MY FEAR VANISHED AS I looked from the tranquilizer gun to the guy holding it. We were going to have better luck reasoning with him than a with mountain lion, that was for sure.
“Frank?! Joe?!” The gun dropped to the scientist’s side as Max Kroopnik ran over to embrace us. Actually, limped over was more like it. It was clear he’d reinjured his left leg badly. “You’re the last people I expected to see!”
“You haven’t been eaten by a mountain lion!” Frank exclaimed, hugging him back.
“I about feel like it,” he said, looking down at his tattered, bloody clothes.
“That’s one heck of a wildcat impression you got there, Doc. I thought for sure we were about to get pounced on,” I told him.
“The idea was to scare whoever it was away, not actually eat them.” He grinned and limped back behind the boulder, using the large rock to prop himself up. We followed him as he reached down into a bundle of gear, pulled out a digital recorder, and pressed play.
“YOWWWWLLL!” it growled.
“Field recordings I made of a large male I’ve been monitoring. I’d hoped it would chase off whoever’s been after me. I just didn’t expect it to be you two.”
“Technically, I guess you could say we have been tracking you, but we’re not after you,” I said. “At least we weren’t at first. We came to Black Bear Mountain to make sure you were okay.”
“Aleksei sent us a letter from prison saying he hadn’t heard from you and was worried something had happened,” Frank explained.
Max smiled. “I can always count on Aleksei. How is the big guy doing?”
“Um, okay I guess, besides being in prison and worrying about you,” I replied, looking at the bedraggled scientist. “He said you’d written that there were suspicious people snooping around the mountain. Then when he didn’t get another letter five or six weeks later like usual, he wrote to us and asked us to check on you.”
“I’ve had the sense for a few months now that people are following me around the mountain,” he confirmed. “That’s odd that he didn’t get my last letter, though. I haven’t been to town, but I handed a letter for Aleksei and a couple others off to Dan to mail for me when he stopped by on one of his trips up with some hikers.”
“Dan sure has a knack for turning up around here at convenient times,” said Frank.
“Or inconvenient, if you’re the one trying not to get crushed by a tree or to send a letter. Do you think he intercept—”
“Wait, you said you weren’t the ones after me at first. What does that mean?” Max cut me off, limping back a step and tightening his grip on the tranquilizer gun at his side.
“We know you took Aleksei’s garnets, Dr. K,” Frank said, his voice sympathetic but firm. Dr. K was our friend, but he was also a suspect. Which seemed to come as news to him.
“You think I’d steal from my best friend?!” he asked incredulously.
“I’m sorry, Doc,” I said. “We’re not saying you did it. We just think it’s possible. All the clues point to you taking the garnets from Aleksei’s hideout, and until we can rule out theft, we have to consider you a suspect.”
“It’s a working hypothesis,” Frank explained.
Dr. K gawked at us. “Aleksei told you he thought I was in trouble. What do you think? I destroyed my own lab and nearly killed myself jumping off a cliff as part of a robbery ploy?”
I shrugged. “Stranger things have happened around here. I mean, Aleksei did crash a plane to fake his death and spend the next thirty years pretending to be a mythical man-eating mountain man,” I reminded him.
“I’ll admit, I did get some wacky ideas from Aleksei, but staging my own disappearance wasn’t one of them. I just wanted to keep the garnets safe from whoever is trying to steal them.” He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a plastic specimen bag, the kind scientists use to pick up interesting things they find in the field, like bits of animal hair or funky mushrooms and whatever other weird stuff scientists find interesting. Only it wasn’t fur or toadstools in this one. The bag was full of radiant green demantoid garnets.
He placed the bag in Frank’s hand. “So you know I’m telling the truth. You can probably keep them safer than me now anyway.”
Our eyes stayed fixed on the bag as Max slid his body down the boulder with a groan and took a seat on the ground. The garnets ranged from the size of a Ping-Pong ball—which we knew from experience was HUGE for a gem this rare—to tiny pebbles, but even the pebbles were gorgeous.
“I used to dream of finding one of these when I collected rocks as a kid,” Frank said in awe, eyes fixed on the largest stone. “But I never could have imagined finding any this big.”
