Peak Road - A Short Thriller (Jon Stanton Mysteries Book 10) Read online

  I’d never really considered that I would be attending his funeral one day. Even when he’d told me of his HIV diagnosis, I’d known that thanks to modern drugs, people could live meaningful, productive lives for decades. His imminent death just hadn’t hit home. But seeing him now, wearing the fatigue as clearly as a heavy coat, I felt the reality set in. I didn’t have many friends, and losing even one would be a real loss.

  “You ready?” Jennifer asked, shutting the door behind her.

  We strolled along the sidewalk. I don’t know why I’d said we should go for a walk because every step sent a sharp, shooting pain up my side. I ignored it. The sunlight came through the trees in fragments and lit our path, but huge swaths of sidewalk remained covered in shadow from the massive trees lining the street. Jennifer had her hands in the pockets of her jacket.

  “I looked up some pictures of Hawaii,” she said. “I can’t stop thinking about it since you told me all that stuff. I told my mama I’m gonna move there one day.”

  “You should. I usually think running away doesn’t solve anything. That your problems just follow you. But I think I ran away there.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not miserable. Maybe that’s good enough?”

  She grinned and reached out to take my hand. “You seem sad. Not like you’re sad now, but like you’ve always been sad. Like you have some secret that makes you like that.”

  I wanted to let go of her hand. She was only nineteen. But somehow, I suspected she needed it more than I did, so I didn’t withdraw.

  “Is your mother on her own?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah. My daddy ran out on us when I was born. I’ve never even seen him. He called my mom once, like five years ago. I think he asked for money, but he didn’t want to talk to me, so I don’t know.”

  I stayed silent as we turned a corner into a new neighborhood. A few cars were on the road now, and country music played through outdoor speakers at a convenience store. A person I guessed was the cashier sat on an empty plastic carton, smoking.

  “Jennifer, I need to ask you something really important: did you tell anyone that we talked?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone that we were here looking into the death of the Noels?”

  She shook her head. “No. Why would I?”

  “What about your mom?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She don’t really talk to no one. I can ask her if you want.”

  “Please do.”

  She was silent for a second. “Why?”

  “He knows we’re here looking for him. Someone we talked to must’ve told someone else, and it eventually got back to him. He’s here, in the town.”

  She stared down at the concrete. “You don’t believe my mom, do you? About what she saw?”

  “I don’t think she’s lying, if that’s what you mean. I just think she’s mistaken. When visual images travel from our eyes to our brain, our brain has to interpret them. Sometimes, because of factors we can’t control, our brains interpret them badly, and we see things that aren’t really how they are in reality.”

  “So what’d she see then?”

  “I don’t know. My guess is an animal.”

  “Have you talked to Trent yet?”

  “We’re going later this morning to catch him at work. Jennifer, if anyone asks you anything about us—”

  “I’ll let you know right away,” she said.

  We stopped and looked at each other for a moment, then she leaned in and kissed me. I didn’t participate, but I didn’t fight it off. She pulled away, smiled, and we started walking back to her house.

  15

  Mickey changed our motel room. We asked the front desk clerk later that morning if anyone had asked about us, but he said no. That meant whoever had been in the room had followed us and watched to see what motel room we were in. It was unusual for either one of us to miss somebody tailing us.

  We set out for Royal Lumber to interview Trent. The lumberyard was small but seemed to have a lot of employees. Many small towns had a central business that employed most of the town. When that business went bankrupt during an economic downturn, the entire town went under. I’d been to several towns in California where that had happened. The only people who stayed were the ones who didn’t have the means to leave, robbing each other of what little they had left.

  We parked near the office, which was just a long trailer, and stepped out of the car. The sound of machines cutting lumber filled the air, which tasted of sawdust. Several men wearing hardhats walked around, and a few glanced at us.

  I climbed the steps of the trailer. Inside, two men sat at a desk. One stared down at a stack of papers, his glasses perched on his nose. The other one was drinking something out of a Styrofoam cup.

  “Excuse me.” I took the chance and flashed my badge. It said Honolulu PD on it, but I guessed they couldn’t see it from where they were sitting. “We’d like to speak with Trent Erby, please.”

  The man sipping out of the cup put it down on the desk. “What do you want with him?”

  “Need to ask him a few questions about a pending investigation. Is he here?”

  The young man rose. “I’m Trent.”

  We went outside and stood near the trailer. Some of the other men were watching us, and Trent said, “We can talk over there.” He pointed to a bench set up among a thicket of pine trees. It was far enough away that no one else could hear what we were discussing. Trent sat on one side of the bench, and I sat across from him. Mickey stood.

  “We’re helping Sheriff Briggs with the investigation into the death of the Noel family.”

  His face turned a light red, and his jaw muscles clenched. “I knew Danny real well. When I think about what happened to him… I just wanna…”

  “I know.” I nodded. “That’s why we’re here. We’re gonna find who did this.” I let a beat pass in silence. “I wanted to talk to you about something else. You and your brother, Travis, were camping once, and you saw something… unusual. Is that right?”

