The Naturalist (The Naturalist Series Book 1)

by Andrew Mayne

  “He’s been very cooperative.”

  “Good. Dr. Cray, if you can continue to cooperate, this will all be over in a little while.”

  There is absolutely nothing reassuring about the way she says that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SAMPLE

  I’m a scientist. I observe. I analyze. I make guesses. I test them. I may be intelligent, but I’m never truly in the moment.

  As a kid reading comics, I wanted to be Batman, the Dark Knight detective, but the character I had the most in common with was the Watcher, the bald, toga-wearing being who showed up in Marvel comics and just . . . watched.

  Right now I’m watching my life like the rise-and-fall flow of a sequence of numbers on my computer screen as I search for a correlation.

  Detective Glenn, the man who found me at the motel, is sitting across from me. We’re having a perfectly ordinary conversation. We avoid the obvious questions, like why I have plastic bags over my hands.

  I don’t think I was technically arrested. As far as I can tell, I agreed to all of this. Not all at once, but incrementally. I think this is what they mean when they say someone was held for questioning. The cuffs came off the moment Glenn sat me down at the conference-room table, but the bags remain taped to my wrists. I’m clearly a specimen.

  Glenn is so calm and disarming, I forget from time to time how I got here. The handcuffed trip in the back of a police cruiser. The guns pointed in my direction. The angry, disgusted looks for which I have no explanation.

  I study Glenn as he observes me between polite exchanges about Montana weather and Texas winters. He’s got receding blond hair and watchful gray eyes sitting in a worn face like an aging baseball pitcher trying to guess how the batter will respond to his next toss. Although his last name is Scottish, his features are very Dutch.

  I try asking again what this is all about. His only answer is, “We’ll get to that. We have to clear some things up.”

  I offer to clear up whatever I can right now, but he demurs, acting disinterested in what I might have to say. Given the two dozen law enforcement agents who swarmed my motel and the present situation of my hands and feet, I suspect they’re very interested in me.

  A dark-haired woman in a lab coat knocks on the conference-room door. Glenn waves her in.

  She sets a toolbox on the counter, then dons a mask over her mouth and nose. “Is that running?” she asks, pointing to a video camera I hadn’t noticed in the corner of the room.

  “Yes,” replies Glenn.

  “Good.” She turns to me and slides the bags off my hands.

  The bags were obviously there to preserve evidence from when they . . . detained me to now. Evidence of what?

  “Mr. Cray, I’m going to take some samples.” Her voice is loud. I assume so the microphone can hear her. She examines my fingernails and points them out to Glenn.

  He leans over and stares at my cuticles. “You have them cut very short. Why is that?”

  “Chytridiomycosis,” I explain.

  “Chy—?” He gives up on pronouncing it. “What is that? A disease?”

  “Yes. A fungal disease.”

  The technician lets my hand drop. “Is it contagious?”

  “Yes,” I reply, surprised by her reaction. “If you’re an amphibian. I don’t have it. At least, I don’t think I carry it. But I spend a lot of time studying frogs in different environments. I have to be cautious that I don’t spread it.”

  Glenn makes a note on his pad. “That explains why you bought your boots three days ago?”

  I don’t ask how he knows that. “Yes. What I can’t sterilize, I destroy and replace. I might be a bit overcautious, but some people think the decline in amphibian populations might be due to researchers unintentionally spreading it.”

  “So you travel around a lot?” asks Glenn.

  “Constantly.” Is that saying too much?

  “Studying frogs?”

  “Sometimes . . .” I’m not sure how much to offer. He hasn’t acted all that interested to this point, but that could have just been a ploy to get me anxious to talk.

  Glenn pulls a folder out from his portfolio and flips through some printouts. I try not to notice, but I can see through the paper. They’re Internet searches about me—faculty pages, research articles, interviews.

  The technician uses a small pick and a swab to go underneath my fingernails. She’s very gentle. I’m surprised that she didn’t know what chytridiomycosis is, but I guess I shouldn’t be. Although she’s dressed like a scientist, she’s a technician who specializes in gathering forensic samples, not examining them.

