When I looked up, I saw that Lien-hua had approached the doors to the food preparation area on my left. Two aquarists wielding slender knives were skinning fish for the next shark feeding.
Buckets of white meat smeared pink with blood lay on the floor beside the sink. Lien-hua caught my eye and spoke softly enough so that only I could hear her. “You don’t think…”
It was a gruesome possibility. “We’ll need to check. See if there’s any evidence of an unscheduled feeding this morning. It’s possible.
We’ll also need to have an officer interview those two.”
“I’ll make the call.”
She stood beside a row of scuba tanks to call dispatch and the aquarium’s water quality control center, and Warren strode over to me with a young Hispanic woman in tow. He raised his nose as if he were sniffing me. “The staff will be waiting in the employees’ break room. And I certainly trust you’ll do all you can to make this… inspection go as quickly as possible.”
“You have my word.”
“Yes, well.” Nose still in the air. “I hope you’ll forgive me, but I have to go and change the text on the television displays again so our paying customers won’t be disappointed when the feedings they were planning on viewing don’t occur.” He gestured toward the nervous-looking woman beside him. “Maria works with Cassandra.
She’ll show you around. And if you need anything else, don’t hesitate to contact me. Obviously, I would like to help wrap up this whole matter as quickly as possible.”
“Obviously.”
He went to summon the aquarists from the food prep area; I greeted Maria, and my guided tour began.
31
Grace and death.
Those were the two things Tessa thought of as she watched the sharks patrol the Seven Deadly Seas. She’d seen sharks on TV and in movies and in books and everything, but that was nothing compared to watching them glide only a few feet away from her face, just on the other side of the glass.
Tessa quickly identified the distinctively shaped hammerheads and the sand tiger sharks with their ferocious-looking, snaggly teeth. She also recognized the shortfin makos, nurse, lemon, bull, and tiger sharks. She saw a number of other species, too, that she couldn’t identify. And that kind of bugged her.
From inside the glass-enclosed pathway that wandered along the floor of the twenty-foot-deep exhibit, the sharks looked like a flock of great, dark, six-hundred-pound birds-who just happened to have rows and rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Tessa leaned closer, close enough to see her breath flutter across the glass. And being that close, it almost seemed like she was in the water with the sharks as they soared silently around her, with perfectly honed power rippling through their supple, deadly bodies.
Silent beauty.
Primordial hunger.
Grace and death.
Tessa glanced at her watch. She wasn’t too concerned about the one-hour deadline Patrick had given her, but she didn’t want to be in the glass observation tunnel during the next shark feeding, which was scheduled to start any minute, especially if they were going to use live fish.
Ew. Disgusting.
She stepped onto the conveyor-belt-people-mover-thing on the right side of the passageway and was halfway to the next exhibit when she saw the message appear on one of the plasma TV monitors mounted on the ceiling that the shark feeding had been post-poned.
Hmm. Good.
More time with the sharks.
She stepped off the conveyor belt and returned to the world’s largest shark exhibit. This time, she raised both hands against the glass, her arms extended like wings, and imagined that she was flying with the sharks through a vast, water-filled sky.
A sky with no boundaries and no restraints.
But of course, the whole time her feet remained planted reluc-tantly on the floor of the aquarium.
32
Maria quickly pointed out the water quality testing stations, the quarantine tanks for ill or injured animals, and the stairwell beside the shark acclimation pool that led down to a small observation room on a lower level. Although I couldn’t be sure what the animal husbandry area usually looked like, nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
I gestured to a two-meter-long metal basket on the deck near the acclimation pool. “Is that for transferring the sharks?”
Maria nodded. “We call it the Cradle. Some of the sharks weigh over a thousand pounds. Without that we wouldn’t be able to get them into or out of the acclimation pool.” She aimed her finger at the three-inch-long hook that hung from the cable above the Cradle, and then guided my eyes up the cable, past the place it coiled around a large drum, to the control panel on the wall. “It’s hydraulic,” she said.
I noted that a lifeguard’s backboard and a highly advanced automated external defibrillator were hanging on the wall beside the controls, readily available in case any of the divers needed to be rescued. Next to them was a phone.
Maria’s eyes jumped restlessly across the room toward the door.
“Cassandra’s OK, right? I mean, nothing bad happened to her or anything? Right?”
“As far as we know, Cassandra’s fine,” Lien-hua said.
“But why would her car be here if she was OK, though?”
“Maria,” Lien-hua said gently, “can you tell me a little more about Cassandra’s work? What exactly does she do here? Is she an educator?” I noticed that Lien-hua had unobtrusively positioned her digital voice recorder in her pocket. I assumed she had also pressed “record.”
“No, that’s more what I do. I coordinate the tour guides’ schedules. Cassandra’s a researcher. She’s always diving with the sharks.”
Maria tapped the first two fingers of each hand rapidly against her thumbs. “Mostly, she’s studying the ampullae of Lorenzini.
Government work. A grant, I think. It’s kind of a big deal to the aquarium, being one of the leaders in the world in understanding the ability of sharks to-”
“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry. You’re going to have to back up for a minute. The ampullae of what?”
“Lorenzini. They’re these little organs on a shark’s head and snout that can sense electromagnetic fields.”
Lien-hua and I exchanged glances. “Sharks can sense magnetic fields?” I asked.
Maria nodded. “The ampullae are filled with a jellylike substance that acts like a semiconductor.”
She seemed to be relaxing somewhat now that she was in her element as a shark educator. She walked to a life-sized anatomical diagram of a lemon shark that hung from the wall, and pointed to a series of large pores on the shark’s head and snout. “Electric fields are produced whenever fish swim through the earth’s magnetic field, and naturally when muscles contract. Sharks can locate fish by sensing these minute charges. In fact, sharks can even find a flounder buried beneath the sand, just by its electronic impulses.”
“They can actually sense these impulses through matter, through sand?” Lien-hua said.
“Yes,” said Maria. “Other cartilaginous animals have the sensory organs too, but the ones on sharks are by far the most advanced.
Sharks can even use these organs to swim thousands of miles and return to their exact starting position in the ocean by using the earth’s magnetic field to track their navigation.”
Geomagnetic orientation. Electroreceptors. I was amazed. I’d never heard any of this before. “So, sharks can really do this? Really identify a fish’s location just by the electric or magnetic impulses created by muscle twitches?”
“Actually their sensory system is so precise they can even locate paralyzed prey. So really, she’s OK then? Cassandra is?”
Lien-hua is much more tactful than I am so I decided to let her address Maria’s question.