Lion Down

by Stuart Gibbs

  14

  GROUNDED

  I didn’t go to jail, but I still ended up in a lot of trouble.

  After reviewing the security footage from the Connelly Farm, the police determined that while Summer and I had trespassed, we hadn’t done so with criminal intent. After all, we were only kids, and the adult who was with us had abandoned us on the side of the road and gone off to commit a crime. The only reason we had gone onto the farm was to try to talk sense into Lily.

  Meanwhile, Lily was locked up right away. We never even got to see her after we were brought to the police station, although we did hear her shouting at some point that the Redwood Corporation was the real criminal and that she was only trying to do what was right. “I’m like the Lorax!” she yelled. “You wouldn’t arrest the Lorax, would you?”

  My parents were the ones I really ended up in trouble with. They were upset with me for hanging out with Lily Deakin, correctly assuming that the only reason I would do that was to help out with the mountain lion case. Mom felt that Summer and I should have called the police on Lily the moment she went over the fence, so there would be no question of our innocence. Dad didn’t quite back her up on this. If anything, he seemed annoyed by the incompetence of Lily’s raid and possibly embarrassed that the police had needed to rescue me from a flock of angry turkeys.

  So I got grounded.

  Summer did too.

  My parents never grounded me at home. They couldn’t keep an eye on me there, and they knew I could simply go off and wander around in the woods if I wanted to. So I had to sit in my mother’s office at Monkey Mountain instead.

  All in all, there were worse places to be. The office had much better air-conditioning than our trailer (I probably wouldn’t have wanted to wander around our mosquito-infested woods on a day that hot anyhow), and there was a window out into the gorilla exhibit.

  Plus, my mother didn’t like to stay in her office. In the wild, she could sit still as a stone for hours at a time, watching gorillas—or almost any other animal. In her office, sitting still for five minutes was a chore for her. She knew there were hundreds of primates in the building, and she was far more interested in watching them than answering emails and filing maintenance requests. So she tended to wander off for large chunks of time.

  I stayed put, as she had told me to. But she couldn’t stop me from investigating further.

  In her office, I had a computer with internet access, which was all I needed.

  I couldn’t help myself. We had new leads in the lion case, and with Lily in jail and Tommy Lopez ordered off the investigation, there wasn’t anyone else to look into it. Plus, it wasn’t remotely dangerous; I was only collecting information. I was on the computer anyhow, writing a report on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, so when Mom slipped out the door, I googled our new suspects.

  I found a lot of intriguing information on all of them.

  Lincoln Stone’s brother, Walter, had a long criminal record. Although he went by “Walter Stone,” he had never legally changed his last name from “Turkmeister.” (Neither had his brother; “Lincoln Stone” was only a stage name.) The Turkmeisters really had been born in Beverly Hills. They hadn’t been rich, but they had been well-off, and yet, even with that leg up, Walter had done poorly in school and been quite a juvenile delinquent. He had been busted several times for underage drinking, public urination, and sneaking into the backyards of famous people to use their swimming pools. Often, he was busted for all three at once.

  Walter had never gone to college, shifting between menial jobs and time in jail for stupid crimes. Once his younger brother had become famous, Walter had come to Texas to work for him. While he often claimed to be the “Executive Vice President of Lincoln Stone Enterprises,” he didn’t seem to do much of anything except back up his brother on various forms of social media. No matter how ridiculous a statement Lincoln made, Walter would happily reiterate it—even statements that Lincoln had quickly admitted were mistaken, like his suggestion that the best way to get rid of old nuclear weapons would be to detonate them. It was as though Walter never had an original thought himself; he simply parroted whatever his brother said.

  Thus, when Lincoln had railed against Rocket for killing King, Walter had gone several steps further, saying that all lions in the US should be eradicated. And when Lincoln had said the Endangered Species Act was yet another case of government intrusion in our lives, Walter had gone on to add that it was “a stupid, moronic, and idiotic law.” (Ironically, he had managed to misspell all three insults—“sutpid, morronic, and iddiotic”—attesting to who the real stupid, moronic idiot was.)

