"And get me some ice cream," Otter instructed her, impervious to the veiled jibe.
She scrunched her face up then, as if in physical pain and put her hands to her ears. For a second she turned bright red, then suddenly let out an explosive breath and seemed to calm down again.
"Okay," she said, with exagerrated slowness and calm. "I'll walk us through it."
Death Otter took the newspaper and carefully un-scrunched it.
"The article," she said, "is fake. It is in a local paper, but written by a non-local writer, regardless of what the byline says. Getting Diana's name wrong was a noob error, so it was probably some junior analyst who thought he had better things to do than ghostwrite some hick town news piece. He hit Google for Chuck Fewell, dredged up a few random factoids...oh, he served on a board, oh he golfted with Acra...and then phoned the rest in. The only IMPORTANT part, as far as the authorities are concerned, is where they say the sheriff is doing the investigation. That's the misinformation. The rest is just...psh..."
She made a fist, then spread her hand wide and fluttered her fingers like a dandelion puff drifting away.
"The 'torn apart by wild animals' is patently BS. There's hundreds of thousands of species of non-insect animals that can be found in the United States. A small percentage can possibly do harm to a human being. A small percentage of THAT will actually attack human beings rather than flee. And of THOSE, only a HANDFUL can 'tear someone apart.' Which MEANS that when a Medical Examiner consults his Big Book of Ways for People To Die...my copy of that is on order by the way...they only need to check a very few things to verify that it either WAS an animal, or WASN'T. If it WAS, they can tell very easily what kind it was."
"Furthermore, an animal has no rights to infringe on, so there's no reason to withold that information if it's known. So IF you see 'torn apart by wildlife' it usually means either they KNOW what happened but don't want to SAY...which would mean it's not wildlife...or they DON'T know what happened, in which case it's ALSO probably not wildlife, unless it's escaped from a ZOO or something, so the Examiner can't figure it out."
Otter took a deep breath, getting louder as she went on.
"And since authorities outside the county are bothering to get involved at ALL, it's very obviously thought to be either drug related, homicide across state or country borders, or related to some other non-local crime which animals are GENERALLY incapable of performing!"
She pauses then and looks around at the attention she's starting to garner from other customers.
"Try the alligator," is her advice for them, delivered deadpan. "It's delicious."
Then she sits back down.
In a more conversational tone Otter says, "My educated guess is that the powers that be suspect these two cases may be murders, and their motive points towards a local Indian tribe. No way to tell if they have a suspect yet, but I doubt it."
"Goddamnit, is the ice cream not here yet?! It's a spoon and a bowl, not an assembly line!"
