scrub growth—including desert plants like mesquite—
marked the upper reaches of the canyon walls that dropped away to the right and
left of them, and down on the lower slopes and canyon floors were trees and
greener undergrowth.
They were less than four air miles north of the town of Sunland, fourteen air
miles north of Hollywood, and twenty miles north of the populous heart of the
great city of Los Angeles, yet it seemed they were in a desolation measuring a
thousand miles across, disquietingly far from civilization. The sheriffs
deputies had parked their four-wheel-drive wagons on a crude dirt track
three-quarters of a mile away—coming in, Lem’s chopper had flown over those
vehicles—and they had hiked with ranger guides to the site where the bodies had
been found. Now, gathered around the corpses were four deputies, two men from
the county crime lab, and three rangers, and they looked as if they, too, felt
isolated in a primeval place.
When Lem and Cliff arrived, the sheriff’s men had just finished tucking the
remains in body bags. The zippers hadn’t yet been closed, so Lem saw that one
victim was male, the other female, both young and dressed for hiking. Their
wounds were grievous; their eyes were gone.
The dead now numbered five innocents, and that toll conjured a specter of guilt
that haunted Lem. At times like this, he wished that his father had raised him
with no sense of responsibility whatsoever.
Deputy Hal Bockner, tall and tan but with a surprisingly reedy voice, apprised
Lem of the identity and condition of the victims: “Based on the ID he was
carrying, the male’s name was Sidney Tranken, twenty-eight, of Glendale. Body
has more than a score of nasty bite marks, even more claw marks, slashes.
Throat, as you saw, torn open. Eyes—”
“Yes,” Lem said, seeing no need to dwell on these grisly details.
The men from the crime lab pulled the zippers shut on the body bags. It was a
cold sound that hung for a moment like a chain of icicles in the hot July air.
Deputy Bockner said, “At first we thought Tranken was probably knifed by some
psycho. Once in a while you get a homicidal nut who prowls these forests instead
of the streets, preying on hikers. So we figured . . . knifed first, then all
this other damage must’ve been done by animals, scavengers, after the guy was
dead. But now . . . we’re not so sure.”
“I don’t see blood on the ground here,” Cliff Soames said with a note of
puzzlement. “There’d have been a lot of it.”
“They weren’t killed here,” Deputy Bockner said, then went on with his Summary
at his own pace. “Female, twenty-seven, Ruth Kasavaris, also of Glendale. Also
vicious bite marks, slashes. Her throat—”
Cutting him off again, Lem said, “When were they killed?”
“Best guess before lab tests is that they died late yesterday. We believe the
bodies were carried up here because they’d be found quicker on the ridge top. A
popular hiking trail runs along here. But it wasn’t other hikers found them. It
was a routine fire-patrol plane. Pilot looked down, saw them sprawled here on
the bare ridge.”
This high ground above Boulder Canyon was more than thirty air miles
north-northwest of Johnstone Peak, where the young campers had taken refuge from
The Outsider in their van and had later fired at it with a .32 pistol on June
18, twenty-eight days ago. The Outsider would have been reckoning
north-northwest by sheer instinct and no doubt would have frequently been
required to backtrack out of box canyons; therefore, in this mountainous terrain
it had very likely traveled between sixty and ninety miles on the ground to
cover those thirty air miles. Still, that was only a pace of three miles a day,
at most, and Lem wondered what the creature had been doing during the time it
was not traveling or sleeping or chasing down food.
“You’ll want to see where these two were killed,” Bockner said. “We’ve found the
place. And you’ll want to see the den, too.”
“Den?”
“The lair,” one of the forest rangers said. “The damn lair.”