“What? Who? The detective is a man.”
“Natasha.” She projected disgust with my misplaced priorities.
Natasha had curled back up with her head against her knees, and she was rocking slightly. Someone had provided her with a sweat suit, and Alex had regained his shirt. We had Chuck on a makeshift litter, and Lance and I were helping push him while Christian tugged him forward. He was heavy, and even with Christian’s strength, the progress was slow.
“Tell her to come down here.” I turned back to the animal.
“Noel! What are you doing? Isn’t a child more important than a monkey?”
“He’s an ape, and Natasha doesn’t want our pity.”
“What are you talking about? She’s in shock!”
“She’s in misery. There’s a difference.”
“You have no idea . . .”
“Oh, yes I do.” I finally gave up pushing the orangutan and stood up. “When he,” I pointed to Alex, “pounded me into my apartment floor, do you know what hurt the worst?”
Marguerite shook her head.
“Watching my family watch me afterwards. You couldn’t hide the pity, and that made the humiliation so damned bad. So go up there and tell Natasha to come down here, and don’t get all maudlin about it. Tell her we need help getting the orangutan to safety, and she won’t hesitate.” I bent back down and flopped one of Chuck’s arms onto the stretcher.
Within a minute, Natasha was standing beside me. “She said you needed help.”
“This is going really slowly. The cops are busy doing police stuff, and we don’t have enough people pushing.”
“Why not get him?” She pointed to Alex.
“Because he tried to kill me one time, and I prefer to keep my distance.” I looked up at her as I spoke, but in the darkness, it was hard to gauge her reaction.
Finally, she said, “So what do you need me to do?”
“He’s so big, it’s hard not to drag the stretcher right out from under him. He keeps sliding off. If you get back here with me and help push and flop, Lance can go up with Christian and pull.”
She took Lance’s place, and we worked together until Chuck was a few feet from the enclosure door. My shoulder and back begged for our golf cart. “He tried to kill you?” Natasha asked.
“Damned near succeeded.”
“Well, how come he was with you earlier?”
“He’s a lot nicer now . . .”
“They all say that.”
She was protecting me. She was protecting the ape. She was protecting everybody but herself. “I know. That’s why I prefer to keep my distance. But we needed his help to find you. We knew there might be trouble here, and he wouldn’t be too easy to beat up.”
“I don’t guess so.”
Chuck was in. We pulled the stretcher free and exited, locking the door behind us. Christian would have a truck here before the orangutan woke, since a padlock would be a small obstacle to our new ape.
“What about you?” I asked her. “Your grandparents are both in the hospital. Will they let you go home alone?”
“No, and I don’t want to.”
“Are you going to stay with a friend?” I pressed.
She huffed through her nose and looked away. “I haven’t got any friends. They can probably find one of Gran’s friends, or I can go back into foster care for a few weeks. I’ve been there before. It’s not so bad, really.”
I didn’t realize Lance was listening until he spoke. “Stay with us.”
“Yes!” I echoed him immediately. “We’ve got a spare bedroom, and one way or the other, we’re going to need extra hands out at the sanctuary in the next few days.”
“I guess . . . I already know some of the smaller monkeys.” Her discomfort seemed to come from our offer, rather than from the way she had developed her familiarity with our residents.
“Good,” Lance said. “I’ll go figure out how to make it happen.”
Now, downstairs, Natasha said, “I can cook,” in a tone that suggested someone was trying to baby her out of the kitchen. We owed that kid something, and I struggled out from under the covers before Marguerite or my mother could drive her to anger with their pity. She needed our help. Everything she’d been through, and it was her hysteria that would probably save us from a media outcry about our homicidal ape when word of what happened last night reached the public. If Natasha was vocal enough, maybe more people than Lance and I might recognize Chuck’s heroism. And if I didn’t get downstairs soon, she was likely to get very vocal indeed with my mother and sister. Or else very quiet. I didn’t like the thought of either.
Our connection, slight though it was, felt real. And I had an obligation to protect her from their pity. I thought I might be able to help her better than anybody, even my sister. The girl might have a shot at recovery if she could maintain that relationship with the big ape. I doubted she could continue to maintain the illusion she had held up ever since she had come to her grandparents. School was liable to be hell when she went back in the fall. I didn’t see any way for her to pretend away the last four years of her life. I knew how much the sanctuary had helped me when I was broken and recovering, how much it mattered that I could throw myself into the needs of creatures who needed me. I hoped she could take similar comfort, if only for a little while.
The center. I groaned. We were surely going to be shut down. Even if we didn’t have to close because of our role in the pornography gang, I doubted the college would be interested in continuing to fund an institution with such an uncomfortable reputation. And Stan and his money couldn’t save us from everything.
It wasn’t all bad. Natasha was safe, and Art’s murderer lay dead. If Lance and I were allowed to keep it, we had a little home for two orangutans. It wasn’t a big space, but it was a beginning. I hoped it was one Natasha would help us foster into something larger.
The argument downstairs had expanded to include Brenda’s voice and a proposal of bacon. Then the doorbell rang. “Enough, I’m up!” I said to the room.
