Beyond all the forensic details, the most important element will be my confession. Working on Christopher, I laid out what I was going to say in my head. It took my mind off the horrible things I was doing to this man’s body.
I’d worked with plenty of dead bodies before I came to Montana, but this was crossing a line. How far apart was I from Clark? Yes, Christopher was already dead, but I was violating him in some way. The last thing he could have wanted when he took that fatal overdose was some asshole to desecrate his corpse. And what about his family? What happens when they finally come to collect him for burial and see what I’ve done?
This is getting to me to the point I have to sit down and take a break.
I drop down on the hard dirt where I parked the Explorer and stare at Christopher’s face. The moonlight reflecting off his red and white cheeks makes him look like a creature half in this world, half not.
“What the hell are you doing, Theo?” I ask myself.
“Surviving,” I reply. “Surviving.”
Even if I see my way through this mess, I’m positive nobody would ever understand why I did what I did. “Why didn’t you tell the police? Why didn’t you warn everyone?”
Those are questions that will haunt me for the rest of my life if things don’t work out the way I need them to.
All of this preparation and planning was a distraction from the real problem. Assuming things do work out and I create a convincing suicide, that still leaves one very large problem: I still have no idea who or where Clark is.
He told me to kill myself because he feared I was close. But the truth is, I don’t know any more than what he suspected I’d already told the police.
I’m at just as much of a dead end as they are.
My only hope is that Clark feared me, not because of what he thought I knew, but what he thought I was close to knowing.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
BREAKING
At 7:22 a.m. a body was found in a car parked in an unfinished housing development northwest of the city. Unconfirmed reports say the victim, a man in his midthirties, may have died from a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. While no motive is immediately known, we can confirm that earlier this morning our news bureau received a link to an alleged confession on YouTube from a person involved with the string of alleged murder victims that police agencies across the state had previously identified as animal attacks. This video confession was made in a vehicle in what appears to be the same area where the body was found. Developing.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
DEAD MAN
I sip my stale coffee and watch the parking lot of the motel from my second-floor room. I’m not paranoid yet. I’m just tired of looking at a computer screen for hours on end.
A big rig pulls up to the diesel pumps, and a stocky man in a tan leather overcoat gets out and walks into the service station. He’s about the eighth guy I’ve seen do the same thing. It’s like there’s a casting office down the road they’re sending them from.
The news announced my name and death eighteen hours ago, along with the video confession I sent to the stations. I’ve spent the last twelve holed up in this motel two hundred miles from Helena, trying to crack Clark’s pattern. As each hour goes by, I nervously check the Internet to see if they’ve caught on to me yet.
I keep the TV on in the background with the volume low, anxiously awaiting another “breaking” report. I’ve seen parts of my confession air three times on the evening news as well as footage of the scene of my fake death, shot from a distance. There hasn’t been a press conference yet, just a graphic of police letterhead saying that the investigation is ongoing.
Ongoing . . . It certainly is.
I try not to think of what the news has done to Jillian or Gus, let alone my parents. I’ve had to stop myself several times from picking up the phone and telling them I’m okay.
I can’t just yet.
I have to find him.
I know he won’t make a move on Jillian or Gus so soon after my death. It would attract attention and let the authorities know there’s another killer out there. He’s smart and patient. He’ll wait it out—then go after them and close that book.
Constantly checking the news was getting distracting, so I created a little script that searches the web for my name and sends me a text update any time it appears in the Montana newspapers.
I also have a police scanner that lets me know what the cops are up to around here—the ones that aren’t using an encrypted channel. If they’ve seen through my ruse and are closing in on me, I think it might give me some heads-up.
The van is parked out back, near the fire escape. I can get to it from the front door, or through the back window that I already have open, with a coil of rope tied to the toilet. Probably overcautious, but the cops aren’t the only ones I’m afraid of finding me.
Clark is a skilled hunter. While I don’t doubt his threats toward Jillian and Gus, I’m sure he’ll come for me if he thinks I’m on the loose.
That’s why finding him first, while I’m dead, is so critical.
Unfortunately, my hunt has been a bust.
Joshua Lee Clark vanished in the 1980s, not long after the Cougar Creek Monster sightings stopped. The next time I know he reared his head was when the oldest victim I found outside of Red Hook was killed six years ago.
I suspect he was active before then in the state, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he went somewhere else for a decade or two.
Using some anthropology software designed to reconstruct facial features from bone structure, I created an adult version of his face and then used that as a comparison to scan through online mug shots. Then I sorted through thousands of possibilities and discounted ones that had traceable family connections.
This narrowed the field to just under two hundred people. To sort through these, I looked at their arrest records and the crimes they committed, and went on instinct.
This yielded a dozen maybes, although none of them felt right. I knew that wasn’t exactly a scientific thing to go on, but I suspected that Clark might be too clever and focused to get busted for the simple things, like robbing a convenience store or selling meth out of his car. However, given his violent tendencies, I considered it highly possible that he might have been arrested at some point when his temper got out of control, so I kept checking.
When this line of attack began to seem less likely to find him, I started trying to think out of the box. For the last two hours I’ve been hypnotized by his purple band of activity that MAAT singled out for me.
Watching all the big rigs pull up, I have an inspiration and try to find a trucking route that lines up with the killings. Nothing matches.
There’s also the problem that MAAT insists overwhelmingly that Clark’s hunting ground is based on victim availability. This suggests that he adjusts his route to the victims, which would be hard if he had to drive a proscribed route. I’d see clusters around specific dates, but I don’t.
My sense of dread is growing with every dead end. I’m running into the walls of the public data sets I have access to. I’ve paid for dozens of background checks, but that’s just not enough. If I had FBI-level resources and an unrestricted warrant, maybe I would have better luck.
Or maybe not. I might still be looking at this the wrong way.
I’ve had a few exciting leads that have given me hope, but they quickly faded.
When I was in the gas station bathroom, I realized for the first time that there were vending machines selling condoms and breath mints. I’d seen these all over the state.
I ran back to my room to see if I could find a connection, thinking that maybe the person who refills them is Clark, but came up empty-handed. MAAT gave that as much probability as Clark just being a random person driving long distances from his home to kill.
It’s obvious. I’m sure of it. I just don’t know what that connection is. I’m going to make some assumptions and see if MAAT comes up with something that jumps out at me.