by Steven James
Tessa leaned closer, close enough to see her breath flutter across the glass. And being that close, it almost seemed like she was in the water with the sharks as they soared silently around her, with perfectly honed power rippling through their supple, deadly bodies.
Silent beauty.
Primordial hunger.
Grace and death.
Tessa glanced at her watch. She wasn’t too concerned about the one-hour deadline Patrick had given her, but she didn’t want to be in the glass observation tunnel during the next shark feeding, which was scheduled to start any minute, especially if they were going to use live fish.
Ew. Disgusting.
She stepped onto the conveyor-belt-people-mover-thing on the right side of the passageway and was halfway to the next exhibit when she saw the message appear on one of the plasma TV monitors mounted on the ceiling that the shark feeding had been postponed.
Hmm. Good.
More time with the sharks.
She stepped off the conveyor belt and returned to the world’s largest shark exhibit. This time, she raised both hands against the glass, her arms extended like wings, and imagined that she was flying with the sharks through a vast, water-filled sky.
A sky with no boundaries and no restraints.
But of course, the whole time her feet remained planted reluctantly on the floor of the aquarium.
32
Maria quickly pointed out the water quality testing stations, the quarantine tanks for ill or injured animals, and the stairwell beside the shark acclimation pool that led down to a small observation room on a lower level. Although I couldn’t be sure what the animal husbandry area usually looked like, nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
I gestured to a two-meter-long metal basket on the deck near the acclimation pool. “Is that for transferring the sharks?”
Maria nodded. “We call it the Cradle. Some of the sharks weigh over a thousand pounds. Without that we wouldn’t be able to get them into or out of the acclimation pool.” She aimed her finger at the three-inch-long hook that hung from the cable above the Cradle, and then guided my eyes up the cable, past the place it coiled around a large drum, to the control panel on the wall. “It’s hydraulic,” she said.
I noted that a lifeguard’s backboard and a highly advanced automated external defibrillator were hanging on the wall beside the controls, readily available in case any of the divers needed to be rescued. Next to them was a phone.
Maria’s eyes jumped restlessly across the room toward the door. “Cassandra’s OK, right? I mean, nothing bad happened to her or anything? Right?”
“As far as we know, Cassandra’s fine,” Lien-hua said.
“But why would her car be here if she was OK, though?”
“Maria,” Lien-hua said gently, “can you tell me a little more about Cassandra’s work? What exactly does she do here? Is she an educator?” I noticed that Lien-hua had unobtrusively positioned her digital voice recorder in her pocket. I assumed she had also pressed “record.”
“No, that’s more what I do. I coordinate the tour guides’ schedules. Cassandra’s a researcher. She’s always diving with the sharks.” Maria tapped the first two fingers of each hand rapidly against her thumbs. “Mostly, she’s studying the ampullae of Lorenzini. Government work. A grant, I think. It’s kind of a big deal to the aquarium, being one of the leaders in the world in understanding the ability of sharks to—”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to back up for a minute. The ampullae of what?”
“Lorenzini. They’re these little organs on a shark’s head and snout that can sense electromagnetic fields.”
Lien-hua and I exchanged glances. “Sharks can sense magnetic fields?” I asked.
Maria nodded. “The ampullae are filled with a jellylike substance that acts like a semiconductor.”
She seemed to be relaxing somewhat now that she was in her element as a shark educator. She walked to a life-sized anatomical diagram of a lemon shark that hung from the wall, and pointed to a series of large pores on the shark’s head and snout. “Electric fields are produced whenever fish swim through the earth’s magnetic field, and naturally when muscles contract. Sharks can locate fish by sensing these minute charges. In fact, sharks can even find a flounder buried beneath the sand, just by its electronic impulses.”
“They can actually sense these impulses through matter, through sand?” Lien-hua said.
“Yes,” said Maria. “Other cartilaginous animals have the sensory organs too, but the ones on sharks are by far the most advanced. Sharks can even use these organs to swim thousands of miles and return to their exact starting position in the ocean by using the earth’s magnetic field to track their navigation.”
Geomagnetic orientation. Electroreceptors. I was amazed. I’d never heard any of this before. “So, sharks can really do this? Really identify a fish’s location just by the electric or magnetic impulses created by muscle twitches?”
“Actually their sensory system is so precise they can even locate paralyzed prey. So really, she’s OK then? Cassandra is?”
Lien-hua is much more tactful than I am so I decided to let her address Maria’s question.
I noticed a door with Cassandra’s name on it, and with the words paralyzed prey ringing in my head, I entered her office.
33
As Tessa watched the sharks, an enthusiastic aquarium-educator girl led a group of little kids around the corner. All the kids were wearing orange T-shirts that read “Third graders rock the world!!!” Tessa tried to sneak past them before they filled the corridor but didn’t quite make it.
Great.
With a practiced flourish, the aquarium girl gestured for the children to stop.
“How many of you know how to smell?” Her voice was high and chattery and to Tessa it seemed to echo way more than the acoustics of the corridor should have allowed. All the children raised their hands. “And taste things like pizza or hot dogs . . . or broccoli?” At the words pizza and hot dogs the children smiled, at the word broccoli they grimaced but faithfully raised their hands. “And touch and hear and see?” More hands.
