The Beasts Of Valhalla

decide and do what's right; you have to relearn something I thought I'd taught you a long time ago. You see, God put both good and evil in the world in equal amounts in order to make us free, and to enable us to test ourselves so that we could grow and become strong as spiritual beings. At the beginning, good and evil were equally balanced. People have no control over evil, but good is different. Every time someone does something for somebody else, it creates a little piece of goodness that wasn't there before. But if a just person sees evil and chooses to do nothing about it, a little good leaks out of the world. That hurts everyone, everywhere. Don't you cause any good to leak away, son. That would make the tragedy of Tommy's death even worse.'

I put my arms around my mother and kissed her. Then, resting my head on her shoulder, I heaved a deep sigh. 'Reverend Blackwood tell you that?'

'My heart tells me that.'

'Is Dad up yet?'

'By now, yes. He's probably shaving.'

'Well, you go up and talk to him for a half hour or so. I'm going to make a phone call I don't want either one of you to hear.'

Information gave me the number I wanted. I wrote it down, then sat and stared at the telephone. I had a real dilemma; the federal government rearing up in front of me, my mother behind me, and I wasn't sure whom, which, I feared most.

I'd been a little slow on the uptake. It should have occurred to me much earlier that there was only one group not included in the

Fortune 500 that could afford to piss away the kind of money the Volsung Corporation represented, and that was the merry pranksters of the Pentagon. The nation's military establishment was engaged in illegal gene-splicing experiments, secure in its belief that it was safe from discovery in paid-off Peru County, Nowhere, U.S.A. I didn't know what they were up to, didn't want to; putting a stop to Pentagon hanky-panky would be out of my league even if most of my relatives weren't living on Volsung's doorstep. I might whisper something in Ralph Nader's ear if I ever got the chance, but the best I could hope for was to get a pass to kill Jake Bolesh personally, and assurances that the scalps of the men who had authorized Volsung's 'enforcer' to kill two boys would be lifted.

How to accomplish that without bringing the roof down on everybody was the problem. The trick was to get this great, often myopic, meat eater to take a little nip out of itself and leave everyone else alone.

Finally I picked up the receiver again and dialed the number in Omaha, two hundred and thirty-five miles away. The phone was answered on the second ring.

'Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agent Randall speaking.'

'Agent Randall, my name is Dr. Robert Frederickson. I'm a professor of criminology, as well as a private investigator licensed by the state and city of New York. If you don't mind, I'll wait while you check my credentials on that National Registry I know you gentlemen keep. You'll find out I'm a straight arrow. My P.I. license number is J A 044- '

'I've heard of you, Dr. Frederickson,' the agent replied drily. 'What can I do for you?'

'I'm calling from Peru County. I'd like you and two or three other agents to load up and pay me a visit. I need your help to nail one very crooked county sheriff who just happens to be a murderer. It's important that you get here as quickly as possible, because right now he could be in the process of destroying vital evidence.'

There was a prolonged silence, then: 'It sounds like a problem lor the State Police.'

'Uh-uh. I'm not sure how far the corruption has spread; we're talking very big payoffs here. You're the only people I can trust, and you can slip in with a violation of civil liberties wedge.'

What I didn't mention was that I feared the State Police might be plugged in to whatever Volsung really was, but there was a good chance, however strange or ironic, that the F.B.I, wasn't. The Defense Intelligence Agency, like the Central Intelligence Agency, didn't think too much of the F.B.I., and the respective agencies shared information only at the point of a cannon.

'You'll have to give me more details, Frederickson. Tell me exactly what the problem is.'

I gave him a good version, some of it truth, some of it fiction, all of it designed to make the agent on the other end of the line believe I had a great deal more hard evidence than I actually did. I carefully avoided any mention of the Volsung Corporation. The F.B.I, might be temporarily ignorant of the secret government research facility, but that didn't mean Randall might not do some checking and find out if I even hinted at its existence. In my present position, I was finished if it were even suspected that I'd been inside the Volsung Corporation complex. Bolesh would kill me on sight if he found out, and the F.B.I, would probably deliver me to Bolesh if Randall ever put all the pieces together. The information I had on Volsung and the Valhalla Project, whatever that might be, had to be meted out in very small bits, if at all, only when absolutely necessary, and only in the right company and situation. Those cards were the only hand I had, or was likely to get. Played right, they could get me what I wanted; one card laid down at the wrong time, or in the wrong sequence, could get me dead. I was balanced on a taut high wire, and the green felt was a long way down.

Randall was silent for a long time after I'd finished. 'Okay, Frederickson,' he said at last. 'I'll look into it.'

'You'll come here and look into it?'

'Right.'

'Now? I told you he's probably destroying- '

'I'll get there as soon as I can.'

'Do you have a plane or helicopter?'

That produced an irritated sigh, and I knew I was pushing too hard.

'I drive a 'seventy-five Pontiac that hasn't been tuned in fifteen months.'

'We can meet at my parents' farm,' I said, and gave him the address and directions.

'I'll be there in a few hours.'

'Please step on it, Agent Randall. And bring some serious firepower.'

10

From body temperature, swelling of the ankles, odor, and state of rigor mortis, I made a very rough estimate that Coop Lugmor had been dead at least twelve hours, and probably more. He'd never made the phone calls to my parents' home during the night. If I'd been home, and if I'd believed it was Lugmor and had come over, I'd probably be dead too.

It was a thought that prompted me to run back out the door, crouch down on the porch, and look around. There was no one outside or on the highway. I pulled Janet's car into the barn, closed the door, then went back into the house to examine the body some more.

Bolesh had, I assumed, come here and killed Lugmor right after he'd cleaned out Tommy's room and put Zeke on the bus to the airport. How Lugmor had been killed was another question, and the murder weapon certainly wasn't the butcher knife sticking out of his gut. There was hardly any blood around the site of the wound, none at all coming from his mouth. Lugmor's heart had stopped beating for at least a minute before Bolesh had found the knife and stuck it into the dead meat of the corpse just for the sake of appearances.

It looked to me like Coop Lugmor had been frightened to death.

He was slumped in a seated position, legs splayed at a forty-five-degree angle, against a wall in the garbage-strewn living room. As it sometimes does, rigor mortis must have set in almost immediately. Lugmor's toothless mouth gaped open in a huge O of a scream. His eyes were as open as eyes ever get, almost literally popping from his head. His arms were half raised, the fingers of the hands curled into claws as if he were clutching at something on his chest that was no longer there; the hands were at least a foot above the shaft of the knife.

I stepped closer, knelt down close to the body, and took rapid, shallow breaths as a defense against the ripeness of the dead flesh. There were small marks-some like scratches, others like pimples-on his face. Up close, I could see tiny, white crystals trapped in the stubble of his beard. There were more of the crystals on the front of his shirt, surrounded by what looked like dried water stains. There were other water stains on the peeling, faded