“No, but we can go see. She should be lying in the doorway.”
They started across the street toward the house, then Bill stopped. He saw that the front door was open. James, who was in front of Bill and didn’t see him stop, continued into the yard. When he got to the start of the sandstone walkway leading to the front door he stopped and looked back at Bill, who was now coming up to join him. “Now do you believe me?”
Bill walked up beside James and saw the poor old black lady lying face down in the doorway. Blood was all over the small front porch and the floor of the entrance hallway. Bill walked on up for a closer look. Alma’s arm, severed at the shoulder, was lying over to the side a little way. Judging by the blood splattered on the porch and the walls beside it, something seemed to have shaken the arm like a dog shaking a toy in its mouth. Bill remembered Alma had big arms with fat hanging down from the upper part, but there was hardly a strip of meat left on the arm lying on the porch.
CHAPTER 11
Texas’ Finest
Chaos was quick to descend on the small town after Alma Carroll’s body was found. The murders had been the biggest gossip to hit Newton County since County Commissioner Alex Harrison had been caught in the drug bust, but up until now the rumors floating around hadn’t caused much panic. But now one of the horrible killings had taken place inside the city limits, and within full view of the elementary school playground. The morning that the body was found, a handful of parents arrived at the elementary school, demanding to take their kids home. Despite efforts to stem the panic, the rumors spread throughout the day more and more parents arrived to pick up their kids. By the end of the day, three quarters of the elementary students had gone home and half of the students at Newton High School had also gone.
And the gossip was no longer contained to Newton County. Reporters from Beaumont and Lufkin arrived and started taking pictures of the crime scenes and asking questions. Worse yet, there was a reporter from the tabloid television show, Current Edition, snooping around town. And as if that wasn’t enough, Debra had been fielding calls from reporters from the major news networks.
After Bill released his only suspect, he went to work trying to prevent more killings. Bill met with John Banks, the Newton County Police Chief, and suggested a dusk-till-dawn curfew for the city. John immediately met with the mayor, who called an emergency meeting of the city council. The curfew was put into effect that afternoon.
Bill hated reporters almost as much as he hated big city lawyers, but he knew the media could be useful. He continued to refuse to talk to any of them in person or over the phone, but he did dictate a letter and have it faxed to all the TV and radio stations in the area. In the letter he informed the stations that the investigation was ongoing and he had no information that he could give out at that time. Then he got to the important part: he told them that, while there was no immediate cause for alarm, he suggested all citizens of Newton County stay inside from dusk till dawn and not to go outside for any reason — just to be on the safe side, of course. Bill knew that suggesting that the entire county stay inside at nighttime would add fuel to the fire as far as the rumors were concerned, but there was a chance that it might save lives.
As far as the fact that this thing might have some sort of ability to take on other forms, Bill kept that information to himself for the time being. He wasn’t sure if the creature did or didn’t have some sort of supernatural power, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit anything of the sort might be going on or was even being considered. If he let it out that he was becoming more and more convinced that they were dealing with something that was neither man nor beast, he was sure that people would think he’d been sampling the narcotics in the evidence room.
Toward the end of what Bill felt was the longest day in his career of law enforcement, he sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. He dialed an Austin number, and asked to speak to Captain Sam Jones, of the Texas Rangers.
The white van with CURRENT EDITION stenciled in huge red letters along its side pulled out from the Steak Shack’s parking lot and started north up Highway 87.
Jana Parish was fuming, as usual. Just as she had hated her last three assignments, she couldn’t stand this one. Jana was a spoiled rich kid from Palm Beach, Florida. She had been a department store model while she was in high school, and had had numerous modeling jobs since. While she was attending Florida State on a cheerleading scholarship, she had posed nude for a calendar, causing her to lose her scholarship. But it wasn’t the loss of her scholarship that caused Jana to drop out of college. Her parents owned the controlling stock in one of the largest manufacturers of luxury yachts in the United States; money wasn’t exactly a problem. She had dropped out a semester after losing her scholarship simply because she couldn’t keep her grades up. After leaving college, Jana was able to use her looks and her father’s connections to get a job as a weather girl for WTRN in Savannah, Georgia. She was at WTRN for only three years before using those same attributes in landing her current job as a reporter for Current Edition. She had now worked at Current Edition for six years.
Vanity had always been one of Jana’s strong suits, and for a good reason: the way she saw it, everything she had achieved so far in life was directly related to her blond hair, blue eyes, and tall, voluptuous body. The fact that her father’s influence had been just as important never crossed her mind.
Not long after getting her job at WTRN, Jana made the mistake of getting married. She had met Lance Whipple while she was attending Florida State. When she moved, he swore he couldn’t live without her and wanted to marry her. At first Jana resisted his advances, but after six months in Savannah, she gave in and they were married. She retained her maiden name, however; there was no way she was going to go through her career with the same last name as the man who squeezed the toilet paper on those old TV commercials. Lance dropped out of college and became a house-husband. Three years after Jana got her job with Current Edition, Lance began to pressure her into having kids. Jana was emphatically against it; she had seen what a pregnancy could do to a woman’s figure. However, like when he had pleaded with her to marry him, Lance was persistent and she gave in. Jana’s worries proved prophetic — the pregnancy was a nightmare. After she had the baby she weighed one hundred and ninety-five pounds; eighty pounds more than she had before her pregnancy. Jana was furious, and she blamed Lance. She filed for divorce and didn’t even contest Lance’s custody of the baby, who she felt was partially responsible for her current problem.
Jana had tried girdles, support hose, everything and anything she could think of to conceal her newfound weight, but the extra pounds were there to stay. According to the fourth doctor she asked, her metabolism had changed — the previous three had pointed toward her new eating habits, but Jana felt they were full of crap.
As Jana had expected, after she put on the extra weight her assignments were fewer and farther in between. Where she once had been Current Edition’s top reporter, now she was being given one or two ridiculously stupid assignments every three to four months, and this assignment seemed to be no exception: a grizzly bear eats a couple of hicks in a redneck town, whoop-tee-do.
Jana had been all over town, and the only interviews she had managed to get were a few housewives who were willing to tell about how they had picked their brats up early from school because some woman had been killed near the elementary school’s playground. Then Jana had visited the sheriff’s office and been given the runaround. She was used to this kind of treatment, but when she finally cornered the Old West throwback they called the sheriff in this county, he had talked down to her like no one since her fifth grade teacher — and Jana’s parents had gotten Mr. Bacon fired. To make matters worse he hadn’t allowed her cameraman inside the Sheriff’s Department, so none of his rudeness was on tape.