Tribal Ways. Alex Archer

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СКАЧАТЬ sandstone beds, of the Wichita Mountains. Annja’s maps showed none of them got as high as twenty-five hundred feet, and the general elevation of the landscape was around a thousand. To Annja they were really just rugged hills by the standards of the ranges not far to the west in New Mexico and Colorado. Much less the Andes and the Himalayas, which she also knew firsthand. But the locals seemed adamant about their “mountain” status, so she felt disinclined to argue.

      There really wasn’t much to see but some nasty dark splashes, now pretty dried out, on the short grass and the rocks. Where it was bare the red soil had sucked the blood down without much trace she could see, although the techs were taking samples and the spots where blood spatter had been found were marked with little plastic tabs. As were the places where the bodies had been found.

      The dig team had been housed in a small RV, a trailer and a small camper pickup. If there was any sign the attacker had entered any of them Annja hadn’t been told. She decided to keep clear of them. She wasn’t looking for criminal evidence, and part of being a trained professional at site preservation meant minimizing the risk of messing anything up.

      She searched for tactical evidence. How had the attack happened? How had the killer come so swiftly on the six people, whose attention, the transcript of Ten Bears’ interview with Paul indicated, had been innocently focused on coffee and doughnuts?

      Some blurred tracks in the dirt suggested the killer had gotten close by using the trailer for concealment, before launching a blitz assault. If the tracks had given the investigators any clues as to the true nature of the monster—and whatever or whoever it was, there was no doubt it was a monster—they hadn’t shared them with her. She didn’t expect they would.

      Following a few quiet words from Ten Bears the troopers at the Troop G HQ had also permitted Annja to see photos of the attack scene taken before the bodies were removed. They seemed surprised at how calmly she studied them.

      They had affected her. But she was long past the point of breaking down from seeing butchery, no matter how horrific. Especially not mere images.

      Now she tried to retrace the killer’s steps. He had worked incredibly fast, ripping or slashing open state archaeologist Dr. Watkins’s throat, then those of the two undergrads, Watts and Luttrell. Next it attacked Allison York, eviscerating her at a single blow.

      All this occurred while Paul had his head turned, and apparently without his becoming aware of it. That was according to what he had told the trooper who rode with him in the helicopter when he was airlifted to Norman.

      The killer then struck Paul. The landowner, Eric James, apparently tried to jump the killer when he was attacking Annja’s friend. The killer then knocked the Comanche man away, leaped on him and savaged him before turning back to further maul his other victims.

      Even with the deadly advantages of surprise and shock, it had been a breathtakingly effective assault. Annja tried to envision what weapons the killer used. Did he carry knives, or wear Freddy Krueger-style knife gloves? Did he actually bite his victims? The highway patrol had declined to divulge to Annja any such particulars. She understood. She had no need to know, and those were the very kinds of things investigators always tried to hold back, on the theory that they could trap the killer, or authenticate any confession, on the basis that he knew details about the crime no one else had access to except detectives.

      Also it spared the victims’ families reading about or, worse, seeing on TV too many titillatingly horrific details about their loved ones’ terrible last moments.

      Annja couldn’t see the murderer in her mind. Just a blur, blood, people falling. In her mental movie there was no soundtrack. She felt grateful for that.

      Having gotten what little she could from the murder scene Annja raised her face to the wind and looked around. The site was along an ancient dry streambed that ran from northwest to southeast. The trailer was parked on the north of the dig team’s camp, forming an upside-down U with the camper on the west side and the RV on the east. There was a pretty short line of approach to the humpback trailer from the natural cover provided by the northerly rise and some rocks and tall weeds.

      The wind sighed and whispered, promising secrets it never delivered. Annja nodded politely to the evidence techs, then climbed carefully back over the flapping yellow tape and made her way up the little slope to the north.

      She found another area marked off by yellow tape fluttering between plastic pickets. Tracks, blurred and indistinct. She realized they’d no doubt been broken down from having impressions taken.

      She walked around, trying to survey with an attacker’s eye. It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar operation to her.

      The approach and setup to the attack had been dead easy. The dig camp had been sited with no remote notion that defense could conceivably be necessary in a normal, orderly, law-abiding universe. The victims had not bothered keeping a lookout. Not even their genial host, secure in the midst of his own domain—unlike his ancestors of a century before, who had found themselves chivvied constantly from one ever-shrinking sanctuary to the next. The fact he’d carried his own Marlin lever-action carbine in a saddle scabbard on his horse, which had bolted back to the barn after the attacker spooked it, suggested nothing of paranoia or even wariness to Annja. It was just a Western thing. He did it because he could, and because it came naturally to him.

      She began to walk around the camp, periodically coming across more recovered tracks. Using the brushy, rocky terrain, the killer had circled around and around. Scoping his target. That part, at least, had been painfully simple.

      He’d stalked them like a cougar hunting sheep. Waited, in the strange, almost submarine predawn light, until he was sure all his prey had come out of their shelters and clumped into a nice compact group. Then he’d slipped down to his final line of departure, crept to the rear of the trailer and attacked.

      He’d probably rehearsed the whole event in his mind, crouching there by the trailer. Savored it like a hungry man’s anticipation of a juicy steak. Reveled in the sense of power—of knowing something those poor, hapless people didn’t know. They were about to die.

      She shuddered. “You’re not a profiler,” she reminded herself in a soft voice.

      But Annja had stalked human prey before. And killed. They were all violent men, sometimes women. Not victims but victimizers.

      They were always wary, those whose lives she took. And always armed.

      By contrast the wolfman was picking easy prey. Like any standard-issue serial killer who picked prostitutes to murder because they’d voluntarily get in the car with him.

      And isn’t that what any successful predator does? she reminded herself. She shivered. Such moments of identification as this, with a being who epitomized the very evil she lived to fight against, chilled her worse than the rapidly cooling prairie wind.

      She shook her head. A strand of her long chestnut hair had worked its way loose from her ponytail. The wind whipped it ticklingly across her face. The same wind teased her with little voices that hinted at meaning but never revealed it.

      The western sky was changing from blood to mauve. The sun was long gone. It was time to emulate it. She went back to her rental car, waved to the deputies and drove away.

      “DAMN!”

      Annja slammed a palm on the steering wheel. The rented car’s motor was jerking and coughing. Jouncing along the no-name dirt track, severely rutted before even the spring rains came in earnest, wasn’t making the car any happier.

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