The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(70)

“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

I have to wedge my foot into a small crack in the rock wall and grasp the upper edge so tightly my fingers turn white in order to pull myself up onto the ledge.

I could imagine a mountain lion making the leap or a bear doing a chin-up if they were really inclined, but I don’t think they would do it with any regularity if there were better places to reside.

“Theo?” calls Jillian.

“Just a second.” I roll over and catch my breath while ignoring the still-healing wounds all over my body. “Fine,” I say after I sit up.

The thermal image suggested there might be a deep passage here. Sure enough, there’s a gap in the rocks like a sharp triangle. Just wide enough for a man to slide through.

I take my flashlight from my pocket and shine it into the chasm. The wall veers to the right after about ten feet, indicating that the cave twists to the side.

“If I don’t come out in ten minutes . . . um, go get help?”

“Why don’t I come with you?” she shouts from the base of the wall.