A lay-by, camping area, and the entire southwestern tip of the Moriston Estuary into Loch Ness had been cordoned off by the police. Villagers were being lined up along the A82 and questioned. An ambulance was pulled off to the side of the highway, its driver standing on the roof of his vehicle, trying to see beyond the dense woods.

We parked in the lay-by where a half dozen witnesses were giving statements to police. I was escorted past a sobbing man in his late forties and two shocked teenage girls to a picnic table that served as a central information point.

A tall man with brown hair and athletic build looked up from his notepad as we approached. "You're Wallace? Michael Gajewski. I'm a scene o' crime officer wi' the Northern Constabulary in Inverness. Tell me, Doctor, have you had breakfast?"

"No."

"Good. Come wi' me."

I followed him through the campsite, then along a narrow wooded trail that descended towards the Loch. "What's this all about, Officer?"

"I'm hopin' you'll tell me."

We approached a small clearing where a police photographer was taking pictures. Garbage was strewn everywhere, apparently from a heavy trash barrel lying on its side.

"Oh, Jesus!"

There was little left of the victim to identify. Blood was splattered everywhere, on the ground, across the leaves, the barks of trees, the picnic table… it was as if a dozen gallons of scarlet paint had been set in the clearing and detonated.

The photographer aimed his camera at the lower branches of a fir tree, where the remains of a left arm, severed above the elbow, hung from its perch. More human shrapnel had been tossed into the underbrush. There were fingers, an ankle and foot, still wrapped in a wool sock, scraps of a navy sweatshirt, divots of human hair patches of torn-away flesh.

I turned away, sickened.

"A' right, Dr. Wallace, ye've seen what ye've seen. So tell me, are we dealin' wi' an animal or a lunatic?"

"God, I don't know, I'm not a forensic specialist. If it was an animal, it looks more like the work of a grizzly than anything living in Loch Ness."

"It's no' a bear. Haven't been bears in the Highlands for a thousand years."

I took a deep breath, fighting the nausea. The air held a strange raw scent, like the insides of a rotted intestine. "What is that odor?"

"Again, we were hopin' you'd know. Smells like bad anchovies."

"Or raw sewage. And what happened to the rest of the victim's body?"

"We don't know. We're still searchin' the area, an' a team's on their way tae dredge the shoreline. 'Course, if it ate her—"

"Ate her? Officer, to cause this much widespread damage to an adult human being, the animal, assuming it was an animal, would have to be huge, at least fifty feet, with a bite radius larger than a great white shark's."