Probe Read online

  For my husband, Sam—again, because he is the best

  THE FINDING

  August 31

  CHAPTER ONE

  * * *

  “Ten to one this is another crank call.”

  Sergeant Biff Matusek implanted perfectly fitting dentures deep in the mushy guts of a Big Mac. Special sauce ran down his outjutted jaw and he automatically slapped it off his double chin with the swipe of a paper napkin. “Should have gone ten-seven off the air, then we wouldn’t be chasin’ our tails around on every Friday-night fracas in town.”

  The in-dash Motorola squawked sudden agreement.

  “Jesus! Squelch that thing. Man can’t even eat in peace.” Matusek was silent while stuffing fingersful of limp fries into his mouth.

  At the wheel, his young, mustached face lit from below by the dashboard lights, rookie John Kellehay glanced regretfully to the quarter-pounder congealing on the seat beside him. The veteran sharing the squad car’s front seat with Kellehay jammed his empty fries sacks into the McDonald’s bag, stretched his six-foot frame in a practiced little buck and, out of some obscure habit, tightened the belt underlining his prominent Milwaukee goiter. Required standards of police physical fitness had not yet reached Crow Wing, Minnesota. Anyway, a red-necked old-timer like Matusek would have snorted at the idea of a weight loss or regular exercise.

  Kellehay smiled, looking even younger with his choir-boy crop and closely trimmed mustache—all the hairiness allowed uniformed officers.

  “Say, Sarge, this might not be so bad. Could be something hot up on the overlook. Usually the kids want us to stay as far away as possible; dispatcher said these sounded pretty shook.”

  “That old hen is dreamin’. Only thing hot you’ll find up there is the Friday-night neckers,” Matusek predicted.

  “Do a hell of a lot more than neckin’ nowadays. But Christ, that ain’t nothin’. You can see it at home on TV a lot easier. And you’ll find out after you’ve been in police work longer, kid, that shinin’ flashlights into lovers’ lane cars is a kick that don’t last. Hell, I’ve spent more time on that damn overlook chasin’ nothin’—Watch out; this road’s a bitch for night drivin’.”

  Matusek glumly watched the black-and-white’s headlights flush vivid green patches of bush and pine from the night undergrowth for a few moments. His bulk bucked uncomfortably again on the sticky vinyl upholstery. It was warm for late August in Minnesota.

  “The big zero. Nothin’,” he pronounced. “You’ll see.”

  The Plymouth hummed steadily up the tortuous incline. Going down the road at murderous speed was a favorite postmidnight summer sport of local hot-rodders expressing high spirits after a few hours of bluff-top necking and Sergeant Matusek’s “a lot more.”

  It was not quite midnight now; a bright full moon bobbed in an August sky clad in scarves of fast-flying clouds. The Crow Wing bluff was a remarkable earthen upthrust from predictably flat Minnesota farm country. Tough native clay fueled the pottery plant that had made the town famous; that same carmine earth shaped the plateau Indians had once used for lost ceremonials. Now, it served mainly as a stage for starlit clandestine necking or daytime sight-seeing, a setting composed of rock, dirt and what random greenery amateur climbers hadn’t trampled. The squad car rolled to a stop near a limestone wall that ringed the official overlook. Matusek lumbered out to stretch again.

  “See, Kellehay? Quiet as a cat up here. Even the kids don’t need the place; nowadays they got them fancy vans they can park pretty as you please in Mommy and Daddy’s driveway.”

  “Nice night,” the rookie agreed, getting out to study the ghostly sky and the few bright barbs of stars visible behind the scudding cloud wisps. “Maybe even a little spooky.” He grinned at the sergeant, who snorted, then placed a perfect arc of spit on a nearby limestone slab.

  “Take a look around, Kellehay. I’ll, uh…” Matusek stretched back into the front car seat, grunting, and surfaced with a white bag. “I’ll finish your burger before it gets cold.”

  Kellehay got the powerful flashlight from the trunk and shook his head as he probed the darkness with rhythmic sweeps of the beam. He was a farmer’s son, but he had a college degree from the outstate branch of the University of Minnesota, and he knew men like Matusek were a doomed breed. Modern police work was filtering down even to isolated towns like Crow Wing. And modern crime. Crow Wing saw its share of rapists and child murderers now, as well as the occasional spectacular crime of rural isolation—the farmers who went berserk and killed their wives, children, dogs and selves seemingly for the sole purpose of bringing a plague of big-city press down on the boondocks.

