Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(53)

“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” He isn’t sure whether this is a joke. No one knows he is here and he can’t help but imagine his body buried somewhere deep in the woods, a little rock for a marker.





Chapter 20



THE TALL MAN climbs out of his Lincoln Town Car, his beltline nearly parallel with the roof of the car. He wears a long-sleeve button-down wrinkled from the long drive. His jacket is folded neatly over the passenger seat, and he pulls it out now and meticulously brushes the lint off it before sliding one arm and then the other into its sleeves. His head is hairless, not because he shaves his head clean every morning, but because he has been burned terribly. His skin has the wrinkly gloss of chewed bubblegum. It isn’t clear where his lips begin and end. His dark eyes appear lidless. His nose is small and upturned and from a distance appears like no nose at all, slitted like a skull.

Three police cruisers, a Forest Service Bronco, and a forensics van are parked nearby, in a parking lot corralled by a split-rail fence. A sign hangs from a post—a varnished block of wood with the letters carved out of it—Blood Bath Hot Springs. A rime of snow coats the letters.

The half-mile trail takes him no time to walk, his long legs scissoring quickly, his black wing tips dusted red when the pines open up into a rocky clearing busy with police. Tendrils of steam come off the springs as if something beneath their surface is alive and breathing. The smell of sulfur, like eggs on their way to going bad, is such that more than a few men have their shirts tented over their noses.

They don’t have enough tape to cordon off the crime scene. So there is a strip of black and yellow hanging across the trailhead. Most would duck under it, but the Tall Man steps over. A goateed man in a black North Face fleece approaches him with a question on his face he doesn’t have to ask. The Tall Man already has his identification out, and the goateed man nods at it and says, “Never seen you before.”

“You wouldn’t have.” His voice is baritone, every word he speaks cleanly enunciated.

The policeman is studying the Tall Man, arrested by the sight of him. He eventually says his name is Don and identifies himself as a sheriff’s deputy. He pulls out a pack of Juicy Fruit and pops a piece in his mouth and jaws at it. “You come from the office in Portland or Salem?”

“Neither.”

The deputy chews the gum another moment. “All right. Be a mysterious *. Let me know what you need to know.”

The bodies are several days’ dead. They would have been perfectly preserved except for the heat of the springs. As is, their skin is blackened and occasionally split red from swelling, like a hot dog left too long on the grill. The severed head of an old man, his mouth gaping open, peers at the Tall Man from the top of a spiked boulder. Here is a body of a woman splayed like an X, her belly hollowed out, a brown-and-yellow tangle of intestines piled nearby.

Policemen in blue Windbreakers snap photos. The flashes explode. The ground is uneven with red blistery rocks that their boots thud against often and that send them stumbling forward. Except for the Tall Man, who walks slowly and cleanly around the springs, stepping over bodies, balancing on the rocks, sometimes turning in a circle to look thoughtfully off into the woods.

He spots something in the red puddle of spring water. A naked body, boiled and egg white, floating belly-up. Don stands nearby, talking into a handheld, and when he ends the conversation, he looks at the Tall Man looking at the body. “Lycans.”

“I am aware.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking about how, when I was in college, I thought I was going to be a volcanologist. Isn’t that a funny thing to want to be? There is something about them, volcanoes, that has always appealed to me. I have stood at the smoking rim of Saint Helens and flown a helicopter over Kilauea and stared down into its terrible orange eye. In the end, I didn’t have the head for chemistry and physics, but I took enough classes and read enough books to know that eruption is about force and time.” He visors his eyes with his hand and looks at the cloud-shrouded mountains above them. “Did you know that the Three Sisters, even though they are quiescent, have magmatic activity beneath them? Did you know that their elevation changes, sometimes by several inches, every year? They will erupt again, and this very place we are presently standing in will be a bright-red sea. It is only a matter of time.”

The head of the body is sunken, barely visible in the red murkiness, but when the Tall Man dips his foot into the spring, as if testing the water, to toe the body, it bobs upward and the face gapes back at him, looking like a pencil drawing smeared over by wet fingers.

“Force and time.”





Chapter 21



NEAL DESAI’S DAUGHTER is having one of her dark days. That’s what his wife tells him over the phone, asking him to come home early if he can. His daughter needs him. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.” But then his lab work distracts him and the next time he glances at the clock it is seven thirty. There are no windows here. Hours often pass without him lifting his head from a microscope or computer. Another missed meal. Another night coming home to an upset wife, her face hidden behind a novel or focused on the TV turned up too loud.

He works in the Pacific Northwest Regional Biocontainment Laboratory in the Infectious Disease Research Center. They are part of the University of Oregon, but located outside Eugene, a collection of mostly windowless concrete buildings surrounded by electrified barbed wire and patrolled by armed security guards. From a distance his workplace could easily be mistaken for a prison.