The Shadowkiller Read online

  Also by Matthew Scott Hansen

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  Confessions of an Enron Executive: A Whistleblower’s Story

  (with Lynn Brewer)

  Andy Kaufman Revealed! (with Bob Zmuda)

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Scott Hansen

  “Deacon Blues” by Walter Carl Becker and Donald Fagen © 1977, copyright renewed 2005 by Music Corporation of America, Inc. All rights administered by Songs of Universal, Inc/BMI. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Davina Mock

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hansen, Matthew Scott, 1953–

  The shadowkiller / Matthew Scott Hansen.

  p. cm.

  1. Sasquatch—Fiction. 2. Washington (State)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.A7225S47 2007

  813’.6—dc22 2006050491

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3728-1

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-3728-7

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To Mom and Dad, the finest hominids I know…

  …and to Steph and Zane, my inspiration

  Acknowledgments

  Although I have written other books, the creation of a first novel is singular, so I have many people to whom I must send out bouquets for their forbearance during this longer than long process.

  First, my wife, Stephanie Bianca, deserves special thanks for many reasons, not the least of which is her brilliant counsel, tireless editing, sterling ideas, tough love, and cool head under fire. Trust me, you’d want this girl in your foxhole.

  If superagent Nick Ellison were simply the best tactician an author could ever hope to have, that would be sublime, but he’s also wickedly irreverent and crazy smart. Thank you, Nick, for embracing this book from the get-go. Thanks also to Nick’s terrific staff, particularly his director of foreign rights, Sarah Dickman.

  I must send out a huge thanks to my team from Simon & Schuster, starting with David Rosenthal for recognizing the value of this story. My editor, Amanda Murray, also deserves particular credit for her un-failing patience and wisdom during the process of putting this book out. Amanda and her assistant, Annie Orr, did all they could to make me look good. I would also like to thank the marketing staff, my copy editors, and the art department for their meticulous attention to detail.

  Thanks to Deputy Rich Niebusch of the Snohomish County Sheriff for his assistance in creating a fictionalized version of his fine organization. Thanks also to Tinabeth Pina for sharing her knowledge of television news. My attorney, Nigel Pearson, requires special kudos for his calm British demeanor in the face of all things Hollywood. Thanks to story analyst extraordinaire David Bruskin not only for his astute suggestions, but for his eyes and ears.

  A large number of friends and family were part of the birthing process of this big, hairy hominid, providing endless support and encouragement, and I must put forth some of their names with my heartfelt thanks. Verna, you were there from day one and read this thing, what, four times? Thank you. And many, many thanks to the gang, Steve and Carol Schneider, Mitch and Jana Hunter, cousins Gregg and Kendall, Alan Erickson, Bill Fitzhugh, Lynn Brewer, Allison Saiko, Mary K. Dean and Walter Addison, Jackie Riggs, and David Brayton. Also, a loving thank-you to my folks, Jim and Grace Hansen, and my sis, Meredith, for listening to my stories from the start.

  And finally, thanks go to Emilio, for giving me the motivation to write fiction.

  The Keepers of Fire allowed it to escape. He watched as they let it loose. Then they ran. The Great Fire rose fast, like the wind, climbing the slopes from the floor of the valley, its white orange maw devouring everything it touched. The inferno pushed his tribe back against the high cliff above the river. It came too fast for him to protect them, so he found a place and clung to the rocks, the teeth of the fire gnawing at him, trying to break his grip. It burned him and the smoke stung his eyes but he held fast, knowing the churning rapids were far below. Eventually the Great Fire moved on.

  All but he had been consumed in its flames.

  He made a pile of rocks to remember them and began walking. He moved north, toward the mountains. Crossing streams and following ridge lines, he relied on his instincts for direction. The farther he journeyed, the more evidence he saw of them. He felt he would soon find many of them. A relentless traveler, he kept moving. He would not stop until he had found the Keepers of Fire.

