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I muted the phone and said, “That’s why I asked him to send me the footprints instead of agreeing to join him.”
“My apologies for assuming you would allow yourself to be distracted.”
My phone jingled, letting me know I had a new text. I unmuted my phone. “The first picture came through, let me look at it.”
“Put me on speaker. I want to hear your reaction to the prints.”
“Okay, you’re on speaker, but I’m not alone just in case you want to talk about secret cop stuff.”
He chuckled. “When are you ever alone? And I wish I had secrets to share about this scene.”
“Okay, well, let’s see if I can help shed some light on it.” I looked at the picture he’d sent. It had only three toes and a rounded, oddly shortened foot. “What size is this?”
The second image he sent had a numbered bracket framing it. “Jesus, that’s big. There’s no native reptile in this area that could leave that footprint.”
“Is it a reptile?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, I want to say some kind of lizard, but it’s not alligator and that’s not native to here anyway. I don’t know what the tracks of a monitor lizard look like really, but maybe someone’s pet got out?”
“That kind of lizard gets this big?” Brice asked.
“Komodo dragons are a type of monitor, so yeah.”
“Aren’t they endangered or something? No one would let someone bring one into this country, right?”
“Well, not legally, but you were a cop before you joined the preternatural service; you know that what’s legal and what people do aren’t the same thing.”
“Well, that’s for sure,” he said.
I stared at the print on my phone, making it bigger. “I don’t think this a monitor lizard of any kind, but google it and see. It’s just the only natural animal I can think of that might have a similar track.”
“Could a monitor lizard bite a person in half?”
I thought of what I knew about Komodo dragons and some of the wildlife films I’d seen of them feeding or fighting each other. “How big a person?”
“Are you serious?”
“Males can weigh two hundred or even three hundred pounds, though that’s rare, and get eight to ten feet long; again, the largerlength isn’t typical, so I ask again, how big a person did this thing bite in half?” I said.
“How do you know this much about Komodo dragons?”
“Preternatural biology degree means I ended up studying animals that could be mistaken for one of the supernatural ones. When someone says they saw a dragon, you want to be sure they didn’t see an alligator or a big lizard before you call out the big guns.”
“I thought you were the big guns,” he said.
“I didn’t plan on being the big guns, or any guns. I planned on being a field biologist specializing in preternatural biology. I was going to be the scientist on the ground trying to decide if the police needed to be involved, or just the park rangers. There was no such thing as the Preternatural Marshal program back then; hell, police weren’t even trained to handle supernatural crime.”
“I remember,” Brice said. “It was irritating as hell that we had to call in bounty hunters to help us with the monster attacks, but they had the experience and a license to kill without being brought up on charges, and we regular cops didn’t.”
“I was one of the first vampire hunters that didn’t start out as a bounty hunter of humans,” I said.
“No, you came out of the animator program. They hoped that the ability to raise the dead would translate to an ability with all the undead.”
“Nice to know the government isn’t wrong about everything,” I said.
“Are you the only biologist in the preternatural program?” he asked.
“So far as I know; now how big was the person that got bitten in half?”
