The Naturalist (The Naturalist Series Book 1)

by Andrew Mayne

  Nothing.

  The strange scent is still present, but I don’t smell the decay of bodies.

  I have a few other spots on my map to check, but I’m doubtful any of them would be as promising as this place. I turn back and head toward the sunlight bouncing around the corner.

  When I reach the bend, I flick my light off. I’m able to make out the front of the cave well enough. But in the half second it takes to turn the switch, I see something that tells me to flip it back on.

  It’s such a subtle feature. A foot to the left or right and I might never have noticed it. When I move the light around, the details stand out quite clearly.

  Four long gouges—the kind you’d get if you scratched the wall with metal claws.

  I have to be careful of confirmation bias, but I just can’t imagine any other explanation. It looks like the Cougar Creek Monster decided to sharpen his claws before going out on the hunt.

  I take some photos, take a flake from the groove, check the other walls, then run out to Jillian. “I found it!” I shout down to her.

  “Found what?”

  “He was here! Claw marks. Four of them.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t a cat?”

  “Cats don’t leave bits of metal when they scratch rock.”

  Amid my excitement I can see an uneasiness in Jillian’s eyes. Things have suddenly become very real for her. She came up the mountain with me to investigate a decades-old legend. Now I’ve tied it in to the present.

  “Was there . . . anything else?” she asks.

  “No. Just the claw marks. The police might do a better job of searching the floor.”

  “Do you think they’ll come out here for that?”

  “I don’t know. Elizabeth’s husband might take an interest now that there’s proof.”

  “Gouges on the wall?”

  I begin to realize what she’s thinking. While the significance is important to me, it won’t be to anyone else—especially when the police are still convinced they’re after an animal.

  “Yeah. I see what you mean. But this can be helpful to me.”

  “I guess it’s better,” she replies, probably glad the cave isn’t filled with victims. “Maybe that means the stories of the other missing hikers are just stories?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And there’s no way they could be buried up there?”

  “No. It’s a solid rock floor.” I scan the rest of the caldera. “I don’t think there’s really anywhere else you could stash a body here without burying it.”

  “Could you find a buried body?”

  “Not the way I found the others. It’s been too long.”

  “Maybe there aren’t any.”

  I watch the steam rise off the spring and waft away in the breeze. “Yeah . . .”

  “Theo? Theo?”

  I let my attention come back to the present. “Yes?”

  “What is it?”

  I’m still staring at the hot spring. The anxious feeling begins to fill me again.

  “He didn’t bury them . . .”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  EXTREMOPHILE

  Jillian watches me as I circle the pond. The outer edge has a yellow sulfur coloration, while the center is a dark void where an occasional bubble of gas breaks the surface. It’s shallow around the first ten feet or so; then the back end drops off dramatically.

  I reach a hand down and measure the temperature at a few different spots. The dark end, the deeper side, is much warmer. Not scalding, but like a warm bath.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  “Did you know that they discovered microbes in the hot springs in Yellowstone that thrived at much higher temperatures than we thought possible? Extremophiles. They’re the reason we think there might be life on other planets.”

  She gives me an uneasy look. “Um, great. So, what, you’re thinking we’re dealing with aliens now?”

  “One second.”

  I turn toward the brush and start digging through for a large stick. I find something like a misshapen medieval rake and bring it back to the pond.

  “You think there might be a body in there, don’t you?”

  I probe the water with the stick and confirm the drop-off is as steep as I estimated.

  “Hundreds of people have been in this pool,” I say out loud, rationalizing my thought process.

  “They would have found something if it was in there.” Jillian tries to say this as a fact.

  “Not if . . .” I stop talking as my mind starts to zero in on something.

  There’s no way to avoid it. The bottom of the pond is what I need to investigate.

  I take off my shirt and lay it on a log. Still focused on the pond, I begin to untie my shoes.

  “Theo . . . you’re not going in there.”

  I glance over at her. “Sorry if this makes you uncomfortable. I have boxer briefs on.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  I remove my pants and take a step into the water. My foot is already warmer than the rest of my body. I go all the way in until I’m chest-deep.

  As I move toward the darker section, the water gets much hotter.

  “How is it?” she asks.

  “Nice, right here. Down there? Good question.”

  “Promise me you’re not going to go diving? It has to be boiling down there.”

  As she says this, a bubble breaks the surface near my face. “Technically, yes. But it’s not the water that scares me.”

  “Your extremophiles?”

  “Go for help if I don’t come back in ten.”

  “I’m going home and forgetting I ever met you,” she replies.

  I take a deep breath and dive under. As I descend, the water gets dramatically hotter. I feel it on my scalp and the back of my neck. When I shove my arms in front of me, my nerves are burning pinpricks.

  I kick my legs, bringing me lower, then hit a wall of even hotter water. My hands begin to burn, so I pull back and head upward.

