The Naturalist (The Naturalist Series Book 1)

by Andrew Mayne

Devon gives me a nod, then escorts her up the hill.

  After they’re out of sight, I bag the jacket, then grab the log they saw me put over the grave and drag it ten yards down the gully.

  Considering the inauspicious circumstances under which we met, I don’t trust them. I have no reason to think they’d do something to the body, especially since police should be here within the hour, but the scientist in me is telling me to take extra precautions.

  When I return to the Explorer, Amber is in Devon’s arms.

  “Can we drop her off at home?” he asks. “I’ll get my pickup and meet you at the police station.”

  It’s a legitimate request, but I feel better for having moved the log.

  “Of course.”

  The drive back to their house is quiet. Amber cries softly in the back seat, dealing with the realization that her friend is truly dead.

  Devon shakes his head and mumbles under his breath, “Holy shit. Holy shit.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  INFORMANT

  The Hudson Creek police station parking lot is almost empty at this time of night. There are a half dozen parked police vehicles and two civilian cars. The lobby is brightly lit behind glass doors.

  I grab the garbage bag containing what I presume is Chelsea’s coat and walk toward the building.

  So much has happened in the last few days. From being suspected of Juniper’s murder, to the ridicule I received in the conference room at the Filmount County Sheriff’s Department, it’s been a strange trip.

  Thankfully, with the evidence they’ll hopefully find at Chelsea’s burial site, they’ll be able to build a case and find justice for Juniper.

  I get a guilty pleasure at the thought of Sheriff Tyson realizing her mistake and Detective Glenn having to admit that he judged me wrong.

  I have to remind myself this isn’t some professional dispute in a journal over the results of a research paper. Two girls were murdered, and maybe many, many more.

  My goal is simply truth. I have to take my ego out of this.

  I step inside the police station, and the desk sergeant looks up at me. She’s in her midthirties, thick farm-gal build, and could probably easily take me in a fight. There are two other uniformed cops sitting behind her, engaged in conversation. One of them has his feet up on a desk.

  “How may I help you?” she asks in a no-nonsense tone.

  I can only imagine the crazies she deals with at night.

  I read her name badge. “Sergeant Palmer, I’d like to report a lead in Chelsea Buchorn’s disappearance.”

  She scrutinizes me for a moment. Probably noticing the bruise on my face. “Buchorn? Didn’t she move away?” As she says this, she picks up a clipboard and flips through it. “Ah, here we go. I didn’t realize this was categorized as a missing person.” She sets it down. “And you say you have evidence about an abduction?”

  I set the garbage bag on the counter. “I think she was murdered.”

  Palmer eyes the bag and places her hand near her sidearm at her waist. “I’m going to have to ask you to step back from the counter.”

  I move back. “Sorry. I know this looks weird.”

  “Just have a seat on the bench over there.” She points to a wall across from the long desk, then calls to the two policemen talking leisurely in the corner. “McKenna, Gunther, you guys want to step over here?”

  They see Palmer’s posture and hop out of their seats to see what’s going on. The one with McKenna on his name badge is tall with a thick black mustache. Gunther is shorter and stockier with red hair.

  “What’s up?” asks McKenna, shooting a suspicious glance toward me.

  “This fella says he knows something about the Chelsea Buchorn disappearance.”

  “I thought she just moved away,” replies Gunther.

  “That’s what I said.” She holds up the clipboard for them to look at.

  McKenna takes it from her and reads it over. “I guess state police put her on there.” He shakes his head. “They need to update this.”

  “What do you think you know?” Gunther asks me.

  “I found her body.”

  McKenna lowers the clipboard. “Come again?”

  “Her body. I believe I found it.” I nod to the garbage bag. “I think that’s her coat.”

  Gunther moves over to the bag. “When you say you found her body, do you mean you found something you think belonged to her and think her body is nearby?”

  As he says this, he begins to open the bag and releases the putrid stench of decaying flesh.

  “Oh, shit!” Gunther says.

  McKenna pulls a pair of blue gloves from a pocket. He grabs the coat and pulls it free of the bag.

  In the stark white light of the police station, I notice what I thought was dirt is the dark reddish-brown stain of blood.

  Gunther eyes the slashes in the coat. “Holy shit.”

  McKenna puts the coat back in the bag. “Where’d you find this?”

  “Off Highway 90. I have a GPS position.”

  McKenna ties the top of the bag in a knot. “Carole, call Steve Whitmyer. Get him up here.”

  She picks up the phone.

  “Gunny, get a map and have Mister . . . what’s your name?”

  “Theo Cray. Professor Theo Cray.” I added my title in an effort to not sound like a crackpot but end up looking like an ass.

  “Well, Professor, could you write down on the map where you found the body?”

  Gunther motions me over to a desk. He digs around through a drawer, then pulls out a map. “So how did you find this body?” he asks as he finds me a pen. His face seems to have lost its color.

  “I was looking for it.”

  “Looking for it? How long’ve you been searching?”

  “Maybe an hour?” I’m searching the map.

  “An hour? That’s pretty good luck . . .”

  “I’ll say. But I had a good idea where to look.” I tap the spot on the map. “I also had Amber Harrison and her boyfriend Devon helping me.”

  Gunther doesn’t say anything for a moment. “Huh. Well, mark it on the map.” He slides a notepad next to the map. “Use this to make any notes.”

  I circle the area and start writing down the specifics about the log and how to find the body.

  Gunther walks away to talk to McKenna and Palmer. I use Google Maps to check the location against the map they gave me.

