Page 81 of Mastermind

“What for?”

“Picking up roadkill,” he replies as we walk toward the ridge where the garbage was dumped.

“Community service?” I ask.

“Not directly. I was collecting dead animals out of personal curiosity,” Theo says over his shoulder.

“Uh . . . didn’t Jeffrey Dahmer do that, too?”

Theo stops and turns around. “I really should provide more context for these things. Some of the pets in my neighborhood had been acting erratic and run away. I was curious if it was rabies. So I started inspecting roadkill.”

The landfill foreperson is walking toward us. I need to explain what we’re doing, but I really need to hear the rest of Theo’s story.

“What happened?”

“It was rabies. I contacted animal control and the public health agencies. They put out a warning and told my mother I needed counseling.”

“How did she handle that?”

“She’d already given up hope. My stepdad, on the other hand, was okay with it. He’d grown up in the woods and skinned animals as a kid. He understood.”

“Can I help you?” asks the foreperson, a stocky man with a neck tattoo of a dragon visible above his blue jumpsuit.

I show him my badge. “We need to do a little searching, if it’s not an inconvenience.”

He shouts over to the man by the bulldozer. “Hey, Sergio! Do you have anything to hide? No dead hookers, right?”

“Not this week,” Sergio replies.

“Have at it,” says the foreperson. He glances down at my shoes. “Looks like you came prepared. You’re doing this at your own risk, yada yada yada, and so forth. Now if you’ll excuse me, Sergio and I are going to go take a smoke break so we don’t have to testify in case you find something.” With that, he leaves Theo and me alone with the garbage.

Theo starts down the small cliff first, walking sideways until he reaches the first bags of trash. He looks up at me. “You don’t have to come down here.”

“Legally speaking, you shouldn’t be down there at all.” I make the hike to the bottom of the ridge and pull out my phone with the app we’re using to track his phone. “This way,” I say, indicating a pile about ten feet from us.

Theo steps over the garbage bags and makes his way to the spot. What looks like the shadow of a cloud passes over him, but when I look up I see a flock of gulls circling overhead, waiting to swoop down and get at the contents of the dump. He glances at the sky, then starts sorting through trash.

“If I were a biologist looking for new antibiotics,” he says as he paws through the trash, “I’d be checking the stomachs of those birds and all the rats around us. They’ve spent so much time eating our infected garbage, you’d have to imagine they have evolved some new coping mechanisms.”

“I know you miss teaching,” I say. “Do you miss doing research as well?”

“In a way, yes. But in another way, no. The problem with pure research is that you make a discovery, if you’re lucky, and then move on to something else. The real work is figuring out how to apply that knowledge and make it useful. I think I’m more useful now. At least I hope so.” Theo pulls aside a mound of fresh trash and stares at a large green lawn bag. “You look familiar.”

“Weir’s?” I ask.

Theo points to a tear in the side of the bag. “This would appear to be where I shoved my phone.” He pulls the bag out of the pile and hands it to me. “Ah, we found your friend.” He lifts another bag of the same color.

“Is that it?” I ask.

“I only saw that one in the can. But I think it’s safe to assume the other is from the second can.”

“Okay. Let’s bring them back up to the car and have a look.”

We haul the bags to the car trunk to have a look inside. First, I open the one Theo ripped and extract the coffee cup with his phone inside. “I guess that answers that question. This is definitely Weir’s trash.”

I take two unused garbage bags from the trunk and slide Weir’s trash bags inside them so nothing falls out as I dig through.

I reach in, start sorting through the trash, and feel a smaller bag inside.