  When I break the surface, the cold air slaps me in the face.

  “My god,” says Jillian, now sitting on the log. “Your face is beet red.”

  “It’s warm.”

  “Satisfied?”

  I dog-paddle closer to the bank. “I’m satisfied that no sensible person would go down there.”

  “Great. Will you come out now?”

  “No. That just confirms my suspicion. Would you hand me my stick?”

  “So you can go bobbing for bodies?” She doesn’t move.

  “Well, if you don’t hand me the stick, then I’ll have to use my teeth. Your choice.”

  “Disgusting.” She tosses it into the water, splashing it next to me.

  “Thank you.”

  I grab the end, push it in front of me like a spear, and dive back down. I go as far as I went last time and use the branch to poke around the bottom.

  The end collides with rocks and what feel like logs. I’m only able to keep probing for a minute before the heat is too much. I swim back to the surface to catch my breath and cool down. Jillian looks none too pleased.

  “This is what you signed up for,” I tell her. “I told you that there might be bodies.”

  “I wasn’t expecting one of them to be yours. I didn’t come here to watch you boil like a lobster.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You know about the frog and the pot of boiling water?”

  “That’s a myth. They hop out. They always hop out.” Unless they’re single-minded professors who don’t know any better.

  I dive back down and probe around in another area. This time the stick hits a rock that gives way when I push it, as if it were stacked on top of another rock. I have to go back up before I can investigate further.

  “Why do you have to be the one doing this?” Jillian asks as I emerge.

  “I couldn’t even get the police to show up three miles away from their station for the first body. What do you think they’d say if I
told them that this was tied to the Cougar Creek Monster?”

  I dive back into the water and return to probing. My stick stabs into something that feels wooden. When I pull the stick back, I can tell that it’s wedged into something.

  I carefully pull it toward me and reach out to touch whatever it is that I speared. My fingers feel a row of something that’s curved and slatlike.

  I try not to get ahead of myself. It could be a deer’s rib cage. I slide my fingers over the back and check the vertebrae for prominent dorsal spines, like you’d find on a deer or a bear.

  They’re short and blunt. Just like you’d find on a human.

  I stick my head out of the water. Jillian’s expression changes the moment she sees me.

  “You found something.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  I swim to the bank, dragging my find behind me.

  I move it into the shallow end of the pond where the water is clear.

  Jillian kneels down to look at the rib cage. “Human?”

  I leave it in the water and slide myself onto the grass. “Adult. Probably female.”

  “Is there more?”

  “Probably. The water or the bacteria chewed through the connective tissue. We need to leave this one in here until someone can do a proper removal. Once it gets exposed to the air, it will start to decompose.”

  I study the surface features of the partial skeleton and notice several prominent claw marks across the ribs.

  Jillian notices them, too. “It’s him.”

  “Definitely.”

  “What’s that?”

  I look to where she’s pointing. Something metallic is glittering against the dark bone. I spot a tiny piece of something wedged into the left side of the ribs. Perhaps a little too impulsively, I pry it loose with my fingers.

  When I scrape away the grime and algae I realize it’s a sharp metal knifepoint. Maybe even a claw point.

  I hold it up for Jillian to see. “This didn’t come from a cat or a bear. They have to believe us now. They have to.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  HAUNTED

  We walk the first half mile in total quiet, both of us processing our discovery. After getting several photos, I dragged the rib cage back to the center of the pool to wait for police divers.

  When I got back out of the pond, Jillian handed me a bottle of water to bathe with, telling me that she wasn’t going to have someone who smelled like a fart bomb as a traveling companion.

  I appreciated her ability to rebound so quickly from what she just saw, then got the drift that she was never all that fazed by it to begin with. I suspect that she’s been around death more than once.

  Even so, she’s still alert. As we head down the narrow pass, I catch her looking over her shoulder several times and scanning the ridgeline.

  The return trip is more unsettling than the hike up. At first I put it down to the fact that we just came face-to-face with death, but then begin to get paranoid.

  “That was somebody’s child,” says Jillian, breaking our silence.

  “Yes. Missing for over thirty years, I guess.”

  “Do you think there are more down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “I found this one without much difficulty. He’d put a rock on the chest to weigh the body down. The chances of me happening to pry loose the one set of bones down there are just too remote. I’m sure there are others.”

  “Right there, in this pond all this time. All those people swimming and playing—god forbid, drinking the water—with a graveyard right under their toes. It’s wrong.”

  “It was risky.”

  She looks back over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”

  “Those bodies could have swelled from gases and risen to the surface. It’s not a smart way to get rid of them. Better to just bury them out in the woods.”

  “Then why do it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. People baffle me.”

  “He’s not a person.”

  “Yes, he is. He’s just a horrible one. If I were to guess, he liked the idea of having all the bodies in one place. He probably got his rocks off watching people swim in that pool.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s encouraging.”

