I buckled my seat belt as Cherry swooshed away, the big engine sucking air and burning tires. Cherry drove like a female version of my partner, Harry Nautilus: with total confidence and less-than-total control. As with Harry, I pulled the belt tourniquet-tight, holding my breath and closing my eyes when the situation warranted.

After fifteen wild minutes, we rounded a bend with tires flinging gravel into the trees. I saw McCoy’s SUV parked beside a Toyota compact with a Transylvania University sticker on the bumper.

“Uh-oh,” Cherry said. “Civilians. Probably saw the coordinates online.”

She pulled a large shoulder bag from the trunk of the cruiser. I offered to carry it but she waved me off. We jogged down the sole path for several hundred feet to a shallow meadow at the base of a cliff. We found McCoy, talking to a young male and female in T-shirts and hiking shorts, she wearing a floppy Tilley hat, he a Cincinnati Reds ball cap. I saw a GPS unit clipped to his belt. The girl was the kind of distraught that shivers, stops, starts shivering again.

“We were looking for a new cache,” the girl said, holding her shoulders like she was hugging herself. “It was on the Gorge-area site. We were looking upstream where the coordinates directed us. But we didn’t see anything. Then we came down here and we-wuh-wuh-wuh … We saw … that thing in the water.”

Her words drowned in a spasm of shivers. McCoy tossed me his GPS. It was a good one, displaying the site in the manner shown on the net:

=(8)=

N XX.XXXXX^o W XXX.XXXXX^o

Eight again, not five. The local coordinates.

I handed the device back. McCoy flicked his eyes toward a line of oaks. Cherry and I headed that way, finding a meandering creek on the far side of the trees, pools separated by shallow, rocky runs, the water maybe a foot in depth. Floating face-down in a pool was a woman’s body. It was slender and well maintained. Strands of false blonde hair drifted in a Medusa circle around the head.

I stepped into the water for a closer look. The victim wore a black leather corset, black boots, a black collar. Hooked to the collar were several yards of blue climbing rope. I held the dripping rope up for display. Cherry grimaced.

We heard voices. Beale and Caudill had arrived. The two cops ran over and looked down.

“Shit,” Beale said, looking disgusted. “Let’s pull it out.”

“Let’s deal with the kids first,” Cherry said. “Get them gone.”

The girl was still speaking, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “No, we j-just saw the coordinates. We were at M-Miguel’s Pizza and Ken was on his laptop. W-we saw a new cache had been added, so we turned on the GPS and went l-looking.”

She dissolved into shivers and tears. I saw Cherry catch Beale’s eye, nod toward the couple. Beale looked back, confused.

“What you want?”

“Get their statements, Sheriff Beale. Did they see anyone else on the way here? Cars, hikers, that type of thing.”

He patted his pockets. “Got something I can write in?”

Caudill said, “There’s a pad in the car, Chief. I’ll go fetch it.”

“Bring me a goddamn pen, too.”

Cherry and I trudged back to the body. She opened the bag and pulled out evidence bags, latex gloves, scene tags, a camera and other necessaries, photographing the scene from every possible angle. We splashed into the creek and wrestled the woman from the water and laid her supine on the ledgerock.

She was a woman who had been attractive while alive. Even at her age - which I guessed as late forties - her body was well-sculpted, slender and heavy-breasted. Her black corset laced through the front, plump white breasts spilling from hard cups. The boots were knee-length, laced. A black leather collar circled her neck, and centering the collar was a stainless steel O-ring. The blue rope was attached to the ring with a carabiner.

“Captive somewhere?” Cherry suggested.

“Looks that way.”

“The boots are maybe three sizes too big,” she said, wiggling the boots as water dripped out. “Plus that corset get-up isn’t laced tight, and doesn’t look like it would. One item’s too small, the other’s too large.”

“You don’t think the boots and boogie gown are hers?”

“No,” Sheriff Beale interrupted from behind us. “Not a chance.”

Cherry and I turned. Beale had finished his note duties and dismissed the kids. “You know the victim, Sheriff?” Cherry asked.

“Tandee Powers. Lives in Hazel Green, not too far from here. Churchy lady. Used to be a teacher who did stuff for orphan kids and that. Took a real pervert to dress her like a whore.”

He looked sick and walked away, acting like he was checking the bushes for clues. We inspected the body, noting some bruising and several deep scratches, but no major wounds. The local ambulance company arrived, ready to transport the body to a nearby funeral home. It needed chilled storage until the Kentucky crime lab could add it to their backlog.

When the body was gone, we scoured the area for evidence. Cherry and I walked with our heads low, studying. Beale and Caudill stomped in circles. McCoy wandered with his GPS unit in hand. I watched him head upstream until he disappeared around a bend. Finding nothing in the vicinity of the body, the four of us trotted after McCoy.

We found him staring into a pool of muddy water, sixty feet long or so, twenty wide. At the downstream end was a rough concrete dam, three feet high, crumbling where it met the shore. In the middle was a horizontal metal wheel, two feet in diameter. The wheel operated the gate, a solid door that controlled water flow.

“Weird,” I said, seeing a small man-made pond in the middle of a thickly forested nowhere, stark rock cliffs rising at our shoulders.

“Not if you know the history,” McCoy said. “Fifty years ago one of the logging companies kept a crew shack by the base of the cliff. This was their swimming hole. I’ve taken a dip here a time or two.” He pointed to the center of the pool. “That’s where the GPS coordinates actually lead, oddly enough.”

“You mean the waypoint is in the pond?” I said.

“Might not mean much. GPS units aren’t accurate to more than a couple dozen feet, the older ones are worse.”

“But the other coordinates were almost dead-on, right? The ones leading to the first bodies?”

He nodded. “Under fifteen feet, all of them. For GPS, that’s an arrow dead-center in a target.”

I looked at the wheel on the dam gate. Wheel and screw rusted. Probably unused in decades. “Let’s see if we can open the gate,” I said to Beale. “Let some water out.”

“Hunh?” Beale said.

“Give it a shot,” Cherry said, suddenly interested.

Beale looked unhappy, but splashed into the eight or so inches of water below the dam and stood beside me, taking one side of the wheel as I grabbed the other. Beale needed a better deodorant. We slammed ourselves into the task, but the wheel was frozen solid with rust.

McCoy appeared, dragging eight feet of rusty railroad track, the small gauge used in logging operations.

“There was a spur track here,” he said, grunting the metal over the ground. “Old rails are still scattered around.”

I saw his intent and helped wedge the rail in the wheel. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” He was talking leverage, and so was McCoy. The ranger stripped off his shirt to keep the rust from smearing his uniform. Though in his early fifties he looked as hard and limber as a top-flight tennis pro.

“Again,” he said, planting his feet against the wet stones. “On three. One, two …”

This time we threw ourselves into the task with several feet of leverage on our side. The wheel made a grating squeal, then began turning, puffs of rust falling away in the breeze. Water trickled from beneath the rising gate, then poured through. We stepped away.