office.”
10
I made it two steps from the trailer before turning back inside. Cherry didn’t look up. I stood in front of her desk and did my best contrite look, a good one, because it was real.
“Now what am I doing wrong?” she said, still writing.
“Absolutely nothing. You’re obviously a professional doing exceptional work with limited resources, Detective Cherry. Mobile’s not generally considered a major metropolitan area and usually I’m the one considered a hick and a yokel. I’ve never been on the other side and I guess I was seeing how it felt. It was stupid and small and I apologize for my general everything.”
She looked up and stared at me with the off-centric eyes. The left one still didn’t like me, but I think the right one was coming around. She started to speak, but was interrupted by the phone, grabbing it up.
“This is - Oh, hi, officer, what’s—”
Her face darkened. She asked several questions and hung up. “Come on,” she said, standing and pulling her weapon from inside the desk. “Maybe you can be useful somehow.”
“What is it?” I followed her to the door.
“Judd Caudill reports a new addition on the geocache website. He and Beale are heading there now. It’s in the national forest so they alerted McCoy. Number eight is back.”
I buckled my seat belt as Cherry swooshed away, the big engine sucking air and burning tires. Cherry drove like a female version of my partner, Harry Nautilus: with total confidence and less-than-total control. As with Harry, I pulled the belt tourniquet-tight, holding my breath and closing my eyes when the situation warranted.
After fifteen wild minutes, we rounded a bend with tires flinging gravel into the trees. I saw McCoy’s SUV parked beside a Toyota compact with a Transylvania University sticker on the bumper.
“Uh-oh,” Cherry said. “Civilians. Probably saw the coordinates online.”
She pulled a large shoulder bag from the trunk of the cruiser. I offered to carry it but she waved me off. We jogged down the sole path for several hundred feet to a shallow meadow at the base of a cliff. We found McCoy, talking to a young male and female in T-shirts and hiking shorts, she wearing a floppy Tilley hat, he a Cincinnati Reds ball cap. I saw a GPS unit clipped to his belt.The girl was the kind of distraught that shivers, stops, starts shivering again.
“We were looking for a new cache,” the girl said, holding her shoulders like she was hugging herself. “It was on the Gorge-area site. We were looking upstream where the coordinates directed us. But we didn’t see anything. Then we came down here and we-wuh-wuh-wuh … We saw … that thing in the water.”
Her words drowned in a spasm of shivers. McCoy tossed me his GPS. It was a good one, displaying the site in the manner shown on the net:
=(8)=
N XX.XXXXX o W XXX.XXXXX o
Eight again, not five. The local coordinates.
I handed the device back. McCoy flicked his eyes toward a line of oaks. Cherry and I headed that way, finding a meandering creek on the far side of the trees, pools separated by shallow, rocky runs, the water maybe a foot in depth. Floating face-down in a pool was a woman’s body. It was slender and well maintained. Strands of false blonde hair drifted in a Medusa circle around the head.
I stepped into the water for a closer look. The victim wore a black leather corset, black boots, a black collar. Hooked to the collar were several yards of blue climbing rope. I held the dripping rope up for display. Cherry grimaced.
We heard voices. Beale and Caudill had arrived. The two cops ran over and looked down.
“Shit,” Beale said, looking disgusted. “Let’s pull it out.”
“Let’s deal with the kids first,” Cherry said. “Get them gone.”
The girl was still speaking, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “No, we j-just saw the coordinates. We were at M-Miguel’s Pizza and Ken was on his laptop. W-we saw a new cache had been added, so we turned
10
I made it two steps from the trailer before turning back inside. Cherry didn’t look up. I stood in front of her desk and did my best contrite look, a good one, because it was real.
“Now what am I doing wrong?” she said, still writing.
“Absolutely nothing. You’re obviously a professional doing exceptional work with limited resources, Detective Cherry. Mobile’s not generally considered a major metropolitan area and usually I’m the one considered a hick and a yokel. I’ve never been on the other side and I guess I was seeing how it felt. It was stupid and small and I apologize for my general everything.”
She looked up and stared at me with the off-centric eyes. The left one still didn’t like me, but I think the right one was coming around. She started to speak, but was interrupted by the phone, grabbing it up.
“This is - Oh, hi, officer, what’s—”
Her face darkened. She asked several questions and hung up. “Come on,” she said, standing and pulling her weapon from inside the desk. “Maybe you can be useful somehow.”
“What is it?” I followed her to the door.
“Judd Caudill reports a new addition on the geocache website. He and Beale are heading there now. It’s in the national forest so they alerted McCoy. Number eight is back.”
I buckled my seat belt as Cherry swooshed away, the big engine sucking air and burning tires. Cherry drove like a female version of my partner, Harry Nautilus: with total confidence and less-than-total control. As with Harry, I pulled the belt tourniquet-tight, holding my breath and closing my eyes when the situation warranted.
After fifteen wild minutes, we rounded a bend with tires flinging gravel into the trees. I saw McCoy’s SUV parked beside a Toyota compact with a Transylvania University sticker on the bumper.
“Uh-oh,” Cherry said. “Civilians. Probably saw the coordinates online.”
She pulled a large shoulder bag from the trunk of the cruiser. I offered to carry it but she waved me off. We jogged down the sole path for several hundred feet to a shallow meadow at the base of a cliff. We found McCoy, talking to a young male and female in T-shirts and hiking shorts, she wearing a floppy Tilley hat, he a Cincinnati Reds ball cap. I saw a GPS unit clipped to his belt.The girl was the kind of distraught that shivers, stops, starts shivering again.
“We were looking for a new cache,” the girl said, holding her shoulders like she was hugging herself. “It was on the Gorge-area site. We were looking upstream where the coordinates directed us. But we didn’t see anything. Then we came down here and we-wuh-wuh-wuh … We saw … that thing in the water.”
Her words drowned in a spasm of shivers. McCoy tossed me his GPS. It was a good one, displaying the site in the manner shown on the net:
=(8)=
N XX.XXXXX o W XXX.XXXXX o
Eight again, not five. The local coordinates.
I handed the device back. McCoy flicked his eyes toward a line of oaks. Cherry and I headed that way, finding a meandering creek on the far side of the trees, pools separated by shallow, rocky runs, the water maybe a foot in depth. Floating face-down in a pool was a woman’s body. It was slender and well maintained. Strands of false blonde hair drifted in a Medusa circle around the head.
I stepped into the water for a closer look. The victim wore a black leather corset, black boots, a black collar. Hooked to the collar were several yards of blue climbing rope. I held the dripping rope up for display. Cherry grimaced.
We heard voices. Beale and Caudill had arrived. The two cops ran over and looked down.
“Shit,” Beale said, looking disgusted. “Let’s pull it out.”
“Let’s deal with the kids first,” Cherry said. “Get them gone.”
The girl was still speaking, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “No, we j-just saw the coordinates. We were at M-Miguel’s Pizza and Ken was on his laptop. W-we saw a new cache had been added, so we turned
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