He said, “If I had Killer, he’d be my only pet. My field is ecology, so I may have a job where Killer could go to work with me.”
“Dogs can be expensive.”
“Well, I don’t date much,” Dylan said. “Make that ‘I don’t date.’ No expensive hobbies either. I’ve got a year of social-distancing training and a lifetime of shyness to overcome.”
The woman laughed, then coughed, deep and phlegmy.
“Got any references?” she asked.
Wade waved a hand and gave a thumbs up.
“Yes. My employer is here. You want to speak to him?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll move the phone closer to him.” Dylan passed the phone down the table. No one was eating. All eyes and ears were alive with interest.
“This is Wade Witecki. I am so sorry about the loss of your brother.”
“Thank you.” There was an inhale, which sounded like the drag on a cigarette. “You think Dylan can handle a goofy, little dog?”
“I think he’d do an excellent job,” Wade answered.
“Alright, then.” There was another inhale. “I’m dying of lung cancer, and I’ve got three cats. I can’t be cleaning up Mitchell’s messes.”
“Was someone annoyed with him?” Wade asked.
“Oh, hell. I’m sure someone was. He could be such a prick.” The woman’s voice went sorrowful. “But he loved the heck out of Killer. Pass me back to Dylan, will ya?”
Dylan took the phone back carefully. He didn’t want to lose connection with Mitchell’s sister now. “I’ll take good care of Killer,” he promised.
“Good. They’re holding him at the Animal Services down there. I’ll put in a call to say you’ll be picking him up.”
“The detective told me I’d need a notarized letter from the family.”
“That’s bullshit.” There was another robust inhale. “Might take me a bit to get it all sorted. I’ll call Mark and see if he can round up Killer’s stuff. There’s a bed and jackets and shit.” She came up with a shaky laugh. “Damn dog is better dressed than I ever was.”
“Any chance someone else could come in to Animal Services and adopt him?” The idea of losing out on Killer now made Dylan’s stomach swoop.
“No. He’s in the back. There’re always some animals that aren’t out for the public to see. Might be a cat with new kittens or a dog from a custody fight. That sort of thing. But it might be tomorrow or so before we get this done.”
“I will go and get him as soon as you say I can,” Dylan said. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he remembered he didn’t have a car. It didn’t matter. He’d figure something out.
“Good enough. I’ll call you. Later.”
Dylan put the phone down as the table erupted in cheers.
“Killer’s a fashion plate?” Mari smiled. “Wonder who he wears?”
“I think he’s going to be a nudist with me,” Dylan laughed. He looked up at the blue, blue September sky. The day sparkled.
And he was ravenous.
“Man, I’m hungry!” he said.
“Quick, everybody,” Mari called. “Grab what you want to eat because in about thirty seconds, Dylan will have eaten everything.”
Dylan grinned. “I resemble that remark.”
After the sandwich makings circulated, Wade rapped the table for attention. “I have some things to report. I spoke with Detective Moubrey. She echoes Mitchell’s sister. He was a provocative man. He wrote scathing articles for several outlets. It’s possible his strangulation was motivated by revenge.”
“But,” Wade went on. “Having several lines of inquiry requires significant time. Moubrey warned me this may take weeks to resolve. Which brings me to you, Dylan.”
Dylan had a mouthful of ham and cheese sandwich. He managed a nod.
Wade said, “I spoke with Yousef Berbera. He suggests that you put together a proposal for an Independent Project. You would work for me and earn some business enterprise credits to finish your degree.”
“Brilliant!” Mari shouted. “That is truly brilliant.”
“I thought so too.” Wade’s smile was warm and happy before a more serious look came across his face. “The caveat is that such proposals are normally written up well in advance of a semester. They are also signed off by a supervising professor in the relevant department, which means Yousef can’t sign for you.”
Dylan swallowed before he spoke. “Knowing Yousef as we do, does he have a work around?”
“He’ll put in a call to a professor who might be amenable. I didn’t catch it all, but it sounds like one piece of your internship might be a weekend of moving display cases for a conference.”
“Not a problem,” Dylan said. “I know my way around a hand truck.”
“And you need to get the project proposal written up, like, immediately.”
“Antihistamine, here I come.” Dylan rubbed his eyes. “Okay.”
“Nope. Not okay,” Wade was firm. “Because there’s more.”
Researchers from around the world have used the slime mold Physarum polycephalum to discover optimal travel routes. Destinations are marked on a petri dish with a mound of oat flakes, and the slime mold is left to discover the most efficient way to those mounds.
Using salt, researchers can also mimic “natural disasters” to see how traffic patterns can be reconfigured efficiently. This sort of work has been carried out to analyze travel in Spain, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Chapter Twenty-five
“I think you should move in with us. I suggest you crash for an hour or two after lunch,” Wade said. “Then you can take my car to your house and pack up whatever clothes and things you need. Come back here, work Bea’s party and plan to stay in the yellow guest room.”
“You want a roomie?” Dylan tried to digest the offer. “I don’t want to be any trouble.”
“It would not be an imposition,” Wade told him. “You would be an asset, particularly if we get Killer installed here.”
