Aaron Elkins: Unnatural Selection

Liz’s clear blue eyes sparkled even more. “Yes, Joey just told me. Is that creepy, or what?”

“Joey Dillard? Is he on this ferry too?”

“Well, he was a minute ago. Back there near the Coke machine.”

Julie looked over Liz’s shoulder and waved. “Joey! Come join us!”

Joey Dillard, if Gideon remembered correctly, had been an investigative reporter for a paper somewhere in the Midwest-Gary, or Des Moines. He had been assigned to do a series on a new meat-packing operation and had come away so revolted that he became a vegetarian on the spot. He then joined PETA-People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-and several lesser-known groups, had since become an officer in some of them, and was now a fairly well-known writer for various animal-rights, vegetarian, and ecology magazines and Web publications.

Knowing his background, Gideon had anticipated an investigative reporter-type: assertive, belligerent, and pushy. Instead, a toothy, bespectacled, generally alarmed-looking young man with fine, pale, almost colorless hair trimmed in a crew-cut acknowledged Liz’s wave and made his way toward them. A faint tic jumped below his right eye. He earnestly clasped a couple of dog-eared magazines to his narrow chest and wore two large, worded buttons on his shirt.

“Oh, Lord” Gideon muttered, “save me from people who walk around with buttons.”

Julie smiled. “Oh, Joey’s not so bad-”

“As long as you don’t take him too seriously,” Liz said kindly. “He means well.”

“I know,” Julie said. “He’s sweet, really.”

Dillard made his hellos, shook hands with Gideon (a cold, damp palm), and sat down next to Julie. The button below his left collar-point said People who abuse animals rarely stop there. The bigger one on his right, less ominous but more comprehensible, said Animals are not fabric. Wear your own damn skin.

Dillard saw Gideon reading them and nervously drew himself up a little straighter, ready to do battle, the tic beneath his eye speeding up. But Gideon, determined not to make waves, simply said, “Glad to meet you, Joey. We were just talking about Edgar Villarreal.”

Joey immediately lowered his guns, reset the safeties, and relaxed. “You mean the bear? God, that was just so terrible. I’m really going to miss his contributions this year.” As far as Gideon could tell, Joey meant it, but he noted that Liz and Julie declined to commiserate.

Joey noticed too. “I mean, sure, he may have had a few problems personalitywise,” he mumbled, “but he really added something valuable, you have to give him that.” When no one seemed willing to give him that, Joey turned it up a notch. “Personally, I liked the guy.”

Another long beat passed before Liz finally responded, the corners of her mouth turned down. “Well, it’s not as if he would have been here anyway. He did quit, you know.”

“He did?” said Julie.

“He did?” said Joey.

“Didn’t you know? I heard it from Vasily months ago.”

“But why?” Joey asked.

“Well”-she offered the bag of milk-chocolate-covered biscuits around. Joey was the only taker-“remember when he gave that talk in town and, what was his name, Pete Williams got all over his case?”

“Who’s Pete Williams?” Gideon asked, but they were too absorbed to hear him.

“How could I forget?” Joey asked. “It was awful. Edgar was really, really upset. We all went over to the Bishop and Wolf for a drink afterward, and he was muttering in his beer, remember?”

Liz nodded and put on an overblown version of Villarreal’s mild Spanish accent. “‘I keel ’im, dat bastar’, dat leedle peepsqueak.’ Anyway, apparently it was enough to make him never want to come back. That and a few million other reasons, but that had to be the last straw. Anyway, when he got back to the States he faxed Vasily a letter resigning from the consortium. I don’t think Vasily was too upset to hear it. Frankly, I wasn’t too upset myself.”

“I guess he didn’t need the fifty thousand,” Joey said. “I sure wish I could say that.” He removed a thin, tar-black cellophane-wrapped cigar from a shirt pocket and held it up. “Do you mind?”

“Yes,” said Liz.

“Yes,” said Julie.

“Oh,” Joey said meekly and put it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”

“You can save it for the catwalk,” Liz said, and then explained to Gideon: “There’s a kind of catwalk around the roof of the castle. He prowls it after dark, like the Phantom of the Opera, smoking his foul weed.”

“It’s the only place they let me,” Joey said with a sigh.

“What do you mean, ‘they’? Those are Kozlov’s house rules. Don’t blame us. Not that I’m objecting to them.”

“I didn’t go to that talk of Edgar’s,” Julie said. “It was the final night, and I suppose I’d had more than enough of Edgar Villarreal by then. I heard it didn’t go well, but what exactly happened?”

Between them, Liz and Joey explained. Villarreal, as the best-known of the consortium fellows, had been approached by the local tourist office and asked to make a public presentation in Hugh Town, St. Mary’s main village. He had agreed, and on their final night on St. Mary’s, he had given a talk at Methodist Hall. Not many had come: two dozen curious locals; six or eight tourists who’d happened to be on St. Mary’s and were starved for something-anything-to do in the evening; all of the consortium attendees other than Julie; and three reporters, one from as far away as Plymouth-plus Pete Williams, who had been hanging around all week, having come all the way from London.

Williams was an English writer who was researching a book (Movers and Shakers of the Earth) on personalities in the environmental movement. He had originally applied to be a consortium fellow himself but had been turned down by Kozlov as having no original contribution to offer. He had shown up anyway, staying at a B amp;B in town, and had interviewed some of the attendees for his book. Villarreal had denied his request for an interview with rather nasty condescension.

But Williams had gotten his own back at the Methodist Hall session, pretty much commandeering the question-and-answer session. He had fired hard questions at Villarreal, at first about his sense of responsibility and regret for the deaths of the two students in the Bitterroot Wilderness Area. Villarreal had put him off with pro forma regrets-“these things happen,” “restoring the wilderness comes with a price,” “they obviously didn’t take proper precautions,” and so on. Many had been shocked at his indifference.

Then it had turned personal. There was apparently a history of enmity between the two men, and an increasingly agitated Williams had made it clear that Villarreal was going to be “exposed” in the book he was writing.

“Isn’t it true,” he’d demanded at one point, “that you never finished your Ph. D. at Cornell, even though you advertise yourself as Doctor Villarreal?”

“That’s so,” Villarreal had responded, “but I do have a doctorate from Stanford.”

“An honorary doctorate!” Williams had shrieked triumphantly. “And isn’t it true-”

Villarreal had gotten contemptuously to his feet and outshouted him. “Isn’t it true that you’ve been playing second fiddle to me for years and just can’t stand it? Isn’t it true that you applied to this consortium and didn’t get in, while I did? Isn’t it true that you applied for the Cambridge research fellowship and didn’t get it because I did? And isn’t it true…”

In the end, Kozlov had stepped in and asked Williams to leave, although it took a constable who was in attendance to make it happen.

Villarreal had waited until Williams had been escorted out before getting in the last word. “And if anybody wants to know what I’m really sorry about,” he’d declared brutally, “what I really regret-it’s that they killed that bear in Montana. There was no need for that. What was the point? Human stupidity is not an excuse for murdering a rare, beautiful wild animal.”