The Naturalist (The Naturalist Series Book 1)

by Andrew Mayne

  Jillian watches the clouds in the fading light. “Where does somebody like that come from?”

  “Two percent of the population is sociopathic. They just don’t feel the way you or I do about others. If you come in contact with fifty people in a day, one of them is a sociopath.”

  “But not a murderer.”

  “No. Yet if they had a magic button they could press that would kill someone and they’d gain from it, risk-free, they wouldn’t hesitate.”

  “Would you know if you’re a sociopath?”

  “I read a lot about it when I was a teenager.”

  “Self-diagnosing?”

  “Perhaps a little. From what I can tell, if you’re intelligent, you’d probably suspect it. If you weren’t, you’d just assume that’s how everybody else felt.”

  “And what did young Dr. Cray deduce about himself?”

  “Socially inept. Terminally.”

  There’s a flash of light in my rearview mirror. I don’t think much of it at first, then realize that we’ve been on a straight road with no other turnoffs for miles.

  Jillian catches me looking in the mirror. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Theo,” she says with an admonishing tone.

  “I think someone just did a U-turn, like we did.”

  “Are they following us?”

  “Good question. Take out your phone.”

  I stop on the shoulder and turn on the interior light.

  “Are we pretending we’re lost?”

  I look away from the road and stare at her phone. “Yep. When the car passes, let me know how many people are inside.”

  “What if they stop behind us?”

  “They won’t. Unless they want to make it obvious that we’re being followed.”

  I see the car approach and pass out of the corner of my eye.

  “The windows were tinted. It was a dark-green Yukon.”

  “Did you catch the plates, by any chance?”

  “Montana. Not the number.”

  “Interesting. Probably nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” She seems more amused than alarmed.

  I turn the dome light off. Jillian is still looking at me, the glow of the dashboard illuminating her face. There’s a curl of a smile on her lips.

  The lingering gaze, I know what that means.

  I think.

  For her this is still an adventure. I don’t think she gets it.

  Or maybe I don’t.

  Impulsively—maybe it’s the adrenaline—I lean into her personal space, and her lips part slightly. I give her a kiss. Intense, but quick.

  She’s smiling when I pull back. “What?” I ask.

  “This is probably the most morbid first date anyone has ever been on.”

  “You asked for it.”

  “I did. I did.”

  She puts her hand on the back of my neck, signaling that we’re not done kissing.

  “You realize that may have been the killer who just passed us?”

  “You realize what a turn-on this kind of rush is?”

  There’s something about her I can’t resist in the moment. I grab her by the back of the head and press her lips against mine again, this time more forcefully. My tongue finds hers, and they play back and forth.

  I slide a hand under her shirt and feel the breasts I’ve been obsessing over all day—actually, since I met her.

  At some point her hand touches my thigh and travels upward until she’s cupping my bulge.

  She whispers into my ear, “Are we going to do something about that?”

  I pull away and lean against my door. “I’m sorry. I . . .”

  “What? Is it me?”

  “No! It’s me. These are dark things. Dark places. I shouldn’t have taken you there.”

  “If I hadn’t gone, then I wouldn’t be here.”

  “An hour ago we were looking at a dead body.”

  “That had been dead for thirty years.”

  “And the killer is still out there.”

  “Yes, Theo. He is. And the insurgent asshole that killed my husband is still out there, too. I’ll never get closure on that.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t say that. Are you sorry you kissed me?”

  “No.”

  “You have to be able to compartmentalize all that. Your problem is you only have one compartment.”

  “It’s how I focus.”

  “Have you considered the fact that it might keep you running in circles?”

  She’s on to something. MAAT didn’t tell me about the hot spring. That came from a random comment. I’ve been doing the same thing over and over again.

  I stare at her. She crosses her arms and watches me with her little smug smile on the corner of her lips. “Now what?”

  I shut off the professor part of my brain and say the first thing that comes to mind.

  “Climb in the back seat and find out.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  INTERNIST

  Dr. Debra Mead looks up at me through her very large-framed glasses and makes a sound somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, then says, “So you’re the nincompoop who spoiled my samples?”

  “Probably.”

  “This way,” she directs me down the hallway of the medical examiner’s offices.

  I was first aware of the existence of her this morning when I was awakened by a phone call before six. It seems that Montana’s single medical examiner keeps very early hours.

  “Theo Cray?” she had asked.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Dr. Mead. Are you the one who keeps sending me bodies?”

  There was something so direct about her question that I almost blurted out an affirmative.

  “Uh . . . maybe,” I replied hesitantly.

  “I’m told you’re a professor of some kind?”

  “Biology.”

  “Don’t tell me you teach, too?”

  “Uh, yes. What’s the problem?”

  “I pity your students. Come to the Missoula medical examiner’s office.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  Mead hadn’t given me anything else to go on, other than the imperious demand that I get there as quickly as I could.