It was probably Hannah, Jan, or Mina. After we left to find Natasha, the false Gert—Gretchen—pulled a pistol on Nana to stop her from calling the police. She thought they were alone in the kitchen when she did it, but Jan had not gone with Hannah and Mina to break up the reception. She was actually in the bathroom. Jan was my Tae Kwon Do partner. And unlike me, Jan had been in her fair share of street fights, albeit many years before.
Coming from the hall, she got up behind Gretchen and kicked the gun out of her hand. Gretchen staggered for the back door, but she burst out upon Hannah and Mina returning to the house. My three friends tackled the would-be murderess, who went down in a heap screaming about her broken hip and multiple sclerosis. Broken hip indeed. People with broken hips don’t go shambling around pulling guns. Nana called the authorities. After we left the police at the orangutan enclosure, we came home to the remnants of our reception and another police investigation. Mama had saved us some of our dinner and a cupcake each, but I had only limited appetite for either.
Now, I pulled on yesterday’s shirt and shorts as Lance rolled over behind me in bed.
I opened the door to the sound of Darnell’s voice downstairs. “We really do need to ask them some questions,” he said.
Yes, I supposed we did owe our volunteers and interns, the honest ones, answers. And maybe they owed us some as well. I hoped Darnell was honest. “You let them sleep, young man,” Nana said.
“It’s all right,” I called. “We’re up. We’ll be down in a minute.” I waited while Lance dressed, and then we started down together.
“Is everything OK at the center?” Lance asked. Darnell and Trudy stood side by side in the doorway.
“It was fine when we left it with Christian last night,” Darnell said. “Is there someplace private we can talk?”
I led them into the back parlor, the one where Lance had first seen my wedding dress. We sat down opposite each other, Lance and I on the sofa and they in mat
ching yellow armchairs that only my mother could have made work in a room. That was when they flashed their federal badges. Natasha had been right, then.
Darnell said, “We’d like to formally extend our thanks to you and the staff of Midwest Primates for helping us conclude a federal investigation. We can only release limited information because prosecution will be ongoing for some time.”
Trudy said, “It’s a lot to process, isn’t it? Federal agents are making a dozen arrests this morning in conjunction with a case we’ve been pursuing for several years.”
Lance leapt to his feet. “So what you’re telling me is that you knew what you were sending Art out to find Friday afternoon?”
Darnell was up as fast as Lance. “No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”
“But you had reason to believe . . .”
“No. None. We believed until yesterday afternoon that Friday’s events were unconnected with our ongoing investigation. You have to realize, Lance, Art was assisting us. He knew. After your center helped break up that exotics ring last year, he got suspicious about the zoo up in Michigan. The one where it seems Chuck and Lucy came from.”
“The one where all the animals got out?”
Finally, something I did know. Until last Friday, the primate smugglers had been the biggest thing to cross into our territory. And Art had expressed concerns about any number of unregulated private zoos in our relative area. The Michigan zoo had folded after the animals’ release revealed unsanitary living conditions.
Darnell continued, “He passed along his suspicions to an agent. At the same time, our agency had been following Gary Buchanan for several months before he came to work at your facility. He was suspected of involvement in the illegal animal trade, but nobody knew about the pornography.
“Our agency had been tracking the exotics ring for some time after Art helped break up that one arm, but the case wasn’t a large priority for the government. Illegal exotic animal trade doesn’t typically crop up in Midwestern America. So a lot of our initial work, Trudy’s and mine, involved data collection until we met your director. When Art told us he suspected one of the animals from the zoo in Indiana wound up at the facility in Michigan, and we then connected Gary Buchanan with your facility, there was finally enough evidence to assign Trudy and myself to surveillance.
“But we got here and . . . nothing. Gary knew he was under suspicion, and he got more crafty about his activities. He graduated and left, and we were getting ready to move on. He falsified documentation for his passport, which allowed us to prevent him from leaving the country temporarily. But if something hadn’t come to light soon, we would have been forced to go home and abandon our investigation.”
Neither man sat back down, and Trudy stood up behind Darnell, so I got up too.
“I brought you all coffee!” Mama materialized in the doorway complete with a tea tray, four cups, sugar, cream, and tiny stirrer spoons. “I wasn’t sure how your friends took theirs”—she made this sound like a deliberate insult on our part to her hospitality—“so I brought all the fixings. Now what are you all having for breakfast?”
“Oh, we won’t be staying long,” Trudy began.
“Oh, no, I insist,” Mama said. “You all have done so much for Lance and Noel these last couple of days. We wouldn’t have extracted them from that sanctuary of theirs for the wedding yesterday if they hadn’t been able to trust you to run the place.”
“No, well . . .” Darnell was obviously flustered.
“Place the order,” I said, sitting back down. “They’ve got waffles, pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and I think sausage.”
From the doorway, Poppy added, “And now Nana’s got Natasha making hash browns and Rachel and Lisa cutting up cantaloupe.”
I said, “Lisa’s here?”
“Yes!” Mama said. “What a sweet little girl. I don’t know what your sister is so up in arms about. Have you seen Rachel’s tattoo?”
