The Ridge (11 page)

No, if Nathan Shipley had pursued this line of work, he wasn’t the sort who believed in jinxes. Wyatt French, on the other hand? He’d believed in something damn strange, and Kimble could not get a handle on it.

He flipped through the photo collection, all those ancient, sepia-tinted images of men with axes or picks or saws in hand. There were dozens of them, and across almost every one Wyatt had written the word
NO
in large bold print. Ten pictures had
names, and computer searching had provided answers about just three of them.

In 1966, a Whitman restaurateur and local golf champion named Adam Estes had shot and killed his financial adviser. In 1979, an auto mechanic named Ryan O’Patrick had beaten his boss to death with a wrench. And in 2006… in 2006, Jacqueline Mathis had happened.

Wyatt kept photographs of all three in his home.

The seven other people who were named—Becky Stapp, Timothy Osgood, Ralph Hill, Henry Bates, Fred Mortimer, John Hamlin, and Bernard Snell—had left no mark on the department computer system or the Internet, but that wasn’t surprising. Their photographs were very old.

Kimble ran through them again, shaking his head, then locked them in his desk drawer and went down to the jail.

A three-story concrete structure built just behind the sheriff’s department, the Sawyer County Jail had been home to Wyatt French on several occasions, though never for more than a night. Kimble didn’t have any questions for the corrections team about Wyatt, though. He had questions about their lights.

Just inside the jail, past the booking area and behind darkly tinted glass, was the control center. Here the security of the facility was monitored around the clock, with banks of computers and television screens ringing the room. Tyler Abel, a longtime road deputy who’d eventually moved into a position as the jail commander and answered directly to Troy, was sitting in the control center today.

“What’s going on, Kimble?”

“Taking bets on the Wolverine. First race is only a few months away. Figured you’re in for, what, a hundred?”

The Wolverine was the department’s nickname for the sheriff’s current racehorse. Troy, whose ability to name a horse was only slightly more advanced than his ability to breed a winner,
had named the animal Wolf and Steam for logic that only he could follow, and his deputies had quickly altered it.

Abel smiled. “Not a jockey alive who can handle the Wolverine. But assuming the sheriff finds such a wrangler, I’m in for a thousand, of course.”

“Noted.” Kimble waved a hand at the monitors that showed images from every security camera in the jail and said, “Got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“You use infrared illuminators for some of these, right?”

“In some cases, yeah.”

“What’s their purpose?”

“Lets us see in the dark,” Abel said, and smiled. “To keep a camera going, you’ve got to have light. The infrared illuminators provide it, but it’s invisible to the naked eye. So it’s not light that disturbs anyone. Perfect for security cameras, or military ops.”

“The ones I saw had these lenses that were, I don’t know, like… textured. Kind of speckled glass?”

“That’s an LED illuminator, probably. Some of them use halogen bulbs and filters, but the more expensive, better ones are LED. Light-emitting diode. Where’d you come across them?”

“You ever see that lighthouse out on Blade Ridge?”

“I have. The thing is… curious.”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“But that’s not an infrared light, Kimble.”

“I know the main one isn’t. But here’s the deal: he had the main bulb, and then surrounding it this ring of infrared illuminators.”

“That is bizarre. And expensive.”

“Yeah?”

“If it’s an LED illuminator of the sort you were telling me about, I’d say each unit went close to a thousand bucks. Could be more. Lot of scratch for a man like Wyatt French to invest in lighting.”

Yes, it was. Wyatt French had tried to purchase his bourbon with scrounged change. It was one hell of a lot of money to invest in invisible lighting.

“What would those be accomplishing that the main bulb wouldn’t be?” Kimble said.

“Had to be using them with cameras,” Abel said confidently.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Security cameras are my business, Kimble. The only purpose for infrared illuminators is cameras or rifle scopes. I mean, what they would have been accomplishing was keeping the place lit, even if nobody could tell. The area within range of those illuminators would never be truly dark. It would be dark to the naked eye, but not
technically
dark. But there’s no gain to that unless you’ve got them paired with cameras, is there?”

“I’ll have to take a better look for cameras,” Kimble said, more to himself than Abel. He’d given the lighthouse a cursory search yesterday, but he could have missed a concealed camera easily enough. There had been the distraction of the corpse, after all.

“To see what, unchanging images of the woods at night?” Abel asked.

“The infrared lights were in the top of the lighthouse, and that’s where he shot himself. Maybe there’s video of it.”

“And you want to
watch
that little snuff film?”

Kimble looked at him, remembering Wyatt’s voice coming at him on the dark highway.
If the victim were somehow compelled…

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I ought to.”

T
HE MOVE WAS GOING
far more smoothly today. The rain had let up, the cats were agreeable, and Wes was his usual precise and competent self, although unusually quiet, often seeming lost in his own thoughts. Audrey watched the old preserve empty out, this place where she had met her husband, fallen in love, and spent such happy years. Everyone from friends and family to complete strangers had urged her not to allow herself to feel obligated to follow through with the relocation when David died. She understood their reasoning: it was his passion project, not hers. What they didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, was that the cats were all she had left of David. They had no children—that part of the five-year plan would never be completed—and now the remnants of her marriage were memories and sixty-seven exotic cats rescued from a variety of terrible circumstances. They were the legacy. And, oh, how he had loved them.

She’d had other options. One of David’s dear friends, a man named Joe Taft, ran a cat rescue center in Indiana. He’d been David’s mentor, and he’d offered to take the animals, all of them.

