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  Ricky felt a tickling in his nose and throat. Damned allergies. The Claritin wasn't working again. Maybe he should go see a doctor, get something stronger. He finished typing a line into the chat screen, hit the enter key, and then instinctively reached for a tissue to blow his tingling nose. Before he could blow, he heard hissing. He turned to look behind him and saw thin white fumes followed by a greenish-yellow cloud rising from the heater vents. The heater thermostat switched on. His eyes watered and burned as he took a blast of pure chlorine gas up both nostrils. His throat burned. Something wrong with the heater, he thought.

  He stood up out of his chair, bent down, and tried to switch off the heater, but his eyes were watering from the fumes and he couldn't see. He accidentally punched the HIGH HEAT button instead of OFF.

  He gave up on the heater and stumbled around the service counter. In three steps he was upon the door, waving his hands in front of his face. He coughed, gasped for breath. There was no air. A thick ribbon of saliva streamed from his mouth and painted a dark jagged stripe on the sleeve of his ranger uniform and then sprayed across a row of pamphlets on a metal literature stand by the door. He twisted the doorknob while he tried to cover his mouth and nose with the crook of his other arm. The knob would not turn. He jerked violently on the door with both hands, then collapsed to the floor with a deep hacking, rasping cough. A hundred tiny knives clawed and slashed inside his lungs. He vomited, coughed, twitched, and then vomited again. He grasped his throat with both hands as his legs, flailing, kicked the door. He knocked over the literature stand, sending pamphlets crashing to the floor. See Historic Hearst Castle! Some of them landed in the vomit and began soaking up the mess. Visit Scenic Monterrey Bay!

  His bloodshot eyes opened wide and stared blankly at the ceiling. The corneas clouded with a yellowish haze.

  He drew a rattling final breath, like a half-snore.

  At the mall later that night the undercover cop called off the sting. She wondered why the creep didn't show. These internet sex predators usually didn't get wise to her until she slapped the cuffs on them. Some not even then. Well, no great loss. She'd bag another asshole tomorrow night. There was never a shortage of internet perverts.

  Night was filling the voids between the trees, and late-arrival campers might show up at any minute. Full timers, retirees in their homes-on-wheels, free from the day-to-day grind of work, free to go wherever and whenever, might well come to stay in this remote spot on a weekday evening.

  A few minutes after the hissing stopped, the killer looked into the ranger station through the back window. When he saw the vomit-splattered body by the front door, he realized that the plan had him now, and it was perfect. Payback's a bitch Ricky.

  He looked out toward the road leading into the park and saw no one. There was no one in the overflow camping area. The park was scheduled to close for day-use. He wiped his fingerprints off the door and anything else he thought he might have touched.

  The killer next dragged the dead Rottweiler over the mulched path behind the ranger station to the visitor overlook, and threw the carcass over the edge. The dog twisted and tumbled down the rocky hillside in a spray of blood. It came to rest with a sickening snap about forty feet down the side of the hill up against a stand of thick pine trees that were clinging to the side of the mountain. The dog's head was folded under its shoulder at an impossible angle. The body was twisted and broken; the forelegs pointed down, the hind legs pointed up. A marrow-oozing fragment of white vertebra jutted from the dog's back.

  The killer retraced his crime scene one more time to make sure that he hadn't left any evidence. He took the rag and stuffed it in his pocket. He threw the tank and the tent stake over the edge. They tumbled all the way through the branches down to the bottom, well past the dog carcass. He walked back to the station to retrieve the pennies from the door. He kicked the door, hard, three times, and pocketed the pennies after they fell out.

  The killer froze as brilliant white high-beams broke over the horizon and traced his double-silhouette on the door of the ranger station. An RV rolled past within a dozen yards.

  The killer kept his back turned, slipped a payment envelope from the honor box on the front of the station, held it in front of his face and pretended to read it, tried to blend in.

  The RV driver downshifted sloppily, then pulled as far as possible down the hill into the overflow lot. The driver, a grey-headed raisin of a man, stepped out, turned to face the side of the RV and began leveling his vehicle for the night.

  Shit. He'd need to get out of here fast.

  The Jeep. It was parked in a gravel space behind the ranger station, so the old RV guy wouldn't see him getting in.

  He found the key for the Cherokee in the ignition. He hopped in and rolled down off the mountain. He'd have to ditch the vehicle, but first he'd need to get someplace where he could catch a Greyhound.

  He had an appointment back in Pittsburgh.

  Part I

  First to Find

  Chapter 3

  Austin Texas

  Monday, February 17

  KURT DENZER RUBBED HIS FACE, swung his feet out of bed, fumbled his glasses off the night stand, snatched glasses and boxers off the floor, put them on, and turned his alarm clock to check the time: 6:42 A.M. He walked out to the kitchen. On the way through the door he reached over to pet his cat perched on the arm of the couch.

