“Someone still might be out there,” Tean said.“Maybe you should be quiet.”
Jem did.But he grinned as he climbed up onto a rock next to the tree.
“What are you doing?”Tean asked.
“Someone tried to kill us,” Jem said, making a face as he readied himself.“I’d like to know why.”
Tean followed.Because he had to.Because with Jem, that was what always happened anyway.
“Whoever it was,” Tean said as they picked their way up the gully again, “they didn’t want us looking around out here.”
“Why?”
The question left Tean grasping for an answer.Finally, he settled on “Because they killed someone and buried the body out here.”
Jem didn’t respond.He trailed a hand through the tall grass, the seed heads filling his palm and then sliding away.
“But,” Tean said slowly, “that doesn’t matter because the police have already been out here.Okay.Maybe they don’t want someone to see something.But that doesn’t make any sense either because, as I said, the police have already been out here.It’s because we were asking questions at the campground.Because we talked to Katie.Oh my gosh, no, that’s so stupid.The police would have interviewed everyone there.”
“Hey, you two be nice to each other.”
And then a stone dropped in Tean’s gut.“I asked about the scar.”
Near the depression that sloped down to the cave, Jem recovered his phone.He bent to examine something and then dropped into a squat.“Do you have a pen?”
Tean didn’t have a pen, but he did have a pocket knife.
Jem used the flathead attachment to turn over a piece of metal.It was small and copper-colored except where the tip flowered out to expose a lead core—a hollow-point.
“They use that kind for hunting,” Tean said quietly.
“Do we take it?”Jem said, but the question seemed mostly for himself.“Or leave it here?”
“It’s because I asked about the scar, isn’t it?”Tean said.
Jem stood and folded the screwdriver back into the pocket knife.“I think whatever we did, it made someone worried in a way that they weren’t when the police came poking around.”
“But that’s—” Tean almost said,That’s crazy.But it wasn’t crazy.It had happened, hadn’t it?
Jem started up the gully again.
The cast-iron sky was still getting lighter, and the shadows continued to shrink.A stone turned unevenly under Jem’s foot, almost sending the blond man off-balance.He recovered, and the stone thunked down, and off in the distance, a bird startled from a clump of snowberries.
“Someone killed Brennon and brought him here,” Tean said.“Fact one.And the same person tried to kill Daniel.”
“Wethinkit was the same person.”
“It has to be.The attempted strangulation.The knife.The victimology.The odds of two killers with the same MO operating at the same time and in the same geographic area are extremely low.”
“Unless one is a copycat.”
“I guess we can hold on to that theory.”
Something in Tean’s voice, though, must have caught Jem’s attention, because he directed a frown over his shoulder.“What?”
Tean tried to think of a way to phrase the idea without sounding crazy.But he was too tired and cold.“What if we’re dealing with a serial killer?”
Jem stopped.Put his hands on his hips.And then said, “Shit.”