Rikard shook his head as he regained control of his breathing and discreetly massaged his wounded crotch.
‘Don’t know,’ he wheezed. ‘Probably cleaning out old data.’
Natalie shook her head.
‘No need, there was hardly anything here anyway, maybe just a few kilobytes of text.’
Rikard stood up slowly as he tried to reassemble his dignity.
‘You sure got a quick hand, honey, I like a firm touch.’
‘So do I,’ she replied, without looking at him, ‘which is why you repulse me.’
Rikard’s hastily erected smile collapsed as he sneered at her.
‘Some people got no sense of humour,’ he muttered, and walked away.
Ben Consiglio grinned up at her. ‘You sure got a way with folk. He’s your boss, remember?’
‘He’s an ass,’ she replied as she stared at the monitor screen for a moment longer. Fact was, Ben now knew that this wasn’t the first time that she’d tried to help Ethan in his search for Joanna Defoe. Ben’s smile melted into understanding.
‘You got a stake in this, Nat?’
She nodded. No sense in messing around now. Besides, she trusted Ben.
‘She’s my brother’s fiancée. I was trying to keep this under the radar.’
‘Until that dick showed up,’ Ben nodded, jabbing a thumb in Rikard’s direction.
She glanced across the office to see Rikard now back at his desk, his pallid cheeks flushed red with embarrassment and impotent fury.
Last she’d heard, Rikard was separated from his wife. No children. The fat idiot had somehow managed to snare himself a spouse and then insulted her by playing out of school, or at least trying to, with a succession of co-workers. Lived alone now and never got invited to after-works drinks. She’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a jerk, and not for the first time she wondered why people found it necessary to devote such energy to pissing others off. Despite her anger with her brother for all that he had done, she could only admire him as a man.
She looked back down at Ben.
‘Can you do some digging, find out why the file on Joanna was closed or by whom?’
‘Sure,’ Ben replied. ‘What’s your brother’s name? I’ll start there.’
13
There was only one chief jailer and seven detention officers staffing the jail, which given Idaho’s low population density Ethan did not find surprising. Whereas back home in Chicago the jails were a teeming mass of drunks, hobos and gang hoods filled far beyond their design capacity, out here in north-central Idaho there were an average of just eighteen inmates each day passing through the system.
Earl Carpenter took them to an interview room with a one-way mirror, where Ethan and Lopez waited with obligatory Styrofoam cups of coffee until Earl returned with an inmate shackled to his wrist and led him into the next room.
Jesse MacCarthy was a thin, pale-looking kid with messy black hair and eyes sunken beneath the weight of too many sleepless nights. He looked up briefly from behind the veil of hair at the mirror behind which Ethan and Lopez watched and then dropped his gaze away again. Earl directed him to a chair and the kid sank into it without resistance. Earl’s voice reached them through a speaker set into the wall.
‘You want to talk again about what happened?’
Jesse sat silent and still, his dark eyes staring into nothingness.
‘Shock,’ Lopez murmured as she watched the kid.
‘Traumatic stress,’ Ethan confirmed with a nod. ‘I saw something similar once, after engagements with the Taliban. Some of the guys had that thousand-yard stare of terror.’
‘Jesse,’ Earl said to the unresponsive kid. ‘I can’t help you if you won’t speak to me.’
‘He’s closed up,’ Lopez went on. ‘He might go into denial if we don’t break him.’
Ethan nodded, and grabbed his coffee. ‘Let’s go.’
They walked out of the observation room, and Ethan knocked on the interview room door before walking in with Lopez.
‘Jesse, this is Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez,’ Earl introduced them. ‘They’re trying to figure out what happened and how to help you.’
Jesse peered up at Ethan but said nothing. Lopez smiled down at him.
‘We’re not cops,’ she said.
‘You don’t look like cops,’ he observed in a voice that might once have been bold but was now scoured of confidence. ‘Why would you want to help me?’
‘Because you didn’t kill your brothers,’ Ethan said.
A glimmer of hope appeared in Jesse’s eyes.
‘They don’ believe me,’ he said, glancing briefly at the sheriff.
‘It’s not an easy story to believe, son,’ Earl said.
Ethan slid into a seat at the table and looked at Jesse. ‘You ever heard of a giant oarfish?’ he asked. When Jesse shook his head, Ethan went on. ‘It’s about sixty feet long and looks like a sea serpent, like one of those things that sailors used to swear attacked ships hundreds of years ago. People didn’t believe them, until they caught one. Now there’s a skeleton of one hanging in a university in Chicago.’
Lopez sat down next to Ethan and leaned forward on the table. She took Jesse’s hand, her rough-edged persona melting as she smiled at the kid.
‘We need to know what happened, Jesse, what you saw up in those mountains. Whatever it is, we need to prove it exists before the state of Idaho decides that you’re insane and puts you behind bars for the next fifty years.’
Jesse bit his lip, his attention fixed on Lopez’s disarming gaze.
‘I din’ kill my brothers, or that ranger. That…’ He struggled for words. ‘That thing got them.’
Ethan watched the kid closely. His hands clenched as he spoke of the animal that had killed his brother. A fingernail paled as it was crushed against the Formica surface of the table.
Ethan could see it wasn’t an act, the kid wasn’t lying. Most teenagers tended to be full of vigour and arrogance: they didn’t cry in front of others. Jesse MacCarthy had not just been frightened beyond belief but had been psychologically transformed from a cocky, fearless youth who had spent an entire childhood out in the woods into a cowering child, afraid of his own shadow.
Lopez squeezed Jesse’s hand gently.
‘Can you describe it? How did you find it?’
Jesse sucked in a trembling lungful of air.
‘Headed east out of Riggins and followed the animal trails into the mountains. We went up that way because the elk move to the valleys in the fall, and most all the hikers stay close to the towns with the tour parties. We figured there was nobody out there to watch us. Cleet, he was the shooter, I was the back-up in case our mark bolted.’
‘Season was out though, right?’ Ethan said. ‘Why not wait?’
Jesse managed a brief, bitter chuckle, staring at the table top as he spoke.
‘Cleet hated the tourists. He was like our old man, reckoned that the forests were better without the people in them. Exceptin’ himself, of course.’
‘We found the ranger’s body out by Fox Creek,’ Earl Carpenter said. ‘Did he follow you all the way?’
Jesse shrugged.
‘Guess so. We tracked a big male elk out that way. Cleet wanted to take his shot at dusk, when we could get real close in the half-light and make sure of the kill.’ Jesse shivered. ‘I guess the creature that killed the ranger was thinking the same thing.’
Lopez’s dark eyes narrowed. ‘You think that it hunted you on purpose?’
Jesse nodded, his voice haunted as he spoke.
‘The ranger collared us before we could take our shot,’ he explained. ‘He asked us who was with us. When we told him it was just the two of us, he din’ believe it and said that somebody was following us. Before we could figure out who the hell it was, we all smelled something.’