Night Wraith Read online

  “Ah,” he breathed. It came in a short breath. Shallow. “God, Karen. You feel so good.”

  “So do you, sweetheart.” She just barely breathed the words. She rode him slowly, with even strokes, up and down, grinding slightly against him when she came down, skin against skin, their pelvises fitting together like lover’s hands. The vision of her above him—her face uptilted and mouth open just enough for her to gasp, her full breasts, her slender torso—was too much. He couldn’t stop himself. It had been too long, damn it, and as much as he wanted this moment to last forever, he was going to come like a newbie on his first night in the cathouse.

  Gavin held her breasts, traced her in the light from the bathroom, gripped her waist and helped guide her movements. Her hair swung above him, her features just as lovely in the half dark as they had been in the light.

  “Karen, I’m going to come,” he said in a half-gasping whisper.

  “It’s okay, Gavin. Come inside of me.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Come for me,” she said.

  He did. It felt like his loins ignited with pleasure. He gripped her tight against him. As he convulsed inside of her, filling her, and as he released what felt like all of the tension of the few weeks, he felt her tremble above him, and she convulsed too, gripping him and crying out as she spasmed with another orgasm.

  In a moment, they were panting and Karen fell onto the bed next to him, pulling the covers up around them, curling into the heat of one another. Gavin felt the magic afterglow that he hadn’t felt since the last time they’d had sex over three weeks ago, before he’d gone a little crazy.

  “God, baby,” he breathed.

  Karen nuzzled against him beneath the covers, running her hands over him softly, completing the spell of utter bliss.

  “Mmm,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.

  “Whew. Sorry so fast, I guess I’ve been—”

  “Oh stop. It felt wonderful. Besides, I’m sure you’ve got a little more left in you if we give it a few minutes.”

  He laughed. “If I don’t fall into the coma that’s threatening to take me, that is.”

  “If you need your rest, sweetie, then you go right ahead and drift off. I feel wonderful.”

  “So do I. And not just because you just made me see stars.”

  She giggled. Any other time it might have seemed strange coming from her, such a woman, but it felt good and right. New love felt like this.

  Love? Do I love her, or is this just the enchantment of postcoital bliss?

  Gavin wouldn’t allow it come from his mouth just yet. Didn’t want her to think that all that mattered to him was this.

  Yes, well done with that plan tonight, bub.

  He closed his eyes and smiled.

  “I guess you needed that,” Karen said, voice muffled by the pillow.

  “I needed you.”

  “I needed you, too,” she said. “More than you know.”

  He knew it was true. And that was okay with him. He lay on his back contemplating the woman who lay beside him, reveling in the feel of her hands roaming idly over his body, and he soon found himself ready again.

  “Hmm,” Karen said with pleasant surprise. “Well.”

  “Sshh.” He pulled her to him.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gavin’s eyes opened in the dark. He heard a voice in the house: a woman’s voice in the hallway.

  Karen was curled against him, unmoving. Her breath was even and measured, deep in sleep. His right arm was pinned beneath her. He didn’t want to move and wake her. Had she spoken in her sleep? Did Carly come home?

  The bedroom door was closed. He looked at it across the dark room. In the hallway beyond the closed door, a small, dim nightlight was plugged in near the floor between his and Carly’s room, leading to the bathroom that she used. Around the edges of his door and the frame, he could see the small sliver of light that outlined it. As soon as the glowing outline came into focus, a dark shape obscured the light on the other side, moving quickly from left to right.

  He caught his breath.

  Is someone in the hallway?

  It had to be Carly. Although, the way his heart was pounding, he knew he wasn’t entirely convinced.

  The phone rang. The blaring sound was like a scream in silence. He convulsed with fright.

  Karen awoke.

  “Gavin?” Sleepily.

  “Shit,” he said, reaching for the receiver. He slid his arm out from under Karen and answered the call. “Hello?”

  “Hi Chief,” Oliver’s voice on the line took no more than a split second to recognize. “I hope you got some rest.”

  “Oh, Christ. What now?”

  “You won’t like it. More kids. This time a car full of them. Looks like five of them from what we’ve found so far.”

  “Found so far? That sounds bad, Oliver.”

  “Like I said.”

  “All dead?”

  “Looks that way.”

  Karen stirred, rubbing her eyes and watching him in the gloom. He felt the smooth brush of her leg against his.

  “It was an accident then?”

  “Yes but, well, there’s more. You might want to come out and take a look.” He told Gavin the location. “I’m here now. Ben’s on his way. EMTs have done everything they can do. The crash is a few hours old. The fog’s been thick all night so no one saw it until twenty minutes ago. An older couple that lives out this way noticed the barbed wire fence was down. The old fella took a closer look and found one of the kids just about cut in half on the wire. A couple of the other kids have been mutilated, too.”

  A dark feeling squirmed in his guts. “Animals?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “This looks familiar, Gavin. Nothing to prove it, but I’ve got a gut feeling these might something to do with the Rainbow Falls mess this past weekend.”

