CENSUS_What Lurks Beneath Read online

  The intensity of Sampson’s barking picked up as Dave approached the house. Sampson jumped straight up into the air as he barked, and his capering in the lamp light cast a crowd of shifting shadows within the house.

  Dave opened the door and Sampson rushed out to bark at the night air. Dave then closed the door behind him to shut out the swarm of bugs, and Sampson immediately figured out that he’d been left outside. Dave pulled off his boots and stowed them by the door as Sampson barked at him.

  Ignoring Sampson for a moment, Dave fished the old Dell laptop out of the small desk in the living room. He set it down on the coffee table, plugged it in, and hit the power button. About half the time, the creaky laptop required multiple reboots before it would cooperate. Tonight, however, it was feeling generous and began its long slog through the initialization process without further prodding.

  Sampson repositioned himself so that he was jumping up and down and barking in front of the window directly across from Dave. Dave smiled, walked to the door and opened it to let Sampson in. Sampson immedi- ately raced over to his food bowl, then turned back to Dave to express his disappointment in the lack of a second dinner.

  “Not gonna happen, buddy,” Dave said as he grabbed a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red from the liquor cabinet and poured himself a stiff measure. Drinking alone was a bad idea, but he needed something to still his quiv- ering nerves.

  He fished the SD card out of his pocket and sat down in front of the laptop. He took a large sip of Scotch and watched and waited as the old Dell finished booting up. Sampson crept in and parked his head on Dave’s right foot. Dave absently scratched Sampson’s ear, his eyes fixed on the screen as he set his glass down on the coffee table.

  Three minutes later all the pictures were uploaded. Another message appeared asking Dave if he’d like to erase all the photos from the card and, per usual, he agreed. Thirty seconds later he stared at the first picture in full-screen mode. It was a shot of tall, waving grass, as was the next picture and the picture after that.

  The time stamps across the bottom of the photos indicated that the pictures were taken within hours of when Dave last compiled the pics last month. He continued to page through the photos, some of which showed a small herd of deer grazing in the grass at 6:37 p.m. on May 17th. Variations of these same shots also appeared at 6:38, 6:39, and so on.

  Dave absently renamed a few of the deer pictures so he’d be able to dis- tinguish them quickly from the empty pictures. The routine was com- forting, and when he arrived at the pics from the prior weekend, he felt even more relaxed to see pictures of himself, Adam, Marilyn and Samp- son fishing. Adam knew where all the game cameras were located, and so there were also several shots of him waving his arms and sticking his tongue out.

  Dave recognized a series of photos that captured his attempt to compel Adam to put down his fishing rod and join them at the house for dinner. All of these pictures were taken at twilight on Sunday, June 6th.

  The next black-and-white picture was from that same night at 9:03 p.m. A male whitetail deer stared vacantly at the camera. The brilliance of the flash washed out the features of the deer and filled the rest of the frame in an impenetrable shadow. The deer seemed confused by what was occurring, and the next shot at 9:04 p.m. showed his nose only few inches from the camera. His impressive antlers extended up and out of the frame.

  Dave smiled as he envisioned the confused thoughts of the deer regarding the flashing box

  hanging from the tree.

  His smile was erased by the next shot at 9:05 p.m., which showed the same confused look on the deer’s face. The confusion was readily un- derstandable, as the deer had been decapitated. Its antlers still angled up, the disembodied head leaned backward against its corpse. It’s life- less tongue now seemed too large for its mouth as it dangled out of the left side. What appeared to be steam came from the hole in the body where the head was previously attached, and black flecks of what must have been blood littered the now-trampled grass.

  Dave pushed back from the image but couldn’t tear his eyes from it.

  Sampson, sensing

  something amiss, whined at his feet. Dave couldn’t process what he was seeing. In the span of sixty seconds, something took the deer’s head off and then repositioned it so that its dead eyes stared back at the camera. He vigorously rubbed his right temple as his ever-present headache again flared.

