Midnight

Body count: seven.

On September 7, while trace vapors of the Bustamante and Sanchez remains might still have lingered in the air above Moonlight Cove, a twenty-year resident of the town, Jim Armes put to sea in his thirty-foot boat, the Mary Leandra, for an early morning sail — and was never seen again. Though he was an experienced seaman, though the day was clear and the ocean calm, he'd apparently gone down in an outbound tide, for no identifiable wreckage had washed up on local beaches.

Body count: eight.

On September 9, while fish presumably were nibbling on Armes's drowned body, Paula Parkins was torn apart by five Dobermans. She was a twenty-nine-year-old woman living alone, raising and training guard dogs, on a two-acre property near the edge of town. Evidently one of her Dobermans turned against her, and the others flew into a frenzy at the scent of her blood. Paula's savaged remains, unfit for viewing, had been sent in a sealed casket to her family in Denver. The dogs were shot, tested for rabies, and cremated.

Body count: nine.

Six days after entering the Bustamante-Sanchez case, on October 2, the FBI had exhumed Paula Parkins's body from a grave in Denver. An autopsy revealed that the woman indeed had been bitten and clawed to death by multiple animal assailants.

Sam remembered the most interesting part of that autopsy report word for word: … however, bite marks, lacerations, tears in the body cavity, and specific damage to breasts and sex organs are not entirely consistent with canine attack. The teeth pattern and size of bite do not fit the dental profile of the average Doberman or other animals known to be aggressive and capable of successfully attacking an adult. And later in the same report, when referring to the specific nature of Parkins's assailants: Species unknown.

How had Paula Parkins really died?

What terror and agony had she known?

Who was trying to blame it on the Dobermans?

And in fact what evidence might the Dobermans' bodies have provided about the nature of their own deaths and, therefore, the truthfulness of the police story?

Sam thought of the strange, distant cry he had heard tonight — like that of a coyote but not a coyote, like that of a cat but not a cat. And he thought also of the eerie, frantic voices of the kids who had pursued him. Somehow it all fit. Bureau Instinct.

Species unknown.

Unsettled, Sam tried to soothe his nerves with Guinness. The bottle was still empty. He clinked it thoughtfully against his teeth.

Six days after Parkins's death and long before the exhumation of her body in Denver, two more people met untimely ends in Moonlight Cove. Steve Heinz and Laura Dalcoe, unmarried but living together, were found dead in their house on Iceberry Way. Heinz left a typed, incoherent, unsigned suicide note, then killed Laura with a shotgun while she slept, and took his own life. Dr. Ian Fitzgerald's report was murder-suicide, case closed. At the coroner's suggestion, the Dalcoe and Heinz families authorized cremation of the grisly remains.

Body count: eleven.

'There's an ungodly amount of cremation going on in this town,' Sam said aloud, and turned the empty beer bottle around in his hands.

Most people still preferred to have themselves and their loved ones embalmed and buried in a casket, regardless of the condition of the body. In most towns cremations accounted for perhaps one in four or one in five dispositions of cadavers.

Finally, while investigating the Bustamante-Sanchez case, the FBI team from San Francisco found that Janice Capshaw was listed as a Valium suicide. Her sea-ravaged body had washed up on the beach two days after she disappeared, three days before the agents arrived to launch their investigation into the deaths of the union organizers.

Julio Bustamante, Maria Bustamante, Ramon Sanchez, the four Maysers, Jim Armes, Paula Parkins, Steven Heinz, Laura Dalcoe, Janice Capshaw: a body count of twelve in less than a month — exactly twelve times the number of violent deaths that had occurred in Moonlight Cove during the previous twenty-three months. Out of a population of just three thousand, twelve violent deaths in little more than three weeks was one hell of a mortality rate.

Queried about his reaction to this astonishing chain of deadly events, Chief Loman Watkins had said, 'It's horrible, yes. And it's sort of frightening. Things were so calm for so long that I guess, statistically, we were just overdue.'

But in a town that size, even spread over two years, twelve such violent deaths went off the top of the statisticians' charts.

The six-man Bureau team was unable to find one shred of evidence of any local authorities' complicity in those cases. And although a polygraph was not an entirely dependable determiner of truth, the technology was not so unreliable that Loman Watkins, his officers, the coroner, and the coroner's assistant could all pass the examination without a single indication of deception if in fact they were guilty.

Yet …

Twelve deaths. Four cremated in a house fire. Three cremated in a demolished Chevy van. Three suicides, two by shotgun and one by Valium, all subsequently cremated at Callan's Funeral Home. One lost at sea — no body at all. And the only victim available for autopsy appeared not to have been killed by dogs, as the coroner's report claimed, though she had been bitten and clawed by something, dammit.

It was enough to keep the Bureau's file open. By the ninth of October, four days after the San Francisco team departed Moonlight Cove, a decision was made to send in an undercover operative to have a look at certain aspects of the case that might be more fruitfully explored by a man who was not being watched.

One day after that decision, on October 10, a letter arrived in the San Francisco office that clinched the Bureau's determination to maintain involvement. Sam had that note committed to memory as well:

Gentlemen:

I have information pertinent to a recent series of deaths in the town of Moonlight Cove. I have reason to believe local authorities are involved in a conspiracy to conceal murder.

I would prefer you contact me in person, as I do not trust the privacy of our telephone here. I must insist on absolute discretion because I am a disabled Vietnam veteran with severe physical limitations, and I am naturally concerned about my ability to protect myself.

It was signed, Harold G. Talbot.

United States Army records confirmed that Talbot was indeed a disabled Vietnam vet. He had been repeatedly cited for bravery in combat. Tomorrow, Sam would discreetly visit him.

Meanwhile, considering the work he had to do tonight, he wondered if he could risk a second bottle of stout on top of what he'd drunk at dinner. The six-pack was on the table in front of him. He stared at it for a long time. Guinness, good Mexican food, Goldie Hawn, and fear of death. The Mexican food was in his belly, but the taste of it was forgotten. Goldie Hawn was living on a ranch somewhere with Burt Russell, whom she had the bad sense to prefer to one ordinary-looking, scarred, and hope-deserted federal agent. He thought of twelve dead men and women, of bodies roasting in a crematorium until they were reduced to bone splinters and ashes, and he thought of shotgun murder and shotgun suicide and fish-gnawed corpses and a badly bitten woman, and all those thoughts led him to morbid philosophizing about the way of all flesh. He thought of his wife, lost to cancer, and he thought of Scott and their long-distance telephone conversation, too, and that was when he finally opened a second beer.

22

Chased by imaginary spiders, snakes, beetles, rats, bats, and by the possibly imaginary reanimated body of a dead child, and by the real if dragon-like roar of distant trucks, Chrissie crawled out