The Case of the Red-Handed Rhesus (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery)

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  “I’ll get it.” Lance reached over me, but the monkey used his arm as a launching board to make a bid for the wall above the door. As it grabbed for purchase, I looked up to find the source of the other voices. Our rafters were littered with macaques. They stared down at us with interest writ large on their human-esque faces.

  “Lance, what’s going on?”

  “I guess I forgot to lock the enclosure after head count last night. Jen said it was wide open this morning when she got here to do breakfast. They were hanging out all over the other enclosures.”

  “We weren’t here yesterday. We were moving.”

  “I was. I ran by between loads to check in around dinnertime.” He meant primate dinnertime, not ours. “The volunteers were all scrambling to keep up, so I pitched in for half an hour or so. I was distracted the whole time, and I couldn’t stay long. But I did the rhesus enclosure. I must have forgotten to lock it up.

  “Jen lured them into the barn with food when she found them earlier. She was trying to call me the whole time we were finding that kid. If we’d transferred the landline to the new house or had our cell phones on this morning, we’d have known about it sooner.”

  “Wow.” Bryan looked around the ceiling. “You have a regular barrel of monkeys, don’t you? How can you be sure you get all of them?”

  “Head count.”

  “But what are you going to do now?”

  “Catch them and return them to the enclosure.”

  “Which enclosure?” Natasha asked. A recent change in Ohio’s exotic animal ownership laws had resulted in an amnesty period inviting people to give up wild “pets” without penalty before they had to obtain permits. This included certain types of monkeys. A record number of several varieties had been surrendered to the sanctuary in the month and a half since Art’s death.

  Although rhesus macaques were one of the most popular monkeys to find their way into private hands, ownership of that specific primate was not affected. This was unfortunate since, as they got bigger and developed a tendency to bite and destroy furniture, their owners often removed teeth and claws and neglected them. Even so, we had received more of them than any other.

  Few sanctuaries are even set up to handle rhesus macaques. They’re mischievous and stubborn, and they are extra territorial. Plus, they don’t carry the same cachet as apes. An ape sanctuary gets more donations. People look at apes and see hairy humans. They imagine their own ancestries and ask themselves what-if. They look at monkeys and they see dogs, cats, and birds. Pets, in other words. All of our chimps had several adoptive “parents” who funded a portion of their care in exchange for a photograph, a thank-you letter, and a tax deduction. Even Chuck already had several extra mothers and fathers.

  But few people wanted to invest in monkeys, which they often considered better fodder for zoos and research laboratories. And even though it was driving us to outrageous lengths, our fears of the owners donating the animals to facilities engaged in less ethical research than ours, which was focused on studying the behaviors of primates in captivity, led us to keep adding space for more macaques.

  Merle, the volunteer in charge of the area, had recently presented us with ten new intakes and the apology, “They all came from the same pet store. It was getting late, and I was the only one here, and I didn’t know what else to do.” What he should have done was call Lance or me or one of the three actual employees to complete the intake. By accepting them, he had put us close to our capacity for housing. But I doubted any of us would have turned them away in his place.

  The general public also lived under the illusion that the state would euthanize animals given to a state holding facility, when in fact the facility was designed with the goal of finding appropriate placements for exotic pets across the nation. By and large, people contacted zoos and rescue centers like ours privately. Most zoos won’t take hand-reared animals, and sanctuaries were filling up fast.

  We were nearly overfull ourselves, but our mission, Art’s mission, had always been to protect unwanted primates from inappropriate public scrutiny. In the wake of his death, our friend Christian Baker, an ape-keeper at the nearby Ohio Zoo, had banded together a group of keepers to donate materials in Art’s honor for several new enclosures, including a second spider monkey area and a second rhesus macaque enclosure. Art’s nephew Rick, a builder who maintained ties to Midwest Primates even after his uncle’s death, assembled the structures, doubling our available housing for several species. If necessary, we could take on up to 150 rhesus macaques in particular. We were running dangerously close to the line.

