The woman pulled out a small notebook, she appeared to carry several, this one was a slender week-per-page calendar. She flipped to today’s date. “No, I don’t think I’m here to cook.” Kate could see that today had one word, Mammoth. Yesterday was Fly Andi to SF.

  “Today is your mammoth day.”

  “Yes.” She put away her planner and moved around the mammoth. “It’s differentiated from the mastodon by greater tusk curvature and flatter teeth.”

  “Flatter teeth,” Emily managed to say it with a straight face which was more than Kate was interested in attempting. There was a geek for everything, she supposed, even animals gone extinct millennia ago.

  “Yes, for grass grinding. A mastodon has a crowned tooth as it also foraged woody brush that it needed to tear up and physically break open rather than merely grind down. I find it curiously anachronistic… No, that’s not the right word. Curiously inappropriate—is that the right word?—that you are staging an Ice-Age Paleolithic Cook Off in front of animals that would have had no dietary overlap with Homo sapiens beyond occasional berries and the like.”

  Not once had she turned to look behind her at the cooking stations or the pantry. Kate noted that the crew hadn’t unpacked the show’s banner yet.

  Emily scanned the area quickly. There was nothing evident that declared the proper name for the event. Or… she bent down until her head was at the same height as the other woman’s. Under the edge of a box on the half-assembled judge’s table, a notebook stuck out. On the binder was the name of the show followed by Chef Profiles.

  The brunette had glanced around for two seconds at most, and noted that amongst all of the fray. Not the curiously naive first impression she created.

  Fly Andi to SF. Not fly with. A pilot?

  “If it’s not rude to ask, who are you?”

  “I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.”

  Emily almost laughed when she saw Kate’s double take. She’d made even more assumptions than Emily herself had. To be an IIC for the National Transportation Safety Board meant she was a specialist in complex accidents in rail, marine, road, and aircraft.

  Making a point of looking around the grand hall that was almost ready for the show, Emily joked. “I don’t see any mammoth crashes.”

  “That would be unlikely,” Miranda stated matter-of-factly. “As these are only skeletons, I find it unlikely that they would reanimate to do battle. Besides, there is only one mammoth here, unless you’re counting the small model.” She didn’t bother pointing to the foot-tall version close by her foot that showed how the animal would appear with furry skin and a trunk. “The other two full skeletons are a mastodon and a four-tusked Gomphotherium productum. Therefore any mammoth crash, singular, occurring in this hall would need a counterpart, for example a mammoth-Gomphotherium crash.” Then she frowned at the mammoth’s knee. “Or did you intend to use mammoth as an adjectival indication of scale? No, there are no large crashes here, nor smaller ones that I’m aware of.”

  “I was making a joke as a way of enquiring why an NTSB investigator is at a cooking show.”

  “Jokes,” Miranda shook her head. “Elusive. And I’m only coincidentally at a cooking show.” She stopped and there was a long pause.

  Kate turned to look over her shoulder toward an increasing commotion at one of the cook stations.

  Emily decided to rephrase her initial question. “Are you studying a mammoth out of general interest or is it somehow relevant to your role as an NTSB investiga—”

  There was a loud cry of agony.

  Emily pulled her Glock 43 Slimline from its hidden holster as she spun.

  Miranda had observed such motions from three of her team members. In speed of decreasing response time: Air Force Colonel Taz Cortez, retired Army Captain Andi Wu, and, the fastest, Holly Harper a retired Australian SASR operator.

  She hoped Andi was enjoying her visit with her mother in San Francisco. They were supposed to have all visited together, but then she’d received the urgent call to come to New York. Andi had wanted to come as well, but Andi’s mother had made the visit sound important and Miranda had convinced her to stay.

  How much trouble can I get into in a museum? Miranda had asked, to which Andi had no particular response. Miranda was a grown-up after all. Since the destruction of her childhood island home, Miranda had been trying to act more independent. Andi encouraged her, but habit had her tending to hover. Miranda’s personal challenges did cause issues but—

  Another sharp cry of pain.