  Dave stared at the gore oozing from the deer’s lifeless trunk. He used his fingers to trace the screen as if they could understand what his eyes could not. His eyes followed the path of his fingers down to the temperature recorded at the bottom. The reading was 140⁰.

  140 degrees? The camera must have malfunctioned. Dave scrolled back to the 9:04 p.m. shot and saw that the close-up of the deer had a temper- ature of 80⁰—which was miserable but sounded right. He’d actually been packing up for the trip home at 8:30 that night and Adam had insisted on wearing pajamas with long sleeves, only to complain about the heat as they buckled him into his seat. All of what he’d seen in the pictures happened within a few minutes of them pulling out of the gate just a few hundred yards away.

  He didn’t want to, but was compelled to scroll forward again to the car- nage captured at 9:05. The lifeless eyes of the young buck stared back.

  Dave scanned the rest of the photo for any clue as to what may have committed this brutality. There was nothing visible besides the muti- lated carcass of the deer. He sucked in his breath and, teeth clenched, tapped the arrow on the keyboard to get to the next picture.

  Large holes appeared in the carcass of the deer. Guts and gore leak out of the holes, which appeared to have been made with teeth, not knives. The holes were large, ragged. The head now rested on its side with the eyes looking out over the pond. The reading displayed 9:06, 145 ⁰He continued through the pictures. The blood now painted most of the body of the deer and the surrounding area black. In the next series of photos, the head of the deer was actively used as a prop. In the 9:08 pic, a wad of intestines had been ripped from the carcass and draped around the upright horns of the buck, while the 9:12 pic showed the upside-down head of the deer held aloft a few inches by its horns, which had been driven into the ground beneath it. The deer’s tongue dangled out of its upside-down skull in the 9:12 pic but was bitten off halfway in the 9:14 version.

  Dave realized that he was holding his breath and made an effort to get some air. He forced himself to take deep breaths as he stared again at the 9:12 photo. What would do something like this? Animals might play with their food, but what kind of animal could decapitate a full- sized deer and then pose the skull upside down, antlers shoved into the ground? How was it that there wasn’t a single picture showing anything except the deer? Where was the carcass now? Dave hadn’t seen any bones near the shattered remains of the camera.

  A chill went down his back. If it wasn’t an animal it had to have been a person. A person who crept onto his property, waited until just after Dave’s family left and somehow ambushed the deer directly in front of the camera. He couldn’t think of a way that anyone could commit such savagery in these short windows of time, and without any evidence of weapons or tools.

  Dave stared out the window into the inky darkness. Anything could be out there. With the drapes open and the lights on, Dave was fully visible to the outside world but completely unable to see more than a few inches beyond the porch.

  He returned to his computer, and slowly pushed the arrow button to advance to the next picture. The next picture was black, and the temper- ature read 150⁰.

  He paged forward again, but there was no change; he was at the last photo. Sometime after 9:13, whatever destroyed the deer had turned its sights on the camera.

  Sampson chose this moment to lift his head and growl at the door. The hair stood up on Dave’s neck as he followed the dog’s gaze to the closed door.

  Dave whispered, “What is it, boy?”

  Sampson continued to growl for a few seconds, then abruptly lost in
terest and collapsed back to the floor. Dave looked down at the dog, utterly confused by how quickly a growl could turn into a snore. He stared at the door, then got up, stepped around Sampson and walked over to it. He checked the deadbolt, which was locked, and stared through the small glass pane at the darkness outside. The only thing he could see was his truck.

  Dave closed the blinds and switched off the overhead light. The room was now backlit by the light from the neighboring kitchen, but anyone trying to peer in would have trouble seeing anything. Sampson, curious about the goings-on, had again risen and sat on his haunches at Dave’s feet.

  “It’s okay, boy,” Dave murmured as he absently scratched the dog’s head. “I think.”

