by Ruby Loren
Auryn stared to see if I was being serious. “And they’re just going to watch and see if it happens?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I suppose they’re hoping she’ll bring a weapon and that they’ll spot her before she gets close. Fingers crossed they do…”
“Hey, are you okay?” Auryn sat down next to me and his eyes searched my own. I tried not to think about the fresh doubts that Ben Ravenwood had put in my head. You just don’t strike me as someone who wants to settle down in a small town and watch the world go by…
“We haven’t thought of a name for the new zoo,” I said, my misery threatening to envelope me. It sounded like this silly little gripe, but it was something that had really built up on me - we hadn’t even had time to discuss that one stupid thing.
“How about we talk about it now?”
I sighed. “It’s really late. We both have to get up and work tomorrow morning.”
“That’s what coffee’s for, right?” Auryn said but his face grew more serious. “We should talk about it. I want to talk about our wedding, too. I know we’ve thrown ideas around, but I want something more concrete. I don’t want this to be an engagement that lasts forever while we find other jobs that need doing and things that come up. I want us to decide on something and then go through with it.”
I looked into Auryn’s grey eyes and felt a rush of warm feelings. Had I really been so ready to doubt everything? We’d just taken on more than expected and the pressure had got to me. “When are we going to do all of this figuring out?”
“If I make you some hot chocolate, and maybe add in some RedBull, we could stay up all night and talk about zoo names. I bet we’d come up with some great ones.” Auryn grinned sideways at me.
“You dare suggest adding RedBull to my hot chocolate?”
“You might like it. I bet it’s what all the kids are drinking in the clubs these days…”
I smirked at his attitude. “You sure you don’t want to be out there clubbing with them?”
Auryn pulled a face. “No way. Hot chocolate, with or without the energy drink, and arguing over zoo names is my idea of a fun night.”
As strange though it sounded, I knew he actually meant it.
When I woke up on the sofa the next morning, I reflected that energy drink in hot chocolate might have been useful after all. From what I could remember, Auryn and I had got as far as dismissing all of the names we’d both been mulling over separately. We’d been back to square one and then… I was pretty sure we’d both fallen asleep. It was lucky the police were watching the house, otherwise I could have woken up dead and not known anything about it.
I took a moment to look across at my handsome blonde fiancé, still sleeping, before my mind processed that the sun was pretty well risen in the sky. I poked Auryn awake. “We’re going to be late!”
He mumbled something and opened one eye. “Why? What time is it?”
I glanced at my phone, which had fallen on the floor and failed to wake me. “Uh… half eight. Heck… I should be there right now!” I’d already missed a chunk of the morning feeds I’d hoped to observe. You could learn a lot about the mindset of animals from the way they behaved at feeding time.
There was something else, too. The great white shark had theoretically been released last night. I had to find out how it had gone.
“Okay, have fun,” Auryn said, shutting the eye again and turning over.
“I said we’re going to be late.”
“Nope, just you. I stayed late last night. I have a free pass until lunchtime for all of the hard work I’ve been putting in.” There was a self-satisfied smile on his face.
“That’s why you were so happy to stay up late last night! You knew you could sleep in this morning.” I was disgusted.
“Mmmm, yep,” Auryn said, his smile getting broader as he covered himself with the soft blanket that had been thrown over the back of the chair.
I threw a cushion at him but he just took it and made himself more comfortable.
“Insufferable jerk,” I muttered and he laughed.
“I’ll bring you a nice lunch to make up for it.”
“Okay,” I said after a moment’s reflection. I couldn’t handle another day of pot noodle.
“Love you,” Auryn called from beneath the blanket.
I muttered something rude under my breath.
He stared at me.
“Love you, too… idiot.”
“I’ve been looking for you,” the zoo manager said when I walked into the office right after arriving to collect my review folder.
“What can I do for you, Sir?” I asked, hoping that over politeness might lessen whatever blow he sought to strike against me this morning.
“You can explain exactly what you did to my PA. She hasn’t turned up for work!”
Alarm bells started ringing in my head. I knew that Aimee was still on the loose. What if, for some reason as yet unknown, she’d gone after Doreen? I couldn’t see the rather senior PA as being someone who would be involved with Ben Ravenwood, but I could be wrong…
“I haven’t seen her since she said she had that appointment with her granddaughter,” I told him.
“Well, you need to go and find her.”
I opened my mouth to protest but the manager beat me to it.
“I’m busy. The rag-tag lot outside of the gates are kicking off today. Apparently we’ve killed the great white shark that was in our care and are now hiding the evidence - even though there’s a YouTube video and a tracking device proving otherwise! As the face of the park, I must go and reason with them.”
I silently wondered if anyone apart from Donovan considered him to be ‘the face of the park’.
“I was surprised to find out the shark had been released. If I find out you had anything to do with it…” he continued.
I waited but apparently it was an open ended threat. I’d always thought they were lazy.
“I’m sure the public will applaud the well-considered act of conservation by the marine park. How is Blanca doing?” I asked, keeping everything crossed.