  Meanwhile, Walter’s newfound job hadn’t made him any more responsible. He still got in trouble, usually when he’d been drinking, which seemed to be much of the time. He had made a fool of himself at several public events for his brother, most notably when he decided to moon a rival journalist at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, forgetting that a hundred noted photojournalists were in the room at the time. The resulting photos of his flabby behind had trended all over the internet for the following week. In the past year alone, he had been pulled over for driving while drunk at least four times, but somehow (probably due to his brother’s influence) had never ended up in jail. He also had a penchant for shooting inanimate objects; not just road signs, but also mailboxes, pinecones, and his neighbor’s drones. He had managed to avoid arrest for all of this as well.

  I also found a story about how Walter had somehow ended up with a few World War II surplus grenades and thought it’d be a good idea to try to get rid of the gophers on his property with them. (Amazingly, by all accounts, Walter had actually been sober when he came up with this plan.) Walter hadn’t killed any gophers, but he had killed his septic tank, creating a geyser of sewage that had also rendered his home unlivable for two months while hazmat crews sanitized it.

  Therefore, Walter didn’t seem like the type of person who had the mental capacity to start a campaign against mountain lions by killing his brother’s dog. However, he did seem like the type of person who, after a few too many drinks, might accidentally shoot his brother’s dog and then try to pin the whole thing on a mountain lion.

  Meanwhile, Petra Olson was far more intelligent. (Of course, one might argue that there were rocks that were more intelligent than Walter.) Petra had authored several books that even her critics admitted were at least well written. I found a few of her editorials online and was impressed, despite myself. Even when she was arguing about something that I completely disagreed with, like gutting the Endangered Species Act, she could be very convincing.

  Petra was an avid hunter herself, and I found plenty of photos of her posed over animals she had killed, including grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, and African lions. However, she had always hunted the animals legally and had the proper licenses. As much as I disliked hunting, I knew that many hunters were also ardent conservationists; the problem with Petra was that she didn’t seem to care one bit about conservation. She had said, on the record, that she didn’t care if the next generation didn’t have any grizzlies or bighorns or lions to hunt. “Animals go extinct all the time,” she had argued. “There’s no tyrannosaurs or brontosaurs anymore and no one complains. If God didn’t want grizzlies to go extinct, he wouldn’t have given us guns.”

  So, if Petra had really wanted to kill a mountain lion, she would have been clever enough to manipulate Lincoln Stone into making it legal.

  Harlan Briscoe was the toughest to figure out. While Walter Turkmeister was an idiot and Petra Olson was a rabid anti-environmentalist, they both seemed to believe the things they said. Harlan merely appeared to say whatever would make him the most money. He was certainly smart and a shrewd marketer—not just anyone could have taken a small-town radio host like Lincoln Stone and made him a huge success—but no one seemed to know if Harlan actually agreed with anything Lincoln said.

  Harlan had worked in TV and radio for a long time, and he had shepher
ded other people to fame as well, including a few stand-up comics who had become big movie stars, a Mixed Martial Arts fighter, and Danger Dan, a TV host who traveled the world doing incredibly crazy things like BASE jumping off the Eiffel Tower or scuba diving with great white sharks. Harlan was extremely well respected in the business for finding and nurturing talent. (In fact, a few people observed that, with some of his comics-turned-actors, he could find talent where none had ever existed in the first place.) In all his years in the public eye, though, Harlan had never made a political statement showing that he leaned one way or another. Danger Dan was extremely pro-environment—a lot of his stunts, like the shark diving, were done to show that animals often weren’t as bloodthirsty as the public thought—so it was kind of hard to believe that Harlan could work with him and Lincoln, but somehow, he did.

  So I had a hard time trying to figure out if Harlan would have killed King or not. He didn’t seem to have anything against mountain lions or to even care about hunting. He also didn’t seem to be the type of person who would get drunk and kill a dog by accident; I got the idea he was far too shrewd and savvy to make such a dumb mistake.