  “The new one,” Lance answered Natasha. It wasn’t actually a new construct, merely the newest of our acquisitions. We had purchased it at auction from the same defunct zoo that once housed our orangutan. Enclosures aren’t typically mobile, but one of the less savory aspects of the unlicensed facility were its enclosures, which were entirely too easy to disassemble.

  We hadn’t initially been interested, but here again Christian helped us out. “The materials are fine,” he said. “Lance ought to come up with me and see if there’s anything you can use.”

  Lance took Rick, who also approved. The structure he built us was as solid as anything he had made with newer materials. But it was smaller. “Good,” Natasha said. “Fewer to catch. How does this work?”

  Natasha had learned our procedures quickly, and she had proven adaptable to our constantly changing needs. “Anybody got soft fruit candy?” I called. In all the time I had been with the center, I had only ever known something like this to happen one other time. Then, someone had noticed the open door right away. Only a couple of monkeys had escaped, and they were quickly captured. But we were all trained for this kind of problem in theory.

  “Candy?” Natasha knew our enrichment foods didn’t typically include sweets. “Aren’t those bad for them?”

  “Not half as bad as staying out.” The macaques had been swooping down from the rafters stealing things all morning. Lance typically wore a ball cap this time of year, to protect his balding scalp from summer sun. He was not wearing it now, and its pieces drifted down from the ceiling. Jen, who was quite nearsighted, had the bad luck to have been wearing her glasses instead of her contacts this morning. The glasses were now somewhere high overhead, and she was squinting her way through the day.

  “I guess I’m grateful I can be sure it was my mistake,” Lance said. “We can spare the volunteers a lecture.”

  “How do we get them back?” Natasha persisted.

  “The same way we acquired them in the first place,” Lance said. “One at a time.”

  Three hours later, all of us were sweat-soaked and covered in scratches. Only I had been bitten, the others having the common sense to get their hands out of the way before sharp things happened. We had dodged countless bombs, as the monkeys let their bowels loose wherever they happened to be, without much care for who might be standing underneath. Actual shit slinging was more of a capuchin problem. Only one of our rhesus macaques had suffered from the kind of neglect causing that particular stereotypical behavior, but he had not lost his skill since moving in back in June. He possessed uncanny accuracy.

  Our basic tactic was to lay out a couple of candies and wait for an interested party to come close enough. Mostly, the monkeys swiped the first offering and escaped with ease but got snagged on their attempts for a second or sometimes a third treat.

  At last, Lance said, “We’ve only got twenty-four. I’ve counted four times.” We were standing in a sweaty huddle around the enclosure.

  “There.” Natasha pointed. The final rhesus macaque was hanging out on the spider monkey enclosure chittering away like a neighbor popping over to talk across the fence. Two more candies got him back into the right place. We counted twice more and went back in the barn.

  “Why did they stick around, Noel?” Bryan asked. “If my cage was unlocked all night, I’d be off like a shot.” The rest of us all had extra clothing stashed in lockers, and we h
ad changed out. Bryan wasn’t a regular volunteer, and Lance was tossing through some of Art’s old things to find at least a shirt not covered in monkey hair.

  “What would you do if you locked yourself out of your apartment, though?”

  “I’d try to get back in!”

  “Right. And what if you got lost in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I’d want to go home.”

  “Exactly. These guys associate us with meals and safety. I’m sure more of them were visiting pals before Jen and the breakfast crew showed up, but most of them came up to the place with the food as soon as it was available.”

  Jen confirmed my thinking. “They explored around the grounds pretty thoroughly, but they didn’t go far. They rushed the barn when I opened the back door.” While we talked, a pair of volunteers went out back with a delayed dinner delivery for the other animals, all of whom were still worked into a frenzy. The primates keyed off of our emotions and each other’s so acutely. They picked up on our tension and excitement, and reflected it in their behaviors.