  1

  Had you asked him when he rolled out of bed that morning, Joe Wylie wasn’t even remotely thinking about being first at anything. Being first had always eluded Joe—in birth order, in school, with women, with jobs, with pretty much everything. Something else Joe didn’t think about very often was the fact he’d been married for twenty-four years. His wife Lori’s unwavering daily consumption of handfuls of Ding Dongs and Double Fudge Yoohoos had doubled her weight since the day they were married. On top of that his nineteen-year-old daughter was over in Seattle shacked up with some dope-pushing jerk on a Harley and, maybe worse, his son had recently decided a nose ring would be a shrewd fashion statement.

  Yet when Joe saw the nose ring, it didn’t bother him, and that’s when he realized he didn’t have strong feelings about anything anymore. His sixteen-year-old had a ring in his nose and Joe didn’t give a crap about that or anything else. Finally, he concluded, at forty-seven, it was nice to be all through with worrying. His rapidly receding hairline didn’t even cause him the stress it used to, nor did his accumulating Budweiser gut. And he sure as hell didn’t worry about his job, which wasn’t particularly rewarding but paid well and was pretty frickin’ easy. More or less drive a truck around in the woods, look at the trees, then tell your bosses they’re still there. Piece of cake.

  Uncharacteristically, Joe Wylie was actually thinking about his job as he steered up Access Road Number 4. Logging roads were rarely given descriptive, enchanting names like Pine Lake or Deer Hollow because they were only used to gain access to the seemingly boundless stores of timber owned by multinational conglomerates and, except for the rare logging crew, only people like Joe and kids looking for places to party made use of them. Road 4 was way the hell off the beaten track, high in the mountains, seven miles and four thousand feet above the last sign of civilization, a Weyerhaeuser equipment facility.

  The day before, local kids had reported some busted trees up Road 4 and Joe was asked to investigate. Joe guessed it was probably the work of disgruntled, drunken loggers out of Sultan or Gold Bar. Joe had been timber cruising ten of the twenty-six years he’d been with Weyerhaeuser and little surprised him. He imagined the perpetrators were probably just vengeful independents put out of work either by his company or some damn owl or rare squirrel or something. He sort of sympathized with their frustration, but if they wanted to ruin trees, they could kindly go over to the national forest, or better yet, Buse Timber’s property.

  Joe fiddled with the radio, hoping to receive a Seattle station, but got only static. He remembered he was on the eastern edge of Snohomish County and that he almost never got good radio here. The dash clock’s spindly hands in
dicated six forty. He wondered why the truck’s manufacturer had bothered with such a shitty timepiece since it had never worked right. By the angle of the sun he reckoned it was about eight fifteen a.m.

  From inside the paper sack on the floor he fished out another longneck Bud. He preferred the longnecks because they were easier to hold while he drove. For Joe they had the pleasant effect of rendering what could be completely stultifying work into the soothing vocational equivalent of easy-listening music.

  Seven miles above the equipment station he slowed the truck as his eyes widened in wonder. A typically uneventful shift had suddenly become the jackpot of interesting mornings: ahead was something he had never seen in all his years in the woods. He stopped the truck and stepped down onto the damp hardpan. Clutching his coat tighter, Budweiser vapor swirling around his head, he stood and stared. Some broken trees, my ass. For fifty yards every tree on both sides of the road was snapped, maybe ten feet above the ground. Expecting two or three or even a half dozen, he quickly estimated a good hundred trees. This is crazy. This is big.

  Joe walked down the lane of shattered fir and hemlock and tried to imagine who on earth had done this. And why? He’d seen the work of spiteful, drunken loggers but this was not that. Some of the trees were big, eight-inch-diameter second growth, yet all were splintered, some hanging by fibers, some clean off. Though he was an experienced woodsman, his mind whirled for answers but came up lemons. Brushing aside his dismay, he forced himself to tick off possibilities.