  After shifting through a few pages, Glenn glances up at me with a puzzled expression. “Bioinformatics? You’re a biologist?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a cross between computational science and biology.”

  Although he’s trying to make his questions seem broad and ignorant, I can tell Glenn is intelligent and listening to what I say and what I don’t. Since I have no idea where he’s going with this, I keep answering in earnest.

  “We use the tools of computational science and apply them to biology. Mostly in genetics. For example, DNA. It’s so complex, you need computers to try to understand it.”

  He nods. “So you’re a kind of geneticist?”

  “No. I study DNA from time to time, but that’s not my area. My current area is phenotypic plasticity.”

  He looks over at the technician, who is shaking her head, then gives me a raised eyebrow. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that has nothing to do with plastic.”

  “Not quite.” I search for one of my cocktail-party explanations and remember how much I hate to explain my work to nonscientists. “Did you play sports in high school?”

  “Football.”

  “Did you bulk up for that?”

  “Twenty pounds of muscle I wish I still had.” He gives a self-conscious grin to the tech.

  I suspect that when they’re not grilling suspects and looking for damning evidence under their fingernails, they’re just like any other coworkers with their own in-jokes.

  “Gaining muscle like that is something mammals can do and reptiles can’t,” I go on. “We can dramatically change our muscle mass. A silverback gorilla gets more food, increases his testosterone, and literally gets bigger muscles and a silver back . . .” I pause. “I don’t mean to bore you.”

  Glenn shakes his head. “No, Professor. Please continue. I find this kind of thing fascinating.”

  “Well, phenotypic basically means the code in our DNA that makes us. Plasticity applies to how it can have variability. For example, Chinese children are growing much taller than their parents. Their DNA didn’t change. It already had built-in code to adapt to increased amounts of protein, larger womb size, et cetera. Obesity is another example. We evolved for an environment where calories were scarce, so we can triple our body mass if we’re not careful. That’s a downside to phenotypic plasticity.”

  “So you’re up here looking at animals that can change their body type?”

  “Basically. In particular, were-phibians.” I smirk at my quip I’ve said a hundred times in front of slightly amused students.

  Glenn and the technician don’t share in my joke.

  “Were-phibians?” asks Glenn.

  “Were-frogs, or tadpoles, to be more precise.” I awkwardly continue. “Wood frog tadpoles are quite interesting. If you get too many of them in a pond, one or more go through a change. Their jaws and tails get bigger and they go from herbivore to cannibal. They resemble mini-piranhas and start eating other tadpoles. When the numbers go back down, their jaws and tails return to normal, and they’re just like any other happy little tadpole waiting to grow up into a frog.”

  Glenn takes a moment to let this sink in. “Interesting. Were-frogs. I get it. And you’re looking for them?”

  “Not exactly. I’m studying the environment that creates them. I don’t think it’s a behavior exclusive to tadpoles. It can be on a
smaller microorganism scale, or human size.”

  Glenn arches an eyebrow. “Humans?”

  “Yes. You can see this in the womb, where one fetus takes nutrients from another, causing varying birth weights. In vanishing twin syndrome, probably one in ten pregnancies results in a twin, but one is absorbed by the other. Did the mother cause this? Did the evil twin? If so, the evil twin always wins.

  “Within a contained environment, like a pond, one organism spontaneously regulates the population, then returns to normal. Apex predators—a dominant animal at the top of the food chain—is going to be emergent when the population gets to a certain size. You see this with cannibal rats, spiders, and even with computer programs.”

  “A sheep turning into a wolf?” asks Glenn.

  I think for a moment. “Perhaps. It’s a bit harder to find these behaviors in domesticated populations. They’re extremely homogenized and intentionally culled. But in livestock going feral, like pigs, you see them reverting to different forms. It happens in dog packs, too.”