  Over my shoulder I notice the three of them are having a small conference, their voices too low for me to hear.

  Amber and Devon should be here by now. They also said they were going to have their friend Charlie, the police chief’s son, meet us.

  I send Amber a text.

  Where are you guys?

  I go back to my notes about the body. When I finish, McKenna is standing over me. “Is that it?”

  “Yes. I’d be happy to go there and show you.”

  “If we can’t find it, we’ll bring you out there. In the meantime, I’d like you to tell Officer Gunther everything you know. We have a conference room over here.”

  Gunther walks me down the hall, and I have a strange déjà vu about the first time I was pulled into a room to talk to a police officer.

  He thought I was a murderer.

  The way Gunther keeps a careful distance and watchful eye on me, I don’t feel like I’m being treated merely as a concerned citizen.

  There’s still no response from Amber and Devon.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ACCESSORIES

  The so-called conference room looks strangely like an interrogation room.

  There’s a video camera in the corner, just like the last one I was in. Gunther unlocks a cabinet and flips a few switches. The red light blinks to life.

  “I’m bad at taking notes,” he explains, nodding to the camera. “This is just so we can understand, in your words, how you found the body.”

  He’s trying to be friendly but comes across as patronizing. There’s also something
distant about him. He doesn’t possess Detective Glenn’s smooth ability to glide you through a conversation.

  “First off,” he asks, “how’d you get that shiner?” He points a pen toward my face.

  “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.

  I can’t imagine why Devon or Amber would want to hide her corpse. Although I did hide the location because I didn’t trust them.

  Gunther comes back in with two cups of coffee. “Whitmyer—he’s the acting chief—he just left to go look for your body.” He notices the phone in my hand. “Any word from Devon and Amber?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Those two aren’t the most reliable. We’ll send someone by their house.”

  I pray they’re not wasted.

  “So a computer program told you where to find the body? Man, is that an app or something? I’d love to have that.”

  He thinks I’m batshit crazy.

  I don’t blame him. I stop and think about what I’ve been saying. I’m surprised I’m not in handcuffs already.

  I have to clarify some things before that happens. “Amber showed me where she last saw Chelsea. We did a search around the area for signs of a burial.”

  “Like a marker?”

  “No, though that would have been helpful. What we looked for was different plants growing together. It’s a sign that the soil has been recently disturbed. Plants create their own herbicides to fight for resources. Eventually one takes over a small plot of land.”

  “I don’t think they taught me that in academy.”

  “Well, if one of your instructors was a botany professor who was a Nobel Prize winner teaching postdocs at MIT, then it might have come up.” And I think I just won the contest between us of who can be the smuggest dick.

  “Nope. They just taught us how to pepper spray suspects and choke them with our nightsticks without leaving any bruises.”

  There’s no humor in his voice, just ice.

  I remind myself that two of his fellow officers are in jail, his chief is a suspect in a meth ring, and people around here think they might be “disappearing” people.

  I force a laugh, desperate to diffuse the tension. “Then let me stay on your good side. I’m just here because I’m trying to do the right thing.”

  Gunther doesn’t flinch. He just stares at me.

  Shit.

  There’s a knock at the door that makes me jump.

  Palmer pokes her head inside. “Lawson just went by Amber and Devon’s place. Neither of them are there.”

  “What about Charlie?” I ask. “Anybody call him?”

  “McKenna did. Charlie says he hasn’t heard from them all day.” She studies me for a moment, then leaves.

  Damn. Amber and Devon are the only two who can corroborate how we found the body. Now they’v
e taken off.

  Undoubtedly, they’re nervous about all the attention this is going to bring to them.

  “Tell me how you got your black eye.” Gunther doesn’t ask, he demands.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  PROBABILITY

  Turns out Officer Gunther is a bully. I’ve met his type before. My policy has always been to avoid conflict and give them what they want.

  Telling him how I got the black eye could make things bad for Devon and Amber. I’m bitter about what happened and still feel the pain, but I pity them.

  There’s also the complicating factor of explaining why I went to meet a known prostitute in the shadiest situation you can imagine. If I heard the story secondhand, I wouldn’t believe my story. Sure, the single professor just wanted to meet the young girl in the abandoned building to talk . . .

  I have to draw the line with Gunther. My knee is shaking at a frantic tempo. It takes all my effort to keep it from spreading.

  “How did you get the bruise?” he asks again.

  “I’m not here to talk about that,” I say feebly.

  “You’re here to talk about whatever I ask you.”

  I look up at the camera facing down on me. “I think I want to speak to an attorney now.”

  “You haven’t been accused of anything.”

  I think about the fact that someone else will see this video. “I’m happy to talk to someone else. Just not you.”

  His face flashes with anger. To anyone watching this, I’ve professionally embarrassed him. He was hoping to get me to say something that would implicate me in some way. I was talkative. Now I’m not, because he’s an asshole.

  Gunther pushes himself away from the table, knocking it hard enough to bump into me.

  If he’s a cop they didn’t arrest, I’d hate to meet the ones they did.

  He stands up and leans on the surface. “You think you’re so fucking smart?” His hand goes into his pocket and pulls out a key ring.

  It’s the key he used to start the video camera recording.

  Shit. He’s walking back to the cabinet with the VCR. “Everyone saw you come in here all bruised up.”

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  There’s a knock. Gunther jerks his head toward the door, pissed about the interruption. “What?”

  Palmer speaks through the doorway. “Whitmyer wants you on the scene.”