Everyone believed the bear

Three bodies in two weeks, and nobody was paying attention. The news kept calling them animal attacks. Every outlet—local, national, it didn't matter—was telling the same story, like somebody had handed them a script. Bear sighting. Stray dogs. Something got loose. People believed it because what was the other option? Admitting that something was out there killing people and nobody knew what? A bear was easier to explain but the truth was always messier. I knew something was wrong from the start. Five years in this job had taught me to trust my instincts, especially when the facts didn't match the story people were trying to sell. Something about the whole thing smelled like a cover-up, and I couldn't ignore it. My name is Iris, and letting things go isn't really something I do. Tom, my editor, means it as a complaint when he says it. My friends do too, but it's also the reason I still have a job, so I'm not apologizing for it. Three victims. Marcus Chen, thirty-two, found in the park near his apartment. Jennifer Walsh, twenty-eight, behind the community centre. David Torres, thirty-five, by the river walk. The wounds were what got me. They were deep, yes, but too clean and precise, almost as if someone had done it carefully and then stepped back to decide whether it looked enough like an animal attack. I started pushing, but Tom told me to drop it. The police said they had everything under control, while the council insisted there was no pattern connecting the deaths. Nobody would look me directly in the eye when they said any of it. So, obviously, I kept going. I already knew what was coming when Tom told me a new reporter had been assigned to the story. His name was Silas, and he'd been transferred from an upstate paper to work the investigation with me. "You need someone to keep you honest," Tom said without looking up from his desk. He meant someone to slow me down. I didn't argue. I went back to my desk, already thinking about how to stay one step ahead of him. He showed up on Wednesday. I heard about him before I saw him because that's how newsrooms worked. Everyone talked before anyone knew anything, and everyone seemed to have the same opinion. Something was off about him. Nobody could explain what. I barely paid attention. New people always arrived with rumours. Then he walked past my desk. I looked up. He was tall, with dark hair and a dark shirt. Tom introduced him, and Silas gave the room a quick nod before coming over to my desk. "Iris, this is Silas. You'll both be working the animal attack story." Silas looked at me. Then his eyes dropped to the crime scene photographs. "Silas," he said. "Iris." I stayed where I was. I didn't offer my hand. "You've jumped into a complicated one." "I don't mind complicated." He pulled over a chair and sat beside my desk. "What have you got?" I spread the file across the desk, laying out the crime scene photographs, witness statements, and autopsy reports. "Animal attacks," I said, tapping one of the photographs. "That's the official line. But look at these. Same depth, same position, all three victims. That's not random. Someone did this on purpose and tried to make it look natural." Silas went through the photographs without saying much. His eyes moved from the wounds to the dates beneath them. "Anyone else know you think this?" "Tom thinks I'm chasing ghosts." "But you're not." I looked at him. "No," I said quietly. "I'm really not." He placed the photographs back on the desk. "Show me where it happened." We started with the park where Marcus Chen had been found. It looked ordinary enough. Trees, a walking path, a small pond where people jogged every morning. Nothing about the place suggested someone had died there. The police tape still fluttered between the trees even though the scene had already been cleared. We ducked underneath it and headed toward the spot where Marcus had been found. I checked the ground, the trees, and the path leading away from the scene while Silas searched the other side of the clearing. Then I spotted something. "Look." I pointed toward the trunk of a large oak. There were claw marks in the bark, far higher than they should have been. The wood around them was freshly torn, pale beneath the dark surface of the trunk. "Too deliberate," I said. "And too high." Silas looked at the marks. "Could be a lot of things." "Then tell me what kind of animal leaves marks that high." He didn't answer. The second scene gave us almost the same thing, and the third wasn't any different. The same strange marks appeared around each location, and I took pictures of them before adding everything to my notes. By the time we reached the river where David Torres had died, daylight was beginning to disappear. I was going through interview lists and timelines when I realized Silas had stopped responding. He was staring at the water and not the crime scene. The river. "What?" I asked. "Be careful with this one." I frowned. "What does that mean?" He turned back toward the river. "Some stories aren't worth finding." I gave him a look. "That's never stopped me." He didn't answer. I watched him for another second before closing my notebook. He hadn't reacted normally at any of the crime scenes, and now he was warning me away from the one place that seemed to bother him. I went home telling myself he was being dramatic. I didn't believe it for a second. I couldn't stop thinking about Silas after I got home. He had looked at those crime scenes like he'd seen something there before, and the way he'd told me to be careful kept bothering me. So I called him but there was no response. I tried again, but this time his phone was switched off. That was strange enough, but then I remembered the file we'd taken from the river scene. I pulled it from my bag and started going through it again, looking for anything we'd missed. I went through the autopsy report first, then the witness statements, then the photographs. That's when I found one I hadn't seen earlier. I pulled it freely. The river was in the background, and several people stood around the area where David Torres had been found. Then I saw him. Silas. He was standing in the background. I turned the photograph over. There was a date written on the back. I checked it twice before looking at Silas's face again. The photograph had been taken years before he joined the paper.