  “What? How?”

  “This was his younger phase and he got smarter, but there was and surely still is some thrill in it for him. Enough to drive him to be careless. He’s capable of making mistakes.”

  Jillian stops. I watch as she tilts her head to the side for a moment, then starts up again.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “What’s what?”

  “You stopped.”

  “Did I? I guess I heard something.”

  This tension between the instinctive animal and the reasoning human who discounts anything that doesn’t fit into narrow sense categories is fascinating to me. I just watched Jillian detect something and then quickly forget about it because she couldn’t classify it.

  “Do you feel a tingling on the back of your neck and a tightening in your stomach?” I ask.

  “Yes. You?”

  “Yep.”

  “I think we’re being watched,” she whispers without turning around.

  We continue hiking without saying anything. We both make an effort to seem less pronounced in our curiosity about what might be following us, keeping our heads forward but searching the trail with our eyes.

  After another half mile, we come to a section where the trees thin out. Jillian whispers, “No place to hide here. But after the next bend it gets thicker. If I were a sniper . . .”

  “That’s where you would be.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep walking.”

  I let her get farther ahead of me, then quietly begin to climb to the ridge. I wait for her to get around the curve before I go over the top, wanting the focus of any watcher to be her emerging through the ravine.

  The forest forms a peninsula as the trail switchbacks in an oxbow.

  If whatever or whoever is stalking us is in the cluster of trees ahead of me, there’s only a narrow band of woods for them to go through to leave.

  I weigh trying to be stealthy against the direct approach and decide to just run full speed into the trees and pray I’m not about to smack into a mountain lion.

  A quarter of the way into the woods, a branch breaks somewhere in the distance. Birds squawk and several thrushes take to the air, flapping wildly.

  Ten yards ahead of me, a branch swings upward. I’m not sure if I’ve just seen a shadow pass by or if it’s the sway of a tree.

  Suddenly fearful of having left Jillian, I run to the edge of the peninsula and see her making her way around the turn.

  She stares up at me and raises her eyebrows, silently questioning me. I shrug.

  As I start to turn back, I notice a patch of dry ground just under a low overhang of branches.

  There’s a clear footprint of a boot. I touch it to measure the moisture. It’s recent. Not even an hour old.

  I take my phone out to grab a photo. When I place a dollar bill next to it for size comparison, I realize how large the shoe that left it is. It’s at least a size fourteen or fifteen. The depression indicates that whoever filled it is quite heavy.

  “Well?” asks Jillian after I skid down the hill to join her.

  “I saw a big boot print. Probably a hunter.”

  “Hunter? There’s no hunting here.”

  “Right. Maybe a hiker. I know I sometimes try to avoid people.”

  “Yeah . . . I’ve noticed. Sure it wasn’t our stalker?”

  “This person was tall and heavy. Not exactly ninja material.”

  She seems satisfied with my answer and continues on.

  As I think about it, I realize something: a few minutes ago I was analyzing how quickly she ignored her own instincts, and here I am telling her that there’s nothing to worry about because the print I found doesn�
��t match my expectation.

  I survey the ridge ahead of us and feel my stomach tighten back up.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  SCENERY

  The sun is setting against a blood-red sky by the time we make it back to my Explorer. Jillian and I climb inside and exchange glances, expressing our relief at making it down before it got dark.

  “So what happens now?” she asks as we pull onto the highway.

  “You mean about the body? I send an anonymous e-mail to the police with the photo and the location.”

  “Do you think that’s going to fool anyone?”

  “No. I’ve just had too many frustrating experiences with the law enforcement around here.” My side still hurts from the beating Gunther gave me.

  “So what are you going to do next?”

  “Find more bodies, I guess. There’s not a lot I can do. They have a lot of forensic tools they can use. Maybe if they get the FBI involved. At some point they’re going to have to give up on their stupid wild animal theory.”

  “More bodies,” she says, looking out the window at the darkening sky. There’s only one other car on the road, and it’s a quarter mile behind us.

  “Actually, I want to see if I can find older victims.”

  “Like the ones here?”

  “Yes. And maybe other places. The problem is he’s too clever now. He knows how to avoid the police. His kills are free of his DNA, as far as I can tell. The metal fragment in the rib cage? I doubt he’d let that happen now. He’s evolved his methods with modern forensics.”

  “But his older murders . . .”

  “He might not have been so clever. The hot spring probably wiped away any trace of him, so it was smart in that regard, but it didn’t hide the fact that there was a killer out there. Now he’s invisible. Maybe there are more clues to be found looking into his past.”

  “So you’re going to look up old murders?”

  “Missing-persons reports. Odd knife attacks. Anything else that might fit over the last few decades.”

  I realize I missed my exit and do a U-turn.

  “I wonder what he’s like? Would we recognize him if we met him?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t think so. He’s intelligent and probably not socially awkward.”