  Kellehay dug his heels into the incline and worked his way below the bluff profile with a seesaw gait. There was a lower outcropping, a sort of earthen work balcony, that the kids liked to scramble down to. It was usually carpeted with broken beer bottles…

  Kellehay’s foot stubbed on something; he heard shattering glass chime on the rocks below a second later.

  “No drinkm’ on the job, Kellehay,” Matusek bellowed jocularly from the bluff lip above.

  The rookie didn’t answer; he was too busy trying to slow what had become a breakneck rush down the treacherous surface.

  “Find anything?” demanded Matusek. “Told you so,” he added into the continued silence.

  The silence prolonged past what was acceptable. Matusek crumpled the cardboard shell of the devoured quarter-pounder and threw it aside, debating pulling his gun and going down. Forty years of simple instinct was suddenly hound-dog keen. The hairs on the back of his hands rose to attention.

  “Sergeant?” It was Kellehay’s voice from below, hushed, strangled.

  Kellehay never called him “Sergeant.”

  Matusek hung over the edge, motionless, waiting.

  “You better get down here, Sarge—fast!”

  Matusek hitched up his belt and thrust himself into the blackness below. Rocks chattered out of his way, spraying into distance. He stopped short on an impenetrable piece of darkness—Kellehay.

  “Whoever called wasn’t dreaming, Sarge. This is gonna be a rough one, really rough. Look.”

  The piece of blackness that was Kellehay trained a shaft of light on the bottle-littered ground, illuminating a swath of tattered Hamm’s beer labels, shattered brown glass and something large and pale and star-shaped lying on the brittle carpet of refuse.

  “Ho-ly Christ!” Matusek extended the words into several awestruck syllables. “I hope she’s dead.”

  “Better have a look,” said Kellehay, not moving. The flashlight beam shook a little in the pooling darkness, but the figure it spotlighted was unforgettable.

  It was a woman, clothed only in the yellow light that revealed her. There was nothing prurient about her nudity; it was too awful. Her body was flat, paper-doll-thin, the dead whiteness of the skin blotched with a leprosy of filth. The face. Dirt-caked until the features looked half-eaten. The eyes. Open, glistening like beer bottle shards. The mouth, open too, distended, stiff, frozen into a death camp grin.

  “What kind of pervert…?” Kellehay spoke in a dazed singsong. Sergeant Matusek suddenly punched him on the arm.

  “Come on, kid. We don’t think. We get her topside and then we call the white-suit boys. Well, come on! You was the one so damn hot for there to be something here. Well, there is. There sure as shit is. Take her feet.”

  “She’s dead, ain’t she, Sarge?” Kellehay asked the dark as he scrambled up the bluff face. He felt that his hands, curled around bone-hard ankles, were about to sink into something resembling rotted marshmallow. The older man only grunted. The white body bridging them hung slack and amazingly heavy. Kellehay couldn’t see anything of Matusek except his dark shoulders.

  They lay the body dow
n not far from the squad car; Matusek straightened over it slowly. “Best answer your own question, John,” he said seriously. “You got all that up-to-date training. I’ll call for the hospital meat wagon.”

  The sergeant turned away while the younger man reached a reluctant hand to the woman’s neck. The face, the awfully grinning face, thank God, had fallen looking away from him. Kellehay’s fingers fluttered on the cold skin, then pressed resolutely on the carotid artery. Behind him, the squad door opened; Kellehay could almost feel its dawning yellow interior light fall like a warm blanket across his back. The Motorola barked once. He felt, against all likelihood, an answering flutter under his fingertips. He pressed harder. His own pounding pulse, it had to be… He glanced toward the horrible visage turned nearly away. A slick white glisten caught the moonlight or some vagrant ray of headlight. The face swiveled slowly toward him—stiff, expressionless except for the savage staring eyes. Pity conquered his revulsion. He put a palm under the short matted hair and lifted the head that seemed so heavy on its fragile neck.

