First to Find

by Mark Gessner

  The light from the back door merged in the middle with the light from the front. The curtains were drawn but there was enough light now to see where the humidity and stench were coming from.

  The kitchen: On the table, they were stacked on the yellowed and cracked linoleum floor under the table. In every cabinet, some of which stood open, they were packed full. They were on the counters, on every square inch of counter space, stacked two high, and as deep as the counter. They were lined up on top of the darkened refrigerator, which stood open, unplugged. They were in the refrigerator, on every shelf and in every drawer and compartment. They were in the freezer, in the sink, in the pantry. Most of them were sealed, many were not. One had toppled over on the floor next to the refrigerator, busted glass glinting, the pieces and fragments stuck to a dried puddle on the floor.

  The living room: They were stacked on the coffee table on a scattering of old yellowed newsprint. They were piled next to the couch. There were three on top of the television, and five more sitting on the stand beneath it. They were lined up in rows three, four, and five deep, stacked as many as five high along the wall under the big window. They were sitting like grisly bookends on the bookshelves lining the wall by the door.

  The dining room: The dining room was almost completely filled by an antique Steinway grand which had been meticulously restored. Nothing was stacked on the piano itself, but the baseboards of the room were covered and stacked three and four deep.

  The hallway: There was another row stacked three deep. There was room only to walk through the hall if you were careful. And you wanted to be careful; you wanted to be very careful. Because in the hall, not one of them had any lids.

  The bathroom: The bathroom was a different story. It was empty. Spotless. No half-melted bar of soap, not a dollop of shampoo, not an errant drop of toothpaste stuck to the counter, not so much as a single fleck of beard stubble on the sink, or a hair in the tub drain. The floor tiles were polished white and the grout scrubbed and sealed. The cabinets were bare inside and scrubbed clean. Not even so much as a spider could be found hiding in the corner. A thick layer of dust covered everything, but the bathroom was otherwise as clean and as empty as the summer day in 1941 when it was built.

  With the exception of the bathroom, the house was filled with an assortment of jars, bottles, coffee cans, and glassware, each and every one of them covered in thick dust and each one filled with urine.

  Chapter 61

  ONCE THE FBI LEARNED that there was an interstate spree-murderer on the loose, and especially when the killer might be a urine-hoarding wacko, they were only too happy to take over the case. The Defense Investigative Service turned over all the records they had on Gary Maxwell Navarre from his security clearance application, and the FBI located his fingerprints that had been filed years ago when his clearance was approved.

  Detective Garner was happy to be shut of the case. He never got over that house. He took early retirement from the force the following year.

  The anosmic rookie eventually went back to college and became a software engineer for a small telecom company in Rowlett, Texas. He left his stint with the Fort Worth police off his resume. He didn't ever want to have answer the question, "So why did you leave the force?"

  Chapter 62

  GARY MAXWELL “MAX” NAVARRE became a shadow.

  In the parking lot of the old Home Depot off loop 360 he found a faded 'seventy-three Yamaha RD-350 two-stroke street bike parked in a line of old cars and motorcycles with for sale signs on them. He called the number and waited for the owner. When the owner showed up, Max test-drove the small bike. It idled rough but still had plenty of acceleration. He was looking for reliable transportation, not a project. It was too small for his frame, but the price was right. He didn't ask any questions. After the negotiations were over, he paid a hundred twenty, cash, then both buyer and seller disappeared. The bike was worth four, maybe five hundred. It had to be hot. That night he drove through the parking lot of an all-bills-paid apartment complex off Koenig Lane and swapped plates with a Honda Gold Wing that he found parked under a very weathered canvas tarp in the back of the parking lot near an equipment storage building.

  He rented a room in a cheap hotel in a run-down section of town a couple streets off Lamar. He paid cash by the week in advance. The proprietor was not one to ask questions of a cash customer. Max shaved his head close and grew out his beard, changed out his wardrobe at the local Goodwill store, picked up a nice leather jacket for twenty bucks and a blue bandanna for fifty cents. He sprayed on a new darker skin tone from a bottle of instant tan from Walgreens and purchased some cheap brown contact lenses to disguise his eye color. He looked like an old Mexican biker. He watched the news and he waited.

  From the sidewalk in front of a university hangout coffee shop, Max logged on to the cache-finders.com website, and established a free account. All they needed to know was a name and an email address, and the name didn't even have to be real; it could be faked and the site owners had no way to check. He quickly discovered that there was no means for the system to verify that you actually found a cache before you posted a comment about your find online. They were on the honor system.

  He spent a few hours reading the website, reading the comments and the cache descriptions. He learned about the culture and jargon of geocaching well enough to pass for a cacher online.

  He clicked over to the pages of the most obscure caches in Central Texas and posted a couple dozen of them with bogus found comments, back-dating them to give his player the appearance of a yearlong history. He chose caches where the owner had gotten tired of playing the game and hadn't logged in to the site for a while.

  After building his player's fake geocaching history, he spent about fifteen minutes more on the Lower Colorado River Authority Parks website, browsing through descriptions of parks out west of Mansfield Dam, west of Denzer's place.

