by Ed McBain
“Fine,” Hardy said heatedly, “you go do that. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting my lions off that island.” He turned to Boyd. “Make sure nobody tries to go out there. I’ll be in the holding area,” he said, and marched off in a huff. Carella figured that anyone who arrived in a dither and went off in a huff couldn’t be all bad. Levine went back to the truck to call his superior. Ollie shrugged and turned to where Carella and Meyer were still watching the lions. A pretty blonde from Channel Four News sidled up to Carella and said, “Fascinating, isn’t it?”
“Thrilling,” Ollie said.
The blonde turned to him as if surprised to learn that a hippopotamus could speak.
“Want to go for some breakfast?” Ollie asked.
“Thanks, I’ve already eaten,” she said.
“I didn’t mean you, Miss,” he said, and grinned. “I was talking to my colleagues here. These superior sleuths from the Eighty-seventh Precinct.”
“Better wait till the ME gets here, don’t you think?” Carella said.
“But now that you mention it, I’m Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks,” Ollie said, turning back to the blonde. “Want to interview me?”
“What for?”
“The leg over there is in my jurisdiction.”
“Then why don’t you go take it away from that lion?”
“I might in a little while.”
“Good. You go get the leg, and then I’ll interview you.”
“I also play piano,” he said.
“A shame we don’t have a piano here in the park,” the blonde said, and turned back to Carella. “How do you suppose the woman got out there?” she asked.
“I’ve been taking lessons for almost two weeks now,” Ollie said. “Right now, I’m working on ‘Night and Day.’ ”
Boyd had been told to make sure no one went out onto the island. But he had just heard the blonde’s question and he wanted to get a little closer to someone who looked so leggy and all in a short skirt and high-heeled boots and a brown leather jacket. So he came over to explain that the way personnel got onto the island was through a tunnel under the moat …
“The lions are brought inside every night,” he explained. “To cages in the holding area.”
“That’s very interesting,” the blonde said.
“I’m gonna learn five songs,” Ollie said.
“That’s very interesting, too,” the blonde said, and turned back to where Carella and Meyer were still watching the lions. It was a frighteningly cold morning, but neither of the men was wearing a hat. Carella’s hair was brown, dancing on his head now in a brisk wind. Meyer was totally bald; his barren pate made him look colder than he actually was. The two detectives stood like bookends flanking Fat Ollie, whose little red watch cap was tilted at a rakish angle. Actually, Ollie thought he cut a fine figure of sartorial elegance.
“My name is Honey Blair,” the blonde told Carella, “I rove for the Five o’Clock News.”
“Hello, Honey,” Ollie said. “I rove for the Eighty-eighth Squad.”
Honey was thinking the two big detectives made a nice picture standing there watching the voracious lions. They were both tall and wide-shouldered, the bald guy looking solid and serious, the other one looking sexy as hell in a way she couldn’t quite understand, he wasn’t that good-looking. Something about the way his eyes slanted downward maybe, giving him a sort of Chinese appearance, though he certainly wasn’t Oriental. Something about thelook in the eyes, maybe. Dark and brooding. As if it pained him to see the woman out there being torn to shreds.
“You new in the job?” she asked him.
“New? Me?” he said, and smiled, and shook his head.
The smile got to her, too.
“Want me to take your picture?” she asked.
“Sure,” Ollie said.
“You and your partner,” Honey said. “Looking over at the lions.”
“I don’t think so, thanks,” Carella said.
“Why not?”
“Wouldn’t be professional,” he said.
“Make a nice shot, though,” Honey said, and beamed a dazzling smile at him.
Meyer raised his eyebrows.
“Thanks, no,” Carella said again.
“Think it over,” she said, and turned away and walked back toward her camera crew, flirty little skirt fluttering about her elegant long legs. Ollie watched her go. So did Meyer. Carella walked over to where Levine was still on the phone with the DI.
“We’re going to have to get on that island soon,” Levine was saying. “ Before the Five o ’ Clock News tells everybody we let wild animals eat ’ em for Christmas. ” He listened, and then said, “ You think so? ” He listened again. “ I ’ m not sure the CEO here is gonna buy that. ” He listened, nodded, said, “ Okay, Boss, whatever you say, ” and put the phone back on its bracket in the truck ’ s cab. He turned to Carella and said, “ Quote: ‘ If a dangerous animal is threatening human life, destroy it. ’ Period. Unquote. ”
“So what does he want?”
“A team of sharpshooters.”
“Mr. Hardy won’t like that.”
“Just what I told the DI.”
“Let me go talk to him. You call SWAT, tell them we need enough sharpshooters to take care of five healthy lions.”
Meyer walked over to the truck.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“Shooting the lions,” Carella said.
