“Stacy Parks pulled a gun on you!?”
“Yep, as easy as pulling out a pack of chewing gum and couldn't decide between Doublemints or Chiclets.”
“Oh, this is so weird. If you knew her reputation back in Jersey, you'd see why this is so strange. But hey, she faked her death, so I'm sure there's this whole other side of her nobody knew about. And now it's all coming out.”
“I'm sure it's going to be a shock to everyone who knows her professionally,” the Sheriff commented.
“Oh, yes, you should have seen them all at the funeral. Nobody said one bad word about her. She had everybody fooled. Well, everybody but the animal activist. But she was completely crazy, so nobody paid her much mind.”
“Well, the truth will come out in the investigation.”
“Sheriff Logan, could we ask you for a favor?”
“What is it?”
“Well, we're working with the insurance company, so is it possible to get a quick picture of them actually in the jail cell? Just so the company can see that this is all coming to an end.”
“Normally, I would say no, but this case is so strange, and I'll be honest with you, I don't like those two. I'm sure you ladies are not going to cause trouble, so sure, I'll take a quick picture.”
“Here, take my phone.”
The Sheriff went into the office and came right out.
“There you go, piping hot from the pokey.” And he laughed.
There on the phone screen were a disgruntled Thomas and Stacy Parks. They didn't look scared, and they didn't look angry; they looked upset somebody ruined their plans.
“Thanks very much Sheriff, we truly appreciate it.”
The Sheriff walked back to his office and Mandy and Jill went back to the hotel.
“What's all that about we were working with the insurance company?”
“Well, I decided to keep it as a surprise for you for the future, but since thanks to you, we were able to follow Thomas Parks and also nab Stacy Parks, I'll tell you now. You see, because I was so angry at this guy for stealing my cat, I made a deal with the insurance company. They said they would give a reward if I could get proof and a conviction on insurance fraud.”
“How big of a reward are we talking about?” Jill's curiosity was piqued.
“Five percent of the value of the policy.”
“Which is?” Jill prodded.
“One million dollars, and we'll split it.”
“Wow, that's great! Well, it certainly solves a lot of problems.”
Mandy and Jill laughed, and Mandy contacted Ralph, the insurance agent again.
“So, are we still on??”
“Yes, you've done amazing work. But are they going to escape??”
“Let me send you this picture.”
Mandy sent the picture of the Parks couple in jail.
“They're safe in jail. Captain Fred Stone is in the process of extraditing them.”
“This is excellent news.” Said Ralph.
Meanwhile, Thomas and Stacy Parks were alone in their cell, Thomas wondering aloud what would happen next and Stacy reassuring him.
“Listen Tommy, don't worry. My father knows a lot of miracle lawyers. A lot of things may happen, but what will probably go down is this: in truth, nothing has happened yet. It's not like we took the money, and it's not like we killed anybody. I'll probably take an insanity plea; my depression in my Stacy Parks role overwhelmed me and I symbolically killed myself to end the Stacy Parks persona and go back to being my regular self Stella Benvenutto.
“Somehow, some way, with enough people being paid off and finding the right judges, we'll probably do a couple of months in a Byron county jail, which is nothing. We still have the cockfighting sideline and we can run the business from Paraguay. At the end of the day, yeah, this is a hitch and it's a real drag not to get those millions, but we'll find another racket to make up for the deficit. My father will help us.
“The part I can't figure out is how they found out? I know nobody squealed, they know better. No, what I think happened is some shamus; some Sherlock Holmes wannabe decided something didn't sit quite right with how I died and decided to investigate the whole thing further. Probably some guy with no life and no girlfriend who spends the whole day solving crimes.”
Back at the hotel, Mandy and Jill were celebrating the money they were going to get.
“Well, maybe we could do a little travel, go to Europe or something.” Mandy mentally weighed her options.
“Oh, believe me, we'll find plenty of things to do. Well, we won't have to worry about work for a while.”
“Yep, that's not going to be a problem. And Roger, I'll get Roger back as soon as we get back to Jersey.”
Chapter Twelve
Gwen Fetlock surveyed her completely empty animal shelter. She had seen the animals on TV and wondered how they all escaped. Surely someone had let them loose. But no one answered her calls, and now she knew why: everyone had abandoned the premises. Where were those simpletons she had hired to take care of the place? Gone. They ran away. What could have been so overwhelmingly bad they couldn't handle it?
It had taken her two years to gather all those animals, to protect them from being exploited, the latest jewel in her crown being poor Roger. His owner didn't have a clue how to take care of animals, so she had to remove him from her house, before he came to some harm, being exploited to sell cat food.
She could hardly get the thought to go through her mind, how someone would force an animal to pose cutely so they could sell pet food. But apparently, she was in the minority because everybody just LOVED having some cute animal in a pet food commercial.
She had taken all those animals to protect them and treated them better than anyone else would. And they were taken from her. Who did this? Someone had to pay for this, she would not let this go unpunished. She called the security guards again, the ones who were here when it happened and who weren't returning her calls.
