“Thanks for the reminder.”
She wished that she smoked cigars.
Chapter 2
« ^ »
Tom Rilker stared at the pictures the two detectives showed him. His face registered disbelief and what looked to Becky Neff like fear. She had never met him before and was surprised to discover that he was old, maybe seventy-five. From her husband’s description she had assumed he was a young man. Rilker’s hair was white and springy like frayed wool; his right hand shook a little and made the pictures rustle together; his brows knit, the salt-and-pepper eyebrows coming close together, heightening the expression now on his face. “This is impossible,” he finally said. The moment he spoke Becky knew why Dick always portrayed him as young—he sounded like a much younger man. “It’s completely incredible.”
“Why is that?” Wilson asked.
“Well, a dog wouldn’t do this. You’d have to train it. These men have been gutted, for God’s sake. You can train a dog to kill, but if you wanted it to do this to its victims, you’d have to train it very, very well.”
“But it could be done.”
“Maybe, with the right breed and the right dog. But it wouldn’t be easy. You’d need… human models for the dog to work on if you wanted it to be reliable.”
“What if you just starved the dog?”
“A dog would eat muscle tissue—ma’am, if this bothers you—”
“No,” Becky snapped. “You were saying, a dog would eat muscle tissue?”
“Yes, but it wouldn’t actually—gut somebody. That isn’t the way they feed, not even in the wild state.” He picked up the pawprints and shook his head. “These all the prints?”
“How big a dog would it have taken?” Wilson asked. Becky noticed that his questions were becoming gentle but insistent; he must sense that the sight of the pictures had put Rilker under a considerable strain. The man’s face was indeed getting flushed, and a band of sweat was appearing on his forehead. He kept giving his head a little toss as if to knock a wisp of hair back. The hand was shaking harder.
“A monster. Something big and fast and mean enough to accept this kind of training. Not all breeds would.”
“What breeds?”
“Close to the wild, huskies, German shepherds. Not many. And I’ve got to tell you, in all my years I’ve never seen anything like this done by dogs. I think its—
He grabbed a cast of some of the pawprints and peered at it, then fumbled with the lamp on his desk and looked closely in the light. “These are not dog prints.”
“What are they then?”
“I don’t know. Something very strange.”
“Why so?”
Tom Rilker paused, then spoke with exaggerated calm. “These prints have circules, like human hands and feet. But they are clearly pawprints.”
“Some kind of animal, other than a dog?”
“I’m sorry to tell you that no animal has prints like this. In fact nothing does. Nothing that I have ever heard of, that is, in fifty years of working with animals.”
Becky had to say it: “Werewolves?” She resigned herself to the inevitable scoffing that would come from Wilson later.
Surprisingly, Rilker took some time to dismiss the question. “I don’t think such things are possible,” he said carefully.
“Well—are they or aren’t they?”
Rilker smiled sheepishly. Becky realized that he was being kind. She could see the glee in Wilson’s eyes. It was all her partner could do not to whoop with laughter, damn him.
“I don’t believe in werewolves either, Mr. Rilker,” Becky said. “Frankly, I wanted to know if you did.”
“Why?”
“Because if you had, we wouldn’t have to trust the rest of what you’re saying. As it is, you look like a creditable expert who’s just given us a very nasty problem.”
“A nasty problem in what way?”
Now Wilson did scoff—but at Rilker. “Well, for one thing, we must proceed under the assumption that these two fully armed police officers were killed by animals. OK, that’s not so good. But we’ve also got to assume that the animals are of an unknown species. That’s pretty bad. And now, to cap it all off, we’ve got to believe that this unknown species of man-killing animals is running free in Brooklyn and nobody knows about it. That I cannot accept.”
Becky’s mind was racing—this new theory plugged holes but it also had some great big ones of its own. “If it’s true, we’ve got to move fast. Brooklyn’s a crowded place.”
“Come on, Becky, stop it. Let’s get out of here. We’ve got real work to do.”
“Wait a minute, Detective, I’m not sure I like your tone.” Rilker stood up and thrust one of the casts in Wilson’s face. “Those pawprints were not made by anything that I have ever heard of. By nothing whatsoever. Not even by a species of monkey—I already thought of that.” He fumbled for his phone. “I’ll call a friend up at the Museum of Natural History. He’ll tell you these prints weren’t made by any known animal. You’re dealing with something highly unusual, that’s for damn sure.”
Becky felt her heart sink. Wilson had angered Rilker. Rilker’s voice rose as his fingers fumbled at the telephone. “Maybe my word isn’t good enough for you sharpie cops—but this guy up at the museum’s a real expert. He’ll tell you bastards I’m right!”
Wilson jerked his head in the direction of the door. ‘We don’t need any help from a museum,“ he muttered. Becky followed him out, carrying the pictures but leaving the pawprints behind because Rilker seemed to have taken possession of the box. The door to his office slammed behind them with an ear-shattering jolt. His voice rose to a frustrated screech and abruptly ended.
“I hope we didn’t give him a coronary,” Becky said as they returned to the street.
“You did good, kid,” Wilson said. “If you hadn’t asked him about the werewolves he would have pulled it off.”
“I can hardly believe that was the Tom Rilker I’ve heard Dick talk about. But I guess he must be a little senile.”
“I guess so. Where are the casts?”
“Still in his office. You want them?” Becky dropped her purse in through the window of the car.
“Yeah. We might need them.”
“Fine, you go up and get them.”
Wilson snorted. “We’ll get more from the Seventy-fifth Precinct. You know something?”
“What?”
“You’re losing your mascara. You’re sweating.”
She laughed as she started the car. “I’ve got to hand it to you, George, you really know how to set a girl up. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in a year.”
“Well… you’re… you know, when your stuff gets messed up I notice.”
“Good for you. That’s the first sign you’re becoming human.” She pulled out into traffic, heading automatically for what she knew would be their next stop, the office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The autopsies were due to start in half an hour and it was now all the more important to be there. Unless a cause of death came out in autopsy they were going to be forced to conclude the impossible—that the killings had been done by dogs. And that is a very unlikely way for a policeman to die.
Becky could not dispel the growing feeling of sick fear that this case was giving her. She kept imagining the two cops out there in the drizzle, facing whatever in the name of God they had faced . . and dying with the secret. At times like this she wished she and Dick worked more closely together. He would understand the source of her feeling in a way Wilson never could. She took her cases very personally, it was one of her worst failings (and also the reason she was often so successful, she felt), and each case affected her differently. This one, with its overtones of horror, was going to be unusually hard on her. What had happened to those two cops was the stuff of nightmares…
“You’re muttering.”