“I’LL HAVE THEM OFF THAT ISLAND before your sharpshooters get here,” Hardy said. “What’s the sense in killing them? The woman is already dead. Besides, it isn’t as if they escaped confinement and wentlooking for prey. The woman found her own way onto the island somehow. These are wild animals. Carnivores. It was in theirnatureto attack her and devour her.”
“Sir, I’m merely telling you what we plan to do,” Carella said. He looked at his watch. “A SWAT team should be here in ten, twelve minutes. They’ll dispose of the animals at that time.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll have them off the island. You have your plan, I have mine.”
“What’syour plan, Mr. Hardy?”
“I’ll have my vets anesthetize the animals and carry them back here to the holding cages.”
“Back here” was a bunker-like building connected to the island by a ramp and a tunnel that ran under the moat. By now, a considerable number of zoo people had gathered here in the holding area. In addition to zookeepers of various grade levels, there were people from the Curation Department, and two animal behaviorists, and the three veterinarians who would be handling the anesthetizing of the animals out there.
The way Hardy explained it to Carella and Meyer—and to Ollie, who had now joined them—the forthcoming operation was really a simple one. The vets would use either dart guns or blowpipes to administer the anesthetic. The holding cages inside the bunker were flanked by keeper walkways. Guillotine doors opened from squeeze cages on the walkways into the larger holding cages. A five foot high concrete wall formed the back of each cage. The front of each cage was constructed of steel wire mesh. The keeper work area ran down the center of the building. There were access doors to the cages on either side of the work area. The anesthetized animals would be carried from the island to the ramp to the walkways and into the holding cages.
Considering that Carella had told Hardy the shooters would be here in ten to twelve minutes, he took his time debating with his staff the procedures they would use in safely anesthetizing and transporting the lions from the island to the holding area. Should they use an explosive projectile dart or a blowdart? Should they use a dissociative anesthetic, a tranquilizer, a non-narcotic sedative, or a narcotic drug?
“Even smaller cats than the ones out there are dangerous to handle without anesthesia,” Hardy explained. “The young lion who carried off that woman’s leg must weigh at least four hundred pounds. I’d say he measures ten feet long including his tail and stands at least three feet at the shoulders. You try to put a net on a wild animal that siz
e, you’re asking for trouble.”
The drug they debated using was ketamine hydrochloride, a dissociative anesthetic most commonly delivered intramuscularly in doses of 100 to 200 mg/ml. For a dose sufficient enough to provide a rapid effect, a larger dart and more powerful delivery force was required. One of the keepers argued that this heightened the possibility of injury to the animal. Another argued that ketamine HCl was a painful injection. One of the vets argued that the drug induced a tendency for the animal to convulse. With three minutes to spare, they agreed to use the drug, after all, and decided that instead of using a blowdart, which had a higher probability of successful injection, they would use an explosive projectile dart, which had a traumatic impact but which was necessary because the drug was ketamine HCl.
At seven minutes to nine, just as Carella thought he heard the approaching siren of the van bearing the SWAT team, Hardy’s own team went through the steel guillotine doors, out onto the run, down the ramp, and into the tunnel that led to a second pair of guillotine doors that opened discreetly onto the jungle-like environment where the young lion was gnawing on the woman’s severed leg. If the lion heard the guillotine doors opening, he gave no sign of it. He was still busy with the bone—which was what the woman’s leg had now become—when the first of the darts hit him in the forehead. The vets were going for the frontal or dissociative cortex of the brain. But as often happened with explosive projectile darts, the impact was insufficient to detonate the charge. Freddie, which was the lion’s name, lifted his head from the bone, spotted the three vets crouched behind one of the habitat bushes—
“Easy now, Freddie,” one of vets whispered.
—crouched for just an instant, and then charged them.
They ran for the guillotine doors, the lion behind them, ran into the tunnel under the moat, and up the ramp, into the run behind the holding cages, startling Hardy, who realized too late that a lion was loose. He stabbed at the button that began closing the guillotine doors behind the three vets—but the lion was inside as well. The doors clanged shut. Everyone was suddenly in a long narrow holding cage with a lion who’d just had his first taste of human flesh.
The access door to the work area was at the far end of the cage. Between that door and the lion were four zookeepers, three veterinarians, two animal behaviorists, two curators, an assistant director, a director, three detectives, and a partridge in a pear tree.
One of the detectives was Steve Carella.
The lion went directly for him.
Maybe it was his smile.
But Carella wasn’t smiling. In fact, he was terrified, his eyes bulging, his mouth falling wide open as the lion leaped into the air at him. He brought his hands up defensively. Four hundred and some odd pounds of animal force knocked him flat on his back to the concrete floor of the cage. Pinned by enormous paws, Carella looked up at a head the size of a beach ball, all tawny fur and yellow eyes and open jaws and teeth. The lion’s roar resounded through every nerve in Carella’s body. He twisted his head away just as the animal lunged for his face.
