“The campus police said a coyote killed him,” Abigail Fishling told me. “Just like the first one.”
McKinnon College was a small school with an emphasis on business, economics, and education in northern Illinois, 30 miles or so outside of Aurora, two hours west of Chicago and not quite on the prairie. Abigail Fishling’s husband had been a teacher there.
We sat in her house, a small bungalow on the edge of the small campus. Abigail was in her 50s, with silvery blond hair and thin glasses. She taught business writing; her husband Isaac had taught Greek and Latin—the education department had a small classics division.
“The first one?” I remembered reading something about it online.
“Joel Gunderson.” She rubbed her eyes. “He was attacked by—something—out riding his bike. Just coming home, Jill said. She heard screams right outside, and ran out, and by the time she got there—” She shuddered and reached for a tissue.
“I’m . . . sorry.” She blew her nose. “It’s just—then two nights ago Isaac was out in the backyard, smoking, with the dog—” She smiled at a small basset hound hiding under a piano bench. “Ulysses came running inside, barking and barking. I went out and Isaac was on the ground, bleeding. I—I thought I saw something, like a deer running away. And Isaac was—” She shuddered. “It looked like something had tried to eat him.”
I wanted to shudder too. But hardboiled private eyes like me don’t shudder. At least in front of clients. “A coyote, you said?”
“The cops said.” She shook her head. “We get coyotes sometimes, but they usually just wander around. Raccoons are more of a problem. I just don’t—” She stood up. “There’s something I want you to see,”
I followed her down a hall, past two bedrooms and into a small office with a window that looked out at flowers in the side yard. A laptop sat on a desk underneath a Monet print. Bookshelves crammed with books lined the walls. I glanced at the titles. Half of them were in Latin. Or French. Or possibly elvish.
Abigail sat down and tapped at the computer, opening an email program. She scrolled down, then opened a message. “Here.”
I bent down. The subject line was “CURSE.” The message was one sentence:
BEWARE THE CURSE.
Okay. I straightened up. “Any idea who sent it?”
“It’s from the college email server. I checked it for viruses before I opened it.” She shrugged. “It came the day before—before.”
I leaned down again. The sender was wendi919. “This is your husband’s computer, right?”
“Yeah. I have my own.”
“Have you replied?”
“N-no. Do you think . . .?”
“Ask who it is.”
With a nod, she wrote “Who are you?” and hit Send. “How long should we wait?”
We waited five minutes with no response. Finally I said, “I’m going to forward this to my own email. I have an associate who might be able to figure out where it came from.” Rachel. She’s good with computer stuff. She’s my girlfriend, but it sounds more professional when I call her an associate.
She nodded. “The campus police just don’t have a lot of experience with—well, we’ve had assaults and robberies, but they’re treating this like just another animal attack. But this isn’t just a coyote, is it?”
Abigail Fishling had heard about me. Aside from the typical cheating spouses, embezzlement, and employee background checks I handle, my cases sometimes veer toward supernatural. Why me? Just lucky, I guess.
“I don’t know much about coyotes,” I said. “But this looks like a threat. Did you show it to the police?”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Probably just spam. That’s what they said.”
“Could I take a look outside?”
We walked back through the house and out a screen door to a small deck in the backyard. Cops had sprayed some kind of paint around some dark stains in the grass. A folding chair lay upside down.
She pointed toward a row of bushes. “It just ran through there. I only saw it for a second. Like I said, it looked like a deer, but deers don’t eat people.”
I walked around the spot, not expecting to actually find anything the cops had missed. But it sometimes pays off to be thorough, or at least look like you’re searching for clues. Some the branches in the hedge were broken. I bent down.
Some kind of footprint was still visible in the ground. Half of it, anyway. Two long toes, and one of them looked like it had poked a deep hole in the dirt. They didn’t seem like deer tracks, not that I’d really know, but I took a few pictures anyway.
I walked back to the deck. “Okay.” I nodded, trying to reassure her without promising too much. “I’ll see what I can find out.”
She stared at the curse on the screen. “Please.”
I collected a retainer check, and then I headed to the McKinnon Campus Security office. It was across the street from the five-story college administration building, a small stone building with a wide awning over the front steps and folded blinds in the windows. Inside I walked up to the front desk, where a woman in uniform was scrolling down her iPhone. She peered up. “Can I help you?”
“Tom Jurgen.” I showed her my card, and a photocopy of my P.I. license. “I’m interested in the deaths of Joel Gunderson and Isaac Fishling. My client is Abigail Fishling.”
She looked at my credentials, then picked up a phone. “Roy? A mister Tom Jurgen to see you. He’s a P.I.? About the coyote killings.” She hung up. “Hang on a minute.”
Five minutes later I was sitting in the office of Roy Benning, chief of security, a short, heavyset man with a sunburned face and large hands. He wore a uniform with a chest patch that bore his name and the MCS logo. “What can I do for you, Mr., uh, Jurgen?”
“Joel Gunderson and Isaac Fishling. Were they killed by coyotes?”
He folded his arms across his belly. “It was some kind of animal. It attacked their legs, brought them down, and started on dinner before it ran away. I can show you the pictures, but they’re pretty awful.”
“Abigail Fishling said it might have been a deer.” I knew how that sounded even before Benning rolled his eyes, but I had to put it out there. “She saw it running away.”
“Yeah, she said something about horns or antlers, but those wounds weren’t made by antlers. Deer don’t attack like that. Maybe there really was a deer, but it didn’t kill her husband.”
