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Back in San Diego, Lauren slept off and on for days. Rowan made sure she ate, and helped her bathe when she asked him to. He tried to work while she rested. He found it hard to focus. He had so many things running through his mind. There were so many unanswered questions. He did manage to find one way to distract himself. He perused the travel website that they so often used to book their trips, looking for ideas of where to take her for their honeymoon.
Of course, they’d never gotten around to talking about wedding plans, but he had placed the ring on her finger at long last. He was content with that — for now. It was so hard trying to find somewhere to vacation, one of the curses of traveling for a living. They hadn’t taken a vacation in all the years they’d been doing the show, and no one in the crew did either. They would make time for side trips when they found themselves in someplace interesting, but traveling for personal pleasure was practically unheard of.
Where on earth could we go that there wasn’t some mystery to solve? Did Scooby Doo and the Gang have this much trouble planning a vacation? He thought to himself.
The Paris underground had been a great investigation, but it took some of the romanticism out of the City of Lights. The Castles of Scotland, Tower of London, the Pyramids of Giza, Ghosts of Cape Horn, the list could go on and on. From one continent to the other they’d traveled time and time again.
Rowan was too tired to think. Maybe we could just go to Vegas, he considered. That would be weirder than all the ghosts and Bigfoot combined.
“What time is it?” Lauren came in and found him in front of the computer.
He glanced at his watch. “About time for dinner,” he smiled. She was wearing a pair of shorts and a tank top and he longed to peel her out of them and celebrate their engagement, but he knew she was in no shape for a good romp.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking over itineraries for our next few destinations. I haven’t made reservations, and I’m kind of glad now that I didn’t.” It was only a half-lie.
“Why?”
“Well, it might be a while before you’re ready to travel.”
“Probably for the best anyway.” She turned his chair and sat in his lap. He snaked his arms around her, mindful of her healing arm.
She suddenly had his full attention. “Why do you say that?”
“We’re not done with this investigation,” she said. “You know, this could turn out to be the best episode of The Veritas Codex ever. We could get another Emmy nomination.”
He blinked in rapid succession. “Have you lost your ever-lovin’ mind?”
“Wait just a second,” she said. “Hear me out on this.” She took a deep breath. “Whatever happened to me, I survived. Sure, I’m busted and bruised, but I survived. But the mystery remains. Is Bigfoot real? To compound that, we have to find out the truth. Did I get kidnapped by Bigfoot?”
He bit his lip, certain she’d lost her mind along with her memory. “You know what they’re saying about you? What’s all over the tabloids, don’t you?” He mimicked quotation marks over his head with one hand. “‘I Was Kidnapped By Bigfoot.’ Might as well tell them you’ve been impregnated by aliens.”
“Stop it, Rowan.” She stood and took a few steps. She turned sharply. “Don’t you get it? It’s our job to find the answers to mysteries. To find the truth!”
“You keep talking about the truth, like ... like it’ll change something.”
“It’s our job.” Her voice raised sharply.
“It’s your life, Lauren. That’s what worries me. You nearly died. Doesn’t that frighten you? ’Cause it sure scares the hell out of me.”
Lauren’s dark eyes turned tender. “I’m never afraid when you’re with me, Rowan. That’s why we make such a great team. We always have each other’s back. We always will.” She laughed so she wouldn’t cry. “I need you at my back on this one. I have to know ... I just have to.”
* * *
It went against his better judgment, but he called the team and scheduled a meeting, asking each of them to bring their data on the Bigfoot investigation. Bahati and Jean-René had been leading the efforts to analyze the data and were in charge of the project while Lauren and Rowan were occupied with her recovery. He hadn’t told them he was bringing Lauren with him.
The conference room table was covered in computers, video and audio equipment. The team, more than a dozen people, were engaged in a heated discussion when he came in, his body shielding Lauren behind him.
“Hey, Boss,” Chance said. The room went silent as Lauren stepped out from behind Rowan.
“Good to see you too.” Lauren managed a smile. Everyone rose and gathered around to welcome her back. “Where are the bagels?”
* * *
“Okay, guys. Let’s get started. We have a lot of work to do. Lauren’s energy level isn’t back to 100 percent, so we need to do everything we can before she gets worn out,” Rowan took over, and helped Lauren to her chair. Without asking, he poured her a cup of coffee and went to work doctoring it for her. “Lauren has asked that we assemble the team to look over the evidence from Washington State. We’re going to piece everything together to see what we can do to help restore her memory of the events there. It’s the mystery we have to answer before we can start our next project. I need everyone on point here. Let’s do this in chronological order, okay?”
“Okay.” A collective response answered him.
“Jean-René?” He handed the cup of coffee to Lauren. “Let’s start with the first evidence from our trip.”