  He shuffled into the kitchen, ignored the dirty dishes festering in the sink for one more day, and loaded the coffee maker. He usually drank his coffee half-caff, but he needed to shake that nightmare, so nothing but a pot of full strength would do this morning. He bent over the counter, rubbed the crusts from his eyes and stared at the pot. "Why are coffee pots calibrated in five ounce cups?" he asked.

  His cat Pokey curled up around his ankles and meowed the only answer she knew: "Feed Me."

  Kurt was thirty-six. As in his nightmare, he'd been a software program manager at Motorola. And like the nightmare, he had grown to detest both the job and the management. Unlike the nightmare, his layoff wasn't the result of a clerical error and his boss hadn't dragged him screaming back into his cubicle after turning him out.

  He was still free.

  Broke, but free.

  As he punched the start button on the Mr. Coffee, his doorbell rang. He snatched yesterday's jeans off the floor, pulled them on, then opened the door.

  Bonnie Heckmann was a short heavy woman in her early fifties, married with two kids who'd finally left the nest. She'd never think twice about popping over to a friend's house uninvited and unannounced before dawn. Kurt had long since gotten used to it.

  "Have you seen the new cache listing online?" she asked, tossing her backpack and hiking stick on the couch. She never went hiking without one of her husband's custom-carved hickory hiking sticks.

  "Nuh-uh, want some coffee?" he asked, holding up the pot. A year before, a co-worker had introduced Kurt to the game of geocaching, a kind of scavenger hunt using hand-held GPS satellite navigation receivers, and he'd been hooked ever since.

  "Well, okay, but we gotta drink up fast sweetie, 'cause someone else is gonna beat us to it," she said.

  Kurt towered over Bonnie, his former coworkers, and his family at six foot three. He had shoulder-length dishwater blonde hair worn feathered back in a style leftover from the late seventies that he couldn't seem to leave behind. On his face he wore a three-day growth of reddish stubble.

  He divided the coffee pot between two thick ceramic Krispy-Kreme mugs. Bonnie helped herself to his fridge, sniffed the opening of the milk carton, and then dumped a dollop into her mug.

  Kurt lived in a cramped two-bedroom ranch house on a hill overlooking Lake Travis, northwest of Austin. From the outside, the house didn't look like much, but back when he had a paycheck, he'd upgraded the interior: granite counters, tile floors, the works. It had an excellent view of the lake.

  At the computer in his back bedroom office, Kurt pulled up his web browser and logge
d on to www.cache-finders.com. Geocache hiders posted descriptions of their hides on that website, including coordinates that finders could punch into their GPS units. Most finders liked to carry a printed copy of the cache listing so they'd have clues and coordinates with them while out on the hunt. Finders could post a comment to the online cache page, indicating whether they found the cache or not, and what they thought about the experience. Sometimes those comments from previous finders contained good clues that could help others find the cache.

  "What's the big deal about being the first to find anyway?" he asked, finishing off his coffee.

  "Just hurry up and print that thing," she replied, thumbing the keypad on her mobile phone. She had only taken a sip of her coffee and abandoned the rest. "I'll call Maari. She won't want to miss this." She pulled the printout off the printer and checked it to make sure it was all there:

  www.cache-finders.com Geocache Listing

  Kelley's First Cache

  by KelleysMom [email this user]

  Texas, USA

  [click to download geographic coordinates and hints]

  This is our first geocache. Just a small Tupperware filled with trinkets, hidden in the woods. We put in some toy cars and some new golf balls, a bag of state quarters and a couple keychains. Be sure to sign the logbook to let us know you were there and if you liked our cache! Don't forget to post your comment online here for everyone else to read too!

  Cache Visitor Comments:

  (0 comments total - This cache hasn't been found yet!)

  Did you Find the Cache? Add your own comment! [click here]

  Kurt and Bonnie arrived at the trailhead parking lot to find Maari already waiting for them there. "Let's go," she said, folding up her copy of the listing printout, after they each had keyed the cache's latitude and longitude coordinates into their GPS receivers.

  Maari Hekkonen was in her mid to late thirties and stood just under six feet tall. Sun-bleached hair pulled back in a ponytail, never married, no kids. Bonnie had invited her along for the hunt and she'd of course jumped at the chance to be in on the first find.

  They packed up their printouts and backpacks and hiked down the crushed gravel trail, following the directional arrows on their GPS receivers. These devices collected radio signals from a constellation of twenty-four satellites orbiting eleven thousand miles overhead. The receivers decoded these signals to tell the hikers how far they were from their destination, and in which direction to walk.

  They walked a third of a mile down the trail, Maari and Bonnie calling out the remaining distance every thirty seconds or so. They all had their own GPS receiver set to display this information, so this calling out was unnecessary. It irritated Kurt but he’d learned that no amount of complaining would change it. Both Bonnie and Maari were strong-willed. Some would say stubborn, but never to their faces.