  He looked up at Mickey then back at me. “Who told you that?”

  “Does it matter?” Mickey asked.

  “No, I guess not. I just don’t talk about it. Some people know, but some people think I’m crazy.”

  “Tell me what you saw, Trent,” I said.

  He looked back at the men as though making sure none of them were paying attention to us. “We were up at Veil Falls. It used to be a waterfall, but the water dried up a long time ago. It’s a gorge now. If you camp up on the ridge, though, you can see the entire valley. We were camping there and sitting by the fire. I think I was talking about something, some girl we both knew, and we heard something.” He swallowed. “It sounded like a howl. We have coyotes here, so I didn’t think anything of it. Then I heard it again—closer. And I’ve heard coyotes, and that wasn’t a coyote.

  “Just past us was the forest. We were camped out in a clearing, and we kept hearing the howls until they were right there. Then the thing growled at us. Travis grabbed the rifle, but we didn’t see anything. We just heard growling all night from the forest. Neither one of us slept. About two in the morning, I was dozing off, and in the trees, I saw it. It was watching us. Crouched down… it was just watching.” He tapped his finger against the table. “I haven’t gone into the woods at night since.”

  Mickey said, “Could it have been a wolf or bear?”

  “No. It was crouched, like it walked on two legs. It wasn’t a wolf, or a bear.”

  “Did you ever see it again?”

  He shook his head. “No. Like I said, I don’t go into the forests anymore. But when the Noels were killed… I thought maybe that’s what it was. In the photo in the paper, they were torn apart.” He looked from me to Mickey and back again. “I don’t know what I saw. But I know for sure it wasn’t a wolf, and it wasn’t a man.”

  Jennifer was working, and after sitting us at a table near the counter, she brought
out coffee and orange juice. We hadn’t eaten breakfast, and after spending a solid hour with Trent, going over everyone in the town we might need to speak with, I was hungry. I took a sip of the juice as Mickey drank his coffee and stared out the windows.

  “I think she likes you,” he said.

  “It’d be more appropriate for her to date my son in high school.”

  “Does age really matter that much?”

  “Would you be with a nineteen-year-old?”

  “My grandfather once told me that you only get a few women that you love in your life. You don’t get to choose them—they’re already chosen for you. The trick is to recognize them and then hang on to them. Ruth was my first, and Camille is my third.”

  “Who was the second?”

  He grinned as he took another sip of coffee. “Gillian Hanks.”

  “The director of Behavioral Science?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve never met her,” I said.

  “She reminds me a lot of you. Laser focus when she’s in an investigation. She’s an administrator in Washington now, but we still talk occasionally. She has a doctorate in psychology, too.”

  “Why isn’t she Mrs. Mickey Parsons?”

  “It didn’t work out between us. Neither one of us recognized what we had, and by the time we did, it was too late. We’d moved on. I was back from Vietnam only six years, still unable to really get a solid footing. I’ve been thinking about her a lot since we’ve been out here.”

  I saw Jennifer smile and wink at me. I grinned and turned back to Mickey. “Why?”

  “She was about as analytical a person as I’ve ever met. In college, she actually started a skeptics magazine debunking the paranormal and fringe-science claims. But our last conversation a few months ago was different.” He paused. “She told me psychic phenomena were real.”

  “Why does she think that?”

  “They had a psychic consultant on that Blood Dahlia case last year.”

  “I remember reading something about that online. I thought the Bureau must’ve been pretty desperate to bring in a psychic.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. But Gillian says the girl proved herself. Sarah King. Gillian thinks I should meet her for some reason.”

  “And you’ve been thinking about Sarah because you’re wondering if maybe there’s some truth to werewolves.”

  He hesitated. “I’m thinking about clinical lycanthropy. What do you know about it?”

  “There’s some suggestion that King Nebuchadnezzar’s behavior in the Book of Daniel was actually a manifestation of clinical lycanthropy. It’s been recognized for thousands of years. It’s a type of psychosis. Many sufferers don’t even remember their transformations or how they behaved. I saw a video once in graduate school of someone with clinical lycanthropy who tore apart a bed with his teeth and then a few hours later asked what had happened to the bed.” I paused. “That’s what you thought twenty years ago. You’re not still thinking it now, are you?”

  “I don’t know. If Gillian Hanks believes in psychics, who am I to question werewolves? You believe in God and the devil. Is this really so far out there from that?”

  “It’s different.”

  “Why? Thousands of people throughout time have said they’ve seen werewolves.”

  “It’s a method of explaining something we can’t understand. They didn’t know about serial murder in the Middle Ages. Werewolves were used to explain the torn corpses the villagers sometimes found. You can’t seriously believe in this, Mickey.”

  “I’m just doing thought experiments to cover every angle. I’m not saying we should go out and buy silver bullets. I think the guy already attacked us, so we know it’s a man. Whether the full moon does anything to him, I don’t know. Whatever it is, it would probably be psychological.”