“Elmer, I'm calling you again. What happened to my animals, what incompetence caused you to abandon those poor animals?”
Elmer looked at his phone. Him and Tony, the other guard, sat at a diner.
“See, I told you we did the right thing. She's flipping her lid. She keeps leaving these messages, like I'm going to answer the phone.”
“What did she say this time?” Tony asked.
“Oh, the same thing, what happened to her animals, how could we be so incompetent, etc. The usual. I'd like to tell her 'Hey, why don't you report us to the cops?' Because you know she can't, she stole those animals, see. Oh yeah, she took good care of them, but I remember the news, the people who owned them were beside themselves looking for their pets.”
“So, what do you think is going to happen eventually?”
“Well, listening to these messages of hers, I'm convinced she's ready to lose her last screw anytime now. We won't have to do much, she'll go really insane and probably wind up in a nuthouse. I took the job originally because it paid well, and it was an easy job, just keep my mouth shut and make sure the feeders fed the animals, simple stuff. But it's just gotten too crazy, and if you've seen her latest protests, she's really gone off the edge. She did one at somebody's funeral recently. They had to call the cops to get her out of there. Well, we won't be seeing her again.”
“So, maybe we should look at the whole thing as blessing in disguise.” Tony suggested.
“That's the way I see it, and that's really how we gotta treat it. Sometimes you need something coming out of left field to tell you, hey, you need a different direction in your life, you ain't going nowhere. I'll never figure out how those animals got across the river, but right then and there I said to myself, I gotta get out of this. And now here we are, looking for new jobs.”
“Yeah, I'm too young to be in a whacko situation like this. I just want a job as a security guard in a mall or something.”
Gwen Fetlock couldn't take it any longer. Those idiots were not going to help her. Tom, t
he camera guy, comprised the only aid she could count on her side. Those animals had been returned to the Animal Services Building. They took her animals and she better go and get them before the owners come by to pick them up and ruin those animals' lives. She had saved them from being exploited and she wouldn't let it go to hell in a hand basket because of a couple of idiots. She would just tell Tom they were going to demonstrate at the Animal Services Building. But in truth, she planned to take her taser, and if anybody tried to stop her, she would tase them. Those were her animals and losing them now after all these years is not something she would allow. She called Tom, the camera guy.
“Hey, Tom, how about we go down to the animal services place and put up a protest? They took my animals and now they're going to give them back to those owners who are just going to exploit them. We have to get them back before that happens.”
“Sure. Gwen, sounds like a great idea. I'll meet you at the Animal Services Building.”
Meanwhile, Tom had been strongly deliberating what to do about this situation. Gwen's craziness had shot up to an off the charts point, no longer about campaigning for animal rights, she just had this crazy idea of what constituted exploitation. She had graduated from crazy to insane. And now she planned to go to the Animal Services Building to take back those animals, the animals she originally stole? No good is going to come from that situation, so he thought it's better to be a no-show at this demonstration because he knew it's all going to go downhill when she started her craziness.
Gwen showed up at the Animal Services Center. She had a crazy look in her eyes as she addressed the woman at the desk. “I'm here to pick up my animals!”
“Which animals are yours?”
“All of them, all the ones recently found wandering on the turnpike.”
“But we've identified most of them belonging to individual owners, who have already picked up a lot of them. Have you any proof of ownership?”
“I don't need any proof of ownership. Protecting those animals from exploitation is my life's work and now I find you're giving them back to the very people I took them from, you incompetent jerk.”
All of a sudden, Gwen tased the woman, who promptly fell to the floor. Others in the room saw this and started to approach her, saying, “Hey, what are you doing? Are you crazy?”
“Don't call me crazy,” Gwen yelled, brandishing her taser. “I know what I'm doing!”
As she ran to the animals, another guard standing by protected the entrance to the room. She tried to tase him, but he fought back, and in spite of the taser set on full blast, the guard pulled her arms away.
“Let go of my arms, I have to get my animals, I have to get my animals!”
By now other security people and center staff workers had shown up and were holding her down on the floor, while someone else took the taser away from her.
“Give me back my animals, I want my animals back!”
Police sirens could be heard in the distance, and people kept telling her to shut up, she could talk to the police when they showed up. One of the vets tried to help the woman who had been tased by Gwen. All in all, confusion and chaos reigned.
Gwen kept screaming “Give me back my animals, they were in my compound, give me back my animals.”
She yelled this to the cops and to everyone around her. Eventually they arrested her and took her away from the animal center. Before they left, Tom, the photographer, showed up and tried talking to Gwen, but Gwen, sobbing and screaming for animal rights, had drifted into her own world. The photographer tried to explain to the cops he hadn't been working with her recently because he saw more and more mental deterioration, and when the animals escaped, she went over the edge.
The cops asked Tom where she kept the animals. He said, at her place, he could lead them to it. On the way he explained how apparently, in her psychosis, Gwen believed that any use of an animal for a TV commercial constituted exploitation of an animal. So she would hire somebody to kidnap the animal, and then bring it to this facility.