  Chapter 63

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Navarre rode up to the Tiny's Electronics superstore up on the Mo-Pac loop. The store, one of two dozen in a national chain, packed a hundred thousand square feet with everything electronic: batteries, cables, electronic parts, test equipment, phones, hard drives, software, calculators, radios, DVDs, appliances, stereos, and everything else you could possibly apply electrical power to. He wondered why it was called Tiny's. It was bigger than a Wal-Mart supercenter inside. The place was staffed with hordes of teenaged clerks in shirts and ties, supposedly trained and expert on all things electronic.

  He needed to buy a GPS receiver. He made his way to the correct area of the store and faced a wall of product boxes. There was a display area with plastic mockups on security tethers, so that you could get a feel for the size and heft of the item without opening the box. Max looked over the lineup and selected the cheapest one. When he found the shelf where the boxes were, there was only one left in this model and it looked as if it had spent a couple hours in a chimp cage. It was shrink wrapped and there were some thick plastic straps wrapped around the box to keep it from being opened in the store.

  "Can this model be used for Geocaching?" asked Max.

  "Geocaching? I'm not sure what that is. I'm new here; I don't know much about these units," stammered the clerk. If you spent more than a minute looking at items in any given department, a clerk would swoop down on you to aid in your purchasing experience. Because there were so many of them, they usually didn't have far to swoop, and because they were sent out onto the floor with little training, they usually couldn't offer much aid.

  "Why's this box all mangled?" Max asked.

  "It's been returned," said the clerk, a caffeinated high school kid who was only working here because he needed the money to add neon ground effects to his lowrider pickup truck.

  "You guys sell returned shit?" asked Max.

  "Our technicians check it out in our service lab and if it is still good, we repackage it and it goes back on the shelf." said the clerk, crossing his arms defensively.

  "Is tha
t legal?" asked Max.

  "Yes," said the clerk, "and the items carry the full manufacturer's warranty."

  "Why should I pay full price for something if it's been returned?" asked Max.

  "That's store policy. Would you like to speak with a manager?" asked the clerk, pointing toward the front of the store. Getting a little nervous now.

  Over the gasped protests of the clerk, Max whipped out a six-inch hunting blade and sliced off the plastic band, ripped through the shrink-wrap, and opened the box. The unit had some finger smudges on the display but the clerk swore it still worked. Another clerk came over to help the first one. They wouldn't let Max actually power it up though, until after he'd bought it. The second clerk carried the opened package up to the counter and waited with Max in line until a cashier was available. The store had a bank of no less than thirty numbered checkout stations all arranged in a line fronting an expansive office area containing the store managers, filing cabinets, and a mammoth metal vault. Max threw a pack of AA batteries on the counter next to the GPS and pushed a few bills toward the clerk.

  He screamed out highway 620 on the bike with his purchase tucked in his backpack. Even with the rough idle, the RD-350 was still a jet fighter on wheels. If you were too quick with the throttle, it was a jet fighter on one wheel.

  Just southwest of Lakeway, he spotted a sign for the new nature park. He slowed the bike, parked it in a handicapped spot on the brand-new asphalt parking lot, and then hiked in to check the place out. The park was so new that it had been posted off-limits to visitors until funding could be secured from the state legislature to staff it. Hiking was allowed by appointment only, but as there was no one there to staff it, they couldn't really enforce that.

  Twenty percent of Texas is classified as Karst area. Karst is a geological formation created when bedrock partially dissolves in water. Sinkholes, caves, and other features form from the voids in the rock. Some of the caves are huge, measuring hundreds of feet long, and up to a hundred feet deep. The walls are razor sharp and jagged, made of dolomitic limestone, otherwise known as Texas holey rock.

  Navarre wandered around a quarter mile or so into the park and found what he needed, just as described on the park website. He powered up the GPS unit, then quickly marked the coordinates.

  Chapter 64

  www.cache-finders.com Geocache Listing

  Karst Area - Normal Cache Type

  by RD350_Rider [email this user]

  Texas, USA

  [click to download geographic coordinates and hints]

  It's a beautiful new park, just waiting for someone to come discover it! Who will be first?

  The cache is a 50-caliber ammo box located within the boundaries of the new state park out southwest of Lakeway. Initial contents include some beanie babies, a few die-cast metal toy cars, a mystery novel, three sets of marble knick-knacks, and the FTF prize -- Get This -- A genuine $100 value quarter-ounce 22 carat gold Krugerrand coin! I've gotten so much out of Geocaching over the last year, that it's time for payback. Enjoy the hunt!

  Cache Visitor Comments:

  (0 comments total - This cache hasn't been found yet!)

  Did you Find the Cache? Add your own comment! [click here]

  Chapter 65

  KURT SIPPED HIS COFFEE and clicked through on the new email message. He was drinking Java Judi's brand now, out of a Java Judi's brand French press. Seems everything in his life now was Java Judi's brand. Judi had gotten him a new four-cup French press and a couple pounds of organic coffee as a homecoming present after he got out of the hospital.