“Well,” she continued, “those things are called our senses. Most of us have five, although some people may lack one or two. Well, sharks belong to a group of fish that have no bones in their whole bodies and are the only animals on the planet who have a scientifically proven sixth sense! Sharks can hunt fish even when they can’t see or smell them! The man who discovered this unique ability was named Stephano Lorenzini. Let’s say that together: Stephano Lorenzini. Isn’t that a nice name?”
Tessa drew in a thin, aggravated breath. Aquarium Girl was doubly annoying. Not only was she way too chipper, but she didn’t even have her facts straight. Lorenzini didn’t discover the receptors; Marcello Malpighi did—fifteen years before Lorenzini ever started taking credit for it. Tessa felt like correcting her but decided against it. Years ago at school in Minnesota, she’d learned the hard way that it’s best to keep your mouth shut when you know more than the teacher does.
Aquarium Girl went on, “When sharks move their heads back and forth, they’re not looking through the water, they’re sensing where other fish are. Kind of like using a metal detector. Let’s all do it together!” The girl began wavering her head back and forth like a shark using his electrosensory organs to search for food, and the class of children imitated her.
Tessa most definitely did not.
Above and around them, the sharks circled in their three-dimensional patterns. Endlessly swimming. Endlessly moving, watching, sensing.
Grace and death.
Both eerie and beautiful.
The girl who didn’t know who Marcello Malpighi was coughed up something that had been caught in her throat, swallowed it again, and then launched into her closing speech. “Sharks, the sea’s magnificent prowlers of the deep, have roamed the earth’s oceans for millions and millions of years. And so,” she concluded, “untouched by nature
and time, sharks remain one of nature’s most magnificent and enduring miracles.”
That was it. Tessa couldn’t put up with Aquarium Girl anymore. First, she taught historical inaccuracies, and now logical inconsistencies. After all, if sharks were miracles, they couldn’t be from nature, and if they were from nature, they couldn’t be miracles. You can’t have it both ways.
Time to go.
But as Tessa was easing past the children toward the next exhibit, she saw a bull shark turn suddenly and swim directly toward the glass. It pivoted at the last moment, curled toward a shiny fish the size of a large cat, and bit it in half.
All around her, the children began shrieking and pointing. Some of the third grade boys were yelling, “Cool! That shark just ate that fish!” Some of the third grade girls were wailing about how gross it was.
Tessa heard Aquarium Girl stutter something about how sharks don’t normally attack that kind of fish and that it might have been a mistake that someone put that fish in there, and that really there was nothing to worry about since sharks are basically good creatures just like all animals because only humans are truly dangerous, but Tessa noticed that her voice didn’t sound quite as chipper as before.
The remaining portion of the fish twitched awkwardly as it sank, until a tiger shark swooped forward, gulped it down, and then circled once again, stony-eyed, through the water. And all the while, a thin trail of blood rotated slowly toward the surface of the water, like autumn mist curling up in a breeze.
Grace.
And death.
Blood seemed to be following Tessa everywhere. She hurried past the children to find a bathroom where she could throw up.
34
I scanned Cassandra Lillo’s office.
File cabinets. Overstuffed bookshelves. Scuba gear on the floor. Low-lying desk covered with papers and research findings. Nothing seemed out of place.
A dog-eared medical journal lay on the file cabinet. I flipped through some of the highlighted pages. Cassandra seemed to be very interested in a new technology that I wasn’t familiar with called magnetoencephalography. I skimmed the article and found that magnetoencephalography, often known as MEG, is a way to measure the magnetic fields that are caused by the electric impulses of the neurons firing in your brain.
Hmm. Just like sharks.
The article contained a picture of an MEG machine. The eight-ton beast looked like an MRI or a CAT scan machine but was designed for someone sitting up. It was located inside a chamber with thick protective glass walls. Apparently, there are only a few dozen of the nine-million-dollar machines in the world. And according to the article, four of them were located here in San Diego. That might be something to look into.
I memorized the issue number, set the magazine down, and touched the spacebar on Cassandra’s keyboard to wake up her computer screen. A small window hovered in the corner: “Welcome, Cassandra Lillo. You are logged on to the Drake Foundation Network. Log-in time: 5:03 a.m.”
So, the Drake Foundation Network . . . that would explain why Victor Drake received such glowing praise in the aquarium’s brochure.
Unless someone else knew Cassandra’s password, she must have arrived before dawn and logged into her computer at approximately the same time I went jogging. It also confirmed my theory that she hadn’t been abducted by her car, but had most likely been attacked while inside the aquarium.
I checked the CD drive to see if she’d been transferring files.
Empty.
I started searching through her file registry to see which documents she might have accessed this morning, and that’s when I overheard Lien-hua talking with Maria just outside the office door. “Maria, do you know anything about Cassandra’s family?”
