
from Colorado State, Cavenaugh had joined the force after earning
an associate’s degree in Criminal Justice from Front Range
Community College, and what he hadn’t learned in the police
academy, he had picked up in a hurry on the streets. The only thing
they had in common was the overwhelming sense of loss, the hole in
their lives that the past two years hadn’t begun to fill.

Gabriel tried to ask the question out loud,
but couldn’t find the strength to voice it.

Did they find the bodies?

“
I want to show you
something,” Cavenaugh said. He reached under his jacket and
produced a manila folder, which he passed to Gabriel. After a
moment of expectant silence, Gabriel opened the folder. “Tell me
what you see in that first picture.”

It looked like the crater-pocked surface of
the moon with a long, segmented mealworm crawling across it.

“
You’ll have to do better
than that,” Gabriel said. “There’s always at least one student
every semester who thinks he can stump me with this. It’s an
unclassified extremophile found on a meteorite speculated to have
originated on Mars. The closest living microorganism we can find on
Earth is a halophile, a species of haloarchaea. What does this have
to do with anything?”

“
Look at the next
picture.”

Gabriel flipped the page and studied the
image, which showed five of the microbes on a lattice-like
substrate. Some were curled into crescents while others were
elongated.

“
And the next,” Cavenaugh
said.

The following picture had the exact same
background, however the microorganisms had assumed different shapes
and positions. He noticed a time stamp on the bottom of the image
and turned back to the previous page. It had been stamped only one
minute prior.

“
They’re alive,” Gabriel
whispered. “That’s impossible.”

“
You aren’t the first to
say that.”

Gabriel finally met Cavenaugh’s eyes. The
expression on the man’s face was unreadable.

“
What aren’t you telling
me?” Gabriel asked.

“
Those images were taken
through an electron microscope on samples of bone prepared from a
human femur that was found just outside of Pine
Springs.”

Gabriel drew a sharp breath.

“
DNA testing confirmed it
was Nathan Dillinger’s.”

“
Did they find anything
else?”

“
You mean anything
belonging to one of our sisters? No. Just the one bone. No other
parts of Nathan Dillinger or the other six.”

“
Are they investigating the
site where they found it? I mean, if they discovered one bone, then
surely—”

“
Calm down, Gabriel,”
Cavenaugh said. His eyes softened and he placed a hand on Gabriel’s
shoulder. “They scoured the National Forest for two straight days
and came up with nothing. I would have told you at the time, but I
didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“
I don’t understand any of
this. How did this microorganism that by all rights shouldn’t even
be alive get onto the disembodied femur of one of the people who
disappeared with our sisters? Where’s the rest of Nathan, and where
is Stephanie?”