  He headed back to the bedroom, Sampson in tow, and went to the closet. He pushed aside several sleeping bags and other camping gear on the long top shelf and fumbled around for something in the very back. After knocking off a couple of sleeping bags, his hand emerged gripping the wooden stock of an old shotgun. He walked the gun over to the bed and went back to the closet, continuing to grasp at something just out of reach. Eventually he produced a white box full of shotgun shells.

  Dave put the shells down next to the shotgun on the bed and then headed for the kitchen. He wasn’t a hunter. The only thing he willingly killed was fish, and he often felt more than a small pang of guilt about that. Bobby Higgins, the handyman who first discovered thousands of dead ants in the pump house, had insisted on loaning him the shotgun when Dave gave him the old refrigerator stored in the shed after his visit to repair the pump control switch. “Everybody needs a shotgun, even if they don’t know it.”

  He’d graciously accepted the gun, which he’d then stashed in the back of the closet. He’d had a wild hair to shoot some cans with it but had never acted upon it. As of late the idea of using it on Bill Jennings had also crossed his mind.

  Dave stood on the seat of one of the breakfast-room chairs and fished around the top of one of the kitchen cabinets. He took growing comfort in the presence of the gun. He didn’t know what he was dealing with, but no one—and no animal—enjoyed staring down the business end of a shotgun. He finally found the small key ring he’d been searching for and headed back to the bedroom.

  He used the key to remove the trigger lock, which he’d insisted on buy- ing, and then put the open lock on the nightstand. Taking four shells from the flimsy cardboard box, he chambered them into the gun. Check- ing to make sure the safety was on, he went back to the couch and col- lapsed into the cushion, leaning the shotgun on the couch, next to him.

  Bobby had been right: unless the bad guy gave you a five-minute head- start the only way the gun was useful was to have it loaded, sitting next to the door.

  The aged Dell laptop still showed the dark frame of the last picture; its internal fan howling with exertion. He closed the lid to hopefully give the laptop a break and stared again at the door. There was no way in hell he was going to be able to sleep.

  He pondered the notion of calling the sheriff, but recalled the fiasco that occurred when he called the night he’d discovered the trailer had been stolen. The deputy that arrived was at least a hundred pounds over- weight and refused to walk in the grass, because of his unhealthy phobia of snakes, which was exacerbated by the dark. He insisted instead on driving his patrol car to various spots around the property while Dave followed on foot.

  The deputy was, however, more than happy to spend an hour sitting at Dave’s breakfast room table filling out his paperwork, and grilling Dave over the presence of an empty beer bottle on the counter. Yes, he’d had a beer. In his own house.

  As Dave reran this painful memory his eyes were drawn to the half- empty glass of Scotch sitting next to the laptop. He could dump the rest of the Scotch, brush his teeth, and conjure up a plate of cookies in preparation for a visit with “Tiny” the deputy, or he could take some more time to try and sort out what had actually happened and then call the Sheriff ’s department in the morning.

  He reached down and grabbed the glass, downing the rest of the Scotch. He’d call the sheriff in the morning. Hopefully a different deputy would be assigned the case. If not, he and Tiny had a lot of catching up to do.

  Dave put the empty glass down and stared again at the door. He fished his cell phone from his pocket and saw that Marilyn had sent him a text

  half an hour ago, asking him if all was well and wishing him goodnight. There’s no way he could tell Marilyn about any of these events at this point. He had no idea what was happening, but knew that Marilyn and Adam would never come out here again if they didn’t feel safe. At this point he wasn’t sure that any of them, including him, would ever again feel safe here. He didn’t like that train of thought. There had to be an explanation.

  He laboriously used his large fingers to tap the small letters on his phone to reply that he had been in the shower, but that all was well. He’d call in the morning. She immediately replied with a couple of Xs and Os. Dave smiled and then remembered that it wasn’t really a smiling kind of evening. He then remembered that he also wasn’t sure how he actually felt about his wife.

  He put the phone down at his side and gazed again at the door, then the closed laptop, and finally, snugged the shotgun next to him. As he was hard-wired to prefer doing something versus relaxing, he picked up his phone and began going through his email inbox.