  Oh, she’d forgotten about that—and turned to see the cause.

  Kate and Emily had raced over toward the man they had been speaking with earlier. Emily reholstered her sidearm in a move as smooth as Andi but not as smooth as Holly would have, which aided her in calibrating Emily’s skill level. Kate had slapped at her hip as if reaching for a sidearm, but wasn’t wearing one. The motion was too brief to offer sufficient information for a skills estimate.

  Mickey Spelene clutched either side of a Bosch 800 series cooktop with the built-in hood extending upward from the countertop—she’d been looking at those for her new kitchen. He shook as if he was being electrocuted.

  “The breaker! Kill the breaker!” Kate shouted as Emily raced off to find it, supporting Miranda’s initial hypothesis.

  Miranda put her head down and ran at the man. She collided hard against him, knocking him clear, feeling no jolt of electrical current herself. He collapsed to the floor and she landed on top of him.

  She pushed away as quickly as she could, without touching flesh-to-flesh. She never liked that. He also smelled slightly of cooked meat, which wasn’t wholly inappropriate; meat was a part of a true paleolithic diet, simply less so than postulated by those touting it as a modern diet.

  “We need a medic here,” Kate called out then extended a hand to help her up, which Miranda avoided. “Good thinking. Straight on to knock him sideways.”

  “It seemed logical.” She felt a little dizzy and wished there was somewhere to wash her hands. “And I didn’t run straight at him. I estimated a fifteen-degree angle would clear the corner of the table, but also knock him back and away. The power cable would have tightened sufficiently to pull the cooktop from his clenched hands.”

  She could feel the two women staring at her, but didn’t like looking at people’s faces. Even if she did, she could rarely tell what people were thinking. She risked a quick glance, then turned away to slip out her autism reference notebook. On the emoji page she tentatively identified puzzlement, which seemed appropriate as she often puzzled herself as well.

  A man wearing a medic’s vest and blue nitrile gloves knelt by the fallen chef and felt for a pulse before shouting for a defibrillator and could someone call an ambulance. Miranda really needed to remember to keep some of those gloves in her pocket. She had several pairs in her crash-site investigation vest, but she’d used and discarded the last pair in her pocket.

  The medic initiated CPR. Silence reigned for the next several minutes. A defib kit failed to restart Mickey Spelene’s heart. And once the ambulance arrived, more medics encircled him.

  Meanwhile, Miranda found the show installation technician’s toolbox abandoned by the entryway. She found a Fluke multimeter on the lower compartment. That pleased her. The Fluke family had owned an island near her own in the San Juans of Washington State for many years before donating it to the San Juan Preservation Trust.

  Wills and trusts. She pulled out her personal notebook and wrote down the idea for her own estate planning. After she had put it away, she tried to remember why she’d been holding a multimeter under the notebook.

  Oh. Electrical currents. Stoves.

  She returned to Station Three as they were lifting the body with a sheet over its face onto a stretcher. The Bosch had a stainless-steel frame, which should have made it electrically a single conductor. Electricity traveled from one conductor to another. In order to pass through the victim’s body, he had to be connected to two different conductors through his body.

  There was no metal plate on the smooth-finished concrete floor. His knees hadn’t been in contact with either the cabinet in front of him that the Bosch rested on or the guardrail for the display behind him.

  She liked working from the outside in. After careful inspection of the workstation’s wooden countertop for an embedded wire grid or some other anomaly, she looked at the Bosch itself. The line of the unit’s front frame was continuous. A single conductor as she’d surmised.

  Then she pictured the dead man’s position before he’d become dead—she was always careful to think about people last. They were far more confusing and unreliable than the machines they operated. A fatal mechanical failure causing an airplane to become so debilitated that it crashed was very rare. Ones caused by human error that the machine couldn’t compensate for were statistically far more significant.