  Maari was Finnish but she had been in the states for so long that her accent had more Hermosa Beach than Helsinki in it. She had a tight physique, and might have even been a bodybuilder at one time. Kurt had always thought it safer not to ask her about it. She had a degree in biomedical engineering from Texas A&M University and had done her time in a top-secret military industrial complex out in California, but she was currently working as a midwife. She had a lot of free time, but she had to be on call twenty four hours a day. This limited the times when she could go drinking and night caching, which was the only real drawback she could find in her new profession. It beat working defense though.

  "What's the hint?" asked Kurt.

  "’Unnatural Rock Pile,’ but I don't see it," Maari replied. In addition to the latitude and longitude, cache hiders usually provided an extra hint, because the accuracy of the GPS system was such that you could still have a fifty or sixty-foot circle to search once the receiver said you were there. Some days the GPS would put you right on top of the cache, other days you’d be scratching your head sixty feet away. Some finders didn’t look at the hint until after spending a long time searching, but Maari was one to read the hint even before setting out. She didn’t like to waste time.

  "Check the coordinates," said Bonnie, lighting a cigarette, taking a break while the other two looked under logs and behind trees. She’d tried to quit before, even went on the gum. She’d gotten addicted to the gum, then had reverted to cigarettes. Cigarettes helped her lose weight, she rationalized. She was also losing weight through geocaching. She had found more than five hundred caches in her first year, and had already lost twenty pounds.

  "I don't see any rocks," said Kurt.

  "What’s that smell?" asked Maari. Something decaying. The smell grew stronger as they approached the cache site.

  "I think I see it!" said Bonnie, after they'd walked another fifty feet. “The coordinates are a little off though.”

  “Newbies,” said Kurt. New cachers were likely to complain of bad coordinates until they got used to using their GPS receivers. Still, the veterans welcomed new players. "Now I smell it. It’s getting worse.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” said Bonnie, who hadn’t smelled anything in ten years and frankly didn’t miss it.

  The cache was only ten feet off the trail, a trinket-filled Tupperware container hidden under a thick overhanging ledge of moss-covered grey honeycomb limestone. A couple of loose pieces of honeycomb were placed in front of the box so that it couldn't be seen from the trail. Bonnie jabbed the rocks away with her hiking stick, then Maari pulled the container out from under the ledge.

  “Oh geez, sign it for me would ya? I can’t stand this,” said Maari, before they’d removed the lid. She scrambled off a dozen feet out toward the trail, waving her hands in front of her wrinkled-up nose. Kurt quickly signed the logbook for all of them, then carefully re-hid the container back under the ledge for the next finder.

  “It’s up here,” said Bonnie, thumbing back over her shoulder. She’d gone further into the woods looking to see if she could spot the source of the smell. “It’s a dead dog.”

  The dog had been buried under a carefully built pile of rocks, at the base of a sheer cliff. Apparently someone’s pet had died and the owner had buried it in the woods. Some scavengers, either coyotes or feral hogs, had pushed away the rocks and dragged the carcass halfway out of its grave.

  They found two other caches in the park that morning. Their usual plan was to find three caches and then go for breakfast. After finding the dead dog, no one was hungry, so Maari suggested they go grab some coffee instead. She knew a new gourmet coffee shop across the street from the park.

  Chapter 4

  THE SHOP WAS LOCATED in a small strip at the base of a dizzying hill leading up to the upper middle class Jester neighborhood, just a couple miles from City Park. Jester was developed in the late 1970's, and at the time it had been pretty remote, but now the city had caught up with it and the property values had soared. The rising property values brought in hordes of dot-com yuppies, and almost all of them got their coffee from Java Judi's. In the coffee business, you had to be at the right place at the right time --when the caffeine wore off.

  Java Judi's was one of Starbucks' copycats. The success of Starbucks spawned a thousand imitators. Java Judi's claim to fame was that everything on their menu, from the coffee beans right on down to the pure cane sugar, was organically grown, and this was just what the coffee drinking ex-hippies of Austin wanted to hear.

  The three explorers got their coffee and settled into a group of overstuffed easy chairs with a small round table at knee-height between them. Their GPS receivers and a few trinkets were scattered on the table among the coffee cups.

  Bonnie logged in to the cache-finders website and posted comments for her morning finds on the pages for each cache. The store supplied free wireless internet access and even a few free laptops tethered to selected tables. Usually it was difficult to get one, but the morning rush was over.

  The staff were taking it easy behind the counter, blowing off steam. A young woman was clearing one of the taller ta
bles next to the group. She had hauled off a load of empty cups and was wiping the table down with a rag when she paused to greet the group, asking them if everything was okay with their orders. Kurt took one look at her and didn't hear anything after that.

  Judi McBride was an attractive thirty-something, petite yet big-boned, with short auburn hair, pale white skin, deep green eyes, and a scattering of freckles. She was in firm physical shape, despite her sworn conviction that her butt was out of proportion to the rest of her body. She was wearing tight faded blue jeans and a tucked-in Java Judi's polo shirt.