The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(25)

I can feel the eyes of everyone else in the room on me as they come to realize they’ve been entertaining a fool.

Kendall gives her head a small shake.

“Thank god,” Richards mutters.

My limbs grow cold. The marker falls from my fingers and rolls across the floor.

“Dr. Cray, would you step outside?” commands Sheriff Tyson. “I’m going to talk to Detective Glenn after the conference and decide if you should be arrested or sent to a psychiatrist.”

Her words don’t faze me as the new reality sets in.

Kendall’s revelation isn’t what she thinks.

“Don’t you see it?” I ask quietly.

They ignore me and return to their discussion about the conference.

My stomach begins to churn.

They don’t get it.

It’s so obvious.

It’s why they arrested me in the first place.

It’s why Juniper ran the wrong way.

The pattern is clear.

“Don’t you see it!” I shout.

All eyes turn back to me.

“Deputy,” Tyson shouts to the open door. “Would you escort this man out of here?”

I ignore her and slam my hand against the spot on the map where Juniper was found. “Are you that dense? She wasn’t killed by a bear! She was murdered by someone who wanted to make it look like that!”

The room is silent.

I get how I sound. But I know if I bring a sample back to my lab and find out it’s contaminated and I’m certain it didn’t happen in the lab, that means it had to have happened in the field. The only way hair from a dead bear ended up on Juniper’s body was because someone put it there.

I can’t even fathom how or why, but this is where reason has led me. Unfortunately, no one else is seeing it as clearly as I am.

Two thick-necked deputies rush inside, reacting to my outburst. I’m slammed against the wall, handcuffed, and dragged away before I can explain.





CHAPTER TWENTY


FRAMED

I’m shoved inside a small room with a metal door and a narrow reinforced-glass window. There’s a bench along the back wall. It’s a holding cell of some kind but without a toilet. It’s not meant for a long stay, I hope.

The ceiling is solid and the walls concrete.

Holy shit, I realize. I’ve been locked up.

Jesus Christ.

I collapse on the bench. Part of me wants to pound on the door and insist there’s been some kind of mistake. But I know they’ll just see this as more crazy-man behavior.

The looks on their faces as Sheriff Tyson’s goons hauled me away . . .

They thought I was raving mad.

I was mad. I still am. Mad at them for ignoring what’s in front of them.

They pulled me in with a SWAT team welcoming party because something about Juniper’s murder looked like a man could have done it.

I never saw the autopsy photos, but it seems clear to me that a bear attack and human attack should look pretty different.

For some reason, this one didn’t, at first.

They were looking for a man and found me. When they found bear hair in Juniper’s wounds and had a chance to examine her more closely, they let me go.

Her blood on Bart cinched the case.

Open, shut.

They chose not to see the rest. Maybe because it’s too fantastical. But it fits the evidence.

Juniper was attacked near the road, yet ran away from it. Why?

The simplest explanation is that she may have been brought to the clearing blindfolded and had no idea where she was. She simply ran.

Ripper’s hair showed up in her wounds. The hair was well preserved enough that we could get nuDNA out of it—a near impossibility under ideal conditions. Unthinkable for hair that has been out in the open for a year.

The odds of Ripper’s hair showing up in the wound are astronomical if you’re assuming a purely natural explanation. Charles Manson’s hair would be a more likely find.

Nothing from Bart was found at the murder scene. If he wallowed in her blood like I did, then there should have been some trace.

Yet, miraculously, Juniper’s blood showed up on the bear miles away.

If the bears were people, you’d call it a frame-up.

A frame implies a framer.

Someone had access to Juniper’s body and Ripper’s hair. Later on they lured Bart to her blood.

This leads me to a paranoid revelation: everyone in the conference could be a suspect.

Richards is the most suspicious, but he hadn’t behaved as I’d expect a guilty man to behave. His responses were natural: he wanted to get the bear that killed Juniper. He was frustrated that he might have killed the wrong animal.

If he was Juniper’s killer, the smart thing would have been to go with the vibe of the room and point a finger at me. But he didn’t.

As for the others: Sheriff Tyson is as cold as ice and Detective Glenn is a mystery to me, but I’d think the both of them would find better ways to cover up a murder.

It doesn’t make any sense. And I’m no judge of character.

It’s probably not any of them. That’d be too Agatha Christie.

Hell, maybe I’m deluded and it’s exactly as they say.

Yet my gut says no. There’s a pattern here.

Hopefully they’re in the conference room right now weighing what I said.