“Right.” Jean-René produced the plaster cast of the first footprint. “Here’s the cast we took on the trail near the river.” He put it under the document cam so everyone in the room could see it on the big screen. “Jess?”
Jess Bynum was the team’s assistant research anthropologist. Rowan had put her in charge of the cast analysis. She stood, taking over the discussion. “I consulted with my colleague, the preeminent expert on Bigfoot, Dr. Menlo in Idaho. According to Dr. Menlo, this print was made by a bipedal mammal of unknown origin. As you can see, the toes are clearly visible, five on each foot. The doctor provided me with this overview where he’s drawn in the probable skeletal form of the creator’s foot.” The diagram appeared on the screen. “Notice the tarsal bones are more pronounced than a human foot, but it is more like a human foot than the foot of a gorilla.” She put a cast of a gorilla footprint on the screen. “You can also see this was obviously not the track of a bear.” She put up a bear track for comparison. “Let me zoom in on the cast again.” It took a second to get the image to come into focus. “This cast shows remarkable details. Your team was lucky to arrive upon it so soon after it was made. The indentions around the edge are indicative of hair, and you can even make out the dermal ridges of the toes. It is my professional opinion, shared by Dr. Menlo, that this is a biologically significant sample.”
“So, you are saying it’s not a fake?” Rowan asked.
“That is what I’m saying,” she said. “There’s no way your every-day hoax-monger would know where to put the heel bone ... in humans, it would be much farther back than it is in this cast.”
“What about the audio we caught?” Rowan turned to Bahati.
“There were other casts for comparison,” Jess interrupted.
“I know. We’ll come back to you. I’m trying to follow the chronology of the data collection,” he said curtly, and she sat back down. If she was upset for being cut off, she didn’t show it.
* * *
Bahati spent twenty-five minutes discussing the howls they’d captured on both audio and video tape, replaying them for the team. She put the video on the big screen and dimmed the lights. Rowan watched Lauren for any sign of a reaction and was amazed at how placid her face remained, even as she watched her own image respond to the cry—more like a baying moan in the black of night. She didn’t even wince. It was as if she didn’t associate herself with the woman on the screen.
When Jean-René began to discuss the events of the night before her disappearance, she turned her attention patiently to him. She listened to the discussions and watched the video clips, showing no emotion. Each of the team members told their side of the story. When Bahati began to recount the events from the night of the disappearance, Lauren seemed strangely disinterested, tugging at a string on the sleeve of her shirt. She watched the video from her web cam but again, it was almost as if she didn’t realize all that actually happened to her. Rowan tugged at the whiskers on his chin as he watched her.
Finally, everyone stopped, just looking at each other. “Is that it?” Lauren asked.
“That’s everything I have,” Jean-René said, glancing at Bahati, who shrugged.
“Well I’m not done.” Jess finally spoke up.
“What else do you have?” Rowan asked, remembering he’d cut her off before.
“Well, Rob and Bahati had the presence of mind to get a cast of the footprint they found at the edge of base camp after Lauren was abducted. In my opinion, this is one of the most telling pieces of evidence you brought back from the mountain,” she said. She stood, taking up the second cast. “This print is approximately 20” long and 6” wide. The cast you took from the riverbank was only about 15” long and 5” wide.” Jess put the two next to each other under the document cam, projecting the image onto the screen. One was obviously bigger than the other.
“So, we have a larger specimen?” Rowan asked.
“One would think,” she said, curtly. “My calculations from the first cast, which my peers have confirmed, suggest we have a creature approximately seven feet tall, approximately 370 pounds. This cast is different. You’ll notice the ball of the foot sunk in quite a bit deeper, not the toes. There’s no evidence of dermal ridges, though we do have some hair imprint. The skeletal structure is significantly different. I managed to salvage a fiber from the plaster. I sent it to the lab for analysis. It came back as a synthetic polyester, most commonly used in fake fur. This footprint is a hoax. A hoax-monger in a monkey suit ran through your camp, and abducted Lauren right in front of your own camera. This print is made by a 250-pound human, carrying your 120-pound field producer.”
She appeared to feel vindicated for having to wait, and she stood smugly over the chaos she’d created. A flood of questions came at her like a hurricane. Lauren remained in her chair, while Rowan stood up, pounding his fists on the conference table to silence the room.
“But the first print was genuine. Right?”
“Yes,” she said. “It appears to be genuine. There are databases of hundreds of these things. I compared it to every single one. We’ve got more fakes then genuine ones, but this one shares many of the common traits of those believed to be real.” She held up the larger print. “This one matches every hoax we’ve ever seen,” she dropped the fake cast on the table, and it shattered. “Hoax-monger in a monkey suit.”