Two men walked down the beach from town: one a short, burly man built like a barrel with flaming red hair and an unkempt beard to match, the other tall, athletically built, with a long, lean, angular face and sharp nose. His long hair was turning a premature dark gray.
“Lucky you were so close and could get here on short notice,” commented Constable Julius “Red” Mathias, the shorter and older of the two men. “I mean, this is the cushiest job in law enforcement up to now—nothing to enforce and plenty of tropical breezes and really good pay to boot—but this thing would drive anybody nuts.” Mathias had a pronounced Midlands accent tempered only a bit by being away from Britain so long.
Gregory MacDonald chuckled sourly. “Luck had something to do with it all right, Red, but it was all bad and all mine.”
“Ain’t as unlucky as Sir Robert, you might note,” the other quipped, sticking an unlit, half-smoked cigar in his mouth.
MacDonald noted it. “Thought you were going to quit those.”
“Y’don’t see me smokin’, now do you? Call it me pacifier.”
They reached the scene and MacDonald was impressed. “Have ’em roll it back a ways, Red,” he instructed. “I want to take a look at what we’re really dealing with here.”
Red gave a sour laugh and spat. “Oh, this is a winner. A classic, lad. The sort of thing that makes up all at once for a century or two of crime-free living here.”
At the constable’s order, the crew began to slowly but professionally roll up the tarps one at a time, exposing the death scene first.
“Where’d you get all these people, Red?”
“Oh, they’s mostly security staff from the Institute. The place is crawlin’ with ’em, so why not use ’em? The others doin’ the heavy work are mostly men from the town. Those security fellows fought like hell my bringin’ in the others, but when you see what we got you’ll understand why I didn’t feel right just leavin’ this all to the Institute boys.”
It didn’t take long to see what the old cop meant. One look at the tracks with their great stride told anyone that either this was the most elaborate hoax in criminal history or something was loose on the tiny island that couldn’t possibly be hidden.
“You made casts of the footprints?”
Red nodded. “Yeah. Wait’ll you see ’em, Gregory my boy. If that thing’s for real, I for one sure as hell don’t want to meet it.”
In spite of the sand and the disruptions and, of course, the weight of the tarp, it was clear from just looking at the things that the old boy was right. MacDonald got out his tape measure and discovered that the damned things were more than two feet long. He measured the stride, not once but at almost every point back to the cliff and found them very consistent. Whoever or whatever did this was very thorough.
Equally revealing was the impression it had made jumping from the top of the trail to the beach below. MacDonald examined it all and then stood up and shook his head. “Whatever it is, I’d put it at somewhere around fifteen feet tall and weighing maybe two or three tons. How the hell does it stand upright without a tail or some other counterbalance? There weren’t any drag marks around, were there. Red?”
“Nope. What you see, allowin’ for the necessaries, is what you got. Other than Sir Robert’s own footprints goin’ first to the beach and then to the water over there, and the footprints of the pair that found it all, there was nothin’ whatever on the beach but what you see. Of course, there’s a lot of prints now, but they was to lay the tarp and photograph the scene, and it’s pretty consistent.”
“And one way,” MacDonald noted. “This monster—how did it leave? The tracks are clear from here, then they go almost to the water’s edge, walk along it for a bit—I assume that area of no prints is a high tide mark—and then . . . what? Sir Robert gets into the water, the thing doesn’t enter but tracks him, and then suddenly it gets Sir Robert and flings him a good ten feet inward of the breakers. So we assume that Sir Robert wasn’t far enough out, or somehow came in to where this thing could reach, and it plucked him out.”
“You’re soundin’ as if you think it was a real creature.”
“For now we’ll stick with it, but that leaves me with a real problem. Okay, so the thing gets its claws on Sir Robert, lifts him up, does him in, and drops him on the beach. Now what does it do?”
“Huh? Um, yeah, I see what y’mean. No return footprints.”
“It doesn’t fly away—some of the prehistoric monsters bigger than that could do it, but they’d take a mile of runway at the minimum and really mess up the beach. If somebody hoisted it out, in broad daylight, such a ship or derrick large enough would be seen by the town or by the whole damn island and sure as hell couldn’t be broken down in—what was the gap?”
“No more’n two hours between death and discovery, or so Doc says.”
