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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  Lance and Mama went back outside with Trudy and Darnell. They sat in the van, comparing notes, and in their lieu, I was left with the newly returned to duty Deputy Greene. Drew had sent him and his partner with us as an easy job that couldn’t possibly get him into trouble, especially since Trudy was along.

  He was obviously uncomfortable in the therapist’s waiting room, and he shifted in his chair and tried to hide behind ancient reading material. “That’s a kids’ magazine,” I told him.

  “I always liked those better than the adult ones.” He had missed my teasing tone.

  I abandoned it. “How are you doing?”

  “Whole lot warmer. I started trying to convince my wife to move to Florida. If I’m never cold again, it’ll be too soon.” Then he changed the subject. “We searched your grounds pretty thoroughly back in June, you know.”

  “I know.” They had retraced the days Gary spent in hiding to the point of finding his car buried in underbrush near the new enclosure. They thought he had been sleeping in it.

  “This records room Natasha is talking about has got to be hidden.”

  “But where? I keep trying to think who else would know the center’s history. Maybe Stan does. I’ll have to ask him. But I’d like to talk to somebody now and he’s . . . preoccupied.” I didn’t want to advertise Stan and Gert’s move until it was over. “There’s been so much turnover in bio science in the last ten years, we don’t have many holdovers.”

  “What about your secretary? Do you think he’s got any files?”

  “Not a bad idea. But he’s . . .”

  “Yeah. Got a concussion.”

  “Among other things.” Travis’s hospital stay hadn’t been a long one, and he was home recuperating. But he wasn’t due to return to work for another day, and I had no intentions of bothering him to go in sooner. His kidnapping had brought his and Bryan’s parenthood crisis to a head. They were getting ready to start all over with social services and adopt from foster care. “I wonder if I can raise the old secretary.”

  However, I was denied this opportunity as Sara swiped the deputy’s magazine. Deputy Greene grabbed it back. “Hey!”

  Trudy and Darnell returned. “We’ve reached a compromise of sorts,” Trudy said. “We’re all going to stay in the hotel on the bypass tonight. Natasha stays with us, we stay with you, and we all join the Oeschles day after tomorrow.”

  “Your dad and grandma went out already,” Darnell said.

  “And we’re going to go swimming at the pool! They have an inside pool for me to use!” Sara announced in a sing-song voice. She threw herself at Deputy Greene and ripped the magazine out of his hand once more. “Read me this, cop guy,” she commanded. “I’ve got a cop guy who’s a friend of mine, but he’s a black guy like me. And he doesn’t read. Also he has a hat.”

  “He does so read! I do too have a hat!”

  “Nuh-uh. I don’t see it.”

  “It’s rude to wear a hat indoors. I left it in my cruiser.” “Oooh, can we play with your lights? Our cop guy lets William and me play with the lights when he comes to change Will’s batteries.”

  Deputy Greene cast me a look that plainly begged, Help!

  “The batteries in his tracer bracelet.”

  “I know which batteries. But I’m not sure . . .”

  “Sara, now isn’t a good time to play with the lights.”

  “But I love the lights. I don’t like the siren so good, because it’s noisy, and I hate loud.”

  “Loud. Yuck.” As always, Will was chugging trucks around the floor. Then the outside door creaked open, and he lunged across the room. “William hates the old guy circle-dot man,” he bellowed. Tony Gibson staggered as William arrived with a crash. Before I could stop him, William had fastened onto Mr. Gibson’s ankles. Fury, guilt, and fear warred in my chest, leaving me paralyzed. Deputy Greene moved to block the door between Mr. Gibson and the therapy area even as Darnell blocked the newcomer inside.

  “Easy there, bud. That hurts.” Mr. Gibson’s tone was almost conversational. “I can see why you don’t like me. I guess I scared the bejeepers out of you, and then you getting . . . well . . . made off with.” He looked around the room at us. I wanted to peel Will off him, but I couldn’t move. “I should have said something about it sooner, but I felt awful about how I’d behaved, and it only would have made me look bad. Nothing I can do to help looking bad now, though, I guess. Anyway, I thought I saw your van outside, and I wanted to apologize before I go turn myself in or whatever.”