  Mr. Spelene had been leaning on the front edge of the Bosch with one hand, perhaps to support himself as he leaned forward. That would have placed his other hand on the top of the downdraft hood unit. It was a two-inch deep panel at the back that had extended a foot above the cooktop. It would suck any cooking fumes into the unit, wash it through a charcoal filter inside the counter, and release clean and relatively odorless air out the base of the cabinet. A good choice for filming inside the museum. A fully enclosed vented room would be more effective but would probably prove impractical for filming.

  The hood unit was mounted to the counter separately from the cooktop.

  She tested it with the voltmeter. A two-hundred-and-forty-volt differential between the hood and the cooktop.

  “That can’t be right.”

  Miranda jumped. She hadn’t noticed Kate and Emily stepping up to her on either side. Three was too many, especially when two of them were strangers. She backed away, then she sidestepped when they turned to track her movement. She finally slipped around to the far side of the counter between Emily and the Megaloceros giganteus—the largest deer that ever lived.

  “They need to rename the museum or remove that deer along with the cave bear,” she pointed toward the display.

  “Why’s that?” Emily asked.

  “That deer, also called an Irish Elk, shouldn’t be here as it has never been found in North America. Or this isn’t the American Museum of Natural History.”

  “Perhaps it’s okay because it is not the Museum of American Natural History but rather the museum that exists in America?” Emily suggested.

  “Oh, that makes sense. I withdraw my earlier comment about the cave bear confusion… No, I don’t. I still find aspects of that to be unclear. Both are cave bears so why was spelaeus named such and included here, when the equally Cave Bear-name-worthy North American simus was not so named?”

  Emily’s eyes crossed for reasons that Miranda couldn’t quite ascertain, but it told her that perhaps she had spent sufficient time on that topic. She spotted the multimeter in her own hands and recalled what she’d been working on.

  “Even at two hundred and forty volts the shock shouldn’t have been so severe. It might have hurled him backward, but dry skin is a sufficient dielectric that it should have mitigated most of the current and left him below the let-go threshold. Cardiac arrest and the burns on his palms indicate that five to ten amps of current flowed through him—causing uncontrolled muscle clenching and immediate cardiac arrest.”

  “Are you a coroner?”

  “I’m Miranda Chase. Investigator-in-charge for the NTSB.” Miranda didn’t like repeating herself, but perhaps she’d been misunderstood the first time.

  Emily didn’t look happy; she had a distinct frowny face. “I, uh, noticed that his palms were fairly damp with fear sweat by the time I let him go.”

  “Oh, that would explain it.” Miranda liked having that puzzle answered.

  “That would explain it. That would explain it?” Kate was having trouble processing what had happened here. “A man just died.”

  “Yes, he did. That’s accurate.” Miranda nodded in the affirmative.

  “That’s pretty cold.” Kate tried to look into her brown eyes and read what was going on in there but they skittered aside as if—

  “Neither of you liked him. I didn’t know him at all.” The woman’s attention remained fixed on the multimeter’s readout.

  “You don’t seem very surprised.” Like someone who was guilty.

  “Oh, is that what you’re supposed to feel when someone you don’t know dies? I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “What the f—”

  Emily was shaking her head at her.

  “What?”

  “You don’t have children, do you, Kate?” Emily asked with all of the patience she herself had lost.

  “What does that have to do with the price of soy sauce?”

  Emily sighed. “Look, we don’t know each other and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes. As a mother, you learn to…uh…research every possible thing your child could be born with.”

  “Like autism spectrum disorder, commonly referred to as ASD,” Miranda said while stowing the two leads around the multimeter in a perfectly aligned spiral wrap.

  “Like autism,” Emily said gently. “I hope I didn’t offend you.”

