Page 45 of Sharp Force

She vanishes from the tablet’s display again as the security video resumes. I see myself on the front steps talking to Marino through his truck’s open window as something crashes through brush in the wooded dark.

“Yikes,” Benton mutters, reaching for his wine.

We listen to the growling, the screams, grunts and hooting. I ask about the source, and Janet’s grim face returns.

“What area of the property were they coming from?” I’m saying to her. “The growling seemed close to where I was standing on the front porch. But not the other noises, the crashing and screaming etcetera.”

“The grunting and screaming were in the garden,” Janet says.

“I’ve worried about the greenhouse from day one.” Bentonoffers this to me, not her. “It can attract all kinds of critters, which is why I wasn’t keen on you doing it. Despite how much I love fresh vegetables.”

Over his objections I bought the greenhouse at an antique fair not long after we moved here. Until last summer, the pieces and parts were in the basement. It took a long time getting around to having it assembled and heated.

“Critters can’t open the door,” I explain. “Not even a raccoon or a bear. To get inside the greenhouse you’d have to push down your thumb on the door handle. Or it won’t open.”

“What about the growling?” Benton asks Janet. “What was doing that? Can you tell?”

“The acoustical signature of that vocalization is consistent with a raccoon. Possibly the raccoon crossing the driveway as Marino was driving Kay home.”

“Do we know if the raccoon is rabid?” I ask. “Because that would be very bad.”

I look at Merlin in his cat bed near the fireplace.

“It wasn’t foaming at the mouth or disoriented,” Janet says. “It wasn’t making whimpering sounds or showing signs of aggression.”

She goes on to inform us that the raccoon lives in a hollowed-out tree near the house and has for a while. Sensors detected him retreating there after I went inside. Over recent weeks he’s been picked up by cameras monitoring the driveway and showed no signs of injury until tonight.

“He has wounds to his face and is limping. It’s likely he got into a fight with another animal,” Janet says as I think of the owls. “But it wasn’t caught on camera. I didn’t see it.”

“What about the screaming and snorting?” I ask while feeling bad for the raccoon.

I make a mental note to send Fabian an email about it. Knowing where the raccoon lives, hopefully it won’t be hard to find and catch.

“The screaming and snorting from the garden are a problem.” Janet looks perplexed. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. But those vocalizations aren’t in any dataset.”

“How is that possible?” Benton swirls wine in candlelight, taking another sip. “I would think virtually every animal sound on the planet has been recorded and is in databases.”

“The vocalizations are inconsistent with any known animal sounds on this planet.” Janet cuts her eyes up to the left, her face tense like it always was when she couldn’t solve a problem.

“Possibly the vocalization was engineered by a computer?” Benton wonders. “It could be that a recording is what Kay heard? Something fake, in other words? Possibly associated with the hologram?”

“The sounds recorded by the security system are full fidelity,” Janet’s avatar answers on the tablet’s display. “They contain frequencies that humans can’t hear, and therefore they were not engineered. They are authentic vocalizations.”

“Something real was crashing around, screaming and hooting? An animal not in any database on the planet?” I make sure, and she nods her head.

“Christ.” Benton isn’t happy. “But we don’t know what kind of animal? What the hell is on our property?”

“I’m sorry, Benton. I don’t have that information.” Janet looks annoyed with herself. “It was smart of you to disable Merlin’s collar. And I don’t advise you or Kay go outside in this weather and at this time of night to look.”

“Don’t worry,” I answer for both of us. “That’s not happening.”

“While we have you, Janet, there’s something else we’d like to chat with you about,” Benton says.

“Of course. Anything you need.” She smiles, her gaze intense on the Barolo bottle. “I’m looking at your wine and feeling envious…”

Benton and I are shoulder to shoulder at the café table, looking at Janet’s face on the tablet. He asks about Rowdy O’Leary and if she can find any information about projects or clients he may have had.

“Rowdy O’Leary is deceased,” she says. “His badly decomposed body was recovered today from the Potomac River at twelve-fifteen p.m. It had been carried by the current nine miles downstream and was discovered by someone walking his dog. The body was halfway submerged, caught in rocks and debris.”