Tess Gerritsen - Die Again

“There were similarities.”

“Who are these other people?”

“Hunters, in Montana. It happened three years ago.”

Eddie shook his head. “My brother disappeared five years ago.”

“But he has been to Montana. He’s familiar with the state.”

“It was one fucking trip to Yellowstone!”

“What about Nevada?” said Frost. “He ever been there?”

“No. What, did he supposedly kill someone there, too?” Eddie looked back and forth at Jane and Frost and snorted. “Any other murders you want to pin on Nick? He can’t defend himself, so you might as well throw your whole cold-case file at him.”

“Where is he, Eddie?”

“I wish I knew!” In frustration, he slapped away an empty bowl and it hit the concrete floor with an ear-ringing clang. “I wish you fucking cops would do your fucking jobs and come up with answers! Instead you keep harassing me about Nick. I haven’t seen or heard from him in five years. The last time I did see him, he was on the porch, drinking with Tyrone. They were haggling over some crap they’d picked up at the campground.”

“Picked up?” Jane snorted. “You mean, stolen.”

“Whatever. But it wasn’t a fight, okay? It was a … lively negotiation, that’s all. They left for Tyrone’s place, and that’s it. The last time I saw them. Few days later, state police shows up here. They found Nick’s truck parked at the trailhead. And they found Tyrone. But they never found any trace of Nick.” As if too weary to stand any longer, Eddie sank onto a bench and huffed out a breath. “That’s what I know. That’s all I know.”

“You said Nick’s truck was parked at the trailhead.”

“Yeah. Police figured he took off into the wild. That he’s somewhere in the woods like Rambo, living off the land.”

“What do you think happened?”

For a moment, Eddie was silent, staring down at his callused hands, the nails crusted with blood. “I think my brother’s dead,” he said softly. “I think his bones are scattered somewhere, and we just haven’t found him yet. Or he’s hanging from some tree, like Tyrone.”

“So you think he was murdered.”

Eddie raised his head and looked at her. “I think they met someone else out there, in the woods.”

BOTSWANA

WHEN THE SUN COMES UP, I AM ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS. I HAVE stumbled for hours in the darkness, and I have no idea how far I’ve traveled from camp; I only know that I am somewhere downstream, because all night I kept the sound of the river to my left. As the sky brightens from pink to gold I am so thirsty I drop to my knees at the water’s edge and drink like a wild animal. Only yesterday, I would have insisted the water be boiled or purified with iodine first. I would have fretted over all the microbial terrors I’m ingesting, a fatal dose of bacteria and parasites with every gulp. None of that matters now, because I am going to die anyway. I scoop up water in my palms, drink so greedily that it splashes my face, streams from my chin.

When at last I’ve had my fill, I rock back on my haunches and gaze across a clump of papyrus to the trees and waving grasses beyond the river. To the creatures who inhabit this green and alien world, I am but a walking source of meat, and everywhere I look, I imagine teeth waiting to devour me. With sunrise came the noisy chatter of birds, and when I look up, I see vultures tracing lazy loops in the sky. Have they already marked me for their next meal? I turn upriver, toward camp, and see the clear trail of footprints I’ve left along the bank. I remember how easily Johnny tracked even the faintest paw prints. My trail will be as glaring as neon for him to follow. Now that it’s daylight, he’ll be hunting me because he can’t afford to let me live. I’m the only one left who knows what happened.

I rise to my feet and continue to flee downstream.

I can’t allow myself to think of Richard or the others. All I can focus on is staying alive. Fear keeps me moving, pushes me deeper into the wild. I have no clue where this river leads. I recall from the guidebook that the rivers and streams of the Okavango Delta are fed by rainfall in the Angola highlands. All this water, which annually floods these lagoons and swamps from which so much wildlife magically springs, will eventually empty into the parched Kalahari Desert. I glance up to gauge the direction of the sun, which is only now lifting over the treetops. I am walking south.

And I am hungry.

In my knapsack I find six PowerBars, 240 calories each. I remember tucking them into my suitcase in London, just in case I couldn’t abide the food in the bush, and I remember how Richard mocked my unadventurous palate. In an instant I devour one of the PowerBars and have to force myself to leave the remaining five for later. If I stay near the river, at least I’ll have water, an endless supply of it, even though it surely carries a host of diseases I can’t even pronounce. But the water’s edge is a dangerous zone where predator and prey so often meet, where life and death converge. At my feet is an animal’s skull, bleached by the sun. Some deer-like creature that met its end here on the riverbank. A line of ripples disturbs the water, and a crocodile lifts beady eyes to the surface. This is not a good place to be. I veer away into the grass and find a pathway has already been trampled here. Tracks stomped in the dust tell me that I am following in the footsteps of elephants.

When you are afraid, everything zooms into sharp focus. You see too much, hear too much, and I’m overwhelmed by a rapid click-click of images and sounds, any one of which might be the only warning of something that will kill me. That must all be processed at once. That swaying of the grass? Merely the wind. The blur of wings swooping above the reeds? A fish eagle. The rustling in the underbrush is merely a warthog rambling by. Tawny impala and the darker shapes of Cape buffalo move along the horizon. Everywhere I see life, flying, chattering, swimming, feeding. Beautiful and hungry and dangerous. And now the mosquitoes have found me and are feasting on my blood. My precious pills are back in my tent, so add malaria to the list of ways to die, along with being mauled by a lion, trampled by a buffalo, drowned by a crocodile, and crushed by a hippo.

As the heat builds, the mosquitoes become relentless. I wave at them maniacally as I walk, but they thicken into a biting cloud that I cannot escape. In desperation, I’m driven back to the riverbank where I scoop up handfuls of mud and slather my face and neck and arms. The silt is slimy with decaying vegetation and the smell makes me gag, but I slap on thicker and thicker layers until I’m encased in it. I rise to my feet, a primeval creature emerging from the muck. Like Adam.

I continue on the elephant path. They, too, prefer to travel alongside the river, and as I walk I spot other prints that tell me this route is used by a multitude of different creatures. This is the bush equivalent of a superhighway, all of us traveling in the footsteps of elephants. If impala and kudu walk this way then surely lions do as well.

Here is yet another killing zone, where predator and prey find each other.

But the tall grass on either side of me hides just as many threats, and I don’t have the energy to thrash my own path through dense bush. I must move quickly, because somewhere behind me is Johnny, the most relentless predator of all. Why did I refuse to see it? As the others were taken down one by one, their flesh and bones fed to this hungry land, I was blind to his game. Every look Johnny gave me, every kind word, was merely a prelude to a kill.

As the sun reaches its height, I am still trudging the elephant path. The mud dries to a hard crust on my skin and clumps of it crumble into my mouth as I eat a second PowerBar, and I devour it, grit and all. I know I should conserve my food supply, but I’m already famished and the ultimate tragedy would be to collapse dead, with food still in my knapsack. The trail veers back toward the water’s edge, where I come to a lagoon so black and still that a twin sky is reflected in its waters. The heat of midday has silenced the bush; even the birds have gone quiet. At the water’s edge is a tree where dozens of strange, pendulous sacs hang like Christmas balls. In my heat-crazed exhaustion, I wonder if I’ve stumbled upon a colony of alien cocoons, left to incubate where no one will discover them. Then a bird flutters past and vanishes into one of the sacs. Weaverbird nests.