“Hold it.” MacKenzie added his beam, and they looked at a small, reeking puddle of something greenish and disgusting.
“Somebody heaved,” Bahr said.
“Yes, I was about to say so myself. Apparently couldn’t stand the Bako stew. Can’t blame him, really . . . .”
“Where in hell are the two men?” Bahr said. “Their camp’s been rifled, and not a sign of them.” He swung the light around at the trees and the ground. “Which way is the lake?”
“About that direction, I’d say.” MacKenzie started through the trees. “There’s a path. Better leave your man behind, Bahr. We don’t want any more footprints than necessary until we get a look.”
Bahr waved at Carmine to stay back, and followed the BRINT man, who was threading his way through the alders. Ahead was a glint of sunset light from the lake. They moved silently, Bahr holding the burp poised in his right hand, finger on the trigger, MacKenzie searching ahead with his flash.
“Hold on.”
They stopped. Something gleamed up ahead on the path. They moved closer, and Bahr turned his light on too. “A camera. Movie camera. Why would somebody leave a camera lying out here?”
“Dropped, I’d say. Seems to have bounced from . . .” MacKenzie moved the flashlight beam carefully, slowly along the ground down the path toward the lake.
“Christ!” Bahr said. The flashlight beam had stopped. In the small circle of light was a man’s hand, palm down, fingers clawed stiffly, four furrows gouged into the soft dirt by the final desperate death agony.
I think we’ve found the strike area,” MacKenzie said.
Above the trees balloon flares hung, blindingly white, cutting the brush and pines into incredible patterns of light and shadow. Below on the ground flashbulbs popped, and small busy teams of men moved actively about, looking, measuring, probing, photographing, collecting, working silently or talking in hushed voices, but all very desperately urgent.
Across the clearing, the film from the camera was being processed in the portable lab carried by one of the DIA ’copters. Bahr and MacKenzie stood over the body as the blanket was lowered into place. There was a large dripping hole through the man’s chest, and a stinking, grisly stain on the ground, as if the fleshy contents of the thorax had been melted out en masse, leaving the bare bones of the cavity.
The body was sprawled facing away from the lake, hands outstretched, the face frozen in an expression of unimaginable horror.
“Bernstein,” MacKenzie said. “The camera suggests that.”
Bahr grunted. “We’ll know in a minute. A man is checking his prints and dental.” The big man paused, looking back at the lake. “He was running away from something, that’s sure. Must have hit him in the back.”
“With what?” MacKenzie said.
“Some sort of dum-dum.”
“Looks more like a chemical agent to me.”
“Well, what difference does it make?” Bahr said irritably, annoyed by the BRINT man’s quiet, infuriatingly reasonable contradictions. “We’ll have a lab check, of course.”
“You might,” MacKenzie suggested, “try Oredos Vegas at the Puerto Rican Cancer Research Center. He’s been doing work with proteolytic enzymes . . . top man in the field.”
Bahr turned to Carmine. “Have the machine section at DEPEX run a cross-index on protein solvents, and that man’s work,” he said. “If he’s done anything, it’ll be in the files.”
“I doubt it,” said MacKenzie. “Your files may fall behind the researcher a bit. Vegas doesn’t publish work in progress.”
“Then how do you know about him?”
“We have an alert contact in the Research Center,” MacKenzie said amiably. Bahr scowled, repressing a sudden violent urge to take the little Scotsman by the throat and choke him. As usual, BRINT’s eclectic view of intelligence put them a jump ahead. “All right, if we can’t solve the problem ourselves, we’ll fly him up to our lab and put him to work on the case,” Bahr said.
MacKenzie laughed cheerfully at this. Bahr turned and started toward the small group of men on the lakeshore, Carmine at his side, with the BRINT man following.
Carmine checked a notebook. “We’ve got one field unit working the brush, and a group checking the camp area. There are some footprints down there on the lakeshore, but they aren’t distinct. Must have been raining.”
“Anything from the roadblocks?”
Carmine’s sneer said what he thought of BRINT roadblocks. “But we’ve found their two-wheeler. Smashed up in the trees a hundred yards back toward the road.”
Bahr nodded. “This is beginning to add up,” he said to MacKenzie. “The ship landed somewhere near here, somebody entered the camp, killed Bernstein and tried to make a meal of the camp stores, then attempted to use the car to get out to the highway.”
“Is that your analysis, from what you see?” MacKenzie broke in.
“You see anything wrong with it?” Bahr snapped.
“Just one thing. Where’s Russel? The other man.”
“Find him,” Bahr said to Carmine. “Or his body. And tell them to get moving on that film.”
They moved across the clearing through the huddles of DIA men, flashlights swinging unnecessarily because of the brilliant flare lights. As they walked, Bahr smouldered, wondering just what in hell MacKenzie was doing there in the first place getting in the way, wondering how he could be doing any investigating, since he didn’t seem to have a shred of equipment with him. He didn’t photograph or measure anything, didn’t pick up specimens; in fact, the BRINT man just seemed to be wandering about in his shapeless tweed overcoat with his hands in his pockets, watching, as if he were really amazed at the strange and inexplicable activities of the DIA men.
Difference in methods, MacKenzie had said. Crimes investigated by BRINT were deliberate, logical distributions of motive and violence, and therefore soluble by introspective analysis of first principles, whereas crimes investigated by DIA were characteristic and unconscious behavior of deviants (criminals) and were therefore soluble by measurement and sorting. (Laughter from BRINT, mocking laughter.)
For a brief, glorious moment Bahr had a mental picture of MacKenzie reduced to mouse-size and strapped down on a mouse board, his chest opened wide by a huge scalpel incision, and Bahr, with magnifying glass and probe, was lifting the BRINT man’s heart out with the probe and carefully counting the squoosh-squoosh contractions to find out what made him tick. The heart removed, he dropped the body in a tank of alcohol. The image recurred, cyclically, synchronized with Bahr’s steps, so that every time his right foot hit the heart came out, and every time the left foot hit, plunk, into the tank.
By the time they reached the wrecked car Bahr had personally destroyed BRINT, mouse-man by mouse-man.
There was no body of Russel at or near the wrecked car. No footprints along the rest of the path to the road, nor any sign of disturbance in the surrounding brush. The brush was a thicket of tightly-grown alder and vine maple; it would take a man ten minutes to get through ten feet of it.
“The man didn’t just vanish,” Bahr snarled.
“We’ve got ’copters working the brush with flares,” Carmine said. “They haven’t turned up anything.”
“But this is impossible. Whatever killed Bernstein wouldn’t let his partner just run off. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It seems to me,” MacKenzie said slowly, “that it’s pretty obvious what happened. If I had your resources at hand, I’d send for an aqua-lung team.”
Bahr turned to stare at him. “You think the ship landed in the lake?”