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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  But when we arrived at the center, we were greeted by a full-blown crisis. We knew something was up from the din being raised out back.

  “Surely to God those macaques aren’t out again.” Lance hurried ahead while I coaxed the twins out of the van. They disliked the frosty ground, and though William refused to put his coat on, he stood shivering while we opened the barn’s big double doors. Inside, I paused to let my eyes adjust. Something looked wrong, but I couldn’t pinpoint what, and the deputies hadn’t flagged us down from their cruiser, as they tended to do if there was anything to report. I let William bring up the buzz of overhead lights while Lance jogged to the stubborn back door. He never remembers to handle it gently, and he curses it regularly. I was surprised to see it swing open at once. His “Oh shit,” followed by cacophonous chatter could only mean one thing.

  “But how did Chuck get out?” I demanded before the host of rhesus macaques swarmed in, hunting for breakfast and fun. This was a huge invasion. There were too many monkeys. This wasn’t one enclosure’s worth. This was all of them.

  “Monkeys!” Sara and William shrieked in unison. They leapt around as the animals poured in the door. Neither child understood the “look but don’t touch” injunction all the animals carried, and they wanted to stroke, hold, and otherwise cuddle the inhabitants.

  It didn’t seem to bother William that these were his least favorite variety. He didn’t melt down as he had the first day we brought him to the center. That day, he had been happy until he saw the rhesus macaques. Then, he dashed back inside and sat in the middle of the barn, rocking, muttering, “No cages, no cages, no cages” to himself. He clearly didn’t buy my distinction between a cage and an enclosure, and he still watched those particular enclosures with suspicion at feeding time or whenever else I approached them. Now, he hollered, “Free, free, get freed,” as the monkeys scattered through the door and up into the rafters, leaving a trail of little red footprints in their wake.

  “Lance, what are we painting? Who left a can of open . . .”

  “Shit,” Lance said again. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Noel, get the kids in the office and lock the door. Then stay put.”

  “What’s with the . . .” I pointed to the smeared path.

  “Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Do not ask. Get the kids in the office and don’t leave.” He practically shouted the last, which was completely out of character for him.

  “This is going to be such a pain,” I grumbled. “We’re out of candy!”

  “Forget the candy. Go!”

  Natasha was as rattled as the twins were enchanted. “What’s going on?” she demanded, her voice unreasonably terrorstricken.

  “It’s going to be fine, Tasha,” Lance said, physically herding us all along. Then he dashed out into the barn, and slammed both our front double doors and the back door the monkeys had so lately rushed.

  Back in the office with us, he placed a call. “Drew,” he said. “Listen carefully, because I’m talking above my kids’ heads. Tasha, be cool.”

  But Natasha was rooting through my desk for one of her inhalers. We had learned early on to keep them handy for the times when panic stole her breath. I found it, and she took two big puffs. She was pale and shaking, and she sat on the floor. The twins clambered over the desk chasing the sole monkey who had followed us into the office.

  “Kids, quit it. That’s a wild animal, not a pet, it’s . . . Lord, Lance, what did we paint? It’s getting everywhere.” The monkey scrambled over piles of paper, scraped its claws against the window to the barn, climbed on William’s back, and skittered under the desk, leaving a trail of red behind it. Sara and Will shrieked and gave chase, scattering even more paper than their primate pal.

  Natasha blocked them at the desk, separating them from the monkey with one leg. “Quit it. It’s not a pet. It’s going to bite you.”

  “Who would leave a can of paint . . .”

  “Noel, that’s not paint,” Natasha snapped. “We aren’t painting anything.”

  “But . . . I . . .” I dropped beside her on the ground. “Are you sure? What else could it possibly be?”

  “Didn’t you get a look through the door?”

  “All I saw was monkeys.” And my kids trying to catch them.

  “Noel, Chuck . . . he . . .”

  “Hang on, Drew,” said Lance. “Not Chuck, okay, Tasha. Not Chuck. I had a clear view. Absolutely. Not. Chuck.”

  “You swear?”

