“Continue your research.Look for any other explanation.”
“I’ve already told you I’ve been through everything.The trackers started going dead after he showed up.”
“And the batteries couldn’t just die?”
“Not these ones.Plus, we’ve never located any of them.Some are supposed to fall off, and we can retrieve it to go through the data, but these just go dead and disappear.”If he didn’t believe her words, she’d show him.
Mac set her laptop on his desk and opened her tracker app as she took a seat in the vacant chair.“These are all the active trackers we have on sharks right now.They are catalogued by the type of tracker and the shark it’s connected to.”Mac moved the mouse over to one of the trackers.“This one was on one of our juvenile black-tip reef sharks.We tagged him at the beginning of the season with a tracker that falls off after a couple of weeks.”
Barry came up next to her and bent forward to look at the screen.He could have stood anywhere else and seen it, but he liked being close to her.“What kind of data can you get in a couple of weeks?”
Mac sat ramrod straight in her seat.She was well aware of his presence but was trying to ignore him.“Lots.Where they go, how deep they go, what their patterns are.If other sharks are tagged, if they are in groups together or loners.By learning their habits, we can learn more about them to keep them safe and away from fisherman and the public.What?”Mac asked when Barry just stared at her.
“You really do love sharks.”He wasn’t being cynical just loved her enthusiasm.He had never met someone before with such passion for a subject.
“I do.”She felt no shame in her passion for sharks and wanting to preserve them.
“Why?”Barry wanted to understand her and where this love of sharks had come from because honestly, he had a hard time seeing loving something grey with black dead eyes and sharp-ass teeth.
“I find them fascinating and vastly misunderstood thanks to movies.People think they are mindless killing machines, like zombies, that just eat everything that crosses their path, and they couldn’t be more wrong.They are highly intelligent and adaptive.They are lethal predators that should be respected and protected.They are top of the food chain and what keeps the ecosystem in check.Without them, the ocean would be devastated.”
He was not about to admit that’s what he’d thought of them.The one time he had jokingly offered to beat up the shark that bit her, she had become fiercely protective of the thing.
They stared intently at each other, and Mac found herself leaning toward him, like a moth to a flame.Mac suddenly averted her gaze and pulled away.She was the one who’d put the halt on their lovemaking, she’d better stick to the agreement she’d started.“Anyway, his tracker suddenly went dead one day.I looked up his last known location, and it was at that spot by the hotel.Another shark, the same thing.That’s when I became suspicious of Miles.After that, more trackers went dead.”
“And there is no way to track them anymore?”
Didn’t he think she would have tried that already?“No, it’s like they got turned off.If the sharks were killed, the tracker would show it’s not moving, and I could locate it by the tracker, but everything is gone.Completely vanished.”
Barry grimaced before he asked, “Don’t hate me for asking, but is it possible it fell off and got smashed?”
“I couldn’t hate you for asking.”Mac smiled.Some of his questions could be annoying, but he was still learning.She was willing to let it slide.“There is that possibility, and if it were only one tag, I might think that, but eight tags have gone dark.And several of those were permanent trackers that are screwed into their fins.There is no way for them to come off unless something destroyed their fin.But again, we should be able to find the tracker.It should give off a signal, but there is nothing.Within a few months of the sharks disappearing and Miles moving in, he bought the water rights there and banned us from researching there.”
“Have the other researchers in the area had the same experience?”
“They have, but they aren’t willing to consider nefarious means for their disappearance.”The fools, they’d rather blame weather and other phenomenon rather than a person for the shark disappearances.
Barry looked just as baffled as she was.“How do they account for the sharks and trackers disappearing?”
“They are too deep in the ocean to get a signal, or they migrated too far away.”There were other theories, but she wasn’t going to bore him with all of them.
“Is it possible?”
“Too deep, yes.The trackers are only meant to go a few hundred feet deep.The ocean is miles deep.But for eight trackers to have the same defect is unheard of.”
“Are all the trackers the same brand?”
“No,” she replied, looking confused by such a question.“Why?”
“It could be a manufacturer defect.”
Her eyes widened in understanding.“No, they are different.Some are prototypes that just came out at the time, and others have been around for years.There is no pattern.”
“Can you show me the trackers for all of the sharks that went missing?”
That was easy enough.Mac typed on her laptop for a few moments.Barry shifted next to her so they were pressed side to side with his hand resting on the back of her chair.Barry wasn’t touching her but very close.He could practically feel the heat radiating from her body.He could smell her tropical shampoo.Barry felt Mac stiffen beside him, but she kept her focus on the screen and not her proximity to Barry.
“So, these are the sharks before the trackers went dead.”She pointed to the different colored dotted lines.“Each tracker was color-coded on the computer to help differentiate which shark was which.If you clicked on each dot, a small window would pop up and give information about the shark.The species, date of tagging, and size so if they recaptured it again, they could add more data.They all follow similar patterns of movement.Following fish along the coast and different waterways, but then they all seem to find their way to that coast.”
