He wrapped his arm around the dog and pulled her close to his side, tucking her under the blanket with him. The rain had stopped, but both of them were soaking wet.
The rescue unit finally had a boat in the water. They had to wait on the CSU team. It was getting dark and two of the men were hooking up spotlights. One of the technicians stopped beside him and handed him a thermal cup.
“Hot coffee,” he told Creed.
“Thanks.”
Then the man put down a stainless steel bowl with water for Grace. She looked to Creed first.
“Go ahead,” he told her, and she lapped at it.
“I appreciate that,” he told the tech.
“Deputy Mason said to tell you, you’re free to go. Oh, and your ride’s here,” he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder.
“My ride?”
“You look like hell,” someone said from behind him.
Creed turned to find Jason and his friend Colfax. Colfax served in Afghanistan with Jason. He’d lost an eye, and that side of his face was scarred so badly it looked like half his face was melting.
“I have my Jeep. You didn’t have to come all this way.”
“Hey, I only do what Hannah tells me to do.”
Jason kneeled beside Grace and she greeted him with tail wags and face licks. He took a plastic bag from his jacket pocket and held out a handful of kibble. He looked out over the water while the dog took bites and crunched.
“You think he did it?” Jason asked.
“I didn’t know him well enough to say.”
“Yeah, well, I thought I knew Tony pretty well and I still didn’t see it coming.”
He pointed to Colfax and told Creed, “One of us will drive your Jeep back. You and Grace can sit back, relax. Enjoy the ride. Have something to eat. We brought food for you, too.”
When Creed didn’t answer, Jason added, “Please don’t make me have to call Hannah.”
Creed smiled at that, and suddenly he was too exhausted to argue.
32
THE PLATTE RIVER VALLEY
SOUTH-CENTRAL NEBRASKA
The largest coyote was the first to approach the lake.
O’Dell swore her legs were starting to ache from trying to stand so still. But now she was captivated with watching the coyotes.
Two stayed back as if acting as guards, occasionally looking over at Rief and O’Dell. The others drew closer to the lake, but even they didn’t go to the edge. They appeared content to let their leader check it out first.
He had to crouch on his front legs to reach over the shallow ledge. Slowly he stretched until his teeth could grab a bird, and even then, he took it gently by the wing, tugging and pulling it, separating it from the others. He did this as he backed up, dragging the bird up onto the shore.
The others watched patiently. They waited while their leader sniffed the bird’s dead body. He left it. Went back to the lake and began again the same process, bringing another one to the shore. This time he nudged it several times with his snout. He left this one, too, and walked to another spot on the lake. He brought up two more birds. By now the others had come over and started to inspect the ones he had rejected. None of them attempted to take a bite.
Then suddenly their leader turned and headed back into the woods. One by one the others followed. All of them left without dinner.
“They could smell that the birds were sick,” Rief said. She didn’t seem surprised.
On the drive back O’Dell was thinking about Ryder Creed’s dogs. The coyotes reminded her that the last time they had spoken, Creed was training his scent dogs to detect different health issues in humans. His team had already trained several dogs especially for private owners with epilepsy and diabetes to help detect seizures before they happened and insulin levels before they dipped. She also remembered that she owed Hannah a phone call.
“If you need a place to stay tonight, my guest room’s available.” Rief offered. “I do have to warn you, I have a black Lab and a cat.”
O’Dell would have been surprised by the offer except that she had worked several cases in Nebraska and the surrounding states. Oftentimes she’d been met by generosity beyond what she’d ever expect. In western Nebraska an Indian woman, a retired coroner named Lucy Coy, had opened her home to O’Dell during an investigation. The two women had remained friends, consulting each other on various cases. But ordinarily O’Dell wasn’t comfortable staying in someone else’s home. She liked—no, she needed—her own space to recharge or to stay up all night if she wanted.
“I really appreciate the offer, but I have a room reserved at the Embassy Suites in the Old Market.” She shrugged. “It’s close to the airport and I have an early flight out. But thank you.”
“Sure, no problem.”
“What are their names?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your Lab and cat? I have a white Lab named Harvey and a black German shepherd named Jake.”
“Tommy is my big baby. Harry is my cat.”
“I would like to buy you dinner if you have time.”
“That sounds nice.” Then, gesturing to O’Dell’s cell phone, she added, “We’ll run into a dead space pretty soon. Not enough towers out here. Which to me is great. I can’t tell you how many thousands of warblers we lose every year when more towers or wind turbines are added.”
“They run into them?”
“Most birds have very poor night vision. You probably have a few miles before we get into one-bar country.”
O’Dell took the advice and started checking her messages. She had a missed call from Agent Alonzo and one from Platt. It looked like Ben had sent her an e-mail with attachments. She had forgotten that she had asked for the autopsy report and photos of Tony Briggs.
She was about to go to her text messages when the first thump on the windshield startled her. She looked up in time to see something slide off the hood of the SUV.
“What was that?”