  “It’s true, so why would I find that offensive?” She tucked the multimeter under her arm and pulled out a notebook, apparently ready to take notes. Then she glanced up at Kate, perhaps as far as her chin. “I’ve always had trouble with understanding emotions, including my own. Andi said I should keep pushing the envelope and try to learn. Do you know why I should find that offensive?”

  “Andi who you flew to San Francisco?” Kate went for a subject change.

  “Yes, that’s where my girlfriend’s mother lives. We were on the way to visit when—” Miranda’s expression blanked then she began looking around the room as if lost.

  “Your day planner,” Emily spoke softly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to peek, but it said Mammoth.”

  “Mammoth! That’s right.” She walked away from them still holding her open notebook and with the multimeter tucked under her arm. She barely noticed when Emily tugged it free.

  “Aren’t you interested in who killed Mickey Spelene?” Kate called after her.

  Miranda stopped dead in her tracks. She turned halfway to them, then halfway back to the mammoth, then halfway to them. Then closing her eyes, she stood dead still for several moments. Finally she faced them fully.

  “I also find topic changes a little hard to keep track of. Open questions can be terribly distracting. Like why this museum has shown a bias for Eurasian fossils over North American ones.”

  “Well, I have to find out who killed one of my chefs an hour to show time.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that.” Kate was losing her mind. It was the only thing that would explain this feeling.

  “I thought it was rather obvious.”

  Kate glanced at Emily who only shrugged.

  Miranda took the three steps back from the mammoth skeleton until the three of them once again stood beside the mis-wired cook station. Then she retrieved the multimeter from Emily’s hands and turned it over.

  Written across the back of the case with a heavy black marker, it said E. Spelene.

  “Based on the white tan line on the left ring finger of the deceased, Mr. M. Spelene, and that your electrical technician still wore hers made that rather obvious.”

  “Where is she?” Kate spun to look around the room.

  “She was the one yelling at him moments before he electrocuted himself. She departed as soon as they pulled the sheet over his face. You’ll find her ring tossed in the sand at the foot of the Amphicyon ingens display. That’s the beardog over there.”

  Emily stepped over and nodded when she spotted it. She called over one of the policemen who’d been interviewing crew members and pointed it out to him. That led to questioning Miranda and his attempt to impound the multimeter.

  “No,” Miranda protested. “We need it to make sure that the cooktop is rewired properly so that Kate can film her show. Besides, I took it from E. Spelene’s tool chest. As a skilled electrician, she wouldn’t have needed it to mis-wire the cooktop and hood.”

  By the time the police left, they’d taken the cooktop with them.

  “Did you bring a spare?” Miranda asked.

  Kate nodded. Of course she had, in case one hadn’t worked. But not in case it killed somebody. “I can’t—”

  Emily shrugged, apparently one of her favorite gestures. She made it look absolutely elegant and assured at the same time. “The other chefs haven’t shown up yet. You can tell them there was an accident. Because I’m betting you won’t be able to get this all organized in the museum again anytime soon.”

  It had taken months of negotiations, permits, and more than a little luck. Kate didn’t know if she’d have the energy to try again but she already had very-high-ticket commitments from the advertisers to play off the museum’s prestige. She didn’t want to let down the museum either.

  However, the numbers no longer worked. Each round of the cook-off was supposed to halve the group, but with only seven in the first round it would…

  Kate turned to look at Miranda. “Do you cook?”

  “Yes, but not as well as Mike.” And she stopped as if that actually explained something.

  “Well, Mike isn’t here,” Kate tried cajoling her.

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “Maybe…” Kate couldn’t think how to ask.

  “Miranda,” Emily decided to rescue Kate; Miranda had her quite flummoxed. “Would you be willing to cook in the first round of the competition? I’m sure Kate would really appreciate it.”

  “I’d make sure you don’t look foolish,” Kate said.

  “Why would I look foolish?”

  “You won’t.” Emily did her best to make it sound like a convincing truth.

  Miranda’s brow furrowed for a moment. Then she glanced over her shoulder toward the mammoth skeleton looming over them.