  Four hours later I’m being led down a hall by a petite, gray-haired woman who doesn’t bother to contain her disdain for me.

  For some reason, I like her. Maybe my spirits have been lifted—because a tryst with a beautiful woman on the side of the road like a horny teenager will do that to you.

  “So, uh, what’s this about?” I ask.

  “It’s about me retiring from the university only to find myself ‘appointed’”—she makes air quotes as she says this—“by the governor as state medical examiner. Apparently I’m the only one in the state qualified after the last asshole left. Total disarray. They were sending bodies to Seattle. Seattle? Jeez.”

  “State medical examiner? Wait, there’s only one in the whole state?”

  “Yes. We have plenty of coroners. Any quack that can pass the test can be a coroner. But to do an official autopsy, one that a court will recognize, that has to be done by someone who knows their ass from their elbow or a bear claw from a knife.”

  “So you know that they were killed by a man?”

  She stops at a door and gives me a dumb look. “Yes, Professor Genius. You’re not the only one capable of calling a spade a spade.”

  “So why hasn’t that been announced?”

  She waves the question away and motions for me to sit in a chair. “Have a seat and take your shirt off.”

  “My shirt?”

  “I’m taking blood, skin, body hairs, and anything else I damn well feel like.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “You teach?”

  “We went over that.”

  “Right. Well, I’ve got a room full of bodies in there that I’m g
oing to be examining. If I find any DNA other than the victims’, I’d like to know if it’s yours. Maybe it’s all yours. I’ll want semen, too.”

  “Semen?”

  “You teach biology?” She shakes her head. “God help us.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Obviously. Let me explain it to you simply. If I find any DNA, I need to know that’s it’s not yours. I’d rather not have to wait to find out. I’m not a patient woman.”

  “Clearly.”

  She gives me a sharp look. “Listen, smart-ass, I can either have you do this voluntarily or I can get a judge to force you. You don’t want to know how we force a semen sample.”

  “Actually, I do. Is it something you assist with?”

  “Yes. I shove an eight-inch needle into your scrotum and drain it like a grape.”

  I break out into a laugh. “Has anyone ever pointed out that’s physically impossible?”

  “Do you think the normal dumb asses we see here even know how to spell scrotum? So what will it be?”

  “Resistance is pointless, isn’t it?”

  After she gets blood and follicle and skin scrapings, she leaves me to provide the final sample. It’s much easier than I would have expected, but I’m not surprised, given the recent memory to think about.

  When I open the door, she’s standing on the other side of the hallway.

  “Forget how to work your zipper?”

  “I’m done.”

  “Goddamn jackrabbit. You must be a real treat for the ladies.” She holds out her hand for the specimen cup. “Let me put your excretions on ice, then we’ll suit up.”

  “Suit up?”

  “Yes. Your notes weren’t exactly as specific as you might have thought they were. I have some questions about how you found the bodies.”

  “Bodies . . . I only told the police I found Chelsea Buchorn. Oh, and then there was Summer Osbourne.” I’m honestly starting to lose track.

  Mead watches my confused response, then replies, “Right. That was in the notes. We have a bunch of other bodies sent to us by a Mr. Anonymous. Do you think there are any other aspiring forensic examiners out there digging up dead girls I should know about?”

  “Well . . .”

  She waves my hesitation away. “If you’re worried about the legal implications, talk to a lawyer. In the meantime, let’s play a game of tell me how this other guy might have found the bodies and in what conditions, okay? The sooner we clear that up, the sooner we can find out who really did this and the FBI will move on to asking questions about him instead of you.”

  “The FBI?”

  Mead shrugs. “I didn’t say anything.”

  Oh, crap. That might have been who followed Jillian and me last night. Mead’s little hint makes it seem that I might be the target of their investigation. Christ.

  If that’s the case, I’ll need whatever help I can get to convince them that I’m on their side. That means doing whatever Mead asks.

  I spend the rest of the day explaining to her about each body and how I found them. She asks specific questions about smells, depth of soil, and vegetation.

  Although the medical technicians who removed the bodies made detailed notes, Mead is very curious about what my observations were when I discovered them. She was acutely interested in skin coloration.

  “Any word on the samples from the hot spring?” I ask after we finish going over the last body.

  “Hot spring?”

  “I found a rib cage in a hot spring near Red Hook.”

  “For crying out loud. Really?”

  “I sent an e-mail to the police last night.”

  “Great. Do you ever rest?” she asks.

  “Do you?”

  “Red Hook, you said?”

  “Yeah. Does that ring a bell?”

  “Maybe. Odd.”

  “What?”

  “When I first saw these bodies, it reminded me of something I examined years ago. A girl, a prostitute from near there. She had a claw mark across her back. Four, not five gashes.”

  “Really? How long ago?”

  “Going on twenty years.”

  “And nobody connected her to this?”

  “No. She died of an overdose. When I did the autopsy, I noticed the scars. She’d healed from them years prior. I just made a note of it and that was it.”