  “Huh. Well, this is very interesting, Dr. Cray.” He turns to the technician. “Caroline, do you have everything you need?”

  “One second.” She swabs around my thumb and places the Q-tip into a plastic bag marked RIGHT THUMB. “That’ll do it.” She puts all her samples into a bag, seals it with tamper-evident tape, and displays them to the camera before leaving.

  I observe the camera observing me, wondering who is on the other side playing the Watcher.

  Glenn stands up. “Dr. Cray, if you have a moment, I’d like to get your professional opinion on something. And we’ll see if we can find you some shoes.”

  While I’m relieved my hands aren’t in handcuffs or plastic bags anymore, I’m concerned at how Detective Glenn’s ears had perked up when I mentioned a specific word.

  Predators.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SELF-INCRIMINATION

  Detective Glenn is still cordial and treating me like an invited guest as he leads me down a hallway. “I appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Cray.”

  As we walk past open offices and people glance up from their desks, I notice I’m being scrutinized, and not casually.

  Clearly, I’m a suspect, or a person of interest, as the news says. But they won’t tell me what for.

  At this point I should be more tense, but strangely, the fact that I’m being kept in the dark makes it easier to deal with. It’s not like waiting for the results of a screening for an aggressive form of cancer. Not knowing the stakes is somewhat dreamlike and unreal.

  Glenn unlocks a room lined with filing cabinets with a large table in the middle. “Have a seat, Dr. Cray.”

  “Call me Theo,” I say as I sit down. I normally correct people earlier, but I’ve been a little preoccupied. “I like to reserve ‘doctor’ for the medical kind.” I save him my diatribe about people with bullshit EdDs and PsyDs that I’ve run into in academia who couldn’t pass a fifth-grade science exam all insisting that they be addressed with the same reverence as the head of oncology at a research hospital.

  “Just Theo?” Detective Glenn riffles through some filing cabinets behind me, pulling out folders. “Aren’t you a genius or something?”

  “You mean the award? That’s MacArthur. I won a Brilliance award. It’s a bit different. The name is atrocious. I don’t put it in my bio.”

  Glenn sets the folders on the table and takes a seat across from me. “Come on. Obviously you’re a genius of some kind. Admit it, you’re a real smart guy.”

  He’s playing to my ego, trying to work me. But toward what? “Not smart enough to know why I’m here.”

  He waves his hands in the air. “It’s just procedural nonsense. We’ll be done soon.”

  Which could mean me back in handcuffs.

  “As a biologist—excuse me, a bioinformatic . . . What do you call yourself?”

  “It changes at every conference. I just say computational biologist.”

  “Okay. As a clever guy, I want to show you some photos. Different cases. I’m curious to know what impressions you get.”

  “Impressions? I’m not a psychic.”

  “Poor choice of words. I’m just curious to see things through your eyes. Humor me.”

  I want to point out that I’ve been humoring him for the last two hours. But I don’t. I’m not very confrontational.

  He pushes a folder toward me. The edges are worn and the label faded. I open it and find myself staring at a man’s split-open head. One eye stares at the camera while the rest of his face is missing. Splattered blood covers the tile beneath his head. I close the folder and push it away. “Ever hear of a trigger warning?”

  “What?” Glenn takes the folder back and glances at the contents. “Jesus. Sorry about that one. I meant to give you this.” He pushes a different folder across the table. “What do you make of this?”

  It’s an image of a cow with bloody marks around its neck and a slit-open abdomen. “In my professional opinion?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is a dead cow.”

  “Yes. But how?”

  “Is this a test?”

  “No. It’s been a mystery around here. More of a joke. The rancher says it was a chupacabra. Others say aliens. It definitely looks like coyotes gnawed at its stomach. But the marks on the neck are a mystery.”

  “Seriously?” I examine the wounds again.

  “Absolutely.”

  I examine the trauma and try to remember everything I know about cows, which isn’t much, but enough to have a notion of what happened. I toss the photo back on the table, unsure if I’m being tested. It seems rather obvious now. “Do you want my answer or the path to the answer?”

