"Big" Bill Lauters dismounted his horse and waited for Dr. Perry to do the same. It took the old man a little longer.
"Damn cold," Perry said. "My back's really acting up."
Lauters rubbed his hands together. "Let's go," he said. "Might as well get it over with."
He went in the house first. He saw pretty much what Curly Del Vecchio had seen the night before. The house was trashed, looking much like a small tornado had whipped through. Furniture was shattered. Dishes and crockery broken into bits that crunched underfoot. Bottles were smashed. Everything seemed to be ripped and splintered. And over it all, flour, sugar…and blood.
"Mary, mother of God," Perry gasped. "What in the hell happened here?"
Lauters surveyed the scene. He was disgusted, angry, but his features never changed-he always looked pissed-off. "What do you think happened here, Doc?" he said sarcastically.
They both knew what they were facing. They knew it from the moment word reached them that Nate Segaris hadn't shown up at the Congregational Church that morning. Segaris never missed. He was a thief and a cheat, as everyone knew, but he never missed Sunday services. His mother had given him a strict moral and religious upbringing. And although he had managed to shake off the morality, the religion in his soul clung on tenaciously. Or had.
"What sort of animal does this?" Lauters asked for what seemed the hundredth time. "What sort of creature busts into a man's house and does a thing like this?"
Perry said nothing. He had no answers. The killings were more than acts of hunger, but violent acts of mutilation and mayhem. And what sort of creature murders people for food like a savage beast and then destroys their lodgings like a crazy man?
Lauters looked at the blood everywhere. "He's gotta be around here somewhere."
Together they stepped through the carnage and hesitated before the door to the rear parlor. There were claw marks in the door running a good three feet. Perry examined them. The gouges were dug into the wood at least half an inch.
Perry swallowed dryly. "The strength this thing must have to do that."
Lauters pushed through the door.
The parlor was wrecked, too. Segaris had kept all the belongings of his late wife in here. Her frilly pillows were gutted, feathers carpeting the floor. Her fine china serving sets pulverized in the corners. Her collection of porcelain dolls were broken into bits. One severed doll head stared at them with blue painted eyes. Her dresses which had been hanging from a brass rod, were shredded into confetti. Even the walls were scathed with claw marks, torn flaps of wallpaper hanging down like Spanish Moss.
"No animal does this, Doc," Lauters said with authority. "No goddamn beast of the forest comes into a man's home and wrecks it."
Perry looked very closely at all he saw, scrutinizing everything with an investigator's eye. He checked everything. He held a fold of wallpaper in his nimble fingers and examined it as though it were a precious antiquity. He mumbled a few words to himself and extracted a bit of something that was wedged between the wallpaper and baseboard.
"But no man leaves this behind," he said, holding out what he found.
The sheriff took it, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. It was a mat of gray coarse fur. "Some dog maybe," he muttered to himself.
"Think so?"
Lauters scowled. "I don't know what to think. I've got five dead men on my hands and what looks like possibly a sixth…what the hell am I supposed to say? What the hell do you want from me?"
"Easy, Sheriff."
Lauters dropped the fur and stalked back into the living area. Cursing, with one hand pressed to the small of his back, Perry stooped and picked it up, sticking it in his pocket. Groaning he stood back up.
"Look here, Doc."
Lauters was squatting down, next to a collapsed end table. There was a shotgun beneath it. It had been snapped nearly in half, the barrels bent into a U. Lauters sniffed them and checked the chambers. "Segaris got off two shots with this before it got him. And what," he asked pointedly, "walks away from a shotgun blast?"
"Whatever made this track does," Perry interjected.
Lauters was by his side now. There was a track in the flour, slightly obscured, but definitely the huge spoor of some unknown beast. "What in Christ has a foot like that?" he wondered aloud.
Perry just shook his head. "Not a man. We know that much."
The print was over three feet in length, maybe eight inches in diameter. Long, almost streamlined, whatever left it had three long toes or claws in front and a shorter, thicker spur at the rear.
"Like the track of a rooster almost," Lauters said helplessly.
"No bird left this," Perry was quick to point out.
"Jesus, Doc," Lauters said wearily. "The print of a giant."
Perry moaned and stooped down.
"Ought to see someone about that back, Doc," the sheriff joked out of habit, but there was no humor in his voice.
Perry ignored him. He was digging through the mess. His fingers found an iron loop. "Root cellar."
With Lauter's help, he pulled it up and threw it aside. The root cellar was a five-foot hole with walls of earth that had been squared off. Lying on the frozen mud of the floor was what remained of Nate Segaris.
"Shit," Lauters said quietly.
Segaris was a mess. His guts had been cleaved open, the organs torn free, the body cavity hollow as a drum. His arms were broken in several places. Smashed and bitten. The fingers of his left hand were missing, save for the grisly nub of a thumb. His right leg was hacked off beneath the knee, leaving a knob of white ligament to mourn its passing.
Lauters swore beneath his breath and lowered himself down there. He thanked God it was November. Had it been the warm months…well, he didn't want to think about the stink and the flies.
"It must've killed him and threw him down there," Perry suggested.
"No shit, Doc."
The sheriff wasn't in the mood for Perry's bullshit speculation. He wasn't in the mood for anything these days. He searched around and could find no sign of the man's missing appendages.
Above him, Perry stared down at the ruin of Segaris' face.
His left eye was gone, as was most of the flesh around it. But his other eye was wide and staring with an accusatory glare. His mouth was frozen in a scream. The top of his head bitten clean open-even from five feet above, Perry could see the teeth marks sunk into the skull. The brains had been scooped out and, it would seem, the gray splatter in the corner was what remained of them.
Lauters looked up at the doc with pleading eyes. "God help us," he uttered.
"I hope God can help us, Sheriff, I really do," Perry said stoically. "But if he can't, then we'd better start thinking about helping ourselves."
Grumbling, Lauters pulled himself up out of the root cellar, ignoring Perry's outstretched hand. He stood and brushed himself off.
"It would be interesting to know the turn of events," Perry mused. "In what order they occurred."
Lauters glared at him with watery gray eyes. "What possible use would that be? A man's dead. Murdered. Half-eaten for the love of Christ."
Perry nodded patiently. He brushed a silky wisp of white hair from his brow. "What I mean, Bill, is that it would help us to understand our killer if we knew a few things."
"Like what for instance?"
"Well, for starters, I'd like to know if Segaris was killed before or after this place was torn apart. If it was after…well, then we're talking about an act of hateful, willful destruction here, an act of vengeance. Hardly an animal characteristic."
Lauters shook his head. "You look too deep into things."
"And you," Perry said, "don't look deep enough."
Lauters ignored him. "Let's get back to town. We've got to get Spence out here with his wagon to cart this body off."
"'His wagon?'" Perry said. "Hate to be the one to tell you, Bill, but Spence is a woman."
"That's your opinion." Lauters sighed and sipped from a pocket flask of whiskey. "Sooner we get that body into the ground, sooner folks'll stop speculating about it."
Perry followed him and mounted.
"Yes," the sheriff said, finishing off his flask and stuffing it in his saddlebag, "I see trouble on the horizon, Doc."
Perry said nothing. His eyes, however, looked to the mountains for an answer. There was none. Only wind and cold.