Chasing Fate (Sentinel & Guide)

Chapter 49

[[These next few chapters are interludes to get to know all the clues in the case. I'll try to keep them short :) ]]

Anton Ricin stared glumly at the file in his hands, another cold case. One that had been hard closed for almost four years.  Another missing person's case, presumed dead or run off to live in Canada. Now he had printouts from Forensics with samples of curly reddish brown hair matching those of the missing Farin Godsby. It had taken three weeks for forensics to run through the national database to find information. 

They'd been lucky the killer had a sick sense of trophy keeping. The intact hair was the best they could get. Beneath the tree were tons of bones, mostly animal. It had taken Tang and Santos the entire day to find the shards and scraps of human bone beneath the tree. There was nothing whole. The body had been butchered post mortem, not even leaving a dental record. There were bits of rib, femur and hip, but no skull or other clear identifiers. Farin had broken his arm as a boy, having it set with pins.  The killer had obviously tried to make his remains as anonymous as possible 

 They'd be lucky to extract anything from the bones, but the approximate age and height of what they could model matched the dead boy. 

Age of death approximately 19 years old. Age of disappearance around two years prior. Farin Godsby had disappeared from church camp four years ago. According to witnesses he simply never came back after running off on a geocache hunt. The park rangers and police had of course turned the place upside down, but it was bear country and they didn't even find his backpack. 

Devastated by the incident, the church camp took their activities elsewhere, and his parents became foresst safety advocates. It had all been summed up to be just that, an unfortunate accident that befell a rambunctious young guide. 

Now the file in front of him told a different story. 

The bucket they'd found had indeed been a geocache. However it only took a ten minute search to show that the original cache coordinates and the ones they'd used to find it were off. The website was run by an active caching group with friendly moderators who were very fastidious about keeping up with the deposits. 

This cache had been marked as missing four years ago, about the same time as Farin's disappearance. Nothing was thought of it, caches went missing all the time, by purpose or by accident. The cheif depositer hadn't bothered relisting the area because of the news of bear attacks in that park. It had fallen into obscurity in the community. Of course, in a world of usernames and avatars, no one knew any kid named Farin Godsby except as the victim of an unfortunate forest accident. 
 
The geocache bucket was unremarkable. Inside was a scrapbook and an instant film camera attached to solar batteries. The lid of the cache had a 360 degree photo of the original location of the cache, a much safer outcrop a bit further along the ridge. The scrapbook had photos of the visitors to the cache, a few per year dating back almost twelve years before finally stopping with Farin. 

That page  sat on his desk now. The scrap book page was decorated with a fruit sticker and the aluminum foil from several gum wrappers. The kid had obviously spent some  time on it. The photo in the center showed a lanky boy on the back end of puberty smiling wide with a peace sign in front of the bucket. Farin was a handsome kid, with a sharp jaw, sun tanned skin and piercing hazel eyes that probably made him pretty popular in high school even if he'd not yet grown into his ears. 

He appeared to be trying to grow a scraggly beard, the reddish brown strands trying their best to cover his chin, but as with most teens, it wasn't much. Most interestingly, his hair was short, buzzed nearly bald. Not long enough to run fingers through, not long enough to wrap around tree branches. 

On the reverse side of the page was a note to the other geocachers in a semi-legible chicken scrawl:

"July 23, 20XX 
Hello traveler! 
This is my first geocache, exciting right? I want to tell you about this beautiful view not too far from here. I'm glad I found it. If you turn south and walk about a half mile down the ridge, then go north, you'll find a little overlook. You can see the whole valley from there. It might be gone one day though, landslides could rip it off at any time. I hope I get to see it again. 

I don't know though. I'm out here because I wanted to do one last fun thing before i get sent to the Institute. I just got my test results back. It turns out I'm a guide?!  I hope I find a sentinel that's cool enough to go caching with me. If not, I'll run away from home! ;) 

My token is the camp wristband i made when i was ten. I hope it brings you good luck like it did for me!

Keep Searching,
FARIN WAS HERE!"