Die Again by Tess Gerritsen Read Free Book Online Page B

of us.
    “Who found him?”
    Vivian’s answer comes out barely a whisper. “We did. Sylvia and I. We both had to use the toilet. It was already getting light, and wethought it would be safe to come out. Clarence usually has the fire started by now, and …” She stops, looking sick that she has said his name. Clarence .
    Johnny rises to his feet. I am standing closest to him, and I take in every detail, from his sleep-fluffed hair to the thickly knotted scar on his abdomen, a scar I’m seeing for the first time. He has no interest in us now, because we can’t tell him anything. Instead his attention is focused on the ground, on the scattered remnants of the kill. He glances first toward the camp perimeter, where the wire is strung. “The bells didn’t ring,” he says. “I would have heard it. Clarence would have heard it.”
    “So it—whatever it was—didn’t come into camp?” Richard says.
    Johnny ignores him. He begins to pace an ever-expanding circle, impatiently pushing aside anyone who stands in his path. There is no bare earth, only grass, and no footprints or animal tracks to offer any clues. “He took over watch at two A.M. , and I went straight to sleep. The fire’s almost dead, so no wood’s been added for hours. Why would he leave it? Why would he step out of the perimeter?” He glances around. “And where’s the rifle?”
    “The rifle is there,” says Mr. Matsunaga, and he points toward the ring of stones where the campfire has now gone out. “I saw it, lying on the ground.”
    “He just left it there?” says Richard. “He walks away from the fire and wanders into the dark without his gun? Why would Clarence do that?”
    “He wouldn’t” is Johnny’s quietly chilling answer. He is circling again, scanning the grass. Finding scraps of cloth, a shoe, but little else. He moves farther away, toward the river. Suddenly he drops to his knees, and over the grass I can just see the top of his blond head. His stillness makes us all uneasy. No one is eager to find out what he’s now staring at; we have already seen more than enough. But his silence calls to me with a gravitational force that pulls me toward him.
    He looks up at me. “Hyenas.”
    “How do you know they did it?”
    He points to grayish clumps on the ground. “That’s spotted hyena scat. You see the animal hair, the bits of bone mixed in?”
    “Oh God. It’s not his, is it?”
    “No, this scat is a few days old. But we know hyenas are here.” He points to a tattered piece of bloody fabric. “And they found him.”
    “But I thought hyenas were only scavengers.”
    “I can’t prove they took him down. But I think it’s clear they fed on him.”
    “There’s so little of him left,” I murmur, looking at the fragments of cloth. “It’s as if he just … disappeared.”
    “Scavengers waste nothing, leave nothing behind. They probably dragged the rest of him to their den. I don’t understand why Clarence died without making a sound. Why I didn’t hear the kill.” Johnny stays crouched over those gray lumps of scat, but his eyes are scanning the area, seeing things that I’m not even aware of. His stillness unnerves me; he is like no other man I’ve met, so in tune with his environment that he seems a part of it, as rooted to this land as the trees and the gently waving grasses. He is not at all like Richard, whose eternal dissatisfaction with life keeps him searching the Internet for a better flat, a better holiday spot, maybe even a better girlfriend. Richard doesn’t know what he wants or where he belongs, the way Johnny does. Johnny, whose prolonged silence makes me want to rush into the gap with some inane comment, as if it is my duty to keep up the conversation. But the discomfort is solely my own, not Johnny’s.
    He says, quietly: “We need to gather up everything we can find.”
    “You mean … Clarence?”
    “For his family. They’ll want it for the funeral. Something tangible, something for