The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(62)

Her body is sixty feet from the road, behind a small ridge in the same kind of shallow depression like the others. There are bruises all over her right arm, as if she was literally grabbed off the street and dragged here.

Long gouges run from her back to her stomach, as if she was struck down from above, then pinned to the ground.

I take my samples and photographs, then seal her back up in the ground with another orange flag for the police.



Stephanie Grant’s final resting place is under a clump of mixed vegetation just like the others. I can spot them pretty easily now by matching the growth pattern to the time the women went missing. It’s become extremely precise. Our killer has a preferred victim and a preferred type of location for burying them. I found her by standing on a hill and just looking. Her body almost called to me.



I’ve become numb. Five bodies so far. Each one lost and nearly forgotten.

Being the first person to lay eyes on them—to even know they exist—is unsettling.

Every one of the red dots in the purple band in MAAT’s map has proven a hit. This tells me something very frightening.

Statistically speaking, when your probability estimates keep knocking it out of the park, something is wrong. It’s not that MAAT is so accurate—it’s because there are many, many more bodies out there than red dots.

MAAT is just showing me the ones with 90 percent probability or more. When I adjust the range to include 50 percent or more, something terrifying happens.

My two dozen dots turn to hundreds.

I know how to find one kind of burial. Who knows if the killer has other methods of disposing of bodies? I could just be finding the impromptu killings he doesn’t have the time to do a better job of hiding. That said, he seems to be doing a good enough job.

Montana has a million residents and even more tourists visiting every year. There’s also the traffic of people driving through the state, crossing the country and going to and from Canada.

A watchful eye would be very good at spotting vulnerable prey—the kind most likely to vanish without much fuss.

Just like I’ve become accustomed to spotting the depression and the clumps of vegetation that signal a body is buried below, the killer might be able to gauge in a glance a victim’s vulnerability.

It could be the outward signs of drug addiction. Or it could be from watching them and realizing they have no immediate family or friends in the area.

It scares me to think this is a skill that the killer could get better and better at until he is utterly fearless.

As I tamp down the dirt around Stephanie’s grave and place her flag, I have a realization.

While it’s important that I keep locating the bodies, unless I find their DNA and get a match, I’m not going to catch the killer from some careless clue he left behind.

I have to understand how the killer thinks. I have to know why he does what he does.

I’m not going to find that buried in the ground out here. I have to go to the places he’s been and see what he’s seen.

I have to pretend I’m the killer.





CHAPTER FIFTY


ANTHROPOLOGIST

It’s been ten days since I left the hospital, and I’ve been ignoring e-mails from my supervisor, too afraid to read what they say. I’m getting closer, but I need more information.

Dr. Seaver, a middle-aged anthropologist currently teaching at Montana State University, leads me down the steps into the basement where his specimens are held.

“You want to see the good stuff?” he asks, giving me a somewhat fiendish glance over his shoulder.

I found his name doing a search for any information on ritualistic killing in the area. Seaver, originally from Cornell, is currently part of an interdisciplinary study examining violence and human culture. He caught my eye because he wrote a paper comparing contemporary homicides with historical precedents.

We reach the end of the stairs and come to a narrow passage between rows of cabinets. The sparse lightbulbs do little to fight back the darkness.

The air is musty with the scent of decaying things. It’s an anachronism compared with modern, climate-controlled labs and vacuum storage.

“The real lab is over at the Museum of the Rockies, but that’s paleontology, primarily. Pre-Holocene. Our study certainly goes back that far, but most samples are quite contemporary by comparison.”

He leads me into a small room with a workbench. Five skulls sit in separate clear plastic boxes. The color of the bone ranges from dark brown to almost bleached white.

“Here, put on a pair of gloves and take a look.” He removes the first skull and hands it to me. “What can you tell me about this?”

The skull is mostly complete, minus the jawbone. The brow appears slightly thick and the cheekbones wider than an average European, but it appears contemporary. “Asiatic?”

“Correct. How about this one?”

He places another skull in my hands. This one has similar features with a slightly higher brow. “Native American?”

“Correct again.”

The third one gives me some trouble, but I estimate it as being sub-Saharan. The fourth as Central European and the last from Southeast Asia.

“Perfect score on identifying the general ethnicity, Dr. Cray.”

“I took a lot of anthropology classes.”

“But you failed to see the forest for the trees,” he replies.