“Who shot them?” she asked.
“I think they shot each other,” I answered. “I’m no TV detective, but this dude was shot at close range, and …” I opened the first man’s coat. His weapon was still in the holster. “Yeah, he didn’t even get a chance to draw his gun. Those two were shot from farther away, and they have their guns in their hands.
“And this bastard is lying here with an empty weapon and a good dozen bullet holes in him. Are there more footprints going down the hill?”
Catherine went around the bodies. The starlight was pretty dim, but our eyes had adjusted. “Yes,” she said. “But there are fewer of them.”
“I think Mr. White Smudge here shot the others. The ones who killed him probably stood around
“Wouldn’t they want to carry their friends back to the car? Or call the cops?”
I shook my head. These guys had expensive suits and identical weapons. I figured them for somebody’s hired muscle—a crew. I’d been part of a crew once. We’d done everything together, but we hadn’t been friends. Not really.
I looked at Catherine. “Do you want to turn around?”
“Let’s keep going,” she said. “We decided to chase the predator, and this doesn’t really change things, does it?” Her arms were still crossed. I didn’t suggest she take one of the dead men’s guns. Her body language made it clear what she thought of the idea. Besides, it hadn’t done them much good. She glanced at White Smudge as though trying to figure out what had turned him on his buddies. Then she looked away.
We followed the footprints down the hill, through a stand of trees into a meadow. Some of the bark was scorched black as though from a fire. The damage looked months old, though, and the forest was rebounding.
The weird soup-can footprints didn’t pass through any of the trees. At least, there were no dark circles on the trunks. I wondered why the predator didn’t take shortcuts through them. Were they too thick? Too alive? Something else? I had no idea.
“Look at this,” Catherine said.
The soup-can footprints headed straight across open ground, then clustered together as though the creature had turned to face its pursuers. Then the trail split apart.
One set of prints continued ahead down to the meadow. Another went to the right. A third led off to the left. The shoe prints also split up to follow the three separate trails.
“It’s not cloning itself, is it?” I asked. Catherine shrugged.
I followed the trail of prints to the right. After about five feet, they vanished.
Catherine waved to me. “The prints stop here,” she said. She was standing about ten feet away on the trail that led to the left. A quick check showed the same thing on the center trail. After about five feet, it vanished.
The shoe prints milled around, then split up and led away in those three different directions. What the hell was going on?
“Maybe it cloned itself and flew away,” Catherine said.
I felt goose bumps run down my neck. The night sky above me was empty, as far as I could see. It gave me the willies to think that the predator might have been above us all along.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I think I don’t want this thing to swoop down on me.”
“I meant what do you think we should do next.”
Was this another test? I looked around. By the starlight, I could see trees, underbrush, uneven ground, and far, far down the slope ahead I saw a single burning bluish streetlight. I reminded myself that I was here with an investigator. A peer would have hunted the predator to kill it—a single predator on the loose could, in the long run, lead to the extinction of life on this planet. Investigators, though, collected information for the peers.
Who would be getting here soon. I hoped.
“Well,” I said, shrugging, “there’s nothing to be learned wandering around out here. And I definitely don’t want to come up on those gunmen by accident. I say we should check out the house.”
She half smiled, then led the way back up the slope. For a brief moment I thought the four dead men were gone, having been carried off into the night sky by whatever we were following, or even worse, having gotten up and shambled off. Then I saw that they were just a little farther away than I’d thought.
No one had come to check on the cars. Catherine didn’t want to drive her Acura any closer to the house, and I agreed. A strange car pulling up at this time of night would attract the worst sort of attention.
Catherine insisted we hike along the driveway rather than take the direct route across the estate, and after a half mile I was glad of it. The slope was not as smooth as it had appeared. We kept to the shoulder, watching ahead and behind for headlights. We were ready to dive into the trees at the first sign of a car, but none came.
We rounded a curve in the road and saw the house up close.
I’d certainly seen bigger. In L.A., all you have to do is drive along a freeway and look up; huge houses are scattered on the hillsides. But this house was huge and isolated and completely out of place. It was three stories tall, with a high, slanted roof and tall, narrow, arched windows like a church. It had chimneys like a porcupine had quills, and I couldn’t imagine the kind of person who would look around at this isolated patch of rain forest and decide it was the place to build a mansion.
There was a garland in the front windows and nets of tiny multicolored lights draped over the bushes along the front. Someone had made the effort.
We ducked off the road into the trees, pushing our way through scattered blackberry bushes and scraggly ferns.
