Strong Light of Day (12 page)

Might as well have taken forever under the circumstances.

Caitlin felt Dakota stiffen and start to slump in her grasp from having his oxygen shut off. The rifle finally slipped from his grasp and clattered to the tile floor below, his kids screeching loud enough to make Caitlin flinch, while his wife remained still and silent, frozen in shock.

The dog was snapping and barking up a storm as it tried to reach Caitlin. Drool flew from its muzzle in thick, frothy clumps, its sights set on Caitlin and nothing more.

Including an old kitchen hutch, dragged awkwardly against a big bay window so no one could see through it from the outside.

Caitlin jerked Dakota that way, sliding back into the open, which meant jerking the man from side to side to shield herself, and dancing from the path of the dog's snapping jaws when it ventured too close. Dakota's legs gave out under him just as she drew even with the hutch. Caitlin felt herself dragged downward by his weight, the dog readying another charge before her. She imagined the inviting target she must make, glimpsed the dog launch itself airborne, straight for her.

In the same moment, she snapped her cuffed hands from Karl Dakota, sideward, tucking both behind the already teetering hutch and pushing. It toppled much faster than she'd expected, directly into the path of the dog, when it was close enough for Caitlin to see its browning teeth and feel its hot breath upon her.

Then the dog was gone, vanished beneath the tumbled hutch with a single yelp.

 

24

A
USTIN
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

“I don't know what pisses me off more,” said D. W. Tepper, as he used his own key on the cuffs still fastened to Caitlin's wrists, “you using your gun or dropping it.” He shook his head and handed them back to her. “Doesn't seem to matter which way those hurricane force winds blow for my acid reflux to kick up a meal or two.”

The sheriff's deputies had crashed through the front door while dust and splintered flecks of wood from the toppled hutch were still staining the air. Paramedics summoned to the scene as a precaution were still tending to Karl Dakota, who'd just regained consciousness, while more of the deputies worked first to untie and then to comfort Dakota's wife and children. A few others, meanwhile, started to lift the hutch off whatever was left of the dog.

“You may want to hold off on that, boys,” Caitlin signaled, gesturing toward the Dakota children.

The deputies got her point and eased it back down.

“Well, I am amazed at one thing,” Tepper said to her.

“What's that?”

“You getting through a whole week's duties without shooting anybody.”

“Don't jinx me, Captain. We're not done here yet.”

“How's that, Ranger?'

“We need to take a look at Karl Dakota's cattle.”

*   *   *

They borrowed flashlights from the sheriff's deputies, to cut through the first of the night, walking off alone toward the grazing fields that rimmed the rear of the Dakota property.

“What time was it when I picked you up outside Christoph Ilg's ranch?”

“I don't remember for sure,” Caitlin told Tepper. “Around eleven maybe?”

“What a day.…” Tepper took off his hat and mopped his brow with a shirtsleeve. “You hear that buzzing sound?”

“Yes, I do. Can't tell you what it is, though, sir.”

“Well, can you tell me why you figure the Torres boy went missing for so long, Ranger?”

“No, I can't—at least not right now.”

“But you don't believe he and his friend were lost, do you? Woods on that nature preserve aren't very thick and don't extend very far. They might well have been in somebody's backyard.”

“You hear anything, Captain?” Caitlin asked him, instead of trying to explain what she'd gleaned from Luke's gaze.

“Just that buzzing. Why?”

“Because where exactly are Karl Dakota's cattle?”

The next sweep of their flashlights illuminated a series of clumps that looked like swollen mounds of dirt or field grass at first glance, but at second were something else entirely.

“Is that…”

“Holy shit,” Captain Tepper finished for her.

 

25

A
USTIN
C
OUNTY,
T
EXAS

The buzzing, it turned out, was flies, swarms and swarms of them, looking like patches of ink in the air of the night's thickening darkness. Caitlin and Tepper froze in their tracks, aware immediately this was some kind of crime scene into which they didn't dare wade for fear of disturbing any evidence.