  Gavin groaned. Rubbed his face. Stubble on his cheeks made a rasping sound against his palm. He closed his eyes, receiver pressed to his ear. He could hear the chatter of voices in the background behind Oliver. “You wanna come take a look?”

  “Give me twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll have coffee waiting.”

  Gavin pressed the button on the receiver disconnecting the call. The face of the phone glowed green as he reached over and placed it back on its base. He watched the bedroom door, studying the light leaking dimly around the door’s edges for any more signs of movement. Nothing. Next to him, Karen pressed close, her bare flesh warm against his.

  “I’m sorry about this,” he said.

  “Duty calls,” she said.

  “You don’t have to leave. You’re welcome to stay and sleep.”

  “It’s okay. I should probably go. I didn’t come prepared to stay the night. Better to get home to bed for a few hours sleep before work in the morning.”

  Gavin nodded and folded back the sheets, sitting up on the edge of the bed. He rubbed his face again and watched the outline of the door one more time. Had he really heard a woman’s voice, or had it been his imagination? Had he really seen movement, or had it been a trick of the light?

  Standing, he went naked to the bedroom door and opened it, peering into the hall. Carly’s bedroom door stood open, moonlight beaming in a rectangle across her bed, perfectly made and empty. She wasn’t home, so she must still be at Abi’s like they’d planned. A glance down at the other end of the hall revealed the darkness of her bathroom, and it was definitely hers with pink coverings, carpets, and shower curtain, the sink piled high with the implements of teenage vanity—hair sprays, make-up, mirrors, blow drier, curlers and curling irons, and a massive assortment of perfumes. Half that crap he couldn’t even identify. He could see the mou
ntain of junk darkly reflected against the wall from where he stood.

  Gavin stepped into the hall and peered into her room, aware of his nakedness, but certain now that his daughter wasn’t here. He wouldn’t admit to himself that he was looking for something else, but still he took a few steps toward her room and peered at its dark corners. His eyes picked over the room’s contents, scanned the floor with its overflowing clothes basket which he’d asked her to bring downstairs before she left, the shelves of stuffed animals and books, the posters, the closet doors standing closed next to her vanity. The picture of Beth and Carly together was still stuck in the upper right curve of the mirror, right where it had been for years. The mirror of the vanity showed his shape reflected in the hall, just a black silhouette.

  Did something else just move in that mirror?

  “Gavin?” Karen’s voice came softly into the violet darkness of the hall. She turned on the master bathroom light and dispelled the night shadows.

  Nothing, he thought. It was a trick of the light. A voice from outdoors.

  But even as he switched on the bedside lamp his convictions wavered as he dug for new clothes and tried to focus on the task at hand.

  * * *

  The accident scene was as gruesome as Oliver promised.

  It took fifteen minutes for Gavin to drive his pickup out to the site of the crash. He didn’t pass another car on his way. The mist-laden night made him feel strangely alone, a cinematic dream sequence in which he contemplates his life and sorrows, and the road never ends. He scoffed at himself in the truck, caught the dark-rimmed look in his eyes in the rear-view mirror, aglow with the dash lights.

  Rampart Range Road ran along the edge of town. It sloped down into a shallow bowl that granted access to a valley, then a forked curve became two roads that led up into the mountains where kids liked to party. These kids hadn’t quite made it, if that was their destination. Just before snaking up a steep grade thick with trees, the road passed an open swath of grassland that stretched about 70 yards to a dark wall of pines. As Gavin drove slowly into the bowl, the thick mist broke and revealed the crash scene before him.

  Tendrils of fog drifted over an upturned car, its under-skeleton facing the sky like a giant dead roach. One tire was askew as if the axle had snapped. One headlight beamed into the field illuminating human-sized piles that were covered with tarps. The lights of Officer Thomas’s patrol car glowed through the fog from where it was parked on the side of the road. The EMTs were there, once again just standing next to their vehicle. As Gavin parked his truck and jumped out, slamming his door, his cheeks went hot and his anger flashed. He wrapped his coat tight around him and strode toward the scene.

  Oliver stood ankle-deep in snow in the field, a cup of steaming coffee in his hand as he talked to the coroner Ben Jenkins and Officer Thomas.

  “What the fuck is going on here, Oliver?” Gavin’s voice boomed, strangely muffled in the fog. “This isn’t a goddamn crime scene, it’s an accident and we need to get these people to a hospital.”

  Oliver blinked and gave Gavin a hardened look. Ben Jenkins scratched his chin and glanced sideways at Officer Thomas, who looked somewhat ill.

  “Boss, these people are dead, like I told you on the phone.”

  “No tellin’ if they might have been saved by some medical help if we would have got them out of here?” Gavin clinched his jaws.

  Officer Thomas stammered.

  “How soon did you get here, Ben?”

  Ben looked haggard. He’d grown his customary beard for the winter, and it was white as the snow in the field. His large glasses reflected the flashing globes of the patrol car. “I got here about thirty minutes ago, Chief. But I think Oliver might be right about preserving this scene. You might want to reserve judgment until you take a look.”