  The only thing I could think of was that, maybe, things weren’t so good between Harlan and Lincoln. Maybe they’d had a fight, or a disagreement over a contract, and Harlan had decided to lash out.

  I still wasn’t sure if Harlan would do something like that, but the more I thought about it, it seemed like maybe other people would. A lot of people hated Lincoln Stone. Really hated him. After all, Lincoln liked saying things that made people mad. When I googled him, I found several lists that counted him as among one of the most despised people in America. (Although there were also lists that included him as one of the most respected people, and both lists seemed to be mostly composed of people who made incendiary political statements for a living.) What if one of those people had wanted to get to Lincoln? I wondered. Killing Lincoln, or causing him any harm at all, was illegal. But killing his dog would definitely upset him. And whoever had done it had gotten away. Lincoln thought a mountain lion had done it.

  Then again, maybe whoever had killed King hadn’t even set out to frame the mountain lion in the first place. Maybe the killer had simply left the collar and the tail behind as evidence that King was dead, and everyone had mistakenly believed Rocket was responsible.

  The more I thought about it, both of those scenarios seemed more likely to me than any of Lincoln’s associates killing King that night. When you had thousands of people who hated you, there was a pretty good chance that, sooner or later, one of them would do something crazy.

  That idea was extremely daunting, though. I wondered how I could possibly even begin investigating the thousands of people who loathed Lincoln Stone, especially when I was grounded.

  I only had a few leads:

  1) Whoever did it would have to know where Lincoln Stone lived. I knew Lincoln tried to keep that a secret to protect his privacy, but there were probably ways to find out.

  2) Whoever did it would have to know that King was actually a bichon frise and not a golden retriever, as Lincoln claimed.

  3) Whoever did it had left the mysterious white substance behind on the ground. This was probably the best clue I had—assuming it had actually been left by the dog killer and not someone else—but unfortunately, I still didn’t know what it was. Once again, I found myself with the tantalizing feeling that I should have recognized the substance, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.

  None of those leads really narrowed my search down at all. So I turned my attention to the two other possible suspects I had.

  There was the fourth person who had been at Lincoln’s house the night of King’s death. The Mystery Guest who had been almost invisible in the security video. All I knew about him or her was that he or she drove a pickup truck that was registered to someone else.

  I googled “Cassie Martinez,” the name of the owner of the truck. There were a lot of Cassie Martinezes in Texas.

  That seemed daunting, so I turned my attention to the suspect I could at least find a name for: Tommy Lopez’s boss. I looked up who the director of the local division of Fish and Wildlife was.

  Her name was Stephanie Winger. Given her refusal to investigate the true cause of King’s death, I had expected to find lots of reports about her being unfit for her job, but I didn’t. Instead, everything I found about her indicated that she was very good at what she did. She had started as a ranger for the service and worked her way up through the ranks. I also found some photos of her, which confirmed she was not the Mystery Guest at Lincoln’s. She wasn’t built as thick as whoever had been driving that truck. Instead, she was tall and thin. Lots of the photos of her were at events with state senators and the governor, so it seemed possible that she had her eye on a higher office in the future, but I didn’t come across anything that suggested she had ever sacrificed her morals for political reasons.

  So I had to wonder: Maybe Stephanie Winger was getting pressure to sweep the lion investigation under the carpet herself. Maybe Lincoln Stone wielded enough political clout to get a politician to force Stephanie to do what he wanted. Or maybe the Mystery Guest in the truck was a politician. A politician who had accidentally killed King and didn’t want anyone to find out. Or a politician who simply wanted mountain lions eradicated.

  Which brought me right back to the Mystery Guest again. The best way to find out who he was would be to find the right Cassie Martinez and ask her who was driving her truck the previous Friday night, but my leads to that had disappeared now that Lily had gotten herself arrested.

  So had my connection to Dr. Goodwin, Lincoln’s vet, who Lily had called right before the turkey incident.

  Then it occurred to me that I could probably contact Dr. Goodwin myself. I looked up her name and easily found the number of her practice: Hill Country Veterinary Clinic. I grabbed the phone on Mom’s desk and dialed the number.