“Aleksei calls them Siberian emeralds,” Max said as he massaged his bad leg. “There might be only a handful of them in the entire world, and probably no one except Aleksei has found one in nearly a century.”
I knew from last time that demantoids were one of the rarest precious gems in the world, and the best ones are found almost exclusively in one part of Russia—the Ural Mountains, where Aleksei was from. It wasn’t just the rarity that made demantoids so valuable either. The transparent gemstones were green on the surface, but green was only the beginning.
“ ‘Demantoid’ is derived from the French word for ‘diamond,’ ” Frank said reverently. “But these refract even more light than diamonds do.”
The clouds parted as Frank held up the bag and rays of sunshine burst into the forest, hitting the stones and sending a brilliant rainbow sparkling over us. I’d seen some on our last trip too, but I still couldn’t stop marveling at the gems and the way they put on a zillion-color light show when the sun hit them just so. It was like Frank was holding a bag full of mini magic disco balls in the palm of his hand.
“Something else, aren’t they? The beauty and intricacy of nature never cease to amaze me,” Max said, looking up at the stones from his seat on the ground. “I’m not trying to profit off them. I’m trying to protect them.”
His words snapped me out of my demantoid daze. I wanted to believe Max. Badly. But I couldn’t entirely rule him out as a suspect until we had more information. “From who?”
“I wish I knew,” he sighed. “I was on my way back late at night after checking my trail cameras for mountain lion activity when I realized there was someone in my research station.”
“What did they look like?” Frank urged.
“I didn’t get close enough to find out,” Max said, sounding a little embarrassed. “I was still on the other side of the bridge when I saw the flashlight moving around. It was too dark to make out much more than shadows from that distance. And after what happened to me last time someone snuck in, I wasn’t about to take any chances. I’m afraid I’m not as courageous as you boys.”
“There’s nothing to feel bad about, Doc,” I tried to reassure him. “Having someone stuff you in you in a cabinet and steal your identity tends to leave an impression.”
“And I know for a fact how brave you are,” Frank added. “I wasn’t alone on that raft when it went over the falls.”
“Yeah, and you do spend your free time chasing after mountain lions,” I said. “But just because we think you’re brave doesn’t mean you’re off the hook yet. What happened next?”
“Once I saw whoever it was tearing the place apart, I figured they had to be after the garnets,” he continued. “The press our last little adventure got brought all kinds of thrill seekers and treasure hunters out of the woodwork. They usually just stomp around and make a mess of the woods. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to clean up after them. This was the first time one of them had the audacity to ignore the no trespassing signs I had to put up and actually break in.”
“He wasn’t a big, military-looking dude with a crew cut, was he?” I asked, recalling the description we’d received of the treasure hunter calling himself John Smith.
“I tried looking through my binoculars, but the person was dressed in black and wearing a face mask. They might have been kind of big, maybe. I couldn’t really tell much from that angle.”
“Do you think it could have been Drawes?” asked Frank.
“Drawes,” Dr. K spat. “I wouldn’t put it past him. Whoever it was, they were turning the place upside down looking for something. I hate to think of all the damage they did to my research, but all the equipment is insured. The garnets sure aren’t, though.” He looked at the baggie with the demantoids. “Aleksei showed me where he’d hidden the final stash. The only thing I could think to do was go to the cabin and get them before the burglar could. I’d planned to get the garnets, sleep at the cabin, and get out early the next morning, only…” He paused, giving a pained look at his bad leg.
“Only…?” I prompted.
“Only the trapdoor in the fireplace jammed and I couldn’t get it back open from the inside. I’d trapped myself in Aleksei’s secret bunker.”
“A bunker with only one other exit,” Frank said.
“Aleksei had stocked the cave with food, but all the water jugs had frozen and burst over the winter while he was in prison. It had never occurred to me to replace them. I never figured I’d need a secret hideout. I only had enough water on me to ration for a few days, and then…” He gave a little shudder.
“You jumped.”
“It was the same parachute Aleksei used to bail out when he crashed his plane here to fake his death in the 1980s. I didn’t even know if it still worked,” Max said, cringing. “He kept it in the cave as a backup escape plan if the authorities ever cornered him. He figured he could take out the piton he’d put in the entrance so no one could climb down after him, then take a flying leap to safety. I told him it was a ridiculous plan. He just gave me that wild smile and reminded me that it had been a ridiculous plan involving a parachute that had kept him out of prison for three decades.”