“I’m not sure,” Rief said as she let up on the accelerator.
Another thud and a smear of black and red.
This time the biologist slammed on the brakes just as the windshield, hood, and roof were being pummeled. Everywhere around them—on the two-lane highway, in the ditches and in the fields surrounding them—birds were falling from the sky.
It was raining birds.
Rief pulled the SUV to the shoulder. The biologist pulled out her own cell phone and immediately was talking to someone about highway barricades while O’Dell turned her cell phone on to video.
The sky had gone dark, but not from the impending sunset. Streams of black birds with red-tipped wings flew overhead, thick flocks blocking out the sunlight. And hundreds of them were falling from the sky.
Smears of blood and feathers streaked the windshield. O’Dell kept the phone steady as she panned across the highway to the ditches and to the fields. Everywhere there were dead birds. She zoomed in to record those on the ground. There appeared to be no movement—no injuries. Just dead birds, and they seemed to be dead as soon as they hit the surface, if not before.
“State Patrol is on the way,” Rief told her.
A pickup flew by on the highway. It was the first vehicle they’d seen since they’d left the lake. O’Dell noticed Rief wince as she started tapping in another phone number. To O’Dell she said, “We need to get this stretch of highway barricaded. If these birds are infected, we don’t want pieces of them being transported to other places on the tires of vehicles.”
As the biologist explained the situation on the phone, O’Dell kept her video going but looked out over the long stretch of road. Dead birds littered the highway for as far as she could see.
She glanced at the timer on the video: five minutes and forty seconds. And birds were still falling.
Ten minutes later what was left of the flock
overhead was gone. The last of the birds had fallen, but O’Dell and Rief stayed inside the vehicle.
The sun disappeared behind the tree line, leaving layers of pink and purple as it set. It was a pretty spring evening, except of course for the hundreds of dead black birds dotting the fields and highway.
“Do you know what they are?” O’Dell asked. Several of the birds were laying on the hood in front of them.
“Redwing blackbirds.”
“Migratory?”
“Yes.” The biologist looked distracted, watching for the State Patrol and keeping an eye on her cell phone and occasionally replying by tapping in a text message. “Birds falling out of the sky en masse isn’t an unusual occurrence. There have been incidents when flocks have been startled and flushed out of their roost by loud noises. It sets them off and they fly too low, crashing into buildings or, as I said before, into cell towers or wind turbines. Sometimes electrical lines. Wind, fog, lightning—all of those factors have been known to cause incidents like this.”
O’Dell stared out the window and refrained from saying out loud what they were both thinking. None of those factors applied here. Not only was the weather beautiful, though the temperatures a bit crisp, but there were no buildings, no wind turbines, no cell towers or water towers anywhere in the distance. It was still light out, so even the birds’ poor night vision didn’t explain this.
“It looked as though they were dropping rather than flying down into our vehicle,” O’Dell said.
“Yes, I noticed that, too.” Rief was reading something on her cell phone. “A colleague is telling me that last year in Idaho he witnessed a flock of geese falling out of the sky.” She paused as she scrolled through the message. “About two thousand. They later determined it was avian cholera. Not sure where the birds picked up the bacteria. But it spreads so quickly that infected birds can have no signs of illnesses and suddenly die in flight.”
O’Dell didn’t bother to keep quiet her immediate reaction. “I wonder if there were any research labs in Idaho conducting studies on avian cholera.”
Before Rief could respond they both noticed the flashing blue and red lights in the distance. O’Dell started to breathe a sigh of relief until she noticed that coming from the opposite direction was another vehicle. And even from this far away she could make out the satellite dish on top of the news van.
33
NEW YORK CITY
Christina reluctantly trudged back to her hotel room at the Grand Hyatt. Although she had been taking a steady regimen of Tylenol, protein, water, and vitamin C, her body was struggling to fight off the muscle fatigue. She had developed a cough and her chest already ached. On her way back she had stopped at the little shop and picked up cough medicine and more orange juice. But she was too exhausted to think. And after getting a look at what was on the illicit flash drive, she was now afraid.
She had forgotten to put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door as the watchers had instructed, and now she was grateful for her mistake. Housekeeping had changed her sweat-drenched sheets for clean ones and had even replaced the fluffy robe with a fresh one wrapped in a plastic bag.
She guzzled down the complimentary bottle of water as she put away her stash of supplies. Carefully she took off all her clothes, putting them on a nightstand and keeping the layers of cash in between. She’d put them all back on again tomorrow and try to come up with a plan.
She turned on the television, not wanting to be surrounded by silence. All day she’d had the noise of traffic and voices, whistles and honks, music and shouting. In the silence she could hear her heart pounding and tonight a new wheezing sound in her chest. She needed to drown out the sounds of her sick body.
She was still trying to decipher what she had seen on the flash drive. Earlier she had gone into a luxury hotel off Broadway. It was one she had been in before when she wanted the doorman to hail a cab for her. So when she walked in this time, she confidently marched to the elevators like she was a guest.