“She’s received a threat.”
Now Benning snorted. “A curse? She couldn’t name anyone who might want to put a curse of her husband, or Joel Gunderson, or her for that matter. If she did, we could ask questions, but there’s not much we can do about a single email except tell her to contact us if she gets another one.”
“Could you trace where it came from?”
“Priorities.” He shrugged. “We might be on a small campus, but we’ve got plenty to keep up with. Like I said, if she could name someone, or if something more happened . . .” He shook his head.
The phone on his desk buzzed. Benning glanced at it. “Sorry, this is president Marston. I’ve got to take this.”
I stood up. “Thanks for your time. I’ll, uh, be in touch if I learn anything.”
He was already on the phone. “Yeah, Phil, I’ve got that report right here—”
Outside I got in my Prius and took a quick drive around the campus. A spring day, the students were walking to and from class, sitting in one of the two parks, drinking coffee in sidewalk cafes, just like normal college students. The classroom buildings were tall and suitably imposing, with brick walls and granite columns. I could smell flowers and grass through my open windows.
I found Gunderson’s address, and the spot where he’d been killed. A few bloodstains were fading on the sidewalk in the afternoon sun. Or maybe they were just oil. The Fishling house was one block over. It felt like a quiet, safe neighborhood. Not a prowling ground for monsters. But you never know.
Rachel was working when I got back to the office we share in our apartment. She’s got short red hair, hazelnut eyes, mild psychic powers. “Hi. New case.”
“Don’t bother me.” She does graphic design when she’s not working with me. “Big project. Boring project.” She yawned. “Is it interesting?”
“There’s a curse. I’m forwarding an email. Can you figure out who sent it?”
She grinned. “Good thing I’m a hot psychic with mad hacking skills and killer legs.” She turned to her keyboard and grabbed her Supergirl coffee mug. Rachel’s computer expertise is way ahead of mine when it comes to ferreting out hidden information. I know some tricks, but she’s less leery about strictly interpreting the rules—and better at hiding her tracks.
I had a number for Joel Gunderson’s wife from Abigail Fishling, so I called her. Left a message. Then I pulled up news stories on the two deaths.
Joel Gunderson, 52. Found mauled to death in front of his driveway. The story quoted his wife Eileen: “I just saw something big and dark, and it was on top of him, and then it just ran away. Jumping. It jumped.” Police and wildlife experts were looking for a coyote in the neighborhood.
A woman saw part of the attack from her living room: “It was all over him, rolling around, and then it jumped up and was just gone, just like that. I heard the screams.”
Isaac Fishling, 63. Attacked in his backyard. Died of his wounds in the campus hospital. Some kind of animal, a doctor who was quoted as saying.
The story quoted college president Philip Marston: “Campus security chief Roy Benning is taking extra precautions, including increased foot patrols and bringing in wildlife officers, to ensure the safety of our community. I’d hate to see any coyotes or any other wildlife killed, but our students, faculty, staff, and visitors are our top priority.” A photo of Marston showed a broad-shouldered man with gray hair and a neck like a bulldog.
I checked out McKinnon College. Founded in 1909 by Emerson Silvester McKinnon, a philosopher and teacher. Originally it emphasized the classics, but over time it had evolved toward more worldly studies, like engineering and science, then shifted during the 1970s toward economics and business. It had kept the classics department but steadily downsized it until its office shared a floor with what was left of the art history department, in a building on the edge of campus.
The current president, Philip Marston, had been a classics prof himself, specializing in mythology and native American studies. He’d worked his way up from department head to provost and eventually the presidency, where he’d expanded business courses while downsizing the liberal arts. Art history had once boasted 15 fulltime instructors, now it was down to five part-timers. Classics had only seven people left—actually five, now that Gunderson and Fishling were gone. A photography division had been jettisoned two years ago. It still had a small journalism school—I used to be a reporter myself, so I liked that—and a student-run newspaper, the McKinnon Press.
The towns near the campus did report sporadic coyote sightings, but no attacks or deaths. A nature preserve to the north was home to deer and other wild animals who were closely monitored by the state park service.
I took a break for some coffee. Rachel had gone back to work on her project after a few preliminary attempts to hack the email. “I’ll get to it, all right?” she told me. “But somebody’s got to pay the bills around here.”
“Hey, I pay my share of—” Then my phone buzzed.
“Mr. Jurgen? This is—this is Eileen Gunderson. Your call?” She sounded frazzled.
“Thanks for calling me back.” I introduced myself again. “This may sound a little strange, but I have to ask—do you know if your husband received any strange or threatening emails before—before what happened?”
“I—I don’t usually look at Joel’s email.” She paused, and then I heard clicking keys. “Give me a minute while I find his password—”
She put the phone down. I waited, listening to murmurs and movement on the other end for 30 seconds. “Here it is. Just a minute . . .” More tapping. “I’m not sure what to look for. It’s mostly department stuff, they’re still sending him—wait. What?” Another pause. “I don’t—this is bizarre. It says, ‘Beware the curse.’ Capital letters.”
Oh boy. “Who’s it from?”
“It, uh, let me—wendi919. What does it mean?”
“Could you forward that to me?” I gave her my email address. “Isaac Fishling got the same message before—it happened.”
“Oh my god.” For a moment she didn’t seem to breathe. “I can’t—what does it mean?”
“I don’t know yet.” I just hoped I could find out before anyone else died.
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