Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 02 - The Dark Place Read online

  The Dark Place

  Deep in the primeval rainforest of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, the skeletal remains of a murdered man are discovered.

  And a strange, unsettling tale begins to unfold, for forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver determines that the murder weapon was a primitive bone spear of a type not seen for the last ten thousand years. And whoever—or whatever—hurled it did so with seemingly superhuman force. Bigfoot "sightings" immediately crop up, but Gideon isn’t buying them.

  But something is continuing to kill people, and Gideon, helped by forest ranger Julie Tendler and FBI special agent John Lau, plunges into the dark heart of an unexplored wilderness to uncover the bizarre, astonishing explanation.

  THE DARK PLACE

  A Novel by

  Aaron Elkins

  Gideon Oliver – 02

  Copyright © 1983

  by Aaron Elkins

  Prologue

  With a curse that echoed weirdly through the dripping forest, Eckert sat heavily down on a spongy, moss-covered log. Then he stood up again and shrugged out of the backpack he wore under his poncho, heedlessly letting it slip to the sodden ground. He rubbed his shoulders and stood staring at his moisture-blackened boots, listening to the never-ending soft rain that rustled in the tall trees and pattered on the plastic hood of his poncho like a thousand spidery, scrabbling insects.

  He was tired: tired in the base of his spine, and the muscles of his thighs, and the ligaments of his knees. And he was tired of being wet, unutterably sick of the dark, glistening forest with its green, under-the-sea light, ghostly and dim. For two days and nights the rain had floated down in a mist, never slackening, never increasing; just enough to keep him continuously wet, cold, and miserable.

  The trail he had been on since eight was too new to show on the map, but the Park Service sign had said NORTH SHORE, TEN MILES. That saved five miles and would put him under a hot shower and into dry clothes two hours sooner than the old trail. But now he wasn’t sure of exactly where he was, and that made him uncomfortable. Still, it couldn’t be more than two or three miles more; it just couldn’t be.

  He continued to stare at his boots. The thought of taking the right one off to get at the pebble that seemed to be lodged beneath his little toe was almost more than he could bear: untying the tight knot with his chilled fingers, undoing all that wet lacing, taking the boot off, then the outer sock, then the inner sock, putting them on, tying the boot up again—and all in that drenching, bone-chilling fog.

  He looked up suddenly at the sound on his left. Twenty feet away, veiled in the mist, a figure had stepped out of the brush, its right hand raised above its head. In the hand was a strange object, hard to make out in the lowering fog. A long, jointed stick? A whip?

  "Wait," Eckert said.

  The figure’s arm plunged down. There was a clacking noise and a whir. Eckert’s heart seemed to explode, and the green world turned red and then went black.

  On the gravel bar at the bend in the river, Hartman hunched over in the misty rain, trying to focus on the hook and line. He blinked twice and protruded the tip of his tongue in a bleary effort to concentrate. If he didn’t watch out, he’d cut his thumb open. Too much brandy. He’d finished most of the pint—his total three-day supply—in the past hour. But it was getting wet and cold, and if he was going to have to spend the night there, he might as well be as comfortable as he could.

  He must have taken the wrong turn at the junction where the signpost had been torn out. He’d meant to continue on the Tletshy trail over the divide and out of the rain forest without stopping, but this must be the new Matheny trail, which meant that it was Big Creek he was fishing in, or trying to fish in. He’d have to return to the junction in the morning. It was only a walk of a few hours, but he didn’t want to do it in the dark.

  He took another swig from the bottle and looked glumly around him. Actually, he didn’t dislike the rain forest, but it wasn’t anyplace he wanted to spend the night. Still, with the brandy, and maybe with a trout cooked over the propane stove, it wouldn’t be so bad.

  The hell it wouldn’t, he thought; it’d be miserable. The rain forest was getting creepier as it got darker, and he’d be clammy and uncomfortable all night, and wake up in the morning soaked and aching. He hadn’t thought to bring a rain fly for the tent, damn it. And of course it would still be raining. Goddamn it, it should have been the Tletshy that branched to the right.

