Page 80 of Foxy Filthy Omega

“I would probably want to do both,” Soren admitted. Then he showed me the route he wanted to take. “If we go through here, we’ll reach a fork in the trail. I want to see what’s between them.”

My father may have taught me how to hunt, but I wasn’t a tracker. I set traps and bait, then waited for my prey to show up rather than track them down. So, whatever Soren wanted to look at was fine with me.

The guy was a damn Eagle Scout after all.

I waved him forward so he could lead me in the direction he wanted to go. “Why didn’t you put that you’re an Eagle Scout in your list of achievements on your resumé?”

Soren shrugged as he led the way with one eye on the trail and the other on his phone. “I didn’t think it would help me get the job.”

Why? Didn’t a lot of those skills correlate to detective work?

“If I said I was an Eagle Scout, that doesn’t necessarily mean I got any of the badges you’d consider valuable,” Sorenexplained. “We don’t all learn the same skills. Some of them, sure. But a lot of them are specialized.”

“Hm.” I leaned over to check the map on his phone. “There aren’t any cameras around here, are there?”

“No, there aren’t.” Soren handed me his phone but I shook my head.

This was his show. I was just here to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble.

“If Parker were here, would you be doing this?” Soren asked, surprising me.

“Absolutely not.” I smiled, knowing just how much she’d hate this. “Lucy doesn’t like bugs, so she’d be waiting in the car or back in the office, already working on the footage. That is, if she hasn’t decided we should put a tracker on every car that’s been here over the last twenty-four hours.”

Soren didn’t say anything to that and I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking.

Was he constantly comparing himself to Lucy, just like I was? Or was he just trying to make sure he was properly filling her shoes?

“Here.”

I stopped when he did to see the trail split into two. A sign pointed in each direction to tell us the names of the trails, but beyond that was a lot of underbrush. The trees were pretty close together, but not so close that we couldn’t walk through them.

“Let’s go then.” I didn’t like the idea of stepping off the trail, but I had an Eagle Scout with me. We’d be fine.

Soren went around the signpost and I followed, keeping my eyes peeled.

Our footsteps were silent and I couldn’t help but be impressed by his skills all over again. He really looked like a soldier with the way he moved, glancing back every so often to make sure I was still following him.

“What exactly are you looking for?” I asked as I eyed the plants along the forest floor to make sure we didn’t walk through any poison ivy.

“I don’t know,” Soren admitted.

He crouched down to study a plant and I had no idea what he was even looking at. It just looked like a normal plant to me. There were no broken or crushed leaves that I could see. So, why this one?

“You’d be surprised how many crimes are committed right under everyone’s noses,” I muttered. “It could easily be a hiker who carried that head around in a backpack. Pulling it out and setting it up wouldn’t take long.”

“You said they want others to see it, right?” Soren brushed his knuckles over a leaf and then stood.

“Usually.” I followed him farther into the forest and listened for any sound of the ocean or the city, but I couldn’t hear much other than the wind and the birds all around us. “There’s also a lot of missing blood and body parts. They’re somewhere. The ocean maybe? Who knows.”

A single head was one thing, but a body? That would be heavy. And there were three of them that we knew of.

“The other two locations are pretty far from here,” I reminded him.

An abandoned building that used to be a restaurant, right in front of a fading sign, and under the Steele Pier.

Each one was displayed in a way that made me feel like it meant something, but I couldn’t be sure.

The one here in the park had been on a tree stump, but that tree stump had the center hollowed out a bit, like a bowl. For whatever reason, that tiny detail was bugging me and I couldn’t think of any reason why it seemed so significant.

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