“That makes sense.” Catalina went still. “But I think … I think the killer screwed up.”
Slater knew from the change in her gaze and in her voice that she was sliding into her other vision. But she wasn’t being overwhelmed by whatever it was she perceived. She was in control this time.
He waited.
“Morrissey is very intent on what he is doing,” Catalina said, speaking in an eerie, dreamlike cadence. “He is excited. Impatient. He is concentrating very hard. But he is suddenly distracted. He is … bewildered. Then he realizes something is wrong. He’s … sinking into himself. He can’t breathe. He knows now that he is dying. You stupid bastard. You’ll never find what you’re looking for without me.”
The last bit sounded like a direct quote, but Slater refrained from verifying that because he did not want to interrupt the vision. Catalina backed away from the rock where the man had been killed. She clasped her hands very tightly together.
“The killer is excited, too,” she continued in the dream voice. “He is thrilled. But suddenly he is alarmed. Furious. He runs toward one of the side caves. There are witnesses. He cannot allow them to live.”
Catalina snapped out of the trance. She was damp with perspiration and she was breathing quickly.
“Are you all right?” Slater asked.
“Yes,” she said, once again in her normal voice. “I can tell you what alerted him. He spotted a camp lantern that we left behind. He realized there might be someone else around. We knew he would find us so we fled down that tunnel. He called out to us. Told us he was an undercover cop. We didn’t believe him. We just kept going. Eventually he gave up, but we couldn’t be sure he was gone.”
“So you spent the night in the caves.”
“We were afraid he might be waiting for us out here. We stayed put until we were sure it was morning. We knew that people would be out looking for us.”
“Any idea why the killer gave up trying to find you?”
“Sure.” Catalina unlocked her hands and gestured toward one of the side tunnels. “He wasn’t from around here. He didn’t know how to navigate the caves. He must have realized that if he went too far into the complex he would get hopelessly lost. It’s not just that the tunnels are a maze—there’s also the paranormal radiation. It’s very disorienting. You start seeing things. The deeper you go, the worse it gets.”
“Hallucinations?”
Catalina looked at him. “Oh, yeah.”
“How did you and Olivia keep from getting lost?”
“We followed the currents of a hot paranormal river going in. Followed the same currents out the next morning.”
“But the killer wasn’t able to follow you, at least not very far.”
Catalina raised her brows. “A lot of the locals can’t navigate the energy rivers in these caves. Olivia and I are both pretty strong, but even working together it was all we could do to sort them out.”
“I don’t doubt it. There’s a considerable amount of disorienting energy here near the entrance. It’s bound to get really hot in the side tunnels.” Slater swept the flashlight around the cavern. “Back to Morrissey and the killer. According to the records, no body was ever found.”
“Olivia and I saw the killer dump the body into the underground river.” Catalina turned to look at the stream of deep water that emerged from a cave on one side of the cavern and vanished into a flooded tunnel a short distance away. “The current is very strong. If you throw something into that water it disappears very quickly.”
Slater walked to the river and stopped a safe distance from the edge. He aimed the flashlight down into the depths. The water was incredibly clear.
“Does anyone know where this river ends up?” he asked.
“No. Some of the locals have tried putting a coloring agent into it to see if the dye shows up in any of the local springs or lakes, but so far no one has been able to locate an exit point.”
Slater aimed the light at the mouth of the flooded tunnel where the water disappeared.
“The killer knew it was unlikely that the body would ever be recovered,” he said.
“Or else he just thought the river was as good a way as any to get rid of the evidence of the crime.”
Slater thought about that and then shook his head. “No, I think he knew it was a safe way to dump Morrissey’s body.”
“What makes you so sure of that?” Catalina asked. “I told you he wasn’t from around here. Neither was Morrissey.”
“Trust me, if Morrissey and the killer were able to find the entrance to this cave complex on a fog-bound night, they knew about the river. At least, the killer knew about it. What about his prints? Can you see where he exited the cavern?”
Catalina concentrated for a moment. “He left the same way he came in. There isn’t any other exit, at least none that I know of. But on the way out his prints are very hot and a little unstable. He’s in a murderous rage.”
“If we go back outside will you be able to see where he went after he left this place?”
“No. I can track prints on hard surfaces like stone, but out in the woods the raw earth absorbs paranormal radiation very quickly. After fifteen years it would be impossible to find the killer’s prints.”
“Any idea of where he might have headed when he left this place?”
Catalina hesitated. “There are only three options. The first is that he went into town, but that would have been extremely risky because he was a stranger.”
“And strangers get noticed in a hurry around these parts.”
“Yes,” Catalina said. “The second option is that he went into the woods. But at night in heavy fog he would have gotten disoriented in a hurry. You can’t even trust an old-fashioned compass here. The third possibility is that he took a boat out on the lake.”
“Is that a viable option?”
“At night? In the fog? It would have been extremely risky, even for someone who was familiar with the terrain. The thing about the lake is that the only way to navigate it is by keeping within eyesight of the shoreline. The fog makes that extremely difficult at night. Over the years Olivia and I have tried to convince ourselves that if we really did witness a murder, the killer must have died out there on Fogg Lake.”
“But you didn’t believe that,” Slater said.
“We didn’t know what to believe. Our memories were so jumbled. As time went by we became more and more certain that we had seen a murder and that we did find a place to hide that night. But all of the details were hazy. Until now.”
“Did any boats go missing around the time of the murder?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Catalina said. “There aren’t very many boats here, so if one had disappeared it would have been noticed.”
“Given that the killer probably left by way of the lake and the fact that no one reported a stolen boat, there is only one logical conclusion,” Slater said.
“The killer drowned in the lake while trying to get away?”
“No,” Slater said. “The conclusion is that the killer wasn’t alone that night.”
“Well, Morrissey was with him, but he was a stranger, too.”