Page 5

The boat began to slow as we neared the end of Boyer Bluff, which rose to our right, and Flanders pointed toward a narrow strip of shoreline.

“This is where we found Will’s body.

He was over there at the base of the bluff, about three feet up from the waterline, facedown.”

The area where the body was found was easy to spot, thanks to some stakes with the tattered remains of police tape on them, the yellow-and-black strips fluttering in the morning breeze.

It was an isolated spot, not easily accessible from land, as the shoreline disappeared and became sheer cliff face several feet from the site in both directions.

A few moments ago, we had passed a stairway attached to the cliffside that gave a homeowner access to one section of beach.

But those stairs were barely visible from here and the house atop the cliff was set back in among the trees without a line of sight to where we were.

“Not easily observable or accessible from shore,” I said.

“Tell me about it,”

Flanders said with a roll of his eyes.

“Is it okay if I go ashore?”

Flanders nodded.

“We can take the dinghy.”

“No need.”

I took off my top and slipped out of my shorts, leaving me in the bathing suit I’d put on that morning.

I kept my sneakers on since the lake bottom and the shore were composed of rocks, making barefoot travel awkward and painful.

“You can’t swim over there,”

Flanders said, aghast.

“Yes, I can.

I’m a strong swimmer.

I swim ten times this distance many mornings.”

“But the water here is only about seventy degrees,” he said.

“Refreshing!”

Haggerty looked amused.

Flanders did not.

He stared at me, mouth agape, and then started to take his shirt off.

“Fine.

I’ll go with you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,”

I said, patting Newt on the head.

“Stay here.

I’ll probably need help getting Newt back into the boat.”

Flanders looked at my dog.

“You’re taking him with you?”

“Of course.”

Newt let forth with a low growl, subtle but with a hint of menace, should anyone suggest otherwise.

Flanders shook his head, looking at me like I was crazy, then like I was the most trying person he’d ever encountered.

He might have been right on both counts.

I slipped over the side and down into the water.

Seconds later, Newt entered the water with a bit less aplomb, but then the two of us were swimming toward shore.

The waters were relatively calm—I wouldn’t have attempted the swim had they been otherwise—and I approached from an angle some feet to the east of where the body had been.

“The evidence guys are done with the site,”

Flanders hollered.

“They just haven’t come back to take up the tape.

Feel free to explore it.”

I reached a spot where I was able to touch bottom and clambered out of the water.

I walked with Newt up to the perimeter of the stakes, watching as he sniffed the air and ground.

He emitted a low growl and backed away from the spot and I wondered what had triggered that reaction.

Was the fact that a dead body had been there reason enough? Or had he detected something else?

I put a hand on his head and reassured him.

“It’s okay, Newt.”

He sat down and leaned into me, still facing the body site.

I told him to stay and then I stepped inside the perimeter tape and squatted to get a better look at the ground.

The waterline was only three feet away, but in terms of understanding how that body ended up there, it might as well have been three miles.

While the water levels changed some with the seasons or with storms—though we hadn’t had one of those for weeks—there wouldn’t have been a significant change here in the time frame we were looking at.

Tidal influences in the lakes were so minimal as to be nonexistent.

That meant that the body had most likely been placed where it had been found. It hadn’t just floated in on a tide.

Something niggled at my brain.

I knew my Loch Ness history.

One of the sighting reports had said that the creature made the water roil and churn before it finally disappeared beneath the surface, reportedly sending out waves that were big enough to have been caused by a steamer.

It might have been hyperbole, but if it wasn’t, could a wave like that have carried a body up onto the shore?

Another thought came to me.

Would a Nessie-like creature have left the water to deposit the body there? Would its neck have been long enough to reach this spot without leaving the deeper water? I supposed it was possible but thought it unlikely.

The creature would have had to hoist its body out of the water and onto the rock shelf that led to shore fifteen to twenty feet out in order to dump a human body where that one was found.

I knew that some of the sightings of Nessie back in the 1930s involved people who claimed they witnessed the creature walking on legs as it made its way back to the water.

But the plesiosaurs had four flipperlike appendages rather than legs, and they would have moved like seals on land.

The odds of flippers evolving into legs on a creature that lived in the water for millions of years were slim to none. Of course, that assumed that the whole plesiosaur theory was correct.

I examined the shore between the body-drop spot and the waterline and saw what appeared to be drag marks, but Flanders had said kayakers had discovered the body and come ashore to check it.

And then police and evidence techs had been there, as well.

I walked to the water and stared down at the lake bottom, studying the smooth stones, some of them apple sized, others as big as a cantaloupe.

Wading out a few feet, I could see where the stones on the bottom appeared to have been pushed out, creating a hollow path to the shore as if something large had been there.

I looked out at the water and saw Flanders and Haggerty watching me from the boat.