  There had been no wind, so he ruled that out. Besides, he knew it would have taken a goddamn tornado to do this and that would have broken other trees, not just the ones facing the road. So his first conclusion was that this was planned. The notion irritated him because it was a waste of good timber, and if loggers had done this, then it wasn’t just excusable rowdiness, it was vandalism, maybe even downright sabotage. Rolling the word sabotage around in his mind, he made a mental note to use it in his report.

  As Joe’s eyes swept the scene from the cold shadows to the sunlit treetops, he squinted, concentrating hard as to how this maliciousness had been carried out. It was then, despite the intake of several Buds and the fact it was not even eight thirty, that he unscrambled the puzzle. Somehow these really determined timber pirates—as he now labeled them—had gotten a big diesel scissors loader up here and somehow snapped the trees off. He’d never seen a scissors loader do that, and sure, there were a few extra somehows in there, but that must have been how it happened. The fact that the pirates hadn’t seemed to have actually pirated any timber was another small detail Joe let slide in his solution.

  Joe smiled contentedly as he pondered the fate of such vicious despoilers of his arboreal kingdom. But then his smile faded as he realized that all of the faint animal sounds had just disappeared. Though he heard the truck purring nearby, suddenly the birds and insects and whatever else that sang and chattered in the woods had fallen silent, as if someone had hit the pause button on the forest sounds tape.

  A moment later something even more disturbing happened. At first it was as if sunlight warmed his back, only he knew the sun’s rays had not yet reached beneath the trees to touch him. Then Joe realized it was really more of a creeping-up-the-spine force, like someone watching you but there’s no one there. He’d felt it before in the woods and had chalked it up to once in a while just feeling something eerie you can’t explain. Dismissing things was Joe’s path of least resistance, but this time the sensation bothered him, even scared him. He nervously scanned the woods but saw nothing. Suddenly he felt very alone, so he headed toward the safe haven of his truck.

  A few yards from the refuge of his beat-up Chevy, a noise behind him caused Joe to spin around. The human mind can identify a threat in a tenth of second and it took about that long for Joe to realize he was in grave danger. And either despite or because of the extreme stress, his brain also reached the rather academic conclusion that in all those years he’d never believed it existed. Until now.

  That’s when the air and his vision and his thoughts became clearer than crystal, and it suddenly didn’t matter if his kid had a nose ring or if his wife had porked out, because everything was about to change for him. Joe suddenly gave a crap again, because you always do when you’re about to die. And with that supreme clarity of cognition he also understood he was about to check out in a very bad way, much worse than a car crash or house fire or gunshot to the chest, and a life-sucking chill rippled through his temples into his neck, down his spine, and jumped to his scrotum, which tightened up like a sea monkey in reverse. Joe’s knees wavered, then buckled, and the two Buds that had gathered in his bladder drained into his pants.

  Because for the first time in his life, Joe was about to be first.

  Seven miles below at the equipment station, twenty minutes had elapsed since Chuck Pendleton waved to Joe Wylie as his truck passed. Chuck readied a couple of quarts of fifty-weight to pour into one of the big D8R Cats he maintained in his yard. As he punched the filler spout into an oil can, he thought he heard something. He set the can down and listened. Faint, it sure sounded like a scream. He shrugged, lit another Winston, and picked up the can.

  Must have been the gate creaking.

  2

  Ty Greenwood wanted to die. Or, perhaps more accurately, he didn’t want to live anymore. Pondering what were probably the last minutes of his life, Ty stared down that dead-end alley and sipped a little more fifteen-year-old Balvenie, searching for the commitment to make it happen.

  And as if to make his case to himself, he made one last push to picture himself happy again and immediately realized it was just another of ten thousand exercises in futility.

  Yes. I’m suffocating. He thought about what went wrong. How he had lost everything that mattered to him. Everything that mattered? But wait, didn’t he have great kids, a woman who loved him deeply, and money and his health? Isn’t that all that matters? So maybe it was just his pride that had been murdered. But isn’t that really everything?

