Page 12 of So Dark

Turk barked suddenly, and the three humans turned. He had his nose pointed under the raised cot that served as a bed. The cot was covered by a bearskin that hung to the floor in front of Turk. He looked intently at the skin. Wyatt walked over, and Faith called, “Careful. Don’t touch anything yet.”

He stopped, and Faith moved slowly to Turk. “Hey, boy. What do you smell? What’s over there?”

Turk looked at her, then looked back at the bearskin. Faith stepped to the foot of the cot and stooped down. There was a sawed-off shotgun balanced on a tripod underneath the cot. She shined her light under the bed, and the beam reflected off of a thin filament that looped around the shotgun’s trigger. The filament was attached to the bearskin.

"Okay, everyone. Back up. There's a shotgun rigged to the bearskin. If you move it, it'll take out your legs."

Michael whistled. “Damn. This guy had a plan B.”

“And maybe a plan C and a plan D,” Faith added. ”Let’s look around for any other traps. Carefully.”

Michael looked around nervously. “Do we really need to? We can’t just assume that overpreparing for his remote murders is part of his profile?”

“I’m a little more concerned with not seeing one and accidentally tripping it,” Faith replied.

Michael shivered. “Yeah. Okay.”

The four of them scoured the cabin. Wyatt checked the fireplace and found nothing. Michael shone his light on the ceiling, but no wires or weapons reflected back at him. Turk and Faith walked outside and looked through the grass that covered the small plateau. Faith was checking underneath some rocks on the upper edge of the plateau when Turk yelped and leaped into the air.

Faith rushed toward him. “Turk? Are you all right?”

Turk barked in alarm and ran in a half-circle, pushing into her legs and shoving her to the ground. She landed using a breakfall technique she’d learned in the Marine Corps, but the fall still jarred her.

“Faith?” Michael called. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Faith called. “Turk bumped into me. I think he was trying to keep me from stepping on something.”

Michael shined his light on the spot Turk had prevented Faith from reaching and whistled. “Yeah. I’d say so.”

Faith got to her feet and followed his flashlight beam. It gleamed off of a thick iron bear trap.

“This guy really hated Ethan Holloway,” Michael said.

“And Valerie North,” Faith said. She reached down and scratched Turk behind the ear. “Good boy.”

“How long does it take to set something like this up?” Michael asked.

“Something like what?” Wyatt asked, walking toward the three of them.

Faith pointed at the bear trap. Wyatt chuckled mirthlessly. “Talk about overkill. To answer your question, the bear trap shouldn’t take long. These modern traps are pretty easy to set up. Maybe five minutes at the most. As for the other two? That requires a hell of a lot of precision, especially for the shotgun. Our killer was here for a couple of hours at least.”

Faith looked back at the cabin and imagined the killer carefully setting his traps, anticipating the places his prey was likely to walk and hiding his weapons, like a viper. No, not like a viper. Like a hunter.

And like any predator, he would hunt until he ran out of prey.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Do you think the killer’s targeting people?” Michael asked, “Or do you think he’s just rigging cabins and hoping people stumble onto them?”

“These are private cabins,” Faith replied. “So I’m leaning to the former.”

They were at Valerie North’s cabin now. Like Ethan Holloway’s cabin, it was spartan. It had no electricity or running water and no modern conveniences of any kind. It was larger than the cabin and had a wood-burning stove made of stone with a clay chimney that extended through the roof, but other than that, it was just as simple as the other one.

"That's not necessarily true," Wyatt corrected. "It's true that private citizens build these cabins, but this is public use land. You can't claim ownership of it. Strictly speaking, you can't build dwellings on public-use land either, but they get around that rule by claiming that since there's no electricity and running water, these are temporary shelters. The Park Service lets them get away with it because they'd rather not find people dead out here from exposure. They still do, but this means they find less of them. The point is, just about anyone could use this shelter if they were of a mind to it and could get here. It's not common out in this part of the park, but that's because people aren't common in this part of the park."

Faith could understand why. If anything, Valerie’s cabin was even harder to reach than Ethan’s. It sat atop a sheer rock bluff underneath a glacial plateau. A trickle of clean water from the glacier collected in a hewn stone pool just outside of the house. To get there, the helicopter had dropped them off in front of a narrow and steep path that rose a hundred feet from a larger rock face. The four of them had to climb up, a task that onlyTurk handled easily. Faith wasn’t looking forward to the journey down the bluff.

“He’d have to be an outdoorsman too,” Michael said. “Or outdoorswoman. These are not easy places to reach.”

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