  “There may be a connection.”

  “Maybe. But at the rate the police are moving, I wouldn’t count on anything turning up for a while.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  NEXT OF KIN

  Between being born and ending up on Dr. Mead’s autopsy table years ago, Sarah Eaves had a difficult life. Other than a hospital and date of birth, I can’t find out much about her childhood. There are arrest records for shoplifting when she’s eighteen and charges of prostitution and drug possession in her early twenties.

  The three mug shot photos show a pretty, if sad, young girl aging too fast. There’s a five-year gap between her last arrest and when she was found dead in a motel room with a syringe in her arm.

  This suggests that Sarah may have cleaned herself up but then had a relapse that killed her.

  Dr. Mead was able to pull a few strings and get the address of her last employer, Darcy’s Hotcakes & Coffee, on the highway outside Red Hook.

  As I sit here, sipping my coffee and using all my willpower not to eat the rest of my blueberry pancakes, I try to place the girl in the photo in a waitress uniform and imagine what could have transpired that would have caused her to regress to her darker past.

  A balding man in his early thirties gets out of a faded Honda Civic and enters the restaurant. Although Robert Moorhen doesn’t share the same last name as his mother, he has the same eyes.

  I wave him over to the booth, and he takes off his well-worn parka and has a seat across from me.

  He eyes the folder sitting in front of me. “Is that about my mother?”

  I’m hesitant to reply because there are autopsy photos in there. “Some of it. Thank you for meeting with me.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I had today off. What can I do for you?”

  “First, you understand I’m not a cop, right? I’m just a researcher?”

  He nods. “I’d tell you anything, anyway. If I knew much. She died when I was five. My grandparents raised me.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He wasn’t around much. He was an oil worker who spent most of his time in Alaska and Canada. Mom and him didn’t last very long. They split before I was three.”

  “This isn’t easy to say, but you know your mother had a troubled past . . .”

  “The prostitution thing and the drug stuff? Yeah, you can say it. My grandparents never mentioned it, but when Dad got drunk, he’d go off on her history. I don’t want to believe it, but I guess I accept it. You just have to understand that wasn’t the woman I knew. I don’t have a lot of memories about her, but she was always there for me. A real good mom.” Robert points to a corner booth. “After preschool I used to sit there and color. She’d check on my ABCs between serving customers. Then . . . well.”

  Robert’s memory is a sharp contrast to her mug shots, but I believe him.

  “When your mother passed away, the doctors noticed some odd scars. Do you remember these?”

  Robert thinks it over. “Maybe? Like dog scratches or something?”

  “Yes. Something like that. Did she ever mention how she got them?”

  “I was five. You kind of just accept the world as it is at that point. Maybe she said something. Like she got them when she was younger?”

  “Younger? How much?”

  “I don’t know. When you’re a kid, you just assume your parents were always grown-up. It’s weird—I’m older now than she was when she died. Yet she still feels like my mom.” He pauses and stares out the window. “The scars. Maybe she got them playing?”

  “Playing?”

  “I don’t know. She just didn’t talk about them. She never talked
about her childhood.”

  “I can’t find much about it. What do you know?”

  “She left the home when she was sixteen or seventeen. That’s about it.”

  “The home?”

  “Yeah. The foster home where she lived. She never talked about that. She’d been in and out of the system since she was a baby.”

  “Do you know anything about this foster home? Who her foster parents were?”

  “No. It wasn’t far from here. I know that. She grew up in this area.”

  Interesting. I need to ask Mead if she can get me any information on that. If that’s when Sarah got the scars . . .

  “Do you have any suspects?” asks Robert.

  “No. As I said, I’m not an investigator. I’m just doing academic research.”

  “I hope you get the guy who killed her.”

  “I hope so, too . . .” I stop when I realize what he just said. “Wait . . . your mother died of an overdose.”

  “Right. But she didn’t put that needle in her arm. Somebody else did and gave her a lethal dose.”

  I slide the police report out of the folder and read through it again. The cause of death is listed as accidental overdose. This might be too much for Robert to cope with, although he said that with so much conviction.

  “You don’t think your mom had a relapse?”

  Robert points to the table where he sat as a child. “Last time I saw her was right there. She finished her shift and went outside to grab a smoke. She never did that around me. And she never came back. Two days later they found her twenty miles away in a motel room.” His voice begins to rise. “My mother may have been a lot of things—hooker, junkie, thief—but she was a good mother, damn it. She adored me. If she wanted to run off with some old boyfriend and shoot up, she would have dropped me off at my grandparents’, not abandoned me.”

  His face is filled with rage. Not just at me but at the injustice the world did to him.

  “I’m sorry, Robert. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

  He stares out into the parking lot and calms down. “Sorry. It’s something that I think about every day. When you called, I just assumed it was about that. That they’d solved the . . . what do they call it? The cold case. I guess it was too much to hope for.”

  “No, it’s not. Why do you think someone would want to kill your mother?”