"This isn't about ghosts and space aliens and you know it," she said. "Why didn't you dismiss the idea of these tigers?"

Gearhart excused himself and started toward the car. Hannah followed and Grand went after her.

"Why won't you talk to us?" Hannah demanded.

"Ms. Hughes, this is why I hate these little discussions. Because everything turns into a goddamn interview, a negotiation for information."

"But we can help!" she said.

"How?" Gearhart asked.

"Like we just did," she said. "Gathering information, talking to people-"

"Your kind of help can also cause panic," Gearhart said. "Or it can inform a perpetrator about what we're doing so he can plan his next crime."

"Animals can't read!" she said.

Before the sheriff could say anything else there was a call on the patrol car radio. Gearhart jogged over.

"Look," Hannah said to Grand. "The call is out of range of his personal radio." They hurried after him. "It's either from the mountains or another town. Something's up. I can feel it."

Gearhart reached the car, opened the door, and removed the handset from the console under the dashboard. "Gearhart here. Go," he said as he slipped into the vehicle and shut the door.

Hannah and Grand arrived a moment later. The car window was up and the voices were muffled inside. A moment later he started the engine and revved it. The voices were lost entirely.

The Wall had finished taking his pictures and ambled over. "Did he offer to put us in for a responsible-citizenship medal, being here before the critical evidence was obliterated?"

Hannah said nothing.

"Then the answer is no," the Wall said. "If nothing else you've got to admire Gearhart's consistency."

A moment later Gearhart turned on his flashing lights and drove off.

Hannah watched for a second and then ran toward Grand's SUV.

"Come on," she said. "Something's up."

Grand and Hannah got into the SUV and the Wall jumped into his Jeep.

"Let the Wall go first," Hannah said. "He's done this before. If we lose Gearhart he'll call me."

Grand obliged. After the Jeep rattled over the train tracks and sped after the patrol car, Grand set out. Meanwhile, Hannah had her phone out, ready to take the call.

As they followed the Wall back onto the 101 and then up into the foothills. Grand realized that he had gotten this all wrong.

It was Hannah who was Douglas MacArthur.

Chapter Thirty-Four

As he raced to the Upper Santa Ynez River Canyon, Sheriff Gearhart thought about the call he'd just received. Screams and gunshots had been heard by a ranger near the Juncal campsite. It had happened less than a half hour before- probably a camper who had had too much to drink at dinner and went a little bonkers. Things like that had happened before. Though he wanted to be sure, Gearhart didn't see how this situation could be related to the others.

The highway patrol had checked out the Hobie Cat serial number and found that it was owned by a Patrick Vlaskovitz, a student at UCSB. He and two friends were seen going out in the late afternoon, so they were probably killed when they came ashore early in the evening and the beach was deserted. Poor guys at the wrong place, wrong time. But if other attacks were a model, the killer needed more time between kills than an hour or two. And the killer tended to tackle isolated persons, not groups. A campsite just didn't fit.

His flashing lights lit the surrounding slopes as he headed into the hills. The siren was muted by the closed windows and the whir of the air conditioner driving icy air through the vent. He needed the cold air to stay alert. He wasn't a young Marine anymore. Being on the go for two days straight with only a few hours sleep was rough. And it wasn't just the work itself that was exhausting. It was dealing with people like Hannah Hughes.

She had no idea, Gearhart thought angrily. She had no mortal foggy notion what it was like.

Hannah Hughes ran a self-indulgent newspaper. If it failed, she still had her multimillion-dollar trust fund to live off. Even Professor Grand probably didn't get it. He taught college kids and solved mysteries that were thousands of years old. If he failed to figure them out, no one got hurt. Neither of them knew the burden of protecting lives and property, order and security, sanity and peace. And Hannah just didn't know how to cut him any slack.

Gearhart didn't particularly like either of them, but that wasn't the issue. As a Marine, he'd learned to look past personality and talent. What would help them realize a goal, complete a mission, and get out alive? Hannah and Grand were both smart, resourceful, and relentless and if Gearhart thought they could help he'd be happy to listen. But Hannah wanted to sell newspapers and Grand probably wanted to write papers. Whatever else Gearhart wanted, he wanted above all to perform the job he was elected to perform.

Yet as sprawling as Hannah's net tended to be-or because of that-she had managed to be right about one thing, though. Gearhart knew more than he was telling about this case. While he wasn't willing to buy the idea of a saber-toothed tiger, he wasn't dismissing the notion that some nutcase was murdering people in the fashion of a saber-toothed tiger. And that the killer was planting evidence to fool wanna-believers like Hannah and Grand. One of Thomas Gomez's lab boys had made that suggestion after examining the backpack they found in the creek sinkhole. The chemist had just taken his son to see the saber-tooth fossil displays at the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles. The boy had posed for a photograph with his head in the tiger's mouth; the depth and spacing of the gashes reminded the chemist of that mouth, so he had E-mailed the museum for exact measurements.

They fit.

The fur specimens the lab boys found in the fish truck supported the notion that someone was trying to emulate a saber-tooth, though Grand was correct about that. They hadn't radiocarbon-dated the sample or tested to see whether it came from a living creature. According to the experts at Page, there weren't any existing examples of saber-toothed tiger hair. The fact that Gomez and his team hadn't found a match meant that the sample in the truck probably came from some obscure animal like a platypus or wombat. As soon as the technicians got a spare minute they'd nail that down for sure.

Gearhart kept people like Hannah Hughes at a safe distance because he knew from his experiences in LA that all he had to tell her was that there might be a lunatic pretending to be a saber-toothed tiger. He could see the headlines now: COPY-CAT KILLER! Gearhart could live with that, but only after they'd found the perpetrator and any accomplices. He didn't need his investigators pressured by front-page yipping and editorial scare-mongering. That was how mistakes and wrongful arrests happened. There were thirty experienced police and search personnel in the field. They were just about finished searching the mountains and would be moving into the caves soon. They'd get whoever was doing this.

Get him and make him extinct.