  We finished eating then decided we needed to see if Mickey’s original suspect still lived in the town. We ran a check on him, but his information ended in 1999. After that, there was nothing to indicate he was even alive—no address, phone number, place of employment, or even credit inquiries.

  Mickey drove through town until he came to an old mechanic’s shop. A car was up on the lift, and a man in dirty overalls was working on it. We approached him. He ignored us and continued working on the car, even when we stood right in front of him.

  “Hello, Earl,” Mickey said.

  Earl Kaiser was a big man with a belly that tightened his overalls. His hands were caked in grease, and his fingernails were black. He put down his tools and grabbed a rag. Wiping his hands, he approached us.

  “You again? I thought I was done with you.”

  “Been a long time.”

  He stuffed the rag into his back pocket. “What you want, Agent Parsons?”

  “You still remember my name. I’m impressed.”

  “Hard to forget the man that accused you of killin’ two families. What you want now? Come to blame the Noels on me, too?”

  Mickey put his hands in his pockets. “You were the only sex offender in town. And the way you raped that girl, biting her cheek like that—you have to admit, you looked good for it.”

  “Shit, that girl wanted it rough. And we were both drunk and high. Don’t mean nothin’. I actually seen her again few years back, and the stupid bitch said we should hang out sometime. You believe that? Ruined my life and thought I’d be happy to see her.”

  Mickey looked over the shop. “You seem to be doing all right in life.”

  “I am.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice you’ve fallen off the grid. How’d that happen?”

  He shook his head. “Government, man. They reading your texts and emails. They planting things in your house… I ain’t got nothing for you fuckers to find. No official address, I don’t get mail, and I don’t use the phone except here. I don’t have nothin’ for you to find. I’m off the registry now ’cause my charges was reduced. I ain’t got nothin’ for you.”

  “Seems lonely, Earl. Being off the grid like that.”

  He shrugged, spitting onto the concrete. “Is what it is. So I’m gonna ask you one more time, then I gotta get back to work. What you want?”

  “I don’t suppose I need to ask you where you were when the Noels were killed.”

  “No, you don’t. I was at home. My neighbors can tell you I rolled up after work, seven o’clock, and was home the entire night till I left the next mornin’. That’s the truth.”

  Mickey nodded. “You know what would really help? If I could search your house. That would really help calm my mind, and you want me to be calm. Don’t you, Earl?”

  “You ain’t searchin’ shit. You fucked me last time, and I ain’t lettin’ it happen again. I’m done.”

  Earl went back to work on the car. Mickey grinned and turned away. I followed him back to our car and we got inside.

  “He hates me because the whole town thought he did it,” Mickey said. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t want anyone to know we had a person of interest, but someone let it out.”

  “Odd that he’d stay in town.”

  “People like what’s familiar. What was your sense?”

  “I didn’t get anything. We should check with his neighbors, but he could’ve easily snuck out at night and gotten back while his neighbors slept.”

  Mickey’s cell phone rang. “Hello?… Yes… No, email it to me. What’s it say, Gus?… You’re sure? How sure?… Okay. Thanks for getting it done so quickly.” He hung up and stared at his phone for a second.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I had the hair collected from Mrs. Noel sent to the labs in Quantico with a rush order. They have the preliminary report done. They’ve identified their origin.”

  “What is it?”

  He hesitated. “Wolf fur.”

  16

  By afternoon, we had talked to Earl’s neighbors. Most of them didn’t pay any attention to Earl. They said he was like a reliable clock. He got home at seven every night and left every
morning at eight. On Saturdays, he ate at the diner, and other than that, he never went out.

  I kept staring at Earl’s home. It seemed like something a grandmother would live in, and I guessed he was renting so he wouldn’t have to register a deed in his name. Dark curtains covered the windows, and the lawn had long since died.

  “I’d love to be able to get in there,” I said.

  “I know,” Mickey said, walking down to meet me on the sidewalk.

  We stared at the home from across the street.

  “You know,” I said, “you’re not technically a government agent. If you were to go in there—”

  “A good defense attorney would tear me up on the stand. I was FBI for twenty-one years. No way a judge would consider me a civilian. Or you, even though you’re not a cop here. Anything we found would be considered part of an illegal search by law enforcement.” He looked over at a home half a block down. “Let’s try that one.”

  The house was larger than the other ones on the block, and the lawn was well cared for. As we walked up the driveway, I looked inside the black sedan parked there. The interior was clean. The car had to have been twenty years old but looked brand new.

  Mickey knocked, then we waited. Before long, an older woman answered the door. A cross dangled from a thin gold chain around her neck.

  “Yes?”

  “Ma’am, we’re investigators helping out Sheriff Briggs and just had a few questions if you have a moment.”

  She stared at him for a second. “Yes.”

  “On the night of April second, did you notice anything unusual in your neighborhood? Anyone leaving or coming home late in the night? Maybe on foot?”

  “That would’ve been Friday, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mickey never called anybody ma’am. I’d noticed he patterned his approach based on who he was speaking with, and he’d even affected a slight southwestern drawl for this woman’s benefit.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “What is this about?”