by Gil Reavill
“Nature shows are the only kind of television the Dalai Lama watches,” Remington said.
Arthur looked at her oddly. “Really?” he said. “I did not know that.”
They left the dome together, with the chimp peacefully settled down in his nest, lolling in front of the wildebeests.
“You’re really interested in what happened out at Odalon?” Arthur asked her.
Remington told him that of course she was interested, that it was her business to find out.
“So it’s like a duty thing for you—you’re just doing your job.”
“What do you want me to say? You want me to join the crusade?”
“The crusade…”
“Apes Are People, Too? That crusade.”
“Well, a few dead animals—you know, who really cares?” There was a shade of bitterness in Arthur’s tone. “It’s only because someone destroyed thirteen pieces of someone else’s property—that’s the interest of the authorities, right?”
Remington didn’t respond.
“You’re looking for an adult male, probably dark-skinned, black hair, about my height, which means he’s just under six feet tall,” Mace Arthur said.
“That would be a description of who, exactly?”
“The perpetrator. Isn’t that the word you police use?”
“And how would you know what the shooter looks like?”
“Couple of possibilities—or maybe three. One, I was at Odalon and witnessed the killings, or two, I’m just making it up. Neither of which is the case.”
“So what’s door number three?”
“The sole survivor described the killer to me.”
“Angle,” Remington said. “Angle described him.”
“Yeah,” Mace Arthur said. “Angle.”
Arthur claimed that the chimp had given up a description of the Odalon shooter. It was the kind of crazy assertion that animal-rights folks habitually make, attributing all sorts of capabilities to the beasts of the field. To back up the claim, Arthur led Remington into the carriage house next to the dome. There, on a computer monitor in a small, cluttered office, Remington watched an “interview” that Arthur had conducted with Angle.
It was a bizarre experience. The footage only vaguely resembled the forensic interview tapes with suspects or crime witnesses that detectives recorded via a stationary video camera. Confessions or depositions—admissible testimony, anyway—the resulting tapes were intended to be available for prosecutors to show to juries.
This wasn’t anywhere near that. The computer screen showed Mace Arthur and Angle sitting face-to-face, interacting. Communicating, Arthur insisted, although one couldn’t tell it by Remington. She didn’t know American Sign Language and had no way of judging the quality of the back-and-forth. To Remington, the little ape seemed distracted, uninterested.
“I’m asking him about the night at the sanctuary—we’re talking about the bad man,” Arthur said, translating the tape for her. “See that? That sign, hand to the lips, then palm brought down? That’s bad.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“See? I ask Angle how tall, see? A finger pointing up, then crooked to make the question mark. Then I say, ‘Tall like me? Tall like Mace?’ That sign, the chin swipe, that’s his sign for me, my beard—that’s how he says Mace. And there, there’s he’s indicating tall like Mace. So I’m five eleven.”
During this, Remington had a constant, repeated thought: You’ve got to be putting me on. She was going to take testimony from an animal?
“See? That’s black, or dark. He’s saying the shooter was dark-skinned.”
Remington stuck to it merely for novelty’s sake, thinking it might make a good story at the shop, humoring Arthur, deciding that he was well intentioned but misguided. All the while, her own interior bullshit detector was poking holes in the ape’s “testimony.” It was pitch-black that night, smoky from the fire and overcast with no moon. How could the chimp see anything?
According to Angle, the sheriff’s department should be looking for a six-foot-tall dark-skinned, black-haired male.
“Listen, I know,” Mace Arthur said when the five-minute interspecies interview finished up on the monitor screen. “You’re thinking, ‘No way,’ right? Harry, my lawyer, told me I should never, ever talk about this to anyone, it’s so nuts. But look, I made a DVD copy of this footage—at least take it, give it to one of your courtroom ASL interpreters. Let them look at it, see if they read it the same way as I was telling you.”
Remington knew the primary American Sign Language translator assigned to the county courts, Bettina Brownstein, a good-natured woman who might be up for a laugh.