A shot rang out.
It took the lion clean between the eyes.
He collapsed onto Carella like a huge smelly rug in somebody’s den.
Fat Ollie Weeks waddled over, grinning, a nine-millimeter Glock in his hand.
He flipped back his jacket, holstered the gun, and said, “You owe me one, Steve-a-rino.”
OVER ALFRED HARDY’S VIOLENT OBJECTIONS , the SWAT team disposed of the remaining four lions in short order. Honey Blair got some nice shots of the sharpshooters doing their job, aiming down their rifle barrels and all, the lions happily munching away on the lady out there, whoever she was, unaware that in minutes they would be merely trophies. Hardy refused to let Honey take any pictures of the carcasses on the island, animal or human, and ordered her off the premises. She went over to where a pair of paramedics were searching Carella for any cuts or bruises caused by what they insisted was a “mauling.”
“I wasnot mauled,” Carella told them over and over again. “I was almosteaten,but I was not mauled.”
“Sounds like a good idea either way,” Honey said, and smiled. “Here’s my card. You ever feel like discussing police work or television reportage, give me a ring. Or even just a cappuccino, mm?” she said, and smiled again.“Ciao, bambino.”
Carella watched her walking off.
He looked at the card.
And tossed it into the trash bin near the railing where he sat.
The paramedics thought the lion mauling him had damaged his brain.
THE THING THAT BOTHERED CARELLA MOST about the dead woman—or what was left of her, which wasn’t very much—was that she was naked.
“Woman wandering around the zoo without any clothes on, dead of winter,” Carella said.
“Which does seem peculiar,” Meyer agreed.
“Almost makes it seem as if she didn’twant to be identified.”
He was thinking that this was the worst time of the year for suicides. Girl loses her man, her job, her mind, her gold watch—she wasn’t wearing a watch, he noticed, unless one of the lions ate it—she decides to end it all. Ashamed of the act she’s about to commit, she strips herself naked, goes for a bare-assed walk in the zoo, straight into the lion’s den.
Another thing that bothered him was the fact that Ollie Weeks had saved his life. Once upon a time, Bert Kling had saved a Puerto Rican courier from a near-fatal baseball-bat beating. The man’s name was José Herrera, and he had informed Kling that in certain cultures—Asian or North American Indian, he wasn’t sure which—if you saved a person’s life, you were responsible for that person’s life forever. The one thing Carella did not want was Fat Ollie Weeks being responsible for his life forever.
“You think somebodythrew her to those lions?” he asked Meyer.
“Be a new one, all right,” Meyer answered.
CARL BLANEY HATED EXAMINING BODIES that were in parts. If he’d wanted to become a butcher, he would not have gone to medical school. This one was particularly disgusting. All chewed over and everything. Your cases involving severed parts were usually your blunt force injuries, where a person got run over by a truck or a subway train. The other times you got a bundle of disconnected arms and legs was when somebody was trying to dispose of a murder victim, and sawed the body up into pieces and packed them in a trunk. This particular corpse, he’d been told, had been attacked by lions, of all things, you’d think this city was the African veldt.
There was not much more than the bare bones remaining of the victim’s left leg. All the tissue and muscle had been torn away, leaving the exposed femur, patella, tibia, and fibula, portions of which had been gnawed through as well. The right leg was in a similar state of obliteration, the bones cracked open, the marrow sucked out. The woman’s right breast was completely gone, her left breast consumed to almost where it joined the chest. Her right arm was still connected to the body, but the hand had been consumed, bones and all, and from the wrist up to the elbow, the tissue and muscle were gone, exposing the ulna and radius.
The heart, the liver, the pancreas, the stomach—all the tasty parts—were gone. He was examining the woman’s head and face, which had been partially consumed, the nose and ears gone, the lips gone, the eyes gone, when he noticed—
But how could that be?
He was looking at a tiny circular perforation in the skull, just above what was left of the woman’s hairline.
To the naked eye, it looked a great deal like a small-caliber pistol wound.
IT WAS TWO-THIRTY THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON when the phone on Carella’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver.
“Carella,” he said.
“Blaney here.”
“Hey, Carl.”
“On this dead girl who got eaten by lions?” Blaney said, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it. “I’ve lifted a good thumbprint and two fingerprints. I don’t imagine you know much about her …”
“Not a thing so far.”
“Reason I’m asking … I’ve come up with something interesting.”
“What’s that, Carl?”
“I found a tiny perforation in the left temporal region of the skull. At first, it looked like a bullet wound, but upon further …”
“Looked like awhat?” Carella said.
“But it wasn’t.”
“What was it?”
“An ice-pick wound. Somebody stabbed her with an ice pick.”