  “Turn yourself in?” Lance sat on the floor beside the man and worked Will’s fingers loose. My body finally released me, and I joined him.

  “I should have retired a long time ago,” Mr. Gibson muttered. “I found what your boss was looking for,” he said to the deputy. “I thought I’d hired trustworthy people! They never stole from me! They . . .”

  Suddenly, the old man toppled over as William made a renewed effort, attaching himself to Mr. Gibson’s knees now instead of his ankles. “Will, let go.” I finally recovered myself enough to speak.

  “No.” I felt torn between delight that my son had responded to me directly and concisely, and frustration because he was offering up defiance. “William.” I reached for him.

  “The old guy circle-dot man yelled at me!”

  “You startled me, kiddo. That kitchen’s not safe for a kid.”

  Mr. Gibson only moved to pull himself loose when Lance and I began prying Will off, and he was careful not to hurt the child, even though William continued to thrash and kick. Free, Mr. Gibson did not stand up, but remained seated, looking between Lance and me. “On the day he was taken, he’d walked in back, and he was heading for the ovens. I shouted at him. Hell, I didn’t know he was autistic. I thought he was some goof about to get burned and land me with a lawsuit. I chewed him right out! He bolted for the back door, and one of my people caught him running up the ramp onto the truck. He squirmed loose, but then he went back up front.

  “When I saw he was with Natalie, I thought I had the long and short of it. Everybody knows the Forresters are overwhelmed with all those kids. I didn’t want to dump more on her head telling her about him making trouble in back. But I guess . . . I think the employee who grabbed him on the truck was Robby. And then poof, the kid went missing not long after. I watched him go outside, and I would swear to you he left my door in Natalie’s group.

  “But I . . . I . . .” his voice faltered as he turned to Deputy Greene. “I’m not so sure now. It must seem hard to believe, but it’s been years since I got on my own trucks, and now I’m not sure at all. I’ve got arthritis, and the truck ramp is steep. I’ve had one of the kids unload for me for a couple of years now. But after the detective was asking so many questions this afternoon, I went out there myself. I guess I need animal control. I’ve got a truck full of monkeys, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with them. I can’t even imagine what the health department’s going to say. I don’t think the animals ever came inside the restaurant . . . surely I’d have seen that! But . . . you’re not going to believe me. I own the place. How could I have not known . . . and for how long?”

  I caught this speech in fragments, as I wrestled Will into a gentle restraint. Deputy Greene said, “Uh, if you’ve got things under control here, I guess I’d better take him down to the station with me. Sir, what makes you think the truck hasn’t driven off?”

  “Because I have the keys right here, and I locked the driver in back.”

  “You what? Do you know how hot . . .” Deputy Greene wavered. Finally, he said, “It’s December. It’s forty degrees. They won’t boil. I think you’re probably under arrest and have a lot of rights that need reading. But we’re going to settle this outside.” And taking Mr. Gibson by the arm, he left. I hoped his partner in the cruiser had a less befuddled response to the whole situation. If not, I didn’t have any trouble at all seeing how the pair had wound up sitting in my refrigerator with knots on their heads.

  In m
y arms, William relaxed only when Tony Gibson was out of sight. Natasha emerged from the therapist’s back room looking exhausted. To my surprise, she sat down on the floor beside me and curled in for a hug. I had expected her to pull back after her previous need for contact. It was what she’d done in the past. After a while, she said, “I want to show you that records room now, and then I don’t want to talk about it again for a long time.”

  The path was overgrown, and we had to park at the top of the hill, near the non-mall, and make our way on foot. When she realized she would be leading, Natasha reluctantly handed me the tablet she had been toting all day. Now, she had a battery pack attached in place of a power cord, and she still intended to carry it through the underbrush. I had long since forgotten it. “When we get done, we’ll check in and see if Chuck wants to take a run at the chat program,” I promised her.