“Her parents are divorced. Her mom died around Thanksgiving, murdered, I think. Her dad lives out East somewhere, but I think he got remarried a couple more times. Cassandra told me once she’d kept her mom’s last name. She never mentioned any brothers or sisters.”
“What about her boyfriend?”
“Which one?”
“She has more than one?”
“There’s this one guy from New England she used to see, but lately it’s this guy named Hunter—I don’t know if that’s his first name or his last name. It’s just what she called him. They met at a beach party a few months ago. Both of them are into triathlons.”
Just as I came across a folder of encrypted files, I heard Lien-hua ask, “Maria, do you know anything else about Cassandra’s work? Anything at all? Maybe someone who was envious of her grant? Someone at the aquarium who was angry with her?”
Maria was silent for a moment and then said, “There was one thing she said to me once, but it’s probably nothing.”
OK. That kind of comment always gets my attention.
“Anything you can tell us would be helpful,” Lien-hua said.
“I really don’t want to get into trouble.”
And that one’s even better.
I could check these files later. I didn’t want to miss what Maria said right now. I stepped to the doorway in time to hear Lien-hua encourage her, “Please, Maria. We just want to talk to her. If she’s in any kind of danger you’d want to help her, wouldn’t you?”
Maria bit her lip. “OK, but I didn’t tell you this.”
And that’s the most enticing comment of all.
“OK,” said Lien-hua. “You didn’t tell us anything.”
Maria took a deep breath and lowered her voice, even though we were the only people in the animal husbandry area. “Cassandra comes over to my apartment sometimes. We party together, you know? And when she has too much to drink, she . . . well . . . one night she told me she was helping make some kind of top-secret weapon for the government with her shark research.”
I’d been hoping for something a little more helpful. Cassandra’s comment sounded exactly like something a drunken aquarist might say. “A top-secret weapon with sharks?” I said.
“Yeah. Some kind of killer ray gun or something like that. I don’t know.”
I tried to retain my professional objectivity, to keep an open mind. “A ray gun,” I said.
“A killer ray gun.”
“Sorry. And she was making this for the government?”
“That’s what she said.”
Fact. Fiction.
Fiction. Fact.
Sometimes it’s hard to hold them apart. But in this case, whatever Cassandra was involved in, I was pretty sure it did not involve helping the government create a shark-based killer ray gun. I impatiently scanned the animal husbandry center again as Lien-hua asked Maria a few polite follow-up questions about the comments Cassandra had made while she was drunk. I rubbed my forehead.
Stay on track here, Pat. Get back to the basics. Timing. Location. Sight lines. Entrances and exits.
OK.
So.
If Cassandra really had been abducted, why here? Why this morning? How did her assailants approach her? Did they lure her, surprise her, trap her? How did they control her? Through threats, force, restraints?
And if she was abducted while she was in the animal husbandry area, how did the offender get her out of the aquarium? The front door and the staff entrance were both monitored by video cameras.
I glanced past Maria to the acclimation pool and the stairwell beside it.
The stairwell.
Oh.
I hurried past the two women, jogged down the steps, and found a tight room encircling the acclimation pool. An open doorway stood on my left. Half a dozen wet suits, weight belts, and regulators hung from hooks behind the stairs.
“What is it, Pat?” called Lien-hua.
“Just a minute.”
I pulled out my flashlight and shone it into the dim region beyond the doorway. The sterile smell of disinfectants and the vibrating sound of the aquarium’s huge filtration motors filled the air. This was apparently the walkway past the foam fractionators to the aquarium’s water quality control center. Nea
rby, I saw the two filtration towers that rose toward the ceiling of the husbandry area.
My light revealed a network of dimly lit pathways that ran beneath the floor of the animal husbandry area to more filtration units and what appeared to be a vast water storage facility in the neighboring wing of the aquarium.
If I were going to try and get someone out of the animal husbandry area without being seen, this would be the place to do it. “Maria,” I called up the stairs. “Do any of these walkways lead to an exit?”
Her voice floated down the steps. “You can get to an emergency exit back by the dumpsters. But no one ever goes that way. It’s kind of creepy being down there by the filtration tanks. Everyone avoids it.”
Creepy is good. Creepy is very good. They always go for creepy.
This is it. He came through here.
I shone the flashlight against the walls, looking for fingernail scratch marks, scuff marks from shoes, other impressions, any sign at all of a struggle.
Nothing.
Next, I looked for fibers, clothing, or hair that might have gotten caught on the crisscrossed metal steps, but found none.
Finally, I scanned the floor and found that a fine, sandy grit covered the tiling. Probably some kind of residue kicked into the air by the sand-based filtration system.
At first I didn’t notice anything unusual, but when I knelt to inspect the floor more carefully, I found two streaks leading through the thin layer of dust beginning at the base of the stairs. I knew right away what those two tracks meant. I’d seen them before on a beach in South Carolina. When you hold an unconscious person’s armpits and drag her from the water, her feet leave impressions in the sand.
Or, when you drag her backward down a set of stairs and into a water filtration center.
“Lien-hua,” I called. “Come here. Maria, stay where you are.” I studied the smeared footprints beside the drag marks and realized they were unusable.