"Love? Ah, that's jist yer knob talkin'. B'sides, there's plenty o' fish in the sea. Last thing ye need is tae be hitchin' up wi' a MacDonald."

I shook my head, wondering how I'd sunk so low as to be asking advice about women from my father.

"So, lad, tell me again about this latest attack."

"I told you all I know. According to the papers, the American photographer's still in a coma."

"But he lost the camera?"

"Yes."

"Bollocks. My trial restarts next week. While every Nessie encounter pushes me that much closer tae freedom, Maxie says it's still no' enough. I need yer help here, son."

"Son? Not Alice or Deirdre? Why am I your son when you need something?"

"Point taken. Now when will ye go after this thing?"

"Not until I know more about it."

"Ugh… ye're wastin' valuable time. Whit else is there tae ken aboot it?"

"For starters, why did a benign fish-eating creature suddenly add red meat to its diet?"

"An' how dae ye expect tae learn that oot?"

"I don't know, seeing as how the Sheriff's lab conveniently managed to lose all the specimens I collected. Guess I'll just have to get more." I stood, heading down the corridor. "We'll talk in a few days. I wanna check out the salmon-spawning grounds."

"The spawnin' grounds? Zachary, wait! Forget the spawnin' grounds, laddie, ye're jist wastin' whit little time I've got left. Zack, are ye listenin' tae me? We need proof, real proof that this thing is oot there an' that it's killed folk. Call Theresa, she'll—"

"For the last time, I'm not interested in speaking with Johnny C.'s widow, or for that matter, any other woman you've shared bodily fluids with."

Pushing past the guards, I left the holding area and trudged up the dungeon's winding stone stairwell, the echoes of my father's rants following me until I reached the castle's ground floor.

Aboard the Nessie III :

An exhausted Michael Newman limped out of the Nessie III's cramped pilothouse, desperate to stretch his aching back. For the last six hours he had sat behind the makeshift wooden desk bolted to the pilothouse decking, attempting to patch together a working sonar grid. Each of the thirty-four sonar buoys floating in Loch Ness had to be recalibrated so that data transmissions could be received and analyzed, and in many cases, Newman had to order a less-than-pleased boat captain back out to reposition his vessel's buoys. Just when it finally seemed the NIST engineer had his grid up and working, the Nessie III's new generator had conked out, shutting down his GPS receiver, sending his blood pressure soaring.

It had taken him the rest of the afternoon to fix the problem, and now Newman's lower vertebrae felt as if someone had been twisting them with a monkey wrench. "Caldwell! Wake up and get in here."

David, asleep on a chaise lounge chair, opened his eyes. "We up and running?"