Page 58 of Three-Inch Teeth

Joe sat up straight. His throat was suddenly dry and he sipped on the bourbon.

“Two days from Rawlins to outside Laramie,” Nate said. “A hundred miles over the top of the Snowy Range that’s not only steep and high, but probably covered with tourists, hunters, and hikers. But for whatever reason, he lets them all go. And he’s increased his pace, because now he’s covering fifty miles a day.”

“What are you saying?” Joe asked.

Nate sat back in his chair. He looked around the kitchen as if checking to see if anyone was lurking and trying to eavesdrop.

“Either this grizzly has superpowers way beyond a state of yarak or hyperphagia,” he said, “or you’ve got two or maybe three different bears attacking humans hundreds of miles apart from each other. And they’re doing it in places that are not known grizzly habitats.”

Joe shook his head. It was incomprehensible.

“Or maybe you’ve got something else entirely going on,” Nate said.

“But what?”

“I don’t know, obviously. But something about this string of incidents doesn’t set well with me. I know about predators—I’ve studied them all my life. Hell, I’ve been accused of being one,” Nate said with a cold smile. “Predators have certain traits and patterns, even if we can’t figure them out at first.

“Clay Junior was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Brodbeck got hit because he was a threat to the bear, and the grizzly probably thought the man was encroaching on his new territory. There’s a kind of logical explanation to that.

“But,” Nate said, “to boogie two hundred and fifty miles to the next kill? Then a hundred more miles to get Dulcie? That’s where the logic breaks down. No, those last two kills seem targeted.”

“Targeted? Then what’s the link between them?”

Nate raised his eyebrows. “Beats me, game warden. Maybe you and your Predator Attack Team need to start thinking outside the box.”

*

WHEN LIV AND Kestrel joined Nate in the kitchen so they could start preparing dinner, Joe stepped away from the table and went outside to the covered porch, where he speed-dialed Jennie Gordon. She was out of breath when she answered her phone.

“Please tell me you’ve got some good news,” she said as a greeting. “I really need some good news for a change.”

“Not really,” he said. “I sent the Mama Bears packing and Clay Hutmacher is in custody for chasing them down. Not that he’s been charged with anything yet.”

Gordon said she was with Brody Cress and Tom Hoaglin and that they were at the crime scene at the Schalk Ranch outside of Laramie, along with local law enforcement and an ambulance waiting to take Dulcie’s body to the medical examiner in Laramie.

“It’s a bad scene,” she said. “Unfortunately, it’s one we’ve experienced before.”

Joe asked, “So you’d definitively say it was our grizzly bear?”

“It’s too early to make that call with absolute certainty,” Gordon said. “But from the MO and the wounds, I’d give it a ninety-nine-point-five percent chance that we’re dealing with the same bear.”

“Not a different bear?” Joe asked. “You’re sure?”

Gordon paused a beat. When she replied, her tone was professionally defensive. “Like I said, we still have to do a lot of work with the body and the crime scene to declare it’s the same bear. But at first glance, the attack is similar to the first three. It appears unprovoked, for one. Second, the fatal wounds are very similar: severe punctures in the facial and cranial area, deep claw marks on her arms, shoulders, and abdomen. Third, the body wasn’t fed on at the scene or cached. Fourth, the bear moved on after the attack.

“Joe, why are you asking me these questions?”

Joe outlined Nate’s thesis to her and Gordon listened patiently.

He said, “I agree with all your points. They make sense to me. But when you look at all the attacks from thirty thousand feet, the most dissimilar encounter is the first one: Clay Junior. He was hit in the river and his body was cached on the riverbank. Also, the grizzly hung around long enough to attack Bill Brodbeck two days later. It was in no hurry to cover hundreds of miles after the killing.”

When he was through, she said, “Maybe our bear is learning and adapting. Maybe it realized that immediately after it attacks someone, a whole lot of people with guns show up on the scene.”

“Maybe,” Joe replied.

“But I do understand that a lot of this doesn’t make sense. We’ve never had a bear behave this way before, so it’s impossible to anticipate where it’s going next and what it might do. But targeting the victims? How is that even conceivable?”

“I don’t have the answer to that,” Joe said. “Neither does Nate. Tell me: you said the fatal wounds are similar. I know there’s no way to determine if the claw marks are similar because they’re probably random and they happened during a frenzy. But are the bite marks on all four of our victims a match?”

---