The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(88)

The final result is a semi-stiff corpse sitting in my Explorer with his hands poised around Gus’s shotgun, ready to pull the trigger and blow off his face—which also proves easier said than done.

Besides the emotional difficulty of literally defacing another human being, I become aware of the practical problem. How could I pull the trigger and make it look like he did it? If the door was open and I stood there, it would leave a rather odd blood splatter with a missing section. The same if I sat in the passenger side.

I consider trying to wire up something through the brake pedal but settle on reaching a garbage bag–wrapped arm through the window and manually pulling the trigger.

I’m sure a competent forensic technician would notice something amiss, but again, I just need a few days, not an unsolved mystery that lasts for years.

I toyed with the idea of setting Christopher on fire as well. While that would certainly complicate a forensic examination, it might make Clark too suspicious. If news reports said the body was burned beyond recognition, I’m sure he’d suspect something is up.

I have to give him exactly what he asked for.

I toiled late last night trying to make Christopher look fresh and planting all the identifying pieces of evidence so it would seem pretty clear-cut who was in the car. I dressed him in my clothes and put my wallet in his pocket.

As I tied my shoes on his feet, I became aware of all the subtle things I was probably getting wrong—like doing the knot upside down. I did my best to fix all those details and spent an hour obsessing over everything, trying to make certain that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious.

In the end, I had to just settle and tell myself that it would be enough to convince first responders and make the news with enough information for Clark to draw the conclusion I want.

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.