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Kris quickly took the space Janet had vacated. “Why does the loch never give up its dead?”
Alan Mac sighed. He seemed tired already, and it wasn’t even 9:00 A.M.
“The cold and the peat make everything sink like a stone. The water temperature means the bodies don’t bloat and come back up.” He shook his head. “If anyone was ever to get a camera down there it’d be a re
gular boneyard.”
The disturbing image of dozens of skeletons dancing in an underwater ballroom filled Kris’s head. Where the hell had that come from?
“If the loch never gives up her dead, how do you explain the body I stumbled over yesterday?”
“‘Never’ might be a wee bit of an exaggeration,” Alan Mac allowed. “Sometimes the bodies get caught on logs or rocks. They might be held close enough to the surface, then they’d drift in. Or someone could find them and not want to be involved. So they leave them on the shore for wandering writer women to trip over.”
Kris lifted her brows at the last, but he did have a point. Weird things happened, and around here they seemed to happen a lot.
“You never told me girls were missing.”
“Why would I? Did ye take them?”
Kris didn’t bother to answer. “I found a body. A second body,” she clarified, in case he’d forgotten. “And now I hear there are five girls missing. Shouldn’t you call—” Kris was going to say the FBI, then remembered where she was. “Scotland Yard?”
“We’ve got no proof any of those didn’t just leave on their own. No proof, either, that the dead girls were killed. People drown in Loch Ness all the time.”
“All the time?” Kris repeated. “Seriously?”
“Aye. The world is composed of fools.”
She couldn’t argue with him there.
“They fall either out of a boat,” he continued, “or into the drink. Within minutes, at that temperature, the whole body shuts down. Yer done for.”
“I have a hard time believing that all these women fell out of boats, or tripped off a cliff and into the loch.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Alan Mac muttered.
“And what might those be?”
He shook his head as if shaking off memories of those stranger things, then rubbed a hand over his face. “Is there something I can help ye with?”
Kris stared at him for several seconds, but his stoic cop mode was back; the tired man she’d glimpsed, the one who might have told her something worth hearing, was gone.
“I was attacked last night.”
“When ye say ‘attacked’—,” he began.
“Knocked over the head and dragged to the loch.” Skepticism filtered into the constable’s expression, and Kris lifted her hair away from her temple. “See?”
His gaze narrowed on the goose egg, then shifted back to hers. “Ye better come inside and give me a statement.”
*
“Ye saw no one?” Alan Mac frowned at the sheet of paper on which he’d been taking notes as he asked and she answered questions. “Heard nothing?”
“Until I came to and Liam Grant was there.”
The constable looked up, and his frown deepened. “Who?”
Kris decided not to mention that Liam was her imaginary friend. There was only so much she could take, and she’d taken it.