  “Yes. Please. Be tough.”

  Frankly, I still feared hysterics, but she sat up straighter. “Yeah. Okay. Not Chuck.”

  “You listening, Drew? These kids are too smart. They’ll pick up if I have to repeat myself. There is an . . . overtly deceased individual at the primate center . . . I can tell because the individual in question has been relieved of a scalp carrying appendage.”

  “No.” Not paint. Not paint. The red footprints up William’s back caught my eye. Not paint. Belatedly, I smelled iron. Suddenly, I thought Natasha had been highly rational to panic. I looked to her for confirmation, and she sliced a finger across her throat. There wasn’t anybody at the gate when we pulled in. “The deputies . . .”

  Lance nodded his understanding. “You need to check in with the deputies who were doing security here overnight. We didn’t see them when we pulled in. We’re good. We’re locked in the barn office with a monkey and the kids.”

  Then the sanctuary exploded into life of all the wrong sort. I wound up being grateful for our blood-spattered little primates because the twins saw none of it. They spent an hour gazing at, luring, and ultimately catching the monkey in the office before Drew sent us back to police headquarters in a squad car.

  I got in back, and as Will climbed in beside me, a brown face popped out of his shirt. “The monkey can’t come with us,” I said.

  “Ma’am, we need to leave.”

  “We need to take that animal back inside before it bites.”

  The deputy was as impatient and firm as William was stubborn and fretful. In the end, the cop allowed someone to bring a carrier out of the barn, but I couldn’t get the little animal away from William and out of the vehicle.

  “No cages, no cages,” Will protested.

  “Could he ride in the carrier with you, instead of staying here?” the deputy asked.

  I started to say no, but Will’s face lit up. “Yes!” We rode downtown, monkey and all. It was easier to clamp the carrier into William’s arms than cope with the meltdown setting up to happen if we took it away altogether. And given the choices between “no cages” and leaving the animal behind, Will opted for the cage.

  At the station, I asked the deputy assigned to question me something I should have known in the first place. “Deputy Greene wasn’t on duty last night, was he?” My questioner’s blank mask evaporated for a moment into a fearful glower. I had my answer. “But he’s . . .” When Art was killed, one of the few moments of levity had come courtesy of Deputy Greene, when our spider monkeys stole first his service revolver, then his hat. I could still hear the echoes of Drew cursing him for being a rookie. “. . . so young.”

  The phone on the deputy’s desk rang. After a curt, “Yes sir,” he passed it to me.

  “Noel!” Drew didn’t mask his fury. “Those spider monkeys have two objects I need back right now, there’s two of the rhesus things hanging on the cage with them, and if they get that ring . . .”

  “Ring?”

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter what it is. You are not coming in here. What do I need to do?”

  “We’re out of candy and raisins both.”

  “What?”

  “Best bribes in an emergency. We’ve got crickets in our refrigerator . . . the fridge! The fridge! Look in the fridge, Drew. That’s what was wrong. There was a food prep table pushed in front of the refrigerator.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I never figured out the first thing I saw wrong this morning. Our walk-in fridge was completely b
locked shut with one of our big silver food prep tables. You have to—”

  “Right! Chester, help me out here. They may have been locked in the fridge. Drew didn’t bother to break the connection when he dropped his phone, so we heard the grunting and dragging, as the table gave way to brute force. “Careful now,” said Drew . . . “no, be careful opening . . . Never mind now. Get me those EMTs. Get those off. Carefully! Trussed up like a . . . Noel?” He came back on the line. “You still there?”

  “Are they okay?”

  “I think so. Can’t say for sure. We’ll know better when the EMTs check him out.”

  Across the desk from me, the young man in brown, who was surely no older than Deputy Greene himself, whooped and jumped up. “Mom!” he shouted. “Mom, Aunt Penny, Ms. Needham, Anna, they found him alive.”