  “The path?”

  “Yes. How I arrived at my guess.”

  He smirks. “Okay, Professor, give me the path.”

  “As I said before, I study systems. A system can be DNA. A cell. A body. A pond. A planet. We all function in different systems. What system do we see here?” I push the photo toward him.

  “Well, by the coyote bites, we see where the cow sits on the food chain.”

  “Sure. But what other system?” I point to the bloody markings on the neck. “What could cause this? Have you found it on other animals?”

  “Yes—”

  I interrupt. “I’m going to guess on sheep. But not pigs or horses. Correct?”

  Glenn nods. “That is correct.”

  “Well, the answer should be obvious.”

  “Obviously . . . and that is?”

  “Coyotes.”

  “Okay, but what about the marks on the neck?”

  “All of those animals I named share a system. What is that?”

  “A farm,” Glenn replies.

  “Let’s be more precise.”

  “A ranch?”

  “Yes. And what makes a ranch a ranch?”

  His gives me a nod as he begins to get it. “Usually a fence.”

  “A barbed-wire fence. That’s how we contain the system. It works great for cows and sheep. But it’s too short for horses, and pigs can burrow under it. The only things getting killed here are the animals that are stopped by a barbed-wire fence. Sheep and cows.”

  “So they’re getting stuck on the fence and the coyotes find them, then drag them away?”

  “Perhaps. I imagine the coyotes have learned to chase them into the fence. The cow gets cut up, but not stuck. It keeps running until it bleeds out. Maybe miles away from where it hit the fence.”

  “Impressive. Well, you’re a genius in my book.” There’s something about his praise that feels exaggerated. He rests his hands on the remaining folders. “These are a bit graphic. Random cases. I’d like you to look at them and see if you get any sciency thoughts.”

  He slides the stack over to me, but I don’t touch them. “Is this why I’m here?”

  “Just humor me again, Professor. Trust me, no one else here is as charming to deal with as me.”

  I decide I don’t want
to find out what he means by that. As far as I can tell, I have nothing to be implicated for, so making some observations shouldn’t be a problem. Anything to get out of here sooner.

  There are two dozen photographs of bodies, bloody handprints, and random items. The photos are of at least three different people: an elderly woman who looks like she was beaten to death, a man with cuts and stab wounds, and a bloodied young woman whose face isn’t visible in any of the images.

  There are also photographs of bloodstained clothes, cell phones, money, and tree trunks, along with some other, pristine items.

  I’m lost in my thoughts as I pore through the photos. Detective Glenn is a million miles away to me. So is the camera in the corner of the room that’s still watching. And presumably the Watcher.

  I gather the photos into four piles and sort through them one by one. I see insect bites, poison ivy rashes, a hand resting on a closed pinecone. I don’t know where to go with any of this. The cow was easy—it was just one photo.

  After a few minutes, I look to Glenn for some guidance and notice the polite smile is gone from his face.

  He’s staring at a pile in the middle. His eyes flick to the camera for a brief second; then he looks at me, regaining his composure. “Dr. . . . Theo, why did you put those photos there?”

  My stomach clenches. Something has happened. Something that makes me look bad.

  I spread out the photos from that pile, hastily trying to explain myself. “These look like different angles of the same victim.”

  He pulls out the photo of the bloody pinecone and another of a purse on a log. “There’s no person in these photos, yet you put them into that pile.” He drops the photos back onto the fanned pile. “Why?”

  “Oh.” I gather up the photos and thumb through them again. “I wasn’t really paying attention. Random, I guess.”

  “There are two dozen photos here. You separated the six that were all from the same case. What are the odds on that?”

  “High. So I guess it wasn’t that random . . .” I try to understand my own reasoning.

  “No. It would appear not.”

  I point to the numbers on the bottom of the photos. “These are case numbers, I’m guessing. They all match up. Mostly. It looks like a coding for a date.”