The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(3)

“I need you to wait here for a moment while we clear this up.”

“Clear what up?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he puts his fingers to his lips and makes a loud whistle. The woman in the cowboy hat looks to see who made the noise.

Her eyes narrow on me. “Cray?” she shouts.

The man nods. Dumbly, I nod, too.

Everything up until now has unfolded with the disorienting calm of a medical exam. Now things go into overdrive as all the energy and attention aimed at my motel room pivot toward me, like the barrel of a cannon.

I feel scores of eyes staring at me.

Some of them angry.

I’m being scrutinized. Judged.

I have no fucking idea why.

“What’s going on?” I ask again.

The woman in the cowboy hat walks over in quick strides. She’s imposing as she stares down at me like I’m a sample in my lab. I catch a glimpse of a blade on her belt.

“Did he try to run?” she asks with a slight drawl, never breaking eye contact with me.

“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.