Her phone tweedled with a steady beep: its drop-everything emergency ringtone. At the same instant, a text came in from the office.
On the screen, she read, “187-187-call in-187-187-call in.” Remington grabbed the DVD copy of the Angle interview, tossed a hurried goodbye over her shoulder to Arthur, and ran for the U-boat.
She got on her cell as she went. One-eight-seven was police code for homicide.
11
“At first we thought, you know, a cougar had somehow gotten into the van and tore the guy up,” sheriff’s deputy Willie Chan said to Remington. He was giving her a guided tour of the crime scene off a twisty dirt road in the throat of Latigo Canyon. The snaky highways in the hills above Malibu could make you dizzy. In all her months attached to the local D.A.’s office, Remington still hadn’t totally found her bearings.
“Now we’re thinking that it might have been dogs, a Rottweiler or some pit-bull breed, going all Cujo on the victim,” Deputy Chan continued.
“I got a one-eight-seven call,” Remington said. Meaning homicide, meaning some human agency involved. An animal killing a human—well, she didn’t even know if there was a three-digit police code for that.
“Right, right,” Chan said. “Well, come on down the road a bit, see if you read this the way we do.”
The scene was crowded. Three sheriff’s department cruisers, an EMT truck from Agoura Hills, an emergency-response van from Thousand Oaks, a fluorescent-green fire marshal’s SUV, a couple of unmarked deputy-detective sedans. By the time Remington arrived from Encino—the Ventura Freeway had been a parking lot—the medical examiner’s body collector had come and taken the victim away.
Uneven curtains of blood obscured the windows of the Big Bear school van. Hazmat suits still worked the interior, vague forms moving behind the screen of red. Numbered evidence flags had been shoved into the dirt of the road shoulder around the vehicle.
Remington walked with Chan down the rutted dirt track. “When did this go down?” she asked.
“The M.E. guy who was just here said last night for sure,” Deputy Chan answered.
“Do you have a line on the ownership of the van?”
“The vehicle has a lapsed registration, transferred from the original school district and taken out in the name of a Baptist church in Riverside. We’re trying to get through to them, figure out if the church still owns it or whether it was sold.”
“It looks as though the crate’s been doing some hard traveling.”
“Someone was living in it—that much we figure,” Chan said. “You know how it is with these hills.”
“I encountered someone once camping out in a chest freezer, had a tarp rigged as a kind of breezeway affair,” Remington said. “Welcome to glamorous Malibu.”
“I heard they’re lifting all sorts of prints from inside the van,” Chan said. “But this is what’s interesting.”
He pointed down the road, where there was another cordoned-off scene. Remington recognized Daria Birch and Paolo Ocasio, two sheriff’s detectives crouched on the shoulder, eyes focused on the ground. A CAU tech trained a high-powered halogen lamp slantwise at the dirt, a method used to highlight any imprint evidence, footprints, or other tracks. Evidence flags fluttered in the faint breeze here, too, just like up the road at the van.
Deputy Detec
tive Daria Birch brightened upon seeing Remington. She rose to her feet and ambled over. “Dee-teck-tive Remington,” she said, drawling out the honorific in a lazy stab at comedy.
“Hey, Birch,” Remington said.
“Another crap day in paradise,” Birch said.
“What’s this?” Remington asked, gesturing toward the roadside scene. She could clearly see tire tracks where a vehicle of some sort had been pulled to the side of the dirt road.
“Follow the bouncing ball,” Birch said. “Soil, dust, and ash from the wildfire—a perfect medium for our story to unfold. See there, we’ve got ’em marked, boot prints. We haven’t measured out the actual shoe size of them yet, but first they lead up the road toward the school van. Then—you can tell the sequence because of oversteps—they reverse their way back down. But if you read it close enough you see Boots had something walking alongside, something that goes about on all fours like a dog. Get this, poochie goes up clean but comes back bloody.”
“The perp wasn’t trying to mask the tracks,” Remington said. Both detectives bent over backward trying not to assume gender, avoiding the use of “he” and “his” even though the human in the boots was most probably male.