Audrey couldn’t agree to it. Canceling on the relocation would have been the ultimate failure to David, who’d been determined not to be chased away, although plenty of attempts had been made. There were multiple reasons for the move, but they all boiled down to one fundamental issue: proximity to people. Ironic, of course, because that problem was the reason all of these cats needed care to begin with. The age-old territory battle never stopped, and the cats would never win. When the preserve had first been built, the locals had regarded it with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, but there’d been hardly any objection. Over the following three years, though, development had overtaken the nearby fields. First came a seventy-home complex called Eden Estates, then talk of a golf course. The good people of Eden Estates moved into their homes, heard the occasional cougar scream or lion’s roar in the night, and began to fear for their children. Complaints began, alleging that the rescue preserve was too close to residential property and the cats presented a danger. True to form in the human-animal history, nobody seemed concerned with the idea that the cats had been there first.

Audrey’s legal background had a real use then, as she defended the preserve, pointing out that no cat had ever escaped from the property and no human had ever been bitten or clawed or hurt in any way, but even as she was making the arguments, David was eyeing new locations. He wanted space and he wanted distance from people. They found plenty of both at Blade Ridge.

Now all of his cats were there. Well, all except for Ira. He’d be moved alone.

There were dozens of cats on the preserve that nobody cared about, and then there was Ira, the subject of intense debate, his photographs and vital statistics being shipped back and forth from cat experts around the globe. The reason: he was living, breathing proof that the mountain lion of so many legends existed. While the term
black panther
was tossed about casually
by the public, it was inaccurate. There were
melanistic
jaguars who exhibited a genetic quirk that turned their fur black—or, rather, black on black, since the cats were spotted—but no proof existed for a black North American cougar.

Until Ira.

And he’d come to the preserve of his own accord.

They’d been in operation for five weeks when he made his first appearance, and Wesley had been the only one to spot him. Even David had scoffed, sure that Wes was seeing things, but their manager was adamant: a cougar had come down out of the hills and surveyed the cages. A black cougar. The kind that didn’t exist.

For a time Audrey had believed Wes was enjoying a practical joke. But as the man spent more and more time in the woods around the preserve, leaving food bait behind and trying to rig a trap camera to obtain evidence of the creature, she realized he was serious, and she worried about what it meant. There was no such thing as what he’d claimed to have seen, and still he pursued it with absolute conviction. It was disturbing to watch.

And then, nine days after he’d first spotted the cat, Wesley wheeled it into the preserve in a transport cage. The cat had entered, he said, and then chosen to ignore the bait that was inside. The guillotine gate hadn’t been tripped by his entrance, though; he’d somehow gracefully avoided triggering it. Rather than retreat, he remained inside and watched Wesley as if daring him to come close enough to lower the gate himself.

“I had a moment of doubt,” Wes admitted.

He’d done it, though. Approached and lowered the gate, and for a moment the cat could have struck, but he did not. Then the gate was down and he was trapped and the Kentucky preserve had the only melanistic cougar in recorded captivity.

David considered that a stroke of luck unlike any other in his life—
Thanks a lot,
Audrey remembered telling him dryly when
he’d informed her of that news. He believed the cougar had been drawn out of the deep woods by the presence of the other cats, by curiosity over his own kind. Wes never seemed convinced of that; cougars were not pack animals, they were isolated, territorial creatures. He would grant David the animal’s curiosity, but he didn’t believe the cat wanted anything to do with his peers, either—a belief that was rapidly borne out by Ira’s behavior. He was surprisingly docile around people, but he
demanded
solitary confinement. Many of the cats were happy to socialize with the others. Ira wanted his own space.

The chaos built quickly. David’s fellow experts disagreed at first, claiming that Ira was the product of crossbreeding, but DNA tests supported Audrey’s husband: Ira was a North American puma, or cougar, or mountain lion. Wes had disregarded the controversy—
Told you from the start he was a mountain lion,
he’d said, and then gone on about his business. The cat, everyone except Wesley agreed, could certainly not have been wild. He was too good with people, too comfortable. Clearly he’d escaped from some private owner, and clearly that person had been involved in something illegal, or he would have reported him missing. Would have reported him, period.

Wes disagreed, but he didn’t like to be in the spotlight, and he refused to give any interviews when curious media folks came calling. David handled that. All Wes would say was, “The cat came out of the woods. Right now, that’s all you know. Don’t presume a damn thing when that’s all you know.”

It was, though, the most uncertain Audrey had ever seen him with a cat. Wes spent hours studying Ira, and she was convinced that he was wondering the same thing: where in the world had he come from? If he was wild, why didn’t he act like it? And if he was not, then how was he an unknown?

They researched for endless hours and came up with nothing but legends. According to Native American folklore, the black
cat was a symbol of death. According to scientific history, the black cat didn’t exist. Put the two together and you generated a lot of excitement.

“He’s ready to go, you can tell,” Wes said when they arrived back at the now-empty preserve to collect the cougar. “We’ve moved everyone else, and it’s making him edgy, being the only cat left. He didn’t like watching the others go away. He’s ready to see where we’re taking them.”

Audrey hadn’t been able to perceive the slightest change in the cat’s countenance, but she knew better than to argue with Wes. If he suggested what a cat was feeling, he was probably right. He seemed to live inside their strange feline brains. It was, frankly, a source of irritation for her. In the months since David had died, she’d tried to think of the cats as her own, but at her core she knew that they did not trust her in the way they had trusted David, trusted Wes. Could she have even handled them without Wes, could she have kept the preserve going at all? It was a question she didn’t like to ponder, because she felt the answer was all too obvious.

She looked at him now and nodded, recalling again the intensity of David’s excitement upon finding Ira. He had knelt in front of the cage, staring in at the black cat with a wide smile, and said, “They’re real. Every wildlife biologist in the country would tell you that if they ever existed, they don’t anymore. But you’re looking at one. And you know what else? This cat’s roots don’t go back to Africa or the Amazon. They go back to these mountains. I can
feel
it, can’t you? Look at him: he belongs to this place.”