“Get Doc Whatley on the line,” Tepper instructed. “My hands are shaking too much to press out the keys.”

Caitlin followed the now-shuddery ribbon of light cast by his flashlight into the grazing fields, trying to make sense of what she saw beneath the multitude of swarms as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

“Are those…”

“Yup,” Tepper affirmed, after her voice tailed off without completing the question. “Karl Dakota's cattle—what's left of them anyway. Maybe he's not as crazy as we thought.”

*   *   *

As luck would have it, Bexar County Medical Examiner Frank Dean Whatley was in Houston for a forensics conference for the week, none too happy to be roused from a dinner by Caitlin's call.

“Why can't you just call the locals? Houston had a police department of their own last time I checked.”

“Because this is a Ranger case now.”

“It wasn't before?”

“How fast can you get out here?”

It turned out to be just over an hour before Whatley arrived on the scene. By that time, Sheriff Lee's deputies had secured the area and ordered up outdoor construction lighting powered by generators from a local contractor well versed in providing them. They had just been switched on when Doc Whatley was escorted onto the scene beyond the fence line from where he'd parked his car.

He carried an ancient forensics case in hand, the leather worn and discolored in stray patches. Caitlin could only imagine what the original contents of that case must've looked at when Whatley began carrying it. Frank Dean Whatley had been Bexar County's medical examiner since the time Caitlin was in diapers. He'd grown a belly in recent years that hung out over his thin belt, seeming to force his spine to angle inward at the torso. Whatley's teenage son had been killed by Latino gangbangers when Caitlin was a mere kid herself. Ever since then, he'd harbored a virulent hatred for that particular race, from the bag boys at the local H-E-B to the politicians who professed to be peacemakers. With his wife first lost in life and then death to alcoholism, he'd probably stayed in the job too long. But he had nothing to go home to, no real life outside the office, and remained exceptionally good at performing the rigors of his job.

Whatley had seemed to resent Caitlin in her first years on the job, warming up to her only after they'd worked closely on a few cases together. Caitlin always let him know how much she appreciated his persistence and professionalism, inevitably treating the victims of violence with a dignity that belied the coldness of his office. He'd purchased floral bed linens with his own money to better dress the steel slabs on which he performed his autopsies, because he believed those with the misfortune of ending up there deserved at least that much comfort and respect.

“Your description didn't do this justice, Ranger,” he told her, swallowing hard. “The scene's even worse than what you indicated.”

He pulled three pairs of pull-on plastic booties from his case and passed sets to both Caitlin and D. W. Tepper, the three of them leaning up against the wobbly fence to put them on. Caitlin held Whatley's stare through much of that process. The man's eyes looked much too big for his face from this angle, and she could read what was in them as well.

Because something had ravaged Karl Dakota's entire herd, eaten each and every animal down to the bone.

*   *   *

Caitlin and Captain Tepper didn't say a word while Doc Whatley slipped into his medical examiner's role, first extracting fluids, sprays, and tools neither of them could identify. They looked on as he disappeared into the task of studying what remained of the animals scattered through the field, in positions identifiable by the swarms of flies dotting the air above them.

Even what her visual inspection told her seemed impossible: Each head of cattle had been picked clean to the bone with not the slightest bit of flesh remaining. Made it look like the animals had been dropped into a tank of piranha fish that left only their skeletons behind. Whatley took dozens of samples, allocated into individual plastic bags or tubes for further scrutiny later. Kept shaking his head through the process, obviously having a difficult time remaining detached from findings he'd yet to verbalize.

“Okay, Doc,” Tepper started finally, “what do you make of all this?”

“I don't. I don't make anything out of it. At least not yet.” He started to dip down again, then looked up and found Caitlin in his gaze instead. “How long is stuff like this gonna follow you around?”

“I wasn't aware it had been.”

“Check the record, Ranger. Chances are the bulk of your cases are filed under either the impossible or the apocalypse.”

“That what you think we're facing here, Doc?” Tepper asked him. “The apocalypse? Because if we are, I wanna get in a whole lot of smoking 'fore the end times arrive. And you just try stopping me, Hurricane.”