  It would be late tonight before the security guards got any peace in this part of the county. Which reminded me, “Why didn’t the deputies notice we had an empty enclosure overnight? They’re supposed to do visual patrols.” In the wake of Art’s death, we had been forced to abandon our old security company. Rather than find a new one, we had started hiring off-duty police officers to keep an eye on things overnight. Rural cops don’t get paid much, and all of them, especially the rookies, needed the extra income.

  “I think Lance talked to them,” said Jen. After that, she let herself into Lance’s and my office to call and let our network know the “termites” had been returned to their enclosures.

  Later, as Lance, Natasha, and I rode back home in the battered primate-mobile, I posed the question to Lance. “Deputy Greene swears they were all full when they swept the place at four,” he said.

  Of all the members of the force who cared for our property when we were absent, Greene was both the most detail-oriented and the most likely to err on the side of over- rather than under-zealousness. If he believed the cages were full, then he had done everything short of a head count. “Must not have noticed they had an exit option until closer to sunrise.”

  Lance started to berate himself for leaving the cage open as we rounded the corner on our street, but he dribbled to a halt as we all realized we had a welcoming committee of one sitting on our front porch.

  “Crap, that’s William’s sister,” Natasha said.

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” I told her. I did recognize her from the pizza shop the day before. “Remind me her name?”

  “Sara. She’s Sara.” The little girl sat on the step, elbows propped on her knees, chin cupped in her hands. Frowsy black hair framed her face, and she stared into space without turning her head, even after we pulled into the driveway.

  “Let me out, Lance.”

  As soon as Sara saw Tasha, her lassitude evaporated. “Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi!” She threw her arms around Natasha’s middle.

  “Hi, Sara.” Natasha wiggled loose and took Sara’s shoulders. “Tell me . . .” she began.

  “You’ll tell me!” Sara’s excitement vanished in an instant. She looked up with wide, entreating eyes. “Everybody else acts like I’m a baby, and they won’t say a thing, but you’ll say.”

  “Say what?”

  “Is William okay? The TV doesn’t make any sense, and nobody wants me to know anything.”

  “The last time I saw him, he was fine.” Natasha smoothed Sara’s hair.

  “Then why won’t they tell me? They all act like he’s dead.”

  Natasha shook her head. “He was pretty shaken up, and I guess he was sore, but he was alive at the Marine this morning.”

  “Thank God.” Sara didn’t sound like she was six. She sounded like she was a hundred. She collapsed against Natasha and began to sob. “I thought he was dead. I was for sure somebody had killed him.”

  “Sara, listen.” Natasha seemed to have regained some of her original purpose. “I need you to tell me something. Does anybody know where you are?” In the time we’d been talking, no adult had manifested.

  Sara blinked and sniffled, hiccupping like she’d been crying for much longer than she actually had. “Y-yes,” she wavered.

  “Who?” Natasha said. “Who knows where you are?”

  “You do,” Sara said, as if this should have been obvious.

  Natasha groaned. Sara burst into tears again. Natasha hugged her more tightly, but the look she cast in my direction was a helpless one. It begged for an established protocol for escaped foster children matching the one for escaped rhesus macaques.

  Behind me, Lance muttered as he scrolled through his phone contacts. “Detective . . . Drew?” he finally asked, “is the girl missing now? The sister of the boy we found this morning?” I couldn’t hear Detective Carmichael’s response, but I knew what it was when Lance’s groan mirrored Natasha’s earlier one. “You can cancel the alert. She’s here. At our place. We got home from work and she was out front. I don’t know how she arrived. Okay. We’re not going anyplace.”

  Lance put his phone back in his pocket. Sara had amped up from a sob to a wail. “I thought he was d-d-dead!” she bawled. We all tried to talk to her, but nothing could shake her from her screaming dismay.

  “Noel, I have to pee, and she’s crushing me.”