A couple of kayakers paddled by behind them, eyeing us curiously.

How easy would it have been to deposit a body there without being seen during that busy time of the year? I gave it even odds, unless it had happened during the night.

Newt whimpered, still staring at the spot where the body had been.

“Okay, buddy, we can go.”

Out into the water we went, and minutes later, we were both back on the boat.

“Well?”

Flanders said as Haggerty handed me a musty-smelling towel.

“Thoughts?”

“I have some questions,”

I said, doing a quick dry off and slipping my clothes back on.

“Both bodies were found early in the morning, right?”

“Yes.”

“How wet were they?”

Flanders looked confused.

“How wet?”

he repeated.

“Were their clothes, hair, and bodies sopping wet, damp, somewhat dry, totally dry?”

Flanders gazed off over the water, his forehead wrinkling as he thought.

“Will’s clothes were saturated.

Oliver Sykes was wearing a wet suit and it was dry along the exposed surface.

The hair on both men was damp but not dripping.

Skin where it was exposed was dry.

No water droplets. They’d both clearly been where they were found for some time.”

“Did you notice anything unusual, like any gelatinous or slimy substances on the clothes or the bodies?”

“No, nothing like that,”

Flanders said without hesitation.

“Do you know if what the men were wearing was swabbed for DNA?”

Flanders shook his head.

“The medical examiner said it would be pointless after the amount of time they spent in the water.”

“They’d still have the clothing, wouldn’t they?”

He cocked his head to one side, looking a little annoyed.

“Are you saying you think they should swab them for DNA?”

he said in a dubious tone.

“What could it hurt?”

“The budget,”

Flanders shot back.

“DNA testing isn’t cheap, so we don’t do it willy-nilly.

We have to have a reasonable expectation for relevant results and a body that’s been in the water isn’t likely to have much in the way of surface DNA.”

“Unless there was an animal of some sort that carried the bodies to where they were found,”

I countered.

Flanders sputtered for a few seconds as he struggled to respond, and his cheeks flooded red again.

Haggerty, who was eavesdropping on our conversation, once again looked amused.

“I’ll look into it,”

Flanders said finally.

“But it will take weeks to get the results.”

I had a strong sense that the DNA idea was going nowhere, so I moved on.

“One more thing,”

I said.

“Those other pictures that were in the folder.

Why didn’t you tell me about them when we first talked?”

“I wanted you to see them without me setting any expectations.”

“Where and when were they found?”

“The deer carcass was discovered about a week before Oliver Sykes went missing.

It washed up near Schoolhouse Beach on Washington Island.

The sturgeon was found floating not far from the ferry dock on Rock Island in late May.

It might have slipped notice, but the DNR has been working to restore the sturgeon population, so they collected the body for examination.”

“Did the ME compare the teeth impressions on those carcasses with the ones on the two men?”

Flanders nodded.

“He said they were consistent in size and shape, and that the overall measurements of the bite found on the deer carcass matched the ones on the men’s bodies.”

Haggerty raised anchor and started the boat again.

We rounded the bluff and headed down the other side, which led us into Washington Harbor and Schoolhouse Beach, a smooth limestone beach that is one of only five of its kind in the world.

But we didn’t go far before Haggerty stopped and I saw another spot onshore that was nearly identical to the first one: a small rock-strewn beach marked with stakes and police tape, and backed by sheer stone cliffs that were topped with thick groves of trees—isolated, hidden, and hard to access from land.

I stared at the spot, imagining the body stretched out there on the sand with the towering bluff behind it.

And then I looked toward Schoolhouse Beach, a popular spot for swimmers, picnickers, and sunbathers during the summer months.

I glanced at the device Haggerty had in the pilothouse that showed the depth of the surrounding water and a sonar display of the bottom.

Once again, there was a shelf of rock that extended out, this time only about eight feet from shore with a water depth of five to six feet at the deepest point.

Then there was a drop-off to seventy-four feet.

“Are you going for another swim?”

Flanders asked me.

I shook my head.

“No need.

You can take me back now.”

Flanders stared at me.

“Something about this is bothering you,” he said.

I nodded slowly, thinking.

“It feels off to me.

Why would an animal kill this way, crush another creature to death but not eat it? Animals aren’t psychopathic or sociopathic the way humans are.

They don’t kill for pleasure and entertainment.

Primarily, they kill to eat or to defend themselves.

They might have discarded the men because they were too big and the clothing was off-putting, but why pass up the deer and the fish? Unless . . .”

I gazed out over the water as another thought occurred to me.

“What?”

Flanders said, leaning to put himself back in my line of sight.

“Tell me.”

I looked at him.

“A mother’s love,”

I said.

“If there is a creature in the lake with offspring that these two men, the deer, and the fish got too close to, she might have killed to protect her children.

And if that’s the case, there will likely be more deaths to come.”