  It was growing dark quickly. Hartman wiped the moisture from his eyebrows, shifted his haunches on the sharp pebbles, and frowned again at the hook in his hand.

  He was startled by a sudden splash at his side. A limb must have fallen from a tree. He looked up. There were no trees overhead; the gravel bar extended far into the bend of the creek, thirty feet away from the forested bank. Frightened, he looked again at the object in the shallow water. It was too straight to be a tree limb, and it had stuck into the stream bed like a javelin. The angle told him someone had thrown it at him from behind.

  He jumped and spun around. He could see only a few feet into the dull green mist of the forest. Nothing moved. The only sounds were the gurgle of the creek over the stones and the steady, light patter of the rain. With his heart pounding, Hartman ran for the tent, where his knife lay next to the stove.

  He didn’t get there. Just as he scrambled from the slippery stones of the bar to the earthen bank, something reared up horrifyingly out of the brush directly in front of him. Hartman stared unbelievingly into a pair of fierce, mad eyes. He tried to stop and turn, but he skidded on the wet stones and fell on his side at the figure’s feet. He looked up to see a black silhouette edged with awful clarity against the sky’s dying light, its right hand raised high, holding what could only be, incredibly, a heavy, rough stone hammer, a caveman’s stone club. Hartman flung his left arm across his face as the hammer came crashing down.

  Excerpt from the Peninusla Daily News, April 2, 1976:

  SEARCH FOR HIKERS ENDS

  QUINAULT, WA—Olympic National Park authorities to day announced abandonment of the search for two hikers believed lost last month in the park’s Quinault area. Clyde Hartman, thirty-eight, of Portland, Oregon, and Norris Eckert, twenty-nine, of Seattle, disappeared within a few days of each other in early March, apparently in the dense rain forest northwest of Lake Quinault. Senior investigator Claude Gerson said that the search had been "the most exhaustive one ever made" in the Olympic National Park, and there was "simply no trace of them."

  One investigator told reporters: "There’s just no way. That’s jungle in there. You’d need a machete to get through. They could have been six feet off the trail, and we’d never have found them."

  Excerpt from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 1, 1982:

  HIKER LOST IN OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK GIRL MISSING IN "DISAPPEARANCE VALLEY"

  National Park investigators are combing the Quinault Valley for eighteen-year-old Claire Hornick of Tacoma, who was reported missing late Tuesday when she failed to re join fellow campers at the Graves Creek campground near Lake Quinault after taking a solitary hike. According to companion Gary Beller, twenty-two, also of Tacoma, Miss Hornick had gone into the rain forest "to be alone for an hour or two," along the Quinault River Trail.

  The Quinault Valley received nationwide notoriety as "Disappearance Valley" six years ago, after a month-long search failed to find any sign of two hikers separately reported missing there. The two have never been found.

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Fenster pressed his lips into a tight little bud. He wasn’t a bone man, had never cared for bones. Too much guesswork, especially after t
hey’d been in the ground a while. They shrank, they warped, they were inconclusive cause-of-death indicators, they gave unreliable tissue types. Give him some blood, on the other hand, or semen, or saliva, or best of all a major organ, and you really had something. A pathologist could get his teeth into something like that, so to speak.

  He sighed noisily and rearranged the bones on the oak table again, this time in a neat row, but Lau could see he wasn’t getting anywhere. After waiting politely for the older man to speak, Lau said, "What do you think, Dr. Fenster? Is it one of them?"

  The pathologist shook his head irascibly and pushed his round, wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose. They were the kind of glasses a five-year-old might draw on a cartoon face, Lau thought. All in all, Dr. Arthur Fenster looked a lot like a child’s drawing: a rabbit wearing little round glasses. An irritated rabbit.