Here these animals were treated like royalty. They were served food cooked especially for them, she would get them toys, she would have somebody play with them, or she would play with them herself. She truly loved the animals. Many times Tom had told her she had to give the animals back, but she would just freak out when he mentioned it.
Once at the center, the cops couldn't believe how high tech and how well she maintained the place. An aura of hygiene permeated the place. The animals resided in an environment where cleanliness and brightness were a priority. You could see the toys in the cages and where the animals would feed in their cages. Gwen Fetlock's home doubled as her headquarters and the place where she kept the animals.
“How could she afford all this?”
“My understanding is at one point, she inherited a lot of money and she decided to devote herself to helping animals. However, something happened along the way and her mental faculties started to give way. And this is the result. It's kind of like a shrine devoted to animals. But she didn't want to share them. She just wanted them for herself.
“Gwen had people who guarded the animals, cooked for the animals, played with the animals. None of them ever knew how the animals got here in the first place. They all thought this a shelter for abandoned animals and the location gave them a temporary home.
“But as her insanity got worse, she started to alienate a lot of the people and started to do a lot of the stuff herself. In the end, she only had the two guards, and after the animals broke out, they probably quit, too.
“I've never seen her as bad as today though, so I think all these events are the beginning of the end. In my opinion, she's not going to be able to take care of herself, because she's just going to be too crazy. Something definitely snapped when those animals were removed. I don't know how it happened, maybe the guards themselves let them free, although I doubt it. They had a cushy job and they weren't going to lose it by letting the animals go.
“No, my guess is somebody from the outside probably did it, someone who wanted to do Gwen in. I'm sure it doesn't come as a surprise to you, but Gwen has a lot of enemies. So, they probably broke in at some point, and let the animals out.”
The cops continued to explore the place, taking pictures, checking to see for any other weird situations. But no, it turned out to be just a home for animals. Afterwards, they went upstairs to see if perhaps there were any animals there. Pictures of animals covered the walls of the house and Gwen had a computer room with three monitors, where she would write on her blog about cruelty to animals and whatever other businesses she wanted to bash on any given day.
As they continued to explore the premises, they came across a room that created consternation among the officers. She had a giant map of all the nearby towns, with pins and ropes showing all the places she had marked as EXPLOITATION. There were several of them on the map. However, the thing really troubling the police officers were the labels next to buildings marked DESTROY.
As they looked around, they found all kinds of notes and agendas. Apparently Gwen had marked several businesses as places needing to be destroyed because with their business practices, in Gwen's mind, they were exploiting animals. One of the cops kept looking at the map and the other continued exploring the house. At one point the one exploring yelled out “Andy, you're going to want to look at this.”
When Andy reached his partner, he saw in a nearby closet, various containers of C4, a powerful explosive, in large quantities in boxes. “There's enough C4 here to blow up a small city.”
“Yep, and looking at the map, she had a couple of places earmarked for destruction. I guess the insanity had really kicked in to the point where she felt these places needed to be off the radar forever.”
“This is serious, though. We're going to have to get the lab guys to remove this stuff from here. Who knows how long she's had this.”
“Yeah, this is going to be a long haul. Routine house check turns into discovering terrorist lab.
Well, I'm glad we found it now, rather than after she did some damage.”
They turned to the photographer, Tom, and asked him about this.
“I knew Gwen had lost her mind, but I didn't know she was planning to destroy buildings and kill people. One of the reasons I stopped working with her is because of the out of control craziness. She busted into a funeral recently, and even I could see no reason to have bothered those people. That's when I said, enough is enough. But as to her housing explosives, and the maps of these nearby towns? This is all news to me.”
The lab technicians arrived and started going through the whole house. Another group specialized in the removal of explosives also arrived and had a special truck for these procedures. More police had also gotten there for support. This exercise had escalated into something much bigger than anyone expected. They found a terrorist psychopath planning on doing some serious damage because of her views on animals.
The cops turned to Tom.
“You mind coming down to the station and making a statement about what you know? There's going to be a psychological evaluation of Ms. Fetlock and we need a statement from someone who knows her and has seen her decline.”
“Sure, no problem,” Tom agreed.
Tom's happy cooperation stemmed mostly from the fact he didn't want any complicity charges having knowledge these animals were locked up and he never reported them. And now, the discovery of all this terrorist stuff, guaranteed to land Gwen in deep doo-doo. This proved how crazy Gwen had become and too out of it to realize it. It really did seem like they were going to lock up Gwen this time, and he needed to cooperate with the law for his own sake. Ah, the plight of the freelance videographer/photographer. You lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
*****
Mandy and Jill headed back to New Jersey. They had nothing more to do in the Upper Peninsula. The next event in this fiasco would be Fred extraditing the Parks couple and bringing them to justice in New Jersey. Meanwhile, Mandy really wanted to get back to get Roger. She didn't want him lingering in some animal services building, no matter how well they took care of him. She had called earlier and told them she saw her cat as one of the missing animals while travelling and she would return to New Jersey to pick him up. The animal services people told her to bring his papers and she assured the authorities she had all the necessary papers.
Mystery at the Pet Food Corp. Page 11