Killer Instinct

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Something akin to a fetid spirit moved past the sheriff and his deputy when the warped cabin door creaked open, revealing a black crypt. But it was just the stale, pent up air, the closeness. Still there was the odor, heavy and solid, like a presence. The flashlight beam sluiced about the empty dark without reporting anything back.

Was the place filled with dead vermin? Had a raccoon crawled in through some hole, given birth to a litter only to die here, her starving young going unattended? Sheriff Calvin Stowell had opted to follow the lonely course of an old logging road, the terminus revealing the old Risley place. It had remained uninhabited for the last several years, the old man having died, his family scattered. Only the land held any value-the trees a mix of the finest hardwoods- but even the land seemed abandoned.

“ Somepin' sure stinks, Calvin,” said Lumley in the sheriffs ear.

The Wekosha Police had covered the territory around Baker's Road west to Three Forks, meeting up with the State Patrol moving eastward from the lake. This after repeated efforts along Old Market Road and Boyd's fishing camp and Killough Cove where the missing woman's family currently resided, all to no avail. Stowell, on a hunch, recalling the ancient, forgotten Risley place, quietly took his own direction now, and as if preordained, the weak and fading flashlight beam picked up a large shadow against one wall. All evening long Stowell's men had fanned out along Hawk's Ridge, a massive swell of connected mounds pushing up along with the boulders here in the shape of a crescent, a giant, sleeping Gulliver in fetal position. The men had wrestled with twisted briar bush, thickets of white and jack pine, coming on ramshackle homes hidden deep in the wood, startling people in the process.

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