  CHAPTER SIX: The Deputy

  He awoke the next morning to the sound of his alarm. He fumbled with his left hand for the phone, which was pinned beneath him on the couch. He also noted the shotgun next to him and grimaced from the stiffness of sitting up most of the night on the couch, and the memory of why he had done so. The ever-faithful, ever-sleepy Sampson groaned audibly and stretched at his feet.

  He typed in his code and shut off the alarm. It was 5:30 a.m. He had to be on the road for a meeting at 7:00. He pondered his next steps as he stared around the room.

  He hit the contacts icon on his phone and scrolled through the roster until he found the number for the Sheriff ’s department. He walked out the front door as it dialed the number, dodging Sampson, now wide awake, and desperate to avoid being left behind. The light next to the door was triggered by the motion sensor and he shielded his eyes with his free hand squinting as he looked around the concrete floor beneath him to ensure that he wasn’t about to step on one of the many scorpions that used the porch as a playground in the night. Staying inside on the couch would’ve been a lot easier, but the tin roof of the house was a black hole in terms of a cell signal (texts and emails were mostly okay, but talking was usually a no-go).

  After waiting through an automated menu, he was connected to dis- patch.

  “Can you please state the nature of your request?” The dispatcher’s voice was tired, world weary, and it was only 5:30 a.m. Perhaps he was catching her at the tail-end of her shift?

  He quickly rehearsed what he wanted to say in his head, then spoke. “I need one of your deputies to come out to my place, please. I think I’ve had an intruder. You folks have been out here before.”

  He gave her his name and address and told her he was in a rush. The dispatcher returned to his specific complaint. “To confirm, was anything taken or vandalized?”

  Dave thought through what to say. How was he supposed to describe what the pictures showed without coming across like a crazy person? Perhaps it was best to low-key the topic until he got someone out to look at the pictures. “I pulled the pics from one of my game cameras last night and it looks like someone poached a deer.”

  “Do you have a physical description of the hunter?” He again stuck with the basics.

  “The pictures were taken at night and they’re hard to make out. I can download copies of everything for your deputy.”

  “OK. We have someone in your area. They should be there in the next twenty minutes.”

  Dave hung up, ushered Sampson indoors, and ran to the shower so he could get ready before the deputy arrived. Sampson followed him to the bathroom,
confused by the departure from the usual routine.

  Ten minutes later, showered, shaved, and dressed, Dave let Sampson out for his regular morning round of barking at nothing, and then hurried back to the kitchen to get out a can of dog food, and a sixteen-ounce Red Bull for himself. He poured the dog food into a bowl while chugging the

  better part of the energy drink. He didn’t know if the Red Bull actually did anything, but today wasn’t the day to try to go cold turkey and find out.

  As he stopped to take a breath, he noted that Sampson’s barking had taken on a more urgent tone. Dave set the can down on the counter, grabbed the bowl of dog food, and hurried to open the front door. He opened it to the sight of Sampson launching himself—all four feet—two to three feet in the air above the caliche driveway as he barked ferociously at something Dave couldn’t see.

  He put the bowl of food down on the porch and called out to Sampson. There was no reaction and the barking and jumping continued. Dave took a couple of steps out and squinted toward the front gate, which sat a little more than a quarter mile away, and saw the unlit but unmistakable red and blue light-bar perched atop a police car parked outside his gate. They were early.

  He rushed back inside and grabbed his keys off the counter.

  Deputy Janice Evans sat in her cruiser, idling in front of the locked gate, using her binoculars to watch a medium-sized, scruffy dog jump into the air. An unopened bag from Whataburger sat on the seat next to her, oozing the tantalizing smell of hash browns and breakfast tacos. Deputy Evans had been married once upon a time. In that era she carried an extra forty pounds on her slight frame. Eating had been her escape from the misery that was her marriage. When that marriage finally ended, she promised herself that she’d never again let anyone hit her, or manipulate her emotions. The unopened bag represented a test of her will and her commitment to her new life—such as it was.