Wade picked up a chip and waved it to emphasize his point. “That’s a barky little dog, and I don’t know who it is that has been on my property strangling people. I would like back up. Please. And you could be here with our very own barking alarm system.”
Dylan’s brain zoomed through the pros and cons. Wade’s place came with hot water and food. The only con was a slight ding to his pride, which was so far down the list of his priorities that it had to be on the fourth or fifth or hundredth page.
“Wow.” Dylan added, “And thanks. So much.”
Mari burst into applause. “You’ll have supervision! Wade the warden!”
Garrett and Alyson laughed.
“I’m all over the ‘crashing for the afternoon’,” Mari said. “If we’re going to be toting art around Aunt Bea’s place for hours, then I could use a rest.”
She grinned at Dylan. “Don’t forget. You’re supposed to be handsome and pleasant. You’re going to need all your strength.”
*
Dylan slept for an hour. He collected car keys from Wade saying, “It will take me a bit to pack up, but I’ll be back by five.”
“Great. We can all troop over to Bea’s and be . . . troops.” Wade’s eyes were focused on his laptop. He swore and read aloud, “The Department of Revenue’s Services page is being updated. We anticipate it will be restored by midnight this evening.”
With a face of thunder, Wade grumbled, “It’s Friday afternoon, for Pete’s sake. Don’t these website managers ever slink off for an early weekend? This page was loading fine this morning!”
Leaving Wade to his administrative black hole, Dylan left.
Driving an upscale sedan after a nap in a bed with a new mattress had Dylan rethinking ecology as a life path. For a minute or two.
“No way I could run a business and navigate the Department of Revenue,” Dylan muttered. “I’m not even keeping up with my laundry.”
That thought had him stopping at a groce
ry store where he happily paid cash for a bottle of laundry detergent and an avocado and chicken panini for an early-afternoon snack. He focused on a ceiling tile above the deli counter while the sandwich heated so his thoughts wouldn’t wander.
He needed to wash, dry and pack some clothes. He should check on car insurance. He needed to draft a proposal for whatever business school professor Yousef was charming.
Dylan drove to his parents’ house with a firm grip on the steering wheel of Wade’s sedan. He didn’t want to wreak the car, and he didn’t want to give in to the stream of anxious thoughts that were pinging on his shield of resolve, like incoming laser bolts in a space war movie.
He arrived home, noting the lawn had not mowed itself. In fact, it was relaxing faster than elastic on mid-pandemic sweatpants.
As he emerged from the car, he could see an envelope taped to the door of the house. Dylan took a picture of it and carefully peeled it off, noting the bright pink paper glowing through the envelope’s front window. He carried the letter into the house and laid it on the dining room table where it joined a small mountain range of other mail that had arrived over the past year.
Dylan gathered his dirty clothes and started a load of laundry on a fast wash cycle. He returned to the dining room table, unpacked the panini sandwich and started to eat as he opened and scanned the ominous letter. The bank holding the mortgage was demanding a meeting.
Sandwich finished, he cleaned up the crumbs, washed his hands and tossed the wrapper into the kitchen trash.
He returned to the dining room table to photograph the letter and sent it via text message to his parents.
“Car insurance.” Dylan sorted through the closest mail stacks until he found an envelope with the name of a national car insurance company.
He was in luck. The innards not only confirmed the name of the insurance company and gave an account number, it also held the proof of insurance that he was to carry in the car . . . since July.
“Whoops.”
The proof of insurance didn’t expire until the end of December.
“Alright!” Dylan took the paperwork to the sofa, which still held the previously forgotten black slacks and shirt. “Pile accumulation spot,” he said. “Here.”
The washing machine chimed. Dylan moved the wet load to the dryer and started a second load on speed wash.
He roamed the house, returning again and again to the sofa, carrying his finds. A pair of boots. A field guide on grasses. A pair of binoculars.
When he dumped his winter coat onto the sofa, he paused, realizing this specific item on the pile was a signal. He would not be back. Not anytime soon.
He was moving forward from his time living in this space.
As so often happened, he had a sudden insight. This time he visualized the movement of a slime mold protoplasm. Like human muscles, acellular slime molds used contracting fibers of actin and myosin. Actin proteins were huge players in most living things. These proteins made cell division and cellular motion happen by forming and dissolving filaments.
The ability to structure and re-structure using filament formation made so much of life possible.
An actin protein didn’t act alone. It was actually a very thin fiber whose only real trick was to accept a calcium ion and unmask a binding site. It made a cove.
And that cove opening was enough.
The myosin fibers adjacent to the actin were thick cables, festooned with connecting “heads” on stalks like the beaded ball fringe on fancy cushions.
A “head” or “ball” made a connection with the cove-shaped opening in the actin. This crossbridge stayed in place until energy showed up. With the arrival of energy in the form of an ATP molecule, the myosin head would abandon the bridge-making moment and would seize onto the ATP molecule. This abandonment movement created a “power stroke” that yanked the myosin along the actin fiber until the big head of the myosin found placement in the next cove.
In the case of slime molds, there weren’t biceps and quadriceps of muscle fibers sliding and contracting. Instead, the slime mold plasmodia would surge forward, anchor, and the rear of the plasmodia would let go, moving the entire unit.