No one rode with her. No one saw what floor she exited, but just in case, she got off two floors above the business center and took the stairs back down. No one else was in the room.
When she viewed the flash drive, Christina had realized there were way too many documents for her to sort through. She knew she couldn’t sit there all afternoon. Eventually other people would be coming in and out of the room. One of them could be a watcher and she wouldn’t have any idea. And if her watcher saw her go into this hotel he’d be waiting for her to leave. How much time before he came looking for her?
With quivering fingers, she had jotted down things that drew her attention. The Tylenol had helped relieve her fever, but she still felt the muddled effects. She had tried to concentrate and even commit some of the information to memory.
There were flight manifests, statistical data, and summaries of experiments. And then there was a file called TEST SUBJECTS. Curious, she had clicked on it, and when she saw her name on one of the lists a chill washed over her body as if someone had opened the door behind her and let in a cold draft.
Now back in her hotel room at the Grand Hyatt, she busied herself with trying to take care of her body. She took her evening dosages of the medicines she had bought. She ran a hot bath and let the steam soothe her aching muscles. She tried not to focus on the words she had read in the file with her name. Phrases like “expire on their own” or “assisted suicide if necessary.”
She was pulling out a map of the city from the desk drawer when something on television caught her eye. Christina hadn’t seen anything like it before. She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. A woman was explaining while the camera showed a highway and a field covered with hundreds of dead birds. Christina grabbed for the notepad from the desk and frantically jotted down the woman’s name and all the information she could gather.
Then she sat down with fingers still shivering. One of the documents she had looked at on the flash drive described future experiments that would infect flocks of birds. She never imagined that it was already happening.
34
FLORIDA PANHANDLE
Jason had seen it before. How a man he looked up to and admired like Ryder Creed could be rendered speechless by death. Not just any death, but suicide. Somehow it made them feel vulnerable, helpless, like they could have caught it and stopped it if only they had been there earlier. If only they had seen it coming. He figured that might be how Ryder was feeling.
Jason saw it a bit differently. He considered suicide a relief, an escape, a promise that you didn’t have to put up with feeling vulnerable and helpless and half a man.
He had brought Creed home and taken Colfax back to Segway House. Now he was back in his double-wide trailer, staring at the box from Tony. Earlier he and Colfax had picked it up from Tony’s mom. She said it had Jason’s name on it and explained that Tony had dropped it off with the instructions that if anything should ever happen to him, this box was to go to Jason. She said he was adamant about it even though he joked that of course nothing was going to happen to him. In tears she told Jason and Colfax that she should have seen it as a sign.
Everybody thought they should have seen it coming.
Jason had pulled up the tape and peeked inside. He recognized the assortment of Tony’s belongings. He closed the lid and set the box in the corner.
Did this mean Tony knew he wouldn’t be returning?
Colfax seemed convinced it was proof that Tony had killed himself. But why travel all the way to Chicago to do it? Was it just as possible that Tony feared he wouldn’t be coming home because of whom he’d gotten involved with?
Jason shared his suspicions with Colfax. He told him about the text message that Tony had sent, and what he’d said about getting himself into “a fine mess.”
“What if someone pushed Tony?” Jason had asked Colfax.
His friend shook his head at the idea and said, “S
eems like a lot of trouble to go through. Any of the guys who wanted Tony dead wouldn’t have cared about making it look like suicide.”
And maybe Colfax was right. Maybe Jason just didn’t want to believe that his longtime friend—his best friend—wouldn’t have confided in him one last time. Wouldn’t have given him a chance to talk him out of it.
Jason looked around his trailer. This was the first place that felt like home since he came back from Afghanistan. Hannah and Creed had provided it for him along with a job and a dog and most importantly, a purpose. Yet tonight he couldn’t stop thinking about Tony. Everyone seemed willing to believe that he had killed himself.
Maybe it was that simple. After all, Jason knew exactly how Tony must have felt. He knew how tempting, how comforting the lure of suicide was.
It was usually after dark—mostly late at night—when the black thoughts came to him. Sometimes they came in a whisper. Sometimes in a roar. He sensed the pressure building now and knew it could grow so intense that it threatened to explode inside his head.
Closing his eyes didn’t help. It brought images of body parts and splattered blood. Pools gathered on the top of crusted rock, otherwise so dry and dusty that the blood reminded him of liquid mercury sliding around.
Jason hadn’t felt the IED that had taken his lower arm. He had no idea his arm was missing the whole time he lay with his cheek against the hard dusty rock. He watched his sergeant flailing before him, limbs twisting and jerking. Half the man’s face was gone. His mouth was an open scream, though Jason couldn’t hear it. The blast had replaced all sound with a hurricane wind tunnel.
In Afghanistan, Jason and his fellow soldiers—including Tony—had talked obsessively about home. How much they missed it. They longed for the simplest of thing, like ice-cold beer and the smell of fresh-cut grass . . . or just grass, period.