Born Predators - Chapter 8
A book about sharks and people by Anthony Palumbi and Stephen Palumbi
The seals at Seal Rocks were lean, agile, and fast. They could twist in half and change their direction in a heartbeat. They could accelerate to impossible speeds that left only bubbles behind. To catch them, she had to be a better shark than they were a seal.
But it was harder now, harder for her to twist and turn and accelerate, now with the large bulge of her pups and their pulsing, wriggling energy. She massed a full ton of muscle and blood and brain and teeth. But her pups added another quarter ton – held tensely in her uterus, full to bursting. The pups got in her way - right when she needed agility to feed them!
And besides, these seals were too small for all this trouble. Each was barely a morsel for her, barely the size of two of her pups. Barely enough to make up for the effort in catching them. They were the natural prey for smaller sharks. For those teenagers. They could have them. She needed more.
Further along her path, beyond where the warm ocean stream flowed offshore into deeper water, the seals were bigger. A belly-full instead of an afterthought. The colder water held more of the fish and octopus and crabs that the bigger grey seals fed on. Sand lance swarmed the bottom like the linguini of the sea, eating tiny crustaceans that themselves fed on single-celled algae in the water. Octopus patrolled the bottom, each one a committee of eight arms, each with its own net-like nervous system reacting to threats and the chance to grow fat on crabs and clams. The crabs defended themselves with aggressive claws, but when the shadow of a grey seal covered them, they could only hide and hope. Hennessey was at the top of this food chain, and what worked best for her was when the whole food chain beneath her was fat and happy.
Hennessey left the rocks and turned north and east, crossing the warm gulf stream, heading north towards the realm that promised larger prey. The distance was tiny as the ocean was measured - and the payoff would be worth it.
Chapter 8
Red pins marked tags with active signals in the previous four weeks, blue pins marked tags that hadn’t been heard from for longer than that. The blue ones were probably inactive. Kinney filtered these out and counted six tracked sharks currently swimming off Long Island’s south shore. She was hunkered down in a booth at the Big Moon Café on the main street in Hampton Bay. Its dramatically angled space-retro roof had seemed so modern when she was ten years old. Now it was slowly slumping in three different directions. Still, its familiarity called to her.
A teenager who wore the name tag BRAD appeared at her table. She ordered from memory. Brad pinched his tongue between his front teeth writing it down. Crab cakes, broiled, with green salad instead of slaw. “Fries or baked potato with that?” asked Brad.
Comfort food called to her. “Fries.”
Brad slouched away. Kinney gathered some courage and returned to her laptop, where the east coast’s shark tracking web sites were all open. She tried to arrange the day’s facts in her mind. Sand Tiger shark scavenger bites. Small white shark test bite. Or…a large shark encounter in a shallow bay at the dead of night. How did she get wrapped up in this mess?
“Kinney?”
She looked up suddenly. “Are you Kinney Austin? Is Mary Austin your mother?” An older woman stood next to the booth, her skin the texture of a Valentino wallet abandoned in the Sun. Her hair was big and worn long, teased and twisted into a kinked mane. She was tall and her thin legs stretched a long way down to vein-webbed feet and a pair of sequined flip-flops. She had rose colored, horn-rimmed glasses, a loose fitting tank top and long pants that Kinney swore were tie dyed.
“Yeah,” was all Kinney could say. “Mary’s my mom.”
“Oh my goodness,” the older woman squealed over a tobacco-scoured throat, slapping her palms on the tabletop. “I knew it was you. Even with what you did to your hair. It was so pretty long.”
“Well, this is just practical,” Kinney smiled, automatically touching her short hair, momentarily derailed from the results of the day.
“Jilly! Jilly Brandt! I used to party with your mom. Our little civic group! Mostly an excuse to drink and play cards. That girl could swat a fly in midair with a beer bottle.”
Kinney blinked, memory flaring with scenes from her last years here. “Oh my God…Oh my God, Miss Jilly.” She slid out of the booth and threw herself into an instinctive embrace.
Jilly face was surprised and pleased and tender all at once. She and Kinney sat.
“I was cah-RUSHED when your mother moved away. Like somebody turned down the volume on life. Is she well? It was awful, what happened with your father. I’d want to get away too.”
“She’s in Florida. New friends. Tennis five days a week. Some new thing called pickleball.”
“What brings you home? Just visiting? Old house to sell?”
“No…” she trailed off, thinking of how much to say. Here was another piece of her history. “I’m a marine biologist now. I study sharks.”
Jilly’s eyes went wide. “Ohhh. Yes, that poor boy. My son, Joey, told me Harry at the Coroner’s office said they found tooth marks.” She reached out with her long nails poised dramatically.
Kinney maintained a neutral expression. “Nobody really knows how he died. Not yet.”
Jilly gave a laugh like dry leaves underfoot. “Hon, where I come from, if there’s shark teeth in a dead guy, it’s the shark that did it.