Donovan harrumphed and then looked uncertain. I’d wrong-footed him. “Fine, I think. Still swimming along. I suppose that means the shark is either alive or in something bigger’s stomach. I don’t know much about the technology…”
I nodded. “Well, I’m sure everyone will be following the story with a lot of interest. If it’s a success, it will prove you were right all along!”
“Yes… right all along,” Donovan echoed, looking pleased and confused at the same time. “I’ll just write down Doreen’s address.” He grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper from a nearby desk and scrawled it out. “The Sat Nav will find it,” he assured me. “Thanks.” It was tacked on at the last minute, right before he walked out of the door, but I thought it held promise. Donovan might be starting to change his opinion of me.
It was unfortunate that what I found at Doreen Lopez’s house would be enough to darken his opinion forever.
Doreen Lopez lived out in the sticks. If I’d been thinking straight, I’d probably have realised that it was just another sign that she was hiding something, or rather… hiding from something.
When I pulled up outside of the rusted iron gates and looked through the wild garden at the small villa beyond, I had a strong feeling that there was no one home. The property could have been abandoned for ten years, given the exterior, and it was only the tyre imprints in the earth - still soft from the recent rainfall - that gave away someone had been here more recently.
My ride-along police escort made no comment, but they’d sent me out with someone pretty junior to look after me. I wasn’t sure if there was a language barrier between us. She seemed in no hurry to get out of the car, either.
I walked through the gates and across the grass. In the back of my mind I was on the lookout for a flash of red hair. Logically, there wasn’t any reason for Aimee to be here waiting for me, but I knew something was wrong.
When
I looked through the window and saw items scattered around, I knew I was correct. My first thought was that a break-in had occurred, but nothing looked broken. That thought was further confirmed when I arrived at the front door and found an envelope with a note attached to it pinned to the wood. A quick search on my phone revealed that it was payment for another month’s rent in cash for the landlord to pick up whenever he came by. My English common sense was astonished by the wisdom of leaving cash out in the open for anyone to take, but this area was incredibly rural. Perhaps there was little to no crime, and it was clear that no one came by very often. For some reason, Doreen Lopez had wanted it that way.
She’s packed up and gone, I realised, reconsidering the evidence in front of me. Perhaps I should have been more concerned about where Doreen Lopez had disappeared to, and why, but when I walked back to the car all I could think about was how annoyed Donovan Powell was going to be that his golden PA had vanished. And I just knew that it was somehow going to be my fault.
I returned to the office feeling mystified. On the car journey back to the park, I’d been running various scenarios through my head. Something was jumping up and down in the back of my mind but I couldn’t quite reach it.
What if Donovan is right and it is your fault? the voice finally spoke up in my head. I frowned at it, but then decided I’d give the idea some consideration.
I pulled out a fresh piece of paper and wrote down everything I could remember about my interactions with Doreen Lopez.
Once I was done, I considered the picture I’d painted. When I’d first met her she’d struck me as nervous. The documentary team had moved in and she’d been curious about their being in the staff areas. Then the murder had happened and she’d started to get a lot jumpier - our meeting in the stairwell where she’d dropped the papers was evidence enough of that. And then yesterday… I’d tried to show her the funny fashions of the seventies in the book I’d found. She’d feigned a phone call and had vanished.
Had there been something about the book?
I dragged the file down from the top shelf and pulled out the volume. It took me ten minutes and several flicks through the pages before I found it.
The photographer had really gone to town, and there were a lot of photos to look through. It was only on my third pass that something finally clicked and I saw it. There was a picture on one of the pages that showed two women with wild perms standing back to back with each other. In-between them was a rather mystified looking monkey, still in a cage. The caption read ‘The notorious Neroli sisters celebrate after the raid on Sunshine Beach Cosmetic Testing Facility’. A glance further down the page revealed that these two women had quite the reputation for fighting their brand of eco-war… and at the time of writing, they had both been wanted for murder.
My eyes rose back up to the picture of the sisters, just to make completely sure. In the end, I was certain. Doreen Lopez was one of the Neroli sisters, infamous for breaking animals out of captivity… and she also had a record for murder.
All things considered, it didn’t look too good.
“Not the perfect PA after all,” I muttered, recalling Nile mentioning the recent misguided rescue of the loggerhead turtle and his fears that things were only going to escalate. Had Doreen been the woman working on the inside, feeding them information and ultimately facilitating their entry into the park?
Then there was the murder to consider. Leona might have looked through the eco book a lot more carefully than I had done in the first place. Could she have recognised the PA, confronted her, and then paid a deadly price?
I just wasn’t sure.
Before I could give it some more consideration, Donovan Powell strutted into the office looking rather pleased with himself. His smug smile vanished when he saw me.
“Where is my PA?”
“She’s gone,” I said and then hurried to explain before the park’s manager could start blaming me.
When I’d finally finished and had showed him the picture in the book, he was silent for a few moments.
“I suppose we’ll have to tell the police who she is,” he said with a deep sigh.
