THE RAT-COAT-GRAY TORN-RAG sky over the guld of Mexico creeping across blackening waters, the morning sun steadily retreating from the shore, the coastal plain just twenty feet above sea level, the maze of oil refineries looking flat in the shadowless light of an oncoming storm, like a pencil drawing hung on a wall …

To Egon Gottfrey, on the trail of Ancel and Clare Hawk, the city of Beaumont, Texas, appears to be more detailed than Worstead, where all this began. But the Unknown Playwright is still sketching the locale rather than painting it in fullest depth and color.

Behind the wheel of his Rhino GX, Gottfrey follows Tucker Treadmont’s GMC Terrain through the outskirts of the city into open country, Rupert and Vince close behind in their Jeep Wrangler. This solemn train of black vehicles feels like a funeral procession sans corpse, though it’s easy enough to make a corpse if one is needed.

Along a two-lane blacktop, they come into fields of coarse matted grass and tortured weeds from some of which depend clusters of pale bladders the size of thumbs. At certain times of the year, perhaps portions of this land become marshes from which, at dusk, clouds of mosquitoes rise in such great numbers that they blacken the sky even before the last light has gone from it.

The GMC Terrain slows, signals a right turn, leaves the pavement for the wide shoulder of the road, and comes to a stop. Gottfrey parks behind it, Rupert Baldwin behind Gottfrey.

Treadmont waits in front of his vehicle, frowning at the grim sky, drawing deep breaths and snorting them out, as though he is part hound and can assess the potential of the storm by the scent that it imparts to the air. For whatever reason, the nipples of his man breasts have stiffened against his pale-blue polo shirt, a sight about as erotic as a squashed cockroach.

“Why have we stopped?” Gottfrey asks.

“This is where I left them, the cowboy dude and his woman. This is where they wanted to go.”

Gottfrey and his men survey their surroundings with puzzlement.

Vince Penn says, “This is like the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing. There’s no place they could go. It’s just fields. Just empty fields is all it is.”

Pointing ahead and to the right, toward a narrow dirt lane that branches off the blacktop, Treadmont says, “The last I saw them, they were walkin’ that way.”

In the distance, what might be a house and two outbuildings—or a mirage—imprint their small dark shapes on the landscape.

“Did they say who lives there?” Gottfrey asks.

“I didn’t ask, they didn’t say, and I don’t care.”

“Why didn’t they want you to drive them over there? Didn’t that seem odd to you?”

“Mister, maybe half of everythin’ that happens in life seems odd as hell to me, most of it stranger than this. Now I got a livin’ to make.”

When Treadmont drives away, Rupert Baldwin squints at the distant buildings. “If we drive in, they’ll for sure hear us coming. What do you say we walk it?”

Like Rupert and Vince, Gottfrey is carrying a pistol on his right hip. He also has a snub-nosed revolver in an ankle holster. The three of them set out on foot.

9

THE LIVING ROOM AT THE CORRIGAN HOUSE is furnished for comfort, with a deep sofa of no particular style and three massive recliners, everything aimed at a big-screen television. Otherwise, the theme of the décor is nautical. The reproduced paintings of sailing ships in calm and stormy seas are the quality that big hotel chains purchase by the thousands. One lamp base is sheathed in artfully arranged seashells; another features a porcelain mermaid topped by a painted shade on which porpoises cavort.

Someone in this desert home yearns for the romance of the sea.

A young DHS agent whose name Carter Jergen doesn’t know—one of the Arcadian backup brigade that streamed into the valley during the past thirty-six hours—sits on the edge of one of the recliners. He smokes a cigarette, tapping the ashes into a conch shell, his hands shaking as if he’s a palsied retiree.

Radley Dubose says, “Harry, is it?”

“Yeah,” the agent says. “Harry Oliver.”

“On the phone, you called it a slaughterhouse. To me it looks like Mayberry, U.S.A.”

