Remo stood. "There's no one else here, Little Father," he said.
The Master of Sinanju sensed nothing, as well. Walking slowly, the two men crossed over to the open door to the loading dock. As they passed, they noted the freshly shredded body of the Lubec Springs truck driver.
Cool air carried the scent of pine as they stepped out onto the concrete platform. Outside, a truck half-filled with cases of Lubec Springs water sat silent.
Dense woods began only a few dozen yards from the back of the building.
Remo began to hop down from the platform, but a bony hand on his forearm held him fast.
"She is gone," Chiun said.
Remo hesitated. "Shouldn't we at least look?" As he spoke, he rotated his wrists in frustration.
"The forest is too vast, and there are too many others like her running through it now, creating false trails. That creature is fast and clever. She would gain distance from us with every step."
The old man released Remo's arm. As the truth of his teacher's words set in, the fight drained from Remo.
"Dammit," he complained. "She got away again." He tore his eyes from the woods, the light of hope dawning. "Maybe we've still got one last shot."
Turning on his heel, he headed back across the warehouse floor.
"OUCH, OWEE, ouch-ouch-ouch."
Thorns dug deep into Bobby Bugget's bare legs. With thumb and forefinger, he gingerly picked them out one by one.
He was still carefully picking when Remo and Chiun appeared from the front door of the bottling plant.
"Crap on a crust!" Bugget shouted.
Thorns forgotten, he ran from the bushes, away from the terrifying men who had slaughtered so many of Judith White's tigers. As he fled, his shoe hooked a root and he went flying face first to the driveway. He landed in a painful slide at the toes of a pair of hand-stitched leather loafers.
Bobby Bugget looked up into a pair of the deadest eyes he had ever seen.
"Oh, hiya," Bugget said. "How ya'll doin'?" He offered a big, disarming Southern smile to Remo and the Master of Sinanju, who stood in the driveway beside his pupil.
"Zip it, Goober," Remo snarled. He grabbed Bugget by the collar of his Hawaiian shirt and dragged him to his feet.
The Master of Sinanju was examining the singer, a look of deep mistrust on his leathery face. "He is not one of the beasts," the old Korean concluded.
Remo had noticed the same thing. Bugget didn't have the same sense of animal stillness or altered heartbeat as the other Judith White victims.
"You were with them," Remo said suspiciously. "Why aren't you one of them?"
Bugget's mustache twitched with his nervous smile. "They tried to turn me. They made me drink that stuff. What's it called?" He snapped his fingers, trying to jog his frightened memory. "You know. What ice comes from."
"Water, you nit," Remo said.
"Yeah, that," Bugget said. He shuddered at the memory. "As a rule I don't drink nothing fish pee in. Anyway, the stuff didn't work on me. Guess they musta thought it did, 'cause they accepted me as one of their own. Kind of like Jane Goodall living with them monkeys over in Africa."
Remo wouldn't need convincing that monkeys would have welcomed Bobby Bugget as one of their own. He had trouble, however, imagining Judith White being quite so accepting.
But as soon as he got a good whiff of Bugget's foul breath, he realized why the singer hadn't been mauled.
Chiun interjected before Remo could speak. "This one has been consuming human flesh," the old Korean accused, face contorted in disgust.
"Hey, even Jane Goodall had to eat a banana every once in a while," Bugget said defensively.
Remo's face was death personified. "Where did she go?"
"She's gone?" Bugget asked, shoulders relaxing. Remo smacked him on the side of the head. Bugget's shoulders tensed up again.
"I don't know where she is," the singer said. "She mostly kept away from the rest of us. Even when she came back to see us, I stayed as far away from her as I could."
"Okay, so what did she want with me?"
Bugget snapped his fingers. "Now, that I do know. I heard her talking to Owen-he's the guy who owns this place. She said something about seeing you in action a couple of years ago, and that you were like no other humans she'd ever seen. She said she tried to turn you into one of her little critters, and that you didn't cooperate."
That was true. In his encounter with Judith White near Boston three years before, she had tried to force Remo to drink some of the formula.
"That's it?" Remo asked. "She wanted to try again?"
"I don't know for sure," Bugget said. "I only know what I heard. It sounded like she was real keen on you."
Remo's lips thinned. "Ten words or less," he said. "Tell me why I shouldn't kill you and let something higher up the food chain than you eat for a month."
Bugget's tan face whitened. He thought very hard. When it came, relief dawned bright.
"Oh." As he spoke, he counted off each individual word. "I ... know ... where ... she ... keeps ... her... genetic..." He paused at the eighth digit. "Hey, old-timer," he whispered to Chiun, "is whatchamacallet one word?"
"Oh, for the love of," Remo sighed, rolling his eyes heavenward.
He grabbed Bobby Bugget by one end of his bushy mustache. With a hard yank, Remo dragged the whimpering singer back across the parking lot to the bottling plant.
Chapter 24
Mark Howard spent several long hours at his office computer in an attempt to find Judith White's lab. But a lengthy, frustrating search through the electronic reaches of cyberspace had yielded no success.
The first thing he had done was check for mysterious deaths which included missing organs or limbs, as Dr. Smith had suggested. Given Judith White's specific needs, he chose to start with the genetics field itself.
Mark had the CURE mainframes go through all unsolved murders for the previous three years in any way connected to genetics research facilities.
He hadn't given this much hope of success. He assumed that the ever vigilant CURE mainframes would have detected a pattern of murders in a particular scientific field.
He was right. The search came up empty.
Mark widened it to include unsolved murders merely in the vicinity of genetics facilities.