Category:

PROLOGUE

Several years ago, just before the last presidential election and before the Portland homeless riots, a group of jurors walked out of a well-heated federal courtroom in Seattle after convicting a defendant of murder, kidnapping and child trafficking. The small squadron of cops and social workers soon moved on to other complicated disasters, but the Seattle Times ran a profile, both in print and online, of the "scientist gumshoe" who had been instrumental in the case. The scientist gumshoe, they said, had broken up a small child-trafficking ring and was one of the few private investigators to have aided law enforcement since the dubious contribution of the Pinkertons during the labor wars of the 1920s. The profile outlined her career working out of Sitka, Alaska alongside her late husband, a writer and investigator himself. Just above the fold in an article featuring a color photo with her and her husband, the paper noted that she was more unique and adventurous than the fictional characters her husband had created. Even in a cynical age, the paper also noted, she had "gone against type and had done her civic duty to a T."

People who knew Delphine laughed at the characterization. It would have made Delphine laugh as well if she had read it, which of course she couldn't.

CHAPTER ONE

It was another day with a follow-up appointment. Delphine worked on her transfer memos in the morning. She wrote on an ironing board at the foot of her bed in the hotel room where she had been living across the street from the Seattle Hospital. She had not been home to Alaska for five months. Her doctor appointments and infusions came often enough it wasn't worth traveling back. Insurance did not pay for her flights, but it helped her cover the expense of the hotel. After the second month of treatment, she decided to write the memos for her students and colleagues, to conclude the story of her research.

Delphine intended for the memos to sound like a cross between a formal scientific paper and a well-researched article for a popular journal. Not a personal memoir. There would be no graphs or tables. There would be nothing about cancer or grief. She wanted her words to have the voice of mature curiosity, which turned out to be a difficult tone to maintain. She had written two memos already, one for the humpback whales and one for the killer whales, but the memo that kept drawing her mind off into the shadowy gloom of her imagination was the one concerning the myriad unanswered questions about the sperm whales. She had been trying to develop a common thread, but she was still struggling with the thought she wanted to convey.

How do animals with large brain mass and a high degree of dexterity within their dynamic environment develop strategies for getting what they want: food, breeding opportunities, safety? She split the question into two parts—how could large-brained animals gain things they wanted, like feeding or breeding strategy, and how could they avoid the things they didn't want, like predators or having cancer (there it was again) or having a dead partner at the time when she needed him most.

Delphine was not happy with her efforts so far. Diving into the murky waters of judging another creature's intelligence tempted her scientist's mind toward solipsism. By the time she finished her fifth draft of the sperm whale memo and walked to her follow-up appointment, she had decided she wanted to stick with what she had seen, photographed and gathered in her forty years of research. There was plenty there to consider.

Outside, it was early summer, and songbirds fluttered in the plantings around the hospital. Through the open window of the examination room, she could barely make out the scent of Puget Sound, while the constant traffic thrummed from the freeway and cars honked intersections to life. A car alarm blared, and a child somewhere was crying at the top of their lungs. The crying should have been distressing but it wasn't. In fact, the small calamity sounded as if it were drifting away on a balloon.

The paper on the padded examination table crackled underneath her butt. She tried to focus on the sounds outside of the window rather than the young doctor in front of her. She had grown up here, but now Seattle had the soundscape of a big city that had forgotten where and what it was. She was listening to learn this new place. The city swirled with cultural indicators of the times, like printed signs exhorting people to SUSPEND THE CONSTITUTION AND REINSTATE THE PRESIDENT. One billboard near the international district suggested that GOD IS MY PRESIDENT. The cultural divide was laid out in the blurred swirl of hand-drawn graffiti: JAIL ALL DEMOCRATS and EAT THE RICH. Other graffiti proclaimed gang names or suggested that poverty was the open door to anarchy.