  Gavin looked at the three men: Oliver, whom he’d known for fourteen years, and Ben, whom he’d known almost as long. Officer Thomas hadn’t been with them long, and for as young as he was, he sometimes felt like he was raising the boy himself. Gavin composed himself. His ire cooled. He nodded. “Okay, then. Let’s take a look.”

  Oliver and Ben led the way, Gavin walking just a step behind them, duck boots crunching in the snow. They arrived at the covered body nearest the driver side of the upside-down Mustang. Oliver reached down and lifted the corner of the tarp.

  Gavin pulled his flashlight out of his back pocket and aimed its beam at some shredded remains that looked only vaguely human. Except for the head and half the face, he wouldn’t have thought it was anything more human than a pile of raw meat and bones.

  Only a third of the face remained on the skull. The skin that still clung to the muscles and bones was pale blue. Both eyes were in their sockets, but one of them sat in a raw open wound on the flayed side of the face. All of the hair had been ripped away in a solid flap, and the entire jaw was missing, leaving a dangling, half-lip behind, and a ripped open throat from which a tongue lay obscenely, like some grotesque alien phallus. Spare shreds of clothing that were left behind lay in blood-congealed tatters beneath the remains. The heavily muscled torso was marred by four streaks that looked as if a claw had taken a swipe at it. White bone showed through where the ribs were. The lungs and entrails inside what remained of the skeletal frame glistened like giant slugs in the dark.

  Gavin looked up, scanned his flashlight around the field at the other mounds of bodies. He halted the beam at the two smaller humps near the barbed wire fence.

  “That one was cut in half,” Oliver said.

  “How many in all, here, fellas?”

  “Five.”

  Gavin straightened. In the cold, he felt a crick in his lower back and his left knee felt like it was getting jabbed with a persistent dull knife.

  “Are we sure this isn’t the work of scavengers, guys? The accident could have been here a few hours before it was discovered. Seems conceivable to me they could have been savaged by coyotes or mountain lions.”

  “Yes, sir, I thought of that,” Oliver said. “Except for one thing that caused me to preserve all this as a crime scene.”

  Oliver got down on his hands and knees in the snow, grunting as he lowered his massive girth to the ground. Gavin got down next to his old friend and followed the trail of his flashlight beam as it scanned the inside of the car. There was blood everywhere. Splashed over the seats, painting the doors and soaking the carpet, splattered across the inside of the windshield. Every surface of the interior was dulled by maroon-colored dried blood.

  “The windshield is crushed from the impact of rolling over, but it’s not busted out like someone’s head went into it. Now, I could be wrong,” Oliver said, “but it looks to me like something happened inside the car before the crash. Something bad.”

  Oliver looked at Gavin. Coffee-scented breath puffed from his lips in a cloud. Gavin surveyed the scene, putting it together, and nodded. Hands and knees still in the snow, his left knee ached even more at the pressure.

  “Did you call the sheriff’s department?”

  “Nope,” Oliver said. “That’s the other thing. I was going to tell you about this in the morning after you’d had a chance to get your beauty sleep, but the sheriff’s department closed the Rainbow Falls investigation yesterday.”

  “Oh, really?”

  Oliver gave him a grim nod. “They’ve instructed Rainbow Falls Park to display signs and notify potential campers that there’s a bear on the loose in the area, and to use precaution when camping or staying extended periods of time in the park.”

  “A bear?”

  Officer Thomas barked a thin laugh. Gavin looked up at him, then over at Ben Jenkins, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet up to the point.

  “Ben, you’ve said a helluva lot of nothing so far. What do you make of this?”

  Gavin stood up and dusted the snow off his
knees. He offered a hand to Oliver, who took it and managed to stand with a groan.

  The coroner shrugged. “Well, I’m not one to argue with the sheriff’s department, Chief, but I didn’t find any indication those kids Saturday night had been killed by any kind of wild animal I’ve heard of. I won’t say there weren’t any claw marks, but there weren’t any remnants of DNA in the form of saliva, or traces of other things a bear might have killed with its claws and then left behind in the wounds of those kids. No question to my mind that those kids were violently attacked, but I’m skeptical a wild animal did it.”

  “Besides that,” Officer Thomas chimed in. “Those kids all claimed to see a green fog of some kind when the kids were murdered. Not just a couple of them either. They all said they saw it.”

  The men traded glances. Gavin looked back up to the road.

  “You did the right thing, Oliver. Okay guys, let’s get the rest of this scene roped off, preserved, and documented as well as possible. Let’s start with the positions and conditions of these bodies so we can get them out of here first. Have you still got the camera in the back of your car, Thomas?”

  “Yes sir,” he said.

  “Grab it.”

  Officer Thomas headed quickly across the field to his car. Gavin hoped they hadn’t completely destroyed any footprints that might have existed in the snow. He hoped Oliver thought of that first, but thinking it was an accident, that wouldn’t have been his first instinct, just as it hadn’t been Gavin’s.

  I guess there’s going to be a few more pleasant visits for me to make tomorrow, he thought.

  “Get you that cup of coffee, boss?”

  “Please.”

  They went to work on the scene.