Deadly Fate (Krewe of Hunters #19)(70)

But she’d said that she’d help. So she sat there, peeling the dried “blood” off the plastic leg.

She noted that Jackson wasn’t amused by any of it; he had brought a laptop with him and she assumed that he had accessed the internet the police techs had gotten working.

At any rate, he frowned while he read.

Looking at the stack of props on the floor, Clara thought that it was going to be a long day; it was good that she was helping.

She started back at it, thinking of the plays she had done, the dramas and the tragedies.

Nothing ever quite this gruesome...

She looked up to find that Jackson was staring across the room.

Amelia had reappeared.

She seemed to waft through the space. And she sank down beside Clara.

“There’s something...” she said. “I feel that there’s something familiar that I’m kind of getting a sense of now...something that sparks memory.” She looked at Clara a little helplessly. “I can’t figure out what it is. It’s important—I know it.”

“Think!” Clara told her.

“Huh? What?” Becca asked.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking...um, what the heck is this stuff, anyway?”

“Mostly red dye and corn syrup—gone sticky in the days past,” Nate said morosely. He paused and added, “Honestly, hard to tell from the real stuff sometimes. I think you have a fly caught in there, too.” He was quiet. “Really like the real stuff, I guess,” he added.

They all fell silent; they all went back to work.

Amelia remained, an image, perhaps, in Clara’s mind, looking perplexed.

And Jackson stared at the two of them.

*

The cliffs and caves on Black Bear Island were treacherous. Some formations were hard ground, hard rock, piled with earth and snow. Some were just ice. And some were just snow. A wrong step could bring a man crashing down to die on a jagged crop of rock or ice.

But both Mike and Thor knew the landscape—and knew to respect it.

They left the snowmobiles behind the high ledge on the southern side of the island and began the slow descent through the crystal-white cover down to the “beach” below.

There, caverns and glacial ice—carved out in the earth long before the coming of man—stood in what was truly fairy-tale beauty. The ice and snow shimmered in the sun. The water glistened. Sea birds flew overhead and the ever-present Alaskan salmon jumped high now and then, creating magical diamond-like dances on the horizon.

Snow and rock crunched beneath Thor’s feet as he walked along the shoreline. About fifty yards from where their descent ended, the caves began.

They were mammoth, appearing—from the water—like giant back mouths, waiting to consume the unwary into darkness forever. They were treacherous; at high tide, water filled the beds beneath them, except in winter, when they were solidly frozen. At low tide, the water was gone, and inside, they offered a spectacular view of natural formations.

Boats could catch on jagged rock and ice—and the inhabitants might well be left in freezing water, helpless to escape. Thor knew that, when early explorers had first come to the island, they had found the bones of many a lost sailor caught within the snow and ice and rubble.

It was low tide. He looked at Mike; they had several hours to explore.

He turned on his heavy-duty lantern, illuminating the first cave they entered. Mike did the same. Light filled the darkness, but created eerie shadows in the depths of the formation.

“I’ll go left,” Mike said.

“I’ll take the right.”

Thor moved in carefully, raising the light, looking everywhere. Police officers and Coast Guard men and women had searched, but there were nooks and crannies abounding here—it would be easy to miss a clue, especially when you weren’t really sure what you were looking for.

“Beer cans!” Mike called out. “Rusty—they’ve been here awhile.”

“Yeah, I found a broken flashlight. Been here awhile, too, though—all rusted out.”

“Hey, Thor! Come over here,” Mike called.

Thor did so, making his way around a spike of rock that seemed to grow like an oak, straight up from the earth.

“What do you make of this?” Mike asked.

Thor hunkered down while Mike held a light up high.

There were splotchy, circular dots on the ground. The color was a deep crimson, almost brown.

“Blood?” Thor wondered.

He walked carefully to the last bit of trail and looked beyond. There were more of the spikes of rock heading toward the rear of the cave. He moved around them and came to what appeared to be a wall of rock and ice.

But there was a break in it.

He slid around it. A crevice—almost like a closet-sized room—had been naturally created there.

He shone the light.

And he found what he was looking for.

A rough brown blanket lay on the ground.

And on top of it...

“Mike!”

He picked up the spade that had been left there. Once upon a time, it had been an ordinary farming spade. But it had been altered. It had been sharpened and honed until it was...

“Sharp enough to slam down and cut through a woman’s body,” Mike said from behind him.

There was a large butcher’s knife beside the spade.