to be on a tightrope or at risk of having his life destroyed by just one error,
by a single failure. Sometimes Lem envied him.
Lem stared at Cliff’s scribbled calculations. “If it takes refuge in the San
Gabriel Mountains, feeding on wildlife and content with solitude, venturing out
only rarely to vent its rage on the people living along the periphery of the
preserve . . . it might never be found.”
“But remember,” Cliff said, “it hates the dog more than it hates men. It wants
the dog and has the ability to find it.”
“So we think.”
“And could it really tolerate a wild existence? I mean, yeah, it’s part savage,
but it’s also smart. Maybe too smart to be content with a hardscrabble life in
that rugged country.”
“Maybe,” Lem said.
“They’ll spot it soon, or it’ll do something to give us another fix on it,”
Cliff predicted.
That was June 18.
When they found no trace of The Outsider during the next ten days, the expense
of keeping a hundred men in the field grew insupportable. On June 29, Lem
finally had to relinquish the Marines that had been put at his disposal and send
them back to their bases.
Day by day, Cliff was heartened by the lack of developments and was willing to
believe that The Outsider had suffered a mishap, that it was dead, that they
would never hear of it again.
Day by day, Lem sank deeper into gloom, certain that he had lost control of the
situation and that The Outsider would reappear in a most dramatic fashion,
making its existence known to the public. Failure.
The only bright spot was that the beast was now in Los Angeles County, out of
Walt Gaines’s jurisdiction. If there were additional victims, Walt might not
even learn of them and would not have to be persuaded, all over again, to remain
out of the case.
By Thursday, July 15, exactly two months after the breakout at Banodyne, almost
one month after the campers had been terrorized by a supposed extraterrestrial
or smaller cousin of Bigfoot, Lem was convinced he would soon have to consider
alternate careers. No one had blamed him for the way things had gone. The heat
was on him to deliver, but it was no worse than the heat he had felt on other
big investigations. Actually, some of his superiors viewed the lack of
developments in the same favorable light as did Cliff Soames. But in his most
pessimistic moments, Lem envisioned himself employed as a uniformed security
guard working the night shift in a warehouse, demoted to the status of a
make-believe cop with a rinky-dink badge.
Sitting in his office chair, facing the window, staring grimly at the hazy
yellow air of the blazing summer day, he said aloud, “Damn it, I’ve been trained
to deal with human criminals. How the hell can I be expected to outthink a
fugitive from a nightmare?”
A knock sounded at his door, and as he swiveled around in his chair, the door
opened. Cliff Soames entered in a rush, looking both excited and distraught.
“The Outsider,” he said. “We’ve got a new fix on it . . . but two people are
dead.”
Twenty years ago in Vietnam, Lem’s NSA chopper pilot had learned everything
worth knowing about putting down and taking off in rugged terrain. Now,
remaining in constant radio contact with the L.A. County sheriff’s deputies who
were on the scene already, he had no difficulty locating the site of the murders
by visual navigation, making use of natural landmarks. At a few minutes after
one o’clock, he put his craft down on a wide section of a barren ridge
overlooking Boulder Canyon in the Angeles National Forest, just a hundred yards
from the spot where the bodies had been found.
When Lem and Cliff left the chopper and hurried along the crest of the ridge
toward the gathered deputies and forest rangers, a hot wind buffeted them. It
carried the scent of dry brush and pine. Only tufts of wild grass, parched and
brittled by the July sun, had managed to put down roots on this high ground. Low