  Judi was sleeping at Kurt's place almost every night now, not exactly moved in, but they both knew it wasn't far off. She just couldn't drink the store brand coffee, so she'd moved in her own coffee service. One morning she'd shown Kurt how to operate the French press and he'd gotten pretty good at it. It wasn't difficult, and he couldn't believe the difference in the taste. He wasn't sure if it was the beans or the metal screen filter in the French press itself, but something was wonderfully different. His old coffee tasted like just a pencil sketch outline of what coffee could really taste like, if only prepared right. After two cups of French press coffee, he'd tossed his Mr. Coffee on the Goodwill donation pile.

  Judi wasn't officially moved in yet, but her dog Nipper was living here now. His arthritis had gotten so bad that he couldn't make the three-story climb up to her apartment anymore. Kurt liked the dog despite his knee-licking fetish, and happily offered the old guy room and board. Pokey was pissed, but then it was a cat's job to be pissed sometimes.

  The new email message was a new cache posting. There'd been quite a few new cachers joining the sport lately, and many were just getting around to posting their first caches. The system could be set up to send you an email message any time a new cache appeared within a certain distance of your home coordinates. Kurt had a thirty-mile radius set up in his preferences, so he got quite a few of these messages.

  As he read the message he slapped out a rhythm on the sides of his legs. Must have been an extra nervous system boost from the organically grown caffeine, or maybe it was the joy of surviving the attack last month and living to fall in love with Judi, or the promise of getting a big fat reward check the minute they caught that Navarre bastard, or maybe it was something else. He didn't even realize he was doing it. Pokey took the rhythm to be a sign that Kurt wanted to pet her and she came over and rubbed up against his ankles. He reached down and picked up the cat and put her in his lap. She climbed up on the desktop instead, and walked back and forth in front of his keyboard and screen. Nipper was sacked out in the livingroom.

  The message was about a new cache, 'Karst Area.' It was nearby. There were few caches out in Lakeway, and Kurt liked it when someone posted a new one, especially if it was in a park he didn't already know about. This new park was a complete surprise to him. The cache even had a hundred dollar gold piece in it for the FTF prize. He wasn't usually interested in being the first to find, but in the case of a hundred bucks in gold, he'd have to make an exception.

  He saddled up the Expedition, tossed a couple spare AA batteries in his fanny pack, checked to be sure that all the doors were locked, armed his home alarm system, and hit the highway. He'd become cautious since the attack.

  The coordinates pointed him only four miles away down highway 620, but those were miles as the crow flies, what some geocachers were calling 'crowms' (pronounced like "chromes"). Kurt thought that word was stupid and refused to use it. Figuring in the curves around the south side of the lake, it could be as far as ten miles on the ground. He'd be cashing in that Krugerrand in no time, assuming no one else got there first. He'd have the rest of the day to locate a reputable coin dealer and shop the coin around for the best deal.

  When Kurt pulled up to the park entrance, he was disappointed but not surprised to see another SUV parked there with geocaching bumper stickers on the back. Halfway out the gravel trail to the cache site, he met Nicholas, the older of the Krager twins.

  "I looked for a good half hour, but man those coordinates suck. I didn't see a thing out there but cactus and rock. But I've got to be at work by ten thirty, so I can't hang out to help you anymore. Fuckin newbies," said Nicholas, kicking a small chunk of holey rock off the trail. Nicholas, who refused to let anyone call him Nick, was twenty-three. He was deeply tanned with long black hair pulled into a ponytail, rippling with muscles underneath his tie-dye T-shirt. He could have probably been a soap opera star if he hadn't been so good at programming embedded sixteen-bit microcontrollers in assembly language.

  "Yeah, that's probably one good reason why I don't try so hard to be first to find," said Kurt. "I like to let the others work the bugs out of a new cache placement, then I'm sure to waste less time on bad coordinates or whatever."

  "Yeah, me too, but there's that Krugerrand this time," said Nicholas, "I wanted that quarter ounce Krugerrand for my coin collection. I think it may be uncirculated."

  "Yeah, that's why I'm here," laug
hed Kurt. "But I'm not a coin collector, I just need the money. I'll be happy to sell it to you if I find it."

  Nicholas agreed to the deal, and then instructed Kurt not to touch the coin because it would be worth more if left in its plastic sleeve. Kurt got a few tips from Nicholas on places where he'd already searched, so he didn't waste any time looking there. The descriptions were all pretty vague though, since the area was all the same, just rocks, stinging nettles, and prickly pears.

  He'd be out here awhile.

  After forty-five minutes of beating the prickly pears, Kurt was about ready to give up. His fingertips smarted from being pricked by cactus spikes, his socks were full of sticker burrs, he had a bloody gash on one shin from when he slipped on a moss-covered rock, and he was starting to sweat. He had left his water bottle back in the truck. He thought about retrieving it a couple times during the search, but he knew that if he went back to the parking lot he'd probably just give up and lose his shot at the hundred bucks in gold. How it would hack him off later to learn that Maari or Jason or one of the Krager twins or someone else with a job had found the hundred-dollar Krugerrand when he so desperately needed it and had all day to find it.