  As news filtered through the department, shouting and cheering made conversation with Drew increasingly difficult. But I finally walked him through tricking the spiders out of their purloined goods. One object was outside the cage and easily retrieved. The other was a ring. It had been pulled inside the cage, making it harder to get back. Eventually, Drew sacrificed an entire container of hibernating crickets in exchange.

  When I finally hung up, the beaming young deputy had returned from his short tour around the building. “Eugene’s my first cousin. I’m the one that convinced him to do this side job in the first place.”

  I guessed, correctly, this young man wouldn’t be particularly thorough in questioning any of us now that his cousin was safe. I hadn’t even considered the family connections in the department. Aside from the fact that he considered us Deputy Greene’s saviors, it was nearly impossible for him to hold a conversation with the twins. Tasha and Lance, who had both seen more, were being interviewed by others, but these two and their primate buddy had been left with me. The macaque was a juvenile, and it had only come to us recently. It still hadn’t quite learned how to be a monkey, so it stayed perched on William’s shoulder when he let it out of the carrier over my opposition.

  I could have put it back. In fact, I should have put it back. My position on monkeys and apes has always been they aren’t people and they aren’t pets. They don’t belong in diapers, and they shouldn’t wear leashes. It isn’t cute when they sit on human owners.

  Yet here sat William, my son, holding a sanctuary macaque like a pet. I couldn’t let this persist. But I also couldn’t do anything about it right now. He could not melt. He might have valuable information we wouldn’t get out of him if he was stressed, and the monkey was clearly soothing him. I was going to have to flex.

  Sara’s answers were choppy and long, half-sentences punctuated with commentary about the macaque. Sometimes, she started sentences mid-thought without any context, as if we all had been chatting about a topic for ages. Other times, she gave entirely too much information, most of it irrelevant. She answered the question, “What did you see?” with, “I saw tons. I don’t like Mrs. Grim anyway, and I don’t want to go back to school ever again.”

  When I had explained this reply and its reference to the day before, the officer tried, “What did you see this morning?” and received a complete rundown from waking through our arrival at the station. “I saw a dead guy with no head out the back door, and Mr. Lance, he’s the guy who isn’t my dad quite, because see, I’m in foster care, only he’s adopting me, he pushed us all into the office, and I nearly tripped on my laces. Did you know I can’t tie my shoes yet?”

  As she rattled on, the officer gazed at me for support. I had to wait for her to wind down before I could get a word in edgewise. “Sara, the only part the deputy wants to know about is when we were in the barn this morning. You have good eyes. Tell us everything in order.”

  “I think I need some paper.” The deputy passed a sheet and his pen across. Sara wrote, in an unsteady scrawl, 1th, 2th, 3th, 4th, 5th. “There,” she explained. “I forget those all the time.” Then she sat back and looked at the monkey on her brother’s shoulder.

  “Sara?” I glanced to the deputy for permission. I didn’t want to take over his job. He nodded. “Good work telling us the order. But now we need to know what you actually saw at the sanctuary. What did you see first?”

  She contemplated. “Firth,” she corrected my pronunciation to match her spelling, “I saw William sneeze. The barn is too dusty. You need to clean it up better.”

  “Okay. What was second?”

  “Seconth,” Clearly, it was important for us to get these words right, and her pronunciation was the right one. “I saw Mr. Lance rattle the back door open. It was not locked.”

  The deputy jerked to attention. “Are you sure the door wasn’t locked?” He picked up another pen and jotted in his notebook.

  Sara closed her eyes. “Yes. Because Miss Noel had the keys.”

  “So I do.” I patted my pocket, surprised by the realization. “So I do.”

  “Open door.” William’s eyes were closed, and his knees were tucked under his chin.

  “What?” Are you echoing, Will, or talking?

  William’s voice went tight and robotic as he struggled to speak our language. “It was not locked. It was open,” he finally spat out. “Open this much.” He opened his eyes and held his hands an inch apart from each other. My guilt about the monkey lessened significantly. Three sentences in a row. That primate was in for some serious enrichment activities if we could ever get it back in its enclosure.

