The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(27)

Glenn escorts me out of the building and to my car. Neither of us says anything.

There’s nothing to be said.

Clearly, he doesn’t believe me. The only reason I’m not back in the cell is because he took pity on me and told Tyson I was going through some kind of grieving process.

Hell, maybe I am looking at things all wrong.

I pack my bags at the motel, hop on the interstate, and decide I can deal with Juniper’s car later.

Eight miles later I pass a sign that says I’ve left the county.

A quarter mile ahead I spot a motel.

The stubborn part of me, the part that got me fired, makes me click on my turn signal and pull into the parking lot.





CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


THE GRAPH

This is insane. I toss my motel room key on the dresser and fall down on the bed. I should be working on my research. I have enough field samples. The smart thing is to drive back to Austin and finish what I can before the semester starts.

That’s the rational, logical thing. Or is it?

When Juniper’s body was found, the hunters went out to find her killer—the brave men of the tribe ventured out to defend their own. They may have never met her, but she was still part of the human race.

No other animal draws boundaries as far out as we do when it comes to protecting other members of our group.

My instinct tells me Juniper was killed by a man—or a woman, not to be presumptive.

It’s what fits the facts.

Then why do the people who are experts on this kind of thing not see it?

What do I know that they don’t?

Their medical examiner is competent enough, it would seem. Richards and Kendall know more about bears than I ever will. And Detective Glenn is no fool. After the animal was tracked down, he was still on the case.

If this was the first act of a movie, I’d be pointing the finger at him. I’m not very good at reading people, but in all my interactions with him, his suspicions were always directed at me.

I can’t rule anything out. Except one thing: I’m not the kind of person that could talk to someone for an hour and have any idea one way or another if they’re guilty.

All of those people collectively know more than me. Yet, here I am, staring at the ceiling, convinced Juniper’s killer walked on two feet.

Why?

What do I know that they don’t?

It’s not any one thing. My expertise isn’t deep in any field. My papers, my research, my life have been about drawing connections from very different fields. My domain is how things are related.

I trace life cycles. I look at gene flows. I build computer models and search for real-world analogues.

I seek out systems and circuits. Whether it’s the nitrogen in our bodies that came from fertilizer plants or it’s our genes for coding specific proteins that evolved a billion years ago.

Systems can go laterally through space. Others move linearly through time.

I get up from the bed, pull some maps out of my backpack, and tack them to the wall with glue dots.

I’m not a detective. I’m not a forensic specialist.

I’m a biologist and a computer programmer. These are my areas of expertise.

I stick a red circle where Juniper was found. Next to it I place a green one to represent that she’d physically been there. I place another on the car repair shop and another on her motel.

These are places where we know Juniper had been alive. It’s part of her graph. I place another on where she was working on her postgrad at Florida State and another where she lived in North Carolina. The final dot I place on Austin, where she was in my class.

These are points in her life graph. In a computer I can create a version that shows this over time. But right now it’s simple enough to see.

This is Juniper’s story.

Her life started in a delivery room in Raleigh. It ended in a forest in Montana.

What brought her to that point?

Life is decided by thousands of external and internal forces.

Her death could have been a random event, initiated by someone catching a glimpse of her as they passed her walking on the highway.

It could be someone she’s known for years, all the way back to North Carolina.

Maybe some FBI profiler could look at her wounds and tell you if it was personal or not. I wouldn’t know. And since the experts think it was a bear, I don’t know what credibility I’d give them right now.

I place a black circle next to the two by her body. This is her killer. We know at one point he was in the same place as her.

I place another where Bart was killed. Our killer was in that area at some point as well.

To be precise, I don’t know that the killer was there. It could have been an accomplice. Graphs don’t always measure actual locations of organisms. Sometimes they just map their influence. For now, I’ll just use black circles for the killer’s graph of influence.

The killer’s graph . . .

I sit back and take it in. I only have two data points, but that’s a start.

In my field, a graph can be just as illuminating as an actual animal or its DNA. Sometimes more so, because it can tell you how it lived and not just the color of its pelt or the arrangement of its genes. Sometimes less so, because a graph can be misleading. Too many unrelated data points leave you looking at chaos.

Sorting through chaos is why I developed MAAT. She’s the software I use to sort through thousands of points of information and find patterns.