To keep the momentum going, the Highland Council voted to use an infusion of grant money coming from British Parliament to install thirty visitor perches around Loch Ness. Each ten-foot-high covered platform would house three high-powered mounted telescopic cameras that ould allow tourists to snap downloadable photos of anything that crossed the lens of their viewport. Meanwhile, Alexander MacDonald, the Council’s new provost (and second cousin to Brandy and True) held a press conference to announce an international symposium, scheduled to convene at my father’s resort April 15 through April 22 to determine what this aggressive new species was. The Council extended invitations to marine biologists, cryptozoologists, and amateur monster hunters from around the world, with all resort guests receiving free passage aboard nocturnal voyages that would attempt to film the creature feeding on deer as the herds crossed the loch.

Reports of new sightings and photos purportedly taken by locals drove the story like a social media tsunami. Within weeks every hotel and bed-and-breakfast in the Great Glen was sold out for the season, led by Nessie’s Lair.

It was all great theater, except that now the public demanded to hear from the marine biologist who had not only identified the real Nessie two years earlier but had tracked it down and killed it. I was hounded twenty-four/seven, which made my life miserable and drew mixed reactions from the normally conservative administrators at Cambridge University.

Brandy, William, and I had been at Cambridge barely a week, living in a two-bedroom rented flat. Having arrived mid-semester, I was relegated to guest-speaking spots, rotating between undergraduate and graduate courses in oceanography and the marine sciences. The experience allowed me to re-acclimate to the academic environment, but the attention coming from my father’s escapades was affecting the student body’s perception of my role at the university—was Dr. Zachary Wallace a teacher or an entertainer?

And then a week before the Nessie’s Lair event, a serious-looking fellow entered my lecture hall, marched up to my lectern, and ceremoniously presented me with an envelope. Baffled, I opened it, my students bearing witness to the publicly staged event.

It was a subpoena.

“State your name for the record.”

“Angus William Wallace.”

The preliminary hearing was being held behind closed doors at the Sherrifs’ Court in Inverness. Present in the chamber was the judge, a court stenographer, my family, and a school of circling sharks in three-piece suits hailing from a law firm rated by England’s Legal Business magazine as the fifth most successful in all the United Kingdom. Judging from their number, it appeared as if they had summoned every attorney from their offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

If my father was intimidated by their full court press, he wasn’t showing it, but his barrister, my stepbrother, Maxie Rael, would need to change his underwear before the morning was through.