“I saw the body before they took it out,” Birch told her. “Man-oh-Manischewitz, I’ve never run up against anything remotely like that. Somebody beat the hell out of him before, during, or after the dog tore him up. Victim was a black male, about thirty, face destroyed like it was, you know, eaten away, really, genitals ripped off, I don’t know what else.”
“Yikes,” Remington said, in a conscious attempt to keep the tone light, the strategy a lot of first responders employed to deal with gore and gruesomeness.
“Yikes is right,” Birch agreed. “Did you scope the inside of the van?”
“Nope,” Remington said. “The techs were still at it.”
“A damned blood bomb went off.”
“What do you think, Paolo?” Remington said, calling to the other sheriff’s detective crouched alongside the imprint of the tire tracks. Paolo Ocasio walked over.
“Don’t quote me on this,” he began. Remington and Birch both laughed at the obscure departmental humor: a thickheaded deputy had once actually invoked the phrase in court, where every word, of course, was indeed transcribed and quotable.
Ocasio embarked on his theory of the crime: “What we got here is a homeless guy victimized by some sort of human predator—like it was a fad a couple years ago for punks to light bums on fire down in Santa Monica, remember?”
“Still happening,” Birch said, shaking her head in wonder at the vileness of humankind.
Ocasio went on with his narrative: “Perpetrator sees where the victim is parked, pulls up down here and leads his attack dog up there, occupant’s probably asleep, perp unleashes the dog into the van, the poor guy wakes up to a friggin’ fangfest, the canine snarling, tearing at him, ripping open his carotid for starters and then going on from there. Afterward, our perp climbs in and finishes him off with a blunt object—a bat, maybe—breaks what the pathologist estimated as a third of the vic’s two hundred bones, head-to- toe trauma.”
“ ‘Fangfest.’ ” Birch nodded. “I like that.”
Ocasio pointed at a numbered evidence flag. “At thirteen over there, and thirty-two farther up, you can actually trace where the chain, or the leash—whatever it was the dog had on him—where it dragged along the ground.”
“No blood on the boots,” Remington noted. “Just on the animal tracks.”
“Sharp lady, this one,” Ocasio said to Birch. To Remington he said, “The techs noticed that, too.”
“We’re thinking the perpetrator wore some sort of plastic booties,” Birch said.
A shout from farther up the road, from the team gathered near where the school van was parked. Ocasio stayed where he was, going back to attend the tech photographing the tracks in the dirt, while Remington and Birch headed over. Two of the CAU techs had emerged from the van. Their Tyvek suits were smeared with streaks of gore. Deputy Chan and others gathered around them.
“We think we have a name,” Chan said.
One of the techs, his face anonymous behind his respirator, held up a clear plastic evidence-collection bag in a gloved hand. The bag was ID’d and logged with a scrawl of black ink across its white labeling panel. Inside was a scrap of red-streaked paper retrieved from the clutter inside the van. Remington and Birch got up close to peer at the bag. A paycheck stub of some sort, its printing nearly blotted out by the soak of blood.
“Hollywood Animal Rescue, Inc.,” read a line at the top of the stub, with a two-month-old date and the amount specified as “$407.93,” along with the payee: Ian Alexander Terry.
“Hey, I know this guy,” Remington said, stunned.
The other CAU tech held up a smaller evidence baggie. Inside was a clump of matted coarse black hair, likewise covered in blood. Each strand was thick and four or five inches long.
“What’s that?” Birch asked.
“Ape,” Remington said, a sinking feeling creeping into her voice.
—
Remington sat with Rick Stills in the ADA’s office, trying to keep her sense of vindication from showing. See? I told you this Odalon thing had more to it than met the eye. But she didn’t say it.
“They like tearing off fingers,” she said instead. “That’s one of their favorite things. You see it all the time in ape attacks in the wild. And genitals.”
Stills gave an involuntary cringe. “You’re a devotee of the nature channels,” he said.