  "How can you tell anything from this junk?" Fenster said. "A few vertebrae, a scapula…" He flicked the pieces disgustedly with the backs of his fingers. "It could be Eckert, could be the Hartman one. It’s been buried for five years at least. Looks like a male, maybe in his twenties, maybe older. But I’m not even sure it all belongs to one person." He folded his arms and leaned stiffly back in his chair. "This garbage is next to worthless. A waste of my time." He looked at the FBI agent with a mixture of annoyance and disapproval.

  John Lau’s big, flat, Asian face remained impassive. "Well, it’s all we have, sir," he said. "Isn’t there anything else you can tell us?"

  Fenster picked up one of the vertebrae and thrust it toward Lau. "See that growth on the ventral surface?"

  Lau nodded. He didn’t know the ventral surface from whatever the others were, but he could see that the ugly, rough excrescence wasn’t a normal part of the bone.

  "I’m not sure exactly what it is," Fenster said. "Some kind of oddball exostosis—a tumor, or a weird variation of osteomyelitis. Maybe even bone syphilis, although that usually doesn’t show up in vertebrae. Anyway, it’s a lead. Have a look at Eckert’s and Hartman’s medical records. If one of them had a bone disease in a highly advanced state, then there’s a good chance this is him."

  "Okay, that’s helpful," Lau said, trying to look grateful. "You don’t suppose a physical anthropologist would be able to tell us anything more? I heard Gideon Oliver was working on a dig up near Dungeness. That’s only a few hours from Quinault."

  Lau had thought it might be a mistake to mention Gideon Oliver, and it was. Fenster snorted, bringing his glasses down over his nose again. He pushed them back up. "Oh, God, spare me, will you? I know you think his reports on the Schuster case and that kidnapping in New Mexico were God’s gift to the world, but I’m a pathologist and I know. They were fantasy, garbage, crap. He was lucky. Maybe he knows his anthropometric theory—maybe, I say—but his conclusions are…speculative." He rolled his mobile lips around the word as if it might befoul them.

  "Still," Lau said, knowing it was pointless, "he might—"

  "Good Lord, the man’s an academic!" Clearly, that closed the case. Lau nodded resignedly. It would have been nice to have the pathologist recommend asking Oliver’s help, but it wasn’t required.

  The telephone on the untidy desk against the wall buzzed, and Lau turned in his swivel chair to reach it, glad for the diversion.

  "Lau," he said; then almost immediately, "Where?" He sat up straight and rummaged through the desk with both hands, twisting his neck to hold the telephone between ear and shoulder. "How many?" he said, writing on a yellow notepad. For a while he listened erectly and wrote, then fell suddenly against the back of the chair. "Oh, God," he said, "that’s all we need."

  He hung up and turned toward Fenster, slapping the pad on the worktable in front of him. "Five more bodies found."

  "Bodies or skeletons?"

  "Skeletons. Mostly just a few bone fragments, not in good shape. Some are just four or five fragments in a basket."

  "Come again?"

  "Some of them were buried in baskets."

  Fenster pursed his tiny red mouth like a child holding his breath and burst out suddenly: "This is ridiculous! I’m not going to spend any more time poking around a bunch of bones in baskets. They’re probably just old Indian burials anyway."

  "Probably, but you know, there are unverified reports of people disappearing around here for fifty years."

  "Yeah, sure, also unverified reports of the Abominable Snowman clumping around stealing sheep and scaring little kiddies."

  His eyes on the pad, Lau smiled slightly. With slow, heavy strokes, he circled the last word he’d written. "Bigfoot," he said aloud. "You hit the nail on the head, sir. They’ve found some eighteen-inch, humanlike footprints nearby. They look like Bigfoot tracks, the locals say."

  Fenster took off his glasses, finically disengaging the wire loops from one ear at a time. Silently he inserted the glasses into a case and snapped it shut with a sharp, terminal click. Then he rose. "I’m not going to be involved in this, Mr. Lau. I deal in real things, not fairy tales. I’ll look at your five baskets of bones this afternoon, and then I have a case waiting for me at headquarters. A hallux major." He paused, looking at Lau as if he expected a challenge. "A woman," he said precisely, "has bitten the big toe off a would-be attacker. The toe has been recovered, and I mean to identify him from it. Now, that is the real world."

