Quarry of Wolves

Sample Chapter

Len Wisneski’s keystroke delivered the last chapter to his petulant literary agent. The story had already earned him and the San Francisco Chronicle a Pulitzer. Len’s third. He had quit taking new stories at the paper’s crime desk a year ago to focus on the novel and the final words he would ever write for money.

But the last year had taken its toll. He no longer felt young at 70. He no longer enjoyed the long nights or the sordid circumstances of murder.

He was tired of death and oh so weary of violence. Tired of looking at it. Tired of telling people about it. Tired of glamourizing it with his award-winning prose, and tired of making it appear something other than what murder was: unceasingly constant and unbearably brutal.

The 87 victims he had spent the year writing about came at the hand of a single man, John Brown, who evaded detection for years by maneuvering the evidence, forensics, and timing of murder to make the arrest and conviction of another person all too convenient. Len’s stories set 81 people free, but three of Brown’s scapegoats had long ago committed suicide before or during incarceration. One had recently died of natural causes while serving a life sentence in federal prison. Three had been put to death by lethal injection.

The stories of the victims and the suffering of their families earned him more than just a shiny trophy. It elevated him to sainthood, something he was extremely uncomfortable with given his penchant for filthy language, old-school tomfoolery, and his immensely pleasurable and incessant poking of the Establishment.

Ultimately, like all criminals, Brown had made a mistake and was ID’d at the scene of a murder at Ocean Beach in San Francisco.

Rebecca Montero, Len thought.

She had been the fourth woman left for dead on that particular sand dune. The other six had been raped and murdered by a tandem that had come to an unfortunate, but just, end. Brown had tried to hide his murder of Rebecca Montero by copycatting the tandem’s murder spree, but it had backfired.

And that coincidental set of happenstances unraveled it all. That and the work of Inspector Tyson Ford and FBI Agent William Hatch.

Rebecca Montero had grown up in the Bay, like Len.

She mattered to him, mattered in a way that was unexplainable in his own mind, but the most obvious way was that it was her death exactly a year prior that had led to what Len hoped was the end of John Brown’s killing spree. Rebecca Montero was John Brown’s mistake. He hoped it wouldn’t be the monster’s last.

Brown had fled to South America, according to Interpol and Agent Hatch, who was still leading a federal task force to apprehend Brown, now the most notorious criminal in the world. Brown’s reign of death the macabre result of his quest to beat the mass-murder record held currently by Luis “The Beast” Garavito, a ruthless psychopath serving a life sentence in Colombia for the all-time serial murder record of 137 victims.

Rebecca Montero had been #63, and Len hoped that Brown was no closer to 137 than he had been when they’d last crossed paths.

The plane Brown had fled in seven months ago was discovered shortly thereafter in a pile of fiery debris outside of Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, the remains recovered from the crash site turned out to be another misdirection and authorities had pieced together that Brown had likely been continuing his “work” in the rural mountain countryside like his hero, Garavito.

Len was standing in front of Rebecca Montero’s parents’ home, thinking about her death, as he pressed the doorbell.

He was finishing a farewell piece for The Chronicle due later that day, a follow-up for the paper’s electronic edition a year to the day after Montero’s murder. She had been no more than 19 years old before Brown had left her body in the cold wind-tossed sand of Ocean Beach on a Sunday afternoon.

In the stillness of the morning, Len wondered whether he had gotten the time wrong. A second ring of the doorbell was followed by a soft “come in” from behind the red-painted door. He put his hand on the knob, turned and opened it slowly.

He heard a second, “Come in. I’m in the back,” from somewhere within the home and stepped into a darkened wood-paneled hallway with family photos in faux gilded frames. As he moved forward down the hallway, Len’s foot slipped the tiniest bit on the thick shag carpet, then sunk. Odd. It was a feeling of viscous suction beneath the soles of his shoes that froze his usually over-confident stride.

He didn’t have to look down at the sound of the sickly squish under his feet, or the warmth seeping through the sides of his loafers to understand. He came to the end of the hallway and entered a living room decorated with the thick ropes of human intestine, the walls dressed like tinsel with nailed human entrails.

Dripping innards were draped over framed family photos, strewn around the room and tacked to the ceiling, oozing crimson onto the furniture and the carpet at his feet.

Len’s mind dug into the word “strewn,” or untidily scattered. Words, memories, anything to bring him back to who he was before this moment. But this wasn’t untidy, his present circumstance. It was composed and decomposing. He felt the desperate thoughts coming rapidly and fragmented, and he knew he wasn’t breathing. The smell…

His eyes found the two heads staring back at him from the glass paneled coffee table, propped-up with fanned-out stacks of Better Homes and Gardens and AAA Magazine. The rest of the bodies, that is, the other pieces, were arranged around a living room that was otherwise bright and neatly decorated.

Len’s knees buckled and he doubled over before vomiting on the carpet. His hands found the feathery soft material of his corduroys, and he looked down at the mess at his feet, framed by his trembling fingers squeezing tightly to his thighs.

Staring down at the blood and vomit, Len noticed another set of feet stepping into view. Remarkably clean shoes. Len knew that the killer stood before him. He knew that his end was ahead. He screwed on his courage and began to rise, driven by both fear and professional curiosity, both forces in terrified harmony. He stood, accepting and expecting the blow that would be his own end.

His eyes locked onto a gentle and welcoming face.

“Len,” was said in a voice that was menacing yet sweet, “I’m John Brown.” Len felt his body surrender.

The choking of the darkness pulled at him, and he was falling toward the bloody floor beneath.