now would do her no good;she would only lose any insights he might be able to provide. The cases were spread over a wide geographic area. And if she wanted to succeed, she was going to need all the help she could get.
The plane bucked wildly, tossing Prusik’s briefcase onto the floor in the aisle. The seat belt light flashed on and the captain announced that they were in for a little turbulence. Her tongue was throbbing, and she tasted coppery blood. She’d accidentally bitten herself.
“Ma’am, are you OK?” A heavyset man in a business suit leaned across the aisle and handed her the briefcase.
“Fine,” she muttered in a funny voice, favoring her tongue.
It took hitting an air pocket to know she wasn’t fine at all. With her heart at a canter, the uncomfortable sinking feeling was taking hold again. She sucked for air, just as she had in the makeshift morgue with her arm buried up to the elbow in pulpy remains. When her hand had touched Missy Hooper’s torn windpipe, she had found something hard wedged tightly there. Pinching the object between a rubber-gloved finger and thumb had sent ten-year-old adrenaline shooting through Prusik’s veins.
Her eyes floated in and out of focus on the seat back in front of her. The past is never done with us, she thought. She had so successfully concealed it from everyone at the bureau all these years, but all it took was one little thing.
One little thing?
She interrupted herself.
One little thing? This was not a little thing.
She clenched her right fist, burying the pinkie nail into her heavily callused palm.
Furtively Prusik checked around the cabin. No passengers were looking. She flipped open the end clasps of her briefcase. Papers spilled from file folders onto her lap. A hard plastic vial rolled loose over the top, tumbling to her feet. Prusik quickly scooped it off the floor, ripping a jacket seam in the process.
She pressed her forehead against the small porthole glass. Blackness met her gaze. The vial in her hand had taken her straight back to the heat, the water, the terror.
Eleven years earlier, she’d been sitting cross-legged between the shelves in the graduate library stacks at the University of Chicago when she had come across a thin sleeve of hand-bound notes. They were research notes typed in the field by Marcel Beaumont, a graduate student in physical anthropology, her own department, in the early sixties.
Beaumont had done fieldwork two springs in a row in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. In May 1962, when he was scheduled to return home from Port Moresby, PNG’s capital, word had come back that the young researcher had vanished in the vast reaches of the Katori rain forest. One possible explanation for his disappearance Prusik had gleaned from the riveting final passages of his prior summer’s typed field notes. He had been in pursuit of an infamous highland clan known as the Ga-Bong Ga-Bong. Though forbidden by law, the Ga-Bong men continued the practice of cannibalism with depraved indifference. There appeared to be no social or kinship explanation for their behavior, nor could it be attributed to internecine fighting—the well-documented practice of ritual wars between tribal villages. Most ritual wars, as Prusik understood, were more a matter of economic shoring up, resetting the balance, a give-and-take between villages, not the wreaking of unholy violence as the Ga-Bongs did. Their attacks were haphazard, with no relationship to debts owed or reciprocal exchanges expected. No witnesses ever came forward, so feared were these nomadic kinsmen.
To Prusik it was too fantastic—a serial-killer family in the wilds of New Guinea. She read and reread the savage tale of Maleek Ga-Bong Ga-Bong, each time drawn to the tantalizing conclusion Beaumont himself had speculated upon—that the Ga-Bong men suffered from an inborn predilection to murder. Were the Ga-Bong Ga-Bongs proof that psychopaths existed among primitive peoples? Or that the drive to
The plane bucked wildly, tossing Prusik’s briefcase onto the floor in the aisle. The seat belt light flashed on and the captain announced that they were in for a little turbulence. Her tongue was throbbing, and she tasted coppery blood. She’d accidentally bitten herself.
“Ma’am, are you OK?” A heavyset man in a business suit leaned across the aisle and handed her the briefcase.
“Fine,” she muttered in a funny voice, favoring her tongue.
It took hitting an air pocket to know she wasn’t fine at all. With her heart at a canter, the uncomfortable sinking feeling was taking hold again. She sucked for air, just as she had in the makeshift morgue with her arm buried up to the elbow in pulpy remains. When her hand had touched Missy Hooper’s torn windpipe, she had found something hard wedged tightly there. Pinching the object between a rubber-gloved finger and thumb had sent ten-year-old adrenaline shooting through Prusik’s veins.
Her eyes floated in and out of focus on the seat back in front of her. The past is never done with us, she thought. She had so successfully concealed it from everyone at the bureau all these years, but all it took was one little thing.
One little thing?
She interrupted herself.
One little thing? This was not a little thing.
She clenched her right fist, burying the pinkie nail into her heavily callused palm.
Furtively Prusik checked around the cabin. No passengers were looking. She flipped open the end clasps of her briefcase. Papers spilled from file folders onto her lap. A hard plastic vial rolled loose over the top, tumbling to her feet. Prusik quickly scooped it off the floor, ripping a jacket seam in the process.
She pressed her forehead against the small porthole glass. Blackness met her gaze. The vial in her hand had taken her straight back to the heat, the water, the terror.
Eleven years earlier, she’d been sitting cross-legged between the shelves in the graduate library stacks at the University of Chicago when she had come across a thin sleeve of hand-bound notes. They were research notes typed in the field by Marcel Beaumont, a graduate student in physical anthropology, her own department, in the early sixties.
Beaumont had done fieldwork two springs in a row in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. In May 1962, when he was scheduled to return home from Port Moresby, PNG’s capital, word had come back that the young researcher had vanished in the vast reaches of the Katori rain forest. One possible explanation for his disappearance Prusik had gleaned from the riveting final passages of his prior summer’s typed field notes. He had been in pursuit of an infamous highland clan known as the Ga-Bong Ga-Bong. Though forbidden by law, the Ga-Bong men continued the practice of cannibalism with depraved indifference. There appeared to be no social or kinship explanation for their behavior, nor could it be attributed to internecine fighting—the well-documented practice of ritual wars between tribal villages. Most ritual wars, as Prusik understood, were more a matter of economic shoring up, resetting the balance, a give-and-take between villages, not the wreaking of unholy violence as the Ga-Bongs did. Their attacks were haphazard, with no relationship to debts owed or reciprocal exchanges expected. No witnesses ever came forward, so feared were these nomadic kinsmen.
To Prusik it was too fantastic—a serial-killer family in the wilds of New Guinea. She read and reread the savage tale of Maleek Ga-Bong Ga-Bong, each time drawn to the tantalizing conclusion Beaumont himself had speculated upon—that the Ga-Bong men suffered from an inborn predilection to murder. Were the Ga-Bong Ga-Bongs proof that psychopaths existed among primitive peoples? Or that the drive to
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