  Thirth, fourth, and fifth were irrelevant observations, and William’s further contributions were so inscrutable neither the deputy nor I could make sense of them. “Brown smells are happy” was easy enough. He had buried his face in the monkey’s side, and the monkey was brown. But “Circle dots are bad cars” still made no sense at all. It was something he repeated often under stress, especially around police cars.

  It was noon before we were allowed to go feed our primates, and the uproar greeting us proved they felt the neglect. Deputies still scuttled from place to place in the barn dodging the falling scat balls and monkey spit, shouting to each other over the din. I saw at least two hats floating around in the rafters, and I doubted they would be returned in one piece. Trudy and Darnell had arrived long ago, doubtless invited in by Drew, who knew their roles.

  I settled the kids and the monkey into the office. “Everyone watch the door. Don’t let William get out. William, you have twenty minutes until you have to put the monkey back in its enclosure.” This is not the most unethical thing I’ve ever done in my career. That particular monkey is not, because I say so, going to bite. Nor is it in any way being violated in its temporary therapeutic role. It’s going to be fine. So why was I close to hyperventilating? “Do you hear me? You have twenty minutes until you have to give up the monkey.” Did that sentence actually come out of my mouth?

  “William hears you,” he all but purred. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I registered his need for a more appropriate therapy animal. If a monkey could reduce his anxiety, I wagered a dog could do the same.

  “Tasha, if you want to help with breakfast, we’ve been cleared to feed the primates, and we could use your hands.”

  “What about . . . ?” She tapped her own wrist as if tapping a watch, but her look to William indicated she was asking about his tracking device and whether I didn’t think he would wander away.

  “Trudy’s here. That makes four of us watching him. One of us will always be in the barn, and if we check the office each time we go out, and that door doesn’t open in between, we’ll know he’s safe.” I hope.

  “I want to help.” Sara’s nose was doing its rabbit twitch, and I knew she was on high alert.

  “Honey, it’s cold out there. You and William need to stay . . .”

  “If you’re worried about me getting upset, you can quit. I already saw the headless guy.”

  Yes. You told us. Did everybody but me notice that? Trudy and Darnell, now fully presenting themselves in their guises of sanctuary volunteers, had been joined by Jen, one
of Art’s last and best recruits. All of us had a police escort to every enclosure. I didn’t have time to stand around arguing with Sara and dealing with the meltdown sure to ensue. “Fine. You can help me with the spiders.”

  “Spider monkeys, spider monkeys, I’m going to feed the spider monkeys!”

  Someone had been decapitated, but all Sara cared about was feeding the spiders. “Come on, then.” I waved her out. William was in his own little world, rocking and cooing at the monkey he had captured.

  Trudy, falling into her nanny disguise, asked if we needed her to sit with William.

  “No, I need you feeding with us. We’ve got to get these macaques put away, and we aren’t going to have time to do multiple head counts before we get turned out.” I turned to one of the deputies Drew had assigned to stay with us. “I’m starting in the middle, with the spiders. You carry this and go with Natasha and Trudy to start in the colobus area. Jen, I know you’re normally over on the other side, but none of those volunteers are here. Start with those poor chimps, and everybody work inwards toward Sara and me. We’ll round up the rhesus macaques last of all.” The man took the bucket and bobbed thanks that he could escape the barn and its rhesus-filled rafters. Lance stayed indoors, chopping fruit and monitoring William.

  Drew himself came along with Sara and me, carefully walking so her view of the sheet-covered body was obscured. But his actions were needless. Sara’s eyes were all for the monkeys.

  “What’s that?” she asked at the enclosure.

  Sara’s, what’s-that’s were legendary. She asked it about foods, about flickering light bulbs, about people’s clothing, and about stormy weather. Her questions had become the background music of my days, and I had learned to give perfunctory answers. “It’s the enclosure.”

  “No. That.”

  “It’s . . .” I glanced in the direction of her pointing finger. “What is that?” And hadn’t Natalie warned me to pay attention for the important questions? Two of the spiders were engaged in a fierce battle over something glinting silver in the early-morning sunlight filtering through the trees.