I groan. “Yeah. Five claws. Polydactylism in cats usually results in six or more, not five. I haven’t heard of this happening in large cats, not that it makes a difference. They’ll make up whatever theory they want.”
“What are we looking for tomorrow? Not bodies, right? I mean, I’d be up for that. I guess.”
“No. We’re looking for the Cougar Creek Monster, or the Cougar Man, as he’s sometimes called.”
Jillian raises one eyebrow, waiting to see if I’m joking. “I’ll bring my gun.”
“I’m sure he’s long gone.”
“The gun isn’t for him.”
“Ah, you trust the mad professor to go off on a hike alone with him, but only if you’re packing heat?”
“More or less. Also, like I said, wait until you see me in hiking shorts.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
THE RAVINE
I let Jillian keep a few paces ahead of me, mostly because this part of the ravine is too narrow for us to walk side by side. Mostly. She wasn’t exaggerating about the hiking shorts.
As distracted by her as I am, I still can’t keep my mind off the unsettling feeling this trail is giving me. Certainly part of that is the vivid imagery of Elizabeth’s story and the dreadful thought of what else happened here, but another aspect is geography.
The trail follows a gradual incline between two steep ridges. At one time there was a stream here, but it has been cut off for years, leaving a dry rock bed that winds its way through the hills.
The trees along the sides are so tall, the only time the ravine isn’t in shadow is near noon.
“This place feels off,” says Jillian.
I’m relieved to hear her say it, because I didn’t want to cause her any unnecessary unease.
“It’s because we’re vulnerable. Nobody feels comfortable pinned down in a tight crevice.”
“That’s what he said,” she replies with a small laugh.
I get the joke a beat too late and have to settle for grinning when she checks over her shoulder to see how it landed.
“Right . . . Some evolutionary psychologists think that we’re hardwired to feel more comfortable in certain landscapes than others. That’s what goes into park design. They’re not meant to recreate nature, but to soothe us. A small body of water in a wide-open space with a few clusters of trees to hide in if there’s a large predator. This is what we looked for when we left the jungle for the savanna. It’s what medieval landscape painters tried to represent and how manors and country estates were designed for hundreds of years. This place? It’s the opposite.”
“Yeah, but I think I can see why a bunch of teenagers would want to come up here. It feels very far away from authority. Especially after graduation.”
I keep my eyes on the shadows, trying to imagine how I’d react if I looked up and saw someone . . . or something . . . watching.
There are a thousand places to hide, and undoubtedly we’re being watched. This place got its name, Cougar Creek, from some settlers who lived nearby a hundred years ago. Statistically, the number of mountain lion sightings here is lower than in other areas, probably from excessive hunting due to the name. That said, I’m sure more than one carnivore knows we’re here.
Jillian stops to tuck a strand of dirty-blonde hair behind her ear, then takes a sip from her canteen. “How you holding up, city boy?”
“This city boy was trekking through Belize when you were holding pom-poms.”
“Pom-poms? Softball and volleyball. I liked to hit things. What were you doing in Belize?”
“Hunting a killer,” I reply.
“Really?”
“Culicidae. Mosquitoes. We were tracking down a species that had a higher incidence of transmitting malaria than others. I was an undergraduate following a field researcher, collecting specimens while the government tried eradicating them from danger spots.”
“How did that work out?”
“A slightly less infectious species filled the niche. Statistically speaking, we saved eleven lives. Eventually, better eradication methods made a more significant difference.”
“Interesting.” She keeps walking for a while. “This is the same to you?”
“Pardon?”
“The way you found the other victims and what you’re doing out here, it’s like hunting a disease.”
“I’m not really an epidemiologist, if that’s what you mean. It’s outside my area. I build mathematical models based on biological systems.”
“A generalist.”
“I guess you could say so. Even biology felt too constraining, so I had to figure out how to make it more exotic.”
“Like how?”
“For my PhD thesis, I created a fifth-dimensional environment, inhabited it with synthetic life, then introduced disease vectors.”
“I’m not even going to pretend to know what that means.”
“It was a little ambitious. What I was after was trying to find common traits between very different systems. The way a funny cat picture spreads on the Internet isn’t all that different from how the flu virus might spread. I wanted to create a very complicated model, really bizarre, and then look for similarities.”
“Did you?”
“Lots of them. None of them were built in to the system, but certain things are inevitable. That’s how I found where the other victims were. My model picked up patterns that were nonobvious.”
“Clever.”
“Half-clever. I could discover a lot about what their burial locations and potential interception locations had in common, but it doesn’t tell me anything about the killer.”
Jillian thinks this over for a moment, then replies, “That’s why we’re here. If this is your killer in his early days, that will tell you more about him.”
“Maybe. It might not even be connected to him, but there could be some data point that helps me better understand that kind of behavior.”
We reach level ground and continue hiking under a dense canopy of trees. After a half hour, we reach the small spring where Elizabeth and her friends made camp.
The pool is dark and twists around a bend. At one side there’s foamy discharge. Occasionally a bubble gurgles up from below. The sulfur smell isn’t overpowering, but it’s clearly there.
Rocky outcroppings surround the location, creating a kind of steep caldera. The presence of the steaming spring suggests some latent volcanic activity, implying that this may actually have been a volcano in the past.
I point up. “See the way the jagged edges of the cliffs cut into the blue sky like black teeth? In other places I’ve been, a geological feature like this would be called a hell mouth.”
“Creepy,” says Jillian, eyeing them with suspicion.
I take out the satellite printouts of the area I brought with me. It takes me a moment to place where I’m standing with the map, but I find what I’m searching for.
“This way.”
Jillian follows me as I cut through brush to get to a rock fall. We climb up it until we’re a good sixty feet above the spring. I find a narrow ledge where we can both sit.
From up here, the clearing is a grassy circle with the tiny pond in the middle. In my mind’s eye, I can imagine the tents spread out across the glade: small, almost toylike, the people insignificant.
“How do you feel from up here?” I ask.
“Like a god.”
“Or a devil.”
Jillian nods. “Do you think he watched them from here?”
“I think he watched them all the way up the trail. And the others. This spot below us . . . it’s special. It would have been his place.”
“His killing ground?”
“Probably more than once.”
I take a thermal map from my backpack and orient it with where we’re looking.
“What’s that?”
“Rangers have been all over this area and never found anything. But there are a dozen places you can’t see from the ground.”
I line up the cooler section on the map with a precipice about twenty yards away. There’s a sheer face about ten feet tall with several cracks in it. Above it is a small ledge.
“Hold my pack?”
“What are you doing?”
“I was looking for a place where a cat or a bear couldn’t get to, but a primate might.”
“What, a ledge?”
“No, a cave.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
LAIR