The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(20)

“Ever been attacked by a bear?”

“Five minutes ago I thought the answer was yes.”

“Well, I haven’t. But I would imagine my only instinct would be to run any way I could.”

“Yeah. You’re right. I guess it’s easy to overanalyze things when you’re not about to die. Still. It seems counterintuitive.”

Glenn folds his arms and looks around. “All right. As a scientist, can you tell me what she may have been looking for up here?”

“Not a clue. Her mother mentioned something about fish. Obviously there aren’t any around here.”

“Nearest lake is through Brookman’s Pass. That got filled in with a mudslide a month back. The only way there from here is a two-day hike. Half of that through pasture.” He points toward the road. “On the other side of there are a few ponds. But you can’t get there from here, as they say.”

“Interesting. I’ll do a little more digging to find out about her research.”

“Let me know. It’s also possible she was looking for a shortcut.”

“I think she was brighter than that.”

Glenn acts as if he’s trying to hold something in. He shakes his head. “If her teacher is any example . . .”

“Don’t judge her,” I reply coldly. “I may be a klutz, but from the looks of things, she went down with a hell of a braver fight than I did.”

“No. You’re right. That was out of line.” He replies with a grave tone. “Tough girl.”

“I wish I’d known her better.”

Glenn lowers his voice. “Come on, now that you’re out of the hot seat, you can level with me. You knew her pretty well, didn’t you? Maybe had a little rendezvous in town?”

I’d punch him if he didn’t have a gun and I wasn’t a coward.

All I can fight back with is a hurt look. Hurt that he’d think that of me. Hurt that he’d think that of Juniper.

“Don’t be an asshole.”

He holds up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. It’s the detective side of me. I’m always poking. I wanted to see how you’d react.”

“What difference does it make now? She’s dead and you got the bear.”

“True. I guess it’s like research. If I ever meet someone else like you, I want to know what’s going on inside his head.”

I’m not sure I like the idea of him still probing my motives. “Have you ever met anyone like me before?”

“Actually, when I first met you, I thought I had.”

“Was he a bumbling goof like me?”

Glenn studies me for a moment. “No. He was a killer. As cold a man as you could imagine.”

“A killer?” My stomach churns.

“Fourteen confirmed kills, to be accurate.”

My skin goes cold at the comparison. “A serial killer?”

“I wouldn’t call him that.”

Glenn’s observation isn’t amusing. “Then what? A mass murderer?”

“No. A sniper. I was his spotter.”

I don’t know what to make of that comparison and just manage to mutter, “I’m only dangerous to myself.”

“Maybe. But I still get the feeling I wouldn’t want to see you angry.”





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


GENBANK

When I get back to my motel room, I notice a voice mail from Julian. “Call me . . .”

“What’s up?” I ask a minute later.

“I’m about to send you a fat file. We got DNA back.”

“That quickly?” I check my watch. His courier picked it up less than twelve hours ago.

“I have a rapid DNA testing start-up, Xellular—with an X.”

“Of course. You named it, I bet. I don’t think I’ve heard of them.” This was the lab he was alluding to. Of course it’s his own.

“Yep. And you probably wouldn’t have heard of them. They’re not in academia. Our main client is the CIA. They use us to identify terrorists and figure out after the fact who they hit with a drone strike. Money is no object, so they were willing to foot the bill on rapid testing. The upside is that we’ll be able to make it commercially available soon.”

“Sounds good. Although I don’t know what to expect out of Juniper’s DNA. If there was some kind of hormonal or pheromonal thing, it would have been in the blood plasma.”

“No,” he corrects me. “Theo, this is the bear’s DNA.”

“The bear’s? I didn’t realize there was a follicle in the sample. It just looked like a short hair shaft.”

“There wasn’t. We got it from the shaft.”

“I didn’t think that was possible.” Accepted wisdom is that hair only contains mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, passed from mothers to their children with little change. Men don’t pass it on. Changes in mtDNA are so slow, mainly due to random mutations, that you can use hair as a kind of genetic clock to see when populations split. As far as identifying individuals, it’s pretty useless. The mtDNA of you and all of your maternal cousins is effectively the same.

Nuclear DNA, or nuDNA, is the DNA that contains the combination of your mother’s and your father’s DNA that describes you. This is how you tell one individual from another. This is how you’d try to clone someone or identify their involvement in a crime.