  “Sara, honey, you have to let go,” I said. I peeled her off of Natasha, and she latched instead onto me. Tasha buzzed toward the door, and I lifted the little girl. It was at once the most natural and unnatural thing in the world. I had cuddled my nieces and nephew through many hurts and temper tantrums, but I had never simply picked up a strange child. I had never whispered soothing things to a person who clearly couldn’t hear me. The lonely feeling that had come over me while holding William’s hand swallowed me once more.

  I tried to gauge Sara’s weight as I swayed from leg to leg. She felt too light. It seemed like my sister’s children had weighed more than this when they were six. I knew I hadn’t been able to lift them so easily by this age. It was like holding a much younger girl.

  Lance joined us and wrapped an arm around me. Natasha returned and picked up a handful of papers off the porch. Wordlessly, she passed them to Lance.

  The top sheet proved to be a computer-printed map with nearly two and a half miles of walking directions. Then came two envelopes, addressed to “Sweet Sara” and “Wonderful William,” respectively. The return addresses were circled on both cards. “They collect cards.” Natasha shouted to be heard over Sara. “As soon as I started seeing them around here, I got their address from Natalie so I could write.”

  “How’d Sara even know to come here, though?”

  “Saw . . . saw . . . saw Natasha on TV,” Sara blubbered from my shoulder. Her sobbing finally started to taper off.

  “And so you . . . what, dug up your card . . .” Lance probed.

  “It wasn’t buried! I don’t put things underground.”

  “Okay, Miss Literal-minded, you . . . found your card . . .”

  “And William’s!”

  “So you went online . . .”

  “And printed out a map like Natty does when we have to go into Columbus!”

  “That’s . . . impressive,” my husband marveled.

  “Miss Becky will be so proud of me!” Sara veered from one form of hysteria to another with fluidity. “I . . . I remembered left, and right, and before, and after, and even then all afternoon.”

  “Have you had anything at all to drink? It’s ninety degrees out here!” Her little body felt sweaty, and she didn’t seem overheated, but I suddenly feared heat stroke.

  “I’ll get her some water.” Natasha turned to go back in.

  “I hate water.”

  “Sara, you’re dehydrated,” I said. “You need to drink something . . .”

  “No! No. No. No. No. NO!” Perhaps this was an improvement from the impl
acable fit about her brother. At least now, she was engaging with me. With us. But she needed to replenish her system.

  “Okay, no water,” Natasha said. “What will you drink?”

  “Lemonate. I only drink lemonate.” Sara enunciated her mispronunciation.

  Where the hell am I going to get that? Ah! I now live in a neighborhood. There are benefits. “Tasha, I saw kids playing out front two houses down when we were unloading yesterday. Will you see if they have anything even resembling lemonade?”

  Natasha returned with an entire pitcher, and Sara guzzled it. She had resumed the hiccuppy breathing that came with hysterical weeping, and I had an idea this was only a short gap before she launched into another crying jag. Instead, she dropped the paper cup Tasha had brought and clutched her crotch with one hand and my arm with the other. “Now I have to go!”

  “Come on, I’ll show you the bathroom.” Natasha guided her away from us and toward the house. Sara tripped going up the porch stairs and would have fallen if Tasha hadn’t been holding her by the shoulder. While we waited for her to come back out, Drew arrived in a squad car. “She in there?” He pointed to the house.

  We showed him inside, where we found Natasha standing outside the bathroom. “But you have to come out,” she said.

  “I want William,” Sara bawled.

  Tasha turned to us. “She locked herself in. She won’t come out without her brother.”

  “If we have to, the fire department can take the door out with axes,” Drew said in a low voice.

  “I can probably pick it if you give me five minutes,” Lance offered.

  “Less traumatic for her.”

  “Not to mention our house.”

  While we waited for Lance to root through my hairpins, I said, “How come the junior detective drew two high-profile problems in one day?” Typically, Drew backed up investigations led by the senior detective. “Boss on vacation?”

  “Right now, I am the detective. Hugh Marsland’s supposed to be at a conference in DC, but nobody can get ahold of him. His wife’s about out of her mind.”