The other armored men exit after him, letting three deputies enter, followed by a tall woman wearing a jacket and a cowboy hat. She’s got tan skin, like leather, with laugh lines and crow’s-feet I can see across the parking lot.
After peering into the motel room, she steps back into the parking lot and scans the cars in the lot. She points to one, and a deputy calls out its plate number on his radio. Everyone is quiet as his voice carries across the parking lot.
The man who told me to get back relaxes and stands up from behind his door. He catches my reflection in his driver-side mirror and wheels around to face me. “Didn’t I ask you to go to your room?”
“I . . . can’t.” I look to the deputies surrounding the door. “I don’t think they’ll let me.”
It takes a moment for this to register with him. I’m still processing what just happened.
“Holy shit.” He narrows his eyes. “Are you Dr. Cray?”
“Yes . . . Theo Cray. What’s going on?”
His hand touches his hip where a gun sits. He doesn’t draw but keeps his palm on the handle.
The man’s voice is low and measured. “Dr. Cray, for your safety, may I ask you to slowly set down the ice bucket and place your hands in the air where I can see them?”
I don’t think. I just follow his directions.
“Now would you get on your knees?”
I’m wearing shorts, so gravel digs into my knees, but I’m too numb to feel any pain.
He steps over to me, his hand never leaving his pistol at his side. “I’m going to stand behind you to make sure you don’t have a weapon.” I watch him out of the corner of my eye. His free hand goes to his other hip. “May I put handcuffs on you for my safety?”
“Okay.” He has a gun. I’m not sure I can say no. I’m too afraid to ask why he feels the need to cuff me.
After the cold metal restraints are quickly, but not forcefully, clicked around my wrists, he asks, “Is it okay if I lift your shirt?”
“Sure,” I say weakly.
I feel cold Montana air on my sweaty back.
“I’m going to pat your pockets now.”
“Okay.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder, pinning me down as he feels both my pockets. “What’s inside there?”
I panic as my mind blanks. “Um . . . my room key. Wallet. Um . . . phone.”
“Anything else?”
I think for a moment, afraid of getting the answer wrong. “Uh . . . a Leatherman.”
I smell the scent of latex as he pulls on a pair of gloves. “May I remove them from your pockets?”
“Yeah. Yeah . . . of course.”
In movies there’s a lot of yelling when this happens. This man talks to me like he’s a doctor. He never raises his voice. He never threatens me.
He removes everything from my pockets and sets them several feet away from me. Close, but out of my reach.
“I need you to wait here for a moment while we clear this up.”
“Clear what up?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he puts his fingers to his lips and makes a loud whistle. The woman in the cowboy hat looks to see who made the noise.
Her eyes narrow on me. “Cray?” she shouts.
The man nods. Dumbly, I nod, too.
Everything up until now has unfolded with the disorienting calm of a medical exam. Now things go into overdrive as all the energy and attention aimed at my motel room pivot toward me, like the barrel of a cannon.
I feel scores of eyes staring at me.
Some of them angry.
I’m being scrutinized. Judged.
I have no fucking idea why.
“What’s going on?” I ask again.
The woman in the cowboy hat walks over in quick strides. She’s imposing as she stares down at me like I’m a sample in my lab. I catch a glimpse of a blade on her belt.
“Did he try to run?” she asks with a slight drawl, never breaking eye contact with me.
“He’s been very cooperative.”
“Good. Dr. Cray, if you can continue to cooperate, this will all be over in a little while.”
There is absolutely nothing reassuring about the way she says that.
CHAPTER THREE
SAMPLE
I’m a scientist. I observe. I analyze. I make guesses. I test them. I may be intelligent, but I’m never truly in the moment.
As a kid reading comics, I wanted to be Batman, the Dark Knight detective, but the character I had the most in common with was the Watcher, the bald, toga-wearing being who showed up in Marvel comics and just . . . watched.
Right now I’m watching my life like the rise-and-fall flow of a sequence of numbers on my computer screen as I search for a correlation.
Detective Glenn, the man who found me at the motel, is sitting across from me. We’re having a perfectly ordinary conversation. We avoid the obvious questions, like why I have plastic bags over my hands.
I don’t think I was technically arrested. As far as I can tell, I agreed to all of this. Not all at once, but incrementally. I think this is what they mean when they say someone was held for questioning. The cuffs came off the moment Glenn sat me down at the conference-room table, but the bags remain taped to my wrists. I’m clearly a specimen.
Glenn is so calm and disarming, I forget from time to time how I got here. The handcuffed trip in the back of a police cruiser. The guns pointed in my direction. The angry, disgusted looks for which I have no explanation.
I study Glenn as he observes me between polite exchanges about Montana weather and Texas winters. He’s got receding blond hair and watchful gray eyes sitting in a worn face like an aging baseball pitcher trying to guess how the batter will respond to his next toss. Although his last name is Scottish, his features are very Dutch.
I try asking again what this is all about. His only answer is, “We’ll get to that. We have to clear some things up.”
I offer to clear up whatever I can right now, but he demurs, acting disinterested in what I might have to say. Given the two dozen law enforcement agents who swarmed my motel and the present situation of my hands and feet, I suspect they’re very interested in me.
A dark-haired woman in a lab coat knocks on the conference-room door. Glenn waves her in.
She sets a toolbox on the counter, then dons a mask over her mouth and nose. “Is that running?” she asks, pointing to a video camera I hadn’t noticed in the corner of the room.
“Yes,” replies Glenn.
“Good.” She turns to me and slides the bags off my hands.
The bags were obviously there to preserve evidence from when they . . . detained me to now. Evidence of what?
“Mr. Cray, I’m going to take some samples.” Her voice is loud. I assume so the microphone can hear her. She examines my fingernails and points them out to Glenn.
He leans over and stares at my cuticles. “You have them cut very short. Why is that?”
“Chytridiomycosis,” I explain.
“Chy—?” He gives up on pronouncing it. “What is that? A disease?”
“Yes. A fungal disease.”
The technician lets my hand drop. “Is it contagious?”
“Yes,” I reply, surprised by her reaction. “If you’re an amphibian. I don’t have it. At least, I don’t think I carry it. But I spend a lot of time studying frogs in different environments. I have to be cautious that I don’t spread it.”
Glenn makes a note on his pad. “That explains why you bought your boots three days ago?”
I don’t ask how he knows that. “Yes. What I can’t sterilize, I destroy and replace. I might be a bit overcautious, but some people think the decline in amphibian populations might be due to researchers unintentionally spreading it.”
“So you travel around a lot?” asks Glenn.
“Constantly.” Is that saying too much?
“Studying frogs?”
“Sometimes . . .” I’m not sure how much to offer. He hasn’t acted all that interested to this point, but that could have just been a ploy to get me anxious to talk.
Glenn pulls a folder out from his portfolio and flips through some printouts. I try not to notice, but I can see through the paper. They’re Internet searches about me—faculty pages, research articles, interviews.