  Lau barely repressed his grimace. Fenster took his jacket from the back of a chair and shrugged into it. "If you need more help than my poor abilities can provide, you have my sincere encouragement to bring in Gideon Oliver from Fantasyland University."

  Chapter 2

  John knew that Julie Tendler usually showed exactly what she felt, and now her black eyes sparkled with surprise as she put her ham and cheese sandwich back down on its waxed-paper wrapping. "You mean you know Gideon Oliver? Personally?"

  "The doc? Sure, why not?" He was having a cup of coffee at her desk to keep her company. As chief park ranger, she had been out with the crew that had been digging up the new burials, and she’d missed lunch. "He’s an old pal."

  "I thought you just knew him because he’d consulted on some cases with the FBI."

  "No, I knew him way before that. Met him when I worked for NATO in Europe, and we kicked around together for a while. We still get together fairly often. Why so amazed?"

  "I’m not amazed," she said, picking up the sandwich again and nibbling at it, "I’m impressed. When I was finishing up my anthropology minor a couple of years ago, we spent a whole quarter just discussing his book."

  "He wrote a book?"

  The sandwich went back down to the table. "Are you serious? He wrote the most controversial—and I think brilliant—book on human evolution to come out in decades. And he must have published hundreds of articles."

  "No kidding," John said. "Are you going to eat that pickle?"

  She shook her head. "Well, what’s he like? He must be a lot older than you."

  John bit off half the pickle and shook his head. "No, he’s about my age—forty, a little less."

  "Forty! That’s hard to believe. I always assumed he was one of the grand old men of anthropology. Tell me more." She returned to her sandwich, but her mind obviously was elsewhere.

  "Like is he married?"

  "That’s not a bad place to start."

  John finished the pickle. "No, he’s not married. Are you planning on leaving the chips over?" She handed him the bag, and he tore it open. "He was married before I knew him, for nine or ten years, and I guess they had some kind of fantastic relationship. She got killed in a car accident three, four years ago, and I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it. I think he’s still in love with her. Nora, I think her name was."

  She frowned at her sandwich as if suddenly absorbed in it. "He doesn’t go out with women?"

  John munched a potato chip with a loud crackle. "Do you always show this much interest in the grand old men of anthropology?"

  "No, but this is going to be the first one I ever met. Does he go out?"r />
  "Oh, yeah, he likes women, all right, if that’s what you mean. Used to go out with this girl in Heidelberg, Janet Feller, but…I don’t know, like I said, I think he’s still in love with his wife."

  "What’s he like?" Julie asked with undisguised interest. "Is he good-looking?"

  "I wouldn’t say he’s handsome," John said with a shrug, "but what do I know? He’s about my size, maybe a little shorter: six-one, six-two. Seems to be in pretty good shape. From what I can tell, the gals seem to like him."

  Julie finished her sandwich and crumpled up the waxed paper and threw it into a wastepaper basket near the desk. She took the lid off her Styrofoam cup of coffee and drank. "It’s funny, you discuss someone’s theories and ideas for ten weeks almost as if you were arguing with him personally, but you never wonder what he looks like, or think of him as human."

  John laughed. "Oh, he’s human, all right. On the quirky side, in fact."

  John Lau’s laugh was the kind that made other people join in, and Julie laughed, too. "How so?"

  "Well, he might seem a little prickly at first, and he talks like a professor most of the time, and his head’s usually in the clouds somewhere. One time I watched him spend twenty minutes looking for a notebook that was tucked under his arm." He laughed again, tilted his head back, and tapped the last crumbs of potato chip into his mouth. "He’s a funny guy, kind of a quick temper, but at the same time he’s, I don’t know, gentle. You’ll see."

  "He sounds fascinating."

  "Yes," John said, nodding, thinking back to other times. "He’s the kind of guy who’s liable to go bonkers at little things, but in a crisis, when the chips are really down, there’s no one I’d rather have around. And I know what I’m talking about."