The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(49)

“It’s a long story.” I’m not sure now is the time to try to explain a case of mistaken identity that started off with two meth heads thinking I was looking to hire a hooker.

Two meth heads who still haven’t texted me back . . .

I get a sinking feeling at the thought that Devon and Amber are back in their house getting wasted. Christ, that’s all I need.

“We’ve got some time. McKenna is waiting on Detective Whitmyer before they head out.”

“I fell,” I reply. It’s not the entire truth, but I definitely remember falling when I was getting my ass kicked.

“You fell?” He makes a note on a piece of paper. “That’s the kind of thing wives tell me when their drunk husbands abuse them.”

I’m trying to find a way to change the topic, but Gunther thankfully drops the matter and moves on.

“What makes you sure you’ve found a body?”

“Oh . . . I forgot.” I pull my phone out of my pocket and pull up the photo I took. “Here . . .”

Gunther takes it from me and stares at the image of the pale white hand. “You took this?”

“Less than an hour ago. Right where I said.”

“Hold on.” He gets up and leaves the room with my phone.

I’m normally nervous enough when it’s out of my sight. Having it in the hands of some suspicious cops in a corrupt police department while I’ve found myself pulled into not one but two murder investigations makes me extremely anxious.

What happens if Amber and Devon text back while they have my phone? Can the police look through anything they want, since I basically just handed it to them?

Even if they can’t legally, that doesn’t mean they won’t.

Although Detective Glenn and company seized my phone and laptop, they never asked me for a password.

There’s nothing incriminating on there. Maybe some personally embarrassing e-mails and a web-browsing history you’d expect from a lonely guy on the road. Nothing weird. Nothing worth passing around.

I’m tempted to get up and go find my phone. I relax when I feel something in my pocket. My personal phone.

I’d taken the photo with the burner I bought at the 88. There’s not much on there . . .

That’s not quite true. The only thing on there is my conversations with Amber. But I’ve already told them about her and Devon.

Maybe the burner is suspicious, but it can’t be any more incriminating than anything I’m ready to say.

Gunther walks back in the room and hands me my phone back. It’s still on the photo of the corpse.

Not that it would be difficult to look through everything else, then go back to that image.

He slides a business card to me. “E-mail the photo and anything else you have to this address.”

He waits until I finish sending the image. “That certainly looks like a body.”

“You get many people making that kind of thing up?”

“You’d be surprised,” he says flatly. There’s something about the way he’s watching me, almost defensively. “So how did you find the body?”

“Like I said, I was looking for Chelsea.”

He makes a note. “Did you know Chelsea?”

“No. Never met her.”

“Did you just read something online? Do you work for some kind of missing-persons agency?”

“No. I teach bioinformatics. I use computers in biology.”

“I didn’t realize that was special. I thought everyone uses computers.”

I can’t tell if he’s just being an ass or not. “Well, we use special simulations and processes to understand certain things. This is how I found Chelsea, or rather the body I believe to be hers.”

“A computer told you?”

I’m not prepared to go into how MAAT works. “Sort of.”

“A computer told you where she was buried?” He can’t hide his skepticism.

“No. No. Not quite.” I’m starting to get agitated. “The computer, I mean the program, told me that Hudson Creek would be a highly probable place for the murder of a young woman.”

Gunther says nothing. He just waits for me to fill in the rest.

“I entered into my computer all of the missing-persons reports and looked for ones that may have been potential murders. This one, Chelsea’s, was the closest.”

“Closest to where you live?”

“No. I’m from Austin. I was in Filmount.”

“Filmount? Where the girl got killed by a bear?”

“Yes. She was a student of mine. And I don’t think it was a bear. That’s why I came here.”

“Because you think a man killed these girls? One of them you know personally?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Give me a second. Let me see if Whitmyer is here.” He leaves the room again.

I check my phone for anything from Amber and Devon. Still no response. I text them again.

It’s going to look bad if my two witnesses are high as a kite when they show up.

I start to get more anxious. What if they’re avoiding me?

My biggest fear at the moment is that Chelsea’s body won’t be there. It’s nerve-racking to leave your most important piece of evidence out in the open like that.