Mitchell nodded. William Steel was a good man and an undoubted patriot, but he was also ruthless in maintaining secrecy at the CIA and hated the interventions made by Congress in the past. Mitchell wasn’t sure just how far Steel would go to ensure his agency remained free from interference, but he was damned sure the general would not be made a patsy for a previous director’s indiscretions.
‘Who’s the enforcer for all of this?’ Mitchell asked as Foster turned to leave. ‘Steel must have somebody on the ground picking up the pieces if everything goes south.’
Foster’s hand rested on the door handle as he replied.
‘I don’t know, but keep your people in sight. The administration is maintaining complete deniability for this little clean-up operation of Steel’s. If his back is forced to the wall, Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez are likely to end up as targets themselves.’
10
The chartered Beech Twin Bonanza thumped down onto the grass runway and rumbled along beside the tiny town of New Meadows. Ethan peered out of rain-streaked windows at the soaring mountains nearby, their peaks lost in dense wreaths of gray cloud and the fields below sodden and damp.
A light drizzle had enveloped the airplane all the way up from Friedman Memorial Airport, the thick clouds obscuring Ethan’s view of the mountainous and forested terrain as the pilot guided them over tumultuous bumps in the air. The mountains caused violent updrafts and downdrafts that tossed the little aircraft about as though it were a leaf in a gale.
Ethan knew that Idaho was not a densely populated state, but even so the vast tracts of wilderness that had stretched into the gloomy distance beneath them had seemed so immense that he could not imagine how one might begin systematically searching it for any creature unknown to science, much less one that had made these lonely forests its home for untold millennia.
‘We’re digging ourselves a hole with this one,’ Lopez said, peering out of her window as the aircraft taxied off the runway and bumped along a track. ‘A big, damp, cold hole.’
‘Sheriff’s picking us up from here,’ Ethan replied as he unbuckled from his seat. ‘Maybe there have been more developments since we left Chicago.’
The pilot shut down the aircraft’s engines, and as Ethan clambered out of the airplane he saw a portly sheriff ambling his way across the rutted, rain-sodden soil toward them.
‘Earl Carpenter,’ he introduced himself, ‘Riggins Sheriff’s Department. Welcome to Idaho.’
He said it with a cheery smile and a twinkling eye, and Ethan wondered whether the drizzle and cold was something folk just got used to up here. The sheriff proved himself a helpful soul, carrying their bags to his patrol car before they climbed in and set off north on the U-95.
‘Riggins is about thirty-five miles out,’ Earl informed them as he drove away from the airport. ‘Say, where did you guys come from? All I got told was that you were working for the government or something?’
‘Private contractors,’ Ethan replied by way of an explanation, ‘the FBI don’t have the manpower to dedicate a team to this investigation, so we help fill in for them.’
Earl Carpenter frowned as he glanced in his mirror at Lopez.
‘You qualified for this kind of work, ma’am?’
‘Worked homicide as a detective in DC for six years,’ Lopez replied without bridling. ‘Ethan here is ex-marines, recon.’
Earl raised an eyebrow and smiled apologetically at them. ‘I guess that’s good enough for me.’
‘What’s the story so far?’ Ethan asked. ‘You’ve got two dead bodies, another supposed dead but still missing and a kid who swears that his brother was killed by an animal, right?’
‘To cut it short,’ Earl agreed, ‘but there’s a whole lot about this that doesn’t fit right.’
‘Tell us,’ Lopez said.
Earl puffed his cheeks and blew the air out as he drove.
‘Hard to know where to start. I get me a call about a local lady whose son’s been found hanging in the garage.’
‘Randy MacCarthy,’ Ethan said.
‘So I goes down there,’ Earl went on, ‘and I check out the scene before the county coroner gets called in. Sure enough, Randy’s swinging in the wind. There’s a stool underneath him and he’d been dead for a few hours.’
‘How did you know?’ Lopez asked.
‘Body was cold,’ Earl replied. ‘His neck weren’t broken, so he died on the rope.’
‘Any history of prior convictions?’ Ethan asked. ‘Anything that might motivate this kid to take his own life?’
‘He’d been busted a couple of times for possession but nothing serious, got held by the local police department for forty-eight hours but no charges were filed as he wasn’t dealing,’ Earl replied. ‘Made a lot of claims about conspiracies and said that he had evidence of government agents working in and around Riggins. Watched too many TV shows, you ask me. But there’s no evidence of foul play. I took some photographs before forensics moved in, and Randy’s post-mortem confirmed death by asphyxiation.’
‘You got copies of the photographs on you?’ Lopez asked from the rear seat.
Earl reached down into the side pocket of his door and pulled out a manila envelope before passing it to the back seat. Ethan watched as Lopez pulled out a wad of six-by-eight images and began sifting through them. If there was anything unusual about the crime scene, she would notice it soon enough.
‘What about the other brothers?’ Ethan asked. ‘And the ranger who was killed?’
Earl Carpenter rested one arm on the sill of his door as he drove. Ethan noticed that the hills around them were getting steeper as they traveled, thickly forested with pines or coarse grass, and the roadside flanked by occasional shacks and game crossings.
‘Well, that there’s a mystery. Cletus and Jesse go off huntin’ out in Nez Perce Forest, and it turns out that the ranger, a local man called Gavin Coltz, spotted them tracking a game elk. Season’s out right now so he decided to follow them and catch them in the act. He was a tenacious soul, Gavin, and he stuck with them for almost four hours before they tried to take their shot out near Fox Creek.’
‘Then they get attacked?’ Lopez guessed.
‘By a bear,’ Earl confirmed. ‘Gavin is killed, so is Cletus, and Jesse runs for his life. Turns up next morning in Riggins lookin’ for all the world like he was dead already.’
‘You don’t believe his story about a monster killing his brother?’ Ethan asked.
Earl Carpenter looked Ethan in the eye.
‘I’ve been working out here since I was a boy,’ he said, ‘and I’ve seen a lot of people come close to dying after attacks by bears and cougars. This kid, he din’ have no reason to claim what he did, that some kind of other creature had at them. In all my years I’ve never seen fear like that in the face of a man, but then if he’d just killed two members of his family then I’d guess he’d be all shook up. Truth is, I don’t know what to believe.’
Ethan glanced up at the foggy mountains looming either side of the car as it drove between the steep hillsides. ‘It’s a mystery all right.’
‘It’s not the only mystery,’ Lopez said from the rear seat.
‘What you got?’ Ethan asked.
‘You say you found Randy MacCarthy hanging just like this?’ Lopez asked Earl Carpenter. ‘And you hadn’t touched him at all?’
‘Exactly like that,’ Earl confirmed. ‘I only touched him once to search for a pulse. Needless to say I din’ find one, and his body was cold.’