The Ridge

“To see what, unchanging images of the woods at night?” Abel asked.

“The infrared lights were in the top of the lighthouse, and that’s where he shot himself. Maybe there’s video of it.”

“And you want to watch that little snuff film?”

Kimble looked at him, remembering Wyatt’s voice coming at him on the dark highway. If the victim were somehow compelled…

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I ought to.”

13

THE MOVE WAS GOING far more smoothly today. The rain had let up, the cats were agreeable, and Wes was his usual precise and competent self, although unusually quiet, often seeming lost in his own thoughts. Audrey watched the old preserve empty out, this place where she had met her husband, fallen in love, and spent such happy years. Everyone from friends and family to complete strangers had urged her not to allow herself to feel obligated to follow through with the relocation when David died. She understood their reasoning: it was his passion project, not hers. What they didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, was that the cats were all she had left of David. They had no children—that part of the five-year plan would never be completed—and now the remnants of her marriage were memories and sixty-seven exotic cats rescued from a variety of terrible circumstances. They were the legacy. And, oh, how he had loved them.

She’d had other options. One of David’s dear friends, a man named Joe Taft, ran a cat rescue center in Indiana. He’d been David’s mentor, and he’d offered to take the animals, all of them.

Audrey couldn’t agree to it. Canceling on the relocation would have been the ultimate failure to David, who’d been determined not to be chased away, although plenty of attempts had been made. There were multiple reasons for the move, but they all boiled down to one fundamental issue: proximity to people. Ironic, of course, because that problem was the reason all of these cats needed care to begin with. The age-old territory battle never stopped, and the cats would never win. When the preserve had first been built, the locals had regarded it with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, but there’d been hardly any objection. Over the following three years, though, development had overtaken the nearby fields. First came a seventy-home complex called Eden Estates, then talk of a golf course. The good people of Eden Estates moved into their homes, heard the occasional cougar scream or lion’s roar in the night, and began to fear for their children. Complaints began, alleging that the rescue preserve was too close to residential property and the cats presented a danger. True to form in the human-animal history, nobody seemed concerned with the idea that the cats had been there first.

Audrey’s legal background had a real use then, as she defended the preserve, pointing out that no cat had ever escaped from the property and no human had ever been bitten or clawed or hurt in any way, but even as she was making the arguments, David was eyeing new locations. He wanted space and he wanted distance from people. They found plenty of both at Blade Ridge.

Now all of his cats were there. Well, all except for Ira. He’d be moved alone.

There were dozens of cats on the preserve that nobody cared about, and then there was Ira, the subject of intense debate, his photographs and vital statistics being shipped back and forth from cat experts around the globe. The reason: he was living, breathing proof that the mountain lion of so many legends existed. While the term black panther was tossed about casually by the public, it was inaccurate. There were melanistic jaguars who exhibited a genetic quirk that turned their fur black—or, rather, black on black, since the cats were spotted—but no proof existed for a black North American cougar.

Until Ira.

And he’d come to the preserve of his own accord.

They’d been in operation for five weeks when he made his first appearance, and Wesley had been the only one to spot him. Even David had scoffed, sure that Wes was seeing things, but their manager was adamant: a cougar had come down out of the hills and surveyed the cages. A black cougar. The kind that didn’t exist.

For a time Audrey had believed Wes was enjoying a practical joke. But as the man spent more and more time in the woods around the preserve, leaving food bait behind and trying to rig a trap camera to obtain evidence of the creature, she realized he was serious, and she worried about what it meant. There was no such thing as what he’d claimed to have seen, and still he pursued it with absolute conviction. It was disturbing to watch.

And then, nine days after he’d first spotted the cat, Wesley wheeled it into the preserve in a transport cage. The cat had entered, he said, and then chosen to ignore the bait that was inside. The guillotine gate hadn’t been tripped by his entrance, though; he’d somehow gracefully avoided triggering it. Rather than retreat, he remained inside and watched Wesley as if daring him to come close enough to lower the gate himself.

“I had a moment of doubt,” Wes admitted.

He’d done it, though. Approached and lowered the gate, and for a moment the cat could have struck, but he did not. Then the gate was down and he was trapped and the Kentucky preserve had the only melanistic cougar in recorded captivity.

David considered that a stroke of luck unlike any other in his life—Thanks a lot, Audrey remembered telling him dryly when he’d informed her of that news. He believed the cougar had been drawn out of the deep woods by the presence of the other cats, by curiosity over his own kind. Wes never seemed convinced of that; cougars were not pack animals, they were isolated, territorial creatures. He would grant David the animal’s curiosity, but he didn’t believe the cat wanted anything to do with his peers, either—a belief that was rapidly borne out by Ira’s behavior. He was surprisingly docile around people, but he demanded solitary confinement. Many of the cats were happy to socialize with the others. Ira wanted his own space.

The chaos built quickly. David’s fellow experts disagreed at first, claiming that Ira was the product of crossbreeding, but DNA tests supported Audrey’s husband: Ira was a North American puma, or cougar, or mountain lion. Wes had disregarded the controversy—Told you from the start he was a mountain lion, he’d said, and then gone on about his business. The cat, everyone except Wesley agreed, could certainly not have been wild. He was too good with people, too comfortable. Clearly he’d escaped from some private owner, and clearly that person had been involved in something illegal, or he would have reported him missing. Would have reported him, period.

Wes disagreed, but he didn’t like to be in the spotlight, and he refused to give any interviews when curious media folks came calling. David handled that. All Wes would say was, “The cat came out of the woods. Right now, that’s all you know. Don’t presume a damn thing when that’s all you know.”

It was, though, the most uncertain Audrey had ever seen him with a cat. Wes spent hours studying Ira, and she was convinced that he was wondering the same thing: where in the world had he come from? If he was wild, why didn’t he act like it? And if he was not, then how was he an unknown?

They researched for endless hours and came up with nothing but legends. According to Native American folklore, the black cat was a symbol of death. According to scientific history, the black cat didn’t exist. Put the two together and you generated a lot of excitement.

“He’s ready to go, you can tell,” Wes said when they arrived back at the now-empty preserve to collect the cougar. “We’ve moved everyone else, and it’s making him edgy, being the only cat left. He didn’t like watching the others go away. He’s ready to see where we’re taking them.”

Audrey hadn’t been able to perceive the slightest change in the cat’s countenance, but she knew better than to argue with Wes. If he suggested what a cat was feeling, he was probably right. He seemed to live inside their strange feline brains. It was, frankly, a source of irritation for her. In the months since David had died, she’d tried to think of the cats as her own, but at her core she knew that they did not trust her in the way they had trusted David, trusted Wes. Could she have even handled them without Wes, could she have kept the preserve going at all? It was a question she didn’t like to ponder, because she felt the answer was all too obvious.

She looked at him now and nodded, recalling again the intensity of David’s excitement upon finding Ira. He had knelt in front of the cage, staring in at the black cat with a wide smile, and said, “They’re real. Every wildlife biologist in the country would tell you that if they ever existed, they don’t anymore. But you’re looking at one. And you know what else? This cat’s roots don’t go back to Africa or the Amazon. They go back to these mountains. I can feel it, can’t you? Look at him: he belongs to this place.”

Now, months removed, Audrey watched the cat swish his long black tail and nodded. “Let’s get him out