“Give us something, Doc,” Caitlin urged.

“In this case, Ranger,” he said, continuing the process of running a portable UV light in a crisscrossing grid around one of the stripped carcasses, “nothing
is
something.”

“You've lost me.”

“Figure of speech,” he said, with grass, dirt, and dead flies staining the knees of his trousers. “Accurate in this case, nonetheless.”

“Accurate how?” Tepper asked him.

“Tell me what you see, Ranger,” Whatley said to Caitlin, shining the brightest flashlight she'd ever seen down on one of the carcasses.

“Bones.”

“How about what you don't see?”

“Skin, blood, hair, grizzle, sinew—how long you want me to go on?”

“That was long enough,” Whatley told her, moving the sweep of his beam off what was left of the animal. “Your turn, Captain. Tell me what you see now.”

“Gravel and grass.”

“Anything else?”

“Not a damn thing.”

Whatley held both of them in his gaze. “That's what I meant by the impossible.”

“You said the apocalypse, too,” Tepper reminded.

“True enough, and still as good an explanation as any I can give you right now. I'm guessing your first thought when you saw the flies and bones were animals got these things. Wolves, cougars, bears—something like that.”

“Actually,” said Caitlin, “I was thinking
T. rexes
or velociraptors.”

“Well, even they would've left
something
behind—plenty in fact. Look, I can't tell you what happened in this field, but I can tell you what didn't. You see how the remains are spaced?” Whatley raised and swept his flashlight about to highlight the dark mounds with fly swarms buzzing over them. “Normally, animals—even cattle—cluster defensively when attacked. Not these. They look to have been standing there eating up grass, blissfully unaware that they were about to get eaten down to the bone.”

Caitlin considered that in the context of what was already on her mind. “And if they'd been attacked from the outside in, normal practice, the animals away from the perimeter would've had some time to back off and cluster.”

“What's that suggest to you?”

“The impossible, just like you said.”

“Besides that, Ranger.”

Caitlin let her eyes roam the field as she responded. “They were all attacked at once, by something they never heard, saw, or smelled.”

“First part of my preliminary report precisely,” Whatley told her.

“What about the second part?” Tepper asked him, as if he really didn't want to know.

“I haven't decided how to word it exactly, without sounding like I've flown straight off the handle.”

Tepper felt for the second cigarette he'd bummed off a patrolman back at the nature center, only to find it had slipped out of his pocket somehow. “Talk to Hurricane here,” he said, gesturing toward Caitlin. “She's an expert on flying off the handle.”

“Here's how it plays,” Doc Whatley continued, not absorbing the humor. “I come across a scene even resembling something like this, a mass animal slaughter, I'm thinking about how they died and who did it. Here, there's no evidence on the corpses to give me any notion as to what happened.…” He stopped here, as if still struggling to form his next thoughts into words. “And also no evidence to suggest anyone or anything did it.”

Tepper and Caitlin exchanged a befuddled glance.

“You want to give us that again, Doc?” she asked, before Tepper had a chance to.

“I can't find a single track of any kind, not a one,” Whatley said, like he was trying to believe it himself. “If a predator got to these animals, you'd see evidence of that in the form of blood and remains scattered all over this field. But there's nothing, absolutely nothing. Almost like whatever did this just swooped in from the sky and then swooped back up when they were done.”

“How many head of cattle we talking about?” Caitlin wondered.

“Somewhere around sixty'd be my nearest guess, Ranger, but it's hard to say.”

“How's that compare to the wild animal kills you've come across in the past?”

“It doesn't, not in any way, shape, or form. I believe the worst cattle kill I ever saw was by a starving wolf pack that had wandered onto the Texas prairie all the way from Oklahoma. Six head torn to shreds,” Whatley told Caitlin and Tepper. “But there was still flesh and fur left over, and enough tracks to make me estimate three times the actual number of wolves had been involved. No tracks anywhere on this scene, though. And as for flesh and fur, well…”