“I’ve been doing research, even though you told me that I really shouldn’t be putting much time in on this,” Remington said.
“A baker’s dozen chimpanzees get killed at an animal sanctuary,” Stills said. “Then a couple nights later their keeper gets torn apart by…by what, a chimpanzee? Are we sure about that?”
“The coroner’s office has yet to weigh in officially,” Remington said. “But even at the scene they were calling it as animal predation.”
“Christ in the foothills,” Stills murmured, invoking a mild curse that, as far as Remington knew, was used only in L.A.
“That ape, that survivor,” Stills said suddenly.
“Right,” Remington agreed, a step ahead. “Angle.”
“Encino is just a hop, skip, and a jump over to Calabasas and the canyons.”
“What I was thinking,” Remington said.
“Maybe we should send you out to visit the guy—what was his name?”
“Mace Arthur. I could take along a Coke or some fruit juice or something, for Angle the chimp, and then, you know, bring the bottle back with me when I leave.”
Stills frowned. “I’m not following you.”
“You know, we inherited the friction ridges on the surfaces of our hands and feet from our primate ancestors.” Remington was enjoying herself, toying with him a little.
“You’re telling me chimpanzees have fingerprints,” Stills said.
“You ought to be watching those nature shows yourself. You might learn something.”
“All right, all right,” Stills said, beginning to get excited. “We get those prints, match them up, nail this guy!”
“Theory of the crime, Mr. ADA?”
“Who cares?” exclaimed Stills. “We can develop that later. Positive ID trumps everything, Detective.”
“Well, we might as well toss some ideas around.”
“Okay,” Stills said, preoccupied with thinking about a slam dunk in court. Ape killings. All right, so it wasn’t a celebrity-movie-star murder, but it could turn into something good. Especially if Stills could bring it home quickly, all wrapped up in a neat bow.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“It’s simple: it’s the oldest story in the book,” Remington said.
“Revenge.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Somebody aces out the Odalon apes with a high-powered rifle. Maybe our victim Ian Terry was involved in the planning or setu
p, maybe not, but Mace Arthur thinks he was, anyway. He locates Terry and sics Angle on him.”
“That’s got to be murder two,” Stills said. “Premeditated, violent, and aggravated. Get some precedents, cases where the instrument of death was an attack dog, maybe, or maybe we could find one where someone used a”—he groped for words, and found them—“a lioness! Or do you think there’s been murder by ape before?”
Slow down, cowboy, Remington thought. “Let me see if I can get prints from Angle first, and talk to Arthur about his whereabouts last night.”
“Right,” Stills said. In his new enthusiasm for the case, Remington noticed that her boss had forgotten all about the plan for the two of them to have dinner together that evening.
She said, “Can you give a call down to the coroner’s, have them go ahead with the postmortem on the chimps from Odalon?”
“Sure,” Stills said, more positive now that he had a human victim on his hands.
Thirteen dead animals and Remington could get no traction at all. But kill a single member of the home species and the engine of justice goes into overdrive.
—
“You’ll see it tomorrow, maybe in the Times,” Remington said to her father on the cell during her drive over to Encino. “Or at least on the Huff Post’s L.A. news page. Ro-Co-Co can’t push something like this out of the way.”
“I’ve got a six-pack of imported that says Ross Murphy’s photo is on the first page of the tabloid tomorrow,” Gene said.
“That’d be a sucker bet. Isn’t the Coll funeral scheduled sometime around now?”
“You really are working too hard—you’re out of the loop. Just don’t drive down Wilshire tomorrow—you’ll hit a traffic jam and a whole cortege of hearses.”
“Donny Coll needs more than one?”
“For the flowers,” Gene said. “There’ll be boatloads of them—limos and limos full, like at a Mafia funeral.”
“Well, he did play Lucky Luciano in that HBO movie,” Layla said. “I’m not a mobster, but I play one on TV.”
“When I go, honey, don’t bother with the florist. Just stick to the charity donations.”