Nessie hunters were like bad golfers who lose their ball out of bounds, yet always search the most advantageous rough for their shot.

Whatever lurked in Loch Ness might be a semiamphibious species, but it still preferred the deep. Locating a creature in a lake that was twenty-three miles long, a mile wide, and seven-to-eight hundred feet deep was equivalent to finding garter snakes in an Olympic-sized swimming pool filled with black ink. As history attested, it was purely hit-and-miss… mostly miss, especially with the public anticipating glimpses of the monster along the surface.

As a scientist, I needed to narrow those odds considerably by understanding my quarry. To do that, I had to attack the challenge from a completely different angle.

What would Alfred Wallace do?

Rather than focus on locating an elusive and quite mobile creature, I decided to analyze Loch Ness as a whole. Granted, the waterway was a unique body of fresh water, its surface waters running into the North Sea (and perhaps, at one time, its deeper recesses as well) but the Loch was still an isolated ecosystem, supporting a variety of different species. At least one of these, presumably an apex predator or predators, had suddenly changed its behavioral pattern and, as a result, its diet. To me, that meant something within the food chain itself had been disturbed.

The first task would be to figure out what was off-kilter.

The second would be to use this information in order to track down the creature… and find a means to lure it up from the deep.

I spent most of that morning in the village buying supplies, and everywhere I went, people were talking about the monster. Word had spread that two large fishing trawlers were already making their way south through the Moray Firth, while another research vessel was coming north up the Caledonian Canal from Fort William. Later in the day, a tractor trailer loaded with sonar buoys was expected to arrive at the Clansman Hotel, this part of an American expedition funded by AMCO Productions, out of Cleveland.

The circus had officially come to town, but I refused to play the clown.

The "strongman" was awake by the time I returned.

"Whit's a' this then?" True demanded, seeing the brown paper bags in my arms.

"I've decided to resolve this whole Nessie thing, once and for all."

"YES!" He grabbed me beneath my armpits and lifted me to the ceiling. "This is bloody brilliant, Zachary, an' I'm wi' ye every step o' the way. So we'll need a boat then, yeah? I'll ring Brandy first thing an' tell her tae cancel all her tours—"

"No boat."

"No boat?"

"Clues and info first. I want to walk as much of the shoreline of Loch Ness as I can, beginning with the Invermoriston site where that woman was killed."

"Walk the shoreline? Why?"