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However, beggars couldn’t be choosers and Alan Mac was the officer in charge. Besides, she should probably report her missing camera. Just in case it washed up somewhere and was turned in to the authorities.
Although what would she do with the thing? It wasn’t as if the camera would still work or her film would be—
Kris froze in the middle of rinsing shampoo out of her hair. Could that be why someone had given her a free ride to the depths of Loch Ness? Because she’d been filming Nessie?
She continued to scrub at her scalp, lifting the thick, curling mass of hair and letting the water wash away all the suds as she considered. Every bit of film taken of Nessie was …
“Crap,” she murmured.
The lack of decent photos—still or cine—was a bullet point of interest on the “Reasons Nessie Doesn’t Exist” list. If the monster were real, there would be a physical record of it—especially during modern times when every third person had a camera and knew exactly how to use it.
Underwater attempts understandably produced junk. The damn peat content made seeing your hand in front of your face a fricking miracle. Kris had firsthand knowledge of that.
The motion pictures that had been shot were hazy, spotty, dark, and wavering. Half of them had been ruined or lost.
The still photography wasn’t much better. Certainly getting close enough to the loch with the right light, appropriate lenses, and film speed at a time when the monster just happened to appear was a neat trick. But someone in the past decade, when cameras had become damn good, should have been able to manage it.
Yet they hadn’t.
Kris shut off the water. Or perhaps they had. Perhaps anyone who’d filmed Nessie without trembling hands or garbage equipment had found themselves at the bottom of the lake.
Like her.
She blew a derisive puff of air through her lips as she snatched a towel. How could that happen? It wasn’t as if the loch had someone who watched over it 24-7 like a—
The towel dropped from Kris’s suddenly limp fingers. “Park ranger?”
Hell!
Maybe Liam had tossed her in.
*
By the time Kris got dressed, microwaved some of the coffee that Liam had made last night but they’d never gotten around to drinking, then drank it before heading for Drumnadrochit at a brisk pace, she was calmer.
Kris was nothing if not a logical woman. And logic dictated that if Liam wanted her dead, he’d had plenty of chances to kill her.
Of course there was also the little voice that whispered: He doesn’t need to kill you now that your film is swimming with the fishes. At least until you do something else that threatens—
“What?” Kris muttered. “What did I threaten?”
Proving Nessie existed would be good for business. Why would anyone want to stop that?
As far as Kris could tell, everyone in Drumnadrochit worshiped the creature. But maybe whoever wanted to destroy the legend of Nessie wasn’t from here. Or maybe they just wanted the mystery to remain a mystery.
Kris paused for a second. That actually made sense. If the monster was proved to exist beyond a shadow of a doubt, there’d be biologists and naturalists and all sorts of -ists who weren’t tourists. And then the government would get involved.…
Kris wasn’t sure how the British authorities worked, but she was quite familiar with the United States. They’d capture Nessie and put her in …
“Sea World,” Kris whispered. Or that big, echoing warehouse where they kept the Ark of the Covenant.
So, she could see why someone might want to protect the monster from detection. It did make sense.
Until you added murder.
Wasn’t killing someone to prevent them from discovering the truth called overkill? Ha-ha. Then again, murders had been committed for less than that.
Kris began to walk again, faster than before. Thinking about murder made her twitchy. She wanted to get to the village, where there were other people, a few cops, eyewitnesses, and she wanted to get there fast.