Before I could answer, Trudy said, “Bacon and scrambled eggs would be wonderful.”
Darnell shook his head but said, “Sausage.”
“Waffle or pancake?”
He looked ready to resist an answer, but Trudy shot him a look and he said, “Waffle. Fine.”
After Mama left, the others sat down again. I perched sitting forward, as I tried to make sense of what they were telling us.
Darnell went on, “Things went bad up in Michigan, and we lost track of a large number of animals and suspected individuals when the saboteurs released all the animals. Art had only recently seen the net result of allowing police to interact with wild animals, and his primary concern in his interactions with federal investigators was to save those animals. So after the police killed the animals in Michigan and northern Ohio, he was feeling frustrated with us, as well.”
I said, “God, Art.” It would be just like him to invite investigators on-site in hopes of saving an animal, but to shut them out if they were even remotely connected to the people who had harmed another animal.
Beside me Lance said, “We always thought he couldn’t keep a secret to save himself. Now it looks like he kept them left, right, and center.”
Darnell said, “I really think he could do anything where Midwest Primates was concerned. He kept working with us because he feared Gary was trying to smuggle animals through his facility without his knowledge. None of us realized Gary was simply using the animals already on-site for a much darker purpose.”
Lance glowered across at someone we had recently considered a friend. “And thanks to your lack of knowledge, there’s a good chance our center will be closed for creating inhumane conditions where animals could be involved with child pornography.”
Neither Trudy nor Darnell said anything for several minutes. Finally, Trudy said, “Approximately the only thing we can tell you for certain is that we will do what we can to ensure the animals’ safe placement if your facility is closed down.”
That hung between us. Ensuring the animals’ safety. Lance said, “You can’t think that closing Midwest Primates will benefit the animals. Not after . . .”
Darnell said, “What do you know about Sally Williams?”
And then Mama came in with Poppy and breakfast. She had Bryce and Daddy drag in a card table and went to elaborate lengths to set out our food, refill the coffee, deliver juice, and lift up the room with running commentary about the disaster of our reception. I remembered that yesterday when Lance and I tried to have a private conversation, the whole family had eavesdropped on every word. It was what my family did. We didn’t keep things from each other. And if we did, Mama or Nana shamelessly ferreted them out.
Mama hadn’t come into the room right when she did by accident. She popped in the first time when she thought things might get dangerous. She came in now to buy Lance and me time to think. It wasn’t much, but I would make it enough. I had been on the verge of telling the agents everything I had ever known about Sally Williams.
Instead, when Mama left, I said, “What do you want to know about Sally?”
Trudy looked at me. Darnell looked at me. “Where she is, for one thing,” they both said.
I answered with absolute honesty. “No idea. Before yesterday, I would have told you that Gary was somewhere in Africa and Sally was at the National Zoo in Washington DC. Yesterday, I would have said Gary was with his elderly mother in Pennsylvania. But Gary, very clearly, was not in Pennsylvania. So who knows where Sally is. Is that everything you needed?”
“You said you spoke with her,” Trudy began.
Lance started to say something, and I mashed his foot under the card table. “Did I say that?”
“What the hell game are you playing?” Darnell snapped.
I stood up, nearly flipping the table, but ultimately only pushing it forward so that Darnell couldn’t stand up. It wasn’t planned, but I took advantage of it. Standing was a position of power. I leaned forward on the table. “I’m not playing a game, Darnell. You walk in here and say you’ve been w
atching the situation that got our best friend killed. That nearly got us killed. You walk in here and tell me you’ve been watching everybody who came through our facility for the last who-knows-how-long. And you expect us to fill in the gaps in your knowledge because you flash a badge.”
Darnell said, “We didn’t have to tell you anything. We could have gone right on anonymously. We could have asked you casually if you’d talked to Sally since Art’s death, and you would have told us out of friendship. We are trying to give you a sense of the depth of the problems you and Lance are going to be facing as the facility’s acting directors in the coming months. If you don’t get shut down, and there’s a good chance you won’t, you’re going to be answering questions like this for some time.”
I leaned harder on the table. “And you can come in with a subpoena and get what you need for all I care. Sally can’t be very hard for you to find. The best you want to offer us is safe placement of the animals, but if you want our willing cooperation, we need a little more help.” I sat down. “And to start off with, I want to know what Sally Williams has to do with anything.”
Trudy started to say something, but Darnell waved her off. “Come out to the car a minute,” he said.
CHAPTER 28
* * *
I was tempted to refuse. The federal badges had looked official enough, but in the long run, there was nothing to say they weren’t forgeries. I didn’t think they were, though. I thought Darnell and Trudy were on the up and up. I also thought they could do a little more than offer to shuttle our animals somewhere safe.
So we all four went out to Trudy’s beat-up sedan, where they had a picture to persuade us to help them. Clearly, they had expected my pushback. It was a graphic image of Natasha and Sally in a clinch. At least there wasn’t a monkey in the shot. I pretended indifference. “And you can’t find her.”
“She’s the only one,” Trudy said.
Darnell added, “And you have her phone number.”
I said, “It’s in the staff files at the center. I’m sure you’ll find her quickly.”
The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) Page 25