Watchers

deliver, but it was no worse than the heat he had felt on other big investigations. Actually, some of his superiors viewed the lack of developments in the same favorable light as did Cliff Soames. But in his most pessimistic moments, Lem envisioned himself employed as a uniformed security guard working the night shift in a warehouse, demoted to the status of a make-believe cop with a rinky-dink badge.
    Sitting in his office chair, facing the window, staring grimly at the hazy yellow air of the blazing summer day, he said aloud, “Damn it, I’ve been trained to deal with human criminals. How the hell can I be expected to outthink a fugitive from a nightmare?”
    A knock sounded at his door, and as he swiveled around in his chair, the door opened. Cliff Soames entered in a rush, looking both excited and distraught. “The Outsider,” he said. “We’ve got a new fix on it . . . but two people are dead.”
     
     
    Twenty years ago in Vietnam, Lem’s NSA chopper pilot had learned everything worth knowing about putting down and taking off in rugged terrain. Now, remaining in constant radio contact with the L.A. County sheriff’s deputies who were on the scene already, he had no difficulty locating the site of the murders by visual navigation, making use of natural landmarks. At a few minutes after one o’clock, he put his craft down on a wide section of a barren ridge overlooking Boulder Canyon in the Angeles National Forest, just a hundred yards from the spot where the bodies had been found.
    When Lem and Cliff left the chopper and hurried along the crest of the ridge toward the gathered deputies and forest rangers, a hot wind buffeted them. It carried the scent of dry brush and pine. Only tufts of wild grass, parched and brittled by the July sun, had managed to put down roots on this high ground. Low scrub growth—including desert plants like mesquite—
    marked the upper reaches of the canyon walls that dropped away to the right and left of them, and down on the lower slopes and canyon floors were trees and greener undergrowth.
    They were less than four air miles north of the town of Sunland, fourteen air miles north of Hollywood, and twenty miles north of the populous heart of the great city of Los Angeles, yet it seemed they were in a desolation measuring a thousand miles across, disquietingly far from civilization. The sheriffs deputies had parked their four-wheel-drive wagons on a crude dirt track three-quarters of a mile away—coming in, Lem’s chopper had flown over those vehicles—and they had hiked with ranger guides to the site where the bodies had been found. Now, gathered around the corpses were four deputies, two men from the county crime lab, and three rangers, and they looked as if they, too, felt isolated in a primeval place.
    When Lem and Cliff arrived, the sheriff’s men had just finished tucking the remains in body bags. The zippers hadn’t yet been closed, so Lem saw that one victim was male, the other female, both young and dressed for hiking. Their wounds were grievous; their eyes were gone.
    The dead now numbered five innocents, and that toll conjured a specter of guilt that haunted Lem. At times like this, he wished that his father had raised him with no sense of responsibility whatsoever.
    Deputy Hal Bockner, tall and tan but with a surprisingly reedy voice, apprised Lem of the identity and condition of the victims: “Based on the ID he was carrying, the male’s name was Sidney Tranken, twenty-eight, of Glendale. Body has more than a score of nasty bite marks, even more claw marks, slashes. Throat, as you saw, torn open. Eyes—”
    “Yes,” Lem said, seeing no need to dwell on these grisly details.
    The men from the crime lab pulled the zippers shut on the body bags. It was a cold sound that hung for a moment like a chain of icicles in the hot July air.
    Deputy Bockner said, “At first we thought Tranken was probably knifed by some psycho. Once in a while you get a homicidal nut who prowls these forests instead of the streets, preying on hikers. So we figured . . . knifed first, then all this other damage must’ve been done by animals, scavengers, after the guy was dead. But now . . . we’re not so sure.”
    “I don’t see blood on the ground here,” Cliff Soames said with a note of puzzlement. “There’d have been a lot of it.”
    “They weren’t killed here,” Deputy Bockner said, then went on with his Summary at his own pace. “Female, twenty-seven, Ruth