  “Okay. But you have to put it in your purse in case he does something while we’re down here. I don’t want to miss a chance.”

  “Natasha, Ace has moved on to other things by now. He and Chuck aren’t down there staring . . .”

  “Please?”

  “All right.” The tablet went in my purse, which I slung over my shoulder.

  “Your mom’s a saint,” said Lance. The officers from the house were to accompany her to the hotel by way of the ice cream parlor. Trudy and Darnell were both with us this time. We had stopped at the barn to pick up flashlights and make sure we hadn’t grown any more monkeys while we were away. Jen was there with yet another deputy serving as a security guard. Our emergency was seriously depleting Muscogen County’s police force.

  Trying to distract myself from crisis and danger, I looked for other topics. “What are we going to do with that mall?” I asked Lance as Natasha led us into the underbrush.

  “Three months ago, I’d have said we should donate it to the center and make it something useful.” The property was ours, an inheritance from Art. Technically, the orangutan enclosure had been ours, too, but we had hurried to donate it, not wanting either the insurance nightmares or the semblance of maintaining anything but a sanctuary.

  “You think we should do something else now?” Blackberry thorns, always prevalent around here, snagged in my jeans, and I cursed as I pulled them free. “How far is this place, Natasha?”

  “Not far,” she said. “Not by car, anyway. We never walked in. I didn’t know the woods took over so fast.” Even though there wasn’t any greenery showing in winter, the woody underbrush was hard to navigate. An axe or saw would have helped. But ours had been stolen. The saw had probably been the tool used . . . I decided to stop thinking about axes and saws.

  Lance mistook my shudder for a shiver and wrapped a warming arm around me. He said, “I think we can make it generate funds.”

  “Are you thinking of turning it over to the zoo or something?” I didn’t want to tell him I’d been thinking along these exact lines.

  “Nope. The sanctuary needs to have a youth fundraiser.”

  “A what?”

  “Let’s host birthday parties.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “See, we’ve already got webcams, right? And now we’ve got the enrichment program for Chuck. We’d put in a couple of bounce houses and charge for kids to bring in a dozen friends and watch the webcams and wave back and forth with Chuck and the chimps. They can even watch the monkeys if they want. Maybe they’ll figure out how fascinating they are.”

  “It might work,” I said. We had already held one birthday party. In order to capture Lucy, I had been forced to borrow a radio from a little kid. In return, I’d invited him and several of his friends to tour the sanctuary. His mother, who drove our fruit delivery truck, asked if she could turn it into his birthday party. We had agreed with reluctance and been amazed by how smoothly everything went. Of course, it helped we hadn’t had the twins yet, and we had been housing Natasha, who had been willing to run kid interference.

  We had never advertised the event, and it wasn’t something we could ever do again if we wanted to maintain our sanctuary status. Still, birthday parties and other educational events had been one of the things on my mind when I had been contemplating joining up with the Ohio Zoo. If we moved the parties away from the sanctuary proper, to a facility off the actual grounds, and if we used cameras to connect the kids to our animals instead of allowing them to tour, it seemed possible we could alleviate some of our financial woes without violating either our role as a sanctuary or Art’s vision for our research work. Of course, all of this assumed we could drum up the money to finish building the mall and change it from “mall” to “youth fundraiser facility” in the first place.

  “Okay, we’re here.”

  Lance and I had been so engrossed in our conversation that we had lost track of the brambles and holes. While we were talking, we had been tramping down the hill from the little-used employee entrance, but toward the creek, instead of toward Chuck’s enclosure. At first, I didn’t see anything. But then I realized there was a concrete edifice poking up above the ground, almost completely obscured by undergrowth. It was a matter of looking at it from the right angle. From three sides, it looked like disorganized brush. But from the front, the rectangular structure was plainly visible.

  “This is the front door. There’s another entrance closer to the creek. That’s where it’s more likely to flood, but it opened easier, so we used it more often.” Natasha pointed to another structure, equally hidden in the brambles.