Kinney sighed. “But nature’s tricky. That’s why the Mayor asked me to fly out from California.”
“That creep,” she sneered. “You don’t want anything to do with him. Trust me, hon.”
“Can I trust him?”
“You got money and a bulldozer? He’s your guy. He’ll let you build any damn thing you want. Let you paint it purple too.”
“There were always rich folks building big houses.”
“They’re building right on the dunes now. Like a construction company took a dump on the sand. Me and my friends love the ocean, every ugly-ass fish - it’s so beautiful, oh my God, I love it. But build on the dunes? Never.”
“And Mayor DiStepano changed that.”
“Couldn’t do a thing on his own,” Jilly waved dismissively. “Needs an air pump to go out on a date, know what I’m sayin’? It’s all that weasel Leach – he tells Ernie when to take a crap.”
“I met Leach too.”
“He’s been buying up everything on the shoreward side of town. Wants my cottage like a drunk wants a Mai Tai. Trust me, you’ve got better things to do with your time than getting to know them.”
Kinney smiled down at her laptop, “Finding this shark is worth doing.”
Miss Jilly shrugged “If some confused shark eats some uber-rich guy every now and then? I say Balance of Nature! That kid was nothing but trouble!”
“Brinson? They said he was planning changes here.”
“Not good ones, dear. Super-rich people are more trouble than the goddamned sharks! At least if sharks eat you, they don’t say they’re doing you a favor.”
She popped her head up like an ostrich to looked around over the booth bulkheads, “Now goddammit, where is that jailbait waiter? Bradley Swain! Get your pimply face over here with those crab cakes! And a beer for me!”
He hurried over with Kinney’s dinner and a beer, mumbling “Sorry, Miss Jilly.”
Jilly sat back and beamed. “Eating alone at a restaurant feels sad, don’t you think?
Kinney stifled a sigh and picked up her fork, using its edge to separate a steaming, morsel from a crab cake the size of her fist. The smell hit and she wanted to cry with the memory.
But instead she whispered, “I never said… I never said. Thank you, you know, for that night.”
Miss Jilly looked gently at her, the brazen shell of her personality evaporating for a moment. “I’m sorry, dear, that I couldn’t fix it. Any of it.” She squeezed Kinney’ hand and simply watched her for a moment.
Then Jilly settled deeper into her spot on the upholstered bench and grinned. “So, I don’t see a ring on that hand. What’s goin’ on with that?”
***
Still no ring… Or answers, Kinney reflected, much later at her villa. She’d loved reconnecting with Miss Jilly and her eruptive laughter. Her stories about Mom. Her connection to all those good times. In fact, Kinney realized when she thought about Hampton Bay, all she thought about was getting away from it. It was the place she, and her Mom, had lived and left. She didn’t think about the time before the breakup very much. About the people she’d known. And the people like Miss Jilly she’d had loved.
And now she was bringing everything she’d learned after leaving back to help the people, the people who were still living here from before. It was like twirling together two completely different worlds, and using one to save the other. New Kinney back to help the people who had known old Kinney.
She went over to the kitchen’s small table, where her laptop had finally stopped its long download cycle of all the data that the shark tagging company Triton had from Long Island. Opening a new window on her screen she could see a long spreadsheet of each record from each of the six sharks that the web site said were there: latitude, longitude, time, temperature, speed, direction…everything. On the original Triton web site screen she could see the crude map of each shark track. She just needed to match the map to the precise data in the chart.
She started with a Dusky shark named Charlie, who the same night Jamie vanished had moved on and off shore—performing a kind of shuttle run to the continental shelf and back - dipping into the harbor twice. Kinney highlighted those points and then found their timestamps and GPS coordinates in the spreadsheet. Charlie had left the Bay too early to be involved in Jamie’s death. Then she switched to the next shark.
Based on Triton’s data set and the winding trail of tracked points, she worked to imagine the lives of all six sharks. Two of Kinney’s six suspects had passed by too late for Sparkistry’s party, not until Sunday afternoon. Sophie and Bennie, both hammerheads. They hunted near dawn among the schools of fish congregating at the mouth of the bay, where the slightly brackish water met clean saline. Kinney checked their Triton pages and saw they’d both been miles south the night of the party.
Three other sharks were Mako sharks that had been too early; they’d visited, hunted and then swum out of the area days ahead of time. Besides they seldom hunted mammals. Makos were globe-striding ocean riding Ronin that put their serrated scissor teeth to work at first on bass and blackfish. The largest among them grew their adult teeth broader and flatter so they morphed into veritable swords—heavier weapons needed for bigger game, like tuna or billfish. Triton showed them in the general area, but not in the harbor itself.
That left one, the momentous final ping: Jamie Brinson’s killer, or at least the animal everyone had convinced themselves did it – the sixteen-foot White shark named ‘Hennessey.’