  A pleasant-sounding woman answered. “Hill Country Vet. How may I help you?”

  I could hear the yapping of several dogs behind her. Probably pets in the waiting room. “Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if I could talk to Dr. Goodwin.”

  “Are you a client here?” the receptionist asked.

  “No. But I have a question for her. She was getting some information for a mutual friend of ours. . . .”

  “Information about what?”

  “A pet that she takes care of.”

  “Your friend’s pet?”

  “No. Someone else’s.”

  “Dr. Goodwin would never give out information about any animal she sees to anyone but the owner.” The receptionist no longer sounded quite as pleasant. “That would be unethical.”

  I tried to explain myself. “This is kind of a special case. . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. It’s still unethical.”

  “But my friend said Dr. Goodwin would tell her.”

  “Your friend was wrong. Did she actually speak to Dr. Goodwin about this?”

  “Er . . . no.”

  “I thought as much. If you or your friend wants information about someone’s pet, I’d advise you to contact the pet’s owner directly.”

  “But . . .”

  “I’m sorry. I have other calls,” the receptionist said curtly. Then she hung up on me.

  I slammed the phone back down in frustration.

  Someone coughed behind me.

  I spun around to find my mother standing there. “That didn’t sound like it had anything to do with Archduke Franz Ferdinand,” she said.

  For a few seconds, my mind spun, trying to come up with a decent excuse, but then I realized lying would only get me into deeper trouble. “It wasn’t,” I admitted.

  “What were you trying to find out?” Mom didn’t sound upset with me for disobeying her. Instead, she seemed intrigued.

  “Lily Deakin thought King’s vet could tell us if the dog was ever abused,” I said.

&nb
sp; “Lily was wrong,” Mom told me. “No vet would share that information with a random caller. If they suspected a pet was abused, they would probably notify the local Department of Animal Control, but they can’t tell just anyone.”

  I sighed. “Sounds like Lily was wrong about a lot of things.”

  “But not everything. She thought Lincoln Stone was a piece of work, and he is. I just heard that he’s been ranting about Rocket all day.”

  “What’s he been saying?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Mom leaned over my shoulder to activate her internet radio, then tuned into Lincoln Stone’s livecast. The moment she clicked on the volume, the room filled with the abrasive, angry voice of the man I had met the previous Saturday.

  “. . . This cat’s still roaming around out there, on the loose, and yet the dimwits in our government still haven’t approved the permit to kill it!” he raged. “Apparently, Stephanie Wingnut and everyone else at the imbecilic Fish and Wildlife Service care more about a bloodthirsty predator than they do about the safety of you and your family! That cougar might only be guilty of caninicide for now, but it’ll be homicide next. Now, I know you members of Stone Nation, being red-blooded Americans, are smarter than Stephanie and the folks at Fish and Wildlife and everyone else in the government, so you need to make your voices heard. Overwhelm their phone lines! Flood their email inboxes!”

  Lincoln went on to give out the phone numbers and emails of everyone he wanted his listeners to call. As he did, it occurred to me that Stephanie Winger was in a tougher position than I had realized. If she hadn’t approved the permit to delist Rocket yet, that meant she was doing the right thing, and yet, she was being pilloried for it. That was a lot of public pressure to be under.

  Lincoln finished giving out the information and launched right back into his tirade. “Now, that’s the absolute least you can do. If you’re concerned for your safety and that of your family—as any smart person ought to be—then I encourage you to take up arms and protect yourself! Get out there and find that barbaric beast and see that justice is served! Despite the fact that good citizens like yourself have been hunting it for the past few days, that dog-murdering cat is still at large! I know some people might tell you that killing it is against the law, but it’s a stupid law. And to prove my point, I hereby volunteer to pay all legal costs for anyone who shoots that cat. Plus, thanks to a generous donation from the fine folks at Cardiff Gun Shops, I am upping the bounty on that lion’s head to one hundred thousand dollars. That’s right. One hundred thousand dollars to whoever kills that cat. I can see my phone lines lighting up right now, so let’s take some calls.”