The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(29)

Scanning through a few more articles, it seems like they’d been estranged for a few years. The first they heard about her whereabouts was when the police called.

What a horrible phone call to receive.

Rhea was a loner. A photo of her shows a hippie chick. The kind I’d seen around campus, struggling to figure out their place in the world. For Rhea, it was trekking out on her own.

Her case is promising, but there just isn’t a pattern yet, other than both she and Juniper were independent young women. Our killer may have a type, but there doesn’t appear to be enough alleged bear attacks to support a pattern.

Alleged . . . alleged implies someone to make the allegation . . .

If a bear kills you in the forest and nobody finds the body, is it a bear attack?

No.

It’s a disappearance.

Hikers said they heard Juniper’s cries. Rhea made it to the road.

What if nobody had heard Juniper? Would the killer have left her in the open?

Or would he have buried her?

The same for Rhea. If she’d never made it to the road, would we be looking at a missing-persons case?

I get a chill. If Rhea’s killer had managed to hide her body, she’d never have been a missing-persons case. At least not for months or years. Probably not in Montana.

Her parents didn’t even know where she was—or seem that concerned.

We’re used to the high-profile cases on cable news shows. The kind where a wife or husband vanishes under suspicious circumstances. Or when a daughter is last seen leaving somewhere and never checks in.

All of them have one thing in common: tight family structures.

What about the loners? What about people living on the fringe?

If the toothless woman who panhandled outside the 7-Eleven went missing one day, who would report it?

People drop out all the time. Drugs, psychiatric problems . . . there are a multitude of reasons.

More than once I’ve received concerned phone calls from parents worried because their child hasn’t called home in weeks.

It’s usually just a phase. Sometimes it’s not. People—especially young people—can begin to disconnect bit by bit, then fall away entirely, if only for a time.

I remember the story of a twenty-three-year-old California girl found dead in her car in a Walmart parking lot. Not only had nobody reported her missing, but she had been dead for three months. She killed herself, then rotted away in a heavily tinted car as people walked back and forth just a few feet away.

I Google missing-persons information and come across the webpage for the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. They have a listing for missing persons—a list of people who have vanished under suspicious circumstances. According to this, there are eighty-four thousand missing people right now in the United States.

Holy shit, that’s a lot of people.

To be sure, many of these are people with drug problems or other issues that made them easy to drop out.

But eighty-four thousand people? That’s like the city of Boulder, Colorado, disappearing.

And these are just the people where someone picked up a phone and told the police they were worried. Who knows how many more are unattached to a family group?

How many go missing and nobody knows?

You could have scores of serial killers out there and nobody would notice. My skin goes cold. We probably do.

What about Juniper’s killer? Is he responsible for more than her and Rhea?

How could I possibly know?

I look up some more data points and make a creepy discovery.

Montana and Wyoming have more missing persons per hundred thousand people than any other states except Alaska, Oregon, and Arizona. What the hell?

This could have to do with how the data are collected. One extra check box on a form can skew things out of proportion.

But still . . .

I click on the link to the Montana Missing Persons Clearinghouse.

The first things that appear are the photos of two smiling young girls. Below them is a Native American couple and their child.

There are a lot of young women on the list. The same for Wyoming.

I count at least a dozen women who fit Juniper and Rhea’s age range. Most, if not all, are probably runaways, many no doubt fleeing bad situations. Or, worse, leaving with men with ill intentions.

But I also have no reason to assume the killer limits himself to women.

There’s usually a strange thrill when I encounter a new data set. I can’t quite describe it. This time I feel guilty when I look at the faces of the missing.

I pull a box of colored thumbtacks from my luggage and push an orange one into my map for every missing woman over the age of eighteen in the surrounding states.

I do a new search to narrow it down by city. It’s depressing how little attention these missing-persons reports get. The data are scant.

The even more depressing thought is that the current state of their investigation is probably limited to having their name on a list and a report collecting dust in a filing cabinet.

Unless the police have clear evidence of foul play and a suspect, many of these women may never be found.

After a few minutes of pinning data points, my map begins to fill with orange thumbtacks. I find myself reluctant to shove them in; they feel like nails in a coffin.

I notice something odd but don’t want to jump to conclusions.

This is getting too complex for my map. Fortunately I have a portable video projector. I connect my laptop and use my bio-geo mapping software to create a virtual map I can project on the wall.