  Then he flashed on how his story had turned him into a punch line. Even Leno had made a crack about him. Ty raised his glass. “To the big joke.” He took a sip, then held the glass high and addressed an imaginary gathering. “Hey? Who believes in monsters out there? Anyone? No? Okay. So just me, huh?” He took another drink.

  His eyes narrowed as he relived the betrayals. His “friends,” his trusted coworkers. The company he practically cofounded. Forced out. Ungrateful bastards. Cruel bastards.

  Or did I quit?

  “Doesn’t matter.” He lifted the heavy cut-crystal glass again and toasted, “To no credibility. To no respect.”

  The black mist had descended over his mind again and the booze was only adding to its opacity. The bouts with depression had only increased in the last year. Then he remembered the unkindest cut of all—that even Ronnie doubted him. His own wife’s skepticism told him that trying to convince anyone else was futile.

  I just cannot prove it. Period.

  Sometimes he wasn’t even sure it had happened. Did it? He was too drunk to remember.

  The time readout in the lower right corner of his computer monitor said it was 2:41 a.m.

  Time to die.

  Ty drained off the last of the single malt and cast a blurry eye to the text on the screen. He hit save and looked for the last time at its morbidly informative title, “Why I Killed Myself,” then exited the program. Ronnie would be poking around in there some day. It would offer some insight into the pressures he was feeling and the way he arrived at his final decision.

  He gave a last glance around the walls and desk in his home office, and each of the photos brought back an overload of memories. Staring at the photo of himself with his current coworkers, a rugged crowd attired in khaki Forest Service uniforms, he saw himself in the context of the other men. Fair-haired, with the same jaw line at forty-two as at twenty-five, Ty felt he looked more racquetball fit than the rest of the guys, who seemed to have earned their musc
le on the job. Carded at bars well into his early thirties, Ty felt his boyish face had only in the last few years begun to assume an adequate degree of character. One of the few men in the picture without a beard, Ty was also standing, tellingly, at the edge and to the rear of the fifteen or so people, yet his lean six-foot-two-inch frame was prominent even in the back.

  He had never invited any of the Forest Service crowd over, partly because he wasn’t really that close to any of them but mainly because he feared the questions his elegant, eleven-thousand-square-foot shrine to state-of-the-art architecture and high technology would elicit from them. It was just too tough to explain. Ty knew the progression of those imagined conversations. He had only taken the job to allow access to something else, something far more important. Like getting his name and his life back.

  But his plan had failed miserably. Two years had passed without an inch of progress.

  Maybe he’d taken the job as a form of therapy. Maybe he took it to fool Ronnie, since she wouldn’t let him search for his specter out in the open. Maybe he’d been fooling himself all along—about finding it, that is.

  But he’d gambled and lost and now it was time to pay up. He poured more Scotch and toasted again, “To the late Tyler James Greenwood, former software king and former respected family man.”

  He drained the silken, fiery liquid into his throat and jumped up, grabbed a fresh bottle of Glenmorangie from the wet bar, and headed toward the front door. On the way he realized that, aside from his eloquent death manifesto, checking out without a simple good-bye would be downright heartless. Ty weaved down the long hardwood hallway with its fifteen-foot arched ceilings toward the kitchen area, behind which was housed Ronnie’s home office.

  This home was the fantasy he and Ronnie had envisioned years ago, back when they were lowly programmers at a start-up software company, both making twenty-two grand a year and banging off the walls of a cramped two-bedroom, one-bath in Totem Lake with a baby on the way. A perfect place to raise our kids. He crushed the guilty pangs and focused on the job at hand. He made his way around the huge kitchen, the center island alone the size of their last kitchen. He passed by the soaring windows, designed by him to allow as much light as possible on those all-too-often gray Washington days. None of these things gave him the joy they used to.