claim.
He shook his head.
The file spilled its inky guts rather conventionally over the space of an ensuing hour or three. The man sipping occasionally from a twelve ounce can of diet Dr. Pepper while ingesting the structural factoids making up the claim’s framework. The who-what-where-when, etcetera. By then the auditors and investigators and annuitants had crunched the numbers rather exhaustively, God bless ‘em.
Frequency of vortex intrusion in the east central portion of the unexceptional midwestern state? Rather routine, that one. The county occupied the northern edge of the tornado belt, after all. Nebraska on average is home to some three dozen tornadic events annually, tied with Kansas, trailing only Texas, Oklahoma and Florida. Chances of a tornado striking any given place at any given moment on any given day in May in that particular locale thus far from negligible, albeit entirely the product of something other than “accident.” Flat land regularly exposed to sluggish locomotives of gulf air meandering north, as directed by atmospheric temperature variations, beelining to those prairie pasturages temporarily a bit light on their typical quota of oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, atmospheric soup, electrons exited by thermal intrusion, photons blasting the planet, for heat rises, and always has, leaving vacancy where once high pressure cozily bunked, and of course the icy jet stream is happy to fill the void, has no choice, in fact.
“Has no choice.”
He scribbled in the margins while nodding slightly and taking another pull on his soda.
The likelihood of a non-smoking father of two, white collar-ish, regular exerciser, no apparent alcohol or drug issues, succumbing to unexpected watery asphyxiation? Not altogether small, as it turns out. Clocking in at number thirteen on death’s hit parade, indeed. Chances the slowly rolling river known for its spring unpredictability would fill to the brim a particularly malicious snare of fallen logs one May day? Not entirely uncommon, in the grand scheme of things.
Lastly the rather astonishing appearance of a predator, or so claimed the file. “Puma concolor” as scientifically known, of the family felidae. A fully-grown male typically six to seven feet in tawny length, it turns out, with a tail two to three feet long. Weighing about one hundred fifty pounds on average. However, big boy adult males range up to two hundred twenty five pounds ! and can be eight feet long !! from nose to tip of said tail. The athletic beast capable of leaping as high as fifteen feet and as far as forty feet. Nocturnal by nature, for the most part. The breed typically feeds on ungulates of the deer variety, though far from unwilling to take the occasional porcupine, possum, rabbit, coyote, bobcat, badger, or skunk. Rather astonishingly extensive in historic range, from the Yukon to the Andes, the southernmost tip of South America to the polar-most territory of our neighbors to the north, the largest range of any mammal other than humans. Formerly quite abundant on the North American plains, well suited to stalking prey in waist-high grasses, feeding on the abundant cud chewers then dotting the prairies, before being driven to mountain lairs by the higher primates’ westward expansion. An adult cat typically claims a range of ten to one hundred square miles, depending on prey abundance. Known variously as puma or panther or cougar or catamount. Supremely stealthy, expert at lying in wait, ambush hunters, well designed to dispatch prey by sinking steely canines into the back of unwitting necks, proprioceptors in the cougar's jaw enable it to determine when its teeth encounter bone, a forcible neck hyperextension typically follows, causing cervical vertebral fracture, even as claws are embedded in the victim’s back. Given to dragging their prey to well-concealed hiding places for later feasting. The sternum and ribs characteristically opened first, with evisceration of the heart and lungs and abdominal organs to follow. Feeding on the extremities and other carcass material typically continues for several days. The robust rebound of whitetail deer populations had lured the cats as far east as Missouri and Arkansas, reclaiming their range, to the chagrin of many an unsuspecting terrier. No housebound tabbies, these. Estimated population numbers exceedingly difficult to come by, nothing more than an educated guess, really, but by conservative estimate on the order of 30,000 – 50,000 animals in the U.S. alone. Sightings not altogether uncommon in the east central counties of the unexceptional state, these days, and regularly getting more common, or so the wildlife boys attested.
He turned attention to the calculations bookending the not uninteresting exposition. On average four attacks and one human fatality per year in the U.S. and Canada, according to one source. Between 1890 and 1990 some fifty-three confirmed attacks on humans in North America alone, resulting in ten deaths. A decade or so later the count had climbed to eighty-eight attacks and twenty deaths. One particularly exhaustive study showed fifty attacks on children, with a shockingly high twenty-five percent mortality rate. Indeed, research demonstrated that sixty-four percent of all victims – and almost all fatalities – were children. Attacks occur most frequently during late spring, particularly with younger cats establishing a territory, working on their skills, stumbling across an untended child or perhaps a jogger stopped to sink to a knee to tie a shoe, looking for all the world like an injured deer. A particularly worrying account of a male cougar silently pouncing from the forest cover onto an eight-year old girl as she bent to examine something of interest late one Canadian afternoon. Only the timely intercession of nearby family members prevented catastrophe.
So speaketh the numbers.
He turned his attention to probabilities.
His particularly speciality.
Two events, independent of one another, compound events, in that the first event has no effect on the probability of the second, so that the probability of the two independent events occurring at the same time is determined by finding the probability of each event occurring separately then multiplying the probabilities, or P (A and B) = P (A) x P (B). As, for example, if a coin is tossed and a single six-sided die is rolled simultaneously the probability of the coin landing heads while the die rolls a three is 1/2 x 1/6 = 1/12. Casually he crunched the numbers, his pencil straying over a yellow tablet. Tornado and mountain lion attack coming together at the same time in the same place, and this just short of seven years following the man’s disappearance? The product boasted an impressive array of zeroes to the right of the decimal.
He nodded grimly. Finding sense in the numbers.
Events far too unlikely to be the product of mere … chance. Like the gall bladder somehow could configure itself, all by itself, through eons of random happenstance. Yeah, right. In the sheer improbability of events one could detect a hint of … design. A death by drowning, supposedly, the body lost, never recovered, not yet anyway, the widow nonetheless fixing to pocket a multi-dinero payday these seven years, nearly, later. Rumors the selfsame chick surrendered a cub, somehow, offspring springing crazily off, who knows where, rather unbelievably, frankly. Folks just don’t go missing, as a rule. There had to be a connection. Who was the claimant trying to fool? Raging rivers are far more dangerous than even handguns, after all, statistically speaking. And while Spartacus never was found, or rather his body, or Franklin’s lost expedition, or, for that matter, the bodies of Ambrose Pierce and Amelia Earhart and Andrew Irvine and Raoul Amundsen and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Crater and Glen Miller and Flight 19, not to mention D. B Cooper, one could not simply ignore the fact the twin birthrate in the U.S. jumped by seventy-six percent in the three decades following the 70’s, as a single egg fertilized to form one zygote divides into two separate embryos. Roughly one in every two hundred pregnant women who reaches twenty weeks of gestation will have a stillborn baby, while, on the other hand, since the relatively recent advent of ultrasound technology the jaw-dropping concept of vanishing twin syndrome extensively has been documented, a kind of resorption conservatively estimated to occur in nearly one-fifth of multi-fetus pregnancies. And of course the divorce rate among couples bereaved by the loss of a child are as much as eight times the norm, according to one study. Another study established that bereaved parents, especially mothers, are at increased risk for a first psychiatric hospitalization after the tragedy, grief concocting implausible fantasy by way of staving off psychic collapse. And while pre-eclampsia and smoking are among the primary causes, in only about forty percent of stillbirths is a verifiable medical explanation found, eerily enough, meaning that for the majority of stillbirths there is no explanation, none at all. As if the stillborn twin had just … disappeared.
A child turns