It was later that morning that Alec Hutch heard the news about the drowned corpse of one of his employees, discovered floating in the whale pool. As head of the park and a VP of its parent company, who owned several similar entertainment facilities as well as other unrelated brands; this was the last thing that he needed. He had just had to deal with the potential media nightmare of someone finding the murdered body of the night custodial supervisor stashed in a god damn freezer. No one in the park even noticed that he was missing for two weeks. This supervisor was not well liked by most of his employees and since they all worked on the grounds and he spent so much time doing paperwork in his office, they just figured that he had been up there the entire time.
The only person who seemed to care at all was his adult daughter. She kept calling the park, wondering what had happened to her father. She contacted HR, but they were so disorganized that they couldn't even confirm that he was actually employed there, let alone tell her where he was; not that they cared enough to try very hard. Someone had just happened to stumble across his body before anyone even seriously considered looking for him.
And then there was that incident a year ago where a child's finger was found floating in one of the shark tanks in the aquarium building. Everyone overreacted to that. After all, none of those sharks were big enough to actually eat a person and no one reported that their child had gone missing. And no one was complaining about their child missing a finger, for that matter. People blew that way out of proportion. The way that Alec saw it, if no one seems to be missing anything; then what's the problem? Sure you can assume that the severed digit must have belonged to someone, but if no one is claiming to be missing it, then why should anyone else care? Sometimes you just find a random finger of unexplainable origin floating around somewhere; these things happen. The public can be such babies about this stuff and the media eats it up. Of course, this isn't even including all of the annual roller-coaster related accidents that occur in the park.
And now there was this mess. What concerned Alec most was the nudity aspect of this. The employee was found dead and naked. On top of that, some dipshit reporter uncovered a recent police document stating that one of his employees had confessed to masturbating on park grounds. Although he had only been the head of the park for a couple of years, Alec was a seasoned, shrewd businessman and knew that when it came to the family friendly crap that the park was selling, people were always more concerned about sex than violence.
On any given day there could be any number of gruesome accidents occurring around the park. But all it takes is just one overly concerned parent catching a teenage concession worker on his lunch break, banging his girlfriend like a Whac-A-Mole in the stall of a public restroom and all hell breaks loose! Alec was going to have to release a statement to the press.
A relatively young assistant whale trainer was the first to spot the corpse in the pool, a couple of hours before the park opened. Floyd, the head trainer had just arrived to work, put on his wet suit and was at the pool when he heard Mira shriek. He was relieved to find her unharmed, as his first reaction was to assume that she had done something stupid and injured herself in the process. However, this momentary relief was interrupted by the somewhat unsettling scene of a dead human body being playfully pushed around the tank by a couple of the whales.
Floyd figured that this was probably just some drunken idiot that had snuck into the park afterhours and decided that it would be a brilliant idea to go skinny-dipping with the large, oceangoing predators; and was drowned as a result. This was exactly why only experienced trainers were allowed to enter the water with the whales. It was a bit like being a lion tamer, except that the lions weighed 12000 pounds, were noticeably smarter than dogs and were perfectly adapted to a cold, saltwater environment that humans were not naturally designed to deal with, or even survive in at all.
One of the whales that was in the main area of the tank that morning had killed a trainer at another facility before arriving here and as a result, even the trainers were not allowed to enter the water with that one. However, all killer whales can be temperamental and dangerous and when you're in their environment, on their terms, even when they know you and you're trained to know them; one false move could still be your last. So it's not a huge surprise that this happened to a stranger who entered the pool, especially one that was stupid enough to try something like that in the first place.
That's what you call "natural selection at work", Floyd thought, looking on with a smirk. The park may refuse to publicly acknowledge Darwinism to cater to the public's fragile little sensibilities about the topic, but from all of his many years at the company Floyd knew that Darwinism was alive and well, because he saw it everyday. And it occurred at least as much in the offices as it did in the animal enclosures.
Mira, getting over her shock, commented that they needed to call the police. "No doubt", Floyd thought. But he needed to cover his ass and in this case, that also meant covering the park's ass. The higher-ups would want to know about this before anyone else. The police would be called, but the guys in Legal would be called first.
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