A tremor ages Harry’s voice to match his trembling hands. “The kitchen, the back porch. That’s where …”

Filtered through the roof and walls of the house, the sound of the windmills is not as it is outside, not like giant swords slicing the air, but rather a low, rhythmic hum. To Jergen it sounds as if some hive fills the attic, a teeming population busy wax-laying and honey-making and brewing a potent venom to ensure a lethal sting.

He follows Dubose into a shadowy hallway where one of two bulbs is burned out in the ceiling light. Beyond open doors to each side, rooms are little revealed by sunshine leaking around the edges of closed draperies. On the walls between the doors, rough seas roll without motion, and tumultuous skies storm without sound.

The first victim is just past the kitchen threshold. Homeland Security ID clipped to the breast pocket of his suit coat. On his back. Face torn and puckered and hollowed by several bite marks. As eyeless as Samson in Gaza.

The father, Rooney Corrigan, lies to the right of a chrome-legged dining table with a yellow Formica top. He’s also faceup, though head and body are not joined.

Dubose steps cautiously to avoid the biological debris that slathers the floor, and Jergen follows with equal care.

Rooney’s younger of two teenage sons is sprawled beyond the table. The condition of the corpse is so appalling that Jergen must look away.

“It’s the remaining son,” Dubose says, “who’s suffered the psychological collapse. His name’s Ramsey. From the Old English, meaning ‘male sheep.’ Ironic, huh? He might have been a lamb once, but not anymore.”

The mother had tried to flee. She’d made it out the back door and onto the screened porch.

Blouse ripped away. Bra torn off. Face wrenched in terror. Lips cruelly bitten, mouth agape in a silent scream. The wide-open eyes suggest that the last thing she’d seen was an abomination worse than her oncoming death. Her neck is broken.

Here on the screened porch, the sound of the windmills has yet a different character. The fine mesh that bars flying insects also seines the crisp edges from the slashing-sword noise, so that the porch seems to be a way station between life and afterlife, where a host of spirit voices softly whisper secrets about what lies beyond death.

Dubose says, “Let’s go have a look at Ramsey.”

10

THE DIRT LANE IS ELEVATED a foot or two above the flanking fields. It is hardpan in which Egon Gottfrey and his men leave no tracks, nor are there any bootprints impressed by Ancel and Clare Hawk the previous day.

Seen closer than from the paved road, the flourishing weeds are even stranger than they had seemed before, riotous thickets in great variety, many of the species unknown to Gottfrey. His attention is drawn to certain gnarled bushes with needled leaves and wiry stems from which are suspended clusters of pale sacs. From the highway, he’d thought the sacs were thumbsize, bladderlike. But they are larger and more like cocoons than bladders, but not cocoons, either, vaguely reminiscent of something that eludes him.

Perhaps because the eerie fields appear to be hostile, like some alien landscape that harbors unknown lethal life forms, Gottfrey thinks of Judge Sheila Draper-Cruxton and the angry dressing-down she meted out to him in their most recent phone conversation. You better stop wasting your testosterone, Gottfrey. Keep your pants zipped, man up, start breaking heads, and get the job done.

The dark clouds race north, harried by some high-altitude wind not felt at ground level. The sky lowers, and birds shriek overhead as they flee toward what few roosts of refuge this flat territory contains.

As Gottfrey and his men continue along the hardpan, they come to a place where the creepy bushes grow within a foot of the lane. He stops to peer more closely at them. The clustered and slightly wrinkled sacs are moist and milky but not opaque. In fact, they are semitranslucent, and dark shapes are coddled within them, as if things wait therein to be born. But these are definitely not cocoons.

“What is it, what’re you doing?” Rupert Baldwin asks.

Rupert and Vince have halted twenty feet ahead of him and are watching him inspect the plant.

“I just thought …” Gottfrey shakes his head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

As they continue toward the buildings, he stares at the bushes, fascinated beyond all reason. He wonders if the sacs are actually part of the plant. Although they aren’t spun-silk cocoons, perhaps they’re extruded in another fashion by an insect unknown to him, the fields infested by some pestilence. Abruptly he stops again when he realizes of what the sacs remind him. Pale, yes. Semitranslucent, yes. But they nonetheless resemble testicles.

“Egon?” Rupert says.