Born Predators - Chapter 6
Master
The skinny, tumbling prey had only increased the clamor of her body for food. And so she left the floating body of bony disappointment and turned back to her original destination a few miles away.
She came quickly to sights and smells of rocks and seaweed. A stone semicircle emerged from the coastal ocean, and nurtured a calm, central beach with glorious prey. The air was full of raucous barks, the smell of fur and pups, the smell of seals. They were small, but their presence and promise peppered the water.
As the morning brightened, sunlight slitted Hennessey’s eyes, and allowed her to see the wild churn in this rocky madhouse. The scent of mammal was everywhere. She swam languidly just below the surface, slowly increasing her distance from the rock pile, edging into deeper water where the larger seals seemed to be. Instantly, a flash to her right pulled Hennessey’s attention, a combination of sight and sound and electric current that shouted ‘mammal’.
A seal shot by in the lee of the rocks, oblivious of everything but the fish it was after. With instinctive speed, Hennessey twisted herself into its path. The seal leapt away at high velocity, frightened and churning toward the nearby rocks. Correcting sharply to her right, Hennessey wheeled, accelerating with her full power. Closing in. An apex hunter’s total mastery of her trade.
Chapter 6
Kinney and Will walked into a maelstrom. The Hampton Bay Municipal Center churned with reporters, cameras and livestream video. The main atrium held batteries of beetle-black cameras set up facing a one-step stage with a quickly-built podium. At least forty people with their gear and phones and laptops waited for news. Reporters were speaking earnestly into cameras or microphones.
When Will and Maxi and Kinney entered, a little grey finch of a woman, standing like the implacable eye of a storm, carved a space in the crowd and made a beeline line towards them.
“Doctor Austin!” Gail beamed, her voice instantly recognizable from the phone. “At last! Come with me, please.”
“No! No! I’m not ready. I have to see the Mayor!”
“You will see the Mayor, dear. He’s already on the podium.” She pointed to where a man of average height and heavy build, fifty-seven years old, with midsection forged from decades of pasta dinners, was climbing warily onto the stage.
“The podium… But we haven’t even—"
Through the protests, Gail led Kinney through the reporters as if she were on a set path, parting the crowd with a no-nonsense smile, and allowing no detours. And at the end of the path was Ernesto Vincenzo DiStepano. He wore an impeccable navy jacket with a sky-blue shirt open at the throat. His silver hair was voluminous, creamed and combed. And he turned to Kinney as Gail delivered her up at the steps to the stage.
“We’re so glad you could make it…I’m sure you’re very busy and it’s not easy taking this kind of time outta, uhh, outta your research.” His rich Long Island accent washed over Kinney’s ears and with a pang she thought of her mom’s truck radio tuned eternally to WFAN.
The press corps had moved densely in front of the stage, microphones and cameras and phones and notebooks ready. The front line was dominated by reporters in well-tailored clothing, mostly print reporters. The back was for bloggers, carrying small keyboards to type and send within minutes. The middle was the zone of free-lancers.
Kinney whispered in a worried voice, looking warily out over the crowd, “Mr. Mayor, I need more time. There’s been no preparation. No rehearsal.”
“Well, this shark thing’s taken off like nothing I ever saw.” Ernie began. “Nothin’ to do but confront it… calm things down.” He turned toward Kinney and asked, “Ok?”
Before Kinney could respond, a second man stepped lightly onto the stage with them.
“Ah, Tim,” extolled Ernie. “Dr. Austin this is my good friend Tim Leach. President of the Hampton Bay City Council. I call him my Veep.”
Kinney saw a trim, tanned and conditioned man, wearing a grey suit with a deep blue tie. He transmitted a serene affect and kept a knowing smile on his face. Behind Leach was a third, middle-late aged man, tall and burly, glancing around the room like a prize fighter evaluating the crowd.
Kinney turned, “Mister Leach. I’m sure you can tell the Mayor this is not a good time to talk to the press. Maybe when you’ve heard from the coroner…”
DiStepano waved her off, “Done, done, talked to Harry already. He says there was a shark.”
Then much to Kinney’s growing horror, he turned to the podium. He ran fingers through his hair and began, “Ladies and gentlemen of the press, despite this weekend’s tragedy, we intend to reassure everybody that Hampton Bay will always be open for business. The family business of summer fun!”
There was an awkward silence.
Then one bald, bespectacled reporter blurted out a question.
“Are the beaches safe?”
With that, the floodgates opened.
“Can you confirm that Jamie Brinson’s death was by shark attack?”
“What is your city doing about the presence of killer sharks?”
“What do you think makes Hampton Bay so attractive to these dangerous animals?”
DiStepano smiled and held out his hands, “One question at a time! Hampton Bay has always been a safe and attractive place for family vacations. I assure you, with all the experience we have had providing safe, summer fun, these sharks will not last!”
Kinney found her heart beating faster. Her mind was racing with a jumble of shark science and ocean conservation. She tried to remember anything at all from her communications training. A line of sweat began popping out on her forehead.
“So, the shark is gone?” another reported asked.
“Won’t it just become someone else’s problem?”
Kinney wondered if she was supposed to step in, but DiStepano betrayed no inclination to surrender the pulpit. “As far as anyone knows, everyone is safe. The shark has not been seen since the incident, and we’ve got a lot of people looking!” he beamed.
“So, there is still a risk? Will you close the beaches?”
DiStepano scowled slightly: “Look, if you want to really get technical, there’s risk to everything! Risk to driving a car, risk to walking down every street in New York City! When some asshole trips over a curb, they don’t close the sidewalks in New York!”
Seventy thumbs batted furiously at bright screens, racing one another to post that attention-getter on social media.
