Just at that moment, his cell phone rang. Logan plucked it from his pocket. “Yes?”
“Jeremy?” came the faint, crackly voice. “It’s Randall. Where are you?”
“I’m driving back to Cloudwater.”
“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for the last fifteen minutes. How soon will you be there?”
“I guess I was out of cell reception. Less than half an hour. Why?”
“There’s been another killing.”
Logan felt himself grip the phone tighter. “Like the others?”
“Apparently so. I’m heading there now. Step on it — I’ll pick you up on my way past.” The connection went dead.
Logan slipped the phone thoughtfully back into his pocket. Then he glanced out the window, looking skyward through the thick tangle of tree branches. A full moon, bloated and pale yellow, stared back at him, unblinking.
11
Logan had grabbed a duffel bag from his cabin and met Jessup out at the entrance to Cloudwater, eager to avoid offering its residents the spectacle of an official vehicle with a flashing lightbar. Jessup drove fast down the twisting highway, headlights stabbing into the unrelieved darkness. Infrequently, a small blur of habitation would shoot past the windows. In the indirect dashboard illumination, the ranger’s face was set in a grim mask. He turned down one dirt road, and then another, and Logan quickly grew disoriented by the walls of dark trunks flashing past, the canopy of branches overhead. The cabin of the vehicle was silent save for the occasional squawk of the police radio.
“Where was the body found?” Logan asked at last.
“Near Sand Creek. A hunter found it, traveling along a private inholding on an ATV.”
“Backpacker?”
“I don’t know.”
“Near Desolation Mountain?”
“Closer. Five Ponds Wilderness, maybe four miles from Pike Hollow.”
Now Jessup turned off the road onto something that could barely be called a trail, the heavy truck bouncing and floundering wildly over exposed roots and deep ruts, pushing tall grass and saplings out of the way. Ahead, Logan could make out a faint, flickering glow.
And then, quite suddenly, the forest gave way to a clearing. Just before them was a cluster of vehicles — state police cars, Forest Preserve trucks, an ambulance — parked in a rough semicircle, engines running, headlights converging on a single spot. Jessup slowed, then pulled in beside the closest vehicle.
“Stay in the background,” he told Logan. “But keep your eyes and ears open.”
Jessup got out, and Logan followed him as he walked behind the parked vehicles to a spot where about a dozen men were clustered, speaking together in low tones. Another man, apparently a scene-of-crime officer, was unspooling yellow tape around the large perimeter on which the headlights had converged. The full, bloated moon hung over all.
“CSI?” Jessup asked a fellow ranger.
“Inbound from Plattsburgh. Expected at any moment.”
“Any idea how long the body’s been dead?”
“The ME will give us specifics, but I’d guess twenty-four hours, max.”
“Identification?” Jessup asked.
“Nobody’s touching that body until CSI gets here.” This was spoken by a state trooper with two silver bars on his uniform: a large, burly, no-nonsense man who appeared to be in charge. The trooper looked at Jessup’s fellow ranger, then at Jessup, and then at Logan, who was hanging back in Jessup’s shadow. He glared for a minute, then turned back to the man he’d been talking to: a pudgy, white-faced man in a faded army jacket that, Logan assumed, was the person who had found the victim.
Logan looked over at the body, illuminated in the pitiless beams of the headlights, then after a few brief seconds quickly looked away again. He had seen death before, of course, on numerous occasions, but he had never seen a corpse so violently torn and lacerated. What had once been clothes were now mere strips of blood-soaked ribbons, decorating the surrounding plants like so much crimson confetti. The limbs were broken and cocked at strange angles. Viscera had been pulled from the body cavity and strewn about seemingly at random, soaking the ground in black blood and leaving the chest and peritoneum an empty shell. The face was so shredded as to be unrecognizable.
Sickened, he fell back farther, returned to Jessup’s truck, and stared out at the surrounding landscape. After the bright beams of the headlights, the night forest seemed blacker than ever. He wasn’t sure, but it appeared that the woods beyond the clearing were thinner here. The Five Ponds Wilderness… Logan wondered just how far they were from the Blakeney compound.
Circling around Jessup’s truck, he made his way over the dark and treacherous ground until he came to the edge of the crime scene tape, on the far side from where the others stood, talking quietly. When he was sure the group was ignoring him, he let his duffel slip to the ground and unzipped it. Then he reached in and removed a small device with a digital readout, toggle switches, and a fat adjustable knob: an air ion counter. He held the device out at arm’s length, then swept it in an arc around him, adjusting the knob as he did so. The reading here was barely different from the basal reading he’d taken upon first arriving at Cloudwater: the air ionization was greater by less than 250 ions per cm3. He would also take readings at Pike Hollow and the entrance to the Blakeney compound when he had the chance, but he doubted they would be any more conclusive.
Returning the device to his duffel, he took out another: a trifield EM detector. Once again, he swung the detector in an arc, at last pointing it in the direction of the body and holding it there, carefully observing the analog needle on its VU gauge as he did so. Once again, the readings were inconclusive.
The equipment told him what he had already anticipated. This was not the site of spectral or paranormal activity: what had happened here was all too physical; all too corporeal — the body on the ground before him was bloody, violent proof of that.
Putting the EM detector back into the duffel and zipping it closed, he remained at the periphery of the crime scene tape, still facing the body. As a “sensitive,” a natural empath, he not only had a heightened ability to sense the emotions and feelings of other people, but he could, sometimes, gather a feeling of a place, as well. Normally, this happened when a presence, usually evil, had dwelt in one spot for a long time. However, it was occasionally possible that, when great evil or violence had visited a location even briefly, a vestigial sense of that evil remained — temporarily. Now he closed his eyes, emptying himself of thought and emotion, shutting out the murmur of voices, letting the darkness that surrounded him creep into his mind, waiting for the surroundings, for the dead body splayed before him, to speak; to render up their secrets; to let him know something of what had transpired here.
For several moments he simply stood, mind empty, waiting. And then — abruptly — he went rigid. And he remained so for over a minute until, with a wail of sirens, a paramedic van and two red-painted SUVs — no doubt the CSI team — arrived on scene.
Logan barely noticed. He opened his eyes, and his shoulders slumped wearily. Picking up the duffel, he made his way back to Jessup’s truck, where he got in to await the ranger’s return. He had seen — and sensed — enough for one night.