could already tell she questioned a lot and didn’t quite know if it was insight or her brain running wild. He could relate. That inquisitiveness had turned out to be a good quality for him as far as the job he did. He hoped she’d figure out where to apply it as well, instead of allowing it to run amok. She was young. Very young. She had time.
Then again, his daughter had been young, too, and she hadn’t had nearly enough time. Not nearly enough. He shut those thoughts down, picking up a notebook on top of a short stack of other notebooks in various colors on the table and leafed through it. It appeared to be a field journal of some sort, with observations about possums and . . . he turned the page . . . deer . . . wolves. Different sections were labeled with chapter headings as though he was outlining a book. Mark flipped through the rest of the notebook quickly and then checked briefly inside the others. Why had Isaac Driscoll taken special interest in those three specific animals, and no others?
He gave the cabin another once-over. Was that the reason the guy had been out here? To write a nature book? “Harper, you’re a wildlife expert of sorts,” he said, and she opened her mouth as if to disagree with the statement, but he went on before she could. “If you were going to observe animals and say, write a book on their behaviors, would you want to live among them?”
Harper furrowed her brow. “I mean . . . yeah, maybe. But I can’t think of any animal that hasn’t already been highly observed in its natural habitat, especially around here . . . a hundred books written, etcetera. It wouldn’t be new material.”
“That’s what I was thinking too,” he murmured, slipping the notebooks into a folded paper evidence bag he removed from his pocket. The techs hadn’t deemed them important, but something told Mark he might want to look through them later.
“Unless,” she said, stepping into the room, “the animal or animals were being observed under very specific circumstances that were different in some way.” She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth in thought for a moment. “Like if the data being recorded was about how an animal would react to something it hadn’t previously been exposed to? Like what they do in labs.”
“Yes. Only, Isaac Driscoll was a researcher with a doctorate at Rayform Laboratories. He took early retirement sixteen years ago and moved here. He left the lab for the wilderness.” Albeit, not the kind of lab that studied animals from what Mark gathered.
Harper shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of that. Unless he was just observing animals for his own interest.”
Could be. The real question was, why would living alone in the wilderness observing possums get you murdered? And in such a violent fashion? He needed to see the spot where Driscoll had been killed. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Harper, and she nodded as he walked toward the room where the murder occurred.
The technicians had taken some of Isaac Driscoll’s blood for processing, but the majority was still there on the wall and floor—a large, dark, congealed puddle.
He wondered if the victim had a next of kin—he was still waiting for that information—and if he did, if they’d even want this dingy cabin in the middle of nowhere where their relative had been killed. Would they want the property? And if so, what would happen to Lucas with no last name? He sighed, staring at the large, dark stain. What the hell had happened here?
It hadn’t been a quick death—again, the arrow had been shot with enough force to pin the victim to the wall so he was rendered helpless. His blood had drained from his body. The same as the Jane Doe in town, though this shot had hit the victim in the chest, and he’d remained conscious long enough to reach his phone and dial 9-1-1. Maybe it had been in his pocket? Accessible enough so he could reach it even in the throes of death.
There was malice in both cases—hatred even. Neither was a random crime, though the arrows found in each body were slightly different in appearance. Whether that meant there were two killers, or whether a singular killer had simply used different arrows, he didn’t know. The crimes were too similar not to be related though. But