  “Hey, Sarge,” he yelled over his shoulder. “Tell ’em to come quick. She’s alive!”

  He looked back to make sure she hadn’t died even as he spoke. The catatonic grin was unchanged, but the glassy eyes were widening with comprehension, with growing terror. The head in his hands swiveled sharply to the car with its door agape and Sergeant Matusek leaning into its illuminated interior, the mike in his hand like a dark lollipop trailing coiled licorice…

  Kellehay’s hands fell away, but her head remained halfraised as her fearful stare focused on him for a moment. Her eyes shifted rapidly to the squad car as if drawn by the mechanical buzz of its two-way radio.

  “You’re a hero, kid,” Matusek was saying with the mike poised in front of his mouth. “You’ll get a citation if she’s alive—”.

  The mike exploded into flame in Matusek’s hand, fanning into his half-open mouth as if he were eating it. Matusek was thrust back against the front seat, his dark uniformed figure as detailed as a spider’s against a fire. The car’s yellow light reddened, then the whole interior exploded out and back, just like Matusek. Everything was swallowed in a curtain of red-orange flame that shook like a clothesline blanket in a fall wind.

  The force of that interior explosion started the car rolling toward the bluff edge. Kellehay saw Matusek’s foot dragging along the ground out the still open door; everything—trunk, roof, hood, wheels—blazed into flame. The gas tank finally ignited with a crimson burst that pushed the burning frame farther down the incline. It rolled remorselessly to the edge, paused on the rocky brink, then teetered over in a shower of shooting flames.

  Kellehay ran numbly to the drop. The car was bouncing—a small, bright ball—down into the darkness. Kellehay wondered what words to what song he should sing as it touched earth each time, then rebounded on to the next note… His stomach was gripped by a sudden spasm of—hunger? Whatever it was, it grabbed his guts and held on. He turned back to the bluff-top. She still lay there. Her eyes were closed. He prayed she wasn’t still alive.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  The phone rang into his sleeping consciousness with the insistency of a dentist’s drill. He hated dentists.

  Kevin rolled out of the smooth warm sheets, and patted the nightstand in the dark. He was pretty good at it, midnight phone calls being the price of his profession. His groping hand hovered over the mouth of his before-bed Heineken, moved carefully around his expensive Swiss watch—don’t want to knock that sucker down—and finally closed on the barbell of the standard-style receiver. Just try and wring extra bucks outa me for one of your fancy phones, Madame Bell…

  “Hello. Blake here,” he mumbled into the mouthpiece, hoisting himself up against his once perfectly piled pillows. He punched them into the semblance of a back support and waited for what would be either news of Dora Culver’s latest suicide attempt or the successful snatch of a cult member or—

  “It’s Cross,” a perfectly wakeful baritone throbbed into the receiver. “Wait’ll you see what the Lord dropped down on a plateau in Crow Wing. We’ve got a triple-priority case here at the hospital. Better get down.”

  “What time is it?” Kevin muttered ill-naturedly, groping for the lamp switch and snapping on a blinding flash. He blinked at the eighteen-karat-gold hands of the Swiss watch and nearly dropped it. “Four A.M.? Come on, Cross, nothing’s that priority it can’t wait three goddamn hours.”

  “Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night…” Cross chanted in an acerbic monotone. “Believe me, Doctor, you wouldn’t want to miss a minute on this one. Also, she’s in pretty tough shape. I don’t want her waking up without you here from moment one. This one is worth your beauty sleep. I’ll see you as soon as.”

  The phone clicked off, settling into a drone Kevin left at his ear a minute. It was almost enough to push him back over the edge into sleep, but Cross was his boss… and often right, which carried even more weight. He swung his feet to the floor and snapped on the watch, a parental gift on his graduation from Harvard Med School. Four-ten a.m. Cross, to be precise.

  She. Crow Wing? Tough shape. There was no speculating on the last phrase. If Dr. Norbert Cross said she was in tough shape, she was at death’s door. Cross was one of the most conservative diagnosticians at the University Hospitals, which was probably why they’d pushed him into administration.

  And why they left the risky stuff to young Turks like himself. Kevin grinned as he jammed on jeans and moccasins and wriggled into a sweater. Preppie he wasn’t—Harvard only proving that even a Minnesota boy can get good grades but no class. It was a damn good thing Probe needed him. What else would they do about mysterious ladies left on hilltops in Crow Wing?