“I like the way the big guy thinks,” I said, earning dubious looks from Frank and Max, who shook his head and continued.
“I would have just used the rope to climb down—that would have been dangerous enough as it was—but the darn thing had rotted away. I put it off for as long as I could until my water ran out. Without water, well, I didn’t know what my odds were of surviving a low-altitude BASE jump with a repacked, vintage parachute, but I figured they were at least better than zero. So I strapped the thing on, got a running start, and…” Dr. K pantomimed leaping off the cliff with his hand. “It’s a miracle I survived. I did bang up my bad leg something fierce when I hit that tree, though.”
Max rapped his knuckles gently against the boulder. “I’ve been hiding out here for a few days, trying to nurse myself back to health so I could make the hike out. It’s not the ritziest hospital room, but I’ve got good cover, easy access to the creek to boil fresh water, and wild edible plants and medicines all around me.”
“Good job staying positive, Dr. K,” Frank complimented him. We both knew from our wilderness training that keeping your spirits up was one of the most important things you could do in a survival situation. They didn’t cover this in wilderness boot camp, but one of the other most important things is not getting caught by a skunky-smelling, gun-wielding gem thief.
“If the trapdoor into Aleksei’s bunker jammed behind you, maybe whoever followed us into the cave got stuck as well,” I said hopefully.
“You didn’t see who it was either, huh?” Max asked.
Frank and I shook our heads.
“You’re the only one who’s had a visual on the suspect,” said Frank.
“I’m not the only one, actually. I don’t think it will do much good because the image is barely more than a shadow, but one of the trail cams I set up to monitor mountain lions picked up something over near Aleksei’s old crash site. This is from a week before I saw my research station getting ransacked.” Dr. K rummaged through his pack as he spoke. “At first I thought it was just a hiker, but I’m not so sure anymore.”
Frank and I hunched down over his shoulders as he pulled out a digital viewer and started fast-forwarding through clips of wildlife passing by a fallen log in the woods.
“I keep trail cameras strapped to trees in cougar-friendly habitats throughout the mountain range. Every time an animal passes within the field of the camera’s motion sensors, it takes a short video clip. I’d been out in the field for over a week collecting the memory cards. Didn’t get any mountain lion footage this time, but I did get this—”
Three more clips of a coyote, a porcupine, and a raccoon flew across the little screen in fast-forward before he hit the play button. The screen was static for a moment, and then a creature’s silhouette passed by through the woods just at the edge of the frame. The clip barely lasted a second, and it was impossible to make out any detail, but one thing was certain: this creature walked on two feet.
“So either that’s Bigfoot, or you may have caught a shot of the perp,” I said. “Can you pause and zoom in?”
It didn’t do much good. The person was at the very edge of the motion sensor’s range, with their back to the camera and obscured by trees. The way they were positioned, it was hard to even get a sense of scale to know how tall they were. It didn’t help that the camera captured the shot in fading evening light. The only real detail you could make out was the faint pattern of camouflage on their clothing.
“The camo could point to the description we received for John Smith,” Frank suggested. “Lots of people wear camouflage in the woods, though.”
“And it could just be a hiker like Dr. K first thought,” I said, frustrated at what looked like another dead end. “Can you play it again?”
“The controls on this aren’t very precise, so it may take me a second to get back to the right spot,” Max said, hitting rewind.
The blurry suspect blurred by in reverse and out of frame. There was a short blip of blank screen before the raccoon sped backward toward the camera, appeared to stop for a few frames to sniff the lens, then zipped out of the picture.
“Oops, went too far,” Dr. K said, hitting the play button. “I get a lot of raccoon shots. They’re about as ubiquitous as mountain lions are rare. That curious little guy stopped by just a minute or two before the person in camo. The video will skip right ahead once it passes.”
The raccoon ambled toward the lens in regular speed, gave it a few sniffs, then moseyed off along the trail.
And that’s when Frank’s and my mouths dropped open. Sure, raccoons may be a dime a dozen in the woods, but raccoons with perfectly round bald patches on their read ends? They tend to be a whole lot rarer.