The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(10)

Even the laboratory can be a dangerous frontier. Madame Curie was killed by the elements she was helping us understand. Virus hunters in level-five containment facilities, where every molecule of air is scrubbed, have lost their lives when a tiny pinprick ruptured the tip of a glove.

Sometimes carelessness is the cause. Other times it can just be the fact that we don’t understand the nature of the thing we’re trying to study. Or it can just be bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In telling my students to go out into the world, turn over rocks, and poke their noses into overlooked places, I perhaps take for granted that they’ll exercise caution. Or maybe I’m guilty of understating the dangers you just can’t account for.

Although I spent a good part of my youth in the woods, now, with my spectacles and absentmindedly combed hair, I’m sure to my students I look not much different than agoraphobic English professors and two-legged lab rats who only see the light of day on their way to the student center’s vending machines.

I’m by no stretch a survivalist. My limit for the outdoors extends to how much fresh water and granola bars I have in my backpack. My understanding of the forest is more abstract and theoretical than practical in many situations.

Yet I learned something about the outdoors from my stepfather and had some common sense knocked into me by my ROTC drill instructors, who rightly regarded my intellectual curiosity as a battlefield handicap in most situations.

And in dismissing what little I do know, I think I may have set Juniper up for what happened.

Detective Glenn takes a call, and I sit here looking at the outstretched hand of the poor girl.

Her fingers permanently curled in agony when her body stopped producing the coenzymes that prevent the stiffening of muscles we call rigor mortis.

You only have so many hours in a semester to impart upon your students what’s important. I’d create endless different lesson plans trying to distill what I thought was absolutely critical. Somehow I managed to find the time to let them play video games on the lecture hall video screen—showing how hip I could be while teaching them how even a digital ecosystem can follow emergent rules.

Now I regret spending so much time on that nonsense, or on movie days when we’d watch a film like Avatar and try to rationalize an alien life cycle.

I should have been teaching them about survival.

The video games and the movies are a selfish indulgence. I have never been the popular professor, good at making jokes or just talking to my students. I’m often disconnected and isolated. These so-called fun teaching tools are my attempts to show them that there is a connection between the cool things in their lives and the world I live in.

Looking at the photographs of poor Juniper, I feel as foolish as a history professor strutting into class in a Captain America costume.

I should have been teaching her and her classmates to be safe, not trying so hard to get them to like me.

Juniper should not have been out there alone. Someone should have known where she was. She should have been packing a gun. She should have done all the things I don’t do . . .

Impulsive, curious, and oblivious, she may have learned more from me than she should have.

“Dr. Cray? You okay?” Glenn asks.

I realize I’ve gathered the six photographs of Juniper into a pile and clutched them close to me. Embarrassed, I set them back on the table.

“I’m sorry.” I push my chair back. “I should probably be going. If it’s okay?”

“Yes. Of course.” Glenn stands up and goes over to the door to open it for me. He stops before turning the knob. “I was just on the phone with Fish and Wildlife. They’ve got their best tracker here. We’re going to catch this animal. If that’s any consolation.”

I give him a weak smile. “We both know that it isn’t. The bear was just being a bear.” I take a gulp of air into lungs that don’t want to move. “She should have known better.”

“Don’t blame her,” Glenn replies.

I glance up. My words are terse and filled with self-loathing. “It’s not her that I blame.”





CHAPTER NINE


MIDNIGHT

A deputy drops me off at the motel parking lot in the late afternoon with a cardboard box containing my shoes, laptop, and other stuff they took from my room and my Explorer.

The door to the motel room still has a splintered frame where the tactical unit knocked it in. I should probably ask the front desk to put me in another one, but I just don’t care.

I shut the door behind me and use the chain latch to keep it closed. The bed is still unmade, but it looks like my pillows have been moved. If I had to guess, someone went over them with a sticky roller, gathering up hair. I suspect they weren’t just looking for Juniper’s blood. They were also searching for any other signs of her.

While Detective Glenn and I spoke, a technician was doing a cursory examination of what they found.

If a long brown hair had been discovered in my bedsheets or in the shower drain, I can bet that Glenn would have innocently asked if I was here alone or had any company. It would be the first step toward establishing if I was a liar and a potential killer.

Up until I left the sheriff’s office, I could tell Glenn was taking a careful measure of me. He’s met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of guilty persons. I’m sure he has his own patterns to look for. Everyone is unique, yet we all overlap in the way we react.