The younger man nodded. “All right, then. So the only place it might go is into the water—its stride and the high tide might mask that. But if it could stomach the water, then why didn’t it just wade in after Sir Robert? Why play cat and mouse and then wait to hoist him inland?”
“Maybe it’s perverse. Cats like to play with mice and rats a long time before they kill ’em. Who knows what somethin’ like this’d be like?”
MacDonald sighed. “I wish I could have seen the body as it was, but I’ll look at the pictures. Never as good as the real thing, but it’ll have to do.”
“Couldn’t be helped, lad. What would y’have me do? Leave Sir Robert there? I mean, it’s one thing if it’d been some janitor, but this was the boss!”
“I understand. You did what you could. The two that found the body—no chance of complicity in the affair?”
“I’d doubt it. Low-level clerks workin’ in the supply system in town, not even Institute folks. Comin’ out here on a slow day to enjoy a few hours beach time on the boss and maybe a little nookie. Besides, their only prints, to and from, cross a high tide mark after the high tide, so they couldn’t have been here until at least ten thirty, and that’s too late.”
“Just checking. Anybody who notices something like that doesn’t need me, though. You’re a good cop, Mathias.” They stopped at the base of the cliff trail. “Okay, they find the body, run back into town, fetch you and a few others, and you all come running up the beach and see the scene. Then what?”
“I checked the body and ordered everybody back from the scene. It was some time before I could tell whose body it was for sure, although I knew from the clothes who it had to be. I sent me gal Friday, Sandy, back to ring up the Institute and give ’em a tentative I.D. Warned ’em to come only by the main road and then to the beach, too. They didn’t listen. The whole place up there erupted with security about five minutes later, but I yelled and cussed a blue streak at ’em and threatened to shoot any one of ’em that came down.”
“You don’t carry a gun. Even most of them don’t.”
“Yeah, but in the shock and all they didn’t remember that. Otherwise we’d have had a bloody mess out here instead of a near perfect reconstruction. Those photos, by the way, were done by the Institute but I doubt if there’ll be any funny business with ’em. Took ’em in three dee, so they should be good’n gory. Got top shots of the whole scene, too.”
“Uh huh. But—after you’d gotten all you wanted, did any of them make their own investigation? I didn’t see much sign, although it’s hard to tell around the body site.”
“Nope. Bunch of ’em spouted stuff into their walkie-talkies and the like, but they didn’t even act all too curious. Of course, I was doin’ all the procedures right and they’ll have copies of the photos—probably have sent ’em to everyplace in creation by now.”
Together they walked up the trail to the top, trying to retrace the path of the victim. At the top stood a tall, tanned man in a loud shirt, jeans, and dark sunglasses, a walkie-talkie on his belt. MacDonald recognized him. “Really nice operation you’ve got here, Ross,” the younger man said tauntingly. “You’re so thorough that nothing less than a fifteen foot prehistoric monster could chase and kill the boss in broad daylight without anyone seeing. Real secure.”
Ross didn’t seem pleased. He was an American with a hard New York accent and he looked like a bad tourist loose in the tropics. “All right, can the sarcasm, MacDonald. We were penetrated and we blew it.”
“Penetrated! I’d say you were invaded!”
“Oh, you don’t believe this horse shit about a monster any more than I do and you know it. I don’t know how they did it, but somebody’s drinking vodka toasts right now and laughing at us as we run around looking for sea monsters.” His tone dropped and sounded icy and threatening. “I will know, though. My ass is more on the line than yours.”
MacDonald sighed. “Well, let’s see what you didn’t manage to muck up in your zeal to get here. Want to come along?”
Ross did, and the three of them started back along the trail. “Not my fault we jumped to get here,” the security man said defensively. “Hell, man, we get word of a gruesome death on the beach and some preliminary indication that it’s Sir Robert. You’d have done the same thing in our place and you know it. Beats me why you’re here anyway.”
“I spent several years at homicide back home. You know that. As soon as the identity of the victim was confirmed the boys at headquarters ran everybody in the company with any sort of background like that through the computers and came up with a number. Then they matched them to where they were and my name came up, my being at that time somewhat drunk and disorderly as befits a vacation about three hours flying time from here. I’m not happy with this, either, Ross, but the buck got passed to me and I’m it.” He stopped and examined the foliage hanging overhead. “Anybody in your organization tall enough to break those limbs?”