“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said Weiss. He grabbed Tucker by the shoulder. “You shoot every one of these babies. I want to look around.”
Weiss slogged from carcass to carcass, borne by a sense of unreality. The dead white eyes, the sunken flesh, the tattered baleen, even the symmetry with which the ocean had coughed up its victims smacked of a dream. But it was real; something strange was happening. He had felt it a week earlier when he and Tucker chanced upon the pod of right whales stranded on a beach north of San Diego. He felt it again that morning when word of a drunken beachcomber’s find reached the motel. Now, seeing huge carcasses for the second time in eight days, he was convinced. Animals as large as whales did not die en masse without there being something very wrong with the world.
The Sea World van had multiplied into four. A swarm of employees, all young enough to be summer help, were unloading gear and fanning out among the carcasses. Weiss approached the only employee who was not moving at double-time, a young woman securing her long red hair with a pin.
“Do you have a boss?”
“Professor Adamski.”
“Ted Adamski?” asked Weiss.
The woman nodded. She had a pert little nose sprinkled with freckles. Photogenic. She pointed toward a man leaning into the back of one of the vans. As Weiss moved closer, he recognized the bald spot and the leathery skin set off by the scraggly white beard. He called the professor’s name. Adamski straightened up as if his back ached.
“Weiss,” he said. “You are like a bad dream.”
“I guess that’s better than being a bad penny.” Weiss reached for Adamski’s hand but the marine biologist did not reciprocate.
“Are you following me?”
“Pure coincidence, Professor. I’m actually covering the human-interest story of the first legless man being hurled into space.”
“And in San Diego you allegedly were covering the senatorial primary,” said Adamski. “You don’t stick to your assignments very well.”
Weiss laughed. “Lemme tell you how this business works, Professor. If a flying saucer landed on this beach, do you think I’d still be interested in the whales?”
Adamski was not amused. “Is this more important than your legless astronaut?”
“I would say that twelve whales washing up dead in Florida one week after eight washed up dead in San Diego is news.”
“But not exactly a scandal.” Adamski leaned back into the van and fiddled with the hasps of a metal box.
“Scandals used to put a lot of bread and butter on my table.”
“And when they didn’t occur spontaneously, you invented them.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Some of us have longer memories than others.” Adamski opened the box, revealing a set of glittering surgical tools. He selected an assortment of scalpels, scissors, and tubes and placed them carefully on a towel.
“Are you preparing to perform an autopsy?” Weiss asked.
“Maybe.”
“What would you say killed them?”
“It would be inappropriate to venture a guess.”
“Don’t guess, Professor. Hypothesize, theorize. Take a look at that adult there. What do you think killed it?”
“Weiss, I don’t give a damn about your new legitimate journalistic career. I’m not telling you a goddamned thing.”
“Pretend you’re not talking to me.”
Adamski looked at the whale lying in a tidal pool twenty feet past the front of the van, big as a cross-country bus or a tractor-trailer rig. A wrinkle crossed his brow, then faded.
“The storm,” he said.
“Bullshit the storm,” said Weiss. “I inspected each one of these whales and they look emaciated, just like the ones in San Diego.”
“Thank you for your observation, Mr. Weiss. You have just cut my workday in half.” Adamski rolled the instruments in the towel and stuck it under his arm.
“Not so fast, Professor. You performed an autopsy last week on those San Diego whales. You must have the results by now.”
Adamski turned away and slogged into the tidal pool. Weiss was right at his heels.
“Is that a yes? Is that a yes, Professor Adamski? Or are you going to tell me that a storm killed those whales, too?”
Adamski put his nose an inch from Weiss’s.
“I have been quoted by you for the last time,” he said, baring his teeth and enunciating each word very carefully. “Now you either leave me to my work or I’ll ask one of those police officers to eject you.”
Weiss backed off. As soon as Adamski disappeared behind the first carcass, he set out looking for the young redhead he had spoken to earlier. He found her scraping green gunk from an adult’s baleen into a plastic container.
“Hi, remember me?” he said.
“You were looking for Professor Adamski,” she said. “Did you find him?”
“Yes, thank you. Nice guy. Do you work with him often?”
“First time. He flew in from San Diego to review our marine mammal protection project. Then this happened.”
“He didn’t exactly have the time to talk to me, but he did say all of you fine young people would cooperate. I wonder if I could ask you some questions.”
“Who are you?”
“Sorry. I’m Aaron Weiss. The Aaron Weiss TV Tabloid. Remember?”
“Oh God, you’re right!” The young woman’s sudden smile crossed the line from charmingly cute to downright goofy. She said her name was Sandy. Weiss immediately knew that he had an ally.
“Do you know much about whales?” he asked.
“Not really. I’m an English major at Florida State and I’m working at Sea World for the summer. But I did write a bio paper last semester on the diets of several species of baleen whales.”
“Great,” said Weiss. “Are you familiar with the whales that were found off San Diego?”
“Sure am. That’s all we talked about this week.”
“Isn’t it true that they were thousands of miles from where they should have been?”
“That’s right,” said Sandy. “Right whales ordinarily spend their summers off the Alaskan coast.”
“What about these whales?”
“They’re far from home, too. I can’t say exactly, but generally the right whales of the North Atlantic should be up around the mouth of the St. Lawrence this time of year.”
“What are they doing here?”
“They could have been sick and the sickness disoriented them.”
“What about the hurricane?”
“I don’t know. I guess it could have killed them.” Sandy scraped more gunk into a separate container.
“What’re you doing there?” Weiss asked.
“Different species of whales eat different types of food,” said Sandy. “Grays prefer small, schooling fish. Blues prefer small crustaceans. Right whales and bowheads feed on phytoplankton and zooplankton. They siphon water through their mouths and their baleen plates catch the plankton. This green stuff looks like seaweed. They can’t eat that.”
“Why are you interested?”
“It’s Professor Adamski’s orders.”
“Why is he interested?”
“Could have something to do with the autopsies of the San Diego whales.”
“The autopsies.” Weiss drew out the words in a knowing tone. “What were the results again?”
“I’m not exactly sure of the technical conclusion,” said Sandy. “But everyone around here is pretty sure those whales starved to death.”
“In the ocean?” Weiss couldn’t contain his surprise. “Those whales starved to death in the Pacific Ocean?”