A voice from the crowd called. “Margaret Stein, Washington Post. If Doctor Austin is present, I wonder if she might lend us some additional perspective on the facts about what exactly happened to Jamie Brinson on Saturday night?”
The Mayor scowled and gestured for Kinney. She stepped up and reached up to the microphone in front of DiStepano, hesitantly pulling it down to her height. She recognized Stein from press events at the Aquarium. Kinney calmed her nerves and focused her attention on the smiling reporter.
She began slowly. “Uh, Mr. Brinson’s body had bites from at least two different sharks, presumably made at two different times. Either could have been fatal, though Brinson’s cause of death is still undetermined.”
“How do you know there were two sharks?” Margaret asked helpfully.
“The bite marks are different sizes, in different shapes, different tooth marks, indicating two species. One set was from a scavenger, probably a Sand Tiger shark. The other, with a width of seventeen inches, showed bone scoring consistent with a test bite from a White shark.”
At that the crowd burst into clusters of murmur, supposition and dismay. The name itself, alone and instantly, had sent an electric charge through these otherwise staid professionals: White shark. A monster—a ghastly specter of incalculable danger. The first blogs posts went out across the world, Test Bite.
“What’s important to keep in mind is…” Kinney started before a sallow-faced man in the front row cut her off.
“Doctor, how big of a White shark are we talking here?”
“A White shark with that bite diameter would be about four meters, call it 13 feet. Still sexually immature.”
Another cascade of note-taking.
“So, a big white shark ate him.” From the same front row person.
“It didn’t eat him. It’s a test bite. Testing to see if the prey is suitable. Most of the time humans are not suitable.”
“But there’s a big shark out there in the water? Testing?” came from the back. Kinney could see barely that far across the crowd.
“Well, the reality is that sharks are a part of life in the water. They’re major predators in every ocean; our ecosystems wouldn’t function without them. Every time you’ve gone swimming in the ocean there were probably a few sharks in the area. You just don’t notice because they’re rare and stay away.”
“But will they stay that way? Rare?”
“Hard to be sure,” Kinney was thawing slightly. “Some shark populations are on the upswing, like the species that are protected – or ones that eat protected prey like seals. Sometimes you have both – protected sharks eating protected prey, like here for instance.”
“So this is like a breeding ground for attacks by protected sharks mistaking us for protected prey?”
“Um, I wouldn’t put it that way, but the breeding ground part…” Kinney began to lose command of the questioning.
“Could the big shark kill again?” An abrupt question from the front.
And then Kinney innocently dropped a bomb, “I’m not sure a shark really killed him this time. I mean not Jamie Brinson, anyway.”
The room erupted. Everyone was furiously typing, speaking, recording, videoing. Kinney looked around in surprise, as if of course everyone would have known this.
A question from the back, “Dr. Austin, why aren’t you sure? I mean, you said you saw shark bites!”
“Well, his lungs are full of water, which implies drowning. People die too quickly after being bitten by a big shark to die of drowning!” Kinney said offhand, like it was a fabulous joke. No one laughed.
“But the body had bites! And people said there was a big shark in the water!” the same questioner, repeating his comment.
“Oh, the bites were not the right size.” Kinney insisted. “The test bite on Brinson was from a 13-foot white shark, but the shark they said was in the harbor was over 16 feet long.”
“How do you know that?” By now it didn’t matter who asked the question: these were things everyone in the room wanted to know.
Kinney explained. “The Triton shark-tracking web site showed a shark tag present in the Bay that night. Dig into the data and you find she was a female white shark named Hennessey. She was 16 feet long at tagging. And may be pregnant.”
The room greeted this with an uproar. Instant tweets flew out Tech billionaire eaten by giant pregnant shark!
“No no!” Kinney tried to correct. “Hennessey is too big to cause the bites on the body! It must have been another shark!”
“So, there are two sharks in Hampton Bay?”
By now DiStepano and Leach were trying to take control of the answers back. Gail looked worried. But the crowd was concentrated on Kinney.
“Maybe, but that would be very unusual,” she tried to be reasonable, scientific, non-pedantic. “Especially in Hampton Bay. Where was the body found?”
“Uh,” one of the reporters answered from the front row, looking through her notes. “Near something called Seal Rocks.”
“Body drifted out on the tide that night, ended up at Seal Rocks,” DiStepano intoned.
Kinney looked at him quizzically, “Seal Rocks are offshore,” she agreed, running a mental picture of the coastal map through her mind. “but south and west of the harbor. The current runs to the northeast! It would never have drifted to Seal Rocks. The body would have to be hauled out there.”
“Hauled?” DiStepano questioned. “Hauled by what? By who? And in the middle of the night? No, that all seems out of the question. I think we’re done here. Doctor?”
Kinney had cocked her head at him. “I thought the shark was seen in the evening.”
“2AM,” he said, still in the same insistent tone. “And if there are no more questions…”
“No way, wait!” Kinney interjected. “2AM! White sharks don’t feed at 2AM! It’s never been observed.”
“Maybe the marine biologists are all asleep by then, so they can’t observe it?” suggested Leach from the back, with a smile.
Kinney ignored him. “So, you are telling me that a 16-foot white shark killed Jamie Brinson at 2AM when they never feed, left tooth marks of a 13-foot shark, and the body then drifted southwest against the current to be found impossibly at Seal Rocks?”
“You said there were bite marks!” DiStepano nearly yelled. “So, it was a shark! The coroner said so too!”
“He said the lungs were full as well,” Kinney rejoined, but then paused.
“It doesn’t add up,” she thought out loud. “Too many things are wrong.”
The press group stood still. Waited.
“No, it can’t be a shark.” Then she looked into the crowd and said quietly. “A shark did not kill Jamie Brinson.”