Final Disposition

FINAL DISPOSITION

 
Ken Goddard

Copyright © 2010 by Ken Goddard

Cover design by Passageway Pictures, Inc.

Books by Ken Goddard

BALEFIRE

THE ALCHEMIST

CHEATER

CSI: IN EXTREMIS

Special Agent Henry Lightstone series

PREY

WILDFIRE

DOUBLEBLIND

CSI Detective-Sergeant Colin Cellars series

FIRST EVIDENCE

OUTER PERIMETER

FINAL DISPOSITION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      My sincere and heartfelt thanks to Professor Maria Otte — former rock musician, book art editor and current neuroscientist, who provided the inspiration for this story by sending me her copy of Dr. Daniel Levitin’s fascinating book
This is Your Brain on Music
… and then kept me from over-anthropomorphizing the component parts of my hero’s suddenly awakened and enhanced brain. 

      And a deep-seated appreciation for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, whose addictive
Symphonic Rock
recordings allowed me to get lost in their music — and my writing — for all those many pleasant hours.

This book is dedicated to Britt, with love …

—  Jichan

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

In Ken Goddard’s FIRST EVIDENCE, The rules are simple:  the ultimate in invasive species have rules they must follow: they can't stay long … they can't use their advanced technology, only what is at hand … but most important of all, they can't
ever
leave evidence of their visit.  But they did ... they lost something ... and they desperately want it back.  The only problem is, what they lost may be in the hands of Colin Cellars, a very persistent and very stubborn Oregon State Police crime scene investigator, which would truly make it ‘first evidence’ of extraterrestrial contact.

But that’s only going to happen if Colin and his childhood friends — lethal-federal-agent-turned-hermit Bobby Dawson, folk-singing Jody Catlin, and mystery-man Malcolm Byzor — can band together to survive the encounters … a problem deeply complicated by the mutual love interest in Jody that caused Colin and Bobby to go their separate ways many years ago.

In FIRST EVIDENCE, Colin Cellars and his childhood friends quickly learned that the road to survival required that they stay together as much as possible, desperately watching out for each other’s back.  But in OUTER PERIMETER, the second book in Ken Goddard’s FIRST EVIDENCE series, the rules have changed.  Facing their fears and adversaries back-to-back isn't going to work this time.

The rapidly accumulating evidence suggests that the retrievers — fearsome creatures responsible for the retrieval of lost ‘evidence’ — have arrived and are closing in fast … their intended battle-ground, the mysterious Bancoo Indian Reservation in central Oregon where the rules of man and Mother Nature seem no longer to apply.  Bad news for Colin and his friends, especially when they discover their only real chance to survive is to stay apart from each other, and face their worst fears alone.

Worse yet, the three-way love interest between Colin, Bobby & Jody has become terribly complicated by the addition of Allesandra, an incredibly exotic and alluring ‘woman’ that — much to Jody’s dismay — both Colin and Bobby seem powerless to resist.

In FINAL DISPOSITION, the third book in Ken Goddard’s series on what may prove to be evidence of extraterrestrial contact, Colin Cellars wakes up in the maw of a fMRI machine at a remote military hospital, having no memory of who he is or how he got there ... but becomes quickly aware that he is being hunted.  His instinctive response is to run, dependent upon a new and incredibly-enhanced sense of music and tone to trigger fragments of lost memories that may help him figure out who is friend, who is foe … and who is something else entirely.

But Colin doesn’t realize that it has been eleven days since Bobby Dawson tricked him into giving a late-night lecture on crime scenes and evidence of extraterrestrial contact to a wide-eyed group of ‘true believers’ that set FIRST EVIDENCE into motion.  Eleven days for all of those who desperately want — or deeply fear — the evidence that he is supposed to possess to lock onto his trail with pitchforks, torches and a wide range of lethal weaponry.  Another way of saying that Detective Sergeant Colin Cellars and his childhood friends are about to experience another bad day.

“As a tool for activation of specific thoughts, music is not as good as language.  As a tool for arousing feelings and emotions, music is better than language.  The combination of the two — and best exemplified in a love song — is the best courtship display of all.”

— Dr. Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“That's the beautiful thing about music - there's no defense against it."

— Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones

Excerpts from the Field Notebook of Colin Cellars

STATE OF OREGON

Oregon State Patrol

OSP (Salem) Headquarters:

Region 9 Office:

Don Talbert  -  Region 9 Commander

Tom Bauer  -  Patrol Sergeant

JASPER COUNTY, OREGON

Jasper County Morgue:

Dr. Elliott Sutta  -  Pathologist

Kathy Buckhouse  -  Lab Assistant

US NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

Special Operations Group 13:

Malcolm Byzor  -  Brig. General, SOG 13

Patrick Fong  -  Colonel, SOG 13 

Delta Company – Eighth Delta Forces:

Mike Montgomery  -  Major 

127
^th
Military Police Company:

Angus Gladstone  -  Major

Bill MacGregor  -  Platoon Sergeant

Sam Harthburn  -  Squad Leader

The Ralph Wehinger VA Clinic:

Dr. Grayforth  -  Clinic Director

Dr. Vargas  -  Clinical Psychiatrist

Lisa Marcini  -  Floor nurse 

MISCELLANEOUS PLAYERS:

Bob Dawson  -  Friend of Colin Cellars

Lorraine Marriott  -  U.S. Senator

Jefferson Mariott  -  Son of Senator Mariott

Anne Tillman  -  Special Admin. Assist. 

