"That makes sense," Hannah said. "But how does that help us? Are you suggesting that a species could have survived unseen for thousands of years?"
"No," Grand said. "I'm just thinking out loud, looking for new ideas, directions."
Grand turned to the keyboard and checked for the results of the gas chromatography tests on the rock scrapings he'd taken. The computer at the lab told him the tests were still working. He sat in silence, staring at the DNA maps, doing what a man does if he hasn't had an epiphany in the form of a vision. Wrestling with science and spirit.
"The Flintstones," Hannah said softly.
"Excuse me?"
"First instincts," she said. "I always thought they were a little crazy but now I'm not so sure. Let me ask you something. Forget about it being 'impossible' for the moment. Is there any way you can imagine that one of these saber-toothed tigers might have survived?"
"Any way I can imagine it?"
"Yes," Hannah said. "Like they do in Scotland with the Loch Ness Monster. Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster?"
"I'm not convinced that it exists."
"But you don't rule out the possibility."
"No."
"Or the Abominable Snowman."
"Where's this going?" Grand asked.
"What if we start from that same place with the saber-tooths?" Hannah asked. "With a possibility, however remote. When I toured Loch Ness, the guide on the boat said things like, 'Ages ago the Loch was closed off from the North Sea and a family of prehistoric animals could have been trapped here… and so on and so forth.' Assume we have a saber-toothed tiger. It certainly seems to fit the profile of our killer. How did it get here?"
Grand shook his head. "First of all, any species with just one living example couldn't survive. There would have to be parents and offspring."
Hannah shrugged. "If we can allow one saber-toothed tiger then we can allow two. Just like in Loch Ness."
"I suppose so," Grand said. "But even if there were a pair of specimens and they lived in caves and only came out at night, there would be some evidence of habitation. Feces. Carcasses of prey."
"Maybe they live deep in the caves or defecate in underground streams," Hannah said. "Maybe they bury the bones like dogs or maybe they eat the bones as well as the meat."
"That's a lot of maybes, Hannah."
"I know," she admitted. "I don't like them either. But let's keep going. How much would these creatures eat?"
"A modern lion, in captivity, needs about twenty-five pounds of raw meat each day," Grand said. "In the wild, where it needs energy to hunt, a lion consumes thirty to forty pounds of meat a day. And that's a four- or five-hundred pound animal, six or seven feet long. Smilodon fatalis weighed from fifty to one hundred pounds more than that on average."
As they were talking, the gas chromatography analysis of the cave scrapings arrived.
Grand immediately opened the file to have a look while Hannah tapped her leg anxiously. She was as intense a person as Grand had ever met. Even in the middle of this-or because they were in the middle of it?-he found it invigorating.
"Talk to me," Hannah said. "What have we got?"
"Another piece to the puzzle that doesn't seem to fit," Grand said. "The rock scrapings from the cave where I found the hair were laced with tephra residue-volcanic ash. There are also significant traces of silicate glass, sulfur, chlorine, aluminum, and sodium and other minerals that, according to the report, are not indigenous to this region."
"Translation, please."
"The mountain passageways could be vents for local volcanic activity or for volcanoes that erupted hundreds of miles away," Grand said. "That would account for some of those elements."
"They got blasted here."
"Right. What I can't understand is the presence of minerals I've only seen in artifacts from the far north."
"Which means?"
Grand sat back and folded his arms. "Stone and wood that have been buried in glaciers become permeated with the waters that comprise the ice," he said. "They have a distinctive chemical signature. We didn't have glaciers this far south, but what we've got here are the same chemical signatures."
"Maybe the chemicals were blasted down here too, carried by a volcanic explosion," Hannah said.
"That's possible," Grand agreed. "But it would be -"
He stopped as he thought of the two paintings on the cave wall. A volcano of fire and a mountain of ice. But not a mountain.
A glacier.
Hannah's cell phone rang and she reached into her bag to answer it. As she talked, Grand just sat there looking at the screen.
All of this was an academic exercise being performed by tired, stymied minds. As much as Grand had always loved comic books and fairy tales, he never confused them with reality. Even though one of his favorite stories in Egyptian mythology was about the phoenix reborn from ashes, myths were fiction. For all of their power and portent, even the Chumash tales of animal spirits were fantasies. Besides, the leap required-from feeling some kind of spiritual presence in a cave to having an animal spirit take form and kill-was a large one. Even when Joseph Tumamait knew it, absolutely. And Hannah's reasoning, while fascinating, had more holes than Painted Cave Road.
Hannah folded the cell phone and put it back in her bag. "That was my managing editor. She just intercepted a radio broadcast from the communications officer at the California Highway Patrol dispatch center in Ventura. The call was to all cars in the area of Summerland. We appear to have more missing persons."
"Where?"
"At the beach not far from Toro Canyon," Hannah said. "A motorist saw a wrecked catamaran and stopped. There were no bodies, no remains. Just bloody sand and something else."
"What?"
"Footprints from some kind of animal," Hannah said as she shouldered her bag and rose. "Big ones."
Chapter Thirty-One
"With any luck we can get there before Gearhart does," Hannah said. "The Wall is going to meet us there." Grand was driving as they sped along 217 headed toward 101. Hannah was on an open phone line with Karen, who promised to provide her with any updates. Unlike the sheriff's office, the highway patrol didn't have a policy of maintaining public radio silence while en route to crime or accident sites. Since a patrol car had only just arrived, no news had come in.
As they reached the highway and headed southwest, Hannah kept a lookout for Gearhart's black-and-white. He might have been up in the mountains, delaying his arrival. Grand's mind was on the paintings he'd seen in the upper caves.
A volcano and a glacier, he thought, with Chumash gods inside of them. A snake symbolizing the inner earth, a dolphin representing the sea-water. According to the geological record, it was uncommon but not unknown for volcanoes to erupt beneath glaciers. It had happened to Mount Rainier in Washington forty thousand years ago, and in several regions well south of that.
Suppose a volcano erupted beneath a glacier in the American Northwest. Suppose the force was so extraordinary that the blast broke into fault lines and followed them south, deep into Southern California. Extreme heat and intense cold together, burning new vents in the mountains, sealing other vents. An eruption so cataclysmic that it inspired a Chumash shaman who may have witnessed it to record the event in two oversized images in a cave.
But then where did the lower cave come in, the white icons?
They reached the site twenty minutes after leaving the university. Two highway-patrol cars were parked between 101 and the train tracks that ran along the coast. The Wall's car was already there; Gearhart's was not.