At first it just looked perfect, that ping. Right on time for the party. But after a next half hour of sifting through maps, layers, and data points, her heartbeat picked up. Her eyes widened going back over the entries, the numbers she’d typed in just minutes before. Because right there, staring her in the face, was a huge jump in Hennessey’s track. Hennessey had been cruising east by gentle northeast, tracking the continental shelf’s sandy edge miles offshore. But then suddenly her tag said she was at the shore, right in Hampton Bay. Though separated by nine miles of open sea, these two pings had appeared just twenty-one minutes apart. Kinney couldn’t imagine any shark moving so far so fast. It didn’t make sense.
Kinney sat, staring at the data file, trying to find what error she might have made. That is, right up until when her villa’s tinny doorbell rang. It shocked her at first. Then scared her. But when she looked out through the viewing hole, it was Will’s familiar face that greeted her. Behind him the sky was darkening after sunset. Kinney had hardly noticed the end of the day. She led him into the kitchen.
“Kinney,” he said flatly. ”Just thought I would check on you, after the…”
“Maxi was great! And I think I’ve got something else…”
“Kinney, it was a shitshow!”
“Yeah, we are going to have to watch this Captain Peterson.”
“Honeypie.” Will corrected. “You named him Honeypie, and it’s already flying across social media. The guy is angry.”
“Hah! Good. That’s the last time he’ll call me ‘darlin’. But look, I just spent the evening turning Triton’s information into usable GPS coordinates and I found our shark.” Kinney showed him the laptop screen.
“OK, great.” Will peered at the display. He saw a map of the ocean near Hampton Bay with some lines on it. “You can go catch it now?”
“That’s just the thing, Will—I found the shark that everyone saw on the app in the Bay - Hennessey. She’s the only tagged shark who came through the harbor around the time of the party. But there’s a point in the tracking where her signal jumps nine miles in 21 minutes. Look!”
Kinney sat down in front of her screen gesturing to it. “She’s out in open water. Here. And then suddenly she’s in the harbor, right when Sparkistry’s party is about to start.”
There was a long silence. Will sat down next to her. “So, the shark moved really fast?” he said at last.
“Not possible. Not enough time. But listen Will, maybe the shark didn’t move at all. Suppose just the signal moved?”
“Lost me, Kinney.”
“Maybe someone rigged the data to make it seem like Hennessey was there.”
“Rigged the data to accuse a shark?”
Kinney ignored the question, already thinking ahead. “Tomorrow, we have to get the tag.”
“I thought you wanted the shark. Like move it somewhere else?”
Kinney stood and paced out into the living room. “We just get the tag. That keeps anyone from finding her again. Then Hennessey is safe…anonymous again. Trackless again. And we’ll have the physical tag with its memory chip – with all the signals it sent to the satellite stored on the tag itself, like a hard copy.”
“Isn’t the tag, like…bolted to the shark?”
“Clipped to the dorsal fin. If the shark’s at the surface and close, I can get it off. If it’s a bad transponder, we’ll know. If she really was in the harbor that night, we’ll know.”
“And then there’s the implication.”
“Yes! Someone tampered with the signal. Made it seem like Hennessey was there.”
“Why would they do that, Kay?”
“I just said, to pretend the shark was there.”
“What you’re really saying is ‘To frame a shark’. To hide a murder!”
“You make it seem pretty crazy,” Kinney stated.
“It is pretty crazy. And there are witnesses. All over Bluesky, all over Facebook. There were 100 people on that boat and they saw a shark. This shark Hennessey.”
“No, Will. They saw other people seeing a shark. They heard other people yelling ‘Shark!’. I challenge you to find someone who saw a real shark.”
“OK, how about the skipper of this little skiff that was searching for Brinson. They were the closest to Brinson when he was attacked. The skipper described this huge splash, huge attack.
“Did they really see a shark at 2AM in a dark Bay? And what about the head of the company? Wasn’t she there too?”
“Puja Ganguly, Sparkistry CEO.”
“Has this CEO person ever said anything different? Like there wasn’t a shark there? Because some people I know said something like that…”
Will was quiet for a moment. “You know you’re talking to a reporter, right?”
“Someone in Monterey was worried about it. Hearsay you’d call it. A lead? We have to talk to the CEO. Tag first. Then CEO.”
Will tuned to face her, “Kinney maybe we’re getting in way over our heads. You’re here 18 hours and already making the Mayor look like a fool and saying the Sparkistry CEO has evidence of a murder?”
“Science is testing hypotheses Will, not protecting them.”
“Would you be offended if I called that trite?”
“Would you be offended if I believed it? If I did that sort of trite shit everyday?” Kinney flared. But then, “And…thanks for being there today. You have a way of cutting through the…layers.”
“Well, that’s what happens when you are trying to take care of a six year old while working on the biggest story of your life. Cut through the layers.”
“And that’s what do tomorrow. We find this Fosi guy, and we start looking for Hennessey.”