Eric Tillman  -  Son of Ann Tillman

Eleanor Patterson  -  Alliance of Believers

Jody Catlin  -  Friend

Allesandra  -  ‘Friend’

CHAPTER 1

      
Damn it, I should have gotten there on time.

      Frustration.  Regret.  He’d made a stupid mistake; several, if he wanted to be truthful.  He understood that now.

      But he was also in serious trouble; he just didn’t know that yet.

      
Christ, how cold
does
it get out here in this God-forsaken place!?

      The snow — a dusting of small drifting flakes when he’d begun his hike — was now dropping faster in loose fist-sized clumps, and showed no sign of abating.  If anything, the storm was growing in intensity.

      Then his eyes shifted upward again, and he suddenly realized that the clouds had begun to turn a much darker grey in all directions, as far as he could see … which made no sense at all.

      
Did the sun set already?  No, can’t have, not yet.  Time is it?

      He fumbled with a gloved hand to expose his wristwatch, and then blinked in shock.

      He would have sworn he’d only been hiking for an hour at the most, which should have put him near the end of his five-mile trek to the tower.  But the digital readout of his watch said otherwise.  According to those numerals, almost two hours had elapsed since he’d locked his truck, slipped on his backpack, and headed up the mountain trail.

      
Two hours?!  No, can’t be!

      He found himself fighting off a far more intense feeling of panic that threatened to overwhelm his grip on sanity.  

      An elapsed time of two hours meant he must have gone off the trail that he and his team had carefully and clandestinely marked at least … an hour ago, if not more, he calculated, wincing in dismay as he realized how far off track he might be at this very moment. 

      A sense of numbness began to flood his mind.

      
No, wait!  Can’t let yourself panic.  Stop … and think!

      He forced himself to remain calm as he made a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn in place, searching desperately as he did so for some sign of one of their partially concealed markers, some recognizable rock formation, or even an isolated clump of tall trees.

      But he saw nothing that looked even vaguely familiar; nothing at all.

      It was only then that he lowered his gaze and saw the increasingly larger clumps of drifting snow tumbling, one after another, into the gaping holes of his long trail of deep boot tracks.

      
Oh shit.

      The sudden awareness that he might not be able to find his way back to his truck — if he didn’t turn back right now — seized at his heart like a clawed fist.

      He turned around sharply, intent on sprinting back down the windy mountain trail that he’d worked so hard to climb, but then somehow managed to hold himself in check.

      
No, wait, not yet!  Give yourself one last chance.  Five more minutes, and that’s all.  If you don’t see something familiar by then, go back.

After quickly double-checking his watch, and then taking in a couple of semi-deep breaths through the coarse fabric of his scarf, he started off to his left on a right-angled vector from his intended path, scrambling up a steeper slope that he hoped would give him a better vantage point.

      Three minutes later, after pulling himself forward and upward on his hands and knees, fighting all the while the weight of the backpack he wasn’t about to leave behind, he finally reached the summit, stood up … and then dropped to his knees again as the ground beneath him shook and trembled violently.

      
Earthquake?

      The rumbling continued for three more seconds, and then stopped as suddenly as it began.

      He stayed on his hands and knees for another fifteen seconds, waiting for the aftershock.  But when none came, he stood back up, took a few stumbling steps forward … and then blinked in disbelief.

      The scenery before his eyes, almost as far as he could see through the increasingly dense clumps of falling snowflakes, was a liquid surface still roiling from the cross-rippling effects of the brief tremor.

      He felt his knees sag.  

      
Oh dear God, the lake.

      Or, to be more precise: the incredibly large and irregular lake that had no name and didn’t even appear on any of his team’s maps because — according to the series of satellite maps he’d gone to a great deal of effort and expense to obtain from one of his well-placed sources — it hadn’t existed as much as a few days ago.

      His mind churning, he quickly worked his way back down the slope to his right-angled starting point, and then began retracing his steps without actually being aware that he’d made his decision.

      Fifteen minutes later, he could feel the sweat beginning to soak into his silk long johns; a sure sign that he was laboring too hard, even though the trail was now mostly downhill and much easier to navigate than it had been coming up.

      But the sky seemed to be darkening by the minute, the falling snowflake clumps were turning into a blizzard, and his mind was being pummeled with the images of rapidly disappearing boot prints, so he forced himself to maintain his pace.

      
Two hours up means only an hour back
, he reassured himself as he paused to take a quick sip from one of his water bottles. 
And maybe less if —

      At that moment, the sound of a tree branch snapping loudly — from somewhere back in the direction he had come — echoed across the chilled night air, causing the uneasy voice in the back of his head to suddenly shriek in fright.

      He’d been running for at least fifteen seconds, wide-eyed and barely aware that he was doing so, when he managed to make the incredibly stupid mistake of not paying attention to where he was going.