  “Did Gary stumble over this or what?” I asked. I wondered if Merle had shown it to him. Perhaps Merle had been part of the smuggling ring but not the pornography ring. I wondered if Merle was dead. “Surely he had people to film down here.”

  “I think they’re all in jail. He’s been using it for ages, though. I never knew where it was until I moved out here. And then . . . it’s hard to explain the forgetting. When I was coming in from the city, I was always lost by the time we reached this point. I didn’t know about the center or where he was getting the animals until then. It looks different during the day.”

  Lance and Darnell braced themselves and lifted a metal bar from across a door, then pulled the handle. The door was practically frozen shut, but slowly it ground open, revealing a set of stairs. “I’m not going down there,” Natasha said.

  “I’ll stay up here with you,” Lance and I volunteered together. That pit oozed claustrophobia.

  “Stand out of sight inside the door,” Darnell coaxed. “Let Trudy and I go down and look around. Once we see what we have here, we’ll all leave. The two of us can come back later with the police.”

  “Who’s going to see us?” I protested. Nonetheless, we crowded into the entryway and turned on our flashlights. We could have had some police if not for Natasha’s insistence on getting this over with now. If we could have waited for either Deputy Greene and his partner or the pair currently sitting at the ice cream parlor with Mama and the twins, Darnell and Trudy wouldn’t have needed two trips. But Deputy Greene was already going to have his hands full until he deposited Tony Gibson with Drew, and Drew himself had inherited a busy afternoon. And, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the Muscogen County police department did have problems other than ours to solve today. If their senior detective hadn’t been one of the victims of this crime, we never would have merited as much attention as we were already getting.

  Lance and I shone our lights as Trudy and Darnell descended through cobwebs. Natasha turned away and looked outside.

  The place stank of mildew. “It’s cleaner downstairs,” said Natasha. “Or it was. But not much.” She called down to Trudy and Darnell, “He used to have a bunch of filing cabinets behind the props along the back wall, but don’t get caught up in those. There’s one wall that isn’t concrete in there, and he’s got a hidey hole in it a little like the one where Will was stuck back at Lance and Noel’s house. Try there.”

  In the distance, the sanctuary was audible, a constant accompaniment of
warbles and hoots, and my purse had started chuffing and grunting. It seemed Chuck was ready to chat today after all. That might be the perfect distraction for Tasha right now. Distracted by this, I initially failed to realize the basement sprang to life with racket when Darnell and Trudy descended.

  Darnell whistled. “Lance, Noel, you’ve got monkey problems,” he called.

  “What?”

  A creaking crash, then, “Found the hole, but it’s empty. I said you have monkey problems.”

  Natasha held up a hand for silence. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.

  “The basement or my purse?”

  Tasha shook her head. “Out there,” she whispered.

  Then I did hear it. Somebody was crashing through the forest toward us. “Trudy, Darnell, help! Who’s there?” I had a glimpse of someone large, and then a human shape blotted out the light.

  “Noel!” Ace nearly knocked me down the stairs.

  “It’s okay! It’s Ace.” For a moment, my gut unclenched.

  Now, the noise from my purse was unmistakable. “Chuck!” Tasha took the purse and rooted out the tablet. “But you shouldn’t leave him alone with his end, Ace! He’ll toss it, and . . .”

  My muscles tightened again. Ace hadn’t run all this way to tell us Chuck found the chat program. “What are you doing here?”

  Drew was a solid man, tall, square, and muscular. But his brother Ace was enormous. There wasn’t room for him and us in that tiny space. “You didn’t answer your phone,” he gasped. “Somebody followed you down here.”

  “Yeah, you!” Natasha still hadn’t figured out Ace wasn’t here about Chuck’s new enrichment program.

  “No. It’s nice enough for Chuck to be outside this afternoon, and I thought we’d try again with that computer. Then another car pulled up and stopped beside your van, and a couple of folks got out. They didn’t pay me any mind when I hollered. I don’t know where they went, though. Thought I’d have found them—”