“Yes, we will.”
“She was so efficient. I’ll have to train up a new person from scratch. It’s going to take forever.” Donovan shook his head back and forth like a bulldog with a chew toy.
“In the book, it says she’s wanted for murder,” I pointed out. I had no idea if the warrant still stood, or if she’d already been caught and served her time - hence the new identity - but it wasn’t for us to make those assumptions. “Also, I think it’s possible that she let the animal activists into the park so they could take animals out.”
Donovan continued to shake his head. “We’ve all made mistakes in our youth.”
“Did you ever murder anyone?”
“No, of course not. This could all be some big misunderstanding.” Donovan was clutching at straws but I was done with attempting to pussyfoot my way around the manager and his strange over-attachment to his PA. It had got to the point where I was starting to suspect there’d been something more between them than just a work relationship. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed… although, Doreen’s recent actions would suggest that it was a one way street.
“Perhaps it is a misunderstanding,” I said, throwing him one last bone, “but that is for the police to decide.” I swept the book off the desk with a flourish and walked towards the exit.
“Things were fine until you got here,” Donovan complained.
I hesitated in the doorway and shot him a final, disbelieving look. “No. They weren’t.”
The park manager may have been happy to keep working with his head in the clouds, but the truth about Doreen Lopez’s other identity raised more questions than answers. Even if it was all an unfortunate coincidence, as Donovan wanted to believe, what was the likelihood of a self-proclaimed eco-warrior settling down to work a normal job at the very kind of animal institution she’d spent her younger years fighting to end?
I thought the chances were slim.
The police had been in a good mood after I’d handed them a brand new lead in their stalled murder investigation. It must have spread to me because I was smiling when I walked into the food store building.
My smile disappeared when I saw Aimee holding a wicked looking fish knife to the aquatic mammal keeper’s throat.
“You took your time. I was starting to think someone else was sure to come in and I’d have to start taking hostages,” Aimee greeted me with a broad smile.
“How did you know I’d be coming here?” I asked. It was true, I’d booked an appointment this morning with Billie, the aquatic mammals keeper, but there was no way Aimee could have known that.
Aimee shook her head in a superior manner. “You don’t cater for all of these idiots without learning a thing or two. I’ve been waiting for a chance to have a private meeting with you. I knew just where to hang around, unseen, while I listened in to all of the latest gossip…” She raised an eyebrow at me. “You should keep a closer eye on your man, that’s for sure.”
I was left wondering who she was referring to - Auryn or Ben? Too late I realised that it had probably been a test, and my uncertainty over her mental state meant that in her eyes, I had just failed.
This was all getting so confusing.
“Let her go, Aimee. This is between you and me.” Apparently I was now auditioning for a role in a low budget spy movie.
“Come closer and we’ll chat,” she countered.
I did what she said with a heavy sinking feeling. The police had been keeping an eye on me all morning but the new information I’d just dropped right into their laps meant they were all preoccupied. Sometimes I thought I was my own worst enemy.
“Did you kill Leona?” I asked, figuring that I didn’t have anything to lose.
“You betcha! I planned it ever since I arrived here and found out she was with my man. I bought her that stupid souvenir on the first
day and the silly hussy thought it was a gift from a fan. She never even looked on the bottom where I’d taped a note. When I went in to deliver her some food one time, I couldn’t believe she’d kept it in her caravan. Then when I found out she had the gall to be cheating on Ben, I couldn’t believe that either. I warned him that she was doing it, but she must have had something on him. That was when everything came together and I knew it was meant to be. If I got rid of Leona, Ben would turn to me and we could finally be with each other.”
It was a sordid fantasy. Unfortunately, I could see she believed it.
“So, how did you do it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It was easy. I waited until the food was gone and no one cared about me anymore. I’m basically invisible to these people, you know. Then I just popped into the caravan. I saw she was sleeping and then I ended it using the souvenir I’d bought her. Poetic really.”
I blinked a few times. “You killed her with the glass statue?”
“Yeah, of course,” Aimee said, looking nonplussed for a second.
I bit my lip. The police obviously hadn’t been as public with the exact details of the murder as I’d thought. Aimee really thought she’d killed the actress.
“You can’t have him. He’s mine,” Aimee said, diverting back to our standoff.
“Let her go,” I repeated, wanting the other keeper gone. None of this was her fault. “I’m coming closer.” I stepped forwards until we were only two metres away. Then I hesitated.
Aimee lunged at me, pushing the hapless Billie to the side. I didn’t blame her when she fled for the door without looking back. I’d already been on the back foot, so falling backwards to avoid the blade came naturally. The concrete floor bruising my spine was less welcome, but served as a potent reminder that I’d have a whole lot worse than bruises to worry about if I didn’t do something fast.
I rolled to the side and kept rolling. Aimee could have been trying to stab me with the fish knife, or she could have been watching laughing. I had my eyes shut and rolled for my life. Hitting something hard made them fly open and I discovered I’d managed to roll under a food prep table.