Page 85 of Three-Inch Teeth

He said, “All these years we’ve done real well on our own, haven’t we? We’ve got your crazy mother, and now mine might have crawled out from under some rock in Colorado. But we’ve got three great girls and we’ve got each other. That’s pretty good, right?”

Tears filled her eyes. “Yes.”

“We’ve done all right,” he said.

“We have,” she responded.

“Why muck it up now if we can help it?”

“I understand.”

Joe reached up with an imaginary eraser in his right hand and moved it in a circular motion, as if to remove the previous exchange from the fronts of their minds.

“So tell me about your morning,” she asked. “What have you found out about that bear?”

He said, “I’m working through a problem and I’d love your thoughts on it. Either we’ve got a bear with magical powers, a bunch of bears acting in unison, or we’ve got something else entirely.”

*

WHEN JOE WAS done recapping the events of that day, Marybeth squinted across the desk at him. “Does Jennie Gordon have a theory on how this is all possible?”

“Not really,” Joe said. “It’s all new ground. We’re both bumbling around in the dark, with no clue when the next attack will come or where it could happen.

“Think about it,” he said. “This grizzly—if it is one creature—has covered hundreds of miles in a huge loop around the state of Wyoming, picking off people along the way and not displaying any kind of normal bear behavior. It’s not protecting its territory, food supply, or cubs. It’s hunting lone humans and tearing them to shreds and not caching the bodies—except for Clay Junior—or even feeding on the remains. Judge Hewitt was the exception to the pattern this morning, of course, but the grizzly was apparently spooked away before it could finish the job. Other than that, the attack was similar.”

“Thank goodness it didn’t finish the job,” Marybeth said.

“Hewitt said something about seeing a red dot before they loaded him on the helicopter,” Joe said. “It doesn’t make any sense. I associate red dots with scopes on firearms, not with bears. I wish Hewitt could have explained what he was talking about, but it’s very possible he was hallucinating at that point. There were plenty of drugs in his system and that attack had to be traumatic.

“All sorts of scenarios go through my head when I consider the factors in the attack,” Joe said. “What if someone has trained a grizzly to kill on command? What if someone is driving around the country with a trailer and a grizzly in the back and unleashing it on people in random places?”

“But why?” she asked.

“I don’t have a clue. That’s where my speculation falls apart. Every theory I have falls apart if you look at it real closely.”

“So you’re injecting a human element into the attacks?” she asked.

“I guess I am. But I can’t get it to square with anything that seems remotely plausible. No one has attack bears at their disposal. And I sure never saw any evidence of that when I actually saw the grizzly in person on the Double D. No, that bear was acting entirely on its own when it went after Brodbeck in the river.”

“So we’re back to the lone bear theory,” she mused.

“I don’t know what we’re back to,” he groused.

“What if the bear is still here?” Marybeth asked.

Joe shrugged. “It could be. Or it could be twenty miles away on a dead run looking for its next target. We just don’t know, and that’s the frustrating thing.”

“Just like we don’t know anything about that drive-by shooting at the school,” Marybeth said with a shiver. “They still haven’t found the car or anything else, from what I understand.”

Joe said, “A white SUV with California plates? That almost sounds like projection instead of reality.”

“You need to stay out of that investigation, Joe,” Marybeth cautioned. “I’m serious. As awful as it may sound, you can’t get distracted right now.”

Joe grudgingly agreed with her.

“There is something that occurs to me,” Marybeth said after a full minute of silence between them. “It’s crazy, but it’s not crazier than the theories you’ve laid out.”

“Please tell me,” Joe said. “That’s why I’m here.”

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