Like the dog vomit slime mold, he was surging forward, making his own new connections. He was moving to a new habitat.
Dylan took a deep breath, grateful for the afternoon nap and the fat-and-protein rich sandwich. Rest and resources now fueled his resolve.
He started the desktop computer in his childhood bedroom and sat down with a list rapidly forming in his mind. He typed, fingers flashing, as thoughts arrived, made bridges, then let go to move his thinking forward as he drafted the proposal for an independent project.
The introduction would be the last thing he would write as he always found introductions impossible to construct until he knew what he had.
Instead, he wrote about what he could learn from working for Wade for a semester.
In the week ahead it would be Human Resources as Wade advertised and identified who he wanted to work on the property for the Halloween season.
There would be security to learn too. Having watched Garrett secure the dormant Porta-Potties with a simple zip loc tie had Dylan aware that ‘prevention of temptation’ was a smart business thing.
There were different kinds of security. Garrett had said he should stake down the Porta-Potties to keep them from flipping in a storm. No doubt it would be important to identify other weather-related challenges and plan to prevent problems.
The zip line. Christ. Dylan’s fingers stilled over the keyboard, shaken by his sudden awareness of how managing an activity was far different from enjoying it.
Department of Revenue? Did he want to learn anything about business taxes? No.
He checked his word count. He could justify a fourteen-point font as a readability choice, but he wasn’t going to stoop to extra wide margins to give an appearance of length.
The washing machine chimed its finish of the second load of laundry. Dylan checked the time and hustled to get the dryer emptied of its first load, then re-loaded and started the machine.
The independent project proposal would have to wait. Dylan shut down the desk top computer and prepared it for relocation.
The elderly computer was the only item he moved with studious care. He primarily used his laptop, but the desktop computer was occasionally handy, especially when the laptop was out of charge and he’d left the charging cable elsewhere.
With a paycheck coming in, another charging cable would be an early and necessary purchase.
After the tower and monitor were set in the passenger-side footwell of the sedan, he moved into jackrabbit mode, hustling part of his collection off the sofa into a duffle bag, day pack and pillow case.
The moving out was going well enough when his phone chimed. Bellingham.
Dylan was quick to answer. “Hello!”
“Hiya,” came the rasping voice he now knew as Mitchell’s sister. “It’s all sorted. You can pick up Killer at the shelter tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks!” Dylan punched the air with a victorious jab. “I will take care of him, I promise.”
“Good. Mark will call you and get a meet up arranged so you can have Killer’s outfits and things.”
Dylan’s first reaction was to refuse whatever hats, suits or hairbows that might be on offer, but he held back with a stammering, “Ah, okay.” He filled in with “I’m working this evening,” so his hesitation sounded reasonable.
Killer might be on a special diet or have medications. Even if he wasn’t, it would be a money saver to have dog stuff supplied.
Dylan went with, “That’s really good of Mark,” which had the added benefit of being true. He just hoped that Mark wouldn’t be an emotional wreck.
He didn’t want to be squeamish about the grief of others, but he was. Tears in others always had him seeking an exit. Dylan realized he could plead work and his project proposal deadline as a reason to leave Mark’s company, if need be.
Which made him feel fractionally better about how much of the proposal remained.
Mitchell’s sister, fortunately, could not know Dylan’s lightning thoughts. She said, “Do me a favor. My number is under Mitchell’s on Killer’s nametag. Get a new ID tag on him fast so I’m not getting any phone calls if he wanders off.”
Dylan agreed. “I will do that tomorrow. I promise.”
“Super. Tootles, kid.”
As he tapped off the phone, Dylan thought of the many things he had to do. It was time to hustle.
He raced to the kitchen, pulled out the trash and galloped the bulging bag out the back door and across the weedy lawn to the neighbor’s big trash bin, where he stashed the bag.
Normally this was a thing he did under the cover of darkness, but with luck, he wouldn’t be back to receive a lecture about paying for trash pickup.
Dylan galloped back to the house and began ferrying the remaining things to the car. He did move the black shirt and pants with a touch of caution, but he abandoned all regard for niceties when it came to the rest of his clothing. As soon as the dryer pinged to a stop, he dumped everything wearable into a pair of laundry baskets and hauled the piled baskets to the sedan, sliding them in the back seat.
He pulled the front door of the house shut and locked it.
You can do this, he thought, as he backed the car down the drive. “Party time at Bea’s,” he murmured, focusing on the road so he didn’t have to look at his childhood home as he accelerated.
“All I have to do is tote around expensive art and look decorative. This next part should be easy.”
Slime molds can anticipate. Researchers at Hokkaido University applied harsh conditions to slime molds by lowering temperatures and piping in dry air every half hour. Once these conditions were halted, the slime molds would grow for thirty minutes, then abundantly slow their growth in anticipation of condition changes.
Chapter Twenty-six
Dylan followed a caterer’s van down the hill to the community parking lot. The road was busy. A blue economy car followed him. The caterer’s van turned off at Bea’s drive. Dylan expected the blue car to be part of the party staff.
The Slime Mold Murder Page 15