  “You took your time,” Cross noted out of habit, his eyes flicking to the bland white moon of the hospital clock. “That fancy watch of yours must be running slow.”

  Kevin raised a propitiating hand. “Look, all present, white coat, washed behind the ears, honest. And it’s only five. Five A.M.! Sometimes, Dr. Cross, I think your generation gets a secret pleasure from getting mine up at ungodly hours—”

  “That’s because we know what yours has been up to the night before. That’s our major form of recreation,” Cross rejoined. He turned and walked briskly down the hospital hall with its colored visitors’ guide ribbons streaming away on the floor ahead like a rainbow-brick road through an institutional forest of monotone green walls and ceiling.

  Cross was in his late fifties, a man of thinning hair and thickening middle. His watery gray eyes could grow sharp with command, though, and he was a hell of an analyst. Cross stopped outside a broad pale wood door. Kevin noticed the name slot was empty.

  “This one’s got ‘Jane Doe’ written all over her,” said Cross, observing his glance. “She was briefly conscious on admission, but no one could get anything out of her.”

  Kevin took the clipboard Cross extended. “These her stats?” He whistled softly through his teeth while he studied it.

  Cross studied him as intently. Shaggy, somehow Kevin Blake’s generation always managed to look shaggy and friendly as an Old English sheepdog. Thirty-something. Bright as surgical steel but all geniality. This particular model had longish brown hair, a not too offensive beard, an endless propensity for blue jeans no matter what the occasion, matching blue eyes that were sharp as a tack and twice as penetrating, and a totally laid-back manner over one of the keenest psychoanalytical intelligences Cross had ever become infuriated with: too damn radical and too often right.

  Kevin glanced up suddenly and gauged the intensity of his scrutiny. Cross didn’t bother to hide it.

  “Why does a brilliant young shrink like you get into a cul-de-sac like Probe?” Cross asked abruptly. “We all know why I ended up a desk jockey. But you… The money’s comparatively rotten and you don’t like our sponsors and the cases are usually downers.”

  “Why do some doctors specialize in cancer? It’s the thrill of the rem
ission, maybe.”

  Hmmmm, and the agony of defeat, as likely. Interesting personality type, the against-all-odds doctor. Strong ego.”

  “Healthy ego, Doctor,” Kevin corrected, returning his eyes to the medical report. He flicked the top sheet. “You haven’t officially tagged her a Doe. I can see why. If she lives, it’ll be a miracle. A hundred and one pounds, suffering from exposure… Found on a scenic overlook in a quiet little rural Minnesota town. Signs of sexual attack?”

  “Nothing obvious.”

  “What’s this? Mention of rictus sardonicus. A corpselike grin. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. I assume the lady is no longer smiling now that Probe’s got its hands on her.” Kevin glanced up and nailed his boss with a look. “I stay in Probe to lend some humanity to your little military-industrial funded mind-unraveling unit, Doctor. The best research in the world means nothing if you don’t put it into a human context.”

  “Lord, Dr. Blake.” Cross laughed suddenly. “Our favorite argument, even at five A.M. You’re made for this work. And you are the best with these fragile cases, you know. This one will take all the humanity you’ve got, Doctor. I have a feeling that when you find out where this girl’s been, you won’t believe it.”

  “Then let’s get on with it,” suggested Kevin, tucking the clipboard under his elbow.

  Cross’s hand halted Kevin’s white-coated arm just as he was about to push his way into the hospital room.

  “Wait a bit on the Doe. There’s… I’d like you to see the police officer who found her first. He was sent down here with her in the ambulance. Actually, in front of her in the ambulance. Wouldn’t ride up back even though she was unconscious. There was a tragic accident when they found her, delayed getting her medical attention even longer. Squad car exploded. This man’s partner was killed. At the moment, he’s a worse trauma victim than she is…”

  Kevin’s hands jammed into his lab coat pockets in mock resignation. “Gee, you get me all ready to meet my blind date and then pull a substitution. Look, Norbert, accident survivors don’t need Probe-level attention. Couldn’t one of the house shrinks see him?”